The crisis of presence.

Semiotic and immersive cinema.

Cinema tends to be a figure of length and duration and, as such, a statement on something's presence.
“Avant-garde” filmmakers like the american James Benning have completely devoted their work to this idea,
trying to examine the self of cinematic image in relationship to whatever its observing (registering). The films
of James Benning seem to be there just to state the existence of things, the “length” of framed phenomena: the
period of time in which the “persona” fades out from a man standing in front of a lens, the length of a specific
gesture against the length of a vanishing summer afternoon, or the reflections of exterior events in a serie of
quiet lakes along the United States and framed symmetrically to the sky 1 (a far away train, a repetitive fish, a
group of people's voices. It brings to mind the famous David Hockney painting a bigger splash: the image of a
pool right after someone— who?— has jumped into the water. The only thing we can see is the frizzed splash
of water: something like the negative of a presence and the unique prove that someone has ever been there).

A bigger Splash (D. Hockney)

1 13 lakes: James Benning, USA, 2004.

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 This extreme position (further empowered by the arrival of video) is, to different degrees, implicit in a
wide range of contemporary filmmakers ever since people like Tsai Ming-Liang popularized the idea of slow
cinema by the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties. The films of James Benning seem to be a
radical exposition of a fascination that any filmmaker has experienced: the immersive pleasure of allowing the
world-itself to fill the frame with its own rigorous arbitrariness.
But as long as the impression of what is real keeps getting amplified and disruptive, the growing
ambiguity on the “true nature” of things, of what is deserved to be portrayed as existing and what not and, by
contradiction, our tacit agreement on the “existence of everything”, the ground is mined for questions that
should keep open and progressive our idea of film. At the same time, the written word culturally looses ground
in people's mental construction and grows further and further smaller against the overpowering Visual State,
and cinema has to learn to answer and participate on this new fluctuating reality of images.

I've found myself struggling to assimilate, for example, the insane multiplicity of an i-phone:
A table lamp is an object with a concrete function and objective that defines it. And at some point in the not so
distant past, a lamp that, for example, would be attached simultaneously in its design to an ashtray, would be
making a drastic metaphysical leap. We have all been fascinated over and over by an object with multiple
functions (as if it where somehow breaking some physical or semantical law 2) but an i-phone seems to be not
even an object anymore in the strict sense of the word. An object without an ontological space of its own, that
could not even give a hint of it's nature based in its plain shape, an expression-less surface that claims a space
in the physical world without actually taking part of it, apparently innocuous from a phenomenological
standpoint but present, all the same, as a motive for perception. An object that would offend Gaston Bachelard
in the same way in which he was offended by the very existence of apartments: spaces, according to him,
without any poetic or existential resonance, without any place for the person to hide, build or nest, to correlate a
part of himself3 (which, needless to say, is certainly open to debate).

And we shall then leave ourselves to the dazing hands of panic! Because who knows what are we really
filming when we aim a camera towards an i-phone, that seems to insist that he does not really exist while
growing insistingly in every possible invisible direction!

2 Who didn't love the great Inspector Gadget!!!!

3 La Poética del espacio (Space Poetics); book by philosopher Gaston Bachelard.

2
 The surreally ironical exercise of trying to look at an I-phone in the same way in which you would
look at a landscape:

An I-phone Landscape in one of the frames of the film “13 lakes” by James Benning
(ontologically abstruse) (ontologically self-evident)

¿What is the meaning of a time passing over someone or something without a real or complete
ontological value (considering this kind of “immersive cinema” as our perceptual frame of reference)?
How is time “spent” by someone or something who doesn't exist or is properly as such? What kind of
Time is this that is not only not meant to be read chronollogically or teleologically but that is also not inhabited
by anyone in the strict sense of the word? What kind of Time is this that can not even be used to feel the
presence of things?
This are questions that indirectly relate to Tarkovski's Solaris (and his concept of film as a “time
sculpture”), who was placing familiar question-marks in the character of Hari: a physical projection of the
protagonist's subconscious without a proper self but thrown into reality and into the anxiety of existing all the
same. Without being able to tolerate it, Hari commits suicide time and again, and is reborn over and over,
representing the single most tragical element of the film. Progressively, one of the last works of the recently
deceased Harun Farocki is an installation that studies this lost time for puppets (Paralell IV): the idea of an
abandoned, unconnected, un-used time for puppets turns provocative as long as, initially, a puppet without a
“task” should not be able to exist at all (a button that won't activate anything, a representation without the
reference to the thing it represents, etcétera). Farocki concentrates in observing and commenting all the possible

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“meaningless” and paradoxical actions of characters from videogames like Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto
or Minecraft and establishes the ground to reformulate fundamental questions and moral paradigms necessary
to face our upcoming relationship to reality and film.

Following this path, the provocation pushed forward in cinema by Italian Neorealism back in the forties
and fifties, asking what was supposed to be portrayed as real or as an honest representation of reality, has never
felt such a strong urge to surface again as today. But if the popular Italian movement denounced to fiction the
existence of reality and a new set of rules to approach it— where the un-glamorous life would jump into scene
with roaring dignity, making besides of its statement on humanitarian and social concerns, a point on the duty
to recognize or accept its roughness into the clean illusion of cinema— today the implications of approaching
reality in film are so different in meaning and objectives that the analogy can be hardly placed at all between
both cases, and we could not even recognize the question as being the same.
Departing from the fact that reality is not something that needs to be or is even susceptible of being
denounced, not because denunciation could ever stop being pertinent and necessary, or things worthy of
denunciation could have disappeared, but because reality can't be held as something “hidden” or avoidable and
is instead experienced as something overly exposed, supersaturated, multiple and invasive, that self-reproduces
and accumulates in all directions and is already assumed as a correlate of consciousness in one way or another,
not even an abstract or allegorical one as it might be supposed: popular culture, participant of all the paradoxes
of modernity, is perfectly informed and aware of the fragility of whatever that is real.

Under this feeling, then, that reality is not an object that is merely the sum of its parts, the trend of
contemporary cinema that came to deal with this question is one that tries to adapt to this polymorphic
construction and tries to grow with it, making as much efforts as it can to convey not only reality's complexity
but its lack of teleology, while searching for a structure to which we may finally relate, since our reality is built
in such a way, that is imperative going way too far if we are ever going to reach it4.

So reality doesn’t exist anymore or, maybe, out of an almost institutionalized convention it is not
anymore Just One. It is not ubiquitous, nor perfect, nor logical, nor continuous, nor finished.
We know nothing about reality except, perhaps, that it is multiple and subjective, but not anymore polarized
between observer and observed, subject and object: they seem, more often than not, to be smashed in some sort
of poorly tailored tuxedo that no one is wearing, dismantling the whole Western metaphysical project.
4 .- Quoted from Rudiger Safranski's introduction to P. Sloterdijk “Spheres”.

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 *
Another fashion-in-turn of independent, avant-garde filmmakers seems to be trying to find things back
not in their selves, but in their reflections, connections, and duplicates.
As in our convention of reality, in film all borders have been crossed over and over along every possible
frontier: The ontological issues of documentary and fiction have since several years ago been assimilated or
integrated by filmmakers like Nicolas Pereda or Lisandro Alonso or Jia Zhangke or... today both of things
(documentary and fiction) copy each other and exist in each other to the same extent, with absolute freedom
and without any contradiction; The codes and meanings of representation and repetition are explored with
everlasting curiosity by authors like Hong Sang-Soo in Korea or Matias Piñeiro in Argentina, or in the absurd
dystopian films of Yorgos Lanthimos, to name a few; Needless to mention the long ago surpassed limits of
graphical exposure or visual saturation as much as most of the classical, today infantile, taboos of violence and
sex, family and manichaean heroes.
This currents, heirs of their respective historical traditions and traumas, and of the predominant position
of language in the study of society, seem to understand that we are condemned to our knowledge of the world,
and there's no way of saving anything sacred when things are as exposed as they are and their connections are
so roughly sketched, so difficult to grasp.
Maybe we should, in opposition, “hide” things while letting their connections jump outside, and there's
a certain feeling in contemporary filmmaking that makes us believe that if truth is elusive to such extent, when
images have stopped being themselves, when there's only left the dialogue between things replicas, between
their representations, projections and duplicates, they won't be anymore what matters, but the movement
between them. So we are not supposed to search presence in things themselves, but in their repetitions, patterns
and investments. And we must then believe that is in that flow where the “true presence” really is; that when-
the-time-comes, the only genuine thing will have always been the movement, in such a way that we might still
save everything else. In such a way that things and their image will find their presence back, not in themselves,
but in the way in which they lean the ones towards the others. In the way in which they flirt, splice and relate;
in their figure, soft and hard, that simultaneously is and is not theirs.

*
(Remains to be known if this two approaches to filmmaking will be enough to find the proper way of aiming a
camera to an I-phone, to solve I-Phone's tragic cinematic existence!).
*

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 The meeting of the aforementioned film motives (the subordination of things to their connections,
representations and duplications and the creation of audiovisual territories and dadaist deities that might still
convey the presence of things) while apparently contradictory, seem to be two of the main problems that
cinema has or will have to deal with and that respectively could relate to “language” and intensity in Cinema.
The ultimate idea is that film has the uncanny possibility of being simultaneously a state and a
“language”, an intensity and a direction, a little as a paradoxical encounter of Heiddeger's being-in-the-world
and Wittgenstein's idea of language (like the shot of a hand in a movie from Robert Bresson, where the hand is
simultaneously the “presence” of the hand and the “concept” of the hand).
It brings to mind a scene in Kagemusha6 in which the forged king has to learn to behave like a real
king: “A king has to move in such a way”: each movement has an intention, a direction, a past and a future.
Each movement of a King's hand is a server for the next of his movements. This is what distinguishes the King
from the Thief, and it would seem to be there, in my opinion, a certain glimpse, an acknowledgement of one of
the beautiful functions of cinema: gliding between reaching out towards the presence of things, while fighting
to save their connectivity.

Hands full of meaning: Bresson's frames of hands.7

6 Kagemusha: by Akira Kurosawa, 1980.

7 Extracted from the short film-essay “Hands of Bresson”, by Kogonada.

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 “We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I
prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within
itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while a metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same
distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning.
One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyze the formula that
constitutes a symbol, while a metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of
touching it.”
Andrei Tarkovsky8

8 Sculpting in time (1989, Andrei Tarkovski)