THIS SURFACE ILLUSION
ISSUE #01
IT’S ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE
And I think that you are right. Probably we are the two big blasphemers of our time, along with a couple of other friends of ours like Agamben and some others. So let’s develop this idea of bad conscience. I take my cue from that old fashioned good French Marxist who said “Let us make the proletariat a bad name.” There is something of negative ethics in it. It’s not about giving a positive message; it’s about giving up your illusions about your situation about identifying with something that you are clearly not, if only at a
symbolic level. So if you look at what I would call the fake, pseudo-exceptionalist culture in cinema (the new special effect culture) it is so easy to look at it as just a surface illusion. But in doing so, you simply adopt one of its own positions: that there is an authenticreal cinema which has been corrupted by this surface illusion. My point is rather that you should simply fully identify with this surface illusion as simply an image that you can project your fantasy on, and then be ready to accept all the consequences.
WE ARE NONETHELESS FASCINATED TEXT FROM AN AI GENERATED INFINITE CONVERSATION BETWEEN WERNER HERZOG AND SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK IN CONVERSATION INFINITECONVERSATION.COM
I follow you very closely here and I can only agree totally. But I have to add something: It is not only hypnosis or trance. It is much more dangerous than that. I would say, where philosophy is trying toreach us, where it touches something inside usis the place where cinema already has been for a long time. At least for me, it’s clear. And that makes me nervous. I think, with me, some part of my thinking will be best expressed in films.
In literature, all these clowns and fools were invented, who were obviously ridiculous. But in cinema, no one has ever really looked at stupidity. I keep a question in mind: How stupid can a human being be? I think the answer lies in cinema. For example, I think that Hitchcock, in a way, with Psycho, already represents this.
Yes, it’s not just the question of truth.
One is tempted to read Hitchcock in a Kantian way , nothing happens but we are nonetheless fascinated.
There are other questions I would like to address in film.
There is a disturbing experience that is purely formal.
For example, the question of stupidity.
And I think it’s not even so far from Lacan’s idea of the gaze without a subject.
Stupidity is an extraordinary phenomenon. And up to now, we almost never really looked at it. We tried, but obviously we do not yet know how to do it.
That’s the cinema effect. Yes, I think it’s much more dangerous than we think.
FOR THE FIRST TIME, I UNDERSTOOD SOMETHING: IT’S NOT THAT THEY WERE LAUGHING AT HOW STUPID THE STORY WAS BUT THEY WERE THERE. IT’S A JUMP INTO A DIFFERENT DIMENSION.
But I cannot deprive myself of it.
A DREAM YOU CANNOT ESCAPE FROM And the point is that even a simpleHitchcock film would have an extremely traumatic impact.
Hitchcock is asking a much more radical question: Whathappens when you are fully possessed by an obsession?
It would be extremely disturbing. You know, people who complain about my obsessionwith Hitchcock, “Come on, it is just cinema”do not understand what I am talking about.
A dream that you cannot escape from.
I tell them, first watch a Hitchcock film, thencome back and tell me that it’s just cinema.For example, in one of the mostimpressive moments of Hitchcock there is no murderno violence at all. In Vertigo, James Stewart is a private detective, a controlsspecialist, he follows women whom their husbands suspect are unfaithful. And then he gets obsessed by this blonde woman.Hitchcock is not simply saying “Look how crazy he is, why doesn’t he get it?”. No!
Where, in a way, reality disappears. In other words, reality itself turns into a dream. There is no external reality. Reality becomes a kind of hallucination. And a Hitchcock film, up to a point, works through the very process of psychoanalysis.
AND YOU KNOW, I LOVE NATURE, TOO. I HAVE A BIG PROBLEM WITH “NATURE FILMS”, BECAUSE I HATE ALL THESE BEAUTIFUL IMAGES THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH NATURE.
ELIZABETH K & MACHINE