Page 163 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 163
identity in a notion of the eastern and western european cinema
ence between Belmondo and Lacan was only this that the Belmondo char-
acter took the absence of the metaphor very seriously and so he vanished
into the light of the very bright sun. Lacan only recognizes the disappear-
ance of subjectivity, Pierrot submits himself to the disappearance from the
picture. Therefore, we can imagine Lacan as a viewer of this Godard’s film
nodding approvingly to Godard’s perceptive visualisation of the productiv-
ity in a form of destructiveness of the identifying process. At the end of this
we find nothing less than the obliteration of subject, not in just metaphori-
cal terms, as Lacan very importantly remarked. We shall come back to this
point further down.
Let us first try now to change the level of our elaboration of different
angles of viewing upon the category of identity by bringing it into a con-
text of the wider cultural space, which is of our special concern, namely
Europe. If there is a distinctive trait of the European cinema, it should be
apprehended through an attitude to the category of identity in most rep-
resentative and intellectually challenging feature films. The very notion of
identity opens a field, where we encounter a number of relevant meanings
as far as films, which we have in mind, are concerned. These meanings,
needless to say, cannot be perceived out of context, which is always histor-
ical. “History and identity are probably the two amongst those concepts,
with which the influence of hundred years of cinema could be assessed”
(Elsaesser 1996, p. 52).3 The recent international theoretical discussion on a
correlation between cinema and history brought up quite clearly a defini-
tive realisation about the impossibility of recent history to avoid a deep im-
pact of film. History is remembered, and it therefore exists through images,
which were unavoidably taken at a certain point in time and so in turn the
point in time becomes an image open to interpretation, which always inte-
grates the time-image in the context of a present. Without elaborating such
complex assertions much further, we can claim that the European cinema
in its most “articulated” products particularly reflected this correlation, in
which the present is the point of becoming and vanishing of identity as it
is produced and destroyed in the processes of identifying. We could deter-
mine the roots of our understanding these processes in the classical Euro-
pean thinking, which is best represented by Fichte‘s effort to formulate an
absolutely free subject, who reproduces himself in a form of his famous das
Ich. The identity is, as we hinted at the beginning of this paper, a dynam-
3 I translated this quotation from the Slovenian translation of the text. So, the respon-
sibility for the meaning of the statement is at least in part mine.
161
ence between Belmondo and Lacan was only this that the Belmondo char-
acter took the absence of the metaphor very seriously and so he vanished
into the light of the very bright sun. Lacan only recognizes the disappear-
ance of subjectivity, Pierrot submits himself to the disappearance from the
picture. Therefore, we can imagine Lacan as a viewer of this Godard’s film
nodding approvingly to Godard’s perceptive visualisation of the productiv-
ity in a form of destructiveness of the identifying process. At the end of this
we find nothing less than the obliteration of subject, not in just metaphori-
cal terms, as Lacan very importantly remarked. We shall come back to this
point further down.
Let us first try now to change the level of our elaboration of different
angles of viewing upon the category of identity by bringing it into a con-
text of the wider cultural space, which is of our special concern, namely
Europe. If there is a distinctive trait of the European cinema, it should be
apprehended through an attitude to the category of identity in most rep-
resentative and intellectually challenging feature films. The very notion of
identity opens a field, where we encounter a number of relevant meanings
as far as films, which we have in mind, are concerned. These meanings,
needless to say, cannot be perceived out of context, which is always histor-
ical. “History and identity are probably the two amongst those concepts,
with which the influence of hundred years of cinema could be assessed”
(Elsaesser 1996, p. 52).3 The recent international theoretical discussion on a
correlation between cinema and history brought up quite clearly a defini-
tive realisation about the impossibility of recent history to avoid a deep im-
pact of film. History is remembered, and it therefore exists through images,
which were unavoidably taken at a certain point in time and so in turn the
point in time becomes an image open to interpretation, which always inte-
grates the time-image in the context of a present. Without elaborating such
complex assertions much further, we can claim that the European cinema
in its most “articulated” products particularly reflected this correlation, in
which the present is the point of becoming and vanishing of identity as it
is produced and destroyed in the processes of identifying. We could deter-
mine the roots of our understanding these processes in the classical Euro-
pean thinking, which is best represented by Fichte‘s effort to formulate an
absolutely free subject, who reproduces himself in a form of his famous das
Ich. The identity is, as we hinted at the beginning of this paper, a dynam-
3 I translated this quotation from the Slovenian translation of the text. So, the respon-
sibility for the meaning of the statement is at least in part mine.
161
