(Dis)locating the Subject, Moving the Image and Reasoning with History

Abstract

“Idealism,” unlike realism and materialism, has not featured much in philosophical engagements with film. Representation, redemption, construction – these terms marked philosophical debates on the image’s relation to reality (Bazin, Hansen). A Deleuzian perspective focused on the reality of the image, while the turn to “affect,” the “body,” and “feelings” reframed the image in “materialist” terms (Deleuze, Sobchack, Marks, Massumi, Ngai). The philosophical complexity of idealism’s conceptualization of the subject, I argue, was lost in this bifurcation. Both the referential focus of realism and the reduction of the spectator to the body in the “materialist” turn sidelined the reasoning subject’s dialectical relation to its own reality and to the moving image. A dialectical understanding of the subject’s shifting relation to a moving object in historical reality, I argue, enriches a philosophy of the moving image by developing the contradictions implicit in realism while avoiding the reductive materialism of ahistorical theories of affect, the body, and the senses. Analyzing Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021), the essay stages an encounter between a dislocated subject reasoning with history through the moving image. My argument elaborates the tension between the embodied subject’s power of reasoning and the moving object’s negativity as the register through which reality is both thought and experienced. The aim is not to avoid the image–reality relation but to understand reality as intrinsically part of, and transformed by, an unstable subject’s encounter with the moving image.