VISUAL GAPS. LOW DEFINITION FOR AN ETHICS OF BEARING WITNESS III. CARGO (2001): Distance and Gap, Places of Production of the Perceivable

III. CARGO (2001): DISTANCE AND GAP, PLACES OF PRODUCTION OF THE PERCEIVABLE.

By Cecilia Bima

Extract p.63-73
 
The sea is again the place of origin for CARGO (2001), a documentary shot over six weeks on a freighter bound for the Middle East. The choice originates from the need to make a film about a port, in response to a commission from the Rotterdam International Film Festival (2001). In this case, however, Waddington decides to travel illegally for nearly two months in the hold, along with a crew of undocumented men, for the most part from Romania and the Philippines, who are not allowed to disembark from the ship. Their existence is spent waiting, passing the time with karaoke sessions and telling each other stories in a TV room. The camera will capture both the everyday life inside the cargo ship and, secretly, scenes of men in certain Lebanese and Syrian ports, from positions hidden behind the portholes. The film thus appears as the documentation of a time and a space uprooted from the conventional course of events and the usual historical and social markers: no footholds or points of reference of life on land are preserved, and social rules are perceived, in some way, as suspended and unattainable. The ship appears, in analogous fashion to ZONE, as a liminal space in which individuals assume different natures than how they would behave on land. The ship escapes the ordinary and predictable world and thus — as Michel Agier writes of refugee camps — is no longer a place, but a “mere space.”¹

“What survives and becomes stronger when people are obliged to abandon all that had previously defined them”² is the question that the filmmaker herself poses during her stay there. In other words, what characteristics are taken on by the condition of men who, were they on land, would be considered subjects, but who lose this identification on the ship? The abandonment of the statute of men in political terms reduces them to bodies, to “bare life.” The condition of stateless persons, such as rejected asylum seekers, illegal immigrants, stowaways, constitutes an anomaly within the system of the Nation-State, the port areas, the ship, and in this case, it is the horizon within which these people move. The second. and perhaps even more significant question which arises during the making of the documentary, focuses on the role of marginal zones and on the significance they entail. To once again quote Waddington: “What did the periphery tell us about our over lit centre and all of us who inhabit it?”³ It is the periphery that interests the director, the decentralized zone where exchanges — often illegal — take place, the loading and unloading of cargo, conversations and thefts. In fact, the footage contains scenes that would be otherwise unobserved, where characters oblivious to the camera’s gaze act in the shadows, suspended in the context of the port. The director herself, however, is obliged to occupy an extremely limited area, which allows little possibility of movement and thus a very restricted visual field; hidden behind the portholes of the cargo ship, she illegally captures the life of the port, risking discovery. The camera knowingly occupies a privileged and at the same time detached space compared to that of the sailors and port workers:

In CARGO there is again a chosen limit: she boards in semi-secrecy a ship bound for the Middle East. From her cabin she records the journey trying to save a few traces, a few images of the ships loading and unloading, impressions that come to her and which she seizes almost blindly. What she records most of all is the difficulty of only being able to live the world by moving across it and withdrawing from its tumult.⁴

In her description of Laura Waddington’s voyage, Bouchra Khalili places particular emphasis on the notion of the limit to which the director is subjected; yes, it is a “chosen limit,” that determines her point of view, but it is above all a physical limit that influences the footage. It is first of all distance that presents itself as a fundamental component; the artist always finds herself in a position of great distance from the objects she shoots, out of sight and hidden. Indeed, she is forced to use wide zooms, often repeatedly, thus generating the typical disturbance of the image, revealing the grain, or large pixels. The spectator thus witnesses a continual approach to and distancing from the subject, a movement of the camera that, far from being fluid, proves to be an extremely mechanical gesture: a series of zooms, result of a lens that alternately shortens or lengthens. Observing the first sequence (figs. 1, 2, 3), the viewer witnesses a man who, in the distance, on a small jetty above the sea, lowers a red and white striped flag from the pole on which it is hoisted. He then picks up a bundle from the ground and approaches the water, where, bending down, he seems to grasp something from below. The camera gradually draws closer and closer to the subject, counting two large zooms that progressively reduce the definition of the image. The sea no longer appears as a compact mass, but rather a series of pixilated bands that move, following one another as if in a flow of micro-particles. The stability of the image also ends up being compromised by the dizzying enlargement: it staggers and shakes at even the slightest movement of the camera, thus revealing the great distance that separates the viewer from the subject of the shooting. What you perceive as close to you is only the result of a camera zoom, the expanse of which corresponds to a diminution of the compactness of the image, which breaks up into the many particles that compose it. Furthermore, it is necessary to focus on the element that recurrently appears in the frame, a shadow, an object, precisely a limit, which stands between the gaze and what is represented. From the first sequence, in fact, vision is often disturbed by an obstacle, at the edge of the visual field; in the case of this sequence, it is a balustrade which is revealed at the extremities of the image in the first two frames, to get lost after the second zoom. Metal rails and a chain attached to them is what frames the scene of the man on the dock, then the lens is shortened and the visual field shrinks, isolating our vision to exclusively what happens in the space between the rails. In other sequences it could be a parapet, behind which the camera is placed, or the jambs of a window from which street scenes are shot, or even the railings of the ship. This creates a series of squares, of internal frames, which delimit the image itself. So what does this choice imply, and how does it interfere with the low definition of the images?

Making use of a famous image by Leon Battista Alberti, the work of art – whether pictorial, photographic or cinematographic — acts as if it were a window onto the world. Emphasizing the as if ends up being fundamental in this case and, more generally, in the discourse about the image, for it draws attention to the age-old problem of representation. One of the greatest contributions to the thinking about these questions comes from Louis Marin, who articulates a distinction regarding the dual nature of the image. The verb to represent in fact signifies both to substitute an absent element with one that is present, as well as to present, that is, “to exhibit, to show, to insist, to bring into the present.” On the one hand a mimetic operation takes place, while on the other hand there occurs “a self-presentation constitutive of identity,”⁵ or, in other words, there emerge characteristics of the image that are respectively transparent and opaque. Marin, in describing this latter term introduces the notion of “force,” understood as energy generated by the image itself: “No verbal description that is duplicated by the mimetic machine of the image, will succeed in taking into account the dark forces of the presentation of the representation, in which the imaginary identifications of the subject take shape, by means of their effects.”⁶ It is on this particular point, on the tie that exists between those dark forces and the imaginary identifications of the subject, that the path of vision is constructed. Thus it is necessary to ask which mechanisms are set in motion in the act of determining the object and its boundaries and, thus, of also positioning “the subject of the embodied, worldly vision, immersed in the field of the visible.“7 It is Merleau-Ponty who, in the debate on the visible, investigates the notion of relationship; namely, no separation exists between what is seen and who is seeing, but rather, perception is constituted in the very heart of the visible, where it is both the person seeing who “exerts a pressure” on the object, and the one who is seen who produces in turn a force on the subject. Thus, a dual dynamic is formed, where observer and image are both active and passive in the perceptual act: “It would be very difficult to say where the painting is that I am looking at. Because I am not looking at it in the way one looks at a thing, […] more than seeing the painting, I see according to the painting or with it.”⁸

In this context, consequently the function of the frame acquires primary importance. It not only delimits the visual field that is intended to constitute the work, but it also defines the boundary between the space of the utterance and the “world” that is external to it. “The frame indicates in other words that the observer is asked to look at what he sees in the painting, not as part of the world within which he lives and acts, but rather as an assertion about that world, which he considers from outside: a representation of the observer’s world”⁹; the viewer, in perceiving a gap between the real world of practical life and the unreal world of the image, is freed from the “mechanism of perception” that induces him to superimpose what he sees in the work or on the screen upon the dimension in which he is living. Thus, as “necessary parergon, constituent supplement,“10, the frame occupies a liminal space, which, like a two-faced Janus, is directed both to the internal image, to synthesize it, and to the external world that is separated from that image; as defined by Group μ, it is, in fact, a tool of mediation.¹¹

At this point, however, one will clearly note that CARGO reveals a peculiar frame typology, which is inscribed, in turn, in the physical frame of the screen. Take the example of the sequence shot from a window in Venice (fig. 4). Through the railing bars of a of a balcony, one glimpses the figure of a woman with a red umbrella, in the act of making a phone call; she is then joined by another passerby, a man with a black umbrella who, after lingering near the woman, rapidly crosses the bridge and disappears from the frame. The camera, in the meantime, executes a quick zoom in reverse, expanding the visual field, into which other details of the “frame” return (fig. 5). Beyond the balcony railings, there emerge the jambs of a window, a blind and a portion of the floor of a room. Here, the frame no longer is configured as only the distinction between image and reality, but establishes another series of conceptual binomials that refer to the nature of the image itself: transitivity and reflexivity, transparency and opacity, representation and presentation. The frame that constantly appears in the shot questions even more insistently the modalities of representation, namely its appearance to the eyes of an observer.

And so the sign becomes opaque, becomes reflexive in the sense that it addresses itself even before what is represented. Similar to other elements that become part of the representation (overturned frames, canvases that are prepared but not painted), the frame as boundary of the representation itself thus allows a movement from transparency to opacity, from transitivity to reflection, from representation to presentation.¹²

What Pinotti emphasizes refers not only to the limit of representation imposed by the physical frame around the work, but refers to an additional level, namely that made up of “other elements that become part of the representation.” Whether it is a question of frames or canvases inscribed in the image, frames painted in the work itself, or, as in the case of CARGO, obstacles that delimit the visual field, in any case what emerges is an attempt to elevate to the maximum power the image’s degree of reflexivity. What emerges, therefore, is not only the genetic context of the work, but also its expository _context: this practice of _mise en abyme is rooted in the seventeenth century, the seminal moment of reflection on the nature of the image and representation, “an era that sees the opening up of intertextuality and at the same time an era dominated by the obsession of the “esthetic frontier.”¹³ Yet it is not rare to witness a deviation in the typical vortex of the infinite multiplication of itself internally, a “regressus ad infinitum iconico” — to use Marin’s words — that bring the concept of reflexivity to its extreme consequences, with the inversion of the movement of separation and distancing, allowed, instead, by the single level of the physical frame.

Now it is a question of understanding which of these dynamics we are witnessing in CARGO, and thus what is provoked by the presence of frames within the image. Laura Waddington, while she observes, and shoots from a distance, scenes that take place in ports or, in the case of the sequence previously analyzed, from the balcony of a dwelling, she becomes the bearer of the viewer’s instance and presents sequences that are out of focus and difficult to decipher, whose interpretation becomes slow and difficult. The visual obstacle is thus caused both by the distance and by the position, often hidden from the eyes of the subjects who are shot, requiring the viewer to make a cognitive effort of recognition.

This is perhaps the problematic crux that is hidden behind the question: “What did the periphery tell us about our overlit centre and all of us who inhabit it?” How much is one allowed to see of the periphery from a privileged position, from an “overlit centre”? The distance chosen by the director thus reproduces a modality of vision and of attestation, in which the gaze of the viewer is the detached, extraneous one of someone who does not end up being involved. It has to do with an evident “asymmetry of gazes” due to the irreducible otherness of the thing seen in relationship to those who see; that is, the point of view of whoever is shot cannot be assumed by the person doing the shooting. It is Montani, in particular, who delves into these specificities , in his analysis of ABC Africa by Kiarostami.¹⁴ Like an extension of the eye, Karostami’s camera travels, moves and slips in among the streets, businesses and people of Uganda, preserving, however, “the discretion of a distance.”¹⁵ In other words, he adopts certain formal expedients as a result of two contradictory and not always communicating “off-screen”¹⁶ elements: in presenting viewers with a funerary ritual where a child’s cadaver is bundled up in a carton, for example, the director decides to insert himself into the shot. He is then shot by a second cameraperson, becoming part of the scene that he himself is filming. However the public does not have access to the images shot by his video camera, “as if its mechanical eye […] could only appear as the object of another vision that involves him in the filmed event, but once again not completely”¹⁷ (fig. 6). Thus in the case of ABC Africa, it becomes possible to preserve the otherness and a conscious distance, through a shift in focus and, in providing evidence of his own distance, physical and also inevitably social, Kiarostami generates a disassociation between the vision of the director and that of the viewer. Waddington, with a similar intent, showcases the frame, that is she provides indications that reveal her position: distant, hidden, often ignored by the thing filmed. This is how a technical device succeeds in assuming a specific responsibility for the form, thwarting any risk of an anaesthetization of the facts and preserving dignity, pain, diversity.

“Thus intervals are generated that tend to limit the public’s illusion. They paralyze its predisposition to identification. These intervals are reserved to its critical stances.“18 Brecht’s words regarding epic theatre, although decontextualized, turn out to be fundamental to the argument. First of all, attention is given to the notion of intervals, which, in Brecht’s case, refers to typical stop-actions of epic theater, “songs, captions, elusive conventions detach every situation from the other.“19 These allow viewers to interrupt their identification with the event and, instead, to take a stance with regard to the narration. Namely it is a question of interruptions — intervals of time — in which there is a rediscovery of an awareness of one’s position, outside the action being witnessed. In CARGO, the same intervals appear through the use of out-of-focus shots: in this case a slowdown is also produced, a friction, in the adhesion to the reality of the image, which makes it possible to assume the same detachment as Waddington in the act of shooting. In the sequence of the man at the port, wearing a white turban, the observer witnesses an exchange of objects between two men, perhaps a sale. At the beginning, only the individual in the white turban appears in the shot, next to a bicycle, while at the sides of the image one can glimpse once again the railing from which the camera is shooting (fig. 7). Then the zoom onto the subject again sets in motion a dynamic of progressive blurring and dissipation of the definition of the image, which continues even when a second man, who engages in the mysterious exchange, enters the frame (figs. 8, 9). Shooting is prohibited and so even the eye of the viewer ends up being external to the dynamic and unauthorized to see what the scene shows; in fact, it is not clear what is happening between the two men, what relationships and agreements exist between them.

Unsurprisingly, the words of Dusi reverberate, where, in calling the grainy images “waiting areas,”²⁰ he emphasizes the concept of suspension of recognition, thus conferring the nature of processuality and duration on perception. It is precisely by virtue of these intervals that the viewer succeeds in assuming a new position, one that Brecht always calls a critical position. The critical nature of the viewer’s posture is analyzed specifically by Didi-Huberman, who, in his analysis of Bertold Brecht’s work, focuses above all on the period from 1933 to 1948, his years of exile. During this period, Brecht develops a particular sensibility regarding the condition of the outsider, which he is at that moment, and whose detachment from any spatial point obliges him to maintain an ambiguous relationship with the space.

[..] but his position in this realm is determined essentially by the fact that he doesn’t belong to it from the beginning, that he inserts into it qualities that do not descend from it and cannot be derived from it. The unity of closeness and distance, which every relationship between people entails, here has arrived at a constellation that can be formulated in the briefest manner in the following terms: the distance in the relationship signifies that the nearby subject is distant, while being an outsider signifies that the distant subject is nearby.²¹

For Brecht, the outsider embodies the “form of the dissimilar,”²² the person, who in the peculiar interweaving between nearness and distance where he finds himself, manages to occupy a privileged place and to manifest the asymmetry of his placement with regard to that of the other; the public consequently is allowed greater comprehension of what he is witnessing. This is why it would not be incorrect to interpret Waddington’s distance in Brechtian terms: her posture as an exile, who neither belongs to the ship’s crew, nor is located outside it, but rather is a clandestine guest of a community that is not her own, takes on dialectical value. Laura Waddington, in other words, places herself in a position that doesn’t correspond to those who, without documents, wandering and stateless, provoke in her and in the viewer a critical reflection about “what it means to be citizens without a State, to wander without a destination. In this way she establishes broader ways of thinking about the nature of identity and human existence.”²³

In essence, that frame-within-the-frame that is created — almost accidentally — around the shot is unequivocal proof of the asymmetry into which the film’s creator is forced. Thus there is a thwarting of any risk of remaining trapped in the illusion of identification, due to the superimposition of the two different viewpoints and thus two different ways of being situated in the world. Here we can recall the event of the tragic photographs shot by a member of the Sonderkommandos, Jewish work units in Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944, to which Didi-Huberman devotes a project that is useful to this analysis. The shots in question depict the horror that is being perpetrated just outside the gas chamber: the remains of victims who have just been killed are burned in large open-air bonfires, under the careful watch of the SS, who see to it that the process is brought to completion as efficiently as possible. The author of the photographs performs a fundamental role in this tragic event, and in fact succeeds in capturing those moments, hiding his camera inside a bucket, so he can then discretely bring it close to his eyes and capture the scene. To accomplish this task without being discovered, the member of the Sonderkommando hides inside the gas chamber from which the victims have just emerged, creating what Didi-Huberman calls “the terrible paradox of the darkroom”:

Terrible paradox of this darkroom: to manage to extract the apparatus from the bucket, to wedge the viewfinder, to bring it close to his face and to take an initial sequence of images, the photographer had to barely hide in the gas chamber — perhaps not fully — emptied of its victims. He withdraws into the somber space. The angle, the darkness where he stands protect him.²⁴

Clearly, the analogy between the Auschwitz-Birkenau photographs and the CARGO documentary can end up being decidedly excessive; the gravity of the slaughter in the camps calls into question problematics that lead a discussion about the image in different directions, but one shared aspect with our analysis clearly persists. Namely, the recurrent treatment undergone by the prohibited shots of Auschwitz, where they were cropped, stripped of their darkroom stamps, to preserve only “what there is to see” — the drama of the bonfire. Nonetheless, the black mass that seems to play the role of the frame around the photograph produces a series of meanings that are not insignificant, but, on the contrary, fundamental to the nature of the image.

The black mass that encircles the view of the cadavers and the ditches, this mass where nothing is visible, in reality gives a visual sign that is as precious as all the rest of the impressed surface. This mass where nothing is visible is the space of the gas chamber: the darkroom where he had to withdraw to shed light on the work of the Sonderkommando, outside, above the incineration pits. This black mass thus gives us the same situation, the space of possibility, the condition of existence of the photographs themselves. Eradicating an “area of shadow” (the visual mass) for the benefit of luminous “information” (visible attestation) is, moreover, to act as if Alex had been able to comfortably take his photos in the open air. It is almost insulting to the danger he ran and his cunning resilience.²⁵

Didi-Huberman’s words are extremely significant for understanding how the “marque visuelle,” the visual sign — or, in semiotic terms, the enunciational sign — of the fram is actually proof of the space in which the author of the photo is positioned. To erase this zone of shadow in favor of mere “information” thus implies erasing the phenomenology of photography, the situation itself, its condition of existence.

The reason we can appeal to the exemplary case of the shots of the Sonderkommando, to understand the signs generated by the railings or by the balustrades of CARGO, must be sought in the nature of the documentary and in its phenomenology. Laura Waddington, in her hidden posture, in her invisible but seeing existence, sets in motion a dynamic of gazes. This is why, in the observation of CARGO, one cannot avoid considering the signs of enunciation; in fact, they attest to a story that turns the documentary into the result of a processuality. In the attempt to avoid the exchange of glances of workers on the ship or those, on land, who work loading and unloading the cargo, Waddington chooses to distance herself and hide, she chooses a tricky viewpoint that produces out-of-focus and low-definition images. Her gaze onto the world rarely finds a reciprocity of gazes, and the person who is shot is not aware of the fact; it would seem to be about, at least apparently, a missed intersection of gazes, where artist’s eye is sheltered by a diaphragm that produces a safe distance. The gaze of the subjects, instead, would not be reciprocated, but rather would undergo only the pressure26 that the director exerts on them: “Do you see that little box? Do you see it Well, it doesn’t see you!,”²⁷ as Giovannino says in the anecdote Lacan gives as an example, in distinguishing the notion of eye and gaze. In this direction, however, there is no consideration of the constituent duplicity of the image, namely its being intrinsically the origin of two opposite and complementary forces. In the words of Marco Dinoi, it is possible to understand that

The image triggers the process of the gaze, but it is itself a process, even when it is a mechanical image, because it does not limit itself to “fixing” or “reproducing” the world, but weaves a dialogue with the gaze. […] The image and the gaze, with which many artists have played, find their productivity in their limits and in their gaps.²⁸

There is always a dual movement that implies the pressure of the eye on the world and the contextual pressure of reality on the seeing subject: “The eye is in the world and the world is in the eye.²⁹ On the other hand, this intersubjective relationship, as Sartre emphasizes, can be maintained even between human being beings and inanimate things; therefore, Giovannino’s assertion is true, the little box does not see us, but looks at us; this is clear:

During an assault, the men crawling in bushes sense, like a gaze to be avoided, not two eyes, but an entire farm that stands out white against the sky, at the top of the hill. In experiences of this type, the vegetation, the farm, the curtain of a window are not the view, but deputize the eyes as a “means of support” for the gaze itself.³⁰

The phenomenological status of the image sets in motion a dual movement of gazes whose point of intersection constitutes the sensitive dimension of reality, what Merleau-Ponty calls la chair — the flesh — of the world; and it is at this point of contact of trajectories that the image itself is produced, “at the boundary of two force fields, it is voted to be the testimony of a certain otherness and, although it possesses a hard core, something else is always missing. The image is always more or less of itself.”³¹ It is thus precisely by virtue of this lack, this intrinsic syncope, that it becomes possible to read more clearly the opaque and grainy patina of CARGO.That is, what occurs is a further dynamic of gazes, this time, however, inscribed in the visual text itself; the film itself attests nothing more than the impossibility of sharing the same position between director and the port and ship workers; the unbridgeable distance, which allows the spectator to perceive a sort of ungluing, in this case, appears in the form of a sort of framing in the image. The otherness of which Daney speaks is, therefore, the gap, to which the documentary bears witness, between the positions of who shoots it — who is looking — and who is shot — is looked at. Between gaze onto the world and gaze of the world. “The visible, in other words, must have boundaries and can have holes, which our gaze relies on to become formant or to complete the image, in agreement or in disagreement with the world, by enchantment or by disenchantment.“32

Translated by Marguerite Shore

FOOTNOTES

¹ L.M. Agier, On the margins of the world. The refugee experience today, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2008.

² L. Waddington, Scattered Truth, op.cit.

³ Ibid.

⁴ B. Khalili, The Pain of Seeing: The Videos of Laura Waddington, op.cit.

⁵ L. Marin, Mimesi e descrizione, in Della rappresentazione, Rome, Meltemi, p. 123.

⁶ Ibid., p. 126.

⁷ K. Zucconi, La sopravvivenza delle immagini, Archivio, montaggio, intermedialità, op.cit., p. 49.

⁸ M. Merleau-Ponty, L’occhio e lo spirito, Milan, SE, 1989, p. 43.

⁹ R. Arnheim, Limiti e cornici, in D. Ferrari, A. Pinotti (ed.), La cornice. Storie, teorie, testi, Cremona, Johan&Levi editore, 2018, p. 121.

¹⁰ L. Marin, La cornice della rappresentazione e alcune sue figure, in Ibid. Marin employs the term parergon used by Derrida, to indicate an accessory, a supplement to ergon, “a parergon is contrary, to the side and in addition with regard to the ergon, the job carried out, the fact, the work, but it does not stand aside, it refers and cooperates, from a certain outside, within the operation,” J. Derrida, Il Parergon, Ibid.

¹¹ Group μ, Semiotica e retorica della cornice, Ibid.

¹² A. Pinotti, La cornice come oggetto teorico, in Ibid., p. 63.

¹³ V. I. Stoichita, Margini, in Ibid., p. 173.

¹⁴ P. Montani, Bioestetica, senso comune, tecnica e arte nell’età della globalizzazione, Carocci Editore, Rome, 2007.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 118.

¹⁶ Ibid., with the expression “off-screen,” Montani intends a horizon of contingent and unpredictable events that thus constitute an irreducible otherness in the object that is shot.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 119.

¹⁸ W. Benjamin, Che cos’è il teatro ipico (II), in Opere Complete, vol. VII, p. 352.

¹⁹ W. Benjamin, L’autore come produttore, in Opere Complete, vol. VI, p. 55.

²⁰ N. Dusi, Strategie della defigurazione. Lo sfocato: dinamiche espressive e processi di enunciazione tra pittura e cinema, op.cit., p. 16.

²¹ G. Didi-Huberman, Quando le immagini prendono posizione.. L’occhio della storia I (ed. by F. Agnellini), Milan, Mimesis (ebook ed.), 2018, see G. Simmel, Sociologia, Milan, Edizioni di Comunità, 1989.

²² Ibid.

²³ International Jury Statement, ARTE PRIZE FOR BEST EUROPEAN SHORT FILM, OBERHAUSEN [online https://www.laurawaddington.com/films/2/cargo, available September 2020]. My translation: “a reflection on what it means to be a citizen without country, to drift without destination. In this way, Waddington opens up a broader reflection of the nature of human identity and human existence.”

²⁴ G. Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout, Paris, Édition du Minuit, 2003, p. 22.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 52.

²⁶ M. Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento. I media, la memoria, il cinema, op.cit.

²⁷ J. Lacan, Il Seminario. LibroXI. I quattro concetti fondamentali della psicoanalisi (ed. E. Caccia), Turin, Einaudi, 2003, p. 94.

²⁸ M. Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento. I media, la memoria, il cinema, op.cit., p. 248.

²⁹ This refers to the work of M. Merleau-Ponty, fenomenologia della percezione, Rome, Bompiani, 2003.

³⁰ A. Pinotti, A. Somaini, Cultura Visuale, Turin, Einaudi, 2006, p. 111 See J. P. Sartre, L’essere e il nulla, Milan, il Saggiatore, 2014, pp. 310-311.

³¹ S. Daney, Cinema, televisione, informazione, Rome, Edizioni e/o, 1999, p. 145.

³² M. Dinoi, Lo sguardo e l’evento. I media, la memoria, il cinema, op.cit., p. 247.