Is this the Landscape of The Hunger Games?

Inference and Reference

In 1981 during a public presentation in Paris at La Cinémathèque Française, Jean Rouch said the following:

“I am an ethnographer and a filmmaker. I have discovered that there is no difference between documentary films and fiction films. The cinema, which is already an art of the double, which presents us with a constant movement from reality to the imaginary, could best be characterized as a cultural configuration which balances between various conceptual universes. In all of this the last thing to worry about is whether reality as such has been lost in the process of creation.” [i]

Lest Rouch be misinterpreted by purists of the documentary genre he went on to say that as a filmmaker he creates the realities he films. He sees himself as a ‘metteur en scène’ as well as someone who has to improvise everything from camera angle to camera movement during the shooting of a film. This process is inspired by the kind of personal choices which inevitably rely upon the imagination of the filmmaker. The key to Rouch's approach here is the role which he sees artifice playing in the construction of any image or as he put it, the way the filmmaking process irrespective of genre is ultimately a sharing of dreams at the level of production and performance. Rouch's statement can be seen as a counterpoint to efforts on the part of documentary filmmakers to overinvest in the realist enterprise. It could also point the way to an examination of why images which “look” real have such a seductive appeal. Most importantly what Rouch suggested is that the image doesn't play as important a role in the production of meaning as filmmakers would like to believe. In much the same manner as Chris Marker in “Sans Soleil,” Rouch's statement questions the place of referentiality within the documentary form and to some degree looks outside of the image for an understanding not only of the message but of its relationship to performance and projection. 

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[i]From documents presented at the celebrations for the 50ieth anniversary of the National Film Board in June of 1989.

Thinking by Inference

To varying degrees, images have always been integral parts of human efforts to construct livable environments. They have always helped shape and form the spaces we inhabit whether they took the form of drawings, markings or pictures in caves or defined the architecture of churches and museums.

Today, as images and screens have become more and more prevalent, they have begun to redefine human action and human subjectivity in even more sophisticated ways than in the past. The extension of image use into digital technologies has further heightened not only their importance but their role as mediators of human experiences in general.

Interestingly, digital technologies rely on inferential thinking. They do not so much make the real come to life as they create an awareness of the many different planes on which our perceptions of the real depend. One of the best examples of this is a CD player and the CD’s themselves. One may infer that a particular CD will play a certain sound and that inference will have a great deal to do with the experience. The properties of the CD that generate the inferential process are not physically apparent either on the CD or even when the CD disappears into a player. In other words, we begin the act of listening within a virtual space of expectation devoid of sensory stimulation yet flush with internal dialogues and feelings and expectations. The laser that helps to generate the sound is invisible. The electric current that energizes the music, gives it a shape and broadcasts it to us is also invisible. Yet, the expectations remain constant. Inferential thinking is at the heart of digital technologies and I will be exploring this mode of thought in greater detail over the coming months. 

Music Videos

To grasp with the ear and the eye is an embodied act. The activity of listening to music or watching a music video goes far beyond "presentation" and into something far more complex that connects our bodies to the screens we watch. 

Music videos combine the many different elements of sound and picture into images. The videos represent the music and they picture bodies that dance — they display not only the physicality of musical creation, but also the potential of audience performance. Music videos, especially the good ones by groups like R.E.M. bring music into the foreground, neither a prop for sight, nor just an aural experience.

They create a space for the performance of meaning, which exceeds and often undermines the mediating layers of image projection. It is the dancing body which music videos call out to, that body which twists and turns, sweats and laughs. It is the body on a vast dance floor that from a distance appears to be one of many, just a cog in a machine, the stuttered movements of Janet and Michael Jackson. But, taken down to the individual, to the release of energy, the release of the body from its everyday constraints, there is suddenly an explosion of sexuality.

This is the haunting look of rock star after rock star straight into the camera, into the living room, beckoning, almost begging for the bodies who watch to join the scene, the stage, the studio. Join us as we dance! The ritualization is so intense that the television screen cannot contain what it shows. Out of this explosion comes the energy of Lolapalooza and the community of Deadheads and the swaying seemingly uniform rhythms of thousands of audiences the world over. Embodied and empowered because of images and sounds.

Images

Images are the “face” of technology at work. Images are evidence of our needs, and windows into our history. They are the tools that we use to explore the world around us. From the start, the power of the television image has been dependent upon our need to explore its surface, not only at the level of form and content, but through touch and smell and sound. We do this by stretching images into our daily lives and thereby giving images volume and form. Screens are only a small part of the ecology that defines imageworlds.

Leadership in Art and Design

This talk was presented at the European League of Institutes of Art, Leadership Symposium held at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in December of 2011.

Designing the Future: Leadership in the 21st Century - Ron Burnett from Emily Carr University on Vimeo