Amanda Egbe

This paper reflects upon changes in audio-visual technologies through mapping the relationship of one image to another in pre-cinematic, early cinema and experimental apparatus. It does so in order to understand what constitutes the responsibility to the real, in our experiences of making, viewing, storing and retrieving moving images. The paper draws upon concepts of archaeology alongside Levinas’ ethics in considering how we instrumentalize film in the subjection of the real.

If we imagine one image placed in a relationship to another image, we might place them in a consecutive relationship as within a filmstrip, images that are side by side, or above and below each other as in the cinema, or in front and behind each other. The examples, before even the consideration of content are image relations that pictorially reflect some of the earliest forms of moving image storage and retrieval, that is the slides of the magic lantern, the thaumatrope, the zoetrope, the flipbook. These relationships of images are not just at the level of layers; they extend to (1) the apparatus, and (2) human perception which is recovered through an archaeology of the moving image. This network is realized through a sensibility or responsibility to the material through the viewer/filmmaker relationship.  It is this relationship that this paper explores with recourse to a Jakob von Uexküll’s thought experiment and utilizing the ethics of Levinas, to investigate how the real comes to be experienced through moving image practices of proximity and subjectivity.

Amanda Egbe is a Lecturer in Media Production at the University of Bedfordshire and an associate researcher at Transtechnology Research, Plymouth University.  She is an artist and filmmaker whose research interests are in moving image production, digital technologies and working with archives.