“Perspective(s)”

Familiarity, which in the last analysis is bound up with cultural belonging, cannot be a criterion of what is relevant. (Carlo Ginzburg)

In the genealogy of “a point of view”, one might consider a curious instance of translation offered by the King James Bible, where Jesus alludes to the single eye: “The light of thy body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” (Matt. 6:22-23) Also, when we use a camera, we invariably use one eye – squinting into the viewfinder, with the other eye closed. And in perspective, the artifice constructs an abstraction from binocular vision. The embodied condition of seeing is here refigured – as a metaphor of and for understanding – through relations between magic and technology, religion and art. This “between” presents an interval of and for reflection on itself, through a “right to silence” that seems almost anachronistic today. What becomes of perspective when it is pluralised – when the interval arises between that perspective and itself? This film proposes its own question of reading in the interval between distance and proximity, background and foreground, the retinal and the conceptual (to cite Duchamp), stillness and movement, repetition and difference, the literal and the metaphorical. Here the question of the image is that of its own example. What, then, might one make of and with the film’s suggested relation between image and word, dialogue and silence, naivety and irony?

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29632