El murmullo de las imágenes. Imaginación, documental y silencio,Shangrila Textos Aparte, 2012
The world does not end in the limits of language, as Wittgenstein affirmed, but rather it continues through the silence of images. This journey to the other side of the mirror is necessary in order to adapt our mentality to the possibilities that are offered to us in a tumultuous time period in constant transformation, such as ours, but which is nevertheless at the mercy of numerous inertias and interdictions of every sort.
The technological progress of the last decades has set the base for an era of the imagination willing to replace the era of the literal which has dominated our culture for more than two centuries. In order to understand this exceptional situation, in which material conditions are actually more advanced than the mentality that has to cultivate them, we must pay attention to silence in audiovisual discourses, as it is through this silence that the imagination is able to circumvent the impositions of the hegemonic discourse which opposes any change of mentality.
Documentary film, which emerged at the beginning of the twentieth-century as an unprecedented type of representation without any real predecessors, was considered a film of the real, one that was attuned to the essentially realistic mentality of that time period. But at the end of the century it experienced such radical changes that it became the spear-head of the current transformations in which the imagination has come to determine the possibilities of understanding reality: forms such as the subjective documentary, web pages and documentary comic books, along with animated documentaries, which completely disrupt the foundations of a film form that, despite everything, continues to be deeply attached to reality –even though it is to a reality which is no longer the same and whose characteristics must be newly deciphered.
The relationship that documentaries hold with the form of reality of each time period turns this type of films into the perfect laboratory to explore the coordinates of each one of those realities; therefore documentaries are the ideal testing ground for our current reality. But this task requires developing a new vocabulary based on the imaginary vectors that technological changes provide; a vocabulary and a conceptualization whose main parameters are established through the concept of silence as it applies to the image.
This essay is structured in four parts: Silence, Cosmos, Imagination, and Mind and Brain. The first explores the territory of representation, establishing a hermeneutics of the image based on the concept of silence. The second part explores the parameters of the world and its forms of knowledge and understanding through two fundamental axes: vision and myth. The third part discusses mentalities and, essentially, the need to adapt our own mentality to the functions of the imagination instead of maintaining an attachment to a positivistic realism which dramatically thwarts intellectual advancement. Finally, part four proposes to examine the crucible of all of the rest: the mind. The starting point of this essay is the idea that the factory of reality is composed of the historically changing combination of all of these parameters.
CONTENT
PRÓLOGO
PRIMERA PARTE: Silencio
El silencio y la melodía de la imagen
El silencio metafórico
Lo vacío y lo lleno
El silencio visual
Figuraciones del silencio visual
El silencio documental
Imágenes silenciosas
Formas documentales del cómic
El silencio de las heterotopias
El paisaje y el silencio de lo real
El silencio de la presentación
Teoría del encuadre documental
Los silencios de la elipsis
Metáfora y silencio
Una imaginación silenciosa
La sombra de la imagen
SEGUNDA PARTE: Cosmos
El silencio de la palabra
El ojo en el cielo
El nacimiento de la metáfora
Mito y silencio
El silencio de las imágenes
TERCERA PARTE: Imaginación
Teoría de la imaginación
El silencio de la cámara
El silencio del tiempo
El cine como ruina
Realidad e imaginación
CUARTA PARTE: Mente y cerebro
La imaginación documental
El horizonte interior
El documental imaginario
Más allá de la ficción