The request for touch in cinema sent me to sensesofcinema dot com. Under book reviews there's mention of a book called The Tactile Eye by someone named Jennifer Barker. It's reviewed by Carl Plantinga, who I think of as reductive and empirical, American. Which made me think of another American, William Wees, and his Light Moving in Time, which I could never manage to read. It's not about touch, but it's in the spirit. There's discussion of Brakhage and notions like "the untutored eye." The search could be broadened to references to "haptic cinema," which would send us to Laura Marks and Guiliana Bruno, but all this raises a question. What kind of reader do we have in mind? What kinds of reading are there? For one kind a text is like a screening programs, or like turning on the tv to watch prices and trends. The "renewed" interest in "expanded cinema" falls into this category, it has the same feel. What's on screen is supposed to be subordinated to the live event, somehow insufficient without it, in theory anyway. Another kind of reader does not read for guidance or confirmation and will lose patience with texts on film, simply because the reason for making a film has little to do with what might have been said about it, or even with what might have been shown. But why does "performance" here seem to be restricted to variations on the process of projection? Is it because projection fits the model of a spectatorship familiar to a writer? The performance is, then, a vehicle of delivery, delivery having moved from the tv studio, the cassette tape, the .mov file, to the interior of a large room. Is it then supposed to expose all that apparatus stuff video explored when we just had broadcast tv? On work hosted by ubuweb we seem to see film's tactile surface. We could talk with Marks about mourning and loss, but suppose the screen simply cannot sustain the interest it did in 2000. We're long past the death of Kodak. Every screen surface is just more digital filtering or lens work, which brings me back to that gallery, only without its projections. It's now a film shoot, only without the acting. Or it's a space for public participation. Bring the camera, but I wouldn't expect anyone who just watches movies to find this interesting. The gallery's advantage is now its capacity to take us out of one public space (projected image) and put us into another (camera and its environment). At any rate, without this use of the gallery, I find myself thinking more about media archaeology than images, about the technologies of storage, including text. If it's going to be materiality that interests us, why must it only be an image and its projection?
Bernie
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