Ontology of image

Byzantium/Modernism features contributions by fourteen international scholars and brings together a diverse range of interdisciplinary essays on art, architecture, theatre, film, literature, and philosophy, which examine how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture. Particular attention is given to intercultural dialogues between the former dominions of the Byzantine Empire, with a special focus on Greece, Turkey, and Russia, and the artistic production of Western Europe and America. Together, these essays invite the reader to think critically and theoretically about the dialogic interchange between Byzantium and modernism and to consider this cross-temporal encounter as an ongoing and historically deep narrative, rather than an ephemeral or localized trend.

Contributors are Tulay Atak, Charles Barber, Elena Boeck, Anthony Cutler, Rico Franses, Dimitra Kotoula, Marie-José Mondzain, Myroslava M. Mudrak, Robert S. Nelson, Robert Ousterhout, Stratis Papaioannou, Glenn Peers, Jane A. Sharp and Devin Singh.

Edited by Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina

This chapter proposes a new theorization of André Bazin’s realism in two directions in which the medium-specific notion of photographic indexicality can be deconstructed and reframed in view of Bazin’s own work and post-Bazinian film history. First, aesthetically, iconic index as full representation: it is more accurate that his ontology of the image is less about indexicality per se than about the indexical effect which can also be created in hyperreal or surreal iconicity. The Bazinian total cinema has evolved in this regard, enhancing the spatiotemporal unity in long-take/deep-focus and even eliminating the boundary between screen and theater spaces through the digital/3D technology. Second, philosophically, imperfect index as partial revelation: Bazin’s realism in a more documentary mode often leads us from actual reality to the virtual Real, the unrepresentable abyss of ontological otherness that is only indirectly, impossibly indicated. This underworld of his realism is a fertile theoretical ground of (French) revelationism that has evolved from Epstein to Daney, from Deleuze to Nancy, Derrida, and Žižek. The chapter delves into these two contradictory trends of Bazin’s persistent inspiration while analyzing relevant films including post-Bazinian world cinema and contemporary digital cinema.

Résumé :
Chris Marker est l’un des premiers à avoir ouvert son œuvre aux images électroniques, aux images synthétisées, puis aux images numériques. Si Lettre de Sibérie et La jetée, en dévoilant la machinerie propre à l’image cinématographique, examinent les possibilités du montage, avec Sans soleil et Level Five, ou encore avec Immemory et les expériences au sein de Second Life, la mémoire visuelle du numérique devient de plus en plus consubstantielle à l’œuvre de Marker. Le « cinéma élargi » de Marker construit une réflexion, aussi bien artistique que philosophique, sur le statut des images, sur leur valeur de vérité et d’être, sur leur nature médiale et médiatique, ainsi que sur leur portée économique, éthique et politique. Une telle perspective m’apparaît comme un point de départ décisif pour interroger l’opposition entre analogique et numérique, trop souvent réduite à une alternative axiologique entre un paradigme « authentique » et un univers – électronique-numérique – où quelque chose propre à l’image – son aura ? – semble irrémédiablement perdu.


Abstract :
Chris Marker had been one of the first directors to open his cinema to electronic and digital images and mean his art as an exploration of such ‘sunless’ images. If Letters from Siberia and La jetée aimed at examining the nature of memory and cinematic image, unveiling its structure and machinery, it is with Sunless, Level Five, and especially with Immemory and the recent experiences of Second Life, that digital memory becomes more and more consubstantial with visual memory in his work. Marker’s questioning of the ontological status of images, of their mediality and immateriality, of their ethic and political significance, concerns some of the most actual issues about our present experience of virtual images. Current debates often address the difference between the analogic and digital regime as an alternative between a paradigm of likeness and authenticity, which is opposed to the numeric sphere – understood as unindexical –, within which something of the image – its aura? – seems to be lost.

Nel contesto della Francia del dopoguerra, segnata dai vivaci contributi della nascente filmologia, l'opera di Bazin assegna allo spettatore cinematografico un ruolo di attiva e libera partecipazione nella costruzione del senso e delle immagini, giungendo a interrogarsi sui limiti della rappresentazione filmica (l'orrore, il sesso, la morte), che mettono in discussione l'autonomia stessa del fruitore.