- human animal character - 

Famous text by Giorgio Agamben "The Open" begins with a curious analysis of an illustration found in a German bible from the second half of the 13th century. In the lower part of the picture you can see a depiction of the feast that will take place in the end of days. The guests of honor in this feast will be the righteous, which are depicted here with human bodies and animal heads. According to a Jewish tradition, the menu for this meal will consist of three legendary monsters depicted on the top of the page: the sea creature leviathan, the land creature behemoth, and the air creature ziz. 

Many researchers refer to this text; despite that, it is not easy to find original image described in the beginning. I am submitting this image below, as I find it to be of utmost importance for complete information about Agamben's theory.

- character, face, representation -

In '20-ies Lev Kuleshov shot a single long closeup of an actor named Mozhukhin, sitting still without expression. He then intercut it with various shots, which comprised a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a child with a toy bear. The audience "marveled at the sensitivity of the actor's range."

In 1961, by looking at his face during the trial in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt points out that Eichmann was a mild mannered civil servant with a wife and kids who epitomized the virtues of the German middle class. It was in his dispassionate face that Arendt saw “the banality of evil”.  

In Shoah (1985), Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half-hour filmic meditation on memory, testimony and annihilation, there are only images of faces and places: interviews with survivors, perpetrators and bystanders intercut with present-day footage of the killing sites. 

What is particularly disconcerting about a number of the survivors’ expressions, is their habitually impregnable impassivity. The camera repeatedly lingers on these faces, inviting us to scan them for insights into the past and the present, yet even when the witnesses are remembering the most excruciating suffering, their faces often remain inexpressive, deadpan, at once unreadable and available to a multiplicity of readings.

Shoah strips the face of spectacular qualities and re-maps it instead as a trauma site. In the absence of direct images of the past, the survivor’s face becomes the place not only where trauma is visually registered but also where the interdiction on representation is affirmed. In this way, the visible face incessantly points to or signifies something beyond the visible, something that perpetually eludes our vision and escapes our knowledge and understanding. 

For Levinas, the human is not represented by the face. Rather, the human is indirectly affirmed in that very disjunction that makes representation impossible, and this disjunction is conveyed in the impossible representation. 

"There is first the very uprightness of the face, its upright exposure, without defense. The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. It is the most naked, though with a decent nudity.... The face is meaning all by itself...it leads you beyond." 

"To my mind the Infinite comes in the signifyingness of the face. The face signifies the Infinite.... When in the presence of the Other, I say, “Here I am!”, this “Here I am!” is the place through which the Infinite enters into language.... The subject who says “Here I am!” testifies to the Infinite." (Emanuel Levinas)

In "The Open" (2002) Agamben analyses images from 13th century Hebrew bible in which the righteous are presented not with human heads, but with those of animals. 

For Agamben, “the righteous with animal heads…do not represent a new declension of the man-animal relation,” but instead indicates a zone of non-knowledge that allows them to be outside of being, “saved precisely in their being unstable”  

against representation

If humanity allows itself to venture into the pure realm of things beyond representation, then it may be capable of embracing its true vocation beyond vocation. The moment we fully embrace this realm beyond all representation, the moment we dissolve transcendence and therefore immanence as well, is the moment we embrace a materialism beyond the animal-human or human-divine dichotomies, a materialism that can only as such be - divine.

- immigrant as a film character -



1. First films that show life of immigrants coming to America are Traffic in Souls (1913) and The Italian (1915). Released near the end of a long period of unrestricted emigration from Europe to the United States, these two films depict hazards that await them in new world, a Darwinian jungle rather than a promised land paved with gold.Despite unfortunate ethnical and other stereotypes, The Italian develops considerable sympathy for the main character, presenting us an unusually complex view of tenement life and multiethnic immigration in America.

2. However, if we try to discover visual and narrative responses to subject of immigration, the theme of "movement" and, much more specific "movement in container" comes to mind. migration implies a movement of specific kind, in specific context: using cheap and/or illegal ways of transport. In Charlie Chaplin's The Immigrant (1917), it is the boat that arrives to New York.

Chaplin gets a lot of laughs, but he also gives us a very accurate picture of the terrible living conditions on the immigrant ships. Most immigrants could afford only steerage class, where they were jammed in like sardines. They suffered from no privacy, bad food, poor ventilation, sickness, and filth on their two-week journey from Europe. There is one thing about these scenes that is not realistic. Real immigrants almost always traveled below deck, at the bottom of the ship. Chaplin put his immigrants on deck because it was a more interesting environment for his story. He needed the ship’s railing and the open sea for his comedy routines. He needed the view from the deck for the scene in which the immigrants see the Statue of Liberty.

Even now, more than before, illegal immigrants have been known to suffocate in shipping containers, boxcars, and trucks, sink in shipwrecks caused by unseaworthy vessels, die of dehydration or exposure during long walks without water. An official estimate puts the number of people who died in illegal crossings across the U.S.-Mexican border between 1998 and 2004 at 1,954.

3. In opposition to this image of the immigrant as a victim, or, sometimes as a danger to the society, in short film Mobile men, Apichatpong Weerasethakul offers us different image of immigrant worker:

"In my recent short film, the main character is played by a migrant worker from Shan state in Burma named Jaai. He is one of the lucky ones who have decent jobs and are contented with the new living condition. But there exist many others who are still living in the opposite circumstances. Mobile Men is a portrait of Jaai. By the act of making the film, I would like to instill and capture his confidence and dignity. It is not about storytelling, but about a man who is full of life. (…) The film honors simple gestures that mark individuality through visual exchanges. I hope the viewers realize that, when the actors and a director are holding a camera and shoot, we are destroying a discriminating barrier. The pickup truck simulates a small moving island without frontiers where there is freedom to communicate, to see, and to share."

4. In documentary films, authors developed different strategies to avoid legal consequences for their characters, illegal immigrants. Their appearance on screen could mean revealing their identities and they could risk expulsion from the country. Most advanced strategy even created a new genre - documentary animation. (Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch).

- cinematographe, biograph, bioscope, film -

What is the nature of cinema, what is it's most important element? Is it a movement, a light, or a life itself? Can there be a film without these elements? And how can we define a basic minimal 

film character corresponding to the nature of cinema?

Let us turn to some etymology for help.

Many names were used for projectors of early films - frequently derived from Greek and Latin, and usually clumsy; such as Vever's Viviograph, Wood's Movendoscope, and the Chronophotographoscope. The names of some machines introduced during this period - the Biograph, Cinematographe/Kinematograph, Bioscope - became generic terms for motion pictures.

Multitude of names for certain new phenomenon (or product, in this case new medium) shows the need to talk about it in particular society. Name acquisition is of great importance, and patent owners struggle for primacy. This process takes sometimes more than few decades, and in some cases term that has lost globally, can win locally. Term "bioscope" has lost by "cinematography" globaly, but it is widely used in South Africa, Sweden (bio), India, Pakistan and Serbia.

Going deeper in analysis, from etymological point of view, each term has different priority if we see it as an attempt to define the phenomenon.

cinematograph (writing with movement) - term used by Lumiere brothers (1896), developed from Gk. kinema "movement" + graphein "to write". "I had the occasion to visit Louis Lumière many times in Paris, but it was one fine day that I was able to divine, without but a word exchanged between the two of us, the birth in his marvellous mind of the general idea of the Cinematograph. Three months after our first brief glimpse, I sent the first role of film to Lyon. To our immense surprise... the Cinematograph was born, projecting life onto a piece of paper set up to act as a screen... and even then, it had all the perfection of the image that we still admire today." (Victor Planchon)

biograph (writing with life) - term used by Georges Demenÿ and Herman Casler, developed from Gk. bios "one's life, course or way of living, lifetime" (as opposed to zoe "animal life, organic life") + graphein "to write". The name Biograph is short for the American Mutoscope and Biography Company, one of the earliest film production companies, established in 1896. Because it held patents on certain types of camera technology, Biograph became, for a time, one of Thomas Edison’s chief rivals. Eventually they teamed up to establish the Motion Picture Patents Company to protect cinema-related patent rights. Biograph’s studios were in New York, and the company produced over a thousand silent films from 1908 to 1916, including numerous early Westerns.

bioscope - (looking at life). Term was used by Max Skladanowsky and Charles Urban. It is constructed from the Greek bios, life + skopeein, to look at, and the Oxford English Dictionary gives its traditional definition as "a view or survey of life". The word was coined by Granville Penn in his 1812 Christian tract The Bioscope, or Dial of Life. Penn's book included a separate card on which was illustrated a dial marked from nought to seventy, marking the ages of man from childhood to decay in decades, with eternity waiting before and after. A pointer was attached for the reader to mark out his current age, and hence to contemplate the lessons in Penn's book on the allotted span of human life and to avoid the belief "that life is a continuous now". This dial was the bioscope, and just as a horoscope was a measure of the heavens at the hour of birth, so the Bioscope was the "general measure of human life".

Since cinema is the term in much wider use than bioscope, globally, we can say that representation of movement is a defining element of new medium, rather than "looking at life". However, there is another term, and it is in widest possible use. It's the term "film".

film - etymology of this word takes us to old english filmen "membrane, thin skin," Sense of "a thin coat of something" is 1570s, extended by 1845 to the coating of chemical gel on photographic plates. By 1895 this also meant the coating plus the paper or celluloid. It is first used for signifying "motion pictures" in 1905. 

In film, the most natural minimal character is light that forms an image, passing through the celuloid membrane.

- numerical codes as characters -

There is a list of most common HTTP codes and their meanings:

Informational

100 Continue 

Success

200 OK 

Redirection

300 Multiple Choices 

301 Moved Permanently 

302 Found 

304 Not Modified 

Client Error

400 Bad Request 

401 Unauthorized 

403 Forbidden 

404 Not Found 

410 Gone 

Server Error

500 Internal Server Error  

501 Not Implemented 

503 Service Unavailable 

According to Google’s search statistics, HTTP error 500 is more than twice as common as 404 errors:

Darko Fritz uses some of less common codes to produce metaphor of human or urban situations. Code 302 is a special case, an example of industry practice contradicting the standard HTTP/1.0 specification, which required the client to perform a temporary redirect (the original describing phrase was "Moved Temporarily"), now the meaning of code changed to - 302 Found. 

In their video "trinity rgb", milica lapcevic and vladimir sojat use numbers to present and quantify rgb signal. This is personification of color white: 

             

Khlebnikov's poem "Numbers" ["Chisla"] (1911) treats numbers not as digits or a system for counting but organic beings.

I see right through you, Numbers.
I see you dressed in animals, their skins,
coolly propped against uprooted oaks.
You offer us a gift: unity between the snaky movement
of the backbone of the universe and Libra dancing
overhead. You help us to see centuries in a flash
of laughing teeth. See my wisdom-wizened eyes
opening to recognize
what my I
will be
when its dividend is one.

Numbers move, numbers think, numbers dictate. From a semantic point of view, one could say that these numbers here lost their denotative meaning. 

ASCII art uses characters to produce image. If we want to create image of character in ASCII, what we got is character depicted with characters.

                                     character(s) in motion

                        

- spectator as a film character -

“The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.” (Martin Buber)By participating in cinematic spectacle spectator is manipulated either through process of imposition of spectacular images (propaganda), or through didactic attitude of author (education). In both cases, spectator is positioned below author in hierarchical structure of the film spectacle.Examples of early films with spectators as film characters show us these two potentials of cinema. 

1. propaganda: 

In Robert Paul’s 1901 film The Countryman and the Cinematograph a countryman stands and stares at a moving train on a cinema screen, reeling in amazement until the moment at which he believes the train is almost upon him. Running from the screen, the countryman acts out the popular myth of the time, in which audiences supposedly ran hysterically from early cinema projections of oncoming trains. Amazement has long functioned within spectacular attractions as a promotional vehicle, both for specific movies and the cinematic apparatus in general. 

However, spectator is drugged by spectacular images - says Debord - by taking part in spectacle, he is automatically dominated by the author. Debord's aim and proposal is "to wake up the spectator through radical action in the form of the construction of situations, that bring a revolutionary reordering of life, politics, and art". 


2. education:

In D.W. Griffith's 1909 film Those Awful Hats, narrative is produced between film spectators, rather than between spectators and screen. This example demonstrate the authors intention to educate spectators how to act in a movie theater. 

The assumption that the viewer needs to be educated or inspired by the artist can also imply an unequal relationship. This seems aligned with outmoded Modern and pre-Modern notions of the artist as genius – where an artist’s talent qualifies him to grant a gift of beauty or rare vision to the viewer. But instead of bestowing something upon recipients, artist should produce a gift: symbol that forms a social bond. For Rancière, artist and spectator should become equal participants in the verification of images and concepts.

- character and gesture -

In his essay 'Notes on Gesture' (1992) Giorgio Agamben has developed a theory of 'gestural cinema', arguing that 'the element of cinema is gesture and not image'. He also argued that this theory means that cinema belongs, essentially, to the realm of ethics and politics, rather than aesthetics. 

Agamben focuses on the disappearance of gestures within the Western bourgeoisie at the end of the 19th century. Scientific analysis of gesture begun by Gilles de la Tourette indicating the breake up of gesture into segments. This not only presages film itself (Agamben also mentions the work of Muybridge) but also the loss of any sense of the gesture. Tourette is, of course, best known for naming Tourette's syndrome, which Agamben describes as 'an amazing proliferation of tics, spasmodic jerks, and mannerisms - a proliferation that cannot be defined in any way other than as a generalized catastrophe of the sphere of gestures'. 

The loss of gestures leads to a desperate attempt to recover or record what has been lost. Cinema, especially silent cinema, is the primary and exemplary medium for trying to evoke gestures in the process of their loss. If Deleuze breaks down the image into movement-images, Agamben will further break down the image into gestures. If the unity of the image has been broken, then we are left with only gestures and not images. The image reifies and obliterates the gesture, fixing it into the static image. Liberating dynamic force from the static spell of the image is one of the main goals and qualities of cinema.

Cinema, in Agamben's words, 'leads images back to the homeland of gestures'. If cinema leads us back to gestures then it also leads us back to ethics and politics, rather than aesthetics. Relating to Aristotle's idea of generical difference between action [praxis] and production [poiesis] Agamben argues that the gesture is a particular type of action - it is neither acting or making, producing or action, but instead - enduring and supporting.

Gesture has been separated from its meaning throughout history of art. Pseudo-zygodactylous gesture of El Greco's painting "Il caballero de la mano al pecho" is clearly separated from its original brest-feeding symbolism. 

In early silent movies (Asunta spina), the use of gesture should not be understood simply as calling upon a lexicon, e.g., arms crossed with hands on shoulders “means” despair, but rather, almost as it would in dance, gesture should be seen as elaborating and helping to orchestrate a given dramatic situation. Naturalism in acting provides a definitive break with the range of acting styles that employed gesture toward pictorial ends. The important feature of naturalist acting as it developed in the 1880s was not that it encouraged actors to approximate real life, but to abandon graceful gestures, as well as expressive ones. ('Naturalism and the diva: Francesca Bertini in Asunta Spina' by Lea Jacobs)

Common usage of non-fictional elements in modern cinema result in restriction of gesture. Realism is not enough any more, gesture has to be spontanious, non-acted, caught by accident. Strangely enough, this development forces cinema to explore incomprehensible ellements of human existence. 

Every image is, according to Walter Benjamin, 'charged with history because it is the door through which the Messiah enters'. With his idea of gestural cinema, Agamben redeems cinema froms the site of the messianic promise contained in the image.

- character and empty place of power -

Claude Lefort's description of democracy: 

"The democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his expert and leadership properties. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

The elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person. The achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its greatest crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, "the throne is empty," which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero-point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted.

The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order.

In film, empty place of power has been populated over the decades with various fictive characters in order to test the audience and prepare them for different scenarios of  political kind (for example, we have seen a number of african-american presidents in cinema; first time such character was introduced in cinema is 1933 film "Rufus Jones for President" with Sammy Davis Jr. In this short musical comedy, the 7-year-old Davis is told by his mother, that anyone can become president, and later dreams of his own inauguration. Outside the dreams, the film reflects contemporary racist attitudes).

In TV show "24", Dennis Haysbert portrayed the lead character David Palmer, a successful terrorism-fighting president. The Jerusalem Post speculated in June 2008 that television ratings "may have predicted Obama's primary victory over Hillary Clinton, as the most recent female television president appears to have been less popular than the black leaders of 24."

"I believe that films of the 20th century were the most significant, direct dramatization of social fantasies." (Slavoj Zizek)

Empty place of power raises also question of representation of non-being with theological consequences. The question is not simply "how does one think non-being?" but also "how does one name non-being?" The proper name, as Badiou points out, is not the transcendent God or the promise of the One or presence but the "un-presentation and the un-being of the one". 

“Names in politics are impoverished. … The weakness of politics today is a weakness of poetry. The fall of communism, also influenced that impoverishment. Marxism had a constellation of names for political concepts. It was a sky of names. We lost the sky." (Alain Badiou)

- character, hero, unknown soldier -

Cinema is an art of figures. Not only figures of visible space and active places. It is foremost an art of the great figures of active humanity. It proposes a kind of universal stage of action and its confrontation with common values. After all, cinema is the last place populated by heroes. 

"In any period of time, in any sequence of history, we have to maintain a relationship with what exceeds our possibilities; with what, as an idea, exists beyond the natural needs of the human animal. In crucial experiences, such as love, artistic creation, scientific discoveries, political struggle, we must exceed the limits of our vital and social determinations. We must encounter, within our own humanity, the obscure, violent, at the same time luminous and peaceful, element of inhumanity within the human element itself. Humanity is not reducible to animality, to the extent that the inhuman is a creative part of humanity. It is in the element of inhumanity that human creation shows that part of human nature which does not exist but must become; Humanity is never completely realized, is never something natural. Humanity is an infinite victory over its immanent element of inhumanity To accept, to support, this experience of the inhuman element of ourselves, we must, all of us, human animals, use some imaginary means. We must create a symbolic representation of this humanity which exists beyond itself, in the fearsome and fertile element of the inhuman. I call that sort of representation an heroic figure. "Figure", because the action of a figure is a symbolic one. "Heroic", because heroism is properly the act of the infinite in human actions. "Heroism" is the clear appearance, in a concrete situation, of something which assumes its humanity beyond the natural limits of the human animal." (Alain Badiou) 

The old figure of heroism, before the great French Revolution was the figure of the individual warrior. It was the central figure in all the great epic poems of all countries. The figure of the warrior is beyond humanity, because it is between the human animal and the Gods. 

The French Revolution replaced the individual and aristocratic figure of the warrior with the democratic and collective figure of the soldier. This was a new imaginary of the relationship between the human and the inhuman. The collective dimension of this figure is essential. The soldier has no proper name. It is the very essence of the symbolic figure of the soldier to be unknown, to remain anonymous. The fundamental dimension of the figure of the soldier is precisely the dialectical unity between courageous death and immortality, without reference either to a personal soul or to a God. It is democratic glory, which creates something immortal with collective and anonymous courage. We can speak here of an immanent immortality. 

Benedict Anderson describes the cultural significance of tombs to Unknown Soldiers: 

"No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence accorded these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who "discovered" the Unknown Soldier's name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones. Sacrilege of a strange, contemporary kind! Yet void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings. The empty tomb represents the ideal everyman, willing to sacrifice himself for the glory of the nation."

The most important question is:

How can we find a new heroic figure, in film, theatre and other media, which is neither the return of the old figure of religious or national sacrifice, nor the nihilistic figure of the last man? Is there a place for a new style of heroism?


- character, emancipation, equality -



"I felt that God did not create us to be the slaves of our brothers, and I bent all my effort to extricate myself from the grip that was choking poor workers... At the age of twenty-three I felt strong enough to effect my deliverance, sensing that the burden I bore was too heavy on me... At that point I had invented a new type of loom that permitted me to manufacture the most beautiful fabrics (shawls). I had enlisted a collaborator to handle the equipment setup. He was a young man who suffered as I did, and who also desired greatly to emancipate himself... We realized that the sufferings we shared were those of our brothers, the common laborers, as well. And I, for my part, had dreams of emancipating a certain number of them with us. (Claude David, worker, XIX century, quotation from Jacques Ranciere: Night of labour)

Emancipation is a broad term used to describe various efforts to obtain political rights or equality, often for a specifically disenfranchised group. Emancipation stems from "ex manus capere": Take out of the hand. Karl Marx understands it as "equal status of individual citizens in relation to the state, equality before the law, regardless of religion, property, or other “private” characteristics of individual people."

However, "the very same word, emancipation, is used to denote the advancement of the individual worker who sets up on his own and the deliverance of the oppressed proletariat."


- equality -

The "=" symbol that is now universally accepted by mathematics for equality was first recorded by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in The Whetstone of Witte (1557).

- visualizing the equality -

Visualizing equality is difficult. But late in the nineteenth century, the engineer and political economist, Fleeming Jenkin, took great pains to confront the critics of economics visually. He drew a picture of exchange in which the participants are faceless: there is no difference in competence to be inferred from physiognomical differences. Instead, in this delicate, dance-like drawing, the order is circular, each actor in the drama of markets has his or her own goals, and these private goals are revealed in the market order, the spontaneous order.

Parallel between Jenkin visualisation of equality and Matisse painting La danse:

When Lenin came to power after the Revolution, he confiscated Shchukin's collection of Matisse paintings because they so clearly demonstrated the "decadence and corruption" of capitalism. Matisse once said, "I'm ready to paint as many frescoes as you like, only remember, it's no good asking me to paint hammers and sickles all day long."