Original scientific paper
The Virtual as a Specter of the Actual: Ante Babaja’s The Stone Gate
Višnja Pentić
Abstract
Through an in-depth analysis of its most important formal procedures, Ante Babaja's last feature film The Stone Gate (1992) is read as a work that sets as its central interest the reshaping and overcoming of the dichotomies absent/present, mental/material, possible/real and virtual/actual inscribed into the ontological definitions of the film medium. To describe the specific logic of the film world which depicts the last days and the death of the middle-aged doctor Boras, the concepts of hallucination and haunting are used. In The Stone Gate Babaja establishes a method for seamlessly integrating mental, i.e., internal and abstract contents into the narrative procedures of the film, focusing on the depiction of the dead and the absent as unavoidable components of reality. The dead, like ghosts, participate in the world of the living, becoming its virtual component, which is staged in the film through the self-conscious use of the concept of the indiscernibility of subjective and objective, physical and mental, visible and invisible, as well as their continuous mutual mirroring. Every presented feature can simultaneously be read as a material reality in which we observe the events from the last period of Boras's life, but also as a mental reality, that is, as a hallucination experienced at the moment of his death. With the aim of showing the essential interweaving of the phenomenon of death in the world of the living, the film establishes a representational structure in which the real and the unreal are no longer separable, and which corresponds to what Gilles Deleuze calls a crystal regime in which the actual and the virtual aspect of the film image, although distinct, are indiscernible. This procedure enables death to be depicted as a specter haunting the living and being inextricably and indissolubly connected with them, becoming a ghostly virtuality that defines and constantly reshapes the actual.
Keywords
Croatian film; The Stone Gate; Ante Babaja; hallucination; death; haunting; the crystal regime
Hrčak ID:
322293
URI
Publication date:
11.11.2024.
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