it’s difficult to begin… That’s a cinematic project I told you before. I want to explore the idea of OOO philosophy in light of cinematic repetition of time. For sure, you can criticize that, it is a matter of discussion. I thought a lot of about that. Though the main inspiration for me is not a theoretical one, I am from a long time ago very interested in postindustrial landscapes, and different time layers they save. Here, I believe, the topic of a pure past (henri bergson) and objective memory (bergson,proust, deleuze) can be brought into discussion too. We will definitely do that later! Now lets turn to the practical things! I had to skip a  bunch of information I found about the underground/post-industrial/abandoned NY sites and now just going to visit the first destination . It is legendary Freedom Tunnel. Oficially it is called Amtrak Tunnel. The name “Freedom” was given by urban explorers,graffiti artists and homelless  people, who  live there.

There are few different story lines I am interested in:

- Aesthetical encounter with space (think about Situationists practices!) Actually,  Freedom tunnel is spatially amazing  (with wonderfull  natural lighting, interesting sounds and astonishing post-industrial atmosphere)

- the tunnel is very famous by its graffities done by well known underground graffitists all over the second part of the XX century. besides i have read that the tunnel remains to be famous spot for the graffitists today

- the tunnel was infamously known as a home area for a big community of  homelless people in New York City till 90ies (now a number of homelless is strongly reduced).

- the history of the tunnel is surrounded by various legends (eg. ghosts, murders, mad  trains etc.)

All these factors  inspired me to go there and at least to make some cinematographic sketches there. At first we could go there without the equipment just to take a look and to make some photos. Then if we succeed I will get tripod, canon 7d’s and sound recorders!

The tunnel is located in harlem. The way that people went in is located at the intersection of St. Clair Place and the offramp from the Henry Hudson Parkway (aka Westside Highway). See below for the map.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=lt&geocode=&q=St.+Clair+Place+new+york+harlem&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=35.547176,75.498047&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=St+Clair+Pl,+New+York,+10027&ll=40.813809,-73.961334&spn=0.008299,0.018432&z=16

Besides, before going I highly recommend to get familiar with a few posts about the history and today of this tunnel. A few links below should help:

http://www.citynoise.org/article/8210

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Tunnel

Let me know what do you think!

Cheers,

Lukas

The relation between film media and everyday life is among the most important concerns in the theory and history of cinema. In the early days of cinema, it was broadly realized that the moving image (or, we could say, moving photography) had a distinct influence (compared with other kinds of plastic arts) on the spectator’s perception of reality. We can look back on the faces of frightened viewers, who were hurrying to leave the theatre after they saw a train coming during Lumiere’s first film screening. Why did they react in such a manner?

Lukas Brasiskis

All of films it is possible to find here. Some of them are really unbelievable! It is very interesting to find the basic principles of cinema language and aesthetics while watching these short films by great directors. Besides, I am going to post here one simple and superficial paragraph about one of these short films soon. I hope you enjoy these films and later we could disccuss about them.

====

The first time I saw Lisbon Story I was just starting to get into the passion of cinema, a passion specially influenced by my career in Fine Arts, and at the beginning I was not able to recognize much of the strengths and particularities of Wender’s film. From a first sight I just thought this was one of those films in which the author is just playing whimsically with the camera, and film theories, without being deeply concerned with theoretical problems on cinema. However, after different encounters with this movie, suddenly, I could see in Lisbon Story a very complex reflection on cinema mainly focused on a major issue of contemporary aesthetics: How can a representation produce an “effect” of realism apart from any naïve realism? Furthermore, this issue is here related with a broader one, an issue with a more philosophical character: Why it would be important to keep making films nowadays, when producing images seems to be a trivial activity with a commercial character?

Indeed, as I will try to show in what follows, Lisbon Story attempts to answer this question by showing that the connection between cinema and reality must not be regarded from essentialist categories about the world, objectivity or true. Accordingly, this approach is detached from a conception of image as a passive reception of the appearance of things. Thus, beyond these problematic conceptions on cinema and image, Wenders’s film exemplifies that cinema is able to draw an approach to the world and to reality in a poetical way, that is, a productive or constructive one. From this point of view, a film is not supposed to be a passive register of things but an experimental comprehension of the world that lets it appear in front of our eyes. So, cinema must not be understood as the communication of particular data, or of preexistent ideas, but as an experimental contribution to our being in the world, a contribution in which we discover new potential understandings of it. In keeping with this poetical approach to cinema, the problem to be solved would be related to the possibility of recovering a thoughtful relationship with image, or a capacity for producing thoughtful images, when television and video are the hegemonic paradigms of the image production, a paradigm that encourages a merely instrumental relationship with our visual world. Indeed, television and cinema tends to subordinate image to the interests of advertising, to the consolidation of clichés, or to communicative purposes, so that the image is no longer a way to
reveal unexpected limits of our experience. Therefore, although these usages of image cannot be considered as something bad in itself, could be undesirable if they become the only pattern for creating images. In Lisbon Story this problem is presented through the nihilist perspective of Friedrich, who decided to record and save videos which have not been contaminated by human eyes. Here, the possibility of pure images, unseen images, is a reaction to the way in which video and mass media creates the delusion of a human control over everything. Winter uses the term “Vidiots” to remark a similar point.

But now I realize I have been talking about the notion of image without stating explicitly an understanding of the term. Although the explicit definitions tends to be so narrow as for to fit the complexity of their respective subjects, Bergons’s definition of image as something in the mean between a thing and a representation would help to clarify my reading of Wenders’s film. Indeed, according to Bergson’s approach, the notion of image is relational, so that it cannot be located neither in the realm of the mere material things nor in the abstract space of subjectivity. In this case, an image is an interval and framing of our being in the world, is like the way it manifests itself our immersion in the world, a singular perspective on it, an interval that implies always a singular rhythm and temporality. Although Bergson’s approach is supposed to be far away from phenomenology, as it is committed to an ontology of image and his point of departure is the exteriority of the material world, it would fit in what it means phenomenology as a return to things themselves, as they show themselves within the field of our worldly experiences –maybe Heidegger’s understanding of the notion of phenomenology would be a good approach here. Lisbon Story is committed to this relational conception of image as it tries to show some reality exterior to the movie itself, like the city of Lisbon, but in doing so the movie is also drawing a reflection on the very media of cinema and its narrative possibilities, that is, its capacity to reflect the author’s thinking on a particular subject. In this sense, coming back to Bergson’s ontology, here the image is neither pretending to have a neutral objective character nor being the pure subjective expression of the director’s or the main character’s view, but somehow do them both. This ambiguity is possible because the film maintains a tension between what the camera allows to show as a technological device with certain autonomy and the things themselves that just appear in front of our eyes thanks to this technological device.

In this respect, it is interesting to find that there is a dimension of reality, with its own particular mood, that comes into the light with a crank chamber, and within the range of black and white photography. This particular situation is very different from that reality, and the respective mood, that comes out of a video camera -or from the classical language of cinema that the director brings into a first plane sometimes. In this respect, it might be stated that there is a phenomenological approach to “reality” –although maybe this word is not appropriated or precise in this caseas this movie does not intend to present a “perspective from above” to Lisbon and to the plot, but is constructed from the immanent point of view of the camera immersed in the city and the main character’s situations. In this respect, and coming back to a phenomenological approach, the film tries to mix different rhythms or intervals in order to show multiple layers of the city of Lisbon as it is experienced by Winter, the main character. On the way to this register of Winter’s experiences in the city, Wenders avoids a merely subjectivist approach as he is constantly reminding the fact that we are also immersed in the very production of a movie. Thus, during the narration of the story the spectator passes through a detailed account of the different genders that traditionally constitutes the history of cinema: road movie, documentary, love story, thriller, musical, drama and comedy. This “historical consciousness” about cinema in which different genders are mixed up might be a way to produce in the spectator a more intense “effect of reality”, putting together different perspectives from which a situation can be experienced: here there might be also a coincidence with a cubist point of view on painting. In other words, it seems that Wenders’s film is trying to show that the possibilities cinema have to tell a story can be interconnected in order to produce a singular experience, not just to tell it.

So, coming back to a previous point, Lisbon Story is trying to produce thoughtful images, that is, images that are able to create singular, and maybe unexpected, experiences. Why singular and unexpected? As the movie is like a mosaic composed of different technological and narrative planes, it is not possible to reduce it to an ideal sense or meaning, or to an homogeneous narrative line, but on the contrary, every time it is seen it is necessary to recompose it –although, of course, there is always the possibility of being in front of a movie without being thinking on it. In this sense, it seems to be that a thoughtful image is not something different to an image that encourages you to think by yourself, something that cannot be understood from an essentialist point of view, but strategically. Lisbon Story might be capable of encouraging an independent thinking just insofar as it states clearly that is under an open construction, and so, it has not said yet the last word about anything or a specific message to transmit, and that it is a at some point just the particular perspective the very author can have about his own experience in a city.

Author: Gustavo Gomez P.