LENTINI family - architectural embodiments
Intro
A constantly panning camera movement accompanies the viewer’s gaze across the realm of the visible. A rotating movement of the filmmaker’s hand overflies the space: the body of the main character – a woman dressed in a pattern dress – and the imposing Roman architecture displaying behind her. In his attempt to grasp the magnificence of the scene and express the connection between the human figure and the architectural environment, the filmmaker performs a circular gesture that on its passage leaves a trace of those invisible connections.
Architectural embodiments
When thinking about invisible connections in philosophical terms, Deleuze’s lines of flight come to mind. The lines of flight are a core concept in Deleuze-ian philosophy, essential for the understanding of the vision of the world as an inherently dynamic concept, composed of a multiplicity of dimension, lines and directions that connect to each other in order to form assemblages. Lines of flight are according to Deleuze those lines reaching outside the assemblage; escaping the structure they are part of and connecting to the outside world. I suggest that what is being aesthetically reconstructed through this scene is an attempt of visualising these lines of flight, the liminal areas of matter (human & architectural matter in this case) that through the movement of the camera are hinted at in their ‘becoming’. What the camera tries to map are areas of connections between bodies and their environment, lines that escape a fixed categorisation (human body/architecture) in order to give shape to architectural embodiments.
Exploration of Architectural embodiments
Interposing the cinema lens between the real world (what is biologically out there) and the imagined world (what the imagining eye/brain perceives), generates a new sort of imagery, one belonging to the sphere between sense and reasoning, objectivity and subjectivity. The cinematic medium bestows upon the image a specific affordability (that which the cinematic lens ‘affords’ to sensibly identify and represent), transforming ‘lines of flight’ (connected to the reasoning process/knowledge) into ‘ lines of light’ (connected to the aesthetic medium: ‘impress through light’).
Notes
The editing process of the scene enabled to ‘rethink’ it in terms of lines of flight, which through medium-specificity became ‘lines of light’; the conceptual application of this notion to the artistic process, traced areas of the visible as connections between bodies and architecture.
