segunda-feira, 31 de outubro de 2011

Notes #16 - Photography

(Onna no Mizumi, 1966)

With no intention to shock or oversimplify things, I could say that photography, because it stoles movement from reality, is sin or I could just say that it cristalizes vision in a way totally foreign to our senses. But there's something perverse in the way it does so. Our eyes, in reality can't catch a glimpse of movement - if we are to be objective, our eyes can't really see anything, by that matter - but they have nonetheless a vague impression of it. Movement, it has to be said, introduces in us the destruction of objects seen by our desperate eyes, because everything that we see is a mere slave of time, and time waits for no man, time never waits for things to come.
The way our senses work recalls a lover that knows that his love is perishable, yet he chains himself to the opposite idea, pretending that the irreality of is foolish behaviour can overturn the real order of things. Our eyes have a paradoxical nature: they are slaves of movement, of death, but at the same time, they try to make things eternal. Such is the sad logic of cinema. The eye can't stand movement by itself, so it has to be accompanied by an eternal, sacred order that doesn't let things perish one after the other like birds in an hunting competition. The eye alone detaches reality from movement, but it never dares - because our senses are already given and can't be changed by will - to stole the movement from reality like photography does.
Photography is the eye free from the paradoxical nature of the senses, and because it is free, it is also sacred, like the soul that finally can abandon the body after its death. There is no movement in photography, there is no time in the strict sense, only a world of eternal shadows of something else, moments that have lost their life. The invention of photography is a sin, because it is a lie that impregnates the eyes with an impression of sovereign beauty and that beauty is indeed sovereign because it is never put to the test of movement, the test of ugliness.

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