摘自《後現代性中形象的轉變》，《文化轉向》。
德裡克·阿爾曼 (Derek Jarman) 影響最大的電影《卡拉瓦喬》(Caravaggio, 1986) 在内容和形式上都極具代表性地體現了繪畫策略，就像戈達爾的《受難記》(1982) 一樣，那些著名但仍然令人振奮的繪畫與演員擺姿勢模仿畫中人的真人場面交替出現。 這種形式與内容的分離暗含了演員模仿的先前場面的存在，由此通過恢複某個“現實世界”重新确認并加強了電影圖像本身的模拟性質，而這部電影隻是偶然圖像中的幻想舞台。
影片展現了一系列這樣的形象：霧藍色的房間裡一動不動地坐着一個身穿紫色衣服的人，僵屍般蒼白的身體裹着鮮紅的衣服，一個水罐被摔得粉碎，一盤橘子被打翻在地，煙霧從典型的下等酒館内散出，一列宗教隊伍在行進，一場惡棍間的決鬥。這些令人驚歎的鏡頭，通過交替與對比相互構成，形式邏輯上完全靜止；它們不僅僅承載着情節，還将它徹底颠倒，把傳記式的動作和事件序列變成展現視覺效果的契機。這在電影中被刻畫成一種無聊與厭煩——模特的無聊，畫家工作室裡的随從的無聊，昏昏欲睡，無休止地等待畫家決定一個角度或一種色調；它更深地銘刻在畫家的生活之中，而畫家的生活本身隻不過是繪畫動作之間的停頓和等待，而這些動作某種程度上外在于人類的時間或實踐。但當我們實際走進這位畫家時，卻充滿悖論意味，他臭名昭著的生活實際上是冒險和危機的典範，是學院派的維庸或熱内！無聊最終成為退出曆史的标志，古典情節現在成為曆史的寓言。甚至性和暴力——在别處構成視覺大衆文化中色情的主要内容——也被畫家的凝視這種巨大的厭世情緒的審美拜物教所掏空。事實上，無聊的補充是觀者所付出的代價，作為對“藝術”本身的一種熱愛，以在反主流文化邊緣性的另一邊重新出現一種虛拟的圖像宗教（毫無疑問，從另一個意義上講，觀衆在這部電影中被寓言性地刻畫為畫家身邊反應遲鈍的啞巴仆人）。
但我還沒有提到這部作品最引人注目的特點，即它的魔幻的現實時空倒錯，例如背景中的火車聲，文藝複興時期的主角騎着摩托車，主教使用的老式打字機，一場戲在停有一輛舊跑車的車庫裡上演，或者穿着絲綢服飾的宮廷人物攜帶計算器。值得注意的是，這些都是擴展的媒體概念的技術，涵蓋了運輸和通信：這些密實的結晶物以離散的工具形式投射到繪畫的過去，突出了後現代美學與技術的關系，揭示了這種美的概念與晚期資本主義高科技結構之間的辯證聯系。賈曼借此實際上是對塔可夫斯基電影神秘性的祛魅，我曾在另一處提到過，塔可夫斯基在寬銀幕上對自然元素的驚人重塑——濕漉漉的沼澤、雨水、熊熊的火焰——本身隻是對使這些景觀成為可能的先進技術的倒置：因此，它們是真正意義上的拟像，誘使着觀者轉向一部來自完全不同傳統的電影來尋求它們的間離和祛魅。我想到的是一部美國科幻電影《綠色食品》（理查德·弗萊舍，1973 年），其中有令人着迷的安樂死場景。片中，一個死寂、荒蕪、污染、人口過剩的星球，星球上的清潔空氣和水以及所有植物生命都消失殆盡；其居民被鼓勵着選擇一次高科技儀式的安樂死 ，足量消費類似《國家地理》雜志中自然美景的全息照片然後死亡，而真正的美景早在一個世紀前便不複存在。
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.
