Markos Hadjioannou

This article originates from a certain philosophical interest in one of cinema’s most elemental features: its dark side. Cinema is a medium technologically constructed as a constant interplay between light and darkness, between the opening and closure of camera and projector shutters, between the control of quantities of light waves within dark chambers and the chemical reaction of light-sensitive surfaces to these waves or their electronic recording by sensors, between bright screens and dark theaters. Beyond the technological, cinema is also about narratives, narratives that, at times, tell stories about dark characters, about sinister and evil antagonists that creep out of murky shadows uninvited and unexpected, who appear at night to haunt our dreams and affect the calmness of our day. It is about stories with entities who gain their forbidding powers in the gloomy veils of the night that offers them protection from the luminosity of the day; and about people who conspire for the creation of a new reality while hidden inside the shielding opaqueness of the night. What all this goes to say is that darkness and the night—or rather, the darkness of the night—becomes a connecting feature that moves us from the technicity of the medium to its produced works and their cultural reception, expressing an immanence within cinema’s own reality. [...] It is with this in mind that I will turn to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and especially his 1943 film "Shadow of a Doubt," which is a wonderful example of Hitchcock’s directorial mastery, presenting us with an interesting comment on the film production of the time. As I will discuss further on, by bringing the debauched masculine agency of film noir head to head with the tormented feminine desire of the American melodrama, Hitchcock shows us that the conceptual specificities of women and men, chaos and order, and night and day can be overturned. In fact, repeating this approach in a number of his films, Hitchcock has presented us with a series of tormented female and criminal male characters that seek to disclose a quite different version of the nocturnal and the diurnal—that is, a different version of temporality where genre and gender relations do not fit within the fixed dualities of binary structures.

ABSTRACT Where theatre was not dependent on a projector and screen for the manifestation of its fictitious worlds, cinema had to rely on such equipment for its representation of moving photographic images. In so doing, cinema could achieve what theatre could only allude to with the help ...

This article considers Alfred Hitchcock’s work in relation to the connotations of “fallacy” within conventional settings of modern Western society. Focusing on two films, Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window (1954), we point to the phenomenon of the incidental push that leads toward an inextricable entanglement of characters, events, and psychic forces in what appear to be logical courses of action. We name this push “the Hitchcockian nudge.”

This article considers Alfred Hitchcock’s work in relation to the connotations of “fallacy” within conventional settings of modern Western society. Focusing on two films, Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window (1954), we point to the phenomenon of the incidental push that leads toward an inextricable entanglement of characters, events, and psychic forces in what appear to be logical courses of action. We name this push “the Hitchcockian nudge.”

""Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, From Light to Byte investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. Markos Hadjioannou asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the technological shift within media archaeologies. Hadjioannou turns to the technical basis of the image as his first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, he explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. He observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace. Throughout this work Hadjioannou examines how the two technologies set themselves up with reference to reality, physicality, spatiality, and temporality, and he concludes that the question concerning digital cinema is ultimately one of ethical implications—a question, that is, of the individual’s ability to respond to the image of the world.""

This voice-body synchronicity—cinema’s audiovisual unity—
points to the medium’s act of narrating reality by way of anchoring
the body within the world, creating a mediated body-image as a representational icon of reality, as a reality effect of which the sounds
of the voice are but an expansion. Nevertheless, the argument that
I will develop in this essay is that cinema does not simply mediate a representation of sound and image—that is, it is not simply an audiovisual medium, as if voice as sound (the sonic) and body as image
(the iconic) were immediately concurrent effects of a directly communicated stimulus. Rather, in mediating, cinema in fact mediates
the continually renewed and renewable interactive relationship
within which the sonic and the iconic are placed every time, where
voice and body, sound and image, and technology and reality are
interrelated in the creation of the world screened: mediation as a
son/iconic construct.

Seen this way, cinema can be understood to not simply erase
the distinction between the sonic and the iconic in its creation of
the cinematic world. That is, cinematic mediation does not merely
create a narrative of unity in accordance with the logic of much
mainstream work that tends to be invested in a desire to naturalize,
as much as possible, the constructedness of the world represented
onscreen. Instead, cinema’s medial power—its automatism, as Stanley
Cavell would describe it in _The World Viewed_—is to enable a foregrounding of the interrelational codependence and disjuncture
of the son/iconic, presenting the charged interactivity between
the two entangled elements.3 Interested in the disjunction that
this entanglement enables, I will explore the particular dynamic
potential of the son/iconic discord with reference to documentary
cinema and with specifi c attention to Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012
performative documentary _The Act of Killing_.

This article originates from a certain philosophical interest in one of cinema’s most elemental features: its dark side. Cinema is a medium technologically constructed as a constant interplay between light and
darkness, between the opening and closure of camera and projector shutters, between the control of quantities of light waves within dark chambers and the chemical reaction of light-sensitive surfaces to these
waves or their electronic recording by sensors, between bright screens and dark theaters. Beyond the technological, cinema is also about narratives,
narratives that, at times, tell stories about dark characters, about sinister and evil antagonists that creep out of murky shadows uninvited and unexpected, who appear at night to haunt our dreams
and affect the calmness of our day. It is about stories with entities who gain their forbidding powers in the gloomy veils of the night that offers
them protection from the luminosity of the day; and about people who conspire for the creation of a new reality while hidden inside the shielding
opaqueness of the night. What all this goes to say is that darkness and the night—or rather, the darkness of the night—becomes a connecting feature that moves us from the technicity of the medium to its produced works and their cultural reception, expressing an immanence within cinema’s own reality. [...] It is with this in mind that I will turn to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, and especially his 1943 film "Shadow of a Doubt," which is a wonderful example of Hitchcock’s directorial mastery, presenting us with an interesting comment on the film production of the time. As I will discuss further on, by bringing the debauched masculine agency of film noir head to head with the tormented feminine desire of the American melodrama, Hitchcock shows us that the conceptual specificities of women and men, chaos and order, and night and day can be overturned. In fact, repeating this approach in a number of his films, Hitchcock has
presented us with a series of tormented female and criminal male characters that seek to disclose a quite different version of the nocturnal and the diurnal—that is, a different version of temporality where genre and gender relations do not fit within the fixed dualities of binary structures.

In line with the dynamic creativity exposed by Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy, this essay addresses the position of reality in the cinematic image. The focus is Ari Folman’s animated documentary _Vals Im Bashir/Waltz with Bashir_ (2008), a mesmerising movie that triggers anew the debate regarding the documentarian’s treatment of the world. Through the creative practice of Folman’s vision, where the world documented is also animated, this essay questions a common assertion regarding the world of non-fiction cinema, placing this type of filmmaking within the uniqueness of Deleuze’s approach to reality in cinema. What becomes central to the discussion is the impossibility of a clear opposition between fiction and non-fiction, and, most importantly, the question of what this means for the figure of reality within the cinematic image.

Where theatre was not dependent on a projector and screen for the manifestation of its fictitious worlds, cinema had to rely on such equipment for its representation of moving photographic images. In so doing, cinema could achieve what theatre could only allude to with the help of costumes, set design and the general consensus of the audience: a representation of the world itself. Nevertheless, this ability of cinematicity could only be achieved at the price of a temporal and existential disjunction between actor and spectator a matter that did not occur in theatre as a result of its liveness. What happens, though, when the two media are brought together; when theatre's stage becomes the backstage for cinema, and cinema's construction is a live performance? This article analyses Katie Mitchell's intermedial performance some trace of her (2008) through an examination of the distinction between cinematic and theatrical art forms. The authors look at the amalgamation of the theatrical space with the cinematic space, examining what intermedial approaches to artistic creation have on the performing and visual arts and their spectatorial experiences. For this, they reflect on Mitchell's controversially received work through the prism of existential phenomenology, examining the ontological implications of the performance's intermediality.

In light of the current transition from celluloid to digital cinema, this paper will explore the relation between old and new technologies as a means for understanding medium specificity as an activity of mediation. While the ongoing debate in screen studies aims at clarifying the extent of digital technology’s effects, it seems that the new technology is either being interpreted as inducing a rupture in film history clearly distinct from celluloid, or as directly repeating strategies, goals, forms, and impulses specific to an indexical and analogical visual culture. Indeed, the desire to acknowledge points of divergence or close interaction between technological forms is unquestionably useful; but my own approach to the technological change takes into account both the differences and similarities of forms as a means of exploring medium specificity. This will be a matter of dealing with the new as not new or old, but new and old – as simultaneously distinct and interactively interrelated, so that each medium acquires a space of its own without fixed boundaries. Rather than merge the one form into the other, the ontological explication of a medium may take account of its specific technological base while simultaneously paying attention to previous technologies that reside in it intact yet affected by the contextual possibilities of the new. Newness, thus understood, becomes a complex concurrency of differences and similarities that shift the borders of distinct forms in unexpected and continually renewable ways. With this in mind, I will discuss an example of digital mediation through Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), with a focus on the digital’s power for a creative interpretation of reality’s experience.

Indeed, the direct inscription of reality's illuminations so fundamental for the creation of celluloid images is missing from the digital, which by forcing a series of conversions into its constructions, makes temporal relations difficult to uphold. Of course, a perceptual realism allows for reality to be recognisable in the digital image according to a habitual reading of coordinates and structural relations of space and light. Nevertheless, the mathematical notations that lay at the basis of the image raises the question of an ontological grounding that finds its roots in the consequences of time. What seems to be at stake is not an iconic impression of reality, but a link to time as historical trace, as unpredictable progression, as expression of change. At the same time, though, it just might be that, while the digital clearly separates itself from celluloid technologies on the basis of its operative configurations, it nonetheless can invoke the ontological force of change on grounds other than indexicality. Guided by this premise, it will be the aim of this article to examine the relationship between celluloid and digital structures, in order to see where time can be found in new forms of cinematic production. As such, I will initially turn to the temporal relations of celluloid film to see how the digital disrupts the bond between image and time, and then see how the digital itself can become an image of time through the work of Gilles Deleuze.

Existential phenomenology addresses the idea of vision as an embodied and meaningful activity. Within this schema, perception is already informed by the sensory intentionality of the living being that is setting itself within a dialectical and dialogical relation to the world. In such an understanding of experience, cinematic vision is positioned within the individual and historical person who interacts with a screen that itself reflects an existential relation between body and world. But what happens when digital images present entities and spaces that are physically not part of this world? How, in other words, do computational structures affect cinema's relation with reality? This article examines arguments concerned with the relation between digital media and corporeality, filtering them through the work of André Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze. From the point of view exhibited by Christian Volckman's Renaissance (2006), it questions the idea that digital cinema is a one-way ticket to incorporeality, suggesting that the new technology does in fact retain the ability to matter through nuances specific to its own constructions.

"Cinema has been undergoing a profound technological shift: celluloid film is being replaced by digital media in the production, distribution, and reception of moving images. Concerned with the debate surrounding digital cinema’s ontology and the interrelationship between cinema cultures, From Light to Byte investigates the very idea of change as it is expressed in the current technological transition. Markos Hadjioannou asks what is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual and how we might best address the technological shift within media archaeologies.

Hadjioannou turns to the technical basis of the image as his first point of departure, considering the creative and perceptual activities of moviemakers and viewers. Grounded in film history, film theory, and philosophy, he explores how the digital configures its engagement with reality and the individual while simultaneously replaying and destabilizing celluloid’s own structures. He observes that, where film’s photographic foundation encourages an existential association between individual and reality, digital representations are graphic renditions of mathematical codes whose causal relations are more difficult to trace.

Throughout this work Hadjioannou examines how the two technologies set themselves up with reference to reality, physicality, spatiality, and temporality, and he concludes that the question concerning digital cinema is ultimately one of ethical implications—a question, that is, of the individual’s ability to respond to the image of the world."