An on-going debate over the last few centuries has been whether we can call film an Art. Some argue that it offers us a way of seeing and understanding things in a way no other art can. For example, we can see something from a bird's eye angle, or we can experience things from an angle or viewpoint in a way Art cannot.
Bergson who we have been studying in class wants to say that Film can never be classed as an Art. He was one of the first philosopher's to analyse cinema and to give philosophical expression to moving images. He looked at the fundamentally important properties of cinema; movement, fragmentation and time.
In creative evolution (1907) Bergson employs what he calls "cinematographical apparatus" as an analogy for how the intellect approaches reality, which appears in his epistemological dualism. Bergson believes that "movement is reality itself" but that cinema is only a reconstituted illusion; real movement broken down mechanically in a series of static single frames and then returned to movement through the projecting appartus.
"Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality....We may therefore sum up...that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind."
He explains here how intuition is the process used to understand the flux of reality, while the intellect gives us a necessary, pragmatic grasp of reality. Bergson believes that cinema can not articulate any sense of reality and should never be considered as an art in anyway. It seems that because film has a mechanical nature, it cannot be human enough and therefore unlike paintings cannot give an audience a view of reality. He believes that a film, once made, is already given, and so time doesn't play a creative role. It is simular to the mechanistic conception of reality; it only takes snapshots of a passing reality. Movement does not exist in the images but is thrown back into them and therefore film is merely a spatialization of time and reality. However most importantly, duration for Bergson (the essence of reality,) plays no part in the cinematographic process because the process involves a succession and not interpenetration of static images.
Do you agree with Bergson? Do you not think that within the 21st century film has become an Art? Is this where we are going wrong? Does Bergson neglect film's representational power because it "spatialises" reality?
Quotes taken from: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Cx4H9wTF8mkC&pg=PA236&dq=creative+evolution+bergson&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
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ReplyDeleteExcellent work Annaliese. I think this is a really good entry practically applying Bergson's concepts and to the concept of cinema. This entry is also good because you are using a philosopher to do somethign philsoophical. I guess when Bergson would suggest that film is not an art, he would be suggesting that the experience of cinema at face value would be just broken down images. I guess the important thing to remember is that this presents a segmented view of reality. Film is wholly spatial in what it represents. Creation is something broader for Bergson. Art in a sense is ontological. This is also an intersting tension point for Deleuze, who it seems embraces the 'flow' and 'interpenatration'. For Deleuze film is philosophy in itself. It provides an expression of reality and is therefore philosophical. For Bergson, I suppose the flow of a musical piece would be a more accurate description of the reality of duree. Since despite the fact that music is made of notes it can never come to be as successive or spatialised notes on a page but only in terms of pure and unbroken flow. This is a really interesting problem for the philosophy of film. I suppose if we wanted to rescue film for philosophy we would have to really try and think of it as pure movement. But I'm just not sure this can be done since it is too derivative of theatre for this to operate i.e. film comes in acts, breaks structures and so forth. Of course, not all films conform to this logic. I can't think of any of the top of my head that do not and in what sense this might work philosophically. Anyone?
ReplyDeleteI agree, an excellent and thoughtful post Annaliese.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that film is 'too derivative of theatre' though Patrick, in that, as Deleuze suggests, film does have the potential to create new concepts of time and movement by means of the image.
Certainly many films can be likened to theatre in terms of structure, (and fiction too) but this seems to me rather reductive--as a number of films have a narrative which could not be achieved in any other medium due to film's ability to manipulate units of space and time, not by means of the projection of the moving image, as Bergson suggests, but rather via cinematography, editing and even narrative.
I'm thinking here of a couple of films which I screened last week-(so you will be familiar with them already Annaliese) namely Last Year in Marienbad and, to a lesser extent, Memento. Sure, Memento plays with narrative structure in a way which is possible in the novel (though not, of course, the theatre) though I think a novel which played with time and structure in this way would be rendered unreadable.
Last Year in Marienbad, meanwhile, can reasonably make claims to be philosophical due to its experimental nature. Time here becomes 'stretched', even meaningless, owing to the cinematography and montage as well as the plot and narration in what is an extremely distorientating viewing experience. Likewise, space has little meaning in the everyday sense, instead becoming a flowing backdrop, a space without boundaries.
Despite it being a visual medium, then, LYIM bears very little relation to a theatrical experience or text because it casts doubt on our everyday perception of reality (space and time).
So, I think film can be recuperated for philosophy in terms of pure time and/or movement image as Deleuze suggests, because it hs the potential to contribute new concepts to the ongoing debate concerning 'reality', space and time.. And this doesn't just apply to 'difficult', experimental films either--Vertigo, for example, does a similar deconstruction of space and time--but that's another blog entry's worth!
Thanks Ruth! I have to confess I was hitting a bit of a mental block in trying to think how film is purely philosophical. So thanks for showing the path. ALthough, I'm not sure about the film theatre divide. I'm pretty sure a theatre practitioner would disagree with you and say that live drama can do all of the things that a film can! Theatre does work on a kind of time warp. There if very rarely a drama that is acted or experienced in 'real time'; which I suppose is the Bergsonian point, I'm not sure, but it would be a very productive excercise to sit down and try and think through this specifically isolating what are the differences and similarities. I think this would be one of those cases where the differences would be as productive as the similarities.
ReplyDeleteI agree that film is philosophical in that sense not only in thinking the strucuturing of time and space, but also in terms of the affect on viewers, contributing to the transformation of the viewers respective realities.
A deconstruction of Vertigo!!! Ruth you gotta do it!!!
I'm extremely happy to see that this topic has got a good flow of conversation and debate going. It's something that really does interest me, however I do think that some people may argue that live drama cannot do what a film does. For example, if you would like to see things as a person does which like Ruth said "Last year in Marienbad" does, we could never see this via live drama. This film shows only from that persons point of view-we are that person. In a live drama we are always the outsider looking in, I think it is much harder to do things like a bird's-eye view or the ability to 'peer' through a window on a 9th storey building. I think even if you showed the peering-through you would never quite grasp the concept of height or danger that a film might. What do you think Patrick?
ReplyDeleteHi Annaliese,
ReplyDeleteSorry about not getting back to you sooner on this. With regard to your question I guess both of you are right. Theatre and film are substantially different enough to suggest that they are both generically different art forms. And again, it is always the differences that can be more insightful than the similarities. I suppose that film, along with CGI, has the ability to manipulate and generate a ‘world’ of reality with a greater degree of freedom and flexibility. In some ways theatre would be at a disadvantage here as it cannot use CGI as easily. So as you say there are things that film can do in a different way. Although, there are moves in contemporary theatre to introduce different types of technology such as film and video, and video games in art installations and so forth; this presents an example of the blurring of the boundaries between film and theatre which complicates matters even more. I suppose traditionally what it boils down to is a very questionable distinction between representation and lived experience. The locus of action of a play is visceral and bodily, and a film is not, one is a representation and the other is in some sense a living breathing sensual experience. I’m not falling down on either side of this fence on this, but I think where one stands on this distinction is the key. Not all plays are naturalistic Anton Chekov or Arthur Miller masterpieces self-contained masterpieces. Many plays, such as Brecht, are episodic and jarring. Brecht sets The Life of Galileo in New York, and it has been known that Brechtian productions ‘represent a fully built car on stage by having a fully built car on stage. That three-dimensionality is something that you can’t really get from film. (Avatar and 3D movies notwithstanding as I think that medium is still in its infancy). So in sum I think that there are substantial differences, enough to warrant treating them as different art forms with different points of interest, in some way, in terms of representation both film and TV have a common aspiration in a attempting to render what is real ‘real.’ The film director replied that you could not smell the book either! I suppose the potential to blend reality hints at art for the future where we could have an interactive blend of film, video games, virtual life, theatre and so forth. One of the best anecdotes I heard about in relation to this topic which I will use to let you mull over was about Patrick Suskind’s great novel Perfume, which was recently turned into a film. For those of you who don’t know it, the protagonist has a highly advanced sense of smell. The critics suggested that the film director failed to convey the sense of smell which was so central to the novels narrative. The director responded that you could not smell the book either.
Well I've not yet seen that film, although I know what I will be looking for this week. Thanks for your views on this Patrick :)
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