Film Classes by Lucifer

... Do you understand? [ you have to have a sense of humor, if you are to read POV ]

2003 updates and comments:

I. TO BE SEEN

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight." (John Berger, Ways of Seeing.)

It's always there, the invisible -- darkness. We need light to realize it... In darkness come the shadows of light. Life arrested and brought back. Oh devil! How could it be! What does it mean? Darkness is needed. If we don't have it, we have to produce it -- the darkness.
The darkness wasn't created. It's always there where is no light. The first hero of light industry had a tragic history. Greeks called him Prometheus, Christian -- Lucifer.
With the birth of light, the darkness was born. This is the first event. The rest is history.

1. LOOK OUT

Looking comes before Seeing.
How to connect an illiterate (dark) mind to the world? Let's go to the movies!

New History is driven by the needs of media, needs to watch (to have) history. Postmodern = future as present. Resurrection makes past into a material for a future. We photograph -- present became past without loosing the presentism, because it's possible to see it in the future. Light recording is a (visual) duplication, not just a memory. [Impressionism spreads out at the rise of photography -- painters recording their emotions, impressions of the real.] Previous distance between past, present and future was redefined.

Motion pictures -- wishful thinking, dreaming, our semi-sub-consciousness, stream of collective conscience. Pictures in motion -- playing with visions: entertainment. Changes (events) attract; even flame has this gravity of interest. We "read" motion in still picture; motion picture "reads" itself. Collective?

1.2. SPEED LIMIT

Secrets of speed: cuts on motion are "invisible". Video doesn't blink? (Replacement).

By "cutting" space we are "speeding" in perception, we jump (not "flying" zoom) not between objects only, but subjects (POVs). We see what we are not suppose to see, what is outside of our natural sight.

"Anatoly, explain yourself!" I hear his voice.

All right, the cut (or "blink") it's not only a break in seeing, it's a negation of space. You might consider it 'The End of the World" -- and it is, but our mind (memory) restores our confidance in the world's existance (there are many good book already written on the nature of duration, repetition and continuety -- this is philosophy, not my subject). The energy (or drama) of seeing is in those breaks, when deep down we are not sure that the world will be back, when we open our eyes again. This is catastrophic undertone, which the film phenomena is based on.

Now, when we return back from the cut or blink, since the world was gone for a moment, we return not to the same spot fromwhere we left. Although the space was gone, but the time wasn't, we are returning to a new time-spot and it doesn't have to be the place I left -- on the contrary, the angelic travel, according to Lucifer is in this ability to move in time as if it's a space. And this is how they get other identities (the famous business about them "possessing" people). It's all about assuming a different point of view, which is a piece of cake for the spirits, who have no bodies.

Of course, it's not "instant" sort of speak, but with the speed of light, as we know now. And this is what I meant saying that we can see (thanks Lucifer), what we normally can't see. We can see it because of the condensation of human experience (technology); I see it because all the human history is invested into this creation of the apparatus of the new seeing.

1.3. EPISTEMOLOGY OF FILM

Movies: "experiencing" as a method of PM non-thinking thinking (F). "Thinking" is uncontrolled in my dreams. Free association laws, day dreaming -- mind works non-stop. We need very little to format this natural tendency. Images of light (reflections) are close to my feelings-thoughts (reflections also). Seeing lives on memories of real experience (emotional recall). Dreams are fast, compressed experiences of experience.

Cinema couldn't be possible without centuries of Christianity. This insistence on other (virtual) world and our need to see it. We made an invisible into a transparent. The inner world of an individual became a focus of public attention. My private feelings became an object of value. "Bad and good" thoughts are possible only within the realm of morality.

Mind control -- we need it. Reality of thought established its presence with a concept of sin. Feelings are actions. My (subjective) feelings became objective! The idea of sin was to move control deeper, into areas out of our control. I was free to control myself, to police my mind and to discipline my soul. I wasn't God's child anymore, I was Christ's brother. Thinking of killing became more important than killing itself; church can forgive a murder but not an unrepentant soul.

STRUCTURING FREE ASSOCIATIONS
"Entertainment as Idealogy" lives on recycling of viewers' emotions, initial feeling (private) are enlarged, processed by media, (re)formulated -- and given back to the original generator as his public (legitimate) emotions (his experience with others). Market can't offer anything which doesn't exist in consumers (as a need; Marx).

The collective conscience works as this mind formulating what he thinks about what he feels. TV is instructional (emotional education) and represents a society which connects mind and soul of so-called individual. Without society being constantly present he wouldn't know how to relate to himself. Before there were moral laws which served this guaranteeing function. Concept of sin was a private sensor; now it is technologically a direct involvement in inner structure of post-humans. It technology is an extension of man, the opposite is also a true. Man is an extension of humankind. Communism is based on this model of total integration of individual, when one has no independent existence from the rest.

COLLECTIVIZATION OF MIND
Photograph, film, television, video, cybernetics -- giving birth to each other, negating the former, getting its own qualities. In one century so many "generations"!
The process works in both directions: connecting the objective and subjective space. The true aim of CNN is a globalization of mind. At the expense of being centered in itself? New (super) mind is supposed to be an extravert.
The colonization of the world by televisual space? Event? War? Why should we call it "communication" v. contact, becoming new One? We change the world by watching it (tv-cam on "smart weapons"). Watching is a control, next -- the disciplined objects. Your independence ends with a video camera being pointed at you. Visual conquest. That's how all conquests begin.

Seeing is a volition, invasion, violation, force (will), aggression...

"...televisual space is condensed into a violent event-scene, where TV can finally become what it always aspired to, but heretofore could never attain: a purely metaphysical structure for a virtualized experience where cybernetics is philosophy and vision is (telematically) severed from the bounded space of the eye." (Kroker. RU)

The mind is also this event-based-space. It is a constant change and looking for a life outside. Camera is an extension of an eye, but an eye is an extension of mind. I recognize (identify) the motion because I am the motion.

"Hold on! Hold on!"

"Jesus! What is now?"

You know he has this unpleasant ability to appear right in your face. You're writing, you forgot about everything....

"I am not Jesus," Lucifer was reading what I just wrote over my shoulder. "This is something you have to explain; that the time is actually is your product, or by-product of existance and the basis for the notion of motion."

"All right, all right! Just don't do again, the jumping, I asked you many times!"

He is correct. The time is not somewhere "outside" me, I am the generator of it.

"Heidegger as a theorist par excellence of dead power (TV as the "harvesting" of the standing reserve), and the implosion of television into a cybernetic system specializing in the virtualization of human and non-human energies." (K?)

Mixture of two, the third type of energy, kinematic? When the subjective energy became objectivized, did the objective world went through subjectivization?

NEXT WORLD
The virtual will merge theatre and cinema (see Virtual Theatre Files).
Digital -- the end of postmodern? Soon we won't be able to distinguish real and fictional, past and present, here and there.

"TV as metaphysics? Yes, but not as metaphysics of `presence,' but of perpetual absence." (?)

Coverage: closing the real, making its very existence impossible. The Real (in our world) asks for archeology, restoration, reconstruction. Not possible, only an approximation. discovering the real.

How does God feel?
Human feelings are only a part of his sensitivity. Do angels laugh? We thought that devils do -- they are angelic in nature too. What is an emotional chronotope (space-time continuum) of virtuality?
Experiencing images as reality. What is an illusion?

Feelings of images? Angels cry and devils laugh.

Semiotics = methods to measure unmeasurable.
Semiotics for me is no more than math is for a scientist. It's a language to view and to describe reality as text.

II. REAL REALITY

[ destructive reading continue ]

1. ANGELIC BEING REGAINED

"Camera ready? Roll the camera!"
Simulated Presence was a build-in mechanism in broadcasting... Watching TV is a distribution of power between the viewer and the viewed. (Sender-receiver relationship is in question -- see McLuhan's tetrads. Communication or contact?). We believe that we have the power over the viewed because the rule of the remote control. (In reality, it is the material that is being viewed that exerts its power over the viewer in that it controls what the viewer sees.) It can manipulate what the viewer perceives about its content. This manipulation is based on visual, dramatic, virtual.

The Virtual is all virtues in one; it always visual and dramatic. I am in the center of events (dramatic), and I am everywhere and see everything (spirit).1 Both are illusions of camera work. Because I am not even there, I am on the sofa watching invisible myself in my dream. Where am I?
May be I should ask "who am I?"

The Holy Ghost has two main qualities:
*virtually*2 for all practical purposes, practically, implicitly; see *essentially*
and
*virtue* [Moral excellence] ideal, ethic, morality, goodness, righteousness, uprightness, ethical conduct, good thing, respectability, rectitude, honor, honesty, candor, merit, fineness, character, excellence, value, chastity, quality, worth, kindness, innocence, generosity, trustworthiness, faithfulness, consideration, faith, hope, charity or love...

Ideal (virtual) reality is pure reality, resurrected, purified, reconstructed, edited, processed. Better reality and best of the real (after or before the real?). Real reality, super and hyper reality, and - pseudo reality.
"Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself." (V C)3

Reality is the catastrophe of the virtual, stopped, slowed down angelic world.

Resurrection is the miracle (catastrophe) of the real.
VIRTUAL REALITY = resurrected reality, ie. formerly dead.4 By the nature of time, it dies all the time (process, negation, changes). In our time, moving with a speed of light, this natural and normal phenomena became the basis of our sensitivity. To prevent time from disappearing we have to record it, we have to kill it in order to save. It's already dead. That's why we can record it.

"Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract." (Deleuze _Bergsonism_ p 96.) Good description of my, resurrected reality. Best definition of film. ...

When "what" do I see? Dreams. Now you know how it fills to dream somebody's dreams.

[ Dreams ]

2. POST-HUMANS: USED USERS

Proto-humanity -- "Sucker is born every minute." Harvesting humans, expropriation of time (see _Time production_).

TV: Instructions on how we should experience the events.
The screen, the icon -- presence of God -- hello, sucker! Get yourself a bigger screen.

Do I have a choice? Turn it off.
To see or not to see... The more you watch, the less you see.
Not being seen?

Light of speed? Too fast for me, a human... not angel.
I lost before the game began. From my birth I do nothing but fight for freedom. Independence from everything? From life, real? I had no room to go down, only up. But I can give up. Stop -- that's all what they ask.
TV is the first cyber kingdom. It was an electronic projector from the start.

Our pm technology is based on light.[5] All life is based on matter.
Electronics[6] -- life within the speed of light. New virtual theology? The universe is the message and the media, God's propaganda. The resurrection is our answer.7 "The origin of the word propaganda is well known: *propaganda fide*, propagation of faith." (V 13) Theory of Viewpoint: does universe has an agenda? Life/being as a message (and messenger).

Spectatorship:
To see without being seen... is it possible?
God's position.
That's why God is invisible power!
Speaking of panopticon?
The world's gaze on me, God's eye! This look is nothing less but the universe itself. Being watched is being loved. Brought into a spot light.

3. IMAGES OF THE SUN'S LIFE

"*The phatic image* -- a targeted image that forces you to look and hold your attention. More importantly it is the result of an ever-brighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur." (14) Framing is always present, always selection, "closing our eyes" on everything else. Seeing is a constant decision-making process. Instant judgement -- what to see and not to see. Too fast to think about, you can only react. Oh, Cinema - the angelic language of light. Better, much better than life. It's human, meaningful, addressed to me! Seeing through Christ's eyes.

Light is a quick matter, a matter is a conserved (suppressed, and compressed) light. Physics, the basis for metaphysics. Now the reverse, new science is based on fantasies.
We use laws of nature to exercise our wishes. Technology is the metaphysics.

"*Supernatural action* of light, the critical problem of the *time-freeze* of the photographic exposure lends daylight a temporal measure independent of the meteorological day. It produces a separation of light and time in a way that recalls the Biblical separation, source of all the visible world's virtualities." (V 20)

CLOSED EYES -- OPEN MIND, OPEN EYES -- CLOSED MIND

"We'll dream of being blind." (Virilio)

Too much light causes blindness. Light is the heart of darkness. We need darkness to have light. "Before" light there was no darkness. Black holes are not nothing. The Nothing is gone.

TV: waiting to forget. Day dreaming. Pleasant death. Is that's how the afterlife looks like?
Recording everything is the way not to remember. Hard drives are our memory.

4. OMNIPRESENT = ALL-POWERFUL (All-seeing)

You only see what you look at and you only look at what you want to see... Blind visions; cinema. Hidden world; I don't see, I was shown somebody's version of the world. [Does cinema teach us to see or to be blind?]

The lies of cinema weren't around the clock: give us TV!

Television lied. It promised us "live" picture. Promised to be a media not a message. Messenger without agenda, taxi driver who doesn't talk, think, live. Live pictures without its own life? Don't I know that this child of war intelligence never tells the truth?
Anti-film cinema: "Capture, don't reconstruct." (Stroheim). Documentary -- an attempt to see, craving for the Real. Like light itself, how do catch it? Moving faster than the speed of light. Impossible? Even for a thought. Einstein limited not only the universe, but mind.
TV betrayed its promise? It's not a telescope, microscope, glasses, not an extension of man, but men.

TOO MUCH!
We shouldn't notice the speed, we better be blind -- too fast, too shocking. The New Feelings are of a shocked human, comatozed. Feelings of a dead, who lost mortal sensitivity, only recalls it. (McLuhan)
Cut!

In Chapter 5 of "Sightless Vision" Virilio talks about "a population of objects all busy staring at you." (V 62) Cash machines and ABC news division. R world is always ready. Electronic sensors in public bathrooms, flash after you leave and turn light off. What a sensitivity, what an attention!

[Control -- ratings.]

Surveillance: industrialization of vision, everything has to be observed, or be ready to be seen. To be see even if I don't watch it. But all is recorded!

Editing reality:
SHOTS are based on CUTS (not seeing).
"Any *take* (mental or instrumental) being simultaneously a *time take*, however minute, *exposure time* necessarily involves some degree of memorization (conscious or not) according to the speed of exposure." (61)

Between photo and motion: Slow motion, now: virtual imagery -- seeing what we don't see. Changing the SPEED. Speed is registered only in acceleration -- cuts, montage. After we concur the speed, we can play with it. We lived for so long without noticing the inner life of life -- changes. Photo not only stops the motion but according to E.'s theory makes it happen -- without noticing an event it has no (integrated) life in OUR universe. In the past we only reacted, now we want to act first, to attack the nature, to control. Science is a military intelligence of humankind.

Overexposed? Remember: the exposure time that allows (or edits) seeing.
"So the act of seeing is an act that proceeds action, a kind of pre-action..." (61) intentionality. Pre-contact, before interaction.

Energy of imagination, thought, emotion?

THIRD TYPE OF ENERGY?
1. potential (static) energy (matter)
2. kinetic energy (light)
3. IMAGE ENERGY (`observed energy'?)
Energy of thought: kinematic energy, energy resulting from the effect of movement, and its varying speed, on ocular, optical or optoelectronic perception.
Thought as a physical phenomena, part of the material universe.
Human = the life of time: "the intensive time of human perceptiveness." (Virilio) How to measure this time's intensity? Mass media, massive time. My (potentially public) time.

Get him!
NET and WEB for Me!
Hey, we're not just dreaming of blindness, we're getting there! We, the masters of light, have to create darkness. How else would we be able to separate the two? The neo-realism of virtuality has to produce the un-real, which is part of a deal.

..."a blurring of perception that affects the real as much as the figurative, as though our society were sinking into the darkness of a voluntary blindness, its will to digital power finally contaminating the horizon of sight as well as knowledge." (V 76)

[Question: known (visible) energy is power, literary. Potential or real? Unknown, not seen yet? What is the non-existing than? Does "it" exist?]

"Go-go" is a motto of light. To stop is to die.
We forced to move all the time: no such thing as `fixed sight.' Even the staring. Changes make world visible.

"As Rudolf Arnhaim understood, sight comes from a long way off. It is a kind of dolly in, a perceptual activity that starts in the past in order to illuminate the present, to *focus on* the object of our immediate perception." (?)

The space of sight is accordingly not Newton's space, absolute space, but Minkovskian event-space, relative space." (V 62) Event-space: changes (including thought or emotion) ask for attention -- vision.

Question # 2: What about non-seen events? Einstein: we can't judge their existence. In paradise China exists only if we all can see it! We would look at China only if something important for us takes place over there. What is could be? A disaster?
This event-organized space means that only eventful space exist (or noticeable). More so, space comes into existence only at the event? China is an idea, a concept, which has to become an image. Image? Now I and China are within the space where our meeting is possible; virtual space has to be produced before any event could take place in it. Philosophy of the accident, when China unexpectedly enters the space of virtuality, is a break of paradise (hell). We remember Chernoble, we knew nothing about the place, not even a name. It wasn't in public domain, wasn't collective property, wasn't watched all the time by Ted Cappol. Don't we all sorry for neglecting the poor guy who missed the moment of the meltdown? The KGB knew that all and every one must be watched, pay attention to love, monitored -- and we didn't believe that it was a ministry of love.
O.J. is not guilty! We didn't see it!

"It is in fact *will*, the will to engage the future, yet again, and not just represent the past." (V 64) Mechanics of resurrection!

[Republican convention in San Diego, August 1996. product. see tv-prod.]
TV: "public[8] image has today replaced public spaces" (V 64) Church, market, square in one. Everything that been seen by media becomes PUBLIC (property) -- and replacing the public. "TV studio," complained TV correspondents. How could the republicans do what they, the media, supposed to do! Infomercial! Next time we would even bother to "cover" such events (Democratic convention in Chicago. They did), because the party did its own coverage. "Television is a media of crisis9, which means that television is a media of accidents." (V C) Fifteen thousand journalists came to see accidents, and weren't ready to simulate accidents. It's okay, next time. That's what their analysis is for.

From campfire to TV set: it took (only) a few millenniums.
"Really, once *public place* yields to *public image*, surveillance and street lighting can be expected to shift too, from the street to the *domestic display terminal*." (V 64)

TV and total spectatorship: you see all you're missing out on, everything you can't have. You never catch up, you always lose.

"From the town, as theatre of human activity with its church square and market place busting with so many *present* actors and spectators, to CINECITTA and then TELECITTA, busting with *absent* televiewers, it was just a short step through that venerable urban invention, *the shopwindow*.10 This putting behind glass of objects and people, the implementation of a transparency that has intensified over the past few decades, has led, beyond the optics of photography and cinema, to an optoelectronics of the means of television broadcasting. There are now capable of creating not only window-apartments and houses, but window-towns window-nations,11 media megacities that have the paradoxical power of *bringing individuals together long-distance*, around standardized opinions and behavior." (V 65)

"Life" TV? How would I know? It always "live" when I watch it? Two senses instead of three: present-present and past-future.
One time: present (end of time?)
Processed through media life is not just transmitted by also recorded, memorized. Freeze frame (photo effect) is the arrested form of time. Present forever, restorable past, everything could be recalled in form of visual. Hey, this is a result of traveling with the speed of light!

..."all this real-time TV monitoring tirelessly on the lookout for the unexpected, the impromptu, whatever might suddenly crop up, anywhere, any day, at the bank, the supermarket, the sports grounds where the video referee has not long taken over from the referee on the field." (V 65-66)

5. PRESENT ONLY

PRESENT-PAST, PRESENT-FUTURE: resurrection chronotope -- past as future, and present as both.

"The three tenses of decisive action, past, present and future, have been surreptitiously replaced by two tenses, *real time* and *delayed time*, the future having disappeared meanwhile in computer programming, and on the other hand, in the corruption of this so-called `real' time which simultaneously contains both a bit of the *present* and a bit of the *immediate future*." (V 66)

Delayed Time is a recorded (saved v. killed) time, noticed. "Real" time is the time of recording. How could I know what is "real" -- not in virtuality.
Present-present?

"The same goes for `delayed-time'[12] perception, the past of the representation containing a bit of this media present, of this real-time `telepresence', the `live recording preserving, like an echo, the real presence of the event." (V 67)

History without Time: Post-Pomo
Cold War: a transfer of war from the actual to the virtual. The Gulf War -- hot cold war.

6. QUALITY OF TIME

Time of light asks for light's attributes:
1. Direction (past, future or present oriented)
2. Intensity (quality), brightness of time
3. Source (human, animal, plant, etc.)
4. Color (emotional) of time

Power (energy) of time.
Depth of time (space attribute), concentration and conservation of (human) energy.

Intensive time will (try) then replace the extensive time. Time can't be wasted, it has to be utilized, it has to be used.
Framing = cutting out.
"Secret" -- removed from understanding. Unknown.

"The shift of interest from the thing to its image, and especially from space to time, to the instant, leads to a shift in polarities from the old black-and-white real-figurative dichotomy to the more relative *actual-virtual*." (V 70)

Time is a killer of space. How do they coexist? They exclude each other! Space of time (determine by the attributes).

"If the categories of space and time have become relative (critical), this is because the stamp of the absolute has shifted from matter to light and especially to light's finite speed. It follows that that which serves to see, to understand, to measure and therefore to conceive reality, is not so much light as its velocity.[13] From now on, speed is less useful in terms of getting around easily than in terms of seeing and conceiving more or less clearly.

*The time frequency of light* has become a determining factor in the apperception of phenomena, leaving *the spacial frequency of matter* for dead." (V 71)

Time is unifying factor of space? Time of time? New type of time? "New Times" -- declared the new age.

SUPER-REAL: the reality principle
(not long ago we thought it was a surreal)

"If real time prevails over real space, if the image prevails over the object present, to say nothing of the being, if the virtual prevails over the real, we need to try and analyze the fallout from this logic of `intensive' time on different physical representations. While the age of `extensive' time continued to justify dialectic logic *by drawing a clear distinction between potential and real*, the age of intensive time demands a better resolution the reality principle, one in which the notion of virtuality would itself come in for a bit of tinkering." (V 73-74)

Intensive time: Time within the speed of light. For an outsider there's no time in such a time (light).

"... the question of REALITY would become a matter of the PATH of the light interval, rather than a matter of the OBJECT and space-time intervals." (V 74)

Instead of `At what space-time *distance* is observed reality?' we should ask: `At what *power*, in other words, at what speed, is the perceived object?' (could we even call it `object'?) Who is the observer? (Einstein).

7. REVERSED GENESIS

Genesis 1.1
The heaven and earth -- gravity?
1. Matter had no forms.
2. Creation of space (directions). G 1.2-5
First day ends in creation of light by separation of darkness.
The world was borne out of the desire.
Angelic world existed before the creation, it was an apparatus of the creator. The world was created in its image and likeness.

Now:
1. nuclear disintegration of the space of matter,
next:
2. the disintegration of the time of light. Controlling time is similar to controlling nuclear reaction.
Light was the begining. And it's the end of the material (A bomb). Nuclear explosion is the release of time (matter) with a speed of light. Nuclear reactor is a slow process of this explosion.

Intensive eternity and empty infinity.

"If all that appears in light *appears in its speed*, which is an universal constant, if speed is no longer particularly useful, as we once thought, in displacement of transformation, if speed serves primarily *to see*, to conceive the reality of the facts, then duration, like extent, must absolutely be `brought to light'. All durations, from the most minute to the most astronomical, will then help to expose the intimacy of the image and its object, of space and representations of time. Physics currently proposes to do this by tripling the once-binary concept of the *interval*: on top of the familiar intervals of the `space' type (negative sign) and the `tome' type (positive sign), we have the new *interval of the `light' type* (zero sign). The interface of the live television screen or the computer monitor are perfect examples of this third type of interval." (V 72)

Interval?

8. SPEEDING UP: LIVING IN "SPEED WORLD"

Invisible in "empty" space: speed is not a phenomenon but, indeed, *the relationship between phenomena* (relativity itself)

High speed = intensity (of light) (not light and dark). Original meaning of "speed" -- to prosper (to succeed in living).

Slow and fast time.

9. WILL TO BE

Existing world (we before us), extensive, could be and still is described in a time-space continuum, not the resurrected (ing), not the process of creation. Becoming-real is different from reality. God and Marx wanted to change not to explain the world.

human, will; or even a feeling (potential, kinematic energy?) is the source of becoming? The will of the observer to see (participate) in any event is the basis for this event's occurrence. It takes place because I'm looking? The universe of wishful thinking? Very human, super-real (unreal). The difference between the will and the wish. The faith. Sin is wrong thinking. Wish or desire?

Death exits only because we collectively do not have a will to live. We are not an organism. It's coming (McLuhan)

The New Universe as a new organic system: universe (nature) + humanity.

---

PART TWO. SCREAMING SILENCE

IDEOLOGY OF LIGHT:
Silent Grammar of Cinema

1. SCREEN: DANCE OF DATA

In film I project myself on the screen. For tv images I am the screen.

Aristotle placed language under his category of "texture" -- not so with the film language; it's structural element (without loosing its textural quality?)

Shot is essentially a cut (framing) of reality. We target some objects to transform them into images. Pictures or visions?

Eisenstein Methods of Montage.
Always a combination of many major types of montage.

Five (major) types[14]:

1. Metric Montage (basic), is included in all other forms? ("Rude motive force" -- Action Movies). The chase?
2. Rhythmic M (metric with the content consideration, "primitive-emotive").
3. Tonal (measured by "emotion," "melodic-emotive").
4. Overtonal (psychological -- higher than physiological, contains it).
5. Intellectual ("conflict-juxtaposition of accompanying intellectual affects" -- ""the intellectual overtone").

2. DRAMA IS SILENT

In VR POVs become constitutional principles. Structure of experience is based on POV.
First, Second and Third person positions (in relation to reality):
1. Inside
3. Outside
2. In Between (bridge)

YOU is something between I and HE. Estrangement from both. YOU is the place where I meet the Other. The Other could be you.

Single and Plural? Only as nominations.

3. PLAYING EMOTIONS

Montage and music (composition). Minor (sad), Major (happy) tones. Minor could be lyrical (passive), tragic (active). Color of emotion. The viewpoint of emotional expression!
"Orchestration" of visual reality. Instrumentation.

SILENT MUSIC (Space is architecture. Time is narrative of it. Reading).

"Thus, tone is a level of rhythm." (E 81)

Is music dramatic? Why? (Losev)

"A construction in simple metrics has been elevated to a new category of movement -- a category of higher significance." (E 78)

Melody: trajectory of POV. (Line = trace of energy).

Film's "melody" (themes); "texture" in Aristotle's classification? Silent music of montage, visual (non-sound) music, tempo-rhythm for the eye.

Montage constructions -- relations of conflict with each other (?).

"Tonal montage grows out of the conflict between the rhythmic and tonal principles of the piece.
And finally -- overtonal montage, from the conflict between the principal tone of the piece (its dominant) and the overtone." (E 79)

Five methods are the basics of montage theory. The secret is a combination, transformation, transition between the five.

4. VIEW POINT and POINT OF VIEW:
Einstein meets Eisenstein. Heidegger on the end of philosophy and film as para-thinking. Observer can't be separated from the event; therefore Identity and Identification should be seen as a (complete?) event.
Screen event requires the first viewer (director), representative of public.

POV and Mise-en-Scene (See Narratology) -- pre-arranged reality for (filming) seeing. Next step of subjectivation -- camera (framing). Third -- montage.

POV is in between Identity and Identification.
POV is almost undetectable because of the power of identification. Anything visual has this gravity of subjectivity.

Spectator: Idea of Alienation and Idea of Identification.
"Existence is Identity," and "Consciousness is Identification," American version of existentialism (Ayn Rand) equals camera with consciousness. Is there Identity without Identification?
Identification (spectator) is a completed alienation of reality. As well as the spectator (full involvement), who loses "real" reality and lives within the screen (virtual) reality.

Film Narrative: switching POVs.
Story out of the Plot; through POVs (emotional storytelling) Authorship (collectivity of experience)[15]

5. FOUR TYPES OF POVs

Even surveillance camera represents somebody's pov. Making world meaningful. As long as something exists we have to find its message. Nothing accidental -- no place for stupidity? That's the place for idiocy to triumph. Mediating we produce massages. You beet not to look, man!

POINT OF VIEW (POV), cinematic
Essentially, there are four points of view that may be employed in film:

[1] Director's interpretive Using the special techniques of the medium, the director manipulates us so that we see the action of the character in the way the direct interprets them.

[2] Indirect-subjective A viewpoint that brings us close to the action and increases our involvement. It provides us with the feeling and sense of immediacy of participating in the action without showing the action through a participant's eyes.

[3] Objective The viewpoint of a sideline observer, which suggests a relatively great emotional distance between camera and subject, with the camera "simply recording," as straightforwardly as possible, the characters and the actions of the story.

[4] Subjective The viewpoint of a character participating in action. (See Point of View, literary).

1, 2, 3 are variations of 4. POV can't be objective. Not identifiable? Yes.

6. MODES OF EXISTENCE

Modes of reality: "It's rather a question of my position relative to the object, or of where I place it." (Arnheim 10)

Lacan's mirror stage: the world needs to see itself in order to develop its (collective) consciousness. Photograph is the product of complete alienation (Kracauer 15).

Magic mirror metamorphosing (part of alienation process). Far from "recording": what is "recording"?

Interpretation (relativity) is build in an element of seeing. Why do we need "personalization"? I am the world!

Does film establish the fact of physical existence? Space is only a material? Time is a method to play with space?

Film goes for "natural" because it's un-natural in its methods.

Spectator (camera) is the engine of the Resurrected world.

Why did we need to invent (discover) film? The reality lived separate life from us, it was "Godless" (with Christ) world, where we weren't mixed with the universe.

POV, literary term

There are five (5) viewpoints employed in literature:

[1] Dramatic (hidden POV) A viewpoint wherein we are not conscious of a narrator, for the author does not comment on the action but simply describes the scene, telling us what happens and what the characters say, so we get a feeling of being there, observing the scene as we would in a play.

[2] First Person An eyewitness gives us a first-hand account of what happened as well as his or her response to it. Second person is a variation of First

[3] Omniscient Narrator (God's POV) An all-seeing, all-knowing narrator, capable of reading the thoughts of all the characters and capable of being in several places at once if need be, tells the story.

[4] Stream of Consciousness or Interior Monologue A kind of first-person narrative, except the participant in the action is not consciously narrating the story. What we get instead is a unique inner view, as through a microphone and movie camera were in the character's mind -- recording every thought, image, and impression that passes through, without the conscious acts of organization, selectivity, or narration. (See also Cinematic POV).

[5] Third-person Limited The is omniscient except for the fact that his or her powers of mind reading are limited to or at least focused on a single character, who becomes the central figure through which we view the action.

Combination of several forms of POV:

Point-of-view Character: A film character with whom we emotionally or intellectually identify and through whom we experience the film. Voice-over narration, editing, and camera position may be employed for this effect.

TIME'S CLOSEUP

Dramatic (intensive) time is the time of cuts16 -- new time, constructed in motion of moving from one observer to another. They all have triadic structure when I, You, He coexist, as well as past, present, future. Instant identification (enforced on my by camera), total destruction of individuality. I move from one mind (POV) to the next with the speed of light (Internet model). Flashback instantly becomes present, without losing quality of being a past, but by its compositional (narrative) status of being a "future' for anything after this flashback. In chronological universe past is historical, not in "emotional" (personal) "space."

Dream Machine: the art of spectator -- you create the environment for your reactions.[17]

Cut!

...

All footnotes and endnotes are lost. Well, all my texts are nothing but notes. Of course, I didn't know that I will try to practice "virtual theatre"...

Glossary

Sight, 6 Senses, oil on canvas

ffaga@uaf.edu

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2005-2006 Theatre UAF Season: Four Farces + One Funeral & Godot'06
Film-North * Anatoly Antohin
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