Una A tectonic aesthetics. Individuational logics in cinematographic images.

Abstract

This article is interested in the individuational logics that surround images, specifically in the kind of cinematographic images that we identify as “classical”. In order to do that, I will start with the analysis of two cinematographic techniques known as shot-and-reverse-shot cutting and long take or sequence shot. The goal of the article would be to appreciate, in both cases, the enactment of the cinematographic image’s most fundamental element in its classical production: the frame. Starting from this technical element, I will make a characterization of these only to find a kind of aesthetics that we could call correlationist, since the camera works as an absolute conscience which chooses and limits its own object while it gives existence to it. Then, by reviewing the cinema of Ben Rivers, I will examine whether it’s possible to detach cinema from this strictly humanist individuating logic, in order to imagine a possible post-humanist cinema that would account for other kinds of existences without reducing them to a cinematographic or, in this case, humanist point of view.