some quick thoughts on the discussion of the "cinematic"

1.  categories are necessary [one is tempted to say essential] for [much?] human thought

2.  all categories are unstable and can be deconstructed given a critic [philosopher?] who wants to do so

3.  to say that something is "cinematic" is not necessarily to essentialize, in the sense of positing transcendental categories . . . it is merely to say that when we use the term cinematic we are referring to qualities X, Y, and Z, that are typical of the category

4.  film – as a material; projection – as a “delivery” system; the moving image – as a quasi-linguistic medium of communication: all of these carry with them certain inescapable corollaries . . . put them all together and you have what might be called the constraints of cinema as traditionally understood

5. the fact that film is what bazin calls an impure form seems to me either meaningless and/or unimportant:  what he surely meant is that it combines elements of other earlier media – which is true . . . but each of those media is itself also impure [drama has narrative and spectacle; poetry has reference and rhythm; painting has color and subject matter, etc. etc.] . . . the word pure is at least as problematic as the word essential, perhaps more

        so, although we have to admit that cinema takes elements already familiar from other media and configures them in a new way, this does not mean that we have to say that “cinema” is not a meaningful category

6.  for some people cinema has a value – adds something important to human experience – and those people are understandably zealous of that value, which they are likely to see connected directly to some configuration of the various constraints mentioned in # 4

6.  the effort of classical critics to define the “cinematic” may have come from a desire to establish it as “a legitimate art form” but is hardly tied to that agenda . . . one could equally well establish the parameters of cinema as part of an effort to show how nefarious it is, how destructive of human intelligence . . . think, for a moment, of contemporary efforts to define the “essence” of pornography as a way of determining what a culture might reasonably want to outlaw, eliminate or censor

6.  [polemical conclusion]  i think what this amounts to is that we may well want to disagree with kermode [i suspect i do] but that we don’t have to [and  probably should not want to] call into question the very concept of the cinematic to do so . . . like other categories it does important work for us, allowing us, for one example, to talk about the way michael snow’s work either reshapes the category or falls out of it . . . that is, without some notion of the cinematic we would hardly be able to note anything special or interesting about snow’s work at all

        so let’s keep the baby, and if some bathwater stays in the bath too, so be it

mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Film-Philosophy Salon [mailto:FILM-
Subject: Re: Just what is Cinematic (from Zizane)

This old-fashioned topic of the cinematic is what classical film 

theory dealt with, trying to establish the medium as a legitimate art 

form. Who cares about film being an art? Film is important whether it 

is art or not. Any claim of x,y or z being 'cinematic' and a, b or c 

being 'non-cinematic' is essentialist. A truly non-essentialist 

approach to film would have to acknowledge that there is no such 

thing as cinematicity. Film is, as Bazin correctly observed, 

basically (but not essentially) an impure form which can best be 

understood in terms of (probabilistic) clusters of properties rather 

than essences. Not even the visual, the moving image, is cinematic, 

as there have been, especially in experimental film, attempts to 

produce and question cinema without a projected image (e.g. by 

Michael Snow or Valie Export).

H