"The multiplication of channels has slowly created the reverse feeling of a fundamental 'unity' of all images and sounds on television."

--Serge Daney, "Saint Zelig, Pray for Us" (1987; translated by Laurent Kretzschmar)

The defining moment of cinephilia is uncanny juxtaposition: the recognition of an element in one film from one's memory of a radically different one. Watch three or so movies in a row, and they will appear to form a pattern, even if that pattern consists of little more than the way establishing shots are framed, or the same make and model of car appearing again and again, or the way one actor resembles another. At its core, cinephilia is the divining of obvious logic from the contradictions of cinema as a whole. It is in cinephilic observation (versus critical observation) that mise-en-abyme manifests itself, because these recursions and similarities do not serve obvious critical functions, though they are often a window into an idea from which a critical meaning can be extracted.

An Appendix to "All the Images"

[this week's column]

In chronological order:

Small Head of E.O.W, by Frank Auerbach
A few sentences...
The Map
[Colossal Youth / Limits of Control]
The Problem of the Image

A few sentences typed in the middle of the night in January and never expanded upon. But maybe they don't need expansion.

A director is responsible for both mise-en-scene and mise-en-abyme. I don't mean the literary definition or the facile application of the term that leads to discussions of structure or plotting, dream sequences, "framing stories," pictoral effects and other nonsense. I mean that every movie has both qualities. Mise-en-abyme can be defined as how a film reflects on the world of images and on its own production. That hall of mirrors we call the history of cinema. In the present, the need to define this aspect is increasingly relevant.