Image, Death, Memory: Imaginary Dialogues

Raúl Ruiz, Life is a Dream (still), 1987.

We are pleased to publish a few excerpts from “L’image, la mort, la mémoire: dialogues imaginaires,” a collaboratively authored text by the legendary Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz and the French philosopher Jean-Louis Schefer, originally published in the experimental film journal Ça Cinéma in 1980 and translated for Film Notes by Ethan Spigland. Written in the form of fragmentary dialogues and creative propositions, the text explores connections between cinema, the structures of memory, and the logic of dreams.1

sequences

A.A.: Increasingly, dreams come to us already edited and mixed, like sequences from a finished film. What could have produced this prosthesis in our memory? Generally, in these sequences, close-ups alternate with long shots. (In most cases, the close-ups correspond to faces.)

N.N.: But doesn't this dictatorship of the articulated image above all affect the desire to move, which is supplemented by the desire to be there before the events occur? Indeed, the desire to move would instead provoke a labyrinthine effect, since we enter zones, each of which is a replica of the one we just passed through.

A.A.: But these zones are impossible to determine, since they are linked together by our movement within the dream.

N.N.: And furthermore, the labyrinthine effect on which the interest of what happens in a film depends is characterized by being impossible to recall piece by piece. In the end, the only thing we remember is this alternation of close-ups and long shots.

A.A.: That would mean that this basic sequence would be merely the indispensable articulation that would allow us to separate ourselves from ourselves and the setting, while they (ourselves and the setting) would persist, thanks to the faith that despite this double forgetting the world remains intact.

N.N.: But this sequence is merely the trap of the amnesiac, because between the close-ups and the long shots there is necessarily an abyss, a conventional forgetting.

A.A.: Indeed, this forgetting allows us to dream (see) in continuity—this provisional continuity of the facts we accept.

N.N.: Even before cinema, we dreamed like that.

A.A.: Indeed, if cinema hadn't existed, we would have had to invent it.

N.N.: So even the cinematic framing (1/66) has always existed?

A.A.: Certainly. Framing is simply the axiomatization of the halo. This halo, which, moreover, is a constituent of memory (it’s a way of manifesting what I forget in what I remember). This halo, moreover, has been crudely translated by some filmmakers, through the use of diffusion and soft-focus. But it is much closer to a prism.

N.N.: This modular memory began to gain ground with the loss of the religious character of memory.

A.A.: But we could develop a technique by which we could graft personal memories onto impersonal ones.

N.N.: Indeed. Between two close-ups of our own, we can perfectly well graft two long shots that come from elsewhere. However, we have not yet developed a technique that would allow us to place two foreign close-ups between two long shots of our own. When that happens, anything will be possible.

-R.R.

it's only a reflection

This doesn't prove that it's your image.

This proves that what this image testifies to (is memory and anamorphosis) took place. That it took place in a world is therefore already only the image taken from a past event in a world whose identity with yours can be suspected (never proven).

This original world is perhaps only intended to allow the birth of images that took place and are viewed in your universe: your universe does not produce images but the duration of your death.

But your death and your adventure are therefore what took place in the world where you can no longer experience them (and is this world the intact memory of the time that has just passed?).

The montage and combination of different images composes or enters into a sequence (an archetypal and transfinite series) that is credible because it creates a “continent” before creating a “figure" or “meaning”; and ultimately credible because of the supposition of the origin of this world separated from ours by a night (like a dream continent): the relationship between these two worlds is metaphysics. Is this the same relationship that the perpetual present maintains with past time?

-J.L.S.

spectator

Undoubtedly, we can only account for the spectator through a paradoxical position, and not simply by placing him within the spectacle. This man invents a position; he inventories within himself the material of unknown affects. These are, for example, the proportions of what he must grasp (of what he can only grasp) as a world that will come to life differently than would a painting or a figurative composition.

And this is called the world—that whose shape constantly changes—however, it lacks a pole of reference, an invariant, and a scale. As if a first degree of existence were attached solely to a variation of proportions.

This absence of proportions would therefore be constitutive of this world. Not that it is a matter, through an unreferenced instance, of observing its new appearance or its changed face. A disquiet, which is not that of resemblance, nor simply its doubt, has been added for a moment to its appearance.

It would therefore be illusory to imagine that simply enlarging a frontal image, that of an amputated detail, as if cut to the quick in the body of a sign or an object remaining entirely invisible, could lead to something of this order; if, first of all, this absence of proportions (that is, that which does not allow a filmed sequence or scene to be reduced to a figurative sequence, the latter being first precisely defined by an order or structure of proportions), this world, this mutilated space, and this fragment of a scene are not entirely visible. I can therefore imagine that something is accomplished in their schematism; that a world, however, or because of this, is outlined in them, that an intention passes through them like a meaning.

However, I am also assured that there is not a scene there before which I construct my interpretation, data demanding my freedom to accomplish their figures in me like destiny, as I sometimes do in front of a painting. Nothing therefore demands like the limit of accomplishment of my death and the recognition of another world by this immediately impossible death (as neither its mad demand nor this response anticipated by the difficulty of defining the visible outside of me)—by these different movements, or indeed by these different moments of a contemplation I do not cease, by my knowledge, my anxiety or my pleasure to substitute myself for any other possible interpreter of the painting. Moreover, I do not cease to be able to become its sublime instance.

Therefore, it is contrary to all that that I first know (and grasp) this: looking at this film, that is to say, a given detail, angle, or shot, I am not an instance of interpretation, nor am I already framed, as in front of a painting (where distance does not vary the proportions of the figures, and from which there even exists an ideal point of vision), to assure myself of the visible by another consciousness of the mastery of the proportions of my body.

Truth be told, in this sense, if the filmic world cannot require a type of accommodation that makes its strangeness and its essential improportionality disappear, I can maintain that it is not, strictly speaking, the object of a regulated or constant perception, that it perhaps takes as its object the unconscious thought in me that is in all perception.

But is it therefore by what this world lacks, like its secret proportion, that I nevertheless recognize it in its aspect and in its meaning without needing to interpret it? Do I recognize this as a world by its particular way of hiding the world? of trafficking, mutilating, or representing time? (as if the ultimate reality of these images was already to make us live time).

Do I recognize this place where I have never been, not even in dreams, by this way, which is nevertheless an uncertain idea in me, of hiding time? That is to say, a hint of a constant flux of action elsewhere, more banal, more tragic, less colorful, without reply? Do I recognize it by this way in which all the waiting and the heavy tragedy of life, or its absolute indifference, are suspended within me? And so I watch this film as if, through it, I would end up seeing any nameless man breathe without offering me a spectacle (and as if only the most exaggeratedly filmed or staged acts, because they take a greater syncopation of time, manage to become transparent to that kind of absent proportion that nevertheless accomplishes them for our eyes).

But what is missing is not the sublime, nor is it the assurance of life itself; it is a pole of the image which, if it were within it, would render it invisible.

Is there, for example, an exchange of the visible between the figures and me who is watching them? And am I not what grants the image such credibility, because I remain more visible than it (because, for example, my inner life, which nevertheless gives rise to no scene, remains insistently the perfectly untranslatable secret of what I see)?

And is it the same effect by which the dialogue of the film (more than the lines in theater) leaves me mute, that is to say, speaks in my place and makes the hope of meaning come out of me without teaching me any language?

-J.L.S.

of place

Place is that by virtue of which one thing can be in another.

No sense perceives place, but its figure.

The figure of place embraces the container and the contained.

Just as the understanding knows the subject by the species, so it knows place by the figure.

Place is that by which one thing can be in another place.

The angle is in the place and the place in the angle.

Just as individuals are in species, substances are in the place.

Given that place is an accident, no accident occupies a place.

Place does not grow. It is bodies that grow.

Place serves to place, as does color.

The very place where the hammer strikes a nail is in the hammer and in the nail.

If place were divisible, its divisibility would not occupy a place.

There is no place without a body.

If there were a place without a body in nature, it would mean that void exists.

of the object

The object is the repose of the power that desires it.

In the will, no object is greater than the loved object.

The greater the object, the greater the power.

Visibility is an object from which visible power removes the similarity of what one sees

and of itself.

on figure

Movement from one place to another is the figure of movement.

A lie is the figure of truth.

The castle is the figure of fear.

Day is the figure of paradise.

The son is the figure of the father.

The effect is the figure of the cause.

on color

There is no simple color that is visible.

All colors have a color in common.

Every color has a quantity of its own.

There are as many colors as there are things.

on similarity

Similarity cannot be equal to itself. It is always the image of something else.

All things have a tendency to be similar to each other.

Only spheres are truly similar to each other.

Every impression provokes a similarity.

dissimilarity

Dissimilarity is habit deprived of similarity.

We weep before dissimilarities and burst out laughing before similarities.

The relationship between dissimilarity and similarity is called passion.

Dissimilarity is a place where all things are invisible.

-R.R.

propositions

the image can be seen by what is missing in it.

something is missing that is constitutive of it (allows it to hide the world in which we are not by a screen of figures but by time).

if what is missing were in it, the image (of which we are a part: the virtual pole or the ghost) would be invisible.

therefore, there exists a spectacle of visible man: it is the awareness of the night of the inner life that makes a spectacle possible.

-J.L.S.

A. Have you ever looked into a miniature mirror or seen the reflection of your face in the pupil of another's eye?

E.: Quite often.

A. Why does it appear so much smaller than it really is?

E. What do you hope? That it will look larger than the mirror that reflects it?

A.: Must images of bodies necessarily be small, then, if the bodies that reflect them are also small?

E. Inevitably!

A.: But if the soul is contained in a space no larger than that of the body, how can images as considerable as cities or vast landscapes, or any other enormous thing imaginable, be reflected in it? I would like you to consider more carefully the magnitude and multiplicity of the objects contained in our memory, or more precisely, in our soul. How vast, how deep, how immense must the soul be, then, to embrace all these things! Yet our premises seemed to show that it could not be larger than the body.

-R.R.

Time therefore has no images, but rather different realities; it is an arrow, a river, a ball originating in our chest and flying away from us.

What we strictly call images of time are not applications of sections of movement, that is, measurements of space as possibilities of trajectories. More precisely, and in their exactitude, they are modular schemes of vision; these visions are without object or, in other words, their objects are pre-corporeal. Nor does memory make them objects, except through this figurative misunderstanding whose effigy's force (as in a dream), rather than recalling it, defies the mobility of this inner life which is made only of time, even though its former truth must have been such: the perception of an object or event that memory attempts to renew by “framing” a scene—was it not taken by a disproportionate consciousness, was it not first the disproportion with which every fact was endowed.

Such disproportion in the memory of perceptions is not primarily an optical fact; it explains that affects emerge beyond the figurative frame of objects; they are therefore their truth, their intention, the order of their selection that time encrusts in them and that accompanies them with their own difference of scale. Yet they are merely a certification of the degree of existence these perceptions have attained: up to the point where memory objects preserve the sense of individual time, which is measured directly by affects, by their halos.

What does cinema do with this (in its greatest generality of effects, and if we already consider the particularity of perceptual phenomena)? It gives in images a precedence of affects (that is, of unstructured feelings) over the legibility of images: like a palpation of meaning so oriented that it never provides anything but the only possible image of a forgotten past. What is forgotten therefore is the otherness of the native world of these images; it does not provide representations of this.

If cinema renders visible the effect of the world's otherness, it reveals the very principle of this otherness, not as something meaningful, but as something sensible, which is the genesis of the soul of the world. That is why the world in which our actions, work, joy, or sorrow take place is, despite everything and in its most immediate data, the least susceptible to the suspicion of a generalized meaning. And yet, this meaning, alone capable of being credited to a soul, attributable to an animus (to a movement and an intention), in fact never ceases to signify, that is, never ceases to be desirable.

And desire? it is only the credit of intention and otherness which begins by clothing every object with this first truth of my desire. This is why, in a tournament, the knight appears before his lady in armor and bearing a distinctive shield—it is also why love is blind.

If meaning is possible in cinema, it is therefore not based on iconic structures but because, unlike icons, it constitutes continents of continuous intentions (this is the cinematic continuum) beyond the ruptures of shots and sequences. This continuum is a continuum of alterity, that is, of meaning, where resemblance refers not to a primary object but to our power of resemblance or imitation.

This power of resemblance is experienced as the principle of our alterity, in other words, as an indefinite and unlimited potential resemblance. This is not only the resource of our imagination, but the knowledge that our unlived potential (sentimental, heroic, criminal) continues to grow in the living, just as, like our consciousness, the invisible part of our body continues to grow as long as we live.

The shock of any film is our potentiality (proportional to its unreality) of resemblance to what moves us then, that is, to the antecedence of affects over their verifiability in acts. The idea of our resemblance comes only from these practically unverifiable acts, because they have become nothing more than a spectacle. They would therefore only address this body, which is within us a body without action. I believe it to be fickle rather than symbolic for the reason that it has a proportion, a quantity within us rather than being a part of a structure. It is measured in the very proportion of time that we make our most intimate life. Its exterior is not imaginary: it is the deceptive spectacle that restores a phantom of that time to the deceptive spectacle of visible man.

Cinema is the memory of time not lived.

-J.L.S.