1. Images as a Quantum Whole
In 2017, a vast number of YouTubers are serving to construct an archive that will be impossible to view in its entirety in the future by imitating spectacles that contain brutal images, such as war, and images of pornography that are forgotten the moment they are created, using techniques that seem to have been brainwashed by television. the fact that Jean-Luc Godard, who once said that “you can't make a film alone”, has been making solo works such as Adieu au TNS (1998) and Prix Sisse/Remerciements/Mort ou Vif (2015) without hesitation does not mean that he is an exceptional artist. In today's world, the existence of a few filmmakers who are able to create works that are worthy of being called masterpieces by oneself, without being constrained by genre, can be seen as a criticism of the modern film production system, shaking the foundations of the production committees and auteurism that are so prevalent.
Klaus Wyborny's series of Super 8 films, which could be called landscape films, experimental films or documentary films, are known as the “Song of the Earth” series, and Wyborny calls them “flicker films”such as those by his friend Tony Conrad, Paul Sharits to whom Wyborny dedicated his Etude for the Decline of the West(1979~2010). The difference between his “Song of the Earth” series and the majority of films, and films where the screen is dominated by a black screen like Guy Debord's Hurlements en faveur de sade (1952), Marguerite Duras' L'homme atlantique(1981), and João César Monteiro's Branca de Neve (2000), is that the images disappear into the blackness through a process of fading out.
Klaus Wyborny, who visited Japan in May 2016, said the following: “I see images almost as an abstract quantum whole, as something that appears and disappears in time and space. A particle is born there, encounters the audience, and then disappears. That's why I don't think of images as something that records reality. I think of images as something like an impression, depicting a special quality that appears and disappears with each moment” (1).
For Wyborny, who was also a quantum physicist and scientist, it is only natural that the “quantum whole” that we cannot see in everyday life, or the movement of particles that “appear and disappear in space-time”, is more real than the world of reality that we can observe with the naked eye, but it cannot be said that all physicists and scientists are as liberated from “seeing” as we are. For example, if you read Lisa Randall's book Knocking on heaven's door (translated by Shinji Mukoyama and Michio Shiohara, NHK Publishing) which is said to be sought out by many people for advice when planning science fiction films in Hollywood, you will find the following quote from Steven Spielberg: “No matter how strange the world is, if it can't be projected on the screen - and if the characters in the film don't experience that strangeness - it won't be very interesting for the viewer.” This is a statement that shows how the perception of images in American films is limited to a show-like interest, but on the other hand, even in quantum mechanics, which deals with both the microscopic and the macroscopic, the meaning of “seeing” cannot be divorced from mass media-like interests.
For example, “Scientists can only decipher what matter is made of once a means of seeing inside that matter has been developed. The word ‘seeing’ does not refer to direct observation, but refers to an indirect method used to explore extremely small structures that cannot be seen with the naked eye, and is interesting in that it suggests that, like Spielberg, physicists also use the technology developed at great cost to “see” as the basis for their own theoretical verification (for example, Hartmut Bitomsky's Dust (2007) is a work that depicts such aspects of modern science). In other words, there are things that cannot be seen without the use of government-funded technological development, and modern physics is also subject to its own limitations. As a result, research cannot continue without a method of informing the public of the results through technology, and in this sense, scientific research, which should not be related to the spectacle, is also “unable to remain unaffected by (mass) media-ness. Furthermore, it could be said that this is also the case for physics books in general, which often include numerous examples, diagrams and mathematical formulae that should be shared with the reader as “images”. (With regard to the idea that mathematical formulae are also images, please read the text by Wyborny “VERSUCHE Schnitt-Theorie/Topologie/Randbereiche(www.lit-verlag.de), and you can read an analysis of D.W. Griffith's The Lonely Villa (1909) in the essay “KOLLISIONSSCHNITTE IN The Lonely Villa”. (In this essay, numerous mathematical equations are used to describe the form of Griffith's short film in detail).
The movement of the appearance and disappearance of images through jump cuts and fade-outs that Wyborny uses in his works is such that, even in a very short time, such as a moment, it makes the audience recognize what the subject is, and then erases that movement into blackness.
For example, Eine andere Welt/Another World (1991-2004) can be summarized as a work in which Wyborny herself retraces the route of Christopher Columbus' third voyage, and films the scenery using Super 8 (video footage with the voice of German poet Durs Grünbein reading his own poetry). There are several scenes in the film that show only the sea from the perspective of a boat, for example, in the first chapter, there are many layers of images of waves shot from all directions using multiple exposures, and these are projected as a series of dazzling images using a red filter and flicker. Eventually, the wave images are left on the screen as nothing more than afterimages of their movement, accompanied by a pointillist piano performance by Wyborny himself. The rhythm of the original editing, with the sudden appearance of images in jump cuts and the gradual fade-out that accompanies them (which matches the overtones of the piano notes fading out on the soundtrack), in other words, the series of movements that slowly fade out the strongly appearing images, captures the audience. Rather than simply being a repetition of the same single image and sound, it seems as if the disappearance and appearance of the mass of image particles is being projected, as if the same single melody were being repeated in different keys and tonalities.
Wyborny's journey retracing Columbus's route actually ends with a scene showing images of the coast and streets of India (which Vasco da Gama, not Columbus, actually arrived at), but even there, Wyborny overlays red and blue filters and then shows the disappearance of the images through a whiteout effect using negative inversion. This stance of confronting images as “the return movement of a mass of particles” makes the strangeness of Christopher Henmerling's encounter with a video of Silicon Valley at the end of his wanderings in Open Universe (1986-1990) seem almost unbelievable. This movement of appearance and disappearance makes the film fascinating in the opposite sense, in that it never allows the viewer to dwell on the images that could be imagined from the original book by Oswald Spengler (factories, abandoned houses, polluted rivers, empty rooms, the ruins of burnt houses, etc.) in Etude for the Decline of the West. Rather than showing the whole, the sudden appearance and immediate disappearance on a black screen is connected to the will to fragment as a media critique. (2)
2. Repetition and stillness
We should not forget that the movement of sudden appearance and disappearance can also be seen in Jean-Claude Rousseau's recent short film Chanson d'amour (2016). This short film, which takes about eight minutes to watch, shows Rousseau himself sitting and standing in a dark room, but the complex and mysterious interactions that take place in front of the camera make us realize that the ordinary movements we are used to seeing with the naked eye are actually very difficult to capture.
In a dark room with a chair with a white shirt hanging on it and a mirror on the wall, we hear the sound of a washing machine. A man wearing a green shirt then enters the room and sits down. An old chanson song can be heard from somewhere in the room, and the man then fades out of the frame. The shot of the empty room continues for a while, and then suddenly a black screen is connected, and the next moment the man is shown entering the frame from the left edge of the shot showing the wall with the mirror, and then quickly fading out again. When the title screen appears, with white text on a black background, the camera then shows a hand closing the curtain on the mirror, the camera then moves to the window where the sunlight is streaming in, and we see a shot of a hand opening the curtain, and then a shot of the man's upper body stopping and fading out of the frame into the darkness at an angle of about 90 degrees to the previous shot. The man then moves into a shot of a chair and the mirror behind it, and before we know it he is wearing the white shirt that was on the chair until a moment ago, and the green shirt he was wearing until a moment ago is draped over the back of the chair. After the man sits down and remains still for a while, the camera angle changes to a shot taken directly from the side, and the man is shown wearing the green shirt again as he enters the frame. The wind sways the curtains, and after a brief insert of the mirror image, the man exits the frame again. The curtains are closed, the camera returns to its original position, and the man is again sitting in the chair. The chanson starts playing again from somewhere, and the man exits the frame again (a repetition of the first action). Then, suddenly, the pool scene is superimposed on the window curtain in an overlap, and the camera moves slowly across the scene, something that is rarely seen in Rousseau's works. The man leaves the room again and then returns immediately. The sound of the washing machine can be heard coming from the pool scene superimposed on the window. Following the composition, the man in the white shirt stands up and leaves the frame, and the man who comes back into the frame is wearing a green shirt. In the following scene, the man changes his shirt from white to green and leaves, but he soon returns and hangs his white shirt back on the back of the chair, and leaves the frame again. Then, the song can be heard again...
The fact that the film ends before the audience has time to be surprised by the unexpected encounter between the familiar techniques of Jean-Claude Rousseau's films and the unexpected direction makes this film even more elusive. The fact that the song heard off-screen is a chanson is also exceptional for a Rousseau film, but the usual Rousseau-esque development of the frame-out of the person from a long still posture we can see the usual Rousseau-esque development of the empty screen and the black screen being connected, and the continuity of the screen linking the Bresson - Straub-Huillet lineage discussed in the first article of this series. Furthermore, the black screen extends the cut, forcing the viewer's gaze to spend time waiting. Or the fact that the continuity of the same movement is maintained by dividing the window into two positions, one directly in front and one directly beside, and the fact that the screen is connected in such a way that the person's frame in/out continues for a moment as if brushing the edge of the screen, are both extremely rare in Rousseau's work. And the surprise that the man's shirt has changed from green to white as he returns to his chair is also the same. Did the tense change in that instant of frame-in/out, as in Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad (1961)? While you're thinking that, before you have time to think about it, the man's clothes have changed back to the green shirt, and the film ends before you can even grasp what's happening there, in a series of timeless actions that repeat the sequence of the shot of the chair at the beginning, the screen stops, and the character is framed out, along with the chanson. What's more, when you add the overlapping pool scenes and the moving shots, you can't help but be stunned. Is this overlapping really the man's recollections? While it is possible to interpret that the sound of the washing machine brought the pool scene to mind, this is by no means certain.
The author experienced with surprise the repetition and stillness (perhaps we should call it “pause” in imitation of music) used in Rousseau's works through participating in the filming that began suddenly during his second visit to Japan in November 2016, following the filming of Late Autumn at the Kyoto Imperial Palace during his first visit in 2014. At this point, I have not yet seen the footage (* Un monde flottant, completed in 2021), and I don't know whether it will be used in the work or not, so I can't go into the details of the fragments, but I clearly felt during the filming that when the repetition of a certain gesture is interrupted by a pause and then connected to another gesture, the same gesture can become a repetition that is not a repetition, and can become a trigger for the return of something different.
At least since Luis Buñuel used repetition in his film El ángel exterminador (1962) (Rousseau chose this film as one of the top ten all-time best films in the magazine “Sight & Sound”), the last person to pursue a unique kind of film by combining stillness and repetition was probably Buñuel's contemporary Manoel de Oliveira. In works such as “The Soul is a Vice” in the dance hall of Francesca (1981), and the scene in which the two waiters in the restaurant in Belle toujours (2006) repeat the line “He's a strange man”, Oliveira was clearly trying to take his own method to a new level by combining real-time elements with repetition. On the other hand, Jean-Luc Godard, in particular in the 1980s with films such as Prénom Carmen (1983), King Lear(1987) and Soigne ta droite (1987), encouraged the audience to adopt a perspective that would allow them to see the scene by deliberately practicing repetition in order to make them understand that “repetition is taking place right now”, and in this way he was able to dismantle repetition.
However, in reality, people have been swallowed up and acclimatized by the flood of audiovisual repetition, where images are used as a tool to make facts, as a result of the mass media, represented by TV, continuing to repeat large amounts of information 24 hours a day, every day. Whether Jean-Claude Rousseau was aware of this or not, the use of still images and black screens to interrupt and delay the repetition of gestures can create unexpected shifts in movement, or create suspense by combining unexpected timing with movement. In the masterpiece “From His Room”, the ashtray and glass placed on the armrest, the steam for heating, the ornament on the piano, and the screw falling from the bathtub all created a sense of suspense as they endured the precarious balance leading up to their fall.
In this work too, the entrance to the room and the hallway are filmed from the same position many times, creating the appearance of repetition. However, just as the close-up shot of the back of the seashell-shaped ornament appears to be like the stars in the universe, it is a repetition that can only be found in the gaze that perceives the entire world as the movement of atoms that make up matter, bodies, air, light, etc., as described in the passage from Lucretius that is repeatedly drawn on in La Vallee Close. Of course, I have no intention of confusing the thought forms of physics and philosophy, but don't you feel that there is something here in common with Wyborny?
3. Granularity that Transcends Boundaries, and Ozu
Even in the case of film shooting where the unit of the team is the main subject, when you try to see people and things as something like the movement of particles, the outlines of the boundaries become blurred, and the audience can no longer even discern what they are watching, let alone the border between documentary and fiction. Gustavo Fontán's La orilla que se abisma (2008) begins with shots of cats, chickens, children going about their business, and the back of a man who looks like a fisherman standing by the river, but after ten minutes of the film, shots of trees with blurred sunlight and shots captured by moving camera appear, making it impossible to discern the subject. When the sound of rain begins to be heard in the image that seems to capture the forest, the shots shift from slow motion reminiscent of Aleksandr Sokurov's The Lonely Voice of Man to an overlap shot filmed in black and white on coarse-grained 8mm film, and then to a long shot of a man rowing a boat and the image reflected on the water's surface. Of course, Fontán's film, which lets us remember Stan Brakhage's Creation (1979) which travels back and forth between macro and micro levels through the splashes of water particles in rivers, oceans, snow and ice, invites the viewer's gaze to further adventures. The camera continues to move upstream in the fog. Even if you can't see anything at the end of the line, don't panic. The camera eventually loses its own focus, and as it pans endlessly through an image of what appears to be a tree-shaded shadow, we hear a reading of a poem by J.L. Ortiz. What is surprising is that the film ends without ever recovering the clear, in-focus, vivid images seen at the beginning.
In the works of Duras and Debord, etc., which I mentioned when discussing Klaus Wyborny, the reason for making this film and the manifesto were explained by the artists themselves on the soundtrack, and because of this, it was difficult to detach the work from the historical context of these discourses, and in a sense, it felt like it was trapped in a certain way. The sound aspect of the black-and-white works is stripped away, and Sokurov never abandons his switching back and forth between shot-counter shot system, no matter how experimental the work. Gustavo Fontán's works, on the other hand, push forward with a thorough separation of sound and image, without being constrained by any such restrictions.
Whether it's a work like La Casa/The House (2012), which combines a documentary about a house that is about to be demolished with a fictional story about memories, or a work like La madre/Mother (2009), which alternates between a fictional story about a son who watches his mother, who is addicted to alcohol and seeks men, and a documentary background of nature, or a work like Elegy of April (2010), as in the case of the family film Elegy in April (2010), in which the director and his staff insert footage (documentary) shot by the director's own son under the pretext of discovering his grandfather's unpublished poetry collection (fiction), it is possible to move between fiction and documentary when the act of filming itself blurs the contours of the subject, and when it is possible to capture subtle details beyond the consciously controlled manner, whether or not actual people are acting, and when it is possible to separate the image and sound.
In El arbol/Tree (2006), when the man played by the director's own father looks into a plant encyclopedia with a magnifying glass, the green leaves blur and spread out in his field of vision. The off-screen dialogue spoken by the women, which overlays the image of the mother and child sweeping the entrance, continues right through to the scene of the flowing water and the scene of the dead leaves and wood being carried over the wall and tiles, without capturing the people who are the source of the sound on screen. The footage that follows, which captures the preparations for the party and the people enjoying themselves, is accompanied by a buzzing sound that is almost as if it were recorded from a distance, and this eventually changes to the sound of an organ. Fontán seems to be confident that the film will work even if the source of the off-screen voice cannot be captured on screen, or even if the voice stops and only the ambient sound remains. In the dinner scene of Juan José Saer's novel adaptation El limonero real/The True Lemon Tree (2016), even though one of the characters is on screen, the other is never seen, and after the dance ends with the sound of people's voices and footsteps fading away, the strange sounds fade into background noise and silence envelops the area. The tracking shot of the river in the middle of the forest at midnight, which seems to go on forever, ends with a long shot of a man. This is reminiscent of the tracking shot at the end of La orilla que se abisma , but in comparison to the shot, which ended with a reading, El limonero real develops a microcosm in terms of sound by creating a silence that is resolutely wordless.
In 1983, Gilles Deleuze wrote in Cinema 1:movement, about American experimental filmmakers (Brakhage, Snow, Belson, Jacobs, Landow) that “in accordance with Vertov (who said that liquid images are still insufficient and have not yet reached the granularity of matter), we must go beyond the flow to the granularity of matter or even to the perception of a gaseous state”, and ‘to reach a certain pure perception of matter as it is’ (3). As mentioned above, Fontan's films are of course a continuation of their work (the same is true of Wyborny and Rousseau in the 8mm film era).
However, more than 30 years have passed since this text by Deleuze was written, and in the current digital age, where image quality is becoming excessively clear, what significance does it have to emphasize the graininess of images when development is being led primarily for military and medical purposes, such as using drones to target targets on the battlefield or using monitors to connect capillaries in surgical operations? For example, as in Fontan's El rostro/Face (2013), which uses black-and-white 8mm/16mm film, by deliberately using a blurry image quality to leave the work open to the indeterminacy of things and people, the very existence of the medium itself is brought to the surface of the work. Such a methodology can be seen in films that cross the boundaries of documentary and fiction to resist the situation in which the medium exerts its power to make images and sound obey the “truth” of textual information within the frame.
In the history of Argentine cinema, there are films such as Alberto Fischerman's The Players vs. Angeles Caidos (1969), which “was enthusiastic about Godard, Cassavetes, and American experimental filmmakers” (4), and such as Julio Ludueña's Alianza para el Progreso (1972), which were banned by the military regime (in particular, The Players vs. Angeles Caidos is a film based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the fact that the current collaborative work by Matias Piñeiro and Lois Patiño* is also based on the same original work means that it is the work that forms the origin of modern Argentinean cinema), and also because of the lineage of "film-within-film" El Ausente(1989) by Rafael Filipelli, which was made after the advent of democracy, it is “the most important work in modern cinema as a critique of the media.
As I have discussed Rafael Filippelli's films elsewhere (5), they are documentaries about time that borrow the form of the “wandering cinema” from Rossellini to Antonioni (in Musica Nocturno (2007), the construction of real time in editing, in Essas Quatro Notas (2004), the film constructs the duration of a single opera performance in multiple spaces), in other words, “the time of the people acting out the fiction”, but in the case of Gustavo Fontán, by taking a distance to the granularity of the people/things, he transcends the boundary between fiction and documentary. It is also possible to say that this is a loss of the sense of time in real time.
Of course, we are familiar with this precedent. For example, in There was a Father (1941), Yasujiro Ozu constructed a scene in which the father, played by Chishu Ryu, has a seizure and collapses, in real time without omission, from the conversation with his son, played by Shuji Sano, the time the son lies down in his room, and the time the father's seizure is noticed by the voice of the maid. However, in the post-war film Late Spring (1949), when the daughter played by Setsuko Hara speaks to her father, who is already asleep next to her, the famous scene of the black shadows of the leaves swaying in the wind is inserted into the background, and when the audience's gaze, which has noticed the sensuality of Setsuko Hara's face, which had lost its laughter before and after that scene, is connected to the screen of the Ryoanji stone garden, which is illuminated by bright daylight and still, with the music growing louder, we must have experienced a contrapuntal leap from a microscopic perspective to a macroscopic perspective at the expense of a sense of real time. It goes without saying that this work, which inspired Teiichi Hori's masterpiece Tenryuku Okuryoke Osawa Fuyu/winter (2015), are the inspiration for all the artists discussed in this article. By passing through the work of modern filmmakers, we can also rediscover the great work that Ozu achieved in terms of time, the freedom to do both continuity and disconnection of time within a single work. The continuity of time in the scene in Floating Weeds (1959) where Kyō Machiko and Nakamura Ganjirō curse each other in the pouring rain, and the disconnection of time in the scene where Kawaguchi Hiroshi and Wakao Fumiko talk against the backdrop of a red boat hull. The fact that the two characters, who are supposed to be in the same place, are cut back and forth by the difference in the background and the “Ozu-esque” gaze, makes the audience constantly aware of the characteristics of the medium of film. We are once again overwhelmed by this mysterious sensation that only film can create.
(First publishing;NOBODY 46, spring 2017 p100~105)
Notes
1. Rhythmic structures and atmospheric impressions. Interview with Klaus Wyborny, by Federico Rossin , 29 July 2012 at IVAC Lefkosia, Cyprus
2. In Klaus Wyborny's works, the music he composes and performs, often including improvisations on the piano played by Wyborny himself, is often synchronized using a computer. The way in which this synchronization is achieved differs depending on the technical limitations of the computer at the time. For example, in “Homage to Beethoven” (1978-2006), he waited for the development of equipment suitable for synchronizing the performance with the silent film that visualizes the piano sonata, in other words, for the development of equipment that would allow one sound to correspond to one image on the screen, and as a result, it took a full 30 years to complete.
3. Gilles Deleuze, “Chapter 5: Perception = Image” (translated by Osamu Zaitsu), Cinema 2: Time-Image, Hosei University Press, 2006, pp. 150-153
4. Beatriz Sarlo, LA MÁQUINA CULTURAL, Maestras, traductores y vanguardistas, 2007
5.My article “From Tense to Time: A Poetics of Latin American Film History”, in Chuo reviews no. 287
. * Lois Patiño's Ariel (2025)
©Akasaka Daisuke