I started reading this chapter with a dictionary and YouTube to help my understanding of this. I was reminded of the Rosalind Krauss essay within Landscape and I seem to have gone off at a complete tangent although now I have a greater understanding of the portrayal of cinematic time and some of the issues around indexing. I may need to revisit this essay at some point.
Two conceptions of the image
The chapter illustrates two different methods of portraying moments of time or photographic memories.
Titanic (1997) - "linear progression of structured moments" (Lister, M. 2013:22) life experiences are represented and then you die. Life has been frozen and flattened into a photograph. In this portrayal, visual representation is rational and cannot change. Settings and location give identity. Frozen moments in time are technologically complex but have no expressivity and spontaneity. Foucault - biopolitics - human body was bound to the world by mechanisms of representation.
Memento (2000) Film composed of 2 parallel sequences - black and white is chronological and colour is in reverse order, showing future past and future present. Photography in this film are "points of access that allow movement from one temporality to another following the topology of a band." (Lister, M. 2013:23) Time is a loop with blurred boundaries and was edited following an algorithm.
Memory here is an exploration of measurable time with cinematic time through photographs which depict time in crisis because it is not linear but is made up in several different ways. By placing photographs in this way, the meaning changes according to where it is placed in the sequence and location of the event in the narrative.
Is photography an archive and memory bank? Is it truthful? How photography is portrayed can be repetitive or uncertain and spontaneous. "Photography points in two directions at once; one side faces the objects, people and situations as they appear in the "real world" and is occupied with the representation of events by flattening their 4D space onto a 2D plane of the photograph.(Flusser 2011 as cited by Lister, M. 2013:25)The other side points towards photography's own condition of manufacturing, which is to say towards the repetition and serial reproduction of the photographic image." (Lister, M. 2013:25)
I have not seen Memento (2000), although watching Arrival (2016), it occurred to me that this film mixes up the chronology of time and depicts three types of time. The basis for the film is taken from "Story of your life" written by Ted Chiang, a sci fi writer. The opening scene uses cinematic blue and the main character cuddling a child. So symbolism suggests to the viewer that perhaps this child has died. The film then follows chronologically the life of Louise (main character) with cut backs periodically to the child's life. Half way through the film, Louise tells her daughter that her name is a palindrome (spelt the same way backwards and forwards) which is the structure of the film. It is revealed towards the end of the film that the child is in the future. The heptapods (aliens) which the main characters meet and interact with consider time differently. Their time is in crisis and non linear, having the power to see into the future which is transferred to Louise which is why the flashbacks she is experiencing are future time. The theme of this film for me was that life is a journey, not a destination and so perhaps it doesn't have to be represented in a linear fashion.
Genealogies of representation
Heidigger - modernity - "world becomes a picture and human being becomes a subject." (Lister, M. 2013:25) Truth is certainty of representing. In the past, (up until Descartes - philosopher in 1600's) representation was allegorical or metaphorical. After Descartes, representation gained the status of a scientific method of enquiry which produced reliable and repeatable results, guaranteeing truth.
The Western world thought that representation of an image was like a diagram which opened up possibilities of seeing the world differently. Humans are rational and can objectify the world, but representation would "establish the human subject as a rational being capable of objectifying the world, yet on the other hand it limits the ability to know the world only to those aspects of it that can be rationally represented" (Judovitz 1988:67 cited by Lister, M. 2013:)
Heidigger's "picture" actually means representation, knowledge, validation and rationalism.
In photography, Cartesian representation is truthful and scientific. Bazin suggests we accept what we see as the real object in time and space."
Photography has been re-contextualized into power and discipline. In 2005, photography was still accepted as an informal idea in which the world is divided through light and shapes the chemicals into an analogue print.
The porridge of the index
Digital photographs do not have the same cultural of linguistic properties as its analogue counterpart.
The two are different and the change from one to another allows theorists to stand back and consider the assumption and paradigms that are associated with analogue photography. Krauss. I had to read around indexing in more detail.
"Peirce defines the index as a category of signs that maintains a physical tie to its referent[...] e.g. Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs are very instructive because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects that they represent." (Schwartz, J. 2017)
This classification was too simple which led to confusion. Is there an indexical relationship within digital mediums? Photography is now more down to the algorithm of the data collected by the camera. Pixels can be manipulated so truth can be questioned. Although even analogue photography was not always truthful.
Where is the image once it has been uploaded to the internet?
References
Lister, M. (ed.) (2013) The digital image in photographic culture: Algorithmic photography and the crisis of representation. Abingdon: Routledge
Schwartz. J. (2017) Is a photograph still an index if it's on the internet? Available at: http://dismagazine.com/discussion/41736/a-discursive-mask/ [last accessed 31/01/2017]
Arrival (2016) directed by Dennis Villneuve [streamed] 21 laps entertainment, Lava Bear films USA [last accessed 31/01/2017]
Canfield, J. (2016) Arrival's ending explained [online] available at: http://screenrant.com/arrival-movie-2016-ending-time-explained/ [last accessed 31/01/2017]
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