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LENTINI family - Intrusions of the virtual

Intro

An apparently funny moment during the celebration of a wedding becomes a point of reflection through the process of creative editing. The boy’s wave with the wedding bouquet acts as an element of distraction and a starting point of reflection.

Intrusions of the virtual

The boy waving the bouquet in front of the camera and being pulled away by a man is an element of distraction from the solemnity of the moment. Yet beyond representing an intrusiveness element, the boy becomes the key to the interpretation of the amateur style of representing and presenting events. It is well known that home movies are mainly known for possessing no style at all. Yet in this lack of style, in its randomness, we can identify a specific way of doing that is peculiar to the genre.

The openness towards intrusion, randomness and chaos becomes the key to exploring the amateur style as a manifestation of the virtual. The creative re-editing process turns into a tool of abstraction, one that is able to bring create the suitable frame for the intrusion of the virtual as a generating force.

Exploration of the virtual

Essential in the exploration of the amateur mode of making an image is the concept of the virtual. I will use here Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual as something that is ‘as if’ it were real, that is virtually so, but not so in fact. Considering that this is an exact definition of memory and that home movies are objects of memory, it overlays perfectly with the aims of the home movie genre. Yet in its virtual acceptance, the home movie image becomes something more than something that exists as if it were real. Beyond what it represents, the home movie projects itself towards what it would and could be, towards a potentiality.

Notes

The creative re-editing of the scene enabled me to reflect upon the home movie style as a fluid style, a style that is always in becoming and never reaching an end. As an audio-visual format based on the manifestation of the virtual, the home movie opens itself towards endless potentialities.

#intrusionofvirtual #latentlife

LENTINI family - alienation

Intro

Solitude is a matter of a multiplicity of presences. This is an insight I drawn from the editing of this scene. Initially nothing happening in the scene hinted at solitude, except maybe for the old age of the people depicted (old age IS an age of loneliness); then again not all of the people shown in these images are old, there are some children who are part of the group too. Then how did I end up reflecting on this aspect?

Alienation

The first word that came into my mind when seeing this scene was ‘alienation’. I connected this term to the sense of detachment and isolation that the walking group of people, despite of being together, transmitted to me. Walking away from the place of celebration represents an alienating gesture, a distancing from centrality. Yet through a closer reflection, alienation is not only referred to the gestures performed in the scene, but goes well beyond it. Alienation refers to a more general phenomenological process that grants the viewer access to the essence of the image. This is how alienating himself from the image as ‘representation’, the viewer gains access to the image as ‘immanence’ (manifestation).

Exploring alienation

According to the philosopher Jean Marie Mondzain ‘seeing an image means gaining access to what gazes out from within the visible itself, it means offering the immanence of an absence to the gaze’. Through this statement the philosopher positions the ability to produce images/ to imagine at the origins of perception. The creative process of re-editing the scene takes the imagining capacity to another level, where the materiality of the images themselves acquires a primordial role. Through an instinctive superimposition of various perspectives of the same scene, re-shot from different angles, I was able to explore the scene beyond its representational function. The creative process was therefore instrumental for gaining access to what was gazing out from within the visible: a multiplicity of solitary gestures (walking away).

Notes

‘Alienation’ served as an instinctive approach for accessing the scene as a non-representative gesture. ‘Solitude’ appeared as the invisible, latent life, piercing through the skin of the visible. The creative editing process instead was the instrument for taking back into the realm of the visible the non-visible: that multiplicity of presences (people) shaping solitude.

#latentlife #alienation

LIGA family - collective encounters

Exploration of broken signs

Intro

Home movie scenes, contrary to what they are supposed to do (create a sense of belonging and familiarity) can be quite daunting. It does not happen seldom to me to encounter home movie fragments or stills that I approach with a certain sense of unease and discomfort. In some of them the degree of unease reaches a high level, becoming: troubling, haunting, specular, scary etc. There is something about these scenes that works in a specific invading manner that manages to unsettle a subtle balance. I call these images that try to establish an encounter. What sort of encounter is another matter that I try to explore further.

Collective encounters

Haunting images are those images, which do not wait to be discovered, but reach out themselves to the audience; by doing so they break a subtle order: they appear before us as objects of discovery. What sort of discoveries are taking place through this encounter varies from case to case. But before being a subjective process (an intimate relation established between the viewer and the image), the encounter is an act of discovery, a moment during which we are confronted with something. In the case of the scene under analysis, the encounter revealed as a collective encounter.

Exploration of collective encounters

Andre Malraux referred to works of art as encounters. What he explains throughout ‘Voice of Silence’ is the fact this encounter is far from rendering justice to the work of art - means of reproduction such as photography only offer a partial and distorted image of the objects of art in themselves -, yet they are there because in our imaginary they are shaped this way. If we apply Malraux example to the case of home movies and in specific to our scene, as works of art depicting intimate imaginaries, we are presented with an imperfect encounter: a group of people holding long candles in their hands and looking straight in the camera. We do not know who they are, what they are doing, why they came together, where they are or what is happening around them. Even if intuition leads us to position this group into a religious and familial context, what we get is only a partial ‘picture’ of the whole. The more partial this encounter is, the more alienated we feel as an audience and the more abstract/general the representation of the object/subject/event of the image(s) the more we tend to be alienated. This is due to to the fact that our minds lack an anchoring point into the concrete, they lack visual cues that enable the formation of patterns and associations. Being presented with a group of unknown people, with candles in their hands, who look motionless straight into the camera is a collective encounter, an utterly uncomfortable one I must say.

Notes

The editing process of the scene brought to the fore two aspects: the abstract level of representation (most bodies/faces appearing in the scene, were transformed through the editing process into outlines, losing their specific expression/personality) and the necessity to connect some familiar elements to mental patterns in order to stick to a ‘plausible’ representation of the scene (candle lights connected to the moonlight). This proved to be a highly abstract and engaging process, where the unconscious tried to emerge through an artistic/concrete gesture.

#latentlife #collectiveencounters

Liga family- a-symmetries

Intro

I would be tempted to say that what attracted my attention in this scene was the attempt of the four characters to stage a funny sausage-assault. Yet somehow in this scene, the sausage appears as an estranged object. Due to the way it is being held up and exhibited by the four people, the sausage appears as a decontextualized object, one that that has lost its functionality of sausage, to become something else.

A-symmetries

What happened to our object of contemplation through this process of estrangement? Following the process of decontextualizing an everyday object (sausage) by taking it from its habitual environment (i.e the kitchen/plate/table) and placing it into a new situation (what Deleuze defines as de-territorialisation), we can start to notice how the sausage is losing its property as an object of survival (nutrition) in order to gain a stylistic meaning.

Exploring asymmetries

By being held and exhibited in front of the camera, put around the neck and swung around into the air, the sausage acquires a different position among everyday life objects: from a basic needs element to an object of style and symbolism. Yet this symbolic meaning generated through the estrangement process is not static, as we would expect from a decorative element. In fact it is the dynamic process of movement that enables the sausage to gain momentum and to become something else. The camera captures the sausages as it swings through the air, drops vertically towards the ground and rises up again with a balancing move. The reproduction of the sausage and its movement captured by the cinematic eye becomes a representation of a different object, one that does not intend to compete with the original but being able to evoke it. Therefore a fracture is being created between two visions: on the one side that of the contemplated object with its cultural and social determinacy and on the other side that of its evocation as a knowledge object freed from its cultural and social determinacy. I refer to this passage from one perspective to the other an asymmetry, as it is being able to offer a glimpse into the passage process from contemplation to knowledge.

Notes

The editing process was of high importance for me as it enabled me to grasp the concept of asymmetry. By re-filming the scene and positioning it in transparency over the original scene I was able to visualise how the two positions relate to one another: my evocative stand that minimised the distance between myself and filmed objects and the home moviemaker’s stand representing an enlarged space of contemplation. The overlapping of the two visions determined a process of asymmetry between spaces: the space of knowledge and the space of contemplation. The asymmetry reveals the ‘latent life’ of the scene, containing those aspects, which are not talked about but rather shown.

#asymmetries #latentlife

Liga family - intuition

Intro

For this particular scene an unequivocal factor determining my selection process is speed. The scene lasts for 1 second, becoming almost a flashing visual element. In the following I will further explore speed as a determining factor in my selection process.

Fleeing struggles of intuition

In a blink of an eye a diagonal opens up through space, cuts through thin air and disappears into eternity. As fast as it opened up, it closes down on itself. What ‘was’ and what ‘could have been’ leave space to infinite future possibilities. This is a moment where the virtual and potential run side-by-side, evading the pure logic and entering the domain of intuition. Intuition alone is left with the hard struggle to decide what ‘could have become’ of this scene.

Exploring intuition

Some gestures are performed so fast as to almost escape our perception. And yet such a moment grabs our attention almost instantly. What is it actually that keeps us hooked? Is it the mystery of the visible which the eye perceives as a flashing instant, or is it the search for the invisible, that marginal space where you have the feeling of something going on but you cannot say what? Adopting a phenomenological rather than a neuroscientific approach means to grasp only partially the answer to this question. To position ourselves in between these two approaches would enable to assess the answer from a more favourable position. In between lies the field of intuition; a space where the spark of logic is being ignited by the bodily reaction to what is being grasped/perceived.

Notes on intuition

This reflection builds a mental image of speed as a triggering factor of intuition, which in turn becomes a representation of an embodied spark. Yet then, are all flashing/speedy scenes worth our attention based on these premises? Potentially yes, practically only if they are able to reach the essence of the image, the pure reason of existence of the image. Essence is not only emotion or logic; it is emotion and logic all together and at the same time it represents more than the sum of its parts. It includes beliefs, personal viewpoints and ways of doing; all elements which escape a classification. Only when speed pierces through the skin of the image and offers us a glimpse of beliefs, personal viewpoints and ways of doing that construct the image, is it able to ignite intuition. I attempted to further explore this grey area through a visual re-editing of the scene, that brought to light the endless imaginary potentialities embedded in the scene’s latent life.

#strugglesofintuition #latentlife