Dans la paume de la main : L’archéologie du cinéma en un geste

Il n’est sans doute aucun geste que l’homme contemporain ne connaisse le mieux et n’accomplisse avec le plus de fréquence que regarder la paume de sa main en tenant un dispositif technique : la posture qu’il prend est très reconnaissable, en partie induite par les nouvelles technologies, en partie mémoire de gestes très anciens où la paume de la main était utilisée comme une surface à lire ou à consulter. À partir de la seconde moitié du XIXème siècle, avec la résurgence de différents savoirs de la main à la frontière entre science et magie, le geste devient une manière de configurer avec le corps un dispositif de visualisation qui, à certains égards, préfigure le cinéma : selon la nouvelle chiromancie, la paume donne forme au temps en recoupant passé et futur tandis que selon la nouvelle chirognomonie, il s’agit d’un miroir où se reflètent l’homme, ses caractéristiques psychologiques ainsi que ses gestes (sténographiés entre les plis cutanés, selon une ancienne pratique d’enseignement de la musique mais aussi selon les idées de certaines théoriciens du cinéma, comme Sergei M. Eisenstein, qui y font référence). C’est là un exemple de ce qu’affirmait un anthropologue éclectique comme Marcel Jousse, à savoir que certains gestes humains représentent une forme de pensée corporelle à travers laquelle l’homme a imaginé et anticipé la technique. Le cinéma lui-même semble se reconnaître dans ce geste primaire puisqu’il présente le motif de la paume comme un écran sur lequel défilent des images animées au début du XXème siècle déjà, pour le développer ensuite à fond, surtout au cours des années vingt. L’archéologie des médias reconnaît-elle donc dans le geste un de ses propres objets ?There are few gestures that contemporary humans make more frequently than looking at their hand to consult a high-tech phone. This gesture is partly the outcome of new technological development, and partly inscribed in the memory of ancient gestures, in practices in which the palm of the hand was examined. From the mid-nineteenth century, a revival of interest in the study of palmistry, between magic and science, anticipated the cinema. In chiromancy, the palm of the hand enabled access to past and future, while chirognomony saw in it a mirror which reflected man’s personality and gestures (inscribed in the folds of the skin – which had been used in the learning of ancient music, but also discussed by Eisenstein). This illustrates the assumption made by anthropologist Marcel Jousse, for whom human gestures represent a kind of corporeal thinking, by which man imagined and anticipated technical development. Cinema itself acknowledged the importance of this gesture, since it used the palm of the hand as a screen onto which images were projected, from the start of the twentieth century to the twenties. Therefore this article addresses the role of gestures in media archaeology

Mediatic Handology?

A chirocentric model of thinking, an alternative to the notorious oculocentric line which is widely questioned today, appeared in philosophy from the very beginning. The idea of the hand as our major instrument of thinking comes from Anaxagoras and reaches Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, who reconfigured the philosophical agenda around this organ’s qualities. The theme of image making is crucial in this trend of thought, while artists from all ages and cultures have always expressed their sheer fascination for the motif of the hand as the conditioning agent of their creative activity. In the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin set up a philosophy of visual media which did not rely upon the optic qualities of the moving images, but on their haptic ones. The hand, after all, took central stage in the imaginary throughout the previous century: hands in X-rays, palms in modern chiromancy, fingers in the newly born chirognomonie, imprints in art, disembodied hands featuring autonomous characters in cinema. Together with these images, another idea of the thinking hand emerged, not only connected with the sense of touch or with craftmanship, but also with expressive gestures, conveying affect, desire as well as imaginative power. Do we need a handology to survey the many lives of the hand in our culture and fully understand the digital turn within the so-called deep time of the media

Lasting Remains: The Anesthetizing Gaze in German Postwar Cinema and Photography

The essay analyzes the traumatic dimension of the images of rubble produced by German cinema and photography in the aftermath of the Second World War. Drawing on Sebald’s reflections on the inability of literature to bear witness to the atrocious experience of the bombings endured by millions of German citizens, this contribution proposes an analysis of the gaze employed in depicting the dramatic condition of the country. In particular, the refusal of the codes of realism and the impulse towards the scenographic portrayal of rubble and ruins, about which scholars largely agree, is here re-read not as evidence for an escape from reality, but as a re-emergence of an ornamental (Kracauer) and anesthetizing (Jünger) visual matrix typical of the aerial point of view and, so, typical of the attacker’s gaze. This resurfacing is testified by two key figures engraved in the landscape of rubble: the skeleton in X-rays and the surface of abstract signs which cross-references the view from above; both strip the flesh from the body/landscape, so that the former is in some way included in the latter. As it coincides not only with the gaze that Germany suffered at the end of the war, but also with that imposed by the Nazis at its beginning, the aerial perspective and the corresponding affectless mode summarizes the specificity of the trauma that Germany underwent, rekindling the conflict of self-representation of the defeated country

Il flash-back nel cinema della nuova Hollywood: forme e figure del racconto postmoderno

Dottorato di ricerca in teoria e analisi del testo. 12. ciclo. A.a. 1998-99. Relatore A. MarzolaConsiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Biblioteca Centrale - P.le Aldo Moro, 7, Rome; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale - P.za Cavalleggeri, 1, Florence / CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle RichercheSIGLEITItal

Dalla parte delle immagini. Temi di cultura visuale

Nell'ultimo quinquennio, la visualit\ue0 \ue8 divenuta un nodo chiave della ricerca, oltre che un campo ormai chiaramente inserito nei percorsi di formazione universitaria. Il volume affronta le grandi questioni della teoria in relazione a specifici casi di studio, trattando e discutendo le questioni che le immagini sollevano. L'idea \ue8 recuperare temi anche classici e di spessore storico, ma a partire dal modo in cui il presente li ha ricodificati, soprattutto in relazione alla sfida del digitale. Il manuale \ue8 organizzato in cinque capitoli che, di volta in volta, eleggendo le immagini a punti di partenza della riflessione, introducono le parole chiave della teoria e le discutono a pi\uf9 livelli. Tale selezione \ue8 stata guidata anche dalla volont\ue0 di fornire a un pubblico di studenti universitari e ricercatori uno strumento di orientamento metodologico e disciplinare: ogni capitolo cerca infatti di rispondere ad alcune domande fondamentali che il nostro rapporto quotidiano con le immagini sempre solleva

Suspended Evidence: Rethinking the Photographic

Though the post-media condition erases their specificity, cinema and photography, in their mutual dynamic, have reappeared overwhelmingly in contemporary media practices and theoretical reflection, specifically since a renewed interpretation of the still-moving dialectic has become a crucial dimension of the contemporary image. Therefore exchanges, overlaps and bonds between the filmic and the photographic categorize the prevailing paradigm not only in the analysis of the new forms of the image, but also in reinterpreting the history of the two media and of their earliest and perpetual intersection. The historical reconsideration of the connection between cinema and photography demands clarity in some grey areas that so far have been neglected, such as film stills, analyzed in the following essay. They constitute a complex dispositif of exchange between cinema and photography, and not by chance are central to much innovative research on the photographic. Historical analysis and visual experimentation have progressed in parallel, both interested in a ‘return to the past’: to the origin of our gaze, but also to a different relationship with images. Hence, having first identified the necessity to adopt a perspective on media relations based on confluence instead of influence, the essay deals with two symptomatic forms of confluence between cinema and photography. First, a form of ‘compressed cinema’ that gives up on time and on the flow of the images and instead is condensed within a single photograph (like in Gregory Crewdson’s works); second, a sort of suspended photography, that takes on the incompleteness, the dynamism and the temporality of cinema, thus transcending its boundaries (as in Linda Fregni Nagler’s Pour commander à l’aire)

Harun Farocki: pensare con gli occhi

Filmmaker, documentarista, artista visivo, critico, saggista e sceneggiatore, Harun Farocki (1944-2014) ha realizzato pi\uf9 di 120 opere nell\u2019arco di cinquant\u2019anni. Acuto interprete della contemporaneit\ue0, ha colto con grande anticipo il potere delle immagini nel configurare l\u2019esperienza del mondo, e ne ha analizzato le forme in magnifici film saggio. La sua ricerca sullo sguardo, incarnato e disincarnato in macchine della visione, sul depositarsi delle immagini in archivi immensi e, ciononostante, violentemente selettivi, sul rapporto fra media e warfare e, pi\uf9 in generale, sul ruolo attivo, e non semplicemente riproduttivo, delle immagini ha accompagnato, e in molti casi anticipato, la riflessione dei grandi filosofi del nostro tempo. Il volume offre una ricca selezione dei suoi scritti teorici, inediti in Italia, affiancandola ai contributi dei massimi studiosi internazionali dell\u2019autore, fra cui Thomas Elsaesser e Antje Ehmann, coautrice delle sue installazioni e compagna di vita