Abstract

"Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again. And in me too the wave rises." Virginia Woolf: The Waves As an homage to film theorist and experimental filmmaker Thierry Kuntzel and his work on waves, and in particular his interactive video installation "The Waves" this video essay is a meditation on the wave as an optical phenomenon, as philosophical object, and as a form of media self-reflexivity. In cinema's ongoing fascination with the image of waves of water we can recognise a fascination with the fluidity of filmic images as their intrinsic quality. A filmmaker like Jean Epstein returns repeatedly and obsessively to images of water and waves breaking on shores as they perfectly represent the camera's unique ability to render everything it captures unstable and fluid. Accordingly, already at the beginning of film history the so-called "cinema of attractions" was drawn to spectacles of fluid wave-like movements, like in the early film genre of the serpentine dances. But even beyond and before the wave as visual motif film is dependent of waves and their diffusion: the light which transports optical information is itself a wave, and so is sound. Accordingly, also the soundtrack of my video essay which may be experienced as the sound of the sea is in fact just the product of modulating electronic sine waves. Finally, also the film material itself, when it disintegrates and falls apart becomes fluid, turning all its images into bubbling waves, as can be seen in the experimental films by Bill Morrison. The wave in and of film stands for what Kuntzel called a "vision flottante" - a "floating vision" (319): A cinema of uncertainty and mutability, of potentiality instead of definiteness, a cinema of flux. As Jean Epstein writes in Esprit de cinéma: "In a space-time that is variable at will, as conceived by the cinematographic tool, each object continually becomes an endless number of aspects-objects that oftentimes cannot be compared. When all forms liquefy in a perpetual mobility, the principle of identity becomes as unsuitable to them as it is to ocean waves" (39). Thierry Kuntzel: Title TK. Paris 2006 Jean Epstein: Esprit de cinéma. Genève, Paris 1955. With many thanks to the "Timeline Tuesday" research group for their feedback, ideas, and inspiration. further inspirational reading: Jean-Baptiste Thoret: "Gravity of the Flux: Michael Mann’s Miami Vice" Senses of Cinema (Feb 2007) Kathrin Dreckmann und Verena Meis: Fluide Mediale. Medialität, Materialität und Medienästhetik des Fluiden (2023)