Analogy

The Image as Transference

In my posts on Lacan, I pointed out that we need to create a transferential relationship between the image and us (the receivers of the Mystory) or perhaps even "us" as a collective EmerAgency. Several theorists in the cinematic instruct us toward this type of relationship as well. Ulmer has claimed that the transference is something similar to Benjamin's dialectical image and other such tropes. To add to this, we have Deleuze's "crystal image," coming out of his work with Bergson, duration and his Cinema books and Victor Burgin's notion of the "sequence image." Both reflect an image that sets off a transferential relationship.

"The image, no longer relying on an internal movement to represent time insteadproduces time through tis relations to other images" (Orlow 181). This is in reference to La Jetee: "La Jetee photographs-as-film incorporate both the flow of time as a present which always passes (cinema) as well as a past which is being preserved (photography)" (182).

Alternately, we can look at how Gaensheimer puts it: "a synthesis of the passign actual iamge of the present and preserved image of the past" (77). He cites Deleuze: ""the crystal always lives at the limit; it is itself the vanishing limit between the immediate past, which is already no longer, and the immediate future, whis is not yet. . .[. . .] it is a mobile mirror which endless reflects perception in recollection" (77).

Victor Burgin calls this a "sequence image": "mainly perceptions and recollections emerge successively  but not teleologically. . .a transitory state of percepts of a 'present moment' seized in their association with past affects and meanings" (203).

All of these describe the transferential relation of the past and present coinciding.

I can't help but recall Lacan's passage (involuntarily, almost automatically): "In short, the point of gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel" (96).

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Blind Spot

For Lacan, we are the blind spot, the stain, the mark, the tattoo, that which is outside the image. Such a theoretical understanding is confirmed in the film book, as many essays address the "outside" of the frame.

"It may be what the photograph does not show, what cannot be seen, that truly constitutes the optical unconscious" (Gunning 23).

"We expect clarity to be a function of change. We expect to be able to decipher the (nearly) static image [. . .] it only reveals our blind spot, our inability comprehensively to see or understand a given image" (Tarantino 35-36).

Blind Spot

In order to combat this "blind spot" this "outside the picture" we might look to the model of the photographic essay and provide captions: “In a picture-story, the captions should invest the pictures with a verbal context, and should illuminate whatever relevant thing it may have been beyond the power of the camera to reach” (Cartier-Bresson 46).

Maybe it would be appropriate to think of the "blind spot" in the sense given to "driving." The pun is satisfying: while we are "driving" toward something, we always have a blind spot. We endlessly move in and out of lanes, maybe never reaching our goal. As we move, as we are "driving" our blind spot shifts. The blind spot is not just one thing, but keeps moving away, like the objet @.

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The Unreadable Image

In one of my emails, I pointed out the necessity of understanding psychoanalytic interpretation in a special, non-hermeneutic sense:

"Hermeneutics is oriented toward meaning; in contrast, what Lacan calls interpretation 

"is directed not so much at the meaning as toward reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior” (212). 

That is, what signifiers are we subjected to despite ourselves? My signifier? The spotlight. The meaning of the spotlight is important, but the spotlight as image is irreducible. Here are some more useful quotes from Lacan that I think indicates how psychoanalyticinterpretation operates: 

“Interpretation is not open to any meaning [. . .] The fact that I have said that the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense, does not mean that interpretation is in itself nonsense [. . .] [interpretation] has the effect of bringing out an irreducible signifier [. . .] What is there is rich and complex, when it is a question of the unconscious of the subject, and intended to bring out irreducible, non-sensical—composed of non-meanings—signifying elements” (250)

"In so far as the primary signifier is pure non-sense, it becomes the bearer of the infinitization of the value of the subject, not open to all meanings but abolishing them all which is different. This explains why I have been unable to deal with the relation of alienation without introducing the word freedom. What, in effect, grounds, in the meaning and radical non-meaning of the subject, the function of freedom, is strictly speaking this signifier that kills all meaning” (252)." 

Thierry de Duve's essay confirms this instruction. Photography resists "reading" in the hermeneutic sense because "“a point is not subject to any description, nor is it able to generate a narration. Language fails to operate in front of the point-pointed space of the photography”; rather,  photography is traumatic in its spatio-temporal form" (57). Photography, as we said, is silent and this is why we might need some captions in a similar fashion to the photographic essay. 

For de Duve, there is a continuous push-pull between melancholy and mania in the photograph. On a pre-symbolic level, our dealing with the photograph oscillates between these two attitudes/affects: "the photography puts the beholder in contact with the world, through a paradoxical object which, because of its indexical nature, belongs to the realm of uncoded things, and in the sphere of codifed signs" (60). This paradoxical object must be held in tension, in "counterpoint" if you will, disallowing any Hegelian synthesis (dialectical resolution). 

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Sllllloooooowwwwww Dooooowwwwwnnnnnn

A major instruction from the Cinematic book that I see is that we have to use the technologies at our disposal to slow down film in order to isolate a gesture or a fragment. For Constance Penley, this is where we find the "filmic." If our project is ultimately photographic, but our analogy is cinema/film, then perhaps Penley hits the nail on the head when she contrasts photography's 'self containment' to the film still:

Film is not in this instance [of Barthes reading of the ‘film still’] reduced to photography because the still has nothing in common with the self-containment of the photograph. It is no more than a fragment which contains the trace of the film experienced as an animated flow; it is here, however, that we can find the ‘filmic’” (118). 

These "fragments" can be related to Lacan's notion of the partial object. We then must take these fragments, shorn against our ruins so to speak, and (re)assemble them into a Felt. These fragments/segments, writes Blake Stimson, must be "sutured back together again into an affective unity or common thread of feeling or being" (93). 

But we don't want the full suture offered by film. The suture we want is not between two present "nows" but between the present moment and the past -- this is the suture of transference that we want to create. Not the illusion of continuous time. 

 In this sense, maybe we should think of our experiment as a photographic essay in Stimson's sense: 

“The photographic essay is thus a form that holds onto the opening up of time, the ‘spatialized duration’ given by the experiments of Muybridge and Marey. It draws its meaning from the back and forth interrelation of discrete images that is eliminated when those images are sutured together in film” (98). 

We want a kind of spatialization (which Prezi and the blog allows for) that produces time, that makes us "feel time." As Chantal Akerman puts it, "“I don’t want it to look REAL I don’t want it to look NATURAL but I want people to FEEL the time it takes which is not the time it really takes” (196). 

Only through a slowing down of film (or a slowing down of our lives) can be isolate these gestures, these frames, these fragments. 

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Surreally Standing-In

If it is true that we need images that conduct between our present and past moments, then it seems clear that we are going to have to take a picture in the present that somehow recalls our past interpellation into the popcycle. Rather than try and re-create a moment from our memory, we can attempt to reproduce a shot from a film like Cindy Sherman. This film still is not from a particular film, but it gives us an uncanny feeling that it is from a film. It is this kind of surreal, uncanny, quality of not-being-able-to quite place it that we should strive for in our own image experiments.

Cindy Sherman--Untitled Film Still

We get this same instruction from Lacan, about the libido/drive being a surrealist montage. Maybe we do not literally have to copy the style of the surrealist montage, but we should take into account thesurreal feeling (unheimlich) of recognizing something but not quite being able to place it. Sherman's photographs recall a kind of noir aesthetic, atmosphere, and mood, but the scene does not provide enough information for us to contextualize it within a narrative. In this way, Sherman creates a fragment that resists interpretation in the context of a particular film. We do not know the meaning, but we can identify in her face and posture a feeling and mood -- perhaps one of dread.

Jeff Wall creates a similar surreal feeling of not-quite-recognition. An image that looks "real" but some little detail or element is off and we sense that what is occurring in the image is an impossible perspective/event to capture without the work of further construction.

Jeff Wall--Milk

The picture to the right, for instance, looks plausible, but we would never be able to see the milk coming out of the container without photography. It makes it look like rushing water or a kind of sculpture. This is a kind of freezing of time, suggesting movement and stasis at the same time. Sculptural and yet potentially filmic.