the beginning of a thought...

I like the idea of immersiveness. the installation. work that connects to all senses.
a piece maybe of this or that, that combines together with other pieces to make a whole.

thats why i like the idea of the film set. Its a creation of another world.
a fantasy world. escapism....

reality or unreality, maybe unreality that becomes reality.

the film set can be very interesting. not just the scene, but the lights, the camera, the construction. it is full of acts of looking.

Gothic as a genre is full of conflicts. it questions answers rather than answering questions.
there is an overlapping between the 'upper' and 'lower' worlds. it paradoxes the sacred and profane. most studies of the Gothic recognise architecture as the "pillar" of the genre. the verticality of the cathedral as it stretches upwards and outwards to reach heaven is also contradicted by the downward secret passages and catacombes descending into the earth.
There is light struggling with darkness.

the cathedrals towers are a symbol of 'political arrogance' and reflect the coming alliance between the ego and the phallus. they are a watchtower from which the voyeur can sit and watch.

I wonder if there is something of the watcher being watched. a film set... to watch the watcher watching, though there is no one to look at.

the gaze, looking.

Mulvey [1975 p 208] has identified three forms of looking in cinema: the look of the camera as it records events, the audience's look at the image and the looks between characters within the diegesis. The look of the camera is, wherever possible, denied or suppressed in the interests of verisimilitude. But it is always apparent due to the confines of the frame.

The look of the audience at the screen is one which reproduces the lively curiosity of the infant deriving pleasure from what it sees. As Mulvey [1975 pp 200-201] puts it, "looking itself is a source of pleasure, just as ... there is pleasure in being looked at". The look has a darker side however.

then we get to panopticism, scoptophilia, the erotic connotations of voyeurism. relationships of power and submission. A lot of Foucault, Freudian and Lacanian philosophy. but must be addressed as it is so prevalent in gothic literature.

Jacques Derrida... deconstruction.... who knows what that is about? not even Derrida
(i think he just made something up, so he could have something to philosophise for years and have everyone else still trying to figure it out long after he'd gone)
but somehow its relevant to Gothic architecture...

the gothic always returns to unconventions, which dissolve boundaries between outsiders and insiders, victims and victimizers, the watched and the watcher.
Gothicism seems to lack any closure, and any gothic 'closing' in fact makes a new beggining.

Ann Radcliffe - "terror and horror are so far opposite; terror expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life while horror contracts, freezes and annihilates them."

....oh the fragments of my thinking will come together concisively one day....