Deleuze was saying that, considering the separation from the eye and the hand in Francis Bacon’s thinking, this haptic vision will occur “every time that strict subordination in one direction or the other, relaxed subordination or virtual connection between the eye and the hand will cease to exist, and when the vision itself discovers within itself a function of the touch that is proper to it, that solely belongs to it and differs from its optical function”9. The third eye Thus, if the cinema of Stan Brakhage, a great figure of the underground American cinema, and his filmic gestures in which it is the entire body that sees, are well-known, André Almuro’s are less familiar. Film-maker and composer, together with Jean-Luc Guionnet, he invented a haptic cinema where the camera was no longer guided by the eye, but only by the arm of those who acted and who were being filmed at the same time. At the core of the passionate ceremonies whose cosmic dimension would manifest through homoerotic rituals, Almuro’s films were a unique experience of organic vision, penetrating the bodies and the adjustments of his desire. In the light of the mineral bodily surfaces, in the sculptural shiver of the encounter, André Almuro resorted to a “third eye” that explored tactility, not a blind eye, but one emancipated from visual subordination to the universe of the touch. André Almuro said the starting point for a painter should be the most subjective body: camera at fist (literally), “affective landscapes”, revealing intensities and energies of corporal interventions. His haptic cinema illustrated a kinesthetic way of knowing the world, and film became a proof of transformation for the one performing it. This “kinetic organicity” would then design landscapes created by the “pineal” eye10. Bill Viola’s The passing (1991) – a parable of the multiple crossings between life and death –, would emerge as the closest investigation possible of the nocturnal breathing and of the ultra subjective vision: he installed a camera on his head and video recorded his sleep. The endless contingencies in between microcosms and macrocosms, sometimes dissolving the vision in the materiality of the video granularity, sometimes in an oceanic vision, would absorb perspectivist structure of the gaze until the latter disappears. These scalar variations allowed the switch of the optical plan to the haptic. The blind spot Directly connected to the Californian feminist movement of the ‘60s-’70s, Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer created their first films following the critical heritage of Stan Brakhage. They were working to produce cinema that associates sight and feeling, that brings vision closer to sensation, liberating itself from the masculine gaze. Carolee Schneemann produced Fuses (1967) in the middle of a sexual spree with her companion, James Teeney. The device in Fuses dissolves the distribution of roles both in front of and behind the camera (and, as well, declines the woman as an object of watching), merging the shots from Schneemann’s point of view with Teeney’s: no point of view could then actually be assigned. The film is then used in a very concrete form, through different media: grattage, painting, “physical aggression” of the film (seen as the second skin). Californian producer Barbara Hammer’s project succeeded in escaping the famous “male gaze”, creating “originless images”. Dyketactics (1971) explores new sensual, emotional, and mental areas, inventing an organless, deterritorialized body. Her deconstruction of the masculine representations of carnal experience in cinema undergoes an entire phenomenology of experience. Finally, having settled in the Cévennes along with the autists, French writer Fernand Deligny (1913-1996) supported the effort to create cinema that is equivalent to wordless language: “refractory to symbolical domestication” and as close as possible to the autistic world. He invented the verb “to camer”11 as a replacement for “filming”, a manifest term, indicating the importance of an archeology of the technologies of representation. “Camering” is a means of withdrawing from the screenplay and from history as a stance on colonialism, “camering” is like “leering” or “squinting”, the way the autistic children see. “Camering”, that is, to represent the images produced from the condition of a minority which explores the “possibilities of watching”, and to break with an objective dimension in order to produce other potential spectators. “What a nice verb, to squint. It would be like two oculars, not used for perceiving the outlines; two oculars, like two memories, even if he who films would have something like an eye that lingers on, looking for anything human outside the script-like scene. One should invent the cross-eyed camera”12, wrote Fernand Deligny.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon. La logique de la sensation, seconde édition, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1972. 10. In 2002, André Almuro publishes “L’oeil Pinéal, Pour une cinégraphie” at Paris-Expérimental. The third eye (also called “interior eye” or “soul eye”) is a mystical and esoteric metaphor that indicates, beyond physical eyes, a third instance of watching, that of self awareness. In some traditions, the third eye is symbolically placed on the forehead, between the eyebrows. Certain authors have thus suggested that this third eye designates in fact the pineal gland, located between the two brain hemispheres. (Wikipedia definition) 11. “Camering would consist in respecting that which doesn’t want to say anything, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t address itself, in other words, abdicates from symbolic domestication (…)” Fernand Deligny, “Camérer”, Caméra/Stylo, n°4, September 1983 12. Ibid.
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