Cinemyths

关于从“我见”到“我见摄影机所见”的调度自觉。而这种转换恰然地划归出一段又一段由精神向原始资料的直接投射。因为区分开了视觉内容和机械图像（摄影机在形态上与作者的视线重合，但后者实际上仍始终处于一个间接的位置并与机械视点维持有一段间距），来自作者目光的凝望与观察反而被激活。

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Different from traditional Japanese minimal narration, Sun on the Horizon consciously brings the camera’s mechanical automatism into the world’s natural tolerance. It doesn’t circumvent the cinematic fact that the audience’s vision is always a compound made of a world and a world as mechanically manifested. However, for Kawase, the opacity of view is not a conundrum that belittles any potential dialogue formed directly between the viewer’s standpoint and the primordial material they attempt to access; what she stays with calls for an ontological faith that the dual nature of cinematic visuality has long been absorbed into the viewer’s competence of viewing, as long as they ever accept the film’s acknowledgment. The communicative feasibility between projector and viewer (through/according to emotion) promises the validity of either’s comprehension, as much as an informative filmmaker’s declaration of the existence of their devices silently reveals the world as a quasi-object rather than emphasizing the separateness before and after the already acquiesced medium is formally disclosed.

Does rationalizing mechanical insertion dialectically mean a compromise on the actuality of this contextual addition? The significance I discern in Kawase’s work lies in her making the liminal space along the transference between what I see and what I see the camera sees as I see full of contemplation. She has thereby been seeking out a truth that lies beyond any objective measure but one that describes the very act of viewing, one that integrates the viewer’s intention to be seeing with the film’s intention to be seen. When, in reticence, Kawase lets her camera (qua subject) openly encounter the cinematic realm of camera (qua medium), I read it as a conversion, or more rightly, a calibration that restores the obscurity of intersubjective viewership to its simplest sequence: from I start to see to I start having seen, my intention has found its introceptive image, and there is revelation.

The condition a thing is submitted to a view, as it were, is any longer an occurrence able to be decomposed or worth. We see it not often because it comes to be particular and yields to objectification, but insofar as there is always a realization of seeing and a realization entailed by the former, that the projection of film experience has to be private, so that a viewer has to (learn to) stand beside a machine.

—— 2024.08.05