![]() ![]() Massumi explores the function of art in Marcel Proust’s diagrammatic work in In Search of Lost Time, where the description of a madeleine cookie and lime tea leads to other diagram-icons in the text such as the grandmother’s kiss and the wart on her cheek. By this I mean such a transformation of our diagrams that characters of one diagram may appear in another as things. The greatest point of art consists in the introduction of suitable abstractions. I was inspired by Brian Massumi’s emphasis on Peirce’s reading of the task of art as related to the art of creating diagrammatic abstractions. What has guided my non-representative reading is the immense affective impact his films have had on audiences everywhere. In that book, I studied von Trier’s oeuvre of film in relation to the exploration of the material qualities of pixels and signals in film and video as well as the diagrammatic style used extensively from the mid-1990s. ![]() This article, then, is a further development in an argument that I began in my recent book Lars von Trier’s Renewal of Film 1984-2014: Signal, Pixel, Diagram. They can provide ‘a viewpoint or standard according to which phenomena are seen and determined’. ![]() They do not simply depict the (already) visible they make visible the (hitherto) invisible. Such diagram-iconsĪre defined in dynamic and operational terms. I suggest von Trier’s emphatic use of iconicity in the film creates what I will mostly refer to as diagrams or ‘diagram-icons’ that articulate, as already indicated, a critical assessment of iconocity itself. My argument departs from Peirce’s idea that icons can also be diagrams and establish analogue (often dyadic) relations to (parts of) an object. The icon – covering three types: image, diagram, metaphor – shares qualities with the object it resembles or imitates. Following Peirce, the indexical sign carries a relationship with an object (a photographic print as an index of light passing through a camera lens) whereas the symbolic sign is a unifying, often arbitrary sign referring to cultural convention (a cross standing for Christianity). In the following reading, I will make use of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic definitions of icon, index, and symbol. Photographic and filmic representations have often been referred to as indexical signs, but as images they are also iconic signs. It is at this level that the film articulates its assessment of Western image regimes as emphatically iconic, a quality which provides for both their aesthetic promise and their political danger. In this article, I intend to show that the film’s transversal relations between iconic features in the diegesis and various explorations of what characterises icons on a cultural level pave the way for abstractions. Thus, Jack’s useless efforts to create an iconic masterpiece of architecture while murdering forms the diegetic world commented on from Verge’s initially extradiegetic voice, later integrated as a character. ![]() Meanwhile, the film’s real forger is Verge (Bruno Ganz), a figure who first appears as voiceover commentary who mocks and undoes Jack’s ambitions – both as a murderer and an architect/artist. But even though he is a criminal, his ambition is another: to become an architect and build an iconic house. The main character, Jack (Matt Dillon), is an engineer and mass murderer, who challenges the laws of society and gets away with it. Lars von Trier’s most recent film, The House That Jack Built, premiered in 2018. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |