| | | | | | harvested. Its offshoot is a crop which, while sustaining, reminds us that plenitude cannot last and that the cycle will quickly resume. The work of art, itself a legacy of the resistance of the world's innermost being to the artist's techne *, ends up reminding viewers that their own will to power, their grand desire to comprehend all things and dominate all creation, is bound to be but self-deluding aggrandizement. | | | | | | | | | I would like now to move to film and see how a work of art operates within the specificity of that medium. At the same time, rather than rehearsing the same argument, I would like to discuss examples that, in my view, broaden its scope. Let us start with a scene from Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946). Halfway through the short film, a character walks into a salon full of people. The setting is quite familiar and so are the participants: guests enjoying a party. Immediately though, everything is other than normal. To start with, the film has no sound track, a choice which thoroughly defamiliarizes the social event. Deren also carefully choreographs the participants' moves, accentuating a gesture here, a turn of the head there. She uplifts extended arms as some party-goers reach our for others. She vamps up warm embraces followed by quick departures. Men and women seduce each other with the twirl of a body. A dance is initiated, then cut short as attractive newcomers make themselves known. Throughout the scene, the camera locks onto particular gestures, freezing the image for a couple of seconds. By focusing on the party's exteriority, Deren brings out the superficiality of what is going on, the shallowness that engulfs the entire happening, the inauthenticity that mars much of social life. In her film, the party becomes a shell game, the encounters snares, people masks. Well, what of it? Surely this characterization offers nothing new: how many times have we followed a protagonist to a social event, a dinner party, what have you, where the participants are shown to be pedantic or frivolous? In those cases, though, we are made to feel superior to the characters (we see them for what they are) whereas here the technique used steers us into accepting that we are no different from them. It is our gestures that are being depicted, our affectations, our mannerisms, our infatuation with our own self. This set is phony and so are the actions but, unlike the ones I attributed to Antigna, Deren dissects the event, calling attention to the phoniness at hand, | | | | |
