The ethics and intimacies of moving images

Abstract

Firstly consider a way of thinking about the relationships between images as constituted through a media archaeological approach.This archaeology provides a foundation to think about how moving images are duplicated/reproduced. That is it becomes a concern for how moving images constitute multiple modes of reality through the process of duplication, seen through the variable ways in which the optical printer has been utilised as an archival tool, a materialist instrument and tool of special effects. It then reflects upon Jakob von Uexkull’s notion of umwelt to consider an ecology of images, as a problematising practice to allow for the reading of moving images as both apparatus and content overcoming the dichotomy between technological and cultural readings of the moving image. This is done with recourse to Aby Warburg’s assemblage practice of the Mnemosyne Atlas project, but is not the subject of this paper. The paper further problematizes this notion of the relations of moving images as being an ethical relationship. By suggesting that notions of Levinas’s ethics in relation to this tentative practice of moving image archival practice, can illuminate how moving image practices, in their duplication can be perceived beyond their instrumentalising, in their aspect of technological apparatus, but rather as a co-constitution of filmmaker, apparatus and viewer constituting realities.