Lessons in Perception

The Avant-Garde Filmmaker as Practical Psychologist

Paul Taberham

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781800737242
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785339028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator's range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.

PART I
COGNITION

CHAPTER 1

THE SPECTRE OF NARRATIVE

A specter is haunting the cinema: the specter of narrative. If that apparition is an Angel, we must embrace it; and if it is a Devil, then we must cast it out. But we cannot know what it is until we have met it face to face.

— Hollis Frampton, ‘A Pentagram on Conjuring the Narrative’.

‘The rejection of linear narrative’, according to P. Adams Sitney, is ‘nearly a defining feature’ of the avant-garde (1978: vii [italics added]). His provisional commitment to the importance of the rejection or displacement of narrative speaks of other elements that come into play when defining avant-garde film. Commercial motivations, production processes and means of financing and distribution may also have a bearing on a film’s status as avant-garde (Smith, 1998: 395). Evidently, the avant-garde is not defined solely by its use, rejection or renegotiation of narrative. But as Sitney suggests, the manner in which narrative is negotiated is a central topic, albeit a contentious one. If there is a lack of unity amongst filmmakers and scholars about how the avant-garde negotiates or should negotiate narrative, it is because both ‘narrative’ and ‘the avant-garde’ are equally elusive terms, and while theories have been proposed, there is no definitive consensus about what constitutes a narrative, or an avant-garde work of art.

This chapter will begin by suggesting that narrative and avant-garde film are sometimes assumed to be alien to one another, without mutual significance. The goal, then, will be to challenge this assumption by demonstrating how narrative is sometimes present in avant-garde films, albeit in unconventional ways. After explaining in detail some of the ways in which avant-garde films can work obliquely with narrative, this chapter will propose two types of strictly non-narrative form in avant-garde film that call upon alternative methods of engagement to narrative comprehension.

This discussion fits into the broader themes of the book in two principal ways. First of all, the subject of narrative is one of several recurring themes in discourse about avant-garde film that has also been widely discussed in the field of cognitive science.¹ In addition, the model of avant-garde filmmakers working as practical psychologists is also pertinent here. Commercial filmmakers utilize the audience’s ability to follow an ordinary narrative, and the viewer will typically follow the storyteller’s lead without conscious effort. The filmmaker might still challenge the viewers – withholding information, surprising or misleading them – but they will rarely compel the audience to pay attention to their own habits of mind, or risk confounding them without an eventual reinstatement of coherence. Some experimental filmmakers, by contrast, oftentimes subvert the pervasiveness of traditional narrative as a mode of engagement in cinema, and also compel the viewer to appeal to other sense-making skills that are less widely exercised in film-going experiences.

Thus, instead of providing an experience whereby the viewer is called upon to exercise their previously well-rehearsed skills in following a narrative, the avant-garde filmmaker provides a novel experience in a variety of ways that will be detailed in this chapter. In short, the viewer might need to make bolder inferences in order to discern the story that is being presented obliquely onscreen. They might also need to adapt their viewing habits and learn to let go of expectations of a conventional story, even though narrative expectations are cued. Allegorical messages might be identified, even if they are not couched in a conventional story. The film might also call upon the viewer to pay closer attention to the feelings evoked by the film, instead of attempting to ‘understand’ it in a conventional sense. When narrative comprehension is challenged, the avant-garde may reveal experiences and pleasures un- or under-rehearsed in cinema that expand the viewer’s sensitivities and range of engagement skills.

To begin with, this chapter will provide an overview that surveys contrasting attitudes on the relationship between narrative and avant-garde film amongst scholars and artists. Following this, aspects of the cognitive position on narrative will be detailed; the concept of narrative as a mode of thought (as opposed to a text-structure) will be considered, an explanation for the pervasiveness of narrative will be outlined, and so will David Bordwell’s model of narrative comprehension (which is informed by cognitive theories of mind). Following this, four studies will explore some of the ways in which narrative norms have been challenged and subverted by avant-garde films. Finally, two alternative systems of organization to narrative will be proposed: catalogue form, and the meditative film. The implications of these alternative systems of organization on the viewer’s comprehension skills will be explored.

Perspectives on Avant-Garde Film and Narrative

The resistance to narrative amongst artists in theoretical writing stretches back to the 1920s. Dziga Vertov declared in 1923: ‘As of today cinema needs no psychological, no detective dramas. As of today – no theatrical productions shot on film … Into the confusion of life, hereby decisively enter’ (Vertov 1978 [1923]: 7). In the 1940s, Maya Deren compared cinema’s dependence on narrative to airborne planes flying above and along earth-bound highway routes and train lines. She comments:

What has been most responsible for the lack of development of the cinematic idiom is the emphatic literacy of our age. So accustomed are we to thinking in terms of the continuity-logic of the literary narrative that the narrative pattern has come to completely dominate cinematic expression in spite of the fact that it is, basically, a visual form. (Deren 2005 [1959]: 27)

In a branch of cinema that polemically defines itself as liberated from traditional conventions, narrative form is sometimes referred to as a ‘constraint’. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, for instance, state:

The American experimental filmmakers [were inspired] to abandon the constraints of narrative and to create something more ambitious… [Man Ray, Kirsanov, Léger and others] heralded the birth of a new freedom in the cinema, wherein narrative became secondary to visual poetry. (Dixon and Foster 2002: 3)

Similarly, Michael O’Pray characterizes avant-garde work as ‘unburdened by narrative’ (O’Pray 2003b: 56) and refers to ‘the avant-garde’s predilection for disjoined forms and structures in which “narrative” played no part’ (O’Pray 2003a: 14). Peter Gidal does not just refer to his film work as ‘non-narrative’, but as ‘anti-narrative’ in a more defined act of expulsion (Gidal 1979). From Gidal’s perspective, surrealists and post-World War I American filmmakers such as Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger would have undermined their oppositional status by incorporating ‘dramatic’ elements into their films.

For Malcolm Le Grice, the use of cinematic forms that do not conform to narrative conventions is the avant-garde’s major claim to intervention on an aesthetic, ideological and political level. His objection to narrative form lies in the ideology hidden beneath the unproblematic ‘linearity’ of presentation that is made invisible and validated in dominant culture.

This linearity of causal sequence is by definition authoritarian. Even if the content is transgressive or anarchic, the form locks the audience into a consequence that unifies the subject impotently with and within the narrative. It is the linear coherence of the narrative and its conclusion that repress the subject (viewer) by implicitly suppressing the complexity of the viewer’s own construction of meaning. Transmitted as a culturally validated convention, narrative subsequently becomes a model by which experience is interpreted – that is, becomes a filter for the life experience outside the cinematic (Le Grice 2001 [1997]: 292).

Not all theoretical texts on avant-garde film assume that narrative is or should be entirely removed. Annette Michelson, an advocate of the avant-garde, claims that the crux of cinematic development lies ‘in the evolution and redefinition of the nature and role of narrative structure’ (1978 [1970]: 410). The avant-garde would be the place for this development to occur. Murray Smith comments that ‘narrative has been displaced, deformed, and reformed [in the avant-garde], rather than simply expunged altogether’ (Smith 1998: 397). Similarly, Edward Small comments that ‘when experimental film/video does deal with narrative … it typically presents fragmented narratives that tend to confound the conventions of classical continuity’ (Small 2005: 21).

Writing in the late 1980s, Tom Gunning referred to what he termed the ‘submerged narratives’, found in the work of Phil Solomon, Lewis Klahr and other members of a tendency he dubs ‘minor cinema’. He comments that in their works, ‘plots stir just beneath the threshold of perceptibility. The sea swells of these subliminal stories align images into meaningful but often indecipherable configurations’ (Gunning 1989–90: 4). In the passage quoted from Sitney at the beginning of this essay, he took care to comment that linear narratives are rejected, implying that non-linear narratives sometimes take their place (one would assume that, like Le Grice, linearity refers to a causally linked chain of events, although this is not made explicit).

This chapter assumes a moderate position on the relationship between avant-garde film and narrative, echoing and refining the claims made by Michelson, Smith, Small and Sitney by suggesting that while narrative reigns supreme in commercial cinema, it has been productively renegotiated within the avant-garde on some occasions, and outright rejected on others. As such, it may be understood as a starting point of creative intervention if it is productively reformulated. This chapter will consider how this is achieved. Before considering the use of narrative in avant-garde film in a series of case studies, however, we can form a conceptual framework of narrative by exploring it in a cognitive context.

Cognitive Narratology

Thus far, it has been established that writers and artists are divided on the function and presence of narrative in avant-garde film. All agree, however, that it is not used in a conventional sense. If avant-garde films are designed to exercise the mind in ways that are unfamiliar in commercial forms of filmmaking, why did narrative become the dominant organizational form in cinema to begin with? This is a question that cognitive researchers have addressed.

According to cognitive theories of mind, narrative form is as pervasive as it is because the ability to think within a narrative framework is an important tool for making sense of the natural world. General audiences appear to have a preference for the clarity of linear narrative in cinema and literature because mentally organizing the varied and tangential array of events in our daily activities into a causally linked chain of events creates clarity and our lives become manageable. As such, developing narrative comprehension as a mode of thought is a fundamental part of human cognitive development. Studies in artificial intelligence have shown that acquiring this skill requires detailed linguistic and cognitive operations (Mateas and Sengers 1999; Herman and Young 2000), so if it is not innate, this otherwise complex process is readily learned. We are hardwired to develop this ability, because it is one of the most powerful mechanisms the mind possesses for making sense out of the complicated events of the world.

In On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, Brian Boyd comments that in order to manage our lives as efficiently as we do, our minds must have been prepared before birth to learn the information specifically relevant to human problems (Boyd 2010: 39). Through evolution, the mind has been tailored towards seeking meaningful patterns (including narrative patterns) from birth, even if this skill is only fully developed later. Evolutionary psychologist Henry Plotkin explains that the world can be partitioned, described and learned about in an infinitely large number of ways. As such, if a truly general-purpose learning device was let loose in the world without constraint, it could begin acquiring information about the world in an infinitely large number of search paths. In turn, the device would be unlikely to learn anything that is biologically useful within a single lifetime. Through evolution, we address this problem in the following way:

[Evolution gains] knowledge of the world across countless generations of organisms, it conserves it selectively relative to criteria of need, and that collective knowledge is then held within pools of species. Such collective knowledge is doled out to individuals, who come into the world with innate ideas and predispositions to learn only certain things in specific ways. Every human, every learner of any species, begins its life knowing what it has to learn and be intelligent about – we all come into the world with the search space that we have to work in quite narrowly defined. (Plotkin 1997: 173, quoted in Boyd 2010: 40)

Generating narratives is also central in the transmission of knowledge. Soon after toddlers develop the ability to speak, they begin creating narratives out of their own experience and they also become interested in the stories around them. There is ecological value in understanding events in narrative terms then – it is adaptive to pass on your experience to others. Most forms of personal experience² cannot be transmitted from one generation to the next genetically, but change and adaptation are crucial for survival. In narratives, meanings are stabilized and lessons are learned from one’s own experiences that can be applied to future situations (Anderson 1996: 144).

It is the very pervasiveness of narrative for reasons explained by Boyd, Plotkin and Anderson that may underscore the impulse of avant-garde artists to challenge or reject linear storytelling, as well as the desire to create work that calls upon the spectator to generate meaning independently, rather than having it served to them. If avant-garde filmmakers aim to provide mental activities for their spectators that are generally unrehearsed in the cinema, abandoning narrative comprehension (or creating challenges in doing so) would be a fertile creative starting point. The viewer is left to find other avenues with which to engage with the work.

Up to this point, it has been established that there is a disparity amongst artists, critics and theorists as to what role narrative should serve avant-garde film. We have also considered why narrative is so widespread, and why avant-garde artists are compelled to challenge its application. But what is the nature of narrative? Within a cognitive context, narrative is understood as a mode of thought, rather than as a text structure. Both of these ways of looking at narrative enable and give form to the other; however, if a film is organized by a narrative structure, it will accordingly facilitate a narrative mode of engagement.

In ‘The Narrative Construction of Reality’, for instance, Jerome Bruner (1991) argues that narrative operates as a mental instrument in the construction of reality. While describing some of its properties, he moves throughout the article between mental ‘powers’ used to navigate the natural world, and the elements of narrative discourse that trigger these powers when engaging with a fictional story. For Bruner, a narrative will feature a chain of causally linked events taking place over time, while equilibrium is disrupted and reinstated through intentional agents. This definition is a commonplace list of characteristics for those who think of narrative as a text structure, yet for Bruner these textual elements serve as cues for the spectator’s mental activity. The focus is on the viewer’s activity rather than the text itself, but both can be understood as different ‘faces’ of the same phenomenon. While the different emphases of the two traditions should be understood, they also share an underlying connection.

David Bordwell provides a general model for the ways in which spectators respond to narrative film in a long-standing theory first introduced in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) and later developed in Poetics of Cinema (2008). Central to his model is the assumption that the spectator draws on real-world knowledge and awareness of narrative conventions in order to go beyond the information given directly in the film. Previous theories of narrative, Bordwell suggests, downplayed the viewer’s role or characterized them as passive victims of narrational illusion who are ‘positioned’ by narrative. In Bordwell’s theory, a narrative film cues the spectator to execute a variety of operations, and so his central line of enquiry asks what the spectator does when comprehending a narrative film, and what features of the film solicit narrative comprehension.

Bordwell’s model operates on the assumption that perceiving and thinking are active, goal-oriented processes, and so a spectator constructs a perceptual judgement on the basis of non-conscious inferences. Not everything that is relevant to the story is directly declared in the film itself, so the narrative is tailored to encourage the spectator to execute story-constructing activities, going beyond the information given to flesh out the story.³ This is done with the use of schemata – organized clusters of knowledge that guide our thought processes. Cues, patterns and gaps are prese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I – Cognition
• Part II – Visual Perception
• Part III – Audiovisual Perception
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index