Jacques Rancière Evening Lecture

As part of our curriculum at the European Graduate School we must attend evening lectures from the faculty. This evening Jacques Rancière spoke to us.

NOTE: As with all my notes from the European Graduate School, there will likely be mistakes because I did not record the lectures, I made notes as they spoke, so I am perhaps interpreting what they are saying as I am writing.

In a sense, it will deal with negation [as was the case with Alain Badiou's the other night]; but less broad in scope.

I am here concerned with the process of unfolding and dissipation of images. What kind of logic is present in images and their processional narrative? Hitchcock's Vertigo is an example of the perfection of the deployment of image in narrative form.

The logic of the film is apparent as soon as the credits. The dispositif of the images from hereon are _____(?)

Deleuze states that Hitchcock is the peak of the image-movement system, but he is also the symptom of the crisis of narrative action.

(2 forms of passivity) Scottie's Acrophobia, 2 fascinations with Death

Let's also consider Vertov's Man with Camera (1929):

The camera has the radical equality of all movement, the Communism of the equal exchange of all images.

The means of fascination used by Hollywood are the remains of a lost cinematic utopia according to Goddard.

An art is never only an art but also the proposition of a possible world and its techniques and elements employed are often the remains of a previously proposed utopia.

Reconfront the suppositions of movement and the look.

[END OF LECTURE]