Itinéraires ()
Du rythme visuel au « rythme spatial du visible » : pour une musicalité spécifique au cinéma
Abstract
This article begins by clarifying the semantic scope of the notion of rhythm, and by drawing up a brief panorama of its occurrences in aesthetic discourse on cinema—by directors and critics/theorists. This panorama highlights the wide variety of meanings that this notion has taken on, in relation to the historical—cultural contexts in which it has been formulated. Particular attention is paid to the decisive contribution made by Jean Mitry, in his book Esthétique et psychologique du cinéma (1965). Anticipating the rediscovery of the Heraclitean rhuthmos during the 60’s, Mitry attempts to free “visual rhythm” from its “Platonician” metrical analogies, in order to think of it as the organization, through editing, of a flow inscribed in the global movement of the world visible on the screen. The challenge for Mitry is in fact to reflect on a conception of cinematographic rhythm that would make it a “main signifying power", the primordial principle of the organization of the cinematographic “life of forms”. This dynamic and cosmogonic conception of rhythm underpins our approach to cinematic space, not as a stable, fixed framework, but as a perpetually evolving substance, an intrinsically mobile material of composition, engaging the spectator’s body in an essential experience of movement. What I call the “spatial rhythm of the visible” is not, therefore, a visual equivalent of the rhythmic cadence of music, but a feeling of movement in form: a flow of contractions and dilations affecting the volumes of fullness and emptiness within the continuous unreeling of the images. This link between rhythm and space leads us to rediscover “musicality”, not as a transposition for the eye of the principles of musical composition, but as a power of abstraction located in the very principle of cinema (and compatible with the narrative and figurative nature of its images): a musicality specific to cinema, in short, rather than a simple play of correspondences or an import of music's compositional procedures within the film; a musicality which, contrary to any static pictorial reference, invites us to return to the rhythmic source of our spatial experience of the everyday world.
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