Montevideo (part 7)
Project: Polytopia

Within our mythological sphere an epic-edge is unfolding, disclosing the current narration: we as humans are re-positioning ourselves. Re-placing our location and standing in the crossroads of a cosmos. That is the myth of our times. On the fresh brink of myriad new narratives with which to re-array our collective and personal mythological arches. And if I were an artist, then the portrait of the human is an iterative open-ended myth, exposing each moment in a close-up, veiling not the iceberg of void.


Close-Up is an Erotic Irregularity

It was many years ago when I became aware of that sense and taste of mind arising while being engulfed in the ritual that cinema proposes. Sitting and floating in a dark space, in front of the wide screen that becomes as if the very surface of my mind, upon which an image in motion arises and shapes a moment into a close-up.


A mind-arousal of intense sense and intimacy provoking and animating the silhouette of indefinite paths ahead of me, negating the mundane, the known, the repetition of my self. That which till a moment ago was out of the frame (of perception), out ‘there’, suddenly becomes the star of my thought and the champion of my emotions.

Absorbed and penetrated by the immediate sense of exposure, i recognize the urge to place myself in the narrative, to take a stand, to redescribe myself. And while narration lures the plot of becoming into presence, I shift towards a close-up into the sense of mind that is arising.

What is a good narrative, if not the arena in which a close-up situation can emerge in the mind as a potent ground for self-reflection? Isn’t that very sense of exposure and unfamiliar the urge that provokes cracks and turns, that opens sudden passageways between universes?

It was and is a close-up inciting mind that changes my life. An erotic irregularity, negating the lines of distinction and embracing differences as corridors of expansion. It is a close-up in which I catch the future of me as a present in the act of becoming.

And again, it is a close up of the aesthetic epic of art, a blow-up into the open negotiation of placing art within human narrative, which exposes the way art punctuatedly re-portray us anew. Critical junctions co-emerge with a difference in the image we hold and behold; a non familiar close-up; a passageway for self-reflection to cross over into the arisal of new narratives.

So I ask, is art the window to human nature? Is art the tool to shape human nature? Or is it a live crack around which human nature is continuously composing itself?

All of which, I read as narration silhouettes, propositions for a close-up. Each close-up leads, in the immediacy, to the emergence of a different beholder. Who shall be the guests at the live edge of your myth?

The Forgotten Power of Close-Up

In “The Forgotten Power of the Close-up” Kevin Johns writes: “As hard as it is to believe, someone had to invent the close-up, and that someone - like most early narrative film techniques - was director D.W. Griffith”.


In exploring the fine line between the evolution of technology, visual language and the conceptualization of cinema, the old masters of cinema and of silent movie, tied themselves to the inspiring process of “placing” cinema as art. Each one of them created a binding parallel in between the subjective act of placing themselves, placing cinema and the carving of the place of cinema in humanity.

In 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer, with “The Passion of Joan Arc” provided cinema with a poetical stance. Through meticulously crafted aesthetics, he situated the close-up itself at the heart of cinema. Most of the movie is a silent exposure (through close-ups) of the inner life of a human, a woman, in a situation of trial.

So yesterday night I took my eyes and balls and watch again the movie, at eighty years from its release, the amazing thing was, it left its marks on me.

It was indeed a reflection into our mind. The mounting progression of close-ups manages to animate an awake-space in which the movie is being re-created in the act of beholding.

Taking the aesthetic line enfolded in the close-up, Dreyer manages to avoid imposing upon the flow of images his a-priori trends of judgment, allowing the act of beholding rare latitude.

Dreyer succeeds in actually opening the reflective event of a trial, burdened with competing mythos unto naked and clean exposure of the primal intersection of self-reflection with contradicting frames of narration, by that placing the beholder in a situation of a close-up.

It is the recursive situation of close-up, leading the beholder breathlessly from one intense face to the next, which addresses the subjective discourse as the one setting the context, much before the place, space and time. It is about me, you and our internal reflections when coming to merge with an interesting other, when placing our selves in an interesting narrative.

It is through the close up that the so called inner life of the character crosses over to enter my space of existence, and seduces me to do the same. It is at these reflective turns, that I am incited emotionally both to expand and to include. I came out from this night with the understanding that close up, when masterfully used, is in our human mind a system of inter-penetration.

Close-up is an aesthetic exposure

For Bela Balazs, who wrote the first major work in silent film aesthetics, the close-up was "the technical condition of the art of film". Jean Epstein, a film director and early film theoretician, described the close-up as the "soul of the cinema - the invocation of an otherwise unknown dimension, a radically defamiliarized alterity”.

Gilles Deleuze, citing Bela Balazs, claims that "the close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity”.


It brings me to reflect upon the tunneling effect between the heart of cinema and the core of thought-sensation, the expression of art and the reflection of mind, it lies I believe in the power of interpenetration shared by both, the open-end exposure of a moment and the rising sense of mind while in a state of close up.

Extending the analogy, one may say that the act of placing oneself in a narrative is an act of self-description – a situation of close-up, a moment perceived as out of time.

Moving an open reflective space into an eventful space of mind is primarily an act of minding through narration, of coming into close up via narration. For however poetically-strange, it is this very act performed in luring the narrative to the surface and placing ourselves within it that makes us, and simultaneously renders us mysterious to ourselves, opening the infinite fields with which we harvest becoming.

Narration itself is the concurring aspect in the arising of self-reflection. Not one specific narrative itself, as much as the effectiveness each provokes in continuously shaping the moment into a close up.

We moved beyond the paradigm of reducing all narration to one book, one truth, one god, one set of images or facts. It is the multiplicity of subjective spaces engaging the journey towards a more complex and yet effective architecture of co-existence.


We walk the fine line of evolution of technology, language and meaning with the latent knowledge that if, in the days of old, placing the human in a narrative was an act performed once in a thousand years, today we develop the muscle to perform it more than once in a lifetime.

It is the editing room of our open-end, placing and re-placing ourselves in the proliferation of new narratives that is portrayed as the ‘mise en scene’ of humanness. In it one finds not the one exclusive image of man but rather image in motion.

The aesthetic of close-up is ‘bringing in’ that which is out of the frame of perception, that which is always in presence, yet, empty from image. As if to say that the soul of art is a close-up into a substantial absence.

Faces of myth

And now that the future becomes the stirring element of consciousness, it is the montage between placing self-reflection and replacing narration rafts that rises into the forefront. We are as if hacking an open end to our mythos to accommodate the myriad of styles of narratives exposing ‘being’ in a situation of close-up.


By that we sculpt the space for a Polytopic-myth, no more myth versus myth, in a hall extruded from our immediacy and yet impinging upon our life for centuries, rather an aware-space (as culture is) in which thousands of fresh mythological arches can carve ways and eventually co-exist.


And so I ask, what is narration? It is the break-through we need now to accommodate the sight of our-multifaceted-selves; the intimate leverage resolving a strip of furious chaos into a multi-voiced sea of possibilities. It is the future of us captured as a present in becoming.

*

An epic edge is unfolding, a mythological provocation transporting myth into the evolutive fields. It is an iterative open edge upholding itself without excuses, an aesthetic close-up into a polytopic-myth in becoming.

It is Now

10:34/27/09/09/PSE

To be continued..

Sun, Sep 27, 2009  Permanent link
Categories: art, , Narrative, Close-up, Cinema
Sent to project: Polytopia

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