摘自《后现代性中形象的转变》，《文化转向》。
德里克·阿尔曼 (Derek Jarman) 影响最大的电影《卡拉瓦乔》(Caravaggio, 1986) 在内容和形式上都极具代表性地体现了绘画策略，就像戈达尔的《受难记》(1982) 一样，那些著名但仍然令人振奋的绘画与演员摆姿势模仿画中人的真人场面交替出现。 这种形式与内容的分离暗含了演员模仿的先前场面的存在，由此通过恢复某个“现实世界”重新确认并加强了电影图像本身的模拟性质，而这部电影只是偶然图像中的幻想舞台。
影片展现了一系列这样的形象：雾蓝色的房间里一动不动地坐着一个身穿紫色衣服的人，僵尸般苍白的身体裹着鲜红的衣服，一个水罐被摔得粉碎，一盘橘子被打翻在地，烟雾从典型的下等酒馆内散出，一列宗教队伍在行进，一场恶棍间的决斗。这些令人惊叹的镜头，通过交替与对比相互构成，形式逻辑上完全静止；它们不仅仅承载着情节，还将它彻底颠倒，把传记式的动作和事件序列变成展现视觉效果的契机。这在电影中被刻画成一种无聊与厌烦——模特的无聊，画家工作室里的随从的无聊，昏昏欲睡，无休止地等待画家决定一个角度或一种色调；它更深地铭刻在画家的生活之中，而画家的生活本身只不过是绘画动作之间的停顿和等待，而这些动作某种程度上外在于人类的时间或实践。但当我们实际走进这位画家时，却充满悖论意味，他臭名昭著的生活实际上是冒险和危机的典范，是学院派的维庸或热内！无聊最终成为退出历史的标志，古典情节现在成为历史的寓言。甚至性和暴力——在别处构成视觉大众文化中色情的主要内容——也被画家的凝视这种巨大的厌世情绪的审美拜物教所掏空。事实上，无聊的补充是观者所付出的代价，作为对“艺术”本身的一种热爱，以在反主流文化边缘性的另一边重新出现一种虚拟的图像宗教（毫无疑问，从另一个意义上讲，观众在这部电影中被寓言性地刻画为画家身边反应迟钝的哑巴仆人）。
但我还没有提到这部作品最引人注目的特点，即它的魔幻的现实时空倒错，例如背景中的火车声，文艺复兴时期的主角骑着摩托车，主教使用的老式打字机，一场戏在停有一辆旧跑车的车库里上演，或者穿着丝绸服饰的宫廷人物携带计算器。值得注意的是，这些都是扩展的媒体概念的技术，涵盖了运输和通信：这些密实的结晶物以离散的工具形式投射到绘画的过去，突出了后现代美学与技术的关系，揭示了这种美的概念与晚期资本主义高科技结构之间的辩证联系。贾曼借此实际上是对塔可夫斯基电影神秘性的祛魅，我曾在另一处提到过，塔可夫斯基在宽银幕上对自然元素的惊人重塑——湿漉漉的沼泽、雨水、熊熊的火焰——本身只是对使这些景观成为可能的先进技术的倒置：因此，它们是真正意义上的拟像，诱使着观者转向一部来自完全不同传统的电影来寻求它们的间离和祛魅。我想到的是一部美国科幻电影《绿色食品》（理查德·弗莱舍，1973 年），其中有令人着迷的安乐死场景。片中，一个死寂、荒芜、污染、人口过剩的星球，星球上的清洁空气和水以及所有植物生命都消失殆尽；其居民被鼓励着选择一次高科技仪式的安乐死 ，足量消费类似《国家地理》杂志中自然美景的全息照片然后死亡，而真正的美景早在一个世纪前便不复存在。
Derek Jarman's most widely distributed film, Caravaggio (1986), is in many ways supremely representative, in its content as well as in its form, of the painterly strategy, in which, as in Godard's Passion (1982), the well-known but still electrifying paintings alternate with tableaux of the living bodies of actors imitating them, in the guise of posing for them. The separation of form and content implicit in the posing of a pre-existent tableau by actors reconfirms and strengthens the simulacrum qualities of the filmic image itself, by restoring some 'real world' of which this is but the visionary staging in an aleatory image. The succession of such images - a fog-blue room holding a motionless figure in purple, bodies with a corpse-like pallor adjoining the folds of a brilliant red garment, the spilling of a jug in pieces, or a dish of oranges, smoke filtering through a classic low-life tavern, or a religious procession, or a knife-duel among toughs - these stunning shots, which frame each other by their very alternation and bring each other into being, produce each other by their very contrast, are in their formal logic deeply static. They do not merely burden the plot - such as it is - they turn it inside out, and make the biographical sequence of actions and events into a mere pretext for the visuals. This is inscribed within the film as a kind of boredom, the boredom of the models, the boredom of the hangers-on in the painter's studio, drowsing and waiting endlessly for the painter to decide on an angle or a tint of colour-contrast; it is inscribed, even more deeply, in the painter's life, which is itself little more than a marking time and a waiting between acts of the painting of a canvas which are somehow essentially outside of human time or praxis. But nothing is more paradoxical when we have to do with this particular painter, whose notorious life is virtually a paradigm of adventure and of crisis, the beauxarts' equivalent of Villon or Genet! Boredom is here finally the sign of the withdrawal from history, of which classical plot now becomes the allegory. Even sexuality and violence - elsewhere the very staples of an essentially visual mass-cultural pornography - are emptied out by the painterly gaze, the aesthetic fetishism of this immense world-weariness. Indeed, a supplement of boredom is the price the viewer is asked to pay, as a kind of devotion to 'art' as such, to the reappearance of a virtual religion of the image on the other side of countercultural marginality (and in another sense, no doubt, the spectator is inscribed in this film allegorically in the person of the mute and slow-witted companion-servant of the painter). But I have not mentioned the most striking feature of this work, namely its magic-realist anachronisms, as when we hear a train in the background of a lovers' bed, watch a Renaissance protagonist work on his motorcycle, a prince of the church peck away at his old-fashioned typewriter, observe a scene acted out in a cavernous garage in front of an old roadster, or watch court figures in silken finery calculate something on a portable adding machine. These are all, it will be noted, the technologies of an expanded conception of the media as such, encompassing both transportation and communication: densely crystallized and then projected into the painterly past in the form of discrete gadgets, these tell-tale objects stand as the symptom for the deeper complex of impulses at work here, foregrounding the relationship between'aesthetics and technology in the postmodern, and unmasking the dialectical link between this conception of beauty and the high-iech structure of late capitalism. Jarman thereby demystifies the very different nature of mystique of a Tarkovsky, about whom I've suggested in another place that his breathtaking reinvention of the natural elements on the wide screen - sodden marshes, rain, blazing flames - are themselves mere inversions of the advanced technology that permits their reproduction: they are thus in the truest sense simulacra, and one is tempted to turn to a film from a very different tradition to seek their estrangement and demystification. I am thinking of the American SF film Soylent Green (Richard Fleischer, 1973), with its mesmerizing euthanasia sequence, in which the citizens of a dead and barren, polluted and overpopulated planet, from which clean air and water, and all plant life, have been effaced, are encouraged in one last hightech ritual to go to their deaths consuming enormous National Geographic holographs of a natural beauty that had ceased to exist on Earth a century before.
