LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology. It needs no ambient light, nor the guidance of the human eye to capture and reproduce a likeness of the world around us. Although LiDAR generates a constant stream of technical literature, LiDAR images, once envisaged for their aesthetic and expressive value, seem to call for alternative modes of analysis. How do we approach the fast-expanding archive of scanner images? How do we adequately describe the intriguing, spectral visualizations that its (...) blind process of recording produces? Following a general introduction, I look at Anouk De Clerk’s filmThing(2013), a work entirely comprised of LiDAR images. De Clerk encourages us to envisage LiDAR counterintuitively, not as the product of technological novelty, but as part of an interdisciplinary history of the arts. (shrink)

A child of the era of decolonization, Claire Denis grew up in various regions of France’s subSaharan colonial lands, and was brought back to the ‘métropole’ as a teenager in the 1960s.She has thus had a double practice of foreignness, abroad, and in her ‘own’ country, whichshe did not know and where, in similar yet fundamentally different ways than in Africa, shefelt like an outsider again. As the daughter of a colonial administrator – a childhoodbeautifully evoked in her first feature, (...) Chocolat – she had stood as a highly visibleembodiment of the Western presence on colonial soil. On her return to France, she wouldlive through the more banal experience of becoming an invisible intruder, an exile at‘home’– a theme explored in her subsequent works. From the start, Denisthus drew on her personal knowledge of feeling rootless to explore issues that haveremained at the heart of her filmmaking: the deeply perplexing questions of identity andalienation, assimilation and rejection, desire and fear inseparable from the post-colonialmalaise that affects France with particular acuteness. (shrink)

While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films – from Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, to Brian De Palma's Obsession, and David Lynch's Mulholland Dr.. What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a nightmare. But it is also a (...) shrewdly reflexive film that haunts filmmakers, critics, and artists alike, raising fundamental questions about the ontology of moving images and the regime of fascination that churns them out. Douglas Gordon's Feature Film, D.N. Rodowick's The Wanderers, and Lynn Hershman's VertiGhost are contemporary examples of how the appropriation and contemplation of some the film's most iconic motifs, themes and strategies ask us to rethink the relation of fetishism to fabulation, and supplementarity to dissimulation and social engineering. Feature Film, The Wanderers, and VertiGhost are supplementary works, but like the original film they are about duplicity, doppelgänger, and dissimulation. What interests us is how they challenge the authority over, or even proximity to, that which returns in the form of the supplement. And ultimately, attaching themselves to the chain of forgers and forgeries, these supplementary works take their place in the vertiginous sequence of substitutions the film established: a neat allegory for a reign of the digital ghosting that Hitchcock could never have anticipated. (shrink)

One of the most fascinating phenomena in contemporary art cinema is the re-emergence of a corporeal cinema, that is, of filmmaking practices that give precedence to cinema as the medium of the senses. This article thus explores trends of filmmaking and film theorizing where the experience of cinema is conceived as a unique combination of sensation and thought, of affect and reflection. It argues that, reconnecting with a certain tradition of French film theory in particular, contemporary French cinema offers a (...) point in case: a large collection of recently released French films typify this willingness to explore cinema's unique capacity to move us both viscerally and intellectually. In turn, the article suggests that such films, envisaged as forms of embodied thought, offer alternative ways, beyond that of mere appropriation and consumption, of envisaging the relationship of subjects to art, and, by extension, of subjects to objective world. (shrink)