Real of Reality

»The being of film«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

Film is not representational, but, as Stanley Cavell, the American pioneer of philosophy of film claims, presentational. My paper proceeds on Cavell’s puzzling statement that a photographic image (which constitutes the film image) presents us “with the things themselves” and not with any kind of similarity or representation, therefore concluding that we “do not know” how to “place a photograph (…) ontologically” (in: The World Viewed). His observation actually cuts back to André Bazin, who claims about the photographic image: “the photographic image is the object itself, (…) it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.” (in: What is Cinema?) This famous quote of Bazin is often interpreted in two ways: firstly as if reproduction would give the model an indexical reference or, secondly, as if reproduction would be an entity identical to its model. I will argue that both readings miss the point. Even if it was not the first intention of disclosure for Bazin, “to be the model” is referred to as something, which can be shared by transfer of reality. This “transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction” further presupposes, without reflecting on it, an equalization of being and reality, two distinct terms, which usually incorporate different meanings reflected by the division between ontology and metaphysics, between the inquiry into being and about the fundamental nature of reality. In some contexts “reality” designates “the world” in which entities are; Martin Heidegger states that “being-in” is the way in which being is, it always is a “being-in-the-world” (in: Being and Time).

I propose to ask, in a Heideggerian way, for the being of objects in film and in the world and furthermore, building on Heidegger’s complex conception of “presence of what is present”, to ask for a ‘real of reality’, which is shared by beings and can be the transferred into the photograph: a kind of essence of reality, which makes the being of the photograph real–it is not fictitious and it is not an illusion.

»Cinema and Real as Immanence«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

In Lacan’s theory of the three registers of human life (Real, Imaginary, Symbolic), Real is quite different from reality. If the reality is the world seen through our faculties of Imaginary (selfawareness) and Symbolic (language), what is behind reality is properly the Real, something elusive and resisting to meaningful formulations. I will argue that such dimension can be thought very close to the Deleuze’s idea of pure immanence. In »What is philosophy?« Deleuze and Guattari write that immanence can be faced not only from philosophy, but from science and art as well. The specific content of philosophy are concepts, the ones of science functions, and the ones of art the composition of sensible aggregates. Art does not cross the plane of virtuality and becoming as philosophy does, it does not establish a plane of reference in which placing the variable entities of the universe as science does, but rather territorializes and deterritorializes, that is it allows a “leap” guiding the artist from chaos into the organization of aesthetic composition, a composition which anyway remains always open. My suggestion is that art is the most frequented and feasible route to approach immanence (or Real), to brush against ideas and sensations which are usually dispersed without however succumbing them. In particular, among the different artistic practices, cinema – thanks to the impersonality of its technical genesis – can be a privileged way to grasp Real in its immanence.

Daniela Angelucci is associate professor of aesthetics at University of Roma Tre. She studies aesthetics and philosophy of art, particularly philosophy of film. She earned her PhD at University of Palermo in 2002. Since 2003 she collaborates assiduously to the works edited by Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana (Treccani). Her early work is on phenomenological aesthetics and philosophy of literature. She is managing editor of the review »Lebenswelt. Aesthetics and philosophy of experience«, and staff member of »Fata Morgana. Quadrimestrale di cinema e visioni«. She is member of the editorial board of the series Estetica e critica (Quodlibet).

»Apparatus Theory Re-Visited«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

Siegfried Zielinski ist Professor für Medientheorie an der Universität der Künste Berlin sowie Michel-Foucault-Professor für Medienarchäologie und Techno-Kultur an der European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Schweiz. Darüber hinaus ist er Direktor des Vilém Flusser Archivs an der Universität der Künste Berlin. Er ist Verfasser der Bücher »Veit Harlan« (R.G. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1981), »Zur Geschichte des Videorecorders« (Wissenschaftsverlag Spiess, Berlin, 1986), »Audiovisionen« (Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1989), »Archäologie der Medien« (Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2002), »[... nach den Medien]« (Merve, Berlin, 2011) und Herausgeber der fünfbändigen Reihe »VARIANTOLOGY. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies« (König, Köln, 2005-2011).

»Can Documentaries Realize Philosophy? The Act of Killing and the Banality of Evil«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

The debate about whether films can do philosophy has focused predominantly on narrative fiction films. In this talk, I consider documentary as a film genre whose philosophical significance has been underappreciated. I argue that documentary films are capable of doing philosophy albeit in a distinctive manner.

In making my case, I invoke the thesis I put forward in Thinking On Screen (2007) that films can do philosophy by addressing a philosophical problem that is also discussed by philosophers. My example of a film that does this is The Third Man (Reed, 1947) which, I argue, illustrates and supplements claims made by Aristotle in regard to the issue of how to dissolve a friendship ethically. To adapt this account to documentary films, I consider The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012). I argue that the film addresses the issue of how people can perform evil actions, an issue theorized by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964) through the concept of the banality of evil.

The distinctive feature of a documentary film’s philosophical contribution is that, whereas a fiction film usually does philosophy by means of a thought experiment, a documentary can support a thesis by means of providing actual evidence to support it. In so doing, documentaries rely on film’s distinctive manner of presenting reality on screen, a feature of film emphasized by André Bazin and others.

»Genius Loci, Spatial Cinema and Site-Specific Narration«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

The language of film was made for the cinema. When a film starts and the auditorium gets dark, we forget about the space around us and get into the reality of the film. Here, the montage is a fundamental technique to narrate a story. We jump from one place to the next and, in doing so, bridge the gap of unnecessary time. The auditorium is a place in which we can lose our customary perception of space and time.

But what happens if we relocate a film to a place where we are aware of our environment? What happens if we think about film as a site-specific narration and a form of augmented reality? When a movie is embedded in a spatial surrounding the montage becomes a disrupting element in an otherwise constant environment.

The spatial film requires a language that takes the environment and the three dimensional projection surface into account. The technology of “Projection Mapping” gives us the opportunity to work accurately and explicitly with spatial structures.

In our talk, we try to re-think common conceptions of film and focus on practical examples of cinematographic aspects outside their common spatial localization. We want to put the theoretical background of cinema into context with a philosophy of site-specific narrations. To illustrate the differences, we will discuss observations and examples from our practical experiences and projects.

»The Act of Killing«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

by Joshua Oppenheimer and Christine Cynn (Co-Director) (Denmark, 2011)

After the 1965 military coup in Indonesia more than one million people were murdered. Until today the victims and their descendants didn’t dare tell their story, because the perpetrators are still in power. Not only are they in power, they boast about being the winners of history. The American documentary director Joshua Oppenheimer decided, together with his colleague Christine Cynn, to talk to the murderers. In a country which celebrates these murderers as heroes, the filmmakers dared to face the taboo and the terror. Free from any regret, the murderers tell about their deeds and are willing happily to reenact and restage them. Eventually, the film project gets the men to talk and think about their atrocities which they haven’t reflected hitherto. Through this reflection, the retroactive restating of reality becomes more real than the actual deeds ever had been for those men. The Real forges ahead through the “imitation” of the past events. The movie, which needed ten years for production, struggled with funding for a long time, but is now considered to be one of the most important filmic works of contemporary cinema. The movie was awarded more than 30 awards.

»Stella Polaris«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

Following a long series of documentary movies, “Stella Polaris” was Knut Erik Jensen’s first feature film, yet it transcends pre-existing genres. It can probably be best described as a poetic constellation of memory fragments pertaining to life in a northern Norwegian fishing village over a period of 50 years. It provides a new perspective on Norway’s northernmost county, Finnmark, its inhabitants, and recent history, setting it as a liminal location, referring to Homi Bhabha’s notion of third space. Such a concept of liminality includes a focus on the “other” and thereby allows us to catch sight of various forms of “othering” that prove constitutive of not only official Norwegian cold war discourse and identities, but indeed of any war discourse. The camera follows a young woman, the narrative’s main protagonist, who walks barefoot through the relicts of a northern Norwegian coastal fishing village. She appears like a ghostly apparition, rather than a realistic character in a historical reenactment. This way, “Stella Polaris” questions, challenges, and potentially subverts borders and barriers in political, historical, and aesthetic registers. Jensen develops a peculiar aesthetic that puts high value on transi­tions between shots and that actively juxtaposes the visual with the audible. His spectator does not enter the cinema to relax or forget, but to engage what he refers to as “audio-visual riddles.” This peculiar aesthetic values an in-between and can therefore be termed as a “liminal aesthetic.”

(This text is based on Holger Plötzsch’s review of the film entitled “Aspects of Liminality in Knut Erik Jensen’s ‘Stella Polaris’”, 2012)

»The Real in Film: The historical real, the optical real, and the material real«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

My presentation is based on the proposition that every film, whether documentary or feature film, is based on the mutual relationship between the found and the invented, the material and the fiction, the real and the symbolic. In addition, as opposed to the closed form of the feature film, the open form of the documentary film can make the interplay between the real and the symbolic, the recorded material and the narrative, more visible. Hence, the documentary film is not a reproduction of reality, but a creative approach to the real, which is directly connected to the everlasting search for the answer to the question: what is the real?

What, then, is the real? The real is not the objective fact of reality, but something that is always perceived by a distorted view. Thus, in the real, the distorted subjective view is always included. However, if one accepts that the documentary material is always framed by an interpretation and subjective perspective, this nevertheless means that the real is the construct of a perspectivism, because there is the actual existence and effect of the real. Nevertheless, this is always in a reciprocal relationship between the observer and the observed.

What is the real in film? In film, at least three kinds of „the real“ can be ascertained. They are the historical real, the optical real, and the material real. My presentation deals with these three kinds of the real based on the film theories of Benjamin, Moholy-Nagy, and Vertov.

»Brothers«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

Aslaug Holm is a Norwegian filmmaker and cinematographer. She has made a number of shorts and documentaries and has founded the production company Fenris Film with her husband Tore Buvarp. She was the director and cinematographer of »Rich Country« (2006) for which she won the FIPRESCI prize, cinematographer and editor of »Cool and Crazy« (2001), which was awarded as best European documentary 2001.

Just recently Holm became the first documentary filmmaker to win Norway’s Amanda Award for best directing, for her compelling documentary »Brothers« (2015), which has now played theatrically in Norway for almost six months. In this personal film, shot over a period of five years and recalling Richard Linklater’s »Boyhood«, Holm is documenting her two sons growing up in Oslo. An experienced cinematographer and documentary filmmaker, Holm is now writing fiction.

»Werckmeister Harmonies«

Lecture/Talk

Wed, 02.11.2016 – Sun, 06.11.2016

ZKM_Media Theater, ZKM_Lecture Hall, ZKM_Media Lounge, ZKM_Cube

In Tarr’s film »Werckmeister Harmonies« the musicologist Eszter is haunted by a question that can be seen as the theme of the film: is math real or simply imagined? It is possible to derive from this question further questions about the reality character of film. Can math be the arbiter of beauty or is there something more fundamental about beauty, which the human ear can hear but which logic and math cannot grasp? The Werckmeister Harmonies problem questions the categorical distinction between the given (nature) and the constructed (culture) and asks whether culture (in the film designated as “math”) is real.

Eszter discovers that there is a gap between math (or mathematically established music) and reality (or real music). The philosophical criticism addresses the »reality character« of geometry/math altogether. Mathematically, if one goes up seven octaves from a C (an octave defined as an interval that always doubles the frequency of the preceding note), one should end up on exactly the note that the human ear identifies as a higher C. The problem is that one doesn’t. After seven octaves, the note that we land on will be a quarter of a semitone off if measured mathematically. Is this an imperfection of the human ear, of mathematics, or of nature? Ratios that appear to exist in nature do not necessarily overlap with mathematical order. Natural laws hold the individual intervals together inside a harmonic system that might be irrational from a mathematical point of view but still needs to be accepted.

Eszter’s questions bear a strong metaphorical link with philosophical questions concerning the reality character of cinema. What is »reality« for cinema? Is it calculated beforehand (in terms of time and space) or is there an organic reality that evolves in cinema and from cinema?