Cinematic Thought: From Controlling Reflection to Attention/Perception

Abstract

The emergence of cinema often seems to be a natural outcome of evolving practices of representation that combine thought and vision in a panoptic grasping of the whole. Within this perspective, cinema becomes one of the tools of a modern control society, which assumes responsibility for individualization. At the same time in phenomenology, psychoanalysis and cinema theory, one can find tendencies that make it possible to break the union of controlling thought and gaze. Phenomenology shifts its focus from active synthesis to passivated modalities in understanding thinking. Psychoanalysis interprets thought as “trial action,” closely linked with the senses and perception. Meanwhile, cinema theory uncovers the dimension of intimacy and closeness. This article aims to trace how modern cinema, represented by its most prominent authors, resists the controlling strategies of gaze. The films of Jim Jarmusch can be seen as a precedent for the active rethinking of the panoptic model of post-capitalist society. In the film-performance “The Limit of Control” he consistently discredits the reflexive foundations of vision, countering thought-representation with the concept of apperceptive thought, which he sees as “a more subtle perception of reality.” The apperceptive thought, grounded in attention and perception, habituates the space of intimacy. The subject of a new type of thought is the protagonist whose plastic gesture and type of movement in the filmic space can be described by terms such as “vibration,” “resonance” and “affective wave.” Jarmusch offers a unique way to experience the world characterized by deep immersion, resonant “selective response,” and the potential for lasting indefinitely.