| | | | | | what transpires between the things themselves." 38 Unlike many films which attempt to provide a smooth, sutured entertainment, without any gap in the representation, by bringing us the world we are familiar with, these films by Bresson, Renoir, and Jancs keep reminding us that any filmic reality remains necessarily in default, that something the "real" continues to stand in reserve. Whereas in most films the frame keeps out anything that might remind the audience that what they are seeing is not necessarily in tune with the rest of the world, the frame in the films we have just described provides excerpts of a reality whose full scope and vista remain forever inaccessible. | | | | | | | | | How is an image articulated? How is it constructed? To make sense of the issues, we might refer back to the formative difference in artistic rendering that is proposed by Heinrich W lfflin in his Principles of Art History: the presentation of the background as a flat plane or three-dimensionally.39 For this indeed is the active difference between traditional and typical everyday images: the presence beyond the participants, in Gothic and Romanesque paintings for instance, of a colorful, highly decorated, graphic background or one that appears to be but an ordinary view of the world.40 Today, to select one or the other, as we shall see, has implications beyond personal choice. | | | | | | | | | Before I proceed further with this, it may be useful first to relate the visual formation of images to our everyday life experience. Even though, as human beings, we become aware of our surroundings through all of our senses (we may hear a car coming long before we see it, the wind may bring us the aroma of food from an apartment window, etc.), the gaze is the most Faustian of them all: it knows no bounds, surging forward until the very end of the horizon line.41 Only the material world, objects, things, beings that stand in its way arrest the visual quest. This stopping is unpleasant for the eyes, as it implies that a reaction, a countermeasure is required. In a way the gaze functions as our avant-garde since we too, when we encounter several people conversing in front of a door, must come up with a decision. We can say "Pardon me!" and attempt to thread our way through them or we may acknowledge their mass and circumvent the area. This reaction is apparently universal for, as Konrad Lorenz once noticed, even the most primitive infusoria similarly find their way around | | | | |
