The Rhythm-Image: Aestheticexperience in the work of Theo Angelopoulosand Bill Viola Thesis presented for the degree of PhD (Media and Communications) Goldsmiths College, University of London Maria Lakka London, March 2006 gSýL ýRýýýrt, WUý-ýýýý. I declare that the work presented in this thesis is the candidate's own. Maria Lakka Abstract Following the secularization of the world in modernity, art's concomitant fate was the separation of form and content, which has founded art on a split that has entailed the inheritance of an abyss of incommunicability. Secularization, however, has not liberated art from the model of representation, which has now assumed the form of the identification of a self-referential beauty. Moreover, the modernist doctrine of autonomy has deprived art of the possibility of infusing the vital powers of being and society, subsuming it to the demands of the institution and the art market. Nevertheless, twentieth-century art is driven by the will to overcome the schism (form/content, art/society), to touch the viewer, and to become an experience rather than merely an object of vision. Responding to this problem, this thesis explores the notion of rhythm, drawn from Bergson's concept of la duree and Deleuze's rethinking of immanence as difference and repetition. Rhythm, which grants the communicability of the work of art, emphasizes that art can only live in the experience; to conceive it solely in-itself as modernism has done unavoidably leads to its reification. Rhythm considers art in terms of intensity of the work and of the encounter, rather than in identifying art's spatial qualities. It tests the work of art and the encounter, but immanently in the life generated for the body. For this latter is also a rhythm, that is an affective surface which creates itself and reflects the world. Art then lives in the body but it also infuses life to the body. 3 Aspects of the work of a film-maker (Theo Angelopoulos) and a video-artist (Bill Viola) are also elaborated, in order to show how their singular implementation of time in images takes them beyond their representational content and opens them to rhythm as an affective, embodied experience. 4 Contents Acknowledgments 8 Abbreviations 10 Introduction 11 1. The context: experience and modernity 11 H. The problem: Aesthetic experience 16 III. The exposition 21 Chapter 1 Secularization and Art: reconfiguring aestheticexperience 25 1. Introduction 25 II. Prolegomena to a coming concept of experience: Benjamin reassessesKant 27 III. Trauerspiel: art configures its immanence 36 N. Bergson and the temporalization of experience 54 a. Intensive and extensive states: the critique of spatialization 55 b. The doubling of reality and the body 61 c. Duration and experience 71 V. Conclusion 80 Chapter 2 TheExperience of Time in TheoAngelopoulos' Cinema 84 I. Introduction 84 5 H. The moving-image and perception 87 III. Beyond realism and psychology 91 IV. The interweavement of spaceand time: the long shot, the depth-of-field and the sequence 97 a. The continuity of long shots and long takes 97 b. Continuity and non-linearity: the sequence-shot and the depth-of-field 102 c. Beyond the visible: the out-of-field 110 V. The Travelling Players: repetition and suspension 114 VI. Conclusion: Towards an ontology of time 119 Chapter 3 Rhythm: the interstices of time and matter 122 I. Introduction 122 II. Self-referentiality as self-annihilation: Agamben on the modern work of art 125 a. The dialectic of the split 125 b. The originality of rhythm 132 III. Intensive difference 137 IV. The repeated difference of rhythm 149 V. Cracked consistency 158 VI. On the mode of existence of the work of art 168 Chapter 4 Materializing Time: Bill Viola's VideoWorks 177 I. Introduction 177 II. Time and video technology 180 III. TheReflecting Pool: eccentric temporalities of an instant 184 IV. The liquid image of Hatsu-Yume (The First Dream) 191 6 V. A shifting surface of The Passions 201 Chapter 5 The Creative Body: perception and affection in a plane of immanence 216 1. Introduction 216 II. The body and the brain: aspects of organization 219 III. Perception: the model of selection 231 IV. Pleasure, value and the test of reality 244 V. Affect: the rhythm of the body 249 Chapter 6 Conclusion 256 Art, rhythm and technology 261 Bibliography 263 Filmography 274 Videography 275 7 Acknowledgments The realization of this thesis has been the course of an experience rather than the accomplishment of a research project. To consider it as an experience means that it has equally been an adventure, initiated by a question that was more intuitive than cognitive, and which, during all this time, I have been trying to answer as much as to understand. Nevertheless, as it is the case with experience and not with knowledge, it appears that it effectuated something in me that cannot be lost. There are several people that have contributed in different ways to the realization of this project. Thus, I would like to thank Dr. Josh Cohen and Dr. Francoise Verges at Goldsmiths College, who have been present at my upgrade panel and offered insightful comments and suggestions, which have proved to be illuminating and crucial for the elaboration of the argument of the thesis. Moreover, I am deeply indebted to my supervisors Prof. Scott Lash and Prof. Celia Lury who during these years have supported this project by sharing their ideas and suggestions, while at the same time gave me the freedom to develop the idea of the thesis in my own way. More specifically, I would like to thank Celia Lury for her support and assistance, especially at the difficult early and late stages of the thesis; and Scott Lash whose vision of Cultural Studies in general and whose openness and generosity gave me the chance to live this experience, at the very first place. Finally, I would like to thank my sister Leda Lakka who has significantly helped me with the final corrections, 8 bibliography and editing of the thesis. And of course, Kostas Koukouzelis who has read, commented, shared his ideas about the thesis and whose help and support at all stages has been invaluable. Last, but not least, I need to thank my parents for being there and supporting me unconditionally. This work is dedicated to my parents for the hold of the past and to K for opening up the future. 9 Abbreviations MWC Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content SW1 Walter Benjamin, SelectedWritings, Vol. 1 O Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Tragic Drama CE Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution IM Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics MM Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory TFW Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will B Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism C1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1 C2 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2 DR Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition TP Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus WP Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 10 Introduction I. The context: experience and modernity The modern era has been founded on the recognition of an absolute separation between immanence and transcendence, which has subsequently structured the world and experience on a split. Although it is not entirely correct to say that the Enlightenment introduced the schism to a previous wholeness of life, we can nevertheless validly claim that the Enlightenment firmly established this division in consciousness by institutionalizing it. Accordingly, as Simmel notes, earlier intimations of the rift were significantly found in at least two historical instances: first, during the Classical era, when Plato's doctrine of Ideas conceived the world of truth and eternal Ideas as a 'beyond' the empirical world of things, which is only the imitation or copy of the original world. Such an intimation of the rift was expressed again with the rise of Christianity, which condemned the flesh as the origin of sinful desires and exalted instead the aspiration for the attainment of a state of purity for the soul. However, "being a religion, it offered reconciliation with the same hand that had created the rift. It was only after 11 having lost its unconditional power over the soul, only after its solution to the problem had become questionable at the beginning of the modern period, that the issue could emerge in its full extent". ' It was only after the Renaissance that the recognition of the fundamental dualism became dominant and reorganized the world and experience according to a polar structure. The complete separation of the metaphysical from the physical was expressed in modern philosophy and science, and this had a most significant consequence: not so much the 'disenchantment' of the world but the recognition that the world had no end, finality or redemption; there was no transcendent point from which the world would be illuminated and existence ascribed a meaning. As we will see in the course of this thesis, the Baroque expresses vividly how, emptied from (transcendent) meaning, the world collapses into an image of inert matter. To be sure, it is not that before the schism the world had a self-evident meaning, but by being a whole, and participating in both the physical and the metaphysical simultaneously, nature - the animate and the inanimate - communicated in the single life of creation. Before the split the world had no meaning simply because it did not need one; it was, and existence did not need justification because it was the expression of God's creative will. However, the need for meaning emerges once it is recognized as lost. The shift that has taken place in the modem view of the world was practically expressed in the structure of experience.