In 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick makes one of the most famous jump cuts in the history of cinema, when he cuts from a bone being flung in the air by an ape. In this scene, Kubrick compresses the entire history of the technical and the human and makes a direct correlation between the first, and most primitive tool use, and the most sophisticated technological achievements of modern humanity. Kubrick was well known for the extensive research that he did for his films. His biographer, Vincent LoBrutto describes his, “capacity to grasp and disseminate information of like a human computer.”
Well, John left us with the notion of “hold that thought,” and Ralph began to talk about the way that we construct meaning out of experience. I want to talk this morning about meaning. This symposium is predicated on the premise that scientific inquiry and new instrumentality constantly burn new information into the brain’s synoptic structure, providing us with new vocabularies, allowing us to access visual information that was previously nonexistent, unknown or inaccessible. Vanguard artists have been investigating new neurobiological models and methods as the basis for aesthetic strategies and to develop new constellations of visual meaning.
‘I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution: there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism-The newer architecture therefore-like other…
Does one film to forget? Or is a film made to create an archive, a catalogue of souvenirs? What is the relationship between cinema and memory? When I think about cinema, I am referring mainly to experimental cinema, video, and film by visual artists. There are various connections between memory and cinema. Is memory already constituted or does it constitute itself through the use of or with images? It is common knowledge that memory does not refer or limit itself to images; rather, it convokes and exerts itself in accordance with all of our senses. In this article, however, I will limit myself to the relationship…
The conventional wisdom on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up is that it questions the possibility of perceiving “reality” non-reflectively; that active signification, semiotic interpretation and conceptual meaning-production necessarily interject between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. By this reading, the true meaning of the events in the park in Blow-Up can only be brought to light through the mediating function of Thomas’s (David Hemmings) photographs, and their reconstitution in the form of a semiotic narrative.
“Many people have a tree growing in their head, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree”—Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus
The encounter between philosophy and science constitutes an event of a special kind, since the event as such envelops both in a mutual form of thinking—of thinking through the other. We know all too well the vulgar forms that this event seems to conjure—the political reckoning with the possible ends of, say, genetic research or the production of chemical weapons. But in fact the event dwells in the “sense” that philosophy makes of science…
Framed in medium close shot, a young skinhead–head shaven, the tatoo of a swastika on his forehead–stands up abruptly and moves towards the camera. Sustained by the movement of the apparatus, his body appears to be projected forward as if smashing into the viewer’s face. The actor’s aggressive body language is reinforced by the slightly lingering camera and the discordant punk music creating a visual choc, a moment of characteristic high tension in this opening sequence.
Memory is the most faithful of films … but who does not see the difference between a memory and the objective image that gives it eternal concrete form.
André Bazin[1]
In Marcel Carné’s Juliette ou la clef des songes (1950)[2] , the protagonist, Michel (Gerard Philipe), falls asleep in prison and dreams of a town on a hill in sunny Provence in which all the inhabitants have lost their memory. He wanders the streets looking for a woman about whom he remembers nothing except that he loves her and she is called Juliette.