/ Philosophy and the moving image

Philosophy and the moving image: John Mullarkey

Preface: The film – envy of philosophy

p. ix. There is a common ground in between philosophy and film and that is that they both give a powerfull depiction of reality. p. xPhilosophy is to capture reality in it's thought. Cinema is the art from reality that captures. Mcginn “film is primarily a medium for sensation and feeling rater then abstract thought, film cannot comprehends it's own profound power.” p. xi Theodor Adorno: philosophy says what art cannot say, but it is art alone who is able to say it by not saying it. The philosopher brings out it's inner voice through translation + clarification.

Philosohical cinema or cinemantic philosophy p. xii The affective thinking of film. Merleau Ponty: film is temporal gestalt("The whole is other than the sum of the parts". Gestalt theory allows for the breakup of elements from the whole situation into what it really is). Film is seen to be philosophical because philosophys light has already shone upon film. A philosophers reality can never capture what laurelle calls the “real” itself. p. xiii Instead of reducing our thought to mere images the turn to pictures inflates material images into thinking processes. Film and philosophy are both algorithmic. p. xiv It's power to capture reality is based on both synthetic function in art and (the fact that it captures aspects of every other art form) as well as it's ever-enlarging incorporation of more and more of our sensory powers across it's historical development. Film status as the seventh art: an art that condeses all art into one. p. xv Moving pictures move us because movement is what's real. Allan Kaprow thinks of art as a minimal event that can shift a reality into artfulness. In a happening a small gesture would become into art. It is only the conceptual decision that transforms our awareness of or attention to anything ordinary from life into art.

Philosphys perpetual identity crisis p. xvii the anxiety of philosophers that everythings being philosophized which causes the destruction of pure philosophy. But what they fear is just a reduction to the illustrative. Film might be able to think without being an illustrative mode. Which means that philosophy might even be filmic. Eisenstein: Look at folm as in thinking in stages of a process.

Introduction: Nobody knows Anything Oh they both make such good arguments! p. 3 Everybody knows nothing. There is more in film than anybody can percieve. This is philisophically interesting and thoughtfull.

The circular logic of paradigms and examples p.4 If film can think then all films can think. Some films are valued as more philosophical then others. p. 6 fil philosophy should be a messy mix of methodologies and eclectic, random examples, rather than exemplars that illustrate one's point perfectly.

Between theory and post theory Perhaps because cinema itself is such a mixed art any kind of therozing on film has always been had to foster diverse connections with other disciplines. p. 7 First set of these theories is taking on a mixture of psychoanalytic , althusserian and semiotic methodologies of reading film as text.

Continental or analityc once more unto the breach. p. 8 Euro culturalism is avowedly more historical, more focused on the polical dimensions of film, and, in places, more relativistic. p. 9 anglo cognitivism, takes empirical psychology as its modus operandt. Sees film meaning primarily in terms of representation and tends to be empiricist, apolitical, naturalist and objectivist. A cognitive analasys or explanation seeks to understand human thought, emotion and action by appeal to processes of mental representation naturalistic processes and rational agency. And it is this kind of analysis that cognitivists wish to extend to film.

Rapprochment or impasse? Film as relational process. p. 10 Film be seen instead as an immanent set of processes, specifically as a series of relational processes and hybrid contexts comprising the artists and audiences psychologies, the cinematic raw data, the physical media of the film, the varied forms of exhibition, as well as all the theorries relating themselves to these dimensions. p. 11 We might even see how film itself can genuinly think rather than merely illlustrte thought. Film is a relational process.

Towards non-philosophical cinema Film doesn't reflect our philosophy, it refracts and distorts it with it's own thinking. p. 12 If film is to think/philosophize we must get away from any definition of film as well as any definition of thinking and philosophy.

Nobody knows everything: knowing being and process. p. 14 Cinema ads knowing and cinema as being. Before we ask the question of what we know we must first ask the question of what exists, becasue when we qask what we know we mean what do we know of what exists. Everybody knows something and nobody knows everything.

1 illustrating manuscripts Does the analogy of Hanekes idea (There is no blackmail, the camera makes us all become responsible for the acting) with Levinas make him and his films philosohical? Or is the film just a medium to do so through. p. 17 film is a rich medium for ideas, for what it adds is a new form of embodied expression for philosophy – it stages abstractions, putting the meta en scene, so to speak. But whether it offers us any new philosophy as such remains questionable.

The advent of high-concept cinema p. 18 Why philosophers ignore the image for the word: because they are in the word business, they are word processors. Why do they use narrative film in their examples because this allows them to use human langauge. High concept films

Extreme pretexts p. 20 In cinematic form, however, we have a medium that makes the difficult ideas of philosophy more accessible because they are less abstract: cinema concretises, it is the external embodiment of philisophical thought. Philosophy is a doing not a knowing- philosophy is less about the exposition of thoughts and more about the induction of thought about problems – in Rowlands mind the visualisation of a problem readies it all the more for such inducement. p. 21 Reducement to an illustration when the film doesn't fullfill it's of explaining. Is one's identity the same as ones memories? The identification of teh audience with the main character. What makes a film perspicuous (clearly expressed) is the emotional engagement of the audience. p. 23 Litch claims that any intention of the filmmaker is irrelevant for the discussion about the philosophy the film may uitstraalt. Plato compares knowledge to the light of the sun, ignorence is dwelling in a dark cave, so lighting in film is important for the philosophy of the film.

Bordwell and other cogitators classical and art house p. 33 A film needs to have a beginning middle and end but not necessarily in that order (godard). The 1960s art house film breaks with classical narrative (beginning middle end). The film tout va bien (godard) drukt ons met onze neus op de feiten that the film is a film he uses refraction as a means to show this to us (letting actors speak to the camera and letting speech not go synchronally with the mouths of the actors). Heighten the awareness of the viewer wit the artificiality of the film.

Messages are for western union Bordwell: Much of what we do while watching a film is learnt. Perception must be understood as biological psychological instead of ideological. Theorys of freud lacan and marx applied to film result ina specific meaning of the film. Yet to Bordwell the meanings are always fals subjective ascriptions based on sampling. Films should be qualified for what they do not for what they mean. Even when what they do is part odf the meaning. Smith: Information provided by a film cues the meaning we make of it. Perkins: the meanings of a film garnered through critical reading are not prven syllogisms but are suggestions to the viewer to enrich or renew his or her experience of the film.

Science empiricism culture An movie is a bundle of appeals. Some of these can be cross-cultural or even universal. Culture does indeed play a large part in comprehension but some stylistic aspects will be crosscultural. Bordwell thinks that this cultural universality follows biology.

Closely observed frames The seperation of the input and the output the syuzhet, style/way the film is organised and the fabula/raw material is called binary. The fabula is always the fixed/static product of a dynamic proces.The film is a static binary. The syuzhte must provide enough material to make to permit an understandable fabula. The other side of the static binary is the film as object, artwork, information, dataset. We only see the film through several close viewings because we need to create an objective viewing context.

From reflection to refraction Branigans paradox. Revealing the process of the film does not expose the cinematic illusion but only creates a world within the film. Images are immanent (part of) to the world (Bergson).

Play time The realities of the film are not placeable. Temporal relationship between all sides of the film process tyat they each become real. When has a film ever represented “real” continuous time when it has involved more than one continuos shot.

Moving the continuum The human face is where the character of a person lies in a film is a strange assumption. Why not in spatial configuration of bodies, movement of bodies or hands etc. Character in costume design, lighting, tone of voice etc etc. The paradox of today is the truth of tomorrow(lens flare). The audience in relation to the concrete viewing process. The relation between form and content is not a fixed duality but a dynamic tension of entities in continual exchange.

The representationalist axyom of analitic film theory Film seeing in accordance to carrol is always representational, as information about the world rather than a direct and worldly connection. Affect is the “glue” that holds the audience attention to the screen.

3 Zizek and the cinema of perversion