PHI350: Philosophy and Cinema - Week One

As part of my assessment for PHI350: Philosophy and Cinema I have to keep a journal which can be presented in whatever creative fashion one desires (although a basic text only, handwritten journal is fine too).  What I've proposed is that I keep my journal online, as an aspect of this website, part of my blog, as there are numerous benefits to doing so.  My T.A. agreed.  The main benefit that I see is the potential for interactivity.  Now I know that my website is fairly new and has a limited readership but the potential still remains.  The journal doesn't actually have to begin until week two however I will share some of my reactions and thoughts relating to week one too.  Also, if you click this link you'll be presented with a list of all of my journal entries.  This will be fairly boring at the moment (March 2008) as you're reading my first journal entry.

The film for this week was Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs (1991), a film about, for the very few of you who don't know, the relationship between a Psych. (I think?) student working for the F.B.I. and her search for a serial killer.  This relationship is mediated via an incarcerated serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter who has had a relationship with serial killer being pursued.  I'm not entirely certain why this particular film was chosen for week one other than it is a popular film and perhaps it would keep the students on side.  Anyhow, the lectures this week dealt with two fundamental concepts, Plato's Cave and the nature of Cinema.

The nature of Cinema was debated via Noël Carroll's 'Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image' which attempts to provide four necessary conditions of cinema without providing an essentialist model.  These four conditions are: 'Disembodied Viewpoints', 'Moving Images', and the last two come under the heading of 'A Difference in Performances'.  I'll paste in my responses to the tutorial questions below which provides greater detail as to what these mean.

Plato's Cave seems to always be the first point of call when studying art or anything that may be perceived as subjective.  The main aspect of Plato's Cave that I was interested in was representations of reality.  This was discussed in the lecture in relation to to the above mentioned text and the Silence of the Lambs.  The particular concept was looking at film as either a prosthetic device or as a mimetic device, how film represents the reality that it is portraying.  This was looked at through a particular scene of the film where a prosthetic device is used to enhance the vision of one of the characters.  I was more interested in how this concept related to film more generally as Plato's Cave provides a great vision of how the true world can be filtered and projected, as in cinema, into the material world.  I doubt that cinema projects a true world, however I would argue that cinema attempts to project true ideas.

Anyhow, we did have the option to watch a supplementary film this week, La Jetèe.  This film does a very good job of representing Plato's Cave and brings into question how to define film itself as it's composed almost entirely of still images.  Some of what I wrote on the PHI350 discussion board is as follows:

... This relates to film in numerous ways, ways that are apparent in La Jetèe.  Jetèe presents us, from not far in to the film, with a group of persons inhabiting a world where their perception of reality is filtered; they are living in Plato's 'physical cave', and their knowledge of the 'real world' post WWIII is filtered as they are unable to leave the cave due to a physical barrier - radiation.

Further, the main character is almost madly focused, even obsessed, with his memories, memories that shape his conception of reality, rather than for empirically gained conceptions of reality and purpose such as the experimenters' desire for wealth. Such memories, internal conceptions of reality that were 'deposited' before the main character entered the cave, are similar to Plato's distinction between the reality of the real world and the filtered reality of the cave. We even see the main character, via the progressive visits into the past, view this reality, a reality outside of the cave, a reality based upon his internal memory, come to believe that that reality is the real reality. His obsession with this new ontological world of objects that fascinate him (such as in the market scene where he looses the woman due to his obsession) becomes more important for him.  Interestingly, this last scene also occurs in Plato's cave allegory where one of the inhabitants of the cave gets the opportunity to leave and is initially blinded by the light of the sun...

I won't present much more here for this week however I've opened comments below for discussion on anything presented here.  Also, as I mentioned above, below are my responses to this week's tutorial questions.

Tutorial Questions

1. What are the necessary conditions an art object or event must satisfy to be called 'cinema'?

Carroll outlines four necessary conditions of cinema. These are:

Disembodied viewpoints

Carroll argues that one cannot orient their physical being with the objects being represented or communicated via the medium of film like one can with prosthetic devices such as binoculars. One doesn't claim to have seen the great wall of China unless one has been in physical proximity of the great wall of china. Carroll does place a small disclaimer relative to this condition however. He states that the Disembodied viewpoint cannot be seen as a necessary condition of film on its own for other mediums such as painting can potentially share it. This is where Carroll's other necessary conditions become apparent.

Moving Images

Carroll explores Danto's claim that for a given X to be a moving picture, a film, it is reasonable to expect to see movement in X. Danto claims that this explains the difference between films composed of still images such as La Jetèe and slide shows for, according to Danto it is logically OK for the viewer of a film of still images to expect movement at any given moment but this is not the case for slide shows.

Carroll has a few reservations with this position and, therefore, refines it as follows. 'X, then, is a moving image only if X possesses a disembodied viewpoint (or – to state it less anthropomorphically – only if X is a detached display), and only if it is logically justifiable to expect movement in X when the spectator of X is informed about its nature. Carroll does have a reservation with this position because he sees some dramatic representations as fulfilling these criteria. I don't necessarily agree for I feel that his disembodied viewpoint clause limits this possibility (although this may be satisfied by Carroll's next clause). Also I feel that if this definition is followed then once the viewer watches a film such as La Jetèe for the first time, of which it would be a film by this definition, any subsequent viewing would no longer constitute it being a film. I find it logically unsound to claim that X can both be Y and Z, where Y and Z are contradictory properties, without changing its substance.

A Difference in Performances

This is actually Carroll's final two necessary conditions. He lists them as '3) only if performance tokens of X are generated by templates and 4) only if performance tokens of X are not artworks.

By tokens Carroll is referring to how a motion picture or play relates to its source. For example the the video I watched today was a token of the Silence of the Lambs by Jonathan Demme. You'll notice that Carroll argues that to meet the necessary condition of a motion picture the token must be generated by templates. These templates may be such things as a film print, a DVD or even a piece of flash code. They all exist in a spatial location and are of substance. If the original motion picture copy is destroyed the motion picture may still exist in the form of one of its other possible templates. A play, while being a token, is not a template, it is an interpretation. If the given interpretation does not exist then the token does not exist. The interpretation, while in action, may have a spatial location, that is no longer apparent when the given interpretation is over. Even in subsequent performances of the play for each subsequent performance is a new interpretation with its own unique, and temporary, spatial location.

The last condition is an interesting one and by this Carroll is not meaning that there can be no artistic merit within a motion picture. What Carroll is arguing is that when one views a play one is watching a piece of art in action in that particular spatio/temporal location whereas when one watches a motion picture it is not art in how it is represented to the viewer; it is simply a mechanical process of delivery that will be, mechanical failures aside, represented identically upon every viewing.

2. How does film performance differ from theatrical performance? What is a 'performance', in the context of motion picture theatre?

I'll directly quote Carroll here. 'One difference between the performance of a play and the performance of a film, then, is that the former is generated by an interpretation and the latter is generated by a template. Moreover, this difference is connected to another, which is perhaps more interesting, viz., that performances of plays are artworks in their own right and can be aesthetically appreciated as such, whereas performances of films and videos are not artworks, nor does it make sense to evaluate them as such (p.78). Performances in motion pictures differ to those of plays, for example, as the 'recipe and the interpretations are constituents of the same artwork' whereas in a play each is its own separate artistic entity.

I was not originally fond of this idea. I was, however, inclined towards Carroll's claim that motion pictures are not performances in their own right like a play is. this led, in a way, to seeing that Carroll was correct to claim that there is a fundamental difference in performance between plays and motion pictures. A performance of a play is a spontaneous event that the actor begins and cannot finish until the scene is over. A motion picture on the other hand at east has the possibility of allowing the actors to retake scenes until everyone is satisfied and post production artists are involved in enhancing the storyline through audio and video editing. Even if one were to make a video recording of a play performance it would be different because of these elements. Further the play is a dynamic entity whereas the motion picture is a static representation.

3. What does Carroll perceive as the advantages of a non-essentialist definition of cinema?

Carroll claims that cinematic essentialism, as he calls it, 'holds that the essence of a medium, such as film, determines what style should prevail in that medium. Andrè Bazin wrote, for example, that “The realism of cinema follows from its photographic nature”. ...it regards artistic media as natural kinds equipped with unalterable, gene-like mechanisms that propel their destiny along one vector of stylistic development (p. 68).'

Carroll has two main objections to this position. Primarily he argues that artistic media are conducive to 'multiple, nonconverging and even potentially conflictive stylistic projects' and secondly that artistic media cannot be thought of as natural kinds because they are 'made by humans to serve human purposes'. Carroll uses the example of the development of the piano to illustrate that human desire is able to shape, and reshape, the development of the medium: 'it is not, ...[as with] essentialism, the pre-existing shape of the medium that dictates style, but style that dictates the very structure and shape of the medium.'

Carroll has reservations about assigning essentialist characteristics to cinema for he feels that in doing so it will limit any stylistic direction open to film makers. Rather than incorporate his four necessary conditions into an essentialist sufficient condition, Carroll instead argues for their use as interpretation tools rather than classification tools that '[legislate] what film and video artists should and should not do'.