Some of my favourite theorist thoughts on beyond the image....
Andre Bazin (French Film Critic and Theorist) uses the term 'asesthetic transformer' to describe receiving an idea by means of a metaphor, that there is a relay station between the scene and the image, ‘the meaning is not in the image it is in the shadow of the image projected by montage on the field of consciousness of the spectator'.
Rolande Barthes (French Theorist and Philosopher) refers to the punctum of an image as a kind of ‘subtle beyond’, as if the image launches a desire beyond what it permits us to see.
Luc Dardenne (Filmmaker, Dardenne Bros) refers to the distance between the camera and the character as the 'space of the secret';1 the transcendence beyond the image an invisible perceptual experience. The Dardenne brothers speak repeatedly of using film as a way of gaining access to humanity, and that the vocation of cinema is 'to capture the human gaze'.
Bazin, Andre. Handbook. The Ontology of the Photographic Image.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida.
Cooper, Sarah. Mortal Ethics: Reading Levinas with the Dardenne Brothers.
