Through the letter box
Director Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson
Countries Italy, United Kingdom, France
Duration 56 min
Synopsis
Through the Letterbox, realised especially for Les Instants Vidéo in association with FID- Marseille, presents extended extracts of the original video footage of Deleuze's courses refilmed and reframed in 16/9 HD letterbox format, as a problematic confluence of cinema and television pedagogy. The high-tech, high definition ‘cinema’ format in which these degraded video images are presented (a fabrication which also includes the projection room itself) opens them to an alterity of virtual fictional trajectories that resituates the question of a pedagogy of the image - a question raised by Godard, Rossellini and others in their 1970s migration towards TV that at the time appeared to them a medium more open to experimentation. Here a specular, 'unpresentable' image of pedagogy is caught up in an improbable wide-screen cinematic becoming. By the simple means of letterbox framing, images destined, at the limit, for small-screen, small hours viewing are presented as if they were ‘cinema’, interspersed with shots of one of the artists watching them on TV, inviting the viewer to interrogate the potential implications of posting such images ‘through the letterbox’.
Through the Letterbox, realised especially for Les Instants Vidéo in association with FID- Marseille, presents extended extracts of the original video footage of Deleuze's courses refilmed and reframed in 16/9 HD letterbox format, as a problematic confluence of cinema and television pedagogy. The high-tech, high definition ‘cinema’ format in which these degraded video images are presented (a fabrication which also includes the projection room itself) opens them to an alterity of virtual fictional trajectories that resituates the question of a pedagogy of the image - a question raised by Godard, Rossellini and others in their 1970s migration towards TV that at the time appeared to them a medium more open to experimentation. Here a specular, 'unpresentable' image of pedagogy is caught up in an improbable wide-screen cinematic becoming. By the simple means of letterbox framing, images destined, at the limit, for small-screen, small hours viewing are presented as if they were ‘cinema’, interspersed with shots of one of the artists watching them on TV, inviting the viewer to interrogate the potential implications of posting such images ‘through the letterbox’.