Recent art cinema has produced several experiments in the tableau that conceive entire movies based on its aesthetic. Such films blur the boundaries between cinema and installation art, and consist of a loosely connected string of tableaux which gain a degree of autonomy and therefore cannot be interpreted in the contexts of cinematic narration and dramaturgy. These films are usually categorized as slow movies, and indeed their duration has inspired the majority of their analysis in film theory. Nevertheless, I suggest that we should focus on the similarities between the tableau sequences of slow movies and the installations of moving image tableaux in order to highlight the ways they revitalise the traditional, intermedial figure of the tableau vivant in art, and foreground the single, photographic frame within moving images. Referring to recent reinterpretations of the notion of the transmedial dispositif and to the revisions of the tableau mode in art (and the ideas of Jean-François Chevrier) I propose to contest Raymond Bellour’s idea of the ‘battle of the dispositifs’ and concentrate on aspects of the complex convergences between the traditional visual arts and the new media of moving images that underlies the tableau aesthetic in post-cinema. Taking into account the implosion of the tableau vivant into a more generic tableau style, I examine a set of gestures and actions of folding together photography, painting and cinema that may define the post-cinematic ‘mise en tableau’ (via examples from the films of James Benning, Lav Diaz, Gustav Deutsch, Raúl Perrone, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang).
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The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema
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The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aes-
thetic in Post-Cinema
Ágnes Pethő, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
in Cluj-Napoca (Romania)




Abstract

   Recent art cinema has produced several experiments in the tableau that conceive
   entire movies based on its aesthetic. Such films blur the boundaries between
   cinema and installation art, and consist of a loosely connected string of tableaux
   which gain a degree of autonomy and therefore cannot be interpreted in the
   contexts of cinematic narration and dramaturgy. These films are usually catego-
   rized as slow movies, and indeed their duration has inspired the majority of
   their analysis in film theory. Nevertheless, I suggest that we should focus on the
   similarities between the tableau sequences of slow movies and the installations
   of moving image tableaux in order to highlight the ways they revitalise the tradi-
   tional, intermedial figure of the tableau vivant in art, and foreground the single,
   photographic frame within moving images. Referring to recent reinterpretations
   of the notion of the transmedial dispositif and to the revisions of the tableau
   mode in art (and the ideas of Jean-François Chevrier) I propose to contest Ray-
   mond Bellour’s idea of the ‘battle of the dispositifs’ and concentrate on aspects
   of the complex convergences between the traditional visual arts and the new
   media of moving images that underlies the tableau aesthetic in post-cinema. Tak-
   ing into account the implosion of the tableau vivant into a more generic tableau
   style, I examine a set of gestures and actions of folding together photography,
   painting and cinema that may define the post-cinematic ‘mise en tableau’ (via
   examples from the films of James Benning, Lav Diaz, Gustav Deutsch, Raúl Per-
   rone, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang).


                       The effect of picture on picture as a factor in style is much
                      more important than what comes directly from the imitation
                                                                           of nature.
                                     (Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History)




The ‘Aesthetic of Confusion’ or the ‘New Adventure of the Picture Form?’

  From the fashionable cinemagraphs breathing life into photographs on our
                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 25, Fall 2015
                                           Ágnes Pethő


portable screens to the monumental photo-filmic installations exhibited in art
galleries, the fascination with moving images posing as pictures (photographs or
paintings) and vice versa, is not only ubiquitous in our digital age, but perceptible
in all layers of contemporary visual culture. The tableau form combining stillness
with motion has emerged as an extremely versatile and widely used template of
digital imagery, connecting the new media of moving images with traditional arts,
everyday consumer practices with highbrow aestheticism. In recent art cinema
we often see entire movies based on the aesthetic of the tableau which blur the
boundaries between cinema and installation art. In such films sequences conceived
as individual pictures are no longer aesthetic ornaments, or privileged moments
interpreted in the context of a cinematic narration and dramaturgy, but gain a de-
gree of autonomy. And while such films are usually included in the general canon
of slow cinema on account of their ‘intensified sense of temporality’,1 we may
not only view them as durational movies, but as films which are concerned with
different ways of foregrounding the single, photographic frame in cinema in an
unprecedented way, revitalising in the process the traditional intermedial figure
of the tableau vivant. Accordingly, instead of considering their aesthetic from the
perspective of temporality (or, as usually analysed, from the perspective of the cin-
ematic long take), I suggest that we focus on the similarities between the tableau
sequences of slow movies and the installations of moving image tableaux in order
to highlight the way in which they effectively re-negotiate the long-established
relations between photography, painting and the moving image.
   In this respect, I have found that the recent reinterpretations of the notion of
the dispositif2 in film theory as well as in the theory of art may prove productive
in determining key features of what we may regard as the post-cinematic tab-
leau. In his seminal essays3 Jean-Louis Baudry described ‘the cinema effect’ not
as something resulting from the discursive specificities of the film as language


1
  Jonathan Romney, ‘In Search of Lost Time’, Sight and Sound, 20.2 (February 2010), 43–44 (p. 43).
2
  Examples for the reinterpretation of the dispositifs of moving images in the last decades include,
among others: Raymond Bellour, ‘La Querelle des dispositifs / Battle of the Images’, in Future
Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. by Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2003), pp. 56–59 (first publ. in Art Press, 262 (November 2000), 48–52); Frank
Kessler, ‘The Cinema of Attractions as Dispositif’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. by
Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), pp. 57–71; André Parente and
Victa de Carvalho, ‘Cinema as dispositif: Between Cinema and Contemporary Art’, Cinémas: revue
d’études cinématographiques/Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, 19.1 (2008), 37–55; Pavle Levi, Cin-
ema by Other Means (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and
Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014),
in particular the chapter ‘The Rise of the Dispositif’, pp. 178–205.
3
  Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘Ideological effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus’ in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. by Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), pp. 286–98 (first publ. as ‘Effets idéologiques de l’appareil cinématographique de
base’, Cinéthique, 7–8 (1970), 1–8); Baudry, ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to
the Impression of Reality in the Cinema’, in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, pp. 299–318 (first publ.
as ‘Le Dispositif: approaches métapsychologiques de l’impression de realité’, Communications, 23
(1975), 56–72).

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     The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema


or text, but as a product of its basic technological machinery (l’appareil) and a
particular ‘set up’, a ‘disposition’ (dispositif), of the conditions of image projec-
tion or spectatorship, of material as well as psychological, social and ideological
components. Digital images produced and displayed with new devices and in
different conditions of reception bring about a multiplication of the dispositifs
of moving images, alongside the traditional institutional dispositif of cinema (i.e.
movies experienced in the cinema theatre).4 Raymond Bellour has written ex-
tensively about the relationship of film, video, photography at the dawn of the
digital age, coining the term ‘l’entre images’ (‘images in between’) to capture
the ‘collusion’5 and collision of these media and their consequences in film.
In several of his latest writings and public lectures, however, he has adopted a
much more radical stance by declaring that today we see an ‘aesthetic of con-
fusion’ and a ‘battle of the dispositifs’ (‘la querelle des dispositifs’), in which,
instead of a fertile in-betweenness, of cross-pollinations among the arts, ‘all we
have is incertitudes — slip-sliding, straddling, flickering, hybridization, meta-
morphosing, transition and passages between what is still called cinema and the
thousand and one ways to show moving images in the vague and misnomered
domain known as Art.’6 As a consequence, quite surprisingly, Bellour reasserts
the uniqueness of cinema and demands that we delimit it from all other arts us-
ing motion pictures.7
   The tableau sequences in recent cinema, in which slow movies, experimental
films and installation pieces converge, introduce us to the heart of this ongoing
debate on the relation between the new cinematic dispositifs and, as Bellour af-
fectionately phrases, citing Serge Daney, ‘the cinema, alone.’8 But instead of sup-
porting the idea of the clash of the dispositifs, purported by Bellour, they lead us
to a unique connection between cinema and the tableau, or ‘the picture form’ in
painting and photography. According to Jean-François Chevrier9 and the discus-
sions in contemporary art theory following his thoughts on the ‘adventure of the
picture form’,10 the tableau can be defined as a particular dispositif with a history

4
  From this point of view there has not been a ‘relocation’ of cinema in the post-media age, only a
multiplication of cinematic dispositifs, even though, as Francesco Casetti’s latest book argues, ‘re-
location’ has emerged as one of the key words defining the major processes taking place in today’s
cinema. See: Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy. Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 17–43.
5
  Bellour uses this verbal metaphor in his Between-the-Images (Zürich, Dijon: JRP Rinigier & Les
Presses du Réel, 2012), p. 16.
6
  Bellour, ‘Battle of the Images’, p. 58.
7
  A similar conclusion is reached by John Belton in his article, ‘If Film is Dead, What is Cinema?’,
Screen, 55.4 (Winter 2014), 460–71.
8
  Bellour, ‘The Cinema Alone/Multiple Cinemas’, Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 5
(Summer 2013), <http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue5/PDFs/ArticleBellour.pdf> [accessed
27 August 2015].
9
  Jean-François Chevrier, ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography’, in
The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960–1982, ed. by Douglas Fogle (Minneapolis:
Walker Art Centre, 2003 [1989]), pp. 113–28.
10
   The most comprehensive discussions of these ideas were published following the conference

                                                                                                  99
                                            Ágnes Pethő


and a trans-mediality of its own. It appears in the history of painting at the time
when the image becomes disentangled from its support in architecture or the
book and is framed as a picture hanging on the wall, becoming an autonomous
art object.11 Beginning from the late 1970s and 1980s the dominance of large
scale photographs in art galleries hails in a new era in which photography ap-
propriates this tableau form from painting, and becomes disentangled from its
own previous connections with print culture. As Chevrier writes: ‘images are
not mere prints — mobile, manipulable sheets that are framed and mounted on
a wall for the duration of an exhibition and go back into their boxes afterward.
They are designed and produced for the wall, summoning a confrontational ex-
perience on the part of the spectator’.12 Thus photography also becomes inex-
tricably intertwined with image-installations, and connected to a parallel evolu-
tion of video art, which renounces its intricate contraptions and machineries
of display towards the end of the 1980s and adopts the dispositif of cinematic
projections upon a single or multiple screens on the walls of the art gallery. Leav-
ing aside all commercial uses which are more like the so called ‘furniture films’
that Justin Remes has described: being ‘meant to be looked at but not seen’,13 the
post-cinematic tableau (the single-take image, with its commanding presence,
viewed in an immobile frame for a considerable length of time) can be regarded
as a ‘new adventure’ of the same, transmutable picture form, of the tableau as a
dispositif handed down to us from painting through photography.
   The tableau vivant in film has always forced the spectator into a direct con-
frontation with the image introducing a pause within the flow of the narrative. In
certain cases, however, when the distinction between the tableau vivant proper
(the imitation of a painting) and the tableau shot (a static sequence shot that
looks like a picture or a scene on a stage) is blurred, the tableau form ceases to be
an incidental rhetorical device, and appears instead as a more or less rigorously
applied constraint, a general mode of pictorial organization, imposing the con-
templative disposition of the tableau form over the string of sequences that make
up the entire length of the film (thus facilitating its presentation as an installation
or its disassembly into a gallery exhibit). Films based on the aesthetic of the tab-



‘Tableau: Painting, Photo, Object’ organized at the Tate Modern in London, 28–29 October 2011.
11
   As Chevrier has pointed out: ‘[w]hen it assumes the form of the tableau, the pictorial work
affirms its status as an autonomous image, endowed with its own support: the tableau is movable,
it is not fixed to one single place, it does not depend upon architecture (in contrast to the fresco);
it does not share its support with text (in contrast to the image of an illustration)’. Chevrier, ‘The
Tableau and the Document of Experience’, in Click Double Click: The Documentary Factor, ed. by
Thomas Weski (Köln: Walther König, 2006), pp. 51–61 (p. 51).
12
   Chevrier, ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form’, p. 116.
13
   Justin Remes, Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis (New York: Columbia University Press,
2014), p. 39. Such films, he claims, invite a ‘series of distracted glances rather than a focused
and comprehensive gaze’ (p. 34). We can see this, for example, in the countless ambient videos
uploaded on YouTube showing exotic beaches, waterfalls or forest landscapes running for hours
as moving photographs.

100
     The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema


leau can in fact be included in the category that Adrian Martin describes as ‘the
dispositif film’, a film conceived as ‘a game with rules.’14


The Photo-Pictorial Gestures of the Mise en Tableau

   Based on Foucault’s ideas, Giorgio Agamben describes the dispositif as a ‘play
of power’, something that realizes ‘a pure activity of governance’15 in the process
through which apparatuses produce their subject, something that can be connect-
ed to the military definition of the word apparatus in French, as ‘the set of means
arranged in conformity with a plan.’16 Thinking in terms of poetics, and leaving
aside more general, ideological or social implications, this could be translated as a
set of gestures that realize this ‘governance’ of formlessness into the tableau form.
   Although Raymond Bellour’s ideas on the ‘clash of dispositifs’ seem unten-
able, I have found elsewhere in his theoretical writings a set of notions that might
be used, paradoxically, to argue for the interconnectedness of the arts realized
through the dispositif of the tableau. In an intriguing essay presenting the im-
portance of certain ‘figures’ in cinema,17 Bellour points out that in film analysis
too much emphasis has been laid on types of shots and the idea of staging sug-
gested by the second part of the term mise en scène. He proposes that we should
concentrate instead on the first words of the phrase (‘mise en’), on the gesture
of ‘placing’ something into a certain form or figure, implying that this form may
also come from photography, language, painting, and so on. Thus, he introduces
a series of new concepts like mise en page, mise en plan, mise en place, mise en
phrase, mise en image, and even, mise en pli.18 Following this logic of certain figu-
rations taking shape within film, we can also speak of the process of tableauisa-
tion of a moving image in terms of the gesture of the cinematic mise en tableau.
Using Bellour’s terminology as stepping stones, in what follows, I will attempt to
argue, through a few paradigmatic examples, that presenting a moving image in
the form of the tableau implies not only one, but a series of gestures or actions.
Far from being exhaustive, the examples offered below are meant to tentatively
map some of those areas where the gestures of folding together photography,
painting and cinema may occur.19

14
   Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style, pp. 187–88.
15
   Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus and Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2009), p. 6 and p. 11.
16
   Ivi, p. 7.
17
   Bellour, ‘Figures aux allures de plans’, in La Mise en scène, ed. by Jacques Aumont (Bruxelles:
De Boeck, 2000), pp. 109–26.
18
   With these concepts he successfully contests the traditional thinking that contrasts the ‘cinema of
the mise en scène’ with the ‘cinema of the image’, a way of thinking that is maintained, for example,
in Aumont, Le Cinéma et la Mise en Scène (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010).
19
   These complex gestures of mise en tableau may also be perceived as the ones that distinguish
‘slow cinema’ (which operates to a large extent on the aesthetic of the tableau) from so called ‘slow
TV’, in which instead of the contemplation of ‘the image’, there is a fluid perception of ‘the world’

                                                                                                 101
                                          Ágnes Pethő


Gestures of Containment: Mise en Cadre, Mise en Pose, Mise en Place, and Mise
en Image

   From the point of view of Agamben’s perspective on the dispositif, perhaps the
most important gestures in the production of a tableau are those that result in the
containment of free flowing forms and movements, of the evanescent moments
captured by the camera in a fixed structure, and which manage to connect ‘the
liquid intelligence of nature’ inherent in the art of photography, as Jeff Wall has
so poetically described,20 with the stability of the pictorial organization. The role
of placement within a narrative (of the mise en histoire) prevalent in fiction films
is replaced by the gesture of anchoring ‘the natural form, with its unpredictable
contours’,21 all the unfolding movements in time and the changes of light and
colour to something that remains fixed within the rigorous composition as a pic-
ture. Most of the time this means a placing within a frame (mise en cadre), but it
can also be a retained pose (mise en pose), an abstract geometrical or compositio-
nal element, patches of colour that remain unchanged within the ensemble. The
tableau in its minimalist form conveys therefore an elemental play upon stillness
versus mobility, in which mobility is always framed (and contained) by stillness
or fixity.
   The whitewash on grey concrete, the massive dark walls, the bright zigzag
line of the neon light on the ceiling of an underground tunnel in Duisburg in the
opening sequence of James Benning’s essay film, a crossover between a docu-
mentary and an installation piece, entitled Ruhr (2009), composed of a series of
digital long takes, frame the movement of the cars or cyclists passing by, of the
withered leaves crawling along the eerie, deserted tunnel in the draught (fig. 1).
The dynamics of the tableau recalls the famous photograph of Cartier Bresson
(Hyères, France, 1932) which captures the moment a bicycle swooshes by in the
street against the angular lines of descending stairs and the heavy walls. A similar
structure of lines appears in the picturesque static takes of Benning’s 2011 film,
Small Roads: this time a yellow paint on the road, the angles of the improvi-
sed barbed wire fence, echoed in colour and form in the road sign stand firmly
against the ‘liquid’ elements of the landscape, the stalks of grain waving in the
wind, the clouds floating above in the sky (fig. 2). The carefully chosen position
of the camera and the frame emphasizing the structuring elements in the landsca-
pe, enclosing the pulse of life, exemplifies more than anything Chevrier’s claim
that a tableau implies not simply a way of seeing but a way of being in the world,
the ‘tableau always presents more than it represents.’22 The prolonged attention


through the hyperbolic application of the digital long take (or sometimes the playful flaunting of
digital wizardry, as we see in projects like Tokyo Reverse, made in 2014 by Simon Bouisson and
Ludovic Zuili).
20
   Jeff Wall, ‘Photography and Liquid Intelligence’, in Selected Essays and Interviews (New York:
MOMA, 2007 [1989]), pp.109–10.
21
   Ivi, p. 109.
22
   Chevrier, ‘The Tableau and the Document of Experience’, p. 51.

102
    The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema




 Figs 1-2: Stills from James Benning photo-filmic essays, Ruhr (2009) and Small Roads (2011).




given to the frame does not only ensure the general mode of contemplation that
defines the tableau mode, and suggest an implicit reflection upon its own con-
structedness, it also foregrounds cinema as moving photography acting as ‘the




                                                                                           103
                                         Ágnes Pethő


pencil of nature’,23 allowing the photographic inscription of the world onto the
screen, with an affluence of perceptual details.
   What is more, such images always fix the frame upon a particular place: both
of Benning’s films quoted here are journeys into specific geographical regions,
enabling an extraordinary attention to the sense of place. Thus, another impor-
tant gesture is performed: a ‘mise en place’ ensures that the aestheticism of the
images, ‘the sensory riches extracted from life’24 are ‘returned’ to the world. The-
se are the words of Jacques Rancière, who identifies this, for example, as the
most relevant gesture in the cinema of Pedro Costa, whose films (also screened
as installations) set in the derelict Fontainhas district of Lisbon, consist of a seri-
es of fixed frame photo-filmic tableaux reminiscent of the masters of the Dutch
Golden Age.25 They show us how the gesture of ‘mise en image’ in the creation
of the photo-filmic tableau may imply, in the words of Chevrier, ‘a return to
classical compositional forms, along with borrowings from the history of mo-
dern and pre-modern painting’,26 even if this means only a few basic elements or
principles of pictorial organization. In this sense, Benning’s installation, Tulare
Road (2010), may present a pure form of this feature of the photo-filmic tableau.
Working like an impressionist painter, he places side by side three takes of the
same stretch of highway shot under different weather conditions: in fog, with
an overcast sky and basking in light, arranging them in a triptych (fig. 3). These
sensuous impressions linger over the abstraction of the landscape, constructed of
lines converging at the horizon, where cars vanish into pixel sized dots or emerge
and materialize as real objects.27
   I will conclude the overview of this set of gestures with a scene from a film
made in 2014, From What is Before (Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon). The five and a
half hour long film was written, directed, filmed and edited by Lav Diaz. It chro-
nicles in stark black-and-white images the life of a small rural community in the
Philippines just before President Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law in 1972.
Each loosely connected scene is like a photograph in motion, framed with the
same aesthetic care (suggestive of both the emotional attachment and the reflexive
distance of the act of remembrance), slowly introducing us to a land and its peo-
ple, to a world that is about to disappear. In a hauntingly beautiful scene we see a
woman with a baby in her arms covered in a blanket, sitting in a boat (fig. 4). She


23
   The metaphor originates from Henry Fox Talbot, a pioneer of photography who published a
series of books with photo illustrations with the title The Pencil of Nature (1844–46).
24
   Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London, New York: Verso, 2009), p. 81.
25
   See more about Costa’s cinematic poetics balancing between photography and painting in:
Ágnes Pethő, ‘Figurations of the Photofilmic: Stillness versus Motion – Stillness in Motion’, in
The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, ed. by Brianne Cohen,
Alexander Streitberger (Leuven University Press: Lieven Gevaert Series, forthcoming).
26
   Chevrier, ‘The Adventures of the Picture Form’, p. 116.
27
   See an insightful analysis of Benning’s work in Silke Panse, ‘The Work of the Documentary
Protagonist: The Material Labour of Aesthetics’, in A Companion to Contemporary Documentary
Film, ed. by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 155–76.

104
     The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema




Fig. 3: James Benning’s installation Tulare Road (2010), an impressionistic, photographic triptych
 (frame grab from the video available on Vimeo: <https://vimeo.com/121401079> [accessed 20
                                          October 2015]).




Fig. 4: From What is Before (Mula sa Kung Ano ang Noon, 2014): the gesture of mise en pose and
            mise en image that invokes the figure of graceful Renaissance Madonnas.




                                                                                              105
                                          Ágnes Pethő


sits motionless as the rain pours down on her and the boat advances, with the lush,
damp foliage swaying on each side, releasing clouds of vapour around her, and we
hear the rain pounding against the surface of the water. This time it is not only the
contrast between the liquidity of nature surrounding the static figure or the lines of
the boat making the linear perspective palpable in the image that mould the image
into a tableau form. There is also an astonishing gesture of mise en pose and mise en
image that invokes the figure of graceful renaissance Madonnas in painting, framed
by nature, arranged in pyramidal compositions emphasizing depth of field. In the
film the image is symptomatic of the coexistence of Christianity with local culture,
and appears detached from the immediate context of events, as a possible vision in
a dream, an apparition of a living picture.


The Act of Building an Image: the Photo-Filmic Diorama

   In many of the contemporary tableau-films images appear to be built as a pho-
to-filmic diorama. Often conceived as actual tableaux vivants, such images strike
us not only with their constructedness, but also with a unique sense of spatiality,
as images are not only contained within a given compositional frame, but they are
built like a glass case display. Gustave Deutsch’s film Shirley: Visions of Reality
(2013), according to the author, is a meditation on the ‘staging of reality’.28 Each
scene unfolds the reconstruction of one of Edward Hopper’s canvases. The ima-
ge is built in the form of an installation assembled as a theatrical set, combined
with painted backgrounds and photographed as a cinematic tableau vivant29 (fig.
5). The methodology is similar to the way Jeff Wall devises his light boxes, and
almost identical to the procedure used by Gregory Crewdson in photography.
Crewdson shoots his uncanny, hyperrealist cinematic photographs (also influen-
ced by Hopper) on elaborate film sets constructed for the sake of a single image,
sometimes using well-known film actors as models, and assembles the final image
as a composite of several takes. The result is a photo-filmic diorama encapsula-
ting a particular historical segment of reality (the tumultuous times of the 1950s
and 1960s in Deutsch’s film, the contemporary American suburbs in Crewdson’s
photos), with specimens of human beings placed in the image as puppets.
   The Argentinean experimental filmmaker Raúl Perrone inflects this structure
in the direction that emphasizes even more the photographic quality of the as-
semblage. Each take in his film entitled Favula (2013) is a composite black-and-
white picture of moving images of still faces appearing to be floating in space
like daguerreotype portraits. Placed behind another transparent moving image
they give the impression of being in the process of exposure, over-exposure,


28
   See the synopsis on the author’s website: <http://www.shirley-visions-of-reality.com/index.
html> [accessed 27 August 2015].
29
   Deutsch presented scenes from the film along with its sets and props also in the form of an art
installation assembled in collaboration with art director Hanna Schimek.

106
     The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema




         Fig. 5: Building an image like a photo-filmic diorama: Shirley: Visions of Reality
                                     (Gustav Deutsch, 2013).

affected by the sudden intrusions of light (fig. 6). In Hierba (2015) the cinematic
tableau vivant reproduction of Éduard Manet’s famous painting, The Lunche-
on on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, 1865–66, oil on canvas 248×217 cm,
Musée d’Orsay, Paris) with its visible double layers of moving image and painted
background recalls not only the colorized frames of early cinema and the photo-
graphic format of the daguerreotype, but also Louis Daguerre’s diorama theatre,
which exhibited superimposed paintings on both sides of a translucent canvas
lit from different directions, producing stunning effects of trompe l’oeil (fig. 7).


Folding the Image and an Architecture of Photographic Spaces

   As these previous examples have shown, building an image as a container
often implies the overlapping of different layers of images, of different media
folded onto each other, in other words, to appropriate with a more concrete me-
aning Bellour’s phrase, an act of ‘mise en pli.’ Bellour introduces the term derived
from Deleuze’s concept of the baroque fold,30 to top all the other acts of ‘placing’
discernible in the moving image, indicating the introduction of multiple levels
of sensations and abstractions folded onto each other within the same scene, an
action of disfiguration of the concrete elements of the mise en scène, and an act
of figuration on another level.31 In many cases of the contemporary tableaux films

30
  Gilles Deleuze, The Fold (London: The Athlone Press, 1993).
31
  Bellour, ‘Figures aux allures de plans’, and ‘Le dépli des émotions’, Trafic, 43 (September 2002),
93–128.

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                                                             Figs 6-7: Raúl Perrone’s Favula
                                                             (2013): faces floating in space
                                                             like daguerreotype portraits, and
                                                             Hierba (2015): the reproduction
                                                             of Manet’s painting in a double
                                                             layered picture.




(installations, feature films or experimental works), we may discern a similar pro-
cess of actively folding the image ‘from within’ a single shot, resulting in ‘folds’
that reflect on complex relationships in cinema between photography, painting,
architecture and installation art. Such folds may also stage a kind of intermedial
‘metabolism’ of post-cinema in which cinema internalizes and figurates the di-
spositif of the tableau within the image itself. This seems to be the case in which
another moving image emerges within an inner frame, as a picture on the wall,
a tableau in motion, juxtaposing and inverting flatness and space, movement
and immobility, the ‘cinematic’ and the ‘photographic’ within the same shot.
James Benning’s short film, Two Cabins (2011), also exhibited as a two channel
installation,32 presents this structure in its purest form by presenting the cabin

32
  The film (available on You Tube: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Na7jNa4uj4> [accessed
20 October 2015]) is part of a larger, more complex project, conceived by Benning in which he

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     The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema




                                                                     Figs 8-9: Apichatpong
                                                                     Weerasethakul:
                                                                     Mekong Hotel (2012)
                                                                     and Syndromes and
                                                                     a Century (Sang
                                                                     sattawat, 2006): moving
                                                                     photographs placed
                                                                     in the découpage of
                                                                     windows on the wall




window as a picture of trees, as a moving still life placed on the wall. Similarly,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mekong Hotel (2012) contrasts the abstract lines
and forms of the static hotel room, which appears as a kind of installation space,
with the fluidity of the movement in the ‘picture’ revealed in the découpage of
the window (fig. 8). The opening sequence of Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and
a Century (Sang sattawat, 2006) offers a more unconventional variation on this
with its continuous tracking shot starting from a similarly abstract space towards
a window that unfolds a photograph-like image (fig. 9).
   The astonishing finale of Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (Jiao you, 2013) provides
an emblematic, slow sequence for folding movement into stillness and combi-
ning different types and textures of images. The scene stages a cluster of image
planes around the human figure, in and outside the ruinous architectural space
and internalizes a tableau. We watch for over five minutes the dark silhouette
of the protagonist standing motionless in front of a mural, in fact a charcoal
painting based on a photograph, enclosed by picturesque walls, while the whole


actually reconstructed the philosopher Henry David Thoreau’s and the anarchist, ‘Unabomber’,
Ted Kaczynski’s cabins to reflect on two versions of social isolation.

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                                        Ágnes Pethő




         Figs 10-11: Folds between architecture and photography in Tsai Ming-liang’s
                                 Stray Dogs (Jiao you, 2013).


scene is lit as an elaborate installation for us to contemplate (fig. 10). The image
is symptomatic in fact of another possible ‘mise en pli’, in which the tableau
is entirely built on the folds between architecture and photography. There are
several scenes like this in Tsai Ming-liang’s films, which sometimes include a
protagonist who contemplates a view from within a space emerging like a sophi-
sticated image installation (see a frame from Visage, 2009, fig. 12). In such cases
spaces are made abstract by their dense overlay with photographic reflections,
the multiplication of inner frames, often with strange loops, or inversions (see fig.
11, or the upside down reflection in Tsai’s Journey to the West/Xi you, 2014, fig.
13), challenging the traditional frontality of the tableau, and resulting in a unique
cinematic architecture of photographic spaces. Chevrier emphasized how the ta-

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     The Image, Alone: Photography, Painting and the Tableau Aesthetic in Post-Cinema




                            Fig. 12: Tsai Ming-liang’s Visage (2009).




 Fig. 13: The entanglement of moving photographs into the fabric of our lives: Tsai Ming-liang’s
                              Journey to the West (Xi you, 2014).



bleau is primarily an autonomous ‘way of being in the world',33 images like these
record a re-entanglement of moving photographs into the fabric of our lives and
suggest the contemplation of a world that folds around us in infinite variations
of inter-media tableaux.




33
  Chevrier’s presentation video recorded at the symposium organized at the Tate Modern in Lon-
don, available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99gOPABmVUM> [accessed 20 October
2015].

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                                             Ágnes Pethő


Conclusion: the Photographic Experience of the Moving Tableau

   The tableau as a dispositif always implies a viewer standing in front of it, at-
tempting to comprehend the picture as a whole, which is traditionally a single
picture, displayed in a manner that visibly separates it from the surrounding spa-
ce. In classical and modernist cinema, the tableau imposes a halt (a break in the
narrative, a moment of self-reflexivity or pure visual attraction) by isolating the
single take within a series. Post-cinematic tableau-films, on the other hand, not
only constitute a separate paradigm standing apart from mainstream trends in
cinema, but also isolate their viewers. With the exception of film festivals, which
only a few people can attend, these films are usually watched in conditions that
favour a more intimate reception, like the occasional screenings in film clubs,
film schools, art museums, or they are viewed at home, in front of a compu-
ter.34 Furthermore, through the repeated gestures of tableauisation named above,
emphasised in the long, fixed frame sequences, the moving image experience
morphs into a photographic one, extending the gesture contained in Talbot’s
metaphor of ‘the pencil of nature’: slowly engraving individual pictures into our
memory. In either case, this cannot be viewed in terms of what we traditionally
regard as cinephilia any more. This is not the pleasure of going to the movies and
experiencing a ghost-like illusion in the dark space of the cinema theatre, which
Bellour defends so passionately as ‘the cinema, alone’ against all the other forms
of moving pictures. It is the sheer pleasure of being in the presence of images, of
beholding a single shot as a tableau, of facing the image, alone.


Acknowledgement

  This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of National
Education, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0573.




34
  The difference between such films viewed in the traditional environment of the cinema theatre, on
the computer or in the art gallery will naturally affect the intensity of the contemplative ‘disposition’
(and as such should constitute an important field in the study of post-cinema), nevertheless, as I
have argued, we should also consider the convergence imposed by the trans-medial dispositif of
the tableau itself.

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