In “The Future of the Image” (2007) Jacques Rancière states that the end of images is behind us. He argues for an aesthetics of the image that acknowledges the continuing power of images as educating documentations of traces of history, as directly affecting interruptions, and as open-to-combining signs of the visible and the sayable ad infinitum. But does Rancière’s claim also concern the future of cinema? His cinematic references, in a Deleuzian sense, are mostly to modern time-images. Is the future of film indeed a form of the time-image, or has the ‘heart’ of cinema moved beyond this image-type? This paper proposes to look at a third category of cinematographic images, based in the third synthesis of time as developed by Deleuze in “Difference and Repetition.” Although there are still movement-images that operate under the logic of the rational cut, continuity editing and the integration of sequences into a whole and are based in the first passive synthesis of time and time-images still find new directors whose work is grounded in the second synthesis of time reigned by the incommensurable or irrational cut of the coexisting layers of the pure past, the heart of cinema has now moved into ‘neuro-image’, which is based on a database logic connected to the third synthesis of time. It is an impure image regime, because it repeats and remixes all previous image regimes with their specific temporal orders (the movement-image and the time-image), but it ungrounds all these regimes due to the dominance of the third synthesis and the speculative nature of the future as such. By comparing Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (1959) to the television series “FlashForward” (2009), the author analyses the temporal operations of the image of the time-image to these images of a new regime of images, the image of and from the future.

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.

The article attempts to clarify the significance of Giorgio Agamben’s works on cinema for contemporary film theory. Agamben’s theory of gesture is the most popular among film historians, on the basis of which some researchers argue for a ‘gesture turn’ in the comprehension of cinema. Drawing on Agamben’s essay “Notes on Gesture”, the article questions the productivity of gesture theory for contemporary film studies and clarifies the reasons why the direct transfer of Agamben’s reflections on gesture to the context of film studies is problematic. For this purpose, the main points of the essay “Notes on Gesture” are explained in connection with the Italian philosopher’s ontological project, which allows us to point out that the extreme experience of language, rather than the theory of the image, is at the heart of the concept of gesture. The concept of gesture contains a number of aporias if gesture is understood as an element of cinema and is examined within the context of film theory. Contrary to Agamben’s intention, “Notes on Gesture” cannot be seen as a continuation, clarification and development of Gilles Deleuze’s works on cinema. At the same time, pointing out the problematic nature of this concept for film scholars does not prevent us from recognising a different potential in the theory of gesture, which is revealed through the figure of dance. In most of Agamben’s texts, the image of dance is predominantly metaphorical. In order to give dance a conceptual weight and, in particular, to show that a specific dialectic in the Agamben’s thought is elucidated through dance, it is necessary to relate the theory of gesture to the experience of dance. Gesture, understood not as an element of cinema but as a dance that holds together statics and dynamics and manifests the rhythmic nature of being, turns out to be the concept through which Agamben moves towards the concept of form-of-life, which is the subject of his later works and will become central in the last volumes of the “Homo Sacer” series.

This article offers a polemical interpretation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical text, “The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami” (2000), from a narratological perspective. Jean-Luc Nancy posits that Kiarostami’s art develops a particular view of cinema as reality, which replaces the view of cinema as illusion. The dichotomy of perception and illusion revolves around not only Kiarostami’s experiments with the film medium but also his directorial “new use” of narrative figures traditionally defined within narratology as metafictional (in particular, mise en abyme).
Kiarostami’s narrative is directly dependent on “invisible” instances in the film medium. First and foremost, this concerns the very organisation of audiovisual material, which is subject to a narrative sequence. Secondly, it is related to a specific way of constructing a point of view, which in Kiarostami’s films coincides with the point of view of the ‘invisible’ intradiegetic narrator. The third aspect of the controversy is related to Nancy’s claim that Kiarostami’s films are devoid of fiction: there is no mise en abyme, which supposedly serves only an illusionist effect. However, the functional potential of the narrative figure mise en abyme, which is the basis of most of Kiarostami’s films, is much broader: this figure creates an optical trap effect that allows the viewer to oscillate between reality and fiction. By polemicizing with Nancy on the narrative structure of Kiarostami’s films, the author tries to show how reflection on the look is actualized in the film narrative and what role “invisible” narrative instances play in this.

Visibility, as a cornerstone of the cinematic medium, often goes unquestioned. Directors employ strategies to resist the primacy of visibility and the dominance of optical “smoothness,” often introducing “roughness” that actualizes haptic perception. Nevertheless, in both scenarios, viewers typically maintain a relatively clear vision, whether confronted with monochrome color, a black screen, or “palimpsest” textures. Conversely, routine viewing experiences, driven by various technical factors—such as an excess of ambient light, low-resolution copies, or a small display diagonal—can disrupt or even obliterate the coherence of clear vision. The inability to casually see what unfolds on the screen necessitates a more focused gaze, thereby altering the viewing experience. Although any film can fall into the category of “poorly visible”, this article exclusively delves into intentional cinematic experiments. In particular, it considers films with dimming of images, minimizing the light in frames. These experiments immerse viewers in a “twilight” realm of destabilized vision, evoking not only a bodily engagement with cinema but also an interoceptive awareness of the viewer’s own body.

This article delves into the analysis of strategies for portraying traumatic experiences, using the works of German director Christian Petzold, a prominent figure in the “Berlin school,” as a case study. The concept of inconceivability and resistance to any form of mimetic duplication is a recurring theme in discussions of trauma. When applied to cinema, this property of unrepresentability becomes particularly challenging: how can one capture something that persistently resists becoming an image? This predicament leads us to view trauma as a means to think about cinema beyond its visual aspects, to present it not merely as a medium for preserving presence but vice versa — as a framework encompassing elements of absence and silence. Christian Petzold’s cinematography, woven from such figures, makes it possible to rethink the classical and repeatedly criticized allocation of metaphorical power in the realm of representation by shifting the emphasis from dramatization of the action to the rejection of its reproduction in the cinema body, from the instance of the controlling observer to the position affirming the existence of the witness, from trauma as a singular event to traumatic experience as a story recurring through storytelling. The manifestation of trauma’s presence within the cinematic fabric, yet outside the domain of direct representation, is explored as one of the mechanisms of post-memory, as proposed by Marianne Hirsch.

This article explores the “Invisible Film Festival,” focusing on its curatorial, production, and spectator practices. The project was born in 2019 and is still taking place in the “Poryadok slov” bookstore in St. Petersburg. Comparing the curatorial project created by Darina Polikarpova, Ksenia Ilyina and Anastasia Volokhova with the retrospective created by Bruce Posner’s “Unseen cinema” and the thematicization of “the cinema of attractions” after the Brighton conference, the author posits that invisibility is a lasting characteristic of films that require specific production and viewing conditions while possessing distinct cinematic attributes. In terms of production, such films are crafted by amateur filmmakers, which challenges the traditional separation of film production time and space from everyday life that leads to destruction of the existing professional separation of the community of filmmakers.
The use of amateur technology allows the definition of invisible cinema through perceptual qualities, such as “amateur excess” (Rascaroli), “sterile movements” (Lyotard), “poverty” (Brashinsky). The amateur aspect of production and technology also results in the observation that, unlike visible cinema, invisible cinema necessitates a focus on the fragmented and transient elements, thus aligning it more closely with the concept of “pure cinema” as a domain of unrestricted evolution. Ultimately, if we regard invisible cinema as a dispositif, we can anticipate a shift in the dynamics among filmmakers, curators, and spectators within the context of a restructured festival format.

Ekstasis (the Ancient Greek word for ecstasy) is the state of being outside (oneself or something), displacement, a state that exceeds individual human existence. It opens a path for a person into the extrahuman transpersonal realm, where other archaic, unconscious, heterogeneous, sensual, erotic, animal forces are actualized. Modern art-house cinema demands even more complex artistic techniques and a subtler level of conceptual work to express these ecstatic states. The concept of ek-stasis enables us to explore the limits and structures of subjectivity, the restructuring and shifting of boundaries between the external and internal, and ultimately, to trace the transition from the visual to the auditory plane in modern cinema, based on their complex interaction. The conceptual experiments of the modern (2000s) art-house — the existential experimental drama “The Lake” by Philippe Grandrieux (2008) and the psychological drama “Euphoria” by Ivan Vyrypaev (2006) — are considered within their social context and analyzed at the intersection of the Christian-mystical philosophy of ecstasy, modern psychoanalysis and audial phenomenology. Lastly, using Dziga Vertov’s “Enthusiasm. Symphony of Donbass” (1930) as an example, we demonstrate how audiovisual cinema does not oppose the sensory modalities of auditory and visual but arranges and (versionem, versio) between them.