Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework (Part 2)
This is the second 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 cinematic diagram: mastering the loss of control
To transpose Nancy’s otocentric mode of philosophy into an art practice raises the question of what it is to be at the edge of meaning. As Moon is working with cinema, this is particularly problematic, for as Michel Chion observes sound and image naturally search for each other to create signification:
In the audio-logo-visual ensemble, sounds and images reinforce, illuminate, and influence one another not only by dint of their meaning content but according to signifying processes in which arbitrary and mechanical criteria, as well as formal ones, often hold sway.[1]
In proposing listening as a model of film practice, the question becomes how to keep image and sound at this “edge” without rupturing them? How to reconfigure the power structure between image and sound without sending one (or both) into chaos? Such a practice, apart from breaking with the ocularcentric logic that Chion finds in sound films,[2] ultimately fractures the signifying force of image and sound in order to open the “space-time” (renvoi) required for the emergence of sens.
The concept of the “edge” is an appealing anecdote, since this figure of speech creates two opposing sites (ground vs. abyss) and a small space tensioned in between (the cliff). The ground is where signification is prospected. An early example in avant-garde cinema is when the sound films just started, and Russian director Eisenstein (endorsed by Pudovkin and Alexandrov) wrote a statement in 1928 expressing his opinions. He attacks the talking films by arguing that sound should conflict with the image through montage, or in an asynchronous match. In effect, advocating for a rupture between the naturalist link of aural and vision. Nevertheless, his motivations to do so stem from his view that a contrapuntal sound “introduce new means of enormous power to the expression and solution of the most complicated tasks”, namely the two impasses that he talks in the previous paragraph of using subtitles (or title cards) and explanatory shots. In other words, the clash would create new understandings that were harder to be expressed only visually.[3] Similarly, Siegfried Kracauer, while being more flexible than Eisenstein by not rejecting synchronous sound, still develops his ideas of sound in cinema (parallel as coincidence of meaning, counterpoint as opposition of meaning) as an instrument to contribute to the film’s signification.[4]
In opposition, at the abyss of meaning are the practices that become pure uncontrolled sensations, such as Stan Brakhage’s latter half of his career. As he stopped using a camera and started painting directly on film, Brakhage (similarly to Pollock which I’ll talk in the subsequent paragraphs) aimed to bypass the eye and open the film to the chaos of chances. To do so, he looked towards ideas like self-hypnosis to deconstruct any mediation between him and what is being created:
Our whole structure of visual thinking is based on manmade laws of perspective and so on! But imagine! I say in my youth, an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. In other words everything you see, you have to be having an immediate adventure with it. It’s not canned in any sense.[5]
Moon, as I propose, tries to settle between both, at the impasse, the fringe of the cliff. Throughout his films, he doesn’t look towards creating meaning and signification but neither wants to go into the realm of pure sensation, as Brakhage. Drawing from one of Moon’s inspirations (the filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux), I’ll map the outlines for a practice that connects sound and vision through the works of Francis Bacon. The Irish painter is an unusual figure to talk about sound, but as Grandrieux figured out, an essential artist when it comes to subverting the hierarchy between the ocular and the aural.[6] Bacon “shares the musician’s attentiveness for the harmony of two moments: his aim is composition in the sense of a melody. Better put: his art consists in a resonance between visible and invisible, or heard and unheard.”[7]
The comparison between Moon and Bacon lies in how listening is present not only in the former’s films and the latter’s paintings but how, for both, it’s a mode of thinking that is imbued in their art practice. As I’ll develop, listening is a subject of Bacon paintings, but most importantly it’s how Bacon paints. This is essential, for in Bacon I’ll develop the fundamentals for an otocentric approach on how to create images that will subsequently be applied to Moon.
The process in which Bacon does this is termed in Deleuze as “diagram.” It is through this diagram that the three characteristics that I explained in Nancy will emerge. The diagram for Deleuze is a procedural term for Bacon’s set of characteristics that puts him at the edge of meaning, the inclusion of chaos, randomness, and catastrophe. In his paintings, this is the isolation of the figure; the making of random marks; blurring the body through swiping, smudging; and other techniques for a new order of painting to emerge — for the figural to emerge from the figure.
A commonplace between Moon and Bacon starts to form since, for both, the randomness of chaos and catastrophe is an ontological constitutive and not just an accident. The artist always must be open to an outside (listening), searching not for meaning but an exchange of sensations (sens). For both, their work can never be thoroughly planned out in advance as it must encounter chaos. The affinity here between painting and sound is immediate. Isn’t Bacon bringing noise into his work? Similarly, isn’t Moon inserting chaos into his films?
Deleuze in elaborating a logic of sensation also discerns the opposing sites where Bacon needs to balance himself at the edge. The abyss is correlated to Pollock, who’s interested in creating a purely haptic space where the diagram is not confined. Deleuze criticizes this approach, for in doing so, painting loses the capacity of acting on our nervous system as it is not controlled, sensation is not focused enough to create an enduring impact. The extreme opposite is a purely intellectual art. He uses Kandinsky as an example of the purely abstract that does not act on the nervous system instead only remaining on an intellectual level. In the middle is the figurative painting, and at the edge of the figurative, balancing between controlling the sensations and eliminating the figuration, the work of Bacon.[8]
Moon’s stance to be at the edge is analogous to that of Bacon that dedicated his life’s work to find the perfect balance in this impasse. But the comparison, if delved deeper, can yield a much greater insight into Moon.
Diagramming sonorous figures — Listening to images
In investigating Bacon to question if it is possible to reconfigure the vision to sound without a complete rupture of the image (like in Kandinsky’s work where the sonorous becomes wholly abstract and intellectualized) a noteworthy segment in Deleuze’s book about the artist comes to mind. When commenting on what is the presence of the figure that emerges in Bacon’s painting, Deleuze’s contrasts this presence with music. Even though he does not see how it could be possible to make music and sound present, he suggests that the step needed to bridge the sonorous to the figure is to “hystericize music,” which, in this context means to bring to presence the material reality of the body — “We would have to reintroduce colors, passing through a rudimentary or refined system of correspondence between sounds and colors.”[9] Is it possible to bring to presence the material reality of a sonic body? I propose that yes.
Hystericizing the (sonorous) body
First off, when talking about presence in Bacon, Deleuze explains that it is to be understood as a kind of excessive presence, that he connects to hysteria: “the hysteric is at the same time someone who imposes his or her presence, but also someone for whom things and beings are present, too present…” It is precisely this hysteria that for him is what painting attempts, to find this intense presence “beneath representation, beyond representation.”[10] It is not the painter who is hysteric, no, the painting carries this in itself, the color system emanating a hysteric presence that acts directly on the nervous system.
Thus, for Deleuze, painting “discovers the material reality of bodies with its line-color systems and its polyvalent organ, the eye.”[11] Music, on the other hand, according to the philosopher, trespasses the body and materiality and finds consistency somewhere else. Bacon is the torch-carrier of a hystericized painting for he refuses a figurative path where the painting stands as figuration (a sign of something else) and also refuses the abstract which has to go through a cerebral/intellectual path. Bacon’s painting then assumes the pure figure, the hysteric intensified presence without referring or taking any other route than to recognize its materiality.
It is within this context that Deleuze’s “invitation” to hystericize music seems maybe like an opening not only to approximate sound to painting but to listen to the figure, to make the image sonorous. For what is the concept of timbre if not the materiality of the sonorous body, the intrinsic “colors” present in the acoustic world? As Nancy points out “Timbre opens, rather, immediately onto the metaphor of other perceptible registers: color (klangfarbe, “color of sound,” the German name for timbre) …”[12]
The key here, furthermore than linguistic etymology, is the idea that bodies have this singularity, a key material value always present that is made audible in resonance, brought forth by the rhythm of its vibrations. Timbre, as outlined a few pages back, is “the very resonance of the sonorous.”[13] It has a two-fold function, first to hystericize music (and sound) by opening a space-time for the self to be present but also by giving a material reality in the attack of time to the sonorous body, and not somewhere else as Deleuze suggests.
Timbre is always present, hysterically present in anything able to resound; resonance merely sets the renvoi in motion. Is not color the same? Doesn’t the eye — that acknowledges and opens in painting the presence of its own material reality — operate as the attack of time that opens the sonorous event and acknowledges the timbre of a body? Isn’t color an intrinsic value set in motion by light that accepts specific vibrations and reflects others? Both visual and sonorous body vibrating, echoing back certain light and sound waves while absorbing others? Both creating a self in the resonance between the world around them?[14]
Moreover, while the visual depends solely on the eye while sound transforms the whole body into an echo-chamber, isn’t Bacon’s figures precisely a body that is entirely transformed and trespassed by the forces of the lines and colors surrounding it? In Bacon, we find a figure that is the hollow drum that resonates back nothing but sens. A renvoi between painting and observer where this referral between the timbre (color) of the figure and the timbre of the observer merge into beyond-meaning, beyond-signification, into sens.
To hystericize becomes a visual manifestation of listening, to invoke the presence of the self through a sort of optical renvoi. In Moon, the hysterical figure gains weight as his interest in trance and possession rituals grows, and is mainly present in JATHILAN • popular trance ritual from Java (2012), to which I’ll soon come back to contrast with a similar film by Jean Rouch, Initiation à la danse des possédés (1949). Both films follow an almost identical structure and have the same theme, the difference laying directly in how Moon hystericizes the image while Rouch goes oppositely to suppress the hysterical presence.
Perhaps, to better juxtapose both filmmakers, the link between the hysterical, the figure and the echo chamber is found in contrasting Bacon to whom he claims to be his master, Velázquez. Deleuze points out that many of Bacon’s elements are already present in Velázquez’s painting Pope Innocent X (1650) in a restrained manner: the parallelepiped prison, the heavy curtain, the mantelet aspect as being a side of meat, and Pope’s fixation on an invisible looming future. Bacon takes all these elements, removes any traces to figuration and bring them to the front in Study of Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X (1953). The screaming pope carries the hysteric, the excessive presence of the material, its body only a figure of pure presence. Bacon decomposes Velázquez’s Pope into pure sens, into color and timbre. Likewise, Moon will decompose Rouch’s films so that the hysteric presence that is hidden may surface.
The scream is of particular importance, in it, Bacon bypasses painting the horror to focus on the invisible forces and their effects on the flesh. Moreover, even though his interest is in painting “the scream more than the horror,”[15] what is painted is not only the scream but the friction of these forces and the precise moment before sound. In doing this Bacon hystericizes the exact instant in which Maldoror “unable to expel the life-giving air speedily enough” opens his lips. The painted scream is the fold/unfold of the starting of dance, the same first cry of the newborn — the attack of time.
As in his later paintings where the body attempts to escape itself through one of the organs, here the body is hollowing itself out by the scream, turning itself into a hollow drum. “The mouth then acquires this power of nonlocalization that turns all meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes…”[16] The painting Head VI (1949) can further help to elucidate this concept. Bacon isolates here the “underlined” paralepidid in which the Pope is imprisoned and removes any possible figuration in doing so.
The head is then encased and isolated in this dimension, the torso and head forming a reconfigured body living in itself, outside of any meaning. Couldn’t the scream here be the attack of time initiating a self that resounds beyond the dimension of the painting? An attack that creates the spatiotemporal place for the timbre of color (Klangfarbe) to reverberate, for the renvoi to take place?
Bacon’s screaming bodies break the ocular linearity. The image is here a starting point for the renvoi, the vibration and echo of a sens that envelops and vibrates. In making present the attack of time Bacon forces the observer to listen to the resonance produced from this friction, to listen to the sound that breaks out from the parallelepiped prison of the canvas, of the screen. Bacon “make[s] visible a kind of original unity of the senses… make[s] a multisensible Figure appear visually.”[17]
Likewise, Moon’s film JATHILAN extracts the figure from any signification present in Rouch’s Initiation à la danse des possédés. The two follow a structure where music is already being played since the beginning while images show people arriving and preparing themselves for the ritual. JATHILAN is shot in a south-central Java village, and Rouch’s film is shot in Nigeria with the Songhay population.
Rouch’s film opens with a large text citing the location, what is happening and with an explanatory note before showing the preparations for the rite:
Here, the camera was the simple witness of the ceremony of the initiation of a woman to the dance of possession. Before the ceremony, this woman was permanently possessed. The goal of the initiation is to master the possession: at the end of 7 days the healed woman will return to normal life and the appeased gods will only possess her on the request of the priests.[18]
As the initial title sequence ends, Rouch lowers the volume of the music being played and sung so that his voice over can be clearly heard and provide the narrative arc of the film. He continually gives context and details on what is happening, and never spends more than two minutes without layering the footage and sound with his commentaries. As such, Rouch suppresses the sensations and the presence invoked by the bodies that contort themselves in trance, to provide an intellectual path that attempts to grasp what is happening. As with Velázquez, the elements that Moon will later explore are all there (in the disfigured bodies, the fascination with possession, music as ritual), hidden beneath Rouch’s need to position his films as ethnographic documents.
Moon, similarly to Bacon, isolates the hysteric presence from the figuration that Rouch imposed, he removes the narrative arc, removes the context (the only explanations is the title and where it was filmed), and leaves these disfigured bodies contorting together with the music sang in Javanese. The framing also moves closer as in Head VI, uprooting the underlying “paralepidid” in Rouch so that the scream assumes the breaking open of the echo chamber that will (literally in this case) invoke the self in the renvoi.
By hystericizing the figure beyond figuration and making present the attack of time, an image can resound and have an otocentric approach, “the body beaten by its sense of body.” Similarly, to Maldoror’s scream resulting in his ear being unsealed to receive back his resonance, the attack of time in Moon and Bacon opens the figure to hear his vibration and echo.
Opening the figurative self
If the attack of time opens the body to the rhythmic and to timbre, the next step would be then to find the rhythm that is born from this fold/unfold, the space-time where the self exists. Deleuze finds this rhythm in Bacon’s triptych structures when writing about his Triptych, August 1972:
A 1972 Triptych shows a Figure whose back is “diminished,” but whose leg is already complete, and another Figure whose torso has been completed, but who is missing one leg and whose other leg runs. These are monsters from the point of view of figuration. But from the point of view of the Figures themselves, these are rhythms and nothing else, rhythms as in a piece of music, as in the music of Messiaen, which makes you hear “rhythmic characters.”[19]
Going back to his other painting reveals that they are also organized similarly, “that each already encompasses a triptych, each distributes rhythms.”[20] In Nancy, the spatial-temporal matrix that unfolds the renvoi is not the beat per se but the gap between the beat where the resonance occurs. In the same way, in Bacon, the renvoi occurs in between the beat of its rhythm and timbre, but it’s a diachronic evolution of sens (Nadal-Melsió makes this point clear), of singularity, of the encounter between the multiple panels and the recurrent referrals between them. Bacon thus similarly shifts this phenomenological self to what Nancy proposes, by imposing rhythm on sensual perception:
…[The multisensible figure] is possible only if the sensation of a particular domain (here, the visual sensation) is in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power is rhythm, which is more profound than vision, hearing, etc. Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. This is a “logic of the senses,” as Cézanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music. It is diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world itself.[21]
In the last sentence of the quotation above, Deleuze points out that the visual rhythm that allows for sens only is possible through hysterization (isolation of the figure) that opens the self. Thus, the visual rhythm in Bacon and Moon is different from merely a visualization of rhythm such as Sergei Eisenstein proposes in the chapter The Landscape of Music in Nonindifferent Nature (1987), Stan Brakhage in Letter to Ronna Page (On Music) (1978) or Michel Chion when he says that:
When a rhythmic phenomenon reaches us via a given sensory path, this path, eye or ear, is perhaps nothing more than the channel through which rhythm reaches us. Once it has entered the ear or eye, the phenomenon strikes us in some region of the brain connected to the motor functions, and it is solely at this level that it is decoded as rhythm.[22]
The latter examples are preoccupied with the sensory path of the image, to create a sound image in the brain of the viewer. The former (Moon and Bacon) are engaged in rethinking the image from an otocentric model of philosophy, using the vision to open a renvoi for interaction. This task cannot only rely on creating a stream of images to be decoded as rhythm by the brain but has to make present this post-phenomenological self through sens.
Such undertaking is different in the visual and in sound. For, while sound is easier to asignify and enter it into the purely sensorial perception, vision is harder to discern from understanding and meaning. So far, Bacon materializes in his paintings and Moon in his work the three core concepts of listening (écouter): escaping the figurative (signification in Moon’s case) for the figural to emerge, the body is reconfigured into one without organs (as the hollow drum that opens the attack of time), and posing anew the self in the resonance.
The diagram, appears thus, as the manifestation of listening. A method to be at the fringe of the chaotic abyss while distancing itself from signification. “According to Bacon: one starts with a figurative form, a diagram intervenes and scrambles it, and a form of a completely different nature emerges from the diagram, which is called the figure.”[23]
In addition, for Deleuze, there’s always a double creation in the aesthetic experience. The mutual creation of a figure and a perceiver both depending on the process of sensation. This perceiver has many similarities with Nancy’s listening-subject (and also distances itself from the human form) and how sens comes to fruition. Filippo Carraro in an article studying the minutiae of the concept of becoming present in Deleuze’s book on Bacon, notes on the endless referrals (renvoi) between the figure and its perceiver:
The perceiver distinguishes forces that constitute, in their play of visible and invisible, organic Figures and definite shapes. The Figure reciprocates by emanating sensations, so that the perceiver is once again hit by forces which have now acquired the artistic nature of a bloc of sensation(…) This ‘outcome’ has eternally already gone back from the perceiver onto the body of the Figure, and it makes its reality(…) The exchange occurring between the Figure and the Figure’s perceiver is the becoming real of the sensation itself, its bypassing of the perceiver’s subjectivity and its formation as a bloc of sensation. This is the Figure then: defined by the income of directed forces while emanating filtered sensations. This is its equilibrium, this is the flux of which the Figure is the filter; this is the eternal pulsation of opposites and the emergence of the acrobat. Bacon has obtained the subject of what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘continual rebirth of existence’: the Figure.[24]
An optic sonic event opens the renvoi so that figure and perceiver may interact in it, the becoming of sonorous figures together with the creation of the listening-subject. Listening as the artistic process of creation is then indistinguishable with the formation of this self outside from an “I” or “other.” There is no reason to separate the act of creation from perception as in listening both functions depend on one another.
The precondition to be able to listen (in film or painting) is that it first has to listen to itself. This may seem obvious in sound, that to listen there first must be an attack of time (the sonorous event) that opens the self and opens itself for other listening bodies to enter in the renvoi. In the visual process of creation, this attack of time happens through the diagram, through opening the canvas, the picture, the film, to chaos and balancing it as an acrobat stuck in the tension between chaos and meaning. The visual creation generating its perceiver, its self. The artist, thus, doesn’t function as the original perceiver but as a secondary listening subject that enters a renvoi that already exists, which will assume a major role in Moon’s diagram through his development of cine-trance. The visual artist Gerhard Richter speaks about arriving late to his own creation. When talking about how randomness affects his process he mentions that “something will emerge that is unknown to me, which I could not plan, which is better, cleverer than I am.”[25]
In conclusion, to speak about a diagram in Moon or Bacon instead of calling it the aesthetics or the style of an artist, is to conceive a practice that aims to create a space, through all the components of each one’s medium, that resonates within itself and creates sens. In Bacon’s case a figure that creates its own perceiver, in Moon a film that creates its own listener.
This can be applied to all arts, the creation of a set of parameters to counter the ontological properties that lends itself to meaning and simultaneously open a space for encounter. Sound, for example, is naturally already closer to an asignifying and sensorial mode of perception and is evidently easier for itself and to the listening-subject to listen. Theater, on the other hand, has specific requirements of a diagram that can include the chaos into it, maybe the theater of Brecht and later that of Boal is an answer to this? To further extend this research to other mediums, the inquiry should be where is this Figure (if thinking of Bacon), where is this “edge of meaning”? Going to an extreme may help elucidate the question. If one regards the olfactory as a place for encounters, is it even possible to find an “edge of meaning” as it entirely bypasses any intellectual processing to act directly activating the amygdala neurons? Doesn’t the perfumer have to think of a diagram that similarly to Bacon attempts to control sensations while opening himself to surprises and to the new when creating a scent? How may such a diagram look like for each distinct art practice?
These questions raise a fruitful area of discussion where distinct diagrams balancing and tensioning specific characteristics to vibrate between meaning and chaos can possibly be found. For this research, I’ll focus on Moon as a form to continue this discussion through the notion of the cinematic diagram.
The Cinematic Diagram
With the concept of the diagram fleshed out the next stage is to explore how to transpose Bacon’s diagram to Moon. An initial sketch on how to make this conversion is presented in Jeremy Powell’s article David Lynch, Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze: The Cinematic Diagram and the Hall of Time (2014). While it’s an article that I’m much indebted too for first bridging Deleuze’s diagram concept to cinema, the “Cinematic” in the title only refers to the visual in Lynch’s cinema. It is an incomplete approach, for Powell, when transposing the notion to cinema only requires one part of the cinematic body (the image) to be submitted through the diagram while ignoring the rest (sound, for example).
Powell argues that the diagram is ontological to cinema (the image in this case) because of the condition of the photograph and the cinematic image. His argument is based on Bazin’s writing about photography — “for the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time, an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man.”[26] The logic in Powell is that even if a shot is constructed, rehearsed, and repeated countless times, the camera that is inhuman will be entering random chaos into it, “giving us marks of the irrational.” For him, this is enough, through the process of visual creation “the cinematic diagram is inherited to cinema as such.”[27]
Even if the same principle is applied to sound (which is not done in Powell), viewing the microphone as an inhuman force that inserts chaos would be a stretch, for many times the audio is dubbed, the sound effects bought from databases, cleaned of all unwanted noises in post, etc. Claiming an ontological diagram to cinema because of its relation to photography is insufficient to bridge Deleuze’s concept to film.
For an all-inclusive cinematic diagram to exist, for cinema to be able to listen — to create the renvoi — the first requirement is to understand it as a body without organs, an indivisible entity where all its elements are merged into one. To reach the “edge of meaning” symbolizes that this body as a whole has to be subjected to the cinematic diagram. The result, an echo chamber that opens itself up to sens.
Greg Hainge, facing a similar task in connecting the work of Philippe Grandrieux to sound, redefines the cinematic body in a way that suits well Moon’s view of his work. The breakthrough that Hainge suggests is thinking of it in an expanded acoustic sense, a “body not as something that pre-exists, that has a fixed form, but only as something that propagates itself in space and time, a waveform whose qualities are constantly formed by its environment and the other bodies.”[28] In other words, to rethink a cinematic body that is no longer the presence of a cinematic space where various figures and forms reside immutable, but as resonance created anew each time the elements of a film is set in motion. He terms this sonic-cinema, a cinema where the film ceases to be an object and becomes a renvoi instead. A cinema that has been subjected to the diagram to be reborn as the neonate infant that no longer able to find meaning, only searches for sens.
In JATHILAN • popular trance ritual from Java (2012), for instance, to isolate meaning Moon resorts both to the aural and optical. The music being sung opens the sonorous event, the image being captured hystericizes the figure. Moon’s cinematic diagram starts with his refusal to research the topic that he’ll film and avoidance of investigating anything beforehand so that his first encounter happens at the site of creation. The film is an immediate result of Moon’s reaction to what was happening in front of him, his inscription inside the renvoi. All elements of his films are subjected to this diagram, his movement, the minimal or non-existent “mise-en-scène,” the natural lighting, collaborating with people at the locations to help capture the sound, and the very basic editing.
All of these are the basis to develop Moon’s cinematic diagram, a diagram focused in creating an autonomous experience that enables the listener to interact with it.
Continue reading 3. PASSING THROUGH THE DIAGRAM or go the INDEX.
[1] Chion, M. (2009). Film, a sound art. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 232.
[2] Chion, when discussing how Pierre Schafer’s idea of reduced listening affects the film (listening not to a meaning but to the sonic qualities of an object) repeats this hierarchization of image to sound: “The consequence for film is that sound, much more than the image, can become an insidious means of affective and semantic manipulation … sound has an influence on perception: through the phenomenon of added value, it interprets the meaning of the image, and makes us see in the image what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently. And so we see that sound is not at all invested and localized in the same way as the image.” (Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, 1994, p. 32)
[3] Eisenstein, S. (1949). Film Form. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, p. 257–259. I use the word “harder” because Eisenstein will two decades later go into great lengths to describe how sound was already present in his silent films. He calls “plastic music” in the chapter The Landscape of Music of his book Nonindifferent Nature (1987).
[4] Kracauer, S. (1997). Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, p. 102–103
[5] Brakhage, S. (2003). Stan Brakhage with Pip Chodorov. (P. Chodorov, Interviewer) Retrieved June 24, 2018, from https://brooklynrail.org/2008/03/lastwords/stan-brakhage-with-pip-chodorov2
[6] Grandrieux mentions Deleuze’s book Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2005) as an integral influence on his films. A quite surprising source, but one that, as Greg Hainge links in his book Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema (2017) may have a lot more to do with cinema and most importantly, with listening.
[7] Carraro, F. (2014, February). Deleuze’s Aesthetic Answer to Heraclitus: The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze Studies, 8(1), 45–69. doi:10.3366/dls.2014.0133, p. 46.
[8] What I termed “ground” (where the aim is signification), would be a middle term that Deleuze maps to the figurative.
[9] Deleuze, G. (2017). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, p. 40.
[10] Ibid., p. 37.
[11] Ibid., p. 39.
[12] (Nancy, 2007, p. 42)
[13] Ibid., p. 40.
[14] I’m attaining myself to the physicality of color, but a philosophical counter-argument for the notion of color that I use can be found in Walter Benjamin. Caygill, who wrote a book specifically on the topic, explains that “Benjamin maintains that a colour does not have a fixed value but gains its meaning from the surrounding colours, which because they are infinitely nuanced, make the value of a given colour infinitely variable.” (Caygill, H. (1998) Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge, p. 13)
[15] (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2017, p. 45)
[16] Ibid., p. 19.
[17] Ibid., p. 32.
[18] Translated from French.
[19] Ibid.¸ p. xiv.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid., p. 32.
[22] (Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, 1994, p. 136)
[23] (Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2017, p. 110)
[24] (Carraro, 2014, pp. 61–62)
[25] RICHTER quoted in O’Sullivan, S. (2009, December). From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 3(2), doi:10.3366/E1750224109000622, p. 255.
[26] Bazin, A. (1967). What is Cinema, Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 13.
[27] Powell, J. (2014). David Lynch, Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze: The Cinematic Diagram and the Hall of Time. Discourse, 36(3), p. 316.
[28] Hainge, G. (2017). Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury, p. 80.
