Topos, Ethos, Eikon. Geopolitics of the image

Abstract

Space is not a mere extension, a simple form of intuition nor a condition of experience and representation. It is the receptacle of the flux of things in their movement and history. Cinematographic space, founded on kineticism explains this property of “place” that carries out at times its iconic incarnation of a certain lived temporality.

Theo Angelopoulos’ film, Le Regard d’ Ulysse, of which here we analyze one of its principal scenes, makes us feel and perceive this iconicity of lived time, the very same that is always deposited in a moving image as if we were dealing with a pause in history (just as we speak of a “pause in the image”) in which the historic and geopolitical experience that we have been experiencing for more than 10 years is condensed in an oriented space, of great complexity but reduced to an eidetic schematism that is relatively simple. This is an experience whose perception can only be felt in an empathic relationship with spatiality that is never pure yet always loaded with affects.