towards a theory of the background

We set some things in the foreground. We push some things into the background. Nothing simpler than this organization of space, with which we bring something closer to us and set something further away. We can then proceed to play by shifting focus. Suddenly, the figure in the foreground might become blurred and the figure in the background appear sharply against the newly found stain of our proximity. Or, the more typical way, the background may remain out of focus, as though dissolving in its irrelevance, while what is in the foreground begins to trace its action with clarity and resolve. Or, we might choose to oscillate between the two, at times sharpening our perception of the background only to then return to the foreground, and then yet again give up the foreground with the purpose of "placing" (historicizing) it in relation to its background. We have in this a description of a basic critical operation: either show the secret relation between the foreground and the background, the background becoming itself for the foreground, the foreground becoming the foreground for its other; or, expose the violence involved in setting one against the other, the suppression of the background by the form of the foreground, the revolt of what has been set in the background against the forces of the less distant.

Yet, in all of this there is still a more radical dimension. For what needs to be explained is how what occurs in this oscillation, the dissolve-resolve of critical consciousness, affects the ground itself; how the ground of the foreground is not the same as the ground of the background. And the difference between the two positions that the ground seemingly supports must also be shown as what splits the ground itself. The critical oscillation contains in itself (and perhaps often also represses) this dimension of the splitting of the ground: of losing ground and regaining ground in its metamorphosis.

The leap from, let's say, a medium shot to a close-up is not simply a movement of oscillation from a thing seen as background to a thing seen as foreground, in which the ground would be simply preserved. It is also the movement of the ground itself, for what it introduces are two completely incommensurable shots. Eisenstein had this in mind when he criticized the term "close-up" and sought to replace it with "enlargement shot". By creating a shot of this sort one does not simply introduce more (or more precise) information that, however, is essentially already contained in the previous (medium, or establishing) shot. One rather cuts into the very ground on which things stand, as though one wanted to separate them from it, but which also means that these things "enlarged" will be of a fundamentally new quality and thus will require a kind of re-grounding. In montage, one loses the common ground between the shots (fragments) in order to gain the experience of an image (obraz) which is its transformation. In the Bazinian deep focus, too, the experience should not be that of a continuity of reality serving as the ground, but rather the loss of reality-as-ground that occurs when the eye is forced to move between two incommensurable planes contained by the image. In other words, one has to dissolve reality as ground in order to gain it as a resolution of faith.

The function of the background then does not lie simply in the critical disturbance of that which stands in the foreground. In fact, the least interesting thing about a background are its attempts to usurp the ground and replace itself for what stands in front of it (becoming foreground). The background's radical function is, on the contrary, to make itself fully into what it already is (becoming background), and thus force the ground into a choice. If it succeeds at this, the ground itself will appear as the ultimate usurpation.