As a paradigm, cinema projects and pronounces that it is a language, whereas media or television constitutes a disappearing act-appearing as nothing more than “that which only shows what is already there.” Business and advertising lubricate the wheels of this machine for which a single word crystallizes its every facet: “infomercial.” Something is being sold or negotiated while it is presented as information. The transition from cinema to television is a transition from a realm of ethics/aesthetics to a realm of the purely technical ( one to one, that which has no supplement). The machine of LIVE: broadcast television and the 24-hour vacuum-packed continuum.
A verb that went into a loop, a cliché, a halt, when it walked absent-mindedly through an invisible threshold to another apparatus, one that broke the continuity of its own history: a new apparatus that placed the image in a non-site, divorced from the body, where the image no longer affirmed or denied anything but its eternal presence. It is a verb rather than a thing (as authors such as Dominique Paini have treated it), an unfolding which began with the lit vitrines in the natural history museums of the nineteenth century: a succession of images, one after another, in the darkness. Cinema is a being who could only show its true face in the moment when it was dying prematurely. What is cinema? The word for a love affair with a moving image in the dark-an experience of “blocked vision” in which the body accepts its stillness in order to allow for the magic trick of movement to unfold in front of it, or rather within the internal screen of the mind.
Nowadays it is clear that LIVE is also a form subject to post-production: LIVE is a filter that can be applied to an image much like the way a fake patina is applied to a copper surface for an inverse effect. 5 In other words, a photo says “this is it, this is proof,” and LIVE was the inheritor of this incommensurable power. As Tom Levin points out: the rhetorical apparatus of LIVE is somewhat analogical to the traditional rhetorical power of the indexical iconic photographic image. This new narrative was totally invisible-not claiming to be a projection of any ideology whatsoever, so much as a mere peephole, a telescope to the stars. However, this state of affairs only lasted until the most sophisticated rhetorical device of our time silently appeared, allowing for a newly “triumphant, collective” narrative to take shape again, fully formed. Depth, the depth of the image is assumed as delusion (state propaganda), so the image assumes its flatness as ‘surface without depth.’” 4 The very nature of the spectacle’s completeness-which developed concurrently in Hollywood and Nuremberg, as Paul Virilio points out-was viscerally repellent for being fascistic and intrinsically manipulative.ĭeleuze wrote that “montage could become secondary with the sequence shot’s new forms of composition and association. World War II had made collective projection impossible to stomach. The spectator was left to wander inside the phenomenological reality of the film on his or her own terms-alone, as an individual. From the end of World War II until the moon landing, cinema could no longer be linked to “a whole thought, triumphant, collective, but to a hazardous singular one.” 3Īfter the war, a kind of pedagogy of perception came about, with the formal, moral articulation of Neo-realism, and its emphasis on the sequence shot.