The Nature of Ostension

O'Brien, Adam

The Nature of Ostension

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Citation

O'Brien, A. The Nature of Ostension. 2023. url: http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/article/view/412331

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Abstract

The initiating comparison for this essay is between two images, or shots; one appears in Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Black Pond (2018), and shows two people looking offscreen, surrounded by dense woodland; the other is reprinted and described in Bruno Latour’s essay “Circulating Reference” (1999) and shows three scientists near a border between a savanna and a forest, looking and gesturing in different directions. Rinland and Latour share an ethnographic interest in the material and gestural minutiae of scientific engagement with the non-human world. This essay explores their common interest in pointing, and in ostension more generally, as it emerges in both case studies. Latour provides a rich and suggestive framework through which to understand Black Pond, particularly in its conception of natural-history study as a multi-stage process of mediation, made up of tools and gestures and inferences – rather than the momentary encountering or witnessing more familiar to eco-film aesthetics.