Exposing The Line In Film
“In that, to be able to read a line ‘as a line’, we first have to posit the areas where there are no lines; within and upon the picture plane, as non-object field. A field which, for line to speak, is required to be read as mute and empty of characteristics, over and above that required to allow line centre stage as the apparent site of all meaning.” Gordon Shrigley, Spatula
At centre of the moving image lies a technological desire for transparency, a need to obliterate a consciousness of the ‘line’. One can see that modern art rooted much of its practice in revealing the line, the edge, of exposing its duplicity in the production of absence and presence. Montage, theorized by Sergei Eisenstein in terms of the cinema, pervaded the modernist movement in the form of Cubism, the use of collage, and so on. The force of modernist art made lines and edges apparent, boundaries were put under constant stress, where the line, a divide between part-images, between fragments of images, split and gathered together images and words, engaging with the production of meaning based a dialectics of conflict.