Clark
Thanks for your detailed response to my own, slightly more abrupt(!),
response. I'll try to expand upon them here:
(First, a brief word on gender in _Fight CLub_: isn't it the case that the
splitting of 'Jack's' character begins at the very moment he sees Marla walk
through several lanes of traffic, oblivious to the onrushing cars? His
entire project, the construction of his alter-ego and the misogynist ethos
of the fight club, stems from an envious relation to this apparently
unattainable woman... Any gender analysis of the film would have to being
there.)
Upon reflection, what I'm questioning is the general tendency to give a
proper name (e.g., 'Nietzsche') as a means of reading the content of a film.
Using 'Nietzsche' as a diegetic tool for reading _Fight Club_ or _2001_, as
you show, can lead to interesting parallels and questions... But what does
this tell us about 'film' or 'philosophy'? Ultimately, I think that this
kind of approach will always be a lot easier with a text like _Thus Spake
Zarathustra_ (a narrative text) than, say, a thetic text like _Human, All
too Human_ or even _The Birth of Tragedy_ (which I don't think would allow
us to equate technology with the Apollinian, as you argue - what about the
fundamental Schopenhauerean thesis of the book: that art is required to make
existence bearable).
This same question could be extended to other philosophical voices. E.g.,
'applying' Nietzsche to _2001_ is going to be a hell of a lot easier (but
possibly just as irrelevant) than reading Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_
with regard to, I don't know, let's say _La Haine_ - in spite of the fact
that Hegel has far more interesting things to say about the nature of
understanding, violence and conflict. (This doesn't mean I think that Hegel
helps us understand Kassowitz's film, though.) The question is: what is the
nature of our claim when we use a philosopher or a philosophical text to
'authorise' a particular reading of a film?
This leads me to the underlying uncertainty that triggered my initial
response to your email: to what extent can one 'pick'n'choose' elements and
by employing them necessarily out of context, retain any meaningful sense of
the ideas? (Here lie the twin pitfalls of loose generalisation and
constrictive nitpicking... - I know that I've been guilty of both! - but
then again, don't these two risks form the co-ordinates for *any*
philosophical debate? This question needs to be examined...)
As I think you originally pointed out in the email I quoted, existential
readings of film seem to spring most readily to hand. Why is that? Is it
because it gives us a readily accessible set of themes, a set of tools that
we can bring to bear upon the cinema? Once again, why would that be the
case? It is as if we needed some structural support, or authority (this is
ironic with respect to existentialism, to say the least!), to validate the
meaningfulness - that is, the *authenticity* - of what we have to say about
a given film.
I think perhaps that, instead, what we need to exploit a certain *lack* of
authority in the realm of thinking film, that what we need to think
*through* is the material specificity of film/cinema, by which I mean the
particular ways in which films differ from all other art forms. Deleuze has
an interesting way of putting this, which has consequences for thinking
about/through film:
'[cinema] is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something
unreal through the world, but makes the world itself something unreal or a
narrative [récit]. With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own
image, and not an image which becomes world.' (_Cinema 1: The Movement
Image_, p.57)
In cinema, the world becomes image: the world is not represented, like in a
painting or a poem or a novel; rather, it *is* an image. (This is by no
means a straightforward statement, of course. I think it's problematic...)
However, it's not accidental that Deleuze's argument here is directed
against phenomenology. What we get, he argues (via Bergson), is not the
intentional directedness of consciousness ('all consciousness is
consciousness *of* something: i.e., the film-spectator as illuminating ray
of meaning), but rather the idea that 'all consciousness *is* something' -
i.e., the film *happens* without me, it *is* a ray of light upon a screen.
Here, the 'secondariness' of the art-form raises real problems for
phenomenology's task of bringing to light the 'natural' attitude to the
world. But from this *duplication* of intentionality - i.e., seeing through
another's (the camera's) 'seeing' - thinking through film (philosophically
or otherwise) might begin...
(In fact, your own extended comments on phenomenology make the case here: it
tends to double up pre-existing conceptual structures, rather than pre-exist
them. In that case, coming back to my original question - 'why oppose
"phenomenological investigations" and "formal conceptual analysis"?' - it
might be more helpful to think of phenomenological/eidetic method precisely
as a kind of conceptual analysis - e.g., a critical analysis of the
presuppositions and relations held within the concept of 'perceiving'. In
this way, phenomenology can actually engage with the world ('the thing
encountered'), rather than just set up another one.)
But I don't want to sound as if I think Deleuze provides the answers/model
here, because I don't. What he does, I think, is take seriously the idea
that philosophy only becomes productive if we cease to think of it as a
domain of ideas existing 'outside' (fixed/eternal) of other realms of
knowledge/practice.
Which brings me back to the question of whether film can *do* philosophy. My
point is simply that it seems an awful waste of the possibilities of
philosophical thought to limit discourses about 'film-philosophy' to
instances of diegetic analysis (although I am in no way disparaging this
activity, honest!). So when do we *do* philosophy? How is it done? And *who*
does philosophy? In whose *name* is it performed - i.e., "here, I am now
'philosophising'"? I don't know, and that's why I'm posing the question,
because it troubles me...
I've just noticed that Nathan has raised very similar questions vis-ŕ-vis
this debate: does the relation of film and philosophy lie simply in the
former being textual examples for the latter (such as teaching aids - I know
that I use them like that all the time)? Like Nathan (and Stephen Mulhall,
and Simon Critchley, and others besides - I won't mention Deleuze again...),
I want to make the case that, on the contrary, cinema puts philosophy to the
test. (Why else do we subscribe to this list!?)
I'm sorry if this is a bit rushed (it's still far too sketchy, I admit) -
that's the problem with writing after a good bottle of wine - but I'd like
to think that we could extend this discussion further. For example, I think
Levinas' modifications to phenomenology, although unwieldy around the
question of art (cf. 'Reality and its Shadow'), might raise interesting
questions/directions for the 'duplication' of intentionality (his project
does spring from Husserl's 5th Cartesian Meditation on inter-subjectivity,
after all).
Still not sure I've got anywhere,
Richard
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