Screen-ing as event

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." 

***Thought is molecular. There are different speeds and slownesses that compose the granular body-ing of AW’s cinema. How are the grains of time moving?***