Persona and Cinematic Form

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Persona and Cinematic Form
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The Aesthetic Richness of Cinema I

• Pictorial Cinema is the projection of a three
  dimensional world onto a two dimensional screen.
  Exploration of the senses of spatiality and the
  forms of images. The size of the cinematic
  image is also particularly importantalters the
  perception of faces, etc. Also various modes of
  color vs. modes of black and white.
• Kinesthetic Unlike paintings and photographs,
  cinematic images move. This movement occurs
  both by how that which is pictured by the camera
  moves and by how the camera itself can move as it
  pictures.
• Sonic Cinema presents sounds in a sonic
  environment. Aleatory, Music, Human Voice
• Temporal Not only are cinematic images
  spatially dynamic but also temporally so. In
  cinema, time can move up or slow down. Not
  only the movement within a scene but the movement
  from scene to scene (cutting/montage) is used to
  explore the senses of time.

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The Aesthetic Richness of Cinema II

• Narrative Through editing and speaking the
  scenes of a film arrange themselves into a
  narrative. (Beginning, Middle, End)
• Dramatic Characters are acted out in a
  filmthey move and come into relationships with
  one another.
• Character Through their actions, characters
  show forth their inner motivations and natures.
• Mis-en-scene Cinematic images portray a
  particular worldthe way in which objects and
  their backgrounds are put together for the camera
  are a crucial part of the aesthetics of cinema.
  Cinema can evoke historical epochs or everyday
  locales, not to mention dreamlike states,
  spiritual depths or fragmented consciousness.

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Form vs. Content

• The formal features of an artwork are the various
  ways of organizing, interrelating its being
  perceived such that the perceptions it evokes
  have a harmonious or significant emotive quality
  to it. The work is beautiful, probing, stunning,
  wondrous.
• The content involves what it objectively
  portrayed or intimated in the formal arrangement
  of an artwork.
• In great art, form and content become synonymous?
  

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Two Tendencies in Cinematic Art

• The Ordinary RealCinema records the complexity
  of details and the surprise and happenstance of
  the everyday. Example the varied movements and
  expressions of the players of the court orchestra
  as they play a composition. The flickering of a
  candle.
• The SurrealCinema offers an alterative reality.
  We see beyond what could be seen in the everyday.
  Often this seeing beyond puts the sense of the
  everyday radically into question. Example the
  appearance of Colombes dead wife in the hut.

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Cinema as a Artistic Medium

• The flickering of light upon a screen. How the
  cinematic media is NOT oil on canvas or charcol
  on paper but evavescent.
• Films that thematize themselves as a meditation
  on the medium of film versus films that do not!
  In what sense is AMW a meditation upon art? On
  film? Or on music?

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Form in CinemaPersona

• Form as Form
• Shadow vs. Light, Shadow vs. Substance, White
  vs. Black, Foreground vs. Background,
  Juxtaposition vs. Separation, Right vs. Left,
  Front vs. Back, Face vs. Faceless, Open vs.
  Closed Gestures, Tiredness vs. Wakefulness, Filmy
  vs. Edged, Silence vs. Speaking, Youth vs.
  Experience, Healing vs. Illness, Listening vs.
  Addressing, Faithfulness vs. Unfaithfulness, Word
  vs. Image, Innocence vs. Prurience, Hope vs.
  Despair, Looking and Being Looked At, Voyeurism
  vs. Participation
• Form as Content
• Doubled Existence, Ambivalence about What is
  Real, the Emptiness of Speech and the Fullness of
  Silence Growing Feeling of Anxiety and then
  Horror at the Other Occupying Ones Self

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Questions Persona Provokes

• How do we know who we are? And which who we
  are??
• What is the relationship of the external world of
  everyday events to the internal world of dreams,
  of memories, of inner voices.
• How worldly is art? How unworldly?

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Cinema as a Form of Art
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Cinematic Form in All the Mornings

• Light vs. Dark
• Stillness vs. Motion
• Everyday Chores vs. Contemplative Art
• Frumpery vs. Plainness
• Country vs. Court
• Catholic vs. Protestant
• Public vs. Private
• Interior vs. Exterior
• Age vs. Youth

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Formal Thematic Oppositions in AMW

• Mastery vs. Apprenticeship
• Male vs. Female
• Father vs. Son
• Teacher vs. Student
• Son vs. Daughter
• Daughters vs. Wife
• Music vs. Entertainment
• Sacred vs. Profane
• Grandeur vs. Intimacy

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Aesthetic of Grandeur
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Music vs. Film in AMW

• Cinema is both words and a moving image. In this
  sense is it both like and unlike music.
• Like music, cinema can live purely in the image,
  in the gestures and gazes of its participants.
  Film is temporal in the way that dance and music
  are, purely formal.
• Like literature, cinema engages us in a story and
  in commentary about the world. Film is temporal
  in the manner of memory, substantial.

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The Temporality of Music and Cinema

• Music invokes a virtual time within an actual
  time.
• The virtual time of music and cinema is
  profoundly formal. At any given moment we have a
  sense of where the time has been and where it is
  going to take us.
• In its formal movement, music suggests an emotive
  form as well. Emotion as a being moved
  Origin 157080 appar. lt MF esmotion, derived
  on the model of movoir motion, from esmovoir to
  set in motion, move the feelings lt VL exmovére,
  for L émovére see e-, move, motion

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Filming Music

• Scene One Practicing the Viol in Marais Studio
• Scene Two An early concert of St. Colombe with
  his two daughters.
• Scene Three The Variations by Marais.
• Scene Four The music of the court
• Scene Five Playing the Suite pour Madeline
• Scene Six Marais playing at the films ending.

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But Paintings Too, Lubin Baugin

• St. Colombe keeps a painting of the table upon
  which he places wine and wafers. Like his music,
  it is without words.
• He visits an actual artist, Louis Baugin, the
  actual painter of the image used in the film.

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Lubin Baugin 1610-1663

• Master of the still-life
• Two distinct periods of workearlier, still life
  (France) later, religious portraits (Italy)
• Lived outside of Paris
• He was openly involved in republishing the books
  of the empirical doctor, David Laigneau, against
  bloodletting. A Protestant, Laigneau had also
  written a treatise on alchemy. Could an interest
  in empiricism and alchemy exist in harmony with
  orthodox piety in 1660? In any case, it was the
  sign of a free spirit, an open mind, a critical
  awareness.

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Still Life PaintingPainting the Realm of the
Dead?

• la nature morte in French
• While painting The Five Senses in AMW, Baugin
  states Death is the sum of what it steals from
  us.
• Rather than speaking with Baugin, St. Colombe
  listens to him in the act of his painting une
  nature morteto the rustling of his brush
  strokes.

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The Five Senses
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The Five Senses au cinema
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St. Jerome--Bible Translator
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