Cinema and Media Studies, and Visual Arts

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Every assiduous reader of Miriam Hansen's work knows that one of her major contributions to film and critical theory was to investigate cinema's possibilities for constituting an alternative public sphere with transformative effects on the experience of modernity. But in reading Cinema and Experience, I found myself following another fascinating though related thread that winds through her readings of Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno in intriguing and provocative ways. I am thinking here of Miriam's deeply original account of what might be called the dynamic and disintegrated subject as a phenomenological characteristic of the experience of modernity, a concern of Miriam's from her earliest American writings. This is a deeply immanent, materialistic, and dynamic conception of subjectivity, inspired most prominently by Kracauer early and late. The critical and utopian dimensions of this fractured or shrinking subject, as it is often referred to in Cinema and Experience, are also explored in Benja-min's and Adorno's writing, although in very different ways. For those of us trying to imagine a different kind of film theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dynamic conception of the subject was intensely appealing; it was the theme of many intense conversations Miriam and I had about Kracauer dating from the earliest days of our friendship. Miriam's characterizations of this fractured, shrinking subject are riven by multiple antinomic senses. The modernist subject shrinks first in relation to other subjects existing together in densely packed urban spaces

When visible sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, sensation releases force as something that might destroy it, or become its ally or friend. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sensation With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: the Movement-Image I begin with two quotes from Gilles Deleuze, including one from his book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Nothing is further from painting than camera-works. Yet one way of justifying images as painterly is to understand the spectrum of possibilities for altering space with the hand, especially if the results are textural and haptic. Call this turning figures into figuration, where producing effects of blotching, smearing, smudging, torqueing and blurring make zones of indiscernibility emerge through and across lines, movements, volumes and colours, which gain therein new intensive variations. My main inspiration here is that there is a powerful link between certain strategies of non-figurative painting and related processes in experimental film and video. In neither case am I referring to pure abstraction. Rather, I am interested in the spectrum of questions and problems raised by Deleuze's account of sensation. Speaking from a personal perspective, the logic of sensation defines the singular point where my philosophical commitments to a vitalist materialism influenced by Bergson and Deleuze intersect most intimately with my own creative moving image practice, and with the work of contemporary artists to whom I feel most closely allied. Many years of acculturation have led us to believe that the Ideal image in film or video is meant to be in clear focus from foreground to background, that the frame line is fixed along a stable horizontal line and at the average height of the human eye, that sound is inseparable from image, and that recorded motion and sound are continuous as if corresponding to an equally idealised arrow of homogeneous and linear time. The aim of these conventions is not to reproduce the world as humanly seen but rather as we believe

From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the institutionalization of cinema studies in universities in North America and Europe became identified with a certain idea of theory. This was less a " theory " in the abstract or natural scientific sense than an interdisciplinary commitment to concepts and methods derived from literary semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism, echoed in the broader influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on the humanities. However, the evolution of cinema studies since the early 1980s has been marked both by a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory. No doubt this retreat had a number of salutary effects: a reinvigoration of historical research, more sociologically rigorous reconceptualiza-tions of spectatorship and the film audience, and the placement of film in the broader context of visual culture and electronic media.

In fall 2007, I offered a graduate seminar at Harvard University on Stanley Cavell’s writings on film. The idea of the seminar was to examine closely Cavell’s thought on film. It was always my intention that the seminar would build toward two final sessions in which Cavell would be invited to conversation with us.

Cavell joined the seminar for two two-hour sessions on December 4 and 11. The first session was devoted to a general discussion Cavell’s writings; the second to in depth discussion of two then recent films, indeed two of the most popular films of summer 2007,
Ratatouille and Knocked Up. Many other films and texts were addressed along the way, and fuller information can be found in the bibliography and filmography that accompany this text.

I am not sure that many people know that my books "Elegy for Theory" and "Philosophy's Artful Conversation" were originally one organic manuscript. The Harvard University Press Board of Syndics (apparently with wonderful support form Stanley Cavell) were ready to publish this massive tome until the marketing department intervened with complaints about pricing. Hence the originally three part manuscript was divided into two books. For those who might be curious about the form of the original project, I offer here my original final draft.

These are corrected pages proofs of Chapter Five from my recent book, What Philosophy Wants from Images. The chapter is an expanded version of my essay, "The Force of Small Gestures," which includes an account of my experimental video, "Plato's Phaedrus."

Two looped HD video projections, color, silent; nineteen digital prints In 1983, I completed a film entitled 1963 (a meditation on history and violence), which would prove to be my last circulating analog work. Made twenty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, 1963 was meant to be a contemplative investigation of the relation between image and memory, and indeed image as a medium that obscures memory as much as preserving or transmitting it. The paradox here is that the more traumatic the historical event, the more images and documents proliferate around it, clouding or fogging the experience to such an extent that one only sees the obscuring haze. Moreover, that haze fills the space around and between us to the extent that we no longer see one another and communicate historical experience directly. Support for the polis is no longer intersubjectivity and attention to others, but rather our blind attempts to navigate the information fog that surrounds and separates us. The source material for 1963 was a copy of Abraham Zapruder's 8mm footage of the Kennedy assassination, itself filmed in color Super-8 off of the screen of a small black and white video monitor as it was broadcast on national television. Already twice mediated, this 26.6 seconds of images was then blown up to 16mm and step-printed at one frame-per-second, slowing and obscuring the image while bringing forward the textures of its electronic and photochemical mediations. In 1963, the step-printed sequence is repeated once—history repeats itself, at least in images. Kennedy's 100 th birthday took place on 29 May 2017, and we are now more than fifty years past the traumatic year of 1963. In the intervals of time that have now past between and beyond 1963 and 1983, I have often thought about returning to these materials, but in expanded form and using digital means. Interval is thus a new iteration of my ongoing interest in the fading of memory and historical experience as a function of image and medium. My intuition here is that the mediated images that comprise our collective memory of historical events are subject in complex ways to temporal erosion, where duration becomes distended and elliptical, gapped and perforated, and space is clouded by a thickening or sedimentation of time perceived as indistinct layerings of the past and the present in uneven rhythms.

#MyNeighborMonVoisinMeinNachbar is a long-term photographic documentation of a precise urban location, which Google Maps identifies as: 48°49'46.2"N 2°23'00.3"E. This space is located in a major European city next to a busy thoroughfare running parallel to the industrialized quay of a river. The location is often empty but sometimes occupied, not only by passers-by but by those without domicile or shelter.

This is an observational study, not a sociological one. It is without story, without interpretation, without judgment. Images are silent, reticent. What can one know of or from an image, or even from the data gleaned from a long series of images?

Plato's Phaedrus is the second iteration of a new series works that I call " philosopher walks, " or more formally, peripatetikos after the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece. Like my earlier " walking works, " the peripatetikos explore formal processes of digital capture as performative gestures in response to specific environments, actions, situations, movements, trajectories, and durations—in this case, specific sites of walking and thinking evoked in the history of philosophy.