The evidence of film and the presence of the world: Jean-Luc Nancy's cinematic ontology

Following Deleuze's theory, the emergence of the "time-image" following the Second World War led to (our relationship to) the world disappearing from film. Following Jean-Luc Nancy, the Iranian film-maker Abbas Kiarostami is a privileged witness to a cinema that liberates itself from a "postmodern" obsession with the disappearance of the world. Nancy reveals three foci of cinema: the look, the movement and the real (the world). The "alethic" (Heidegger) look is "mobilized" by cinema; it forces us to remain in contemplative and mental motion. In experiences of e vidence the cinema presents us "the real" (Lacan). In Früchtl's article, he argues that cinema is not merely the ontological celebration of presence, but the aesthetic celebration of a tension generating and suspended difference: between presence and its re-presentation. The evidence of cinema thus is the mediated result of an interactive, even playful relationship of our dimensions of experience. What opens is a space full of possible meanings, a textual web which only takes shape with time and with the help of the subject providing meaning.