Rethinking Rhythm through the Life of Images

Abstract

Rethinking Rhythm through the Life of Images Valentina Rosales (bio) Domietta Torlasco. The Rhythm of Images: Cinema beyond Measure. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 200 pages. $100 cloth. $25 paperback. What if we understood cinema as a viewing screen through which images flowed both inward and outward, unconstrained by a chronometrical rhythm, in other words, outside of the indelible ticktack of clocks, the schedule of trains, and the measurable units of a workday? Furthermore, what if we saw the relationship between rhythm and images through a lens that promises to challenge the abstract measure of forms as well as the mechanical and industrial power that is exercised through them? These questions arise from the philosophical terrain that Domietta Torlasco explores in her new book regarding cinema, opening a productive discussion about the ontology of images through examples that abide to neither a chronological nor a historical order and ultimately lead to a reconceptualization of the well-known and disputed relationship between subject and object. In the introduction, Torlasco interrogates the configuration of "Being as rhythm" in the Platonic sense, which poses rhythm as a chronometrical and ideal molding of forms, constructing from the very start a theoretical as well as experiential ground for seeing [End Page 380] rather that thinking time (7). This way of seeing is what opens the metaphysical door to the unpredictable flow (and overflow) of time and creates for images the possibility to resist the violence and exploitation that surge from culturally fixed forms. This is where Torlasco introduces the concept of rhuthmos (rhythm), which will bind together all the examples and arguments that are found in her study. Borrowed from Émile Benveniste's idea of "a passing, irregular form of configuration" (5) in the way that was understood in pre-Socratic philosophy, rhuthmos is the counterbalance of—and sometimes the rebellion against—a platonic conception of rhythm and therefore a way of understanding perception as "freed from perspective and chronology" or as a "flesh of time" that flows with its movement, leaps, and ambiguities (9). In chapter 1, titled "Life," filmmakers Harun Farocki and Jean Vigo become essential for the construction of such viewing/seeing experience, for they are builders of images that pertain to what one could call "the cinema of life" as opposed to a "cinema of constraint." Following Luce Irigaray, Torlasco describes these artists' fluid images to be that which "cannot be defined, enumerated and formalized," thus challenging "the economy that makes it possible to speak of a subject" (30). Vigo's L'Atalante, for example, works as a montage of images that show the force of the waves and thus the liquidity of forms but also the liaison that arises from two lovers dancing underwater at a distance: they are not inhabiting the same space, yet they are connected through the strings of a becoming that makes them less and more than subjects, lovers of an unbounded and ungrounded temporality. This "idiorrhythmy" (a term that Torlasco borrows from Roland Barthes) is revolutionary in the sense that it holds a "negative relationship to power" (27),1 for a romance that happens outside of a formal rhythm cannot be controlled by any kind of institution, and in this very movement it liberates the eccentric image from regulated time. It is also in this sense that Torlasco positions herself outside of a Western theory and practice of vision, following the traces of (eccentric) images that conjure up or set free a temporal fluidity that is aligned with Irigaray's feminist critique of science.2 Perhaps it is this very line of critique that lets her speak of a feminized temporality, or of a time that is always escaping the restraint of "solids" through a body that seems to be everchanging and fluid.3 Certainly, this body could also exist as an image that challenges a filmic aesthetic that relies mostly on the principles of formal logic, that is, on "negation, identity, and generality" (15), thus opening a space, where the multiple, the dissimilar, and the particular can for a moment displace (or flood) the solid ground of the thinking [End Page 381] subject. Here Torlasco borrows from Ewa Plonowska Ziarek the notion of...