Le double cinématographique: Mimèsis et cinéma (Champs visuels) (French Edition)

Barros - Notes of the Master Eisenstein 71 and the point at which they both build a dialog or must dis- tance themselves. As an example, let us take an excerpt from Bel-Ami, written by Guy Maupassant , in which Eisenstein analyzes the construction of the ar- tistic image. The striking of these clocks, heard at various distances, is like ilming an object by shooting it in a number of dimensions and by a sequence of three different shots: Towards a Theory of Montage. BFI Publishing, We cannot disregard that Eisenstein starts his teaching practice in a period when the cinema was a recent language, consequently thinking about the seventh art in dialog with the other languages seems an appropriate path to develop that matter.

The work method revealed by the material of the classes at the VGIK shows that Eisenstein understood teaching practice in the scope of a critical investigation, and his artistic education project was based on understanding how art works in order to generate in each student the ability to analyze several artistic objects and conceive a singular artistic project. Thus, the student builds the creative resolution of a speciic theme in a critical manner from cooperative classes.

However, we will not develop that issue in this brief essay. Barros - Notes of the Master Eisenstein 73 the reason that his movies have an impact beyond the events that surround the theme in each work. The multiple possibili- ties that unfold from the deep essays performed by the teach- er-ilmmaker for thinking about arts education and the myriad aesthetic aspects considered in his writings make it possible to use his legacy in academic courses in the several majors in arts, as well as in experimenting with the potentialities of different languages.

Every critical and creative learning process leaves a legacy thanks to the resonances generated in the dialogic act of learn- ing. He argues that the human unconscious preserves the memory of the primordial biologi- cal stage, an aquatic stage characterized by the absence of dif- ferentiation between the sexes. Muzei kino, , 1: In this essay, Eisenstein discovers references to bisexuality in a number of writers and artists, from Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare to Balzac, Nietzsche and the modern French playwright Jacques Deval — Equally important are the personal anecdotes which Eisenstein relates in some detail.

A patient was introduced to Eisenstein at the Institute, a male Bulgarian engineer, dressed as an elegant lady. Before moving on to discuss the bisexual imagery in Ni- 3 Ibid. He points out that Dr. According to Eisenstein, this was the reason the Nazis raided the Institute and burned its archive soon after Hitler came to power. Strikingly, in this essay, Eisenstein neglects to mention sev- eral important facts relevant to his memoir. Hirschfeld in and had had a personally and intellectu- ally signiicant conversation with him.

Magnus Hirschfeld was not only a proliic author and publisher; he was also the public face of German sexual science in the Weimar period. In the inter- national arena, he founded and chaired the World League for Sexual Reform. Semi- nars, performances, public events and drag balls were also host- ed in the mansion. Monthly Review Press, serves an excellent succinct intro- duction to the topic and features an extensive bibliography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, , see It is worth noting that the mul- tifaceted activities of energetic Dr.

Hirschfeld also took him to the ield of ilm production: In the ilm, Hirschfeld played the part of a sexology expert, that is, himself; Karl Giese played the tragic protagonist as a boy. The ilm caused a considerable controversy that prompted the Reichstag to create a ilm censorship board. In addition to his public prominence, there was also an intel- lectual reason that set Hirschfeld apart from mainstream sexol- ogy and made him interesting for Eisenstein.

But his own elaborate theory took shape a decade later, in Mexico when he 8 Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity New York: Knopf, , It was toward the end of his stay in Mexico, in early , that Eisenstein came up with the formulation: As late as , he writes: In the area of sex, [it is] the dynamic unity of opposites.

And the recreation of a stage of universal development… And [it is so] for everyone personally. That is, [it is] the ecstatic in every parameter. British Film Institute, , University of Chicago Press, , especially Dear Doctor, To spare you the task of deciphering my signature, I will name myself immediately: This letter comes from S. However, this does not keep me from turning to theoretical works in my free time—works in the areas of ilm making and creativity in gen- eral. Your assistant who was present smiled subtly and ambiguously.

You added the remark: Anne Dwyer San Francisco: Potemkin Press, , , Please be so kind as to send the answer to Mexico D. Anyhow, I ask you to do this as soon as possible, as a letter from Europe takes weeks to arrive here. Could I be in some way helpful to you in my travels?

Below is the German original: Dieser Brief stammt von S. Augenblicklich drehe ich einen Film in Mexiko. Motivated by such logic, Eisenstein illed his notebooks with psychological portraits of bisexual geniuses, from Oscar Wilde to Jesus Christ in one drawing they converge, and Jesus acquires a physical resemblance to the poet, as well as a young male companion named Johnnie—that is, St. Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, Gogol, and many others were also supposed to have personiied the connection between ecstatic creativity and bisexuality. The reply from the Institute arrived in July Those of humans, adult or young, did not move me.

I was reproached for that. Nowdays none of them move me. All his central theoretical points on the topic, as he expressed them in , had crystallized in his mind circa The Memoirs of Sergei Eisen- stein, ed. BFI Publish- ing, , When asked to name his favourite So- viet director he was liable to answer: I completely deny that I am unambiguously linked to the cinema most of all; this is the whole drama. Of course this is a mistake: As suggested by these references, when pressed to do so, Tarkovsky usually placed himself in the international tradition of poetic cinema.

Where are you Rossellini, Cocteau, Renoir, Vigo? You greats, poor in spirit? Where is the poetry? Money, money, money and fear… Fellini is afraid, Antonioni is afraid… Only Bresson fears nothing. Perhaps there is some point in taking tastelessness to the point of absurdity. Diary of a Country Priest [dir. Robert Bresson, ] 2. Ingmar Bergman, ] 3. Ingmar Bergman, ] 5. Charles Chaplin, ] 6. Ugetsu [Kenji Mizoguchi, ] 7.

Akira Kurosawa, ] 8. Ingmar Bergman, ] 2 Andrei Tarkovskii, Martirolog: Mezh- dunarodnyi institut imeni Andreia Tarkovskogo, , Bird - The Rule of Tarkovsky 89 9. Robert Bresson, ] Woman in the Dunes [dir. Tarkovsky himself associated the horse-race at the beginning of the second part of Andrei Rublev with Mizoguchi and, to be sure, Chinese landscapes in ink. He gave serious consid- 4 Reproduced in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 14 Iskusstvo, , Ob Andree Tarkovskom Moscow: Vagrius, , ; Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews, ed. University of Mississippi, , Mostly, though, Tarkovsky always took pains to present his cinema as utterly sui generis.

This is an inluence of a deeper nature. Clearly, even in the company of the greats, Tarkovsky craved a stage of his own. Toronto International Film Festival Group, , Bird - The Rule of Tarkovsky 91 truth. Tarkovsky addressed to Piavoli the following note in Italian: The Blue Planet is a poem, a journey, a concert of nature, the universe, life… It is an image different from those we always see. Really and truly anti-Disney.

Andrei Tarkovsky 29 June , Rome11 Beyond this note, however, there is little evidence that Tarkovsky availed himself of the opportunity to test his es- tablished preconceptions of ilm against the work of other in- dependent ilmmakers. After completing Nostalghia with the sponsorship of the Soviet foreign ilm concern and RAI, he was able to complete his inal ilm Sacriice through the Swedish Film Institute, thus ensuring that he could continue to make ilms free of the pressures caused by commercial backing or by independent production.

Brakhage was there to show his short ilm Hell Spit Flexion , later included in The Dante Quartet [] , and also as a regular visitor and friend of the organizers. Istoriko-teoreticheskii sbornik 10 , Why do you do this? Further citations of this article are given parenthetically. Bird - The Rule of Tarkovsky 93 mental cinema like his own. With tight state control over the technologies and media of ilmmaking, there was really nothing like independent ilm in the USSR although bold experiments sometimes took place on the margins of the state industry, in ilm schools and provincial studios.

Despite all of these contrasts and misunderstandings between Tarkovsky and Brakhage, there are also signiicant conver- gences that allow one to imagine a conversation occurring between the two bodies of work and which make their almost accidental confrontation into a meaningful encounter. One sim- ilarity is the autobiographical emphasis of many ilms. I personally think that the three greatest tasks for ilm in the 20th century are 1 To make the epic, that is to tell the tales of the tribes of the world. Still, at the very least these lists characterise the cine- matic epoch and atmosphere within which Tarkovsky and his collaborators were working—and within which his ilms must inevitably be placed.

Francois Truffaut, ] Una vita dificile Italy [dir. Dino Risi, ] Il posto Italy [dir. Elio Petri, ] Casanova Italy [dir. Terence Young, ] Goldinger [dir. Sergio Leone, ] Once upon a Time in the West [dir. Sergio Leone, ] Roma [dir. Frederico Fellini, ] Maddalena. Zero for Poor Behaviour [Maddalena, zero in con- dotta; dir. Vittorio de Sica, ]16 Clearly, Tarkovsky and his crews were interested in meas- uring their work not only against great ilms of the past, but also against contemporary standards, including those of Hol- lywood.

It is intriguing to contemplate the inluence of James Bond and spaghetti westerns on Mirror. He expressed a strong desire for Jill Clayburgh to play the lead female role in Nostalghia and Sacriice, in the wake of her Oscar for An Unmarried Woman Roman Karmen, ] in relation to Andrei Rublev. A colleague once told me that Tarkovsky made great ilms, but bad cinema.

I take that to mean that, in his desire to create ilmic art works, Tarkovsky withheld the signal pleasures of cinema-going. These lists help us to imagine a Tarkovsky im- mersed in cinema as a medium, willing to relate even his most cerebral works to the splashiest spectacles around. In the inal analysis the ilmmakers who inlu- enced Tarkovsky most may have been those who established and continued the pedagogical tradition at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, most notably Sergei Eisenstein, with whom Tarkovsky constantly argues in his published texts, his teacher Mikhail Romm, and his mentor Marlen Khutsiev.

Even the most sui generis ilmmaker exists only within the global histories of ilm genre, style, technology and institu- tions. Too often Andrei Tarkovsky is treated as an exception to ilm history; but it can be more productive and enlightening to treat Tarkovsky as the rule. The stated goal was to show Eisen- stein as a philosopher tout court. The contributions of the many scholars participating at the conference conirmed this idea.

More than ten years after that Venetian conference, in , Method was published in Russia, edited by Kleiman. In this sense, we can say the work that Kleiman talked about in Venice was still, literally, quite completely unknown. This is the most a-systematic, frag- 1 All the essays have been collected in Sergej Ejzenstejn: I owe him my intellectual encounter with Method. Method, indeed, ap- pears to its reader as a huge construction performing the recip- rocal and proitable circuitry of diverse subjects and distinct ields of knowledge.

However, thanks to the application of one single method the dialectical one they all intertwine in a single multifaceted text. AFRHC, , Cervini - One Book, Several Books 99 from one to the other, back and forth without rest. This is the interpretative hypothesis that Naum Kleiman advances in his important introduction to Method. Method is instead the transparent sphere of a magician in which the signs of the past are recalled and reused in order to anticipate an image of the future. A sort of re-writing that uses a language that is the same language of emotions, body, images, acquired in their natural dynamism.

It is not my intention to revisit here the contents and the themes of this work. It is suficient to recall here again at least two of the already mentioned texts written by Kleiman on the theme: Here it is possible to ind some valuable suggestions in order to understand the ultimate meaning of the Eisenstenian work.

Eisenstein, Metod, 2 Vols. Muzei kino , 1: This is the hypo- thesis that I want to outline here briely. The library that Eisenstein had conceived over the years is today only imaginable. Only one photograph of that library was taken before the demolition of the house where Eisenstein lived during the last years of his life. Naum Kleiman says that the photograph was coniscated by the KGB immediately after being shot.

The attempt to reverse a falla- cious idea of enlightened progress is perhaps the greatest in- heritance — still alive and current — that Eisenstein has left us. Spengler, The Decline of the West. The volume was in his library and Eisenstein made large use of it while writing Method. Cervini - One Book, Several Books ily, one wants to interpret as the result of an external attack, as the result of a struggle between different cultures.

Probably I am forcing the terms of the question, but it is Ei- senstein himself, in a certain sense, who asks this of the reader. Such a lifelong relection demands to be taken seriously, con- sidered beyond any possible resistance or reduction. Something like an ideal opposition to all the circumstances of terror, the limitation of creative force and con- trol exercised over life and conscience.

Not by chance, Method is a contemporary and satellite of Ivan the Terrible. From this point of view, the style of the book is very signi- icant: In fact, art is conceived as the most functional example of what it means to bring all metaphysical opposites to unity: It is possible to understand what I am saying here simply by reading a book like Method and by imagining the enormous encyclopedia of human knowledge that the director had in mind to build starting from his library.

That is why — as Eisenstein used to say — movement and books are indissoluble, as body movement is not different from the evolution of history and thought. A movement that is always a journey back and forth, in and out of our self. That is why this kind of movement can never trace a straight line, but rather a whirling spiral. This is the conceptual key that allows Eisenstein to read historical and individual processes, as well as cultural and artistic ones, us- ing the same tools.

Every heritage, above all an immaterial heritage like the intellectual one, requires to be kept alive and shared in order to preserve its ability to speak to those -- scholars and ordin- ary readers -- who will come to it. One is to revise and correct much that has been repeated over sixty years, often without empirical veriication.

The other is to provide routes for access to those who ind the mass of material daunting. Graphic Works by the Master of Film London: Thames and Hudson, With Naum Kleiman here: Hilda Doolittle , in a book about the new Soviet cinema. Presumably the prospect of Eisenstein visiting Britain in late must have caused con- sternation in some circles, although there is no evidence that he had any dificulty entering the country, probably from Holland.

Rutgers University Press, , What Bulgakowa was able to conirm, however, was that Eisenstein actually arrived several days earlier than previously assumed, at least before November 5. This enabled him to plunge directly into the heart of Anglo-British tensions, by attending the House of Commons on that day to hear a historic debate on whether or not Britain should resume diplomatic and trading relations with Soviet Russia, which had been broken off in At any rate, the debate was long and well-atten- ded by the political elite.

Britain was just months into its second-ever Labour government, propped up by an alliance with the Liberals, and one of its policies was to end the diplomatic rift with Rus- sia. What was Britain gain- ing, after trade with Russia had plummeted, while other coun- 5 Bulgakowa reports that Eisenstein wrote few letters from England, probably due to having such a crowded schedule. But it may be worth recalling that he wrote again to Strauch from Mexico in , and that the two published letters are among the most revealing from this period of his travels.

The inal vote around Eis- enstein may well have felt relieved to be starting his visit with Anglo-Russian relations renewed. But researching and mounting an exhibition devoted to his life-long fascination with English themes and motifs threw up a number of interest- ing connections and questions — many not easily answered. His irst West End hotel proved embarrassing for a visitor without money to tip the porters, even though his accommod- ation was paid for by the Film Society, so he moved to more modest one off Russell Square in Bloomsbury.

One of his main goals for the visit to Britain also proved unrealisable. It appears that he was far from impressed. Not only were parts of this much-censored ilm missing, but he thought Meisel ran it too slowly, favoring his own music rather than the editing rhythm of the ilm the stone lions suffered most apparently, even provoking mirth , and so received more of the applause than he deserved.

Although this is the received view of that famous event, we should perhaps be cautious in taking it at face value. Above all, Potemkin was already an old ilm, certainly for Eisenstein and no doubt for many of those present, who would have already seen it privately, or in Germany. Meisel is credited with music and sound effects.

Methuen, , Eisenstein was assigned to design the sets for this complex satire on the wealthy classes of Europe on the eve of the Great War. However, as with many designs during this impoverished period, the production never took place. One such, an unexpected discovery at the Bakhrushin Mu- seum, was a set of costume designs for a show entitled Sher- lock Holmes and Nick Carter, also dating from Philip Wilson Publishers, , Lawrence in several letters, essays, and in his memoirs. Lawrence in Sardinia 6 Desires, And clearly Eisenstein took back to Russia memories which would be activated many years later, as many of his drawings testify.

Living irst in Bloomsbury and then at 8 Royal College Street, Camden, the two lovers contin- 14 A letter to Kenneth Macpherson requesting works by and about Lawrence, dated October 13, is quoted in Seton Eisenstein, Beyond the Stars, After a series of bitter arguments Verlaine left London, and their brief reunion in Brussels soon after concluded with Verlaine shooting his young lover in the wrist in a drunken rage. Behind her in one of these, a scene of debauchery is interrup- ted by the shadow of the approaching queen. In fact, however, it was his Alexander Nevsky, which still lay nearly a decade in the future, that would play its part in linking Britain and Russia, not only when it was widely shown in the early years of the war, but also when it was transformed into a 18 In fact, Eisenstein could have met the Woolfs, through his contact while in London with their Russian-born collaborator Samuel Solo- monovich Koteliansky.

But there is no record of this within the co- pious documentation of Woolf and her circle. But his indirect contribution to the war effort through radio has been largely ignored. Louis MacNeice was already working for the BBC when Bower invited him to write a play based on the ilm, of which there was only one unsubtitled copy in Britain; and we know form the production iles that there was anxiety about the script being ready in time. But two works stand outside these larger categories, and raise interesting questions, or speculations. One is the extraordinary panorama of characters that exists as a strip nearly a metre long; and the other is a pair of portraits of his mother.

These, surely, would be considered of enormous signiicance from any ilmmakers other than Eisenstein. But are they displaying poverty or hunger? But it is the extraordinary vari- ety of types that impresses us especially when looking at this virtuoso work of miniaturization in close-up. Audiences around the world over ninety years do indeed know who these individuals are, and the fact that we know nothing extraneous about them has made them both poignant and uni- versal. But of course there are other such bravura displays of typage in mass action. Think of the bourgeoisie attacking the Bolshevik lealeteers in the July Days episode of October, glee- fully stabbing at the fallen demonstrator with their parasols and stamping with their elegant shoes.

Think also of what seems like the most literal echo of the queue: This has so often been analysed in the terms that Eisenstein proposed, as an ad- aptation of a Japanese composition, that we have perhaps for- gotten it is another queue of diverse individuals, here united in supplication that the Tsar will return from his self-imposed exile. These are unlike any other drawings by Eisenstein. They have an in- tensity that seems to speak of complex emotions; and of course we know that Eisenstein had mixed feelings, to put it mildly, about his mother.

The strongly worked texture of these drawings seems to speak of very differ- ent emotions from those expressed so playfully or scandalously elsewhere. Whether conined to Moscow or exiled to Alma Ata, he was still inspired by mem- ories of the historic places he had visited a decade earlier dur- ing those three weeks in Britain. But perhaps not surprising after all, for this little boy from Riga who imagined himself as David Copperield and remained a lifelong devotee of detective stories. Eisenstein, Glass House, Introduction, notes et commentaires de F.

Mais partout, aussi, on construit des digues: Trotsky, , trad. Engels, Le Manifeste communiste , trad. Engels, Dialectique de la nature , trad. Benjamin, Origine du drame baroque allemand , trad. Hirt, Paris, Flammarion, , pp. Il existe aussi de nombreuses antho- 7 A. Gorz, Les Chemins du paradis. Paris, Gallimard, , p. Douleur nouvelle sur douleur ancienne: Muller, Essais lorentins, Paris, Klincksieck, , pp. Paris, Gallimard, , passim. Paris, Flammarion, , pas- sim. Touraine, La Parole et le sang. Il y a des cycles et des latences, des remuements en tout cas. Tilly, La France conteste: Diacon, Paris, Fayard, , passim.

Londres-New York, Routledge, , pp. Karns, New York-Londres, Praeger, , pp. Mais pour penser 25 M. Dobry, Sociologie des crises politiques. Major, Paris, Stock, , p. Damals war ich Ulrich Gregor Student in Berlin. Ich folgte einer Einladung zur Teilnahme an einem internationalen Jugendfestival in Mos- kau. Man fuhr mit dem Zug von Berlin bis zum Belorussischen Bahnhof. Wir trafen uns erst wieder , bei unserem ersten Besuch der Moskauer Filmfestspiele. Und dieser Ort wurde, bedingt durch Naum, zu unserer Heimat in Moskau, wann immer wir dort waren.

Dort haben wir immer wieder Freunde getroffen und neue kennengelernt. Die Smo- lenskaja war der interessanteste Treffpunkt in Moskau. Es waren immer wieder Entdeckun- gen. Wir glaubten an didaktische Ausstellungen. Dort erfuhren wir die wichtigsten Informationen. Es war ein unver- gesslicher Eindruck. Und wir waren auch dort zu Hause. Nebenan hatte er seine Sammlungen, darunter auch eine Filmsammlung. Alle Vor- stellungen waren voll. Ich erinnere mich besonders an einen Men- schen aus Saratow. Wir verfolgten und bewunderten nicht nur Naums Arbeit als Museumsleiter, Sammler und Programmierer von Filmzyklen, als Vermittler von Kenntnissen, als Inspirator, sondern auch seine schriftstellerische, wissenschaftliche und editorische Ar- beit im Umgang mit den hinterlassenen Schriften von Sergej Eisenstein.

Es ist erstaunlich und bewundernswert, dass unter schwierigsten Bedingungen diese Publikation bis heute erscheinen konnte und kann. Dass er eine Zentraligur der Filmvermittlung, der Wissenschaft und der Filmkultur ist, dar- an kann kein Zweifel bestehen. Ohne Kompromisse mit den Machthabern. Darin ist er uns ein Vorbild, ist seine Arbeit ein Modell. Und er ist unser Freund, unser Seelenverwandter. This is how Osip Brik described the work of the camera. For Walter Benjamin, one of the most perceptive diagnosticians of his time, cinema possessed explosive power due to its way of seeing things in an unusual, estranged manner.

Clearly, it is another nature which speaks to the camera as com- pared to the eye. For some reason it was necessary for Shklovsky to trans- form Tolstoy into a camera, even though cinematography had 1 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols. Harvard University Press, , Para- doxically he associated the machine not with the re-awakening of vision but, on the contrary, with the erasure of all freshness in perception.

The machine reproduces and automatizes, and by doing so, the machine goes blind. The dis- continuous world is a world of recognition. The cinema is a child of the discontinuous world. Human thought has created for itself a new non-intuitive world in its own image and likeness. From this perspective, the motion picture is a tremendous modern phenomenon--in its magnitude, perhaps, not third but irst.

What makes ilm discontinuous? As everyone knows, a movie reel consists of a series of mo- mentary shots succeeding one another with such speed that the human eye merges them; a series of immobile elements creates the illusion of motion. Pure motion, as such, will never be reproduced in cine- matography.

Cinematography can only deal with the motion-sign, the semantic motion. It is not just any motion, but motion-action that constitutes the sphere of a motion picture. Russkie formal- isty v poiskakh biograii Moscow: Vysshaia shkola ekonomiki, I will have to leave this interes- ting subject out of the present discussion. Dalkey Archive Press, Iampolski - Film Resisting Theory vision and fully belongs to the domain of recognition. In a pe- culiar way, memory, as Bergson constructs it i.

In his early book, Time and Free Will: Vision belongs to the domain of duration, and duration does not presuppose either isolated objects or separate and consec- utive psychic states. Duration connects percep- tions of the present moment with some elements of the past; those moments that are captured by memory and are therefore heterogeneous in relation to the present moment of perception. In reality, however, there exists no percep- tion that would not be saturated by remembrance: With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.

He uses this example to demonstrate that our perception of the world consists of two components. Now, between this succession without externality and this ex- ternality without succession, a kind of exchange takes place, very similar to what physicists call the phenomenon of endosmosis.

As the successive phases of our conscious life, although interpene- trating, correspond individually to an oscillation of the pendulum which occurs at the same time, and as, moreover, these oscilla- tions are sharply distinguished from one another, we get into the habit of setting up the same distinction between the successive moments of our conscious life…. It is a com- plex dephasing relationship between the external existence of divisible and countable elements i. What Bergson describes reminds one of the dephas- ing reduplication as understood by Gilles Simondon, a useful reference for the clariication of the problem.

Iampolski - Film Resisting Theory An optic machine like cinematography is not capable of inte- grating the world aesthetically and subjectively.

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Such integra- tion needs a duplication of the world that could allow mediation and transformation. Technology differentiates individuates itself from a magical relation to the world and acts as a medi- ator between the human being and the surrounding world. The process of individuation and genesis proceeds through phases. Simondon understands phases not as consecutive stages of de- velopment but, speciically, as bifurcations and reduplications of phenomena. Any technical or quasi-technical device emerges from dephasing and reduplication of the originally integral relation- ship with the world.

Cinematography further complicates and makes more dynamic this relationship of constant dephasing, of uninterrupted translation of the outer into the inner. Cinematog- raphy thus appears to be a technological means of mediating reality by slicing it up into component parts. In this sense, cin- ematography is nothing speciic at all. Speech and, of course, writing are also technologies that articulate reality. Why, for the formalists, as paradox- ical as it might be, did literature and not ilm and photography demonstrate a closer afinity to vision?

In the world of art, the world of continuity, the world of the continuous word, a line of verse cannot be broken into stresses; it has no stress points: The traditional theory of verse emphasizes the violation of con- tinuity by discontinuity. The continuous world is a world of vi- sion. The discontinuous world is a world of recognition. Shklovsky is trying to resolve the relation between the continuous and the discontin- uous in terms of form and material.

These terms are unfortu- 8 Shklovsky. Literature and Cinematography, For Shklovsky, the whole of the outer world together with its char- acters, actions, and motivations was material for the work of the artist, for art to re-distribute and give shape to. According to Shklovsky, ilm differs from painting and litera- ture by virtue of the fact that the apparatus producing the image deforms it in a manner that can be compared to the production of artistic form.

The situation becomes more complicated in the sec- ondary formation of the already-formed technological material in the process of editing. The material of painting is visible reality, or colored planes. The material of cinematography is not the visible world but the already-articulated world of recognition. As is well known, Shklovsky the theoretician tended to in- terpret artistic form narratologically as a plot.

But a ilmic plot is different from a literary one: In its essence, cinema is the plot. There is nothing else in a ilm. Iampolski - Film Resisting Theory time by means of montage and narrative: In ilm, plot displacement triumphs. Moreover, when the continuous material of literature is transposed onto paper, transformed by the plot, and achieves articulatedness, still, the discontinuity thus produced relates to the continuity of the narrative itself and thus appears as pure dephasing.

Nothing like this takes place in the cinema. One simply takes a frag- ment of a previously dismembered series and moves it into a different place. He insists on this many times: In a ilm, those segments which interrupt one another are much shorter; they are truly segments; we usually return to the same moment of the action.

An ordinary contemporary stunt ilm consists of a number of engaging scenes which are connected with each other solely by the unity of the characters. One part of a ilm is indispensable, because in it the cameraman shows a view of a city from above; in the next part, a trained monkey performs; the third part of the same ilm contains a ballet performance, and so on. And we watch all of it with interest. What is a ilm plot? An artful selection of scenes, a successful chronological transpo- sition, and good juxtapositions.

It is for this reason that, in spite of all its modernity, cinematography appears to him a modern nightmare from which one can only ind rescue in the literary word. Fundamentally, cinematography is extraneous to art. It grieves me to observe the development of cinematography. I want to be- lieve that its triumph is temporary. Then there will be no motion pictures. Tynianov believed that literary form was dynamic and not static.

The unity of the work is not a closed, symmetrical intactness, but an unfolding, dynamic integrity. Between its elements is not the static sign of equality and addition, but the dynamic sign of correlation and integration. The form of the literary work must be recognized as a dynamic phenomenon. Ardis, , Iampolski - Film Resisting Theory The principle of dynamic deformation producing a particular form can be found in the relation between meter and rhythm in poetry. However, at the same time, there is a radical difference between cinema and verse. And this articulation is mechanical in its essence.

Conversely, meter exists in verse on an exclusively virtual basis. Meter does not exist as such, but is given to us as the never realized expectation of mechanical repetition. In such a case, meter ceases to exist in the shape of a regular system, but it does exist in another way. We have either a coordination of unities which is accomplished progressively , or a subordination which is accomplished regressively.

Thus, a poetic system uses the same dephasing redu- plication in which the mechanical regular is virtual and the non-regular rhythm is actual. Cinema, as the formalists understood it, never pos- sessed any virtual or ideal dimension. In ilm, everything is giv- en to the gaze. Tynianov insisted that a constructive shift in literature pro- duces a renewed vision and can serve the destruction of recog- nition. But what is it that gets visible apart from the form itself? What is visible is to a great extent reduced to the dynamics of the construction that in the inal analysis 17 Ibid. It is not by accident that later on Jakobson would talk of the becoming-visible of the poetic language itself.

This however was not all that Tynianov suggested. He also used the idea of the constructive principle in order to include cultural history in his thinking. According to Tynianov, evolution presupposes system changes not affecting tradition. But the change of systems also means that evolution itself has a certain inherent constructive principle. One system becomes virtual, like meter, and against its background, the actual system reveals its potential func- tionally comparable with rhythm.

To a considerable extent, the evolutionary mechanism follows from the constructive principle that forms the system of the verse. On the contrary, it emphasizes this distinction. Such is the historical role of poetic parody. Here, he no longer thinks of cinema as the mechanical repro- duction of fragments of reality, but as a dynamic structure simi- lar to poetry. A dynamization of static articulation is the product of historical evolution that neither cinema nor any other medi- 19 Ibid.

Iampolski - Film Resisting Theory um can escape. Thus evolution overcomes the limitations of technology and transforms cinema from a purely mechanical medium of re- cording into a form of art. It introduces a constructive principle into objects that are alien to it. This becomes possible because there is no signiicant difference between the constructive prin- ciple in art and evolution. Evolution transforms cinema into an art form and simultaneously reverses the relation between tech- nology and form: Furthermore, cinema as art is no longer concerned with innova- tion in and of itself, but only with the technical means that develop its intrinsic potentials and that are selected with its basic devices in mind.

In the interaction of technology and art, the positions of the two have been reversed as compared to the situation that ob- tained at the outset: The art of cinema has found its material. It does not give rise to new 21 Ju. Michigan Slavic Publications, , This provides the basis for a completely new interpretation of gesture and movement. Had the shots been three-di- mensional, given in relief, their interpenetration, their simultane- ity, their synchronicity, would have been unconvincing.

Only by taking advantage of this simultaneity is it possible to create a com- position that not only reproduces motion, but is itself based on the principles of that motion. Due to such limitations, the new art transcends the level of reproduction of movement — as metric regularity and abstraction — and acquires a lexible dynamism arising from the principles of dephasing, shift, deformation, and evolution. In this way, cinema becomes similar to literature.

In spite of the modernity of their approach, the formalists failed to overcome a fetishistic attitude towards art. Paradoxi- cally, it is the technological nature of ilm that made it dificult for them to think of cinema outside the framework of aesthetics. The problem lay in the simple fact of the regularity of intervals between photograms.

Tynianov was able to integrate the virtual regularity of meter into poetry, but the purely mechanical regu- larity that constitutes the ilm image appeared to resist the idea of art as the formalists cultivated it. Already at the time of the invention of the movies, the reg- ularity of intervals between photograms created dificulties in 22 Ibid. Iampolski - Film Resisting Theory the measurement and reproduction of movement. In the work of the formalists, cinema developed a new resistance to theo- ry, disrupting theoretical efforts to explain it on artistic princi- ples.

This resistance increased with new attempts to integrate mechanical reproduction into the domain of the artistic. If that was a failure, its history is interesting in itself. I was looking for him in the delegation of Russian ilm artists and scholars visiting Bombay. A man with an intense and meditative expression caught my eye. He wore glasses, was of medium height, with a high forehead, a compact body and gentle manner.

I observed him, unobtrusively I thought, but he had noticed it. We exchanged faint, complicit smiles. He had to be Naum. And so he was! From that point, the thread of word- less understanding runs till today. If I were to mention only one quality of Naum that I ind out- standing, it would be neither his vast erudition, nor his fantastic mind, nor his insatiable curiosity, nor his generosity, nor his joie de vivre, nor his capacity to love and connect with people, but to really listen to them. His listening is an intense activity — an act of almost Yogic concentration.

As he listens to you, your thoughts arrange themselves, like iron ilings aligning along the magnetic lines of force. Naum can draw the unborn, unthought thoughts out of you, with the love, patience and tenderness of a Socratic midwife. Since getting the books that I needed for my study was dificult in the U. By the time I left Moscow, there was a ninety-kilo hillock of rare books on his table; one day, this enchanted hillock lew into my study in Bombay.

I still have the age-yellowed notes of our unending conversa- tions and wonder whether we worked together for ive weeks or ive months! A picture of Eisenstein began to emerge for me. It was like looking at a mural in a vast Ajanta cave, in the light of a sin- gle luttering candle, with images coming into light, passing into darkness; an image of the compassionate Buddha appear- ing and disappearing. A vague sensation has now grown into a conviction…not just one Archimedean Point, but many. The language was very dificult… the hardest thing was un- derstanding the way of thinking … by which Oriental turns of phrases, sentences, word formations and word outlines are con- structed.

Three of the fundamental concepts of his aesthetics emerged out of this study: With these, he built a sensuous-conceptual hanami- chi, or Flower Bridge,6 between Japan and his world. Such Flower-paths had also reached the Indian shores7 and Eisenstein was the most revered artist-thinker for us. In the his- tory of colonial India, our inest artworks were nothing more than The Much Maligned Monsters8 to the Europeans.

BFI Publishing, , 3: It is a long, raised platform left of centre, from the back of the theatre, through the audience, to connect with the main stage.

Generally used for entrances and exits and asides of the actors or scenes taking place apart from the main action. As India and the U. University of Chicago Press, Though Indian culture did not play a major role in his world-view, each one of his references to it is a penetrating insight. He made us look at our culture anew. He had learnt from many non-European civilisations and in each of them, he found an Archimedean Point, to turn some part of the Eurocentric world upside down.

From , he trav- elled to Europe, the US, and Mexico, returning only in This experience provided him the physical and mental space to look within from without. He also met some of his greatest con- temporaries and exchanged ideas with them. All this provided him with many signiicant perspectives on art and the sources and process of creativity.

Eisenstein experienced the grandeur and immensi- ty of the Pre-Columbian landscape architecture and sculpted space. He had used the wide-angle lenses in Strike,10 General contact with the Indian art used to regard the many-headed Indian deities as monsters. It took centuries before these works could be appreciated in their true signiicance and grandeur; though, admittedly, some of the British administrators did a lot for their discoveries and preservation.

Thames and Hudson, , Khopkar - The Flower Bridge and The Archimedean Points Line,11 and even in October, to stretch space, but there was a qualitative shift in what he created in the Mexican footage and thereafter in Ivan the Terrible.

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He used the wide-angle lens- es and pan-focus consistently for the construction of oneiric, even hallucinatory visions not seen before in cinema. In terms of a kinaesthetic experience of monumentality, Western sculpture does not have much on the scale of Assyr- ian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Pre-Columbian, Buddhist in- cluding the brutishly destroyed Bamiyan Buddhas , Persian Persepolis , Khmer Angkor Wat or the Indian monolithic cave temples of Elephanta and Ellora. Just as Eisenstein took from other civilisations, he gave to them generously.

On the same page there are two more examples from Strike. The great Indian ilmmaker, Ritwik Ghatak was deeply inlu- enced by Eisenstein. He used wide-angle lenses for all his ilms. From ilm to ilm, his lens-angles became wider. The monumental com- positions of the 9. In one particular shot, Ghatak framed three heads, the frontal face of a young boy lanked by two proiles of women, evoking the famous three-headed gigantic sculpture of Lord Shiva, in the Elephanta Cave temple near Bombay.

Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros San Francisco: Chronicle Press, , Editions Complexe, , Methuen , These heads, … twenty feet high, are smaller than those of the Bayon in Angkor; but colossal in comparison to the igures around them, they ill the cave as Pantocrator ills the Byzantine cathed- rals of Sicily. Like the Pantocrator, this Shiva stops below the shoulders without becoming a bust. Hence its disturbing aspect of severed head and divine apparition.

A full face and two monumental proiles, whose planes …are worthy of the highest work of art…This igure belongs …to the domain of the great symbols, and what this symbol expresses, it alone can express. It dovetails with a much broader framework of music of landscape in Nonindifferent Nature. Gallimard, cited in Bombay, meri jaan, writings on Mumbai, eds. Penguin Books, , Una visione rifratta delle rilessioni sul colore di S. Eisenstein was happily out- side the ambit of the U. Chinese civilisation was also a major inluence of Eisen- stein.

Mei had toured the US in and had met Charles Chaplin, who had spoken to Eisenstein about Mei,23 who had a tremendous impact on the avant-garde of the twentieth century. The University of Chicago Press, Edwin Mellen Press, Hong Kong University Press, These books by Min Tian deal with the most important intercultural relationships between the Occidental and Chinese theatre. They help us understand better, not only Eisenstein, but also Brecht, Tretiakov and Meyerhold, four giants of the twentieth century art.

In Kathakali,26 a great Indian dance-drama, the men perform female roles even today, in a stylised gesture language and manage to convey exquisitely the feminine emo- tions and actions, even breastfeeding, in the most reined way without pretending to be women. In Maharashtra, Balgandarva, a male actor playing female roles, set the template for women, from speech, gestures, gait to hair styles in the early decades of the twentieth century. The Indian dance-form, Bharatnatyam, which used to be performed by Devdasis, women attached to temples, is considered one of the most sensuous dance forms.

Its great gurus have been almost exclusively men. Like cinematic mentioned earlier, imagicity is a key concept for Eisenstein, which he never freezes. Both these concepts have great importance in his exploration of the Grundproblem, which Naum Kleiman deines as follows: These two books have excellent essays on the dance-drama. Richard Taylor London and Calcutta: Seagull Books, , He had begun to feel that it was the source culture from which Japan had learnt a great deal.

Along with cinematic and imagicity Eisenstein speaks of polysemie of the Peking Opera, wherein a simple object like a table becomes a staircase, a mountain, to a stool, a bed, etc. It splits into Yin, the female, and Yang, the male principle. This is a social unity splitting into Yin and Yang. If the division between the sexes were the cause of the irst division of labour, then how come only in Ancient China it became so important? Shiva, mentioned earlier, in an androgyne. He is symbolically represented in union with his consort Shakti the female force.

Their icon is the union of an erect phallus lingam penetrating a vagina yoni. Another form in which they are represented is called Ardhanaarishwar, half-man, half-woman God. All classical Indian artistic creation in theatre, dance, painting or sculpture,36 oscillates between the feminine aspect, lasya: One of the paths that leads to this Lord is called Tantra. Without going into greater detail here, sufice it to say that the highest aim of this path is ecstasy.

But the Indian female principle, Shakti — literally power or energy — also has its terrible and destructive aspect in Kali, the dark Goddess, like the Greek Furies. The Sunwise Turn, Inc. He deines the aesthetic bliss as the co-uterine, as the ecstatic bliss Brahmananda, the joy of feeling one with the universe. From Yin and Yang, in Pair — Impair 39 we come to their speciic application to numbers — odd impair Yang and even pair Yin.

Using their interplay as his conceptual tool, Eis- enstein analyses several diverse compositions: They always reveal something concrete, new and valuable about how a work of art is created and experienced. Eisenstein explores the relation- ship between the pre-logical and the logical thinking and in the process, discusses magical thinking, animism, sensuous versus logical thought and even histories of philosophy and literature.

Features, considered functional at one stage, recur as expressive at another. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, Khopkar - The Flower Bridge and The Archimedean Points sphere, where bodily needs are never experienced and gravi- tational force is nonexistent. Ancient China, with its pantheistic world view, was the irst civilisation to devote centuries to the development of landscape painting. The Tao of Painting42 has instructions about painting natural phenomenon from rocks to insects.

The Chinese paint- ers organised each element of painting, through the conceptual framework of Yin and Yang and brought astonishing visual uni- ty to their paintings. These were at once the pictures of nature and expressive rhythmic patterns. Blindness to the supplement is the law. And especially blindness to its concept. Moreover, it does not suffice to locate its functioning in order to see its meaning. The supplement has no sense and is given to no intuition. We do not therefore make it emerge out of its strange penumbra. A trace is visible to me.

Its visibility, what it sees, is invisible, thus ensuring it simultaneous secrecy, spectrality, respect. Memoirs of the Blind stresses the blindness of the artist, too. Interrupted—ellipsis—this movement however brief is total. Because the artists cannot see, the portrait can only be a trace, which makes the text much more explicitly a trace structure without any signified presence of the sight.

The visor effect creates a situation where the gaze of the ghost has the right of inspection over me. The spectre comes before us and hence we are responsible for inheriting it. In Spectres of Marx, this decision will determine our relationship with justice, for the right of inspection that the spectre enjoys can only produce a forceful gaze, but cannot deterministically make us act.

The visor effect ensures the impenetrability of the spectre. In Apparitions, Kas Saghafi writes to this effect: It is on the basis of this visor effect that we inherit the law: Saghafi is able to say this for many reasons. Spectrality is at the nexus point where belief and non-belief overlap. Our society is under the illusion that its knowledge is empirical and scientific. This viewpoint would posit that the light of photochemical process gives us a transparent view of the world, that we can safely account for the history of photography and that the content of the photograph can be connected to facts: But on the other hand, the photograph also interpellates us in a way that is totally unrelated to the raw facts.

Photography requires us to rely on belief in the origin of the referent. Ken McMullen, Ghost Dance The use of formulas in Derrida is uncommon, but when they do appear they are pregnant with deconstructive possibilities. Da is understood as a set that cannot be separated.

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What must return is repetition itself. In the end, even when we are in science we are never being scientific. Properly speaking, spectrality is a challenge to scientific discourse. Death and life blur under its logic, occluding a scientific understanding of it. Robert Briggs argues that mainstream media determine our perception and experience of events by manipulating space and time: And they make space.

It creates space by blurring geographical and political boundaries and identities. The purest appeal to presence in visual culture is perhaps live media. The artifactual consists of a complex mixture of specific institutional, economic, and technological forces working together to deny their own pre-established interventions. Media industries also determine the rhythm of what can be discussed in the public sphere Derrida and Stiegler 7. Derrida rejects a certain resistance to technology that runs through Romanticism, New Ageism, and Heidegger.

Our experience is transformed profoundly and globally through liveness, which also includes the internet Derrida and Stiegler I do not want to try to reduce all of technical modernity to a condition of possibility that it shares with much more ancient times. However, if we are going to understand the originality and the specificity of this technical modernity, we must not forget that there is no such thing as purely real time, that this does not exist in full and pure state. The spectral teaches us that one is no longer when one thought one was, either.

Cinema itself is haunted by stillness, and hence contains the same attributes these critics observe in photography. What makes film spectral is the photography that is its basis. The technical apparatus shows itself when film slows down or repeats itself.

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Delay casts light on the tracing machine at work. Delay causes suspense between the now of the viewing and the time of the recording. As Laura Mulvey persuasively shows we can actively stop cinema and allow its dead, uncanny images to shape and haunt us. In Camera Lucida, Barthes defines the studium as the intended, culturally produced or coded dimension of photography.

The punctum, on the other hand, is never coded. The punctum speaks to me, concerns me, and therefore contains the power of spectre. As a powerful writing performance, photography produces traces of things or places that have the potential to return to us like ghosts. This is also what attracted Derrida to photography to some extent: Focusing on the transparency of the medium, Barthes is able to shed some of the cynicism of the semiologist and enter into a more direct relation with the real world. For Barthes photography gives us that option.

Visibility of others and ourselves is actually the secret thesis of the book. This division or spectrality, we may say is what allows for the possibility of repetition and technical reproduction. The camera automatically picks up these details and thus enlarges our understanding of the diversity there is to be found in the world. There is no denying the multiplicity of people and histories.

The contingency of the photographic image somehow awaits their inclusion. The only thing in the way is censorship of all kinds. Death has appeared in traditional and ritualistic art throughout history, but as traditions change and new art forms take hold, death and dying and their representations must be reinterpreted. Contemporary artists and scholars have commonly chosen photography as the medium that is intricately connected to death.

If photography is death, then death itself must share an important and unique relationship with the photograph. Describing a photograph of a convicted man, Barthes defines death as the logic of the photograph: Mulvey sees the photograph as the basis of cinema, thus bringing in all the characteristics of arrest, death. Mulvey shows how death is intertwined with cinema at many levels narratological and technological , as her study emphasizes the power of delay in cinema.

Instead of relating the theme of stasis or death to a Bazinian mummification, as would traditionally be done in studies of death and photography, Derrida draws from a saying or thought that came to him one day in Athens: Athens is a city that dies a little more each day, a city whose ruins are aplenty and that seems to invite the work of the photographer-as-archivist.

Delay is an inbuilt feature of photography as Derrida conceives it. The delay that characterizes the activities of the photographer, such as the delay of setting up the shot before the click of the camera and the waiting that occurred after the picture was taken, waiting for the photo to be developed, and the delay of the photograph itself, the way it holds our attention, seems to colour the entire photographic enterprise with the logic of mourning. He regrets that he came to Athens late in life: In Copy, Archive, Signature, Derrida confronts the latest frontiers of photography, including digital cameras and live TV, and pays greater attention to technology as a determining force of the context of photography.

Although the book reproduces a very short interview, it is full of fascinating insights, on photography, and points us to how deconstructive readings of new visual media can continue to be forged. The interview starts with a description of what makes digital photography different from film-based photography. It is argued that the recording and producing moments of photography are now combined under a single performative act, turning photography into an endeavour akin to Photoshop, one that instantly archives itself and makes the technological act just as important as the artistic one.

The photographic project is already marked by indeterminacy, and lack of aura, as Derrida will go on to show. He reminds us that even before photography, perception is a kind of photographic operation: We can no longer oppose perception and technics; there is no perception before the possibility of prosthetic iterability; and this mere possibility marks, in advance, both perception and the phenomenology of perception.

Copy 14 Throughout the book, Derrida will make many similar insights. We are left with a few short works by a thinker who wanted to theorize media. Derrida wrote multiple pieces on photography from the mids onward. Photography and psychoanalysis would thus concur in time over a certain non-concurrence in space and time, a non-concurrence that, I would like to suggest in conclusion, is also the very temporality of deconstruction and the archive.

Indeed these concepts have been reinforcing each other in Derrida since Of Grammatology. Naas argues deconstruction can be understood better through consideration of photographic technologies. Cinema and photography allow the detail to be magnified. This is also a goal of psychoanalysis. He describes a cyclical relationship wherein deconstruction becomes more tenable as a result of photographic technology: Photography as a metaphor for deconstruction was always there.

Naas maintains Derrida arrived at this conclusion early in his writings. There are spectres, foreknowing before the image is taken. To summarize a large amount of recent post-structuralist theorization on the topic, every photograph is in a sense haunted by the absence of its referent. When the camera clicks and the photograph is taken, the death of the moment is inscribed within it.

Death is never a settled matter in Derrida. Why are some images more haunting than others? In war photography, for example, we internalize the death of a ghost who will keep on living both outside and inside of us. When the referent gets further and further away from the image, the greater the haunting. Saghafi notes, In photography the referent is not renounced but is held in abeyance. Even though this suspension entails putting off, deferring, and delaying the encounter with the absolute referent, the wholly other, a suspended relation is still maintained with the referent in this process of placing it in quotation marks.

This suspended relation denotes suspense the state of being suspended, of awaiting determination or a decision that is pending but also dependence on the referent a hanging onto, a reliance on it. While there is no direct access to it, the referent is still desired and reference is maintained. In terms of joining up with the referent, the image will always be in a state of delay. Ethics for Derrida is both universal and unknowable. Indeed, the delay before the picture is taken potentially creates a spectre that was never not part of the image.

This is the paradoxical, unsteady foundation on which deconstruction rests: Death is the movement of differance to the extent that that movement is necessarily finite. This means that differance makes the opposition of presence and absence possible. Without the possibility of differance, the desire of presence as such would not find its breathing-space.

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That means by the same token that this desire carries in itself the destiny of its non-satisfaction. Differance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible. Spectrality haunts because it is other another time, another subjectivity, etc. If there is such a thing as Derridean film theory, it must emphasize the technical nature of the medium while developing subject positioning and ideology critique approaches. A membrane displaying traces of light, the screen becomes not the site of the consecration of that former metaphysically oriented or motivated operation but rather its marginal or liminal support.

Its supposed diaphanous quality then results not so much from its being an imperfect window upon the world but from its functioning as membrane, locus of relay and articulation, as well as system of protection involving its own abolition. In other words, the screen must both be present and obscured, or absent, for its effect to be realized.

Oswald develops the notion of cinema-graphia to account for the similarities between writing and cinema. This notion emphasizes the self-reflexively graphic nature of the medium. Her main example of cinema-graphia is from Eisenstein Brunette and Wills Often in Eisenstein, a shot is supposed to carry one meaning. However, this type of montage compels us to understand the shot as a matter of deferred meaning. The meaning of the shot comes later, after it is presented. As she sees it, there is deconstructive potential in montage: Oswald finds such uses of montages in Tarkovsky and Resnais, which she only briefly mentions.

The spectator no sooner finds a footing in the events of the fiction than the editing breaks the terms of scopic identification and opens up yet another space-time and yet another locus in which the spectator must insert himself or herself. The intrication of narrating and spectating subjectivities never quite achieves a coherent unity in the present and presence of the film image, but follows a movement without origin, present, or presence, a movement that perpetually postpones the closure of I and eye to an unlocatable future-past.

The endless movement between desire and fulfillment, between anticipation and remembrance in The Mirror is dictated by the film frame marking junctures between vision and blindness, between reality seen and imaginary scene in film discourse. Brunette and Wills Apparatus theories conceive of cinema as a host of technical practises, from the production to the reception, that affect viewer psychology.

Apparatus theories were de rigueur in the s when film theory was infused with Marxist and Lacanian political and cultural worldviews see Rosen The technical aspect of the medium and how a subject gets positioned is always emphasized. Apparatus theory deals with the mechanics of the cinematic experience. Baudry stresses the minimal ideological effects of recording raw reality. In which case, concealment of the technical base will also bring about an inevitable ideological effect.

Baudry suggests filmic inscriptions framing, editing, depth of field offer clues to the kind of ideological effects that are produced by the film. The way the camera frames the image according to Western aesthetics and the way it simulates motion are suspect to Baudry: The subject is being formed here through technological apparatus.

To many viewers today, the video of the Rodney King beating, probably shows an African American man being excessively beaten by the police. Memorably, the trial resulted in the police officers being acquitted of the charges against them. As Judith Butler shows, even unedited documentary video is interpreted On the one hand, the optical apparatus and the film permit the marking of difference but the marking is already negated, we have seen, in the constitution of the perspective image with its mirror effect.

On the other hand, the mechanical apparatus both selects the minimal difference and represses it in projection, so that meaning can be constituted; it is at once direction, continuity, movement. The projection mechanism allows the different elements the discontinuity inscribed by the camera to be suppressed, bringing only the relation into play.

Derrida addresses a classroom of students while he is being filmed from a camera in the corner of the room. Recording devices, notably video or filmic ones, have been a topic of our seminar. On several occasions, we examined them in light of the example posed by the Rodney King verdict. This is a California film crew, by the way. In that case we posed the question: What happens to the testimonial archive when one takes into account that the classic definition of testimony excludes the intervention of recording devices?

Derrida maintains the present is divisible, as opposed to Husserl Burchill The implication of this for film is that difference underlies the medium. There is a phantasmatization of objective reality images, sounds, colors —but of an objective reality which, limiting its powers of constraint, seems equally to augment the possibilities or the power of the subject.

Baudry The phantasmatization of reality must therefore mean a kind of conjuring, a faux subject. Film feigns transcendence, in other words. The viewer is interpolated as the transcendental subject. The cinema, for Baudry, is a support of ideology in the final analysis. Copy Photography makes the moment die and live simultaneously: The irrefutable existence of the referent—which is possibly at its fullest expression in cinema, in the flow of life— always rubs up against the death that technics provides.

Spectrality comes on the scene precisely to offer the hope necessary to put life back into the stillness. Derrida is perhaps more aware of the mechanics of the apparatus than Baudry. Cinema viewers face the prospect of internalization more than pure identification, that is to say, assimilation of every cinematic element actor, light, sound, etc. Derrida stresses the role of invention in the photographic scene: There is no strict division between photography as a technological act and its experience Copy Death 24x a Second provides a fresh, theoretically-grounded methodology that allows spectators and therefore scholars to use digital technologies to study film differently: Special features and chapter access have also influenced the way Mulvey reads cultural artefacts: A still frame when repeated creates an illusion of stillness, a freeze frame, a halt in time.

Although the projector reconciles the opposition and the still frames come to life, this underlying stillness provides cinema with a secret, with a hidden past that might or might not find its way to the surface. Stillness can create this sense of delay and the uncanny. Commenting on the scene in Psycho dir. And modern ways of viewing moving images have only amplified this tendency. I am receptive to this kind of material for its practicality, too. While Mulvey could have developed this idea of delay even further—she could have compared moments of stillness and movement featuring Marion to see how the theme of death played out therein—her study makes a key insight that brings together deconstruction and film theory through the notion of delay.

Like the film scholar, video artists have also harnessed these technologies in order to deconstruct the opposition between stillness and movement. Mulvey is especially important to this discussion because she uses an informed psychoanalytic approach to study not only cinema language and content but also the technical nature of the medium.

Uncanny feelings are aroused by confusion between the animate and the inanimate, most particularly again associated with death and the return of the dead. Whatever the nature of the art of photography, that is to say, its intervention, its style, there is a point at which the photographic act is not an artistic act, a point at which it registers passively and this poignant, piercing passivity represents the opportunity of this reference to death; it seizes a reality that is there, that was there in an indissoluble now.

In a word, one must choose between art and death. A detail, probably unnoticed by the photographer, suddenly captures the viewer's attention and emotion. The stillness also does something a lot more tangible, that is conscious, revealing artificiality and techne at once, the apparition, and active mourning.

Deconstruction, in short, reminds us cinema is photography. Montage can be used to alter temporal and spatial continuity. Mulvey argues that such unnatural, bizarre realities are the very stuff that underlies the medium. In Camera Lucida, Barthes also sees a connection between photography and cinema. He experiences a sense of pity when watching the Fellini automaton It is at this point in the book that the death effect of photography joins up with cinema: In them, inescapably, I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when, as Podach tells us, on January 3, , he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse: What is dead about a corpse is not only its stasis but the sense of subtracted life it conveys, the sense of what has been evacuated from behind its eyes.

Moving pictures no less than static ones are a visible function of nonpresence, a trace of the passed away. Such photographically based representation results in either a disembodied imprint on paper or spectral emanation from the imprinted celluloid in the projector. The difference, one might say, is between the cadaverous and the ghostly. Godard knows the technology will one day, pave the way for more manipulation. If Godard began his career by introducing the jump cut and thus transforming film continuity, in Every Man For Himself he tried to do the same, this time through an innovative use of slow motion.

A few scenes illustrate this point well. One is a domestic scene with all three main characters. Isabelle Isabelle Huppert enters the apartment and goes toward the kitchen. Paul reads the title of a magazine article: They both fall to the floor. He has his arm wrapped around her neck like a snake. They tussle on the floor. If I did it at the normal speed it was not possible to see things or at least indicate a possibility, which is not completely reached here that there is something different to be seen. For example, they were fighting together but you had to indicate they were still in love together…To slow it down just to have the time to look.

To take your time to look at what you are doing, and then you discover that these movements…It can be whether a jab or whether a carress. And then probably I was not capable enough of doing it completely. The shot is too long. Maybe there should be a change of angles and different timings. But I kept it that way because it was an indication. They want to love each other, but the only way they want to love each other, the only possibility is by touching themselves though jabs.

So you indicate to the audience there is a possible that moves are changing…So you use it…It was only because I was working in the movies and the techniques in movies are very conservative. And then I thought of it later. And not before the shooting. It still looks a bit like a gadget. A gimmick like in a Sylvester Stalone movie.

One risks being interested in the figure itself to the detriment of the play going on within it metaphorically. The film about a time traveller in post-apocalyptic Paris is composed nearly exclusively with still images. The question of the image is in fact the question of the film itself. The hero travels through time but cannot know with certainty if the images he experiences are real, dreams, or something other.

Notably, the photo-montage contains a single motion picture shot. When the woman the man loves lies in bed on a lovely morning, a single shot captures her blinking. The blink is preceded by a series of impeccably timed dissolves—perceived like a slow motion shot—of her lying on the bed: Love and life and presence in motion. The film seems to pit life and death against each other. Delay is seen as the antithesis of cinema.

But even the moment of motion is now undeniably based on the photographic basis of the medium. We are never more aware of the stillness underlying the simulated motion. The film offers us a view of technics before naturalism. Spectrality includes an element of suspense, and thus, fear. The hero haunts the woman, thus, possessing her. How is delay already anticipated in Derrida? On the Derrida DVD released by Zeitgeist Video in , the deleted scenes and chapter access offer new ways of altering the order and repeating the film.

While some features on the DVD like the commentary ostensibly put things in a more linear order than the actual film, others would in fact expand and throw us off narrative track and prevent conceptual framings. Derrida also appears in slow motion when he is watching previously recorded footage of himself and Marguerite. The act of watching, deciphering is stretched.

A spectral life is one based on delay. Pleshette DeArmitt explains the double movement of ex-appropriation in Derrida with reference to, among other things, Derrida and Echographies of Television. The Echo and Narcissus myth that Derrida meditates on in the documentary contains the principle dynamics of the decentered self: So at exactly the moment of counter-signing, we have a delayed image track that does many things simultaneously, including present the death effect, proliferate punctums, and promote blindness.

In a sense these moments create room for future singularity. The creation of the Marguerite ghost through repetition and slowing down proves to be the peculiar one. Had Derrida lived longer, how would he speak to this ghost? We do know that a certain aspect of the footage of him and Marguerite comes back to him in a spectral structure when he claims not to have remembered being asked the question about how he and Marguerite met.

I was moved by the scene, I liked it a lot. But I liked it precisely because we said nothing. We were about to say something but we remained on the edge of an impossible confidence. Derrida, Derrideans, philosophy itself? Is she just an anecdote even while featuring as a prominent ghost in his archive? Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida The anecdotes sequence and the final shots echo each other in their use of slow motion.

Slow motion acts as an invitation to slow down and delay an image. But they occur precisely at moments when biographical information is being discussed. They both have to do with who he is. Both show Derrida silent in slow motion, reduced to a crawl. The first presents a series of anecdotes that may offer a key to understanding Derrida better.

A slow motion shot voyeuristically approaching the house in California begins the end of the film. What will be the key to Derrida? The film offers many possibilities. Both times we project but always come up with nothing. A sense that all they could get was a photographic portrait, that is, a structure of absence and presence. Nicholas Royle describes the scene thus: There is something especially strange and painful about the silent vigilance of this ending in which the camera lingers on the face of the star so long.

By utilizing slow motion, repetition, and refilming, films like Derrida tell us something about the conditions of representation. These strategies suggest the moment of filming or photographing—which is usually understood as a form of presence—is never simply done and over, never isolatable as an undivided present, but always conditional on the technics that representation—indeed all meaning— depends on.

Derrida would want us to note the technics of film, the elements that constitute its truth in the moment of reception. Mourning Others, Mourning Images Ghost Dance, from , stages the work of mourning on multiple fronts, including radical uses of sound and image. The unhinged voices proliferating throughout never allow the total incorporation of the other. What we get instead are traces of machinic recordings of the other that disseminate and reemerge unexpectedly. Ghost Dance focuses on a young woman who confronts and studies the ghosts of the postmodern society and city.

The film was shot in Paris and London, and in the London scenes derelict, industrial locations are used to signal among other things the ghosts of a certain urban working class culture. The film is a direct influence on Specters of Marx. Why does Derrida bring up the topic of visibility and telecommunications in Specters only to drop it quickly and not offer concrete examples? Zina UK, was his first film with a large budget, financed by television and commercial film companies.

His films have mixed revolutionary politics and formal experimentation Leahy Ghost Dance engages with the ethico-political dimension of spectrality and deconstruction in sometimes eccentric and humorous ways. Many things coincide at roughly this same time. Ghost Dance introduces the idea of the philosopher as a possessed entity through mourning, something Zina, through its depiction of the communication of historical revolutionaries, extends to include public intellectuals more generally.

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Although they have rarely been discussed, Ghost Dance and Zina open up a whole constellation of ideas related to intellectual subjectivities, spectrality, and revolutionary politics pre, pre-Specters of Marx. The themes of teletechnology and neo-liberalism explored in the films are well-suited to the structure of spectrality and no doubt feed into it. Derrida refers to Ghost Dance multiple times in later writings and interviews when discussing the experience of being photographed, and working with Pascale Ogier, the French actress who passed away shortly after making the film.

In Specters of Marx , a study of the ways Marxism still haunts post world culture, Derrida defines spectrality as a non-present inheritance that regards you, but that is temporally out of joint. In Ghost Dance and Zina, the inheritance always comes from another time and through media letters, photography, radio, or oral stories. Characters communicate through letter writing.

As the letter is read, the camera starts to pan and shows a huge hole in the wall of the building. The camera pans left, goes outside, passes a cliff, and then Zina is there in person speaking with Trotsky, who has suddenly switched places. Zina forcefully warns him about the encroaching threat of fascism.

The camera then repeats the same motion backwards. The assistant finishes reading the letter to Trotsky. The film cuts back to Kronfeld reading the letter. The shot blurs divisions, between written and oral, exile and non-exile, original and copy. The scene is about rereading without an origin. Zina and Trotsky who are both in exile are at times credited with witnessing the encroachment of fascism in Germany. She over-identifies with Trotsky, declaring at one point that she is selfless, and is shocked when Trotsky suddenly appears.

What we internalize, and how these things can reemerge. After a period of exile in which Zina became even more alienated from Trotsky, who is seen recording his political ideas into a phonograph, she moves to Berlin and, at the request of her father, begins therapy. Kronfeld also records everything Zina says about her family, turning a family drama into a spectral medium that can ostensibly last generations. Does the film display a nostalgic hunger for origins, or does it suggest the Trotsky family will produce spectral relationships? McMullen advocates a position of mid-mourning as he shows how the key anti-fascist message is successfully carried on through time.

Ghost Dance follows Pascale Pascale Ogier , a young student who meets various people in both real and surreal situations all having to do with the existence of ghosts. The recording devices that proliferate in the films place everything at a potential remove, creating an uncanny experience even from the most natural-seeming scenes. Derrida explains the spectral inheritance in terms of an anachronism. All anachronisms are ghosts. How is inheritance heterogeneous? The ghost is never merely seen yet there is connection with its singularity. What we inherit first passes through technology, given its out of joint quality.

In Ghost Dance, for instance, the inheritance always comes from another time and through technology, whether photography, radio, or folklore. At one point, in Ghost Dance, the protagonists dance in their apartment dressed in tribal wear. The film then dissolves to the images of the dead of the French commune.

It is at this highly eccentric point that Derrida returns. This time, he is heard, not seen. We were talking about the ghost of Freud. Their theory of ghosts is based on a theory of mourning. In normal mourning, Freud says one internalizes the dead. One takes the dead into oneself…and assimilates them. This internalization is an idealization.

It accepts the dead. They just occupy a particular place in our bodies. They can speak for themselves. They can haunt our body and ventriloquise our speech. So the ghost is enclosed in a crypt, which is our body. We become a sort of graveyard for ghosts. It is not our unconscious, it is the unconscious of the other which plays tricks on us. It can be terrifying. In film, images haunt, but the voice of the philosopher is especially haunting. John Durham Peters argues media that record the voice are experienced as uncanny due to their relatively recent development Like all films, Ghost Dance is out of joint, with its time and space.

The disjointed soundtrack constantly forces us to encounter the other in a ghostly, disembodied fashion. The film begins with Pascale recording herself on a tape recorder, and then replaying it. She later tells a professor she runs into that she records his 17 Compared to other philosophers, Derrida left a vast archive of his recorded voice.

Many of these recordings are from lectures he gave in the university setting, available at his archives at University of California-Irvine and IMEC. So I like to play it anyplace, like in bars, in the bath, in the subway. Since the sound- and image-tracks have been created at different, unknown times, there is no natural order. Cowie draws on Derrida to show how history is created in the traces, anterior to the live event, forcing us to question the supposed spontaneity of the live event. Television is never just live. What is left out of the event of writing: Since this is unobtainable, the whole discourse on spectrality enters the scene as what haunts the trace.

Cowie stresses how telecommunications are used to reproduce liveness, simultaneity, and contemporaneity. We forget there is a writing presentation, a form to communication. Emergencies are often experienced through reproductive technologies. These traces of the departed have indeed survived. Sound in film is usually anchored to the image, the more overt signifier.

While these elements are actually all disembodied, narrative film sutures them together and thus suppresses their disembodied quality. Voice is important in mourning and in Derrida. This is how voice works in Ghost Dance and Zina, to create an uncanny disembodied experience. The long shot in Zina works in a way to constantly readjust our interpretation of the events. No stage of full presence. McMullen wanted to suggest that Trotsky is just one voice that gets drowned out, giving it a ghostly status.

George Robbie Coltrane angers the protagonists because of his incessant drum-playing while listening to the radio weather forecast. This adestination gives communication its spectral quality, always implying a more to come. In a France Culture radio interview on the program Le Bon plaisir, McMullen explains his interest in the philosopher: Derrida for me is inspirational.

But I read them, I move in and out of them, and carry certain notions and ideas around. And some of those ideas, I suppose, I re-articulate them and attempt to put some of them in dramatic form. What this hints at before language as a social phenomena and before language in personal development terms already text is being established…The film is not a linear narrative. It is an accumulative narrative. In other words, it has five or six sections which overlay each other. And meaning jumps between these levels, underlaying sections. In that sense, I think that maybe even the form that Derrida writes in presents itself to some extent within the film.

Because I think sometimes my impression of reading Derrida is that the concepts become defined by reading a number of sections because to some considerable extent really concepts are always undefinable. They become lost in language. And the voices in the film serve this suspense and dispersion effect. Characters inhabited by other characters is a theme common to Ghost Dance and Zina.

McMullen explains, I was very aware of the notion of registration. You take one level or registration which reveals the next which reveals the next, and so on. Like The Arabian Nights—inside each story is the beginning of the next. In other words, the incorporated splinters of others channel that speech. The struggle for me is to get rid of the preconceptions that range in the psyche. Leahy Both image and voice produce new interior ghosts. Ghost Dance speaks of generations going back to the seashore. Generations, and inheritance frame the whole.

Ogier records her breakup message: This is a promise to whoever lives there. Or could it be a message to herself? After all, the character is represented by two actresses after this scene. Derrida draws a parallel between his texts and the arts and emphasizes the polyvocality of his writing: I have written many texts with several voices, and in them the spacing is visible. He defines beauty in art as that which we cannot consume, like the voice of the other: In Ghost Dance, Derrida says he is possessed by at least three ghosts: Freud, Kafka, and Marx. The Freudian ghost appears explicitly in the monologue reproduced above.

As in Specters of Marx, there must be a promise. Heritage and the spectre share a close relationship. This forces us to ask what happens to a promise when it is repeated? Derrida spent one day on the set of Ghost Dance, and according to McMullen, the idea of being in something small and experimental appealed to him McMullen Spectres allow us to make a choice, because every spectre is a kind of promise. The scene is haunted by Godard, suggesting just how much film depends on iterability. The status of the cameo is supplementary in most cases; it functions as a moment apart, condensing all character history and motivation and commenting on the whole.

Whereas I believe that ghosts are part of the future. And that the modern technology of images, like cinematography and telecommunication, enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us. Pascale declares she is a student of ghosts: Is this her first encounter with the ghost? Is this the moment when her identity was first divided?

Images from the film are now partly buried in a muddy wall near the shore. This seems to be a decisive burial, the kind Freud argued for. Of course, all the characters are dead now, including Ogier, Derrida, Pinon, and Coltrane, dead, because photographed. Back and forth, Fort: Da, the wave functions as a metaphor for mid-mourning. At the end of every film we mourn, throw images of characters into an ocean. The ocean, too, is spectral. The weather forecast connects his media consumption with his world-view and embrace of all things actual or real.

His desire to repeat the act but never admitting anything is wrong turns it into a fetish. Second, George thinks anything that is out of joint, old, different, in a word, other, is suspect. Thought you said this was a thesis? You must be a right nutcase to write this stuff. Hey, Jim, have you seen this? I, told you, it always gets jammed with filth in it. The scene ends with George laughing derisively at Pascale. After being rebuffed by Pascale and Marianne, he decides to get a shave, ponders a makeover, and decides to buy a suit. I wish I could change my skin, but that would be too expensive.

George is the only character who explicitly forces himself upon another in a film about ghosts and ancient myths. George rapes while Derrida becomes a voice speaking to us ever more faintly from the past. Haunted, haunting, Derrida also improvises but draws attention to the fact that he is already under the gaze of at least three: These three, this set, for Derrida, speaks of spectrality. In his improvised comments, Derrida says he is haunted by Ogier, too.

If we cannot be haunted by Kafka, Freud, and Marx, as Derrida is, then we are at least haunted by Derrida, who is haunted by Ogier, another possible point of shared haunting. In fact, it is alterity itself, that stand-in within this structure of spectrality. Drawing on Levinas, the God-Other pair is brought together within spectrality, too, according to Saghafi: The other always has the accent of the ghost because of the way the visor effect presents itself as inheritance.

Being haunted by the otherness within him, Derrida questions whether what we even get with the image is not always already spectral. The image, like the televised one, feigns presence in the form of liveness. Telecommunication seems to disseminate images that reflect the world as it is. Yet even in the most innocent form of the present, ghosts proliferate. But spectrality gets perhaps first articulated and explored by Derrida in Ghost Dance. Derrida begins exploring the various forms of spectrality after his Prague imprisonment and his first step into fiction filmmaking.

Indeed by the time of Specters of Marx, spectrality is refined to a point that necessarily incorporates visual culture and teletechnology. Both works speak to each other, as the film leaves things out that the movie takes up and vice versa. Could Pascale Ogier be the scholar of ghosts that Derrida calls for in Specters?

But taken together, the film and book illuminate several key themes related to deconstruction: In Specters, Derrida writes, The specter But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that it is, a structure of disappearing apparition From the other side of the eye, visor effect, it looks at us even before we see it or even before we see period.

We feel ourselves observed, sometimes under surveillance by it even before any apparition. Derrida conceives of a truly phantom screen in the future: Derrida then develops an idea of law and the performative and how the spectrality means a right of inspection over you. We are free only if the other grants us this freedom. Being regarded can be both good and bad.

This is not a pessimistic view or something to bemoan. It is because there is something other that watches or concerns me. This Thing is the other insofar as it was already there—before me—ahead of me, beating me to it, I who am before it, I who am because of it, owing to it. Derrida and Stiegler I am always in a position of inheriting the other.

The spectre of death is never seen in the flesh. The spectre is dead and the dead are spectral. The other opens up another origin of the world. As Saghafi also argues this sense of alterity in photography is also connected to death. Respect for the alterity of the other dictates respect for the ghost [le revenant], and, therefore, for the non-living. Ogier, the whole experience of Ghost Dance, its production, its afterlife, connects directly to Specters of Marx. In some ways, Ghost Dance both precedes and comes after Specters of Marx. It follows Specters because it is only after Specters can we begin to speak to the ghosts around us and try to distinguish, put simply, the good ones from the bad ones.

Indeed, is there a chance that spectrality gives in to the authority of everything that is patriarchal? Is spectrality a form of male authority? Of course, spectrality often is of the male genre. By doing that, Yerulshami can have a greater authority over Freud. What is the risk with adorning any and all spectres with male authority? Is this a constant problem of spectrality? It seems to me that if we were discussing the origin of a world, this would be a creative force, equally feminine as well as masculine. Stiegler then asks about Specters of Marx directly.

This reality aspect of spectrality is perhaps what compels Stiegler to wonder if spectrality is a kind of Marxist materialism. Marx, like most of philosophy and science, is in the business of chasing ghosts in order to kill them. Rational discourse tries to make them disappear: This being in the now, the living, is also always already technics for Derrida. Moments of so-called presence proliferate in Ghost Dance.

George plays the drum while listening to the radio, as if the weather forecast provided him with the lyrics to a song he had played many times before. The cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. Not just any other voice, but that of my own ghosts. So ghosts do exist. Perhaps they already have. All this, it seems to me, has to do with an exchange between the art of the cinema, in its most original, unedited form and an aspect of psychoanalysis.

Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts. You know that Freud…Freud had to deal all his life with ghosts. At this point in the monologue, the telephone rings and Derrida without hesitation answers. He could have told me any old story. Well, what Kafka says about correspondence, about letters, about epistolary communication also applies to telephonic communication.

In the era of global teletechnology, the powers of mourning and haunting are greater than before. Technology actually denies the safe, comfortable sense of the living moment. On teletechnology, Derrida writes in Specters, [A]t stake, indissociably, is the differantial deployment of tekhne, of techno- science or tele-technology. The primary follows the secondary. Mourning and otherness derives from this teletechnological stew.

Derrida sought film above all to explore and let proliferate spectres. He writes, [T]his ghost is not some wraith that we see coming and going but rather some one by whom we feel observed and surveyed, like the law. Being looked at and watched by law places an infinite demand on me by addressing me solely with an address that is impossible to determine as a request or an order. Derrida describes the lack of reciprocity in mourning: We are speaking of images. It is the gaze of the law looking at us from within ourselves. He summarizes the situation perfectly: The larger socio-cultural implications of mourning and visual culture are rarely discussed in post-structuralism.

Derrida, however, is very much interested in exploring these issues in relation to his own collaborations in film. It is a mourning activity to consciously adapt Derrida to the moving image. Like he mourned his peers, the filmmakers develop a system of the work of mourning.

Whenever an image of someone is recalled, mourning takes place: Mourning begins with the image of the other in me. Saghafi explains the name in Derrida depends on repetition. Punctum can be a common experience, but it addresses seemingly just me and carries the singularity of the other: Because the punctum functions as a personal communication, the presence seems greater. Photographic images oscillate between suspense and dependence, according to Saghafi Saghafi explains how the photograph of the other functions similarly to the signature or name: