Cinema and gesture

 

Cinema and Gesture: Regarding Image and Gesture in A Summer Home

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  The main concept that can relate how cinema is in the very side of film and in the very side of the visual arts, can be the concept of gesture in its relation with the concept of cinema 

  Let develop how can we theorize and discuss this. 

  I will first want to explain how gesture is evolved and major to understand how the imagination of cinema started to be considered from the visual art meaning now only the plastic arts coming from painting, drawings, photography, etc., let then late discuss how gesture can be theorized and discussed in cinema coming from the very side of film recording far from the plastic arts meaning discussing it as a matter of the camera and let after try to theorize and discuss how to relate as well as difference both sides 

  The first way to start to include cinema in the plastic arts was related with the imagination to retain and record in a film the process of painting, there is usually a time in the process of painting when affording the canvas with steins and colour it evolution from the empty canvas to drawings and painting something, this process take a time of days or weeks sometimes months or a year but is usually loosed or forgotten replaced as process by the final result paintings with its images.

  Paying attention to that process itself more than to the final result happen without being yet considered to be recorded but as an attention itself on it by asking why should that spontaneous field of gestures erased and replaced by a final outcome or end and not retained by its own values and interest like it was in action painting when the canvas consisted about only an interface of the ritual process of painting and when the concept of the canvas as interface replaced the idea of the canvas as a metaphysical representational frame.

  There was yet of course a frame at the end because all the interfaced process is finally collected and seen under a frame but the philosophical basis on how to understand the concept of frame changed. It was an slow process. Since the earlier abstractionism the idea itself to replace that idea of using that frame to create the illusion of a represented reality by an abstraction started to modify how to understand such a frame and such a surface, it was an slow process to see such a support as a near surface and not as an illusionist representation of the eyes illusions.

  Abstractionism started it while cubism explored ways to then reconsider reality under such a new idea of the frame, de-composing and or deconstructing it, exhibiting the frame by the way without a painting was first done by max Ernest an artist from the Dadaism and surrealist movement and materic art a tendency developed by artists such as Tapies was the first one to really transform the canvas in an interface. 

  While in abstractionism the canvas evolutioned to be a surface it was still yet a metaphysical one, the turn of materic art started to transform the canvas in an interface while there was not yet a full attention to gesture in it the idea of the frame as interface supposed to understand that anything collected inside such a frame start to be seen as a gesture. 

  The full attention to gesture considered as a representational fact was a matter focused by expressionism but it was yet a representation of gestures and not gestures itself, the moment to meet both things, the canvas as interface and the attention to gesture, started in USA with artists as Klein and Pollock, the first one used to use models not a references to be represented but as actors to be painted like naked woman’s who’s bodies Klein painted in blues and then asked them to clues their bodies under an empty canvas to late collect the whole used colour to be exhibited at show cases, the second one Pollock certainly transformed the canvas in an interface of spontaneous gestures.

  The imagination of cinema in the plastic art started from there, artists who committed themselves to use the camera to record the process of painting with attention to the stein and the near phenomena of lines, gestures and colour now seen and or considered as a visual cinema to be also sometimes accompanied by music, there are in fact earlier cinemas in the plastic art consist mainly about a near cinema of the process of painting, steins, colour, lines and gestures in movement while doing it framed as a cinema abstract universe now with music and sound.

  The difference between this concept of gesture and the concept of gesture that we have in cinema seen it now coming from the very side of film is defined by the fact that in film the camera is already from the beginning placed to ask the question while in the plastic arts the camera was just a toll that arrived later to fix and or retain a gesture considered before the arrival of the camera.

  Given that in a film the camera is already there from the beginning everything regarding gesture revolves around the already framed field of any image to be considered as gesture, the camera is being seen before a gesture and the gesture is being seen as later, there is no longer in film a free gesture before out of the eye focused attention but an eye asking on it the recorded images and or the actor body movements considered as gestures.

  Instead of an interface of a process before the frame and the eye consist already in a recorded level that is being representational to any further outcome gesture. However, the theoretical discussion of cinema supposes a relation with gesture that turn our attention to the fact that the first inscription evolved in a recorded image can be also seen as interface something clear when we use the camera like in documentation to only retain and memory something like for example occasions of everyday life that by any reason we decided and or want to remember and retain as a memory.

  Of course, this idea of the camera seen as an inscription of a recorded passing time stay to be again by different reasons looking to the camera still as only a toll since to pay attention to such an inscription as just interfaces supposes to priorize what is being experience as experience itself, a family vacation occasion, for example, considered to be important as experience, or a travel, considered to be relevant as travel itself when the camera is being used and all its recording as only a toll.

  But there is something about this that helps to understand in a deeper manner the more ontological relation between cinema and gesture, if we ask about cinema itself, what is it, how can we define the consistency of cinema, when and to define what can we certainly speak about the specificity of cinema.

  This question itself near to explicit that if we are now in front of many image already recorded like a collection and we have to make a differences in between about when are with in front of a cinematic image and when we are not, such images toward to define here we have a cinema while in this other one we don’t have cinema, the basis to define it as cinema is defined itself by a certain relation, a major one, between such an image as image and the clues of a certained gesture to which such an image supposes and or seems to be related.

  The point here is not about looking for a gesture in terms of representational images of gesture, but about how to understand how and when the whole image as image can be considered as a gesture, a cinematic image, related from the beginning as we well know and defined by movement, stay to be cinematic and not other thing precisely when we can recognize in such as image as a whole that there is something of a gesture in it. 

  And I think that this concept of the image in movement considered as gesture, again not as a representation of a gesture but as a gesture itself is related with the clues of how the ontology of the image in terms of space and time is expressed in the image entrance.  

  This idea of the image entrance moves us to the relation between subject and object and to how the subject is being related with the recorded process of getting an image inscribed and or created.

  The idea of recording and inscribing certainly move us toward a presupposed already pregiven reality or phenomena who’s entrance to the frame is not to intervened in its nature by the subject position, something of the subject attention should be entertained to use a word in the sense that the eye and the frame gives entrance to images retaining the gestural instance of it as it was already and letting the frame be to a certain a point or level almost an interface.

  A cinematic image always address us to the ontological relation between image and movement with the concept of gesture, if we are in front of a cinematic image something of that image as an image in movement should call our attention to a certained gestural regard of the image ontology with the space and time of the relation between the subject, the eye, the frame, the space and time of the recording process and the object, the element retained, inscribed and or choiced, selected, focused and or composed, it can be more or less intervened and or manipulated by the subject intentional composition, motivations and ideas by the ways to let it speak the clues of the relation between the image entrance to the interface and the clues of the space and time of the subject relation to it as both as pregiven and as modified, intervened an or used under a composition.

  The issue of space and time in cinema is a complex issue theoretically, I would like not to go this time such a way because it far us from an attention to film, but if there are certain relations between cinema in film and cinema in the plastic arts if we choice the concept of gesture to analyze it there are also major differences in between both sides.

  The first difference is defined now not by the ontology of cinema but by the ontology of the image, from the side of film the ontology of cinema is paying attention to how the image ontology group up in the subject as a retained, recorded image, the attention is turned to the inscriptural instance when the ontology of image is regarded to be at the end an effect of the ontology of cinema, what is important to film about cinema is the fact that such an image is in movement, while the attention to the image in the plastic visuals arts is regarded to such an image as an object, in the plastic arts cinema is only used to turn the attention on the ontology of the image not to cinema itself which is at the end only considered a media, but to the superobject of images such a cinema creates or help to accent. The visual artist can be more or less interested in the fact that his work is finally a cinema even interested in that a lot but if we really pay attention on the why we will immediately recognize that the reason of the attention will be always about the superobject it helps the image to become.

  From the side of film the same phenomena is being considered exactly in the opposite sense the attention is not at all to the superobject of the image or to image as a superobject, but instead to the supersubject. The ontology of cinema seen from the film side bring us to the idea a supersubject while the attention to cinema in the plastic arts turn us to the idea of a superobject. 

  

Notes

  1-I conceived this paper as a reconstruction memo of all I discussed to a film of Brian Deutzman during 2016

  2-There is an additional short dialogue on my concepts distintions of superobject and supersubject to which I illustrated the concept of the image as a superobject with the case of pop art image Andy Warrol when the effects of the image seems to be a superobject more more real than the real object or the case of hyperrealism when it seems to be more real than the real in a few words cinema is being explored in the plastic arts mainly to obtain the several modalities of superobjects cinema helps image to be, while the supersubject can be cinema itself when the accent is ordered to focusses not on cinema as a toll or a medium to obtain an image but all the opposite when the ontology of image appears as an effect of the ontology of the cinematic

Bibliography

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Relations and Differences between the Arts, conference lectured at Los Angeles Art Festival Panel, The Japanize House of Culture, December, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2002

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Hermeneutic and Axiology, The Subject in Creativity, Complete Works, Tome II and also The Interpretation of Art: Hermeneutic and Analysis of visual Art Discourses and Rhetoric’s, Selected essays

Roland Barthes, Reading Gestures, The Responsibility of Forms, Essays on Music, Art and Representation, The University of California Press