Listening to Vincent Moon — Index
What I’m going to talk about?
This thesis confronts how, in Vincent Moon’s films, experience takes the spotlight in detriment of signification. I formulate that the director, rather than worrying about imbuing his films with an inherited sense, is instead searching that his work may express something unique each time it is encountered. To achieve this, his artistic practice is submitted through a set of procedures that are more in line with the field of sound than that of cinema. By transposing values that are deeply rooted into sound philosophy to film (particularly Listening by Jean-Luc Nancy), Moon’s work criticizes the predominant ocular-centric perspective where meaning and understanding is the ultimate goal. Questioning the implications of such a practice, I relate emerging studies related to sound with Deleuze’s Actual/Virtual circuit and Walter Benjamin’s auratic experience. I conclude by proposing that in Vincent Moon a new form of image surfaces, one that even though in its early stages, should be comprehended through its explosive capacity to deliver an experience and in its intrinsic transient and ephemeral nature — the encounter-image.
This is the first chapter of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
Index for all the stories published
INTRODUCTION
1. VINCENT MOON, THE TRAITOR
La forma de la espada / Early Experiments (2000–2005) / The Take Away Shows (2006–2009) / Feature Documentaries and other projects (2006–2011) / Petites Planètes (2009–2014) / Híbridos (2014–2018)
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Part 1 — Listening: overcoming the limitations of a visual model of thought / What is it to be listening? /At the Edge of Meaning / The Resonant Self / The Sonorous Body / Balancing at the Impasse
Part 2 — The Cinematic Diagram: Mastering the Loss of Control / Diagramming sonorous figures — Listening to Images / Hystericizing the (sonorous) body / Opening the figurative self / The Cinematic Diagram
3. AUDIOVISUAL ANALYSIS: PASSING THROUGH THE DIAGRAM
Part 1 — Accompaniment: becoming the coadjuvant / Voice: searching for uniqueness in the what and the who
Part 2 — Music: resonating the encounter / Noise: forcing an opposition
4. IMPLICATIONS: UNFOLDING THE ENCOUNTER-IMAGE, THE DATABASE AND EXPERIENCE
Part 1 — The encounter-image: altering the production of sense / The audiovisual tear / Two opposing visions of becoming / The production of sense / Halting the sense-event / The noisy resistance in the Actual-Virtual circuit / Short-circuiting the Actual-Virtual with Cine-trance
Part 2 — The fold: the (Neo-Baroque) production of beings / Database
Part 3— What is there to experience? Fragments of existence in Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura / Aesthetics as sensory perception / Encountering fragments of one’s own existence
