Falling in real — notes on Welfare, by Frederick Wiseman

Abstract

We don’t just look at images; sometimes they are alive and we are like ghosts summoned to the theater in which they are created. In this case, it is not an affective connection between the look and the image that it is at stake. It is a new relational condition: the look and the image are in a reciprocal relationship. Such a condition occurs (very rarely) due to the possibility that art has to accommodate movements similar to those of the everyday world, thus achieving the embodiment of the ecstatic stability that is
experienced in life itself. In this paper, we will try to understand cinema precisely as a unit of opposites, in which the images and the observer stand between worlds. This unity sprouts in a theater of images, in which the boundaries between the material and the immaterial, the world and its representation, the corporeal and the fantastical are obscured. As far as the relation between gaze and reality is concerned, drawing, photography and cinema have always been drawn by the same desire to spatialize movement, by rescuing it from time. The immemorial correlativity between these spellings of the visible, or what resembles them as gestures of approximation to the real, is freed from the technical disposition of the photographic image. However, it would be poor not to take into account the institutional relationship that photography, as a body or support, allows to establish with the images of life that
keeps ‘imprisoned’ inside. Frederick Wiseman’s ‘filmed theater’ serves as a motto to think about this rare relational tension that cinema manages to establish with the total institution that is life. It is the space of representation conceived in Welfare (1975) — or, more precisely, in the first two minutes of the film — that we propose to analyse here. Indeed, it was in this film that Wiseman’s
cinema first covered itself with a second ‘skin’. There is a switch into the invisible body, the unsaid, the non-being in any image. The spectator ceases to be a mere observer distanced from the lives of others (fly on the wall) and becomes an invisible presence (ghost in the shell). What kind of observation do we speak of when we speak of a certain type of body, which falls within a film so real as reality itself? It is the production of this observant and phantasmatic body that we will address here.