Philosophy and Cinema Journal - Essay Example

Philosophy and Cinema Journal Week 2 Representation, Reality and Truth The focus of study for Week 2 is the methods by which cinematic images are interpreted or read. Cinematic images are not read independently but the social, political and economic condition at the time of their creation must be taken into account. In this connection, the readings cited French philosopher Ranciére’s three “conditions of readability” or “regimes of visibility.” Ethical Regime. The ethical regime of the arts refers to that period when a work of art was studied for its quality and its ultimate effect upon society, therefore its “ethos.” An example is Plato’s review of “the simile of the cave” and “the example of the three beds,” which he called mere imitation of the real thing but without revealing their essence. This view is the ontology of the image. Plato likewise saw these images as something that catered to the lower senses and passions of the people and not to the higher faculty of logic and reasoning. This observation is the effect of the art upon its viewers. Representative Regime. In this regime of artistic perception, a work of art is judged for what it represents and how it fares in comparison to other works of art. There was a set of criteria as well as genres that correspond to the hierarchy of artistic works. A tragedy for example, must tell a story which must be complete with a beginning, middle and an ending. Aesthetic Regime. With the success of the American and French Revolutions, the representative regime was overtaken by the aesthetic regime. This regime is characterized by total freedom of expression, where a work of art is evaluated for its own merit. Gone were the days of hierarchies, set criteria and genres. Week 3 The Question of Realism In re Bazin’s famous page (p. 13), where he referred to the camera as a non-living agent that recreates the world, he said: “For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative invention of man.” It may be true that the camera does the recreating but to say that the process is without the creative intervention of man is, to this writer, not perfectly accurate. The angles, the lighting, the lenses choice, and the timing of all these elements are products of the cameraman’s creative intervention which results in the shot. Bazin, who elevated photography as the most significant in what he called “plastic arts,” had only superlative descriptions of its aesthetic and creative powers. Aesthetically, it is superior, according to Bazin, because of its ability to present reality in its most naked condition. Unlike other forms of art, nothing comes between the original subject and the cold lens of the camera. What the camera does is to strip the object of all contextual non-necessities attached to it by time, place and space and lay it bare to the viewer, an experience that is almost impossible in real life. And to Bazin, photography “can surpass art in creative power” which surprisingly implies despite his extolling photography, that he did not classify it as art. Bazin reasoned out that unlike painting, photography does not substitute reality but rather add to it. Photography is more creative because there is no need for a meticulous combination of tricks to create an object of hallucination, like what surrealist do, but it is a hallucination and at the same time, also a fact. Week 4 The Art of Movement The readings for this week featured, among others, the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema movements. What is interesting about Deleuze is that he was by profession, a philosopher and was not a film critic or a film reviewer, film theorist or had anything to do with cinema as a profession. Deleuze viewed cinema from a purely aesthetic point of view and did not believe that it was suppose to represent anything.1 Deleuze’s writings include the study of cinematic frames as a means of evaluating movements in films. He gave two definitions of cinematic frames: geometrical and physical. The geometrical frame consists of “spatial composition of parallels and diagonals” which provides balance to all the masses that occupy it as well as a fixed constitution for the said masses. As a physical conception, a cinematic frame is the dynamic constitution which is associated with the “the image, the characters, scene, and the objects which fill it.” The difference is that geometric frame pre-exists all the objects which will eventually fill it whereas the physical frame is dependent and co-exists with the objects filling it. Deleuze’s was known to have been influenced much by Bergson, whose fame he revived after the Second World War by publishing a book called Bergsonism in 1966. In particular, Deleuze heavily borrowed Bergson’s concept of multiplicity. Bergson theorized that everything in the world is interconnected constituting a whole and this whole is constantly changing qualitatively. From this theory, Deleuze created his concept of the cinematic image as a framed image-in-movement and the singular frame as a part of the entire cinematic montage. Week 5 The Art of Time The subject that this week tackled is the element of time in relation to the movement-image, with references mainly to the works of Deleuze and Andre Tarkovsky. Deleuze who posited the concept of the dimensions of movement-image stated that it is characterized as having a dual perspective: “temporal and spatial, relative and absolute.” The first dimension is characterized by the relation of an image-movement to the rest of the whole (the entirety of the film). The second dimension refers to the relative position of the image with other elements or parts of the image. The aberrant-movement or false continuities referred to by Deleuze are the tears or discontinuities in space or the illogical intervals that may suggest the absence of a whole, despite the fact that this absence may later be dispelled afterwards and a continuity established eventually. Week 6 Phenomenology and Cinema Phenomenology, the topic for this week, is the study of the structures of consciousness introduced by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl. What is important in this discipline is that the human body is not detached from the world but is a part of any philosophical undertaking. Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a French philosopher known for his studies of human perception. To him, the ultimate conclusion of the study of human perception is the ontology of the flesh. This ontology is borne out of the interaction of the self with the world around, and the significance that comes out of the self and outside of it. The objective self and subjective self is not two distinct and separate entities but they are related, constituting the visible and the invisible Thus, the flesh, according to Merleau-Ponty which is the ‘me’ as a seer is at the same time the being also seen by others. He said: “this circle which I do not form, which forms me, this coiling over of the visible upon the visible, can traverse, animate other bodies as well as my own.”2 According to Meleau-Ponty, the properties of the visible are: possessing the visible implying also being possessed by it, thus a circle is formed which the flesh did not itself create; a person is one of the visibles but is not one of the visibles he sees. Although he sees and understand what he is seeing, there is a divide between him and the thing he sees and this divide is caused by the person’s look and body, and; a person’s vision is not different from another’s vision if vision implies opening one’s self to a world that allows itself to be seen. Week 7 Cinema and the Imagination Week 7 tackles the philosophies of Hegel and Slajov Zizek. Zizek was a Slovene philosopher and among the many of his writings was subjectivity while Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher who wrote on various topics including the subjective origin of images. Hegel, in his writings, described the process by which the mind takes in what he sees in the world outside of him and stores them so that the mind masters these things. In all the processes involved, the presence and the role of the object = subject is ever present. Internalization involves the feelings, intuition and then lastly, the mental representation. Hegel thus differentiates between intuition, image and idea. Intuition is the recognition of a feeling and sensation which prevents indifference towards them. An image, on the other hand, is a stored data existing in the mental faculty of a person as a result of the internalization process. The image represents the mastering of the mind over it cause by its ability to recall that idea, the mind has somehow a power over it. The concept of idea is related to the image, the difference being that while the image is externally bound, idea belongs to the realm of the internal mind. Zizek, on the other hand, critiqued Kant’s concept of imagination. Zizek bewailed the fact that Kant merely focused on the ability of the mind to synthesize, to bring together a multitude of intuition to made into a recognizable whole but neglected to consider the other opposing function of the imagination which is to tear or break the “fabric of intuition apart.” This is the analytical function of the imagination – the disruptive, decomposing aspect of the mind. Week 8 Identity, Embodiment, Mortality For this week, the readings brought the topic closer to films and film appreciation. Thus, the different philosophical approaches to the cinema were taken up namely: the aesthetic approach; the theoretical problem approach; the psychoanalytic/theory approaches; the cultural-ideological approaches, and; film as philosophizing approach. Moreover, two classic films were taken up, both by director Ridley Scott. These are the 1979 Alien and The Blade Runner in 1982. In the movie Alien, the central computer – MU-TH-R-182, of the spaceship Nostromo and the android Ash (played by Ian Holm) were both, in a sense, as alien as the multiple egg-laying creature in the movie, as both were machines. Mother and Ash had no compunction as to the expendability of the crew as they recover the alien, a well concealed purpose. It was really the plan of The Company, to bring back the alien-life form to earth to serve as a means of weapons-development. It was the female character Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) of the film, which ultimately took on the alien and vanquished it. This was a classic match between two females of different species standing on the opposite sides of the spectrum. While the alien was purely driven by its instinct to survive and multiply indiscriminately, Ripley was likewise driven to survive the alien and was impliedly a celibate. They were complete opposites and therefore a perfect match. Ripley had a resolved that no other in her crew had which is the reason why she, of all the crew members, was able to defeat the alien. Week 9 The Cinematic Unconscious (David Lynch) The title for this week’s topic was initially baffling. However, the fact that the name of David Lynch immediately follows it makes one glimpse a little of its meaning. Lynch, after all, is known for his penchant for films that play a discordant note like The Elephant Man, Mulholland Drive and the topic film for this week The Lost Higway. Greg Hainge, who contributed in the book The Cinema of David Lynch: American Dreams, Nightmare Visions, commented that Lynch likes to use language and narrative as one of the means to “heighten the artifice of his work, to remove us from the realist mode in order to cast us further into his cinematic metaspaces.” In the film, the cinematography intervened with the normal narrative conventions. Thus, shots of lips talking to telephones and to the skin in love scenes, and narrative being done while the camera focusing elsewhere in other parts of the frame permeated the movie - all contributing to the feeling of being lost and out of this world. Hainge cited Todd McCarthy’s film review published in Variety, which described Lynch’s narrative strategies as ultimately geared towards creating a mystery for which there is no palpable answer. As for Lynch’s psychoanalytic approach to the movie, Hainge was of the opinion that this approach had served to present an illogical perception of the film and therefore non-sense. The events depicted in the film simply defied logic. In one scene, Fred, the main protagonist, was suddenly transformed into another man in his cell in prison while waiting for execution. In another, which happened at the end of the film, a telephone call announced the death of Dick Laurent. This transposed the film to the point of origin. These events, according to Hainge, not only contravened the law of time but also of physical reality. Week 10 Cavell On The Philosophy of Hollywood Comedy For the tenth week, the readings were excerpted from Stanley Cavell’s two books “Knowledge as Transgression: It Happened One Night” and “The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Films.” Cavell was an American philosopher known for including films and cinemas in his philosophical undertakings. In the second book, Cavell critiqued Bazin’s views on photography. The statement for example of Bazin describing photography as automatically satisfying recreation of reality earned a comment from Cavell pointing out that this automatism is manufactured, and what is manufactured is an image of the world. Obviously Cavell did not share Bazin’s enthusiasm in photography. He called Bazin’s statement “photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness,” as misleading. According to him, what photography satisfied was the human wish and not that of the painters because the latter was compelled to let go of likeness in its pursuit of reality. Likeness did not satisfy the painter’s desire for reality and thus had to let it go. The result, according to Hainge, was that it freed photography to be invented. Read More