PHI350: Philosophy and Cinema Week Two

This week's material was actually quite wide ranging.  We had readings by Rancière on Artistic Regimes and the Shortcomings of the Notion of Modernity, Jarvie, more broadly, on the Philosophy of film, Aristotle on what makes a good plot, and, of course, Plato's cave and a little on art theory (such as his simile of the chair).  The film for this week was either Buster Keaton's 'Our Hospitality' or 'The General', I chose 'The General' as I own a copy.  And, as usual, my tutorial question responses follow at the end.

I really enjoyed the Aristotle reading this week, although I feel he'd be a little shocked if he were to find himself situated in the Post-Modern world that Rancière describes.  Aristotle, although defining that which makes a good story (plot) is based upon subjective experiences, is quite an absolutist.  Maybe he'd even be considered, if he were around, as one of Jarvie's 'Protectors'.  The most fundamental difference between Aristotle's perspective and a post-modern perspective is that the post-modernist, through a devotion to egalitarian principles, allows a mixing, as it were, of genres and other aspects of 'art' that Aristotle would have seen as abhorrent.  I'm sure that Aristotle would have been a fundamental critic of Michael More's post-modern documentary style that allows for a mixing of historical facticities and poetic verse.  Although were Plato still here he'd likely criticise both for focusing upon mere mimeses/mimesis' (I don't know what the plural for mimesis is), representations, rather than suppressing the passionate desire for sensual pleasure (artistic experience) and focusing the mind upon the true world.  It would certainly make for a fascinating debate!

Anyhow, that's enough of my historical judgmentalism.  Let's have a look at the film for the week.

Buster Keaton's 'The General' is perhaps my favorite slapstick film, if you haven't seen it it's a must!  'The General' is a train and Keaton plays the engineer, or is it the assistant engineer, I'll have to double check.  Anyhow, in true slapstick style the hero is an object of objects, in 'The General' Keaton becomes the object of the train, amongst other objects.  This poses some interesting cinema related metaphysical questions.  As I mention below Aristotle argues that what makes a good plot is not the story of the hero but the actions that are focused upon.  'The General'  has the train as the main hero with Keaton as an accidental recipient of praise towards the end.  It seems throughout the entire film that the train has a desire upon the world around it and possesses a certain power to act within this world.  I won't go into too much of a spiel about this film as Noel Carroll has written a brilliant piece that I just couldn't compete with, 'Interpreting the Moving Image' of which chapters four and five deal specifically with Buster Keaton and 'The General'.

Below are my responses to the tutorial questions for this week.  Perhaps I'll be blessed with a comment or two as I'm yet to receive any on the tutorial discussion board.

Jarvie Reading

In what way does Plato's parable of the cave anticipate cinema?

There is a particular quote within the Jarvie excerpt (p. 48) that illustrates the relationship between Plato's cave parable and it's relationship with cinema, both the content of cinema and one's relationship with cinema. The quote is as follows (and was neatly indicated with parentheses by a previous reader!):

Cinema goers are not fettered, but they do concentrate their attention on the frontward source of light and sound and attempt to exclude 'distractions'. There is a single source of light above and behind them that casts shadows on the front wall. The shadows are artifacts, only some being reproductions of objects in the real world. Sounds are generated that appear to come from the direction of and hence out of the shadows. We are, then, re-enacting Plato's thought experiment every time we experience a film.

Jarvie goes on to argue that just as in Plato's cave parable if one were to take the shadows, the cinema projection, the projected reality, to be actual reality then he or she would be considered mad. One should not substitute the false reality of films for actual reality (p. 48).

Why is the situation of the 'cave people' in Plato's parable different from that of cinema goers? And why does Jarvie think this is significant for an understanding of cinema?

To begin with the people of Plato's cave have been there since birth and, even though the concept didn't exist in Plato's time, were not there of their own free will. The person who engages with cinema moves in and out of the world around him or her and the cinematic world akin to Plato's cave and thus routinely experiences the differences between the two 'worlds', allowing the person to discriminate upon both 'worlds'. Those whose discriminatory ability is limited in this relationship we designate as mad, as in the answer to the above question (p. 50). Also, and of fundamental importance, when we enter the cinema we are aware of the possibility of deception. This, argues Jarvie, is one of the qualities that make cinema going desirable (p. 52).

Jarvie does turn to a point that is instantly awakened upon reading his above defence of cinema in relation to Plato's cave parable, how does one actually know which is the real world and which isn't? What features designate cinema as non real that subsequently judge our other everyday experiences as real for isn't cinema just an aspect of the 'real' world? We aren't actually shifting between two distinct worlds when we participate in cinema, are we? These concepts are discussed in the answer to the following question (p. 50).

What is the phenomenological dimension of cinema? What characterizes cinema from the point of view of the viewer/listener, in terms of the boundaries between real/unreal, and imagination/reason?

Phenomenologically cinema is an aspect of our 'real' world. Many of the experiential qualities of participating in cinema are to be found outside of cinema too. One doesn't think that the chair she's sitting on in the cinema is a different ontological entity than the chair at her work desk, neither does one conceive of the darkness present in the cinema as different to that in his wine cellar. Cinema is, therefore, ontologically the same as our other 'real' world experiences.

What does happen in cinema, argues Jarvie, is that we create 'real' conditions within our 'real' world that allow us to to experientially engage with a non real world within our minds. We therefore know that this created world is a non real world (p. 51). We are not deluded when we participate in cinema, we subject ourselves to voluntary illusion that we are at all times aware of (p. 54).

Because cinema is an aspect of the natural world but differs from it certain ways it becomes nested within our perception of the natural world (p. 54-55). Cinema becomes a sub class of phenomenological experience that exists under and within what conditions we know are apparent within the natural world. because we are always aware of this relationship, cinema, like other nested attributes of the natural world, elements such as dreams and drama performances that seem to allow us entry into an other world, accentuates the characteristics of the natural world through highlighting the differences between the natural, or 'real' world, and the non real worlds these nested experiential conditions present (p. 55).

Rancière Reading

What are the three major 'regimes of art'? How are they characterized, and what sets them apart from each other?

Rancière (p. 20) argues that '[w]ith regard to what we call art, it is in fact possible to distinguish, within the Western tradition, three major regimes of identification'. These three regimes are the 'Ethical Regime of Images', the 'Poetic Regime', and the 'Aesthetic Regime'.

The Ethical Regime of Images.

Under this regime art is understood based upon its relationships. Ethics is fundamentally concerned with relationships, relationships between one's passions and one's rational mind, between one's desires and the desires of the community, and the relationship, and hence classification of an almost teleological kind, between the different origins and ontological statuses of the varied aspects of the relationship. Ethics analyses these relationships and postulates what the likely outcomes will be. Rancière argues that art can be perceived within such an ethical framework as questions arise as to the origin of the artwork and the truth of its content, and what the end, purpose, or result of the artwork will be (p. 20). Rancière (p. 21) uses a Platonic model to analyse ideas relating to the origin of artworks, the Platonic concept of representation, and how their end, their result, allows a value to be placed upon them:

These imitations...are distinguished by their end or purpose, by the way in which the poem's images provide the spectators, both children and adult citizens, with a certain education and fit in with the distribution of the city's occupants.

In this way, Rancière argues, people and art exist in a kind of relationship of which art is able to exert an influence. Because of this relationship art must be thought of in terms of ethics.

The Poetic Regime.

The

Poetic Regime

looks at the substance of art. Art's substance, the components that combine to create the final artwork, are defined through methods of doing and methods of constructing which therefore constitute, what Rancière (p. 22) calls, 'proper ways of doing and making as well as means of assessing imitations'. Rancière uses the example of the poem as an example here, an example that I needn't go into, but one that shoes how artworks contribute to a discourse of representing truth and images and, perhaps more importantly for this definition, how artworks are defined by their substance as in the poem's plot which constructs elements in certain ways that impact upon the essence of the image being represented or imitated (pp. 21-22).

Rancière also add that the Poetic Regime contains an element he calls Representative. Artworks are Representative in so far as they organise 'ways of doing, making, seeing, and judging' (p. 22). Artworks are fundamentally about being visible to the senses; how the artwork achieves this goal becomes classified under Rancière's Representative clause.

The Aesthetic Regime.

Rancière claims that the Aesthetic Regime exists in contrast to his position on Representation discussed above (p. 22). This regime is best outlined via a direct quote of Rancière (p. 23):

The Aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres. Yet it does so by destroying the mimetic barrier that distinguished ways of doing and making affiliated with art from other ways of doing and making, a barrier that separated its rules from the order of social occupations.

This may all seem a bit long winded, and perhaps it is, but what Rancière is attempting to explain is that art, under the Aesthetic Regime, no longer needs to conform to artistic genres, classifications and rules relating to subject representation. Art becomes singular, each artistic representation is its own unique entity that is its own expression, can portray its own unique style, and represent any subject in any way it sees fit. However, as the lecture this week explained, the Aesthetic Regime, through asserting its singularity and defining itself based upon concepts such as creativity, allows all sorts of paradoxical situations to arise. For example, the increasingly common assertion that 'my young child could have painted that'. Perhaps this need not be seen as negative however. Perhaps this is an example of how art can be an egalitarian enterprise. It still remains, though, that if no barriers are to be placed upon the Aesthetic Regime it will be increasingly difficult to define what an artwork is for what defines an artwork shifts from the artwork representing itself as art to the individual perceiving something as art. Perhaps my description of a tree, a naturally occurring entity, to an audience defines that particular tree as an artwork because now it is seen through a certain aesthetic perspective dictated my myself, a now self designated artist.

Rancière has a big problem with the notion of 'modernity'. Why?

Rancière (p. 26) claims that '[t]he notion of modernity...seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationships with the other spheres of collective experience'. Rancière argues that there are two variations in the understanding of modernity and its relationship with art.

The first is that of the autonomous nature of art, of art being identified with an 'anti-mimetic revolution' (p, 26). This would see artworks explore, and only explore, what is intrinsic about themselves such as painting exploring only the use of various coloured pigments and brush strokes and poetry exploring only communication (p. 26). Rancière has issues with this position as it is severely limiting. Rancière (p. 26) claims that there has been an 'overwhelming defeat of this simple modernist paradigm, which is forever more distant from the mixtures of genres and mediums as well as from the numerous political possibilities inherent in the arts' contemporary forms'.

Rancière (pp. 26-27) calls the second variation, or form of modernity, Modernatism by which is meant 'the identification of forms from the aesthetic regime of the arts with forms that accomplish a task or fulfil a destiny specific to modernity'. Modernatism seeks to expand upon Schiller's concept of a dichotomous ontological distribution and promote an almost Aristotle like middle ground. The concept of aesthetic autonomy, however, displays the limitations of Modernatism through illustrating the primacy of freedom and pure thought, perhaps some early form of contemporary egalitarian theory.

Aristotle Reading

What is the ideal length of a plot or story? Why?

Aristotle (p. 53) argues that 'just as organized (sic.) bodies and animals, if they are to be beautiful, must have size and such size as to be easily taken in by the eye, so plot, for the same reason, must have length and such length as to be easily held in the memory'. Now for Aristotle there is no rule of a set limit of time, as far as the concept of time is concerned, such as a performance being timed with a clock. What Aristotle does argue for is that the intrinsic nature of the plot or story, or in the case that he is most explicitly referring, a tragedy, will itself define the ideal length. It would be absurd to say that the ideal length of a plot, for example, is X minutes across all plots, for some plots will possess far more characters, or many more relationships, than others and to effectively communicate a beginning, middle, and end (see question below) would be impossible in these circumstances. So the ideal length of a plot for Aristotle occurs, in his own words, '[i]f the length is sufficient to permit a change from bad fortune to good or from good fortune to bad to come about in an inevitable or probable sequence of events, this is a satisfactory limit of magnitude (p. 53)'.

You'll notice that Aristotle is here referring to the tragedy. This needn't his summary of an ideal plot length to just tragedies however. This statement may be read as follows: A satisfactory length for any given plot occurs when the length is sufficient to fulfil the criteria of the genre and for the beginning, middle, and end to occur in a natural fashion. Of course this places the concept of the ideal length of a plot upon the viewer thus making it very subjective. Do remember, however, that Aristotle is arguing that the ideal plot length is akin to beauty and, after-all, isn't beauty a subjective phenomenon? (excuse the rhetorical question)

What confers unity to a plot?

There are multiple aspects to a good, and unified, plot in Aristotle's Opinion. To begin with a plot necessarily has three temporal characteristics, a beginning (that which has something following it), a middle (that which occurs after something and also has something else following it), and an end (that which follows something but has nothing following it). 'A well constructed plot' says Aristotle (p. 52) '...will neither begin at some chance point nor end at some chance point, but will observe the principles [above]'. Further it is not sufficient for a plot to be centred around a character for the main aspect of a plot, and more specifically the plot of a tragedy, is the action.

Aristotle provides the example of Homer's plots that focus on an action rather than the hero himself (p. 53). The Odyssey, for example, while certainly having a main and central character, is devoted to the action of this character rather than every event experienced by the character over a given time period. It is true that the Odyssey focuses upon a hero, Odysseus, but what is of prime importance for Aristotle is the fact that the epic narrates a single action of Odysseus, namely his return to Ithaca following the fall of Troy, rather than every event that occurred during this time frame.

The goal of a plot is, therefore, to communicate an action, a unified action, and, as Aristotle (p. 54) says, the plot 'must be the imitation of a unified action comprising a whole [Odysseus' journey for example]; and the events which are parts of the plot must be so organised that if any one of them is displaced or taken away, the whole will be shaken and put out of joint...'.

What are the differences between history and poetry?

Aristotle (p. 54) argues that 'the poet's function is not reporting things that have happened, but rather to tell of such things as might happen, things that are possibilities by virtue of being in themselves inevitable or probable'. Further, and from the same paragraph, Aristotle states that historians deal in prose and that poets deal in verse, and that poetry is of a much more universal form, being philosophical in nature, and being of a higher class than history as history deals with a particular given fact (such as it was 33 degrees Celsius in Brisbane on labor day 2007), whereas poetry is much more expressive and descriptive, good poetry doesn't just state a fact but will describe relationships with a given fact, or what a given person would likely do in relation to the fact.

There is quite a lot said in the above statement. To begin with it may appear that Aristotle is arguing for a temporal distinction between history and poetry, he says that historians report things that have happened (past temporal locations) and poets report, or perhaps it's better to say write, things that might happen (future temporal location). This is not what's occurring here however. Poets have just as much liberty to compose their prose in any temporal setting they desire, poems are not only set in future temporal locations and Aristotle would think it absurd to argue so. What Aristotle means when he claims that poetry deals with things that might happen, things that are possibilities, he is arguing that the poet uses his or her intellect and imagination to project likely situations, reactions, events, etc., onto a given occurrence, of which the occurrence may be a historical fact. It was a historical facticity that it was 33 degrees Celsius in Brisbane on labor day 2007, it was not a historical facticity but a piece of poetic verse that:

...The winds stirred overhead, the trees, tall and rebellious witness, ever opposed to the irrational whim of the unseen. His hand was gently swathed by the supple hem of his father's jeans, encased, secure, comfort. 33 degrees cried the busker, sweat down his nose, glistening and serene...