Fragmented Realism
David, Gerard
Virgin and Child with the Milk Soup
c.1515
Raoul Ruiz begins his Poetics of Cinema 2 by proposing a cinema design/practice whereby images exceed their narrative purpose, restoring "to the image its natural ability to engender [its own] stories."
The budget contraints of today’s movies, (so-called) indies and studio blockbusters, allow for very little excess of image. Everything serves the story. Rarely are we allowed to drift as spectators. Even if the production design is rich in detail (as it is in the recent Children of Men), the images rarely break away from the main storyline. As with many sci-fi movies, a world is built out of details that hint at potential stories, but they are still illustration.
What I miss as a viewer, and what I think Ruiz is talking about, is the incongruous. Hitchcock, Ozu, Antonioni – to name a few – were precise in their imagery, but so much of their most powerful frames were a play of resonances that overwhelm plot or character. How do the stuffed birds figure into the plot/storyline of Psycho? Yes, Norman’s hobby, but our imagination has to work at finding the meaning of those birds in his world.
I’ve been fascinated by this idea and have followed Ruiz to books on the Northern Rennaisance painting. Specifically, Moving Pictures by Anne L. Hollander and The Mirror of the Artist by Craig Harbison. Unlike the Italians, Northern European painters like Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van der Goes, Jan van Eyck, Gerard David and of course Hieronymus Bosch sought a “complex polyphony” in their spatial representation of the biblical stories. The particular is not subservient to the general. Unity is not imposed. It comes about by the eye’s wandering over the “puzzle-like details.” (Harbison)
Is the fragmenting of the world’s image via the explosion of online video an honoring of the particular or just more noise? Can “movies” and their myths still connect along side this deluge?
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