Not Exactly a Still Life

Radically not exactly – a phenomenological challenge for Johannes Binotto

In Not Exactly a Still Life, Johannes Binotto invites Artificial Intelligence (AI) to his editing table, to elaborate on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. More specifically, the elaboration concerns portraits, faces, and their doubles – the fundamental aspects of Vertigo. It concerns – and is concerned by – the dream and/or the wish of replicating faces, the faces of beloveds. In Vertigo, Scottie’s dream and/or wish of replicating Madelaine/Carlotta in real life becomes a true intention, the intention being to obtain the double without using mirrors, beyond mere representation, beyond the mediation of a technical device: through painting beyond painting, through film beyond film. This is the human-too-human dream of reversibility, of rebirth after death. Is it only imagination that can do that?

Binotto’s more-than-explicit introduction of AI, a technical device (the DreamStudio software), could be seen as a negative answer to Scottie’s intentions. In his own commentary on his film essay, Binotto speaks of “failure”, and here I would ask: are dreams destined to be just dreams, to fail their realisation, to evaporate when in contact with reality? With Not Exactly a Still Life, Binotto opens another room of the psychoanalytical castle in order to learn from failures, from their particular quality and variety, in order to add – through AI – another chapter to his book about the uncanny as the entanglement of familiar and unfamiliar. In the aforementioned commentary, he says: «Retroactively, the [AI-generated images] rendered the supposedly original stills more weird. Suddenly the film images looked as eerily fake as the AI ones».

We can thus also explore another side of the same entanglement of familiar and unfamiliar, the side where we do not discover the fake of the original but the originality of the fake, where we do not feel the unfamiliarity of the familiar but the familiarity of the unfamiliar. This means nothing other than insisting on listening to Midge’s words: «not exactly a still life», insisting on listening to this “not exactly” and to its ability to disclose improbable options. The “not” of “not exactly a still life” breaks the certitude of failure, and has us take the hypothesis of an apparent still life that subsequently reveals itself to be life – or at least lively enough to be enjoyed as life – seriously. It is effectively difficult to do this through the monstruous AI-generated images that Binotto proposes in his essay. In this respect, the fact of insisting on listening to Midge’s “not exactly” would mean to take the odd agency of AI seriously; for example, in imagining how the line between AI animation and life would start to become blurred. In Not Exactly a Still Life, it remains a difficult task indeed, a task that challenges our imagination and seems to be accomplished in an easier way against Binotto’s images.

At stake is the possibility of making the step from fictional to “non-fictional imagination” – to use Fred Dewey’s brilliant expression. Whether this can be done with or against Binotto, with or against Hitchcock, it is not only a question of perception but of cognition, of thinking. Definitely, as Binotto’s film essay cinematically “thinks” together with Cristina Álvarez López and Chris Marker, both either quoted or referred to in Not Exactly a Still Life. A detour-that-is-not-a-detour becomes necessary. Scottie’s intention to “replay” Madelaine is the object of Chris Marker’s «A free replay (Notes on Vertigo)» (1994), itself being the object of Cristina Álvarez López’ «Replaying Marker» (2022). Binotto’s perspective on Scottie’s intention to replay Madeleine is impossible to disentangle from his replaying of Cristina Álvarez López’ replaying of Chris Marker’s replaying of Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Thinking with Chris Marker and Cristina Álvarez López

Before falling into the vertigo of the replays in Johannes’ plus Cristina’s plus Chris’ plus Alfred’s cinematic thinking, let’s focus on Cristina’s favourite passage by Chris: «One does not resurrect the dead, one does not look back at Eurydice. Scottie experiences the greatest joy a man can imagine, a second life, in exchange for the greatest tragedy, a second death. What do video games, which tell us more about our unconscious than the complete works of Lacan, offer us? Neither money nor glory, but a new game. The possibility of playing again. “A second chance”. A free replay.» Vertigo considers the unconscious desire of a second chance, ponders the vertigo of time that is Orpheus’ desire of reversibility – this is Chris’ thesis. But how? In which form? In the form of a desire that will remain a desire, that will be never satisfied (except as desire). In this way, Chris underlines how this desire can only take the form of wishful imagination, and proposes – as Cristina says – «an oneiric interpretation of Vertigo’s second half, by carefully tracing the film’s complex game of mirrors, reflections, double figures and double meanings». Chris does not believe Scottie’s beliefs, and reduces them to the expression of unconscious desires.

According to this line of thought, we can listen to Midge’s “not exactly” and figure out how a still life could still be life, but this figuring out will be an imagination that can not be truly believed, insofar as it is just the expression of an unconscious desire. Cristina, in her replaying Chris’ thinking, stresses how this imagination can factually not be believed, how we could not say that it should not be believed: «“One does not resurrect the dead, one does not look back at Eurydice”: this is not a lesson to be learnt; this is something we already know.»  She then adds: «something that nonetheless must be transgressed, forgotten or ignored to pursue our unconscious needs that are deeper and stronger than any law or knowledge.» Cristina and Chris thereby recognise a dichotomy between factual law or knowledge and the unconscious needs and desires that can or must transgress said knowledge. The realm of desire is wider and freer than the constraints of factual reality. If Cristina and Chris are keen to accept this realm of desire, they are doing it only in the framework of the fundamental dichotomy of conscious and unconscious, reality and fiction. Cristina continues: «Fictions are aware of that [our unconscious needs], hence our dependence on them. Fictions are a bait – but a bait that plays a fundamental role in our unconscious life. Or, paraphrasing Marker again: fictions are stratagems holding up a mirror to us and bringing out our repressed desires.» Here fictions reveal our unconscious life and our repressed desires, not our conscious life or our realisable desires. Therefore, Orpheus’ desire of reversibility is not negated, but accepted only as an impossible desire, recognised as purely fictional. There is no room for non-fictional imagination. There is no room for Scottie’s beliefs. The traditional dichotomy of conscious and unconscious, reality and fiction, is not really questioned.

What would cinema be if it could not provide us with the vertigo of the possible continuity between cinema and life?

Now it seems natural to me to ask: are Cristina and Chris really listening to Midge’s “not exactly”? Are they really listening to the cinematic power that makes this “not exactly” a radical one? Are they really replaying a movie or rather abandoning the specificity of cinema in their replays? In front of Vertigo as a movie, I feel obliged to take Orpheus’ desire seriously. I feel obliged to believe, or at least to have the experience of believing, that Eurydice will be resurrected. I will believe Scottie’s beliefs – and their eventual deception won’t change the experience of believing that I had. If we learn something from cinema, it is this capacity of experiencing what seems impossible to realise. Thus, the movie Vertigo is interesting because Midge challenges us not only to imagine but to believe that there can be life in a still life or, to use another expression, to non-fictionally imagine that there can be life in a still life. In this way, we fashion the experience of what it would be to see life in a still life. What would Vertigo be without this experience? What would our love for Vertigo be without the permanence of this experience in our lives? What would our lives be without the experience of the vertigo of time? As banal as it might sound, cinema is not an ersatz. I don’t believe that Alfred made movies in order to make us learn from the failures of cinematic delusions – from the impossible as impossible – but rather to provide us with the experience of the impossible as possible, for example with the experience of the reversibility, or the experience of the vertigo of time. What would cinema be if it could not provide us with the vertigo of the possible continuity between cinema and life?

Now, Johannes’ choice for AI-generated images leads to a free replay that is completely different from the one of video games. Where the video games provide us with a perfect rebirth after the game over (as long as we pay for the new game – still a considerably cheaper solution than paying a Lacanian analyst…), the AI-generated images confront us with the irreversibility of metamorphosis. Said images clearly break the suspension of disbelief that makes the cinematic experience so distinctive. With this approach, Johannes enhances the “traditional” thinking of Cristina and Chris, where the unconscious desires that would transgress the factual law or knowledge – be that the impossible reversibility of video games or the impossible irreversibility of AI-generated images – are accepted only as long as they are “disambiguated” as exclusively fictional, so confirming and maintaining the dichotomy of conscious and unconscious, reality and fiction. In so doing, Johannes follows Chris’ oneiric interpretation of Vertigo, on the basis of Cristina’s recalling our “knowledge” that “one does not resurrect the dead, one does not look back at Eurydice” – the knowledge of irreversibility. In spite of this, to my eyes cinema is cinema precisely because it does not know it, so that in cinema we can pretend to not know it either.

The loving thread

This position of ignorance is probably foolish, exactly like how Scottie’s love is “foolish”, and here is another (fundamental, in my opinion) thread of Chris’ “notes” – a thread that Cristina’s love for Chris’ notes apparently makes her not see: the amour fou. If Scottie and Orpheus believe in this reversibility it is because they are in love, they believe that – as banal as it may come across – love wins over death. The foolishness (rather than the madness) of their love pushes them to believe the improbable, or make them take the impossible for improbable. Is cinema doing something different with us? The beliefs of a cinema-goer are not so far from the ones of a lover...

Now, it is interesting how Chris both proposes and deactivates the theme of the amour fou: by intertwining the theme of love in Vertigo with his own love for California, it places the features of love in the past: «As Gavin says, San Francisco has changed…» The development of the theme, inside and outside of Vertigo, transforms love into nostalgia for the replicated (and beloved) past. In Chris’ replay, love is remembered and not replayed, so that the theme of the amour fou leaves room for the “impossible love”, the love as destined to be lost. Even the cinema-goer seems to become an ex-cinema-goer. Alfred’s alleged cynicism is probably speaking for Chris as non-believer, as non-lover, as non-cinema-goer. What if Chris’ loss of a revolving California would more accurately conceal the loss of the ignorance that is appropriate for wishful love? Chris – and Cristina with him – seem to know too much… In the last sentence, Chris even confesses to «know Vertigo by heart», this knowledge being a precondition for us to become the addressees of his text and to «deserve anything at all» (!). I don’t want to polarise love and knowledge, but to make love independent, at least independent from a profound knowledge of the movie – and from “too much” knowledge in the movie. Who knows, could Chris’ knowledge be an expression of his love for Vertigo?

What about Johannes? How ignorant, how loving is his Not Exactly a Still Life? I believe that the apparent coherence of his film essay with Cristina and Chris’ traditional thinking in terms of dichotomy between conscious and unconscious, reality and fiction (the coherence of psychoanalysis, whose dialectic sources are rooted in theology), can still be challenged by a certain degree of ignorant love (a certain degree of phenomenology, whose non-dialectic sources are rooted in geometry and mathematics). This ignorant love could make us pretend not to know that the AI-generated images are unfamiliar per se, a love that could make us believe his AI-generated images as possibly familiar. We only have to love Not Exactly a Still Life strongly enough.

At the cinema we cannot but be with Orpheus in his belief of resurrecting Eurydice

This is exactly what occurred to me during a visit to the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart Am Römerholz in Winterthur, where an installative version of Johannes’ film is currently presented. In the exhibition room, Ruth – whom I love – found a magnifier; she decided to put it on her left eye, then approaching the magnifier’s analogue deformation of her eye close to the digital deformation of the essay on the screen (see the main picture). On one side, this gesture recollects the “analogue source” still working behind any AI generation of images. On the other, Ruth’s eye under the magnifier shows how blurred the distinction between AI-generated images and the “normal” ones can be, in a way demonstrating the possible continuity between fiction and reality. I would express this continuity as the conflation of the (unfamiliar) reality of the unconscious and the (familiar) fictionality of the conscious.

Cinema and love – and love at cinema even more – make us ignorant. Phenomenologically so, for this ignorance resembles the phenomenological “epoché” through which we suspend the judgement on the existence of things and focus on our experience of them. At the cinema we cannot but be with Orpheus in his belief of resurrecting Eurydice, through cinema we see life in a still life, because in cinema the impossible is not exactly impossible, radically not exactly, as far as its experience is in perfect continuity with all other experiences we have. I know, you know Vertigo by heart, Johannes, just like Cristina and Chris. My phenomenological challenge to your Not Exactly a Still Life will be resumed in the loving-and-cinematic invitation to listen to Midge’s “not exactly” as radically as possible. Who knows, perhaps you’ll hear the hidden voice of Alfred exclaiming: Let’s love, Johannes, let’s love!