While watching _Jurassic Park_ and reading on Lukacs concept of the
specificity of the filmic image I begin to wonder whether the recent
restructuring of the theoretical space of film studies towards an
understanding of the filmic image as indexical (and here I am thinking of
both Doane's _Cinematic Time_ and Rosen's _Change Mummified_) is
misleading. While even Lukacs makes reference to the indexicality of the
filmic image, based on Peirce's concept of the same, I wonder whether the
specificity of the cinematic image is not infinitely more applicable to
understanding the relationship between the subjectivity and cinema than an
understanding of the 'evidentiary' quality of film.
This comes from seeing something as fantastic as J.P., surely, wherein I
find it hard to see anything evidentiary in the images... That is to say
that the images 'pull me in' and convince me to some extent as to
the 'reality' of the image, but I am fully aware, even cognizant, of the
falsity of the images and the narrative structure of the film. The images
lose evidentiary specificity and simply have the specific appearance of
reality. The same can be said for something as 'vague' as Haneke's _The
Piano Teacher_ and the rather horrendous rape scene therein. While I am
repulsed by the violence of the scene, I do not feel as though this image
is evidence of an actual rape. In other words, I wonder if the internal
construction of the narrative (that is the extra-diegetic construction of
the diegetic reality, an action taken on by the subject) does not work to
overcome any notion of 'indexicality.' The filmic image is fundamentally
different from the video image of a man in mask robbing the local 7-
Eleven, isn't it? Whereas the latter would be indexical of an actual
event, the former is indexical of a narrative structure. Does that mean
that indexicality plays into documentary narrative? Can indexicality
be 'turned on and off?' How much does indexicality depend on the larger,
structuring semiotical system of the 'cinema'?
Part of this comes from a philosophical issue I have with Peirce's
categories, in that I feel that the indexicality of the footprint is
inherently different from the situation of the photograph; the former is
positioned within the universal sphere of referentiality, an unending
frame of reference, and the latter is positioned complexly on the border
of the temporal present and the past...
Does anyone else have an opinion on this matter?
Best,
JohnAW
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