Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Filming Detroit



Filming Detroit
—for Joseph Cornell

“Me? I pursue an
image, no more.”
—Gérard de Nerval

“The still offers us
the inside of the fragment.”
—Roland Barthes,
“The Third Meaning,”
Image-Music-Text
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Cornell’s boxes institute a reading that is at once instantaneous & vertical—it scorns cinematic narrative “talkie” horizontal time.

The boxes are “stills”—still-shots that show us how to dissociate technical restraint from what is cinematically indescribable: the “third meaning.”

The boxes are “silent” screenplays—they’re “stills” from a film that isn’t simply seen & heard cinematically, but rather stops in time & space so that the “fragment” can be scrutinized and listened to attentively.

This seeing & hearing enables the “box” to be a “still” that’s a “ready-made” object, a ready-made scene within a film that exists in a new way, i.e., thru the “third meaning” which is vertical not horizontal narrative.
_________________

Collage of Detroit’s Michigan Central Station
—“Detroit’s Beautiful,
Horrible Decline,” Time

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1882089_1850985,00.html


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