The Moving Image is no Evidence

The title of this blog comes from "The Death of Cinema" Paolo Cherchi Usai's dense, beautiful and complex meditation on moving images, memory, and preservation:

"The moving image is no evidence. Nature and social life are perceived by cinema as a sequence of events that can be remembered. Moving images produced outside the world of fiction give identity to the viewing experience as fragments of empirical evidence, but they can prove nothing unless there is some explanation of what they are. Be it ever so eloquent, the moving image is like a witness who is unable to describe an event without an intermediary. The ability to transform it into evidence, true or false, is inherently linked to a decision to preserve, alter or suppress the memory of the circumstance under which the image was produced. The loss of the moving image is an outcome of an ideology expressed by the very object that made it possible."

I'm still not sure I have any idea what that means. But it touches on several ideas I've persistently been drawn to emotionally and intellectually. How our minds transform our experience and perception, how the art we attend to and celebrate reveals our values, our self-image, our desired legacy.

I want to use this as a place to focus my ideas and to return to the practice of watching and writing about film daily. Who knows if anyone will ever want to read it besides me, but maybe it will evolve into something coherent and interesting. Or not. Whatever.