14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts 273
tool for image retrieval by QBIC, where the user is supposed to draw an outline
of the object to be found. 42 Another notion of sorting pictures is blending,
which derived from camera techniques and brings us even closer to the project
of a visual encyclopaedia of filmic expressions, and in cognitive linguistics it
means the virtual combination of two realms of imagination. It is different
from metaphoric speech, in that blending transforms the context of image a
into image b. 43 And so, if cognitive operations work like this, why not translate
them into algorithmic procedures?
2. A Cinematographic Thesaurus (Harun Farocki)
I am a lover of dictionaries. I get great pleasure out of looking up words and
their etymological sources in specialised and obscure lexica. This I do without
any systematic approach and thus it resembles my general working method: a
filmmaker does not work within a clearly demarcated field, but rather continually
notices new things with passing interest, believing that he thereby acquires
a kind of intuition for such things. In searching for order in my collection
of material, I have to think of dictionaries because of the way they
document the usage of a word or expression chronologically, through the decades
or centuries. And it occurred to me that there is nothing comparable to a
dictionary in the realm of cinema. How might one even name such a thing?
One could call it an ‘illustrated book’, a ‘thesaurus’ or a ‘treasure trove of images’,
or perhaps even an ‘archive of filmic expressions’. I arrive at this latter title
by way of the exemplary series of publications termed the Archiv für
Begriffsgeschichte (literally, the archive for the history of concepts), published
by the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz over the past several decades.
This collection has the advantage of not being bound to any lexical or
systematic principle, and it includes, for instance, a contribution by the philosopher
Hans Blumenberg, who offers a basic approach to the study of metaphor.
There, he examines the word ‘to enjoy’ in German, when used with the
genitive case as in Latin (‘frui’), such as is found in Johann Sebastian Bach’s
hymn ‘Genieße der Ruh’ in contrast to ‘enjoy’ with the accusative case, as
would be common usage today (‘genieße die Ruhe’). Over a space of perhaps
thirty pages Blumenberg makes the distinction between these two grammatical
cases clear. Such a contribution sharpens one’s consciousness for the manner
in which language functions. There ought to be a similar work, which offers
an education of one’s perception of the fine distinctions within filmic
language! Something akin to Christian Meier’s text on the political terminology
in use among the Greeks in the 6th century B.C., which follows the trans-