Laura Waddington

Visual Gaps: Low Definition for an Ethos of Bearing Witness.

By Cecilia Bima

Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore

Chapter 2: Zone (1995): An Exercise in Unlearning to “Re-arm the Eyes”

Excerpt pp. 41–44

it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world

Charles Baudelaire – The Painter of Modern Life

Zone (1995) is an experiment, an attempt on the artist’s part to reevaluate and deconstruct the teachings acquired during her education in the practice of cinema. More concretely, the documentary sets in motion dynamics that aim to dismantle and question the foundations of conventional cinematographic language; in 1994 Laura Waddington embarks on board the ocean liner the QE2, traveling from New York to the coast of England. On this occasion she decides to document her journey by means of an unconventional technique; in fact, she uses a spy camera sewn inside the lining of a Turkish-made vest, covered with small mirrors. Removing one of these little mirrors allows the the spy camera to “look out” onto the world, while remaining invisible to other people; it records all the artist’s movements on board the ship, not allowing her to have control over what is being shot. Linked to an 8mm recording device inside a pouch, the spy camera thus performs the role of a blind eye — allowing the artist to free herself from traditional shooting techniques and, above all, forcing upon her a relative obliviousness regarding the type of images that are being captured. “Wandering the decks, I learnt to frame with the movement of my body, my shoulders hunched over to prevent the camera from sloping up towards the sky.“1 Thus the body must make an effort to maintain a specific posture, with shoulders hunched, to prevent the camera, positioned between chest and stomach, from tipping upward; she moreover must become familiar with the way the tool functions, steering her movements and predicting, without the organ of sight, the result of the shooting.

Subsequently the artist carries out a process of remediation of the footage that she has obtained; using another video camera, she, shoots the original sequences projected onto a screen, a second time, to create a new work. The resulting images appear distorted and opaque, on the brink of disintegration, as if placed beneath a thick filter that considerably lowers their definition. Thus, while at the outset, the images are blurred and out-of-focus due to the lack of control over the camera, they now undergo a further diminution of definition as a result of the subsequent process of remediation.

From the material thus obtained, Laura Waddington produces a narrative, a fictional story, linked to the initial documentation, creating a new object, that profoundly questions the nature of documentary and blurs the boundary between reality and fiction. She inserts a textual apparatus of subtitles (without an accompanying voice over on the soundtrack) that convey, in the form of a first-person monologue, the thoughts of a person searching for someone. Second thoughts, loss of orientation and memory loss characterize the narration, so entering into a close relationship with the “disintegrated” and indefinite status of the images. Zone consequently is composed of three stratifications, the result of three actions of editing and remediation, one after another.

Scrutinizing reality through the eye attached to her body, she wanders around the ship’s deck, capturing and documenting surrounding events without others being aware of it; the images resulting from these actions are flickering and indefinite, tracing the trajectory of an anomalous and experimental gesture, as if the artist has delegated to limbs, not normally assigned to sight, an act that, on the contrary, would require the careful and controlled use of the eye. In the initial sequence (fig. 1) the unstable framing captures the figure of a man who is walking in a presumably urban context; after a few seconds, the visibility of the scene, already compromised from the start, diminishes, due to a darkening of the upper part of the frame. It is possible that at that moment, the spy camera has inadvertently slid inside the pouch due to a careless or over abrupt movement, partially hiding the scene. In analogous fashion, the eighth sequence (fig. 2) testifies to the strong impact of body language on visibility. The setting would appear to be that of a luxurious ship’s dining room, where the observer is subjected to dizzying swaying and changes of direction. Lights pass rapidly over the screen as if they are stains, and the shots rotate rapidly, creating an almost dancing effect. The artist’s body thus makes numerous twists and changes of posture, attesting to a restlessness that, on closer inspection, will characterize the entire course of the film.

Basic notions of the “modality of visual action” – point of view, perspective, focus — are therefore challenged and profoundly questioned. As Omar Calabrese points out, the first concept designates “a gaze that is oriented towards the world,” while the second is the resulting “spatial orientation of observed objects,” which in turn give rise to focusing, or “the focus of the objects observed.”² These three components of the gaze, therefore lose not only their meaning but also their intentionality and control on the part of the subject. The gaze that is no longer humanized assumes mechanical qualities, so much so that its orientation on the world is inevitably bottom-up: a perspective where observed objects occupy an unstudied and almost chance position, that is, the eye of the director exercises no power over the shots produced. Consequently, the focusing ends up being intermittent and discontinuous, never truly targeted or aware. Zone thus raises the question of whether these three radical components of the gaze are still valid as foundations of visual action, based on certain precedents. Mechanical vision is, in fact, central to a long cinematographic tradition, which, beginning with the Dada movement, redefines the limits and possibilities of the gaze; first of all, Entr’acte (1924) by René Clair, considered a manifesto of Dada cinema, gives rise to a succession of almost dancing frames — sometimes not very different from the instability of Zone — which unfold in the fullness of their freedom. Emancipated from the desire to tell a story, the image itself becomes the film’s protagonist, joining forces with it, disintegrating and recomposing. Entr’acte thus becomes the expression of an “automatic cinema”,³ the main interest of which is the rhythm that the editing gives to the dance of alternating frames, sounds and light. Remaining within the horizon of avant-garde movements of the early century, Dziga Vertov, in Man with a Movie Camera (1929), also creates an equation between technologies, vision, representation and perception.⁴ (fig. 3) David Tomas describes it as an interesting operation, because of the peculiar articulation that is established between biological and technological elements — eye and machine — and “the tools for thinking (hypotheses).”⁵

This metaphor simultaneously represents the power of thought to construct a representation of itself as an autonomous “intelligence” that can project itself beyond itself by taking the form of a compact, compound image.⁶

The same attention that Vertov pays to cinematographic technique is also found in La Région Centrale (1971) by Michael Snow, which reproduces the vision of a machine that rotates in all directions. Here, Snow steers the camera with the help of a device called an activating machine, which allows any type of camera to rotate 360°, vertically and horizontally (fig. 4). Both Vertov and Snow question the sensory apparatus of the viewer, proposing visual experiences that can no longer be associated with the conventional paradigm of the “natural” vision of the human eye, but rather experimental products derived from the optical and perceptual possibilities of the machine. However, this sort of imbrication between gaze and camera does not occur in analogous fashion in Zone, where, instead, it is the body that becomes a diaphragm and carries out new possible forms of witness. The proximity of the video camera to the body, in fact, makes the hybridization between body, gaze and machine more complex compared to the relationship established by Vertov and Snow, where the capacity to see is delegated exclusively to the technical device, and it consequently ends up being controllable and predictable. Man with a Movie Camera, in fact, is a manifesto for a new cinema that leaves behind fiction and any attempt at entertainment, in favor, instead, of a didactic and educational practice for reflection on the very means of cinema. La Région Centrale, conversely, is a veritable essay on perceptual potential. Snow’s camera reaches where the eye cannot, so that the visual experience ends up being almost psychedelic and immersive. Indeed, as Tomas writes, “La Région Centrale was able to trigger physiological effects that mimicked a body’s sensory responses to a gravityless open-ended three-dimensional space.”⁷ Although this cinematographic tradition, of the eye that becomes machine, constitutes a horizon of reference for Laura Waddington, it is still the corporeal component — absent in the aforementioned works — that significantly marks the documentary experience of Zone. The adhesion of the camera to the body establishes a close relationship between the organic and human dimension and the technical one of the device, leading them almost to be superimposed. However, it is precisely this hybridization that results in the eye’s loss of control over the cinematographic act; if, in fact, in the cases of Vertov and Snow, the camera is a prolongation of sight, which amplifies its potential, Waddington entrusts the machine with every prerogative of the eye, which thus loses any control over the means. Vision becomes machine, certainly, but it is the body that governs the gesture, provoking a “defamiliarization” both in the act of seeing and in the act of shooting.

Excerpt p. 41–44

In other ways, Laura Waddington’s attitude instead possesses certain traits that position her work in another light; while it is true that the body/machine she uses aims to deconstruct the act of filmmaking from the hegemonic system of the controlled framing, on the other hand, her solemn stride on the bridge and inside the ship appears like the controversial one of the voyeur: “to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.”¹⁰

What does this choice imply? Might it be interpreted as a reproduction of the gaze of the mythical Argus Panoptes, who thanks to innumerable eyes scattered over his body, possesses the power to always see, everywhere? Both, Argus and the gaze configured by Zone, seem to share the same capacity to see, or rather to spy, one without being seen, the other hiding its mechanical eye inside a pouch. Or even that the low definition, monochromic appearance and blurry streaks might explicitly recall the characteristics of security cameras. So we have to ask ourselves if the desire to “defamiliarize” and deconstruct certain logics of filmmaking might not, instead, refer visually to certain dynamics of monitoring devices.

Surveillance cameras, as Harun Farocki’s work demonstrates, reveal a shift of the regime of the gaze as a human prerogative, to software. Thus the machine is entrusted with the task of both surveying and observing the recorded images. In this way, new imaginal forms are created, those that Farocki calls “operational images”:

the machines were starting to see for themselves. Harun Farocki was one of the first to notice that image-making machines and algorithms were poised to inaugurate a new visual regime. […] In fields from marketing to warfare, human eyes were becoming anachronistic. It was, as Farocki would famously call it, the advent of “operational images.”¹¹

It is to machines, inorganic objects that the task of scrutinizing reality is delegated; in other words, the machine begins to see autonomously.

It is precisely this, however, the deviation between the two typologies of images in question; those in low definition, rough and grainy produced by Waddington’s filming, mark the big difference with devices of control of a voyeuristic nature; while panoptic eyes are always open and watchful, nothing is missed and everything appears sharp and clear to them, in the case of Zone, it is not this way. Its images are not the product of a knowingly investigatory gaze, but rather the result of a body in motion, which acts in space and consequently interacts with objects and people. It is not the machine that “sees for itself”; the process of the shooting and reworking of the image, in fact, is anything but mechanical, but instead attests to the bursting through of the body, the human and carnal factor, into the work.

The images reproduce the solemn gait of a body in the process of searching, a blind and often random search, attested to by the entire apparatus of silent subtitles. That is, a sort of soundproofed caption embodies the viewpoint of a character lost in the titanic effort to find someone who doesn’t exist: “a mute narrator, who speaks only in subtitles, searches for someone, who perhaps doesn’t exist, on a lost ship, going round in circles.“12 These are phrases that are uncertain and characterized by suspension points, which refer to the uninterrupted flow of the character’s thoughts, as in a monologue between herself and herself. The character stumbles, contradicts herself, forgets what it she is seeking and changes her mind; her search, in other words, emerges as confused and sometimes desperate. One reads phases such as “….And I took a boat….to a place I didn’t know,” “And I waited every night…. to see you…. Although…. they said…. you wouldn’t come,”¹³ “….I forgot what I was waiting for…,” “Then I knew, I’d never find you, but I kept on looking. What else could I do” Questions and expectations in her discourse thus trace the uncertain and non-programmatic stride of the camera on the ship’s deck: the loss of control over the shots, in turn traces the trajectory of the body, along with the monologue created, which thus gives rise to what Waddington calls “a fictional story out of randomly shot documentary footage.”¹⁴ In fact, the relationship that is established between the narrative trail and the video images, produces that feeling of lack, of emptiness around which the documentary revolves. It is not clear who is the object of the search, nor if he or she exists; we would appear to be dealing with a beloved person, whose identity, however, is unknown.

The uncontrolled nature of the shots confuses the figures, thus definitively belying the possibility that we are dealing with a control device, such as the panoptic eye. On the contrary, it would seem that the superimposition of the act of shooting with the body’s movement creates a type of cinema intended as performative activity; the gesture, emancipated from the regime of the eye, is documented through the same images produced by it. In presenting itself as such, the documentary reveals the presence, the action of the author, who, unmasked, fractures the traditional adherence to a presumed reality, required by the genre. And so documentary cinema presents a partial perspective, result of the creator’s gaze. Through a reflexive action, one of folding back on oneself, the performance assumes a veritable role of alienation, in other words one of estrangement from what, instead, is represented.

It is on this point that Waddington’s work distances itself from the progress of Argus Panoptes, namely that it does not constitute an attempt to hide her gaze from other subjects, but, on the contrary, to execute a new way of exercising that gaze. It is the body that guides it, dismantling every habit of cinematographic practice.

It would be wrong to suspect voyeurism in the use of a camera, normally reserved for spying. For What Laura Waddington is really tracing is her capacity to renounce her gaze and abandon herself to the movement of her body in order to produce a trembling of vision… a gaze that encompasses everything in a single gesture.¹⁵

Bouchra Kahlili’s words underscore the desire to bring an end to the feeling of familiarity with which we treat the images and the act of documenting events, what, in other words, George Didi-Huberman calls an exercise of “disarming the eyes” — “il faut désarmer les yeux: faire tomber les remparts que l’idée prélable — le préjugé — interpose entre l’oeil et la chose.”¹⁶ Thus the body reemerges as an active and fundamental presence, revealing the non-coincidence between the documentary and its presumed adhesion to reality, as well as its irreducible opacity.

Excerpt p. 45–50

In particular, Zone possesses an additional degree of elaboration that justifies and confirms the dual nature of the image; in fact, the director implements an editing process that aims to further destroy the definition of the video, that is, using another camera, she re-films the material obtained on the ship, then, from time to time modifies the speed of the footage, sometimes speeding it up, sometimes slowing it down. The result is a work on the brink of disintegration, which expands and restricts the dimensions of the framing, with phantasmic and spectral figures that in turn oblige the eye to make a tensive effort of recognition.

She sets about methodically destroying this trembling image: she re-films the images in video, then breaks through the layers to get closer to the consistency of film. There is nothing redemptive in this re-working of texture. It is, in fact, the degrading of the original recording to better reveal the nature of its vision: impure, fragile and haphazard.²⁴

Three different effects are notably revealed, which help to break apart the original image and generate renewed meanings. The first, and most frequent, is the jerky motion of the moving images, starting from the beginning of the film, both due to remediation and intentional slowdowns provoked by the artist. Here the sensation is of being in front of an extremely low-definition image, as if the quality had been lowered specifically at the expense of the video’s fluidity. Thus, the distance that is established between the spectator and the image is generated by the perception of the device that re-films the initial video, highlighting the disconnection between the time of the spectator and the time of the video. In fact, in the first sequence black and white plastic formants can be noted, which alternate on the screen in an uncertain manner. This suggestion is remarked upon even more notably by the device of the subtitles, which, in the use of the past tense, alludes to remote and distant events: “When winter came… They told me to forget you… And I took a boat….” In other words, the sensation of distance gives rise to a tale of an ancient memory, certain unattached fragments of which gradually emerge, as in a slow monologue. Similarly, the second sequence presents the same development in spurts as the previous one, and some human shadows move along the side of the ship. They are phantasms without identity, which operate without any fluidity. In their uncertain gait, these figures, unlike those of the earlier sequence, seem to allude to the “they” those who, in the verbal text, discourage the narrator’s search: “And I waited every night…to see you…although they said you wouldn’t come…. Or again, they could be equally compatible with the impersonal significance of the English pronoun. The phantasmal shadows thus would refer to the broader context of customs and “it is said that” which recur in the textual apparatus. The inconsistency of the silhouettes projected on the side of the ship might in some way confirm the vacuity of those expressions. The low quality of the image in this first context thus defines a vain attempt to recall a story of the past, lacking in details and lucidity; it is as if throughout the entire duration of the film, the narrating voice were forced to recall, to remember an extremely distant past, one it no longer possesses.

The second disintegrating effect of the image appears like a reticulated filter (fig. 7) that is superimposed on the video image. In other words, this is a sort of filigree that, applied to the original footage, impedes the immediacy of the figures’ recognition, taking shape as an obfuscation, a fog. The tale, therefore, takes on even more the uncertain contours of the vain search of the voice/character, which often loses awareness of the objectives of its action. Once again, the relationship with the subtitles proves to be profoundly significant; the reticulated filter is inserted toward the end of the first sequence, at the same time as “And I took a boat…to a place I didn’t know…” just as in the fourth sequence, where the vague images, presumably of a port, bear the words “The nights, that year… were far too long… I forgot what I was waiting for.” Continuous reference to the loss and to the opacity of the actions thus weave a close relationship with the filtering patina generated by the remediation of the initial footage. The viewer’s effort to recognize what is appearing on the screen thus reflects an analogous slowdown in a search being conducting on the part of the narrating voice; in conclusion, the filigree retraces its hazy stride, with its changes in direction, losses and amnesia.

The third and final strategy that contributes to the fracturing of the integrity of the image is the undulation of the outlines, “similar to folds of a curtain of dark transparency,”²⁵ as Deleuze would describe it (fig. 8). In other words, in certain sequences veritable waves are discerned, which move a portion of the image and disperse its sharpness, as if it were a mirage. The sequence in question presents, in addition to the constant jerky pace of the first typology, the figure of a long-haired woman in the act of swishing and re-arranging her hair down her back, to then turn to the right, as if searching for someone with her gaze. The sequence opens with the image of the woman who enters the frame walking, to then exit it: “Sometimes I thought… I even saw you”; only later, the contours take on that undulating character, corresponding to “but then I turned around… you would disappear.” And so an image-mirage takes shape beneath the eyes of the viewer, to whom it is not clear if it is a real image, or rather the result of some mental trick, and which thus can disappear just as it took shape on the screen. And so by virtue of this particular ripple of the video, narration and image produce another level of significance: drawing from the universe of illusion, the figure of the woman assumes the form of a chimera, a presence on the brink of disappearing that confounds perception.

The choice to reduce the definition of the image to the minimum, revealing its impurities and imperfections, is thus the result of the will to rework, once again, the initial footage, imbuing it with new value and other significances; as Waddington notes, “Out of the broken images, a story emerged.”²⁶ It is precisely in the expression “a story emerged” that the living heart of the act of re-filming is concentrated: in the remediation or, to use Montani’s words, in the intermedial montage, that there is an abandonment of the principle of transparency and succession in mass production, to “intercept a critical space.”²⁷ Consequently what is required is a process of exploration of the meanings that the image possesses, through filmic modalities of involvement, reconstruction and creation of complexity. Thus the editing appears as a productive and creative act that, after the action of “disarming the eyes” carried out in the shooting phase, allows the gaze to “re-arm itself,” to “re-learn to see”:

But we must, secondarily, re-arm the eyes. Instead of general rules, principles as hard as iron or representations that would close down anew the visible in the trap of preconceived ideas. Rearm the eyes to see, to try to see, to relearn to see.²⁸

From the experience of Zone, in fact, one witnesses an evolution of the director’s role. Becoming aware of her recorded material, she is prepared to work on it further, arousing in the viewer another vision and setting in motion new critical spaces. The medium, in other words, is reinvented and emancipated from the role of mere support, to cover an autonomous and articulated entity.²⁹ The attitude of disinterested and vaguely ineffectual observer gives way to a new awareness, what Gilles Deleuze calls visionary, that of the seer. “The seer is that figure, or configuration of the gaze,” who, according to Francesco Zucconi’s interpretation, is “capable of arousing a further vision on the part of the viewer. The seer manifests the coalescence of reality and spectacle and is capable of reading and allowing the former to read, the former passing through the forms that this assumes in the latter.“30 In other words the author assumes the role of a visionary, who through the editing and reconstruction of video fragments, creates a new and problematic narration. This visionary nature is manifested in one particular sequence of Zone. The final minutes of the documentary show the ethereal and phantasmatic figure of a man, a Filipino sailor, member of the crew (fig. 9), who, illuminated frontally by a light, as if by a lighthouse, smiles with his eyes fixed beyond the video camera. Then, through the visual field framed by the video camera, as if in an apparition, the framing is abandoned. For Laura Waddington, the presence of the Filipino sailor emerges as both revelatory and function for the conception the next work, CARGO (2001):

Years later, when I was commissioned by The Rotterdam Film Festival to make a video diary in a port, the memory of that man led me to shoot CARGO (2001). For I had often thought about the sailor, who had spoken to me in Tagalog and shown me the moon, and how hundreds of Filipino workers lived on the cruise ship below sea level, forbidden to take air outside and invisible to the passengers, except when cleaning their rooms.31

The sailor appears as the revelation of a secret, a character of destiny who assumes the role of apparition in the narrative. In fact, in the textual apparatus we read in the subtitles: “So they sent me the man…”, as if the providential encounter were desired by someone.

The final sequence is significant, however, also for other reasons. Simultaneous with the continual jerky movements of the figures and the filtering retina that reduce the quality of the image, the face of the Filipino worker is illuminated frontally by an unknown source of light. It allows his face to emerge from the black background, creating a contrast between what is clearly bathed in the source of luminescence and what, instead, remains unaltered; the light, in defining two zones of different degree of concentration, sets in motion an effect of meaning that functions plastically as a filter in the gradual opposition between light and darkness.32

The question arises, in this case, about what type of unveiling and substrate33 emerge under these circumstances; the figure, like a specter, appears and then disappears smiling from the frame and becomes visible only and exclusively at night, out of sight of the eyes of the daytime passengers. The fleeting vision of that man, who does nothing but smile, opens up a tear in the confused search for the voice-character. The sailor is inserted in an image that has little movement and action, but rather constitutes a situation of encounter with the narrating instance, the utterer with whom he weaves a contact that is ambiguous and needs to be deciphered; unexpectedly it would seem that all the obfuscation of the search were clearing up and that the continuous stumbling is over, in favor, instead, of an unexpected and dazzling illumination: “So they sent me the man… with the strange smile… who told me things… I could not hear…”. The continual absence of sound on the recording and the inability to hear the words of the man to the other, concentrate the scene’s focal point scene precisely onto the face and smile of the sailor who “more than being engaged in an action is consigned to a vision, which he pursues or from which he is pursued.“³⁴

However, the now familiar thickness of the grain of the image persists through the entire duration of the film; thus a light condition is created, which Fontanille would describe as lumière-matière, namely a condition that “invents obstacle, transparency and all the figures of occupation.”³⁵ The presence of the filtering membrane, which generates a granular and obfuscating texture would thus seem to interpose itself between the refracting light and the face of the sailor, resulting in a particular typical characteristic of the lumière-matière, namely a diffused and agitated state of light, what Fontanille would call nebulous. Therefore, on a general level, this effect takes place in cases where there are found scattered points and areas of illumination, and a “cloudy,” fragmentary and moving obstacle. Dusi refers to its characteristics with regard to the Deleuzian analysis of Bacon’s works:

The material light is thus a form of occupation of the space, where there is no simple dual relationship between light source and target, since he establishes a conflict with the actants, whether obstacles or filters. The different modulations of light provoke effects of volume and granularity of the figure, with lines and reflections that no longer depend only on the global vectorization imposed by the light, by its force of “cohesion,” but rathe by its “dissolving” force, its dispersion.³⁶

It is precisely through the effects of volume and grain that the images assume material character, breaking “the constriction of a purely “optical” image, allowing other sensory worlds to intervene.“37 Effects of sense, already within the image, are thus amplified in the interaction between filtering light and patina due to the process of remediation, and confirm their value of “emergence” and unveiling.

Continue to chapter 3

Footnotes

• O. Calabrese, Come si legge un’opera d’arte, Milan, Mondadori Università, 2006, p. 32.

• S. Bernardi, L’avventura del cinematografo, Venice, Marsilio Editore, 2007.

• D. Tomas, Vertov, Snow, Farocki, Machine vision and post human, New York, Bloomsbury Academy, 2013.

• Ibid., p. 1.

• Ibid.

• Ibid., p. 178.

• C. Baudelaire, Il pittore della vita moderna, op.cit., p. 1282.

• T. Paglen, Operational Images, in “eflux Journal n. 59, November 2014, [online https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/].

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

• All italics in the subtitles are my own.

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

• B. Khalili, The Pain of Seeing: The Videos of Laura Waddington, in The 51st Oberhausen Short Fiom Festival Catalogue, 2005 (online https://www.laurawaddington.com/articles/7/the-pain-of-seeing-the-videos-of-laura-waddington, August 2020 entry.]

• G. Didi-Huberman, Remonter, défendre, restituer, in L’image-document, entre réalité et fiction, edited by J.P. Criqui, in “Le carnets du bal,” n. 1, 2010, p. 169.

• P. Montani, L’immaginazione intermediale, Perlustrare, rifigurare, testimoniare il mondo visibile, op.cit., p. 18.

• Ibid.

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

• G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Logiche della sensazione, Macerata, Quodilibet, 2020, p. 72.

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

• M. Bertozzi, Documentario come arte, riuso, performance, autobiografia nell’esperienza del cinema contemporaneo, op.cit., p. 55.

• G. Didi-Huberman, Remonter, defendre, restituer, op.cit., p. 169.

• It is Rosalind Krauss who deliberated on the concept of medium specificity. In fact, in the art scene of the ‘Nineties, she finds a tendency to make use of mixed media or intermedia, in support of, according to her, a global “trend” toward the spectacularization of art. See R. Krauss, A voyage on the North sea. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London, Thames&Hudson, 1999.

• F. Zucconi, La sopravivenza delle immagini, Archivio, montaggio, intermedialità, Milan, Mimesis, 2020, p. 151. Author’s italics.

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

• N. Dusi, Strategie della defigurazione. Lo sfocato: dinamiche espressive e processi di enunciazione tra pittura e cinema, op.cit., p. 15.

• L. Waddington, Scattered Truth, op.cit. In the interview, Laura Waddington goes back to Antonioni’s words regarding the stratified nature of the image: “We know that beneath the revealed image there is another one, more faithful to reality, and beneath this one, yet another, and again another beneath the latter, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see, or perhaps down to the decomposition of any image, of any reality.”

• G. Deleuze, L’immagine-tempo, Cinema 2, op.cit.

• N. Dusi, Strategie della defigurazione. Lo sfocato: dinamiche espressive e processi di enunciazione tra pittura e cinema, op.cit., p. 15; see J. Fonanille, Sémiotique di visible, Des mondes de lumière, Paris, Puf, 1995.

• N. Dusi, Strategie della defigurazione. Lo sfocato: dinamiche espressive e processi di enunciazione tra pittura e cinema, op.cit., p. 15.

• Ibid., p. 16.

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