Film, Poetry, Media and The end of civilisation

Bridges

sublime
-adjective
1. elevated or lofty in thought, language
2. impressing the mind with a sense of grandeur or power; inpsiring awe, veneration
3. supreme or outstanding
4. complete; absolute; utter
5. Archaic.
a. of lofty bearing b. haughty
6. Archaic. raised high; high up

sublime
-verb
1. vaporize and then condense right back again

thought as a violent confrontation with reality

The cinematic sublime occurs when the imagination suffers a shock forcing you to go beyond imagination towards thought again.
For this to occur thought/logic/intelligence/the pathetic must share common ground with the senses/passion/emotion/the organic. (previously thought to belong to separate spheres)
Essentially when you are watching a film you put together all the sensory inputs in a certain way to create a logical interpretation. once this has been achieved it is not necessary to fully analyse future images, you just need your imagination to oscillate around the central themes. thought is no longer necessary. When the shock-image occurs, the previously logical interpretation is destroyed and it is necessary to reconsider all these fragments and attempt to construct a new logic for them. All through this reconstructive process is an internal monologue (a drunken monologue) searching to reassign meaning to the various parts and combinations of parts.

Rather than asking what is this "Shock" perhaps it is more informative to ask "What does it do?" which is answered above and "How does it work?"
Deleuze talks about the harmonics which accompany the perceived dominant image. Each image activates in the brain not only the dominant interpretation of the image- for example soldiers fighting with bayonets in a field -but other harmonic images which are resonant of the dominant image- for example cowboys and indians, tanks, planes dropping bombs, dead bodies being dug into mass graves. Resonance occurs between the dominant image (frequency) and its harmonics. With film there is not only images but sound as well which bring there own harmonics to the overall physiological and psychological sensations. This overall sensation is a multiplicative combination of energy rather than the sum of its parts. A shock occurs when these parts contradict each other or what you expect of them because seeing and hearing them at the same time creates new links between previously unlinked harmonics and more energy than usual is being poured into the resonant force.

"When the violence is no longer that of the image and its vibrations but that of the represented, we move into a blood-red arbitrariness. When grandeur is no longer that of the composition, but a pure and simple inflation of the represented, there is no cerebral stimulation or birth of thought." p 164

In bad cinema (the movement image) instead of illiciting previously unthought of combinations of images and sounds the baddie jumping out of nowhere simply illicits other stored images of baddies jumping out of nowhere with the similar accompanying screech of the violin or scream.
Thus in bad cinema the shock does not illicit thought but laughter or disgust ie a release. The shock is not great enough to make us rethink our previous logic.

Godard show us the genius of composition in Notre Musique and Weekend. The violence portrayed come from opposite ends of the realistic spectrum. Notre musique shows actual images of war, representations of war (some perhaps poorly done) where as weekend shows illogically red blood, extreme and outrageous violence- both transmit similar messages.

Cinema as a subtractive rather than additive force
The force of cinema relies in the ability to reinterpret on many levels.
Deleuze talks of the Whole - reality in its infinite number of interpretations- something which the cinema can not recreate on screen just because it has sound and movement. Sound plus movement does not equal reality. Cinema is there for great in what it subtracts from the Whole. Cinema organises movement and time in a way that can make us think.
In good cinema this organisation cannot be arbitrary (unlike the arbitrary constraints of language - Russian ) : Hell, Purgatory, Paradise (neatly transported from religious texts or perhaps Dante)
In Notre musique Hell a collection of war footage and Paradise a strangely familiar woods (see Week-end) guarded by U.S. Marines enclose the longer drawn out Purgatory. In purgatory we encounter a mixing of media, poetry, filosophy, history and film. Journalism, journalists, interpreters, homer and the illiad, Greeks, palistinians, Jews, yugoslavians, french-russian jews, "red indians," conflict and Godard. Yes all these things exist in reality but only in film can they meet as they do. Their collective presence feels like a montage -

"As beautiful as a chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table."

only these meetings are carefully designed by Godard.
These combinations are designed to make us think.

What do they represent?
violence - war, suicide
displacement - "red indians" the franco/russian jew
literature - great poets --- palestinians more interesting than jews but only interesting because they are victims. poetry is for victors. The trojan side of the story not told? -the aeneid by virgil.
identity-identity through philosophy, identity through race, religion, language, shared past, victimisation
language-books in an old church.
culture

Once you start thinking about the links between these things it consumes you.

Composition and transcendence


Pier Paolo Pasolini

RoGoPaG
A film by Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini and Gregoretti




"Quattro racconti di quattro autori che si limitano a raccontare gli allergri principi della fine del mondo."

Four stories by four authors about the jolly onset of the world's end.

The Ricotta
pasolini's montage of poetry, politics, film, media and religion.
The free indirect subjective

Automaton: mechanism with concealed motive-power; living being whose actions are purely mechanical

metonymic: substutution of an attribute for the name of the thing meant eg turf for horse-racing