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Substitute location : semiotics and perception of substitute location : in fiction film : A Road Movie
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My thesis, the result of an Artistic Research Project, is composed of a theoretical part, which is titled “Semiotics and Perception of Substitute Location in Fiction Film” and a practical work, a Road Movie. The Road Movie will take us through a coordinate system of topics (alienation, assimilation, ideological interpellation, immediacy, etc.) that the theoretical work approaches from a different angle: For the theoretical part, I have analyzed a number of fiction films and artworks with a special focus on the question how places and locations are perceived by the human visual system, which operates as an interface or even as a translation centre between seeing, perceiving, mapping and being. Visual perception is at the same time the source that anchors semiotic information perceived as representative for a real, physical location and the projection point for mapping the world in schemes of virtual environments. Any filmmaker or photographer has to find his own position on a scale that goes from 'total subjective projection' to 'total objective documentation'. Hence, the semiotics of a filmic/photographic narrative space is not only a geographical, geometrical, or a cinematographic category, but always also a moral category. This is expressed in the double meaning of the term point of view, which designates simultaneously a topological and an ethical dimension. As the object of my theoretical research I have chosen a practice that is common in feature film production. It should serve as a point of departure for my speculative journey, and this phenomenon is called 'Substitute Location'. The James Bond movie Die another Day (Lee Tamahori, 2002) is one of many mainstream movies, which illustrate this practice. The film has a plot that takes place in part in Havana, Cuba and some of the scenes show the actor Pierce Brosnan as agent 007 walking along the famous Malecón in Havana, but these scenes were actually shot in Cádiz, Spain, so Cádiz serves as a ‘Substitute Location’ for Havana. A location is a place where a film or a TV series is wholly or partially produced, in addition to the scenes that are shot in a film studio or on extra sets produced for the film. Since Roberto Rossellini and Italian neo-realism, many filmmakers prefer to shoot in real locations because they believe that they will catch more realism if they are in a real place, and not in an artificial studio set pretending to be a real place. The realists - among them many documentary filmmakers - assume, in the philosophical tradition of Aristotle, that the basic structures of reality are reliable, can be reflected by experience, and, in principle, can be represented adequately in linguistic or other symbolic (iconographic) form. The particular phenomenon of ‘Substitute Location’ addresses in a concrete way, how disembodiment and the ideological semiotics of 'make-believe' work hand in hand. Substitute Location allow us simultaneously to assume that somebody in the film team (the responsible producer/ director/ location scout) believed that location A 'looks more historically appropriate than' or 'will be perceived as' location B while exploring moments of convergence and conflict between the signifier and the signified. A Substitute Location then becomes a potential, yet involuntary, environment for a dialectics of seeing, where the blind spots of our projections become an integral part of our individual and collective perception of identities and their ideological interpellation. My artistic approach to reality is influenced by the discipline of Psychogeography. There is no universal definition of what Psychogeography means, however, this discipline was undoubtedly influenced, if not created by Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI). The body of work which has been created by the SI may seem trivial today but I think that the current state of our society, which has raised passive consumption and its prerequisite, individual financial success, to the measure of all things, can not only be grasped, but it also can be effectively countered with the methods and strategies of the SI. Psychogeography endeavors to develop relevant insights into past, contemporary and future environments, and today, these environments are constructed to a significant degree by mass and social media. In some respect, Psychogeography seeks to reclaim a form of travel that was once synonymous with adventure. Today, one can only state a demise of real travel that is no longer individualizing or heroic. Psychogeographers are disenchanted at the sense of inertia, with which modern travelers seem to move around the globe, taking no risks and facing no unknowns. Prior to the breakdown of global barriers in the semiosphere, travel was not an almost instant change of places, but a transforming event filled with historical and psychological significance. Since the question of identity is closely related to places and their meaning, my research focused on the changes that the ongoing process of mediatization brings about and in particular, the role of the screen device in that process. I assume that the ubiquitous presence of screens brings forth a collective sense of dissociation, as identity is increasingly constructed outside of an anchoring body. With this in mind, I propose to broaden the concept of Substitute Location and apply it to all our projections. The interfacial approach to the lifeworld generates a universe beyond, that is, like Walter Benjamin's Arcades, an abortive ersatz dream-space (substitute location), which serves predominantly to stir desires for consumerist impulses. Once our desires are projected into this dream media space, our bodies are left behind. Occasionally, an opening appears, and we can look back onto the world outside of the dream, which looks like a gigantic landfill for waste and debris. I define my task as a researcher in the field of Psychogeography as to find and construct dialectical images from that historical depository. However, I am equally interested in finding out, how the measure of a human lifetime can resist that collective sense of dissociation. Therefore, my practical work, the Road Movie took on the form of a biography. Biographies look back on a past, which is topical. If people had no ties to a place, there would be no identity, no culture. My research analyzes the modifications and transformations of places into mediated space, from 'site' to 'sight', as it is constituted in the film narrative. The memory of a real, physical body or place, and their uses as disembodied signifiers helps creating the shape of a grand narrative, which constitutes a structured landscape of thinking. The film narrative is solipsistic. Subjectivity becomes distanced and is applied to society as a whole, which collects thousands of narratives. Not only things and memories but also signs are located. By focusing on a spatial description, the narrative can be organized in relation towards History as well as towards its ideological interpellation with individual identity. At a first glance, there is only a road and its name: Rua Ricardo Chibanga. Toponymy is an important part of historical geography and henceforth of Psychogeography: toponyms are often very stable in time, and they document the history of a settlement. Migratory movements of individuals are reflected in the origin of names, the anthroponyms, which are particularly instructive. Residential site names like Lourenço Marques (city), Mount Everest (mountain) or Rhodesia (country) represent the reference of general toponyms to the names of explorers and colonizers in the strict sense, which means, those places are ideologically interpellated by their very names. What struck me when I came across this road sign are the absent signifiers: the sign says that Ricardo Chibanga is a bullfighter, but it does not say that he is of African origin. However, his name makes this fact conspicuous by its absence and nevertheless influences the meaning of a signifier actually used. Another form of absence has the specific label of 'that which goes without saying', in this case, the fact that usually bullfighting is an activity reserved for a predominantly white, Iberian aristocratic class. Suddenly, the divisibility of this place emerges from the name, from the language that came to inscribe this place, just as a ‘point de capture’ keeps a floating signifier in place. As such a language must communicate something (something other than itself) the road sign does not exactly name the just the place, but it creates a whole system of values. The street name refers to a person, an African bullfighter, who came to live in Portugal. Portugal had been a colonial power at the time when he came. The official ideology in Portugal stated that all territories in Africa were actually an integral part of Portugal and there was no such thing as a colony - the natives of these territories were actually citizens of Portugal. The road that I encountered now turns into a place where a tension emerges with the split between the topographic vision of colonial Africa and the proper name Rua Ricardo Chibanga haunts this urban space with an additional meaning that needed to be addressed: the name of a living person has become the name of a road. This act of assimilation is actually a historical 'closure'. The Road Movie, which is in my case a film about a road, aims at reopening this 'closed case'.
Descrição
Tese de doutoramento, Belas-Artes (Audiovisuais), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Belas-Artes, 2016
Palavras-chave
Teses de doutoramento - 2016