 |
 |
The problem of how to film a thought is not so different from that of how to speak or write one. For that matter what if anything is a thought? These matters have been occupying analytical philosophers (not to mention linguists, cognitive scientists, etc) for a long time. The attempted answers are fascinating and there are volumes of them. Just for a taste of the kind of things it involves consider the difference between speech, which can say ' I believe that Sirhan killed Kennedy', and film which has problems signifying an 'I' (whatever that is), showing 'belief' (whatever belief is) and then showing whatever it is that is being believed. Filming a belief is a bit like filming a thought. I should point out that speaking a thought or belief is not a simple or obvious thing at all, even though we think and say we do it all the time. I dont know of any similar analytical work on film, and I think its lack is a serious problem, just waiting to be redressed. If it has been, I would love to know of such work. The only thing that comes to mind is Raul Ruiz who, in Poetics of Cinema, mentions Judith Jarvis Thomson's Acts and Other Events - a book that could be subtitled 'what if anything is an event', and one of a number of analytical works on acts and events that erupted about 30 years ago. Ruiz is delighted and inspired by Thomson's deadpan analysis of the the event 'Sirhan killed Kennedy'. Ruiz then does a few thought experiments about filming acts/events, and demonstrates that even the question 'how to film an event' is a fascinating one - even when the event is an empirical event like 'Sirhan shooting Kennedy' rather than a phenomenological one like 'Ruiz thinking that Sirhan shot Kennedy'. Ross