Routine

Underexposure. I have realized that we don’t get a great deal of natural light straight in. It gets to us refracted, but the rays scarcely enter our living room. Thus, my BW will not be as interesting as they could have had I been able to rely on unmediated natural light more abundantly. 

Directionality

I may be wrong, but for now it seems that BW analog is much harder to do well. 

Mimesis

I was incredibly lucky with my first roll, which rendered 33 (our of possible 36) fairly decent exposures. I find this particular one quite intriguing. Is it mimicking anything, and if so, what? The découpage matters here, specially for what happens inside the mould. Nothing moves or seems to take place. And yet, more than any action-centered photograph, this one theorizes what one understands of “something is happening”. Something is being staged here. Yes, photography does not simply capture, but it also stages. 

According to Barthes, 

“Take the Western theater of the last few centuries; its function is essentially to manifest what is supposed to be secret (‘feeling,’ ‘situations’, ‘conflicts’), while concealing the very artifice of such manifestation (machinery, painting, makeup, the sources of light). The stage since the REnaissance is the space of this life: here everything occurs in an interior surreptitiously open, surprised, spied on, savored by a spectator crouching in the shadows. This space is theological–it is the space of Sin: on one side, in a light which he pretends to ignore, the actor, i.e. the gesture and the word; on the other, in the darkness, the public, i.e., consciousness” (Empire of Sings, 61)

Just as the stage and cinema, photography mounts an interplay of what is seen and unseen, exhibited and concealed. Photography seems to solidify the enlightenment ideology that seeing is believing. Within that logical system of causality and isomorphism, what is not visible becomes a secret, at best, or meaningless or implausible at worst. 

Visibility and visualizing becomes to configure our understanding and senses of reality. Reality is that which enters the frame. Reality, as a result, reasserts itself as an optical phenomenon. According to Deleuze,

“a matter of a new form of reality, said to be dispersive, elliptical, errant or wavering, working in blocs, with deliberately weak connections and floating events. The real is no longer represented or reproduced but ‘aimed at.’ Instead of representing an already ‘deciphered ‘ real; neo-realism aims at an always ambiguous, to be deciphered, real; this is why the sequence shot tended to replace the montage of representations” (Cinema 2, 3). 

Where I teach, not what I teach–sadly

Analog. I am very pleased with the frame, the découpage. I was lucky to have natural light entering the building through the large glass that makes for the building’s outer wall. Lovely natural light, tenuous and intricate rather than sharp and obvious, on the upper floor.

The felicitous result of this shot owes to how it was framed, I believe. Photography presupposes découpage. In fact, I believe that découpage is an operation constitutive of découpage. 

Deleuze sets photography apart from cinema thus:

“The difference between the cinematographic image and the photographic image follows from this. Photography is a kind of ‘moulding’: the mould organises the internal forces of the thing in such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium at a certain instant (immobile section). However modulation does not stop when equilibrium is reached, and constantly modifies the mould, constitutes a variable, continuous, temporal mould. This is the movement-image that Bazin contrasts from this point of view with the photo: ‘The photographer proceeds, via the intermediary of the lens, to a point where he literally takes a luminous imprint, a cast. [But] the cinema realises the paradox of moulding itself on the time of object and of taking the imprint of its duration as well'” (Cinema 1 24)

The moulding is not only of time, the materialization of a certain instance, but of a immobile fragment of space and material composition, including humans. If photography’s aims is to capture such an instant of equilibrium, cinema’s aim is to accumulate these many instances of moulding and out of that density create variable, continuous modulation. I would like to give more thought to the paradox that cinema seems to embody for Bazin. 

 

 

When the light goes on

I love the contrast created, unwittingly, in this shot. I did not anticipate for the right side to turn out so underexposed. I like it though. I appreciate the discrepancy. I can’t fully articulate the reasons that draw me to this photo, but there are many. I smile at the may post-its sticking out of the books whose upper area alone entered the shot. The darkened side makes the light of the lamp look even more artificial. Strange, but there is an unusual tanned calmness in what could have been strident artificiality.

Today I am thinking about realism and representation. About that, Francesco Casetti says:

“At the level of representation, realism springs from a verisimilar depiction. The concept of verisimilitude takes us back to Aristotle: for the philosopher, the verisimilar, as opposed to the necessary, is not simply what happened but what can happen, the ‘probable’–and what happens is ‘proof’ of what can happen. The shift from ‘what can happen’ to ‘what happens, in the way in which it happens,’ and vice versa, is the core strategy of mimesis” (October 100). 

Tinker, Taylor, Solider, Spy

This photo was taken with my first film roll and my recently acquired Pentax K1000, which is a beauty. Joshua and I saw the film at this very theater soon after it opened nationwide. It was a curiously empty theater, perhaps because of the late hour (the last showing near midnight). As we became slowly engrossed less by the diegetic progression than the exquisite cinematography, I noticed that people around me were either falling asleep (evinced by their snoring) or checking their phones and moving around ceaselessly like restless children who did not know where they were and did not know what to do with themselves. All around a bizarre situation. Joshua and I left mesmerized, utterly bewitched, with a rejuvenated passion for fine cinema. Alfredson, whose earlier Let the Right One In is another jewel, understands the quiet intricacies of cinema as well as the senses it can awaken. If cinema remains a particular distribution of the senses, as Ranciere argues, then, it would be an intellectual crime to view cinema as no more no less than visualized narrative.