Filmic Space: Representing the Chiasmus (Rough Chapter 3)

To restate the original premise of this thesis: architecture as a tool through which to know the ultimate truth. As a method of realising the synthesis of the internal and external, of the thought and felt, of seeing and being. Architecture as the embodiment of embodiment. Of representing experience so that experience can be reflected upon and further experienced to a deeper degree.
Neuroscience’s developments that have just been discussed demand a new expression. They describe complex dynamic networks in flux. They describe plastic subjectivity. They pose deep questions about the symbiosis of states. They describe the existence of consciousness on a cellular level, they hint at what our very consciousness may be. They propose the link that represents the chiasmus. They describe new mobius like topographies of space, one in which experience and perception feed back eternally. To represent this as a static image or merely to describe it as a graph, an arrowed diagram or a complex equation is to lose the essence of these new truths. The altered perspectives suggested and proved by neuroscience, point to movement, dynamism and the effects of time.
As Vivian Sobchack states in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience “More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.” In essence the filmic medium manages to both represent the embodiment of space while at the same time embodying space.
Deleuze speculates on the encompassing nature of cinematic space “the cinema provides such passageways of thought, showing itself to be a profound and sometimes rigorous surface that covers the visible world.”
For the purpose of this thesis I will be using the terms defined by Najmeh Khalili in her essay, Walter Benjamin Revisited: The Work of Cinema in the Age of Digital (Re)production. In this essay she defines two types of space which I feel make up contemporary current filmic space, hypercinema and cybercinema
“I have adopted the term hypercinema in order to refer to the formal aspects of a cinema which is equipped by 1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene (such as virtual actors, digital spaces and hyper-real motifs), 2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine and 3) an interface which allows individual interaction with the narrative.”
In this essay she describes how, the medium through which filmic space is now expressed is altering its very makeup, in particular the rules that dictate narrative:
“Since the advent of sound, narrative film has dominated the scope of cinematic experience, to such extent that much of our film theories and cultural studies have been dedicated to using the language of film to convey a meaning or to decipher its text. The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema.”
The term cybercinema is defined to further the “narrative connotation of hypercinema”
“ 1) the poetics of the virtual imagery, or the non-narrative and oneiric possibilities provided by digital technology in creation of images which are not entirely divorced from meaning but are more dedicated to intensity and duration of an experience and to “haecceity” (referencing Deleuze)
2) the cult of digital image production and distribution.”
Using this notion of ‘filmic space’ I hope to analyse the philosophical meanings gleaned from the developments in neuroscience with regard to embodiment and show that it indeed is best suited to further understanding and experiencing of this embodied space and therefore of the essence of space itself. That it is best placed at this current time to ‘reveal the truth’ (find this quote, its somewhere in Visible and Invisible, MP)
“Deleuze is engaged in the work of concept creation ‘alongside’ the cinema. New concepts are invented, on the basis of some well-known philosophical themes and then put to work in the cinema.”
“For what is interesting in philosophy is that it proposes a cutting [decoupage] of things, a new cutting: it groups under a single concept things that one would have thought were very different, and it separates from it others which one would have thought very close. Now, the cinema by itself is also a cutting of visual and sound images. There are modes of cutting which can converge.”
“For Deleuze, the philosopher ‘works alongside’ the cinema, producing a classification of its images and signs but reordering them for new purposes…Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.”
In Cinema 2, Deleuze is “concerned with the taxonomy of the time-image and its signs, which are called ‘chronosigns’. These are signs of the order of time, of its internal relations and signs of time as series. Both types of signs bring the notion of truth into question and the book culminates in powerful discussions of the powers of the false in the cinema, thought in the cinema and the body and the brain…..The time image which Deleuze releases from modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and out, the relation between the brain and the body.”
“Antonioni does not criticise the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticises the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body which pulls all the weight of the world and modern neurosis; but also the cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world; its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains.”
Using Deleuze’s approach: i.e. through the creation of cinematic spaces, I hope to unravel new philosophical truths about the self in space and the new dynamic relationships of environment, subject and experience suggested by neuroscience. In this manner, Deleuze as a tool aids in fulfilling Merleau-Ponty’s desire for truth.