» IN THE DARK MIRROR - Of will-o'-the-wisps and images
.................................................................................................................................................................. "Jonas Mekas Lecture"
of the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

by Fred Kelemen

I would like to start with two quotes:

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened." (Albert Camus)

"For now we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know fully even as also I was fully known." Paul 1 Cor. 13,12

When we speak about the "interculturalness" of the mostly digital, moving images, which circle in an inflationary, endless stream around the world and through our heads, about their form and intention that reveal or obscure insights into other cultures, other worlds and forms of existence, or even just think about them, we presume the ability to see. Because what we see are images. Images of the reality that is visually imparted to us, and images created by people, but which are at the same time part of our visual reality. Thus we presume the ability to see. But there are people who are blind even from birth. Does the absence of the visual, of images, lead to an absence of reality? Certainly not. Since the absence of images does not make reality disappear, images are obviously not the same as reality and not necessarily bound to it. There is a reality beyond images, independent of them. So if images are not reality, what are they? Insofar as they are truthful images, they are visual manifestations of reality, they prefigure such reality. Otherwise they are will-o'-the-wisps, prefiguring nothing and letting us drown in the swamp.

In a world of an inflation of circulating images created by people, it is quite possible that we see nothing anymore, because the images do not show anything anymore, because the images do not show anything anymore, do not point to anything, do not show any reality beyond them, but rather they obscure, cover up, keep them misleadingly in the invisible and unnoticed, and distract from them. Neither one's own nor another's reality is visible in them, neither that which is yours, your own experience, your own condition, your own being-in-the-world with all its facets, tensions, yearnings and struggles appears in these will-o'-the-wisps, nor can another's being-in-the-world be seen there or even recognised. The images are there, but no world and its spirit vibrates in them. The reasons for this are the structures and purposes of the production of the images themselves. If images are to circulate globally and be effortlessly consumed, i.e. also be rapidly assimilated these days, they must be reduced to the single dimension of the quick uptake of superficial information; instead of a condition they show at best a result, they explain, but they do not narrate. Because narrating is about the condition and not the result, it must be suffered and lived. Narrating as the guardian of time is also narrating as healing, as Walter Benjamin called it in "Storytelling and Healing". Successful narrating is an opening - not a closing. To make images narrate, different images are needed than repeated clichés and stereotyped image patterns with a smoothed, immaculate, dense surface, which can only stimulate an intended reflex in the observer, like one of Pavlov's dogs, and no reflection or genuine feeling, no shock, whether positive or negative, and thus no vision of reality.

So how can we attain images that narrate, that say something - about me or others, and on a deeper level about us both, about our humanity -, that point truthfully to reality and open our view into it? The reality these other images point to must undoubtedly radiate into them. And the image must be transparent enough, permeable enough, to let this radiation through to the observer, to pass it on to them. With a small modification to a quote from Paul Ricoeur, it can be said that the sense, the metaphysical content - namely this radiation - of an image's narration must be guessable. It is the legend that the observer creatively provides the image with. And this legend, which talks about the reality to which the image points, is what matters. It can be a complex story or an emotion telling something of humanity, or even an ontological inkling difficult to describe in words, which can only be evocatively lit up in that crystalline moment of an image's appearance.

The essential aspect of the radiation that a truthful image delivers in contrast to a will-o'-the-wisp, and which penetrates the surface, is beauty. This does not mean the aesthetic appearance of a fashion magazine, but that beauty, which according to Fyodor Dostoyevsky will save the world, and of which André Bréton said: "Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be", about which Susan Sontag wrote in her book "Regarding the Pain of Others": "...but in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. How else to get attention for one's product or one's art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again?
The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence".

The image as shock only can avoid sinking into a cliché if, as mentioned before, an appearance permeable to radiation exists that leads to the reality behind it, lets beauty be experienced, which is awful and, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky said, a riddle, which convulses the observer, affects them and breaks open for something beyond the image, which speaks about one thing and tells us about another hidden deep within us as reality - the only one there is - and radiates in the dark image of the mirror of which the Apostle Paul speaks. There, beauty, which is also an ethical dimension, fulfils the meaning of its Sanskrit origin, Bet-El-Za, which means "the place where the divine radiates". Images that point to it lead us to that reality beyond the dark images in the mirror of the surface of our visually perceivable world, lead us to beauty's space of enigmas and into ourselves and to the other, to the human being, of whom Sophocles says: "The uncanny is manifold, yet a human being is the most uncanny of all."

In this sense, beauty would save the world with sympathy, empathy, love, which is only possible for truthful images, while the will-o'-the-wisps let us get lost and lose both ourselves and each other.
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Lecture given on 27th January 2015 at the
Department of Film Studies of the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz