Go Home Go up a level

 

A OR B

The original concept of the short film ‘A/B’ comes from the 1954 book ‘The Counterfeit of the Uncanny’ by Buccafusca Stornelli, a chapter of which is dedicated to ‘The Tale of Two Poussins’, in which is described the convoluted history of a painting by the French history painter Nicolas Poussin. In that the question of the identity of an original work of art is the point of interest in this case, and also that this event occurs simultaneously with the rise to dominance of French Rationalist philosophy in the 17th Century, (with its emphasis upon the distinctness of self-identity and the essence of knowledge,) we discover that the contradictions in Enlightenment thought, later vociferously put to task by thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche at the dissolution of that movement, were in fact present at its outset. By dissecting the painting in question into uniform sections according to a simple mathematical pattern and then by setting the images against the [abridged] text by Stornelli, we have attempted to conceptualise the idea that one can never entirely see ‘the whole picture’; a problem purportedly resolved by Enlightenment thinkers with the development of logic. Thus can be encapsulated the notion that the development of any system of thought automatically necessitates the contradiction of that system.