marginalia 0.2 - cinematographic appropriations

"Les Carabiniers" - Jean-Luc Godard

In the movie Les Carabiniers, of Godard, an emblematic sequence shows the protagonist in his first cinema screening. The images he sees: a series of references to historical images of a first cinema, along which a recreation of the Arrival of the train to the station, of Lumière brothers. In an explicit reference to the history of cinema, Godard emphasizes the counterpart of this invention [to cite Jean-Louis Commoli]: the spectator. Throughout the screening, the protagonist reacts directly to the images shown based on his naïve belief in the cinematographic device – already assimilated by the more experienced spectators.

He covers his face to the arrival of the train [as it is said to have happened in the Lumière screening]; tries to see the woman that undresses herself beyond the border of the screen by changing his position in the movie theater; when the bath scene comes, he jumps off from his seat and gets closer to the screen. Firstly he tries to see inside the bath tub to then start to touch and caress the image of the woman - her face, her legs – seeming start to understand the nature of the image. But then, trying to actually enter the image, he tears down the projection screen.

Marginalia Project seeks to explore this precise aspect of the relation between spectator and image, but through the construction of a specific device in which this desire of the spectator in relation to the image is incorporated to the projection itself. Beyond an illusion of virtual reality, the experiment proposed by the project centralizes the materiality of the image, that shall not be forgotten nor ignored by the spectator, but actually emphasized in a new form of interaction.