Symbolic Folds and Flattened Discourse: Andrei Zviagintsev’s Elena (2010)

I demonstrate how subjectivities work to flatten such folds (as conceived in Deleuze’s work on Foucault and Leibniz) by examining Elena, the logic of which is underpinned by the notion of flatness. In his special attention to surfaces and patterns Zviagintsev elucidates a particular film philosophy which Zviagintsev’s cinematographer, Krichman, calls ‘visualisation’, or transference of meaning with the help of cinematic symbols. The symbolic modes instantiates a new plane of meaning, a surface on which meaning is inscribed, which, while alluding to the materiality of being, is elusive in its metaphysical construction. Cinematically, while the camera looks in both directions, it glides above these surfaces and in doing so creates meaning; it is in the gap between surfaces that the meaning is actualised. Krichman and Zviagintsev discuss non-representational strategies which they call ‘visualisation’. Zviagintsev compares film to a ‘magical mirror’ which enables a two-directional mode of operation: while viewers watch films, the films watch the viewers (Zviagintsev 2014). For him, film offers both knowledge and non-knowledge. The latter—a more powerful stance, according to the director—provides ‘freedom and emptiness’, that is, a temporal lack of signification, a void of meaning to be filled in the process of watching (2014).