The look

The gaze hides and protects, opens and reflects, opening a passage on reality. We modify our look, with eyeliner and mascara. We give dirty looks when disappointed, we wink as a sign of empathy. We close our eyes when what they see is too bad. We open them wide in front of the unexpected beauty. We crave a look that is as wide as possible but we do not notice that we are wearing blinders. We hide the most intimate gaze when we wear a mask.

I live among vague and luminous forms that are not yet darkness.

In praise of shadow, Jorge Luise Borges

In this strange time, I often find myself interpreting the role of actress and spectator simultaneously, I rarely feel like a director. It happens to feel like Jaques Aumont told in his writing “The eye endless”: frame and history are both the result of a certain wandering of the gaze on phenomena that was so dear to Godard.

This “look” today is tired, at the end of the line. End of his omnipotence, drop my eyelid.

The look at the cinema and the theater – albeit fixed and delimited – radiates and makes visible, brings other worlds closer and makes them present. When we watch a film, when we attend the representation of a play, we are allowed for that time to cross the threshold, to cross the border and set foot in another universe, different from ours.

This damned Coronavirus is forcing us to live without that look too – to some extent already long dead. It survives in us as a remnant of past wonders, but it no longer works. The cinema of the origins was born from a mourning similar to the one we are experiencing, culturally speaking, today: the eye is transformed into a simulacrum in which the form of what has been remains, but is no longer capable – and perhaps not even wants – to grasp the world.

No more shocks to amaze our eyes and mind, much of what can be done has already been done.

Are we become addicted to “watching”? Are we voyeurs whose fantasies have fallen asleep? How is it that we have become so many Alex at the time of the Ludovico technique, how is it that we are no longer able to be indignant at the righteous in the face of injustice and are anxious about the superfluous?

Perhaps we have seen too much, we have crossed the border of “enough”.

Medicine is the whole culture.

In this suspended time, however, the shopping centers are open. The cinemas are closed, the theaters are closed. Closing these places is something like closing our brain, closing the gaze of the country.

Culture is as essential as food to fill the stomach.

All cultural workers are human, humans must eat, cultural workers must eat. A syllogism to say that those stomachs are now empty. As empty as our gaze in front of a closed curtain.

On this gloomy November Monday, I want to see the clear sky on the horizon. I want to hope to soon find myself in the presence of the red velvet of a curtain that opens, of lights in the stage that turns out, of a white screen that magically becomes populated by a thousand stories and colors.

In this November we want to know what is behind your gaze, what thoughts are hidden in your eyes. Whatever your way of seeing things, we want to capture as many different points of view as possible. Where does your look rest today? Where was it yesterday, where will it be tomorrow?

If you want, tell us about it at the hashtag #dietrolosguardo. As always, we are waiting for you here, on Instagram, on Facebook and on Twitter.