tabula rasa

The recently developed film theory (based on the psychoanalytical theory by Jacques Lacan) considers the screen as a mirror, wherein the viewer is under the impression that he himself is creating the film through identification with his own (inherent voyeuristic) act of watching. In fact there are specific conditions which make this way of looking at film possible. “tabula rasa” accounts for these preconditions, swinging from figurative to the abstract, which as a visual irritation does not allow itself to be understood as one's own creation as a viewer. As object of the look serves the most common one: the female body. It's this body, which moves back and forth between revealing (as a picture) and covering. Behind the power of the imaginary reality of classical film one can find the symbolic discourse of the Other (the author/filmmaker) in which the power of film as imagined reality is revealed. (Peter Tscherkassky)