Pierre HIRSCH is at it once again. On the 29th, he presented us with a careful selection of ‘avant-garde’ films. Man Ray's L’Étoile de mer (The Starfish): images pass without logical connection, without ‘history’. In it, cinema is no longer photography. There is something else (perhaps only a frosted glass) that makes this short film into a moving painting with stock tricks; a masterpiece. Each gesture borrows symbolic value from the vaudeville ditty. Man Ray seeks: some people laugh and yet their ears hear a melody and they don't try to understand; they enjoy themselves. Why don't their eyes enjoy the melodies?

Ruttmann set images to Schumann's music. And since Schumann had composed his piece with simple notes, Ruttmann composed his film with simple elements, with water, wind; he shows us lakes and boats, and the evening, and leaves rattling, and waterfalls and streams; the splashing of water after an outpouring of notes. The audience understands and doesn't complain that dreams have been imposed on them; and yet?

The third film, The Trunks of Mr. O.F., has been reviewed. I no longer know what the critics said. To me, it's a full-length film about a simple idea. The beginning is perfect, and then the effects become heavy-handed—nothing fails, nothing is silly, it's just that Granowsky is rather logical in his fantasising. I missed L’Étoile de mer.

If you would like to see different films, if you would like to see the curious results obtained by those who seek to photograph or recreate nature, those who, tired of words, compose poems of images, help your mate Hirsch out.

Join the Cine-Club, because Paris is faraway, the Rue de Béthune is full of duds, and ‘films’ are expensive.

The shaft graves of mycenae, like the tholoi and the large chamber tombs of this period, have produced a considerable quantity of metalwork in gold, silver, or bronze, from weapons to jewellery and vessels. In this respect Grave Circles A and B can be compared to the great treasures of the Balkan Chalcolithic (the Varna cemetery: Ivanov 1978) or the Anatolian Early Bronze Age (Troy: Tolstikov and Treister 1996). Decorative styles are as varied as the forms that are found.

Along with frescoes, it is seals that best represent the Minoan art of this period: the richness of their iconographic repertoire is unmatched in the other arts. The growth in administrative activity entails an increase in their production; at Knossos, Zakros, and some villas like that of Haghia Triada this is reflected in the presence of archive deposits containing significant numbers of sealings. In total, nearly 2,000 seals and several hundred imprints allow for the study of Neopalatial glyptic – and this number is probably tiny compared to the total output. It has been estimated that at Knossos several thousand seals must have been in use at any one time (Krzyszkowska 2005, 119–53).

>The reconstruction of minoan sites destroyed c.1450 bc does not always happen immediately and often is limited to a reuse of earlier walls, with partial refurbishment. This is the case at Malia, where House Epsilon, a large Neopalatial residence to the south of the palace, is reoccupied in Late Minoan (LM) II without major modifications (A. Farnoux, in Driessen and Farnoux 1997, 135–47). It is only towards the beginning of LM IIIA2, after 1370 bc, that new architectural programmes are started, in particular at Haghia Triada.

Continuity with the previous period is best shown by terracotta figurines and figures; religious practices remain the same but popular cults grow, notably on Crete, where the most creative responses are found.

One can think of the camera as a tool, an instrument, a machine that enables images to be recorded. These images can then be projected.

Words have a history. What the dictionary told us—in times past—of projeter, to project, was ‘jeter dehors’, the image evoked being that of rejecting something, throwing it out, while the word projet, a project, which has the same origin, evokes ‘all that by which people tend to modify the world or themselves in a given way’.

One is well aware that what's rejected is not worth much, is detritus. It's not particularly surprising that so many projections do indeed cause one to think of a rubbish dump on the outskirts of a village. Society takes out its rubbish and contemplates, and is moved by, the result of its effort. Society sees itself in the household rubbish that is projected in various formats. But what then is the Itself in question? Do people see themselves as they are? They see the leftovers, the packaging, the rejections, and are prompted to contemplate what they don't want, or no longer want, from their own customary. Nothing is lost. Projections are consumer goods. Thus functions a recovery circuit in which household rubbish holds on tight to what's imagined, projected.

One sees the S’ functioning as a dominant instrument on a detour by way of the camera, that small chamber ruled, reigned over, by a camérier, or chamberlain, ‘an officer in the pope or cardinal's chambers’, or by a camériste, or chambermaid, ‘a woman who attended to a princess’. On occasion, it's the camerlingue, or camerlengo: ‘a cardinal of the papal court who administers justice and the treasury, presides over the apostolic chamber, and governs when the Holy See is vacant.’

This is the case in the Petit Robert dictionary, which makes no mention of the cameraman. Though it is true that he who shoots a film occasionally takes himself to be the pope.

At the start of the Early Bronze Age (EBA) we see a lot of continuity with an earlier tradition of incised decoration on closed vessels such as cylindrical pyxides (globular or biconical), small jars with narrow necks (footed or footless), and kandylia. Such vases usually have lateral lugs, allowing for their suspension and attaching lids (Figure 11.1). An EC I globular pyxis from Naxos (AE1, fig. 97) whose shape, like some stone vases, mimics a sea urchin is completely covered in diagonal incised lines arranged in alternating bands (herringbone). This motif, which is very common in the EBA, could have been in imitation of basketry or textiles (Rambach 2000, vol. II, 175–80). The incisions are often infilled with white paste, producing a contrast with the burnished black or reddish vase surface.

1 - To begin by saying that images are not seen (by the self ).

Image takers visit me here, on a regular detour in their paths.

They leave their contraptions someplace else—I’m not entirely sure where—such that their hands are to be found at the ends of their arms, their hands, and there you have it.

They’re not very old; I am.

I tell them stories, stories full of images. They can't take the images; it's not that I prevent them from doing so, but that the images are illuminations. They have a camera. They need images that move.

What I say to them is that the images they seek are on the screen, just like a painter's work is on the canvas. There is the canvas; that's where the painting is. It's not seen. It waits, and always will. Painters have said this. No one believes them.

This is what I say to the image takers:

– ‘Images are not seen (by the self ).’

This hardly helps them make progress; how can they take what is not seen (by the self)? They’re not out of the woods yet.

I tell them the story of a mate of mine.

He and I were the same age. In 1937, I found him sitting on the floor of the small flat

I lived in, its window opening onto the Place d’A., the square in a small town in the Nord of France where there was an asylum and I was the teacher at this asylum. There was a class of children who were slow. I told them stories.

I had lived with the mate who was sitting there, right under the window, his back against the wall, for months and months among the dunes by the North Sea. He had enlisted in the Brigades and gone to Spain. And as for myself, I taught children who were slow.

There was a jocular air about him, as always, which didn't hide the fact that he appeared a bit weighed down. He said to me:

– ‘It's nearly finished over there… .’

I thought he had come to stay. He told me he was an officer and that he had been wounded three times.

The image is distinct in being an image.

In the place of language, there is only language, in whatever form it may take.

The image does not become language.

Language is not transformed into image.

There may be symbiosis between language and image.

But symbiosis is association, not confusion, and one that is lasting and mutually beneficial.

The Man that we are is lichen, alga and fungus, that is, in this case, image and language.

That said, what becomes of the image, if we admit that the image eludes being language?

It's a question of language approaching what it might be like to be an image, of language believing that it grasps the image, understands it, assimilates it.

This having been done—and it's a decoy—there remains the image, still just as enduring; the fungus didn't appropriate the alga; the Man—that we are—is lichen.

If I write that Man is lichen, lichen in this case is not image.

It's a plant or, to put it better, an organism made from an alga and a fungus; perhaps a promising monster, as they say in biology.

Likewise human beings, who are promising—if they happen to persist instead of destroying themselves?

It can also happen that language flows into the image; it's thus that the being—human that we are—becomes a tree.

Believing is enough.

I have sometimes said:

– ‘Image is what is not seen (by the self ).’

This comment didn't make the task any easier for the image taker who happened to be here.

That said, I suggested he regard his camera as not being able to take movement, movement being what is seen.

I had gone to tell him that image and movement were of the same nature, movement— in cinema—being caused by what is called retinal persistence.

Who knows what ‘persistence’ the image—that everyone sees even though it is not there—develops from.

What I say to the image taker:

– ‘If the image is not there in—in or on—the film, there is no point looking to take—so to speak—images, since it's understood that images will capture themselves, as it were, just like flies on pre-war sticky paper.’ You just need to find the glue.

It is debatable whether we can really speak of Mycenaean glyptic during the Cretan Second Palace period. On the one hand, no trace of a workshop has been found in mainland Greece for this period; on the other hand, no seal impression has been preserved. There is nothing to indicate that seals could have had an administrative role on the mainland before the appearance of the Mycenaean palaces. For the Mycenaeans, seals and signet rings were above all ‘marks of distinction’, prestige objects placed in tombs alongside metal vessels, ceremonial weapons, and jewellery. As for the manufacture of the latter, it is therefore probable that workshops were set up at Mycenae and other major centres with the participation of Minoan artisans; glyptic is not an art form that can just appear, but rather requires years of apprenticeship. This was a domain in which the Mycenaeans had no previous experience.

There have been imports, imitations, and artistic transfers between the Aegean world and its neighbouring powers, whether Egypt or the Near East, in all periods (Smith 1965; Crowley 1989; Davies and Schofield 1995 ; Aruz 2008b; Aruz 2013). What is new between around 1400 and 1200 bc is the appearance of hybrid artworks, made of precious or semi-precious materials (gold, ivory, faience), that borrow their motifs from diverse sources to create an original style; they are subject to exchange among the elites of the Mediterranean world, accompany diplomatic relations (ambassadors, merchants, artists, dynastic marriages), and bear witness to an international culture.

On Crete this is a period of development and transformation in figurines, under the influence of Knossian workshops. Since the previous period, Mesara workshops were making some figurines partly on the wheel, with a cylindrical lower part. It is this type of construction that becomes widespread after 1450 bc, at the expense of the naturalistic-type figurines (Rethemiotakis 2001, 10–18). If some still keep a stepped lower body, a simplified representation of a flounced skirt (AE2, fig. 148; Popham 1984, pl. 191a), most now have a strictly cylindrical base; torso and face are highly stylised, except with some rare exceptions like a head from Psychro with eyes carefully outlined (Rethemiotakis 2001, fig. 21). These figurines are made from separate parts, inserted one into the other or joined (skirt, torso, face, limbs). The torso is still solid, at least on the biggest ones.

At the beginning of the neolithic, pottery was much less common than in later periods, and some scholars maintain that it could have been reserved for ceremonial or ritual use; in any case, pottery seems to have rarely been used for cooking, even if it could have served for storage or movement of foodstuffs. In the Middle Neolithic (MN) period new shapes, techniques, and decorative motifs appear, but it is only from Late Neolithic (LN) that pottery, including everyday wares, truly takes off, with various kinds of bowl (globular, convex), with rounded or sometimes flat bottoms, and often a ring base. Shapes and manufacturing techniques are the same across Greece. Generally made using the coil technique (coils of clay superimposed), pottery vessels are of excellent quality, considering the period, and all manufacturing techniques are skilfully employed, with the exception of the potter’s wheel (Vitelli 1993, 60; A. Kalogirou, in Laffineur and Betancourt 1997, 11–17).

1.

There are two of us, one writing and the other realising (a film).

It's said that there is a literary art and a cinematographic art.

Between us, the question here is to find a way for the two arts to work together— with the utmost sympathy for one another, of course, but above all, in symbiosis. Lichen is a very hardy organism that has always endured, or nearly so; this little species of moss is quite obstinate and exists as a result of the meeting between an alga and a fungus.

I believe that algae was the first to emerge from nature's breast; an alga is what I am, since writing had long existed when cinematography appeared; all of a sudden, along came fungi.

Between us, working together over the years will be a question of respecting the phenomenon of symbiosis, which is frequent in nature.

It will not in any way be a question of a union, or a designation, or something else that is overly conventional; an understanding is necessary; that we get on well.

What remains is to invent, between us, the workbench, which is not the oeuvre itself, but what the oeuvre will be placed on—between us; placed there, the oeuvre will be easy to handle.

2.

You happened to ask me for a screenplay. I evaded your request. You had shot the images in Ce Gamin, là (That Kid, There) … always without a screenplay. A series of images had been realised and these were in need of a binding; I thus not only wrote but said out loud what I preferred to call a legend rather than a commentary.

The years passed, and now here we are again, not with our backs up against the wall, but on either side of a workbench, or rather on either side of a space that is still vacant—a space where the workbench should be placed. It's clear that what we’re missing could come from what existed during the shooting of That Kid, There… .: the living areas that existed for years; those in which the children said to be autistic resided.

We spoke of resuscitating a flock of kids who had emerged from the darkest depths of a cave.

As with glyptic, it is only on Crete that stone vases are made in the Middle Bronze Age – it seems that neither mainland Greece nor the Cyclades produced them. Stone vases are now made in a wider range of materials: not only serpentine, but also breccias and limestone chosen for their colours or texture. Gabbro, a local stone of white crystals with fine green veining, also starts to be worked, as with a small cylindrical vase from Phaistos (AE1, fig. 152). Shapes continue like those of the preceding period (alabastrons, bird’s nest bowls) and it is often difficult assigning a precise date: a bird’s nest bowl from tomb B at Platanos (AE1, fig. 153), with an incised star as decoration, belongs to the Early Minoan (EM) III tradition.

The Linear B tablets from the palace of Pylos make mention of pieces of wooden furniture: tables, thrones, and stools. But very few wooden objects have been found in Greece (O. Krzyszkowska, in Herrmann 1996, 85–103), and because there is such little evidence we have surely underestimated the importance of wood carving in Mycenaean art.

The best-preserved piece of evidence, from the Shaft Graves of Mycenae, is a sycamore box (Poursat 1977a, n° 215), whose sides are fixed with tenons and mortises. It is adorned with ivory plinths that represent stepped cornices, on which are placed relief dogs carved in wood (AE2, fig. 50). We should dismiss the hypothesis that this is an Egyptian import (Persson 1931, 179–81; contra Karo 1930–3, 319); this type of architectural cornice does not depict house roofs in the Egyptian style, but a form that does exist on Minoan relief frescoes.