061.
(see Version 1.1 of this card)
The first level continues: Cinema is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities, an illumination of the dark corners of topography. For Walter Benjamin, what is to be valued is the ‘optical unconscious’, cinema’s machinic vision of a world that is itself machined with a dense grid of lines. Cinema can expand or shrink space, extend or compress time, it can cut together images of diverse scales or forms — intimations of topology. It creates a ‘Spielraum’, a playroom, for dividing up the machine world otherwise. Contra Lukács, Benjamin opens towards the formal properties of the line at the expense of its representation of an historical situation as a totality. But what doesn’t change is that the spectator, like the reader, is external to the line itself. Cinema can show how the world is made through its cuts and montages, an industrial process with the unique quality of showing itself as works. Yet there is still a separation between those making the cinema and those watching it.
(All comments will be moderated)
(All comments will be moderated)
(All comments will be moderated)
(All comments will be moderated)
(All comments will be moderated)