사색하는 초상, 초상에 대한 사색

A Pensive Portrait, or Pensive Take on Portraiture: Some 20th-Century Motifs for Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait

Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait(2006), a feature-length film directed by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, has a number of aesthetic qualities that are parallel to the aesthetic qualities of the silent era. Highly corporeal and synaesthetic, the sensory experiences that the film evokes re-illuminate what was referred by Jean Epstein as photogénie of the late silent era. Unrestricted by narrative structure or linguistic fabrication, let alone the flow of the ball or the overall continuity of the game, the audiovisual stimuli offered in the film reinvent the raw awe of early cinema. This study contemplates on the quality of photogénie as an aesthetic mechanism for the cinematic portraiture, which has never become a distinct convention in history. At the same time, the visceral spectatorship operates with the mechanism of long-term memory, which was largely constructed by the cinematic apparatus that govern sports business. A double reflection on the physicality of an individual presence in the public sphere, or the function of the portraiture, and on the role of the cinematic apparatus in the mass-oriented digital technology, Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait induces a cinematic experience in which a state of indeterminacy sustains. Parallel to what Jacques Rancière calls “the pensive image”, moments of idleness, or the aesthetic potentials of what Maurice Blanchot called “désœuvrement” evokes the complexity of the cinematic text.