14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

Towards an Archive for Visual Concepts 283
have often observed scenes of visiting hours in prison but I don’t believe that I
have ever seen that happen before. We are only familiar with such a skilled
transgression of prohibitions from our own life, usually from childhood, often
in connection with prohibitions around love. Another clip is from the prison in
Snake River in Oregon. The guards wanted to demonstrate to us their technological
capacities and zoomed in close as a couple passed a piece of paper beneath
the table. It could even be read from above. From the same perspective,
with similar framing, one could see how a woman took out two coins from her
transparent purse. One coin was a new quarter, which had just been entered
into circulation; the other was a regular old quarter. The man bent over and
compared the two with great curiosity. As I read this image, the new coin indicates
to him that momentous things are happening outside the prison and that
he is not participating in them. That a prisoner is missing out on life is a story
often told, mostly in the way his wife or girlfriend are leaving him. Here, in
this material that was considered worthless, I made a little discovery, a new
variation on an old topos.
In the brothers Grimm’s dictionary of the German language, the majority of
quotations are taken from Goethe or Schiller; in the Oxford English Dictionary
there are also at least quotations from newspapers. I have already mentioned
that textbooks on films usually draw their examples from canonised or sub-canonical
sources. I myself have enjoyed a good film education in cinémathèques.
For this project, however, knowledge will also have to come from the obscure
and the nameless in cinema history. I intend to develop definitions like the
ones mentioned here, gleaned from sources such as these.
Translation by Robin Curtis.
Notes
1. Myron Flickner et al., ‘Query by Image and Video Content’, in: Mark T. Maybury
(ed.), Intelligent Multimedia Information Retrieval, Cambridge, Mass. / London
(MIT), p. 7.
2. Alexander G. Hauptmann and Michael J. Witbrock, ‘Informedia: News-on-Demand
Multimedia Information Acquisition and Retrieval’, in: Maybury 1997, pp.
215-240 (226).
3. Quoted by André Gaudreault, ‘Film, Narrative, Narration: The Cinema of the
Lumière Brothers’, in: Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative
(London: British Film Institute 1990), pp. 68-75 (72).
4. Ibid., p. 72.
5. Roger Odin, as quoted in Ibid., p. 72.