On “On Otto”: Moving Images and the New Collectivity

Abstract

Here is how the movie project named On Otto (2007) starts: with a poster for a film that is yet to be made, a film that no one, at this stage, knows if it is even possible to make (fig. 1). No names (of actors, directors, producers) are mentioned. But, like all movie posters, it takes film itself for granted; in fact, it takes the whole cinematic context or apparatus as absolutely self-evident. There is, and will be, cinema: beyond individual productions, cinema is something akin to a paradigm—a generative set of rules organizing the production of phenomena at once scientific, perceptual, aesthetic, technological, economic, and existential. There will be titles, music, editing, stage design, sound. Something will be directed by, produced by, photographed by, acted by. The poster advertises this certainty and spells it out in letters that visually frame “the cinema” that they promise: A screening space, seen from the back of the row of seats so that attention is directed towards the movie screen. On this screen the enormous head of a film diva—apparently caught at the moment of death—clings to the foreground of the screen-image; due to the play of shadow and light, a lock of her hair actually seems to have spilled over into spectator space, as if to make contact. And the quest for contact is reciprocated. A boy, a lone figure among otherwise empty seats, points a fish in the direction of the screen, directly in the angle of the blonde coils of diva hair. Between the screen and this spectator, a space of action is established: the poster, none too subtly, marks this space with a red markered circle. Demarcating an “expanded” notion of cinema, the poster for On Otto announces a cinematic production process that will reformulate the place and status of so-called “moving images.”