Time Regained
Published March 6, 2021
Disregarding
scientific belief, sculptor Auguste Rodin claimed that photography did not
capture movement and, consequently, time, but rather expelled it from visual
representation. Therefore, the impulse to mechanically represent time with
devices such as Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographic gun and soon after
cinema were solutions to a self-manufactured problem. According to Rodin,
movement is better represented in the arts, by which he meant painting and
sculpture, by condensing several successive movements in a single image: “If
the representation as a whole is false in showing these movements as
simultaneous, it is true when the parts are observed in sequence, and it is
only this truth that counts since it is what we see.” For Rodin, truth is what
we experience, and as we do not see the knife-edge instant of photographic time,
photographic pictures are not truthful representations. The cinematic apparatus
regained through its own mechanical means the truth that Rodin denied to photography.
But to do so, it had to borrow from the playbook of sound: speed, rhythm, and
an engulfing sense of overflow became the basic building blocks for this new
image that would render all past representations UNBEARABLY STATIC.
Feautured sounds:
Trois Gymnopedies (First Movement) - Gary Numan
Related to on TikTok: @bettyimages; @kaiomijm; #morningroutine
Other related media: Michael Haneke on The Seventh Continent (1989)
Further reading:Virilio, P. (1994). The Vision Machine. Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press.
Trois Gymnopedies (First Movement) - Gary Numan
Related to on TikTok: @bettyimages; @kaiomijm; #morningroutine
Other related media: Michael Haneke on The Seventh Continent (1989)
Further reading:Virilio, P. (1994). The Vision Machine. Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press.