Machines for the Suppression of Time - ACE108.3

Man in street; goes to buy Polaroid camera. Caption "Media", photographs, caption altered to "Mediation". The Gleaners. Captions, "Semic Code Adjectival", "Bulk", "Darkness", while commentary says "Adjectives build up a theme through repetition", and shapes from painting repeat in different colours. Caption/diagram interrelates Woman/Nature/Bulk/Darkness. The Gleaners with triangulating lines marked on it. Commentary: "The repetition of one of the codes leads the viewer to select it as a key to the narrative content of the image." Details. Man passing woman scrubbing step. Caption: "Secular Women → Beasts of Burden." Woman and step, photograph of woman in veil, women field workers. Caption: "Symbolic Code." Field workers. VO "Speech struggles to name oppositions…" Captions: "Sky/Earth", "Sacred/Secular". Caption/Diagram interrelates Sacred/Secular/Woman. Various views of the field workers picture with analytical pointers. "Narrative is an escape from oppositions. It slides over them to make the world appear innocent." Children. Field worker. Caption: "Sacred Women → Holy Mother Russia." The ILN Supplement; man decides not to buy camera. Images from film; commentary: "The image evokes a phrase, ‘women, beasts of burden’, and through repetition becomes a cliché." Repeat of captions: "Secular Women → Beasts of Burden" and "Sacred Women → Holy Mother Russia". Front and back of the Supplement, other illustrations from the film. Commentary: "But what do these expressions tell us about the oppositions of Capital and Labour, between Man and Woman, between Science and Human Values?" Commentary says that the "Codes of narrative are like part of speech, but they don’t unfold in sequence as parts of speech do in a sentence…" Pages from Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1960s onwards). "Barthes claims that they weave their own threads of meaning through a story…" – copy of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children (1907) in which parts of speech are being identified – as "chains of thought … called Syntagms". Table listing ideas ("man/experiment/live/bird") from the Air Pump which "echo … under the primary Code of Action". Tables of "girl/sees/death seme → sympathy" and "man/stares seme → sinister", Composite table: "The complexity of narrative enables it to be read in many different ways according to the Code we choose to follow." Images from the film. Commentary: "Image makers often choose to resist narrative in a search for what lies beyond language. In painting there is [a tension between narrative and colour oppositions which does not exist] in photography [where] at the level of the Sign … there is only a chemical deposit. Photography returned the visual arts to narrative representation." Illustrations from Michael Kirby’s Futurist Performance (1971) and elsewhere as commentary says that the Futurists "defied narrative" and wrote "spacially defined" scripts, attempting to reinstate the "male/female opposition" which had been "mediated by romantic narratives". Version of Futurist play (Amooore, 1912) with puppets and people. A Humument poster. VO quotes "The masses have no voice in the matter. The signifier chosen by a language could be replaced by no other...." Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Clichés. Woman passes man on her way into gardens.