Still Life and High Life: Being and Tenderness

The question of the limits of representation has long gained significance for the the- ory and practice of cinema, but in recent years the critique of representational strat- egies has given way to concrete projects unfolding in a different logic. This article attempts to find a theoretical basis for these new cinematic statements in the clas- sical ontological opposition of Plato and Aristotle. The appeal to the fundamental philosophy does not seem to be accidental, since the most famous film-theoretical concepts steadily go back to Plato’s thought and to the visual metaphor of cognition that dominates in the Greeks. At the same time, the phenomenological shift in con- temporary culture and the increased ontologization of the cinematic event leads us to the Aristotelian concept of essence, which allows us to speak of cinema in terms of possibility and reality as that which is not yet visible and that which is no longer visible. The experience of the visible is placed within these boundaries and acquires a quality of obviousness. The cinematic event here not only maintains a connection to truth, but also becomes the center of affects that sustain and cherish all that is alive.