![]()
Part I
The Nature of Film
![]()
1 (Collapsed) Seeing-In and the (Im-)Possibility of Progress in Analytic Philosophy (of Film)
Malcolm Turvey
One of the most fundamental questions analytic philosophers have sought to answer about cinema is: what do we see when we look at a motion picture?1 A related but narrower question is: why do we tend to say that we “see” characters and other fictional entities in movies given that fictions by definition don’t exist? Film theorists have often answered both questions by arguing that we experience an illusion when viewing films, although illusion theories come in many shapes and sizes. What the philosopher Robert Hopkins calls classical illusionism asserts that we seem to see directly the events movies depict rather than a pictorial representation of these events.2 However, analytic philosophers have almost universally rejected classical illusionism by claiming that we do not react to films in the way that we would if it appeared we were face to face with the things they portray.3 We do not, for example, flee the movie theater when a dangerous alien is on the loose in a science fiction film, as surely we would if it seemed the alien were directly before us. Moreover, films are not typically designed to foster this illusion. They lack three- dimensionality, frequently move through space and time via editing and camera movement, are often accompanied by extra-diegetic music and subtitles, regularly employ patently unrealistic staging, lighting, setting, costume, make-up and color (including black-and-white), use out-of-focus shots, high, low and tilted camera angles and so on. Although it might be possible to manufacture and exhibit a film so that it seems to its viewers that they are seeing directly what the film depicts rather than a pictorial representation of it, films are not typically designed this way.
In place of classical and other variants of illusionism, analytic philosophers have proposed different accounts of what we see in motion pictures. So-called transparency theorists believe that we actually see, albeit indirectly, the events recorded by photographic films. Others maintain that we recognize the contents of moving images, perhaps because they resemble things in the real world. Others still argue that, at least when watching fiction films, we imagine seeing the fictional entities they depict either directly or in a mediated way. Each of these powerful theories has won adherents who offer slightly different versions of them, and they have been refined and strengthened in response to criticisms over the years. However, there is little consensus about which is correct, and it is not clear how one can adjudicate between them. Like other answers to perplexing philosophical problems, they don’t, at least at first blush, seem as if they can be falsified by empirical investigations, and they each possess significant strengths and weaknesses.4
This lack of agreement about the answer to the question of what we see in motion pictures as well as other big philosophical questions, such as why we respond emotionally to fictional entities that we know do not exist, might lead one to doubt—as I increasingly do—whether analytic philosophy (of film) can ever make progress in the sense that its practitioners converge on the truth about a (cinematic) phenomenon.5 To be sure, analytic philosophy has contributed enormously to film studies by exposing the considerable logical and empirical inadequacies in previous film theorizing, clarifying important film-related concepts and proposing robust theories of cinema as well as intriguing interpretations of specific films. But as Peter van Inwagen remarks about philosophy in general, “Disagreement in philosophy is pervasive and irresoluble. There is almost no thesis in philosophy about which philosophers agree.”6 Or as David Lewis puts it, “Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively.”7 What Colin McGinn calls “the magnitude and intractability of much philosophical disagreement” may be due, as McGinn has suggested, to “inherent limitations on our epistemic faculties” rather than anything “intrinsically problematic or peculiar or dubious” about philosophical questions.8 But whatever the reason, at least in philosophy of film it is hard to think of any significant philosophical issue around which there is a consensus about the truth of the matter, or any authoritative philosophical theory that has been disproven definitively. When confronted by two or more such theories about a film-related topic, it seems that, at the end of the day, we have only our intuitions to guide us about which is correct.9 Or as Lewis concludes, “Once the menu of well-worked-out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion.”10
One way of pushing back against this skepticism about the possibility of philosophy (of film) making progress in the sense of its practitioners converging on the truth is to contest Lewis’ claim that “philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively.” While it may be the case that there is little consensus about which philosophical theory is right, it could be maintained that there is much more agreement over which are wrong. Peter van Inwagen, for instance, qualifies his pessimism about philosophical progress by allowing that “If there is any philosophical thesis that all or most philosophers affirm, it is a negative thesis: That formalism is not the right philosophy of mathematics, for example, or that knowledge is not (simply) justified, true belief.”11 Through robust criticism, one might insist, the field of legitimate theoretical contenders is winnowed until only the strongest remain standing. Furthermore, this is progress in the sense of converging on the truth, for while there is never consensus about the right theory, there is at least agreement about which theories stand a chance of being correct and which don’t. Thus, the range of possible truths is narrowed even if no single victor ever actually emerges. A good example in the philosophy of film might be illusion theories. While philosophers may never ultimately concur about, say, whether photographic images are transparent, they at least agree that transparency is one of several theories of cinematic representation that should be taken seriously, unlike illusion theories, which have been shown to be wrong. However, while analytic philosophers might have almost universally rejected illusion theories for a time, recently the philosopher Robert Hopkins has resurrected the concept of illusion in proposing a novel theory he calls “collapsed seeing-in” or “collapsed photographic illusion.”12 Although it differs considerably from classical illusionism, this example, which I will consider in this paper before returning briefly to the issue of philosophical progress at the end, shows that even the most discredited theory can be salvaged in a modified, improved form by an enterprising philosopher on the lookout for alternatives to dominant views.
Hopkins’ theory concerns standard fiction films in which “a photographic representation of a set of events, the events filmed … themselves represent other events, the story told.”13 Hopkins calls these “two-tiered” movies and maintains that, when watching them, we can experience what he calls “collapsed seeing-in.” Although there is much debate about the precise nature of seeing-in, Hopkins defines it much as Richard Wollheim did in his later writings as a visual experience with a “distinctive phenomenology” that sets it apart from “seeing things in the flesh, or visualizing them.”14 In “seeing-in,” to employ Robert Stecker’s useful formulation, “I can see something that is F (e.g., a woman) in something else P (e.g., a painting), without it following that there is something F that I am seeing.”15 I can see F in P not because I am experiencing the illusion of seeing F. Nor am I really, albeit indirectly, seeing F, as transparency theorists would claim about photographs, or imagining seeing F, as the imagined seeing thesis would have it. Rather, as Hopkins puts it, the pattern of marks in P “is organized in such a way that we are thereby visually presented with something else.”16 This can happen by chance, as when we see a face in a cloud or a wallpaper pattern, or by design, as is the case with representational pictures. Hopkins also follows the later Wollheim in arguing that seeing-in is accompanied by what Wollheim called “twofoldness.” We not only see F in P, but we are also, to quote Stecker again, “aware of seeing P and some of its features.”17 Or as Hopkins says, “When seeing things in pictures we are in some sense aware of those things. But we are also aware of the surface before us.”18 In twofoldness, we are simultaneously aware of both the marked surface of P, what Wollheim called its configurational properties, and what we can see in the marked surface, which Wollheim referred to as its recognitional ones. Indeed, for Wollheim, the configurational and recognitional are “two aspects … of a single experience,” although it is debatable whether we are always aware of the marked surface when seeing in it.19 We see things in the marked surfaces of trompe l’oeil pictures, for example. But when trompe l’oeil pictures deceive us, we are unaware of their marked surfaces. Indeed, we are unaware that they are pictures with marked surfaces and instead seem to see directly what they depict.20
In collapsed seeing-in, according to Hopkins, we experience twofoldness and therefore always remain aware of the marked surface of the motion picture as we see in it. However, the representation of the movie’s story by the actors and sets—what Hopkins calls the “events filmed” or “theatrical representation” or “second” or “lower tier”—“drops out” of our experience of the movie, and we “see in the film the story told.”21 The photographic representation and the other tier, the story told, thereby collapse into each other in our experience, leaving out the events filmed or theatrical representation, and we see the story in the moving image. This can happen because the second tier of theatrical representation in movies is often “illusionistic.” “Illusionistic representations are precisely those for which it is difficult to see their configurational properties,” Hopkins asserts, and he compares the experience of a two-tier movie with an illusionistic theatrical representation to the experience of a picture of a trompe l’oeil picture:
Provided the picture of the picture is not itself illusionistic, we will see the “outer” picture for what it is—a picture. We will see something in that outer picture. But since the depicted picture is illusionistic and since illusionistic pictures tend not to be experienced as pictures, what we see in the outer picture will be, not the depicted picture, but whatever it is that inner picture represents… . In two-tier filmmaking, the representation of the story told by the events is often illusionistic. It is so in just the same sense as trompe l’oeil depiction is illusionistic. When it is, given that cinema images are depictions of those illusionistic theatrical representations, our experience of those images will follow the course described above. Seeing-in collapses, so that what we see in the picture is simply whatever the “i...
