1 - The Ethical and the Image

Summary

A woman is sitting on the edge of a bed in a relatively dark room, against a blue wall that emphasises and helps to set off not only the poor conditions of the room she is in but also her sad face, greasy hair and gloomy red eyes. The static, extended shot of the woman lasts for one minute before the next shot presents the title. The initial shot can be said to represent destitution, poverty and pain. There is something else to it, however, that provides the grounds for representation but also works to disrupt it. The woman is looking offscreen, and even though she is mute, expressionless and immobile, the persistence of her stare subtracts something from the representa-tional thrust of the image. The shot is reduced to a persistence within the image, not only of the body of the woman, but of her looking offscreen – a look that can be said to be sad or in pain, but is devoid of content, does not resonate with anything on- or offscreen and disrupts the meaningfulness of the shot by its mere persistence.

This first shot seems to reaffirm something of the image, something of its structure beyond what the image is or signifies. The frame of the image separates it from the surroundings and gives it an irreducible position within my frontal visual field. At the same time, the image appears to be irreducible to an image about the world it shows; it is not merely a derivative of the world it represents. Prior to being a representation of the world or an object within my vision, the image appears to be presenting itself to my eye, referring to itself as what is self-presenting. The shot contains the body of the woman, and her looking offscreen is there within the image. But it is precisely because of its being within the image, being a constituent of what the image contains, that the looking offscreen emphasises the address of the image, its opening towards me, beyond whatever is revealed to me or exposed within the image as visual content. The looking seems to resonate with the image itself: it asks me something but what it asks or demands remains untold.