Immediacy and Cinema: Re-"appropriation" of the World through Films

投稿日: 2012/04/21 12:16:27

According to Bergson, in our daily life we see people and things around us through our framework of habits and language, and are thus separated from the immediate manifestation of the reality itself. For him, we can only restore immediacy through some activities exterior to our daily life, one of which -and probably the most remarkable- is art. And now the question is: can the cinema play such role? On the one hand, as W. Benjamin pointed it out, the cinema, for all the sensation of reality it creates, may rather deprives us of immediacy since it tends to show, instead of presenting us the living reality, nothing more than stereotyped images taken out of it. Nevertheless, we can also affirm --and Benjamin himself hinted at this possibility-- that beside these corny images another cinema exists: there are films that break precisely with those clichés and offer us a fresh vision of reality. This cinema may well be called the "cinema of immediacy".

In this essay I study thus the "cinema of immediacy" that helps us recover the direct contact with things and people in our present day world. Through filmic works and spoken words of the directors like Dreyer, Resnais, Perrault, Kiarostami and Iosseliani among others, I inquire into the creation process of such cinema (the encounter with the "phenomena" in the Bartokian sense, and the expression of that encounter), the necessities that emerge in that creation (to capture the "life" of reality and the birth of the words, as well as to display a whole series of signs in a Humean "medium" between sympathy and comparison creating at the same time the film's own musicality of images).

But what, concretely, does this cinema of immediacy reveal to us in our present condition of life? It seems to me that these films, opening us to the immediate relations with things and people, free us -or at least free our glance- from this world governed everywhere by the property rights. In effect, nowadays almost every relation is mediated, in some way or another, by legal rights and economic relations, to such an extent that we nearly forget that the world also existed before it has been transformed into a mass of legal-economic relations. But here the cinema of immediacy, certainly, can give us back a fresh vision: the films of Ouedraogo, Ford, Kurosawa or Iosseliani, among other directors, approach this problematic and show us the importance of re-"appropriation" of the world by our own eyes and hands. But surely this is not a Utopian story. As recent Iosseliani's films (Farewell, Home Sweet Home and Monday Morning) show clearly, we can't but continue to live in this society governed by the property rights and economic relations: another world does not exist. Only, perhaps by way of some Pathos der Distanz, may we be allowed to re-"appropriate" our world, although keeping on with our actual condition of life.