Hi Raja,
Thanks for a thoughtful and interesting essay. Here are my questions and comments which, hopefully, might do your insights justice:
Regarding Wittgenstein, I would think there to be two discreet grammars of film. The first would be founded on a universal psychology; and concerns nuts and bolts issues such as, for example, eyes on the horizontal plane designating two characters talking-- regardless of other distinctions between shots…etc.
The second is based on those socially-based distinctions which serve as cultural frames of reference. In passing, I might mention that these cross-cut so-called national cultures. The best example of this might possibly be my experience in 1971 of seeing “Z” with an American audience who was unaware that the events depicted were not themselves fictional!
Conversely, GWTW is so phony that, perhaps, this movie would not offer a Greek audience any insight whatsoever into the American Civil War. Furthermore, there are those who would flatter themselves into thinking that the slaves at Tara were as happy and healthy as they were portrayed.
Then again, perhaps ethnographically speaking, the slaves’ social lives were far too interestingly complex to be reduced to such dreadfully materialistic categories such as “coerced human labor.” This, of course, is a perspective that Hollywood makes clear. In passing, it’s my sad understanding that some anthropologists feel the same way.
Yet a compromised middle ground between materialistic disgust and idealistic fluffery of song and dance might be reached by the narratological suspension of all judgments of value: let’s just concentrate on the purely aesthetic dimension. That gorgeous Greek-revival mansion, the coy young breeders in bright, hoopy dresses with just enough exposed bosom, those cute, tushy boys all a-saddle going off to a war which never really happened….Kith of the Spider Woman has nothing on this for a drag classic.
So much for my own “narratology” which, presumably, would raise the questions, ”Whose being?” or even, “what one-ness? This is to say that the true being of film might in turn to instruct, justify, titillate, catharize, and even, perhaps to question. Now as these are ontologies all, what foolishness ever to have said, “It speaks, univocally.”
This is also to say that these particular frames of reference might be idiomatic. For example, I indulge myself in late Bertolucci despite the fact that he totally misunderstands Paris ’68, employs psychobabble to demonstrate motivation, and apparently thinks that embracing Tantric mumbo-jumbo has something to do with one’s perception of color. What I enjoy of him is analogous to entering into Kieslowski’s cathedral. Both directors offer me a clarity of vision not of my own, and one that will provoke me to think. On the other hand, Spielberg is all about dreaming, and is therefore totally deprived of being.
Grammars also emerge through the written text; or what is commonly referred to as “screenplay”. The most pernicious of these is that of having a main character to identify with; and film is the most un-modern of art to the extent that it persists in clinging to this nineteenth-century rebus.
Even Deleuze commits this fundamental error in his borrowing of the Bergsonian crystal to describe the subject in question. But great film never is about the je-fele: rather, of the substance that’s being shattered. (It’s “Bicycle thieves”, by the way!) In other words, The virtue of truly great cinema is to subjectify the milieu itself—and perhaps even to show the individual as indifferently or even as “unsympathetic” as possible. Yet to do this means certain financial failure.
Filmically speaking, an ontology that defines a milieu as the subject would ostensibly not only utilize deep focus, but also a closer-in focal point that defines near-background. Please observe this employ by Cimino in the dance-hall scene from Heaven’s Gate, as well as , of course, in Veerhoven. This resulting edginess is most displeasing to the Amerikans who want to dream, and to be entertained. This requires sharp focus on the hero.
As a cornerstone of modernity, character non-identification furthermore clearly indicates a rejection of the author’s ontic “identification pact” with the reader/viewer. Even an accessible writer such as J.C. Oates makes this clear. “You have a frame of reference that I will proceed to question, to mangle”.
Cinema, then, is essentially a spectacle of Debordian proportions. It’s an immense accumulation of images whose fundamental purport as a commodity is to entertain. As an ideology it’s the enemy of thought; as it knows itself to be. Only state-funded art can maneuver out of this morass. Left to its own, film will naturally return to the slime from which it began.
Simply put, the fundamental being of film is to be a movie: a propagandistic commodity whose box-office performance is justifiably monitored by telebimbos as are stock markets by the more-serious looking of the genre. That you, I, and others demand more than this does not change the basic nature of what “this” is. And although the pursuit of being must, in the Sartrian sense, entitle one to will and imagination, what we have here is a manifold social reality that demands recognition-- which is to say that Hollywood functions upon need.
So if it’s time to forgive and forget Nanking, slave prostitution and Pearl Harbor in the interests of Zinnish hugging, there will always be an Eastwood to peddle “realist” junk that falls within our own Wittgensteinian bild. Yet if we want to interest ourselves in The Being of others, I’d strongly recommend Twenty Four Eyes, The Burmese Harp, The Human Condition.
My particular bild understands the double reference in The Sanctus from Pool’s L&D; as well as resonances of Kant and Dostoevsky. Both Land and Freedom and the Apu Trilogy import deep emotional appeals which make these frames rather personal—therefore idiomatic—in nature.
On the other hand, because countless other references are lost on me, these films remain senseless. Wovon mann night sprechen kann….A good example of this is Blue Velvet; as it was patiently explained tome that Lynch was referencing some sculptor whose name I’ve since forgotten.
In brief, our own, highly-generalized ontology is that of transcending the base commodity form that defines, materially speaking, what film is. The question, then, is how we might become cinematic bodies without organs.
BH
----- Original Message -----
From: indra karan<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 2:28 PM
Subject: Re: FILMOSOPHY- Ontology of Cinematography and reflection on Cinema.
"The ontology of Cinematography and reflections on Cinema."
The ontology of cinematography and the reflections on cinema addresses the question of what film is, what makes a film a film, and to examine what Wittgenstein would call the grammar of our concept of film and the role films play in the forms of our life.
The ability to record moving images therefore arrived at the modernist and histories of cinema together belong to the modernism. In the convergence of humanistic enterprise, scientific enquiry, artistic endeavor and philosophical debates that, together framed both modernism and the birth of cinema.
Cinematography is the projection of images suspended in time and space. The Images that are seemingly real have their own grammar and represent their own world,” An autonomous world”. These images that are recorded and projected, which are in constant conversation with us and are trying to say something(s), which are sometimes akin to our own experiences and beyond, and this beyond can only be mediated through participation.
It is up to the man posited at both the ends that of a creator and receiver (perceiver, audience, participator, critic and Investigator) to make meaning out of these images,” The images in conversation”.
The ontology of film is to relate to the nature and reflexivity of film, Film about film, to examine its own processes and structures. Film thus becomes an investigation and demonstration of its own properties, an epistemological and didactic enterprise.
In a GREENBERGERIAN sense film is located in the history of modernism, A radical divide from the past academic disciplines and forms of art (literature, painting, music). As such film is posited in modernity a technological revolution.
To refer to SHARITS one can see the dual nature of film (recording process-optical/ material process) a problematic eqivocality which is perhaps cinema’s most ontological issue.
The film is self-referential is a tool of enquiry in to the problems of film language and film being. The images or sequences in filmmaking are organized in order to convey a determinate sense of meaning, in other words the need of reference and denotation governs the structures of all the various levels down wards. This particular need in cinema to capture a likeness of the world can be dispensed with and consequently new structural protocols introduced. These need not lead to meaninglessness because a principle of self-referentiality is introduced. So the film is about itself and its own structure.
Film because of it duality of being can both be an autonomous object and its own self-representation. Through the idea of the object hood of the film itself, through its circular process of self-reflection, film is now directed towards its own nature.
In the general arena of ideology, filmmaking can avoid pitfalls of illusionism, of simply being a substitute for the world parasitic on ideology, which it reproduces as reality.
Film as projected in time and space given to its organic nature (that of raw material assuming forms,shapes,sounds,etc)seems like breathing life by which it seems to equally assume the significance of the world as we experience it. Film by the nature off its own self-reflexivity as “life”,is ontologically bound to philosophy as a discipline. Posited in modernity cinematography (FILM) in a magical sense has become central to being and philosophy.
The essence of art does not lie in mere craftsmanship of the thing so that the encountered can disclose itself in its being. In an encounter with a work of art, we become more fully present and we bring what we have experienced and who we are in to play and our whole self-understanding is placed in balance or suspended. The experience takes place in the unity and continuity of our own self-understanding. The legitimacy of the art does not lie in the disinterested aesthetic pleasure but when it reveals as being. It presents us with a world, A new world.
When an Artist/film maker who has the power to transform in to an image or a form his experience of being the materials that are used are not altered but transformed. There is a total mediation and mediation of art must be thought as a whole. It is precisely the experience of art which shows that the work of art has an authentic being in the fact that in becoming experience it transforms the experiencer. ”The work of art works.”
The subject of the experience of art the thing that endures through time is not the subjectivity of the one who experiences the work but it is the work itself.
A world is out there for exploration .but neither the empirical description of entities within it nor even the ontological interpretation of the individual as such will encounter the phenomenon of world. The world is something sensed “along side” the entities that appear in the world. Yet understanding must be through world. World and understanding are inseparable parts of the ontological constitution of being in its existence. The world in which we exist is more than simply the realm of the preconscious operation of the mind in perception. It is the realm in which the actual resistance and possibilities in the structure of being shape understanding. In short it is the realm of hermeneutical process by which being becomes thematized as language a filmic language.
As Paul sharits would put it, the most fruitful research procedure lies in making films that are indeed in the strict sense of the word experimental. Such films made by the researchers would produce information about their own linguistic /cinematic/philosophical structures.
As Deleuze would hint when he says: "This is the first aspect of the new cinema [time-image]: the break in the sensory-motor link (action-image), and more profoundly in the link between man and the world.
Much of what he says is based in a belief that cinema has in fact changed the way we think and feel about times and the world we live in.
A paradigmatic shift in terms of our understanding and construction of reality, An ontological reality that is based on Dasein, whose essence of understanding lies in the discloser of the concrete potentialities for being within the horizons of one’s own placement in the world to a newer understanding, a profound change in our perception of a world, where filmic reality interlopes and interoperates with the self.
Thus the self-referential film is a tool of enquiry in to the problems of film language and film being.
Through the idea of object hood of the film itself as in its autonomous nature, through the circular process of self-reflection, self examination, self investigation film is directed towards its own nature” seen as ontologically inherent in the medium, where Film and philosophy together in their reflexivity can forge a common ground as in "Filmosophy," giving rise to a new discipline of thinking and epistemic investigation in to the very nature of unknown and Filmmaking( Digital content) thus can be a project of meaning with horizons beyond itself.
-----Raja Indrakaran.
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