<Once again, as a challenge to listees wordlwide:If anyone can offer me
reasons why they think one can do philosophy in film without picking up
the apparatus of cinema - I'd like to hear about it.
dan>
I assume Dan means philosophy 'of' film. Doing philosophy 'in' film
seems to me to necessarily entail doing it as film (or video or ...). So
maybe I am way off the challenge -
I would say the questions of meaning, use, truth, can all be posed of a shot
albeit with varying degrees of queerness. (Do we ask if a shot is true or do
we only ask whether it is misleading? 'How is a shot being used' sounds
quite like ordinary language...and I would add contra Dan's suspicion of
narrative fiction, fiction (somewhat neglected in philosophy of language)
has to be an important subject of any inquiry into film usage)
I used to think film would profoundly define its own philosophical concerns,
and it
certainly does have its own conerns, but I think the old philosophical
concerns (terribly
linguistic) of meaning, truth, usage, etc still seem to be urgent concerns
of film. This is because we use film as propositional communication (which
also implies that viewers as well as filmmakers are in a position to do
philosophy of film). The more I think about it the more I think film is
like language
and I suspect an inquiry like 'ordinary film philosophy' - whether done in
film or not - would give us a lot of insight into film. I think the more
formalist approaches (which I think seem to dominate and are perhaps are a
result of by the aporia of dealing with pictorial propositions) have not
yielded all that much.
I actually think of film and language more as one big interlocked thing,
than as strongly separated, together and not apart in their ordinary use in
the everyday project of human intersubjectivity
One thing you notice with a camera and computer as your 'pen' is that film
(silent film) lacks many of the logical tools of language. When we follow
one shot by another there is no explicit way to signal 'and', 'or', 'not',
'if..then'. The only way we can say these things in film is by supplying
enough in the shots and the context for viewers to infer them is
'implicatures' of the shots. Ordinary film is sound film and we want to
supply the logical tools of language in
language. Without inventing a lot of contrived conventions (which spoil the
amazing pictorial resources of film) doing logic in film is going to be
impossible - and yet doing logic is almost defining for philosophy - unless,
and this is unlikely, film gives rise to some new type of post logical
philosophy .
The conventions I am thinking of would be supplying logical connectives and
quantifiers, using perhaps colour codes for signalling modalities like
could, would, must, etc. These are all things language does, albeit not in
strictly formal logical ways but in its own quasi logical grammar.
Instituting such tools in cinema would require a lot of experimental film,
and it would be hardly likely to be ordinary film and reflect ordinary film
usage. Although I imagine such a thing could eventually culturally evolve.
Perhaps one reason narrative film - especailly fiction - dominates is that
film's pictoriality and the kind of logic tools it has suit it
pre-eminently for narrative because narrative connections (temporal
priority, cause) are so readily infered from a sequenceof shots. Hence the
two genres: documentaries (history), and fictions (even though the word
fiction, like truth, itself seems slightly odd when we use it of film)
Ross
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