if there was a poetic cinema, a surreal cinema, a neo-realist cinema, perhaps we can see today a cinema that speaks to and is within a condition of an always being imaged environment. the name, a cinema of the immediate, which is a cinema of the intimate, a cinema that is always on, always imaging but not necessarily recording, names a condition of the network, a cinema that is so real time, so always on, it is not often recorded but simply as pervasive as the air.
this always on condition might be perceived to be below the level of the cinematic. it is too every day. it is as mclluhan would say an extension of perception, and almost invisible. this could not be cinema as cinema frames the shot, orchestrates the event, creates the event of seeing and narration.
yet isn’t this condition a new event for the cinema, an event that grows out of the cinematic, as television did from film, is not the network a new cinematic apparatus. in the network the cinematic event becomes very new, the event as constituted by the gaze, the shot, the cinematic apparatus.
in his new work, hi how are you guest 10437, this author sees the network and its seeing under the gaze of cinema and examines the network’s relay of sight and representation
though the network exceeds and devours the cinema, think only how godard used video to examine the cinema and then invent a new cinema for himself in his later career, here the cinema and its language plays back the network as recording, orchestrates recordings and examines what it is to make an image and represent a self in an always on world.
if the cinema constitutes terms of seeing what happens when the seer is seen and the seer sees the seeing, when all seers not only see but represent themselves to be seen when Off screen is always On Screen, some other screen.
If the network condition is to be on camera, to be always already public, how is one at the same time private and public, that is, how does one bring ones self alone to the network. a network that looks that is both private and desirable public. what is facebook after all, but the beckoning to be public, all of us, you, me, to be public.
in this work, a woman is always and never alone. it is an alone that is not quite alone with the network her stage, her witness, her audience, the network that brings the condition of a private with one’s self, in one’s self but public to the world, that the woman in quest becomes woman.
The story is simple, perhaps seemingly too simple which belies its complexity.
storyline….
a very different mise-en-scene
a classic hollywood film, joan of arc yet something very new
marc lafia 