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In the cinema I have always distinguished a quality peculiar to the secret movement and matter of images. The cinema has an unexpected and mysterious side which we find in no other form of art. Even the most arid and banal image is transformed when it is projected on the screen. The smallest detail, the most insignificant object assume a meaning and a life which pertain to them alone, independently of the value of the meaning of the images themselves, the idea which they interpret and the symbol which they constitute. By being isolated, the objects obtain a life of their own which becomes increasingly independent and detaches them from their usual meaning.

Antonin Artaud, "Witchcraft and the Cinema"

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La deuxième nuit (Eric Pauwels, 2016)

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La deuxième nuit (Eric Pauwels, 2016)

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Al Primo Soffio Di Vento (Franco Piavoli, 2002)

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An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)

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Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

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Jean-Luc Godard, 1998

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Robert Beavers' Listening to the Space in my Room proposes the idea that space is nothing but a stratified zone of receptivity, of permeability into which the tremblings of the heart reach and find just as many resonances as they send out for. We inhabit space; according to the rhythmicality, the tonality of our lives, space becomes our sojourn. Yet cinema invokes a curious doubling of what we call space, making it uninhabitable, always from a distance, before making it ours again, though this time as space lived from afar, as if I would become the dreamer of another's sleep. As Jacques Rancière suggests, the image is always a third still, impossible to reduce to the intention of the imagemaker nor to the interpretation of the spectator — it is always, invariably, a third, meaning that I could never hope to occupy it, to make it my own. I cannot but watch the image from a distance. Cinematic space is categorically uninhabitable; it opens itself up by the same breathturn according to which it encloses itself again. And yet it is infinitely open, too. But only if we ourselves are prepared to become equally open and meet the image somewhere halfway, always halfway. Serge Daney wrote that the cinema taught him where his gaze ends and the gaze of another begins. Could it be however that what separates my gaze and the gaze of another is exactly this meeting of two gazes, each belonging to the ontological density of a visage, infinitely distanced from one another? If so, cinema is always a matter of ethics — and I, I can only hope to inhabit cinematic space to the extent that I, too, become the sojourn for its image, and we together come to sound in the same yellow note of light. When Robert Beavers set out to put to image the surrounding space of his room, he could perhaps not have envisioned that he would capture a glimpse of cinematic space altogether and the space of our hearts. And when the final image turned to black, I had seen and heard it all (sound having become vision, the image become song) — every single gesture, turn of light, or change of season, all of them, all of us cosmic bodies continuously, unendingly crashing into one another, and I became aware of every trembling as I trembled concurrently, and still I sound, always still I sound for in the image I become space and I become time, and we together, if only for a little while, if only for the impossible duration of an instant, come to share in the same breathturn where nothing endures except the utter fact of our having met in spite of all.

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On 'Corps Aboli' (1978) by Teo Hernández

A dance of two incommensurable bodies — one onto which, invariably, the gaze inscribes its perception and another which possesses, directs the gaze. What becomes possible in this dance however, is a meeting of the two without one to the other becoming same; the dancer and the camera remain forever distanced yet find themselves entangled in an unconsummated carress, in the same manner that the wind grazes my hand's grasp. As such every regime of the body is laid waste to; all signification is worthless for the body, at once, becomes nothing more and so much more than it already is. The dancer's body then, is no longer a thing to be gazed upon: "his body no longer perceptible, his soul a fire on display." [1] Instead, the gaze joins in onto its dance as the two together become nothing but pure motion — dance as a manner of being in the world. It is a marvelous little film, an a-signifying machine which shows that other gazes and perceptions always remain possible still.

[1] https://ultradogme.com/2023/06/30/the-cinema-of-teo-hernandez/

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My Best Fiend - dir. Werner Herzog (1999)

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Robert Bresson

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Les films rêvés (Eric Pauwels, 2010)

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Les films rêvés (Eric Pauwels, 2010)

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“His is the world of the irremediable; but in it, destiny is not at the same moment fate: neither Fate nor the Furies. There is no submissive acceptance, but the road to reconciliation; what do the stories of the ten films we now know matter? Everything in them takes place in a pure time which is that of the eternal present: there, past and future time often mingle their waters, one and the same meditation on duration runs through them all; all end with the serene joy of one who has conquered the illusory phenomena of perspectives. The only suspense is that irrepressible line rising towards a certain level of ecstasy, the ‘correspondence’ of those final notes, those harmonies held without end, which are never completed, but expire with breath of the musician. Everything finally comes together in that search for the central place, where appearances, and what we call 'nature’ (or shame, or death), are reconciled with man, a quest like that of German high Romanticism, and that of a Rilke, an Eliot; one which is also that of the camera – placed always at the exact point so that the slightest shift inflects all the lines of space, and upturns the secret face of the world and of its gods. An art of modulation.”

— ‘Mizoguchi viewed from here’ by Jacques Rivette in Cahiers du Cinéma nr.81

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What does it mean to open onto an other? When Apichatpong Weerasethakul describes his film 'Syndromes and a century' as "a film about heart […] about feelings that have been forever etched in the heart," well then perhaps he provides us with the possibility of an answer — the heart as an infinitely open space onto which the trails of memory are etched in a non-language that supersedes chronological time. Is not the film screen the kind of heart which i could never bear to carry by myself? Forever distanced, I approach the screen without ever touching it, becoming the wordless witness of lives that could otherwise never belong to me. In this crevasse where my gaze ends and the gaze of an other begins, infinitely, my heart becomes the site of refuge from which memory renews the vow of time between Cronos and Aion. I am but a vessel, a kind of spaceship, floating onto regions of existence that were never meant for me. I remain the sleepwalker of an other's dream. And yet — yet i recall how these bodies moved away from and toward one another, in the same manner that I remember how the wind swayed gently, as if it were a caress, through the trees or how the sun shone brightly and unceasingly onto the moon whose only intimacy is the dark ends of night. And I find that these recollections themselves carry within them just as many traces of all that leads beyond the screen, of all that exceeds the heart, onto different spaces and different times which I have lived before and which I will live again, and perhaps that is the single moment where the screen and my body finally, truly meet. I do not yet know which force leads a singing dentist onto the pathway of a monk who once wanted to become a DJ, but then perhaps cinema is nothing but this etching of chance onto the open which marks a trail from my gaze to the heart of all things.

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“In Asia, many spectators ask me the same thing: why do you make incomprehensible films? After a screening, they have tons of questions. Why this? Why a wall? What does it mean? I don’t know how to answer. I advise them to contemplate the moon. Because the moon cannot answer you. And nobody asks her questions for that matter. If you really look at the moon, you sense and feel new things each time. Her sight makes us more sensitive, more tender. Maybe it’s a budding solution to the world’s problem. In a way, my films… It’s what my films can’t do. The sight of the moon makes us tender, more sensitive, able to feel other people’s sorrow. In a way, my films are exercises for the audience. Those who enjoy them know how to moon gaze. If you’re a moon gazer you know how to watch my film.”

— Tsai Ming-liang in an interview before a screening of Stray Dogs (2013) at the Cinémathèque Française (via treethymes)