Gawan Fagard

My paper investigates the relationship between reality and presence in cinema as two opposing forces of the moving image. Photographic realism is been often considered the ground on which cinema is and should always be bound to the optical reality as it appears to us. In my approach, however, I will seek to understand cinema as a revelatory art, which brings to life invisible bodies by a process of incarnation onto the screen.

On the basis of the work in cinema by filmmakers as diverse as Sharunas Bartas (LT, 1964), Joanna Hogg (UK, 1960) and Chantal Akerman (BE, 1950), I would like to investigate to what extent these filmmakers manage to render presence of those bodies which are initially absent. I argue that this process does not only happen in terms of a reproduction of optical reality by the cinematic apparatus, but that their cinema allows for the incarnation of abstracted, invisible or »spiritual« bodies onto the film screen. Philosophically speaking, these filmmakers overcome cinema’s limitation to optical reality by infusing it by the desire for a »true« image – a notion putting any sound-image under the highest suspicion. The core question of my paper will thus be: to what extent can the veracity of cinema survive in a world where the sound-image is one of the most mistrusted means par excellence?

It needs to be added that my argument follows in part Marie José Mondzain’s work on film in relation to the byzantine aesthetics of the sacred. Mondzain’s presence as a keynote to the conference will certainly be a stimulus for contextualizing my contribution.

Gawan Fagard (Belgium, 1985) studied Art History and Archeology at the Free University Brussels and the Freie Universität Berlin. He was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley and worked in several institutions for contemporary art and cinema, both as a lecturer and a curator. Currently he is finishing a PhD on »Contemplative Attention to Moving Images – Profanations of the Sacred in Film and Vieo Art« at the International Graduate Program »Mimesis« of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He’s also teaching at the Free University Brussels.