Exhausting the Gaze. Interfaces of Images in the Video Essays “My Mulholland” (J. McGoff, 2020) and “Watching The Pain of Others” (C. Galibert-Laîné, 2018)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24310/umatica.2024.v6i7.20721Keywords:
surface, interface, remediation, imagination, video essayAbstract
This essay explores the transformations in our ways of seeing images and their implications for contemporary visual culture. It proposes to rethink the relationship of gaze, materiality of the image, and the possibilities of imagination. Instead of simply trying to find new displacements of the gaze, this text offers a reflection on the materiality of images and their remediations in order to open the potential of imagination. The central site that the gaze occupies to address images in visual studies is set into question, especially tackling the images of female bodies. In order to develop this notion, two video essays are brought forward for analysis: My Mulholland (2020), by Jessica McGoff, about the fears of watching David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) as a female teenager, and Watching The Pain of Others (2018), by Lého Galibert-Laîné, a visual diary that tries to make sense to their fascination for Penny Lane’s film The Pain of Others (2018). Both video essays are bringing forth the spectatorship of an existing film and remediate them, they put them back into the medium, inserting their gaze within the image. These critical video essays question the act of looking by exploring the interfaces of their images –that is, the material sites of contact or limit between two media. It is from that place, I argue, that the possibilities of an imagination that exhausts the gaze can be engaged.
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