Ramona Fotiade

This paper explores notions of realism, evidence, undecidability and faith in the context of our relationship with images following the digital revolution and the transition from a culture of analog photographic and filmic records to the new space-time of virtual reality. The argument provide a reappraisal of modern and post-modern conceptions of the photographic image and of film, which have queried the inherent realism of the indexical photographic sign, and have highlighted the fraught ontological and temporal nature of images supposed to document and extend our perceptual relationship to reality, beyond the confines of time. The films discussed in this paper include: Luis Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel, Chris Marker's La jetée, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad and You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, and Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love.

This volume examines a number of landmark conceptual shifts that have shaped our understanding of the body in its profane and sacred dimensions as site of conflicting discourses on presence and absence, subjectivity, mortality, resurrection and eternal life. Drawing together some of the best international scholars in the field, the volume provides for the first time a representative cross-section of influential trends in the philosophy of religion today (e.g. phenomenology, existential thought, Biblical hermeneutics, deconstruction), illustrated through original critical interpretations and previously unpublished writings by three major contemporary philosophers of religion: Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy.

This paper explores notions of realism, evidence, undecidability and faith in the context of our relationship with images following the digital revolution and the transition from a culture of analog photographic and filmic records to the new space-time of virtual reality. The first part of the paper contrasts the phenomenological account of photographic images and the post-structuralist elaboration of an aesthetics of spectrality in the works of Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida. Through the comparative analysis of films exploring processes of memory and time perception in relation to photographic and mental images, such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the argument highlights the emergence of complex storytelling strategies which challenge our assumptions about the objectivity and mechanical functioning of the recording camera. In the second part of the paper, I discuss the consequences of the meta-narrative use of theatrical mise-en-scène and its avatars to bring into view the shared spectrality of the recording camera and of the human psyche in the age of virtual reality. Alan Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046 provide the case studies for a reassessment of the evolution of film theory from a culture of epistemic knowledge and technological progress, to a culture of belief and metaphysical exploration of the human condition as both limited by death and open to non-linear processes of haunting.

Through the comparative analysis of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Alan Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046, this chapter considers the effectiveness of the postmodern notions of the “outside” as theorized first by Foucault, and then by Deleuze and Guattari for the possibility of outlining a different conception of temporality in its relationship to memory and testimonial. Deleuze’s notions of the “time-image” and of the “repetition of faith” help illuminate a radically different account of recollection as creative restitution of memory turned toward the future, which breaks the logic of temporal irreversibility and promises to overcome oblivion and, ultimately, death.