Skip to main content

I-You-Witness, Visual Consciousness

I-You-Witness, Visual Consciousness
/9
    • I-You-Witness, Visual Consciousness
    • Eu-Tu-Partner, Concepţie vizuală
  • 1979
  • 3 Super 8 films transferred to 16 mm and digital, 3 screens, color and b&w, no sound
  • 11min, 31sec
Designed for three screens and three synchronized Super 8 projectors, the experimental film “I-You-Witness. Visual Consciousness” epitomizes Constantin Flondor’s ongoing fascination, reflection, and research concerning the principles of visual perception, an interest stimulated by Gestalt Theory and by his discussions with Romanian psychiatrist Eduard Pamfil, founder of Romanian anthropological psychiatry, during the weekly Bionic Circle meetings in Timișoara. This film, intended by the artist to be concept-based, marks the passage from his early phenomenological investigations towards his later ontological questions, from the Cartesian way of viewing reality towards the subjective, more obscure aspects of the gaze. “The camera can become a deepening of the gaze and an extension of the body,” states Flondor. He attempts to challenge the fixed, static eye of the Renaissance (represented in the film by Rafael’s “Betrothal of the Virgin Mary”), thereby organizing his filmic triptych from three perspectives (or three consciousnesses): one (that of the witness) is static and records the behaviors of the other two (being the artist himself and Sigma Group member Doru Tulcan), whose perspectives are mobile. The film outlines the different perspectives captured by the three cameras, emphasizing the subjectivity of the gaze, its instability and unpredictability, and the fact that no one can capture the truth in its totality. The simultaneous recording of space and time represents the simultaneity of visual consciousnesses, underlining how each visual consciousness is unique: “one person = one visual consciousness, another person = another visual consciousness, ‘n’ persons = ‘n’ visual consciousnesses. The visual universe = the sum of all visual consciousnesses.” Furthermore, this film reveals itself to be a metaphor—a personal way of apprehending the time/space relationship. A.Se.