Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Figurative Economies
- Part II Adventures of the Classical Body in Modern Cinema
- Part III New Abstractions in Figurative Invention
- Part IV Summonses: Figures of the Actor
- Part V Image Circuits
- Part VI Theoretical Invention
- Epilogue: The Accident
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 22 - In The Meantime: Kirk Tougas’ The Politics of Perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Figurative Economies
- Part II Adventures of the Classical Body in Modern Cinema
- Part III New Abstractions in Figurative Invention
- Part IV Summonses: Figures of the Actor
- Part V Image Circuits
- Part VI Theoretical Invention
- Epilogue: The Accident
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For Françoise
“The manner of application is: It is best if the guru from whom the deceased received guiding instructions can be had.”
—The Tibetan Book of the DeadIn the meantime, an experimental Canadian filmmaker, Kirk Tougas, found the trailer for a film by Michael Winner starring Charles Bronson, The Mechanic (1972), worked on it until he gave it back its soul, added a critical preamble and entitled his polemical essay The Politics of Perception (1973). It was a good trailer: full of cinematic metaphors about erasure (still camera viewfinders and guns, photocopiers, photos, the body defined as material and human beings as machines…). Like lightning to a tree, it attracted the murderous treatment to which Kirk Tougas submitted it.
His name is Bishop. He's as methodical as a machine, as precise as a computer. Bishop is a mechanic. He's specialized in body works.
Bishop is a master at manufacturing accidents, and for twenty years, his performances have left no complaints, no clues, no witnesses. He planned his moves in meticulous detail because one mistake could be mortal.
(Voice of Charles Bronson): “No second chance. Sure dead…or dead.”
Then Bishop made his first mistake. In his business, that's one too many. The Mechanic. When he fixes somebody, they never work again.
Tougas loops the entire trailer some twenty times, washing away a little more of the image and sound with each pass. At first imperceptible, the chromatic and sonic erasure speeds up, the loss of definition becomes exhaustive and the iconography typical of action films opens the field to a shadowy combat between figurative destruction and plastic abstraction. The image becomes earthy, then ashen, marbled, mottled and flecked. In the end, there is nothing more than a white screen and a sonic veil analogous to a beating heart.
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- Information
- On the Figure in General and the Body in ParticularFigurative Invention In Cinema, pp. 209 - 210Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2023