Filmic Matters

A quotation and three diversions.

Barthes. "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills" trans. Stephen Heath in Image, Music, Text pp. 66-67.

If, however, the specific (filmic of the future) lies not in movement but in an inarticulable third meaning that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon, the possibility of configuration mentioned earlier <note>Barthes here provides a note about other arts and pictograms</note>, then the "movement" regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, <pb n="67"/> mobility, "life", copy but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes necessary, a theory whose possible points of departure […]

What is the motor of "permutational unfolding"?

Kari Kraus has helped me sense that conjectures are special types of questions that connect questions. What? If not this, that. If not that, then this. If not this or that, then what? Novelty resides in recategorization.

What is the motor of "recategorization"?

Years and years ago (actually a scant decade ago), in the context of an exploration of the discourses of cognitive science and narratology, I pondered how questions can be used to lift and lodge sequences, i.e. how our human curiosity (propensity to ask questions) informed how we exploited the inherent narrativity produced by our interactions with the world. That exploration into the role of the question as exploiter of narrativity was missing something: how questions themselves connect.

Answers are open to mutation.

And so for day 304
14.10.2007