We
often presuppose the subject is first, that everything that happens happens for
a subject. We often presuppose that an image requires a subject—someone,
something—in order for it to appear. But what if the idea of a founding subject
is itself a false image—an after-thought? What if the condition for experience
is not subjective?
Gilles
Deleuze argues: "The brain is
the screen."
***What
if a concern with cinema isn’t something we project subjectively onto the
screen? What if the screening of
cinema amounts to an activity, a life,
that includes us? What if the « bodying » of that experience, as a
complex system of relay, is itself a movement of thought?
An
ethology of images asks us to rethink the status of the image beyond a
transcendental system of judgment. Explanation puts the image at a distance by
erecting a sanitary wall between the subject and its object. Explanation
undermines the affective capacity of the image (what it can do). Ethology: a
study of how cinema forces us to think/act.
Immanent
critique: the event, as it happened, appreciates
and evaluates itself by itself. This is what affect does.***
Apichatpong:
"I
wanted to suggest the idea of time disruption, that the movie isn’t dealing
with one reality, there are multiple planes…"
***A
concern with the ecology of perception, its milieu, past, present, future,
existing in mutual immanence.***
Apichatpong: "I believe that cinema has its own
life."
***Where
else the life-forces of cinema can lead? What else the thought-forces make us
think and feel? And what if the image, as a movement of thought, is not at all
present? Deleuze’s thesis (in his Cinema books) is that an image can only be said
to be present when it represents something else. But an image itself is a
complex assembling of durations, speeds. The coexistence of durations in the
image should not be mistaken for the present mediated or represented by the
image. The contemporaneity (co-immanence/withness
of past, present, future) of an image is not the same as the presentness of an
image.***
Apichatpong: "Before I used to think of film as maybe just one
project. With my process being finishing it piece by piece, before moving on
to different themes or interests. But lately I think of film like
satellites: surrounding this ongoing universe; even building that universe. So
when I finished Cemetery of Splendour, it wasn’t really
finished. It’s almost like a platform, to move onto another work that can be
built from it. "
***A platform is a proposition.
A lure for thinking, talking, dreaming, jumping (like a monkey), even
finishing. What are
the problems (questions) that Apichatpong’s cinematic plateforms generate
and/or relay?***
Brian Massumi: "Active participation precedes conscious perception. It is you who
are inducted into the situation, almost in the military sense, before you
reflectively perform any inductions about it. You are drafted into the
situation, and are already to some extent constrained by the lay of the
participatory land in which you find yourself. You are constrained in the sense
that the active potentials enveloped in the relational milieu are conditioned
by the situation. But there are always degrees of freedom – precisely because
what presents itself is a landscape of alternative potentials, and not a fait
accompli. It’s not over until it’s over. " "What a Body can
Do" Politics of Affect.
*** What does it mean to participate in this
relational plateform (until it’s over)?
Ordinary perception fails to grasp the co-implication of the various tendencies
enveloped in the relational milieu. Conscious perception is selective. A
participatory perception is one that pushes subjectivity and personhood to
their limit.
What
does it mean to be conscious in a
film? Film as a mode of thought.***
Brian Massumi: "There is a mutual implication – a co-implication – of the diverse
and the unitary as aspects of the same event. In order to account for the
event, you have to use a kind of logic that is about how different aspects
co-compose, how they are mutually included in the same event. You miss the
event if you put the unitary and the diverse, the emergent and the given, into
opposition to each other." "What a Body can Do" Politics
of Affect.
***A
logic of mutual inclusion fosters the multiplicity or sociality that conditions
the event’s form-taking.***
Apichatpong:
"Maybe science is the wrong
word. Maybe it’s the idea of transformation. In the movie, with this six-reel
idea of transforming time. Or maybe you can refer to a scientific nature,
because science is everywhere and we don’t see it—there are moving particles in
this table, nothing is solid."
