Modelos de deformación del policristal

Film orders images and also gives orders to the audience. The early days of cinema were a playground of art and ideology that gave shape to an industry that would dominate the spread of mass cinematic spectacles. In the Soviet Union, two filmmakers pioneered film art with significantly opposing ambitions. Sergei Eisenstein developed an intellectual form of montage that draws the audience into stories with political intention. The aim was to create cinema ‘as a factor for exercising emotional influence over the masses that delivers a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience’ (Eisenstein, 2010: 39). This has led to the predominant form of cinema we find distributed to theatres and, to be polemical about the centralising force of Hollywood, has succeeded on multiple levels to enforce a dominant world-wide cinema of celebrity and desire. We enjoy the ‘blows’, exotic worlds and alter-egos and indeed it is satisfying to create them. But early cinema had another vision in Dziga Vertov who saw the cinematic apparatus as an evolutionary extension of human vision, a conquest of space and time that creates a means of ‘comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order’ (Vertov, 1984: 87-88). He named it the cinematic kino-eye, ‘more perfect than the human eye for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space’ (Vertov, 1984:

co-creative art of discovery that would incite new visions for humankind by showing us the world as only the camera could see it. Where Eisenstein provided an intellectually driven art by meticulously controlled storytelling and technological invisibility, Vertov wrote and worked towards a form of montage that gives character and voice to the camera, the environment, its inhabitants and their technologies. Recalling the concept of

Kino-eye, we find a perspective on film that endeavours to create meaning from the experience of everyday life. Vertov writes,

Kino-eye plunges into the seeming chaos of life to find in life itself the response to an assigned theme. To find the resultant force amongst the million phenomena related to the given theme. To edit; to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase, an essence of “I see.” (Vertov, 1984: xxvi)

However, ‘seeing’ in the Lifemirror machine is not sculpted by an individual authorship but though the combination of participation as meaning, the concept of collective address, and a data-driven consensus of lives unfolding in the cinematic frame. In his discussions on film aesthetics, Rancière tells us that Vertov and his contemporaries viewed the form ‘as opposed to stories as truth is to falsehood. The visible is not for them the seat of palpable illusions that truth has to dissipate. It is the place where energies that constitute the truth of the world are made manifest’ (Rancière, 2014: 29). Echoing a sentiment that would later find form in Expanded Cinema, Jean Epstein proclaimed, “Stories are false, cinema is real!”. In today’s world it is not difficult to discern the influence of Eisenstein’s cinema embedded in the program which suggests a valid need to challenge and seek alternatives for its reign by drawing on the capabilities of digital

and network technologies. That stories are told by and through the people marked the aura of the storyteller that Walter Benjamin warned us is disappearing in the age of mechanical reproduction9_{. I suggest that the digital, as both a personal and collective}

extension, transcends the mechanical element of reproduction and so the stories of narrative cinema (at least those repeated through formula) can be challenged and evolve with new understandings of shared space and time.

The last century saw photographic equipment become more accessible. Film however, because of its expense and dependency on projection was slow to follow and leaving the ‘consumers-with-cameras’ as receivers of cinema whilst simultaneously re-engaging with life through viewfinders. This delay caused a movement in image perception that could be argued correlates with the movement-image rupture at the point of World War 2 and after which television was quick to follow. As Vertov’s original aim was to connect the spaces of the world with the camera, it was beginning to happen naturally through the domestication of cine cameras and is now arguably being actualised with networked cameras. With regards to the cinema books, it becomes more convincing that Deleuze’s political agenda is partly focused on giving cinematic agency to a people who have always been creative but have been fed images from a dominating industry (He specifically uses ‘high-art’ films to create his concepts through techniques that are now widely adopted in television and internet productions). Regarded as a reflection of a cultural movement, the Neo-realist turn can then be taken literally as a new realism of a people becoming ‘kino-eyed’. I would then argue that with the arrival of digital plasticity, cinematic realism explodes into a form of any-realism-whatsoever which in turn gives unprecedented control with regards to media authorship. As Deleuze returns

the cinematic image to an elemental intelligibility, Lifemirror, in its current state, performs a similar reversal within the network and explores an elemental realism evolving through co-conscious camera play.

In identifying the thought-matter energies between camera, brain and screen, Deleuze opens doors to alternative systems where a camera-equipped community may discover creative expressions of thought beyond the affective and perceptive functions of narrative film. As Rancière relates, ‘The proposed “classification” of film images is in fact the history of the restitution of world-images to themselves. It is a history of redemption’ (Rancière, 2006: 111). In order to find cinema’s latent potential as a community tool, it is, in my view, necessary to reconsider the ‘unprocessed film’ that gets rejected in the process of traditional film production. Our mobile cinematic creations are unique to the individual and so a truly egalitarian film could not exclude any one perspective or style. If we combine this proposition with a sensitivity to the idea that we ourselves are

narrative, we might create an opportunity for a communal cinematic path. This position immediate questions narrative form. The Life in a Day project issued a call to film a guiding set of questions. Although edited in order to reconstruct the day’s light cycle, there is a distinct ‘rule-based’ movement in the crowdsourcing method that may transfer to cloud-cinema systems. However, as suggested by the online comments highlighted in the introduction, cinematic experience fosters many subjective tastes and expectations. So the question arises as to what would constitute a consensual form that might contain a collective flow of material? The proposition lies in the Lifemirror machine that such films cannot be judged – which is the antithesis of what defines cinema as an industry – and so leaves the task of challenging accepted forms while maintaining enough cohesion

to be accessible. As Deleuze wryly notes, ‘we require just a little order to protect us from chaos’ (Deleuze, 1994).

As an art of subtraction, cinema removes unnecessary elements that do not contribute to narrative – so to find narrative, with film, perfections imposed by film-practice must be undermined. Jean-Francois Lyotard forms a political position by proposing a concept of cinema that does not sculpt and refine its elements to the demands of story. In his essay

L’acinema, he proposes a hypothetical practice that celebrates and entertains excess film movement as a libidinal force where the energy of life itself takes precedence over the technical processes of story-making. His concept of the libidinal economy here extends to cinema as a means of organising and distributing energy (both at the level of the institution and in respect to any given film) where ‘movement reflects the flows and montages of libidinal investments’ (Jones, 2014: 76). He conceives of film production as the elimination of possible movements to the ruling of the filmic whole and as such questions the ‘ordering’ of life that emerges for cinema audiences. He claims that cinematography is ‘conceived and practiced as an incessant organizing of movements following the rules of representation’ (Lyotard, 1991: 170). This implies a ‘good form’ of cinema where aberrant shots like false movements, over-lit sets and faces etc. are the ‘illegitimate discharges of libidinal energy’. ‘Good form’ is predominant and therefore an illusory step beyond the film itself. The organisation of elemental material is subordinated to the ‘whole’ of the film entity and so ‘implies the return of sameness, the folding back of diversity upon an identical unity…disciplining the movements, limiting them to the norms of tolerance characteristic of the system’ (Lyotard, 1991: 172-173). I would here interject that recent cinema and television productions use ‘deliberate’ bad form to further manipulate effect and it is now another technique in the commercial

repertoire which pacifies potential forms of resistance. A recent example of this can be found in the blockbuster film Exodus (2015). Here, Christian Bale performs Moses in the midst of battle when a sudden splatter of blood obscures the camera lens. In Eisensteinian terms, this is a subtle ‘blow’ to the audience where the biblical becomes more real than expected to instil a potentially religious ‘organisation of the audience’ that uses camera reality to reinforce an idea of truth. In this way, the techniques of cinema are expanding an interactivity of story and point towards subtly directed virtual realities in the future. This view gives a clearer picture of the cinema machine at work in consciousness and so opens doors to theoretical propositions and design opportunities for filmmaking grounded in the reality of people.

To return to Lyotard, we are confronted with a challenge to form. The concept of L’acinema rejects the veneer-like representation created by the industry and embraces ‘bad form’ cinematics to take the stage (or screen), not in the form of illusory accidents (as in Exodus) but as an essential, libidinal freedom. In resisting norms of identification and narrative totalisation, l’acinema would re-present a form of contingency and freedom from control that would signify a redemption and escape from a standardising force in media, or what Deleuze has termed ‘the civilization of the image’ (Deleuze, 1997b: 21). Narrative structures would be forced to transform and perception would be considered by way of a disruptive break from cliché imposed on the viewer. In this sense, the Lifemirror machine achieves this through the dissolution of an editing process that reconstructs itself as a temporal concatenation of fragmented events. No shots are favoured as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and narrative structure is performed as a network activity unfolding through the many ‘by dividing all the possibilities of the visual field into a heterogeneous multiplicity of perspectives.’ (Jones, 2014: 80). For the individual, there is

the fragmentation of narrative, however in recognising the data-driven transparency of the system (shots unedited from the light and time they were formed) the viewer knows it is a sequence of moments drawn from the shared filmset. The narrative is filled inbetween the encounter of self with other in a paratactic interleaving of meta-narratives formed from libidinal movements; a liquid community of movement and encounters.

What is emerging through this argument is a correlation between film and social network. Considered as such, we might call to imagination the movements of a Facebook wall and ask, in the sense of its cinemacity, ‘How should a film end? Can we now reframe Aristotle’s view that beginnings and endings are essential to the dramatic story? What becomes of the unity of space in today’s hyperconnected world? Interactive environments allow people to find unique points of entry and exit and parallel storylines open up possibilities for a community-minded understanding of narrative. However, tradition confines cinema to an event-led experience where open participation is strictly controlled.

One wonders whether there might be a musicality to cinematics that could facilitate wider participation in actual cinema spaces and so inspire new collectively-created meaning. Like the automated telephone systems that harass phone-owners for a response, and diametrically opposed to this, the shortening attention spans and conversations in the social networks, films released through the Hollywood model are in danger of repeating themselves and becoming less meaningful and useful to society. Focusing on the cinematic subject as process rather than event, and giving it an open forum to evolve of its own accord, might be a way forward for re-evaluating how cinemas can function through networked participation. This will be discussed further in relation to Jean-Luc