The Cinema That Does Not Rerpresent

Abstract

This article attempts to identify and describe the ability of cinema not only to speak about the world in the language of cinema, which in film theory is invariably analogous to verbal or written language, not only to represent the world in signs and images, but also to become the very site of experience communication, which does not fit into the categories of language or representation. The effort to take the analytics of cinema beyond the paradigm of representation can be traced in various authors. What this paper attempts to show is that these lines of thought, though unfolding from different perspectives, nonetheless bring us back to the idea of “cinema in itself,” which regards the category of the cinematic as self-valuable, independent of the mediating procedures of theorizing, narratizing, institutionalizing, and critical evaluation. The action of which cinema is then capable can be described as the creation of simulacres (as interpreted by Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski) or as a gesture (as described by Giorgio Agamben). The rejection of the representation of cinema as one of the techniques of representation allows us to leave behind the annoying duality and tired opposition of “cinema — reality” that has haunted theoretical thought about cinema for decades. Not trying to universalize cinematography’s capacity not to show and not to be language, the author aims to provide the reader with a conceptual framework and concrete examples in which this capacity to present the experience that does not fit into language, the gesture of the machine, becomes evident.