In search to look up some more specific and interesting question about the specificity of the cinematic image versus indexcality I came across the luxonline website with this well written article on Isaac Julien’s work ….
This concern with the act of looking and with the confluence of looks that cinematic spectatorship explores, is a long-standing feature of Julien’s work in which the ‘look’ becomes the index of desire, of conflict, of mis-identification. But it must also be seen as a fundamental structuring trope of cinematic representation. Think of how ‘shot/counter-shot’ works in narrative cinema, the look from one character to another becoming the invisible spine of a scene, an expressive element as well as a basic structural tool. In Territories, for example, the ‘look’ is the incommensurable space between white law and black subject and one achieved through a montage effect, that of the superimposition, given in a repeated sequence, of shots of a policeman and a young black man. Julien’s 1996 made-for-TV documentary-essay film on Frantz Fanon’s life, times and legacy, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, is shot through with this repertoire of enigmatic looking, frequently breaking out of the conventions of easily stitched-together shot/counter-shot conventions and, through an effective combination of direct, frontal looks to-camera and glancing, ‘un-matched’ looks, converging in the territory of the spectator.
.. read on
.. read on