Werner Nekes’ Uliisses: literary citations between eye and brain in the cinema of “Light-erature".

Abstract

The metaphoric use of light, traditionally a domain reserved to painting and architecture, has always, by its very nature, played a major role in film, because photography and cinema are simply specific ways of dealing with light. In Uliisses (1982) German film director Werner Nekes makes use of the fact that the processing centers of the cerebrum work much faster than, for example, the organ of perception, the eye. Indeed it is just this sluggishness of the eye, creating the impression of actual movement out of a specific rapid sucession of individual images in sequence, which is fundamental for film as a medium. In fact, it is clear that it is not the eye that sees, but the brain. In that sense, in this film, both, text and viewer inhabit the same dominant fiction. This paper explores how Nekes ’ film language attempts to activate the capacities of the cerebral cortex, and in so doing, to bring about a greater collaboration between eye and brain.