----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 11:02
PM
Subject: RE : Bibliography on
contemplation
First of all, thanks to the people (at least the 3 of you) who
answered. I did not know all the books you advised me. So, I’m feeling a
bit less lonely in my lake of materials.
(But for me the Lumiere Brothers'
Arrivee d'un train a La Ciotat does not involve a contemplative attitude at
all (even though it’s a still shot) since there is a lot of movement in it, a
lot of action, the frame is almost saturated. Also, I think that in its
context, this film plays on the spectacular side of the film apparatus, on the
spectacle of the cinematic event itself (see the theory of the “attractions”
in the early cinema elaborated by Tom Gunning (for instance: GUNNING, Tom,
“The cinema of attraction: early film, its spectator and the avant-garde”, in
Wide Angle, vol 8, n° 3 & 4, sept 1986, pp. 63-70.) , see also the
commentaries of the early watchers who where really afraid when the train
comes to a close-up) which for me is the opposite of any contemplative
attitude since it involves an aesthetic of visual shock that “snap” the
spectator attention “up”, likesay (sorry for the terms but I don’t know how to
translate that properly.).
Anyway, 2 points come to mind from your answers:
- it seems that contemplation in the cinema has not been strongly
theorised in a large scale by scholars yet (so the field seems open) and that
it is more about filmmakers concerns
- it seems that the idea of contemplation or the contemplative
attitude generally aims to a kind of transcendence that induce a sort of
ecstatic (etym: “out of oneself”) way of seeing the film picture. So, in this
aesthetic tradition (the pattern must originate in the religious mystical
contemplation), the contemplation of a work of art, of a film, should lead the
spectator “beyond” the picture, “beyond” the sensitive world and “beyond“ the
self toward something exterior and superior to the world and to the sensitive
phenomena. So the contemplative spectator becomes a pure spirit cut from his
sensorial activity.
But my idea would be that the contemplation attitude in film doesn’t
aim to a transcendental state of mind, but on the contrary helps to reveal to
the embodied spectator the primary and essential sensitive immanence of the
picture and of the (embodied) self. To contemplate is to feel (the picture,
the world, oneself) in a particular but intense way that only leads to
strongly feel the sensitive immanence of life itself. The contemplative
attitude does not aim to any beyond, to any transcendence but only reveals to
the spectator the very sensitive immanence of the picture, the world and the
self by proposing a particular kind of affect, the contemplative affect.
Well, I don’t know if I’ve made myself clear on this point (I guess it’s
not even clear for me in my own language, so…) but I would like to dispute the
traditional aesthetic way of analysing the contemplation phenomenon.
So, if any idea about that comes to you and that you don’t mind wasting
time discussing it, don’t hesitate to answer.
Thanks
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