Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
The idea of an outside of the film is based on the assumption that an absent cause is structurally immanent to film. In a film, the absent cause coincides with the camera’s gaze, which remains external to the image precisely as the generator of the cinematic image. This is the paradox of the cinema: the camera can never reveal itself as the cause of the image, the generative outside cannot be transferred to the inside of the image. With apparatus theory, however, this necessary split between gaze and image, cause and effect, production process and product, becomes the cardinal ideological problem of a political film aesthetics. How can cinema produce political effects when its the structure of its dispositif works towards concealing its productive outside?
Keywords: Absence, Apparatus, Camera, Ideology, Off-Screen
“To understand this necessary and paradoxical identity of non-vision and vision within vision itself is very exactly to pose our problems (the problem of the necessary connection which unites the visible and the invisible).”
– Louis Althusser“…which would mean that the effects are successful only in the absence of cause.”
– Jacques LacanIf, in almost all advanced discourses of film theory, it is a commonly held position that the media self-reflexivity of an aesthetic object is virtually synonymous with an explicit political reflexivity, then it should be recalled, in line with Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, that even the most refined reflexive turn is always, in the end, condemned to failure when it comes up against the hard kernel of an “absent cause.” An apparently simple structural phenomenon, which can be described as a fundamental impossibility of every self-reflexivity, forms the point of departure for the following discussion on the complex theoretical history of the twin, inextricably intertwined concepts of enunciation and suture: the film camera cannot film itself in the process of filming. The original site of capturing the image in every cinematic shot appears as a blind spot. The entity that gives rise to the visible world remains necessarily external to it. The plenitude of the visible is thus based on the existence of an invisible site, the Inside on an Outside, the on-screen world on the off-screen world, the effect on an absent cause.
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- Towards a Political Aesthetics of CinemaThe Outside of Film, pp. 13 - 24Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020