Page 192 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 192
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
titled to ask from a work of art” (Benjamin, 1969: 234). A more recent con-
firmation of this insight can be found on the conceptual level in Rancière‘s
work on “aisthesis”, where he almost in passing enunciates what I proposed
as a relevant new concept, in a notion of immediacy. Consequently, this
means that aesthetics as a complex pluralistic discourse operates as a ubiq-
uitous agency; it is situated in the centre of a whole network of movements
of interconnected changes, which involve the sensual world and subjective
identities in a way that establishes the very existence of members of a so-
ciety as participants in symbolic exchanges. Aesthetics, along with its own
transmutation, instigate far reaching social transformations. Hence, aes-
thetics itself – as theory, as artistic practice or even as some modes of life-
style – is caught in a dialectics of multiplicity of the cultural world.
This conceptual constellation was reflected in an extensive and long
lasting debate on realism in cinema. Of course, Benjamin did not have in
mind film as a mirror of the so-called real world since he built his very con-
densed argument on the concept of “distracted perception”, which clearly
hints to a “transcendentalistic” character of film. Although the cinematic
moving image is always imbued by objectivity, considering that the lens of
a film camera cannot but “look” at something, its gaze is always marked by
subjectivity. Taking into account the fact that a cinematic production fur-
ther requires chemical developing and physical montage, there is no doubt
that we can only describe this production of reality with a transcenden-
talist metaphor in a strictly Kantian sense. The (objective) reality is always
viewed by the mind’s external eye of a film camera.
Film itself as an art form most explicitly undermined the “realism hy-
potheses” in the so-called experimental film of the 1950s and 1960s, which
also preceded video installations that brought moving images into art gal-
leries, thus transgressing boundaries between art forms and art genres.
While discussing experimental films of Brakhage, Snow, Belson and Jacobs
in conjunction with Vertov, Gilles Deleuze developed the term of a gase-
ous perception. Through the drugs metaphor, reminding a reader of Carlos
Castañeda, Deleuze writes about the “third state of the image, the gaseous
image, beyond the solid and the liquid: to reach ‘another’ perception, which
is also the genetic element of all perception. Camera-consciousness raises
itself to a determination, which is no longer formal or material, but genet-
ic and differential” (Deleuze, 1986: 85). Film, therefore, modifies reality; the
reality represented by film is always marked by its intervention into it and
experimental film, which equalled, say, abstract painting and cannot be de-
190
titled to ask from a work of art” (Benjamin, 1969: 234). A more recent con-
firmation of this insight can be found on the conceptual level in Rancière‘s
work on “aisthesis”, where he almost in passing enunciates what I proposed
as a relevant new concept, in a notion of immediacy. Consequently, this
means that aesthetics as a complex pluralistic discourse operates as a ubiq-
uitous agency; it is situated in the centre of a whole network of movements
of interconnected changes, which involve the sensual world and subjective
identities in a way that establishes the very existence of members of a so-
ciety as participants in symbolic exchanges. Aesthetics, along with its own
transmutation, instigate far reaching social transformations. Hence, aes-
thetics itself – as theory, as artistic practice or even as some modes of life-
style – is caught in a dialectics of multiplicity of the cultural world.
This conceptual constellation was reflected in an extensive and long
lasting debate on realism in cinema. Of course, Benjamin did not have in
mind film as a mirror of the so-called real world since he built his very con-
densed argument on the concept of “distracted perception”, which clearly
hints to a “transcendentalistic” character of film. Although the cinematic
moving image is always imbued by objectivity, considering that the lens of
a film camera cannot but “look” at something, its gaze is always marked by
subjectivity. Taking into account the fact that a cinematic production fur-
ther requires chemical developing and physical montage, there is no doubt
that we can only describe this production of reality with a transcenden-
talist metaphor in a strictly Kantian sense. The (objective) reality is always
viewed by the mind’s external eye of a film camera.
Film itself as an art form most explicitly undermined the “realism hy-
potheses” in the so-called experimental film of the 1950s and 1960s, which
also preceded video installations that brought moving images into art gal-
leries, thus transgressing boundaries between art forms and art genres.
While discussing experimental films of Brakhage, Snow, Belson and Jacobs
in conjunction with Vertov, Gilles Deleuze developed the term of a gase-
ous perception. Through the drugs metaphor, reminding a reader of Carlos
Castañeda, Deleuze writes about the “third state of the image, the gaseous
image, beyond the solid and the liquid: to reach ‘another’ perception, which
is also the genetic element of all perception. Camera-consciousness raises
itself to a determination, which is no longer formal or material, but genet-
ic and differential” (Deleuze, 1986: 85). Film, therefore, modifies reality; the
reality represented by film is always marked by its intervention into it and
experimental film, which equalled, say, abstract painting and cannot be de-
190
