PRE-SESSION TEXT
(The following is the exchange-conversation that Emilio, Camilo and Marlene (The Ecoversities Audiovisual Lab (AuLab) facilitators) had by email and whatsapp threads, as an initial input and example for the 1st session, that happened on Wednesday February 14th 2024)
[2/9, 17:59] Emilio’s email:
We have prepared some inputs for reflecting about some aspects of the visual
The language revolution: from word to image
- Written Language:
- Alphabet letter: abstract symbol
- Words: composition of letters
- Sentence: composition of words
- Syntax: In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/ SIN-taks)[1][2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.
- Predicate: A predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence (the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies)
The interpretation of the dynamic of language is based on our personal internal time, our inner rhythm, because each time we listen to or read a sentence or a period we imagine a correspondent scene.
This doesn’t happen with the visual language (dynamic and static).
The most important difference is that visual language is based on what is seen (perceived) without the possibility of internally imagining anything
Jean Luc Nancy says that the image is violent because it cannot be mediated. Once it appears it is there without the possibility of mediating it. It is like a fist.
I think he means that you cannot imagine an image, you cannot use the same process by which we read a written language or listen to a spoken language.
So the visual alphabet is determined by the impossibility to mediate what appears. It is based on the absolute value of its terms.
We can only categorise the elements of the visual alphabet as standard images, because we do not form the image in/with our imagination: once we see the horse, the sky, the woman as they physically appear, we can only accept them and put them into standard categories.
One relevant difference is the use of time. Stories and novels are characterised by the succession of facts and actions, at different times.
But how one moves from one temporal condition to another is subjective and depends on imagination and personal background in terms of experiences, traditions, culture, biography. In visual language, montage compulsorily imposes the end of something and the beginning of something else. Our inner time no longer has any reason to be.
There are some authors who are working on the relationship between inner time and cinematographic time. One of these is Bela Tarr. I send you a scene taken from Satantango and I invite you to make your considerations.
Camilo Bossio on whatsapp:
[9/9, 06:42]: Hello Audiovisual partners…I will expose my proposal for the audiovisual unconference (my image and vision) inspired by the thread Emilio brought with his inputs and the audiovisual piece! I hope you have more threads for this weave Emilio started. My “disueño” (dreamdesign):
Partial Transcript :
This language talks about our time, the way in which we learn.
With that video, watching those cows and understanding what was happening in that place…
And so many zoom video conferences and so many edited, “managed” images, overthought, overproduced images all the time
How can we learn through taking all of that? the simpler ways of saying, how my eyes as a camera, me as a pollinator, me as a creator, me as a person who is just trying to share what I want to share with you…how we are learning all together?
I felt that maybe this unconference can be a place where you arrive and see what’s happening in the other learning, putting in dialogue images – going back to this syntax and how messages are done – maybe we can use audiovisual in the way that we are used to, to put a frame with really, (showing) just the humble image of what our eyes are watching.
I would like to see through your eyes! Those kind of magic moments where everything is just happening and you can say here we learn like this, here we are sharing like this.
So, with that idea, I made a video that I would love to share in a zoom frame and people maybe can just watch it and then say “I want to talk with him!” “I want to go there, I want to know what’s happening there!” And there’s another frame where Emilio shows us something else.. it doesn’t have to be a video made by me! Could be a video made by someone around us, or something that we want to share. That magical moment when learning is happening, when knowledge is around, when wisdom is around.
I am going to send you the video now and thank you if you were listening until here! I was very inspired. But yeah, I also think this is like a thread, a proposal, so I would love to see more from you, maybe a video, a piece, or a comment if you have. Bye you all, thank you.
It’s my current service… a (non)school of Nonviolent Communication, one week where 40 leaders of life caring (as diverse as indigenous authorities, nurses, young lgbtq, mothers and victims of war, women co=learning collectives, ambientalists, +++++) meet to learn together through this language, this Nonviolent intention of one day get to live in Peace (“la Paz Total” that has been the heart of the revolution my country is living since 2016!… the revolution of learning to make peace from the horrible truth, to learn to live through its narrative to build from there, even around a constant emergent violence that never stops. These people are all keepers of wisdom and activists of life!🥹)
[12/9, 12:12] Emilio’s email:
Dear Camilo
I totally agree with your comments and appreciated your video which seems to me to be a continuation of the dialogue started by the excerpt from Bela Tarr’s Satantango.
I think we could invite a number of people to a zoom call to show more examples of the relationship between inner time and cinematic time. This is essential to begin to analyse the grammar of dynamic images. By studying and hearing this we can develop a critical eye to unveil the standardisation and clichés of audiovisual language.
I suggest that each invitee bring an example of their own or other authors’ videos. We can also extend the zoom call for those who want to listen and watch our videos and comment on them.
In the meantime anyone who wants is welcome to continue the discussion on whats app. what do you think?
[16/9, 05:35] Camilo on whatsapp:
I’m visioning the zoom space much alike… I’ve been approaching to video in a particularly observed way these days… just a perspective over perspectives of what has been for me “to be learning with a divergent intention”… and how to frame it🧐🤪
[18/09, 18:55] Marlene’s email
Dear friends,
I really enjoyed your video Camilo and I think, as Emilio said, that it felt like a kind of continuation from Satantango, because it gives a lot of space to observation, taking the time and curiosity and involvement for giving attention. Also the matter of inner time and inner imagination, your movements around the group were delicate and soft, and I could perceive your admiration for the moment – like if you were moved and grateful – and in the last image just filming the sea and the palms with the voices calm in the background we could feel a suspension, that is the kind of poetic suspension that maybe cinema is able to create. Might it be that this suspension, that was all over the satantango extract, is the poetic potentiality of the audiovisual medium, that doesn’t need much explication, no commentary through spoken language, it kind of explains itself without anything else needed and it makes our head spin as it creates strange connections in space, time and emotions.
I thought about the fact that tools that can record audio and video were first created to stop time, to fix the flow of our memory, prevent what is destined to change from changing, to die from dying. And because of this they might have been originally powerful tools of observation of the real, able to perhaps enhance our attention rather than distracting it. This sounds so different from what we have now, as in the overflow of images that are being created what is important is solely the mediation the tool exerts, the real is totally obnubilated. And with it our connection to what we have in front and around us, to what we cross, spaces, beings, and to our inner time as well.
The audio-visual possibilities or attitudes of our days tend to become yet another tool of disconnection rather than connection, a way of forgetting the world and maybe our engagement to it.
Maybe what we can push forward is the power of the image and sound to connect rather than disconnect, to really observe, and to make us delve in our inner time as well as of others.
Before experiencing what you shared, when we had to meet last time, I had prepared a video to show you, please watch it before reading my comments below or you’ll get spoilers that you dont need! And I think it is related to all that you shared
This video really plays with the language of cinema, in an ironic way that I really enjoyed. It starts playing with the concept of “control” over the images and the voice he uses wants to replicate the authoritative voice of the director (if you have watched and remember Truffaut’s “La Nuit Americaine”, this film kind of came out after John Smith’s had watched it) but then this doesn’t hold as the real reveals itself in a magic way! (when he tells the clock what to do and the whole space to move up) and we understand that rather than a staged event we are observing a simple, modest, ten minutes in east London. And these ten minutes acquire a total liveliness, all these people are very present and they’ll maybe stay with us in our memory a little longer, just because they appeared there and we observed their gestures. And they also go beyond what is real, inner imagination comes in, as the voice adds details to some of the characters (i.e. the thief), while we do not see some of the mentioned characters and we kind of think of them out of the frame. Also the suspension that I was talking about earlier comes in at the end, when another real is also revealed through the sound of the natural landscape John Smith is actually watching, followed by its image too, merging back with the London audio. Maybe this suspension I am talking about comes in when we are still able to imagine, while we have in front images and sound, breaking this process that you Emilo had underlined:
The most important difference is that visual language is based on what is seen (perceived) without the possibility of internally imagining anything
Jean Luc Nancy says that the image is violent because it cannot be mediated. Once it appears it is there without the possibility of mediating it. it is like a fist.
I think he means that you cannot imagine an image, you cannot use the same process by which we read a written language or listen to a spoken language.
And this creates a “cortocircuito”, a kind of “mind itch”, of “estrangement”, breaking the usual standardised language of cinema and bringing us towards imagination, connecting different spaces and times, feelings that we don’t even know or can grasp about much, but they arise.
So this email came out like a stream of consciousness kind of email, sorry for the length! Maybe we can bring forward some of the thoughts and they can be more organised in the future, or maybe they do not need to be organised much, they can maybe stay in their unsolid realm 🙂
hugs to you both and looking forward to meet again,
Marlene
[19/12] Camilo on whatsapp:
… I have a new video and a new audio that I will put in our document…
- “Image over image” (audio) (Listen to the audio here!)
“… the video I’m attaching was in a rural area, in the jungle… it’s a communication school that is guided by some friends and I was invited for 3 days… what happens there in the image… first and at the end the only voices that your can hear are my 2 friends, the teachers… they try to make this in a very horizontal way of learning, like to “make a film together” was the exercise for the day… as you see everyone was on a camera as now everything is with cellphones and, as it is a communication school directed to young collectives from the 4 indigenous associations of the area, its meant also for being reporters with their cellphones… but here they were learning the basics, funny cause they are all the time doing videos and selfies…
… so what happened in these 3 days they were filming everything! They were trying to talk about script, about the frame… but just the rhythm, the flow made everyone to be (interested) in the camera, and filming what it was filmed, like (if) the task of everyone is to film over film…
… so, thinking about time, and my inner time, versus this repeatedly over time, over images, over films… because the exercise was then to edit it, so everyone had images of everything because they filmed everything… it was funny how they were sharing between them tons of images from the same second… and at the same time there was an official perspective made with a professional camera…
… made me remember when I was in my cinema school when every image was so sacred and lots of people were working all around, artistically… here it was different because even in this place, in the jungle with indigenous people that they really understand time, ancestral, they can still live in another time… but this was such a flow of images, image after image after image after image, so fast… and then silence…
… at the end, even at the table where we had food, we sat there just watching images from before, with cell phones, making some more videos, all the time… so my inner time, and my context time, well just vanished! … I couldn’t even be in my present, it is quite crazy.
… in perspective this (school) was also important in so many ways, but it felt like … ALL OF US HAD BEING COLONISED BY THIS “OVERIMAGE TIME”
Marlene’s addition on the drive: LIBRARY SCENE WINGS OF DESIRE
On the concept of “windows” and inner time: Metaphorical creation of openings to other worlds —– frame
Characters are a bridge between the inner personal time of the people and the spectator.
In the film these characters are angels, they have powers we don’t have, they are so empathic that they can hear and feel what every person is thinking and feeling.
When Camilo was talking about seeing through someone else’s eyes I thought about this scene and about how every being is a world on their own and how it is impossible to be-feel-live as someone else but we can still be touching something of the worlds we live, of how our worlds intersect. And how are we able to open windows.
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INNER TIME VS CINEMATOGRAPHIC TIME
AULAB ZOOM SESSION NOTES, RECORDS AND LINKS
(Next we share the exchange-conversation that happened on Wednesday February 14th 2024 between the group that attended this 1st session)
- If you prefer just to listen the Audio Record as a “podcast”
- The chat Transcription, from which we list next the links of your shared videos:
- From Josh: “I have a short film I made that I’d be happy to share, its 6 minutes long, and I feel it relates to the theme of the conversation” (Password: TINAP23)
- 15min film from Angela´s and Monwabisi´s
- Advice from Angus Joseph: Movie: Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams: The Tunnel (1990) “watching the cows reminded me of cloud watching. There isn’t really a purpose or script running, rather its an immersion in the moment”
- Also check this from Pooja: Pooja´s YxY GAC SHOWCASE Presentation @Learning Festival January 2024
- Another advice-referent from Eva: “I’d comment and share more in the documents: bela tarr’s video made me think about the 11 hour Filipino film of Lav Diaz “Evolution of a Filipino Family” as well as Red Phallus (Bhutan film)”
- Luz here: I would like to add to the list two short documentaries (my first work). Both actually were gonna be a long documentary movie of 1h, but it didn’t work out, so I split them in two. But, note, they have the same ending (sorry for that). I don’t show them together, but anyways. Here is the link: Killing Curiosity and Mental Colonisation
INNER TIME VS CINEMATOGRAPHIC TIME
AFTER-ZOOM OPEN CONVERSATION
(Next we opened this document as an INVITATION TO CONTINUE the exchange- conversation, weaved by “INNER TIME VS CINEMATOGRAPHIC TIME”.)
I will like to propose another film, is called “Historias Extraordinarias” (Extraordinary Stories), it’s a 5 hour argentinias film (but no worries, it’s a 3 parts movie, you´ll see) that interacts with the spectator in two dimension of the narration since the beginning, as an intended perspective notoriously, having a first where a constant storyteller´s voice is “explaining” what´s unseen… but makes it possible, in my opinion, to multiplicate the images, not just as a spectator in my brain (inner time), but also the possible threads of the film evolution. Makes the experience “mentally” creative, contrary to the common advice I had in my screenwriter´s school: “whenever a narrator is used, it’s because you couldn’t put it with images”. It made me have explosive multi-options of images, not just in the development of the cinematographic timeline… also to imagine their pasts, and multiple presents happening even at the same time! Enjoy:
“Historias Extraordinarias” Part 1
“Historias Extraordinarias” Part 2
“Historias Extraordinarias” Part 3
Excited to read (or hear) from you,
Camilo
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