Filmosophy

Daniel Frampton

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850100
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Filmosophy is a provocative new manifesto for a radically philosophical way of understanding cinema. It coalesces twentieth-century ideas of film as thought (from Hugo Münsterberg to Gilles Deleuze) into a practical theory of "film-thinking," arguing that film style conveys poetic ideas through a constant dramatic "intent" about the characters, spaces, and events of film. Discussing contemporary filmmakers such as Béla Tarr and the Dardenne brothers, this timely contribution to the study of film and philosophy will provoke debate among audiences and filmmakers alike.

FILMOSOPHY ® is a registered U.S. trademark owned by Valentin Stoilov (www.filmosophy.com) for educational services in the field of motion picture history theory and production. Mr. Stoilov is not the source or origin of this book and has not sponsored or endorsed it or its author.

part one

one |film minds

The thousands of tiny frames in a moving filmstrip act like the cells of the human brain: the same overwhelming rapidity of perception, the same multiplicity of many-faceted mirrors which effortlessly juxtapose the farthest horizons, suppress distances, abolish the bondage of time and space, embrace all the cardinal points [of the compass] simultaneously, and transport us in a fraction of a second from one extreme point of the universe to another!

– Emile Vuillermoz (1917)¹

Since its invention film has been compared to the mind, whether through analogy with human perception, dreams or the subconscious. The shock of seeing a world ’freed’ by man’s imagination caused many early writers to see a profound link between the mind of the filmgoer and the film itself, leading them to understand film as a mirror of mindful intent. In a sense film offers us our first experience of an other experience (the experience of the film camera as it were). Film seems to be a double phenomenology, a double intention: our perception of the film, and the film’s perception of its world. Thus our understanding of our world can be informed and changed by this other way of experiencing a world, this other view of a similar world. Whether resembling an omniscient mind or our own consciousness, seeing film as thought-like opens the door to new and interesting avenues. The task is to search through the poetic and the radical in order to provoke new philosophies of film style and meaning.

Early reaction to cinema was almost unavoidably philosophical. In a conversation published in 1985 Deleuze noted that ’cinema critics, the greatest critics anyway, became philosophers the moment they set out to formulate an aesthetics of cinema. They weren’t trained as philosophers, but that’s what they became.’² The first writers were philosophers by necessity – a new art demanded new thinking. These early writers put forward the case of film as art by situating film as the direct creation of the mind and imagination, so as to place it alongside music and painting. (The competitiveness of these early writers should also not be forgotten – who can come up with the purest, most poetic theory of cinema, and so forth.)

For example, in 1926 the screenwriter and theorist Gerard Fort Buckle, though mainly concerned with the effect of film on the mind, likened film actions (focusing, angles of frame, movement) to the actions our mind and/or body performs. His simple version of a film mind was ’the artificial or changeable angle of conception, that is, the angle of conception which is determined by the mode of expression or, in other words, technique’.³ Technique produces a particular conception: film thinks around and about its subject. There are no limitations to the mode of expression of film. André Bazin, co-founder of the seminal journal Cahiers du cinéma, perhaps hints at this kind of thinking: film ’has a thousand ways of acting on the appearance of an object so as to eliminate any equivocation and to make of this outward sign one and only one inner reality’.⁴

These writers who link film with the mind are few, and sparsely scattered through the twentieth century. They all saw ideas of the mind as an ultimate in relation to film. The mind, the brain and consciousness all became the locale of visual flights, without a wire or a safety net. Mindful of the plethora of metaphors that have gone before – film as eye, as writing, as music, as painting or inscribing with light – I intend to show the lasting importance of understanding all the ways in which film can be linked to thinking, whether fictional, human or other. In this chapter, the first of four to consider the history of the linking of film and thinking, I shall look at some of the mindful ways in which writers have conceptualised film: how film might be understood as a recording of the brain (Edward Small, Parker Tyler), a visualisation of our thoughts and memories (Henri Bergson, Germaine Dulac, Pierre Quesnoy), or similar in form to our subconscious (Emile Vuillermoz, Ricciotto Canudo); how film shows the subjectivity of characters’ thoughts in film (Antonin Artaud, Bruce Kawin), and whether film is itself a ’subjective’ or ’objective’ medium (Hugo Münsterberg); and finally how some writers (Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Béla Bálazs) have realised that film perhaps reveals another kind of thought, a future form of thinking.

Visualising thought

The most direct analogy to be made is that between film and the actual workings of the brain, and much of the theorising that posits this link has been inspired by viewings of experimental film, usually by those that actually work within and write about this genre. In 1980 Edward Small did not argue that film merely acts like a mind, but that (non-narrative experimental) film has the ability to show mental states.⁵ Small considered what it might be to correctly show various mental states in cinema: how it might precisely show vision, imagination, memory, dream (which provokes questions of how we use images in our thinking).⁶ Here the mental is only conceived of in relation to avant-garde, experimental, abstract or ’eidetic’ cinema. For Small (as for Eisenstein and Artaud, as we shall see later), only some sort of pure cinema can ’reproduce’ the human mind, and he argues that psychologists could learn from film’s portrayal of mental states, and filmmakers could also use psychological theories to perfect their representation of those states.

But it seems nonsensical to argue that cinema makes thought visible. The idea of film recording the brain conjures up (in a strange circular sense) abstract blurry images. The road that writers such as Small take appears a dead end – how could one ever exactly reproduce the brain’s imagery? Would not such images only make sense in their original form? It would seem more fruitful and more interesting to form a new course of thinking that was designed via film’s possibilities. Yet in 1972 Parker Tyler wrote with a similar bent to Small:

The whole film strip and its revolving images are simply an embodiment of the way the mind works … the closest we can come to the world’s naked presence through a medium, till perchance a machine be invented to record the image-by-image processes of the brain.⁷

For Tyler film is uniquely able to show how we think with our imagination – the function of film is to become this mental process. Tyler theorises a particularly ontological consciousness as regards his version of the film mind: he imagines how film can literally photograph ’the life of the mind as the mind converts images into ideas’.⁸ For Tyler the film work is a portrait of the brain’s content – yet, not only does Tyler fail to produce winning examples, but his poetic rhetoric and philosophy of cinema carries him on to theorise film from multiple and faintly contradictory perspectives. Ultimately Tyler holds a strange ’film-thinking’ theory, as his ’film’ thinks less via camera and montage than through the subjective actions of characters.

In her 1953 essay ’A Note on the Film’, Susanne Langer realises that film is free from spatial and temporal restrictions, and quotes approvingly from R. E. Jones’ 1941 book The Dramatic Imagination:

Motion pictures are our thoughts made visible and audible. They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do, and their speed, with their flashbacks – like sudden uprushes of memory – and their abrupt transition from one subject to another, approximates very closely the speed of our thinking. They have the rhythm of the thought-stream and the same uncanny ability to move forward or backward in space or time … They project pure thought, pure dream, pure inner life.⁹

And 19 years later V. F. Perkins also ventures a direct link, a mirror, between film and thinking, finding editing to be freely able to re-enact the dream-like imaginative associations of the mental process. He also assigns value to those moments,

when narrative, concept and emotion are most completely fused … such moments compose a unity between record, statement and experience … observation, thought and feeling are integrated: film becomes the projection of a mental universe – a mind recorder … where there is no distinction between how and what, content and form.¹⁰

It is here that Perkins slips from what might be unique, a mental universe, to what would be (if it ever could be) impenetrable: a recording of the mind.

But the most common analogy has been with our conscious thinking – with the perceptions of the mind: our day-to-day thought, our imagination, our memories. For the French film director and theorist Germaine Dulac, writing in 1924, the cinema can match in expression our thinking and emotions: ’What is more mobile than our psychological life with its reactions, its manifold impressions, its sudden movements, its dreams, its memories? The cinema is marvellously equipped to express these manifestations of our thinking.’¹¹ For another early theorist, Pierre Quesnoy writing in 1928, film can feel time and memory in ways similar to the novels of Marcel Proust – superimpositions and shifts to markedly different scenes painting the psychological evolution of characters (subjective experience and triggered memories, for instance).¹² The philosopher Henri Bergson also noticed a link between cinema and memory (namely, mental imagery) and wondered whether it was possible to see cinema as a model of consciousness itself. In an interview with Le Journal in 1914 Bergson remarked:

As a witness to its beginnings, I realised [the cinema] could suggest new things to a philosopher. It might be able to assist in the synthesis of memory, or even of the thinking process. If the circumference [of a circle] is composed of a series of points, memory is, like the cinema, composed of a series of images. Immobile, it is in neutral state; in movement it is life itself.¹³

Commentating on Bergson in 1992, Paul Douglass found him to be realising that, like philosophy, cinema ’has evolved toward a greater awareness of reality-as-mobility’, and that early cinema can be seen as ’an example of the spatialising tendency of the mind’.¹⁴ But Bergson was hostile to cinema, and attacked the ’cinematographical illusion’ for breaking up movement, and cutting up the fluidity of life into ’still lifes’.

Yet while hardly convincing – cinema and memory are both ’composed of a series of images’ – the analogy floats in a relationship between the intentional colouring of (past) experience in human memory (my rosy childhood), and the way cinema can colour its objects and subjects with all the elements of film form. Cinema believes in its objects just as we have a belief about our past. Film can thus possibly help us understand our own forms of memory and recollection. Metaphors and illustrations of memory are a starting point for realising film’s capacities of thinking. That film not only ’resembles’ thinking, but that using ’thinking’ as a concept for understanding film helps us solve some questions around film’s intention and meaning.

Perhaps the next level of theorising links film to our subconscious life (rather than conscious thoughts). As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Emile Vuillermoz noted film’s cerebral connections way back in 1917 – frames as cells, camera as perception, editing as imagination – and a year later suggested that film is ’an exploration of the subconscious’, adding that ’some day one might photograph the music of the soul and fix its changing visage on the screen in rhythmic images’.¹⁵ For the ’cerebralist’ Ricciotto Canudo (who inspired Abel Gance’s filmmaking), film presents and must exactly develop, ’the extraordinary and striking faculty of representing immateriality¹⁶ – that is, of representing the subconscious. Film presents (reveals) moments (slow or close or backwards or linked) that we could not ourselves experience normally. For Canudo, writing in 1923, cinema was like arrested thought, transmitted to others, and capable of expressing the soul of the artist – and this is significantly another kind of thought rather than a representation of our thought.

Usually hanging off these accounts of ’subconscious film’ are propositions (less frequently arguments) of film as dream. For Paul Ramain, writing in 1925: ’All the expressive and visual processes of the cinema are found in dream.’¹⁷ And for Jean Goudal, writing in the same year as Ramain, film is a ’conscious hallucination’,¹⁸ a waking dream. Yet for Deleuze, the dream is ’much too individual’ to be a template for film’s internal monologue – ’the dream is too easy a solution to the “problem” of thought’, he writes.¹⁹ And as Stanley Cavell argued, ’dreams are boring narratives’, and that to talk of films as dreams ’is a dream of dreams’.²⁰ In the end, dreams do not match up to the ways of film – film can be much more expressive than dreams, which actually seem quite ordered, with recognisable symbols and logic. Apart from any other argument, how people dream is usually very far removed from cinema, as we are never merely watching our dreams but rather being our dreams.²¹

Subjective minds

If a film has a person in it then an immediate possibility offers itself in the guise of that person’s indicated thoughts and perceptions. Remembering, dreaming, imagining as well as simply seeing. This is the realm of the fictional character’s mind. The writers of this section illustrate film as character eye, as character experience, or as character mind – and perhaps try to suggest that film is mostly character-subjective. For example, Yhcam, inspired by the Futurists, envisioned a type of ciné-theatre which would involve ’projecting the characters and, simultaneously, their states of mind’, not in the realm of hallucination or dream, but in everyday walking states – character thoughts ’made material by means of the cinematic image’.²² And Christian Metz, writing in 1973, notes ’the purely mental image: what a character imagines, dreams, the things he envisages in a state of fear, terror, desire, hope, etc.; in short what he does not see’.²³

The great actor and writer Antonin Artaud also saw the possibilities for showing subjective states in cinema, and referred to The Seashell and the Clergyman (directed by Dulac, scenario by Artaud) as a ’film of subjective images’.²⁴ He also wrote scenarios for numerous unmade films which revolved around the possibilities of filming (character) thought – as with ’Eighteen Secon...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index