Film Worlds

A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema

Daniel Yacavone

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231538350
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Film Worlds unpacks the significance of the "worlds" that narrative films create, offering an innovative perspective on cinema as art. Drawing on aesthetics and the philosophy of art in both the continental and analytic traditions, as well as classical and contemporary film theory, it weaves together multiple strands of thought and analysis to provide new understandings of filmic representation, fictionality, expression, self-reflexivity, style, and the full range of cinema's affective and symbolic dimensions.

Always more than "fictional worlds" and "storyworlds" on account of cinema's perceptual, cognitive, and affective nature, film worlds are theorized as immersive and transformative artistic realities. As such, they are capable of fostering novel ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding experience. Engaging with the writings of Jean Mitry, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz, David Bordwell, Gilles Deleuze, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, among other thinkers, Film Worlds extends Nelson Goodman's analytic account of symbolic and artistic "worldmaking" to cinema, expands on French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne's phenomenology of aesthetic experience in relation to films and their worlds, and addresses the hermeneutic dimensions of cinematic art. It emphasizes what both celluloid and digital filmmaking and viewing share with the creation and experience of all art, while at the same time recognizing what is unique to the moving image in aesthetic terms. The resulting framework reconciles central aspects of realist and formalist/neo-formalist positions in film theory while also moving beyond them and seeks to open new avenues of exploration in film studies and the philosophy of film.

PART I

FILMS AND WORLDS

ONE

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS

Fictions, Narrative, and Aesthetic Enclosure

REFERENCE TO THE CREATED AND EXPERIENCED WORLDS OF individual works is commonplace in the theory and criticism of literature, art, and film. Yet there is little consistency of meaning across disciplines and various critical and theoretical approaches, or even within them, with respect to this proposed description, or analogy. The numerous and varied senses of world in these contexts, as well as in general aesthetics and the philosophy of art, range from the clearly metaphorical (and often unanalyzed) to certain contemporary attempts to invest such “world talk” with more literal (and logical) meaning and precision.

Concerning any representational art form, there is an important but too often neglected difference between the world of a work and the represented or described world (or worlds) within a work.¹ Understandably, from one perspective, most theoretical treatments of cinematic worlds are confined to the latter. They seek to describe and understand the nature and comprehension of fictional, narrated, or so-called diegetic worlds of represented places and events in a common space and time inhabited by characters, which are (in some manner or another) referenced and communicated through a film’s audiovisual form. These accounts are largely self-limited to what films are about in terms of a story rather than what they also are, as created, unified works—together with what they may mean in nonnarrative (or extranarrative) and nonfictional ways.

In the position I take throughout this book, by contrast, it is vital and necessary to distinguish between the more or less skillfully constructed fictional story-worlds present within narrative films and the larger, multidimensional, and aesthetically realized worlds of films as artworks. The viability of this distinction is integral to many of the arguments that follow. To fully appreciate this, we must first look at some of the principal ways in which what I will term the world-in (as distinct from the world-of) films and representational and narrative works more generally, have been theorized. We will begin with logical and fictional worlds theory, which for some good reasons may appear to be at the most abstract remove from cinema.

LOGICO-FICTIONAL AND “MAKE-BELIEVE” WORLDS

Inspired by the theories of meaning and reference in the modern philosophical traditions of logical positivism and empiricism—associated with such figures as Gottlieb Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the early Wittgenstein, who asserted that “the facts in logical space are the world”²—one approach to the virtual and imaginary worlds presented by narrative works of all kinds regards them as built entirely out of certain kinds of abstract, quasi-semantic entities, or “propositions,” as expressed in language.³ This general view involves the adoption of what may be identified as the world variance conception of the meaning and truth status of the representational elements of works of (artistic) fiction.

Some references made by a work are factual (or ontologically grounded) as related to features of empirical reality, in the form of the corresponding, genuinely existing objects and properties that precede them. Others are said to be “objectless”; that is, they have no ontic counterparts or make no genuine references to anything that exists outside of human imagination and its many shared, cultural products. Thus, every work that communicates a story contains a kind of mixture or blend in terms of real and fictional persons, places, things, events, and so forth, as well as all their properties and relations as described by the work in words or perceived in its visual depictions.

For many thinkers who are committed to referential and causal theories of meaning and truth (and to so-called truth-conditional semantics), it has been thought necessary to identify or construct a domain of some kind in which objects of reference that are fictional maintain their special mode of existence. Fictional propositions are true, if at all, only in some sense within the cognitive domains—the discourses, or “semantic fields”—where the nonexistent is taken to exist, such as the story-world of an artistic fiction. This remains the case even when such fictions are present in primarily visual works, like films, since sequences of images also may be thought to instantiate cognitive messages that generate linguistic interpretations and construct story-worlds.

To speak, then, of worlds in the propositional sense as within narrative works, including fiction films, is to refer to numerous story-worlds, and these are basically variant and hybrid worlds of actuality and possibility, of reality and imagination.⁴ In every narrative fiction the true, factual, or historical is intertwined with the “false” and the merely fancied. The basic intuition here is that narrative “world-making” consists essentially of making imaginary modifications to parts or aspects of genuinely existing reality in ways that are more or less partial and subtle or extensive and obvious. In this view empirical reality—that is, the “real” or “actual” world—always remains the standard for the comprehension of every fictional and imaginary world. Representative of this propositional, world-variance position, Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick defend what they refer to as the “intuitive cosmology of fictional worlds.” This entails that “every time we encounter a new fictional story, we create a new world. The default assumption is that this world contains everything that the real world contains. We then modify this representation based on several constraints: what the story tells us explicitly, what we can directly deduce from specific conventions of the fictional genre, and, most importantly, how similar to the real world the fictional world is described as being.”⁵

Not just philosophers, but a number of literary theorists have embraced this general paradigm. Marie-Laure Ryan, for instance, argues that the metaphor of “textual worlds,” grounded in relations to discourse-independent objects of reference, is indispensable, in offering a less relativist theory of meaning as existing outside of texts.⁶ David Herman, a fellow traveler in contemporary narratology, claims that the heady contemporary works of Ryan, Thomas G. Pavel, and Lubomir Dolezel “have sought to overturn the structuralist moratorium on referential issues, using tools from model-theoretic or possible-worlds semantics to characterize the world-creating properties of narrative discourse.”⁷

There are also, however, a host of objections to various versions of the world-variance doctrine and what philosopher Kendall Walton calls the “Reality Principle” that it assumes.⁸ In terms of our actual engagement with fictions, Walton is among those who have rightly recognized that truth in the discursive and rationalist sense (appealed to in standard propositional conceptions of work-worlds) is inadequate to account for the sort of imaginative commitments that we regularly make in our encounters with representational artworks. In his important book Mimesis as Make-Believe he accepts the existence of fictional or story-worlds that, when analyzed, are found to contain large sets of descriptive propositions.⁹ Drawing on speech-act theories of language and meaning, Walton goes on to argue, however, that these are copresent with socially instituted “game worlds,” which all appreciators of representational artworks create by intentionally playing, in their imaginations, self-aware games of make-believe. In these activities works (or parts of them) function as guiding props. The theory of tacit game-playing in relation to the representational arts enables Walton to make a general distinction between all matters of reader or viewer engagement with fictional characters, and situations in which they are placed, and the actual truth status, if any, of assertions concerning such characters and their various attributes and actions. (Consistent with this general view, in seeking to better understand fictionality in cinema, Noël Carroll has adopted a speech-act framework and an “intention-response model of communication” inspired by the work of Paul Grice.)¹⁰

Other philosophers of art, such as Joseph Margolis and Nelson Goodman, go much further still in raising fundamental doubts about propositional conceptions of fictional worlds within works.¹¹ Margolis also questions key aspects of the games of make-believe thesis as Walton’s proposed alternative. Arguing against the views of Walton, John Searle, and others that the “imaginative work of the novel and pictorial representation” count as “fiction and make-believe,” Margolis draws a distinction between what is “imaginative” and merely “imaginary”: “simply put the imaginative is hardly limited to the imaginary.”¹² In fact, in separating these concepts, he points to the “power of modern cinema,” and to the “grand liberties in this respect afforded by filmic imagination,” as showing how “the play of imagination is subtler and freer than propositional commitments.”¹³ Both Margolis’s and Goodman’s positions are motivated in part by a wish to steer well clear of an age-old Platonic legacy: the pejorative sense of both the imagined and the fictional as equivalent to falsehood, and a corresponding diminishment of the full cognitive status and function of representational art.

CINEMA AND THE HETEROCOSMIC MODEL OF THE ARTWORK

Where does fictional-worlds theory and the different versions and objections to it, here only very briefly sketched, leave us with respect to cinematic worlds? Walton acknowledges that representational works are more than sets of propositions and more than imaginary (“make-believe”) realities. In what must appear to be both a truism and a very substantial understatement, he writes that the “critic or appreciator needs to be sensitive to a work’s features—the look of a painting, the sound of a poem—apart from their contributions to the generation of fictional truths.”¹⁴ It is quite clear that the complex sensory-perceptual, cognitive, and affective reality of any work of art, especially one as heterodox and composite as a film, cannot be reduced to fictional objects, representations, propositions, or a series of invitations to engage in acts of imaginative making-believe—if, that is, we are to be left with anything resembling Citizen Kane, Chinatown, Éloge de l’amour, or any other cinematic work as purposefully created and actually experienced in its full range of cognitive and expressive contents. From an aesthetic perspective a film, including its presented world, is not only or simply made (and intended) to refer viewers to aspects of common experience, as modified by creative imagination (freed from any burden of literal truth-telling). Rather, it is also something to be experienced “for itself.”

When many critics and theorists (as well as filmmakers) discuss the worlds of individual films or directors—for example, the “world of 8-1/2” or “Fellini’s world”—they often do not limit themselves to literal contents, in the form of discrete camera-given representations, or, as Dudley Andrew argues in this context, to “a catalog of things appearing on screen.”¹⁵ Nor do they apparently mean to refer to fictional characters, places, and actions alone, or even the stories containing them, but also and more generally to a “mode of experience” (Andrew) that these films create.¹⁶ The implicit concept of world appealed to thus often extends beyond the fictional reality or story-world abstracted from a film’s formal and medial presentation; it also includes that presentation itself, making use of the properties and possibilities of cinema—entailing camera movements, color schemes, rhythms, editing styles, music, production design, performance registers, soundscapes, and so on—as all contributing to the creation and experience of a readily identifiable cinematic world as a perceptual-imaginative and affective whole. To borrow philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff’s phrase, while film works do indeed “project worlds” of a fictional nature, they do so in their concrete, perceptual presence, as enabled by a medium that is capable of communicating audiovisually.¹⁷

In a cinematic work sensory and affective features are closely integrated with representational and semantic content in a way that is, moreover, far more pronounced than in any literary narrative. No matter how much films share in narrative and fiction-making processes to be found in other arts and media (and no doubt they share much), they are also fundamentally unlike any founded entirely (or primarily) in discourse. In and of themselves the worlds posited by logico-fictional and speech-act (or make-believe) conceptions of representational and fictional works are neither sufficiently “cinematic” (in the above senses) nor sufficiently aesthetic to be the basis of a world-model or mapping that more fully reflects the experience of film works and accounts for more, rather than less, significant artistic features of them.

Stepping back from philosophical and theoretical conceptions of work-worlds rooted in logical and linguistic paradigms, it is important to recognize that these have been preceded by another tradition of reflection on literature and the arts. Unlike the views I have mentioned thus far, this older scholarly tradition rejects the idea that created works are (or should be) primarily experienced, understood, and judged in close conjunction with the real world, and to logical and empirical truth, as a standard of reference. The long-standing position in question is associated with what has been called the “heterocosmic” model of art and artworks. It is anchored in a sharply drawn distinction between the abstract truths of logic and reason (or didacticism) and more concrete “ways of knowing” afforded by artistic perception and imagination. The noted literary theorist and scholar M. H. Abrams has traced the long and fascinating history of this general conception of art as entailing the creation of new worlds of experience, fashioned from sensuous and imagistic, as well as semantic elements.

As Abrams points out, Joseph Addison, Karl Philipp Moritz, Alexander Baumgarten, Kant, and other early and mid-eighteenth-century writers argued in various ways that a representational work of art is not in essence a replication or alternative version of reality as it is familiarly known but a “unique, coherent, and autonomous world unto itself.”¹⁸ Artistic creation involves the construction of domains of experience that are very largely self-sufficient and self-referential. Departing from earlier conceptions of art as in one way or another anchored in the traditional Western mimetic doctrine of the imitation of nature, and instead drawing inspiration from the Judeo-Christian theological notion of the Creation as an autonomous, spiritual act, the work of art in this tradition is not as much a reflection or imitation as a human-scale analogue of the natural world freely created by God (in the form of a work created “second nature”).¹⁹

It is noteworthy that the most developed early articulation of these ideas comes with the very birth of philosophical reflection on art (and beauty) in its more modern guise. More specifically, it occurs in the writings of Baumgarten, who is generally credited with founding aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophical inquiry. In claiming for art a more autonomous status within human activity and reflective thought than had traditionally been granted, Baumgarten defends the idea of a work as a veritable world of its own with reference to Leibniz’s logical and metaphysical conception of “compossibility” (i.e., the principle of internal coherence) as applied to poetic works: especially those Baumgarten calls “heterocosmic fictions,” which frequently violate the known laws of nature and establish their own unique relations among phenomena (Abrams 177). As Abrams discusses, Baumgarten contrasts logic, which is abstract and general and signifies essences, with poetry, which is “determinatively particular, individual, specific” (174). A poem is considered to be a matter of representation that is “qualitatively rich, abundant, imagistic” and constitutes a “concrete whole” with a pronounced “sensuous appeal.” Unlike the discourse of reason, poetry and imaginative literature convey a distinct poetic knowledge, which, in his Aesthetica of 1750, Baumgarten also describes as “esthetico-logic” (the logic of “sensuous thinking”) and contrasts with rational thought and argument (Abrams 178).

Abrams aptly summarizes Baumgarten’s subsequently highly influential position: “a poem provides sensuous knowledge of its own poetic world—a world governed by causal laws analogous to causal laws in our world but specific to itself; a world whose ‘poetic’ truth and probability does not consist in correspondence to the actual world but in the internal coherence of its elements; and a world that is not ordered to an end external to itself but by an internal finality whereby all its elements are subordinate to the progressive revelation of its par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Films and Worlds
• Part II. Worlds of Symbols
• Part III. Worlds of Feeling
• Part IV. Worlds of Truth
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index