I am teaching a Philosophy of Film class in which we have been reading selections from Stanley Cavell's The World Viewed. from the Carroll and Choi anthology Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. The reading is tough, but rich. One has to take into account a seemingly casual and unpredictable style: read and contemplate seems to be the order of the day. My specific interest here is in the relationship between the aesthetics of film and the aesthetics of everyday life. A lot of the early part of the reading, for example in the "Sights and Sounds" and "Photograph and Screen" seems pretty familiar when one comes to it from such earlier theorists as Panofsky and Bazin. Then the essay takes some interesting and surprising turns. But here I will only talk about the first section, "Sights and Sounds."
Following Bazin, photography is taken to be the medium of movies and photography is of reality. Of course the question, as Cavell puts it, is somewhat new viz. "What happens to reality when it is projected and screened?" (67) We'll get back to that. First, however, Cavell discusses another familiar point, that photographs present us with the things themselves, or even that photographs have "an aura or history of magic surrounding them." But magic is not much discussed in analytic philosophy, so this is a bit surprising in a textbook that follows, for the most part, the analytic line. Cavell perhaps makes all of this safe-sounding by putting it in the language of ordinary language philosophy, talking about "what we say" and finding interesting insights in that. We can say all sorts of things that don't sound true to the (only and always) science-minded if we are just talking about the ways people typically talk: for example "a man can be spoken to by God and survive" is said by Cavell, but not asserted, since he is only talking about what some people ordinarily say. Still, as much as Cavell wants to mark a big difference between the way we see pictures and the way we listen to recorded sounds so that "That's an English horn" on listening to a recording is less weird than "That is Garbo" on looking at Garbo on screen, this just doesn't seem plausible to me. When we hear Garbo speak on screen we are hearing Garbo who is not present speak just as we are seeing Garbo who is not present speak.
But back to mystery: Cavell says "My feeling is....that we have forgotten how mysterious these things are" which I think is basically right. And he is entirely correct about some stuff we say. For example, we can say that a record "reproduces a sound" but it is not clear what a photograph reproduces, if anything. Cavell has some interesting things to say about what we mean by "sight" here. He thinks the best candidate for what photographs might reproduce is "sights," but this does not fit how we ordinarily use that word, i.e. "objects don't make sights, or have sights." And, rather neatly, he says "I feel like saying: Objects are too close to their sights to give them up for reproducing."
On the issue of whether photographs and paintings are in competition, Cavell follows the unusual strategy of going behind both to the notion that there is a "human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation - a wish for the power to reach this world, having for so long tried...to manifest fidelity to another [i.e. heaven]." He ties to this the observation that painting in Manet was forced to forego likeness "exactly because of its own obsession with reality."
I connect this to my philosophical project in this way: the interest in everyday aesthetics comes, in a way, after religion. Cavell and I are on the same wavelength here. Foregoing likeness is just one way of getting closer to physical reality, which really means here the experienced reality of everyday life (since, after all, it does not mean the reality of physics.) Cavell brings this out in more detail later in the the book when he talks at length about Baudelaire's Painter in the Modern World. So, for me, everyday aesthetics is closely tied to the project of aesthetic atheism, i.e. the project promoted by Nietzsche and Dewey, among others (for example it is implicit in Kant, and very deeply buried but also implicit in Plato read rightly, and also it is to be found in Zen Buddhism) that in turning away from a transcendent realm one becomes transcendental and in doing this one revives the magic in things of everyday experience (that was the lesson the American transcendentalists learned from Kant).
Cavell ssys: "It could be said further, that what painting wanted, in wanting connection with reality, was a sense of presentness - not exactly a conviction of the world's presence to us, but of our presence to it." (69) This is where his theme of the great quest of overcoming skepticism comes in: "At some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became subjective." (69) I would call this the Cartesian wrongturning: a wrongturning that everyday aesthetics seeks to overcome. The opposite of individuality in Cartesian isolation is individuality interacting with the surrounding world, i.e. the sense of John Dewey's notion of experience. But, perhaps unlike Cavell, I do not see Descartes as providing any positive contribution to this. Cavell says "The route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgment of that endless presence of self" and I think this is giving too much credit to the cogito. This "terror of ourselves in isolation" is a pretty manufactured terror, a self-inflicted disease.
For Cavell "apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art." I am with that: finding oneself in the world is what making art, and also appreciating art, are all about, but this would be true even if there had been no Descartes to muck up consciousness by splitting mind and matter in two. Descartes just took the worse tendencies in Plato exacerbated by St. Augustine and plopped them into the scientific world view just as they were beginning to lose power as an essential aspect of the religious one.
"To speak of our subjectivity as the route back to our conviction in reality is to speak of romanticism." (70) Yes! As long as it is OK to speak of romanticism once again in a positive light. And I agree with: "the recent major painting which [Michael] Fried describes [in "Art and Objecthood" 1967] as objects of presentness would be painting's latest effort to maintain its conviction in its own power to establish connection with reality - by permitting us presentness to ourselves, apart from which there is no hope for a world." (70) Very nice. And then photography overcame subjectivity in another way.
However, I cannot place as much emphasis as Cavell does on the automatism of photography or on the idea that the human agent is entirely absent in photography. Really? What about all the choices and manipulations photographers make? But maybe something else can be made of sentences like "Photography maintains the presentness of the world by accepting our absence from it." (70) Perhaps Cavell is talking more about a temporal thing. That is, I am not present to the photograph because the world it portrays is of the past of which me, now, cannot be a part. Well, maybe. But that is also true for painting: a painting comes out of the past, it has a history. Maybe the difference is that in viewing a photograph we are viewing a past that was at the time of taking very much present, whereas in viewing a painting one is viewing a past that build up over time in the the slow layers of paints on surface, as the artist slowly digested the world, and also as future appreciators slowly digested the product in the history of appreciation. But the second slow digestion is also present in photography. So, again, I do not see the big differences Cavell sees.
Showing posts with label aesthetics of film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aesthetics of film. Show all posts
Thursday, October 19, 2017
Thursday, October 5, 2017
Currie's attack on the idea that film is importantly like language and that semiotics is a worthwhile endeavor
No one believes that film is literally a language or that there are literal film languages. So that is a red herring. But film philosophers since the 1990s have been attacking that idea that film is importantly like language. One of the most prominent articles in this areas is Gregory Currie's "The Long Goodbye: the Imaginary Language of Film" first published in 1993 and appear in an anthology I am currently using in a class: Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Blackwell, 2006). Noel Carroll in his Introduction to Part II of the book endorses Currie's attack on semiotic theory, saying that his critique is "devastating." Although I think Currie makes some good points I hardly think that his critique is devastating. It has, however, led me to some serious rethinking about the nature of language itself.
To introduce my comments I think it is useful to refer to a passage in Carroll's discussion of Curry. One of the most telling points is that film, unlike a standardly accepted language as English, has no grammar. This leads Carroll to a claim, based on Currie's premises, which is so outrageously false that the entire enterprise of Currie and Carroll is thrown into question. The passage in question is in a paragraph about poetry. "English has a grammar, but English poetry qua poetry does not. What is right as poetry is not what abides by strict grammatical conventions, but that which, when executed, proceeds in cognizance of how things are usually done, but which nevertheless works with or against traditional procedures in order to move the reader in the way the poet intends. If an infinitive needs to be split, so be it. This is not poetically ungrammatical. For poetry has no grammar. Ditto film editing." (62). On this view, since language requires grammar and poetry has no grammar, then poetry is not language, or rather, not in language. Sure, he qualifies this by saying "poetry qua poetry" but it is not clear how the "qua" functions here. So neither film not poetry are language, nor are they in language. This is so deeply wrong, one has to question the foundations of the entire enterprise. And if contemporary Philosophy of Language entails this then there is something deeply wrong with it too!
For a more thorough analysis we need to turn to Currie himself. (I recognize that Carroll has written on this issue at length, but my focus here is on Currie.) Currie claims that film is not in any way interestingly language-related. But this is dependent on his understanding of natural languages like English. His view of English (which is, I grant, a standard one, and perhaps close to universally accepted by philosophers and maybe also by linguists) is that it is characterized by productivity, conventionality, recursiveness (meanings are assigned by convention to a finite stock of words and we combine meanings by rules of composition), and it must be molecular (which seems to me to mean the same thing as "recursive" except that it is a metaphor that understand the sentences as molecules and the words as atomic.) Then he says what I have found shocking (closely related to the implication by Carroll that poetry qua poetry is not in language).
"Since the atoms - words in English - are assigned meanings individually, and since the composition rules make the meaning of the whole a function of the meanings of the parts, we can say that meaning in our language is acontextual." I believe this to be wholly false. The meanings of words used depend on where and how they are used: meaning is contextual. (This is my extremely controversial claim.) Currie must be referring to some abstract thing, called "language," that we actually do not use in daily life. Currie's big point is that meaning in a film is contextual and, since acontextuality is is required for the presence of language then film cannot be like or involve anything like language. I grant that meaning in film is contextual, but so too is meaning in language! The meaning of an English sentence (not some ideal sentence floating outside of real use, but a sentence as used) is as contextual as a meaning of a sequence of shots in a film.
Then it turns out that Currie (and others like him...they are legion) holds that when we speak of utterance meaning then meaning is contextual. (I see this as damage control: a concession to the real world, although, as we shall see, a very weak one, since it the only context it seems to require is assuming the rationality of the speaker, i.e. a Davidsonian move.) The problem he thinks is that film theorists are confusing semantic (also called "literal") meaning and utterance meaning. My claim is that there is no so thing as semantic or literal meaning. It is a fiction. What is the literal meaning of Currie's sentence "There are several reasons for this, and I shall mention just one of them." (95) Is it a set of dictionary synonyms for each word in sequence? We cannot speak of anything like literal meaning here unless we think of the context in which it appears. The separation of literal or semantic meaning and contextual meaning is bogus.
The problem, I think, is a kind of Platonism. Plato believed that real reality was acontextual. The meaning of the Forms do not depend on context.
Consider Currie's discussion of the sentence "Harold is a snake." He correctly observes that it may mean in some context that a human named Harold is scheming. There is of course an ambiguity in the phrase "this same sentence is used." Sure, we can use "sentence" both for a set of words in sequence that can appear in different contexts and one instance in which that set of words appears. The second is the ur-meaning of "sentence." The other is just an abstraction and it is noteworthy that "sentences" in that sense have no meaning. Currie however says that the sentence "Harold is a snake" does not mean that Harold is scheming. He believes, it seems, that the meaning of the sentence is in someplace like the world of Forms. But that is not how language works. Language is a living, breathing thing. Language is how we actually communicate with each other. If I say that "Harold is a snake" in the context of intending that a human named Harold is a schemer this does not depend in any way on the claim that Harold is the name of an actual snake. The linguistic idealist like Currie (my label) seems to think that the true (utterance) meaning of the sentence (as it is used) depends in some way on the ideal meaning. It does not. Semantic meaning is a myth. It stands in place for the fact that we have certain models in our minds of how words can be used in certain contexts, models that are usually reflected fairly well by dictionaries (although dictionaries also have some normative force.)
So it is false that "the meaning of a particular utterance depends in part also on the meaning of the sentence uttered" if the meaning of the sentence uttered is taken to be the semantic meaning! I do not deny that there are conventions, dictionaries, and grammar books, and that these serve their important purposes mainly in helping us to communicate, conventions being the most important since we could certainly have language without the others. Semantic conventions do play a role in determining meaning.
The problem is in how these facts about conventions are used. Currie seems to think that utterance meaning is gained simply by adding to conventions of semantic meaning certain "non-conventional rules of rationality" ones that help us determine the intended meaning of the author. I do not want to go into all of the questions surrounding the notion of "intended meaning" which, itself, is something of a myth. But a quick look at the debates over that will show that determining the meaning of a sentence, for example in a literary work, or even in a philosophical writing, depends as much on the context of words that come before and after that sentence as on anything that can count as the "author's intention" which is notoriously nearly impossible to pin down independent of the immediate textual context itself. I say this without denying that interviews of the author or, in film, the director, can be immensely useful in shedding light on the meaning of the novel or film.
I would go further and bring up something mentioned by one of my students, that films should be seen as like novels, upon which they are often based. Neither films nor novels are languages as such, but language plays an important role in each, it is just that novels only use language. Films of course usually use a lot of language, literally English for example, in filmic dialogue. But in film we need to recognize that whatever the characters say is inextricably connected with the behavior of the actors who are playing those characters, including various gestures. When in Citizen Kane Orson Welles talks he is not just reading a script. The meaning of each thing he says is contextualized and modified not only by what came before and what comes after but also by the movements of his body, the intonation of his voice, and so forth.
Currie asks "does any of the story meaning that cinematic images convey possess the communicative features that we have attributed to the meanings of words and sentence?" This is a misleading question. They do communicate in the way sentences do, but this very often involves (and certainly should not exclude) communication by actors portraying characters using a natural language among other means of communication. It also includes the other surrounding contextual features which film semioticians often refer to as "the language of cinema." That is they include close-ups, tracking shots and so forth. This too is part of the overall way that directors and other key players in the film-making art communicate to us. Actors do part of the job but directors direct the whole enterprise. Doesn't it make sense that the whole package is language since the goal is communication?
Currie notes that George Wilson has taken what I consider to be the reasonable position that interpretation of a film needs to look at it holistically. (94) Currie then says "Wilson is right to say that what the cinematic images tell us about the story depends on the surrounding context of other images. But that is true also of words and sentences in a text, where there is no dispute about the presence of language. What kind of relation between described events is suggested by one bit of text depends upon the role that bit of text is seen to have in the context of all of the other bits...So the context-dependence of interpretation applies to literature as much as to film": which all seems completely right to me. But this undercuts the idea that language is irrelevant to film as it also undercuts the idea of the acontextual nature of language.
Currie imagines defenders of cinema language saying that we should not conclude that the "meaning intrinsic to the images themselves is contextually determined." I agree: this would be a bad move since it relies on the very same linguistic idealism that Currie unfortunately accepts. The problem is not, contra Currie, a matter of mixing up semantic and utterance meaning: the problem is with taking semantic meaning as something real. The defender of cinematic language should just insist that there is no acontextual meaning either in literature or in film, or anywhere else for that matter.
To introduce my comments I think it is useful to refer to a passage in Carroll's discussion of Curry. One of the most telling points is that film, unlike a standardly accepted language as English, has no grammar. This leads Carroll to a claim, based on Currie's premises, which is so outrageously false that the entire enterprise of Currie and Carroll is thrown into question. The passage in question is in a paragraph about poetry. "English has a grammar, but English poetry qua poetry does not. What is right as poetry is not what abides by strict grammatical conventions, but that which, when executed, proceeds in cognizance of how things are usually done, but which nevertheless works with or against traditional procedures in order to move the reader in the way the poet intends. If an infinitive needs to be split, so be it. This is not poetically ungrammatical. For poetry has no grammar. Ditto film editing." (62). On this view, since language requires grammar and poetry has no grammar, then poetry is not language, or rather, not in language. Sure, he qualifies this by saying "poetry qua poetry" but it is not clear how the "qua" functions here. So neither film not poetry are language, nor are they in language. This is so deeply wrong, one has to question the foundations of the entire enterprise. And if contemporary Philosophy of Language entails this then there is something deeply wrong with it too!
For a more thorough analysis we need to turn to Currie himself. (I recognize that Carroll has written on this issue at length, but my focus here is on Currie.) Currie claims that film is not in any way interestingly language-related. But this is dependent on his understanding of natural languages like English. His view of English (which is, I grant, a standard one, and perhaps close to universally accepted by philosophers and maybe also by linguists) is that it is characterized by productivity, conventionality, recursiveness (meanings are assigned by convention to a finite stock of words and we combine meanings by rules of composition), and it must be molecular (which seems to me to mean the same thing as "recursive" except that it is a metaphor that understand the sentences as molecules and the words as atomic.) Then he says what I have found shocking (closely related to the implication by Carroll that poetry qua poetry is not in language).
"Since the atoms - words in English - are assigned meanings individually, and since the composition rules make the meaning of the whole a function of the meanings of the parts, we can say that meaning in our language is acontextual." I believe this to be wholly false. The meanings of words used depend on where and how they are used: meaning is contextual. (This is my extremely controversial claim.) Currie must be referring to some abstract thing, called "language," that we actually do not use in daily life. Currie's big point is that meaning in a film is contextual and, since acontextuality is is required for the presence of language then film cannot be like or involve anything like language. I grant that meaning in film is contextual, but so too is meaning in language! The meaning of an English sentence (not some ideal sentence floating outside of real use, but a sentence as used) is as contextual as a meaning of a sequence of shots in a film.
Then it turns out that Currie (and others like him...they are legion) holds that when we speak of utterance meaning then meaning is contextual. (I see this as damage control: a concession to the real world, although, as we shall see, a very weak one, since it the only context it seems to require is assuming the rationality of the speaker, i.e. a Davidsonian move.) The problem he thinks is that film theorists are confusing semantic (also called "literal") meaning and utterance meaning. My claim is that there is no so thing as semantic or literal meaning. It is a fiction. What is the literal meaning of Currie's sentence "There are several reasons for this, and I shall mention just one of them." (95) Is it a set of dictionary synonyms for each word in sequence? We cannot speak of anything like literal meaning here unless we think of the context in which it appears. The separation of literal or semantic meaning and contextual meaning is bogus.
The problem, I think, is a kind of Platonism. Plato believed that real reality was acontextual. The meaning of the Forms do not depend on context.
Consider Currie's discussion of the sentence "Harold is a snake." He correctly observes that it may mean in some context that a human named Harold is scheming. There is of course an ambiguity in the phrase "this same sentence is used." Sure, we can use "sentence" both for a set of words in sequence that can appear in different contexts and one instance in which that set of words appears. The second is the ur-meaning of "sentence." The other is just an abstraction and it is noteworthy that "sentences" in that sense have no meaning. Currie however says that the sentence "Harold is a snake" does not mean that Harold is scheming. He believes, it seems, that the meaning of the sentence is in someplace like the world of Forms. But that is not how language works. Language is a living, breathing thing. Language is how we actually communicate with each other. If I say that "Harold is a snake" in the context of intending that a human named Harold is a schemer this does not depend in any way on the claim that Harold is the name of an actual snake. The linguistic idealist like Currie (my label) seems to think that the true (utterance) meaning of the sentence (as it is used) depends in some way on the ideal meaning. It does not. Semantic meaning is a myth. It stands in place for the fact that we have certain models in our minds of how words can be used in certain contexts, models that are usually reflected fairly well by dictionaries (although dictionaries also have some normative force.)
So it is false that "the meaning of a particular utterance depends in part also on the meaning of the sentence uttered" if the meaning of the sentence uttered is taken to be the semantic meaning! I do not deny that there are conventions, dictionaries, and grammar books, and that these serve their important purposes mainly in helping us to communicate, conventions being the most important since we could certainly have language without the others. Semantic conventions do play a role in determining meaning.
The problem is in how these facts about conventions are used. Currie seems to think that utterance meaning is gained simply by adding to conventions of semantic meaning certain "non-conventional rules of rationality" ones that help us determine the intended meaning of the author. I do not want to go into all of the questions surrounding the notion of "intended meaning" which, itself, is something of a myth. But a quick look at the debates over that will show that determining the meaning of a sentence, for example in a literary work, or even in a philosophical writing, depends as much on the context of words that come before and after that sentence as on anything that can count as the "author's intention" which is notoriously nearly impossible to pin down independent of the immediate textual context itself. I say this without denying that interviews of the author or, in film, the director, can be immensely useful in shedding light on the meaning of the novel or film.
I would go further and bring up something mentioned by one of my students, that films should be seen as like novels, upon which they are often based. Neither films nor novels are languages as such, but language plays an important role in each, it is just that novels only use language. Films of course usually use a lot of language, literally English for example, in filmic dialogue. But in film we need to recognize that whatever the characters say is inextricably connected with the behavior of the actors who are playing those characters, including various gestures. When in Citizen Kane Orson Welles talks he is not just reading a script. The meaning of each thing he says is contextualized and modified not only by what came before and what comes after but also by the movements of his body, the intonation of his voice, and so forth.
Currie asks "does any of the story meaning that cinematic images convey possess the communicative features that we have attributed to the meanings of words and sentence?" This is a misleading question. They do communicate in the way sentences do, but this very often involves (and certainly should not exclude) communication by actors portraying characters using a natural language among other means of communication. It also includes the other surrounding contextual features which film semioticians often refer to as "the language of cinema." That is they include close-ups, tracking shots and so forth. This too is part of the overall way that directors and other key players in the film-making art communicate to us. Actors do part of the job but directors direct the whole enterprise. Doesn't it make sense that the whole package is language since the goal is communication?
Currie notes that George Wilson has taken what I consider to be the reasonable position that interpretation of a film needs to look at it holistically. (94) Currie then says "Wilson is right to say that what the cinematic images tell us about the story depends on the surrounding context of other images. But that is true also of words and sentences in a text, where there is no dispute about the presence of language. What kind of relation between described events is suggested by one bit of text depends upon the role that bit of text is seen to have in the context of all of the other bits...So the context-dependence of interpretation applies to literature as much as to film": which all seems completely right to me. But this undercuts the idea that language is irrelevant to film as it also undercuts the idea of the acontextual nature of language.
Currie imagines defenders of cinema language saying that we should not conclude that the "meaning intrinsic to the images themselves is contextually determined." I agree: this would be a bad move since it relies on the very same linguistic idealism that Currie unfortunately accepts. The problem is not, contra Currie, a matter of mixing up semantic and utterance meaning: the problem is with taking semantic meaning as something real. The defender of cinematic language should just insist that there is no acontextual meaning either in literature or in film, or anywhere else for that matter.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
To what extent are films like dreams?
I have been reading Susanne K. Langer's "A Note on the Film" which appeared originally in her Feeling and Form (1953) and which also appears in Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi's Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Film for Langer is a new art which is no longer to be seen as "a new technical device in the sphere of drama." And, as a new art, it exhibits a "new poetic mode." Before commenting on this new mode, which Langer takes to be related to dreaming, I wish to remark on her methodology. I applaud her collaborative technique, rare among philosophers: she says that there were four collaborating members in producing this essay (although she is clearly the leader) and it is they who came up with the results that the "structure of the motion picture is not that of drama" and is closer to narrative (by which she seems to mean novels and epic), and that "its artistic potentialities became evident only when the moving camera was introduced." The second result (which seems to overcome the first, since the novel and epic forms hardly feature the moving camera), is also prominent in a much later paper by Arthur C. Danto from 1979 "Moving Pictures," which also appears in the Carroll/Choi anthology. Following up on this, Langer asserts that "the moving camera divorced the screen from the stage" and that it is only a special technique just to photograph the action on a theatrical stage.
Whereas many theorists of film have tried to tie it to a previous art form, for instance in the silent era to pantomime, Langer stresses the way in which film is "omnivorous," consuming or rather incorporating many different art forms. Thus also although film theorist Arnheim worried about sound and technicolor destroying the perfection of the silent film, Langer welcomes these new developments. She thinks that perhaps people were simply put off by earlier crude versions of these appropriations.
So film is what she calls a "poetic art" which simply means a creative or "fine" art like painting, sculpture, music, dance, literature, and architecture. As a poetic art it has what she calls a "primary illusion" or "virtual history" of its own. Previously Langer had argued that each art form has its own primary illusion. For example in dance gesture is the primary illusion whereby the dance illusion is realized.
To better understand Langer I find it useful to think of Nietzsche. Langer herself however, when she mentions Nietzsche in Feeling and Form, seems to misunderstand and oversimplify his aesthetic theory. She believes that his concept of the Dionysian/Apollonian duality is only about the "preponderance of one principle or the other" like the ones we find in such polarities as emotion vs. reason or instinct vs. intellect. (FF 17). She actually sees the Dionysian as the extreme of pure feeling and the Apollonian as pure form. I will not go here into all of the ways this is wrong. Readers can get my own take on Nietzsche and these two concepts by typing them into the search function of this blog.
What is helpful, rather, is to think of the Apollonian as setting up something like a dream world on stage, which is precisely what Langer is getting at, except in her case the dream world is related to the virtual reality set up on the screen by film. The Dionysian is an element that Langer leaves out of her analysis, although that, in itself, is interesting. Nietzsche believed that the Dionysian element of tragic theater is the sense of oneness between audience member and protagonist who ultimately represents Dionysus himself. The Dionysian allows for an ecstatic aspect of art experience in which it seems as though one has punched through the selective and god-like illusion of the Apollonian dreamworld to the ultimate nature of reality itself. I think that this can provide us with an insight that is missed, actually made impossible, by someone like Arthur Danto. Danto, by setting up the world of art as radically separate from the world of actual things, as something transcendent (because when one appropriately sees Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as art, then it is transfigured into the realm of art, and this is what distinguishes it from its indiscernibly different counterpart in the grocery warehouse), breaks off the intimate relation between art and reality, or rather makes it impossible. In short, Danto's Apollonian aesthetics excludes the Dionysian. Langer's does too, but she does not go as far as Danto in that direction, and to that extent is preferable, from a Nietzschean perspective.
So Langer stresses the mode of film art is the dream mode, which is not to say that film copies dreams. The mode is a "mode of appearance." She explains this by noting that fiction is in the memory more and that is "like" (she uses scare quotes here in a confusing way) memory. It is so "in that it is projected to compose a finished experienced form, a 'past'" i.e. a virtual past, not the past of the writer or reader. Film, similarly, creates a virtual present, "an order of direct apparition." To be sure Langer is a bit too systematic here. There is no reason why fiction could not also project a virtual present or film a virtual past. But, set that aside.
Now to the comparisons with dream. Langer says "The most noteworthy formal characteristic of dream" is that the dreamer "is always at the center of it" even though everything else may change, often in strange ways. Actually this does not correspond with my own experience of dreams, and of course this is a major problem with comparing film with dreams: you can't confirm any of it since our dream worlds are pretty private and only become public when we describe them to others. The others cannot verify our dream statements, or falsify them, for that matter. From the old positivist perspective, our dream statements have to all be meaningless. But they are not, which is what was wrong with positivism.
In any case, I do not experience myself in my dreams as the dreamer who is always there. Perhaps others do. Nor do I fully understand what Langer means by the "immediacy of everything in a dream." Some things in dreams seem to happen right away, and some things take time. Perhaps she is saying that nothing is ever mediated by anything else in a dream, for example perceptions are not mediated by concepts. But this does not seem to be true in my dreams either.
But what I get from sentences like "this aesthetic peculiarity, this relation to things perceived, characterizes the dream mode" is the importance of things perceived, the importance of the world of everyday life. A film, on her view, "creates a virtual present" just like a dream. I think what is being suggested is that films take the world around us and edits that world, transforming it greatly, but still always keeping us in contact with the things perceived.
So what then is the relation between camera and the scene portrayed? Langer argues that the camera takes the place of the perceiver in that unlike the dreamer it is not in the scene. (She forgets about cameras reflected in mirrors, sometimes). Again, my own experience is that sometimes I am someone watching the events of the dream but almost more often I am one of the characters in the dream. In this respect my dream life is not like my perceptual life which is always seen from the perspective of my body, my eyes, my mind, and where I am never part of what is seen except insofar as I can see myself in mirrors, or see my body from the perspective of my unseen by me eyes.
Langer also thinks that the film is not "dreamlike in its structure," which I think actually weakens her case because it really is insofar as things do often happen outside of normal sequencing of space and time (although these distortions seldom seem very odd to the film viewer...we quickly adapt to a virtual reality). Perhaps she wants to stress how film is coherent whereas a dream is not since she then says about film what she says about any art form, i.e. "[it] is a poetic composition, coherent, organic, governed by a definitely conceived feeling, not dictated by actual emotional pressures." Well, yes and no, or rather usually, but not always.
A further explication of "immediacy" ensues. Langer writes that "the basic abstraction whereby virtual history is created in the dream mode is immediacy of experience" which the art of film "abstracts from actuality, form our actual dreaming." OK, that makes sense: that the film takes the structure of the dreamworld and abstracts that structure in creation of virtual time. Sounds Kantian (not surprising, as she was a student of Cassirer, a major Kantian of the time). Again, Langer's approach is that the audience member enters the virtual world through the camera: "The percipient of a moving picture sees with the camera; his standpoint moves with it, his mind is pervasively present. The camera is his eye..." and "He takes the place of the dreamer" and yet is not in the story. The work is an apparition. I think all of this is foretelling the French new wave cinema with all of its emphasis on hand held cameras and a you-are-there feeling. Danto, who says something similar, and is clearly inspired by Truffault, is not prescient in this way.
It is interesting that for Langer all of this shows that a moving picture, when good, is a work of art, and also that she sees an important ally in Eisenstein. Eisenstein of course was the prime advocate of the montage theory of film, a theory which fit his own work, and that of many of his contemporaries, quite well, but which declined when film moved on to other forms. Of course the very idea of montage, and the look of montage, does remind us of the fragmented nature of our dreams. In this way an Eisenstein film is even more like a dream than many other films. There is something surreal about the scene on the Odessa steps in Potemkin, although it should be remembered that Eisenstein himself would have stressed the greater realism of this technique. Perhaps more telling is Langer's quoting of Eisenstein on the creative process, where he says that the whole is governed by the "initial general image which originally hovered before the creative artist." Eisenstein and Langer are like Dewey in following the creative process from inception to reception, and not simply understanding creativity in terms of whatever produces a highly valued product, an approach typical of analytic aesthetics. Along these lines, Langer also endorses (as Dewey would) Eisenstein's insistence that the film viewer must, as she puts it, "use his imagination to create his own experience of the story." So, again, the film creates an illusion "of the dimension in which [things] go on" i.e. "a virtual creative imagination" because it seems to be the product of one's own imagination, much like dreams.
So film is art because it takes "diverse materials" and transforms them, and, "like a dream, it enthralls and commingles all senses."
It is only in the final part that Langer draws a parallel between epic and film, which, again, she traces back to Eisenstein who favored Milton over Shakespearean analogies. What is valuable for me in the last part of this essay is that point that "dream events are spatial - often intensely concerned with space - intervals, endless roads, bottomless canyons....but they are not oriented in any total space." This, I think, is correct, and also for film. She concludes that the dreamed reality on the screen can "move backward and forward" in space and time "because it is really an eternal and ubiquitous virtual present" unlike drama which always moves forward, creating a virtual future instead.
Langer's importance for the aesthetics of film has been very much under-rated. A contrast again can be made to Danto who uses the moving camera to emaphasize not the mediation of the structures of dreaming but the idea of consciousness of consciousness, which he takes to be a sign of advancement, much like Hegel before him, and thus the arthood of film coming with this kind of hyper reflexivity where ultimately it is film about film, or film about film about film, thus taking it away further and further from life, strangely like the problem of the "third man" in Plato, where Plato is forced to hyothesize infinitely further eternal forms of Man, or alternatively, limit the power of God by forcing Him to create only one Man. In short, Danto's theory separates art form life whereas Langer's ties it more closely to life in the way that dreams are close to life, taking from life, concentrating, abstracting, intensifying, etc.
Noel Carroll, in his "Introduction to Part II" of the same anthology, thinks he can refute Langer by observing that the "film viewer is not in the center of the array. She is typically off to one side." (59) Aside from the fact that this misreads Langer, who does not put the film viewer at the center of the array, this also fails to see that being to one side in a theater makes hardly any difference in our experience of the film. We quickly adapt and phenomenologically immediately take up the position of the camera, as Langer clearly states. But I do agree with Carroll that some of the things Langer thinks are unique to our experience of film and cannot be experienced in theater can actually be experienced in theater. I just do not think that the difference between theater and film is as great as Langer makes out.
One can also agree with Carroll that its dream-like nature is not defining for film while still agreeing with Langer that the analogy is illuminating. The big disanalogy between dreams and films that Carroll finds, i.e. that dreams are absolutely subjective experiences whereas films are shared and "interpersonally available," is not all that impressive since first, as mentioned earlier, we can tell our dreams to others, and second because, when viewing a film, and identifying with the visual perspective of the camera, while identifying perhaps empathetically with the characters, one is having an experience as if in a dream.
The other refutation of the analogy Carroll finds in a quote from Cavell, i.e. that most dreams "are boring narratives...their skimpy surface out of all proportion with their riddle interest and their effect on the dreamer." Further, as Carroll observes, we have ordinary events in dreams charged with emotion for no real reason, and this contrasts to films where the events are usually extraordinary, and also, as he argues, "most dreams are not anywhere as interesting as films." One might reply that most non-music sounds are not anywhere as interesting as music, but this is not reason not to say that much of music is inspired by non-music sounds (and originally, all of it was). Of course film takes what dreams do and does it a lot better. Moreover, although some dreams are about ordinary situations many are about ones as extraordinary as anything found in film, and this is true vice versa too. So, overall, Carroll's attempt to discredit the film-as-dream approach to film is pretty unconvincing.
Whereas many theorists of film have tried to tie it to a previous art form, for instance in the silent era to pantomime, Langer stresses the way in which film is "omnivorous," consuming or rather incorporating many different art forms. Thus also although film theorist Arnheim worried about sound and technicolor destroying the perfection of the silent film, Langer welcomes these new developments. She thinks that perhaps people were simply put off by earlier crude versions of these appropriations.
So film is what she calls a "poetic art" which simply means a creative or "fine" art like painting, sculpture, music, dance, literature, and architecture. As a poetic art it has what she calls a "primary illusion" or "virtual history" of its own. Previously Langer had argued that each art form has its own primary illusion. For example in dance gesture is the primary illusion whereby the dance illusion is realized.
To better understand Langer I find it useful to think of Nietzsche. Langer herself however, when she mentions Nietzsche in Feeling and Form, seems to misunderstand and oversimplify his aesthetic theory. She believes that his concept of the Dionysian/Apollonian duality is only about the "preponderance of one principle or the other" like the ones we find in such polarities as emotion vs. reason or instinct vs. intellect. (FF 17). She actually sees the Dionysian as the extreme of pure feeling and the Apollonian as pure form. I will not go here into all of the ways this is wrong. Readers can get my own take on Nietzsche and these two concepts by typing them into the search function of this blog.
What is helpful, rather, is to think of the Apollonian as setting up something like a dream world on stage, which is precisely what Langer is getting at, except in her case the dream world is related to the virtual reality set up on the screen by film. The Dionysian is an element that Langer leaves out of her analysis, although that, in itself, is interesting. Nietzsche believed that the Dionysian element of tragic theater is the sense of oneness between audience member and protagonist who ultimately represents Dionysus himself. The Dionysian allows for an ecstatic aspect of art experience in which it seems as though one has punched through the selective and god-like illusion of the Apollonian dreamworld to the ultimate nature of reality itself. I think that this can provide us with an insight that is missed, actually made impossible, by someone like Arthur Danto. Danto, by setting up the world of art as radically separate from the world of actual things, as something transcendent (because when one appropriately sees Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as art, then it is transfigured into the realm of art, and this is what distinguishes it from its indiscernibly different counterpart in the grocery warehouse), breaks off the intimate relation between art and reality, or rather makes it impossible. In short, Danto's Apollonian aesthetics excludes the Dionysian. Langer's does too, but she does not go as far as Danto in that direction, and to that extent is preferable, from a Nietzschean perspective.
So Langer stresses the mode of film art is the dream mode, which is not to say that film copies dreams. The mode is a "mode of appearance." She explains this by noting that fiction is in the memory more and that is "like" (she uses scare quotes here in a confusing way) memory. It is so "in that it is projected to compose a finished experienced form, a 'past'" i.e. a virtual past, not the past of the writer or reader. Film, similarly, creates a virtual present, "an order of direct apparition." To be sure Langer is a bit too systematic here. There is no reason why fiction could not also project a virtual present or film a virtual past. But, set that aside.
Now to the comparisons with dream. Langer says "The most noteworthy formal characteristic of dream" is that the dreamer "is always at the center of it" even though everything else may change, often in strange ways. Actually this does not correspond with my own experience of dreams, and of course this is a major problem with comparing film with dreams: you can't confirm any of it since our dream worlds are pretty private and only become public when we describe them to others. The others cannot verify our dream statements, or falsify them, for that matter. From the old positivist perspective, our dream statements have to all be meaningless. But they are not, which is what was wrong with positivism.
In any case, I do not experience myself in my dreams as the dreamer who is always there. Perhaps others do. Nor do I fully understand what Langer means by the "immediacy of everything in a dream." Some things in dreams seem to happen right away, and some things take time. Perhaps she is saying that nothing is ever mediated by anything else in a dream, for example perceptions are not mediated by concepts. But this does not seem to be true in my dreams either.
But what I get from sentences like "this aesthetic peculiarity, this relation to things perceived, characterizes the dream mode" is the importance of things perceived, the importance of the world of everyday life. A film, on her view, "creates a virtual present" just like a dream. I think what is being suggested is that films take the world around us and edits that world, transforming it greatly, but still always keeping us in contact with the things perceived.
So what then is the relation between camera and the scene portrayed? Langer argues that the camera takes the place of the perceiver in that unlike the dreamer it is not in the scene. (She forgets about cameras reflected in mirrors, sometimes). Again, my own experience is that sometimes I am someone watching the events of the dream but almost more often I am one of the characters in the dream. In this respect my dream life is not like my perceptual life which is always seen from the perspective of my body, my eyes, my mind, and where I am never part of what is seen except insofar as I can see myself in mirrors, or see my body from the perspective of my unseen by me eyes.
Langer also thinks that the film is not "dreamlike in its structure," which I think actually weakens her case because it really is insofar as things do often happen outside of normal sequencing of space and time (although these distortions seldom seem very odd to the film viewer...we quickly adapt to a virtual reality). Perhaps she wants to stress how film is coherent whereas a dream is not since she then says about film what she says about any art form, i.e. "[it] is a poetic composition, coherent, organic, governed by a definitely conceived feeling, not dictated by actual emotional pressures." Well, yes and no, or rather usually, but not always.
A further explication of "immediacy" ensues. Langer writes that "the basic abstraction whereby virtual history is created in the dream mode is immediacy of experience" which the art of film "abstracts from actuality, form our actual dreaming." OK, that makes sense: that the film takes the structure of the dreamworld and abstracts that structure in creation of virtual time. Sounds Kantian (not surprising, as she was a student of Cassirer, a major Kantian of the time). Again, Langer's approach is that the audience member enters the virtual world through the camera: "The percipient of a moving picture sees with the camera; his standpoint moves with it, his mind is pervasively present. The camera is his eye..." and "He takes the place of the dreamer" and yet is not in the story. The work is an apparition. I think all of this is foretelling the French new wave cinema with all of its emphasis on hand held cameras and a you-are-there feeling. Danto, who says something similar, and is clearly inspired by Truffault, is not prescient in this way.
It is interesting that for Langer all of this shows that a moving picture, when good, is a work of art, and also that she sees an important ally in Eisenstein. Eisenstein of course was the prime advocate of the montage theory of film, a theory which fit his own work, and that of many of his contemporaries, quite well, but which declined when film moved on to other forms. Of course the very idea of montage, and the look of montage, does remind us of the fragmented nature of our dreams. In this way an Eisenstein film is even more like a dream than many other films. There is something surreal about the scene on the Odessa steps in Potemkin, although it should be remembered that Eisenstein himself would have stressed the greater realism of this technique. Perhaps more telling is Langer's quoting of Eisenstein on the creative process, where he says that the whole is governed by the "initial general image which originally hovered before the creative artist." Eisenstein and Langer are like Dewey in following the creative process from inception to reception, and not simply understanding creativity in terms of whatever produces a highly valued product, an approach typical of analytic aesthetics. Along these lines, Langer also endorses (as Dewey would) Eisenstein's insistence that the film viewer must, as she puts it, "use his imagination to create his own experience of the story." So, again, the film creates an illusion "of the dimension in which [things] go on" i.e. "a virtual creative imagination" because it seems to be the product of one's own imagination, much like dreams.
So film is art because it takes "diverse materials" and transforms them, and, "like a dream, it enthralls and commingles all senses."
It is only in the final part that Langer draws a parallel between epic and film, which, again, she traces back to Eisenstein who favored Milton over Shakespearean analogies. What is valuable for me in the last part of this essay is that point that "dream events are spatial - often intensely concerned with space - intervals, endless roads, bottomless canyons....but they are not oriented in any total space." This, I think, is correct, and also for film. She concludes that the dreamed reality on the screen can "move backward and forward" in space and time "because it is really an eternal and ubiquitous virtual present" unlike drama which always moves forward, creating a virtual future instead.
Langer's importance for the aesthetics of film has been very much under-rated. A contrast again can be made to Danto who uses the moving camera to emaphasize not the mediation of the structures of dreaming but the idea of consciousness of consciousness, which he takes to be a sign of advancement, much like Hegel before him, and thus the arthood of film coming with this kind of hyper reflexivity where ultimately it is film about film, or film about film about film, thus taking it away further and further from life, strangely like the problem of the "third man" in Plato, where Plato is forced to hyothesize infinitely further eternal forms of Man, or alternatively, limit the power of God by forcing Him to create only one Man. In short, Danto's theory separates art form life whereas Langer's ties it more closely to life in the way that dreams are close to life, taking from life, concentrating, abstracting, intensifying, etc.
Noel Carroll, in his "Introduction to Part II" of the same anthology, thinks he can refute Langer by observing that the "film viewer is not in the center of the array. She is typically off to one side." (59) Aside from the fact that this misreads Langer, who does not put the film viewer at the center of the array, this also fails to see that being to one side in a theater makes hardly any difference in our experience of the film. We quickly adapt and phenomenologically immediately take up the position of the camera, as Langer clearly states. But I do agree with Carroll that some of the things Langer thinks are unique to our experience of film and cannot be experienced in theater can actually be experienced in theater. I just do not think that the difference between theater and film is as great as Langer makes out.
One can also agree with Carroll that its dream-like nature is not defining for film while still agreeing with Langer that the analogy is illuminating. The big disanalogy between dreams and films that Carroll finds, i.e. that dreams are absolutely subjective experiences whereas films are shared and "interpersonally available," is not all that impressive since first, as mentioned earlier, we can tell our dreams to others, and second because, when viewing a film, and identifying with the visual perspective of the camera, while identifying perhaps empathetically with the characters, one is having an experience as if in a dream.
The other refutation of the analogy Carroll finds in a quote from Cavell, i.e. that most dreams "are boring narratives...their skimpy surface out of all proportion with their riddle interest and their effect on the dreamer." Further, as Carroll observes, we have ordinary events in dreams charged with emotion for no real reason, and this contrasts to films where the events are usually extraordinary, and also, as he argues, "most dreams are not anywhere as interesting as films." One might reply that most non-music sounds are not anywhere as interesting as music, but this is not reason not to say that much of music is inspired by non-music sounds (and originally, all of it was). Of course film takes what dreams do and does it a lot better. Moreover, although some dreams are about ordinary situations many are about ones as extraordinary as anything found in film, and this is true vice versa too. So, overall, Carroll's attempt to discredit the film-as-dream approach to film is pretty unconvincing.
Monday, August 7, 2017
what the ordinary person in everyday life sees?
"Pudovkin has said film strives to lead the spectator beyond the sphere of ordinary human conceptions. For the ordinary person in everyday life, sight is merely a means of finding his bearings in the natural world. Roughly speaking, he sees only so much of the object surrounding him as is necessary for his purpose. If a man is standing at the counter of a haberdasher's shop, the salesman will presumably pay less attention to the customer's facial expression than to the kind of tie he is wearing (so as to guess his taste) and to the quality of his clothes...." (Rudolf Arnheim Film as Art). The first sentence seems fine, but the second is false. The ordinary person in everyday life might use sight just to find his bearings in the natural world: for example, I am walking in the woods and I want to know where north is, so I look to see where the sun is setting. But this is not the only ordinary use of sight. Sight is ordinarily often used just to entertain oneself ...for example in observing the people in a museum during an interval between looking at artworks. The next sentence may be true, although not only for the ordinary person in everyday life but for everyone at least some of the time: for example, a great pianist may focus just on what is necessary for realizing this work by Beethoven in front of this audience. Also the mind of the ordinary person often wanders from the purpose is at hand. The next sentence seems wrong too since the salesman, although clearly focusing on what is necessary for the situation, is in fact focusing on aesthetic qualities. He is simply focusing on aesthetic qualities of the clothes and not on the aesthetic qualities of the face. So, what does this say about the first sentence? The film maker could focus on the aesthetic qualities of the face, but could equally well focus on the same aesthetic qualities of the clothes that the salesman would focus on. The filmmaker could give us the world through the eyes of the salesman. Yes, films take us beyond the ordinary, but let us not think that the ordinary itself is so mechanical and bland. As Dewey would say, film as art abstracts and intensifies the aesthetics of everyday life.
Arnheim is not out of accord with this. For he also gives an excellent description of how a film maker can make something ordinary extraordinary and, through doing so, can highlight features of the world surrounding us that we do not normally notice.
"If an ordinary picture of some men in a rowing boat appears on the screen, the spectator will perhaps perceive that there is a boat, and nothing further. But if, for example, the camera is suspended high up, so that the spectator sees the boat and the men from above, the result is a view very seldom seen in real life. The interest is thereby diverted from the subject to the form. The spectator notices how strikingly spindle-shaped is the boat and how curiously the bodies of the men swing to and fro. Things that previously remained unnoticed are the more striking because, the object itself appears strange and unusual. The spectator is thus brought to see something familiar as something new." (Arnheim Film as Art)
Notice that this transformation is not fully described when it is described as a change from subject to form. It could better be described as a change from seeing the subject just in terms of conventional labels and noticing other features of the subject through seeing it "as something new." Seeing something formally is not the same as seeing "as something new"!
To continue on the same quote: "At this moment, he becomes capable of true observation. For it is not only that he is now stimulated to notice whether the natural objects have been rendered characteristically or colorlessly, with originality or obviously, but by stimulating the interest through the unusualness of the aspect the objects themselves become more vivid and therefore more capable of effect. In watching a good shot of a horse I shall have a much stronger feeling that 'here is an actual horse - a big beast with satiny skin and with such a smell...' That is to say, therefore, not only form but objective qualities will impose themselves more compellingly." (Film as Art 43-44)
Thanks to Noel Carroll Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton U. Press, 1988) for drawing my attention to these quotes.
Arnheim is not out of accord with this. For he also gives an excellent description of how a film maker can make something ordinary extraordinary and, through doing so, can highlight features of the world surrounding us that we do not normally notice.
"If an ordinary picture of some men in a rowing boat appears on the screen, the spectator will perhaps perceive that there is a boat, and nothing further. But if, for example, the camera is suspended high up, so that the spectator sees the boat and the men from above, the result is a view very seldom seen in real life. The interest is thereby diverted from the subject to the form. The spectator notices how strikingly spindle-shaped is the boat and how curiously the bodies of the men swing to and fro. Things that previously remained unnoticed are the more striking because, the object itself appears strange and unusual. The spectator is thus brought to see something familiar as something new." (Arnheim Film as Art)
Notice that this transformation is not fully described when it is described as a change from subject to form. It could better be described as a change from seeing the subject just in terms of conventional labels and noticing other features of the subject through seeing it "as something new." Seeing something formally is not the same as seeing "as something new"!
To continue on the same quote: "At this moment, he becomes capable of true observation. For it is not only that he is now stimulated to notice whether the natural objects have been rendered characteristically or colorlessly, with originality or obviously, but by stimulating the interest through the unusualness of the aspect the objects themselves become more vivid and therefore more capable of effect. In watching a good shot of a horse I shall have a much stronger feeling that 'here is an actual horse - a big beast with satiny skin and with such a smell...' That is to say, therefore, not only form but objective qualities will impose themselves more compellingly." (Film as Art 43-44)
Thanks to Noel Carroll Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton U. Press, 1988) for drawing my attention to these quotes.
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