Through the Viewfinder: Vibrant Places, Duration and Immanence

Abstract

This thesis explores philosophical issues around duration and perception in film and HD video through the materiality of analogue film within the present digital epoch. In particular, the 16mm Bolex camera has provided specific opportunities to write and make creative work juxtaposed alongside, or imbedded within, digital film formats and equipment. These works examine and explore the vibration between memory and immanence. Via the privileged view through the camera lens, I endeavour to create film works that are a response to my first-world, increasingly transient lifestyle and societal experience. As I gaze into the viewfinder, I am also contemplating the operation of the camera, my connection with it and, arguably, my place in the universe. An ontological search for my place in the world as a first-generation New Zealander of Dutch descent has centred my focus around two specific periods connected to my genealogy. First is the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, where modern trade and banking developed alongside the life and times of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and scientist / inventor Christiaan Huygens. Second, I will look to De Stijl in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century; specifically, the Rietveld Schröder House (1924) in Utrecht. The neoplastic ideas within this building, like the paintings of Piet Mondrian, sought to unify the early twentieth-century world by stripping back reality with mystical and abstract solutions. Utilising Gilles Deleuze's writings on cinema, I have created artworks that endeavour to evoke a consciousness that shakes us out of the repetitive, automatic actions in our daily lives; that which Henri Bergson calls the sensori-motor schema. Maya Deren's experimental 1943 masterpiece Meshes of the Afternoon is one such film that dynamically experiments with the architectural space of a house and the non-linear assemblage of memory in order to transform the everyday / banal into a cinema of abstraction. This work has formed the basis of some experiments created as part of the candidacy. With the focus of a transcendent or spiritual utopia shifted to the immanent and anthropological non-place (1992) of Marc Augé and Michel Foucault's other spaces (1967), I have made artworks that aim to a create a consciousness around the multiplicity of places. For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980), this would be the creation of a line of flight away from an oppressive society. This is the reason for this research; a way out of a current impasse through the creation of a new cinema language, or better still, Deleuze's 'camera consciousness', re-imagined as what I would like to call 'Bolex consciousness'. The haptic / optic (anti-digital) nature of the Bolex 16mm camera creates the vibrational immanent place par excellence at the centre of this new, utopian way of seeing.