Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 4: Unfolding the Encounter-Image (Part 1)
This is the fourth 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.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
The encounter-image: altering the production of sense
In 2013, Moon had another radical change when he shifted from shorter films that usually took days or a few weeks, into a three-year journey with the project Híbridos, The Spirits of Brazil (2016).[1] The project marks another step into his diagram, as he advances in reconfiguring his vision of how sound and image relate. The years of practical research in Petites Planètes show its result in Híbridos, since it pushed his diagram to its limits and in doing so uncovers something that has been there all along — the encounter-image.
First, some context about Híbridos. The project holds a database of all the rituals he captured in Brazil as short films (in the format and structure more common to Moon’s previous film), but it’s also comprised of an installation, a live-cinema project, and a feature film. The feature film is the output that has been more thoroughly worked on, going to extended amounts of time in post-production which is unusual for Moon. Also unusual is that he rarely writes descriptions about his films, but this time, there is a brief explanation that merits further examination:
From 3 years of research around Brazil, HÍBRIDOS, THE SPIRITS OF BRAZIL dives into the sacred culture of the largest country in South America through a poetic and sensorial approach.
As a cinema-trance experience, the film breaks down the distance between viewer and subject, from Indigenous rituals to Afro-Brazilian traditions, from north to south, from the jungle to the ocean; revealing the fraternal bonds between healers, shamans, mystics, adepts and devotees. An adventure into meditation, a musical journey in its purest form.
A musical and ethnographic journey through sacred ceremonies and their diversity, as well as a trip through cinema as pure poetic language. Without any commentary, an inner voyage, only with the voices and songs performed in the rituals.[2]
The description appears pedantic in its affirmations of being a “purely poetic language,” notwithstanding, many aspects of this description coincide with Moon’s diagram. It defines that the approach is a sensorial one and clearly mentions that there will be no explanation or commentary whatsoever. It also situates the film in the realm of music. With many of the rituals included not even being chanted — using spoken words, screams, or even orgasms — calling it a musical journey is to be understood from Moon’s larger conception of music being the soundscape. Lastly, the question arises of what a “cinema-trance” experience is? Cine-trance is quite known due to Rouch, but for him it was mainly a mode of extreme attentiveness the he would try to enter when capturing his documentaries, a sort of barbaric state of creativity, as I’ll return in the second part of this section. But the description mentions “cinema-trance” and not cine-trance, would it be an experience that is extended to how the listener interacts and views Híbridos?
To start with, Híbridos finally gives birth to a visual that is unencumbered by sound. What do I mean by this? Moon started his career with the Take Away Shows, as previously explained, a format meant to listen on the iPod with the visual as evidence to the spontaneous conditions in which the performance was recorded.[3] The most significant loss in closing the eyes and only listening to the early Take Away Shows would be to not have a clear notion from where the sounds are being originated. It was a film meant to be taken on the go and to be watched while commuting to work, or whenever there are some spare minutes. Many times, this meant putting it in the pocket while getting off the bus, still hearing the video but not watching it. The hierarchy of the format was that sound is more important than the visual, a heritance from music video and television. A topic that I already related to Michel Chion, but that Serge Daney also comments on:
Because the image serves only as the pretext for the wedding of commentary and viewer, the image is left in an enigmatic state of abandonment, of frantic disinheritance, which gives it a certain form of presence, of obtuse significance (Barthes’ third meaning), which (with a certain element of perversity) can be enjoyed incognito, as it were. To see this, mute the sound on your television and look at the images left to themselves.[4]
One can listen to the Take Away Shows but in no case, only watch it. There is a catch, though, why release these performances as videos instead of releasing it only as sound files to be downloaded? My personal attraction to them, as I mentioned in the introduction, is in the intimacy they conveyed, the sensation of partaking in an unexpected performance that could go anywhere. In Sergi Sánchez’s book Hacia Una Imagen No Tiempo, he analyses Jonas Mekas 365 Day Project (2007), a project also released for the iPod. Sánchez suggests that the small screen and the digital image are connected to a sense of intimacy present in this kind of miniature cinema:
…the experience of cinema in miniature tends to bring us closer, to retrieve our perception and identity, embracing the logic of the private and the domestic. (…) As such, it seems that the notion of portability in digital cinema has as its objective to underline its interiority while transforming intimacy into an abstraction that requires our maximum attention in unveiling its secrets.[5]
The visual in the Take Away Shows asks to come closer, to lift the iPod closer to the eyes so that one can enter what is happening, to see Moon’s encounter with the sounds of the performance, to hear how the bodies are moving through space. It is an attempt to visually capture the experience of participating in the renvoi. As such, it opens a space where the listener can intrude into this aural exchange together with Moon.
In Petites Planètes, though, the visual starts gaining more importance, and instead of only reinforcing what is being heard, instances where image dialogue in a more significant way with the music start appearing. In Mezzo Morra, as has been studied already, Moon used the landscape to ground the voices of the tenores that are singing. The unique reversal here is that having the central axis of the film being the music, these shots of the environment act as an out-of-[sonic]field. The visual expands on the core of the film that is the sound. The image is still not central, but it fleshes out the structural bones of the sonic interaction. Just hearing Petites Planètes becomes more prejudicial in capturing the full extension of Moon’s intention, but there is still a significant overlap between sound and image.
In Híbridos, on the other hand, sound and visual become fully distinct — each a discrete entity with specific functions that neither can assume. Sound carries the function to express what can’t be seen — the literal search of each sonic body for an encounter. The visual, on the other hand, concentrates on inscribing the self opened in the interaction (through the hysterization of the image as explained through Bacon). Tellingly, when well done the result is intriguing, like the sequence in Híbridos, expanded in the following paragraph, that surfaces a connection between three distinct rites from the tangential borders of sound and visual.
After an intense moment where hundreds of people squeeze together in the procession of “Círio de Nazaré,” that ends with the coarse sound of a wooden cross being lugged through the asphalt, Moon cuts to a long shot that rises above the clouds. While the sound is almost muted the image goes from the cross to the sky, indicating the transcendence of the ascension of Christ as pertaining exclusively to the visual. With the transition to the next shot, a muffled hum of an airplane’s motor (number 1 in the spectral analysis) persists while Moon cuts to a group of spiritism-adepts gathered inside a room.[6]
Slowly and very discretely, something inaudible emerges from the constant hum. Instead of hearing the noises of the people in the room, the sound locates the interaction in a high-above elsewhere (sonically extending the notion of the sky). The focus on the hand as a corporeal evidence of what I’m hearing connects to the next shot, where, the sonic interaction condenses and starts dripping down back to the visual. Back to the hands of the Catholic pilgrims gathered to celebrate the “Bom Jesus da Lapa.” The crisp sound of each droplet (2) joins the persisting hum as the pilgrims collect the miraculous water, the condensation of an elsewhere that is expected to open an encounter to interact with the divine. As the sequence ends, the shells of the “búzios” hit the wood collapsing sound and visual back in sync.[7]
Returning to the initial story of Calvino in A King Listens, as the king emerges from the darkness and is asked to open his eyes the vision no longer is the same, it had been reconfigured anew. Likewise, when Moon reaches Híbridos, an image gestated from sound now becomes able to live independently. In the example above, the visual explores the opposing depths, the separation between the earthly world where the adepts pray to an ascended Christ beyond this world. The interaction, though, between here and hereafter occurs in the sonic. It is sound who can travel back and forth between these polar points, only in the aural the spoken prayers can rise, and the answers condense and fall back. Man and God, two opposites that are fixed and immobilized in the image, only able to unfold an exchange in the present-time opened by a sonic interaction.[8]
In addition, once Moon reaches this comprehension of how to use the distinct characteristics of the sound and visual, he also arrivas at a drastically different kind of image.
The audiovisual tear
Gilles Deleuze, in his series on cinema, throughout the whole first book and in almost all the second one, posits the sound as always coming attached to the visual with terms like “pure optical and sound image” or “pure optical and sound situations.”[9] Only in the ninth chapter of Cinema II, entitled Components of the Image, will sound assume a central position, even if it’s mostly positioning sound as subservient to the visual in classical cinema. He reminds how sound is transposed and viewed through an ocular-centric approach throughout the better half of the 20th century:
Rather than invoking the signifier and the signified, we might say that the sound components are separate only in the abstraction of their pure hearing. But, in so far as they are a specific dimension, a fourth dimension of the visual image (…), then they all form together one single component, a continuum. And so far as they rival, overlap, cross and cut into each other, they trace a path full of obstacles in visual space, and they do not make themselves heard without also being seen, for themselves, independently of their sources, at the same time as they make the image readable, a little like a musical score.[10]
Deleuze develops an interesting point between sound and the Actual/Virtual (which I’ll come back soon) throughout his whole ninth chapter, albeit sound is always in service of the visual. More examples of this view: “In fact, all sound elements, including music, including silence, form a continuum as something which belongs to the visual image”;[11] “In short, sound in all its forms comes to fill the out-of-field of the visual image, and realizes itself all the more in this sense as component of that image…”;[12] “… sound cinema adds a direct, but musical and only musical, non-corresponding presentation to the indirect representation of time as changing whole. This is the living concept, which goes beyond the visual image, without being able to do without it.”[13]
He recognizes at that time that such situation is changing and that it may not always continue like this — “At the present junction, cinema remains a fundamentally visual art…”[14] It is then only in the conclusion of Cinema II that he indicates sound as a disruptive force in the merging of cinema with electronics. There is a part that is usually left entirely out in a widely quoted paragraph (that I also will use in the Fold chapter) on the screen losing its vertical position and the brain city, that is of great importance when talking about sound:
… information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature. Finally, sound achieving an autonomy which increasingly lends it the status of image, the two images, sound and visual, enter into complex relations with neither subordination nor commensurability.”[15]
As the cinema screen is transformed and loses its verticality, as the movement-image turns into time-image and even further as a “no-time-image” the whole of the “pure optical and sound image” is torn apart.[16] The visual and sound can’t form a whole anymore, instead they enter into an irrational relation, “the audiovisual image is not a whole, it is a fusion of the tear.”[17]
That the sound must liberate itself from the image is then one of the outcomes of cinema in the age of electronics. This is reinforced throughout the concluding chapter, “sound must itself become image instead of being a component of the visual image…”[18] In admitting this total separation, Deleuze frees the sound from the ocular-centric theory of cinema and recognizes its potential — “the visual image will never show what the sound image utters.”[19]
In doing so, he envisions a kind of cinema that operates in the intersection between sound and visual. However, an impasse occurs when Moon’s pure becoming of sound clashes with how his image functions, the becoming of the image as explored in Deleuze. Cox uses 4’33’’ to exemplify the musical becoming as a slice of the sound world. In his appropriation of Bergson’s theory, becoming in sound is an answer to move past the “time-object” and have an experience that unfolds only in the present. In cinema, on the other hand, Deleuze’s transposition of Bergson becomes to fold the past and future into the void of a present that never happens: creating the “time-object” that Cage condemned. Two visions of Bergson’s becoming that couldn’t be farther apart.
Two opposing visions of becoming
Pure becoming, in Deleuze, results in him positing the time-image as a direct presentation of time. The perfect ideal of what a pure becoming should be is to sidestep the present, to be always forthcoming and already past, which he explains at the beginning of The Logic of Sense. Pure becoming, the paradox of going in opposite directions, being suspended sequentially and directionally, growing while also shrinking.
As such, in Deleuze’s becoming, the present is a void which never happens, while also being the place of this suspension. Sergi Sánchez, updates this discussion commenting that the digital image would better be understood as an “eternal now.” It “makes the present a ritual that seems to capture in media res, the no man’s land that transforms the daily routine.”[20] A cine-becoming, as viewed in Cinema I and Cinema II, consequently, is the opening-up of all times in the zero of the present, so that past and future may coexist in a present that is no more.
Oppositely, Cox sees a sonic becoming as the destruction of a music that folds past and future and that instead insists only in the present. The sonic becoming an elimination of all times except the now. The difference between music and time-image is that in Cage (and more so in the artists that expanded his ideas) music is transposed to the sounds that envelops oneself in the present, there is no longer any need for an apparatus to capture the present as the ear is the only requirement to interact with the music of the landscape.
In cinema, such a conception appeared in the Lettrist movement (dialoguing with Fluxus when they were experimenting with happenings), achieving what a musical becoming is through the destruction of the cinematic apparatus. French artist Ben Vautier (a disciple of both Lemaître and Fluxus), created what he called “My Ten Films,” which I quote his first one:
My first film.
During the 1963 Cannes Film Festival I put a poster on the walls that read, ‘Ben, creator of the total art, presents and signs his extraordinary film City of Cannes 1963. Movie created through the invention of a total reality.
Screening locations: Everywhere.
Screen : Your Eyes.
Author : (The Whole) Ben.
Cast : You.
Music : (The Live) Ben.
Mise-en-Scene : (Ben).
Length : Unlimited.
Color : Natural.
For this film Ben requests the First Prize for Creation and will authenticate you as total actors (certificate upon request).[21]
Conversely, to call this cinema is controversial, for it foregoes any cinematic apparatus and is closer to performance art. Nicole Brenez, previously to writing her book on the Lettrist movement preferred the term “expanded cinema.”[22] It is interesting, nevertheless, to see how Vautier’s musical becoming (the elimination of all times except the present) recasts the eyes as the “screen.” It is not you who look to the world, as if what surrounds you is the screen but it is the world that looks towards you; you become the screen, the cinematic body to which others will interact with, your eyes will resonate and echo back, create the renvoi from the gaze of the others.
For Deleuze, though, such type of “expanded cinema” is not considered in his Cinema books as he prefers to focus on the time-image. Surprisingly, in the last chapter, he contrasts both music and time-image and its potential to directly present time. For him, music is the simpler form since it already directly presents time. The image, on the other hand, can only achieve such function, of being a “direct time-image” when time is presented in its transcendental form in the crystal of time. Thus, what looked like a deadlock can be seen through how becoming affects two very distinct forms of art — music and cinema.
Returning to Moon, his film practice departs at a moment that not only is past the tear between visual and sound that Deleuze mentions, but at a point where the visual has been enslaved to sound in the television and music video through the 80s and 90s (as Chion’s and Daney comment when regarding the television). Moon’s artistic pratctice backtracks the historical relationship between the visual and sound, reaching, as a result, a different understanding of the function of the visual. A crude visualization of such differences can be seen in the following comparison:
With the sound being the site of interaction and the main axis of Moon’s diagram, the visual gets stuck in a limbo, it is never actualized as a movement-image and never fully virtualized in a time-image. In other words, using the questions that Deleuze proposed to understand the drive that distinguishes both images, when I see Moon’s films I neither ask “what is there to see in the next image?” (movement-image) and neither “what is there to see in the image?” (the time-image).[24] I’m also not asking “what is there to feel in the image?” as Grandrieux’s films may indicate, instead, in Moon the question is “what is there to experience in the image?”
The production of sense
In Moon’s film, the encounter with sens is what is at stake. The sound opens oneself as an echo-chamber to enter the renvoi where the visual inserts the listener before the moment of actualization, in the passage between the Virtual and the Actual. Sound image and visual image combine to form the encounter-image. The encounter-image, hence, is the coagulation of the stream between the Virtual (where one can find sens) and the Actual (where one is ready to resonate). To inspect this halt between the Actual/Virtual circuit, it is helpful to follow Moon’s route and backtrack Deleuze philosophy this time starting at sound and advancing to the visual.
To properly dissect this, it’s necessary to recap that Deleuze’s elementary coordinate is the opposition between the Actual (acts in the present, what is experienced, and the person as an individual) and the Virtual (“outside” elements, time, singularities, what I’ll later synthesize into my experience of reality). Sound acts in the Actual, sonic waves bouncing off bodies going back and forth in endless referrals, changing at each new moment of the present. The renvoi, in that case, is in the Actual, sonic bodies interact in the present. Yet, to hear, to understand is in the Virtual, for one has to recollect information on what is known about each sound and bring it back into the Actual (to actualize). The Virtual though is not a parallel dimension without depth; it could be better visualized as a Y-axis (the X-axis is the flow of time in the Actual). The farther up the Y-axis, the deeper in the Virtual, the closer to the X-axis the closer to the Actual. The Actual/Virtual circuit is better understood through the process of thought, a person lives in the present but continuously goes to the Virtual to find meaning, memories, or any other sensation that is applied back to the present. An endless loop of interaction.
The concept of virtuality renders another layer to Nancy’s and Nadal-Melsió’s allusion to the newborn infant as the perfect model of listening (as écouter). A neonate only has senses and instincts. It doesn’t find meaning in sound for there are no memories yet developed. It only lives in the Actual, gradually unfolding the depths of the Virtual as it grows. To idealize along this line is to advocate a mode of interaction that is the closest possible to the Actual. Acknowledgment as the recognition of another singular body that one is interacting with in the present.
The sound in Híbridos carries this aim of acting always in the Actual, to bypass any Virtual associations one might have and open itself as a renvoi where it’s possible to resonate. Such a stance, though, is as utopic as the possibility to purely listen as one can’t go back to a neonate state. It is more sensible to postulate a sound that is at the edge of the Actual. The visual in Híbridos, similarly, is stuck at the edge of the Virtual. The continuity of the movement doesn’t describe the figure as in the movement-image and avoids elucidating any mental process as the time-image. It is in this edge, at the borders between the sonic renvoi and a not “fully developed” visual that the encounter-image emerges — stuck in the middle of the Actual/Virtual circuit, an image that must be interacted with to free it from the passage of becoming, the site that Žižek calls the site of production:
The proper site of production is not the virtual space as such, but rather, the very passage from it to the constituted reality, the collapse of the multitude and its oscillations into one reality — production is fundamentally a limitation of the open space of virtualities, the determination and negation of the virtual machine.[25]
The encounter-image stops short of completing its own production. It is halted in the passage back from Virtual to Actual before the multitudes of the Virtual are collapsed. It preserves the “open space of virtualities” provoking an encounter with one’s own sens as the path through the passage is completed by the listener.
In its feature form, Híbridos is a letter of intent of the encounter-image. In the sequence of the “congados,”[26] a hand suspended against the golden walls of an old church holds the music while I recompose myself and get ready for another encounter. The previous sequence was quite fierce, connecting Candomblé to Evangelical practices of exorcism and a medium entering trance and being possessed. The brief pause enticed by this suspended hand, where only some distant crickets can be heard, is a welcome moment to gather some strength for the joyous experience that follows.
A single powerful voice opens the renvoi, piercing the listener as the film cuts to a close-up of the singer’s contorting face. As the verse repeats new voices join in, first a woman, then the chorus, and lastly the percussion instruments. Trusted into this interaction, the following crescendo of the volume and the voices resonate stronger. The listener’s body echoes back the transformed sound that entered into an exchange with it. What is being encountered though? What is the listener interacting with? The sequence only reveals a couple of details: it’s happening inside a church, there are a couple of people in the group (impossible to figure the size), and a very fast glimpse of a banner with one of the titles of Virgin Mary.
Foregoing a what, when, where, who, or how, the “congados” is in Híbridos for the encounter of a sensorial experience, one that produces sens. Comparing to the full ritual, in Congado de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e Santa Efigênia (2017) that is available in the database, evidences the process of what ended up in the final edit of the feature. The film from the full ritual lasts almost 27 minutes and was already edited from the hours of footage captured. It shows the congados, preparing themselves, walking through Ouro Preto, better showcases the city, the people and the tradition that is being shot.
In Híbridos though, instead of choosing from the many scenes that could hint some understanding of the “congados” the film opts for the less revelatory segment, the single take three-minute sequence that most obfuscates meaning. The chosen segment is the one that best carries the interaction between each voice while only giving away its singularity. It is where the figure is most isolated. Where the diagram reveals its max potential. As with Bacon’s isolation of the figurative, Moon hystericizes the body in relation to its signification so he may invoke sens. The screaming mouth is letting the forces of sound open the singer as an echo chamber, becoming the body without organs.
In the Actual/Virtual circuit the body without organs is an intricate figure. While it attempts to live only in the Actual, as the newborn that only can sense and reverberate back its environment, there are traces and fragments that are accumulated from this total opening and merging of all the senses (as I’ll get to explore deeper in the chapter on experience through Walter Benjamin). In this flesh that vibrates in the renvoi, a uniqueness is emanated from the voice and body of the singer.
The sonic interaction distorts the body, an impression that lingers throughout the whole film. Bridging Nancy’s echo-chamber to the figural in Bacon, the body in Híbridos is subject to the forces of sound. It shakes in trance, falls during possession, contorts during exorcism, amalgamates in processions, and merges into the earth.
The physical body in the encounter-image exists at the border between visual and sound. It’s similar to Grandrieux’s nightclub scene in La Vie Nouvelle (2002), where the director transforms the actor into the primal organon of sens (as in Nadal-Melsió’s newborn primal-scene), a transformation impossible to achieve just from the outside (the filmmaker) for it needs an invaginating, folding/unfolding, of resonance between the inside and outside.
In La Vie Nouvelle, the scene starts with the dance between Bayan (the pimp/owner) and Mélania (the prostitute). Bayan apparently is directing her dance as a puppeteer in this undistinguishable “Lynchian” room. As the techno music flows in and the scene becomes more intense the music and dance consume both bodies. They turn into a blur of light and movement carried by the music. Each beat, each turn, each movement, breaking down the organs to form the organon. The music is resonating within them and transforming, in this, resonance what was previously a human body into a “skin stretched over its own sonorous cavity.”[27] As Mélania spins faster and faster time in the film becomes elastic, in a systolic-diastolic pulse going faster and slower. Sound is not only opening the echo-chamber but in doing so is preparing them for the attack of time that is to come. The body becomes the instrument in which this is made visible: “To render time visible, to render the forces of time visible… there is the force of changing time, through the allotropic variation of bodies, done to the tenth of a second, which involves deformation…”[28]
The body in Grandrieux’s scene is fully transformed by sound. The organon, even though wanting to exist purely in the Actual, becomes a conduit for an unconscious stream that trickles from the Virtual. It reminds Nancy ending words, when listening ends in a “body beaten by its sense of body, what we used to call its soul.”[29]
Likewise, in Híbridos, the body is no longer in control of its gestures as its purpose becomes to open and interact with the renvoi, to find this raw untouched experience in the virtual and transform it into sens. The function that the body assumes in Moon’s work is a crucial process in creating the encounter-image. It also helps elaborate on how he short-circuits the Actual/Virtual and stops the image from being actualized.
Halting the sense-event
The key to the statement above is to go even deeper in what is becoming to Deleuze. To be at the passage of becoming is to halt, pause, or freeze, at the sense-event. In cinema, it is the sense-event that virtualizes the image and frees it from its corporeal cause. Žižek sums up nicely the correlation between both when he asks — “is cinema not the ultimate case of the sterile flow of surface becoming? The cinema image is inherently sterile and impassive, the pure effect of corporeal causes, although nonetheless acquiring its pseudo-autonomy.”[30]
The possibility of halting such becoming — suggesting that the existence of an encounter-image is possible — can be found in the fifth chapter of the Logic of Sense where Deleuze discusses the paradoxes of sense.[31] What he calls the “paradox of sterile division, or of dry reiteration.” Using language as a ground to develop his theory, Deleuze before exploring sense will delve into how its structure through the concept of proposition. He describes that pausing the proposition, fixating it, not only is possible but is developed as a solution to the infinite regress paradox of sense.[32] The logic is “to immobilize it, just long enough to extract from it its sense — the thin film at the limit of things and words.”[33]
I’ll soon come back to the proposition, but for now, it’s important to note that immobilizing the proposition has its issues. The first implication is that sense, when extracted from a frozen proposition, becomes independent “since it suspends its affirmation and negation, and is nevertheless its evanescent double: Carrol’s smile without the cat or flame without a candle.”[34] Such a reading leads to the effect being released from its corporeal cause. Žižek will later use the same example of the cat’s smile to propose that cinema would be better understood as an “Organ without a Body” instead of the more common Body without an Organ.[35] It would be erroneous though, to grasp all cinema as an apparatus that fixes propositions, for even if the gaze itself is an autonomous organ, no longer attached to a body, it still completes the Actual/Virtual circuit.
The second implication in halting the proposition is that whoever interacts with it becomes responsible to release it from its frozen state — “the task is to combine the sterility of sense in relation to the proposition from which it was extracted with its power of genesis in relation to the dimensions of the proposition.”[36] In other words, in immobilizing the proposition, whomever/whatever interacts with it is delegated the task to unfreeze it so that the sense-event can occur.
The encounter-image, thereby, relies on delaying the proposition, an idea that in the Logic of Sense is not really explained. How to immobilize it, how to fix the circle of proposition that is composed by denotation, manifestation, signification? A lead to the answer comes at the beginning of Deleuze’s book on Bacon, where another circle very similar to that of proposition pops up. One that transposes the terms from language to that of the image. So, before getting back to the encounter-image, its adamant to explore the proposition and how connecting these two circles potentially unlocks modes of altering the Actual/Virtual circuit.
The correlation between how language and image express sense insinuate an intrinsical connection. Denotation, the proposition’s relation to the world connects to the figurative, the indexical relation of an image to an object. Manifestation, the proposition’s bearing of its speaker’s desires and beliefs together with the values of veracity or illusion is linked to the illustrative. Signification, the connection of the proposition to other propositions is transposed to the narrative, the link between an image in relation to the others that surrounds it.[37] Additionally, as Daniel W. Smith notes, Deleuze’s proposition can be grounded on Kant and his three terminal points in “Transcendental Dialectic”: the world as denotation, the subject as manifestation, and God as signification.[38]
In Bacon, for example, the circle is altered by disrupting the figurative through isolation for it is the “simplest means, necessary though not sufficient, to break with representation, to disrupt narration, to escape illustration, to liberate the Figure.”[39] This is the aim of his diagram, to break the circle of proposition (not to freeze it as Moon) and extract sense from the isolated figure that lives continuously in the Actual. “The forms may be figurative, and there may still be narrative relations between the characters — but all these connections disappear in favor of a ‘matter of fact,’ or a properly pictorial (or sculptural) ligature, which no longer tells a story and longer represents anything but its own movement, and which makes these apparently arbitrary elements coagulate in a single continuous flow.”[40]
The technical explanation of a short circuit is handy here. In its simplest form, a short-circuit is an electrical circuit that allows a current to travel along an unintended path with no impedance. The result is that the circuit is overcharged as an excessive amount of current flows back. Bacon, using this analogy, short-circuited the Actual to the Actual, a powerful flow with no barriers that comes back to its own origin. By doing so, he exemplifies how the circle of proposition/image can be altered, in his case by the opposition of an isolated “figural” to the figurative. Grandrieux’s diagram non-surprisingly also follows Bacon’s lead, but this time it’s the narrative that is responsible for the short-circuit. By isolating segments from the rest of the narrative, unconnected and incomprehensible, like the thermographic scene in La Vie Nouvelle (that follows Bayan’s and Mélania’s dance sequence) where the bodies become heat maps that devour each other. Grandrieux’s diagram is set-up to achieve moments that bypass the circuit Actual/Virtual, also relating the actual back to itself.
Both artists alter the proposition/image circle to create an unexpected path that subverts the Actual/Virtual circuit. It offers an insight into the potential of such an approach, but, still doesn’t mean that it’s an encounter-image. Bacon and Grandrieux are not interested in halting at the passage of becoming but to sabotage its natural flow.[41]
Moon’s diagram, on the other hand, doesn’t have a severe break in any specifics of the proposition. Instead all of them never seem to be fully formed. The whole circle is waiting for it to be unfrozen. The body doesn’t go to an extreme like in Bacon, but it’s still transformed and isolated through sonic forces, undermining the denotation/figurative. The manifestation/illustrative is perverted in a shift from the desires of the gaze (in the Take Away Shows) to the filmmaker’s body (how he filmed the latest ritual possessions); released from concerns of truth or illusion, what matters is to inscribe an interaction. Signification/narrative is transposed to a surface that needs to be folded and unfolded while I navigate in the database. The surface becomes central for it is the site of production where sense is delayed and interaction takes place.
For Moon, to never fully form the proposition/image is a method to ensure its interaction — “I truly think that the more you know about how a ritual works the less you will interact with it, the less you will, really, be inside the moment.”[42] As such, the proposition is not severed but is faltered. The encounter-image isn’t a total circumvention of the Actual/Virtual circuit like that of Bacon and Grandrieux, but a temporary short-circuit, one that is waiting to be fixed.
The noisy resistance in the Actual/Virtual circuit
As a brief addendum, noise once more plays an important role, now as an integral part to the Actual/Virtual circuit (and not in the physical or historical implications that was explored previously). Greg Hainge proposes in his book Noise Matters, that the Virtual is a site of pure white noise, and that actualization is the process of contracting from these infinite multiplicities specific noises that are expressed into becoming.[43] To view noise as ontologically insistent in the sense-event adds another layer to understand Moon’s temporary freezing of the proposition in its path to actualization.
To illustrate how noise is rather an operation in the process of becoming that drives away any indexical meaning, Hainge, also recurs to the notion of the electrical circuit:
Noise is then indeed oppositional, but the opposition that it presents is irrecuperable (contra Hegarty and Attali). It does indeed resist, but the resistance that it proffers is better conceived of not merely as political, as a ‘resistance toward the dominant ideals of music, and consequently, of the larger society’, but rather as the kind of resistance found in electrical circuits.[44]
The scholar goes into lengthy details to apply the notion of the resistance as noise to how electricity flows through a current:
In a metal conductor, for instance, the outer electrons of the lattice of atoms are able to dissociate form their parent atoms and float in such a way that they form a fluid environment that makes of the metal a conductor since when a voltage is applied to the circuit the electrons in this fluid travel from one end of the conductor to the other. What electrical resistance illustrates beautifully, then, is the way in which any expression, which is to say any material entering into expressive relations (which is to say, of course, everything) necessarily enters into a systemic process with its own material ontology (read medium). This medium resists the transmission of the expression at the same time as the expression is entirely dependent on the system at the most fundamental level of base materiality, for its expressive potential can only be actualized in a material assemblage formed between the system and the expression that reconfigures both of them.[45]
At the core of Hainge’s idea is his desire to focus on how medium and content are integral to one another, how becoming is a process that denies binaries and how the Actual/Virtual circuit subjects and transforms the whole body into expression. As such, the concept of noise intrinsically creating resistance in the path of becoming helps explore how Moon’s films can temporality create the short-circuit, how he’s able to pause the proposition. Noise, in Moon, becomes the agent that coagulates the path back to actualization by creating enough resistance between the system and the expression that it is stops short of being expressed.
Hainge furthers his inquiries by correlating Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of abstract machine to noise. The abstract machine is a figure that is purely virtual, with no substance or fixed form, a machine that is only function, thus why it’s called abstract. In Noise Matters, this abstract machine is to be regarded as noise — without form or substance, noise as the function to pass from the virtual to the actual.
In Moon, though, the abstract machine is paused through his notion of cine-trance. Attending to Hainge’s notion of “everything is in noise, and noise is in everything”[46] posits that through cine-trance (as I’ll explain next) Moon saturates the passage of becoming with the overflow of soon-to-be-expressed noise, the unexpressed noise from the virtual pauses waiting for the abstract machine to resume and contract the multiplicity into the singular once it’s actualized.
Short-circuiting the Actual/Virtual with Cine-trance
The name Cine-trance, obviously, brings a clear link to Rouch, who coined the term in 1971 to talk about a possession-like experience he felt while shooting Les Tambors d’Avant: Tourou et Bitti (1971). A film that, by comparing with Híbridos, assists in differentiating how cine-trance is regarded by Rouch and Moon.
Beginning with Rouch, the importance of this film and why it merited a new term like cine-trance is thoroughly described by anthropologist Paul Henley.[47] The film happens in a Zerma village north of Niamey, the capital of Niger. Very similarly to Moon, the film was shot in a single take that lasted the duration of the 16mm reel (approximately 11 minutes). As Rouch explains in the voice-over of the film, he and the sound recordist were waiting for the mediums to enter into trance and be possessed. After four hours of the music being performed and nothing happening, they decided to not waste the opportunity and at least capture the drums that were rarely played anymore (Tourou and Bitti are the names of the drums).
The single take starts by entering the village and exploring its surroundings. After a brief reconnaissance, it glides through the musicians and shows the drums being played. The narration indicates that suddenly a shout calling for “Meat!” is heard. The medium, that so far has been unsuccessful, goes into trance in front of the camera and is possessed by the spirit of “Kure, the Hyena.” As Henley notes, Rouch afterwards claimed that the fact that they were shooting a film provoked the trance to happen.[48] Rouch walks to the other side of the drum players and kneels to capture the face of “Kure” from a lower angle, while the villagers come to negotiate with the spirit that possessed the medium. In the meantime, another medium goes into trance and is possessed by the spirit of “Hadyo, the Fulani captive.” Rouch explores both mediums, investigating their reactions, their manners, how they move and speak while in trance. As the 16mm magazine reaches its end, to conclude the single take, the camera moves backward leaving the village and capturing a final glimpse in a wide angle shot.
After the shooting of Tourou et Bitti, Rouch described that he was trembling with exhaustion. He thought that the rhythm of the drums besides helping the possession of the two mediums also sent him into trance. His idea of trance though, very differently than Moon’s, is a sort of “enthusiasm which cannot be defined but which is essential to the poetic creativity.”[49] He also attempted to explain trance through Nieztche’s concept of the Dionysian — cine-trance as creativity being spontaneous and intuitive instead of being rational. Deleuze in Cinema II when talking about Rouch and cine-trance mentions his film Dionysos (1984) as an example. A strange choice, since he chooses a film shot in France that obscures the origins of cine-trance. Deleuze reinforces Rouch’s notion of cine-trance within the western idea of creativity, instead of the more literal possession rituals that originated cine-trance a decade before in Niger.
This spontaneous creativity as filmmaking invokes a performance on both sides, the filmmaker provokes the subjects through the situations and enters into a trance state, where free of theory, he can release what Rouch called “la barbarie de l’invention.” He even suggested that, ideally, the process of making a film would be closer to a jam session, or perhaps even closer to Moon, to “the flashes of revelation that could arise from the electrifying effects of an encounter between strangers.”[50]
Moon’s idea of cine-trance started very similar to Rouch’s conception but has gradually developed through his oeuvre. The first fundamental difference is that while Rouch diverts trance and possession into the realm of creativity, Moon, on the other hand, has expressed a more literal interpretation of cine-trance. Seeking ways to incorporate trance and possessions in their full meaning:
Interviewer: Do you personally believe that people are interacting with spirits or their deities during trances, or are they overcome by the intensity of the atmosphere at the ceremonies?
Vincent Moon: Of course I believe. To make such researches and bringing along the old anthropological point of view would not make sense. Those barriers are exploding nowadays and Brazil is definitely the land of the re-creation of new forms of identity — in between various levels of reality. As I have been working myself in such directions, I have started to incorporate spirits on a few occasions, but once more words can’t explain it all, and actually, words should not try. A new language is needed, we are working towards it.[51]
Cine-trance, in Moon’s diagram, should not be seen in analogy to creativity but in the full context of what happened that first time when Rouch saw the mediums in the Zerma village in Niger. Reinforcing, even more, this position, Moon, in the same interview also mentions exploring “new uses of technologies mixed with plants used for expansions of consciousness.”[52]
Rouch, when first presenting the article where he defined cine-trance, explains the process of trance and possession in the Songhay-Zerma culture. They believe that every individual has a “shadow,” “reflection” or even “soul” (what is called bia). Rouch, though, prefers the term double (the more common term at the time in anthropological literature); this double leaves the body in death or in other specific circumstances. When the possession happens, the individual’s double is replaced by the double of the spirit. This is an important differentiation; the body remains the same, but the double is replaced. The adept becomes the physical incarnation of the double of a spirit. The possessed is believed to enter a different order of relation with the world through the substitution of his double. The analogy made in Rouch’s article is that the filmmaker when in cine-trance transitions from “the world of the real to the world of the imaginary.”[53]
What does it mean to supplant the analogy of cine-trance with an actual cine-trance and cine-possession? I comprehend such an intention through the concept of the encounter-image. Cine-trance is the final (and utopic?) goal of Moon’s diagram, the most drastic step in short-circuiting the Actual/Virtual. It’s a search for an outside double that replaces subjectivity, but that keeps the body participating in the renvoi. The camera ceases to be a cine-eye and merges with the body, a body without a brain, organs and free will; a body possessed from the outside as an answer to the trance induced by the rhythm of sound.[54] As with his subjects, the filmmaker becomes a mass of flesh that vibrates exclusively in the Actual.
In Híbridos, it’s the sound that enables the trance and mediates the possession. The preparation of the “Santo Daime” (the religious name and ritual for ayahuasca) is synced to the hymns being sung. In the film, to prepare for the ritual, all movements must become sound. The hand of the woman who is collecting the leaves follows how she sings; the cutting of the root is syncopated with the guitar that starts playing; the men who are squashing the root, are instructed on when to hit it based on the rhythm of the chant; each gesture of preparation to the upcoming ritual becomes one with music.
Only when all the bodies are synchronized (subjects and filmmaker), can the ritual take place. In silence, the ayahuasca is ingested, and all the bodies wait the renvoi to open, to resonate within it and be transformed (in this case, possessed). As a new chant starts, Moon concatenates the next scene to show the bodies entranced by Ayahuasca being possessed by the spirits of Umbanda. The camera, which in the preparation of the tea has been mostly observing from eye-level, now becomes frantic, a transformation has taken place, from the camera as gaze to the camera-body.
I’m interpreting cine-trance to its extreme literality, and conversely, it’s impossible to know how literal Moon is possessed during Híbridos. Nevertheless, to even have such a concept as cine-trance shows a desire to explore alternative methods and alter Actual/Virtual circuit. Seeking an ideal camera-body that expresses a sense that is lost in the Virtual, to the outside double of a possessed subjectivity, freezing the sense-event in the passage of becoming. And, as such, preserving the multiplicities of the Virtual as it never collapses back to the Actual.
It also exposes a longing to be able to experience the encounter-image; to aim for a viewing experience that is also a first encounter as Moon finally finishes the Actual/Virtual circuit that his body started in the renvoi but was unable to finish. The idea of the creator arriving late to its own creation, as I explored in Bacon. Encounter-image and cine-trance are inseparable in his work, for it is the former that coagulates the Virtual in its path to actualizing and freezes the proposition/image. Moon is utterly unabashed in his search:
Is consciousness within us or outside of us? It’s a huge, wonderful question. I’m convinced that consciousness resides outside of us, and that we can connect to it via various methods. Brazil is fascinating because it presents a range of relationships to the invisible and to entranced bodies which push us to our limits via altered states of consciousness that are constantly accessible at different levels. There is no distinct rupture — there isn’t a person in a trance and one who isn’t. There are only rising vibrations, which can become incredibly intense, to the point that a person experiences a loss of consciousness, is totally possessed. There are many more interesting stages in between, intermediary stages where you are in a state of pure reception to outer energies that are modifying your way of being, while being utterly conscious.[55]
Moon’s spiritual pursuit shouldn’t be considered as an isolated quest, as it hints a larger scenario in the resurgence of Baroque ideals, that I’ll develop in the next chapter. Continuing to take cine-trance to its maximum consequences also carries another enticing innuendo. The film’s ambition is to inscribe this outside double (a Virtual double) through the body of Moon. Apart from breaking the idea of cine-eye to this organic camera-body, it also means that by cine-trance the perspective of this camera-body can either be the pure resonance of the body interacting in the renvoi or that of an outside double. Comparing to how Žižek views cinema uncovers the extent of how having sound as the starting point distances Moon’s works from the more common visual regime:
…when we watch a movie, we see that flow of images from the perspective of the ‘mechanical’ camera, a perspective that does not belong to any subject; through the art of montage, movement is also abstracted or liberated from its attribution to a given subject or object — it is an impersonal movement that is only secondarily, afterward, attributed to some positive entities.[56]
Cine-trance is also, then, a way to make the interaction personal, to tie the camera to an actual body, the perspective of the double that soon becomes my own. It also further differences Moon from Bacon and Grandrieux, that also alter the proposition/image, it’s his method for creating an encounter-image.[57] Reiterating that such image solely exists for the act of unfreezing sense, in the experience of completing its passage and being part in originating the flow of becoming. In cinema, this is a rare trait, one that Deleuze comments on, but that usually is in the backseat of film theory, that prioritizes how sense insists in the image:
The most general operation of sense is this: it brings that which expresses it into existence; and from that point on, as pure inherence, it brings itself to exist within that which expresses it.[58]
Moon’s films live in the first phase of how the sense-event operates. The encounter-image is modeled to give the experience of unleashing the power of genesis that expresses sense into existence. As such, the encounter-image correlates to Attali’s idea of composition — the possibility for everyone to compose their way out of repetition — it also answers how to partake in creation even without producing (the problem that Steven Shaviro found in Attali). In the encounter-image to compose is to express one’s own sense, to go through the passage of becoming.
Additionally, it is also an ephemeral image, for once interacted with, the encounter-image collapses into time-image, always alluding back to the first encounter, to the experience in emancipating it. It can be argued that all films pass through this first experience process. Raymond Bellour in discussing the contemporary importance of the collective experience of cinema writes that “one can rewatch a film in various situations, but only if, first time around, it has been seen and received according to its own aura.”[59] I’ll come back in the next chapter to explore what this auratic experience means, but what would difference the encounter-image from the regular cinematic experience? Bellour answers this quandary by complimenting that the spectator first experience is what “triggers the desire, afterwards, to go deeper.”[60] While Bellour recognizes the importance of Deleuze’s operation of sense as “expressing into existence” in the first encounter with a film, it leads to a deeper interaction in each repeated viewing of the film.
With Moon, and the encounter-image, on the other hand, the initial experience is the only level of interaction. There is no other layer than that of the surface. This disposability, in turn, is a strong propulsor for the sheer volume of films that Moon released. For once the question “what will be encountered?” is known, the next interaction needs to be a new and unknown experience.
In Moon’s route from the aural to the visual, the encounter-image is born to bridge the musical experience to the visual. His first experiments between 2005 and 2006 already asked: “how to visually transpose music?”[61] As his interest expanded beyond the indie rock music, this question remained at the core of his practice. It isn’t a question of how to make music visually appealing, but how to connect the sonic encounter to the visual. How to include new models of capturing the present that preserves the renvoi that is opened in the Actual.
Returning to Rouch, for all his explorations on cine-trance, it only operates in his relation to his subjects. Tourou et Bitti has a following commentary track where Rouch is constantly explaining what is happening, talking about the ritual, the drums, how they were frustrated, etc.[62] “La barbarie de l’invention” was something that he went through but that by the time the film reached the listener was already collapsed into a specific meaning and narrative, the Actual/Virtual already completed. Sense is already inherited in Rouch’s film. With Moon, though, the idea of cine-trance as “la barbarie de l’invention” is an invitation to interact with the encounter-image, to possess Moon’s camera-body and express sense by making it one’s own. To fold/unfold sense through navigating the database, which is the next trait in Moon’s diagram.
With its birth in sound, the encounter-image carries in its DNA the singularity of each sonic body but can only express it in interaction (as Cavarero defends). Thus, it is an image that is all ears, that is attentively listening and waiting to celebrate the moment of the encounter that will open it up as an echo-chamber. Exceeding cine-trance to cinema-trance implies such an interaction, the listener enters the film analogously to entering into trance. As the short-circuit (in the passage of becoming) is frozen, whoever interacts with it becomes the one responsible for opening Maldoror’s body so that it can finally scream.[63] A unique and unrepeatable instant that now enables the sens to freely flow between Actual and Virtual.
Continue reading Chapter 4: The Fold or go the INDEX.
[1] Híbridos also sets a new precedent in being Moon’s longest collaboration with another filmmaker — the French director Priscilla Telmon (who co-directed and co-develop the project).
[2] Translated from French, available at: http://hibridos.cc/fr/themovie/ The website also offers a very different presentation in Portuguese and in English. As both Moon and Telmon are French I resorted to what I suppose is their original version.
[3] In October 2015, five months before the Take Away Shows started the first iPod that supported video was launched.
[4] (Daney, 2013)
[5] Sánchez, S. (2013). Hacia una image no-tiempo: Deleuze y el cine contemporáneo. Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, p. 182. (Translated from the original in Spanish)
[6] I’m using the name of the events and explaining what is happening to facilitate my description, but the film never explains anything and only specifies location and event in a very confusing way in the final credits (some rites are omitted and there is no visual link). The sequence being discussed here starts at around 22”.
[7] Búzios or Cowrie-shell divination (in English) is form of divination with origins in West Africa that became very prominent in Afro-American religions.
[8] The question of the image immobilizing and therefore limiting the depiction of God is central to Judaism (and Islam). The prohibition of any visual artefact has a curious affect in the Old Testament — the interaction with God occurs mainly through sound (the thunderous voice in Mt. Sinai) and through time (Sabbath as a place for encounters that is sculptured in time).
[9] Deleuze’s use of the term “image” not only relates to the visual but is more akin to any individual aspect that is a part of the whole. Throughout this section every time I use the word image it is the Deleuzian sense, reserving the term “visual” to express the optical.
[10] (Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 2013, p. 241)
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid., p. 242.
[13] Ibid., p. 246.
[14] Ibid., p. 247.
[15] Ibid., p. 273.
[16] Sánchez´s book Hacia una imagen no-tiempo (2013) explores well this transition.
[17] Ibid., p. 276.
[18] Ibid., p. 285.
[19] Ibid., p. 286.
[20] (Sánchez, 2013, p. 137) This is my personal translation of the original in Spanish, when he talks about the digital image and Kiarostami’s film Five: “Five se entrega a lo que podríamos denominar ‘ahora eterno’. El digital hace del presente un ritual que parece haber captado ‘in media res’, en la tierra de nadie que convierte lo cotidiano”.
[21] Brenez, N. (2015). “We Support Everything since the Dawn of Time That Has Struggled and Still Struggles” Introduction to Lettrist Cinema . Berlin: Sternberg Press.
[22] http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ43/Brenez.html
* This is an oversimplification as Rick Altman in his book Silent Film Sound (2004), Alberto Cavalcanti in his article Sound Film (1985) and Eisenstein in the aforementioned Landscape of Music discuss how sound was already present (and not just visually) in Silent Cinema.
[24] In Cinema II (2013, 279) Deleuze asks these questions as a simplified example to portray the change of the viewer’s interaction between movement-image and time-image.
[25] Žižek, S. (2003). Organs Without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences. Abingdon: Routledge Press, p. 20.
[26] Starts at 40” of Híbridos.
[27] (Nancy, 2007, p. 43)
[28] (Deleuze, 2017, p. 48)
[29] (Nancy, 2007, p. 43)
[30] (Žižek, 2003, p. 21)
[31] As the word “sense” is going to be heavily used in this section, I would like to point out that whenever I write sens, in italic and without the “e” I’m referring to Nancy’s idea of sens elaborated previously in the chapter where listening is discussed. When the word appears in this chapter, in its common form — sense — it is referring to the Deleuzian connotation and all that it implies: As the ideational event of the proposition; as the expressed of the proposition; as being at the surface of things; as not being an object and neither an idea; as not existing but rather insisting or subsisting in the event; in its relationship to nonsense; and as being neutral.
[32] The infinite regress being exemplified through Lewis Carrol’s segment where Alice encounters the Knight and asks the name of the song. The question provoking a regression where each answer (sense) gives rise to a new proposition, and so forth.
[33] Deleuze, G. (2015). The Logic of Sense. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 34.
[34] Ibid.
[35] (Žižek, 2003, p. 30)
[36] (Deleuze, 2015, p. 34)
[37] The conception of each element of the proposition is in the chapter Third Series of the Proposition in the Logic of Senses. Regarding the image circle I preferred to use the terms as they appear in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.
[38] Smith, D. W. (2006). From the Surface to the Depths: On the Transition from Logic of Sense to Anti-Oedipus. Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 10(1), 135–153. doi:10.5840/symposium200610111
[39] (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2017, p. 2)
[40] Ibid., p. 113.
[41] Understanding the variables of the circle of proposition/image can also produce an interesting rereading of Deleuze’s cine-brain, for through the proposition it would mean that a non-human force like the concept of brain city could be able to repair the proposition and unleash the expression of sense.
[42] Moon, V. (2016, August 8). A fortuitous rendez-vous with Vincent Moon. (G. Leașcu, Interviewer) theAttic. Retrieved May 5, 2018, from http://the-attic.net/features/1814/a-fortuitous-rendez_vous-with-vincent-moon.html
[43] (Hainge, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise, 2013, p. 18)
[44] Ibid., p. 16.
[45] Ibid., p. 16–17.
[46] Ibid., p. 2.
[47] Henley, P. (2010). Postcards at the service of the Imaginary: Jean Rouch, shared anthropology and the ciné-trance. In R. Parkin, & A. de Sales (Eds.), Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic theory and practice in French Anthropology (pp. 75–102). Oxford: Bergahn Books.
[48] Ibid., p. 90.
[49] Rouch quoted in (Henley, 2010, p. 91)
[50] Ibid.
[51] Moon, V. (2015). Capturing Trance Rituals: Vincent Moon: Filmmaker / Explorer. (M. Lawry, Interviewer) The Terrestrial. Retrieved February 10, 2018, from http://www.theterrestrial.com/interview/vincent-moon/
[52] Ibid.
[53] Rouch quoted in (Henley, 2010, p. 94)
[54] Moon’s merging of the camera to the body is an active research is the last years: “My work these past years has been researching on the integration of the camera into my own body as much as possible” (MOON, 2015)
[55] Moon, V. (2016, November 30). Vincent Moon, Filmmaker and Explorer of the Invisible. (G. G. Sedita, Interviewer) Retrieved January 10, 2018, from https://gabriellesedita.uk/2016/11/30/1091/
[56] (Žižek, 2003, p. 20)
[57] If there are other models of producing the encounter-image is out of the scope of my research, but nevertheless, it’s an interesting question that deserves further investigations.
[58] (Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 2015, p. 170)
[59] Bellour, R. (2012). The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory. In G. Koch, V. Pantenburg, & S. Rothöler (Eds.), Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Vienna: Synema Publikationen, p. 15.
[60] Ibid., p. 18.
[61] The series of films on The National (2005–2006), Sonic Youth — How to catch an Explosion with a Soul (2005) and LIARS LIARS LIARS! (or how to play nirvana in 2006).
[62] In the versions I found, including in the official Centre national de la recherche scientifique website that are the associated producers of the film, the commentary is always embedded without any option to see the film without it. In addition, the technical information cites that the film is composed by “Music and Voice Over”. I’ve searched for information regarding if originally its screenings happened without the commentary track but was unable to find anything useful. The link for the full movie at the CNRS website: http://videotheque.cnrs.fr/doc=559
[63] The mute character of Les Chants de Maldoror that finds his voice in his necessity to scream.
