Film and the Ethical Imagination

Asbjorn Gronstad

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137583734
• eBook ISBN: 9781137583741
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the turn to ethics in literature, film, and visual culture. It discusses the concept of a biovisual ethics, offering a new theory of the relation between film and ethics based on the premise that images are capable of generating their own ethical content. This ethics operates hermeneutically and materializes in cinema's unique power to show us other modes of being. The author considers a wealth of contemporary art films and documentaries that embody ethical issues through the very form of the text. The ethical imagination generated by films such as The Nine Muses, Post Tenebras Lux, Amour, and Nostalgia For the Light is crucially defined by openness, uncertainty, opacity, and the refusal of hegemonic practices of visual representation.

Part I
Ethics

© The Author(s) 2016

Asbjorn GronstadFilm and the Ethical Imagination10.1057/978-1-137-58374-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Asbjørn Grønstad¹

(1)

Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

End Abstract

To capture images is “an ethos, a disposition, and a conduct in regard to the world.” ¹ So writes Jean-Luc Nancy in The Evidence of Film (2001), his book with the Iranian film artist Abbas Kiarostami. The statement has resonated with me over the years. Ethos. Disposition. Conduct. These are properties that, presumably, few would deny are intrinsic to the filmed image. Yet the scholarship on images in general, and on cinematic images specifically, has been somewhat slow to grapple with the implications of Nancy’s remark, at least in a sustained and theoretical fashion. The problem of images and their ethos, disposition and conduct is not first and foremost a question of meaning but rather of value. If we want to engage in a dedicated reflection on what may be seen as the ethical life of cinematic images, this distinction between meaning and value would be a good place to start. While images that have value obviously mean something, this value is irreducible and cannot just be a matter of semiotics. Images and values are joined together in two different ways: images are, first of all, valuable in and of themselves; and second, images bring (new) values into the world. Aesthetic forms of communication, irrespective of their medium, do not imitate the world but enlarge it, thus creating an often unacknowledged fund of values that profoundly affect our world, even as we dismiss these transmissions as esoteric art or mere entertainment.

The goal of this book is to show how contemporary art cinema comes to embody a distinctively visual ethics through its diverse aesthetic affordances. Film and the Ethical Imagination asks the question: what is the ethical content of film, and how might we conceptualize this content as being different from language-based ethics? In seeking to address this question, the book aims to surmount two of the greatest obstacles both to ethical thinking and to our understanding of visuality and the world of images: one, the exclusive reliance on language in ethics; and two, the failure to consider ethics as an integral part of the hermeneutics of screen media. The proliferation of new visual media forms since the invention of photography and, later, film in the nineteenth century has triggered a string of interpretive frameworks by academics, intellectuals, and artists. The aggregation of knowledge about images has passed through a range of different phases and conceptual preoccupations, from ontology (i.e. what is cinema?), to questions about medium specificity, aesthetics, structuralism, rhetoric, semiotics, identity politics and gender theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and new media theories. What, until very recently, has been missing from this burgeoning cache of visual hermeneutics is the ethical dimension. It is rare to find scholarship in any discipline that presupposes a theory of ethics as the ground zero for the production of knowledge about the nature and meaning of visual objects and of visual communication. To the extent that philosophical discussions have scraped the surface of the question of value, they have, more often than not, approached the matter negatively, as in Guy Debord’s hugely influential critique of the society of the spectacle. ² Contrary to Gayatri Spivak’s suggestion that “the eruption of the ethical interrupts and postpones the epistemological,” ³ I argue that the untheorized space of ethics and of value is more constitutive of the hermeneutics of the visual than we have heretofore recognized. Is it the case that vital questions concerning the world of images in which we are enfolded have been elided or bypassed, questions such as: What is the value of an image, and what values are communicable by an image? What makes an image good in ethical terms, and what makes it bad? Could we imagine an ethics not only for but also by the image? Do images convey forms of ethical experience and knowledge that elude language? What if ethics precedes not only ontology, as Emmanuel Levinas has suggested, but also epistemology? ⁴

This study imagines possible answers to these questions. As a theoretical matrix, I introduce the notions of bioscreens and biovisuality, the imbrication—both phenomenological and conceptual—of human (as well as non-human) life and the image. The biovisual, as a theoretical term, denotes both the degree to which visual media are extensions of subjectivity and the current inclination to regard images as constitutive of their own ecosystems and life forms. The materials I engage with consist of a broad sample of theoretical and philosophical work on images and visuality and an extensive array of contemporary films by artists such as Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Michael Haneke, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Claire Denis, and John Akomfrah, to name a few. The overall objective of this book is to renew the epistemology of the cinematic image through a conceptualization that seeks to uncover a pre-ontological ethics generated by the material and formal specificity of images themselves. Finding inspiration in part from the aforementioned Levinas’s enigmatic and still unresolved claim in Totality and Infinity that “ethics is an ‘optics,’” the main structure of the project consists of an extended theoretical study across two main sections. ⁵

Part I consists of two main sections. In the first, I provide an extensive overview of the field of ethics in relation to not only cinema studies but also neighboring disciplines such as literature. In the second section, I advance my own theory of cinema and ethics and its central foundation in the vital concept of the ethical imagination. The ensuing chapters are not illustrations of this theory but ways of expanding upon it.

A general shortcoming of the otherwise productive research in visual culture studies and related fields, such as film and media studies and art history, is the relative neglect of the domain of ethics. On those rare occasions when scholarship has engaged with ethical issues, it has tended overwhelmingly to focus on the degree to which mass media and images conform to ethical standards that are external to the object itself. This neglect of theorizations of the image that posit ethics as something emanating from, and manifested by, the visual itself impedes a fuller understanding of not only the ethics but also the hermeneutics of contemporary image culture. In spite of the philosophically advanced state of much current film and visual studies research, we still know very little about the ways in which images inscribe extra-linguistic ethical discourses into the very fabric of their aesthetic form. Few prior studies exist that have broached these questions in any systematic fashion. The present project provides, for the first time, a comprehensive and theoretically informed scrutiny of various forms of ethics articulated by moving images. By addressing this lacuna in the scholarly literature, this study may also rectify another obvious shortcoming in film and visual culture studies, the conceptualization of the viewer. What is very much needed is a theory of spectatorship that eschews the epistemologically frayed vectors of scopophilia/scopophobia and voyeurism/exhibitionism. In other words, the relation between viewer and the screen must be theorized in a manner that neither condemns nor celebrates the regime of the image, but that instead is able to accentuate the specifically ethical relation between the spectator and the screen.

In recent years there has been evidence of a, so-called, ethical turn in literary studies. ⁶ In film research, conceptualizations of ethics have had a more belated arrival, but the decade has seen the emergence of some notable studies (for instance, Cooper 2006; Saxton 2008; Wheatley 2009; Downing and Saxton 2010; and Nagib 2011). ⁷ Part 1, Ethics, provides an in-depth appraisal of this work while also laying out the components for a new theory of screen ethics. The argument I make aims to answer a threefold research question. First, what insights might arise if we shift the locus of the ethical from content to form, from the textual to the visual? Second, what might be the epistemological gains for visual culture of an interpretive and analytical practice defined by the ethical? Third, if images are capable of inscribing ethical value into their formal configurations, how might we discern and in turn translate this distinctively visual ethics into language without losing its material and conceptual specificity?

My own work on visuality and ethics draws upon a few salient sources—harbingers of an ethical orientation in image studies—that I significantly expand upon and develop throughout the book. There is the notion of axiographics, defined by Bill Nichols as “the attempt to explore the implantation of values in the configuration of space, in the constitution of a gaze, and in the relation of observer to the observed.” ⁸ I tie the reflections on axiographics to the problem of “the imperative of looking ethically,” as explored in psychoanalytically inflected theories of cinema. ⁹ Also prominent, furthermore, is the recent and fundamental reconceptualization of the image as an existential, anthropomorphic entity with its own desires and demands. ¹⁰ If images are virtually analogous to living beings—if the image and the viewer are both part of the same ecology—that acknowledgment certainly entails a transformation of our ethical awareness. My approach is also shaped by the kind of empathetic and imaginative, yet confrontational ethics promulgated in the work of scholars such as Jill Bennett and Georges Didi-Huberman. ¹¹

Following this critical consideration of previous work on the intersection of ethics and images, I put forward my own conceptualization of this fraught relationship. The point of departure for this theorization is the argument that artistic productions and aesthetic experiences are intrinsically ethical. What I mean by this is that the ethical significance of works of art may be located not on the level of content but on the level of aesthetic form. Contrary to conventional convictions, I argue, images do not dramatize ethics; they are not first and foremost “about” ethical issues. Rather, images perform, or embody, ethics through a process that is considerably more profound and far-reaching than that of a mere thematization of an immediately recognizable issue. In making this case, I draw on a wealth of theoretical insights, chief among them the notion of differential cutting, as elaborated in the work of Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska. Taking their cue from the philosophies of Henri Bergson and Karen Barad, among others, Kember and Zylinska consider artistic practice (their main example is photography...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Ethics
• 2. Imagination
• Backmatter