Facing images: ethics, realisms, and the cinematographic eye

Abstract

This dissertation enquires into the consequences of Levinas’ philosophy of ethics for cinematic aesthetics. Levinas’ iconoclastic conception of ethics as ‘a vision without image’ famously derides the image by understanding it as necessarily acquisitive and reductive. It is tied to representation and thus to a work of making meaningful by returning the other to the familiar. What is therefore banished by the image, according to Levinas, is a genuine otherness that resides in the immediacy of the encounter with the ‘face’ of other and the call to responsibility that the encounter involves. Reading Levinas against himself, this thesis challenges his antipathy for the image. I propose that, in developing his concept of the face for establishing the parameters of the self’s exposure to the other, Levinas’ ethics bears directly on the viewer’s relation to the cinematic image. The face of the other is where the ethical breaks through the visual but also disrupts the latter precisely because the face is indissociable from the movement of ‘facing’. To be a face or to have a face harbours the verb to face. It is making an entry within the visual but also withdrawing from it, remaining irreducible to the image the face leaves behind. This thesis puts the cinematic image in contact with this conception of the face. Instead of conceiving the image as a copy of the world or as an object in the world, this thesis asks what it means to say that the cinematic image faces the viewer by presenting itself to the eye and addressing the viewer without that address being reducible to meaning. The idea of facing is brought to bear on both the automatism of the cinematographic machine that records the body of the other and the duration of the image that hosts this encounter. At its degree zero, the filmed body of the other is a physicality summoned by the camera and enveloped in duration. In so far as the camera is non-selective and indifferent to the profilmic body, it records the other without presuming the descriptive or narrative value of the body that is made available to its gaze. As such, the automatic rendering of the body by the camera brings to life what is contingent and particular and ensures that the filmed body is always already too much, is uncontainable as visual content. The cinematic image has the potential to think the tension between the ethical and the visual by staging the withdrawal of the filmed body of the other. Focusing on the uniquely visual being of the cinematic image, this thesis investigates how a handful of films have secured an approach to the cinematic image that is consistent with the ethics that Levinas derives from the notion of facing. While the dominant traditions of cinematic narrative reduce all that is in the image to the telos of meaning and visibility, this thesis analyses filmic experimentations that engage in a certain critical negotiation with the excesses of film’s presentation of the body. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), and Pedro Costa’s Ossos (1997) exemplify radical body-camera interactions where there is an ethical resonance between the automatism of the cinematographic machine and the face of the image. These cinematic experiments expose the excess of the filmed body and make possible a certain rewatching of the body of the other. They show how respecting the human other requires a recounting of his/her story but also a breakdown of intentional meaning and a retention of something of the inhumanity of the machine. These practices aesthetically earn what the cinematographic machine technologically achieves – a sort of sustaining the body of the other that precedes and remains inexhaustible by its recognition and identification. These cinematographic experiments turn the image into an active gift: a giving of bodies to be witnessed irreducible to a rendition of visible, meaningful givens. They bring forth the ‘facing image’: an image that appreciates the other precisely because it performs its failure in capturing the other. It is where the other faces the viewer without the latter being able to move beyond the persistence of the filmed body onscreen.