The Palgrave Handbook Of The Philosophy Of Film And Motion Pictures 3030196003, 9783030196004, 9783030196011

Table of contents :
Foreword......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 13
List of Tables......Page 21
Introduction......Page 22
Part I: The Medium in Film and Motion Pictures......Page 24
Chapter 1: Film Ontology: Extension, Criteria and Candidates......Page 25
Determining the Extension of “Film”......Page 26
Criteria for an Ontology of Film......Page 30
Realism......Page 32
Illusion......Page 35
Imagination......Page 37
Film as Dream......Page 38
Film as Language or Symbol System......Page 40
Film as Thought......Page 42
Moving Pictures, Moving Images......Page 44
Further Conditions?......Page 47
Bibliography......Page 48
Chapter 2: Medium Specificity......Page 50
What Was Medium Specificity?......Page 51
The Return to Medium Specificity......Page 56
The Issue of Evaluation......Page 65
Bibliography......Page 68
Chapter 3: The Moving Image......Page 69
Why Images? Why Motion?......Page 70
Transparency......Page 74
Depiction......Page 76
Movement and Moving Images......Page 79
Conclusion......Page 87
Bibliography......Page 88
Chapter 4: The Art of Cinematography......Page 90
Preliminary Considerations: Picture-Making......Page 91
The Resources of Cinematography......Page 93
Film Stock and Lab Work......Page 94
Lighting......Page 98
Lenses and Camera Movement......Page 101
The Question of Authorship......Page 107
Bibliography......Page 110
Part II: The Structure of Film and Motion Pictures......Page 113
Chapter Overview......Page 114
Part I: Narration and Narrators......Page 115
Chatman’s Argument......Page 117
Questions About Chatman’s Argument......Page 118
Can the Actual Filmmaker Tell Her Fictional Story?......Page 119
Defending the Ontological Gap Argument......Page 121
Imagined Seeing at the Movies......Page 123
The Imagined Seeing Thesis: How to Formulate It?......Page 125
Part V: Reconsidering the Objection from Absurd Imaginings......Page 127
Conclusion: Further Issues for Cinematic Narration......Page 131
Bibliography......Page 132
Chapter 6: Narrative and the Moving Image......Page 135
Narrative Dynamics......Page 136
The Modality of Narrative......Page 140
Serial Narratives......Page 144
Narrators, Authors, Tone, and Point of View......Page 148
Bibliography......Page 155
Introduction......Page 158
Editing and Rhythm in Film Philosophy......Page 159
Rhythm and the Editor’s Cognition......Page 161
On Asking: What Is Rhythm in Film Editing?......Page 162
Materials of Rhythm: Time, Energy, and Movement......Page 164
Timing......Page 166
Pacing......Page 168
Trajectory Phrasing......Page 170
Purpose of Rhythm: Cycles of Tension and Release......Page 172
Conclusion......Page 175
Bibliography......Page 176
Chapter 8: Animation......Page 179
What Is Animated in an Animated Image?......Page 180
Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques......Page 181
Why Has So Little Philosophical Attention Been Paid to Animation?......Page 187
Appreciating Animation......Page 191
Digital Animation......Page 196
Bibliography......Page 200
Introduction......Page 202
The Place of Sound in the Concept(ion) of a Film......Page 203
The Challenge Against Mimetic Sound......Page 204
Medium Specificity Challenge: The Case of Sound......Page 205
Sound and the Threat to Expression......Page 206
The Conception of Film in Contemporary Philosophical Writings: The Absence of Sound......Page 207
Realism in Film Sound......Page 213
Cognitive Versus Perceptual Illusion......Page 214
Perceptual Realism Versus Convention......Page 218
Transparency......Page 221
Conclusion......Page 224
Bibliography......Page 225
Chapter 10: What Is a Screenplay?......Page 228
Authorship......Page 230
Screenplays and the Ontology of Cinema......Page 234
Screenplays and the Artistic and Ethical Evaluation of Cinema......Page 239
Conclusion......Page 243
Bibliography......Page 246
Part III: Approaches and Schools......Page 248
Chapter 11: Analytic Philosophy of Film: (Contrasted with Continental Film Theory)......Page 249
Introduction: Never Mind the Gap......Page 271
A Long and Winding History......Page 276
Language, Analysis, and Description: On Various Methods......Page 278
Of Science and Scientism......Page 282
A Short History of Historicism......Page 285
Arguing the Points: Clarity Clarified......Page 287
Conclusion: Beyond the Sinne of the Fathers......Page 290
Bibliography......Page 292
Introduction......Page 296
Phenomenology for the Philosophy of Film?......Page 298
Husserlian Phenomenology......Page 300
Husserl on Image Consciousness......Page 305
Perceptual Phantasy......Page 309
Heideggerian Phenomenology......Page 311
Dasein......Page 312
The Existential Structures of Dasein’s Being-There......Page 315
Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack, and the Embodied Film Viewer......Page 319
Bibliography......Page 323
Chapter 14: Ideology and Experience: The Legacy of Critical Theory......Page 325
Historical Background and Theoretical Assumptions......Page 326
The Benjamin-Adorno Debate......Page 329
Cinema and Experience......Page 333
Cinema as a Public Sphere......Page 336
Critical Theory in/and New German Cinema......Page 339
Ideology Critique and Experience......Page 340
Bibliography......Page 343
Introduction......Page 344
Skepticism and Perfectionism......Page 347
The World Viewed: Automatic World Projections and the Hollywood Star......Page 354
The Comedy of Remarriage......Page 358
The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman......Page 361
Reception......Page 363
Secondary Sources......Page 364
Chapter 16: Film Art from the Analytic Perspective......Page 366
Film as Art......Page 367
Gaut’s Three Levels of Discussion and Beyond......Page 369
The Emergence of Analytic Philosophy of Film: Sesonske and Sparshott......Page 375
Highlights in the Analytic Philosophy of Film After Sesonske and Sparshott......Page 380
Persistent Questions......Page 385
Bibliography......Page 386
Chapter 17: Cognitive Theory of the Moving Image......Page 389
Origins and History......Page 391
Grounding Tenets: Cognition and Naturalism......Page 394
Narrative Comprehension......Page 399
“Hot” Cognition and Embodiment......Page 402
Character Engagement, Sympathy, and Empathy......Page 406
Emotion, Affect, and Mood......Page 409
Questions and New Directions......Page 410
Bibliography......Page 412
Chapter 18: Aesthetic Criticism......Page 417
Bibliography......Page 444
Chapter 19: Poststructuralism and Film......Page 448
What Is Poststructuralism?......Page 451
Saussure and Structuralism......Page 452
The Critique of Structuralism and Poststructuralist Turn......Page 456
Poststructuralism in Film Studies......Page 458
Poststructuralism and Carroll’s Critique of ‘Grand Theory’......Page 460
Deleuze’s (Post-Poststructuralist) Film-Philosophy......Page 464
Bibliography......Page 471
Part IV: Philosophy Through Film......Page 473
Chapter 20: Thoughtful Films, Thoughtful Fictions: The Philosophical Terrain Between Illustrations and Thought Experiments......Page 474
I......Page 476
II......Page 480
III......Page 485
IV......Page 491
Bibliography......Page 494
Chapter 21: Contemporary Philosophical Filmmaking......Page 496
Some Preliminaries......Page 498
Raising a Philosophical Question: Waking Life......Page 499
Presenting a Counterexample to a Philosophical Thesis: Crimes and Misdemeanors......Page 503
Illustrating a Philosophical Thesis: Anomalisa......Page 504
Providing Empirical Support for a Philosophical Thesis: The Act of Killing......Page 509
Presenting and Supporting a Philosophical Thesis: Amour......Page 513
Conclusion......Page 515
Bibliography......Page 516
Chapter 22: Filmosophy/Film as Philosophy......Page 517
Film-Philosophy/Film as Philosophy......Page 518
Early Film-Philosophy......Page 519
Cavell......Page 523
Deleuze......Page 526
Thought and Cinema......Page 527
Frampton’s Filmosophy......Page 531
Film-Philosophy/Film as Philosophy......Page 534
‘Bold’ Film-Philosophy (Mulhall)......Page 535
‘Moderate’ Film-Philosophy (Wartenberg)......Page 538
Conclusion......Page 539
Bibliography......Page 541
Part V: Auteur Theory, the Avant-Garde and New Filmmakers......Page 544
Chapter 23: The Auteur Theory in the Age of the Mini-Series......Page 545
Chapter 24: The Question of Poetic Cinema......Page 552
What Is Poetry?......Page 553
Filmed Poems: Adaptation, Illustration?......Page 555
Maya Deren......Page 557
Piotrovskij......Page 558
Pasolini......Page 560
Epstein......Page 562
Poets and the Cinema: Surrealism......Page 565
American Avant-Garde Cinema......Page 567
Bibliography......Page 570
Chapter 25: Avant-Garde Films as Philosophy......Page 573
Avant-Garde Films Illustrating Philosophy......Page 577
Avant-Garde Films Originating Philosophy......Page 585
Avant-Garde Films Enacting Philosophy......Page 591
Avant-Garde Films Occasioning Philosophical Reflection......Page 594
Bibliography......Page 598
Part VI: Documentary......Page 601
Chapter 26: Show and Tell: The Identification of Documentary Film......Page 602
“No, it doesn’t matter”......Page 603
“Yes, it is important to know whether you’re watching fiction or nonfiction film”......Page 607
Showing: The Realist Approach......Page 609
Telling: The Relational View......Page 616
Show and Tell......Page 622
Bibliography......Page 624
Chapter 27: The Autobiographical Documentary......Page 626
Narrative: On the Differences Between Filmic and Literary Autobiographies......Page 629
Fiction and Nonfiction: Perspectives Within Documentary Filmmaking......Page 634
The Autobiographical Act......Page 637
A Brief History of the Autobiographical Documentary in North America......Page 638
The Question of Evidence......Page 640
The Autobiographical Act: An Alternative Perspective......Page 643
Bibliography......Page 647
Part VII: Movies and Society......Page 650
Chapter 28: Feminist Philosophy of Film......Page 651
Images of Women......Page 652
Spectatorship and the Male Gaze......Page 653
Audience-Film Negotiation......Page 657
Cognitivism......Page 660
Ideology Critique......Page 662
Constructive Feminist Philosophy of Film......Page 664
Subversion of Patriarchal Ideas......Page 665
Development of a Resistant Imagination......Page 667
Expansion of the Feminist Imagination......Page 670
Conclusion......Page 671
Bibliography......Page 672
Chapter 29: Race in Film......Page 674
A Brief History of Race in Cinema......Page 675
On Interpretation......Page 681
Aesthetics of Race in Film......Page 684
Double Consciousness of Race in Cinema......Page 685
Political Aesthetics of Race in Film......Page 688
And Yet to Come......Page 694
I......Page 695
II......Page 697
III......Page 701
IV......Page 704
V......Page 707
VI......Page 712
VII......Page 716
Chapter 31: Film, Art, and Pornography......Page 717
Definitions, or What Is Pornography?......Page 718
Can Porn Be Art?......Page 729
The Value of Pornography......Page 742
Conclusion......Page 750
Introduction......Page 752
Propaganda Simpliciter......Page 754
Neutral Propaganda......Page 755
Negative Propaganda......Page 758
Omnipresent Propaganda......Page 760
Top-down Propaganda......Page 765
Heterogeneous Propaganda......Page 769
Bibliography......Page 774
Part VIII: Movies and the Arts......Page 776
Chapter 33: Film and Fine Art: Automatism, Automata and “The Myth of Total Cinema” in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann......Page 777
Part One: The Defensive Legacy of Orthodox Film Theory......Page 778
Part Two: Automatism, Automata and the “Myth of Total Cinema”......Page 782
Part Three: The “Possibilities” of Film and Philosophy......Page 789
Bibliography......Page 793
Chapter 34: The Sonic Art of Film and the Sonic Arts in Film......Page 795
Two Overviews: Film Music and Philosophy of Film Music......Page 797
Turn It Up: Music Matters to Movies......Page 802
The Sonic Arts of Film......Page 807
Film Music and Theories of Music......Page 810
Conclusion......Page 812
Bibliography......Page 813
Chapter 35: Adaptation, Translation, and Philosophical Investigation in Adaptation......Page 816
I......Page 817
II......Page 821
III......Page 830
Part IX: Emotions and Psychology......Page 835
Introduction......Page 836
Cognitive Theory of the Imagination......Page 837
Fictional Truth in Film......Page 838
The Nature of the Imaginative Experience Elicited by Film......Page 842
Affective Response......Page 845
Simulation and Identification......Page 849
Bibliography......Page 852
Chapter 37: Empathy and Sympathy: Two Contemporary Models of Character Engagement......Page 855
A Note on Identification......Page 856
Empathy......Page 859
Basic or Lower-Level Empathy: Emotional Contagion and Kinesthetic Mimesis......Page 860
Higher-Level Empathy......Page 864
Sympathy......Page 868
Conclusions......Page 876
Bibliography......Page 877
Chapter 38: Affect and Motion Pictures......Page 882
Theories of Emotion......Page 883
An Integrative Approach......Page 886
Other Affective States......Page 887
Biology Versus Culture......Page 888
Empathy and Alternatives......Page 891
Do Movies Arouse Real Emotions?......Page 893
How Do Movies Arouse?......Page 896
The Paradox of Negative Emotions......Page 898
Emotion and Identity......Page 902
Conclusions......Page 903
Bibliography......Page 904
Chapter 39: Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Film......Page 911
Questions About Applying Psychoanalysis......Page 912
Plato on Poetry......Page 913
Why Apply Psychoanalysis?......Page 914
Poetry Without Pleasure......Page 915
Ambiguity of Application......Page 916
Pathography......Page 917
Character, Work......Page 919
The Special Case of Analysts in Films......Page 922
Film Theory......Page 924
Audience as Analysand......Page 927
Feminist Theory......Page 930
Stanley Cavell......Page 931
Bibliography......Page 932
Part X: Alternative Media......Page 934
Chapter 40: The Television Medium......Page 935
An Art of Television?......Page 940
Television Aesthetics......Page 945
Bibliography......Page 954
Introduction......Page 957
Defining Videogames......Page 959
Videogames as Films......Page 961
The Medium of the Videogame and the Art Form of the Videogame......Page 965
The Art Status of Films and Videogames......Page 966
Videogames as Art......Page 967
Videogames and Interactivity......Page 969
Smuts on Interactivity......Page 970
Lopes and Gaut on Weak and Strong Interactivity......Page 971
Self-Involvement and Interactivity......Page 973
The Ethics of Films and Videogames......Page 974
Videogames, Art and Ethics......Page 975
The Ethics of Interactivity......Page 976
Bibliography......Page 978
Technological Variety of Virtual Reality......Page 981
A Brief History of Virtual Reality as an Art Medium......Page 983
VR and Cinema: A Stylistic Continuity or Rupture?......Page 988
Body Ownership Illusions and the Unique Potential of VR......Page 992
VR Uniqueness in Neuroscientific Terms......Page 995
Index......Page 1001

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures Edited by  Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa Shawn Loht Foreword by  Errol Morris

The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures

Noël Carroll Laura T. Di Summa  •  Shawn Loht Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures

Editors Noël Carroll The Graduate Center City University of New York New York, NY, USA

Laura T. Di Summa William Paterson University Wayne, NJ, USA

Shawn Loht Baton Rouge Community College Baton Rouge, LA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-19600-4    ISBN 978-3-030-19601-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: TEK IMAGE / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

There really is no disentangling philosophy and film. Film is part of philosophy; philosophy is part of film. Most major philosophical issues are expressed in film in one way or another because film, properly conceived, is a way of thinking about the world. It’s about the relationship between our perception of the world and the world itself. It’s riddled with fundamental issues of epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of perception, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and on, and on. Let me give an example, which I use in my recent book The Ashtray: one of my favorite John Ford movies, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Looked at from one perspective, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an extended essay on reference, meaning and the coherence versus the correspondence theories of truth. Following Horace Greeley’s injunction to “Go West, young man,” Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) takes his law school diploma and hangs out his shingle in Shinbone, a lawless frontier town in a life-or-death struggle with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), gunslinger and goon of the cattle barons. In the final shoot-out, Stoddard seems to kill Valance. But when his conscience revolts against his newfound notoriety, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) recalls for him—and we, the audience, see—that it was really Doniphon who shot Liberty Valance from the shadows across the street. We, the viewers, and a few people in the world of the film—admittedly a fictional world but a world that we can easily imagine—believe that Tom Doniphon shot Liberty Valance. But everyone else believes that Ransom Stoddard shot Liberty Valance. We know that one view is true and one view is false. That is, one view is true and one view is false in the world of the film. And, make no mistake, films endlessly conjure with fictive worlds which are meant to be seen as real worlds in the sense that we are asked to think about what people believe in them and how they act on their beliefs. It’s at the very end of the film where these issues come directly into play. Ransom Stoddard and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) are returning to Washington v

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from Shinbone on the train; the conductor explains to both of them that he will do all in his power to ensure that they make all their connections and arrive in Washington on time. He adds as a rejoinder, “Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.” He says this while looking at James Stewart (Ransom Stoddard). Who is the conductor referring to? Is he referring to Ransom Stoddard or is he referring to Tom Doniphon? The conductor in the world of the film clearly thinks that he’s referring to Ransom Stoddard. But is he? On the one hand, his description uniquely identifies Doniphon; on the other, his intention is to pick out Stoddard. This has become a sticky wicket in the world of language philosophy—endless debates between people who feel that proper names are sticky labels and people who think that proper names are disguised definite descriptions (and, to be honest, a whole lot of complicated examples in between). But the point is that it’s just this kind of ambiguity in language that gives John Ford’s epic an additional oom-pah-pah. Because we’re thrown back on the ambiguities, the ironies, the uncertainties of the film. And in considering them, they multiply before our eyes. Is Tom Doniphon good or bad? He’s good because he allowed Ransom Stoddard to go on and serve his country and attain statehood for his unnamed western state. He’s bad because he committed a cold-blooded murder. A murder no matter how you look at it—possibly justifiable homicide, not according to the law, but by some higher moral principle if there is one. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance also has much to teach us about ideas of truth and heroism. After all, what can be more heroic than giving up everything for the woman you love and losing that woman in the process, as does Doniphon? What does such a movie have to do with philosophy? There’s a simple answer to that: EVERYTHING. It’s like one of those pictures you’re given and asked, how many animals can you identify in this image? How many philosophical issues can you identify in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? My guess is hundreds. Instead of trying to expound them, I would like to offer another example: Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948). Consider how our picture of the world is changed by adding and subtracting information. In The Fallen Idol, the young protagonist Phillipe (Bobby Henrey) has one version of reality, the police have another. And a man’s life hangs in the balance. Movies are particularly good at this—at providing versions that call attention to what is real and what is imagined. In that sense, they are ultimately epistemic. (I could be, perhaps, charged with indulging in that same kind of device in The Thin Blue Line.) The Fallen Idol is an especially nuanced film in this respect. The different perspectives it presents challenge an audience to confront both the mystery of what happened and its role as investigator and interpreter of that mystery. Near the middle of the film, Phillipe, a diplomat’s son in the care of his embassy’s staff, finds himself in the middle of a domestic crisis. He is roused by a quarrel between his father’s butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), and Mrs. Baines (Sonia Dresdel). Philippe spies the couple arguing at the top of the

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embassy’s grand staircase. He runs out to the fire escape and down a level to get a better view as the fight intensifies and gets physical. Just when it looks like Baines is about to throw his wife down the stairs, Phillipe goes down another level, anticipating her fall. He can’t see that the fight de-escalates as he does. Baines calmly walks off while his wife, who is trying to confront Baines’s mistress, runs to a nearby window and begins to pound on it. The bottom of the window tilts inward from the force of her blows at the top, knocking Mrs. Baines off her feet and down the stairs. It is at this point that Philippe arrives on the next level of the fire escape and has his expectations confirmed when he sees Mrs. Baines’s body tumbling down the last few stairs. As the camera follows Phillipe down the fire escape, we can peer into the building through windows spaced widely apart. We see that Phillipe does not have an unobstructed view of what is going on inside the building. We know, then, that we cannot trust his version of events. But can we trust our own? Phillipe’s perspective is an almost perfect metaphor for film itself. For the now old-fashioned idea of the persistence of vision. A strip of 35-mm film has 16 images every foot and is projected at a film speed of 24 images a second—24 images separated by strips of black. How neatly this matches Phillipe’s warped perception as he runs down the fire escape: the dark, blank wall of the embassy exterior and the images that he sees through the windows. Ultimately, there is no separating philosophy from film or film from philosophy. They’re interwoven with each other. I could name a few more themes, but it’s clearly a partial, incomplete list. Images and reality. The motivation of characters that are partially real and partially make-believe. Documentary (of all stripes and descriptions) and drama. Epistemology, ontology, and everything else you could imagine. The question isn’t whether there is philosophy in film. The question should be: how could it be otherwise? FilmmakerErrol Morris New York, NY, USA

Contents

Part I The Medium in Film and Motion Pictures   1 1 Film Ontology: Extension, Criteria and Candidates  3 Frank Boardman 2 Medium Specificity 29 Noël Carroll 3 The Moving Image 49 Nick Wiltsher and Aaron Meskin 4 The Art of Cinematography 71 Patrick Keating Part II The Structure of Film and Motion Pictures  95 5 Silly Questions and Arguments for the Implicit, Cinematic Narrator 97 Angela Curran 6 Narrative and the Moving Image119 Patrick Keating 7 On Rhythm in Film Editing143 Karen Pearlman 8 Animation165 David Davies ix

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9 Sound in Film189 Paloma Atencia-Linares 10 What Is a Screenplay?215 Ted Nannicelli Part III Approaches and Schools 235 11 Analytic Philosophy of Film: (Contrasted with Continental Film Theory)237 Richard Eldridge 12 When the Twain Shall Meet: On the Divide Between Analytic and Continental Film Philosophy259 John Ó Maoilearca 13 The Phenomenological Movement in Context of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures285 Shawn Loht 14 Ideology and Experience: The Legacy of Critical Theory315 Espen Hammer 15 Stanley Cavell: What Becomes of People on Film?335 Paul Guyer 16 Film Art from the Analytic Perspective357 Deborah Knight 17 Cognitive Theory of the Moving Image381 Carl Plantinga 18 Aesthetic Criticism409 Andrew Klevan 19 Poststructuralism and Film441 Robert Sinnerbrink

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Part IV Philosophy Through Film 467 20 Thoughtful Films, Thoughtful Fictions: The Philosophical Terrain Between Illustrations and Thought Experiments469 E. M. Dadlez 21 Contemporary Philosophical Filmmaking491 Thomas E. Wartenberg 22 Filmosophy/Film as Philosophy513 Robert Sinnerbrink Part V Auteur Theory, the Avant-Garde and New Filmmakers 541 23 The Auteur Theory in the Age of the Mini-Series543 Douglas Lackey 24 The Question of Poetic Cinema551 Tom Gunning 25 Avant-Garde Films as Philosophy573 Malcolm Turvey Part VI Documentary 601 26 Show and Tell: The Identification of Documentary Film603 Vitor Moura 27 The Autobiographical Documentary627 Laura T. Di Summa Part VII Movies and Society 651 28 Feminist Philosophy of Film653 Zoë Cunliffe

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29 Race in Film677 Lewis R. Gordon 30 How Do We Look So Far? Notes Toward a Queer-Film Philosophy699 David A. Gerstner 31 Film, Art, and Pornography721 Jacob M. Held 32 Propaganda and the Moving Image757 Sheryl Tuttle Ross Part VIII Movies and the Arts 781 33 Film and Fine Art: Automatism, Automata and “The Myth of Total Cinema” in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann783 Kristin Boyce 34 The Sonic Art of Film and the Sonic Arts in Film801 John Dyck 35 Adaptation, Translation, and Philosophical Investigation in Adaptation823 Garry L. Hagberg Part IX Emotions and Psychology 843 36 Imagination and Film845 Jonathan Gilmore 37 Empathy and Sympathy: Two Contemporary Models of Character Engagement865 Daniel Jerónimo Tobón 38 Affect and Motion Pictures893 Jesse Prinz 39 Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Film923 Nickolas Pappas

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Part X Alternative Media 947 40 The Television Medium949 Ted Nannicelli 41 Videogames and Film971 Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin 42 Virtual Reality as an Emerging Art Medium and Its Immersive Affordances995 Gal Raz Index1015

Notes on Contributors

Paloma Atencia-Linares  is a research associate at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She did her PhD in Philosophy at University College London (UCL), was a lecturer at the University of Kent, UK, for two years and worked for six years as a sound designer for TV and films. Frank  Boardman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Worcester State University. He has worked predominantly in the philosophy of art, with excursions into logic, ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. In the philosophy of film, he has so far been primarily concerned with film ontology, the rhetorical and cognitive values of film, and the nature and criticism of concert films. Kristin Boyce  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a faculty fellow at the Shackouls Honors College, Mississippi State University. She received a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2010. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellowship, a post-­doctoral fellowship from Stanford University, and a Josephine De Karmán Dissertation Fellowship. Her primary research interests are in philosophy of art, history of early analytic philosophy, and Wittgenstein. Noël Carroll  is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written over 15 books, including, most recently, Humour: A Very Short Introduction. He has also been a journalist and has written five documentaries. Zoë Cunliffe  is a PhD student at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. Her philosophical interests include aesthetics, social and political philosophy, and social epistemology. Most recently she delivered a paper, “Narrative Fiction and Epistemic Injustice,” at a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. When not doing philosophy, she is usually eating Asian food, binge-watching films and television, or exploring the city.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Angela Curran  is a visiting assistant professor at Kansas State University. She works on topics in ancient Greek philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of film, and is author of The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Aristotle and the Poetics (2015). E.  M.  Dadlez has a PhD in Philosophy from Syracuse University and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her work is mainly on the philosophy of art and literature, and on topics at the intersection (sometimes, more accurately, the collision) of aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. She is author of various articles on aesthetics and feminist ethics, as well as of What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions and Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume. She is editor of Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives. David Davies  is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. He is author of Art as Performance (2004), Aesthetics and Literature (2007), and Philosophy of the Performing Arts (2011). He is also editor of The Thin Red Line (2008) and co-editor of Blade Runner (2015), both in the Routledge series Philosophers on Film. He has published widely on philosophical issues in the metaphysics and epistemology of art; issues relating more specifically to film, photography, performance, music, literature, visual art, and dance; and issues in general metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Laura T. Di Summa  is an assistant professor at William Paterson University. She received her PhD from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center in 2014, where she worked with Prof. Noël Carroll. She has written and presented papers on autobiography and its developments, philosophy of motion pictures, everyday aesthetics, and issues related to the cognitive analysis of visual arts. She has been the Managing Editor of The Philosophical Forum since 2010. John Dyck  is a PhD candidate at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, finishing his dissertation on aesthetic value. He also writes on philosophy of music. Richard  Eldridge is Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy at Swarthmore College. He has held visiting appointments in Bremen, Erfurt, and Freiburg (Germany); Essex (UK); Sydney (Australia); and Stanford and Brooklyn (US). He has written widely on aesthetics, the philosophies of literature and film, German Idealism and Romanticism, and the philosophy of language, including, most recently, Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom and the Human Subject (2016) and Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019). David  A.  Gerstner  is Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Media Culture at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) College of Staten Island. He also serves as a member of the doctoral faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include: Christophe Honoré: A Critical Introduction

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(with Julien Nahmias, 2015), Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic (2011, Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2012), Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (2006), and The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (editor, 2006— New York Public Library “Best of Reference,” 2007). His co-edited works include Media Authorship (with Cynthia Chris) and Authorship and Film (with Janet Staiger). He is editor of the book series Queer Screens. Jonathan Gilmore  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York, the Graduate Center and Baruch College. He is author of Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind. Lewis R. Gordon  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut (UCONN)-Storrs, Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies, and Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University in South Africa. His books are Fear of Black Consciousness and his collection of essays 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (“On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race”), trans. Li Beilei. Tom  Gunning is Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media at the University of Chicago, and author of D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity, and over 150 articles. Paul  Guyer  is Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Brown University and Florence R.C.  Murray Professor in the Humanities emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his AB and PhD from Harvard under the supervision of Stanley Cavell. He is author of ten books on Kant, including Kant’s aesthetics, and of A History of Modern Aesthetics in three volumes (2014). He was General Co-Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant, and in that series was co-­editor and co-translator of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment and editor and co-translator of Kant’s Notes and Fragments. With Ted Cohen and Hilary Putnam, he edited Pursuits of Reason, a volume of essays on the work of Stanley Cavell (1993). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Garry  L.  Hagberg is James H.  Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has also held a Chair in the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge and Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; his most recent book is Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature as well as of his most recent edited volume, Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Co-editor of

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature and editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Hagberg is presently writing a new book on the contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, and editing a volume Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Espen Hammer  is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. He is author of, among other books, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (2002), Adorno and the Political (2005), Philosophy and Temporality from Kant to Critical Theory (2013), and Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (2015). He is editor of German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives (2007), Theodor W.  Adorno II: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (2015), and Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives (2018). He is also a co-editor with Peter E.  Gordon and Max Pensky of The Blackwell Companion to Adorno (forthcoming) and a co-editor with Axel Honneth and Peter E. Gordon of The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School (2018). Jacob  M.  Held  is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) Core (General Education) at the UCA in Conway, Arkansas. His philosophical work focuses on political and legal theory, pornography, and popular culture and philosophy. His most recent works include The Philosophy of Sex (7th edition), edited with Raja Halwani, Alan Soble, and Sarah Hoffman (2017), Stephen King and Philosophy (2016) and Wonder Woman and Philosophy (2017). Dr. Held focuses primarily on scholarly work that is accessible to and engages a broad audience. Outside of the academy his work has been featured in venues such as The Huffington Post, The Guardian, and PhilosophyTalk. Patrick Keating  is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Trinity University, where he teaches courses in film studies and video production. He is author of Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (2010) and editor of Cinematography (2014). His most recent book is The Dynamic Frame: Camera Movement in Classical Hollywood (forthcoming in 2019), for which he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. Andrew Klevan  is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the Oxford University. He is author of Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (2018), Barbara Stanwyck (2013), Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (2005), and Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (2000). He is also co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism (2011). Deborah  Knight teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Her early academic career in film studies was cut short because she supported analytic film theory in the days of dogmatic poststructuralism. She

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has written on filmmakers including Hitchcock, Eastwood, and Nolan and on film genres including the Western, science fiction, detective fiction, and horror. She has written about the structure of film narratives, emotional engagement with fictional characters, sentimentality, and ethical criticism. Forthcoming work will allow her to revisit Blade Runner as well as her skepticism about the claim that certain feature-length fiction films are philosophical thought experiments. Douglas  Lackey is Professor of Philosophy at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he has taught courses on film theory and the history of film. He is interested in connections between perception theory and film, and action theory and dance aesthetics. Shawn  Loht  has written on phenomenology, the philosophy of film, and ancient Greek philosophy. His recent publications include the monograph Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (2017). He has taught in the philosophy departments at Tulane University, Mercer University, and Pennsylvania State University. Aaron  Meskin  is Professor of Philosophical Aesthetics at the University of Georgia. He works on a variety of issues in aesthetics, the philosophy of food, and philosophical psychology. He has authored numerous journal articles and chapters and co-edited five books, including The Routledge Companion to Comics (2016), Aesthetics and the Science of Mind (2014), and The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (2012). Vitor Moura  is an assistant professor at the Universidade do Minho, Portugal, where he presently teaches a number of courses, ranging from logic to aesthetics of architecture. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-­Madison in 2006. His research projects address the issue of intentionalism in aesthetic interpretation, and perception and aesthetic experience. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the European Society for Aesthetics. Ted  Nannicelli teaches at the School of Communication and Arts, The University of Queensland. He is author of A Philosophy of the Screenplay (2013), Appreciating the Art of Television (2017), and Artistic Creation and Ethical Criticism (forthcoming). John Ó Maoilearca  is Professor of Film at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London. He has also taught philosophy and film theory at the University of Sunderland, England, and the University of Dundee, Scotland. He has published ten books, including (as author) Bergson and Philosophy (2000), Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (2006), Philosophy and the Moving Image: Refractions of Reality (2010), and (as editor) Bergson and the Art of Immanence (2013) and The Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy (2013). His last book was All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (2015).

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nickolas Pappas  is Executive Officer and Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New  York’s Graduate Center. He is author of several books, including the Guidebook to Plato’s Republic (now in its third edition) and most recently The Philosopher’s New Clothes: The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy’s Turn against Fashion. His numerous shorter pieces cover topics in ancient philosophy and aesthetics. Karen  Pearlman  is a senior lecturer at Macquarie University (Sydney) and author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing (2016). Her creative practice research film Woman with an Editing Bench (2016) won the Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) Award for Best Short Fiction and the Australian Screen Editors Guild (ASE) Award for Best Editing in a Short Film along with six other film festival prizes. Other publications from Karen’s ongoing research into editing, cognition and feminist film histories include “Editing and Cognition Beyond Continuity” in Projections, The Journal of Movies and Mind (2017), “Documentary Editing and Distributed Cognition” in A Cognitive Approach to Documentary (Palgrave Macmillan 2018), co-editing a special issue of the journal Apparatus titled “Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 30s” (2018), and the essay film After the Facts (2018), which has screened at many international film festivals, won “Best Editing” in Open Content at the ASE awards 2018, and has been accepted for publication in [in]Transition in 2019. Carl Plantinga  is Professor of Film and Media at Calvin College and former president of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. He is author of Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (2018), Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (2009), and Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (1997). Plantinga also co-edited The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (with Paisley Livingston) and Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (with Greg M. Smith). Jesse Prinz  is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New  York and was Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Prinz is interested in how the mind works and how philosophical accounts of the mental can be informed by findings from psychology, the neurosciences, anthropology, and related fields. His research interests include emotion, consciousness, cultural cognition, concepts, perception, moral psychology, and aesthetics. Much of his work is a continuation of the classical empiricist tradition, which emphasizes the role of perceptual experience and socialization in grounding our cognitive capacities. Prinz is author of over 100 articles, and several books, including: Furnishing the Mind, Gut Reactions, The Emotional Construction of Morals, The Conscious Brain, and Beyond Human Nature. Two other books, Works of Wonder and The Moral Self, are forthcoming, and a book on social construction is in progress.

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Gal Raz  is a visiting lecturer at the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and a researcher at the Sagol Institute for Brain Functions, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center. His fields of research include brain network dynamics, neuroscience of empathy, cinematic empathy, neuoroaesthetics of motion pictures, audiovisual brain computer interfaces, and virtual and augmented reality. Jon Robson  is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively in a range of areas within aesthetics (especially on the epistemology of aesthetic judgments). Outside of aesthetics, he works in a range of other philosophical sub-disciplines, including epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. He is co-editor of Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind (2014) and The Aesthetics of Videogames (2018) as well as co-author of A Critical Introduction to the Metaphysics of Time (2016). Sheryl  Tuttle  Ross is Full Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She researches at the intersection of art, politics and morality. She has written extensively about propaganda, developing the Epistemic Merit Model and its application to a variety of artworks, media and social circumstances. She is currently expanding her research focus to include political humor and aesthetic akrasia. Robert  Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Australia. He is author of Understanding Hegelianism (2007), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (2016), and Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019). He is also on the editorial boards of the journals Film and Philosophy, Film-Philosophy, and Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind. Daniel Jerónimo Tobón  teaches at the Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia, and is a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has written on aesthetics, contemporary Colombian art and film, art and memory, and emotions. Malcolm Turvey  is Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Tufts University. He is also an editor of the journal October. He is author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (2008) and The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (2011), and co-editor of Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (2001). His Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism will be published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Thomas E. Wartenberg  is a senior research fellow in Philosophy at Mount Holyoke College. His main areas of focus are aesthetics, the philosophy of film, and philosophy for children. Among his publications are Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism, Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide, and Mel Bochner: Illustrating Philosophy.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

He has edited or co-edited four volumes on philosophy and film, most recently Fight Club (Philosophers on Film). He is Film Editor for Philosophy Now. Nick Wiltsher  is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow at the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Philosophical Psychology. He has previously been employed at Auburn University (AL, US), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre, Brazil), and the University of Leeds (UK). He works on imagination in the philosophy of mind and on a number of topics in aesthetics.

List of Tables

Table 7.1 Table form distillation of the three questions being asked and the ideas being proposed in response to each Table 7.2 Table form distillation of the three operations, or tools, editors deploy and each of their three suboperations

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Introduction

At present, we are in the midst of a heyday in the philosophy of film, or, more accurately, the philosophy of the moving image or motion picture, whose practice comprises not only film, but television, video, video games, digital imaging, virtual reality, and technologies yet to come and which are delivered by a comparable array of platforms. Never before have so many philosophers, from such a wide variety of theoretical traditions, taken this measure of professional interest in the movies. These interests, moreover, range across the philosophical division of labor, raising metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and, of course, aesthetical questions with respect to cinema. In this anthology, we have attempted to provide a wide sampling of the many issues from a diverse range of schools that are philosophically interrogating the moving image today. Philosophers such as Hugo Munsterberg and György Lukacs took an early interest in film, commenting upon it even before 1920. Moreover, writers who were often classified as film theorists—such as Béla Balász, Rudolf Arnheim, André Bazin, and V.F. Perkins—were, even when not card-carrying philosophers, nevertheless philosophically informed, and they pursued the philosophical investigation of film in the process of enfranchising film as an art form and establishing what they identified as its constitutive norms. In the English-speaking world, from the standpoint of professional philosophy, the publication in 1971 of Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film was a seminal event. Here was a book-length treatise on film by a member of Harvard University’s philosophy department, arguably one of the most distinguished philosophy departments in the Anglo-American world, whose faculty at the time included many giants of twentieth-century philosophy (such as W.V.O. Quine and John Rawls). Cavell’s work provided both inspiration and legitimatization to younger philosophers who grew up movie-mad and aspired to unite their love of film with their love of philosophy. All the authors in this volume belong to the generations who, if they have not followed Cavell’s lead, have benefitted from the opportunity he made possible, if only institutionally. They have gone where philosophers have never gone xxv

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Introduction

before and recorded in depth the sophistication of the contemporary philosophical conversation focused on the moving image. Perhaps needless to say, this anthology has not covered every imaginable subject in the expanding area of the philosophy of cinema, a moving target, if there ever was one. But we, the editors, have attempted to canvas topics at greater length than previous volumes in this genre, and we have encouraged our authors to attempt original philosophizing in their contributions. In this regard, we hope that this volume will not only track past and recent achievements in the philosophy of the moving image but also pave the way for the future. Noël Carroll

PART I

The Medium in Film and Motion Pictures

CHAPTER 1

Film Ontology: Extension, Criteria and Candidates Frank Boardman

Our concern in this chapter is with a set of issues central to the ontology of film. “Ontology” traditionally refers to the branch of philosophy that deals with questions about the being and nature of things. We can safely assume that films exist or even less controversially that there are some films. So, our first question in the ontology of film need not be “are there films?” but rather “what is film?” An even clearer statement of our primary question may be “what sort of thing is film?” Armed with an answer to that question, we could wade more confidently into secondary issues regarding films’ constitutive parts or the conditions under which they persist through time. But alas, while we have no shortage of available theories about the nature of film, there is nothing like consensus around any one of them. This has not been an entirely unfavorable condition, however. A good number of critical insights and useful observations about film have emerged out of philosophers’ debates, arguments and disagreements over film ontology. Another sort of disagreement, though, has been less beneficial. These are disagreements over the question itself, which largely emerge from two sources. First, we don’t enjoy antecedent agreement on the class of things that are films (the extension of “film”). And we can’t expect to agree on what makes things films if we don’t first agree on which things are films. Second, we don’t yet agree on what we’re asking. That is to say, we don’t agree on criteria for an adequate answer. So, instead of offering or defending a particular theory of film ontology in this chapter, I’d like to discuss the proper extension of “film” and propose a set

F. Boardman (*) Worcester State University, Worcester, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_1

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of criteria for selecting an ontological theory of it. I’ll then consider some ­current and likely candidate theories using those criteria. By way of conclusion, I’ll offer some suggestions for ways the discussion might move forward.

Determining the Extension of “Film” We should notice right away that there is no natural or privileged use of “film” or set of films independent of some particular theoretical or conversational interest. A frustrated aficionado of celluloid and acetate film might be interested in the nature of the set of objects that ranges from Louis Le Prince’s experiments to those few hold-out 35-mm theaters scattered around the world. But most of us do not think that the history of film ended with the swift triumph of digital projection in this decade. The films that dominate the cultural landscape are still being made, distributed, seen, discussed and written about, even if there is no longer any film involved. The “film” in this sense relies on Le Prince’s and Edison’s technologies, but doesn’t emerge until others use that technology to say and tell. And it is not entirely clear when that activity starts. Are the Lumiere brothers’ early projected films the start of this history or does it wait on the first narrative film (which may also have been theirs)? We can’t just be interested in narrative films per se, lest we exclude whole swaths of genuine films more likely to be seen at the gallery than the multiplex. But then again, it is not merely the technology of moving images in which we’re interested. Whatever films are, they don’t include security camera footage or Skype conversations. We should think of ourselves as primarily investigating an art form. This is not because we should assume from the outset that there is an ontological difference between last night’s security footage and Rear Window, but because only the art film (understanding that term as widely as is reasonably possible) provides us with a special investigative interest.1 The cultural, aesthetic and historical interests we take in Hitchcock’s masterpiece2 motivate questions about its nature. And because we take similar interests in other films, we should not assume that Rear Window is ontologically sui generis. Just as it is the art form status of films that arouses our interest in its ontology, the ontology of film has figured prominently in the establishment of film as an art. As moving pictures matured from curiosity to art form, the live-­ action narrative film naturally invited comparisons to two close cousins. Focusing on the technology and means of display, the film is kin to photography. It is in fact photography itself, multiplied, put in motion and coupled (eventually) with sound. Focusing instead on their content, films are in the family of theater and continue the ancient history of drama and comedy.

1  For a slightly different (and stronger) take on the discontinuity between the technical and artistic natures of film, see Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, Emiliano Battista, trans. (Oxford: Berg 2001) 11–12. 2  Yes it is.

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This situation presented something of a dilemma for the early advocate of films’ art status. On the one hand, the art status of photography was itself in question. On the other, if films are artworks in the theatrical tradition, then the artwork in question may just be the actions filmed rather than the film itself. Thus, the price for resting the possibility of films’ art status on similarity with another art form is that it makes room for a skeptic to claim that film is no distinct form, but rather a mode of presentation for the form to which it’s compared. This central problem is still with us, even if the art status of (some) photography is more of a given today. If film can be an art form, it must be a kind of thing that is (a) capable of being art and (b) different in some significant and relevant way from existing art forms. Given their proximity, the pressing challenge for (b) is to distinguish film from photography and theater, though we want to be able to distinguish it from painting, poetry and music as well.3 We have good reason, then, to want an ontology of film as an art form. And, in fact, it is difficult to see what other compelling reason we could have for wanting an ontology of film. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by thinking that the ontology of art is just more interesting than the ontology of security or communication technology. Even so, there does not necessarily need to be an ontological difference between the film and the security footage in order for there to be a difference in their art status, unless there is an ontological difference between art and nonart (but that would be another matter). There is, after all, at least a prima facie distinction to be made between ontological and art-status questions. In the present context, the former ask “what makes this thing a film and not something else?” While the latter ask, “what makes this film a work of art and not something that is not a work of art?” There are two reasons, though, to confine the extension of “film” in question to filmic works of art and exclude security camera footage, home movies, Skype conversations and the like. The first follows from the kind of interests we just discussed. It is captured in what David Davies calls the ‘pragmatic constraint’ on the ontology of art: Artworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are termed “works” in our reflective critical and appreciative practice; that are individuated in the way such “works” are or would be individuated, and that have the modal properties that are reasonably ascribed to “works,” in that practice.4

3  I should note that there is no universal agreement on the need to distinguish film from other arts. Alain Badiou, for instance, thinks that “cinema is nothing but editing” and that otherwise it is the “plus-one of the arts” taking from music, stage, literature and even painting without contributing anything essentially artistic of its own. Alain Badiou, Cinema, Susan Spitzer, Trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 2017) 97; 89. 4  David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 18.

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This “methodological principle guiding philosophical inquiry,” Davies notices, is at least implicitly at work in many and otherwise various ontologies of art.5 Sherri Irvin later makes explicit use of the same criterion, (rightfully) preferring to call it the “critical practice constraint.”6 Applying the critical practice constraint to film suggests an ontological difference between (for instance) security camera footage and live-action narrative films. It is inappropriate to criticize security footage for its aesthetic or otherwise formal faults. Regardless of how films are properly individuated, the question of individuation does not arise for security footage. Footage has duration, not individuality. And the same film could have different endings. If some duration of security footage has a different ending (and “ending” is not even the right word here), it is a different bit of footage. The second reason becomes apparent when we consider the difference between actual security camera footage and security-camera-footage-like shots in a film. Certain shots in The Wire (2002–2008) or The Bourne Identity (2002), for instance, let you know that a character is being filmed by providing the perspective of the security camera filming. The entire movie Look (2007) is shot from such perspectives. But in these instances, the shots themselves establish the existence of a fictional and unseen security camera. Actual security cameras require the existence of an actual unseen security camera. These are not merely ways of seeing the film and the footage. Something is fundamentally different about the two. One camera is fictional and the other actual. Surely, the difference between the fictional and the actual is ontological. This is not to say, however, that the ontological difference between security camera footage (and the like) and film as we mean to discover it must track the fiction/non-fiction divide. There are, after all, plenty of non-fiction films, both documentaries (in the traditional sense of “documentary,” we’ll consider another in a little bit) and nonnarrative (what are often and sometimes pejoratively called “experimental”) films. We could imagine, in fact, actual security footage being repurposed as such a film. But then it would have been transformed (or “transfigured” in Arthur Danto’s parlance).7 And that transformation is a transformation in the kind of thing that it is. It will go from a mere recording to something with a point, a meaning. It will go from having only duration to an individual identity. Its modal properties will change. It will become subject to aesthetic evaluation. It will, in short, become a new kind of thing. So, only those moving images8 that might be reasonably thought of as artworks are films in the sense under consideration. But there is still some work to be done to say which artworks are members of that class. The first couple of  Davies, Art as Performance, 18–19.  Sherri Irvin, “The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks” in New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones (London: Macmillan, 2008), 2. 7  Arthur Danto, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33 (1974). 8  Or, as we’ll see a little later, potentially moving images. 5 6

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questions involve the technology of displaying films—even (as we discussed above) when the technology that is standard is changing over time. First, is such technology necessary? For instance, if films involve moving images, then so do flip books, and we might be reluctant to admit flip books into the relevant class.9 But perhaps we shouldn’t be too hasty. Bill Brand’s “Masstransiscope” is a series of paintings that appear as an animation to riders of the Q train after they leave Dekalb Avenue on their way to Manhattan from Brooklyn. The moving-image effect is delivered by stationary pictures viewed from a moving train rather than moving pictures viewed from a stationary position. The same visual effect could have been carried out in the normal way, with those particular pictures in motion. In fact, it is theoretically possible to set up giant slides of each frame of The Godfather (1972) separated by black pillars at just the right distance and have a train pass them all at just the right speed while piping in synchronized audio across the loudspeakers. The overall effect would be a viewing of The Godfather by other (albeit rather extraordinary) means. And The Godfather is a film. Then is the technology of film display enough to guarantee a film? Mike Hoolboom’s White Museum consists visually of half an hour of film leader (the empty film used by technicians to mark beginnings and endings) projected on a screen. Most of us would want to count this as a film, even if it is the kind that could only be made as a minimalist comment on the nature of film.10 So, once art status is established or assumed, it seems that uses of certain display technologies are sufficient for a work to be a film. But what about the images that are displayed? Most importantly, is there a useful ontological category that captures both animation and live-action films? Three considerations speak in favor of there being one, or at least our defaulting to the position that there is one in the absence of evidence to the contrary. First, there are the obvious commonalities. Both involve displayed moving images typically (these days anyway) accompanied by sound. Both typically tell stories, involve acting and have a common lineage as narratives in literature and theater. Second, animations and live actions occupy the same place in the cultural landscape. They are shown in the same theaters, on the same televisions and via the same websites. They’re reviewed and discussed in the same sections of newspapers. Third, if they were distinct categories, there would be a great and ever-greater number of bothersome borderline and otherwise unclear cases. There are the mixtures like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and The Phantom Menace (1999), entirely Rotoscoped films like A Scanner Darkly (2006), and the action blockbusters that leave virtually no shot untouched by visual effects. Admittedly, none of these considerations are quite definitive. It may be that the right 9  Noël Carroll, for instance, thinks these are outside the relevant class. See “Defining the Moving Image,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Especially 131. 10  For more on such cases and an account that puts the sufficiency of cinematic display technology front and center, see Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2006).

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­ ntological account separates animation from live action. But such an account o has the dual burdens of a proof that we tend to be in error and a diagnosis for that error. Finally, while we’re on the topic of borderline cases, there may be a question about the status of mixed-media works that involve film. Carl Hancock Rux’s Mycenaean involves live acting on a stage accompanied by projected moving images. And the band Neurosis used to accompany their performances with original video projected around them. But these sorts of works shouldn’t over-­ worry us. These hybrid works are plausibly combinations of various art forms.11 It seems unlikely that they would need any special ontological account. They are, as we should expect, works whose parts belong to various categories, whatever those categories turn out to be.

Criteria for an Ontology of Film Having sketched an outline for the extension of the operative sense of “film,” we’re in a better position to provide some criteria for a good theory of film ontology. If the goal of such a theory is to answer the question “What is film?” or “What makes this thing I’m watching a film and not something else?”, then the primary condition on a successful theory is that it provides necessary conditions for membership in that extension that together come as close as possible to being sufficient. That is to say, we’re after a set of conditions, each one of which must be present in something if that thing is to be a film, and (if possible) all of those conditions being present in something guarantees that that thing is a film. It may be that no set of conditions will be sufficient because films may share an ontology with non-films. But we should not assume this at the outset. And even if sufficiency is impossible or undesirable, we should still aim at coming as close as we can to it in order to say something interesting about the nature of film. So, we’re after properties common to everything in the class described above that help us distinguish those things from nonmembers. As should be clear from our earlier conversation, we at least want to be able to distinguish film from other art forms, especially photographs, paintings and theater. Much of the usual criteria for theory selection apply to ontologies of film in a number of interrelated ways. Such theories ought to be consistent, at least in the absence of evidence of some dastardly paradox waiting at the heart of film. They ought to be plausible as well. That is to say, we ought—ceteris paribus— to adopt the ontology that forces us to amend fewer of our present beliefs. Similarly, the best ontological theory will, again ceteris paribus, be simpler. We ought to prefer the theory that forces us to take on fewer new beliefs. Especially important in this context is that we should take on as few new ontological entity types as we reasonably can. The best theory will also produce more 11  My use of “hybrid” here is akin to Jerrold Levinson’s in “Hybrid Art Forms,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 18 (1984).

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­ tility. There is more that we can do with the most preferable theory, be it u opening new lines of research, informing our appreciation of films or otherwise guiding our actions. Finally, explanatory power is as important a criterion for adjudicating between ontological theories of film as it is in other contexts. So what ought to count as data for such a theory? For starters, an ontological theory ought to shed some light on our common experience of film and our everyday discourse about films. The latter will include a wide range of practices, from the writings of professional critics to watercooler talk about recent summer blockbusters. It’s this kind of consideration that motivates the “critical practice constraint” we discussed earlier. There may, however, be something wrong with our common experience of or discourse about film, and we should be open to the possibility that the best ontology of film can show us this. But again, this places a heavy burden of proof and diagnosis on the theory that would attempt to do so. In the absence of both of these, our default demand ought to be that a theory help us explain rather than explain away our typical experiences and practices. Of special interest regarding explanatory power are two puzzles that Danto introduces in “Moving Pictures,” both of which point to crucial and fundamental issues.12 The first, in very Danto-nian style, involves indiscernible counterparts: the photographic slide and the unmoving film image, projected side by side onto a screen or wall. The two are exactly the same to all appearances, and yet there is an important difference between them. Because that difference is a difference in kind or, to be a bit more dramatic, mode of being, it is incumbent on an ontology of film to explain the difference. One way of looking at this problem is that it raises the stakes on a prior condition on an ontology of film: that it should appropriately distinguish film and photography. The second puzzle that Danto considers has—I think unfortunately— received less attention, at least as an issue in film ontology. This is the distinction between what Danto calls a “screenplay” and a “documentary” film. Here, “screenplay” does not mean the textual plan for or documentation of a film, nor is “documentary” the genre designation with which we’re most familiar. Rather, they refer to two ways of viewing a film, which correspond to two ways of viewing given filmed objects. When we watch that famous scene in The Godfather, what we see is the result of the work of a camera trained on Al Pacino walking into a staged restaurant-like setting with a prop gun. When we see Al Pacino acting with a prop in his hand, we view them as motifs and The Godfather as documentary. We are literally seeing what the camera documents. Alternatively, we can see the same thing before us as Michael Corleone walking into a restaurant dining room with a gun in his hand. That is to view Pacino and the prop as models and The Godfather as screenplay. We do not yet have an ontological distinction (much less a problem) but rather two ways of seeing. The ontological issue arises when we notice that some films can only—at least  Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (1979).

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without error—be viewed as documentaries, others as screenplays or documentaries. No one in the security camera footage is a model, and it is not at all a screenplay. But there’s still no real trouble, since typically no one is acting in security footage. The really difficult questions start when we consider films of plays. When my son acts in a school play, he is a model for whatever fictional character he’s playing. And yet my recording from the third row cannot be viewed as a screenplay even though it is recording someone being a model. I can slip into viewing him as model, but what I’m viewing is him-as-model within the play that is then filmed, not in the film itself. Given the facts (a) that there is an ontological difference between the film that can be viewed as screenplay and the film that cannot and (b) that the screenplay is, among films that may count as art, more common than those that cannot, it is incumbent on an ontology of film as an art form that it account for or at least help explain this difference. Until we have done so, we have not really distinguished film from theater. Incidentally, we also risk turning the in-theater handheld camera bootleg of a movie into its own work. Two one-time ambitions for the ontology of art are notably absent from these criteria—namely that a theory of this sort should provide a critical standard or teleology for film. This is not because these things are undesirable. If further utility is a reason to prefer a theory, then, surely, we should—ceteris paribus—choose the theory that provides benefits as useful as these. This result, however, is just too unlikely to demand of a theory. The diversity of styles and purposes of good films strongly suggests that there is more than one good-­ making quality of film, whatever their ontology. It seems only a vestigial Aristotelianism would have us expect an inference to the goodness of a thing directly from its kind or type.

Candidates With these criteria in hand, let’s evaluate some candidate ontologies of film. Some of these have been introduced for other purposes, though they’re all claims that either have been offered as ontologies of film or might reasonably be so offered. Realism Realism has a special place in the history of film and film theory. In its simplest form, it is the claim that what distinguishes film as an art form is its capacity to transmit, present or re-present reality as it is. André Bazin used this feature of film to distinguish it from other plastic arts.13 On his account, photography is the culmination of a centuries-long fascination with reproducing reality in the plastic arts. Film then expands photography’s capacity to capture reality by providing it with movement. Realism thus provided Bazin and his immediate 13  André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

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followers with three key things: (a) an ontology of film, (b) a justification for the art status of film and (c) a critical standard for film. Regarding (b), the art status of film is achieved by establishing a place for photography and film at the end of a narrative history of art forms. For (c), Bazin thinks that because film is essentially photography, and realism is photography’s great defining achievement, films are at their best when they focus on this realist project to which they’re uniquely suited. Formalism, realism’s primary rival, is (allegedly anyway) more at home in painting and other traditional plastic arts. Our focus is, of course, on (a), especially given that the art status of film is not so controversial, and providing a critical standard is no requirement of an ontological theory. It is worth noting, though, that the photographic (and especially mechanical) nature of film has in other hands been used to cast doubt on its art status.14 Read strictly as an ontological theory, Bazin’s realism is somewhat unclear. First, he makes quite a bit of the “objective” nature of photography and film as opposed to other “subjective” plastic arts like painting and sculpture.15 While it’s true that we can, as Bazin argues, under normal circumstances infer the existence of x from a photograph of x and not a painting of x, this hardly makes photography and film objective, as though consciousness is not involved in choosing, curating and editing shots. In the kinds of photographs and films we’re interested in when we consider them as art forms, such conscious involvement is necessary. Second, he speaks about film as a reproduction of reality rather than—as might seem more natural—a recording of it. This appears to not be a metaphor. As he says at one point: “The reality that cinema reproduces at will and organizes is the same worldly reality of which we are a part, the sensible continuum out of which the celluloid makes a mold both special and temporal. I cannot repeat a single moment of my life, but cinema can repeat any one of these moments indefinitely before my eyes.”16 Bazin seems here and elsewhere to come awfully close to suggesting that there is no important difference between seeing in life and seeing on film, except that the latter has the advantage of potential repetition. But taken literally, this claim entails the absurdity that there is no important difference between the object and its image on film. It is perfectly reasonable that we might be watching Blazing Saddles on television and I say, “I see Cleavon Little there on the screen.” But if you were to then say, “where is Cleavon Little now?” I could not reasonably respond “I just told you, he’s right there on the screen.” But perhaps Bazin has in mind something more plausible, something akin to Kendall Walton’s “transparency thesis” regarding photography and film.17 On  Notably: Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 15  Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 13–14. 16  André Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon,” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies, trans. Mark A. Cohen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 30. 17  Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1994). 14

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this version of realism, photography and film are perceptual aids to seeing what we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see, much like a telescope or a convex mirror in a parking lot. Instead of allowing us to see at great distances or around corners, film allows us to see what has occurred in the past. I’m thus no more committed to saying that Cleavon Little is right there on the screen than I am to pointing at the mirror when you ask where is the car that I see in it, or to the telescope when you ask where is the star that I see in it. In this respect, “transparency” may not be the best term. The first case of transparency we think of is the window. But when I remark on a tree I see through a window I point in the same direction when you ask, “where do you see this tree?” as I do when you ask, “where is this tree?” But when we’re in the garage and I remark on a car around the corner, I point toward the mirror when you ask, “where do you see this car?” and another direction entirely when you ask, “where is this car?” And I point to the telescope when you ask where I see a given star but not when you ask where that star is. It is true that we say things like “I see the star through the telescope” and “I see the tree through the window.” But we risk equivocation when we assume these sentences have exactly the same structure. In one sense, “seeing through” is synonymous with “seeing by means of” (as in “we see unicellular organisms only through microscopes”) and in another “seeing through” is synonymous with “seeing on the other side of without seeing around” (as in “A person can only see through so much water”). We “see through” some things in both senses, eyeglasses, for example. Film, however, is not one of these. This complaint may not amount to much more than terminological quibbling. What is important may instead just be that viewing a photograph or a film allows us to see real things the same way that telescopes and mirrors do, even if not quite transparently. But if it is not actual transparency, then the transparency theorist owes us an account of this particular kind of seeing reality. A number of detractors have objected that no adequately sufficient condition has been offered for this sort of transparency.18 As a first attempt, causal production seems like a decent candidate. The actual car around the corner, plus the mechanics of reflection causes me to see what I do in the mirror. The actual star, plus the mechanics of telescopy causes me to see what I do in the telescope. And Cleavon Little himself, plus the mechanics of cameras and projections, causes me to see what I do on television. But then again, an optical sensor and a description-generating program can mechanically cause a written description of an object, but we wouldn’t call that description “transparent” in any sense. So perhaps visual similarity should be added. But imagine a chess-­ obsessed society in which sensors on the boards of grandmasters transmit their moves to boards set up in living rooms across the country so that each move is 18  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) especially 61–76; Berys Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film: History, Issues, Prospects,” Analytic Philosophy 38 (1997) 147–8; Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” 121.

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replicated by automatically moving pieces on boards everywhere. We’d all sit and watch the same games played out on our own boards, which look exactly like the one on which the grandmasters are playing. But those boards would not be transparent as a result. However, even if the transparency theorist has nothing to offer in the way of rebuttal or additional conditions, it is not clear that transparency has thus been refuted. She could, for instance, posit a virtuous circle between transparency and seeing through (in that first sense of “through”). Or she could insist that transparency is a simple, irreducible concept that is (a) given in our perceptual experience of photographs and live-action film and (b) evidenced by everyday language? Then again, transparency of any sort may not provide the best account of those experiences or our discussion of them, even among realist theories. And if not, then it is not clear that anything speaks in favor of transparency. Perhaps we say that we “see” Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles but not in the most detailed verbal description of him because recognizing Little on film is so very much like recognizing him in real life. But recognizing his description is not at all like recognizing him. The latter first involves recognizing certain shapes or sounds that look and sound nothing like Little himself. Little in life (when he was alive) and Little on film trigger the same recognition capacities. If we can recognize Little in the former circumstance, we can do so in the latter, at least under normal circumstances. But this does not mean that Blazing Saddles presents Little to us, as transparency would have us believe. Perhaps, instead, it represents Little to us. And the specific way in which this pictorial representation via perceptual likeness happens via moving pictures provides film with its unique ontology. This is more or less Gregory Currie’s position, and is at present the most plausible version of realism available.19 But will any version of realism provide an adequate ontology for film? Probably not, if we take seriously the requirement that such a theory explains the difference between the film and the recorded play. If what we see is the object in front of the camera, either because we see it directly or because photography is transparent, then we see only Cleavon Little and never Sheriff Bart, since there is, in fact, no such sheriff. Similarly, if cinematic representation is only carried out through the recognition of perceptual likeness, it is not at all clear how we could distinguish Blazing Saddles, in which it is perfectly reasonable to see Sheriff Bart or Cleavon Little and some rehearsal footage of Blazing Saddles where it would only be appropriate to see Little. Bart and Little, after all, look an awful lot alike. Illusion If film is not essentially the presentation or representation of reality, maybe its nature is to be found rather in its unique capacity to present us with (or cause in us) the illusion of something real. There is something to be said for this view  Currie, Image and Mind, especially 79–112.

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as well. We do praise films for “sucking us in” and fault them for ruining our suspension of disbelief. And yet films do not tend to produce genuine cognitive illusions, at least in adults. That is to say, we do not believe what we see in the film is really happening before us, that the perspective of the camera is our own. If we did, we’d have to ask how we fly over cities when we see establishing shots or jump back and forth in a room without continuous movement in multi-­ camera scenes. Nor do we think the content of the film is actually happening, or we would either be inclined to do something about it or have to ask ourselves troubling questions about our omniscient impotence.20 So films do not engender propositional illusions, or false beliefs that x. The aerial establishing shot does not, for instance, produce the illusion that we are flying. But it may still produce a different, non-propositional sort of illusion. The Icaruses among us may feel liberated, while the acrophobes feel some nauseated panic. These feelings are part of the illusion of flight without the illusion that we are flying. Similarly, “Dutch angle” shots may give us the sensation that something is not right with the world. We might call this sort of thing a “sensory” illusion, and it does seem perfectly natural to say that such shots provide the viewer with the sensation of flying or of unease. The problem is that while this sort of sensory illusion may be a capacity of film, it is hardly a necessary condition. The aerial shot may produce an illusory sensation of flying, but do scenes from the film adaptation of Neil Simon’s Lost In Yonkers similarly produce a sensation of being present for a conversation? Is there such a thing? Even if there is and it does, it seems highly implausible that the film does so in some way that is significantly different than a stage production of the play. A somewhat different sort of perceptual illusion (which may be thought of as a subset of sensory illusions) might be thought to be far more common, if not universal, in films.21 Specifically, we might wonder if the unique essence of film is that it produces the illusion of movement. Currie argues against this “weak illusionism,” insisting that the images on the screen really do move. Images, after all, are mind-and-perception-dependent entities. The effect may be pulled off by a quick succession of still pictures, but the image itself is nonetheless moving. Others—notably and I think most successfully Andrew Kania— have insisted that this movement is illusory after all.22 A film of Misty Copeland doing pirouettes appears to be an image of her moving, but some frame images include Copeland’s whole face, some just the right side of it, some just the left, and others none of it at all. How can a faceless image and a full-faced image be the same image? We say it is, so claim the illusionists, only because these differ The reader may notice a certain similarity or affinity here with suggestions in Colin Radford’s treatment of the paradox of fiction in “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 49 (1975) 71. 21  I’m relying on Currie here for the distinction between perceptual and cognitive filmic illusions. Currie, Image and Mind, especially 28–30. 22  Andrew Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film,” British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002). 20

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ent images are united by the illusion of movement that their quick succession produces.23 There is no reason to posit continuity much less identity absent that illusion. I haven’t the slightest idea how to adjudicate between the illusionist and anti-illusionist on this point. I suspect, in fact, that they may be having a purely verbal dispute. The good news is that we don’t need to settle the issue here, as we have some other reasons to think even perceptual illusionism is inadequate as an ontology of film. For starters, plenty of other art forms are capable of producing the illusion of movement, and if we make our characterization of “art form” fine grained enough, there are some entire forms that do so. Ink-­ and-­paper optical illusions are a well-established sort of example, but there are others. Stage settings in plays, operas and ballets sometimes give the illusion of movement to stationary figures, and a note or melody being taken up by different parts of an orchestra at different times creates the illusion that the sound is traveling in space. The illusion of movement is not necessary for film either, as Danto’s example of the motionless film indicates. And finally, the illusion of movement, even if it is a genuine feature of film, does nothing to distinguish the screenplay from the recorded play. One produces the illusion of movement if and only if the other does as well. Imagination There are ways for us to entertain an idea, claim or attitude without being aware of or under the illusion of its truth, actuality or veridicality. One of those is to imagine it. Film may be a means by which we come to imagine the events depicted. This too has at least two versions. On the first, we imagine participating in the experience. Unless we imagine that we are invisible, inaudible and capable of taking on another’s perspective (which would be a lot), we imagine that we are right there in the depicted scene having the perspective of the camera. The same sorts of issues we identified with regard to cognitive illusions apply as well to participatory imaginations. We might be a little more lenient and forgiving, though, as we can imagine all sorts of things we can’t actually believe. We may be able to imagine ourselves flying during an establishing aerial shot, for instance, or having the capacity to move from one place to another without continuous movement during multi-camera scenes. But given a split-screen shot, are we to imagine that we’re in two places at once? Is this even possible? Also, what on earth are we imagining is happening to us when we hear a disembodied voice-over, especially when the speaker is a narrator and not a character in the film? Who is talking to us? When we hear the soundtrack, where is that music supposed to be coming from? Even if we could imagine these things without distracting questions attached, the participatory imagination theory has another problem in just the kinds of  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film,” 253–4.

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shots that might seem to give it credence. If films produce imaginations, then the point-of-view (POV) shot invites us to imagine having the perceptual experience of a character fictionally present to the events of the film.24 The POV shot provides a kind of first personal storytelling. But if this is the nature of film, then all shots do this. How, then, do we recognize the POV shot and distinguish it from others? We could avoid all of these issues by instead thinking that films provide for an impersonal imaginative experience. On this view, a film puts us in contact with the content of an imaginative experience without placing us in it. So, when I watch the scene in Blazing Saddles where Sheriff Bart meets the Cisco Kid, I imagine as actual the meeting I’m seeing. I’m aided in this imagination by Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder’s acting, the set, costumes and so on. But I don’t imagine being a third person inexplicably unacknowledged there in the jail cell. This is undoubtedly a more plausible account of our experience of films. Unfortunately, impersonal imagination won’t do much better as an ontology of film. Our first concern should be this: what exactly is the film object here? If it’s the imagination, we don’t experience the same films. This certainly does not conform to our everyday language and critical practices regarding films. If instead the film is an aid to the imagination, we have nothing to distinguish films from other narrative art forms such as plays or novels. Either way, we’re no closer to a unique ontology. And we’re certainly no closer to explaining either of Danto’s puzzles. The still photograph and the motionless film both engage the imagination in the same way (if either of them do). And whatever the difference between the screenplay and the recording of a play is, it can’t be in their capacity to aid imagination. The recording of an excellent play might spark an audience’s imagination much better than a poor screenplay. And an excellent screenplay might do better than a poor recording of a play or a recording of a poor play. Film as Dream The “dream” or “oneiric” theory of film may refer to a number of different theses. Weakly, some films are subject to the kind of Freudian psychoanalysis that is applicable to dreams, and some of the methods of such analyses are valuable mechanisms of film interpretation in general. Ambiguously, Hollywood was once known as a “dream factory.” And confusingly, Christian Metz and Alfred Guzzetti claim that, despite some important differences between watching a narrative film and dreaming: the filmic flux resembles the oneiric flux more than other productions of waking resemble it. It is received, as we have said, in a state of lessened wakefulness. Its signifier (images accompanied by sound and movement) inherently confers on it 24  Notice this presence is fictional even if the film is non-fictional. Real people don’t record their perceptual experiences.

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a certain affinity with the dream, for it coincides directly with one of the major features of the oneiric signifier, “imaged” expression, the consideration of representability, to use Freud’s term.25

If dreams do involve the id’s expression via the image content of dreams, this does indeed indicate a certain isomorphism between dreaming and film. But this similarity is not enough to establish the stronger claim that film experience is of a type with dream experience. After all, there are stark differences between the representational natures of dreams and films. For instance, films represent in part via the kind of complex communicative implicatures that mark everyday utterances. Cinematic conventions are so commonly and successfully used to express meaning to an audience that confounding convention can be a successful tool for changing the meaning of an image. A filmmaker’s anticipation of her audience’s expectations regarding these conventions guide her filmmaking decisions and the audience’s expectations of that anticipation guide their interpretive judgments. Film meaning and interpretation is, therefore, cooperative. Even if it is reasonable to think that the id expresses the content of dreams in order to communicate something to the ego (and “communicate” may be a stretch or at best a metaphor here), the communication is hardly cooperative. To bolster the stronger claim, Metz and Guzzetti posit the “lessened wakefulness” of film experience, so that viewing a film takes us into something of a daydream state. By “daydream,” they must mean something more removed from waking experience than mere musing or imagining. But what then? Are there daydreams that genuinely get us closer to the dream state wherein, crucially, we take the image to be real? Maybe we do. I seem to have the experience of daydreaming so deeply that I have to consciously re-recognize the unreality of the daydream’s content. But that does not happen with films. In the darkest theater showing the most realistic film, I only “remind” myself of its unreality when I want to shake off its emotional effects, not to settle what is real and what isn’t. What we need to consider, then, is a strong dream theory that relies on the psychological condition of film engagement rather than any dubious claims about the degree of actual “sleep” involved in our reception of films. And luckily we have such theories. Colin McGinn, for instance, claims that “movies arouse in the viewer the same kinds of psychological mechanisms and processes that characterize the dreaming state.”26 Like the participatory imagination theory we just discussed, the dream theory has a problem with the kinds of cases that might at first glance look like good homes for it. Consider “The Test Dream,” from season five of The Sopranos. The episode’s title comes from an extended dream sequence in which the viewer is taken into one of Tony Soprano’s dreams. This sequence is 25  Christian Metz and Alfred Guzzetti, “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study” New Literary History 8 (1976): 90. 26  Colin McGinn, The Power of Movies (New York: Vintage, 2007), 102.

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remarkably successful in capturing the phenomenal quality of dreams. Tony dreams a symbolically rich semi-linear narrative in which events occur uncaused, the predictability of time and space is fleeting and people from his life assume others’ roles in a way that suggests he is dreaming amalgamations of people. Tony himself “moves” through each inappropriately connected stage of his dream unaware of the abrasiveness of their juxtaposition and unaware that he is dreaming. The sequence is surreal without being disorienting, absurd without being unfamiliar. The aesthetic effect is in fact exceedingly familiar. What is displayed is very much the way we remember dreams. It is, in a word, dreamlike. How, then, does this show the dream theory false? If we have an instance of film that is recognizably dreamlike, doesn’t that at least provide some anecdotal evidence for it? In fact, it does just the opposite. What we should focus on here is not the fact that this sequence is dreamlike but rather that we are able to recognize that it is dreamlike. The sequence is recognizably dreamlike because it engages—through the use of both dramatic and cinematic techniques—the psychological operations characteristic of dreaming. It is remarkable only because not all—in fact very few—films do so. If all film worked on us this way as the strong dream theory imagines, it would be trivial to say that this one particular film is dreamlike. All film would be dreamlike. Compare the situation with film viewing and dreaming to two activities that more clearly involve the same psychological operations: lying and storytelling. These are not the same things and neither is one a version of the other (though they may both be versions of creative imagining). Yet it would clearly be trivial to say that a given instance of lying was storytelling-like. Of course, it was storytelling-like, just like all instances of lying. Lying and storytelling have just the kind of relation that the dream theorist imagines for film viewing and dreaming. But it is not trivial to say that this sequence from The Sopranos is dreamlike. So, it must be false that, in general, viewing films and dreaming involve the same psychological mechanisms and processes. Film as Language or Symbol System If one problem with the oneiric theory of film is its inability to adequately account for the communicative capacity of film, perhaps we should look directly to that capacity for the nature of film. Language, being our primary means of communicating, is a natural place to start. And indeed, so much has been said about the “language of film” that it has become an assumption in some quarters that there is such a thing. But even if there is a language of film, this does not entail that film is essentially a language. English is the language of Moby Dick, Old English the language of Beowulf and First-Order Logic the language of the proofs I should be grading right now. But no one would therefore say that Moby Dick, Beowulf or proofs on an exam are these languages. But if there is a language of film and film is not itself that language, what language is it? More to the point, it is not uncommon to read or hear that film is a specific and unique language, and that is the sort of theory in which we’re interested.

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In order to evaluate this theory, we’ll need to first say what a language is. A language is first and foremost a symbol system, though not all symbol systems are languages. There is an unfortunate tendency to conflate the two concepts, but it is worth keeping them distinct. A symbol system may be any set of determinants for the range of “stands for,” “represents” or some other relevantly similar relation. The “check engine” light in my car is part of a symbol system but not a language. The “check engine” example may suggest that a language is a communicative symbol system, and what’s lacking in the car notification system is communicative intention and Grice’s “nonnatural meaning.”27 The light means that there’s a problem with the engine, but only “naturally,” as my hurting elbow means that there’s some problem in my arm. If this is right, then film may be a language after all, as we’ve discussed its communicative nature already. But languages are not only communicative and not all systems of communication are languages. Performative utterances are noncommunicative uses of language. And I may point to my smiling face to communicate my happiness to you.28 A still rough but better approximation: a particular language is a set of symbols and rules that (a) determine when sequences of those symbols are well formed and (b) relate those sequences to meanings. The two key features here are that a language must contain a syntax and semantics, and the latter must be determined by rules of the language rather than anything like natural fit or resemblance. And on this characterization, it is pretty clear that film is not a language.29 True, there may be cinematic conventions that rely upon communicative symbols. Montages mean that the ratio of screen time to fictional time decreases during them—a shot of a building followed directly by an interior shot means that the depicted room is in that building, and if the camera pans away slowly from two characters who might have sex, then they had sex. But these are remarkable cases. Most meanings in film are not delivered by semantic rules or conventions. We need not and should not appeal to any convention to explain why Sheriff Bart is a person and not a horse. If Mel Brooks wanted the Sheriff to be a horse, then he would have had a horse play the part and not Cleavon Little. Maybe we could imagine a convention that would override this natural assumption, one where horses are customarily used to play people. But the fact that a convention could counterfactually override more natural ­depictive assumptions does not mean that those assumptions are themselves merely conventional. Film may fail to be a language and still be a symbol system, even if the “represents” relation is in most cases dependent on a perceptual similarity between the representation and the represented. Whether or not this is a feature of  H.P. Grice, “Meaning” Philosophical Review 66 (1956).  Just to be clear: the smile itself may indicate that I’m happy. It’s the pointing that does the communicating. 29  Currie helpfully provides us with a fairly devastating argument against this sort of theory. Much of what I say in this section echoes that argument. Gregory Currie, “The Long Goodbye: The Imaginary Language of Film,” in in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 27 28

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many films will ultimately depend on your preferred theory of depiction. The good news (again) is that we don’t need to decide, since depiction is not necessary for film in the first place. Even if it is appropriate to say that the interview of Shelby Foote in Ken Burns’ Civil War is a depiction of Shelby Foote (a rather large “if”), still there is no depiction in purely abstract films. In its favor, a linguistic or semiotic ontology of film may be capable of explaining one of Danto’s two puzzles. It may just be that the screenplay is in the language of film (whatever that turns out to be) and the recorded play is not. This may be even if the recorded play looks in many ways like a screenplay, just as the sequence “Blund parg remple dwo draguile ringe” may look like a sentence but is not. Of course, a whole lot of work would have to be done to explain how this works in the case of film, and we’ve already considered some reasons to be pessimistic about success. The theory is entirely lost, though, in providing help on the other puzzle. If the unmoving film image is in a language, then the photograph is in the same language. Film as Thought There are two different diagnoses available for the shortcomings of the last few theories. First, we might think that their proponents err in seeking a psychological characterization of something that is not essentially psychological in nature. Alternatively, we could lay the fault in the theorists’ attempts to align film too closely with other, unrelated psychological faculties—an audience’s imaginative or illusory reception, on the one hand, or a filmmaker’s oneiric or linguistic capacities, on the other. If we want to avoid the latter mistake, perhaps what we need is a theory of film that assigns to it a relatively unique psychological function. We have the foundations for such a theory in Gilles Deleuze’s expansive work on cinema. Deleuze rejects purely psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of film, and yet film is for him still essentially bound to human psychology. As he says, “The great directors of the cinema may be compared, in our view, not merely with painters, architects and musicians, but also with thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts.”30 Film on this view is a set of image-kinds (or, perhaps, kinds of image-making) distinguished by their role in a fairly sui generis psychological process. We cannot, therefore, characterize films and filmmaking using established categories; we can only offer analogies such as Deleuze’s suggestion that images are to filmmaking what concepts are to cognition. What is left for us to do in fleshing out a theory of this kind, then, is not to say what sort of thing the film image is, but rather to provide a taxonomy of film images. We see the beginnings of just such an attempt in Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image, 30  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) xiv.

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born of a number of distinctly cinematographic techniques that Deleuze elides into “framing,” is fundamentally dynamic. It is neither reducible to series of still photographs nor is it a mere illusion produced by their rapid succession. It is characteristic of films that their images have no privileged moments. Deleuze then provides kinds of movement-image categorized by what they are images of—notably perceptions, affects and actions.31 Time-images, which we gain from the montage, are likewise more than a depiction or signifier of time. As the montage relates discontinuous movement-images, it provides—or just is—a distinct form of thought about (and in) time.32 For Deleuze, these image-kinds also have historical significance. The advent of the time-image marks the break between classical and modern film. And the latter is only possible as a postwar phenomenon, just like other forms of thought—notably but not exclusively philosophy. The taxonomy of images that Deleuze provides is both insightful and useful, and it’s possible that he is not espousing a film ontology in quite the same vein as the others we’ve considered here (his intentions are not always so clear). Even so, his work is illustrative of an approach to film ontology about which we ought to have at least two concerns. First, any account that treats film as a mode of thought is going to have to contend with the facts that thoughts typically belong to individuals and films are typically made by many people.33 Given a filmic image, we might wonder whose thought we’re seeing: the director’s, editor’s, cinematographer’s, camera operator’s or set designer’s? There are a couple of strategies we could employ to resolve this sort of issue, though neither are available to Deleuze. First, we might think of a film as presenting a collective thought in much the same way that a legislature can collectively enact a law or a committee can collectively issue a statement. But a necessary feature of these other cases is that the members of the bodies in question communicate and coordinate with one another to reach an agreement on the thoughts they express. This is only possible through the use of articulable concepts, and the thoughts they collectively express employ concepts as well. But the thoughts Deleuze ascribes to film are imagistic rather than conceptual, and it is not at all clear how a group of people could agree on images before they’re produced. We might avoid this problem by positing a kind of collective unconscious that manifests itself in the filmic image rather than in cognitive content. But whatever plausibility the phrase “collective unconscious” borrows from Jungian psychology (and that might not be very much) dissolves when we realize how comparatively local and mysterious this unconscious commonality would have to be. Instead of residing in all people because of a long-shared history, this collective unconscious would reside in a few people making a film together because of extraordinary coincidence.  Ibid., 64–5.  Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta, Trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) 34–8. 33  Deleuze himself tends to focus just on directors. 31 32

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Our second problem: while there is clearly something distinct about filmic images, they are not unique as a matter of thought. Setting aside for a moment the aforementioned problems that attend multiple authorship, imagine a film director and a stage director both in total control of their productions. They both must imagine and produce from imagination something for an audience to see. The resulting visual arrays are both bounded or framed, either by the scope of the lens or by the edges of the stage. Stage settings can move to alter perspectives in many of the ways that camera movement does in films. And finally, costume changes, actor switches and discontinuous settings and actions can produce on stage the same temporal imaging that we see in film montages. Moving Pictures, Moving Images Emphasis on movement is a recurring theme in a number of the theories we’ve already considered. For the representational realist like Currie, it identifies the film’s species among the genus of depiction. For the perceptual illusionist, it is the crucial illusion that film generates. And it forms the foundation for a full half of Deleuze’s taxonomy of filmic images. We’ll consider here Arthur Danto’s and Noel Carroll’s ontological theories, both of which put film’s movement front and center. Unsurprisingly, Danto has the advantage of at least attempting to provide in his ontology of film an account of the two puzzles we’ve been discussing. Indeed, his focus is on distinguishing film from photography, on the one hand, and from theater, on the other.34 The former is achieved, he thinks, by recognizing that films are essentially moving pictures. The movement of films is threefold: pictures move in the projector, images move on the screen and cameras move while they record. So, the unmoving-image film is distinct from the perceptually indiscernible photographic slide by virtue of the fact that we watch the one but (at most) see the other. That is to say, it is reasonable to wonder if the film image will move, but not the photograph image. And the unmoving nature of the film image is a stylistic choice of the filmmaker, while for the photographer it is just a function of the medium. As long as we’re heading down this rabbit hole, though, we might wonder about another sort of image projected next to the first two. This one consists of the photograph replicated and pasted over and over onto a 35-mm reel and then projected on the wall. So, we have: (a) a photograph projected onto a wall next to; (b) a perceptually indiscernible still film projected on the wall next to; and (c) a reel of film containing a series of reproductions of (a) projected on the wall.

 Danto, “Moving Pictures.”

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Is (c) a film? On the one hand, there would appear to be some tension between counting Hoolboom’s projected leader as a film but not (c). On the other hand, there seems to be a relevant difference between (b), which was shot with a moving picture camera, and (c) which is the same image shot with a still photo camera. For instance, movement in the first camera would have produced a moving picture. Movement in the second camera would have produced a different picture. So (b) at least potentially involves all three kinds of filmic movement that Danto identifies—the camera, the picture and the image, while (c) contains only one. It is not clear if all three are necessary or if they’re individually sufficient for the requisite movement, and I fear we may be approaching the limits of intuition and good philosophical taste. Let’s turn then to the other explanandum, the distinction between the documentary recorded play and the screenplay. According to Danto, the difference is that a recorded play is about what is photographed, while the screenplay is not. The recording of a theater production of Romeo and Juliet is about the actors and what they’re doing on a stage. The screenplay Romeo and Juliet is also a film of actors, but it is about two doomed teenage lovers. Those lovers don’t appear in the recorded stage production at all, only people acting in those roles. As much credit as Danto deserves for taking this problem seriously, we should have at least two concerns about his strategy for solving it. First, I’m not sure the recorded play is about what is photographed either. It is not clear that the recording of the play is about anything. It seems more natural to say it is a recording of a play, not about the play. Second, some non-fiction screenplays are about what is photographed. There is an important distinction to be made between the “documentary” recording, as Danto uses the term in this context, and the “documentary” genre of non-fiction films. The genre-documentary is not a mere recording of some event. Though it is about real events, and, therefore, it is about what is photographed, it can still be a work whose artfulness depends on its moving images. That is to say, there are still two ways of viewing the genre-documentary film. We can view it as recording-documentary when we consider only the events captured on the film or we can view the same footage as a means to the filmmaker communicating something about what is being shown. To view the genre-documentary in this way is effectively to view it as screenplay rather than recording-documentary. And because this is an appropriate way of viewing the genre-documentary, some screenplays are about what they photograph. Carroll prefers “moving image” to “moving picture,” in part to capture the continuity between celluloid and digital films. That Carroll and Deleuze both emphasize “movement” and “image” should not tempt us into exaggerating the similarity of their approaches. Carroll’s “image” does not have the psychological content of Deleuze’s. And for Carroll, movement is an essential feature of film, while for Deleuze the “movement-image” is a historically contingent mode of cinematic thought. Terminology aside, Carroll’s approach is rather more in line with Danto’s. In fact, Danto’s emphasis on the possibility of

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movement (at least on first viewings) forms a key part of Carroll’s own ontology of film. It is for Carroll one of five necessary conditions. In sum films (or moving images) are: 1. capable of movement—it is reasonable for first-time audiences to wonder if the image will move or not; 2. detached displays—audiences cannot orient themselves in or to the filmed spaces; 3. (as performances) tokens generated from tokens—a given film performance (i.e., a projection) is produced from a token (present on the reel/ hard drive) of a type (the film itself); 4. (as performances) not distinct artworks—the projection of a film is not subject to artistic evaluation and 5. two dimensional—the film’s display is two dimensional, even if perhaps its appearance isn’t.35 Each of these conditions serves a purpose and helps get us closer to our goal: (1) as we’ve said, distinguishes film from photography and (2) rules out filmic realism. There is an important difference between everyday perception of an object, even mechanically aided perception of objects and seeing them on film. When I see a car in the garage mirror or a star in the telescope, I can always say where I am in relation to what I see. This is very rarely the case when I see something on film. (3) and (4) distinguish film from theater. The performance of a play is a token of a type (i.e., a performance type that may be instantiated only once), and we do evaluate such performances. They have their own directing, acting, staging and so on. Film performances used to require some special skill when they were shown using complicated 35-mm projectors. But the projectionist had no artistic choices to make. And today it is mostly connecting an external hard drive to a projector and pushing a button. (5) ensures that the conditions don’t include things like moving sculptures. Let’s grant that these conditions work as Carroll intends. At best, we have necessary conditions that are not jointly sufficient. But, as Carroll claims, sufficiency might be fool’s errand. Even so, we want conditions that will distinguish film as an art form (as moving pictures, moving images, etc.) from as many of its nearest neighbors as possible. If it is worth distinguishing film from kinetic sculpture, then it’s worth distinguishing a screenplay from a recorded theater production. And Carroll’s conditions don’t do that. Let’s consider, then, a few conditions that might be added to his list that might get us a little closer still.

35  Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” especially 124–130. This terminology is characteristic of Carroll’s desire to move us away from theories of film that emphasize its medium.

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Further Conditions? Intention might be a natural place to start. Adding a requirement that something is a film only if it is made to be more than a mere recording would emphasize the artifactual and communicative natures of film. More importantly, it would help fill the gap left by Carroll’s conditions mentioned above. The person who sets up a camera at the back of the theater to record a play likely does not intend to make a film so much as record an event. And the in-­ theater bootlegger does not mean to create a new film but to have a recording of the one on the screen. We do not want to rule out the possibility that someone could make a film by editing existing footage that was not shot with the requisite filmic intentions, and so we would want to be agnostic about whose intentions are determinative. But in so doing, we may be inviting other troubles. For instance, intention does not buy us sufficiency. We can try to make a film, successfully record video and audio and end up with a mere recording. There would be a kind of perversion in addition to dishonesty in the theater bootlegger claiming to have made his own work simply by virtue of recording someone else’s. A filmmaker’s intention does not seem to be necessary either. If I install security camera footage in a gallery as a kind of (albeit superficial) comment on the surveillance state, what I have is a work of art. And if the art form isn’t film, I don’t know what it is. But it would be wrong to say that there’s a filmmaker involved. What, then, about the intention of the people acting or otherwise performing? When I set up a camera to record a play, they are acting for the audience, which happens to include a camera. And when I make a film, they are (so to speak) performing for the camera. But again, performing for a camera can’t be necessary without ruling out abstract films, nature films and all the others that involve no conscious performance at all. Perhaps the above example suggests instead that we should borrow a bit from Danto’s and George Dickie’s theories of art status.36 We don’t want to conflate the ontological and art-status questions, but perhaps they’re not entirely separable. After all, we are looking for an account of the kinds of objects that are members of a particular art form. The larger problem is that institutional theories aren’t going to help us solve the central problem. Films can be art, but so too can be plays. I can display a film in a gallery, but so too could I display a play by showing a recording of it. Nor will the particular artworld context of a display fix the art form in question. Films are usually shown in theaters. But when the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts productions in theaters, they do not claim to be showing opera films but rather “transmitting” theatrical opera productions to theaters.

36  Arthur Danto, “The Artworld” Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964); George Dickie, The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Evanston, IL: Chicago Spectrum Press, 1997).

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So, if neither the intention of a would-be filmmaker or performer nor the context of display are going to work, it seems only natural to look to certain features of the object itself to determine the distinction between the film and the recorded theater production. Indeed, the recording of the play and the screenplay will likely look very different. The former, for instance, is less likely to hide stage settings, non-fictional audience members and so on. But it is not impossible for films to include such things. The end of Blazing Saddles might be an example, if not everyone was in on the joke as the fight scene stumbled out onto the studio lot. And a significant portion of the New York City population has accidently appeared in episodes of Law and Order. Also, I could add quite a bit of cinematography and editing to the recording of my son’s play without transforming it into a film in its own right. The Metropolitan Opera, in fact, has added more and more depth to the filming and editing of its recordings. But it is not clear that they at some point started making films. And if they did, we’d still be confronted with a kind of sorites problem: at what point did their recordings transform? What one little change caused the extraordinary change from mere recording to film?

Conclusions? This is where I think we’ve found ourselves: with a significant explanandum for an ontology of film and without an otherwise plausible ontology of film to adequately explain it. Those accounts that might help us distinguish the film from the mere recording are helplessly flawed in other ways. The difficulty of this problem is related, I suspect, to the attraction of such theories. Oneiric and imagination theories connect the experience of film to psychological processes that are themselves somewhat mysterious, and there is something mysterious about film. There is a difference between the film and the mere recording, evidenced by the appropriateness and inappropriateness of certain ways of seeing but not reducible to them. We should not, however, mistake something mysterious for something spooky or inexplicable. In fact, the ontology of film is in a terrific position, as better theories emerge along with more refined questions. We should feel bolstered by evidence of genuine progress and eager to see it continue.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. 2017. Cinema. Trans. Susan Spitzer. Cambridge: Polity. Bazin, André. 2003. Death Every Afternoon. In Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Margulies. Trans. Mark A.  Cohen, 27–31. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2005. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. In What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray, 9–16. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carroll, Noël. 2006. Defining the Moving Image. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 113–133. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. The Long Goodbye: The Imaginary Language of Film. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 91–99. Oxford: Blackwell. Danto, Arthur. 1964. The Artworld. Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–584. ———. 1974. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33: 139–148. ———. 1979. Moving Pictures. Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4: 1–24. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Malden: Blackwell. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2013. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dickie, George. 1997. The Art Circle: A Theory of Art. Evanston: Chicago Spectrum Press. Gaut, Berys. 1997. Analytic Philosophy of Film: History, Issues, Prospects. Analytic Philosophy 38: 145–156. Grice, H.P. 1956. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66: 377–388. Irvin, Sherri. 2008. The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks. In New Waves in Aesthetics, ed. Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones, 1–19. London: Macmillan. Kania, Andrew. 2002. The Illusion of Realism in Film. British Journal of Aesthetics 42: 243–258. Levinson, Jerrold. 1984. Hybrid Art Forms. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 18: 5–13. McGinn, Colin. 2007. The Power of Movies. New York: Vintage. Metz, Christian, and Alfred Guzzetti. 1976. The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study. New Literary History 8: 75–105. Ponech, Trevor. 2006. The Substance of Cinema. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64: 187–198. Radford, Colin. 1975. How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 49: 67–80. Rancière, Jacques. 2001. Film Fables. Trans. Emiliano Battista. Oxford: Berg. Scruton, Roger. 2006. Photography and Representation. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 19–34. Oxford: Blackwell. Walton, Kendall. 1994. Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism. Critical Inquiry 11: 246–277.

CHAPTER 2

Medium Specificity Noël Carroll

The notion of medium specificity has a long history in the philosophy of art but probably finds its most classic statement in Lessing’s treatise Laocoon. The doctrine of medium specificity, as traditionally construed, holds that art forms are individuated by their physical media which also provide said art forms with norms of excellence that, in turn, are determined by the possibilities and/or limitations of their material constitution. The idea of medium specificity has been especially influential in the history and philosophy of film. Many theorists of the silent film such as Béla Balázs (Balázs 2010; Carroll 2014), Rudolf Arnheim (Arnheim 1933, 1956; Carroll 1988), and Soviet montagists like V.I. Pudovkin (Pudovkin 1958) relied upon the doctrine of medium specificity to establish the artistic credentials of cinema. Subsequently, sound film theorists, such as André Bazin (Bazin 1967) and Siegfried Kracauer (Kracauer 1960) mobilized the notion of medium specificity in order to defend realism as the essence of cinema. Throughout film history, some critics have used the notion of the medium specificity, which they sometimes referred to as the cinematic, as a measure of filmic achievement. A film was good if it exploited the unique properties of the medium; a film was defective to the extent that it was uncinematic—that it failed to take advantage of the potentials of film as film. The concept of medium specificity was also employed in order to advance the case for developing academic film departments. It was argued that since film art was grounded in unique features of the medium, it required its own discipline of inquiry distinct from literary, theatrical, and art historical study as well as from the departments of history, psychology, and sociology. For various reasons, including the philosophical problems to be canvassed in the next section, medium specificity theses fell out of favor in the last quarter N. Carroll (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_2

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of the twentieth century (see Carroll 1988, 1996a, b, 2003a, b, 2008). However, in the last decade or so, we have seen the return of modified versions of the claims of medium specificity in the work of Berys Gaut (Gaut 2010, 2016), Dominic Lopes (Lopes 2014), and Ted Nannicelli (Nannicelli 2017). These philosophers have expanded the conception of the medium to comprise not only the material characteristics of film but also the film practices. To this extent, they advocate what might be called a praxeological concept of the medium over a material one. Because medium specificity claims have been proposed in different forms at different stages, this chapter will be divided into two main parts, addressing what medium specificity was in the earlier stages of the philosophy of film and what theorists are claiming the thesis amounts to today. Because medium specificity thinking is so intimately connected to film evaluation, I will conclude by briefly sketching an alternative approach to motion picture evaluation, which I believe is superior to the invocation of medium specificity, but that can also do everything that theory in its various forms can legitimately claim to be able to do.

What Was Medium Specificity? As previously mentioned, the notion of the specificity of the medium of film arose early on in film history as a way in which to philosophically enfranchise the emerging technology of film as an art form in its own right (Carroll 1988). Early film theorists—such as Hugo Münsterberg (Münsterberg 1970; Carroll 1996a, b, c, d), Belász, Arnheim, and most of the Soviet montagists— faced two fundamental challenges. The first challenge involved showing that film could be an art in the face of the argument that, due to its photographic provenance, cinema was naught but the slavish, mechanical recording or reproduction of reality, thereby providing no opportunity for creativity, expression, and/or formal invention—that is, the very hallmarks of artistry. Film theorists, like the philosopher Hugo Münsterberg, countered these arguments by maintaining, for example, that cinema, through its physical structuring devices—like the close-up and parallel editing—was mind-like and, therefore, capable of expressive effects and imaginative manipulation. However, even if cinema could deliver art to its audiences, was it an art form in its own right or merely theater in a can—that is, a film can? In other words, was film only a recording device, relaying whatever transpired theatrically before the camera to audiences, or did it have an original artistic contribution of its own to make? Just as one might charge that a CD is not an artwork but simply a means for storing and exhibiting an otherwise autonomous musical artwork, so the suspicion arose that cinema might not be anything more than a mechanism for distribution theater to the masses. Medium specificity theories emerged and flourished in order to block the allegation that cinema was just theater in a can—that there was no autonomous art of cinema, but only filmed plays—recording of famous plays with famous

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players. To suppose that there was an autonomous art of film separate and apart from the artistic plays they contained would be like mistaking the potato chip package for the potato chips. Moreover, it was supposed that if film was to be acknowledged as an art form in its own right, it should be in virtue of its capacity, based in its material nature, to do something other than what could be done by another art form, notably theater. Here, there was something like the underlying presupposition that the arts should be subject to the principle of the division of labor. Medium specificity theorists, like Arnheim, another proponent of the silent film (Arnheim 1956), argued that there were specific features of the medium which differentiated film from the other art forms, in particular, theater, AND that in virtue of these unique features, cinema possessed a range of effects that it could discharge better than any other art form. The relevant features of the medium here were thought of either in terms of the stuff that comprised the medium—as in paint is the stuff of painting so celluloid was the stuff of film— that is, the physical medium of film, or the medium was thought of as the instrumentalities used to manipulate the stuff—the camera or editing—the splicing together of pieces of film (Carroll 1996a, b, c, d). Thus, the medium in both the sense of a physical medium and an instrumental medium was material. That was why Arnheim called his theory “Materialgerechtigkeit”—or “doing right by the material” where this meant exploiting the material for the best effects for which it is suited. The pertinent effects here—such as the representations of fast-moving action over great distances—moreover, were not only putative effects that no other artistic medium could deliver as expeditiously, they were also the best effects available by means of cinema as well. Cinema was enfranchised as an autonomous art form via medium specificity thinking because there was something it could do that either other art forms could not do or that cinema could do much better. Thus, cinema had something to add to the system of the arts (a.k.a. the artistic division of labor) and, hence, deserved to be acknowledged as an autonomous art form.1 But also since these effects represented what cinema did best of all the things it did, these effects were ones that cinema artists qua cinema artists were advised to aspire to, since these effects were the very best cinematic effects at which one could aim. So, in addition to enfranchising cinema as an art form, the notion of medium specificity supplied filmmakers with guidance. Namely, aim at those effects as to what to make that in virtue of the material cinematic medium—whether in virtue of its distinctive capacities for representation or its distinctive limitations—cinema delivers whether uniquely or better than any other art medium, such as theater. Moreover, this approach also provides critics and viewers with a means for evaluating what filmmakers produce. Effects produced by cinema-specific 1  Although this strategy for defending the credentials of silent film was pursued by many of its defenders, one notable exception was the Soviet theorist, Sergei Eisenstein (see Carroll 2002).

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means—effects often called cinematic—are regarded as positive achievements of film art, while those that do not recruit cinematic ends, perhaps by trafficking in theatrical effects, are to be regarded with disapproval qua cinematic art. On this view, the theatrical set design and acting of Lars von Trier’s Dogville comes off badly even though these choices were perfectly suited to realizing his purpose: to portray American society as governed by implacably oppressive roles for which theater functioned as a symbol. As V.F. Perkins and David Sorfa have observed in their talk in the Film-Philosophy Conference in Oxford in 2015, medium specificity criticism has traditionally imposed an agenda or set of standards dictating what artists should do. Moreover, these standards are general. They provide a way of evaluating any putative specimen of film art. For any work of film art, ask whether it realizes the best effects available in the material medium—that is, best relative to effects of other media, including close rivals like theater, and the best of all the distinctive effects of film. Cinematic excellence will occur, in other words, at the intersection of what cinema does better than the other arts and best of all the things it does as a function of its material medium. Films that aim lower—such as the ones that verge on theatrical effects—are uncinematic, that is, defective as film art.2 Again, it pays to emphasize here that this is a general view. Cinematic excellence is always a function of pursuing effects distinctive in the ways determined by the material means of cinema. This is a much stronger view than the view that sometimes a film may be excellent because the filmmaker has ingeniously exploited some feature of the medium to rewarding effect—as Orson Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland did in order to achieve depth of field in Citizen Kane. Nor is this the view that on certain occasions, a film may be defective precisely because the filmmaker has failed to use the medium in such a way as to achieve desired effects—as might occur, for example, if he/she opts for a slow film stock that is inappropriate for shooting at night. For, although the preceding two assessments make reference to the material medium, they are not examples of medium specificity thinking, properly so-­ called, as it has been handed down in the tradition of film theory because these appraisals are local, applying to the effectiveness or defectiveness of the use of the medium relative to the specific filmmakers’ aims. Indeed, the preceding example of using the wrong film stock for nighttime filming, though it refers to the medium, seems grounded in common sense rather than an application of the medium specificity theory or, for that matter, any theory. Furthermore, note that the preceding examples cannot be generalized to all motion pictures because not all motion pictures have the same aims or purposes.

2  Indeed, although medium specificity arguments traditionally promised to distinguish cinema from every other medium, typically, the contrast that was emphasized most was with theater, perhaps for the reason that it was the closest neighbor to film (and not to mention, its nearest competitor for audiences).

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Motivating the notion of medium specificity is probably something like the commonplace, practical intuition that one should use the right tool for the job. All things being equal, you should have a church key to open a beer can, not a Phillips head screwdriver. Use a Phillips head screwdriver to turn nuts with an x-shaped notch on top. A Phillips head screwdriver can open a beer can, though somewhat inefficiently and inelegantly. But it is not the right—the most suitable—tool for the job. So, don’t use it for a task for which it is not intended. Similarly, battles and chariot races are more vividly portrayed on film than they are onstage. So, use film rather than theater to portray them. Theater, on the other hand, is better suited to deliver soliloquies. So, present Oedipus at Colonus live; don’t try to film it. Language in cinema should be laconic, in the service of action. Speech in theater is primary; the movement serves to accentuate it. So, give unto theater what is theater’s and to film what is film’s. Moreover, These Prescriptions Are General. Nevertheless, understanding traditional medium specificity theories to be general in scope, they are susceptible to a number of objections. Here are some of the most decisive. Some of the most challenging problems that the medium specificity theories face involve their approaches to critical appraisal. The first problem is that such theories do not seem to accord neatly with how we actually assess achievement with respect to the history of the motion picture. Consider the Oceana Roll sequence in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush. The Tramp, in order to entertain some lady friends, takes two dinner rolls and attaches them to two forks, proceeding then to execute an exquisite mime of a dance—the rolls serving as feet and the forks as legs. It is pantomime pure and simple. Arguably, Chaplin could have done it to equal effect on a stage. For all intents and purposes, it could have been a mere recording of a stage performance. No special features of the motion picture medium like editing or depth of field are in evidence. Thus, it should deserve a fairly low grade from the medium specificity proponent, if not being counted as outright defective—a failure of film as film. On the other hand, the Mack Sennett, Keystone Kop comedy, Lizzies of the Field, traverses an expansive space hyperactively with the eponymous automobiles buckling as they throttle forward at high speed. The film exploits the advantage of editing for representing this type of event, and it could never have been portrayed on stage with comparable effect. Thus, by the light of the medium specificity thesis, Lizzies of the Field would get a passing grade, if not a high one, as a work of film art. In any event, it would get a higher grade than “The Oceana Roll.” But how plausible is that? Given a Sophie’s choice between “The Oceana Roll” and the Keystone Cops’ comedy Lizzies of the Field, what film historians would plump for Lizzies of the Field? Barring allegiance to the notion of medium specificity, as traditionally advanced, would any critic rank Lizzies of the Field more highly as a work of motion picture comedy than Chaplin’s Oceana Roll? “The Oceana Roll” sequence is infinitely more imaginative, in its own right, than the admittedly serviceable slapstick violence of Lizzies of the Field, while,

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at the same time, the Oceana Roll sequence exquisitely performs the narrative function of reinforcing the idea of the Tramp’s poetic sensibility and delicacy. What could the friend of medium specificity say on behalf of his higher ranking of Lizzies of the Field? That it was true to the medium—that it is pure film, unencumbered by theater? But what does that amount to? What virtue is there in pure cinema so-called? One problem with this proposal is it makes it sound as though being true to the medium or being pure is good for its own sake or intrinsically good. But that would appear to contradict or, at least, misconstrue the very idea of what it is to be a medium—that is, a means. A medium, in other words, is instrumentally valuable, if it is valuable at all. By fetishizing being true to the medium for its own sake, the advocate of medium specificity theorist appears to have lost sight of the very thing a medium is. Of course, the defender of medium specificity at this point may claim that his view is not that medium purity is good for its own sake, but that it has been proven empirically that impure cinema is defective, whereas pure cinema is always better, and, even, that all the very best cinema is pure. But that claim is hardly sustainable in the face of counter examples like the Oceana Roll. Moreover, there are many more examples than merely this one from Chaplin. For instance, myriad hack TV directors have produced work that is thought to conform more strictly to the alleged dictates of the medium than did Marcel Pagnol, but few, if any, have produced a masterpiece as moving as his film Césare. Furthermore, it should be obvious that things a medium does better than other media are not destined to be excellent. Computer-generated imaging (CGI), considered as a material medium, stages battles between superheroes and behemoths bent on conquering Earth better than other media, notably theater and maybe even photographically based cinema. But the effect is uniformly tiresome rather than excellent as proven by the last 20 minutes of most Marvel blockbusters when our heroes hurl large objects, like trucks, trains, and buildings at the monsters, and the monsters return gargantuan fire with monotonous regularity and ineffectuality. In response, medium specificity theorists sometimes claim that their theory has been empirically validated by the failure of the early silent film d’arts. But perhaps that failure could be ascribed to their lack of sound. Of course, Shakespeare merely mouthed but not spoken is boring. Similarly, medium specificity theorists may assert that their theory best explains the problem with early sound films; they were too theatrical. But perhaps the better explanation was that they were tedious theater. Fans of medium specificity will undoubtedly attempt to declare that my apparent counterexamples are without weight on the grounds that they are not truly excellent. But this attempt at damage control typically risks begging the question, since it usually rests upon presuming the very medium-specific standards it is supposed to be defending. This liability is in evidence in one of the most frequently recurring embarrassments of medium specificity theorizing—namely, that medium specificity theorists do not agree among themselves upon which features of the medium

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are pertinent for their prognostications. Indeed, they notoriously line up in opposing camps such as realists versus montagists (e.g. sound film theorists like Bazin versus silent film theorists like Pudovkin). And when one side presents a counterexample to the other, the defending camp cries foul—for example, formalist charge petitio principii when realists, like Kracauer, deny that Hitchcock’s thrillers are exemplary cinema basically on the grounds that it offends the canons of realism that supposedly follow from the photographic nature of the medium. In defense of my own counterexamples to the medium specificity approach, I argue that from the perspective of critical evaluation, artistic excellence is of utmost concern. Moreover, artistic excellence need not be the result of a distinctive use of the medium in the sense that a proponent of medium specificity understands that concept. The “Oceana Roll,” for example, is artistically excellent without essentially deploying any specifically mediumistic resources unavailable to theater. My slogan might be summarized as “Excellence above purity.” But what of the underlying intuition that one should use the right tool to do the job—that you should use a hammer to drive nails, not a shoe, and you should use cinema to do what it is for—to stage battles, not monologues? In fact, the intuition is based on a questionable analogy. Film is not like a hammer. Considered as an art form, cinema does not have a single purpose or even a determinate range of purposes. We think we should choose the right too to do the job because in practical affairs, inefficiency should be avoided. But inefficiency is not an issue. If the result is worthwhile, we will suffer to put the question of efficiency to one side. No matter how many takes Chaplin forced his crew to endure, where the result is excellent, we are unlikely to complain. Yet what about the intuition that there should be a division of labor betwixt the arts? Again, it is inspired by a doubtful analogy. If two art forms, based in different media, can do the same thing, we do not demand that one cease and desist. Rather, we count our blessings. Many early comedy shticks originated on stage, often the vaudeville stage, only to be transferred essentially unaltered to film, but we do not begrudge such routines by Harry Landon, W.C. Fields, or the Marx Brothers for that reason. We are richer for having more excellent things. And that is more important to us than the purity of the media.

The Return to Medium Specificity Although the case against medium specificity may seem formidable, three leading philosophers of art—Berys Gaut, Dominic McIver Lopes, and Ted Nannicelli—have recently come to its defense. One strategy that these philosophers share is an expanded notion of what constitutes the nature of the medium under discussion. Specifically, they think of the medium as comprised not only of material elements—such as the stuff from which moving images are made and the instrumentalities through which that stuff is articulated—but also of practices. One might characterize their conception of the medium as

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­ raxeological as distinct from the traditional view of the nature of the medium, p which we might call material. This raises the question, as we will see, of whether these contemporary philosophers are really defending anything worth really calling a medium specificity theory or whether they have changed the subject in a way that is ultimately uninteresting.3 Since Gaut’s position was developed earliest, I will deal with his version first. Gaut sets out to defend three theses which he maintains amount to allegiance to a medium specificity doctrine (Gaut 2010, pp. 286–287). They are: (i) Some correct artistic evaluations of artworks refer to distinctive properties of the medium in which these artworks occur. (ii) Correct explanations of some of the artistic properties of artworks refer to distinctive properties of the medium in which these artworks occur. (iii) For a medium to constitute an art form, it must instantiate artistic properties that are distinct from those that are instantiated by other media. The key modification in Gaut first two theses is their restriction of the scope of the claims of medium specificity. Only some evaluations and only some explanations are said to rely upon the distinctive properties of the medium. But this is far less ambitious than the preceding medium specificity theories which proposed systematic generalizations about the relation of, for example, deviations from medium specificity and artistic defectiveness. Arnheim’s argument against the sound film was a priori, whereas one supposes that Gaut thinks that those evaluations that refer to distinctive features of the medium will be discovered a posteriori. Likewise, Arnheim thought that any deviation from cinematic medium specificity was a defect, whereas Gaut only proposes that some are. Arnheim, in addition, contends that there will be a systematic relation between expressive deviations from the mechanical reproduction of perceptual appearances and artistic achievement, whereas Gaut does not say when reference to the medium will result in cinematic achievement or not. For Gaut, it seems to be a purely contingent matter. His version of medium specificity is far less powerful than Arnheim’s. Consequently, inasmuch as Arnheim is probably the most articulate proponent of medium specificity, I think we may fairly charge Gaut with changing the topic rather than offering a defensible version of something authentically considered a medium specificity thesis, especially if that view is a theory in the sense of plotting systematic regularities. Moreover, since Arnheim’s theory was a general one, I doubt that Arnheim would have denied that some negative evaluations of motion pictures might refer to distinctive features of the medium—like my previous example of some3  The traditional notion of medium specificity was impressively robust in its claims of generality. The qualifications of certain versions of the praxeological approach, notably Gaut’s, reduce the view to scarcely more than banal, common sense.

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one trying to shoot a night scene with a film stock that is too slow. Rather, by invoking medium specificity, Arnheim wanted to claim much more, namely that any motion picture trespassing onto the domain of theater would be defective. Furthermore, anyone, including Arnheim, could ground the criticism of using slow film stock for night shooting without appealing to the doctrine of medium specificity. One could simply point out that it is absurd or self-­defeating to shoot at night with film stock that will not register anything perceptible, if you want viewers to see the action. That is, one can reject this particular use of the medium as defective on the common-sense grounds that it patently does not secure the filmmaker’s purpose. Thus, we can see the connection between some evaluations of cinema and features of the medium—the first premise of Gaut’s revisionist view—hardly supports the idea of medium specificity as it has evolved historically. Likewise, Gaut is probably right that some artistic properties of film are connected explanatorily to the medium, especially when it is expanded praxeologically. Disjunctive editing explains the surrealistic, artistic properties of the films by Buñuel and Dali. But Gaut’s qualification of the thesis is not a very daring claim when one considers that film also shares many artistic properties with theater and painting. Such a view is too underwhelming to claim lineage from theorists like Arnheim or Bazin. Gaut defends his claim about the relevance of reference to the medium using two arguments. The first notes that artistic achievement often involves overcoming difficulties posed by the medium. Hence, in order to commend an artist for overcoming the relevant difficulties, one will have to refer to the medium. This argument falls short of dealing with even all the cases that Gaut’s view hopes to lay claim to, let alone to all the pertinent cases for the obvious reason that, for example, not all of the cases of motion picture evaluations that refer to the medium will involve overcoming difficulties. Hitchcock’s mastery of montage is justly lauded, but there is no difficulty that his editing always overcomes. Murnau’s camera movement in Sunrise is eminently fluid, but there is no difficulty that it appears to be transcending. Gaut’s second contention in favor of his view of evaluation is that “There are terms of critical appraisal that refer to differential features of the medium in which it occurs.” But doesn’t this beg the question? Yes, there have been critics who accept versions of the notion of medium specificity—often in terms of the cinematic. So, in fact, they have referred to features of the medium in their critical appraisals. Does the fact that they talk this way always make their appraisals correct? They might be victims of a false theory. Perhaps Gaut is claiming that this is the way that critics should talk. But isn’t that what Gaut should be demonstrating? He shouldn’t merely presume it. Or perhaps he is merely repeating his first premise—namely, that it is sometimes apposite to include reference to the medium in evaluations. That is true, but it is question-

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able whether that constitutes a commitment to medium specificity rather than being a matter of simply changing the subject. Gaut not only differs from traditional theorists, like Arnheim, in the scope of his claims. He also disagrees about the nature of what we call “a medium.” For Arnheim, the medium of film is material—a matter of film, cutting, and cameras. Again, that is why he called his view “Materialgerechtigkeit.” Arnheim’s view is also closer to the dictionary meaning of “medium” with reference to art forms. But Gaut, following Richard Wollheim, wants to include practices—uses of the technical resources of an art, of how they are manipulated—under the rubric of “the medium.” Ostensibly, Gaut, again, following Wollheim, motivates this in order to distinguish art forms from non-art activities that employ the same technical resources that related artworks do. That is, art photography and forensic photography may share the same technical resources—cameras and so on. So, what distinguishes them? Practices—the way they are used— Gaut proposes. Traditionally, medium specificity theorists had ways to tell, if only implicitly, art from non-art. For example, Arnheim and Balász held expression theories of art. Their task was, given that, to distinguish the unique art forms that met that task, by explaining how, for instance, film could be expressive. Thus, they did not need to find a way of distinguishing art from non-art within what they thought of as “a medium.” They had what Lopes calls a buck-stopping theory of art at their disposal (Lopes 2014). Consequently, the pressure Gaut feels at this juncture in his view is not something he shares with most of the others we call “medium specificity” advocates. That does not, of course, necessarily count against his theory. But I think the addition of practices to an account of what constitutes a medium makes it difficult to be a robust medium specificity proponent. The reason is because what we think of as discrete art forms, although they may deploy different materials, often share practices. Theater and cinema both share strategies for multiplanar composition in depth, both share method acting, and so on. Also, film, video, and broadcast TV share a vast number of practices, if only for the obvious reason that the later technical inventions imitated film in the process of enfranchising themselves as art. Furthermore, there is the process that I call “the interanimation of the arts”: this occurs when certain art movements that have their home in one traditionally individuated art form begin to be imitated across other art forms—as surrealist painters adapted the practices of surrealist poets and as minimalist filmmakers imitated the practices of minimalist painters and sculptors. Adding practices to what constitutes a medium not only diverges from previously known medium specificity approaches; it also makes establishing the uniqueness of individual media, as commonly conceived, more and more unlikely. Gaut’s way of attempting to individuate media is to regard each medium as a collection of media. That is, nested in each medium are an amalgam of various technical resources and practices. Some of the features in different media

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such as multiplanar composition in depth appear at least in theater and film. Nevertheless, for Gaut, media can be still individuated in as much as the exact collection of technical resources and practices that make for one medium are not replicated exactly in any other medium, even though many of them are. This, however, raises a question about whether this is a genuine medium-­ specific approach to film since it will not necessarily forestall theatrical practices in insofar as both film and theater will have many of the same practices, as well as their effects nested in them. Indeed, cinema and theater may have so many practices in common that the only way to individuate them may be to go back to such old-fashioned medium-­specific distinctions as between recording versus live performance, indicating that in certain cases, Gaut’s expanded praxeological concept of the medium is not always relevant to individuating media. And what will Gaut say of the convergent practices of mainstream film, video, and television? Since for Gaut it seems the material medium is not supposed individuate art forms, will he be compelled to say, perhaps counterintuitively, that they are one and the same art form? Gaut’s various concrete attempts to individuate cinema seem to me to fail. At one point, he claims that the moving image is unique to cinema. But if “cinema” is being used here in its conventional sense, this sounds false, since shadow puppetry, video games, flip books, various optical toys like the zoetrope not to mention broadcast TV, and video all involve moving images. Moving imagery is not a sufficient condition for cinema. Nor does it seem that moving imagery is a medium in the normal sense, since moving images are realizable by so many different means of implementation. Is it a medium in Gaut’s sense, one composed of shadow puppetry and so on? That seems improbable since the moving image would not seem to be composed of a coherent set of practices. That, needless to say, does not show that it cannot be a medium in Gaut’s sense. But it does shift the burden of proof to Gaut. Let him tell us the unique package of technical resources and practices that make for the moving image medium as opposed to the more familiar idea that the moving image arts are composed of many discrete media. In a number of cases, Gaut’s suggestions about what differentiates cinema from theater are off the mark. Considerations of space do not allow a review of all of them. But here is a sample of unsuccessful contrasts. He cites editing as unique to cinema, but if the editing in question involves the juxtaposition of scenes and/or images, theater can do it by means of lighting. Gaut cites rack focus as another contrast, yet the effect can be secured via scrims and lighting. Pace Gaut, the appearance of camera movement can be aped and functionally approximated by a revolving stage as in Les Miz. Nor is the close-up effect impossible to approximate in theater. One way involves the use of spotlights and, as Susan Sontag pointed out, magnifying mirrors have been deployed to simulate close-ups in theater (Sontag 1969).

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A final problem worth noting with Gaut’s proposal for individuating media may be that it will result in too many media. Avant-garde film and mainstream narrative cinema are generally thought to belong to the same medium. However, given the way in which Gaut counts practices as pertinent to media individuation, they should count as distinctive because of the radically different ways in which they manipulate their technical resources. Indeed, once practices are added into the mix, might not westerns, horror films, romantic comedies, musicals, and so on constitute different media. But surely that is to radically change what is meant by a medium.4 Of course, one may call for such revisionism on the basis of some promise of added explanatory power. But what the advantage would be in this case remains obscure? Recently, the philosopher of television Ted Nannicelli has explicitly endorsed the practice-oriented or praxeological conception of the medium advanced by Gaut especially.5 Since Nannicelli’s approach is perhaps the most developed application of this revisionist viewpoint so far, it is useful to examine it in some detail. Nannicelli asserts that “A medium is something like a cluster of relatively, stable coherent practices of making something in a particular vehicular medium [where a ‘vehicular medium’ is a set of particular materials – a.k.a. a traditional medium]” (Nannicelli 2017, p. 63). Given this conception of the relevant sense of the medium, Nannicelli proposes to individuate movies from television in virtue of their allegedly divergent practices of that which he calls temporality. What he has in mind here is that films putatively are organized to be stand-alone or one-off affairs intended to be watched in one sitting—narratives, in other words, with temporal closure meant to be taken-in in single encounter. Television, on Nannicelli’s account, in contrast to film, is partly characterized by “1) the understanding of ‘the work’ as being temporally subdivided in various ways: series, season, episode, format and so forth and thus potentially having different sets of temporal boundaries, some of which are malleable in a way that the temporal boundaries of films are not, and 2) a diverse and complex set of practices for making these temporally diverse and malleable kinds of works.” (Nannicelli 2017, p. 67). Apparently, Nannicelli wants to demonstrate that the praxeological conception of “the medium” is superior to the traditional material conception inasmuch as the former can differentiate film and television more effectively than the latter.

4  I am not an advocate of the traditional version of the idea of medium specificity, nor am I in favor of making a great deal of the notion of the medium for purposes of evaluation or even individuation. Nevertheless, I do think that if one wants to advance a defense of medium specificity, one needs to employ the notions of medium specificity and the medium as they are traditionally used in order to avoid changing the subject. 5  That is, although Nannicelli acknowledges Lopes’ influence, it is Gaut’s example that primarily guides his approach.

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However, if Nannicelli’s alleged distinction is meant to support the praxeological approach as a replacement for the material conception of the medium, it is arguably a failure. Since the earliest days of film, it has featured continuous series (or serials), such as Fantomas, Vampires, The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon, Rocket Man, and so forth. Some of these series, like Hopalong Cassidy and Flash Gordon were among the most popular programs on early television, where they had been transposed from the silver screen. Since the self-same serials were staples of film and television, such seriality cannot individuate the two media. Comedy series, like sitcoms, are perennials on television, but they were likewise common in the cinema as evidenced by series like Our Gang Comedies, The Three Stooges, and many others which were also recycled as popular TV programs. Cartoon series like Popeye the Sailor Man and Betty Boop would also appear to fall into this category. Furthermore, the serial form has also been adopted as a feature-length film format. There are temporally continuous movie series such as The Hunger Games, The Maze, Divergent, Twilight, It, Justice League of America, and, of course, Star Wars, among others. And, there are many movie series with discontinuous episodes that are temporally comparable to TV series like Perry Mason with continuing protagonists like Bulldog Drummond in the 1920s; Tarzan, Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Nick, and Nora Charles in the 1930s; and James Bond and Indiana Jones in our own day. Moreover, television also employs stand-alone or one-off temporal forms. The most obvious case is the made-for-TV movie, such as Steven Spielberg’s Duel, to mention one of literally thousands of examples worldwide. Early television had a number of programs that specialized in anthology presentations—produced to advertise companies like Alcoa and General Electric—that featured stand-alone dramas like Marty and Requiem for a Heavyweight that were later adapted for the big screen. Less elevated were the weekly anthology series like The Twilight Zone, One Step Beyond, Lights Out, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Outer Limits, and others which presented a series of discontinuous, stand-alone episodes with closure. Here, Nannicelli refers to the viewer’s experience as piecemeal and processional. But might that not also describe the experience of film series like the Sherlock Holmes series featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. In addition, there are anthology films with multiple stand-alone episodes such as O’Henry’s Full House, I Vinti, Seven Deadly Sins, Paris, J’Aime, and, of course, The Twilight Zone: The Movie.? What Nannicelli seems to have done in setting up his distinction between film and television has been to contrast certain typical kinds of contemporary movies with the kind of television series, like Better Call Saul, that exemplify the so-called present Golden Age of television. At best, this would be to mistake certain selected period-specific trends for an ontological distinction. However, even its historical accuracy is questionable, since the kinds of coun-

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terexamples I have raised have occurred throughout the histories of film and television. Apart from these empirical oversights, Nannicelli’s approach leaves us with the possibility of too few media. Since his account of “the medium” seems to be intended to be exclusively praxeological, where all the practices between traditional, materially distinguished media are shared, we would appear to have to say that we have one medium. Arguably, experimental film and experimental video possess all the same practices. Similarly, mainstream commercial cinema and commercial narrative television may also share the same practices. Should we regard these, respectively, as cases of the same media? Surely, this is at least at odds with our current classificatory schemas. And what reasons do we have to abandon that classificatory schema? Lopes’ version of the medium specificity approach shares many of the same problems that beset Gaut’s and Nannicelli’s. Like them, he does not regard media as necessarily just material. They can be physical and/or symbolic, as in the case of literature, and they are also constituted in terms of practices. Moreover, again like Gaut, a medium is nested. Lopes calls the collection of media that make up a medium its media profile. But Lopes’ ultimate aim is not to defend just the medium specificity approach to cinema. Rather, he thinks that he is committed to medium specificity on the way to stalking bigger game—namely, that of addressing the enduring question of defining what it is to be an artwork by maintaining that something is an artwork just in case it is a member of an art kind. This, of course, raises the question of what it is to be an art kind. And this is where the commitment to medium specificity enters the picture for Lopes, since being an art kind requires having a distinctive medium profile which includes practices, notably appreciative practices, that is, practices that are appropriate to understanding work in the art kind. Here is a formal statement of Lopes’ view: X is a work of K [e.g. cinematic art], where K is an art [an art kind or art form] only if X is a work in a medium profile M, where M is an appreciative kind and X is a product of a M-centered appreciative practice P. (Lopes 2014)

Crucial for our purposes, here is that something is a work of a certain art kind—say cinematic art—only if it is the product of an M-centered practice— that is to say a medium-centered-appreciative practice—a practice that focuses appreciation upon the distinctive properties derived from manipulating the physical and/or symbolic resources of the medium. An example of what Lopes has in mind here, derived from his writing on photography, is the use of photography to bracket the object in front of the camera from its natural context and reframe it, in a way that enables us to see the object afresh (Lopes 2003). To appreciate a work of photographic art on Lopes’ view is, among other things, to attend to its unique medium profile, its capacity, for instance, to defamiliarize things by, so to speak, lifting them out of space and time for

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decontextualized scrutiny. Thus, we are able to see the strenuous exertion that the runner expends as she strains toward the finish line in a photograph, revealing something to us that we would have missed in the haze of activity on film. Lopes offers the aforesaid formula as framework for research into the nature of individual art kinds. Since this framework has yet to be filled out in a single case, its viability remains to be seen. At best, it is a promissory note. Lopes cites my own theory of the moving image (Carroll 1996a, b, c, d) as the kind of thing he has in mind, although he does not commit himself to it. Nor should he, because, since it is not an account of moving image art, it provides no suggestion about what sort of things are to be appreciated qua moving images, and, if I am right, the moving image is not itself a medium but an effect multiply-­realizable by a range of different media, properly so-called. Furthermore, I do not believe that Lopes’ formula is successful on its own terms. It implies that every work of art is a member of at least one art kind. There are no, in other words, what Lopes calls free agents. Among other things, he says, there are no artworks without media. I think that this is false. For example, I do not think ready-mades can be said to have a distinctive media, since anything can be a ready-made. Also, what is the medium of conceptual artist Robert Barry’s piece “All the things I know but of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 p.m. June 15, 1969.”? Surely the medium was not the card with this statement penciled on it. You might be tempted to say that the medium is thought, as Lopes is, but is thought an artistic medium and if it is, is it a distinctive one? Also, another candidate that would appear to lack a medium profile is performance art which would seem to be open to any sort of human activity including inactivity. Installation art poses a similar challenge in that anything can comprise it and it can serve as a vehicle for a wide range of discourses including but, not confined to, art theory, politics, economics, racism, and so forth. Lopes is aware of challenges like this. He does not reject these works as art. He proposes two strategies to deal with them. In some cases, like Duchamp’s Fountain, he suggests that they be regarded as the early progenitors of what will become an art kind, in this case, the ready-­ made. This strikes me as ill-advised, since it involves Fountain becoming an artwork retrospectively—that is, only after the art kind was consolidated successfully. Rather, I think that it is more plausible to think that Fountain, like all other artworks, was art at the moment of its birth. Another strategy that Lopes proposes in order to deal with the putative free agents I have enumerated is to claim that they are all examples of a specific art kind, namely Conceptual Art. The first thing that needs to be said is that Lopes’ category of Conceptual Art is much broader than usually believed and, frankly, rather ad hoc. It would regard various Fluxus events as conceptual art—such as Alison Knowles and her friends gathering at the Museum of Modern Art regularly to lunch on tuna fish sandwiches. However, I question whether that is correctly classified as Conceptual Art, at least as it is typically construed.

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Lopes maintains that so-called Conceptual Art has a media profile including language, and ideas, mostly ideas about art. Of course, whether language and ideas are media is controversial and, in any event, Conceptual Art, as usually understood, is not restricted to trafficking only ideas about art. And it is not clear that every work of performance art must involve language or ideas about art or anything else. It may simply be predicated on provoking a reaction.6 Thus, it is not clear that Lopes’ framework for investigation of art kinds is as general as he maintains. Consequently, there is no reason to think that it fits cinema. In his work on developing this framework for exploring the individual arts, he has not said that much about evaluation. However, he does tend to be emphasizing that the value that individual arts, like photography and paintings, have as or qua photography and paintings. Does he think that this is the only or primary way that art kinds have value—in virtue of the kinds of appreciation that attend to the medium profiles of the art form? If so, that would appear to return us to the problem of fetishizing purity over excellence.

The Issue of Evaluation Although historically the notion of medium specificity played a central role in the artistic enfranchisement of film and video, today, if the idea has any function with respect to those media, it would appear to be primarily in terms of evaluation.7 As we have seen, for Gaut, the idea of medium specificity with respect to evaluation amounts to the claim that some cases of filmic evaluation advert to features of the cinematic medium. For example, Jean Renoir’s irregular panning in some of his films of the 1930s is said to contribute to the feeling of spontaneity in his images which, in turn, contribute to his overall project of realism. That is, Renoir’s camera follows the movement of the characters wherever they go rather than framing the characters in such a way that they must roam within a predetermined, proscenium-­like box. Instead, the camera must track their seemingly spontaneous movements as they plunge off screen, plotting a jagged floor plan, in contrast to the elegant, preplanned, geometric type of crane shot that Hitchcock would employ in order to reveal the key in Notorious. In contrast, Renoir’s shooting style leaves the impression that the characters are free to engage the space as the situation requires rather than being apparently blocked ahead of time in a pre-rehearsed environment, thereby via cam-

6  Moreover, if we accept Lopes’ revision of the notion of Conceptual Art, that will result in having too few media, in terms of how we currently individuate media, since ready-mades and performance art are not typically regarded as belonging to the same medium. Likewise, avant-garde video and avant-garde film will arguable be regarded as the same medium, although that is not how we currently categorize them. 7  One area in which medium specificity argumentation may still be marshaled for the purpose of artistic enfranchisement is in the defense of the artistic status of computer art (see Lopes 2009).

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era movement imparting the feeling that the image is more authentic, that is, a more realistic portrayal of human action. But here, a crucial question arises: is it the irregular panning as such—arguably a film specific feature of the medium—that is commendable? Or, is it that this feature has been used in a way that serves Renoir’s purposes, namely, the production of a certain sense of realism? Surely, this use of the medium is commendable because it serves Renoir’s purposes so neatly. Indeed, it embodies or articulates his purposes. The lesson here is that when it comes to evaluating an artistic choice in film (as in the other arts), it is the question of whether or not the artist’s purpose is being served that is paramount, not whether the device is specific to the medium.8 To endorse the latter view is to revert to fetishizing the medium, as if it were valuable for its own sake. A similar point can be made with respect to negative evaluations. One feature of the medium, often cited as essential, is its capacity to record whatever stands before the camera, irrespective of the intentions of the film director or the camera operator. If a bird lands on the lover’s head as he pleads his case to his lady-fair, that untoward event is indelibly ingrained in the film footage. Obviously, this essential feature can give rise to straightforward artistic defects in certain films. For example, in various films of the distant past, including The Ten Commandments, Viking Queen, and Spartacus, characters have been reported to have been seen wearing wristwatches (Givens 1999). This is certainly an artistic defect, even if it is not perhaps one of the highest order. But why is it an artistic defect? Surely not because these films enlisted an essential feature of the medium simpliciter, albeit one supposes accidentally, but because engaging that specific feature of the medium in those particular contexts involved an effect that was at odds with the purposes of these films— which, broadly speaking, was to at least deliver a convincing representation of the past. It was not the use of the medium as such that was artistically dubious. It was the use of the medium relative to the constitutive purposes of the films at hand.9 Had these movies been time-travel films, there would have been no problem. So, once again, it is the purpose behind the use of the device that is relevant to evaluation. And this, of course, is the reason that choices of devices not putatively unique to the medium of film, such as theatrical devices, can also warrant positive evaluations when they serve the designs of the filmmakers. An avant-garde film of the 1970s might, for example, employ highly stylized, artificial acting in order to articulate the theme that the film was constructed without incurring aesthetic offense. 8  This is not to claim that this is the only concern that the critic needs to address when evaluating a movie. One may also need to ask questions about the value of the purpose, including the question of whether the purpose was worth the effort (see Carroll 2016). 9  By “constitutive purposes,” I mean the purposes that make the motion picture artwork, the artwork it is.

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The film The Battle of Algiers has been commended again and again for its use of grainy film stock. Obviously, this is not because grainy film stock has something inherently good about it, but because it served the purposes of that particular film by imbuing it with a documentary look, thereby enhancing its realism. Though it was a brilliant choice for the purposes of The Battle of Algiers, it would have been an artistic defect in Pillow Talk. Indeed, it is exactly because of the predominance of purposes that Gaut must limit his claims for medium specificity to at best some instances. But even more significantly, the reasons that some cases of evaluation are connected to features of the medium have less to do with the value of the use of the medium as such, but to the purposes to which the medium is put. And the same points apply even when the medium is conceived praxeologically. As already noted more than once, the difference between Gaut’s revisionist conception of medium specificity and traditional views is that the traditional accounts provided general criteria of cinematic excellence (and defectiveness). This, all things being equal, is an enviable, theoretical virtue. I have been touting the line that purpose is more fundamental to motion picture evaluation than is medium specificity. But how does this approach compare with the admirable scope of the medium specificity approach? Clearly, my competing approach to evaluation is at least as general as the medium specificity view, if not even more encompassing. Why? Because every film has a purpose (or set of purposes, often interconnected), and, for that reason, the question of whether or not it has secured its purposes is at least a part of the process of evaluating it. One counterexample to this conjecture might be a film so confused in its intent that we might be tempted to say that it has none. Fair enough. So, let us amend the view to claim that every movie has an intended, constitutive purpose (or set of such constitutive purposes) and that assessing how the movie manages to discharge those purposes or, more likely, fails to do so is a major part of critical evaluation. Another worry might be films that supposedly eschew any preordained purposes—films whose (avant-garde) produces allege are open to viewers responding to them as they may. But the very ambition to afford such an open structure for viewers is unavoidably itself a purpose and, therefore, not a problem for the purpose-driven view. Among other things, a further advantage of my alternative approach to evaluation over the idea of medium specificity is that my view has the means to avoid the kind of untenable evaluations that entangled the medium specificity view when it was confronted by the comparison of the “Oceana Roll” sequence of The Gold Rush and Sennett’s Lizzies of the Field. For Chaplin’s invention is a more creative way of articulating or embodying his comic purposes than is Sennett’s—notwithstanding the fact that Chaplin’s is theatrical and Sennett’s is putatively cinematic.

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Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolf. 1933. Film. Trans. L.M. Sievking and I.F.D. Morrow. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1956. Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Balázs, Béla. 2010. Early Film Theory. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. New  York: Berghahn Books. Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carroll, Noël. 1988. Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1996a. Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video and Photography. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 3–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. The Specificity of Media in the Arts. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 25–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996c. Defining the Moving Image. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 49–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996d. Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 293–304. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Eisenstein’s Philosophy of Film. In Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, 127–146. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2003a. Forget the Medium! In Engaging the Moving Image, 1–9. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2003b. Kracauer’s Theory of Film. In Engaging the Moving Image, 181–202. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2014. Béla Balázs: The Face of Cinema. October 148 (May): 53–62. ———. 2016. Art Appreciation. Journal of Aesthetic Education 50 (4, Winter): 1–14. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. Cinematic Art and Technology. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 17–35. London: Routledge. Givens, Bill. 1999. Film Flubs: Memorable Movie Mistakes. New York: Citadel Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lopes, Dominic. 2003. The Aesthetics of Photographic Transparency. Mind 112 (July): 1–16. ———. 2009. A Philosophy of Computer Art. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2014. Beyond Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Münsterberg, Hugo. 1970. The Film: A Psychological Study. New York: Dover Press. Nannicelli, Ted. 2017. Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective. London: Routledge. Pudovkin, V.I. 1958. Film Acting and Film Technique. London: Vision Press. Sontag, Susan. 1969. Film and Theater. In Styles of Radical Will, 99–122. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux.

CHAPTER 3

The Moving Image Nick Wiltsher and Aaron Meskin

When you watch a film, you typically have an experience rather like that of seeing things move. The questions of how to characterize and theorize that typical experience preoccupy us in this chapter. In addressing this question, we take ourselves to be asking, more or less, what a moving image is, or what sense can be made of the phrase. Moving images occur in a motley of forms and formats: Hollywood movies, film art, CCTV footage, home videos, Skype calls, and so on. There is an interesting, narrower category of artifact in the vicinity, namely cinematic images. These are moving images apt for appreciation as cinematic—constitutive parts of movies, TV shows, and similar. What makes them so apt is what makes them a more specific category of moving image, and this aesthetic question is beyond our purview here.1 Our discussion is the broader category of the moving image, but the chief reason to be interested in moving images is because they are central to the experience of cinema. So we will often refer to film. However, not all images that move are moving images in the sense with which we’re concerned. Roughly, by moving images, we mean the sort of images that are seen when a film is projected at a frame rate that produces the 1  For an approach to cinematic images that we can’t hope to summarize here, see Gilles Deleuze’s heroic attempt to taxonomize the distinctively cinematic forms of movement in both space and time—that is, those forms of movement that cinema is uniquely or distinctively able to show: Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1986), and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, (London: Athlone Press, 1989).

N. Wiltsher (*) Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium A. Meskin Department of Philosophy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_3

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impression of motion (the standard rate for contemporary film is 24 frames per second) or digital equivalents of this. Whether other sorts of images that move should be assimilated to these moving images is a topic of some contention, as we’ll see. Given that the term “moving image” has two parts, you might expect that a satisfactory characterization of it would say something about images, and something about movement. Broadly, this is what we are going to do, but it is hard to separate the two entirely. Although, as we explain in Section 1, philosophers have suggested that the images involved in films have various distinctive features, it’s their movement that’s their most distinctive and most puzzling feature. So, even though we treat image-questions and movement-questions somewhat separately, it will be apparent that each impinges on the other; one might say we are treating two aspects of the same issue separately rather than discussing two issues pertaining to the same subject. In more detail, here is how things go. In Section 1, we explore preliminary issues concerning the identity of moving images, making clear why movement is thought to be a highly distinctive feature of images typically found in film, and why we are talking about images rather than pictures. In Sections 2 and 3, we address issues about images. These are essentially general issues concerning pictures and images which are specifically relevant to film, namely whether certain kinds of image are transparent, enabling a sort of indirect perception of their object (Section 2) and how to theorize depiction, the distinctive kind of representation of which images are capable (Section 3). The film-specific versions of both these questions are mostly concerned with movement. The big question about the movement of moving images is whether it is real movement, or apparent or illusory movement. We discuss this debate, and alternative accounts of the experience of image movement, in Section 4. We also address the issue of the ontology of moving images—the question of what sort of thing they are—which is, again, entangled with the question of movement. We conclude with some comments concerning the centrality of movement to the literature as it stands and possible ways in which progress might be made.

Why Images? Why Motion? We are concentrating on moving images because it is a commonplace to think that such things are necessary and important constituents of film. So philosophizing about film requires attention to them. They’re almost certainly not sufficient constituents; a movie doesn’t count as such solely in virtue of involving a moving image. But the thought that films involve moving images is intuitively compelling, and indeed embedded in the basic descriptive vocabulary we use regarding cinema. Equally, though, we talk naturally about moving pictures rather than images, and the former is arguably the more common term (it’s the motion picture industry—not the moving image industry). But “picture” and “image” are not synonymous, and so a choice needs to be made.

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Noël Carroll prefers the term “images” to “pictures” in this context because “pictures imply recognizable representations, whereas…much of the art that concerns us has been and will be nonrepresentational and abstract”.2 Carroll is correct to say that there are many abstract and arguably nonrepresentational films that need to be considered in giving a general account of the moving image. Consider, for example, Hans Richter’s Rythmus 21 (1921), Stan Brakhage’s hand-painted films such as Water for Maya (2000), and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993). However, his reasoning is unpersuasive. It is not at all clear that the term “picture” implies recognizable representations. After all, the public has no trouble making sense of the idea that highly abstracted and nonrepresentational paintings are pictures of some kind or other (even if they dispute their artistic status and value). Barnett Newman’s zip paintings and Jackson Pollock’s drip works are pictures in at least some ordinary sense. There are, however, other challenging cases that suggest “image” is the better term. Consider Stan Brakhage’s nonphotographic Mothlight (1962), which was made by inserting various natural objects between two strips of celluloid. There are certainly images on the screen. Are they pictures? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Or, consider films that only involve text, such as Paul Sharits’ Word Movie (Flux Film #29) (1966) or Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982). These films do not involve pictures of any kind. As Gregory Currie puts it, “the word ‘Vienna’, though I may recognize it as referring to Vienna, does not represent Vienna pictorially”.3 Nor should we be tempted by the thought that these movies depict words—such a view would tend to collapse the distinction between presenting and representing linguistic items. Yet it is reasonable to characterize these textual films as composed of images. (Such films might not involve movement. Snow’s film does not. But, as we shall see below, it still falls into the category of the moving image.) These examples suggest that we should talk about moving images rather than moving pictures. But perhaps even this is a mistake: perhaps films don’t involve images at all, let alone moving ones. Trevor Ponech argues that the essence of cinema is “stroboscopic visual display”: a field of projected points of light in rapid, flashing motion.4 The fact that the points of light are themselves in motion doesn’t entail that a viewer will have an impression of motion; a display in stroboscopic motion can show something static. An image may supervene on the display, but it doesn’t have to; the visual things appearing in the display might be “sketchy abstract shapes, an undifferentiated m ­ onochromatic field, words, num-

 Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xiii.  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7–8. 4  Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (2006): 187. 2

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bers, or snowy static interference”.5 Ponech thus denies that images are any part of the essence of cinema. Jonathan Walley argues that Ponech mistakenly relies on the historical contingency that most films have been produced in such a way to make an essentialist argument, and that he misidentifies that historical contingency in a number of ways—that is, he gets the technological history and present of cinema wrong.6 One might also wonder whether at least some of the things that Ponech contrasts with images could in fact be subsumed under a more capacious conception of them. Interested readers might also consult Ponech’s reply, but we note the issue principally to set it aside.7 We take it that films do indeed involve images—if not necessarily, at least typically. We will, however, be more cautious about the claims that films have a special or essential relation to movement, and that the images they involve must move. This latter claim has customarily been finessed by careful theorists of film, who note that one may use a film projector to show images of static, unchanging objects. (Chris Marker’s La Jetée approximates this condition.) Yet surely this projection would count as a film, and therefore it can’t be that actual movement of an image is necessary for something to count as such. This point was first made by Arthur Danto, and has been reiterated by Carroll.8 Danto’s suggestion for a finesse is that in the case of still pictures such as slide projections, the lack of movement is “logically determined”, whereas in the case of moving pictures, stillness would have to be the product of “perverse artistic intention” (5). This, however, cannot be right, since the stillness of slide projections is surely not a matter of logic nor even obviously one of necessity; slide projectors are not necessarily static or stable. An alternative approach, which Danto also suggests, is that a properly informed viewer has a “legitimate expectation” that there will be movement in a film, even if it turns out that there is not.9 But it is illegitimate—in fact, according to Carroll, it is “conceptually absurd”—for someone to “expect to see movement in what she knows is a still picture”.10 So, according to Danto and to Carroll, it is a necessary condition of something being a film (and, more generally, an instance of the moving image) that it makes sense to expect it to move, at least on first viewing.  Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema”, 195.  Jonathan Walley, “On Ponech on the Essence of Cinema”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 4 (2007): 408–12. 7  Trevor Ponech, “Cinema Again: A Reply to Walley”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 4 (2007): 412–16. 8  Arthur C. Danto, “Moving Pictures”, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4, no. 1 (1979): 1–21; Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 63–6; Carroll, “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image”, in Philosophy of Film, ed. Cynthia Freeland and Thomas Wartenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995), 66–85; Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 58–9. 9  Danto, “Moving Pictures”, 5. 10  Carroll, “Towards an Ontology”, 73. 5 6

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Again, it is hard to see what role conceptual possibility is playing here, and making films’ connection to movement relative to the reasonable expectations of the typical viewer will not satisfy those seeking a connection intrinsic to the medium.11 One might also wonder whether it’s really so absurd to expect to see movement in a still picture. As James Shelley argues, stills can show things moving; they can show things in motion.12 So it’s not unreasonable to go to the art gallery expecting to see (depictions of) things that are moving. It might be unreasonable to go there expecting to see things move, but a lot of still pictures allow us to see movement happening. From this and similar observations, Shelley draws the conclusion that films have no special or essential relation to the depiction of movement. Moving images, whatever they are, don’t have a capacity to show movement that sets them aside from still images; if we want to find the essence of cinema, we have to look elsewhere. One might argue that it is not the depiction of movement that marks the distinction between moving pictures and still pictures but, rather, the different ways they depict movement. So, for example, Robert Hopkins argues that “the difference between still and moving pictures is that only in the latter does development (stability or change) in properties of the representation determine development (stability or change) in properties represented”.13 This is too strong; there could be still (but changing) pictures in which development in color or shade properties determine development in color or shade of properties represented. Perhaps, then, the difference between still and moving pictures is that only in the latter does development in properties of the representation determine the representation of change of position. That is to say, in moving pictures, the ways in which parts of the picture change, or don’t, dictate the ways in which the things pictured move or do not move. However, even this cannot be quite right, since a picture in which mere changes in color determined the representation of change of position need not count as moving. (Imagine a stationary picture of a moving ball in which color properties were used to represent the ball’s position.) Perhaps the thing to say about this case is that this picture doesn’t represent the motion pictorially (although it represents other features pictorially), and that this needs to be added to the modified version of Hopkins’ account; that is, the focus must be on depictive aspects of pictures.14 On the other hand, it is not clear why we should require that moving pictures depict movement rather than depicting something else.

11  Such people might find more appealing Carroll’s idea that films are moving images because they “belong to the class of things for which creating the impression of movement is a technical possibility”. Carroll, the Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 59. For criticism, see Robert Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noël Carroll”, Film Philosophy 12 (2008): 135–140. 12  James Shelley, “Motion Sickness” (unpublished manuscript, May 2017), Microsoft Word file. 13  Robert Hopkins, “Depiction”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009), 65. 14  Hopkins (personal correspondence) suggested this.

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It is not clear whether a modified version of Hopkins’ account can be developed that will rebut Shelley’s heterodox conclusion. We shall put aside the issue. But note, again, that an account such as Hopkins’ sounds as if it will be silent regarding the movement of non-depictive images. Our task is to survey current debates about moving images, and those debates are conducted almost exclusively in just the terms whose relevance Shelley is denying: moving images are fundamental to cinema, and moving images bear some special relationship to movement that stills somehow don’t—a relationship bound up with a special capacity to show, exhibit, manifest, or represent movement. But the reader might well find, by the end of our survey, that they feel that much of the debate needs rethinking at the sort of fundamental level that Shelley suggests.

Transparency We began this chapter by saying that films give us experiences rather like those of watching things move. The simplest explanation is that we are, in fact, watching things move. This is to claim that films are transparent. Of course, the claim on its own does not underwrite the natural idea that, in some way or other, the images involved in films themselves are moving, but one could consistently conjoin the idea that films transparently show objects in motion with an account of the motion of the images depicting those objects. The transparency thesis has primarily been explored with regard to photographs, and the debate is primarily conducted in the terms laid down by Kendall Walton.15 His claim is that photographs allow us to literally see their objects; we see through the medium to the thing. This is not to say that photographs aren’t pictures, nor that we do not see the photographs themselves (they are transparent, not invisible), but to claim that they are pictures of a special sort: ones that allow us to indirectly see their objects. (Walton also holds that such pictures prompt us to imagine directly seeing their objects, but this is an implication of his general theory of depiction and is not directly implied by the transparency thesis.) In brief, Walton argues that photographs are transparent because they involve belief-independent, counterfactual dependence on their depicted scenes which preserves real similarity relations. As Diarmuid Costello and Dawn Phillips put it, this thesis has proved “remarkably resilient”, despite the fact that numerous philosophers have found it counterintuitive.16 The somewhat inconclusive debate that has ensued consists mainly in people trying, with greater or lesser degrees of success, to identify relevant discontinuities between the experiences of seeing an object represented in a photograph and seeing that same object. So, for example, Berys Gaut has argued that seeing involves “being in unmediated or direct 15  Kendall L. Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”, Critical Inquiry 18, no. 1 (1984): 67–72. 16  Diarmuid Costello and Dawn M. Phillips, “Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography”, Philosophy Compass 4, no. 1 (2009): 6.

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contact with an object” and that this requires that rays of light “pass uninterruptedly from it to our eyes”.17 Several other critics have argued that seeing necessarily involves the provision of certain sorts of spatial information concerning the location of objects relative to the viewer, and that photographs do not provide this egocentric information.18 One possible reason why this debate is inconclusive is that Walton’s original claim incorporates, or relies upon, what he later admits is a conceptually revisionary account of ordinary seeing, according to which (for example) one counts as seeing a foot by virtue of seeing a footprint.19 So attempts to grapple with the transparency thesis have to be oriented either to Walton’s revisionary account or to some more ordinary understanding of sight; this raises the danger that the parties to the debate will end up talking past each other. In any case, the transparency thesis is typically held to apply to film as well as to still photographs, both being largely photographic media. But a number of considerations concerning transparency are more germane to films than they are to photographs; here are four. First, it seems that the transparency thesis, even if correct, cannot apply to all films, at least not without some nuance. Some films are animations; some animations not produced by photographic means; so, the transparency thesis cannot apply straightforwardly to them.20 Second, and somewhat related, one can wonder what objects one sees through a putatively transparent film. Most photographs are documentary: they aspire or purport to show things just as they were. Some films are also documentary, in this sense, but a good number are fictions: they tell a story, and they show how some things are in the story by showing us how some things really are (how we get from the latter to the former is not our concern here). The transparency claim is most usually taken as the claim that we really see actors, props, and sets; if, in any way, we “see” characters, items, or venues, it is a special sort of “imagined seeing”.21 However, Hopkins has argued that there is a respectable sense in which one does really see fictional things in fictional films.22 So there is room for debate concerning the objects of transparent seeing through films. Third, it might seem that certain forms of broadcast video introduce factors which make the transparency claim more plausible for moving images than it is for photography. For example, the viewer of the feed of a fixed security camera will know the location of the depicted objects. However, commentators have  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 91.  Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 62–3; Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 56–8; Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (2004): 197–210; Currie, Image and Mind, 65–7. 19  Kendall L.  Walton, “Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (1986): 805. 20  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 97. 21  George Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Films (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 22  Robert Hopkins, “What Do We See In Film?”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 2 (2008): 149–59. 17

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generally held that such cases are ultimately not different from the photographic and cinematographic cases because the image itself does not carry the requisite egocentric information.23 But, fourth, one could argue that, even if still photographs are not transparent, and even if moving images are not wholly so, the latter might be transparent with respect to motion. A lot of the arguments against the transparency thesis in the literature rely on finding differences between the ways in which actual seeing reliably informs us about the spatial location of objects relative to us and the ways in which seeing photographs and films fails to do so. As Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin put it: “photography is not transparent, insofar as the visual process of looking at photographs fails to carry egocentric spatial information about their depicta”.24 Now, to see motion, one needs to see an object change its position. This change needs to be relative to a perspective. Cohen and Meskin suggest that properly seeing an object requires reliably carrying information about the spatial relations between the object and the viewer; the question is whether properly seeing movement requires this. Perhaps it is enough for motion-seeing that information is reliably carried to the effect that the object is changing position, whether or not information about its various positions relative to you is also reliably conveyed. If that is so, moving images might transparently show motion—they might allow you to see an object’s motion—even if they don’t transparently show the actual object. Moving images might be transparent in many, some, or no respects. But even those who accept the thesis often say that transparent images can also represent objects in a more mediated manner. So, it’s worth exploring the distinctive sort of representation of which images are capable, particularly their putative capacity to represent movement.

Depiction If films don’t show motion in some literal, transparent sense, perhaps, instead, they represent motion. Films doubtless represent in multiple ways. They often contain linguistic representations of one sort or another, they may well involve sonic representations, and so on. But we’re concerned with the moving image, and so the form of representation we’ll consider is depiction. Depiction is a form of representation by which pictures or images represent their objects. While it’s a type of representation unique to images, it’s not the only way in which images can represent; not everything an image shows or represents is depicted. Comics represent various things without depicting them: for ­example, they often represent speech without depicting it. Allegorical paintings can represent an idea without depicting it; they depict objects that ­somehow represent the idea. So it is an open question whether motion is 23  Carroll, Theorizing The Moving Image, 63; Cohen and Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs”, 203. 24  Cohen and Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs”, 201.

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among the things that films generally depict or among the things they usually represent in some other way. Theorizing about depiction usually starts from static images, typically paintings. Theories of depiction can be grouped into four kinds. According to the first, depiction depends on resemblance or intended resemblance between aspects of a picture and aspects of the depicted object.25 The second kind of theory holds that pictures symbolize what they depict, much as words and sentences symbolize their objects.26 According to this view, depiction has a syntactic structure and semantic scheme that we need to learn in order to grasp the representation. The third kind of theory says that depiction relies on recognitional capacities.27 According to this view, pictures exploit our ability to recognize things by triggering just the same perceptual or neuropsychological capacities; a picture of a toucan depicts a toucan by triggering whatever it is in the eyes, brain, and mind we use to recognize real toucans. The fourth kind of theory says that depiction involves a special sort of experience. This experience is often called seeing-in. The idea is that experience of an image involves seeing, in the marks on a surface, that which the image depicts; the experience has two aspects or folds, one of the surface, the other of the represented object.28 Some have said more about this special experience: for example, that it’s an experience of resemblance, or that it’s an experience with both imaginative and perceptual aspects.29 Without settling the question of which of these theories is right, we can ask whether any of them make it seem plausible that motion is something that can be depicted. Paintings and photographs can certainly show movement, and perhaps, indeed, they depict it. Quite plausibly, different theories will say different things about how, or under what circumstances, images depict motion. A symbolic theorist will be attracted, perhaps, to the example of a cartoon image of a sprinter, with waving lines flowing behind them; these seem to symbolize motion. Partisans of the other approaches may be less likely to say that such an image depicts motion, but ready to say that a picture of, say, a ship under full sail does do so, by virtue of triggering recognitional capacities, acting as an imaginative prop, or through resemblance. 25  For example, Catharine Abell, “Canny Resemblance”, Philosophical Review 118, no. 2 (2009): 183–223; John Hyman, “Depiction”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 71 (2012): 129–50. 26  For example, Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); John Kulvicki, On Images: Their Structure and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 27  Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Flint Schier, Deeper Into Pictures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 28  Richard Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 3 (1998): 217–26. 29   On experienced resemblance, see Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); On imagination and perception admixed, see Kendall L.  Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 293–352.

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But none of these thoughts seem germane to the question of how motion is shown in moving images. The trouble is that there is something peculiarly direct and literal about the relation of moving images to motion. The images don’t represent motion—they display motion, or they’re in motion, in some sense. Just think how unintuitive it is to say that motion is symbolized in an ordinary film; one wants to say that, no, there just is motion there, not a symbol of it. Resemblance is likewise intuitively unsuitable. Similarly, it seems strange to say that one recognizes motion in film, perhaps because motion is not something one generally recognizes in actuality. Recognition is to do with successfully reidentifying objects by their appearance, but motion does not have an appearance in this sense. One does not reidentify motion in different cases by noticing a certain way it looks. Plausibly, one detects motion using some more basic capacity to understand spatial relations.30 The fourth view is less clearly implausible, insofar as it seems that one does experience motion when watching a film. But the question here is specifically whether films represent motion via a special experience, and once more, it seems that, for example, the idea that motion is represented via a special sort of imaginative experience makes a complex mountain out of a simple molehill; the experience is, really, very much like that of seeing motion. However, the idea of seeing-in on which the experiential view is founded does at least allow us to distinguish clearly two aspects of film experience that might be confused or conflated. Suppose that depiction indeed involves an experience with two aspects: one pertinent to that which is depicted and one pertinent to the medium of depiction. It’s common, regarding the latter, to talk of the variegated ways in which surfaces might be marked: they might have colors, textures, and so forth. But the colors that a painting depicts (if it does so) need not be among the colors that the surface actually is.31 Similarly, a painting may depict a shape without any of the marks on the surface actually instantiating that shape. With this in mind, we can distinguish two aspects of films’ movement: the motion that’s depicted and the motion that is (perhaps) a property of the medium in (partial) virtue of which it depicts. One might think that movement is fundamental to the moving image: a property by which it depicts movement. But the movement depicted need not be the movement of the images. The experience of movement in seeing film is intimately connected with the construction of the space of the film by camera angles, tracking, and suchlike. This is also how a spatial perspective is constructed. Constructed spatial perspectives in paintings are plausibly construed in terms of seeing-in: we are aware both of our actual perspective on the painting and the perspective shown on the objects in the painting. And so, similarly, we might think that the motion of moving images involves seeing-in: we are in some sense aware of both the motion of  The term “motion recognition” is typically applied to machine detection of motion.  Dominic McIver Lopes, “Pictorial Color: Aesthetics and Cognitive Science”, Philosophical Psychology 12, no. 4 (1999), 419–423. 30 31

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images and the motion of the objects that they show. This, again, is an issue meriting consideration that we can’t give it here.32 We turn now from the image aspect to the movement aspect of moving images.

Movement and Moving Images Suppose moving images don’t transparently, really, show us objects in motion. And suppose that motion is not a depicted property of the objects in the image. Perhaps, instead, we see motion in films because we see images apparently move. Something like this idea is more or less orthodoxy; moving images are images that move, which is why they can show movement. What’s far from settled is how exactly to understand the claim that images move: do they really move or do they just seem to move? Those who think they really move are generally called realists; those who think they just seem to move generally claim that the movement is an illusion, and thus may as well be called illusionists. The debate between illusionists and realists is one of those curious arguments where both sides often claim to be advancing, or vindicating, the common-­sense view of the matter, and so tend to claim that the burden of proof rests with their opponents. For this reason, positive arguments for either side are somewhat thin on the ground, while reasons to doubt the other side’s position proliferate. The illusionist’s version of common sense runs something like this: we all know that films are made up of a series of static images, which seem to move when shown consecutively at a certain speed. So at no point do we really see a moving image; that is impossible, since there is no actual, single, moving thing to be seen. Rather, we experience an illusion of movement. Because illusionism does have a certain intuitive plausibility, one might think that not much more is needed than this.33 Andrew Kania, however, offers something more substantial.34 He argues that a central feature of illusions is that we can be disabused of them, shown that reality is not how our experience suggests it to be. And we can be disabused of the illusion that the cinematic image really moves. If we slow down the film, the movement disappears; we start to see images discontinuously.35 The point is not that the motion disappears, and so must have been an illusion; the point, rather, is that once you understand what’s going on at the lower level, you’ll change your mind about what to say about your experience at the higher level. You will now say something like: I was not really seeing a moving image, just as you will want to say that you were not really seeing a bent stick when you realize that it was a straight stick standing in water. 32  For more on the issue, see Currie’s discussion of whether films represent time and motion by way of presentation of time and motion, or in some less direct manner, in Image and Mind, 96–102. 33  Currie cites several culprits who insouciantly assume the truth of illusionism (Image and Mind, 34). 34  Andrew Kania, “The Illusion of Realism in Film”, British Journal of Aesthetics 42, no. 3 (2002): 243–58. 35  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 248–9.

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In defense of realism, Carroll argues that the motion of images does not count as a perceptual illusion.36 Most things are not, at some fundamental level, as they appear to be. For instance, objects that are apparently solid are, at a microphysical level, full of gaps, holes, and air. Nonetheless, it is an objective fact that ravens and writing desks are solid objects; we would be badly mistaken to say that their solidity is illusory. But this means that we have to accept that appearance properties such as solidity are, in some sense, objective response-­ dependent properties. An appearance property counts as real, or objective, if creatures like us, with perceptual capacities like ours, tend to reach intersubjective agreement on the question of whether objects do or don’t have the appearance property in question. By this definition, the motion of moving images is a real, response-dependent property of those images. We will return shortly to this idea of response-dependent motion, but will first finish with Carroll’s argument. Its key move comes as he considers a putative problem with it: doesn’t it obliterate the category of perceptual illusion entirely? After all, a half-submerged straight stick will appear bent to any creature with something like our perceptual capacities; so doesn’t the stick’s bentness count as a real, response-dependent appearance property in Carroll’s view?37 And so are there no perceptual illusions at all? To dissipate this difficulty, Carroll argues that we can be disabused of perceptual illusions, but not of response-dependent appearances, using “our normal perceptual capacities and ordinary or everyday or conventional procedures”.38 We can find out that an apparently bent stick is not actually bent by taking it out of water. We can’t find out that a table is not solid without employing expensive and complicated apparatus. He then suggests that the means by which Kania suggests we disabuse ourselves of the “illusion” of motion are not ordinary, everyday, or conventional procedures; film projection technology is such that slowing a film down counts as an “extraordinary” process. Therefore, filmic motion is as real as the solidity of tables. The illusionist could well respond that there is something unsatisfactory, to say the least, about sorting perceptual illusions from objective appearances on the grounds of how easy it is to complicate or undermine the apparent deliverances of perception. For one thing, Carroll’s distinction is hostage to technological fortune. If, at some point in the future, advances allow an electron microscope in every garage, it will be everyday and conventional to disabuse ourselves of the appearance of solidity; solidity would thereby become a perceptual illusion. Nonetheless, the illusionist doesn’t have all the common sense on their side. The realist’s version of common sense goes along these lines: when we look at a film, we seem to see the image move; this is manifest in the experience we undergo. We should take this experience at face value, unless we have good  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 89–92.  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 90. 38  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 91. 36 37

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reason not to; we don’t have good reason not to. So, we should take the experience at face value, and agree that the images really move. This sketched argument for realism is essentially that presented by Currie.39 As you might expect, Currie defends the argument by concentrating on the crucial claim that we have no good reason to doubt that moving images really move. He claims, among other things, that cinematic images must actually move; that is, that one cannot coherently hold that cinematic images exist but do not move, else we’d only see static images in films, and this is wildly implausible.40 In response, Kania argues that many of the considerations Currie advances falsely, or perhaps question-beggingly, assume the presence of a continuous image on the screen.41 However, like Carroll, Currie mainly premises his defense of realism on the claim that the motion of film images is a response-dependent property. He does this by analogy with the idea that colors are response-dependent. Plausibly, we can’t specify what it is to be a certain color without reference to (typical, human) experience of that color; nonetheless, it’s true that things have colors, that colors aren’t illusions. We can say something similar about motion in films: we can’t say what such motion is without reference to our experience of it, but it’s not illusory, all the same. Currie’s argument has an advantage over Carroll’s, in that it doesn’t depend on questionable claims about the response-dependent nature of all appearance properties. Rather, it trades on the common (though eminently debatable) idea that some such properties, paradigmatically colors, are response-­dependent in the relevant sense. Nonetheless, Kania argues that the analogy is poorly drawn. Paradigmatic cases of motion, he says, necessarily involve a thing being in one place at one time, and then in a contiguous place at a contiguous time.42 If we understand motion so, film images don’t involve ordinary movement; they don’t change their spatial location in this manner. There is no image that occupies contiguous spaces. What Currie has done, effectively, is identify the special filmic illusion by calling it response-dependent motion, much as we might call the apparent property of a half-submerged stick response-dependent bentness. This is just the accusation to which we saw Carroll responding with somewhat desperate maneuvers, and it’s not clear what Currie could say against it. However, trading on the notion of response-dependent properties is not the only route open to the realist. Kania points out that, in the argument just ­outlined, Currie seems to distinguish two sorts of motion, and attribute one to images and the other to objects.43 The other option available, with which Currie seems to flirt, is to argue that the film image is a special sort of entity  Currie, Image and Mind, 34–42.  Currie, Image and Mind, 34–5. 41  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 250. 42  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 254. 43  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 258, referring to Currie, Image and Mind, 47. 39 40

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capable of real movement: an entity not quite like the medium-sized dry goods which we’re perfectly happy to say move, but enough like peculiar things such as shadows to which we more or less happily ascribe movement. So, we could retain a univocal conception of what movement is, and gently expand the range of things to which we’re willing to ascribe it. Against this, Kania argues that the slippery slope from shadows is far from frictionless. We’re happy to ascribe movement to shadows because the paradigmatic condition of contiguous positioning is fulfilled, and, indeed, we become less happy to do so when it isn’t. But that condition fails with regard to film because we can see (once we inspect the mechanisms of projection) that the condition is not actually fulfilled.44 Nor can the realist argue that our ability to apparently see the image proves that a continuous, moving image really exists; this would, again, be to effectively deny that there are any such things as illusions, since we would then apparently be committed to saying that seeing a bent stick in water proves that there is a bent-stick-entity (rather than, as before, a stick with the property of response-dependent bentness).45 Kania seems entirely right that the realist is faced with two fairly unpalatable options: make distinctions among types of motion, where we might previously have thought there were none, or carve out a class of novel entities capable of real movement. Nonetheless, we might explore further these options and, in so doing, cast some doubt on the illusionist’s position. We can start by asking what, exactly, the illusion that the illusionist attributes to film is meant to be. While the debate has often been conducted with respect or by analogy to such familiar perceptual phenomena as apparently bent sticks and Müller-Lyer lines, the really salient illusions are those of apparent motion: that is, cases where discrete, stationary projections or appearances in different locations at small time intervals produce the impression of motion of a single object. It seems that the illusionist wants to say that cinematic motion is an illusion of just this kind. However, Christoph Hoerl argues that the movement of cinematic images is not an illusion of apparent motion. One of his arguments for this conclusion relies on the observation that in many cases of apparent motion, there is an identifiable gap between the appearances of the two discrete stimuli; the impression of motion is created despite the subject being aware of that gap. The subject sees a dot flash to the left of an array, and then a dot flash to the right of the array, and sees them as distinct dots, but, nonetheless, still has some impression of movement. But, he argues, cinematic motion is not (usually) this sort of illusion, if it’s an illusion at all. The viewer does not see the images ­composing a film as distinct images and, nonetheless, have an impression of movement; the viewer really seems to see one continuous image.46  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 254–5.  Kania, “The Illusion of Realism”, 255–6. 46  Christoph Hoerl, “Seeing Motion and Apparent Motion”, European Journal of Philosophy 23, no. 3 (2015): 692–94. 44 45

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Hoerl’s argument depends on the claim that there is a phenomenological difference between experiences of apparent motion and experiences of real motion, and that experiences of moving images are phenomenologically closer to the latter. Apparent motion, he argues, “does not involve the visual presentation of something that is moving”. Rather, “apparent motion displays suggest that there is something moving, because they resemble paradigm cases of visible movement in certain respects”.47 The point is that apparent motion does not involve, or seem to involve, a single spatio-temporal particular reappearing at different points, whereas real motion does involve this appearance. So does cinematic motion, and thus cinematic motion is closer to real motion than it is to apparent motion. However, it’s not clear why the illusionist can’t accept all this and still maintain that the motion of images is illusory. Showing that such motion is not an illusion of apparent motion in Hoerl’s sense doesn’t show that it’s not an illusion at all, and so it doesn’t show that it should be classified as a case of real motion. Hoerl does have other arguments, though, which address both sides of Kania’s dilemma concerning multiplying motion types or pluralizing our ontology. Regarding motion, Hoerl argues that many cases of actual movement are not paradigmatic cases of visible movement. Some things move too slowly, some move too fast, some too far, and some not far enough, for their movement to be visible to us. Tectonic plates move, but we can’t see them doing so. So do insects’ wings, but their movement is too fast for us to track. The paradigmatic cases of visible movement involve spatial and temporal displacements of magnitudes that we humans are well-adapted to detect. Conversely, in cases such as illusions of apparent motion, the spatial and temporal displacements can be of magnitudes similar to those of paradigmatic cases of visible movement. All in all, then, there is an objective property of appearing to be in motion that is not enjoyed by all moving things and can be enjoyed by non-­ moving things.48 Hoerl’s aim is to explain illusions of apparent motion within a direct realist framework—that is, without invoking perceptual contents or sense-data to explain the impression of movement. The point of mentioning the argument here is to contrast it with Currie and Carroll’s notion of response-dependent motion; we leave it to the reader to make comparisons and relative evaluations. Hoerl also claims that Kania’s argument about slowing down the projector relies on a questionable assumption about what’s required for cinematic motion to count as real motion. This assumption is that cinematic motion is dissective. Once again, an analogy with color is employed. A pointillist painting may look green, while actually being made up of yellow and blue dots. Yet the painting really is green; it’s just that its real green-ness is only detectable at a certain distance. This shows that color is not dissective; that is, not every part of a  Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 694.  Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 686–7.

47 48

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colored object needs to be that color. Indeed, conceivably, a painting such as this could be really green even though no part of it is actually green. Similarly, Hoerl argues, cinematic motion is not dissective. Under the right conditions, it looks like the images are moving; why not say they really are moving? If the motion is not dissective, the fact that it disappears under other conditions, or closer examination, does not mean it is not there in the first place.49 Kania, of course, is likely to respond that real motion is dissective, and so if cinematic motion is not, that just shows that we are once again diversifying types of movement and effectively naming the special cinematic illusion. Hoerl anticipates this response by, once more, arguing that we “should allow into our ontology re-identifiable spatial particulars other than physical objects. Once we do, these can clearly undergo movement”.50 So, again, we return to the possibility of diversifying our ontology. Perhaps it is really ontology that is the key to this debate. Both sides invite us to assimilate moving images to a certain kind of artifact, agree that that kind of artifact can or can’t undergo motion, and then agree that therefore moving images can or can’t really move. So the realist asks us to think of them as akin to shadows and to accept that shadows can move; the illusionist says we should accept that moving images are not anything more than the things they’re composed of, namely static images, which clearly cannot move. As this suggests, the illusionist takes it that there is no such thing as the moving image—there just isn’t a single image that could be moving. The realist takes it that there is, in fact, such an image. It’s an interesting question how we might settle this—that is, how we might establish the identity conditions of a moving image—without begging the question against one side or the other. The kind of thing moving images are will affect the kinds of movement of which they’re capable. And so, what one says about one issue will affect what one says about the other. But one might wonder which is the dog and which the tail. Because the question of ontological categorization usually arises in the literature in conjunction with the issue of movement, it’s not clear which way the motivation travels: whether thoughts about ontology motivate thoughts about movement, or vice versa. The reason that the ontological question is difficult, and interesting independently of its influence on the movement question, is the peculiarity of the moving image. On the one hand, moving images do not seem to have the same status as, say, celluloid images, which are fairly clear examples of concreta. As Currie remarks, “there does seem to be a difference between the substantial pictures we make contact with when we look at a painting or a photographic print, and the insubstantial pictures of film—the images on a screen”.51 On the other hand, cinematic images appear to be public in nature and, hence, do not  Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 689–90.  Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 690. For a similar argument, see Trevor Ponech, “External Realism about Cinematic Motion”, British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 4 (2006): 349–68. 51  Currie, Image and Mind, 30. 49 50

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seem to be purely mental phenomena like mental imagery. So how shall we understand the image? The first thing to point out is that there are at least two things that might be meant by talk of “the moving image”: on the one hand, there is the visual display that takes up the entire screen or projection surface, and, on the other hand, there are the parts of that image which often appear to move—an image of a droid or a princess, for example.52 It is not always clear which sort of image various authors are referring to, but our primary interest is in the latter sorts of images, since these are the only plausible candidates for movement. The simplest account of moving images is that they are identical to patterns of light on a screen. This seems to be Gaut’s view of what moving images amount to, and on such an account they are real but do not move.53 Currie’s view is more complicated. He appears to identify moving images with patterns of color that are both mind dependent and extrinsically sustained.54 That is, these patterns are dependent both on the responses of viewers and on some sort of technological apparatus, and perhaps also on various screening conditions. So it seems that, for Currie, there is a moving image if typical observers typically experience a moving image under the right conditions, just as red is identifiable as that which is experienced by typical observers under the right conditions. Here, we have response-dependent ontology to go with response-­ dependent movement. But more needs to be said if this ontological conjecture is to support realism about movement, since the illusionist can just respond that to call this a single image is to beg the question—we haven’t established why we should call this a single image rather than the illusion of an image. There is one more argument against illusionism that might be made on the basis of Hoerl’s work, though he doesn’t quite make it himself. His main aim is to argue that apparent motion illusions can be accounted for within a direct realist framework, without appeal to representational content or sense-data. He does so by diversifying types of movement and types of objects capable of movement. Insofar as those are moves typical of realists, they are moves illusionists are likely to reject. This suggests that illusionists ought to be representationalists: they ought to think that illusions of motion are explained by something to do with representational content. In particular, they ought to appeal to content to explain the fact that there is a persistent and continuous object of experience, the moving image, despite their claim that there is no single image that is moving. The obvious representationalist way to do so, as Hoerl recognizes, is to argue that stimuli are “subjectively supplemented”: they are augmented with mental items that fill in the gaps in the series of stimuli such that something  Cf. Currie, Image and Mind, 35–6.  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 65. 54  Currie, Image and Mind, 30–4. Gaut claims that Currie holds that cinematic images supervene on the light pattern on the screen, but this does not seem right. Currie’s supervenience claim is about the movement of the images. See Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 65, and Currie, Image and Mind, 40. 52 53

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constant is presented.55 But one can see that, if one continues along this path, the moving image itself—the continuous thing that is the object of experience—is in danger of becoming a mental item: either an artifact of representational content or a sense-datum. And it may well be that the illusionist, and anyone else, should balk at the idea that moving images are essentially mental items. We haven’t the resources or space to go more deeply into this question, but one thing it does highlight is that the debate between illusionists and realists may in part be down to confusion over the relation between the (intentional) object of experience and the actual perceived object in the case of film. Realists sometimes appear to argue that, since there is a persistent object of experience, there must be a persistent object in the world to be experienced; more precisely, that since the object of experience appears to have a certain property, some actual object must have that property. That’s not a good argument. There might indeed be an actual image with the property of motion, but we can’t infer that from the fact that we experience motion. On the other hand, the illusionist needs to explain how there can be a continuous object of experience here without resorting to or falling into claiming that cinematic images are mental. What this might suggest, in turn, is that the whole focus of this debate is misdirected. One can get a feeling this is the case when one reads Currie claiming that our experience of film represents to us that there are images moving.56 If this is meant as a straightforward report of the experience of watching a film, it is plainly false. As Shelley argues, it is very rarely, if ever, the case that we seem to see images moving when we watch films.57 Rather, we seem to see things moving. It could be that there are images involved, but those are not things we seem to see, not things that figure in the contents of our experiences. And if it doesn’t seem to us in experience that we see an image move, then its seeming movement can neither be real nor illusory; there is no seeming movement of an image to explain. If Shelley is right, the illusionist and the realist are the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb. Of course, if he’s right, he seems committed to some version of the transparency thesis or a more sophisticated explanation of how cinematic images can depict motion without themselves moving or seeming to move. Before we conclude, we wish to mention briefly one last point about the debate we have just surveyed. Therein, it seems that everyone implicitly thinks they are comparing the experience of film to experience of real motion, and that it is straightforward what that is. It is not, and there are reasons to doubt Currie’s claim that there is no position in the metaphysics of motion that makes a difference to the debate.58  Hoerl, “Seeing Motion”, 682–5. Hoerl does not endorse this thesis.  Currie, Image and Mind, 36. 57  Shelley, “Motion Sickness”. 58  Currie, Image and Mind, 34. 55 56

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The usual, intuitive view of what motion is, whose codification is commonly attributed to Bertrand Russell, is that, necessarily, something moves if and only if it is in one place at one time, and at a different place at a different time.59 As a corollary, it is said that for something to be in motion at an instant is for it to have a velocity over intervals. This seems to be more or less the account being assumed by the participants in the debate over filmic motion. Now, elements of the received view have been questioned: for example, John W. Carroll discusses problems with the notion of motion at an instant, and Shieva Kleinschmidt argues that the metaphysical possibility of multiply-located entities presents problems for the stated definition of movement.60 Owing in part to such problems, Graham Priest endorses a “Hegelian” account of motion, according to which motion is inconsistent: “to occupy more than one place (in fact a continuum of places) at the same time, and hence both to be and not to be in some place”.61 It’s an interesting question, deserving further study, whether what we say about real motion might affect what we say about supposed contrast cases such as the movement of images. Such study might also consider Chris Mortensen’s contention, based partially on Priest’s work, that the experience of motion has inconsistent contents: motion perception is, therefore, inconsistent.62 Teasing out the implications of this position for the debate on moving images is beyond our scope here, but it seems clear at least that the “real motion” and “experiences of real motion” with which cinematic motion is compared are less well understood than we might assume.

Conclusion In conclusion, here are two points which emerge from this survey of various ways to account for the apparent motion of the film image, which is so often taken to be a necessary aspect of such images. The first is that, if we are ever going to make sense of the idea of the motion of moving images, a lot is going to depend on how we make sense of adjacent and antecedent notions. Many of the issues revolve around comparisons between “real” things and not-real things: in the case of transparency, real seeing is compared with the ways in which film allows us to see; in the case of depiction, real perspective is compared with constructed perspective; in the case of illusionism, real motion is compared with illusory motion, and real appearance properties with somehow 59  Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), sec. 447. 60  John W.  Carroll, “Instantaneous Motion”, Philosophical Studies 110, no. 1 (2002): 49–67; Shieva Kleinschmidt, “At It Again: Time-Travel and the At-At Account of Motion”, Erkenntnis 82, no.2 (2017): 185–98. 61  Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent, expanded ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 180. 62  Chris Mortensen, “Motion Perception as Inconsistent”, Philosophical Psychology 26, no. 6 (2013): 913–24.

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less real ones. In each case, it could well be that it will be much more clear how we should think about the moving image once it has been established how exactly we should think of the real things with which aspects of it are being compared. As a strategic move, however, sitting on our hands as we wait for the philosophy of perception to be settled has little to recommend it, and we might therefore pay more heed to a second point suggested by the foregoing. The thought that films show movement is obvious and intuitive, as is the thought that this is a distinctive feature of moving images, and so it is natural to focus closely on them and their movement. But the intricacies involved in elaborating and explaining moving images’ motion might lead to the thought that it is hard to say much decisive when considering motion in isolation from other properties and aspects of moving images. And this is true even when considering moving images in isolation from other aspects of film and filmic art. We might do better to treat the motion of the moving image as an important member of a cluster of qualities that make such images important, interesting, and captivating.

Bibliography Abell, Catharine. 2009. Canny Resemblance. Philosophical Review 118 (2): 183–223. Carroll, Noël. 1995. Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image. In Philosophy of Film, ed. Cynthia Freeland and Thomas Wartenberg, 66–85. New York: Routledge. ———. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carroll, John W. 2002. Instantaneous Motion. Philosophical Studies 110 (1): 49–67. Carroll, Noël. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell. Cohen, Jonathan, and Aaron Meskin. 2004. On the Epistemic Value of Photographs. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2): 197–210. Costello, Diarmuid, and Dawn M. Phillips. 2009. Automatism, Causality and Realism: Foundational Problems in the Philosophy of Photography. Philosophy Compass 4 (1): 1–21. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danto, Arthur C. 1979. Moving Pictures. Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4 (1): 1–21. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone Press. ———. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Athlone Press. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Hoerl, Christoph. 2015. Seeing Motion and Apparent Motion. European Journal of Philosophy 23 (3): 676–702. Hopkins, Robert. 1998. Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2008. What Do We See In Film? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2): 149–159. ———. 2009. Depiction. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga, 64–74. London: Routledge. Hyman, John. 2012. Depiction. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 71: 129–150. Kania, Andrew. 2002. The Illusion of Realism in Film. British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (3): 243–258. Kleinschmidt, Shieva. 2017. At It Again: Time-Travel and the At-At Account of Motion. Erkenntnis 82 (2): 185–198. Kulvicki, John. 2006. On Images: Their Structure and Content. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lopes, Dominic McIver. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Pictorial Color: Aesthetics and Cognitive Science. Philosophical Psychology 12 (4): 415–428. Mortensen, Chris. 2013. Motion Perception as Inconsistent. Philosophical Psychology 26 (6): 913–924. Ponech, Trevor. 2006a. The Substance of Cinema. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 187–198. ———. 2006b. External Realism about Cinematic Motion. British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (4): 349–368. ———. 2007. Cinema Again: A Reply to Walley. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (4): 412–416. Priest, Graham. 2006. Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent. expanded ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Russell, Bertrand. 1903. Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schier, Flint. 1986. Deeper into Pictures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelley, James. Motion Sickness. Unpublished manuscript, May 2017. Microsoft Word file. Walley, Jonathan. 2007. On Ponech on the Essence of Cinema. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (4): 408–412. Walton, Kendall L. 1984. Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism. Critical Inquiry 18 (1): 67–72. ———. 1986. Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin. Critical Inquiry 12 (4): 801–808. ———. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, George. 2011. Seeing Fictions in Films. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wollheim, Richard. 1998. On Pictorial Representation. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (3): 217–226. Yanal, Robert. 2008. Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noël Carroll. Film Philosophy 12: 135–140.

CHAPTER 4

The Art of Cinematography Patrick Keating

Over 80 years ago, the Hollywood cinematographer Victor Milner wrote that his job was to “attune the visual mood of the picture to the dramatic mood of the story.”1 British cinematographer Douglas Slocombe defined the function of cinematography in similar terms: “Not merely to reproduce something, but to comment on it and translate it on to the screen in the ‘mood’” that best fit the story.2 For French cinematographer Henri Alekan, the task of the cinematographer was not confined to “humbly reproducing” the subject; instead, the cinematographer was supposed to “create” a shifting series of atmospheres.3 All three practitioners emphasized the cinematographer’s power to give artistic shape to the films they shot. Admittedly, Milner, Slocombe, and Alekan were not unbiased observers; they had an interest in defining their craft under the most favorable terms. But I think they were onto something. The cinematographer is an artist—not just a technician but a picture-maker, a storyteller, and, in some meaningful sense of the word, an author. In this chapter, focusing on the narrative fiction film, I will define and defend the cinematographer’s contribution to film art. Part One clears some ground by clarifying the sort of “picture-making” I have in mind, arguing that a cinematic image may reasonably be described as a picture of a fictional character. Part Two, the heart of the chapter, considers how a cinematographer might use a range of techniques, such as camera 1  Victor Milner, “‘Miscasting’ the Cinematographer,” American Cinematographer 13 (February 1933): 13. 2  Douglas Slocombe, “The Work of Gregg Toland,” Sequence 8 (Summer 1949): 70. 3  Alekan, quoted in René Predal, “Les grands operateurs (IV),” Cinéma 73 173 (February 1973): 93. My translation.

P. Keating (*) Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_4

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­ ovement and lighting, to contribute to a film’s larger storytelling goals. Part m Three defends the idea that films are authored collaboratively and explains how cinematographers might be understood as members of a collaborative authorial group. Throughout, I will argue that we can find considerable continuity between the film-driven techniques of traditional cinematography and the computer-driven techniques of today’s digital cinematography. Digital tools increase the filmmaker’s ability to shape the image in meaningful ways, but those abilities have been quite powerful for some time.

Preliminary Considerations: Picture-Making Cinematography is the craft of producing moving images—typically, by photographing a series of still images that produce the appearance of motion when they are projected at a suitable speed. Suppose we are watching the 1944 film Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder and photographed by John F. Seitz. A strip of film, containing a series of stills, is running through the projector. When we look to the screen, we see projected pictures of Phyllis Dietrichson, the femme fatale played by Barbara Stanwyck. Is it fair to describe these pictures as pictures of Phyllis, even though Phyllis is a dramatic role? I think it is. Here, I take inspiration from an important article by Catharine Abell, who has defended the view that a fiction film may “primarily depict” its fictional characters the way a documentary primarily depicts its non-fictional subject. Abell writes, “Cinematic representation, I propose, involves primary depiction. […] The computer-generated film Shrek primarily depicts Shrek, Princess Fiona, and Donkey; films produced by painting onto film stock primarily depict the things that are painted onto it. Likewise, the documentary Crumb primarily depicts Robert Crumb; All About Eve primarily depicts Margot Channing; and Les Triplettes de Belleville primarily depicts the Belleville sisters.”4 This proposal provocatively groups the photographic film All About Eve with various kinds of animated works, suggesting that a fiction movie may depict fictional characters in various ways. To be sure, a photographic film may simultaneously depict actors giving performances, as All About Eve depicts Bette Davis playing the role of Margot Channing. But the fact that the film depicts its actors does not preclude the possibility that it also depicts its characters. Abell’s proposal has the significant advantage of retaining a way of speaking that seems quite natural in ordinary conversation. Looking at a newspaper’s comics pages, one might readily describe certain images as pictures of fictional characters, as when one says that a cartoon is a picture of Charlie Brown, even though Charlie Brown does not exist. Indeed, in an ordinary-language context, I simply cannot imagine someone looking at a relevant Peanuts cartoon and insisting “That is not a picture of Charlie Brown.” It does not seem 4  Catharine Abell, “Cinema as a Representational Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 3 (July 2010): 277.

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­ nreasonable to extend this way of speaking about pictures to the cinema. It u would be perfectly understandable to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (David Hand, 1937) and say that we are seeing moving pictures of Snow White. Pushing the case a little farther, the viewer of The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) might look at the computer-generated image of a large green man and describe it, quite reasonably, as a picture of The Hulk. Our usage of the phrase “picture of…” is quite broad—broad enough to include Charlie Brown, Snow White, The Hulk, and other fictional characters. The next step is more challenging. If we are willing to say that all of the images listed above are pictures of fictional characters, then we should be willing to say that the images in Double Indemnity are pictures of Phyllis Dietrichson. Admittedly, there are two immediate problems with this view. First, the images in Double Indemnity are also pictures of Barbara Stanwyck, and it seems odd to say that one image can depict two subjects. However, the oddness recedes when we consider precedents in other arts. As Abell explains, “On the assumption that Rembrandt intended both Bathsheba and Hendrickje Stoffels, whom he used as a model, to be identifiable in his painting Bathsheba, it will turn out to depict both women, since both are identifiable in the picture.”5 If a painting may depict two subjects at once, then so may a film. To make sense of such cases, we can take advantage of the distinction between primary and secondary depiction (a distinction that Abell credits to Dominic Lopes). The images in Double Indemnity primarily depict Phyllis Dietrichson and secondarily depict Barbara Stanwyck.6 A second challenge to my view is the fact that the images in Double Indemnity are photographic, and therefore different from paintings, and different from the images in cartoons, animated films, and movies packed with CGI (computergenerated imagery). A photographic image has a causal relationship with its subject. Because Phyllis Dietrichson does not exist, it is simply not possible to take a photograph of Phyllis Dietrichson. The best one can do is take a photograph of an actor playing Phyllis Dietrichson. This reasoning is sound, but I do not claim that the images in Double Indemnity are photographs of Phyllis Dietrichson. I merely claim that they are pictures of Phyllis Dietrichson, just as the images in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves are pictures of Snow White and the images in The Avengers are pictures of The Hulk. The filmmakers of Double Indemnity intended to tell a story about Phyllis Dietrichson (among other characters). To do so, they made use of several tools—writing, acting, music, costume design, editing, and, yes, photography. Animation is one of cinema’s ways of producing pictures of fictional characters. Photography is another. A hypothetical scenario might make this proposal sound more plausible. Suppose we were to learn that Barbara Stanwyck failed to show up for photography one day on the set of Double Indemnity. And suppose that the ­filmmakers  Abell, “Cinema as a Representational Art,” 275.  Or, if you prefer, the other way around. For my purposes, it is only necessary to establish that it makes some sense to speak of pictures of fictional characters. 5 6

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had access to some cutting-edge proto-CGI technology, allowing them to produce pictures of Stanwyck playing Phyllis artificially. In such a case, we might be willing to count the (hypothetical) computer-generated shots of a woman with an anklet as pictures of Phyllis, the same way we might count computergenerated images of a large green man as pictures of The Hulk. I think it would be odd to say that some of these images (the computer-­generated ones) are pictures of Phyllis and that the rest (the photographic ones) are not. Watching the film, they all serve as—and, in my view, are—pictures of Phyllis. For that matter, they are all pictures of Stanwyck. The difference is that only some of them are photographs of Stanwyck. (None of them are photographs of Phyllis.) In 1944, this example would have seemed far-fetched. Now it seems pretty routine. Big-budget Hollywood movies shift between photographic images and CGI all the time, often imperceptibly. Even in the 1940s, a film might have depicted its characters and situations in various ways—photographing actors against rear-screen projections, replacing actors with stunt doubles, or combining two or more settings into one apparent space via an optical printer. Filmmakers had a range of techniques for producing pictures, one of which was photography. There are other important ways of thinking about the problem of cinematic depiction, such as Robert Hopkins’s proposal that we experience a “collapsed” form of seeing-in when watching “two-tier” films and Gregory Currie’s argument that a sequence of cinematic images may “give us information about” the fiction, without performing the impossible task of “representing the characters of the fiction.”7 Both are compelling theories that explain certain problems that I cannot address here. Here, I will continue to rely on the everyday usage of the phrase “picture of…” because I think it will help us understand the sorts of contributions that cinematographers might make to the art of cinema—contributions that most often respond to the problem of picturing characters in expressive ways. Earlier, I wrote that the craft of cinematography is the craft of producing moving images. Now I can make the claim a little more precise. In the realm of the mainstream narrative fiction film, the craft of cinematography is the craft of producing pictures of fictional characters, objects, and places. How might a cinematographer use the resources of the craft to produce those pictures expressively?

The Resources of Cinematography Many works in the philosophy of photography pay special attention to photography’s causal relationship with its subjects. Roger Scruton goes so far as to exclude idealized forms of photography and cinema from the realm of the representational arts because they are incapable (at least, qua photography and 7  Robert Hopkins, “What Do We See in Films?,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 149–159; Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11.

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cinema) of expressing an artist’s intentions.8 By contrast, defenders of the cinema as a representational art, such as Abell, argue that “cinematic works can have aesthetic value in virtue of expressing their makers’ thoughts about their primary subjects.”9 This section adopts the latter strategy. Focusing on the narrative fiction film, I will list some of the techniques a cinematographer might use to craft pictures with an expressive purpose. Film Stock and Lab Work In a Hollywood film, the person in charge of producing the pictures is the cinematographer, who leads several teams of craftspeople, including the camera crew, the grip crew, and the electrical or lighting crew.10 Some industries treat the lighting designer as a separate job. On set, the cinematographer usually answers to the director, who may dictate instructions to the cinematographer with more or less precision. For most of cinema’s history, cinematographers have photographed movies on film stock, such as 16 mm or 35 mm. In the last decade, digital cinematography has become the norm, though some prominent directors and cinematographers still prefer to work with traditional film.11 In both cases, the cinematographer may express ideas by making judicious choices regarding the handling of the medium. Let us consider the case of traditional film first. The choice of film stock can make a significant difference to the “look” of the finished film. The point is obvious when we compare black-and-white stock to color stock, but it remains true when we consider variations within those two broad categories. For instance, two black-and-white film stocks might differ in terms of latitude—that is, their responsiveness to a range of light values. Suppose that two cinematographers—call them Judy and Woody—are photographing the same scene. On set, the brightest part of the scene is 50 times brighter than the darkest part of the scene. Judy has selected a stock with a latitude of six stops. Because one stop is equivalent to a doubling of the amount of light, such a stock is capable of preserving detail as long as the brightest part of the scene is no more than 64 times brighter than the darkest part of the scene. In other words, Judy is capable of registering the entire scene, from the shadows to the highlights. By contrast, Woody has selected a stock with a latitude of five stops. Such a stock is capable of preserving detail as long as the brightest part of the scene is no more than 32 times brighter than the darkest 8  Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” The Aesthetic Understanding (London: Methuen, 1983), 103. 9  Abell, “Cinema as a Representational Art,” 285. 10  In brief, the electrical crew sets up the lamps, but the grip crew modifies the light by setting up stands to create shadows, diffusion, and other effects. The grip crew also works with the dolly and crane, while the camera crew works with the camera and the tripod. 11   Christopher Lucas, “The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000-Present,” in Cinematography, ed. Patrick Keating (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 133–140. Christopher Nolan is an example of a director who prefers film.

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part of the scene. If Woody opens up the aperture, he will be able to register detail in the shadows, but the highlights in the finished film will register as white, with no detail.12 If he closes down the aperture, Woody will be able to register detail in the highlights, but the shadows will register as black, with no detail. If Woody decides that he does not like these options, he may alter the lighting itself, perhaps adding more illumination to the shadows, thereby ensuring that the scene will “fit” within his latitude of five stops. Both film stocks preserve aspects of the scene’s tonal scale. Within the latitude, darker objects will appear darker in the finished film, and lighter objects will appear lighter. In that sense, the resulting picture resembles the original scene in terms of its patterns of light and dark. Indeed, the causal nature of photography may allow the filmmaker to capture such gradations with exceptional nuance, arguably exceeding the abilities of most painters. Still, the choice to use one film stock rather than another remains a creative choice. Woody might prefer the look of a narrow-latitude film stock, and Judy might prefer the look of a wide-latitude alternative. In addition to the variable of latitude, stocks vary in several potentially meaningful ways. Whether black-and-white or color, some film stocks are more sensitive to (blue) daylight than they are to (orange) tungsten-balanced light. Some film stocks have more visible grain than others. Some film stocks are fast, responsive to low levels of illumination, and some film stocks are slow, requiring more illumination to produce an exposure. When we add the variables of developing and printing, we see that the filmmaker’s ability to shape the image via cinematography is considerable. A few historical examples will give a better idea of the range of options. During the 1930s, the standard practice among black-and-white cinematographers at MetroGoldwyn-Mayer was to add extra illumination to each scene, compensating for the added brightness by reducing the negative’s time in development. This procedure produced the studio’s characteristic low-contrast style, featuring gentle gradations of gray instead of intense highlights and black shadows. Meanwhile, the standard practice at Warner Bros. was the reverse: Cinematographers would use less illumination and the lab would compensate with increased development time, resulting in high-contrast images with darker shadows.13 In each case, the style suited the studio. The wealthy M-G-M could afford to spend more money on electricians to operate the extra lamps, and its glamorous stars benefitted from the softer look. The more cost-conscious Warner Bros. favored a cheaper style, and the studio’s tough-guy stars had less need of glamor.

12  I have simplified the example in various ways, most notably by ignoring the fact that most film stocks are negatives. On the negative, a highlight will appear black, and a shadow will appear clear. These values are reversed on the positive print. If anything, this complication strengthens the case that a cinematographer may express a thought through the handling of film stock, because the process of using a negative to make a positive print introduces another stage where choices must be made, regarding the printing of the positive image. 13  Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis, 3rd ed. (London: Starword, 2009), 253.

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After the end of the studio system, cinematographers had more freedom to develop signature looks. During the 1970s, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond gained considerable esteem for his work with “flashing,” exposing the negative to a small amount of light before or after shooting. In films like the revisionist Western McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1971), the negative would pick up extra details in the shadows, lowering the contrast while adding a slight sepia tone that mimicked the appearance of nineteenth-century photography.14 The 1990s brought considerable experimentation with film stocks and processing, at a time when digitization loomed on the horizon. By using tungsten-­ balanced stocks outside, a cinematographer could produce a blue look that could be enhanced further with blue filters, as on Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993, photographed by Stuart Dryburgh).15 By mixing together 8 mm, 16 mm, and 35 mm stocks, a cinematographer could alter the film’s grain structure from scene to scene, with equally visible shifts in color and latitude, as on Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991, photographed by Robert Richardson), filmed on a total of 14 different stocks.16 By working with the laboratory to restore silver to the negative or positive during processing, a cinematographer could darken and desaturate the shadow areas, producing deep pools of black, as on David Fincher’s Se7en (1995, photographed by Darius Khondji).17 Even before the considerable expansion of digital tools in the 2000s, cinematographers had a wide range of options at their command. The best cinematographers patterned their decisions, creating a progression that underlined the structure of the story. Consider Ernest Dickerson’s work on Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992). The story may be divided roughly into three large sections. In the first section, Malcolm (Denzel Washington) is a minor criminal; in the second, he goes to jail; in the third, he becomes an activist. Each section features a different style. At first, the cinematographer favors highly saturated images, taking full advantage of Wynn Thomas’s colorful production design. Next, Dickerson employs strong contrasts with desaturated colors, as if all the color had been drained out of Malcolm’s life. After Malcolm emerges from prison with a new outlook, Dickerson shifts to a more balanced strategy, reintroducing color while avoiding the garish over-saturation of the first section.18 The visual progression echoes the progression of the narrative, which tells the story of a man who finds his identity after experiencing various alternatives. 14  See Herb Lightman, “The New Panaflex Camera Makes its Production Debut,” American Cinematographer 54, no. 5 (May 1973): 619; and Vilmos Zsigmond, “Behind the Cameras on Heaven’s Gate,” American Cinematographer 61, no. 11 (November 1980): 1110. 15  Ric Gentry, “Painterly Touches,” American Cinematographer 78, no. 1 (January 1997): 56. This article also explains how Campion and Dryburgh produced four distinct color palettes for four different stages of the story in The Portrait of a Lady (1996). 16  Bob Fisher, “The Whys and Hows of JFK,” American Cinematographer 73, no. 2 (February 1992): 45. 17  David E.  Williams, “The Sins of a Serial Killer,” American Cinematographer 76, no. 10 (October 1995): 37. 18  Al Harrell, “Malcolm X: One Man’s Legacy, to the Letter,” American Cinematographer 73, no. 11 (November 1992): 34.

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Arguments insisting on the causal nature of cinema and photography often rely on an idealized notion of the practice, asking us to imagine a photograph taken using standard exposure, standard developing time, and standard color timing. As Paloma Atencia-Linares explains, “Philosophical accounts of photography have generally provided an oversimplified view of the photographic practice,” ignoring many crucial steps in the process.19 Suppose you want to take a photograph of a street on a bright sunny day. The range of illumination may exceed the latitude of your film stock, no matter which stock you choose. Do you expose for the highlights, sacrificing detail in the shadows? Do you expose for the shadows, sacrificing detail in the highlights? Or do you set your exposure somewhere in the middle, hoping to capture most of the scene while losing detail in the very brightest and very darkest spots? Each choice produces a different picture. The same logic applies to later stages, such as development and printing. On a major motion picture film, the cinematographer works with a color timer to set the printing lights for each shot. The color timer may start with a default set of printing lights (say, 25-25-25, indicating an equal balance of red, green, and blue light), but those lights can be dialed up or down, altering the color balance and the density of the positive print. To be sure, the camera’s causal process captures an astonishing range of details, including details that may escape the cinematographer’s notice or control. But the existence of a causal connection should not prevent us from noticing how much of the process can and must be guided by choices, from early choices about film stocks to later choices about printing lights. Most of these observations apply, with even more force, to cinematography in the digital age. The role of color timer is now occupied by a color grader, equipped with considerably more powerful digital tools. Whereas a color timer had the ability to alter the overall color balance of a particular shot (for instance, by adding blue to the entire composition), a color grader can now alter the color balance of every detail (for instance, by adding blue to one character’s jacket). Even a film that was photographed on traditional 35 mm film stock may take advantage of the color grader’s services. Cinematographer Roger Deakins photographed O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000, directed by the Coen Brothers) in 35 mm, which was then transferred to a digital intermediate. A color grader adjusted the colors digitally, and the result was printed back onto film stock.20 Since then, the digital intermediate has become the norm in Hollywood production for movies shot on film. Meanwhile, the majority of Hollywood movies have been shot (or “captured”) on digital cameras. Like a film camera, a digital camera may produce pictures with more or fewer pixels  Paloma Atencia-Linares, “Fiction, Nonfiction, and Deceptive Photographic Representation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 21. 20  Lucas, “The Modern Entertainment Marketplace,” 134–135. Deakins defends his use of the digital intermediate by situating the technology within a broader history of cinematographic craft. See Roger Deakins, “The DI, Luddites, and other Musings,” American Cinematographer 89, no. 7 (October 2008): 78–83. 19

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(roughly similar to grain), with more or less dynamic range (roughly similar to latitude), and with more or less responsiveness to low light levels (roughly similar to speed). A digitally captured image may receive gentle or extensive manipulation in the hands of a grader. Indeed, some cinematographers worry that the digital grader has become too powerful.21 Traditionally, cinematographers made many of their most important decisions on set, while working with the camera, electrical, and grip crews. Now the grader has astonishing new powers to alter the cinematographer’s expressive interpretations. Lighting In The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), the great cinematographer Gordon Willis famously lit actor Marlon Brando from above, casting deep shadows over his eyes. The result is certainly artistic, but what sort of art has Willis produced? From one perspective, Willis’s achievement would appear to be dramatic, rather than cinematic. Like a theatrical lighting designer, Willis and his electrical crew have lit the actor in a particular way, expressing the mysterious danger of his character by making his eyes hard to see. Film lighting does indeed have a great deal in common with theatrical lighting; however, the tasks are not identical for several reasons. First, Willis’s decisions regarding exposure impacted the ultimate appearance of the lighting effect. Willis could have exposed for the shadows, making the eyes visible while leaving the rest of the face overexposed, or he could have exposed for the light, making the illuminated parts of Brando’s face visible while leaving the eyes underexposed. (Willis opted for the latter solution.) Second, the cinematographer needed to take the latitude of the stock into account when making decisions about lighting. Willis could have underexposed the eyes by a small amount, allowing the eyes to remain within the latitude of the stock, or he could have underexposed the eyes by several stops, allowing the eyes to go completely black. In practice, Willis judged the lighting very carefully, allowing us to see just a hint of detail in the eyes—not totally black, but not readily visible, either. Third, Willis needed to take the direction of the light into account, in ways that were not identical to the concerns of a theatrical lighting designer. Consider the problem of “eyelight.” Suppose a theatrical designer set up a lamp that produced a glimmer of light in an actor’s eyes. In the theater, the spectators would be spread out, witnessing the action from multiple angles. Some spectators would see the reflection in one part of the actor’s eye, others would see the reflection in another part of the actor’s eye; still, others might fail to see the reflection at all. In the cinema, the camera typically photographs the actor from one angle at a time. A cinematographer who wants to add an eyelight must place each lamp with precision, taking note of the reflections as they appear from the cam21  See the discussion between cinematographer John Bailey and colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld in Jon Silberg and Steven Pizzello, “Cinematographers, Colorists, and the DI,” American Cinematographer 90, no. 6 (June 2009): 78–82.

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era’s “monocular” perspective. A cinematographer who wants to eliminate an eyelight must be equally careful, placing each lamp to ensure that none produces the unwanted reflection. Willis had to work very hard to keep Vito’s eyes as dark as they appear on film. As we have seen, cinematographers took special pride in their ability to adjust lighting over time to suit the changing demands of a story. Recall Victor Milner’s desire to “attune” a film’s lighting moment by moment, Douglas Slocombe’s call to “translate” the mood of the story, and Henri Alekan’s urge to “create” the right atmosphere. In the absence of a universally accepted term, I propose the word “modulation” to describe this technique of altering the lighting as a story develops. We can find modulation on a large scale, as when a film alters its lighting from scene to scene or act to act, and we can find modulation on a small scale, as when a film alters its lighting within a scene. An example of large-scale modulation is Vittorio Storaro’s work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987). In interviews, Storaro explained that he assigned a dominant hue to each section of the story, moving through all of the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) and culminating in white, representing the synthesis of all the colors.22 In the finished film, the distinctions are not as obvious as Storaro’s comments might suggest, but the general strategy of shifting the palette as the story progresses remains quite visible, as in early scenes where Storaro and his crew have flooded the sets with orange light or in later scenes where the nighttime windows are rendered in an almost unnatural purplish blue. As an example of small-scale modulation, consider a scene in Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939). The protagonist, played by Greta Garbo, is living in the Soviet Union, thousands of miles away from her lover in Paris. In one scene, Ninotchka is sitting at a table with three friends. A small lamp hangs overhead. The lighting on Ninotchka’s face mimics the appearance of the overhead lamp by producing shadows under her nose and chin. Within this relatively stable framework, cinematographer William Daniels modulates the lighting’s contrast from shot to shot. Early in the scene, the lighting is relatively high-contrast: The shadows under Ninotchka’s nose and chin are fairly dark. Later, Ninotchka receives a letter from her lover. When she reads the letter, the film cuts to a medium close-up of Ninotchka’s face. She is still lit from above, but now the shadows under her nose and chin receive more fill light, producing a lower-­ contrast image. Then, Ninotchka learns that the letter has been censored. The final shot of the scene shows Ninotchka sitting under the lamp, and the l­ ighting has changed once again. Now the “top-light” effect is a little more extreme, casting longer shadows under her nose and chin, while making her eyes diffi Storaro, quoted in Ray Zone, “The Literature of Light: An Interview with Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC,” in Writer of Light: The Cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, ed. Ray Zone (Hollywood: ASC Press, 2000), 85–86. I discuss several examples of Storaro’s work, including this one, in Patrick Keating, “What Does It Mean to Say that Cinematography Is Like Painting with Light?,” in Transnational Cinematography Studies, ed. Lindsay Coleman, Daisuke Miyao, and Roberto Schaefer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 109. 22

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cult to see. The shadows are also darker, resulting in more contrast. Notice how the character’s mood changes over the course of the scene: Ninotchka is glum, then hopeful, and then in despair. The scene’s lighting shifts in comparable ways, starting out with a plausible representation of the overhead lamp effect, shifting toward softness when Ninotchka experiences a moment of hope, and then shifting again toward a more brutal top light as Ninotchka’s hopes are dashed. These modulations might seem troubling to some. Should we understand that the lighting in the room is actually changing, as if the lamp had a magical power to respond to Ninotchka’s moods? Or are we supposed to understand that the illumination from the hanging lamp remains constant from beginning to end, regardless of the pictorial evidence that it is changing whenever Ninotchka turns happy or sad? The example illustrates a more general problem. Once we take the time to look, we may notice that films are filled with lighting effects that make no sense. In one scene, a star’s hair may be aglow, illuminated by a powerful backlight, even when there is no light source behind the character. In another scene, the star may be dimly visible, even when the film has established that the character is in a pitch-black room. Notice that the problem is not exclusive to photographic cinema. We might see the same inconsistent lighting in an animated film, or a computer-­generated film, or indeed in a printed comic book or a painting. Perhaps the problem of inconsistency is nothing more than a “silly question.” Many philosophers have argued that it is pointless to ask questions about certain seemingly nonsensical features of represented worlds. Mocking such silly questions, Kendall Walton has asked, “Why do all thirteen of the diners in Leonardo’s Last Supper line up in a row on the same side of the table? […] Must we suspect that they are fearful of facing one another—of kicks under the table or bad breath?”23 Similarly, we might mock questions about inconsistent lighting as obtuse, failing to understand that the shifting lighting serves a pictorial purpose. My own view is that it is useful to draw a distinction between what we see and what we understand. We see pictures of Ninotchka—pictures that are designed in particular ways. On the basis of these pictures, we come to understand the character and her situation. The pictures are means to storytelling ends. Depending on the nature of those ends, the pictures may contain various design features, including some visible inconsistencies. On this view, we see pictures of Ninotchka in and out of the shadows, but the film as a whole does not give us reason to understand Ninotchka’s world as a place where light magically adjusts to her moods. Seeing the pictures is one thing, understanding the story-world is another. Watching a film, I see the pictures moment by

23  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 175. I have benefitted from Murray Smith’s discussion of this passage. See Smith, “On the Twofoldness of Character,” New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 290.

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moment, but I develop and revise my understanding of the story-world by taking the norms and logic of the entire film into account. Whether this proposal is persuasive or not, the problem of inconsistent lighting has attracted the notice of cinematographers as well as philosophers. Some cinematographers have rejected illogical lighting shifts in favor of a more consistent approach. Taking note of this approach, the historian Fabrice Revault d’Allonnes has proposed a distinction between “classical” and “modern” lighting. Whereas a classical film like Ninotchka modulates its light to dramatize the changing moods of the story, a modern film represents light as dramatically “indifferent.”24 Pointing to examples from L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1960) to L’argent (Bresson, 1983), Revault d’Allonnes argues that many post-neorealist filmmakers strive to capture the nuances of light without seeking to correlate those nuances with the story’s moods. A character might commit suicide in broad daylight or find love in ominous shadows. One form of Revault d’Allonnes’s modern lighting is naturalism, abjuring the artificiality of Hollywood lighting in favor of an approach that is more faithful to the lighting of the real world. But modern lighting need not be naturalistic; it could just be flat, as if the cinematographer were making no effort to model the subject. The lighting is still expressive—but the idea being expressed is the idea that the light of the world is meaningless or obtuse.25 The “modern” cinematographer is rejecting the role of storyteller in favor of the more elemental role of picture-maker, using the tools of cinematography to draw our attention to the subtleties of light and shade, independent of story concerns. Whether working in the studio period or in the Hollywood of today, the classical cinematographer remains both, a picture-maker and a storyteller. Lenses and Camera Movement Lenses offer several variables to the cinematographer, such as aperture, focus, and focal length. By adjusting the aperture, the cinematographer allows more or less light into the camera. All other things being equal, the resulting images will be lighter or darker. Of course, all other things are rarely equal. In practice, the cinematographer must take several factors into account when selecting the f-stop (a measurement of aperture), including the illumination on the scene itself, the speed of the film stock, the shutter speed of the camera, and the amount of light lost in the lens itself. Unlike the amateur photographer who relies on the camera’s automatic exposure controls, the professional cinematographer judges the f-stop very carefully. An incident light meter may help the cinematographer measure how much illumination is falling on the scene, and a reflective light meter may help the cinematographer measure how much illumination is reflecting back into the camera, but the cinematographer must

 Fabrice Revault d’Allonnes, La Lumière au cinéma (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1991), 9.  Revault d’Allonnes, La Lumière au cinéma, 11.

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i­nterpret each one of these measurements, treating them as pieces of information to be weighed rather than as requirements to be followed. The choice of f-stop inevitably alters the resulting picture’s depth of field. By photographing a scene with a wide-open aperture (say, f/2), the cinematographer produces a shallow-focus image. If the middle-ground is in focus, then the foreground and background will look soft. By photographing a scene with a closed-down aperture (say, f/16), the cinematographer produces a deep-­ focus image, with sharp focus on the foreground, middle-ground, and background. Famously, the cinematographer Gregg Toland photographed several classic films in deep-focus, including Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946). Toland used powerful arc lamps to produce intense illumination on each scene, while employing coated lenses to make sure that very little light was lost in the lens itself. These technologies allowed Toland to photograph several scenes using the necessary narrow aperture settings.26 Still, these techniques were not always sufficient. There are several “deep-focus” shots in the film that were, in fact, produced with the aid of special effects, such as rear-screen projection or compositing on an optical printer.27 For instance, when Charles Foster Kane discovers that his wife Susan has poisoned herself, the “deep-focus” image is in fact a composite; the foreground, with its glass of poison looming ominously in the frame, was shot separately with the aid of a matte. The French film critic André Bazin wrote that “depth of field creates a relationship between the viewer and the image which is closer to the viewer’s relationship to reality.”28 Several subsequent philosophers of film have endorsed Bazin’s view, such as Gregory Currie, who argues that the long-take, deep-­ focus style “enhances our ability to detect spatial and temporal properties of the fiction by using the capability we have to detect those properties of things in the real world.”29 In this way, Currie situates Bazinian realism within the context of the “recognition” theory of depiction that he favors elsewhere.30 By contrast, George M. Wilson thinks of the Bazinian aesthetic as a kind of epistemic realism. He writes, “the ways in which movie viewers (fictionally) come to know about the world of the story are, so to speak, realistically presented and articulated.”31 Wilson distinguishes epistemic realism from the perceptual realism associated with photographic transparency. 26  Patrick Ogle, “Technological and Aesthetic Influences on the Development of Deep-Focus Cinematography in the United States,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 58–83. 27  On Toland’s collaboration with other contributors, including special-effects expert Linwood Dunn, see the chapter on cinematography in Robert Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 28  André Bazin, “The Evolution of Film Language,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Timothy Barnard (Montreal: Caboose, 2009): 101. 29  Currie, Image and Mind, 107. 30  Currie, Image and Mind, 80. 31  George M. Wilson, “Imagined Seeing and Some Varieties of Cinematic Realism,” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2016), 61.

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For my purposes, it is important to note that deep-focus cinematography is a technical achievement—the result of creative choices made by the cinematographer. Indeed, the fact that many of Kane’s deep-focus techniques were produced with the aid of special effects provides further support for the idea that there is considerable continuity between the cinematographic techniques of the twentieth century and the hybrid techniques (mixing together photography and CGI) of the present day. Like Roger Deakins, Gregg Toland was above all a picture-maker, happy to use any available tool, from the arc lamp to the optical printer, to produce meaningful pictures. The creative input of the cinematographer is even clearer in the case of “shallow-focus” images. Here, the cinematographer must work with the director to choose which part of the composition will be in focus. For instance, in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001, photographed by Donald McAlpine), one shot shows Christian (Ewan McGregor) walking away from the stage, while Satine (Nicole Kidman) sings a love song to win him back. Christian is in sharp focus, just left of center. The distant stage, featuring a purple and magenta set that looks like a heart, is centered but soft. The resulting composition pulls our attention in two directions at once—toward the heart-shaped set, with its bright saturated colors and its central position, and toward Christian himself, the only focused figure in the frame. Close the aperture just a touch, and you will throw the entire composition out of balance: The heart-shaped set will look a bit sharper, and we will lose sight of Christian in the shadows. Lenses also introduce the variable of focal length. A cinematographer may choose to photograph a scene with a wide-angle (short focal-length) lens or with a telephoto (long focal-length) lens, producing strikingly different results. Many philosophers have used the example of focal length to make larger points about the philosophy of film. For instance, Catharine Abell cites the use of a wide-angle lens to support her argument that a film can express a thought about a fictional character, while Berys Gaut argues that the distortions associated with different kinds of lenses present a problem for the idea that we imagine seeing the fictional world. (“Are we to imagine,” he asks, “that we have eyes that can change their focal length so that they can mimic the effects of such lenses?”)32 Given its significance to these larger debates, it is important to be precise about how focal length produces its visual effects. One way to characterize the difference would be to say that the wide-angle lens deepens or stretches the space, while the telephoto lens makes the space flatter or more compressed. Another way to characterize the difference would be to say that the telephoto lens magnifies the center of the image, while the wide-angle de-­ magnifies it. I prefer the second way of speaking because I think that the idea

 Abell, “Cinema as a Representational Art,” 283–284; Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 205. 32

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of “stretching” or “compressing” space is misleading.33 Suppose you have a wide-angle lens on the camera. You ask two actors—call them “Humphrey” and “Ingrid”—to stand in front of the camera. Humphrey is standing two feet away from the camera, in a tight framing from the shoulders up. Ingrid is standing four feet away, in a slightly looser framing from the waist up. Because Humphrey is two times closer (two feet away as opposed to four feet away), the image of his face will occupy more screen space. Indeed, to borrow a term from the philosophy of depiction, his “occlusion size” will be four times greater— twice the height and twice the width.34 In general, the viewer of the picture will not see Humphrey as abnormally large. As long as other depth cues are present, the viewer should see Humphrey as normal-sized but closer. Now replace the wide-angle lens with a telephoto lens. (If you are using a zoom lens, you may simply zoom in. A zoom lens is a variable focal-length lens, capable of shifting from short to long and back again.) In contrast to the wide-­ angle lens, the telephoto lens secures a narrower angle of view. It picks out a smaller slice of space and magnifies it. The angle of view is so narrow that now you cannot really see the faces of Humphrey and Ingrid at all; perhaps you see a big close-up of Ingrid’s eyeball, four feet away. Assuming that you would still like to have a good view of both actors’ faces, you must ask the actors to move farther away. Let us say that you place Humphrey 100 feet away, and you place Ingrid 102 feet away. Humphrey is now framed from the shoulders up, and so is Ingrid. Their occlusion sizes are almost identical. Why? The absolute difference in distance remains the same. Humphrey is still two feet closer. But the relative difference in distance is now much smaller. Previously, Humphrey was two times closer—and so his image was four times bigger. Now, Humphrey is just two percent closer—and so the difference in occlusion size is very small. The similarity in relative size may account for the sense that the telephoto image looks “flatter” than the wide-angle image. But doesn’t a zoom-in (or zoom-out) distort the space? There is at least one plausible way to say that the answer is “No.” Put a wide-angle lens back on the camera. Keep the actors far away: Humphrey at 100 feet away, Ingrid at 102. The actors’ relative distances will be roughly the same (approximately a two percent difference), and so again their occlusion sizes will be roughly the same. Indeed, go ahead and take a photograph from this location, with the wide-­angle lens on the camera. And go ahead and take another photograph from this location, with the telephoto lens on the camera. Now “blow up” the wide-­angle shot, magnifying it in a darkroom or on a computer. The resulting image might look grainy, but the blown-up wide-angle shot will look identical—spatially—to the unmodified telephoto shot. In both shots, you will see a ­ shoulders-­ up framing of 33  The following discussion of lenses draws on Bruce Block, The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV, and Digital Media, 2nd ed. (Burlington, MA: The Focal Press, 2007). The appendix offers a particularly clear account of Block’s view. If you find Block’s line drawings unconvincing, try photographing some of his arrangements for yourself. 34  I borrow the term from John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 98.

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Humphrey and Ingrid, with similar relative occlusion sizes. Both shots will look equally “flat.” All that the telephoto lens has done is to magnify the center of the image without moving any closer. What about the celebrated shot in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where the filmmakers have combined a dolly-in with a zoom-out to produce the image of a stairway “stretching” out in space, as if space were getting deeper? Doesn’t the example prove that the wide-angle lens stretches space—and that the telephoto lens compresses space? Not necessarily. Notice that there are two variables here: focal length and relative distance. Zooming out allows the camera to move closer to the foreground objects. Moving closer to the foreground objects changes the relative distances. Changing the relative distances changes the relative occlusion sizes. Changing the relative occlusion sizes (as well as some other altered depth cues, such as textural diffusion) makes it appear that space is getting deeper. Another oft-noted effect of the wide-angle lens is its tendency to distort a person’s features in a close-up. However, this example supports my point that we always need to take relative distance into account when we seek to make sense of focal length’s effects. Suppose you want to take a close-up of Humphrey. If there is a wide-angle lens on the camera, you will need to ask Humphrey to stand very close to the camera—perhaps just a few inches away. Now Humphrey’s nose will be twice as close as Humphrey’s ears. So Humphrey’s nose will appear unusually large (in terms of its occlusion size), and his ears will appear unusually small. Significantly, Ingrid, standing in the background of the shot, will not look distorted, even though she, too, is photographed with a wide-angle lens. If you were to place a telephoto lens on the camera, Humphrey’s proportions would remain the same. The only difference is that you wouldn’t be able to notice the proportions because you would be looking at a blurry, unrecognizable patch of skin on Humphrey’s face. The defining feature of the wide-angle lens is, quite literally, its wide angle of view. The angle of view is wide enough that an actor can approach the camera and remain comfortably within the limits of the frame. When the actor is that close to the lens, small differences in absolute distance may produce large differences in relative distance, producing large differences in relative occlusion size. The telephoto lens, with its narrow angle of view, requires you to position the actors farther away from the camera, with consequences for relative distance and corresponding consequences for relative occlusion size. None of this means that the cinematographer cannot use focal length in a meaningful way. Quite the contrary: Filmmakers have long used wide-angle lenses, mid-focal-length lenses, and telephoto lenses for expressive purposes, such as characterization, mood, and spatial clarity (or spatial obscurity). For instance, in Julie Taymor’s 2002 film Frida (photographed by Rodrigo Prieto), one shot represents the protagonist’s point of view as she lies in a hospital bed and receives an injection. By photographing the shot with a wide-angle lens, the filmmakers have created a composition with exaggerated occlusion sizes. The syringe looks close to the camera and huge onscreen, but the ceiling panels

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look distant from the camera and small onscreen. The resulting shot represents what Frida (Salma Hayak) sees, while expressing how she sees the world around her—as a vast, empty space, dominated by the syringe and the pain it represents. The last cinematographic tool that I will discuss is camera movement. By panning or tilting the camera, the filmmaker changes the camera’s angle of view horizontally or vertically. By dollying or craning, the filmmaker physically moves the camera from one position in space to another. It is quite common for filmmakers to combine camera movements, as when the operator pans to reframe in the middle of a dolly shot. All of these movements can be mimicked in digital cinema, as in the “virtual” shots swooping through various neighborhoods as Judy (the rabbit voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) takes the train to the city in Zootopia (2016, directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush). Recently, Katherine Thomson-Jones has situated the moving camera within ongoing debates about the relationship between cinematic seeing and cinematic narration. Specifically, she argues that it is sometimes appropriate to imagine moving in response to a moving-camera shot in a fiction film, but she insists, plausibly, that this example of imagined seeing does not require a cinematic narrator.35 Noël Carroll rejects the imagined seeing model altogether, instead situating the moving camera within his account of cinematic narration, whereby filmmakers seek to maximize audience engagement by controlling the spectator’s attention. One of the most powerful tools of attention management is variable framing, which is “fundamentally a matter of changing the position of the camera on the action,” whether through editing or camera movement.36 For instance, in the climactic scene of Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993, photographed by Dean Cundey), the youngsters Lex and Tim (Ariana Richards and Joseph Mazello) are hiding in a kitchen as they attempt to elude two velociraptors. In one shot, Tim is cowering in the left foreground, while Lex crawls by in the background. After Lex exits the frame, the camera dollies in to a close-up of Tim. By dollying in, the film mandates that we look at the terrified boy. “Mandate” is a strong word, but it seems appropriate here. To borrow Carroll’s terms, the framing controls our attention through a combination of bracketing, indexing, and scaling.37 Here, the moving frame has bracketed off everything else we might see, such as Lex or the dinosaurs, thereby giving Tim unchallenged priority. Meanwhile, the camera has moved toward Tim, pointing at him as if the camera were an index finger. The movement of the camera also serves to change the scale of the image, making Tim even larger onscreen. Variable framing often serves the function of clarity, directing our attention to the most informative story point. Spielberg and his collaborators remind us 35  Katherine Thomson-Jones, “Narration in Motion,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 1 (January 2012): 34. The article is a response to George M. Wilson’s defense of the cinematic narrator idea. See “Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration,” in Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 29–51. 36  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 125. 37  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 125.

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that Tim is paralyzed with fear. Movement also denies us access to information we would very much like to have. We would like to know if the dinosaurs are twenty feet away or three feet away. We would like to know if Lex, who just escaped an attack, is now moving into a safer position. By dollying in to such a close view of Tim, the film increases suspense by keeping crucial information off-screen, thereby asking us to fear the worst. The dinosaurs do not appear in this particular shot, but Carroll’s bracketing-­ indexing-­scaling model could apply to any type of shot, whether photographic or computer-generated. At the end of the same kitchen scene, the camera appears to dolly forward into a tight close-up of a velociraptor’s (computer-­ generated) face. As in a purely photographic shot, the movement brackets off extraneous details and indexes the velociraptor’s face, while making the face large enough that we can read the dinosaur’s crafty, malevolent expression. From the standpoint of storytelling, the function of the movement remains the same, whether the shot in question is photographic or digital.

The Question of Authorship Traditional auteur theory excluded most cinematographers from the realm of film authorship. At Movie, a British journal of film criticism that did much to develop the auteur approach in the 1960s, Ian Cameron explained, “The assumption which underlies all the writing in Movie is that the director is the author of a film, the person who gives it any distinctive quality it may have.”38 Of course Cameron admitted that there were exceptions, but the auteurists’ urge to defend cinema’s power as a medium of artistic expression encouraged them to prioritize examples where one individual was clearly in control. Most cinematographers simply were not candidates for single-auteur status. Some even took pride in their willingness to serve the director. According to cinematographer William Clothier, “It’s stupid to fight with directors. If John Ford told me to put the camera upside-down, I’d put the camera upside-down. It’s the director’s prerogative.”39 Since then, a few cinematographers have made more ambitious claims for the craft. Perhaps the most admired cinematographer of the past fifty years has been Vittorio Storaro, who won three Best Cinematography Academy Awards while working for three different directors: Apocalypse Now (1979, directed by Francis Ford Coppola), Reds (1981, directed by Warren Beatty), and The Last Emperor (1987, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci). Pointing out that “cinematography” means “writing with light,” Storaro told one interviewer, “Cinematographers are authors of photography, not directors of photography. We are not merely using technology to tell someone else’s thought, because we

 Ian Cameron, “Films, Directors, and Critics,” Movie 2 (September 1962): 13.  Clothier, quoted in Scott Eyman, Five American Cinematographers (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 126. 38 39

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are also using our own emotion, our culture, and our inner being.”40 In practice, Storaro used a wide range of techniques, such as carefully controlled color schemes, heavily filtered lenses, and the specialized handling of film stocks, to create meaningful patterns, unique to each film. Recently, several philosophers have defended the view that films may be collaboratively authored, a view that is expansive enough to include the authorial contributions of cinematographers. For instance, Berys Gaut has offered an eloquent defense of the multiple-authorship view. Within this broad framework, Gaut proposes two useful distinctions. The first, he writes, “concerns the degree to which creative power in determining the artistic properties of a film is centralized or dispersed.”41 In some films, a single powerful figure, such as a writer-director, might make almost every important decision. But there are many films where tasks are distributed according to a clear division of labor: The writer crafts the script, the director works with the actors, and the cinematographer designs the lighting and compositions. “The second dimension of variation,” Gaut continues, “concerns the degree to which the different collaborators are in agreement over the aims of the film and their role within its production.”42 Even in a film with dispersed responsibilities, the filmmakers may all work together to produce a coherent film—or they might work against each other to produce a work filled with contradictory meanings. As a historian of Hollywood cinema, I think that Gaut is correct to say that most mainstream films are collaboratively authored. The fact that Gaut allows for a wide range of collaborative possibilities—from the hierarchical to the egalitarian, from the harmonious to the conflicted—adds to his model’s appeal. Elsewhere, I have studied how cinematographers of the Hollywood studio system faced several competing demands. Their professional organization—the American Society of Cinematographers—encouraged cinematographers to think of themselves as artists, modulating the lighting to suit the changing moods of each story. But the studios pushed cinematographers to think of themselves as portraitists, responsible for making the stars look good at all times, regardless of story concerns.43 As we have already seen, cinematographer William Daniels altered the lighting from shot to shot when photographing Ninotchka. We might interpret these modulations as storytelling choices, employing gentle contrasts for a moment of optimism and harsh contrasts for a moment of despair. Alternatively, we might interpret these modulations as an attempt to balance the demands of the studio with the demands of the story and its setting, prioritizing glamour in the close shots while prioritizing the plausible representation of a hanging lamp in the wide shots. The two ­interpretations are not mutually exclusive. In fact, it is a mark of Daniels’s achievement that he has accomplished multiple goals with a disarmingly simple shift in contrast. 40   Storaro, quoted in Benjamin Bergery, “Reflections 10: Storaro, ASC,” American Cinematographer 70, no. 8 (August 1989): 70. 41  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 128. 42  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 128. 43  Patrick Keating, Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 161.

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To be sure, even Gaut’s expansive view of film authorship does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the cinematographer is an author. As several scholars have pointed out, most film crews include caterers, but we usually do not think of caterers as members of a film’s authorial team.44 Summarizing Gaut’s view, Katherine Thomson-Jones offers a good way to make the relevant distinction: “Film interpretation is guided by signs of creative intelligence in the work itself. […] These signs do not need to be signs of a single author; they can be signs of multiple authors who we may imagine as coordinating their creative activities more or less successfully in a more or less unified film.”45 The specific decisions of the caterer usually do not leave signs of creative intelligence in the film; the specific decisions of the cinematographer usually do. Working with the camera crew, the electrical crew, and the grip crew, the cinematographer shapes the look of the film by manipulating on-screen details of composition, lighting, and camerawork. For instance, consider cinematographer Mandy Walker’s contribution to Hidden Figures (2016). In consultation with director Theodore Melfi, production designer Wynn Thomas, and others, Walker eschewed digital capture and photographed the movie on film stock, to better evoke a “Kodachrome” look that evoked the film’s 1960s setting. Most of the film was photographed on 35 mm stock, but early scenes of a protagonist’s childhood were photographed on 16 mm, evoking an even earlier time period by introducing visible grain. Each primary location featured a distinctive color palette, established through costume design, set design, and lighting, all subject to post-production manipulations via a digital intermediate. Houses were depicted in warm colors, in contrast to the desaturated look characterizing the computing rooms.46 The filmmakers also worked out a visual progression through their use of camera angle. Walker explains, “When we were shooting the African American women talking to the white guys, we had the camera just a little bit under their eye-­ line, so they were always looking above them. As the film develops, the camera starts to be on the same level for both characters.”47 In this way, Walker and her collaborators expressed the film’s primary theme concerning the struggle for equality. All of these choices serve as signs of a creative intelligence shaping the film’s visual style in meaningful ways.

44  C. Paul Sellors, “Collective Authorship in Film,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 269. See also Sondra Bacharach and Deborah Tollefsen, “We Did It: From Mere Contributors to Coauthors,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 27–28. 45  Katherine Thomson-Jones, Aesthetics & Film (New York: Continuum, 2008), 52. 46  Carolyn Giardina, “How Hidden Figures Got its 1960s ‘Kodachrome’ Look,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behind-screen/how-hiddenfigures-got-1960s-kodachrome-look-963042 47  Walker, quoted in Agatha French, “Hidden Figures: An Interview with Cinematographer Mandy Walker,” Cinema Thread, https://cinemathread.com/bts/hidden-figures-interview-withmandy-walker/

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The increasing digitization of cinema has changed the debate over cinematographic authorship in surprising ways. On the one hand, certain digital tools threaten the cinematographer’s authority. The digital intermediate gave color graders considerable power to change the images that the cinematographers had worked so hard to produce, while computer-generated sequences had the power to exclude cinematographers from the task of image creation altogether. As historian Christopher Lucas explains, the cinematographers of the last two decades “have felt compelled to assert their relevance to the production process as the malleability of digital cinematic images opened the field to more ‘collaborators.’”48 On the other hand, some cinematographers have welcomed the new digital tools as extensions of their traditional powers. Roger Deakins, who championed the use of the digital intermediate, later served as a “visual consultant” for digitally animated films, such as Gore Verbinski’s Rango (2011).49 Even films that employ no cinematographer at all may rely on a conception of the craft that has been around for a century or so. From this point of view, digital cinema can be seen as the fulfillment of the craft’s long-term goal of producing meaningful pictures that express the shifting moods of each story, down to the smallest details.

Conclusion It is possible that digitization will continue to alter or even eliminate the position of cinematographer, who might come to serve as a consultant on the design of looks executed by others. But even those films that are made entirely on computers will still owe a considerable debt to the tradition of cinematography that I have sketched here—a tradition of picture-making, storytelling, and authorship.

Bibliography Abell, Catharine. 2010. Cinema as a Representational Art. British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (3, July): 273–286. Atencia-Linares, Paloma. 2012. Fiction, Nonfiction, and Deceptive Photographic Representation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (1, Winter): 19–30. Bacharach, Sondra, and Deborah Tollefsen. 2010. We Did It: From Mere Contributors to Coauthors. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 68 (1, Winter): 23–32. Bazin, André. 2009. The Evolution of Film Language. In What Is Cinema? Trans. Timothy Barnard, 87–106. Montreal: Caboose. Bergery, Benjamin. 1989. Reflections 10: Storaro, ASC. American Cinematographer 70 (8, August): 70–74. Block, Bruce. 2007. The Visual Story: Creating the Visual Structure of Film, TV, and Digital Media. 2nd ed. Burlington: The Focal Press. Cameron, Ian. 1962. Films, Directors, and Critics. Movie 2 (September): 12–16.  Lucas, “The Modern Entertainment Marketplace,” 153.  Lucas, “The Modern Entertainment Marketplace,” 155.

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Carringer, Robert. 1996. The Making of Citizen Kane. rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carroll, Noël. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Deakins, Roger. 2008. The DI, Luddites, and Other Musings. American Cinematographer 89 (7, October): 78–83. Eyman, Scott. 1987. Five American Cinematographers. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press. Fisher, Bob. 1992. The Whys and Hows of JFK. American Cinematographer 73 (2, February): 42–52. French, Agatha. Hidden Figures: An Interview with Cinematographer Mandy Walker. Cinema Thread. https://cinemathread.com/bts/hidden-figures-interview-withmandy-walker/ Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gentry, Ric. 1997. Painterly Touches. American Cinematographer 78 (1, January): 50–57. Giardina, Carolyn. 2017. How Hidden Figures Got Its 1960s ‘Kodachrome’ Look. The Hollywood Reporter, January 13. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/behindscreen/how-hidden-figures-got-1960s-kodachrome-look-963042 Harrell, Al. 1992. Malcolm X: One Man’s Legacy, to the Letter. American Cinematographer 73 (11, November): 28–34. Hopkins, Robert. 2008. What Do We See in Films? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2, Spring): 149–159. Hyman, John. 2006. The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keating, Patrick. 2010. Hollywood Lighting from the Silent Era to Film Noir. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2017. What Does It Mean to Say that Cinematography Is Like Painting with Light? In Transnational Cinematography Studies, ed. Lindsay Coleman, Daisuke Miyao, and Roberto Schaefer, 97–115. Lanham: Lexington Books. Lightman, Herb. 1973. The New Panaflex Camera Makes Its Production Debut. American Cinematographer 54 (5, May): 564–567, 598–599, 611–620. Lucas, Christopher. 2014. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000-Present. In Cinematography, ed. Patrick Keating, 132–157. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Milner, Victor. 1933. ‘Miscasting’ the Cinematographer. American Cinematographer 13 (13, February): 36–37. Ogle, Patrick. 1985. Technological and Aesthetic Influences on the Development of Deep-Focus Cinematography in the United States. In Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 2, 58–83. Berkeley: University of California Press. Predal, René. 1973. Les Grands Operateurs (IV). Cinéma 73 173 (February): 87–95. Revault d’Allonnes, Fabrice. 1991. La lumière au cinéma. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Salt, Barry. 1992. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. 2nd ed. London: Starword, p. 253. Scruton, Roger. 1983. Photography and Representation. In The Aesthetic Understanding, 102–126. London: Methuen. Sellors, C. Paul. 2007. Collective Authorship in Film. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (3, Summer): 263–171.

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Silberg, Jon, and Steven Pizzello. 2009. Cinematographers, Colorists, and the DI. American Cinematographer 90 (6, June): 78–82. Slocombe, Douglas. 1949. The Work of Gregg Toland. Sequence 8 (Summer): 69–76. Smith, Murray. 2011. On the Twofoldness of Character. New Literary History 42 (2, Spring): 277–294. Thomson-Jones, Katherine. 2008. Aesthetics & Film. New York: Continuum. ———. 2012. Narration in Motion. British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (1, January): 33–43. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Williams, David E. 1995. The Sins of a Serial Killer. American Cinematographer 76 (10, October): 34–42. Wilson, George M. 2011. Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration. In Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies, 29–51. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Imagined Seeing and Some Varieties of Cinematic Realism. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 57–75. New York: Routledge. Zone, Ray. 2000. The Literature of Light: An Interview with Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC. In Writer of Light: The Cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, ed. Ray Zone, 79–92. Hollywood: ASC Press. Zsigmond, Vilmos. 1980. Behind the Cameras on Heaven’s Gate. American Cinematographer 61 (11, November): 1110–1113, 1164–1165, 1172–1181.

PART II

The Structure of Film and Motion Pictures

CHAPTER 5

Silly Questions and Arguments for the Implicit, Cinematic Narrator Angela Curran

Chapter Overview Fiction films tell a story, with images and sound, and in doing so invite the audience to imagine that specific events have happened, as they are reported and shown in the image and soundtrack of the movie (Carroll 1990, 1996, 2006; Currie 1990; Walton 1990: 39; Lamarque and Olsen 1994).1 But how more precisely does movie narration work on the viewer so that she comprehends the story? Here there is a tremendous and fascinating debate regarding the nature of cinematic narration, or how a movie conveys the story events to the audience. This chapter concerns these disagreements. The focus is on the view that there are ubiquitous, implicit narrators in fiction films. Such a narrator is the agent that is tacitly understood to be carrying out a showing of the story events to the audience from the world of the film fiction. My chapter aims to advance the debate on a problem often raised by philosophers who are skeptical of implied narrators in movies. This is the concern that positing such elusive narrators gives rise to absurd imaginings (Gaut 2004: 242; Carroll 2006: 179–180, 2016). The worry arises because critics maintain that the “Realistic Heuristic” governs our imaginings about fiction. The Realistic Heuristic involves the claim that when we engage with a work of fiction, we “fill in” and draw 1  For an influential discussion of make-believe and the mimetic arts, see Kendall Walton (1990). For recent discussions of fiction and imagination, see Matravers (2014) and Stock (2017). For an accessible overview of some key debates about fiction and imagination, see Stock (2013).

A. Curran (*) Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_5

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i­mplications from what is explicitly true in the fiction based on how things work in real life, unless it is explicitly stipulated to be otherwise. The problem, critics allege, is that when we “fill in” the implications of the implied cinematic narrator’s presence in the story world, absurd imaginings follow. For instance, how is it possible for an implied narrator to convey the story of the Battle of Dunkirk from the scene of the action without getting shot or having to duck bullets? George Wilson, a supporter of some kind of implicit, “narrating agency” in fiction films, maintains that the indeterminate nature of what is true in the story world means that questions about how the implied narrating agency is able to carry out its mission are “silly” ones to ask (Wilson 2011, 2013). The debate between friends and foes of the cinematic narrator has been at a stalemate most centrally because there seems to be no resolution as to whether the questions critics raise about the implied narrator in movies are legitimate ones to ask. In this chapter, I examine how the “absurd imaginings” problem arises for all the central arguments for the elusive cinematic narrator and discuss why the questions critics pose about this narrator are legitimate ones to ask. In Part I, I introduce some terminology relevant to understanding the debate about cinematic narrators. In Parts II, III, and IV, three central arguments—The Narration Implies a Narrator Argument, The Ontological Gap Argument, and the Imagined Seeing Thesis—are considered and assessed. In Part V, we focus on the arguments for and against the claim that positing the implied narrator in movies gives rise to absurd imaginings. In my concluding comments, I briefly discuss directions of research that further inquires into cinematic narration might take. Part I: Narration and Narrators We should clarify some terminology. Fiction films convey a story, which is about something, what we call its fictional content. The story is concerned with giving an account of imagined characters and situations. A film has a plot, an underlying sequence of events as they occur in the story, and narration, the telling or relating of these fictional events to the audience.2 Cinematic narration is the way in which the film tells a story.3 Some of the ways in which we talk about narration in cinema has its origins in literary theory.4 Someone creates or makes a work of literary fiction: this is the actual flesh-and-blood author. The author is something external to the film, its cause or creator. So, for example, Conan Doyle is the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. An author also sometimes creates a narrator, an internal component of the work that is the fictional voice that recounts the 2  See Wilson 2013 and Livingston 2005 for a survey of some of the points in contention about narrative, in general. For skepticism about the usefulness of talking about cinematic narration, see Pye (2013: 136). 3  For an introduction to the basic principles of cinematic narration, see Bordwell (1985: 48–61) and Carroll (2008: 116–146). 4  See Gaut (2004) and Thomson-Jones (2007).

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happenings and situations that take place in the story. For example, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, it is Sherlock’s trusty sidekick, Doctor Watson, who is a character in and the narrator of the Holmes stories. Similarly, someone creates a film: this is the flesh-and-blood filmmaker, the actual person who is the cause or creator of a film. Where it is reasonable to think that one individual exercises the most significant control over the movie, we can speak of the filmmaker as the counterpart of the author (Livingston 1997). Alternatively, when it makes sense to think of the movie as the creative product of a group of individuals, such as the director, the screenwriter, the cinematographer, and so on, we can say the movie is the collaborative project of multiple filmmakers (Gaut 2010: 128–132). When literary theorists talk about how works of fiction convey points of view on the events in the story, they often use the concept of the “implied author.” This is a hypothetical construct whose viewpoint on what happens in the story world makes itself clear in the text (Booth 1961: 70–71; Nehamas 1981). Likewise, some use the term “implied filmmaker” for the hypothetical agent who is responsible for the sensibility and attitudes manifest in the film’s narration.5 We said that a narrator is a fictional character that recounts the goings on in the story. Some novels have explicit character-narrators, such as Doctor Watson in the Sherlock Holmes novels or the character of Esch, who tells her story in the first-person in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones. In these novels, it is fictional that the characters are telling the story. However, some hold that in every literary fiction, there are implicit narrators—fictional beings who recount the story events as real to the reader. These narrators are implicit, not explicitly introduced, and they have no interaction with the other fictional characters in the story. The actual author cannot tell the story because she does not believe the events in her story happened. Instead, there must be a narrator who is part of the story world and who believes the characters and events exist and reports them as fact to the reader. The debate over cinematic narration concerns whether we should make the same move and say that there are implicit narrators in movies by whose actions we come to know about the depicted events in the world of the film. One central point of contention is whether the same reasons that some say there are implicit narrators in literary fictions carry over to support the claim that movies standardly have implicit narrators as well. A second is how best to describe the specific imaginative experience of the audience who watches a movie. We can understand this point of contention as a question about what the audience at the movies is “mandated” to imagine. 5  See Wilson’s discussion of the implied filmmaker of Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948) in Wilson (1986: 134–9). Some, such as David Bordwell, reject the notion of an “implied filmmaker” and, instead, prefers to talk about how the “narration itself ” cues the viewer to be surprised, sympathetic, and so on (Bordwell 1985: 62). Greg Currie (1995a, b) uses the concept of an “implied filmmaker” to address unreliable narration in fiction films.

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The idea is that a fiction film “mandates” or requires that the viewer imagine various things as part of their correct comprehension and appreciation of the movie’s narrative. The second point of contention is then: are viewers at the movies “mandated” to imagine just the fictional contents of the story? Alternatively, are they also required to imagine how it is that they come to learn of the story events? If so, is it standard for viewers to learn about the world of the story through an implicit, fictional narrator? If the answer to this last question is “yes,” then we say that the implicit narrator “mediates” our access to the story events and the narrator presents those events to us “indirectly” (Walton 1990: 357). Now, to illustrate, some fiction films mediate our access to the story by using characters from the story that the film explicitly introduces as the tellers of the tale, as happens in Shawshank Redemption (Drabont, 1994) or Murder My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944). Films also tell the story by using omniscient narrators such as the voice-over narrator in The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson, 2001). In this case, the narrator belongs to the fictional world and reports the events as if they happened, but is not involved in any of the story events. But what does the audience imagine when they watch a fiction film where the story is not told either by a character-narrator or by an omniscient, third-­ person narrator, as is the case with The Wizard of Oz? Some claim that every fiction film has an implicit, fictional narrator who is responsible for conveying the story, as a whole, to the audience. Call this the “Ubiquity Thesis” (see Kania 2005: 47). We now turn to examine arguments for this thesis. Part II: Narration Implies a Narrator Chatman’s Argument Why should we think that there are ubiquitous fictional narrators in movies? Seymour Chatman has argued for the implied cinematic narrator, simply by considering what is implicit in the concept of narration (Chatman 1990: 128; see also Levinson 1996: 252). Thus, Chatman’s argument is known as the Analytic or A Priori Argument.6 His argument is that the meaning of the concept of “narration” logically implies there must be a narrator. The Narration Implies a Narrator Argument: Stage One (Chatman 1990: 113–15) 6

1. Every narrative is an activity, the act of telling or showing a story. 2. Activities must have agents. 3. The agent of a narration is its narrator. 4. Therefore, necessarily, for every act of storytelling, there is a narrator.

 Gaut (2004: 235–236) calls it the former; Kania (2005: 47–48), calls it the latter.

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Stage Two (Chatman 1990: 133–4) 5. Fictional films contain narratives. 6. Therefore, necessarily, for every fiction film there is a fictional narrator. Chatman responds to David Bordwell, who proposes that narration is a process or activity of selecting, arranging, and rendering story material (Bordwell 1985: xi). Chatman counters by saying that activities require agents; there is no doing without a doer (Stage One above). In the case of cinematic narration, the agent carries out the showing of the story to the audience. The narrator is not an actual human being (see Stage Two above), so this means the narrator cannot be the actual filmmaker who creates the film. Also, Chatman argues the narrator cannot be the implied filmmaker. Narration, the act of telling a story, involves communication between a sender and a receiver, whereas the implied filmmaker (hypothetically) invents the narrative, but does not communicate it to the audience, says Chatman (1990: 130). Narration implies someone or something that narrates: therefore, in literary works and fiction films, there is a narrator, distinct from the actual filmmaker, who uses the soundtrack and the series of edited photographic images to convey the story.  uestions About Chatman’s Argument Q Some question the claim that narration logically implies a narrator. For example, David Bordwell’s view is that every property attributed to a narrating agent can instead be ascribed to the film’s “narration itself” (Bordwell 1985: xi). Critics say in reply that this involves an inappropriate personification of the filming process, or it is a shorthand device for saying there is a narrating agency doing the narration, which does not get rid of an intentional agency doing the storytelling (Gaut 2010: 200; see also Currie 1995a, b: 247–9).7 So many are inclined to accept that narration implies a narrator. The central problem with Chatman’s argument is that it fails to establish that narration requires a fictional narrator. For even if we restrict the argument to fictional narratives, and we suppose that the claim that (a) there is a telling or narration of a fictional story, entails the claim that (b) there is someone who tells the story, it does not follow without some further argument that (c) there is fictional narrator or teller of the story. For it could be the author who is the one who tells the story.8

7  For the same reason, some who accept the idea that storytelling or narration is an intentional activity reject Kendall Walton’s suggestion that there could be a “naturally occurring” and nonintentionally produced story, for instance, cracks in wood that seem to tell a story, provided the audience standardly decided to use such things as “props” in their game of make-believe (Walton 1990: 52). 8  See Kania (2005: 48), Köppe and Stürhring (2011), Gaut (2004: 235–237), and Wilson (1997: 299–300).

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Indeed, some maintain that given that narratives are artifacts that are made to communicate a story, the clear choice for the person who tells the story is the actual author or filmmaker. For the narrator is the person whose intentions have to be understood if the story is to be correctly appreciated and that would be the actual person who created the story (Currie 2010: 66). If this line of criticism is successful, the intentional nature of a film, as a work designed to communicate a story, leads back to the actual author as the storyteller, not toward an implied cinematic narrator. And the attempt to say that logic requires there are implicit fictional narrators in every film fails. Finally, when we think of explicit narrators, we normally suppose it is appropriate to ask things such as, how does the narrator know about these things? And, what is its point of view? (Currie 2010: 66). But there are no answers to these questions about an implicit narrator, who is not explicitly introduced as the agent giving us access to the story. Chatman tries to maintain that questions about how the narrator works are “non-questions” not in need of an answer (Chatman 1990: 130). But as we will see, such queries about the implicit narrator are not disposed of so easily. Part III: The Ontological Gap Argument  an the Actual Filmmaker Tell Her Fictional Story? C The argument we will discuss in this section aims to make up for the deficits in Chatman’s argument. It does not try to reason, a priori, from the concept of narration to the existence of a fictional narrator. Rather, the argument is that implicit cinematic narrators are needed to explain the nature of our engagement with fiction films. The argument, presented by Jerrold Levinson in a rich discussion of film music and narrative agency (and recently defended in Wilson 2011 and Matravers 2014), has come to be known as the “Ontological Gap Argument.”9 Ontological Gap Argument: 1. Reason demands an answer to the question of what makes possible our knowledge of the story events. 2. Only fictional beings can have access to events in the world of the fiction. 3. Therefore, only a fictional narrator can convey to us the knowledge of the events in the world of the fiction. 4. We do have knowledge of the story events in film fiction. 5. Therefore, there is a fictional being, an implicit, cinematic narrator who is responsible for conveying the knowledge of the events in the story.10  See Levinson (1996: 252–256); so-named by Andrew Kania in (2005).  Levinson describes the cinematic narrator as an agent who provides access to the story world. But in a note, he also endorses another role for the cinematic narrator: the cinematic narrator is also responsible for crafting the plot, the underlying sequences of events in the story (see Levinson 1996: 280, footnote 21). 9

10

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Note that the conclusion of the argument, (5) above, applies to all fictional movies. Thus, if the Ontological Gap Argument is correct, the Ubiquity Thesis is established. Implicit fictional narrators are ubiquitous; they are standard in all fiction films. Such implied narrators are “the best default assumption available for how we make sense of narrative fiction film” (Levinson 1996: 252). But does the argument stand up? If this is the correct way to formulate Levinson’s argument, then several problems arise. One worry is that the argument is undermined by its assumptions (Kania 2005: 48–49). Premise (2) says that only fictional beings can have access to the world of fiction. But the cinematic narrator, Levinson supposes, is part of the story world. It follows that the audience cannot have access to the fictional narrator and its fictional narration since this occurs in the world of the story. So implied fictional narrators do not help with the worry about how we “access” the story world. Also, Noël Carroll raises a Platonic ThirdMan style objection. The Ontological Gap Argument maintains that we need a fictional being to access items in the fiction. Since the cinematic narrator is part of the story world (even if it does not interact with the other denizens in the world), then we are off on an infinite regress, and we will need another cinematic narrator to access the first cinematic narrator, and so on! (Carroll 2006: 179). Another point of contention is the claim that only a fictional being can show the story events to the audience (premise 3). It follows that the actual or implied filmmaker cannot show or narrate the goings on in the story. The filmmaker, either actual or implied, can show us images, for instance, shots of the sets on the lot of Universal Studio, which are filmed to represent Frankenstein’s castle. However, the filmmaker cannot show the audience the fictional goings on in Frankenstein’s castle, for they stand apart from it, in the outside (actual) world (Carroll 2016: 117). Carroll challenges the Ontological Gap Argument by testing our intuitions about scenes in which movie directors appear as themselves, a not uncommon practice in cinema (Carroll 2016: 121). Carroll discusses the case of Bergman’s Persona (1966), where toward the end, we see documentarystyle scenes of Bergman and the camera crew (Carroll 2016: 121). What are we supposed is going on in this scene? It is natural to suppose that the filmmaker, Bergman, is appearing in the story, not some fictional stand-in. For, if contrary to fact, Bergman was to have a heart attack in the scene, who would we say died? Carroll maintains that our intuition tells us that it would be the actual director, Bergman, not some fictional doppelganger, Carroll maintains. These and similar examples (for instance, Hitchcock making a cameo appearance in his films) give us reason to question the sharp dichotomy between the fictional world and the actual filmmaker on which the Ontological Gap Argument rests.

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 efending the Ontological Gap Argument D In reply, Levinson is likely to say the above formulation of his argument misses his central point. Viewers at the movies imagine that they are receiving visual information from the story world. The actual filmmaker cannot convey visual information from the fictional world. Only a narrator operating from within the world of the fiction, for whom the events are “real and reportable” can give the viewer the sort of perceptual access that she imagines herself to have (Levinson 1996: 255). Indeed, Derek Matravers recently argues that Levinson’s point involves the “standard view” that to “imagine a story” involves something like, “to imagine it is a report of actual events” (Matravers 2014: 123). However, it is far from clear that this is the consensus view on what is involved when viewers imagine a story, by either reading a literary fiction or watching a fiction film. Critics insist that an important point is being begged in describing what the viewer imagines that she is seeing is a “report” of events, if this is taken to imply the viewer imagines she is seeing a visual recounting of actual events (Carroll 2016: 126). Instead, other explanations of how a movie works on the viewer so she understands what is going on or true in the story are available. Noël Carroll proposes the view, for example, that what is so in fiction is whatever the maker or makers of the fiction intended the audience to imagine (Carroll 2016: 122). Call this the Imagination Account of Fiction. If the actual filmmakers of An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981), for example, mandate that the audience imagines that American college student, David Kessler, is bitten by a werewolf and turns into one, then it is true in the fiction that this is so. If Carroll is right, there is no need to posit a fictional narrator, reporting the story events as if they are real, to explain how a viewer understands what goes on in the story. Narrative comprehension comes about through the “fictive intent” of the work’s creator (Carroll 2006: 176). Derek Matravers, however, insists that the Imagination Account of Fiction is mistaken (Matravers 1997: Chapters 3 and 7). He firmly rejects the idea that fiction can be defined by the creator’s mandate to imagine the story contents. For fictions mandate that we imagine, as well as believe, various things are so in the story world. For example, a viewer of Nowhere in Africa (2002, Caroline Link) is mandated to imagine various things, such as that Walter and Jettel Redlick are a Jewish couple that is forced to relocate from Nazi Germany in 1938 to a farm in Kenya. However, the director intends that we also believe various things, for instance, that Kenya is in Africa. Is it possible for the Imagination Account of Fiction to account for the fact that there are truths in fiction we are mandated to believe as well as imagine? In a very recent book-length treatment of imagination and fiction, Kathleen Stock suggests that it can. She defends what she calls “extreme intentionalism,” the view that the fictional content of a work is what the author intended the reader to imagine (Stock 2017). In response to Matravers, she argues that the total content of a fiction is stored in the mind of the reader and then marked as “imagining.” When the author intends the reader to believe various things are

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so in the story, the reader indexes these truths as beliefs. Thus, Stock responds that the Imagination Account can acknowledge that an author intends that some of a work’s contents are to be believed and not just imagined (Stock 2017: 168). Noël Carroll explains how this type of mental compartmentalization might work. The default assumption is that what is true in the fiction is what the filmmaker mandates that the viewer imagine. However, as we work to comprehend the story’s narrative, depending on the film, we might then “suspend” the mandate to imagine various things as so in favor of a mandate to believe these things instead (Carroll 2016: 124). For example, as we comprehend the story in Gone With the Wind (1939, Fleming), we suppose the author mandates us to imagine that certain things are so in the life of Scarlett O’Hara, but then come to understand that we need to believe various things (for instance, that Atlanta is in Georgia) (Carroll 2016: 124). We might say that in Carroll’s view, as we engage with a work of fiction, we go through a process of “reflective equilibrium” in which we measure hypotheses about what goes in the story against the evidence that is presented in the story figure out what we are mandated to imagine versus what we are mandated to believe. To be sure, more could be said about how this happens, as Carroll acknowledges. But in principle, we see how a response to Matraver’s objection to the Imagination Account of Fiction works. Carroll’s reply to Matravers also has implications for another point that often comes up in the discussion of the Ontological Gap Argument. For in defending the argument, Levinson seems to make use of what is known as the Assertion Argument.11 According to this view, movie narration works the way in which some think that narration in literary fiction works. Literary works employ declarative sentences to report the goings on of characters and events in the story, as does the first sentence of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets “Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four Privet Drive.” Declarative sentences make utterances or assertions, and it is natural, the argument goes, for the reader to imagine that where there is an assertion, there is an asserter, the implicit narrator of the story.12 George Wilson builds on the Assertion Argument to argue that we need implicit narrators in literature for the reader to understand what is true in the fiction versus what is just supposition (Wilson 2007: 82–83). If, to use a version of Wilson’s example, “Katie loves Hubble. Many people thought this was true. But was is so?” there is a question if we are supposed to take “Katie loves Hubble” as something we imagine is true in the story versus something we are just supposed to consider as a possibility. Wilson’s idea is that to figure out that “Katie loves Hubble” is true in the story, we need to determine whether we should imagine a fictional, implicit narrator is “asserting” that this is so.

 Carroll (2006: 197), Thomson-Jones (2009: 299); see also Matravers (2014: 123).  Walton (1990: 265), Matravers (2014: 122).

11 12

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However, we can see how Carroll and others might reply that no such imagining of a fictional narrator is necessary. The reader faces a choice of taking “Katie loves Hubble” as true in the fiction versus something she is simply supposed to wonder about or entertain as a possibility. Her task then is to ­determine whether the author mandates her to imagine that “Katie loves Hubble” is true in the story or whether “Katie loves Hubble” is something she should just consider as a possibility in the story. To determine the author’s intentions, she asks which hypothesis makes the most sense of the narrative as a whole. No fictional narrator is needed. Wilson replies that while it is possible to figure out what is true in the story without imagining a narrator asserting it to be so, it is “extremely strained and artificial” to not have an implied narrator be the way one ascertains the truth in a fiction (Wilson 2011: 120).  onclusion: Where Do Things Then Stand with the Ontological Gap C Argument? To accept it, we must make several assumptions about viewer’s experience at the movies. First, viewers at the movies imagine they are receiving a report from inside the story world; second, that to comprehend what is true in the fiction, we need to imagine a fictional presenter asserting or reporting that things are so in the story world. Implicit narrator skeptics call both these assumptions into question. Instead, they propose the Imagination Account of Fiction: that we can comprehend what is true in the story by what the author mandates us to imagine. The Imagination Account faces some challenges, specifically the fact that sometimes we are mandated to not imagine things are so in the story world, but also believe them. This is a challenge that proponents of the Imagination Account acknowledge they have to meet. But they maintain that there is ample motivation to do so. There is simply no evidence that the “plain viewer” at the movies imagines herself to access the story events through the mediation of a fictional narrator (Carroll 2016: 126). As noted, in Part I, some suggest that the reasons for thinking there are implicit narrators in literature also support narrators in movies. However, novels convey a story with words, while the use of images is central to storytelling in films. In the next section, we look at George Wilson’s formidable argument, which takes into account the nature of cinematic narration as visual storytelling. Part IV: The Imagined Seeing Thesis I magined Seeing at the Movies Like Levinson, Wilson is interested in how audiences at the cinema say that, in some sense, they “see” or make perceptual contact with the fictional events and characters in the drama.13 Wilson acknowledges that the audience does not

13  Wilson (2011: 7). Wilson is inspired by a fascinating discussion of visualization at the theater and at the movies in Williams (1973).

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literally see the characters in the narrative story, yet he wants to take seriously their talk of “seeing” the characters in the story. To do so, Wilson argues for a distinctive thesis regarding movie narration: the Imagined Seeing Thesis, the view that movie narratives work on viewers by prompting them to imagine that they see the characters and events in the story, or “imagine seeing” for short. There are many questions that philosophers raise about the Imagined Seeing Thesis. One basic question is: just what is imagined seeing? Is it just a manner of speaking? Should the phenomenon Wilson calls “imagined seeing” be analyzed or reduced to other sorts of imagining? For instance, perceptual imagining, which is counterfactually dependent on perception (Currie 1990: 181–185) or “seeing-in,” where one imagines one thing (a photographic image of Cary Grant) as another (an image of Roger Thornhill).14 Is the Imagined Seeing Thesis an empirical claim about how viewers, in fact, engage, with movies? (Stecker 2013: 153). If so, what is the empirical evidence in support of it? Imagined seeing is often differentiated from impersonal imagining, or imagining that certain things are so in the fiction, for example, that Harry Potter is a student at Hogwarts, the school for wizards.15 In contrast, imagined seeing is a form of personal imagining, for I place myself into the content of what I imagine, for instance, I imagine that I see Dorothy and Toto arriving in the land of Oz.16 Imagined seeing is thought to be a kind of experiential imagining because when a visual representation induces imagined seeing in the viewer, it is said to induce an experience one thinks of as “as if” one were actually seeing the events and characters in the fiction (Wilson 2011: 73, 2013: 167). Talk of imagined seeing gives Wilson a distinctive way to argue for his version of the implicit cinematic narrator, a “minimal narrating agency” (Wilson 2011: 112). This minimal narrating agency has no personal characteristics; its only function is to show the story events to the audience. Thus, Noël Carroll has dubbed this argument the “Seeing/Showing” Argument for the implicit cinematic narrator (Carroll 2016). The Seeing/Showing Argument: 1. Movie narration works on the audience by standardly prompting them to imagine that they see the story events from the fictional world. 2. If (1), then standardly, in all fiction films, there must be a fictional presenter, an implicit, minimal narrating agency that shows the audience the events from the world of the fiction. 14  For discussions of seeing in, see Wollheim (1998: 217–238), Hopkins (2008, 2016), and Stecker (2013). For a response to Wollheim that imagined seeing should not be understood in terms of seeing in, see Walton (2002). 15  Some philosophers, such as Noël Carroll, Colin McGinn, and Greg Currie maintain that imagining at the movies is standardly impersonal imagining. See Carroll (1995: 98–99, 2006, 2016), Currie (1991, 1995a, b), and McGinn (2005) and Gaut (1998: 333–334, 2010: 217). 16  For personal versus impersonal imaginings, see Currie (1990: 181–185).

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3. Therefore, standardly, in all fiction films, there is a minimal narrating agency that shows the audience the events from the world of the fiction. If the Seeing/Showing Argument is correct, then, standardly, in every fiction film there are implicit “narrating agencies” that mediate our access to the story worlds and the claim that every fiction film has an implicit narrator is confirmed. But how sound is the argument?  he Imagined Seeing Thesis: How to Formulate It? T The Imagined Seeing Thesis needs to be refined, as Wilson recognizes, because there are some puzzling questions that arise when we try to take seriously viewers talk that they imagine seeing the events and characters from the fiction. The problem with imagined seeing arises from the following claims: if the audience imagines that they are seeing the story events, then they imagine seeing them from a series of definite visual perspectives. If they imagine seeing from a visual perspective, then they also imagine that they see from a vantage point that is within the story world. This would be the account of the IST that George Wilson calls “Face-to-Face-Imagined Seeing”: Face-to-Face Imagined Seeing Thesis: When the audience watches a fiction film, they are prompted to imagine that they are seeing the story events by standing face-to-face with them (Wilson 2011: 36).

But Face-to-Face Imagined Seeing gives rise to a host of perplexing questions. Is it plausible to think that as we watch Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), for example, we are mandated to imagine that we are there on the beach at Dunkirk as bullets fly and the Allied Forces are rained down with bullets?17 What do we then imagine about how we are able to dodge bullets? And when we imagine seeing a murder in the story that is stipulated to be unseen, doesn’t that involve us in engaging in contradictory imaginings, that (a) we imagine that it is true that the murder is unseen and (b) we imagine seeing the murder (Currie 1995a, b; Carroll 1995, 2005, 2016; Gaut 2010)? Wilson rejects Face-to-Face Imagined Seeing because he does not think it is true to the viewer’s experience. It is not part of our engagement with a movie that we imagine ourselves located within the story space, at the viewpoint implied by the vantage point of the motion picture shot. So Wilson instead favors this version of imagined seeing: Mediated Imagined Seeing: The audience imagines that they see a recording of the events in the story world that has been photographically derived in some undetermined way (Wilson 2011: 89).

17  But see Thomson-Jones (2012), who argues that some films prompt the audience to imagine that they are moving within the world of the film.

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According to Mediated Imagined Seeing, the audience imagines that they see the story events, indirectly, through seeing a motion-picture-like recording of them. Just how this recording is obtained is not part of what the audience needs to imagine (Wilson 2011: 89–91). Wilson has a battery of arguments in favor of Mediated Imagined Seeing. His most central point is that Mediated Imagined Seeing is the best way to explain the way that aspects of cinematic construction such as color, grain, focus, camera angle, and editing mediate the audience’s imagined seeing of the characters and action. For example, when the viewer sees the action jump quickly from one time and place to the next, as happens in the final shots of North By Northwest, what does the viewer imagine is going on? According to Mediated Imagined Seeing, she does not explain this as the actual filmmaker’s decision to move the action by having a rapid cut. Instead, the viewer imagines that there is some editing going on at the level of the fiction, through the action of the implicit, minimal narrating agency. One worry is that, like its cousin, Mediated Imagined Seeing, is open to the objection that it gives rise to absurd imaginings (Gaut 2004: 242; Carroll 2006: 179–180). For if the viewer imagines she is watching motion picture shots of actual events, then she will need to imagine the implications of this, and embarrassing questions follow such as how is the fictional narrator able to record the incidents and go unnoticed? How can there be a recording of a story, such as The Ten Commandments (Demille, 1956) that takes place in B.C.E., before the invention of the camera? Wilson is aware of these objections and says that we may imagine that we are watching segments of the story world via “naturally iconic shots,” shots that are causally dependent on the scene but need not be produced by a camera. So, imagining the presence of a camera or other recording device need not be part of what it is that the audience imagines (Wilson 1997: 113, 2011: 48). Thus, the burden of Wilson’s reply to the concern about absurd imagining is that viewers can imagine things without having to imagine the implications of what they are imagining (Wilson 2013: 161). Wilson supports this claim he derives from some work by Kendall Walton (Walton 1990: 174–182). Walton’s idea is that there are questions about fictions whose answers are not specified and so these questions are “silly,” pointless, and inappropriate to ask. Wilson takes up Walton’s idea and illustrates it with the example from Flash Gordon in the old black and white science fiction serials (1986). In the story, we suppose that Flash Gordon has a viewing machine that enables him to see anywhere in the universe, but such a device violates the laws of physics, as we know them. Wilson maintains that it is a silly question for the viewer to imagine how such a device works, for this is indeterminate or not specified in the Flash Gordon stories (Wilson 1997: 314–315). The same is true if viewers had to imagine the implications of imagining they are watching a recording of actual events. With this move, Wilson tries to fend off the absurd imaginings objection by saying that questions about how the recording of events comes about are silly ones to ask.

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In reply, critics such as Berys Gaut and Noël Carroll insist that what is known as the “Realistic Heuristic” governs our imaginings about fiction. Their idea is that when we engage with a work of fiction, we “fill in” and draw implications from what is explicitly true in the fiction based on how things are in the real world, unless it is explicitly stipulated to be otherwise.18 In the Flash Gordon serials, the story makes explicit that the screening devices work as shown. So, we go along with this feature of Flash’s screen, just as we go along with the idea, in other stories, that there are wizards that can perform magic, there are zombies that are dead and alive, and so on (Carroll 2006: 181). In short, critics charge that Wilson’s defense rests on a misleading analogy (Carroll 2006: 181). Because Flash’s screening device is explicitly introduced to work as represented, we do not take issue with it. We suspend “default realism” and do not expend energy worrying about it. However, no one clues us into the implicit narrator: it is, after all, an implicit feature of the narration, not explicit. So, we cannot fend off worries about how the cinematic operator with the thought “just accept the filmmaker says this is how things work” (Carroll 2006: 125). Because there is not, in other words, an exceptions clause for the cinematic narrator, the Realistic Heuristic licenses us to imaginatively fill in the implications of its presence in the story world (Carroll 2006: 181). Thus, the debate between Wilson and his critics concerns whether the questions that critics ask about the operation of Wilson’s version of the implicit cinematic narrator are “silly” ones to ask. This is the question we examine in the next section. Part V: Reconsidering the Objection from Absurd Imaginings To review, by far, the most serious objection that friends of the implicit cinematic narrator face is the concern about absurd imaginings. This question dogs all versions of the cinematic narrator we have discussed. In response to this problem, Chatman maintained that questions about how the narrator comes to have its knowledge are “non-questions” (Chatman 1990: 130). Levinson had to fend off Kania’s concern that it is not possible to say a fictional narrator is our guide to the story’s sights and sounds without embarrassing questions about the narrator following. Also, Wilson faces the objection that his Mediating Imagined Seeing thesis cannot avoid the sort of absurdities that have plagued other formulations of imagined seeing. The question we must now, then, try to sort out is whether the critics’ questions about the cinematic narrator are legitimate ones to ask. Concerns about improbabilities in works of fiction go back to Aristotle’s Poetics, where he said that ideally there should be no improbabilities in the plot (Poetics 1460b27). Drama is an imitation of human action and life. Dramas that have improbable incidents, especially in the plot, undermine the sense that goings on in the drama work as they do in real life. For things in real life obey  Gaut (2004: 245), Carroll (2006: 181, 2016: 120).

18

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cause and effect, and the audience’s emotional response to the story depends on their making a connection between the fiction and everyday life. Thus, plays that build to a narrative resolution by having a deus ex machina solution, such as Medea improbably spirited away in a chariot at the last minute, are to be avoided, unless there is some overriding reason to include them (Poetics 15.1454a37). Also, when the poet must include them, to achieve a certain effect, the artist should find ways to de-emphasize them, for instance, by including them in the “backstory” of the larger story world from which the play draws, and not as part of the events that are dramatized in front of the audience on the stage (Poetics 15.1454b5-7). Kendall Walton voices similar ideas when he advances the “Reality Principle” (Walton 1990:144–151). To comprehend and appreciate the story, we must “fill in: a great deal of information that is not explicitly represented.19 The Reality Principle directs an appreciator of fiction to “fill in” or infer from what is explicitly presented in the fiction, based on the idea that the fictional world operates as the real world does. So, for example, to appreciate the Harry Potter stories and movies, we have to infer things that the novel does not explicitly introduce: even though Harry is a wizard and can perform magic, in every other relevant respect, Harry is like ordinary “muggles”—he is not immortal, has parents, and so on. Thus, Walton’s “Reality Principle” is very much like Carroll and Gaut’s “Realistic Heuristic.” One might say that, in general, the Realistic Heuristic, the idea that we fill what is true in the fiction according to how things work in real life, is sound. For an important, if not universally accepted, way of thinking about fiction is that it is capable of affecting a change in the audience’s view of themselves and the world.20 To do so, works of fiction must present representations of human action that are broadly realistic and true to life, unless things are specified otherwise in the story (for instance, Flash Gordon’s viewing screen or magic in the world of Harry Potter). Further, there is an important practical reason for assuming that the Reality Principle holds. It is just not possible for an author or filmmaker to fill out everything that is true in the story world she creates for the reader or viewer. To do so would run the risk of distracting from the appreciation of what is essential and relevant to know and what is not. Instead, with the Reality Principle, the creator of the fiction can leave certain fictional truths implicit, and we use how things work in the real world to fill in information about the story world. When the story world departs from the real world, this exception can be explicitly introduced. So, the Reality Principle provides a practical way for the appreciator of a fictional work to “fill out” the story world, without leaving the contents of the story world mostly unspecified (Gaut 2004: 245). 19  The problem of just what an appreciator of fiction “fills in” as she comprehends a story is a subject of great debate. See, for example, Lewis (1978), Beardsley (1981: 242–247), Walton (1990: 144–161), Lamarque (1990), and Lorand (2001). 20  Catherine Wilson (2004), Elisabeth Schellekens (2007).

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In response, Wilson is likely to insist that there are paradoxes and inconsistencies at the base of many fictional narratives. A prime example that Wilson gives comes from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is fictional that Huck, a barely literate young man who goes stir crazy when he sits for too long, wrote the 300-page memoir about his adventures (Wilson 1997: 309). If we ask how this could be, we would get tangled up in imagining absurd scenarios that distract from our proper appreciation of the story. Wilson suggests we are just not meant to imagine the implications of how such a narrative feat is possible, and so the Realistic Heuristic is blocked. We need not imagine all the implications of how Huck could have crafted the tale. In other words, we should not expend energy worrying about the embarrassing questions about the cinematic narrator/fictional shower because they have no answer within the world of the story, and so they are silly questions to ask (Wilson 1997: 308–9; Wilson 2011: 48). It might appear that we have arrived at a stalemate or impasse between philosophers on both sides of the debate. However, we might make headway by looking more closely at some of the examples that are often given of silly questions to ask. If these paradigm examples are like, in relevant respects, questions one might ask about the cinematic narrator, then Wilson’s argument might be plausible. On the other hand, if the agreed upon examples are not sufficiently like asking questions about the cinematic narrator, then we might have some reason for thinking that Wilson’s response to his critics is not plausible. Centrally, the silly questions that Walton considers to be inappropriate are so because it is wrong to seek an answer in the world of the fiction. Instead, we find the answer outside the story world, by considering the generic conventions that govern the art form in question. For example, the audience at the opera does not ask why it is that the characters in opera often spend their last moments singing, while they are passing away in excruciating pain! (Walton 1990: 177). Only someone who was ignorant of the conventions of opera, as a particular art form, would ask this question. Further, it is fictional in the play, The Belle of Amherst, that the character, Emily Dickinson, is shy and retiring, a person of few words. However, the actor who impersonates Dickinson has many lines and commands the attention of the audience (Walton 1990: 176). It is silly or inappropriate to ask why a quiet person is talking so much and expect the answer to be found within the terms of the story. The conventions and nature of a play of this sort require that the character talk a lot to convey the poet’s thoughts and feelings. In these types of cases, as Greg Currie notes, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the features of the representation, for instance, of Othello and the features that Othello has in the story world (Currie 2010: 59). That is, a well-informed spectator of theater understands that the poetic speeches that Othello offers, for example, do not reflect a quality in the character of Othello, but are there instead to stir the emotions with the beauty and eloquence of the quality of the language. As Currie puts it, “While the words uttered by the actor constitute great poetry, they are not represented as representing great poetry in the mouth of the character” (Currie 2010: 60).

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Generalizing from these examples, we can explain why the questions one could raise in these cases are inappropriate ones to ask. A question is a silly one, in these cases, to ask, provided the answer is not found within the terms of the fiction but instead is explained by the nature of the genre of the artwork and its associated conventions. We can also see how accepting that these cases involve silly questions is compatible with holding our imaginings about fiction are, in general, governed by the Realistic Heuristic. It is not given as true in the fiction that Othello is a fine poet or speechmaker: this is a feature of how Othello is represented due to the artistic requirements of Shakespeare’s plays. As such, we are not mandated to imagine the implications for what is true in the story world when Othello makes a beautiful speech. Similarly, we are not required to infer what follows from imagining that barely literate Huck Finn authors a 300-page memoir. We understand it is Mark Twain’s words that are the source of the fictional memoir, not Huck Finn’s, because fictional narratives have to be crafted by actual authors. So, we understand that we do not need to infer what follows for the story world if we imagine that we are reading a lengthy fictional memoir that Huck pens. Now what follows for the debate between Wilson and his critics over the absurd imaginings? Recall that on Wilson’s Mediated Imagined Seeing thesis, when we watch a movie, we are to imagine that we are watching a recording of the story events taken from within the fictional world. Critics ask, how was such a recording made? How could there be a recording of events if the story is set in a time before the camera was invented? And, further, if we suppose that some naturally occurring camera is the source of the shots we are seeing, what are we to imagine about point-of-view shots? How can naturally occurring cameras get inside people’s heads? Are the questions that his critics pose silly ones to ask? Recall that according to Wilson’s Mediated Imagined Seeing, we are to imagine that it is true in the story world that such a recording was made. For recalling the Ontological Gap Argument, the narrator or narrating device has to be imagined to be part of the fictional world in order for us to imagine that what we are seeing is a recording taking place from within the story world. The objection then is that once we imagine a recording takes place in the world of the fiction, we must imagine what follows from this, in accordance with the Realistic Heuristic. But when we imagine what follows from the presence of a recording of the story events, absurd imaginings follow. Wilson insists that to seek answers to these questions is inappropriate. But our examination of some central cases of silly question pertaining to fiction suggests that the questions about how the recording comes about are legitimate ones to ask. For we said that there is no reason to think that it is true in the fiction that Huck is a literate or capable of sitting still long enough to write a 300-page memoir. And there is no reason to think it is true in the fiction that Othello, a brash man of action, makes beautiful speeches, and so on with the other examples we looked at. But Wilson would have us imagine that it is true

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in the fiction that there is a recording of the story events or fictional facts. This means, as Wilson’s critics charge, that once we suppose that the implicit narrator (or minimal narrating agency) is part of the fictional world, it is reasonable to fill in the implications of its presence there. And when we do, we get tangled up in the embarrassing questions about the cinematic narrator that we have rehearsed in this section.21 Conclusion: Further Issues for Cinematic Narration If we are skeptics about imagined seeing as the way movies work on us as viewers, is there another way to explain the phenomena to which Wilson’s work draws our attention? For Wilson is insistent that any account of how movie narratives engage our imagination will need to address the way in which viewers at the movies describe their experiences as that it is “as if ” they are seeing segments of the story world. A concern with explaining the impression that we are making perceptual contact with the story world also clearly motivates Levinson’s Ontological Gap Argument. But explaining our engagement with movies in terms of imagined perceptual relations faces problems, as we have seen. How might we undertake to explain how film as a distinctively visual form of storytelling works on us, the viewers? Greg Currie proposes that we distinguish visual fictions from nonvisual fiction by how film narration determines or conveys the story content. Currie uses the term “perceptual imagining” to mark out the distinctive kind of imagining movies prompt in viewers (Currie 1991: 140, 1995a, b: Chapter 6). When a viewer watches a movie, it is the viewer’s actual perception of a visual image that prompts her imagining the story’s contents. In visual fictions, the viewer’s imagining of story events is then counterfactually dependent on looking at images.22 Noël Carroll discusses the distinct perceptual and cognitive faculties that movie narration engages, as a form of pictorial comprehension (Carroll 2008: 108–115). Movies present familiar scenes and characters even if they are ones the filmmaker makes up. Thus, movies mobilize the same capacity for object recognition that we employ in everyday life. Therefore, one might say that the “Recognition Prompt” view can explain why viewers report that their experience is “as if ” they see the characters in real life, without positing they stand in an imagined perceptual relation to them. What they are reporting is a sense of recognition of something previously encountered in perception, not an imagined seeing of them. A further possibility is to hold that the notion that viewers at the movies look at the moving pictures on the screen and “see in” to them the characters  See also Curran (2016: 103–106).  Wilson remains open to the possibility that what he means by “imagined seeing” at the movies is what Currie means by perceptual imagining. See Wilson (2011: 75–76). Currie revisits his views about imagined seeing at the movies in Currie (2018). 21 22

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and situations that the image depicts (Wollheim 1998: 217–238; Hopkins 2008, 2016). Seeing in is not an imagined seeing of characters but a seeing in which one thing (a movie shot of Ingrid Bergman) is taken as a representation of another (Ilsa Lund). The virtue of “seeing-in” is that it can account for the role that perception plays in imagining story content, while also being able to explain how the viewer can appreciate the properties of the moving shot as an image or representation (Stecker 2013: 153–4).23

Conclusion Cinematic narration is the way in which movies tell their stories to an audience. The overall question we have looked at here is how do movies work on us so that we come to imagine the story events? There are two broad areas of contention. The first concerns whether to comprehend what is true in the story— we need to imagine a fictional presenter who reports or shows that things are so in the story. Alternatively, is the Imagination Account of Fiction right that we comprehend the story in virtue of the actual filmmaker’s mandate to imagine things are thus and so in the story? The second concerns whether audiences at the movies standardly imagine seeing the characters and story events. Or do we instead imagine that certain things are so in the story world, without imagining we are seeing these incidents? We have seen that the issue of how we imaginatively “fill in” the implications of what is explicitly the case in the fiction is central to resolving both issues. An exciting line of further inquiry is whether the Imagination Account of Fiction can offer a complete answer to how viewers comprehend a story. If the argument in this chapter is correct, there is sufficient reason to hope it can do so.

Bibliography Beardsley, M. 1981. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Indianapolis: Hackett. Booth, W. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press. Bordwell, D. 1985. Narration and the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Carroll, N. 1990. Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. ———. 1995. Review: Mimesis as Make-Believe. The Philosophical Quarterly 45 (178): 93–99. ———. 1996. Fiction, Nonfiction and the Film of Presumptive Assertion. In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2005. Introduction: Part IV: Film Narrative/Narration. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, an Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 175–184. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2006. Introduction to Part IV: Film Narrative/Narration. In N. Carroll and J. Choi (2004), 175–184.  For Wilson’s view on imagined seeing as “seeing in” look at Wilson (2013: 167–168).

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———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2016. Motion Picture Narration. In K. Thomson-Jones, ed. (2016). Carroll, N., and J. Choi. 2004. Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Chatman, S. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Curran, A. 2016. Fictional Indeterminacy, Imagined Seeing, and Cinematic Narration. In K. Thomson-Jones, ed. (2016). Currie, G. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1991. Visual Fictions. The Philosophical Quarterly 41 (163 (April)): 129–143. ———. 1995a. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995b. Unreliability Refigured: Narrative in Literature and Film. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1): 19–29. ———. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. Visually Attending to Fictional Things. In Perceptual Imagination and Perceptual Memory, ed. Fiona Macpherson and Fabian Dorsch, 186–208. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, David. 2010. Eluding Wilson’s “Elusive Narrators”. Philosophical Studies 147: 387–394. Gaut, B. (1997). Film Authorship and Collaboration. In R. Allen and M. Smith, eds. Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford University Press: 149–72. ———. 1998. Imagination, Interpretation and Film. Philosophical Studies 89: 331–341. ———. 2004. The Philosophy of the Movies: Cinematic Narration. In P.  Kivy, ed. (2004), 230–253. ———. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, R. 2008. What Do We See in Film? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 66 (2): 149–159. ———. 2016. Realism in Film and Other Representations. In K.  Thomson-Jones, ed. (2016). Kania, A. 2005. Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63: 47–54. Kivy, P., ed. 2004. The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics. 1st ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Köppe, T., and J. Stürhring. 2011. Against Pan-Narrator Theories. Journal of Literary Semantics 40: 59–80. Lamarque, P. 1990. Reasoning What Is True in Fiction. Argumentation 4: 333–346. Lamarque, P., and S.H.  Olsen. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, J. 1993. Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies. The Philosophical Quarterly 43: 70–78. ———. 1996. Film Music and Narrative Agency. In D. Bordwell and N. Carroll, eds. Post-Theory. Reconstructing Film Studies. The University of Wisconsin Press, 248–82. Lewis, D. 1978. Truth in Fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1): 37–46. Livingston, P. 1997. Cinematic Authorship. In R. Allen and M. Smith, eds. Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 132–48. ———. 2005. Narrative. In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, 2nd ed., 359–370. Oxon: Routledge Press. ———. 2013. The Imagined Seeing Thesis. Projections 7: 139–146.

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Lorand, R. 2001. Telling a Story or Telling a World. British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (4): 425–443. Matravers, D. 1997. The Paradox of Fiction: The Report Versus the Perceptual Model. In Emotion and the Arts, ed. Mette Hjort and Sue Laver, 78–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. Fiction and Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGinn, C. 2005. The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact. New York: Pantheon. Nehamas, A. 1981. The Postulated Author. Critical Inquiry 8: 133–149. Pye, D. 2013. Seeing Fictions in Film. Projections 7: 131–138. Schellekens, E. 2007. Aesthetics and Morality (Bloomsbury Aesthetics). Continuum. 63–92. Stecker, R. 2013. Film Narration, Imaginative Seeing and Seeing-In. Projections 7: 147–154. Stock, K. 2013. Imagining and Fiction: Some Issues. Philosophy Compass 8 (10): 887–896. ———. 2017. Only Imagine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomson-Jones, K. 2007. The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator. British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (1): 76–94. ———. 2009. Cinematic Narrators. Philosophy Compass 4 (2): 296–311. ———. 2012. Narration in Motion. British Journal of Aesthetics 52: 33–43. ———., ed. 2016. Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film. New York/London: Routledge. Walton, K. 1990. Mimesis and Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Walton, K. 2002. Depiction, Perception, and Imagination: Responses to Richard Wollheim. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60 (1): 27–35. ———. 2008. Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. 1973. “Imagination and the Self”, in his Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972, 26–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, G. 1986. Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1997. Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration. Philosophical Topics 25: 295–318. Wilson, C. 2004. Literature and Knowledge. In Philosophy of Literature: Contemporary and Classic Readings, ed. E. John and D. Lopes. London: Blackwell. Wilson, G. 2007. Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film. Philosophical Studies 135: 73–88. ———. 2011. Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Seeing through the Imagination in the Cinema. PRO 7: 155–171. Wollheim, R. 1998. On Pictorial Representation. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56: 217–233.

CHAPTER 6

Narrative and the Moving Image Patrick Keating

How does a film tell a story? The simplicity of this question hides a number of puzzles. Some scholars try to unpack these puzzles by focusing on the word “story.” What sorts of situations might constitute a story? How are those situations linked? Others have focused on the word “tell.” Does a film tell a story or show it? And who does the telling (or showing)? A third alternative is to focus on the word “film.” Does film offer distinctive resources for storytelling? What resources does it share with verbal narrative? In this chapter, I approach all of these puzzles by starting with the “how.” How does a film tell a story? Over time. Whether film or novel, narrative is temporal. Whether narrative or not, so is film. Part One endorses a “rhetorical-functionalist” theory of narrativity, placing special emphasis on the temporal effects of prospection, retrospection, and re-­ cognition. Part Two develops this time-based approach further by considering the modality of narrative—that is, the way narratives appeal to our sense of what might happen. Part Three expands the focus beyond film to include television, where many narratives are told in serial form, stretching across multiple episodes or seasons. Part Four turns to a difficult problem that has received a great deal of attention in the philosophy of film—the problem of the cinematic narrator. After reviewing some of the key positions in this debate, I argue that we can understand cinematic narration without the overly personalized notion of the narrator. I also propose that the purpose-oriented logic of the rhetorical-­ functionalist approach to narrative gives us good reasons to hold on to the “implied author” as a useful concept for narrative analysis.

P. Keating (*) Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_6

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Narrative Dynamics In “What Is a Temporal Art?,” Jerrold Levinson and Philip Alperson have proposed over a dozen ways that an art form might be considered temporal. The cinema fits into almost every category. For instance, like music and dance, the cinema requires time in its presentation: “The parts of the artwork are not all available at any one moment, but only consecutively.”1 Narrative movies are temporal in another sense: As the sequence onscreen unfolds, typically over the course of a couple hours, the story-oriented spectator must make sense of another sequence, the sequence of changes in the fictional world, a sequence that may cover hours or years or centuries. Narrative theorists have proposed various terms for these two sequences, including the structuralist pair story-­ discourse and the formalist pair fabula/syuzhet.2 In a recent essay on narrativity, Meir Sternberg has offered several possible pairs: “actional vs. presentational or rhetorical, mimetic vs. communicative, narrated vs. narrative, told vs. telling/ reading dynamics.”3 Whichever terms we use, the process “entails an interplay between the one sequence’s flow of development and the other’s flow of disclosures—between the two great sources of narrative change, in the world itself and in our knowledge about it, respectively.”4 Though primarily concerned with literature, Sternberg’s evocative language, contrasting a flow of development with a flow of disclosures, seems particularly apt for cinema. Watching a narrative film, the pictures and sounds offer a flow of disclosures; those pictures and sounds reveal and conceal the details of the developing story-world. Some observers might question the wisdom of splitting these two sequences at all. Don’t we just see the story-world unfolding onscreen? As debates in the philosophy of depiction suggest, such a question might be answered in many ways—for instance, by appealing to ideas of recognition or imagined seeing. For now, I want to argue in favor of the dual-sequence proposal by giving an idea of its explanatory power. The “development and disclosures” model sharpens our awareness of a crucial feature of cinematic storytelling: its selectivity. We do not see the story-world in its entirety; we see a selection of the story-­ world, represented in framed pictures. Consider two scenes from Clarence Brown’s 1926 film Flesh and the Devil, where the camera’s movements shape our understanding of the story-world by controlling what is inside the frame and what is outside it. Set in the nineteenth century, the film tells the story of a woman, Felicitas, who tries to destroy the friendship between two men, Leo and Ulrich. In one scene, Leo (John Gilbert) and Felicitas (Greta Garbo) are 1 Jerrold Levinson and Philip Alperson, “What Is a Temporal Art?,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (1991): 441. 2  On the differences between the story-discourse pair and the fabula/syuzhet pair, see Seymour Chatman, “Towards a Theory of Narrative,” New Literary History 6, no. 2 (Winter 1975): 295–296. 3  Meir Sternberg, “Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm,” Poetics Today 31, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 636. 4  Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 637.

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embracing. The door opens, revealing Felicitas’s heretofore unintroduced husband, an angry older man named Count von Rhaden (Marc McDermott). Seeing his wife with Leo, Rhaden raises his left hand in astonishment. The camera dollies closer as Rhaden clenches his fist in anger; onscreen, it appears as if the husband is crushing the lovers with his hand. The next shot cuts to Felicitas. She has seen her husband, but Leo has not. In one sense, the dolly-in toward the clenched hand supplies privileged information; we see what the characters do not. Leo and Felicitas are oblivious to the clenched hand; even Rhaden himself is probably unaware of it, so immersed is he in his own rage. The film tells its story by focusing our attention on a crucial detail, demanding that we notice its significance. Still, our privileged view remains partial. The hand itself occludes our view of Leo and Felicitas, and the tighter framing leaves Rhaden’s face off-screen. These exclusions affect our experience of time by making us want to know more: in the short term, we want to know when the lovers will notice Rhaden’s presence; in the longer term, we want to know if Rhaden’s anger will pose a threat to the lovers. Rhaden challenges Leo to a duel, which is represented in the next scene in a celebrated moving-camera shot. First, we see seven men silhouetted against the sky. The camera (mounted on a vehicle) dollies back rapidly, as the two duelists take their paces and the four “seconds” run to safety below the horizon. Now only one man remains in the shot: the “impartial,” who raises and lowers his hands to signal for the men to fire. From off-screen, we see two puffs of smoke. The seconds re-enter the shot and run for the sides of the frame while the screen fades to black. This shot is remarkably opaque. We see seven men, but we do not see their faces. Then we see only three men, and then only one—and the one we care about, Leo, is off-screen. The firing of the guns leaves us as uncertain as ever, since we see no bodies fall. The quick fade-out forces us to wait for the next scene to find out if Leo has survived or not. (He has.) In the previous scene, the camerawork was informative, dollying in to draw our attention to a key detail. Here, the camerawork explicitly conceals information. Moving the camera backwards makes the edges of the frame salient, emphasizing the process of inclusion and exclusion. Again, the framing shapes our experience of time. Suspense about an upcoming duel is converted into intense curiosity about a duel that just happened. These shifts are profoundly temporal, not just because the story-world is changing, but because our understanding of that world must be revised with every new disclosure. As Eyal Segal explains, this temporal way of thinking about a film or novel places special emphasis on functions: “Unlike most narratological approaches, Sternberg’s defines this essence of narrative not in the mimetic terms of represented or narrated action, but rather in the rhetorical-communicative terms of narrative interest.”5 One way of defining narrative is to prioritize the shared 5  Eyal Segal, “The ‘Tel-Aviv School’: A Rhetorical-Functional Approach to Narrative,” Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Greta Olson (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2011), 302.

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properties of stories, as opposed to plots, thereby favoring one sequence over the other (for instance, by stating that a story must consist of two or more linked events). By contrast, the rhetorical-functionalist scholar tries to keep both sequences in mind at all times, considering how the interplay between the flow of disclosures and the flow of development produces effects, most notably the temporal effects of prospection (looking ahead toward the future), retrospection (looking back to a known gap in the past), and re-cognition (rethinking events we thought we understood). For the viewer, interest is sparked by a gap—that is, by a salient unknown. There are countless things we do not know about the story-world, but the film makes certain gaps in knowledge salient, as when a character says that she is going to an audition tomorrow (prompting us to wonder if she will get the part) or when another character finds a dead body in the living room (prompting us to ask who killed the victim and why). Characterizing the process of prospection as a kind of suspense, Sternberg explains: “Suspense arises from rival scenarios envisaged about the future: from the perceptible discrepancy between what the telling lets us readers know about the happening (e.g. a conflict) at any moment and what still lies ahead, ambiguous because as yet unresolved in the told world, at least not to our knowledge.”6 In Flesh and the Devil, when the duel scene begins, Leo’s fate has not yet been resolved. It is a salient unknown in the future. Because Leo is a sympathetic protagonist, we may hope that he will survive, and we may fear that he will be injured or killed. Sternberg contrasts the future orientation of suspense with the past orientation of curiosity. A mystery may skip over a murder, generating the reader’s curiosity about who committed the crime: “Knowing that we do not know, we then go forward with our mind lingering on the gapped antecedents, trying to infer (bridge, compose) them in retrospect.”7 In the duel scene, as soon as we see the two puffs of smoke off-screen, we know that the duel has already happened; it becomes a gap in the past. The moving camera has ensured that we notice this gap by making the frame and therefore off-screen space unusually salient. Re-cognition or surprise is also oriented toward the past, but in a different way. According to Sternberg, “We must be lured into a false certainty for a time about time past. […] The narrative first unobtrusively gaps or twists its chronology, then unexpectedly discloses to us our misreading in ignorance and enforces a corrective rereading in late re-cognition.”8 In these terms, the initial appearance of Rhaden qualifies as a surprise. Until this point, the film has not disclosed the crucial fact that Felicitas is married. Perhaps we assume that she is unmarried; perhaps we just do not think about her marital status at all. Either way, we must revise our understanding of the story-world when Rhaden appears. What seemed like a romantic relationship was a dangerous 6  Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 640–641. Sternberg’s definition of suspense is admittedly broad, and some readers might prefer to use “prospection” as a less emotionally laden term. For a more narrowly targeted theory, see Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94–117. 7  Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 641. 8  Sternberg, “Narrativity,” 641.

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affair all along. The dolly-in toward Rhaden’s hand forces us to confront Leo’s ignorance—and our own. Whether appealing to prospection, retrospection, or re-cognition, the film shapes the spectator’s experience by disclosing developments over time. Within film studies, the leading exponent of Sternberg’s theory of narrative has been David Bordwell. In the co-authored volume The Classical Hollywood Cinema, Bordwell argued that we may think of a Hollywood narrative as a chain of tightly linked causes and effects.9 For Bordwell’s admirers, this observation helps explain why mainstream films are so easy to follow. For Bordwell’s detractors, the causal chain model seems overly reductive, eliminating everything that does not follow in a straight line. My own view is that the causal chain is the action-oriented portion of what is ultimately Bordwell’s much richer “functionalist” argument, in which the film cues the spectator to make various inferences about the story (fabula), thereby activating the emotionally charged play of prospection, retrospection, and re-cognition that Sternberg discusses. Although it can be useful to think of a classically constructed film as a straight line of causes and effects, I prefer another metaphor that Bordwell proposes: the “winding corridor” that shifts and curves, suggesting a clear path to follow but keeping us guessing all the while.10 Early causes point us toward later effects, but not in a way that everything seems inevitable. Will the lovers meet? If so, how? Will the villain be defeated? If so, how? If anything, Hollywood’s corridors have grown more winding or even crooked in recent years, to the point that some of Hollywood’s most complex narrative films mislead their spectators for long stretches of time before revealing their “third-­ act twists,” as in The Sixth Sense (M.  Night Shyamalan, 1999), The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006), and Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016).11 But the winding corridor was always a guiding principle of Hollywood storytelling, with its long-standing appeals to suspense, curiosity, and surprise. Another cinema scholar who has examined how a film might disclose its developments over time is V.F.  Perkins. Perkins’s approach differs from Bordwell’s in various ways; for one thing, Perkins subscribes to the view that the causal chain is overly reductive. But the two share an interest in the ways a film might shape our experience moment by moment. In an essay on the concept of “worldhood,” Perkins writes, “Since the film’s characters are in a world, their knowledge of it must be partial, and their perception of it may be, in almost any respect, distorted or deluded.”12 A world must be understood from 9  David Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style, 1917–1960,” The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 13. 10  Bordwell, “The Classical Hollywood Style,” 37. 11  On recent puzzle films and twist films, see David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 73–82. 12  V.F. Perkins, “Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction,” in Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 26.

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a point of view, and the individual point of view is always limited. Crucially, Perkins extends this insight outward: “That applies to us, too, as observers of their world and their understandings.”13 No matter how informative the storytelling, there are aspects of the film’s story-world that will remain forever unknown to us. This obscurity is not a flaw but a simple fact of world-making that the artful filmmaker may turn to advantage by choosing with care which details to disclose and when to disclose them. Bounded by a frame, cinematic representation is always selective and fragmentary: “We are offered an assembly of bits and pieces from which to compose a world.”14 The spectator uses this sequence of fragments to make sense of the film’s world—a process that is always partial and in flux. All along, the spectator is guided by an awareness that the film is a purpose-built construction. Because a film represents a world, we may always ask, “Why is the movie, now, showing us this and not that?” Watching a narrative film is a deeply temporal experience, not just because the film takes time to pass through the projector, but also because the images onscreen provides a sequence of disclosures—disclosures that help us make sense of another sequence, that of the story-world.

The Modality of Narrative To understand a simple causal chain, you need to understand what happens and why. But most films offer a more complicated pattern, engaging our interest by asking us to consider what might happen—whether it ends up happening or not. We might think of this aspect of narrative as an appeal to “modal” thinking. How might a narrative engage our understanding of possibilities? One strategy is to rely on characters to open up this more expansive view. Marie-Laure Ryan defines embedded narratives as “story-like constructs contained in the private worlds of characters.”15 When a character hopes that something will happen, the reader understands the target of their hopes as a “virtual event.” Hopes, fears, beliefs, doubts—any of these private feelings may generate a virtual event. Some of those events may indeed become actualized in the world of the story (as when a character’s worst fears are realized), but others may not (as when a fear proves unfounded). Either way, the virtual event serves to shape our experience of the narrative as it unfolds in time, orienting us toward possibilities in the past, present, and future.16 Somewhat differently, Gerald Prince has proposed the category of the “disnarrated,” referring to “events that do not happen but, nonetheless, are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text.”17 In a novel, a narrator might explain  Perkins, “Where Is the World?”, 26.  Perkins, “Where Is the World?”, 26. 15  Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 156. 16  I discuss Prince and Ryan elsewhere in Patrick Keating, “Narrative Dynamics and the Competitive Reality Show,” Storyworlds 5 (2013): 55–75. 17  Gerald Prince, “The Disnarrated,” Style 22, no. 1 (1988): 2. 13 14

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a series of hypothetical events while pointing out that they did not happen in the fictional world. Such disnarration may sharpen our understanding of an actual event’s significance. Note that Prince’s category overlaps with but differs from Ryan’s. For Ryan, the virtual event requires some sort of mental state, as when a character believes or fears that something might happen. For Prince, an event may be disnarrated—presented as a hypothetical but unrealized possibility—whether a character is aware of the possibility or not. The functionalist approach I have been advocating places special emphasis on the logic of possibilities. Discussing the dynamics of prospection, retrospection, and re-cognition, Sternberg writes, “Let me just point out their inherent modality. Arising from a gapped future or past, all three dynamics entail multiple (ambiguous, uncertain, hypothetical, reversible) gap-filling, necessarily a matter of ‘possibility or probability’ rather than ‘fact.’”18 A narrative is modal because it appeals to our understanding of what might happen (or might have happened), not just what does happen. When we wonder what will happen next, we are in the grips of an emotionally engaging story. To be sure, some gaps are temporary rather than permanent. When a detective solves the crime at the end of a classically constructed mystery, uncertainty is replaced by certainty. But the finality of the ending may feel all the more satisfying because of all the uncertainty that has come before.19 Certain cinematic genres and techniques appeal to modal thinking explicitly. For instance, David Bordwell has analyzed “forking paths” films like Sliding Doors (Peter Howett, 1998) and Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 (Ka-Fai Wai, 1997), which represent alternative timelines without necessarily establishing which one (if any) is the “true” timeline.20 (As Bordwell points out, many of the films are less radical than they appear, offering various clues to suggest that the last timeline should be given priority.) Other films depict characters’ imaginings as if they were actual events in the story-world. In High Fidelity (Stephen Frears, 2000), one scene shows the protagonist Rob (John Cusack) meeting his insufferably pretentious rival Ian (Tim Robbins). Unexpectedly, Rob starts to insult Ian—but then the film returns to an earlier moment in the conversation, and we realize that Rob simply imagined insulting him. The film then repeats the joke, first showing Rob attempting to punch Ian and then showing Rob killing Ian with the help of his friends. Each time, the film returns to the initial conversation, marking Rob’s increasingly extreme behavior as an increasingly fanciful bit of wish fulfillment. This technique has become a comedy-film cliché, but more dramatic films have used such virtual events to profound effect. At the end of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour (2002), there is an extraordinary  Meir Sternberg, “If-Plots: Narrativity and the Law-Code,” in Theorizing Narrativity, ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 34. 19  As Eyal Segal explains, “A successful conclusion of the investigation thus resolves the curiosity gaps about the crime mystery—and simultaneously the suspense gaps regarding the course of the investigation.” See Segal, “Closure in Detective Fiction,” Poetics Today 31, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 167. 20  David Bordwell, “Film Futures,” Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 171–187. 18

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sequence in which a father (Brian Cox), hoping that his son Monty (Edward Norton) will not report to jail, delivers a long monologue explaining how the son might go on to live a productive life if he runs away. The film illustrates the father’s words quite vividly, revealing the sights and sounds of a future that will not happen. Indeed, the sequence goes on for so long that a spectator might wonder, “Wait—this is a fantasy, right?” Similarly, at the end of La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016), the two protagonists, now living separate lives, share a fantasy of how their love might have developed differently. The stylized set design, reminiscent of ballet sequences from 1950s musicals, clearly marks the sequence as a fantasy, and yet the musical number goes on for so long that a spectator might doubt its status, at least for a moment. In Prince’s terms, Lee’s film disnarrates the future: Chazelle’s film, the past. Although representations of imagined events are not hard to find, they remain exceptions to the norm whereby mainstream films simply depict what happens. However, we should not dismiss modality as a curiosity, relevant only for films that feature explicit “what if” sequences. Applying the functionalist model to cinema, Inbar Shaham has shown how Hollywood genres deploy patterns of forecast, enactment, and report in distinctive ways, as when the heist film offers a detailed forecast of a future theft, generating a set of predictions that will shape our understanding of the heist itself, which may or may not go according to plan.21 More broadly, any narrative film may mandate its spectators to consider a wide range of possible outcomes, whether they are actualized or not. Consider Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man, based on a screenplay by Graham Greene. The film offers an array of characters with conflicting goals and shifting beliefs. To borrow Ryan’s terminology, each articulation of a goal or belief produces a “virtual event.” Holly (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Vienna expecting to meet Harry (Orson Welles). At first, his expectation is thwarted; later, it is realized. The military policeman Calloway (Trevor Howard) aims to convince Holly that Harry was guilty of involvement in a murderous racket. Calloway fails to accomplish his goal at first, but then he succeeds. Harry’s former lover Anna (Alida Valli) believes that Harry is dead. We think that she is correct, but then we learn that she is wrong. Then Harry is killed, and she forms a new belief that Harry is truly dead—a belief we now know to be correct. To understand any of these events as they unfold in time, we must understand a great deal that goes beyond the “objective” events, because we must understand what the characters think will happen, what the characters believe about what has happened, and what could end up happening whether the characters expect it to happen or not. The crucial scene when Holly learns that Harry is alive evokes surprise in the narratological sense of the term. In the story-world, with its flow of developments, Harry was alive the whole time. In the filmic sequence, with its flow of disclosures, the truth of Harry’s survival remains concealed for half the film. 21  Inbar Shaham, “The Structure of Repetition in the Cinema: Three Hollywood Genres,” Poetics Today 34, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 442.

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Harry’s sudden appearance mandates an act of re-cognition—a quick reshuffling of previous assumptions. Significantly, Harry’s appearance does not come as a total shock. Prior to the moment of revelation, the film has offered several hints, encouraging the spectator to think of Harry’s survival as a possibility. These hinting scenes show how a filmmaker might take advantage of cinematic resources like composition and lighting to suggest a possibility without actually showing it. For instance, when the still unrevealed Harry sneaks into a doorway, the camera is positioned up high and far away. Centering ensures that we notice the mysterious man, but angle and scale keep his identity hidden. A few moments later, a cat approaches and plays with Harry’s shoelaces, thereby providing another clue to the mysterious man’s identity, since we know from a previous scene that the cat liked only Harry. Though probable, the possibility that the man is Harry remains unconfirmed; because the cat is filmed in close­up, the man’s face remains off-screen. A few moments later, a drunken Holly tries to taunt the man in the doorway. Cinematographer Robert Krasker’s lighting is carefully arranged, allowing us to see the man’s shoes, while keeping his face in total darkness. Finally, a neighbor turns on a light, conveniently illuminating Harry’s face. The camera dollies in, unmistakably directing our attention to a long-withheld fact: Harry is alive! Camerawork, dialogue, framing, lighting—all have worked together in a play of concealment and revelation, hinting at a possibility before finally offering confirming proof. Noël Carroll’s theory of erotetic narration provides a useful way of analyzing films that unfold in this teasing way. Writing about popular movies, he writes, “At one level, the plot is a network of events and states of affairs held together by the cement of causation. Yet, at another level—namely, the level of rhetorical address—a typical movie narrative is a network of questions and answers, where the questions are self-generated but then finally resolved.”22 Early scenes often generate macro-questions sustained over a large part of the film. When Calloway tells Holly that Harry was a ruthless criminal, the information generates questions about the past (Was Harry guilty?) and the future (Will Holly be able to vindicate his friend?). About halfway through the film, the question is resolved decisively. Holly and Anna both come to agree that Harry was guilty. The question is closed, for them and for us. But the surprise revelation that Harry is alive introduces a new macro-question: Will Holly help Calloway apprehend Harry? This question sustains our interest right up to the climactic scene, when Holly kills Harry. At a narrower level, individual scenes might generate micro-questions, answered soon after they are posed.23 When Holly runs away from a group of henchmen, we ask, “Will Holly escape?” This question generates suspense for about a minute of screen time, as long as it takes for Holly to elude his would-be captors. Together, the macro-questions and the micro-questions keep us watching from beginning to end.

 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 136.  Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 137–138.

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All of this might make it seem like a mainstream movie is little more than an easily solved puzzle, but a skillful film may use its question-and-answer structure to generate thematic richness. The Third Man introduces the question “Will Holly help Calloway apprehend Harry?” to develop a contrast between Holly and Anna. Both characters care deeply about Harry, but they respond to the news about Harry’s guilt differently. Anna insists that her love for Harry has not changed because of what she has learned about him, and she refuses to betray her beloved by helping Calloway. Anna’s steadfastness qualifies any admiration we might feel regarding Holly’s decision. The film gives us good reasons to hope that Calloway will convince Holly to help, reminding us that Harry’s crime was lethal and deserving of punishment. And yet the film also gives us good reasons to criticize Holly, whose mercy killing of Harry stands in such sharp contrast to Anna’s abiding love. In this way, the film has deployed its question-and-answer structure to raise difficult, possibly unanswerable questions about what we owe to someone we love. Not all films deploy twists and turns in the manner of The Third Man, but the modal model is broadly applicable, even in much simpler films. A minimal story about a character with a straightforward goal appeals to a viewer’s understanding that the character may or may not achieve it. A predictable film relies on us to make predictions, selecting outcomes from multiple possibilities. Because a film unfolds in time, future revelations (including revelations about the past) are always uncertain.

Serial Narratives All of my examples so far have involved feature films with defined endings, but there are many works of moving-image art that extend their stories across multiple episodes. Indeed, it could be argued that serial storytelling has become the dominant norm in American media industries. Just as many of the most prestigious television works are long-running series, such as The Sopranos (2000–2007) or The Good Wife (2009–2016), many of the most profitable big-­screen films are sequels, as in the Harry Potter series or the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In an elegant analysis of the prime-time serial (PTS) format, Michael Z. Newman argues that television producers have responded skillfully to a distinctive set of constraints: “Given the incentive to produce narratives that engage audiences week after week, television has developed a powerful mode of storytelling.”24 The solutions involve a distinctive approach to time: “Looking at the PTS’s narrative form, we may consider it to have three storytelling levels for analysis: a micro level of the scene or ‘beat,’ a middle level of the episode, and a macro level of greater than one episode, such as a ­multi-­episode arc.”25 At a small-scale level, a scene must deploy narrative infor24  Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative,” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall 2006): 17. 25  Newman, “From Beats to Arcs,” 17.

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mation in an artfully redundant way—repeating just enough information to ensure that novice viewers of the program will not get confused, without becoming so repetitive that devoted fans will get bored. At the next level, an episode must provide some sense of closure, while leaving enough storylines dangling to keep the viewer tuning in for more. At the highest level, a multiepisode arc must reward long-time viewers for their investment in the show’s characters, without compromising the interest of particular scenes or episodes. For instance, The Good Wife develops multi-season arcs concerning Alicia Florrick’s (Juliana Margulies) increasingly successful career as a lawyer and her increasingly troubled relationships with her boss Will (Josh Charles) and her long-­unfaithful husband Peter (Chris Noth). Individual episodes center on the specific legal cases that Alicia’s firm wins or loses, while individual scenes show Alicia confronting and overcoming local obstacles along the way. Throughout, the show introduces gaps to play on our feelings of narrative interest, producing both long-term suspense (Which man will Alicia choose?) and short-term suspense (Will Alicia win this week’s case?), as well as various forms of curiosity (Did Alicia’s client commit the murder or not?) and surprise (I thought Alicia was losing the case; I didn’t realize she had devised the perfect plan to win!). As we have seen, a typical popular movie achieves closure by answering all of its questions (or, at least, the most salient ones) by the end of the film.26 Certain highly episodic television shows adopt a similar structure. The characters may remain the same from season to season, but each episode stands more or less on its own, as in mysteries that introduce new suspects and new solutions every week. By contrast, the highly serialized form of the soap opera refuses closure by delaying answers systematically.27 As Newman points out, the prime-time serial is a mixed form, “a hybrid of episodic dramas and serials such as soaps and miniseries.”28 A beat might introduce a micro-question that is answered after the commercial break or develop a macro-question that is answered at the end of an episode or sustain an even larger macro-question that is stretched over multiple episodes or seasons. Again, it is useful to think of questions and answers in relation to other narrative functions, such as characterization, lest we turn TV shows into mere guessing games. Unlike a two-hour movie, a multi-season television show can examine a character’s psychological growth (or decline) in extraordinary detail and nuance, sometimes approaching the complexity of a novel. In any given scene, our understanding of a character’s behavior may be enriched by our understanding of the character’s past. While a series offers writers an opportunity to examine a character in depth, it also poses a significant storytelling ­challenge, requiring the writer to balance the interests of long-time viewers 26  Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 89. 27  Noël Carroll, “As the Dial Turns: Notes on Soap Operas,” Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121. 28  Newman, “From Beats to Arcs,” 16.

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with the needs of novices seeking to comprehend basic information. With this in mind, Jason Gendler has examined how television writers create psychologically rich situations “through the information established within an individual episode itself (what I call episodic enrichment), versus the degree to which rich situations are created by relying on information accrued over the course of previous episodes (serial enrichment).”29 He concludes that highly serialized shows like Mad Men actually rely on episodic enrichment more than we might suspect, along with a third category (blended enrichment), whereby our understanding of a character’s psychology is enriched by earlier scenes within the episode as well as earlier scenes within the show as a whole. Many of the problems of serial storytelling are not specific to film or television but appear throughout the more general category of “serial fictions.” Andrew McGonigal has used this term to refer to a class of fictions “whose generation and reception is (i) connected in an interesting way to distinct, relatively discontinuous episodes of installments that are (ii) appropriately construable as taking place in a single fictional world.”30 Examples include long-running comic books, such as The Amazing Spiderman; novels originally released in a serialized format, such as The Pickwick Papers; and the stories of Sherlock Holmes. Within this broad category, there are a number of distinctions: for instance, between fictions that move toward completion and fictions that remain open-ended or between fictions that indicate the temporal ordering of specific episodes and fictions that leave important facts about temporal order indeterminate.31 McGonigal is particularly interested in the problem of fictional truth—a problem that certain serial fictions raise by introducing troubling contradictions over the course of the series. In the original episode of Star Wars (1977), also known as Star Wars IV: A New Hope, there is considerable evidence that Luke is not the son of Darth Vader, most notably the fact that the trustworthy Obi-Wan Kenobi explicitly tells Luke that Vader killed Luke’s father. In the sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Darth Vader tells Luke that he is Luke’s father, and the remaining films in the series (both sequels and prequels) ask us to assume that Vader’s statement is true. Imagine a spectator in 1977 who watches Star Wars and states that Luke is Vader’s son. Now imagine a spectator in 2007 who watches Star Wars and states that Luke is Vader’s son. McGonigal’s intuition—which I share—is that the first statement is somehow worse than the second. His own solution appeals to relativism, making no appeal to an “absolute” fictional world. “Whether a given proposition is true-according-to-the-fiction,” he writes, “is something that always is implicitly relative to a context of assessment.”32 Other scholars have proposed different solutions, such as Ben Caplan’s “work contextualism,” whereby “the 29  Jason Gendler, “The Rich Inferential World of Mad Men: Serialized Television and Character Interiority,” Projections 10, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 40. 30  Andrew McGonigal, “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” British Journal of Aesthetics 53, no. 2 (April 2013): 165. 31  McGonigal, “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” 165. 32  McGonigal, “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” 178.

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content of the movie changes across contexts,” and Lee Walters’s “invariantism,” whereby “current installments of a serial fiction represent defeasible evidence for what is true according to the maximal fiction of which it is a part.”33 My own view is that fictional worlds, whether serialized or not, often contain inconsistencies, precisely because fictional worlds are means toward rhetorical ends. As a standalone work, Star Wars seeks to establish Darth Vader’s status as a formidable villain. As a sequel pointing ahead to at least one more successor, The Empire Strikes Back seeks to enrich Luke’s characterization, to establish a macro-question that will stretch on into the next episode, and to produce a moment of surprise (or, in the case of my 10-year-old self, utter astonishment) by forcing us to re-cognize aspects of Star Wars that we thought we understood. Even today, if we view the original film in light of its own rhetorical goals, we may reasonably conclude that Luke is not Vader’s son. If we view Star Wars in light of the larger series’ rhetorical goals, then we may reasonably conclude that he is. Questions about what happens in the story-world are complicated further in works of “transmedia” storytelling. As Henry Jenkins explains, The Matrix trilogy (1999–2003) confronted the challenge of telling its story across three distinct films, two of which were made several years after the first was completed. Even more remarkably, the franchise told portions of its story through various supporting materials, such as video games and comic books. These supporting materials depicted crucial events in the story-world’s causal chain. It simply was not possible to understand the films’ story-world fully by seeing the films alone; a committed spectator needed to seek out the supporting materials, as well.34 In this case, the directors of the films (the Wachowskis) were closely involved with the production of the supporting materials. But what should we make of unauthorized expansions upon existing fictional worlds, such as fan fiction? It is increasingly common for fans of film and television shows to generate their own narrative content, in the form of short stories or videos, re-imagining characters in creative and sometimes radical ways. As Marie-Laure Ryan points out, such works bear an interesting relationship to authorized or “canonical” works of serial fiction. A work of fan fiction may project a fictional world that is distinct but related to the fictional world of the canonical text. By contrast, a later episode of a television series unambiguously projects the same story-world as earlier episodes do.35 Consider a hypothetical example. In the fifth season of The Good Wife, the beloved character Will dies unexpectedly. If a fan were to write and film an episode of The Good Wife in which Will survives, the fan’s 33  Ben Caplan, “Serial Fiction, Continued,” British Journal of Aesthetics 54, no. 1 (January 2014): 73; Lee Walters, “Serial Fiction, the End?,” British Journal of Aesthetics 55, no. 3 (July 2015): 337. Thanks to Andrew Kania for pointing me toward this interesting debate. 34  Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 95–134. 35  Marie-Laure Ryan, “Transfictionality across Media,” in Theorizing Narrativity, ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 388–392.

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intervention would not change the story-world of the original show. My intuition is to say that Will would still be dead. All this talk of worlds might sound overly metaphysical, losing sight of the functionalist perspective I have been championing so far. To put the case in more functionalist terms, let us start with the assumption that the story-world of The Good Wife is a construction—a construction that is always subject to revision during viewing in light of the show’s flow of disclosures. When I, a devoted fan of the show, watch Season 5, Episode 15 (the episode in which Will dies), I use information from previous episodes to make sense of the twists and turns in this particular episode. At the same time, I use information from the episode I am watching to revise my understanding of previous episodes (pondering whether the circumstances of Will’s death cast his previous behavior in a new light) and make predictions about future episodes (wondering how Alicia will react to Will’s death). But suppose I were to watch the hypothetical fan video in which Will survives. As with the real episode, I would be warranted in using information from previous authorized episodes to make sense of the fan video’s twists and turns. However, I would be reluctant to use the fan video to warrant significant re-cognition of previous episodes; if the fan video were to claim that Will and Alicia had been married all along, that would not make it so for the canonical episodes. Nor does the fan video warrant prospection toward future authorized episodes, though it might warrant prospection toward future fan fictions. As this example suggests, the concept of the “canonical” text may raise another set of problems—problems regarding the authorship of fictional works. I consider the problem of authorship in the next section.

Narrators, Authors, Tone, and Point of View In the philosophy of film narrative, one of the liveliest debates concerns the status of the cinematic narrator, a concept that may be distinguished from the figure of the character narrator. Many films, such as Julie & Julia (Nora Ephron, 2009) and The Shawshank Redemption (Frank Darabont, 1994), employ character narrators—fictional characters who recite their stories. The character narrator poses a distinct set of philosophical problems. In Julie & Julia, there are several passages of voice-over narration based on the letters, books, and blogs written by the main characters. Do these voice-overs express the internal thoughts of the characters writing the words or the internal imaginings of the characters reading them? In The Shawshank Redemption, Red (Morgan Freeman) narrates much of the story in a voice-over. To whom is Red speaking? Is he speaking to us? If so, how can a fictional character speak to real spectators? These are interesting questions, but the problem of the cinematic narrator raises a different set of puzzles. Here the question is whether or not the film itself has a narrator—some storytelling agency that organizes the ­pictures and sounds, including but going well beyond the voice-overs of Julie, Julia, and Red. Some scholars, such as Seymour Chatman, have argued that all

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films have narrators, whether they have character narrators or not.36 Other scholars, such as David Bordwell, have argued against the idea of the cinematic narrator.37 As in literary theory, the question of the cinematic narrator raises related questions about authors, both real and implied. My own view is that the cinematic narrator points us toward a cluster of important issues regarding a film’s tone and point of view, but that we can usually explain those issues more efficiently by appealing to the (implied) author. For George M. Wilson, the real interest of these questions does not lie solely in the problem of the narrator; rather, it lies in the even more fundamental problem of what it is to see a fiction in a film.38 Specifically, he argues in favor of two closely related ideas, which he calls the Imagined Seeing Thesis and the Fictional Showing Hypothesis. He writes, “If, in watching a movie, viewers imagine seeing the narrative action on screen, then presumably they thereby imagine that the projected motion picture images they are watching are, in some way, ‘showing’ the narrative action to them.”39 The idea that spectators imagine seeing the action requires some additional imagination regarding the showing. Significantly, Wilson does not believe that viewers imagine seeing the fictional world directly, as if they were invisible observers looking over the shoulders of the characters. Instead, he argues that viewers “imagine themselves seeing those fictional constituents through the mediation of the onscreen moving images, images that fictionally have been transparently derived from the dramatized situations of the story.”40 Wilson’s emphasis on mediation is salutary because it encourages us to consider how photography, editing, and sound shape the viewer’s experience. The case for Imagined Seeing supports the case for Fictional Showing, which in turn meets a necessary condition for the claim that films have audiovisual narrators who fictionally recount the events. I do not have the space (or, frankly, the expertise) to make a case for or against the Imagined Seeing Thesis. Instead, I merely remark that Imagined Seeing is only one of many possible ways of theorizing what we see when we look at the cinematic image. Other theories, such as “recognition” accounts or “resemblance” accounts, might provide less immediate support for the Fictional Showing hypothesis, thereby making the case for cinematic narrators less pressing.41 For instance, in a response to Wilson’s book, Robert Stecker has proposed Richard Wollheim’s 36  Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 133. 37  David Bordwell, “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative,” Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 122. 38  George M.  Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 126. 39  Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film, 54. 40  Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film, 89. 41  For a survey of approaches, see Catharine Abell and Katarina Bantinaki, “Introduction,” in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. Abell and Bantinaki (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–23.

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“seeing-in” theory as an alternative to Imagining Seeing, partly to cast doubt on related arguments concerning fictional showing and effaced narrators.42 However we theorize seeing movies, I think there is another reason why the narrator idea merits attention, even from its critics. As narrator skeptic Katherine Thomson-Jones explains, “The primary motivation for arguing that films and other kinds of narrative art always have narrators is the observation that a story is always told in a certain way. This accounts for the tone of the work, or the set of attitudes manifest in the way that characters and events are described or depicted.” After listing some of the ways a film might manifest such an attitude (for instance, through cinematography or editing), Thomson-Jones explains, “When we pick up on the attitudes manifest in a film’s style, we naturally want to assign these attitudes to someone. And if we want to assign them to someone inside the story, we assign them to a narrator.”43 This argument sounds like an endorsement of the cinematic narrator, but Thomson-Jones goes on to argue that the idea’s appeal is illusory, the result of a bias toward analogizing film with literature. If we think of film as analogous to theater, then the urge to look for a cinematic narrator becomes less acute.44 We might want to assign the film’s attitude to someone—but that someone need not be a figure “inside” the story-world. I am sympathetic to Thomson-Jones’s approach, which criticizes the overly literary notion of the cinematic narrator while acknowledging the value of an approach that helps us characterize the distinctive way a film’s story is told. The challenge is to develop an account of a film’s attitude without (or without necessarily) appealing to the figure of a narrator. A number of film scholars have addressed this challenge in recent years. In another thoughtful response to Wilson’s book, Douglas Pye argued that we can preserve Wilson’s nuanced approach to close analysis while attributing the relevant choices to a film’s author.45 Influenced by Perkins’s work on worldhood, Pye himself has written major works on the difficult concepts of “tone” and “point of view.” Regarding the former, he proposes four possible “axes” of tone: “Attitudes implied to the film’s subject matter; attitudes implied to the film’s audience; attitudes implied to the conventions the film employs or invokes; attitudes implied to the film as a film.”46 While appealing to our understanding of how a film’s world is represented, Pye wisely warns against making too sharp a distinction between “how” and “what.” The details of the world may express tone just as well as the ­techniques of its framing. In contrast to tone, “point of view” is more closely related to the kinds of access a film’s sequence of images and sounds may offer 42  Robert Stecker, “Film Narration, Imaginative Seeing, and Seeing-In,” Projections 7, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 147–154. 43  Katherine Thomson-Jones, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 1 (January 2007): 78. 44  Thomson-Jones, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator,” 90. 45  Douglas Pye, “Seeing Fictions in Film,” Projections 7, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 137. 46  Douglas Pye, “Movies and Tone,” in Close-Up 02, edited by John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 30.

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us. As Pye explains, “The idea that limits imposed on the spectator’s or reader’s access to the story are significant and highly variable is perhaps the central importance of the concept of point of view.”47 Considering a film’s point of view involves a consideration of the film’s patterns of access as they develop over time. Some films pattern their disclosures by “following” a single character from scene to scene. However, Deborah Thomas cautions against the temptation to associate a film’s point of view with that of a specific character. She writes, “A film’s point of view is clearly not reducible to that of the characters—or even a privileged character—within it, but includes an attitude or orientation toward the various characters (whether one of ironic detachment, sympathetic involvement, moral condemnation, or whatever) as well as some sort of epistemological relationship which is never precisely one of identity (where we see and know precisely what they do, nothing more nor less), and a spatial positioning which is not identical with theirs.”48 The term “orientation” captures the idea well. One orients oneself with respect to something else. The patterns in the film guide us toward adopting a particular posture toward the characters. Consider an example from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), directed by Alfonso Cuarón. The film’s organization keeps us tightly attached to Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), who appears in virtually every scene, and the sound design and camerawork occasionally represent his subjective experiences. For much of the film, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) worries that the escaped convict Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) plans to kill him. In a crucial scene, Harry and Hermione (Emma Watson) find an injured Ron (Rupert Grint), who points to the other side of the room. The film cuts to a new shot, dollying along a set of dog’s footprints before revealing Sirius (who can turn into a dog), standing menacingly behind a door. It is as if we are seeing Sirius through Harry’s eyes, focusing his attention on the surprising threat. However, it would be an oversimplification to say that the shot is simply taken from Harry’s point of view, as there are several factors that complicate the issue considerably. First, the shot does not represent Harry’s exact position in space. The camera moves toward Sirius, but Harry stands still. Second, Harry is not the only character looking toward Sirius. When Ron points at Sirius himself, Harry and Hermione turn together to look at the footprints on the ground; the subsequent shot represents their shared point of view. This is a significant choice, given the film’s larger strategy of comparing Harry and Hermione, each of whom has strengths and weaknesses that the other lacks. Third, there is the obvious but important fact that we cannot see Sirius from Harry’s point of view because Harry is in the Shrieking Shack and we are sitting in a theater looking at pic47  Douglas Pye, “Movies and Point of View,” Movie 36 (2000): 2. Pye makes this comment in the context of his discussion of George Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 48  Deborah Thomas, Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy, and Romance in Hollywood Film (Moffat, UK: Cameron and Hollis, 2000), 20.

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tures of Harry and his friends—who, in any case, are not real. These pictures provide us with carefully managed access to the story-world and its characters. Harry believes that Sirius is a mortal threat, but we have an entirely different relationship to this mysterious figure. We may already suspect that Sirius is not what he seems, and we almost certainly assume that Harry will survive the confrontation, even if we do not yet know how. Rather than fear that Harry will die, our real concern is that Harry will give in to his darker urges, reacting to the threat of Sirius with violence. The emphasis on Hermione’s shared point of view balances our Harry-centered fears with the Hermione-centered hope that she will help Harry survive the ordeal with his good nature intact. Rather than put us directly in Harry’s position, the film pushes us to take a more complex orientation toward the protagonist by adopting an understanding but critical attitude toward Harry’s confrontational response. So far, I have been describing this scene using a depersonalized vocabulary, suggesting that “the film” directs our attention and shapes our orientation. I think that there are merits to this depersonalized approach. The film does not sympathize with Harry and Hermione; guided by the film, we do. We experience a complex blend of sympathies in response to the film, with its sequencing of pictures and sounds. Similarly, David Bordwell prefers to speak of a film’s “narration” (or, sometimes, “narrative dynamics”), setting aside talk of narrators and implied authors as unnecessary.49 Even more broadly, Pye prefers to speak of the “movie,” a product informed by complex intentions—not just the telling of stories but also the building of worlds and the elaboration of ideas.50 I share the skepticism of Thomson-Jones, Bordwell, and Pye about the value of the term “cinematic narrator” as a tool for film analysis. However, two caveats are in order. First, though the term “narrator” strikes me as misleadingly anthropomorphic, the theory of film narrative must start with the assumption that the movie mediates our (oft-changing) understanding of the story-world. Analyzing the movie’s patterns of mediation, whether we attribute those patterns to a narrator or not is a step toward understanding how the movie produces its effects. Second, for all my hesitations about the personalized connotations of the word “narrator,” it seems fair to say that some useful phrases will necessarily appeal to some kind of storytelling agency. For instance, I have argued that the film has “a strategy of comparing Harry and Hermione.” The appeal to strategy is an appeal to purposes. The question is: Whose purposes? Some would answer this question by citing a single author, such as the director Alfonso Cuarón or the author of the original book, J.K. Rowling. Others would appeal to multiple authors, on the grounds that most films are made by a collaborative group of artists and technicians. Still others might appeal to the notion of the “implied author,” understood as a construct of the text, or perhaps as an authorial persona that is manifest in the text. Berys Gaut has surveyed these possibili Bordwell, “Three Dimensions of Film Narrative,” 122.  Pye, “Seeing Fictions in Film,” 136.

49 50

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ties, and more, with care.51 Like Gaut, I believe that most mainstream films have multiple authors, a category that may include directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, and more.52 As a historian, I spend most of my time studying real authors in collaborative and sometimes competitive relational dynamics, and I worry that the term “implied author” places too much emphasis on unity to account for real films that manifest contradictions and compromises. Nevertheless, I think the term “implied author” identifies something important about our engagement with narrative films because it points us to purposes that are, literally, implied by those films. Let us consider the logic of purposes more carefully. Recently, some philosophers of film have proposed a two-part model, distinguishing the logic of the film’s world from the purpose-driven logic of the film’s design. For instance, Gregory Currie has argued that we may approach a narrative from an internal or external perspective. Internally, “we speak and think directly of the characters and events in the story”; externally, “we see a vehicle, something that represents a sequence of events in virtue of the activity of an agent we call the author.”53 When a character behaves strangely, we might make sense of the behavior by asking about the character’s goals. Alternatively (or, in addition), we might make sense of the behavior by considering how the passage furthers the author’s goals. These ideas echo some important discussions within the rhetorical-­ functionalist framework. According to Meir Sternberg and Tamar Yacobi, when seeking to make sense of an unexpected feature of a text, a reader may appeal to several mechanisms of integration. One option is to treat the unexpected feature as a mistake. Perhaps we assume that the text was misprinted— or that the film was projected out of focus. In such a case, we are choosing not to look for a purpose behind the feature.54 But sometimes we do look for purposes. Within the broader framework of integration, the theory of motivation seeks to explain how we make sense of a text while “regulated by a sense of the text’s purpose.”55 As Sternberg explains, a work of fiction (be it a novel, painting, or film) may be structured according to “a pair of motivational logics, mimetic (world-like, referential, fictional) as against aesthetic (rhetorical, ­communicative, functional).”56 Among this set of pairs, I find the binary “fic51  See the chapter on cinematic authorship in Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98–151. 52  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 125. 53  Gregory Currie, Narratives & Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49. See also Murray Smith’s discussion of the “referential” and “formal” aspects of a film, in Smith, “On the Twofoldness of Character,” New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 289. 54  For a summary of the theory of integration, see Meir Sternberg and Tamar Yacobi, “(Un)reliability in Narrative Discourse: A Comprehensive Overview,” Poetics Today 36, no. 4 (December 2015), 402–412. 55  Meir Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence,” Poetics Today 33, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2012): 413. 56  Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation,” 368.

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tional vs. functional” to be particularly apt, suggesting the contrast between explanations that appeal to features of the fictional world and explanations that appeal to the work’s purposes. Crucially, the two logics are not equal: “The internal tensions between [the] two modes—as alternative, ‘mimetic’ vs. ‘aesthetic,’ fictional vs. functional, logics of patterning—are always resolvable and always in favor of the second mode, by way of a higher teleological explanation.”57 Here, the word “teleological” indicates that we make sense of a curious feature by treating it as part of a larger design, seeing the text as a purposefully made construction. The traits of the story-world (its objects, its characters, its events) are understood as means to rhetorical ends. To return to my earlier example from The Third Man, consider the moment when the light turns on, suddenly revealing Harry Lime’s presence in the shadowy doorway. Within the story-world, the moment is carefully motivated. Because Holly was sad, he got drunk. Because Holly was drunk, he started yelling at the mysterious man across the street. Because Holly was yelling, a neighbor turned on a light. Because a neighbor turned on a light, Harry’s identity was revealed. Behind these fictional motivations there lie functional motivations—most notably, the purpose of delivering a major surprise, requiring spectators to reorganize their understanding of previous events. Although these particular features are doubly motivated, certain choices regarding the film’s camerawork are motivated functionally but not fictionally. Within the fictional world, there is no particular reason why the camera should have framed the cat so tightly; after all, there is no camera in the fictional world at all. The framing choice makes sense, not in light of the film’s world (where the camera does not exist) but in light of the film’s purpose, hinting at Harry’s presence before making the decisive revelation. These hints shape our attitude toward Holly, allowing us to remain one step ahead of the film’s likable but foolish protagonist, who does not see the revelation coming at all. This two-tiered model of motivation also explains cinematic techniques like camera movement. In Flesh and the Devil, the dolly-in toward the husband’s clenched fist does not represent anyone’s motion within the fictional world; no one is moving toward the hand. A Hollywood filmmaker might call the movement “unmotivated,” but if anything the (functional) motivation for the camera movement is overly obvious, as if the filmmakers were calling out to the audience, “Look here! See how angry this man is!” By contrast, the movement toward Sirius in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is doubly motivated. Why the sudden movement toward Sirius? Because Harry and Hermione have focused their attention on the threat. But also for a purpose: to direct our attention to a plot point. Or, more fully, for a multileveled purpose: to direct our attention to a plot point through the mediation of Harry and Hermione, thereby deepening our attachment to these two characters who are experiencing this threat together.

 Sternberg, “Mimesis and Motivation,” 411.

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Sternberg’s theory of motivation presupposes an implied author. So, too, does Currie’s theory of “internal” and “external” explanations.58 My own view is that the “implied author” concept does important work, even if the term strikes me as a little too anthropomorphic, conjuring up the image of a magical storyteller who doesn’t really exist. In defense of a less anthropomorphic version of the concept, it can be useful to remember that no one, to my knowledge, is literally claiming that a mysterious being called the “implied author” actually made the film. If anything, the causal relationship runs the other way. The implications are in the film; the movie implies a (shifting) set of purposes as it unfolds in time. Of course, a team of real people made the film, guided by purposes that may have been in unison or in conflict; the word “implied” does the work of reminding us that we are not in contact with the real authors. We are in contact with the film, and we make sense of the film by considering its implications. H. Porter Abbott suggests the term “inferred author,” a term that nicely captures the fact that “we often differ with each other (and no doubt the author as well) in the views and feelings we attribute to the implied author.”59 Whichever term we use, the implied author is understood here as a construction, always subject to debate.

Conclusion There are many issues in the philosophy of film narrative that I have been unable to address here, such as unreliable narration, interactive narration, and the problem of imagination, to name a few.60 Instead, I hope to have offered a perspective from which to address such problems—a perspective that places special emphasis on the temporality of narrative. Whether we are watching a film or a TV show, we experience the moving-image artwork over time. When the moving image tells a story, it represents a world that develops over time, as well. To understand how narrative works in moving-image media, we must consider the ever-shifting relationship between these two sequences.

Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter. 2008. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Abell, Catharine, and Katarina Bantinaki. 2010. Introduction. In Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, ed. Catharine Abell and Katerina Bantinaki, 1–23. New York: Oxford University Press.  Sternberg and Currie differ on other points, for instance, on the need for a narrator as mediator. 59  H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 85. 60  For an introduction to these debates, see the following: on unreliable narration, Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 260–280; on interactive narration, Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 224–243; on (and against) imagination, Derek Matravers, Fiction and Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 146–157. 58

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Bordwell, David. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Style, 1917–1960. In The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, ed. Janet Staiger Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 1–84. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2008a. Film Futures. In Poetics of Cinema, 171–187. New York: Routledge. ———. 2008b. Three Dimensions of Film Narrative. In Poetics of Cinema, 85–134. New York: Routledge. Caplan, Ben. 2014. Serial Fiction, Continued. British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (1, January): 65–76. Carroll, Noël. 1996a. As the Dial Turns: Notes on Soap Operas. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 118–124. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. The Power of Movies. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 78–93. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996c. Toward a Theory of Film Suspense. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 94–117. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden: Blackwell. Chatman, Seymour. 1975. Towards a Theory of Narrative. New Literary History 6 (2, Winter): 295–318. ———. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Narratives & Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. New  York: Oxford University Press. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gendler, Jason. 2016. The Rich Inferential World of Mad Men: Serialized Television and Character Interiority. Projections 10 (1, Summer): 39–62. Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling. In Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 95–134. New York: New York University Press. Keating, Patrick. 2013. Narrative Dynamics and the Competitive Reality Show. Storyworlds 5: 55–75. Levinson, Jerrold, and Philip Alperson. 1991. What Is a Temporal Art? Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16: 439–450. Matravers, Derek. 2014. Fiction and Understanding. New York: Oxford University Press. McGonigal, Andrew. 2013. Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction. British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (2, April): 165–179. Newman, Michael Z. 2006. From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative. The Velvet Light Trap 58 (Fall): 16–28. Perkins, V.F. 2005. Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction. In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16–41. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Prince, Gerald. 1988. The Disnarrated. Style 22 (1): 1–8. Pye, Douglas. 2000. Movies and Point of View. Movie 36: 2–34. ———. 2007. Movies and Tone. In Close-Up 02, ed. John Gibbs and Pye, 1–80. New York: Wallflower Press. ———. 2013. Seeing Fictions in Film. Projections 7 (1, Summer): 131–138.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. Transfictionality Across Media. In Theorizing Narrativity, ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 385–417. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Segal, Eyal. 2010. Closure in Detective Fiction. Poetics Today 31 (2, Summer): 153–215. ———. 2011. The ‘Tel-Aviv School’: A Rhetorical-Functional Approach to Narrative. In Current Trends in Narratology, ed. Greta Olson, 297–311. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Shaham, Inbar. 2013. The Structure of Repetition in the Cinema: Three Hollywood Genres. Poetics Today 34 (4, Winter): 437–518. Smith, Murray. 2011. On the Twofoldness of Character. New Literary History 42 (2, Spring): 277–294. Stecker, Robert. 2013. Film Narration, Imaginative Seeing, and Seeing-in. Projections 7 (1, Summer): 147–154. Sternberg, Meir. 2008. If-Plots: Narrativity and the Law-Code. In Theorizing Narrativity, ed. John Pier and José Ángel García Landa, 29–107. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ———. 2010. Narrativity: From Objectivist to Functional Paradigm. Poetics Today 31 (3, Fall): 507–659. ———. 2012. Mimesis and Motivation: The Two Faces of Fictional Coherence. Poetics Today 33 (3–4, Fall–Winter): 329–483. Sternberg, Meir, and Tamar Yacobi. 2015. (Un)reliability in Narrative Discourse: A Comprehensive Overview. Poetics Today 36 (4, December): 327–498. Thomas, Deborah. 2000. Beyond Genre: Melodrama, Comedy, and Romance in Hollywood Film. Moffat: Cameron and Hollis. Thomson-Jones, Katherine. 2007. The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator. British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (1, January): 76–94. Walters, Lee. 2015. Serial Fiction, the End? British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (3, July): 323–341. Wilson, George M. 1986. Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2011. Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies. New York: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 7

On Rhythm in Film Editing Karen Pearlman

Introduction The issue of rhythm in cinema is enormously complex and still not well understood. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (1997: 196) I think all good editors have to be good dancers Robert Dalva, editor (cited in Gross 2009: 37)

What is rhythm in film editing? Philosophical discussions of rhythm in film are divided in their treatment of the subject. Cognitivists and analytic philosophers treat it warily, if at all, as an object of study that is complex and hard to understand. On the other hand, continental philosophers embrace rhythm as a subject, but can  make their discussions complex and hard to understand. This chapter aims to provide a bridge between the two. It attempts to demystify what rhythm is, how it is shaped, and what it is for, while still respecting that it is, in both a film editor’s and an audience’s experience, a felt phenomenon. The intention is to provide an analytic discussion that offers an explanatory framework for the embodied and affective experience of edited rhythms. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the issue of different philosophical perspectives on rhythm in film. It then offers a cognitive framework for understanding the expertise that film editors activate when shaping rhythms. The question of what rhythm actually is, is considered by synthesizing my own firsthand knowledge of editing practice, and that of other practitioners, with theoretical and philosophical discussions of film. The filmmakers’ perspective, while less common My thanks to Ilona Hongisto and Catalin Brylla for their comments and suggestions in the development of this chapter. K. Pearlman (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_7

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in contemporary philosophizing, has substantial precedent in the writings of Esfir Shub, Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein, for example. It is used here to support the argument that understanding the cognitive complexity of the editors’ actions in shaping rhythm sheds light on its effect on audiences. The other unusual perspective in the mix is that of dance theorists whose insights about rhythm in movement help to support the argument that movement is primarily what is being shaped into affective rhythms through the editing of moving images.

Editing and Rhythm in Film Philosophy The question of what rhythm is in film arises with the first film philosophers. Very early in the history of theoretical writings on the medium of film, Harvard experimental psychologist Hugo Munsterberg wrote about the vitalizing power of rhythm in the movies, underscoring its capacity “to excite and to intensify the personal feeling of life and to stir the depths of the human mind.” (1916: 220) Munsterberg saw cinema as a “psychotechnology” endowed with a distinctive power over the viewer’s existential reality—and as such also a continuation of the various types of mechanical instruments developed to measure and quantify the human mind. (Henriques et al. 2014: 9)

This précis of Munsterberg’s ideas reveals a dichotomy present in discussion of rhythm in film from as early as 1916. The schism is between theorizing film as a deeply felt, almost spiritual experience and as a technological phenomenon that could measure and quantify, and thus presumably itself be measured and quantified. This dichotomy is particularly salient to my discussion of rhythm. The analytic approach offers specific and contained explanations of film techniques, which are useful to filmmakers and theorists. However, the study of rhythm is a study of something that is not, or is not primarily, created or encountered analytically.1 Dictionary definitions of the word “rhythm” frequently emphasize that “rhythm is a felt phenomenon” (Brogan 1993: 1068). Or, as Jean Mitry puts it, rhythms consist in “relationships that are felt” (1997 [1963]: 115, ital. in original). This quality of being felt and created through feeling is significant. It is this quality that causes rhythmic creativity to be characterized as subjective and ineffable in writings on the craft of editing and to be handled warily in cognitive theory. This chapter aims to provide ideas about rhythm in film editing that do not disrupt the felt experience, but do make the case that, although rhythm is a felt phenomenon, it is not just felt. Its properties can be identified. The processes of creating it can be articulated. The purposes it serves in engaging spectators in films can be understood. 1  There are, of course, important exceptions to this in the philosophizing of rhythm generally. See, for example, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, Lefebvre (2004).

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The dangers of this analytic approach must first be acknowledged, though necessarily briefly. Merleau-Ponty’s description of cinema applies to the experiences of a film’s rhythm, as shaped by editing: “not a sum total of images, but a temporal Gestalt…” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 54). Films experienced in the wild (Hutchins 1995) (as opposed to classrooms or laboratories) are not g ­ enerally experienced as “discrete cinematographic elements (visual, aural, and editorial) but in these elements’ meaningful totality as a temporal and sensual configuration that is grasped” (Sobchack 2008: 439). The danger in breaking down a “meaningful totality” into component parts is that it actually does not function as component parts. Analogous to this concern would be breaking a bicycle down into its component parts. Doing so might reveal the parts needed to make a bike and the mechanics of their relations, but the bike cannot be ridden when it is in pieces. Films can’t be screened when they are in pieces either. The editor has to shape those pieces through selection and limitation of movement into a rhythm. It may therefore be useful to know what the component pieces of rhythm are. The question arises: can philosophy contribute further refinements to the question of what are the components of cinematic rhythm, how are they shaped, and what are they for, without slicing cinema into a dysfunctional bicycle? Perhaps due to the resistance of “flow” (Greek: rhythmos) to analysis, the design of rhythm as the kinetic, energic, and temporal patterning shaped by editing a film has had little attention from analytic or cognitive studies. Cognitive studies in editing such as Tim Smith’s study of continuity and attention (2012), James Cutting’s work dissecting films into the categories that make up its material/surface form (see, e.g., Cutting 2016) and Heimann et al.’s 2016 study of neurological responses to edits offer empirical evidence of biological mechanisms that respond to edits and editing techniques, but not rhythm in film editing. Noël Carroll’s discussion of point-of-view editing reveals evolutionary mechanisms that ground the expectation of a shot of someone looking to be followed by a shot of what they see (see Carroll 1996), but the rhythmic dimension of this is not discussed. One analytic text that does make mention of rhythm in film editing is Film Art. Bordwell and Thompson describe a number of attributes of rhythm in their discussion of the “Rhythmic Relations between shot A and shot B” (Bordwell and Thompson 1997: 278–280). This pragmatic discussion, which is found in a book that covers the whole gamut of film techniques and is directed to the attention of undergraduate students, is necessarily cursory. Most of the operations it describes will be subsumed under the operations I will call “pacing,” as in frequency of cuts rather than rhythmic relations as a whole. However, Bordwell and Thompson’s neo-formalist approach, which is generally to observe and describe techniques being used in the composition of films, will be applied to the materials with which editors are working and the tools they have for working with them. Doing so will help develop an understanding of what an editor is doing when shaping rhythm, which in turn can help us to understand what rhythm is when experienced in a finished film.

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Rhythm and the Editor’s Cognition Once editing of film evolves, as it did very early in cinema history, to become part of expressive narration of ideas, it involves creative decision-making (Orpen 2003; Pearlman and Heftberger 2018; Pearlman et al. 2018). Editors are responsible for the final decision-making about structure and rhythm of the film that ultimately reaches an audience. (Pearlman 2009, 2016). Editors’ creative skills have some basis in the built-in meaning-making and expressive capacities of humans, but are not, as skills, “natural” or even “instinctive.” They are culturally learned and developed forms of expertise. Thus, I propose, understanding editors’ expertise helps to reveal what it is that they are expert at shaping when they shape rhythm. The inclusion of the editor’s cognition in the analysis of rhythm in film editing is further supportable given that the editor is positioned, on a production crew, as the film’s first viewer. Robert Wise is just one of many esteemed editors and directors who would agree that “as the editor you are the audience” (Wise, cited in Orpen 2003: 7). As the film’s “first audience,” the editor embodies several key attributes which have been associated with affective responses to film in cognitive film theory. One that is particularly salient is embodied simulation (ES), as described by Gallese and Guerra: ES has been proposed to constitute a basic functional mechanism of humans’ brain, by means of which actions, emotions and sensations of others are mapped onto the observer’s own sensory-motor and viscero-motor neural representations. Such theory was triggered by the discovery of mirror neurons in the macaque monkey brain. Mirror neurons are motor neurons that typically discharge both when a motor act is executed and when it is observed being performed by someone else. (Gallese and Guerra 2012: 184)

The theory that mirror neurons are the source of embodied simulation continues to be controversial (see Hickok 2014). However, whether it is specifically through mirror neurons or these neurons are simply metaphorical for a much more complex imitative system in human brains, it is plausible to suggest that editors respond to movement that they see in the unedited filmed material. Some part of what they see or hear in the uncut material’s movement will provoke an empathetic response, and that part will be selected and juxtaposed with another part that also has a qualitative affect. Putting two shots together, each of which inherently has rhythm, makes a third rhythm, which is not the same, or even just the sum of the first two (see Eisenstein 1942, 1949; Kuleshov in Levaco 1974). So, the edit begins to have a rhythm of its own. At this point, editors cannot simply recognize a “right” rhythm, as an audience might. Their own internal rhythms must come into play to shape rhythm through an editing process. As editors begin to do more than respond to  existing rhythms, we draw on rhythms known to us through what Arnold Modell might call ­“corporeal imagination” (2003), as well as latent rhythms in the film material, to create the finished film’s rhythm.

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Modell’s phrase “corporeal imagination” suggests that the editor’s embodied and extended cognition responds directly to movement they see in the material. Applying cognitive dance theorist Dee Reynold’s phrase “kinaesthetic imagination” (2007) takes this a step further. “Kinaesthetic imagination” describes choreographers’ capacities to draw on their own feeling for movement and imagine creative patterns and flows of movement. I propose that this is also a skill that editors develop. They use embodied cognition, corporeal, and kinesthetic imagination in concert with various forms of procedural and cultural expertise, to construct coherent movement phrases from disparate fragments of moving images. They apply this enactive cognition to several kinds of movement (e.g., narrative movement and visual movement,) to shape persuasive (Orpen 2003) rhythmic experiences of films. Modell and Gallese and Guerra tie their cognitive neuroscience directly to phenomenology. They take a cognitive approach to the understanding of a felt phenomenon, and in this I follow them. Scholars working on the linguistics-­ based Cinematic Poetics research project in Germany (http://www.cinepoetics.fu-berlin.de/) also could be said to tie the two traditions together in their analysis of rhythm. Films move their spectators. The film’s communication with spectators can be understood as a vital form of aesthetic composition and as bodily and sensory responsiveness. In this sense, when we say, the film moves the spectator, it is not meant to be understood metaphorically but quite literally: Film images develop as movement patterns, combining different staging tools like sound composition, montage rhythm, camera movements, and acting to one temporal gestalt. They do literally move spectators, because they organize their perception processes in the temporal course of the film reception. (Scherer et al. 2014: 2083)

The notion that films “literally” move spectators’ bodies is ratified in scientific analyses of human response to movement (e.g., Heimann  et  al. 2016; Gallese and Geurra 2012; Grodal 1997). The notion of the film as a “temporal gestalt” implicitly points to the work of the editor in piecing together filmed fragments into a unified experience. That film images “develop as movement patterns” (Scherer et al. 2014: 2083) is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but one which is shaped by the expert embodied, embedded, and enactive cognitions of the editor. Thus, by analyzing the editor’s work of shaping rhythm, I aim to shed light on what part rhythm plays in the experience of an audience.

On Asking: What Is Rhythm in Film Editing? Lewis (2008) writes of Mitry that: [h]is intellectual project was ambitious, Aristotelian in nature. What are the material, efficient, formal, and final causes of the cinema? What is it made of? How does it work? To what effect? To what end? (397)

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The approach I have taken to analyzing rhythm in film editing was originally intended to follow these august thinkers and ask these same questions. However, the inquiry took a “cognitive turn” at a certain point and landed on a variation. Thus, asking “What is rhythm is in film editing?” is actually asking only three questions: The first of these is, like its Aristotelean antecedent, “What is it made of?” I argue that the materials for making rhythm are time, energy, and movement, with movement being the material through which the other two are experienced. The second question is a variation on “How does it work?” which asks about how an editor works on it, or how the materials from which rhythm is made are shaped into a significant form. The argument here is that the editor has three cognitive/conceptual tools or operations that they draw on: timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing. Even though all of them are at work simultaneously in the fluent editor’s expert work with filmed material, each of these can, and will, be broken down into more refined operations. Analyzing how an editor works on rhythm reveals something about how edited rhythms work because the words for the editor’s tools—timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing—are also words for what audiences ultimately experience. The questions “To what effect? To what end?” are here amalgamated to ask “What is rhythm?” in the sense of “What is its purpose?” This question returns us to the definitions of rhythm that position it as a felt experience. The proposal is that its purpose is to modulate feeling and attention into “cycles of tension and release” (Pearlman 2009, 2016). A further purpose (effect and end) of these cycles is to “synchronize” (Pearlman 2009, 2016) an audience to the movement of images and sounds, emotions, and events in a film (Table 7.1). However, before elaborating on the materials, tools, and purposes of rhythm in film editing, it is important to note some limitations on this inquiry. I am not asking what is good rhythm. The “goodness” of rhythm is contingent, at the very least, on the intentions of the filmmakers and the cultural context in which it is being received. What is a “good” cycle of tension and release, shaped with “good” timing, from “good” movement in the captured material in, for ­example, the United States in 1918, may be considerably less viable as an affective experience in Nigeria in 2018. Nonetheless, it is still a rhythm constructed by an editor from the same materials, with the same tools and, generally, for the same purpose.

Table 7.1  Table form distillation of the three questions being asked and the ideas being proposed in response to each Questions

Ideas Proposed

What are the materials of rhythm? What are the editors’ tools? What is the purpose of rhythm?

Time, energy, movement Timing, pacing, trajectory phrasing Cycles of tension and release

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Therefore, I am not asking about the experience of individual constructions of film rhythms—which film flows well and which one does not. I am also not asking about difference between rhythms of cultures, genres, or forms. Instead, I propose a model through which film editing can be understood, and which can be applied to diverse films for testing, expanding, or refuting.

Materials of Rhythm: Time, Energy, and Movement It is a contemporary film industry truism that good editing is “invisible.” This means that, as in many arts, the experiencer’s attention is drawn to the cumulative effect, which in film is usually called “story,” rather than to the craft of its construction. Editing is, of course, not invisible. If it were, movies themselves would be invisible. However, what we see is not the edits; we see that which is edited. The “editing” is experienced not as a series of joins, or even a series of shots joined together. The experience of an edited film is an experience of flow of movement: movement that has been shaped, limited, and designed into cinematically expressive phrases. Movement, then, with its expressive possibilities, is the real concern of editing theory and philosophy. Reducing the materials available from which to craft cinematic rhythms to time, energy, and movement, three elements present in every aspect of life and being perceivable by humans, may seem to be a simplification. That, in a sense, is the point. The materials from which narrative and non-narrative experiences of cinema could be crafted are exceedingly diverse. Their number and diversity has increased exponentially since the invention of the film camera and the establishment of the two major forms of editing (commonly known in English as continuity editing and montage editing). Boundaries of propriety and access, and affordances of film equipment, which may once have limited what could be filmed and edited, have fallen away, and nothing whatsoever comes to mind as potentially excluded. Therefore, any attempt to theorize editing and rhythm in film editing usefully must first reduce these possibilities to something they have in common. Movement, being the root word of cinema (kine), is the clearest choice. Rhythm in the arts, as in the sciences, is understood to be patterned movement over time. This movement may be physical/physiological, molecular/ biological, conceptual, verbal/written, visual, aural, or a blend of modes, as it is in cinema. Waking/sleeping, eating/digesting, working/resting, and inhaling/exhaling are just some of living beings’ ways of participating in the rhythms of the world, of surviving by oscillating or moving with the rhythms of their physical world. Going beyond rhythmic survival, and into rhythmic creativity, as film editors must, it is useful to stream the complexities of types of movement being shaped in cinematic constructions to three broad and overlapping categories.

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Movement of events—the rise and fall of perceivable changes to narrative, also sometimes called plot or structure. Duration (time) and emphasis (energy) of the movement of events is crafted by editors in editing processes. Movement of emotions—the dynamics of character emotions as they are expressed in performances, the tonal aspects of spaces and situations, and the affective valence of sequences, all move over time and through degrees of intensity (energy). Editing shapes these movements. Movement of image and sound—the visible and audible experiences of movement in the captured material. Patterning of rate of movement (time) and its force (energy) may be designed for optimal smoothness (see Pudovkin 1949) or explosiveness (see Eisenstein 1949), but in either case, it is patterning of movement. Movement happens in time, and it is impelled by energy, but we cannot see time and energy. So, editors use movement, movement of events, emotions, images, and sounds to shape expressive patterns of time and energy. While editing has been hidden under the distracting cloak of “invisibility,” and overshadowed in film theorizing by a preoccupation with narrative, some useful theory has been developed in dance to explain the significance of shaping experiences of time and energy by shaping movement. The “Choreographic Cognitions” team conducted a study of what dancemakers shape and viewers respond to in danced movement. They write: [T]he artistry of movement is in trajectories, transitions, and in the temporal and spatial configurations in which moves, limbs, bodies, relate to one another… In a dynamical system, time is not simply a dimension in which cognition and behaviour occur but time, or more correctly dynamical changes in time, are the very basis of cognition. (Stevens et al. 2000: 4)

Movies are also dynamical systems. The actions and behaviors that are directed, performed, recorded, and shaped into narratives and narration are movements. They may also be facts, symbols, provocations, and so on. However, the argument being made here, as it has been in dance and in some editing theory (see the bodies of work by Eisenstein, Vertov, and Shub, in particular), is that without energy (dynamic) changes in time, the events, emotions, and images are inert. They lack significance or discernable intention. For a quick experience of how this works, type the words “go home now” and get your computer’s voice to read them out. The time between words and emphasis on words will be even, so you cannot tell what intention impels the words— is it fear or delight? Without dynamical changes in time, it is not really possible to understand the affective significance or intention behind the words. Understanding energy as intention draws on movement/dance analysts Rudolf Laban and Irmgard Bartenieff’s ideas about effort. Effort, as described in their in-depth studies of movement, roughly translates as the attitude and intention behind movement which informs the way it is done (see Bartenieff 1980). The kind of effort with which a person moves is what they mean or

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intend with movement. A punch means aggression, violence, forceful intentions, if its effort is aggressive, violent, and forceful. A punch can also be playful. It may originate from a playful state of mind, and the effort that propels it will be entirely different. It may move along the same spatial pathway as an aggressive punch, be a similar speed, and have the same shape, but its effort, or energy, will tell us that it means something different. Narrative context will, in a movie, be important to understanding whether the effort, energy, or intention is aggressive or playful. However, it is worth noting, that, given two performances—one aggressive and one playful—it is actually the editor, working in collaboration with the director, who selects which one to use. The editor composes the series of movements, selected from the recorded material, into the moment-to-moment sense of causality we call “narrative.” In film editing, editors are rarely simply making an experience of time, energy, and movement; they are also shaping story, character relationships, and other kinds of information. Furthermore, film editors rarely work exclusively with human movement. However, in shaping the rhythm of the film, time, energy, and movement are the salient factors. They shape the qualitative experience of the story and information. The movement through time and energy of all of the filmed images is shaped into phrases of related movements and grouped emphasis points. These phrases are then varied, juxtaposed, interpolated, and shaped within themselves and in relation to one another to make the overall experience of time, energy, and movement in a film that is known as rhythm. The next section examines the specific tools an editor has for the shaping of rhythm in film, and considers how they shape an audience experience of edited films.

Editor’s Tools: Timing, Pacing, and Trajectory Phrasing Shaping rhythm is complex, due to the many layers of movement being shaped, purposes for which it is being shaped, parties with investment in its ultimate shape, and equipment available for shaping it. However, from the editor’s point of view, it is possible to analyze the shaping of movement of events, emotions, images, and sounds into three operations: timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing. These operations each has three suboperations or aspects, and each of these addresses some part of the shaping of the film, and the audience’s experience of it, as a constructed rhythm. For the film philosopher interested in becoming a film editor, more detail about these three operations can be found in both editions of Cutting Rhythms (2009, 2016). Timing There are three aspects of timing to be considered when discussing rhythm in film editing: (1) choosing a frame; (2) choosing duration; and (3) choosing the placement of the shot. Each of these choices is a functional aspect of shaping

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rhythm. Choices made, of course, imply choices not made—movements not included, and this too is of considerable significance in shaping rhythm, because rhythm is not just the generalized flow of movement but the limitation and definition of the flow of movement. 1. The choosing a frame sense of timing is the tool at work in firmly limiting the movement of one shot by choosing the precise frame on which to begin and end it. Think of a child holding a crystal goblet on a stone patio. The editor might choose to show us first the stone floor, then the glass held over it by a child’s greasy fingers. Our minds do the work of connecting these shots and fearing the collision of expensive crystal on unforgiving flagstone. (This shot is an example of creating the tension side of the cycles of tension and release that will be discussed below.) But on which frame does the editor cut away from those fingers, and what is implied by the choice of different frames? Cutting before the glass leaves the hand implies its crash is accidental. Cutting on the frame where fingers deliberately begin to lift their grip might imply threat, an intention to execute the destructive action. Cutting a frame or two after the glass has been released might reveal the hand freezing in fear of consequence. Thus, the choice of frame on which to cut shapes the movement to three different narrative implications. We could summarize these as: “the child drops the glass” or “the child destroys the glass” or “the child fears punishment.” These different implications would be surmised from the choice of frame on which the editor cuts. 2. Choosing duration is distinct from choosing the precise frame on which to cut, because, although a shot may change meaning quite dramatically by holding or dropping a frame, the feeling of its duration is not really affected by one frame (which is only small fraction of a second). A ten-­ second shot will feel long if it is juxtaposed with a series of one-second shots. The same 10-second shot, used in the same context, will still feel just as long if it is actually only 9 seconds and 20 frames. And the same 10 (or so) second shot will feel quite short if juxtaposed with a series of 60-second shots. The feeling of a shot’s duration is created by the relative durations of the shots near to it and the concentration of information, movement, and change within it (which is discussed under pacing, later). Perception of duration, as part of the felt experience of rhythm, is also richly entangled with what Mitry calls the “relationships of intensity” (1997 [1968]: 125). Intensity is discussed as an element particularly relevant to the design of trajectory phrasing, later. 3. Choosing the placement of the shot. The decision about where to use shots is also called timing. This sense of timing refers to where in the sequence or ordering of shots a particular reveal of information gets placed. Think of this aspect of timing as analogous to placing a punch line in the context of a joke. A comedian will not start with the punch

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line; they will place that piece of information deliberately in relation to a setup that frames it. Otherwise it isn’t funny. This sense of timing has significant implications for the shaping of cycles of tension and release. The shaping of an edit rarely goes according to script, and the editor has a lot of control over the timing of release of information. If we think of narrative tension as the creation of a question in the viewer’s mind (see Carroll 1996), and release as the resolution of that question, then we can see that this sense of timing, of where to place the reveal of information, is a domain in which the editor’s choices are very powerful in shaping the audience experience. Pacing Pacing as an operation in shaping a film edit is often conflated, confusingly, with timing (see, e.g., Reisz 1953). They do overlap, of course, but, in fact, they are different operations. Pacing refers not to the frames, durations, or positions of shots, but to modulation of (1) rate of cutting; (2) rate of movement within a shot; and (3) rate of movement overall. 1. Pacing, as in rate of cutting, concerns how often cuts occur per second or minute or hour. This is not just another way of saying “duration of shots,” although the two ideas do overlap.2 Pacing in this sense can easily be seen when the rate of cutting occurs in patterns, for example, accelerating the number of cuts per minute as a chase gets closer to its climax. (In this case, the durations of the shots get shorter, and the two meanings overlap.) However, pacing, as in rate at which cuts occur, is also a factor in the rhythm of film—even when it is not patterned by design. For example, cutting frequently around a conversation may make the performances seem edgier or sharper. Here, we are not looking at durations of shots directly, but at the content curve of movement within the shots, and either cutting it very sharply, which creates a sense of the pace being quicker, or leaving it loose, with full arcs of movement intact, which makes the pace seem slower. Thus, the pacing, in the sense of the rate at which the cuts occur, manipulates the sensation of the movement of the conversation. Further, the rate at which cuts occur defines the rate at which new visual sensations are introduced. Every cut is in itself a change, so a lot of cuts make a faster rate of change. 2. Pacing also refers to the juxtapositions of rates of movement or change within shots. Imagine these actions occurring on one five-second shot: glass shatters—child cowers—father looms—friends disperse. Now, visualize 2  For more on rates of cutting and duration of shots, see Salt (1974) and the work of scholars in the area of cinemetrics: http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php

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that shot in juxtaposition with another five-second shot, in which: hands get cut—dog yelps—child wails—broom descends. The pacing of the sequence may be seen as very fast, even though the cuts are relatively infrequent. Making one cut in ten seconds is not a “fast” rate of cutting in contemporary cinema (see Salt 1983; Bordwell 2002). If the editor chooses to present each of these events in its own shot, thereby making a cut every three seconds, rather than one cut in ten seconds, they would make the rate of change slow down. These events, each shown in a single 3-second shot, would take 24 seconds, not 10. The editor would have sped up the rate of cutting, but the overall effect would be of slowing the pacing. A different kind of tension is created by each choice. Cramming action into ten seconds and seeing it overlap inside shots, albeit necessarily wider shots, will force the movement of the viewer’s eyes rapidly around the frame, trying to absorb the full content curve in each of the overlapping movements in the shot. Tension arises not only from the action but from the necessity of working hard to comprehend it and surmise its implications. Spreading the action over eight closer shots, each containing a single action and lasting three seconds might create tension that is more like dread. The slow unfurling of actions delays resolution of the situation and forces a more intimate experience of the full content curve—the “preparation,” “execution,” and “rest” (see Schmidt 1996) of each action. There is, of course, a third choice: the editor could cut together just the close-ups, using only the peak of each one’s movement quotient, for example. That would increase the rate of cutting to eight shots in eight seconds, making a faster rate of cutting and a faster rate of movement within shots. There is also a 4th choice, a 44th choice, and a 444th choice. At least. There are multiple shots, say, in this case, 10, that have multiple frames, say, 24 per second × 7  seconds each, and any one of these frames could be juxtaposed with any other frame for any duration. Most of these choices can be chunked down by expert editors and easily discarded, without being tried. Some are tried, usually iteratively, meaning we refine until it feels right in the moment and then refine again when that moment becomes part of rate of change overall. . The rate of change overall aspect of pacing refers to rate movement or 3 change of the overall film. A film’s pacing may be the rate at which events move in the film or the rate at which movement of images or emotions occur in the film. In the audience experience of rhythm, this aspect of pacing is necessarily an outcome of the other two aspects of pacing (discussed above). It is felt not as a series of distinct choices, but as a flow of these choices into one another to produce experiences which are generally summed up in one word such as “fast,” “slow,” or “uneven.”

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Pacing is very important, especially for the creation of sensations of time and energy, but it is not by itself rhythm. Although rate of movement is significant to rhythm, a rhythmically designed expressive film also requires phrasing of the movement trajectories. Trajectory Phrasing “Trajectory phrasing” is a term designed to cover an area of editing rhythms which is not precisely covered by saying “timing” or “pacing.” Trajectory phrasing describes the manipulation of energy in the creation of rhythm. The word “trajectory,” according to the Random House Dictionary, means “the path described by a body moving under the action of given forces.” So, “trajectory” describes a combination of the direction of a movement and the energy that propels it. “Trajectory phrasing,” then, is joining together movement trajectories in different shots to shape the flow of energy between and through them. This is done by choices of takes and positioning of cuts. The three operations that “trajectory phrasing” describes are (1) linking and colliding trajectories; (2) selecting energy trajectories; and (3) stress. 1. Linking or colliding trajectories: In practice, this means looking at aspects of movement, such as screen direction and asking if they should link or collide. A smooth cut is one in which movement from right to left in one shot is matched with movement from right to left in the next shot. A cut in which movement from right to left is collided with movement from left to right, or simply unmatched in spatial organization and energy, is what Eisenstein might have called a “conflict.” Eisenstein favored the creation of these collisions, famously stating, “montage is conflict” (1949: 38). He writes about several things which could be put in to conflict, including: “close shots and long shots, pieces of graphically varied directions, pieces resolved in volume, pieces resolved in area, pieces of darkness, pieces of lightness” (Eisenstein 1949: 39 italics in original). Significantly for this argument, Eisenstein’s list includes “conflicts between an event and its duration” (1949: 39, italics in original), revealing that the shaping of movement trajectories is a more comprehensive montage action than just the joining of two shots. Trajectories of events, like emotions, are experienced through their visible expression in movement. This movement can be linked, or collided, or edited along a spectrum between the two. The smoothness or conflict in its phrasing will be one of the things that impacts on audience comprehension and felt experience.

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2. Selecting energy trajectories: This involves selecting different takes for the variations on use of energy or effort within them. Returning to the scene of the smashed glass on the stone patio, take, for example, the p ­ resence of notoriously difficult to direct animals and children. The script reads: dog yelps—child wails, but this is at best a guideline. The dog might howl and the child cower. The dog might sniff and the child shrug. We might have shots of all of these variations, and cutting them together into the story would change the trajectory phrasing and create a differently nuanced narrative. If the dog obliges with a convincing yelp, the phrase of movement would have a different dynamic—and timing—and significance—if it is followed by the child’s wail, or cower, or shrug. Any of these shots can be cut together to match (link smoothly), but the rhythm of the scene is shaped by the choices of movement energy. The question for the editor is: which gestures, with their particular emotional valence as expressed by effort, will be cut together to create the trajectory that best expresses the intended movement of emotions in the film? Which shots create or release tension as appropriate to the desired significance of events and character relationships? 3. Stress. This refers to creating emphasis points, or stress accents, by manipulation of the trajectory of movement. Stress in movement is gradations of strength or intensity of energy. In our hypothetical sequence, above, the shots of wailing, cowering, or shrugging may be of equal duration. The rates of movement or change within them are comparable, but the stress (effort) they contain and the stress (emphasis) they create are different. Both the shot size and the energy being expended within the shot contribute to the energy accent it makes. By phrasing the trajectories of movement, editors are working in collaboration with everyone from directors and actors to sound designers and composers to put together an appropriately dynamic flow of energy in shot-to-shot juxtapositions, scenes, sequences, and the whole film. What is ultimately considered “appropriate” may vary from the original intention, due to variations in performances, issues with the script, unexpected production problems, and many other things. Thus, an editor’s operations are often understood as “problem-­ solving.” However, it is important to understand this problem-­ solving as a creative act. The phrasing of trajectories is creatively phrasing the flow of movement, time, and energy into rhythms (Table 7.2). An editor uses the tools of timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing when cutting rhythms. The creation of rhythm in film editing will generally rely on all of these tools and operations being employed simultaneously, or in close alternation, because, as in dance, rhythm in film “is not just a duration of time, accented by stresses. It is also the result of the interaction of Effort combinations with variations” (Bartenieff 1980: 75).

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Table 7.2  Table form distillation of the three operations, or tools, editors deploy and each of their three suboperations Editors’ Tools or Operations

Aspects of Each Operation

Timing

Choosing a frame Choosing duration Choosing placement of shot Rate of cutting Rate of movement or change within shots Rate of movement or change overall Linking or colliding trajectories Selecting energy trajectories Stress

Pacing

Trajectory phrasing

Purpose of Rhythm: Cycles of Tension and Release I turn now to the purpose of rhythm in film editing, which I propose is the creation of cycles of tension and release. “[A]lternating tension and rest” (Mitry 1997 [1963]: 104) is core to Mitry’s definition of rhythm as a whole. The slightly more active “tension and release” is a variation borrowed from choreographers’ more colloquial discussion of danced movement. It is used here, in the first instance, as shorthand for three things: 1. The “on-off ” pulsing of bodily rhythms as they move from exertion to relaxation. For example, inhalation is exertion, while exhalation is relaxation. Similarly, the heart is a muscle that contracts (tension) and releases. As has been demonstrated in a range of experiments, watching films has a direct influence on these kinds of bodily tension and release in the viewer. 2. “Tension and release” is also shorthand for a discussion of a range of kinds of experiences of emotions. Characters and social actors undergo heightening and relaxing of emotional states as they encounter problems and solutions in their worlds. For example, they create tension for themselves, for one another, and for audiences, in the heat of dramatic conflict and release the pressure they have built if/when they reconcile. 3. Finally, “tension and release” is also shorthand for the ways that narrative events excite cognitive attention with questions and release it by resolving them. Returning to the crystal goblet hovering over the flagstone in the child’s greasy grip, we can see that “tension” is potentially created or released in every shot-to-shot juxtaposition. Indeed, this might be an effective way of summarizing the editor’s contribution to the sense of causality in narrative films. As has been well rehearsed in writing about editing over the years (see Kuleshov in Levaco 1974), the viewer’s mind will put two shots together to make an infer-

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ence about them. The glass hovers: tension, the glass smashes: release and a new tension. The first tension, “Will the glass get broken?”, is resolved by it breaking. The break raises a new question: “Will there be consequences of the breakage?” Now the editor has a choice in how this tension about the consequence of breakage is refined and resolved. If the editor cuts back to the child’s hand frozen in shock or fear, the question might be refined as something like: “Will the child get in trouble?” If the editor cuts to Dad looming, the question might be more like, “Will he hit the child?” If the editor cuts to a smiling gardener with a broom, the tension will likely dissipate, even lose interest as a question altogether, as we surmise, “Ah, he’ll clean it up.” This example of tension and release in a shot-to-shot juxtaposition reveals how tension can be built, dissipated, and rebuilt at the level of image and sound. The editing composes a phrase of movement from glass hovering, to smash, to hand retracting. These are simple movements in image and sound. Our minds do the work of connecting them causally. The sequence also clearly reveals movement of emotion. The verbs are affectively inflected. So, we follow along with the sequence through feelings that might flow in this way: apprehension (hovering), shock (smashing), and fear (retracting). Two points are worth noting here. First, our kinesthetic empathy with the movement of image and sound triggers our affective engagement. Our embodied knowledge of the movement feelings of hovering, smashing and retracting trigger apprehension, shock, and fear. Second, as an audience, the depth and direction of our feeling is being managed by the editor. As noted earlier, the editor’s choice of which shot to cut to after the smash will cognitively (though perhaps not consciously) trigger different questions and hypotheses. Each of these will vary the qualitative shade of fear we feel from a lot (Dad looming) to a little (gardener smiling). The sequence is also a movement of an event, call it: “the glass smashes.” How the editor chooses to make this event move will determine our sense of how significant an event it is in the narrative. It could be the most significant event of the story, in which case the editor might choose to manipulate duration and energy (through timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing) to center our attention on it commensurately. Or, it may barely be an event. It could be just something that occurs in the narrative of, for example, “the family celebrates.” In this case, the breaking glass incident might be one of many at the party, and thus rhythmically shaped to move appropriately. Like the movement of emotion, our cognitive assessments in the movement of events are grounded in our kinesthetic empathy with the movement visible and audible in the composition of shots. The logic is this: the composition of “hovering, smashing, and retracting” triggers apprehension, shock, and fear. Apprehension, shock, and fear would give rise to the question: “Will the child get in trouble?” Changing the physical (image and sound) sequence of movement to “hovering, smashing, and smiling” would change the emotional “ride” we take with the movement to apprehension, shock, and relief. This sequence of emotions would facilitate a different question, something like: “Will the party continue?”

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Tension and release are thus created, by the editor, at all three levels of rhythmic construction: image/sound, emotion, and event. Tension and release are also experienced, by an audience, physically, emotionally, and cognitively. Although it is possible, and in some cases desirable, to describe these different kinds and sources of tension and release, it is important to note that all three are grounded in the embodied experience of perceptible movement. Further, all of these levels of tension and release, and their cinematic triggers, are operating at the same time. They are profoundly entangled, both in the film-­making process and in the film-watching process. Pulling them apart provides, perhaps, an image of different scales of tension and release, or different causes within the flow, but ultimately these differences are resolved into one “sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic” experience (Deleuze 2005: 29). The proposition is that watching a film is a physical experience of patterns of movement. Films synchronize the audience’s physical, emotional, and cognitive experience by getting us to embody, empathize, and conceptually participate in their movement. Just as all of the elements discussed here are functionally entangled (e.g., time and energy cannot be separated from movement), the bodies that rhythm addresses are also functionally entangled: address to the body through patterns of movement is address to its physical, emotional, and cognitive capacities as one living, breathing entity. Interestingly, continental and cognitive philosophers can agree on this. One writes: When it comes to the capture and modulation of the rhythms of heartbeat and emotions taking place in the cinema, for instance, we can speak about a mode of power that operates on the level of sensorimotor bodily adjustments. (Henriques et al. 2014: 15)

The other writes: When a viewer chooses to watch a film, he thereby chooses to be cued into having constant fluctuations of heartbeat, perspiration, adrenalin-secretion and so on. (Grodal 1997: 42)

There are clues in the word choices, but one would be forgiven for not knowing which was written by the continental philosopher and which by the cognitivist, since they agree: the comprehension of a film is physical, first. Thus, we might say that when effectively designed, and optimally drawing on the resources available in the uncut materials, rhythms are the movement of the film composed in such a way as to influence the viewer’s pulse, breath, and attention. A film’s significance is not just “this happened and then that happened.” A film’s impact is in the way that this, then that, happened, including how fast or slow or bumpily or smoothly or forcefully or limply.

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Rhythm plays a crucial role… in the way the story is told, in the game of revealing and withholding story information from the viewers to maximize both their active involvement in anticipating the events and their passive abandon to the story’s events. (van Leeuwen 1985: 186)

So, whereas events, characters, and images trigger specific emotions, expectations, and ideas, the rhythms of these modulate the rise and fall of the tension and release—the “resonance of bodily reactions” (van Leeuwen 1985: 186)— with which we follow them.

Conclusion Rhythm in film editing is time, energy, and movement shaped by timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing for the purpose of creating cycles of tensions and release (Pearlman 2009, 2016). Rhythm is, unsurprisingly, a body thing. Our bodies navigate rhythmically in order to survive and thrive in our rhythmic universe. We participate in the oscillations of natural and human-devised contexts by oscillating with them. It is therefore also unsurprising that we shape the rhythms of movies with the same materials from which we and our rhythmic contexts are made—time, energy, and movement. The tools with which we shape rhythms are dictated by the affordances of these materials: timing, pacing, and trajectory phrasing are the operations afforded by moving images to shape the rise and fall of narrative, affective, aesthetic, and embodied experiences. Comprehension and description of these experiences are not exclusive to the domain of continental or cognitive philosophy. Rhythm is a body thing, self-­ evidently—our hearts, breaths, and gaits are all rhythmic. But it is just as self-­ evidently a “mind” thing. We perceive, inquire, analyze, and understand in cycles that parse information, ideas, and concepts into modulated formation and release. Editors call the complex cognitive activity of shaping rhythms “intuitive” (see Oldham 1992, 2012)—meaning they do it by feel, not by conscious calculation. The editor’s cognitions are “hybrids, unevenly distributed across social, technological, and biological realms” (Sutton 2006: 239). Editors deploy cognitive actions distributed across their brains, bodies, and the filmed material as it passes through the editing technology. Editors’ expertise draws on knowledge of the construction of story, their own felt experiences, their kinesthetic empathy with movement in the filmed material, and their capacity to align how they feel when watching versions of the different rhythms they are creating to how their audience is likely to feel (see Pearlman 2018). Thus, editors’ expertise involves assessing the possibilities in their edit room environment and the possible impacts in the final viewing environment (e.g., the cinema); using that expertise to chunk down and discard potentially thousands of options; and shaping the flow of time, energy, and movement into patterns known as rhythms.

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Rhythm in film is complex, but it can be understood. Shaping rhythm is not unlike shaping dance, and thus it does not hurt for editors to be good dancers, or at least have heightened capacities to tune to rhythmic possibilities and shape phrases of movement into significant form. The editor’s understanding and their dancing might be standing in, here, for mind and body, or cognition and the felt experience. This discussion has provided an explanatory framework for the embodied and affective experience of edited rhythms, which demonstrates that edited rhythms act on bodies and minds in a functionally integrated way. Thus, we can say what rhythm is, how it is shaped, and what it is for, while still respecting that it is, in both a film editor’s and an audience’s experience, immediate and embodied.

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Pudovkin, Vsevolod. 1949. Film Technique; and Film Acting: The Cinema Writings of V.I. Pudovkin. Trans. Ivor Montague; Introduction by Lewis Jacobs. New York: Lear. Reisz, Karel. 1953. The Technique of Film Editing. 1st ed. Boston: Focal Press. Reynolds, Dee. 2007. Rhythmic Subjects, Uses of Energy in the Dances of Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, and Merce Cunningham. Hampshire: Dance Books. Salt, B. 1974. Statistical Style Analysis of Motion Pictures. Film Quarterly 28 (1): 13–22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1211438 ———. 1983. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. London: Starword. Scherer, Thomas, Sarah Greifenstein, and Hermann Kappelhoff. 2014. Expressive Movements in Audio-Visual Media: Modulating Enactive Experience. In Handbücher Zur Sprach- Und Kommunikationswissenschaft/Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK) 38/2, eds. Jana Müller, Cornelia Cienki, Alan Fricke, Ellen Ladewig, Silva McNeill, and David Bressem, 2081–92. De Gruyter. https:// doi.org/10.1515/9783110302028.2081. Schmidt, Paul. 1996. Meyerhold at Work. New York: Applause. Smith, Tim J. 2012. The Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity. PRO 6 (1): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2012.060102. Sobchack, Vivian. 2008. Phenomenology. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, Routledge. New York. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780203879320.ch40. Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell. Stevens, Kate, Shirley McKechnie, Steven Malloch, and Agnes Petocz. 2000. Choreographic Cognition: Composing Time and Space. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, ed. J.A.  Sloboda C.  Woods, G.B.  Luck, R.  Brochard, F.  Seddon, and S.  OʼNeill. Keele: Keele University. Sutton, John. 2006. Distributed Cognition, Domains and Dimensions. Pragmatics & Cognition 14 (2): 235–247. https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.14.2.05sut. Van Leeuwen, Theo. 1985. Rhythmic Structure of the Film Text. In Discourse and Communication. New Approaches to the Analysis of Mass Media, ed. Teun A. van Dijk, 216–234. Berlin: De Gruyter.

CHAPTER 8

Animation David Davies

If cinema, broadly construed, is taken to be the medium of the moving image, then animated cinema differs from other kinds of cinema in the kinds of processes generative of this image. In such talk of the ‘moving image’, the ‘movement’ or change in question is a feature of the content perceivable in the image by an attentive observer. Our perceptual engagement with a non-moving image, such as a still photograph, may take place over an extended period of time, and, as spectators, we may ourselves move relative to the photograph (or, indeed, the photograph may move relative to us, as when we observe a photographic image from the window of a slowly moving train). But there is no movement of or change in the elements entering into the perceived content of the image. On the other hand, in perceptually engaging with a cinematic image, such as a shot in a motion picture, we usually see the things in the picture as moving or changing. I shall begin (section “What Is Animated in an Animated Image?”) by asking what it is for a moving image to be animated, and thus, what it is for something to be an instance of animated cinema. This provides the basis for distinguishing different kinds of cinematic animation (section “Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques”), and may also help to explain (section “Why Has So Little Philosophical Attention Been Paid to Animation?”) why, traditionally, so little philosophical attention has been paid to animated cinema per se and why recent developments in cinematic technology have already begun to remedy this deficiency. I shall comment here on the famous exchange between Stanley Cavell and Alexander Sesonske over the status of animated movies. In the remainder of this chapter, I shall examine (section “Appreciating Animation”) certain epistemological and ontological dimen-

D. Davies (*) McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_8

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sions of animated cinema and look at the conditions under which animated cinema can be art. I conclude (section “Digital Animation”) by reflecting on the significance of the use of digital technology in the production of animated cinema.

What Is Animated in an Animated Image? Etymologically, to animate something is to give it life, soul, movement or expression. A speaker can become animated when she speaks on a topic that engages her, for example. But it is merely necessary and not sufficient for something to be an animated image that (1) the attentive receiver perceives the content of the image as moving or changing. For one thing, even in the case of some non-cinematic images—certain Italian Futurist paintings, for example— the impression of movement is conveyed even in the absence of the perception of actual movement in the elements that make up the perceptual manifold. So we have to insist that it is perceived actual movement in the latter sense that is required for moving images in general, whether animated or not. Second, animated cinema is standardly contrasted with live-action cinema. In the latter, the presented sequences of images in which we perceive movement are elements in shots that are the result of capture by a camera that continuously records movements and changes taking place in pro-filmic space. What is further required for animated cinema is that (2) the perceived movement or change in the content of the presented sequence of images not be the result of the capture of movement or change occurring independently of the image-­ making process, but be a result of (other) features of the image-making process itself. In looking at a sequence of images resulting from the capture of the performance of a dancer by a non-digital movie camera, for example, we observe something that meets the first of these conditions—we perceive the dancer’s movements, as captured by the camera, in looking at the presented images—but not the second—the movements we perceive in the sequence of images owe their reproducibility but not their existence to the image-making process productive of the recording. It is sometimes said that the distinctive feature of animated moving images is that they give the ‘illusion’ of movement and change. For example, the 2017 Wikipedia article on ‘Animation’ defines the term as ‘the process of making the illusion of motion and the illusion of change by means of the rapid succession of sequential images that minimally differ from each other’. But we need to be clear wherein this ‘illusion’ resides. While this has been disputed,1 some have claimed that when we view the aforementioned recording of a dancer, there is the illusion of movement and change because the immediate source of our visual experience is a rapid succession of still images of the dancer projected

1  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 34–42.

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onto a screen.2 The purported illusion here resides in the relation between the sequence of still images of the dancer that are the immediate source of our visual experience and the motion and change of the dancer that we see in watching the movie. In the Wikipedia definition of animation, on the other hand, the proposed ‘illusion’ presumably resides in the absence of pro-filmic events that both (1) have the properties of movement and change that we see in attending to an image and (2) are causally responsible for the fact that, in looking at the images, we see the movements and changes that we do. (I shall ignore, in this context, subtleties relating to the possibility that pro-filmic movements and changes can play an intentionally mediated causal role in relation to the movements and changes that we see in an animated movie—if, for example, pixilation is used to reproduce movements or changes previously recorded on film.) A further point to be stressed here is that, while the movement and change that we see in an animated moving image must be a product of the image-­ making process rather than a property of a thing imaged that is causally responsible for the perceived movement and change, a thing imaged that exists independently of the image-making process may be what we see in looking at the image and may be otherwise causally implicated in the perceived movements or changes. As we shall see below, one process used in the production of cinematic animation—pixilation—creates the illusion of movement and change by combining a sequence of individual still images of a three-dimensional (3D) entity—a person or object—in minimally different positions, with each shot in the sequence being separately posed.

Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques The class of animated moving images, as we have seen, is defined in terms of how the motion or change perceived in a moving image is generated. In the case of the animated image, we have said, this is generated through features of the image-making process other than the capture of pro-filmic movements and changes occurring independently of that process. What kinds of features of the image-making process play this role in animation?3 In perhaps the simplest cases, all that is necessary is a manual process of image generation that produces a sequence of images where each differs minimally from its predecessor in a given scene and a way of presenting this sequence of images to the eye of the receiver at a speed sufficient to produce the appearance of change or movement in the visually presented content. ‘Flip-books’ manually activated by the viewer meet these conditions, as does the much more sophisticated but 2  See, for example, Francis Sparshott, ‘Basic Film Aesthetics’, in Film Theory and Criticism 3rd edition, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 284. 3  For a brief overview of animation processes, see David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson, Film Art: An Introduction 5th edition (London: McGraw Hill. 1997), 46–49. For a more extensive survey, see Paul Wells, Fundamentals of Animation (Lausanne: AVA, 2006).

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­ re-­photographic zoetrope, where images painted on the interior of a cylinder p produce the appearance of movement in the depicted scene when the cylinder is rotated and the viewer looks through slots in its wall. Flip-books and zoetropes are examples of animated cinema in the broad sense of cinema identified earlier. Neither, however, would qualify as cinema in the narrower sense of the word with which many of us are more familiar. Cinema in this narrower sense involves a sequence of (traditionally) photographic images presented to viewers on a screen of some kind. To say that the images are photographic is to say that they are the result of a trace-making process of ‘writing with light’, the images originating in the causal agency of what Henry Fox Talbot4 termed the ‘pencil of nature’. In the case of most of the photographic images of interest to us, the image also reflects intentional rendering of the trace-making process or its result, something that may involve pre-capture choices as to camera, lens, focal length, perspective on a subject, and lighting and/or post-capture choices involving such things as selecting particular images from a contact sheet and the use of developmental processes such as cropping, dodging and burning. As we shall see in the following section, the tendency to think of cinema, including animated cinema, in terms of this narrower conception is largely due to the hegemony of the camera and the projector in the production of moving images, whether animated or not, from the time of the invention of such technological devices until relatively recently. This has also arguably contributed to the marginalisation of cinematic animation in the philosophical literature (see section “Why Has So Little Philosophical Attention Been Paid to Animation?”). For, to the extent that animated cinema is taken to differ from non-animated cinema primarily in terms of how the camera is used and what is placed in front of it in order to produce a moving image, it is tempting to think, as many have done,5 that the interesting philosophical questions about the moving image are inherited from its photographic nature. As noted earlier, animated cinema (in the broad sense) is usually contrasted with moving images that capture ‘live action’. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson speak of ‘live-action’ cinema in terms of ‘continuously filming an ongoing action in real time’.6 It is not enough for ‘live-action’ cinema that we have ‘the photographic recording of real people and events’7 since, as we shall see shortly, at least one kind of animation (pixilation) would seem to satisfy this definition. Until the advent of digital technology that was usable in animation processes, the production of animated moving images of any degree of complexity relied upon the use of the camera. The latter was used to produce a 4  William Henry Fox Talbot, The Pencil of Nature (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844). 5   See, for example, Roger Scruton, ‘Photography and representation’, in The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture (London and New York: Methuen,1983); William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge MA: MIT Press,1992). 6  Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 46. 7  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7.

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series of individual photographic images where, as in the case of the ‘flip-book’, the photographic content of each image differed minimally from that of its predecessor in a given scene. As in the case of live-action film, the impression of movement and change can be produced by projecting the resulting series of photographic images onto a screen at an appropriate speed. Animated cinema of this sort relies on the same facts about human perception that explain how we see continuous movement and change when viewing the sequence of images making up a photographic recording of live action.8 What distinguishes different kinds of photographically based animated cinema is the nature of the things put before the camera in order to produce a sequence of images capable of being used in this way. In the case of what is often termed ‘traditional’ animation, the things photographed are drawings or paintings, or combinations thereof. Just as, in the case of a flip-book, we get the impression of movement and change by ‘flipping’ a sequence of minimally differing individual drawings, the same kind of impression can be produced if we photograph such a sequence of drawings one at a time and then ‘screen’ the resulting series of images either by means of a projector or on a television. This allows us to transcend the physical constraints on the construction and use of flip-books, and as a result, it is possible to produce moving images of much longer duration and narrative complexity in this way. Equally obviously, however, if the movements and changes presented are complex, involve various different elements in the represented scene and are presented against a variegated background, it will require a considerable amount of skilled labour to produce the individual drawings to be photographed. A major breakthrough in traditional animation technology came in 1915 with the invention by Earl Hurd of the ‘cel’ technique. Cels are transparent rectangular sheets of celluloid upon which marks can be made by means of tools capable of applying media such as paint or crayon. Animation artists can inscribe, on individual cels, marks representing particular elements that are partly constitutive of the content to be represented in a given image belonging to a series that is to be photographed to represent a given scene in an animated movie. As in the case of the drawings used in traditional animation prior to the invention of the cel technique, the elements represented in a given image that is part of a scene may include a more or less unchanging background, stable objects that may change their positions in relation to that background and things whose movements and changes are represented in the sequence of images making up that scene. By breaking down the total content of individual images into such component elements and inscribing different elements onto separate cels—an opaque background on one cel, foregrounded objects relative to which the characters are moving on other cels and a moving or changing character—say a dog—frozen at a particular point in its movement or change on yet another cel, the animation artist can reconstruct the required content for each image by stacking the relevant cels on top of one another. The cel 8

 See, for example, Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 8.

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representing the background is placed at the bottom of the stack and the other cels can be suitably ordered on top of this. The resulting stack can then be photographed to produce one in the sequence of photographic images required for presentation of the scene in question. The next image in this sequence can be produced by generating another stack of cels, reusing some of those just used—in particular the cel representing the background—and creating the new cels necessary if the screening of the sequence is to give the impression of movement and change. One of the cels required for this following image will represent the next stage in the movements of the dog—in our example—to be represented in the animated film. The cel technique reduces the amount of labour involved because there is no need to exactly redraw the background or the relatively immobile elements each time in generating a sequence of images. It also allows for the labour required for the entire process to be divided up between a team of animators with different individual responsibilities. An alternative technique that was used in the first feature-length animated movie—Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 film The Adventure of Prince Achmed—is to use two-dimensional (2D) jointed cut-­ outs that can be posed against a painted background and photographed to produce the individual images in a sequence that represents movements and changes. The second major class of photographically based animation techniques also involves the generation of the appearance of movement and change through combining a series of individual photographic images whose representational content undergoes minimal change from shot to shot. In this case, however, what are placed before the camera are not themselves images—whether drawings or cels or cut-outs—but three-dimensional objects that are minimally repositioned between successive shots. There are a number of different varieties of what is termed ‘stop-motion’ animation. These differ according to what it is that is manipulated or reposed between the taking of the individual photographic images that make up the material basis of the film. Because of their malleability, clay and plasticine have been popular media, and the manufacture and manipulation of clay figures is best known through the technique of ‘claymation’ used in films such as Gumby and Wallace and Gromit. A second kind of stop-motion animation employs three-dimensional models and structures that are manipulable in virtue of various articulations built into them. Such techniques are used in Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, for example. Third, stop-­ motion animation may employ real people or objects where these can be reposed between individual shots. In the case of ‘pixilation’, as this technique is usually called, real people and real things enter into the content of the moving images, but the images do not result from the capture of real movements and changes on the part of those entities, even though the entities are represented as moving and changing in the ways that result from the stop-motion techniques employed. Pixilation has been used in many music videos. All of the animation techniques listed thus far fit our intuitive idea of a movie as something that involves the use of photography in the production

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stage and the use of screens in presenting the movie to an audience. It is worth noting, however, that animated movies that employ film can be produced without using film photographically to ‘capture’ pro-filmic objects or events. Some experimental film-makers (e.g. Stan Brakhage, in Mothlight) produced animated films by directly marking the individual frames on a spool of film to produce the appearance of movement or change when the resulting images are projected. The development of digital technology has made it possible to produce animated movies, or to incorporate animated elements in otherwise ‘live-action’ movies, without relying upon the photographic capture of pro-filmic things and events such as drawings, structures or real people and objects. Digital animation, to which we shall return in the final section of this chapter, can itself take many forms. The simplest examples involve the use of a computer to perform the tasks performed manually and/or photographically in traditional or stop-motion animation, such as the construction and combination of cels. The resulting sequence of images can then be either composed into a computer file—to be screened on a computer screen or by means of a digital projector— or converted into analogue form and encoded on a film strip for non-digital screening. Certain kinds of computer software are able to ‘bridge’ between cels to produce sequences of images representing continuous movement and change without the need to produce individual cels that represent the bridged elements. Digital technology also allows for the manipulation and transformation of images resulting from photographic capture to produce movements and changes that originate in the digital processing rather than in the events captured, thereby satisfying our definition of animation. But digital technology also allows for the production of moving images that are entirely the result of digital processing: software programs or algorithms can be used to directly generate digital files that, when screened, are experienced by the viewer as moving images. Such animated sequences can also be digitally combined with live-action images to represent things and events that do not exist pro-­ filmically—for example, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the eponymous King Kong in the remade edition and Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. A principal exponent of this kind of digital animation has been the Industrial Light and Magic company founded by George Lucas. One technique that has been used in various ways in animated cinema since its early days is rotoscoping, and the latter raises some interesting questions about the definition of an animated image presented in section “What Is Animated in an Animated Image?”. Rotoscoping uses live-action footage as the basis for the production of what are generally taken to be animated films. The rotoscoper takes a live-action shot of certain pro-filmic events and traces out the moving figures or objects in the individual frames constitutive of the shot. These tracings—which, if they are only of the moving or changing elements, will abstract from background features of the traced frames—can then be artistically manipulated in various ways—for example, by painting in details or by imposing the traced figures on a new background. The (modified or u ­ nmodified)

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tracings can then be photographed to produce a sequence of images that reproduce the pro-filmic movements and changes captured in the original live-­action footage. In a number of recent ‘animated films’ by directors with prior artistic credentials (e.g. Richard Linklater), use is made of much more sophisticated computerised techniques, such as the ‘interpolated’ rotoscoping developed by Bob Sabiston in the 1990s. I shall say more about some of these recent films at the end of section “Appreciating Animation”, but it is worth noting here that, while most films that employ rotoscoping also use other more standard animation techniques, a film that used only rotoscoping might fail to count as animated cinema given the way in which the latter was defined above. For, in what we might term a ‘strictly’ rotoscoped film, the movements and changes perceived by the viewer are the result of the original live-action capture, even if the process of rotoscoping does not preserve the background of the original capture and presents only traced images of the movements of the central figures or objects that were the subjects of that capture. While the image-making process might substantially change the appearance of the moving and changing objects, it would be the live-action footage that is the source of the movements and changes themselves, in virtue of its having captured movements and changes occurring pro-filmically. An interesting example that might seem to exemplify this kind of strictly rotoscoped film is Loving Vincent (2017), co-directed by Dorota Kobelia,9 This film, about events in the life of Vincent Van Gogh, was initially shot in live action in a studio with actors performing against a green screen. After editing, a crew of experienced artists were assigned separate shots in the film and used oil paint to paint the individual frames constitutive of their assigned shots. Over 100 professional artists were employed in making the film, and their activity resulted in 65,000 oil paintings, many of which were not included in the final print. In painting the frames, the artists used Van Gogh’s own visual vocabulary for both the characters (rotoscoped from the live-action footage) and the backgrounds. It appears, however, that some shots in the film were animated in a more traditional way. In the BBC documentary on the making of the film, one painter is shown producing the 12 images that make up a one-second shot of a woman turning around in front of a church. The woman’s movements were not, it would seem, a result of live-action capture. Do examples like this suggest that we need to rethink our definition of animated cinema, or should we respond that the precise movements and changes that we see in such a film reflect not only what was captured through live-­ action but also the work that the artists have done with the resulting frames? This is a question for which we are unlikely to have, and perhaps should not seek, a clear and principled answer. In this respect, it resembles the question (see section “Digital Animation”) as to when the digital manipulation of a 9  See the 2017 BBC documentary on the making of Loving Vincent, accessed 28 September 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/41422698/loving-vincent-the-first-fully-painted-film

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photographic trace results in a loss of the indexicality usually taken to be definitive of photographic images. It is important to note that a given animated movie may, in fact, result from the use of many different animation techniques. The 2002 Festival at the Centre International du Cinéma d’Animation, at Annecy in France, for example, included films containing one or more of the following techniques: 2D and 3D computer animation; claymation; sand; recyclomation; drawing on cels; cut-outs; puppets; live action; ink, pencil, or gypsum on paper; pixilation; animated objects; paint on glass; engraving on film; and photography. One particular short animated film—(The Rise and Fall of the Legendary) Anglobilly Feverson, edited by Rosto—while lasting less than ten minutes, involved a remarkable range of different techniques: Cut-outs, Pixilation, 2D Computer, Animated objects, Paint on paper, Puppets, 3D Computer, Photocopies, Photos, Collage, Mixed techniques and Internet Software.

Why Has So Little Philosophical Attention Been Paid to Animation? Until very recently, little if any serious philosophical attention has been paid to animated cinema. As we shall see, even the attention paid to it recently has been parasitical upon a broader interest in the bearing of digital technology on long-standing philosophical issues concerning photography and film. We shall look at the relationship between animation and digital technology in the final section of this chapter. Here our concern is with why, prior to the interest in digital animation, so little philosophical attention has been paid to animation per se. For example, the voluminous Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy,10 published less than ten years ago, contains neither an entry on animation nor any references to it in the Index. Part of the reason for the lack of interest in animation on the part of philosophers of film and film theorists is that, for the most part, their interest has been in establishing that the moving image is a serious medium, and indeed a potentially artistic medium, in the face of the criticisms levelled, from the outset of photography, at the products of photographic processes. The latter were characterised as ‘merely mechanical’, and as capable only of documenting pro-filmic things and events.11 To the extent that cinema in the narrow sense is taken to be the result of a photographic process, challenges to the artistic pretensions of photography also infected such pretensions on the part of film. We find a concern with responding to these challenges in the opening pages of Rudolph 10  Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London & New York: Routledge, 2009). 11  For detailed histories of these criticisms, see Noël Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 20–29; Patrick Maynard The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press.1997), 269–77, 290–93.

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Arnheim’s Film as Art,12 where they are countered by a detailed account of the ways in which the film-maker can use both composition and editing to represent a subject or scene in a certain way, thereby ‘embodying in pictorial form a thought about’ that subject—the very thing that Roger Scruton later argued could be done in paintings but not in photographically generated images.13 Another central figure in classical film theory, Andre Bazin, stressed the ways in which film could serve our interests in artistic realism through exploiting the possibilities not of editing but of cinematography.14 In a different vein, Jean-­ Luc Godard’s cinematic practice and theorising were concerned with exploring the social and political possibilities of film, and, indeed, with whether the medium could offer an ‘epic’ cinema analogous to Brecht’s ‘epic’ theatre. Stanley Cavell,15 whom some have viewed as the last of the classical film theorists, had a more limited goal although one pursued with great philosophical seriousness: he sought to establish the intellectual and affective power of mainstream Hollywood cinema. For philosophers of film or film theorists having these kinds of agendas, animation, if attended to at all, might seem to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The majority of animated films were intended for a mass audience, often a predominantly juvenile one. The makers of such films had little obvious concern with artistic values or social and political critique. Furthermore, animated cinema seems to offer relatively little in the way of the things cited by philosophers and theorists in responding to challenges to the seriousness of cinema in the narrow sense, as illustrated earlier. Composition and editing might seem to play limited expressive roles in non-digital animation, in part because the very labour-intensive nature of the production of animated cinema dictates that the entire film be carefully storyboarded before the actual generation of the images begins, and also in part because the kind of compositional changes possible in live-action cinema require considerable work if they are to be the result of non-digital animation. Cinematography has no place in analogue animated cinema, even if animators can try to generate images that mimic cinematographic achievements, and there seem to be few opportunities, in animated movies, for the kinds of emotional engagement achievable with characters portrayed by skilled actors, even though the medium can be used to produce certain kinds of emotional effects—consider the portrayal of the death of Bambi’s mother! (For responses to some of these claims, see section “Appreciating Animation”). In place of these ‘artistic’ elements central to the making of traditional live-­ action cinema with artistic pretensions, the salient elements in the making of most predigital animation cinema were perceived to be the artisan-like skills  Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1957).  Scruton, ‘Photography and Representation’. 14  André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 15  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); The World Viewed: Enlarged edition (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 12 13

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required to generate the sequences of images used in animation, the division of labour and semi-production-line methods used to generate such sequences given the availability of cel technology, and the simplicity and limited expressive potentiality of the image content. In short, cinematic animation did not obviously engage with the kinds of interests driving most theoretical and philosophical reflection on cinema, whether broadly or narrowly construed: (1) an interest in the use of the cinematic medium to make narrative artworks, where the skills of directors, cinematographers and actors are utilised in the interests of telling a compelling and perhaps socially valuable story, and (2) an interest in the use of different potentialities of the medium for expressive or realistic purposes. As the brief survey in the previous section might suggest, the interesting questions about animated cinema seem to relate to the different techniques used, but these techniques, over and above the visual arts skills used in producing drawings or cels, seem to be of technological rather than artistic interest. Furthermore—something to which we shall return later—there was for some time considerable resistance in philosophical writing on the arts to thinking that the history of making of an art object plays a crucial part in the appreciation of the resulting artwork. Thus, if there were certain animated films that were held to have artistic or social value, this was taken to depend upon what they shared with live-action cinema rather than upon what distinguished them from it. This is not to say that animation has been altogether excluded from the discourse surrounding classical film theory. But even its most prominent intrusion into this discourse turns out, upon closer inspection, to be in the interests of clarifying certain features of live-action cinema. I refer here to the widely discussed exchange between Stanley Cavell and Alexander Sesonske. Sesonske,16 reviewing Cavell’s The World Viewed, challenged Cavell’s definition of cinema in the narrow sense on the grounds that it excluded animated cinema. For Cavell, the material basis for moving pictures is a succession of automatic world projections. ‘Automatic world projections’ are the result of photographic capture of pro-filmic events. Sesonske notes that Cavell is assuming here that moving pictures are products of photographic processes, and that his principal claims about the ontological and epistemological significance of cinema rest on this assumption. Because a moving picture, as an automatic world projection, is a trace of some independently existing reality not otherwise accessible to us, to screen a moving picture is also to screen the viewer from this reality, and thereby to raise through its very nature traditional philosophical concerns about scepticism. The camera, says Cavell, ‘is fated to reveal all and only what is revealed to it’: whatever is screened in a moving picture must have existed before the camera but is no longer accessible to us. Sesonske raises two problems with such a view. First, if the elements of which a photographically generated moving picture is composed are ‘­automatic world16  Alexander Sesonske, review of The World Viewed, by Stanley Cavell, The Georgia Review 28 (4) (1974), 561–70.

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projections’, it doesn’t follow that the moving picture itself is such a projection, or that the actions, events and relations that are screened must have existed as part of the pro-filmic reality. To think that it does follow is to ignore the significance of editing, inter alia, and also the distinction between the pro-filmic events—actors on a film set—and the fictional ‘world’ presented to the viewer. Second, to think that all photographically generated motion pictures are ‘automatic world projections’ in the designated sense is to ignore those animated motion pictures produced by photographing either drawings or cels, as in ‘traditional’ animation, or three-dimensional objects, as in various kinds of stop-motion animation. The films produced by the Disney Studios featuring ‘stars’ such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were experienced by audiences no differently from photographically generated ‘live-action’ movies, Sesonske maintains. In watching such films, we experienced ‘a world present to us while we were not present to it, with the same immediacy and conviction, the same sense of moving through its space, the same feeling of intimate acquaintance with its inhabitants’.17 But, as Sesonske stresses, the world present to us in looking at such animated movies is not one that existed prior to the moment of projection. All that existed prior to the latter were the drawings or other entities recorded photographically in the individual shots making up the sequence of images that present to us the world we experience in watching the movie. Sesonske observes that the role of editing in bringing into existence the world we view in watching an animated film reminds us that, even in the case of live-action cinema, the picture itself is not an ‘automatic world projection’. This undermines the attempt to confer on our movie experience the kind of philosophical significance claimed by Cavell: ‘the fact that the camera necessarily did its work at some time before the finished film is screened does not at all necessitate that the world I see is a world past’.18 Indeed, Sesonske’s point, in introducing animated cinema, is less to make a case for the latter than to give a clear example of what he takes to also be the case in the kinds of Hollywood movies dear to Cavell. In the latter as well as in the former, the world projected depends upon various choices made in both production and post-production, and only in virtue of such choices is what is projected sometimes the world as it exists independently of the activities of the film-makers. This point is crucial when we consider Cavell’s response to Sesonske.19 He simply denies that cartoons, and presumably animated moving pictures more generally, are movies. They are not movies, he maintains, because the laws governing the fictional worlds of cartoons are unclear, and as a result of this and the other ways in which the narrative is presented, we cannot be engaged by them emotionally and intellectually in the ways that we can with live-action cinema. Since his concern in The World Viewed is with movies taken to be things that, when well done, can engage us in these ways, he sets aside Sesonske’s criticisms as irrelevant to his intended subject. As noted earlier, it is  Sesonske, review of The World Viewed, 563.  Sesonske, review of The World Viewed, 566. 19  Cavell, The World Viewed: Enlarged Edition, 166ff. 17 18

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the achievements of Hollywood cinema that he wishes to explore and account for, and it is films that have the ability to achieve such things that he is defining as movies. As may be clear, however, this response misses Sesonske’s point entirely if, as I have suggested, animated moving pictures are primarily used to illustrate the constructed nature of projected worlds in general. Even in the kinds of Hollywood films celebrated by Cavell, we do not coherently engage with the projected worlds as ‘automatic world projections’.

Appreciating Animation In this section, I want to look at continuities and discontinuities between the appreciation of animated movies and the appreciation of other forms of cinema. Reflecting an ambiguity in the notion of ‘appreciating’ any artefact intended to entertain, stimulate, inspire, challenge or otherwise engage a receiver, there are a number of distinct issues here. In one sense, to appreciate such an artefact is to have the kind of experiential engagement with it that its maker(s) intended or that it affords independently of its maker(s)‘s intentions. Insofar as the artefact in question presents to the receiver some kind of perceptual or conceptual manifold and that it is possible, whether or not in accordance with the maker’s intentions, to grasp certain features of that manifold and relate them to one another and to things external to the manifold in valuable ways, the question about appreciation is a question about the kinds of cognitive capacities involved in achieving such a grasp. ‘Cognitive capacities’ here may involve perceptual or conceptual skills, motor skills of various kinds and affective capacities. But we also talk of appreciating an artefact as the kind of artefact that it is, where this requires not so much our receptivity to what a manifold has to offer us but something closer to an understanding of how, and how well, the artefact embodying such a manifold serves its intended purposes and how it does so in virtue of the ways in which it has been crafted by its makers. And a third question is whether a given artefact lends itself to the kinds of appreciation—in both of these senses—that might be thought to be distinctive of, or appropriate for, the things that we think of as artworks, in some sense of this term. I shall consider how the appreciation of animated cinema compares to that of ‘live-action’ cinema in each of these senses of ‘appreciation’. The movements and changes, and the things moving and changing, that are represented in animated cinema sometimes differ significantly from the movements and changes, and things moving and changing, represented in live-­action cinema, and from those movements, changes and moving and changing things encountered in our non-cinematic experience. Indeed, as we shall see later, one of the attractions of animated cinema is that it enables us to present to the receiver things and events unlike anything she could encounter in the actual world or in any cinematic images derived by simply capturing pro-filmic events. Whether it is a matter of large talking mice or aliens and superheroes with powers no human agent possesses, our engagement with animated movies is often motivated by the pleasures we derive from exploring such supra-­real worlds.

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But, in spite of this, it isn’t clear that the cognitive and other capacities upon which we draw in watching animated movies are significantly different from those that we employ in cinematic experience more generally. Indeed, our ability to effortlessly process the visual information furnished by even the more outlandish animated movies testifies to our mental versatility. It is plausible to see this as a further extension of the visual and cognitive capacities employed in making sense of pictures more generally, and live-action movies in particular. In considering our ability to understand what is being portrayed in live-action cinema, Gregory Currie20 argues that, in grasping the content of representational visual images, we utilise the same perceptual skills that enable us to recognise the things represented. In recognising a picture of a horse, we mobilise the same set of feature detectors that enable us to recognise, with considerable reliability, actual horses. He talks here of the ‘natural generativity’ of pictorial representation—depiction—contrasting this with verbal representation— description. While in the case of pictures, I can usually recognise an x-depiction when I can recognise an x, we can grasp the content of a description only if we know the relevant linguistic conventions. Extending this idea to animation, we can say that we recognise the nature, movements and mental states of an animated character by drawing upon the same sorts of discriminatory capacities that are engaged in watching live-action movies, where the latter in turn draw on the same capacities that we exercise in recognising and making sense of the kinds of actual things represented. Makers of animated movies depend upon our ability to extend these kinds of recognitional skills to animated representations of horses, mice and ducks. It is a salient fact about us—upon which the very possibility of such animated movies depends—that we do process the information in such images in this way, and, indeed, seem willing to invest almost anything represented as being capable of self-generated motion with a mental life. This is not to ignore the conventional dimension in much animated cinema. The representation of a horse in Japanese anime stands in a relation to the tradition of stylised representation in Japanese drawing, just as European and American animations typically mirror stylised modes of representations in Western visual art, but this is not usually an obstacle to recognition for those unaware of those traditions. Nor is it clear that there is a striking difference in subjective aspects of our experience of animated and live-action movies—this is the substance of Sesonske’s plausible claim (cited earlier) about our engagement with the worlds of animated and live-action cinema. In the second sense of appreciation distinguished earlier, the salient question is whether knowledge of the particular techniques employed in producing a given animated movie is necessary for appreciating that movie as the artefact that it is. One’s response to this question is likely to mirror one’s views about the appreciation, in this sense, of artefacts in general. For those who subscribe

 Currie, Image and Mind, 80–88.

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to broadly ‘empiricist’ views of appreciation,21 appreciating an artefact as the artefact that it is may involve some kind of understanding of how the artefact does what it does, but does not concern itself with how this functionality was conferred upon it by the actions of its makers. Empiricism as a view about the appreciation of artworks has been challenged by a number of theorists over the past 40 years.22 An influential resource in these debates has been the art historian Michael Baxandall.23 Baxandall prefaces his defence of an anti-empiricist account of the appreciation of pictorial artworks by considering what it would be to appreciate an artefact like the Forth Railway Bridge. To appreciate the latter, he argues, is to apprehend it as ‘a solution to a problem in a situation’. Full appreciation, in the sense that concerns us here, of an artefact or artwork requires that we also appreciate the achievements of the makers, what have been termed the ‘achievement properties’ of the work. Those who are moved by these kinds of general arguments for the relevance of achievement properties to appreciation in our second sense are likely to hold that the appreciation of an animated movie requires that we comprehend the various processes of animation that went into its creation. Indeed, it might be thought that animated movies provide a particularly striking example of—and argument for—the more general thesis concerning the appreciative relevance of achievement properties.24 As we saw in section “Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques”, not only is there a plethora of different animation techniques, but there can also be animated movies with perceptually very similar properties that are the result of radically different processes of animation. Where a single movie can draw upon a wide range of different animation techniques, it can be argued that we need to have recourse to information and evidence not given to us in an unmediated perceptual engagement with such an artefact in order to properly appreciate it as the artefact that it is. Furthermore, if we are ignorant of the workings of the cel technique, we would radically overestimate the amount of labour involved in producing even a fairly simple animated movie, such as a Betty Boop cartoon, since we would assume that each photographed frame had to be produced as an individual image in all of its detail. Similar issues arise in the case of films made using rotoscoping, as discussed in section “Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques”. Our third question was whether there are animated movies that are properly accorded the kinds of appreciation—in both senses—that we accord to those things that we take to be artworks (‘properly’ here in the sense that these movies are indeed correctly taken to be artworks rather than ‘properly’ in the sense 21  For example, Clive Bell, Art (London: Chatto and Windus,1913); Alfred Lessing, ‘What is wrong with a forgery?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23.4 (Fall 1965), 461–71. 22  For example, Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art (New York: St Martin’s Press,1989), chapter 2; Jerrold Levinson, ‘Evaluating music’, in Musical Worlds, ed. Philip Alperson (College Park PA: Penn State Press,1998), 93–107; David Davies, Art as Performance (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), chapters 2 & 3. 23  Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven CN: Yale University Press, 1985). 24  Davies, Art as Performance, 68.

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that it is productive to treat them as if they were artworks). Caution is necessary because the term ‘art’ is used in different senses in raising such questions. In a broad sense most familiar in the case of paintings, an artefact counts as art if the processes and materials entering into its making are the same as those that enter into the making of things that are unquestionably artworks. In this sense, what a child produces in nursery school when using crayons and paint to make marks on sheets of paper is art. However, we are less inclined to classify as ‘art’ even in this broad sense every sequence of sounds produced by the playing of anything reasonably classified as a musical instrument, or every photograph taken by a tourist on holiday. Fictional narratives generated by children might be called ‘literary art’, in this broad sense, but it sounds odd to say so save in very particular cases. In a narrower sense, however, we speak of ‘works of art’ with the intention of picking out artefacts that are accorded a distinctive role or value in a culture. Part of the confusion in debates about the artistic status of ‘Outsider Art’ or ‘tribal’ artefacts is a result of failing to distinguish these two senses in which something can rightly be described as art.25 The confusion is compounded when we consider a category like ‘mass art’ that comprises both things that are art in the narrower sense and things that are art in the broader sense. Noël Carroll26 rightly points to the significance of the intentions of the makers in delimiting the scope of the category of mass art, but on many conceptions of ‘high’ art this allows for some works of mass art to also qualify as high art (e.g. Orson Welles’s A Touch of Evil). Most animated cinema falls clearly under the label ‘mass art’—this is particularly the case with animated films made for television viewing such as The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, The Simpsons and South Park. But it is undeniable that, on any plausible account of what qualifies certain motion pictures as cinematic art in the narrower sense, there are works of animated cinematic art in this sense. Although, as we noted in section “Why Has So Little Philosophical Attention Been Paid to Animation?”, classical film theorists interested in defending the artistic pretensions and ‘seriousness’ of moving pictures paid scant attention to animation, there is no reason why the kinds of features to which they pointed in their defences of cinematic art cannot also be realised in animated cinema. Animated films, no less than live-action films, can embody in pictorial form thoughts about their subjects and thereby qualify as ‘expressive’ in Arnheim’s sense, for example. Animated films differ from films that use live actors and locations, in that the movements and changes perceived in the temporally unfolding visual manifold are the result of one or more of the kinds of animation processes described in section “Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques”. But many of those who work as animators certainly think of what they do as making artistic contributions to a film ­comparable to 25  See David Davies, ‘On the Very Idea of “Outsider Art”’, British Journal of Aesthetics 49.1 (Winter 2009), 25–41; Larry Shiner, ‘“Primitive Fakes”, “Tourist Art” and the Ideology of Authenticity’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52.2 (Spring 1994), 225–34. 26  Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 196.

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the contributions made by actors. Berys Gaut27 notes here the common practice of referring to animators as ‘actors with pencils’. If there are works of animated movie art in the narrow sense, this raises at least two questions: (1) who are the artists to whom such works should be credited, and (2) for what kinds of reasons might a director aspiring to produce a cinematic work meeting whatever we take to be the conditions for being cinematic art choose to produce an animated work. (1) Berys Gaut28 has argued that cinematic artworks are better thought of as multiply rather than singly authored, given the different kinds of contributions that directors, screenwriters, actors, score-writers and cinematographers, inter alia, make to the artistic qualities of a feature film. In arguing for this conclusion, Gaut rejects the idea that, because the director exercises ‘sufficient control’ over the creative contributions of others, she is the sole author of the films she directs. While he argues convincingly against this claim in the case of live-action cinema, it might be wondered whether there might be a stronger case, on such grounds, for the single authorship of animated movies. It might be said that the contributions of many different individuals to the construction of the cels used in the production of Disney animated movies, for example, are strictly supervised by the film’s directors, and are in any case acts of craft rather than of art. Possibly for these kinds of reasons, it was the practice in early animated cinema to give all authorial credit for animated movies to the person(s) who oversaw the processes of animation, and some have argued for genuine single authorship in more recent animated films.29 But contemporary descriptions within the industry of animators as ‘actors with pencils’ suggest that Gaut’s arguments against the ‘sufficient control’ strategy, if sound for live-action cinema, are also sound for animated cinema. (2) One reason for making an animated cinematic artwork was alluded to earlier. Animation can make visually real for an audience fictional worlds that depart in striking ways from the actual world, and can do so using either more traditional methods of animation or digital animation interpolated invisibly into live-action footage. A more interesting reason has been voiced by Richard Linklater in interviews about two of his films that use Bob Sabiston’s ‘interpolated rotoscoping’, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. Speaking of the former film, Linklater30 notes that it was first shot as a live-action film and then animated by the computer-­ enhanced interpolated rotoscoping process. Linklater makes clear that  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 138–39.  Berys Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration”, in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 149–72. 29  For example, Paul Wells, Animation: Genre and Authorship (London: Wallflower Press, 2002). 30  Richard Linklater, interview (2001) with Spence D. on A Waking Life, accessed 03 September 2017, http://ca.ign.com/articles/2001/10/20/interview-with-richard-linklater 27 28

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the film was not originally conceived as an animated film, and would in fact not have been completed and released had it not been for his encounter with Sabiston’s rotoscoping process. Given that the film deals in ‘unrealities’, Linklater states, he was unhappy with the ‘look’ of the live-action footage but found what he was seeking in the animated images produced by rotoscoping: ‘Up to that point the film was too blunt, too realistic. I think to make a realistic film about an unreality the film had to be a realistic unreality. You know, the animation is that. It’s realistic because it’s real voices, real gestures, real people and yet it’s unreal because it’s ultimately an animation of that. And yet it’s real world based, so it’s the perfect kind of place to watch this movie from’. As is clear from these remarks, the motivation in this case for producing an animated film was an aesthetic one, given the content of the film. In the case of Kaufman’s Anomalisa, shot in stop-motion animation using multiple 3D-printed manipulable figures produced for each of the principal characters, the motivation relates less to the look of the film and more to the metaphorical implications of the animation process itself. Kaufman,31 asked about his reasons for spending two years in producing a film that could otherwise have been shot in a matter of months, stated that ‘there’s something about this type of animation that communicates fragility and humanity and brokenness … because it’s all handmade, and because it’s an imperfect process’.

Digital Animation As noted earlier, increased philosophical attention to animation in the past decade or so has been prompted by a more general interest in the use of digital technology in the production of both still and moving images. As some recent commentators have noted, the use of digital technology can play a number of significantly different roles in the making of wholly or partly animated moving pictures. Some have also claimed that this helps to illuminate the philosophical significance of animation. One writer who has drawn such a connection between philosophical issues relating to animated cinema and philosophical issues posed by digital cinema is Philipp Schmerheim,32 in an article that discusses inter alia the Cavell-Sesonske dispute. Sesonske, as we have seen, points to animated cartoons—of an analogue nature—that fail to satisfy Cavell’s description of movies as ‘successions of automatic world projections’.33 Such films may be projections of a world that comes into existence at the time of 31  Charlie Kaufmann, interview about Anomalisa, Fresh Air, NPR, December 22, 2015, accessed 30 October 2017, http://www.npr.org/2015/12/22/460632027/frame-by-frame-filmmakersmake-the-mundane-miraculous-in-anomalisa 32  Philip Schmerheim, ‘Scepticism’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 413–19. 33  Cavell, The World Viewed, 72.

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screening, but they are not projections of aspects of the actual world captured by a camera. Sesonske’s claim is in part epistemological—we engage with the screened world in the same way whether it be a result of live-action capture or a result of traditional or stop-motion animation. But, as I suggested earlier, his larger point seems to be that nearly all screened worlds are constructed worlds: the world of Jules et Jim is no less constructed than the world of a Disney cartoon even if live-action capture of movement and change in pro-filmic events plays an essential part in the former but not in the latter. Schmerheim ignores this more general point and suggests that Sesonske’s arguments prefigure the challenge that is posed to Cavell by digital cinema: they illuminate what would be required of ‘a “digital version” of Cavell’s film ontology under the assumption that animated cartoons share basic features with forms of digital cinema, such as extensive use of animated elements, which in turn have a weaker indexical relation (or none whatsoever) with whatever it is we call reality’. ‘Indexicality’ here is a matter of one thing’s indicating something else in virtue of standing in the right kind of causal relation to it. Certain marks in the sand, for example, indicate the recent passing of a bear, and the rings visible when one fells a tree indicate the age of that tree. Similarly, the distribution of marks on the surface of an analogue photograph indicates certain aspects of pro-filmic reality at the time when it was taken. This is because of the ‘mechanical’ nature of the photographic process. It is in virtue of being mechanical recordings in this sense that photographic images are indexical. It is this fact about the making of a photographic image that leads Lev Manovich,34 for example, to describe traditional cinema, using analogue photography, as grounded in ‘deposits of reality’ and as ‘an attempt to make art out of a footprint’. Indexicality is central to a still image’s being photographic because it is a consequence of the trace-making process whereby photographs are generated. Some theorists have maintained that one loses indexicality, and, consequently, the photographic status of the image, when an image is generated digitally. The most influential proponent of such a view is William J.  Mitchell.35 Mitchell argues that the digital image is non-photographic because it is shorn of those features traditionally held to distinguish photography from painting. Whereas the traditional photographic process allows the photographer relatively little opportunity to change the resulting image, the digital image is ‘inherently mutable’: ‘The essential characteristic of digital information is that it can be manipulated easily and very rapidly by computer. It is simply a matter of substituting new digits for old’.36 Furthermore, because we are aware of this mutability, we cannot with any confidence draw conclusions about the nature of 34  Lev Manovich, ‘What is Digital Cinema?’, published online in 1995, accessed at http:// manovich.net on 1 November 2010. No pagination. 35  William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992). 36  Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 7.

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pro-filmic reality from features of the digital image. In looking at the latter, we have no way of determining which features of the image indicate aspects of the pro-filmic world and which reflect the intentional activity of the photographer. This calls into question the traditional way of marking the difference between (indexical) photographs and (non-indexical) paintings. Traditional photographs ‘were comfortably regarded as causally generated truthful reports about things in the real world. But the emergence of digital imaging has irrevocably subverted these certainties, forcing us to adopt a far more wary and more vigilant interpretive stance’.37 Thus, Mitchell maintains, ‘although a digital image may look just like a photograph when it is published in a newspaper, it actually differs as profoundly from a traditional photograph as does a photograph from a painting’.38 Manovich draws an even stronger conclusion. Where Mitchell claims that digital photography departs from analogue photography as much as the latter departs from painting, Manovich39 claims that the inherent mutability of the digital image ‘erases the difference between a photograph and a painting’. Should we agree with Mitchell and others about the epistemological and ontological implications of the move from (still and moving) analogue images to digital images? And to what extent does the debate about the latter point to philosophically distinctive features of animated moving images? These questions are best addressed in the context of a more general account of how digital technology can enter into the making of still and moving images. In his A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Berys Gaut distinguishes three ways in which this can happen.40 First, it may play a part in encoding the results of a trace-making process of ‘writing with light’. Most obviously, this occurs when pro-filmic events are captured with a digital camera. Such a camera may differ from a camera employing photochemical technology only in how it records the light rays stemming from the pro-filmic event. While the trace produced photochemically by a standard analogue camera is a negative, the trace produced by a digital camera is a bitmap in which ‘the integer...stored at each pixel... encodes information about the light emanating from the part of the object that the pixel represents’. Second, digital technology can enter into the generation of an image through ‘painting’, the alteration, by means of a software editing tool, of the information encoded by the pixels in a bitmap. Finally, an image can be directly generated by a computer through the execution of an algorithm, often by means of a computer-generated 3D model to which the algorithm is applied. Digital animation is the result of the use of digital technology to produce a moving image where the appearance of movement and change results from features of the image-making process other than the capture of pro-filmic  Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 225.  Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye, 4. 39  Manovich, ‘What is Digital Cinema?’. 40  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 16. 37 38

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movements and changes. Digitally animated cinema is then one kind of digital cinema, but digital processing does not by itself result in an animated image. For example, early Dogme films such as Thomas Winterburg’s Festen were shot with digital cameras, but are not examples of cinematic animation. Images resulting from the digital capture of pro-filmic movements and changes are no more animated in virtue of this fact than are images resulting from analogue capture of the same pro-filmic events. It is only when moving images result from digital processing falling into Gaut’s second two categories that we may wish to speak of the images as animated. As noted in the survey of animation techniques in section “Kinds of Animation: A Taxonomy of Techniques”, this may be a matter of generating the appearance of movement and change by using a software tool to modify the result of digital or analogue capture of live-­ action events, or it may be the result of generating movements and changes by purely computational means through running various kinds of programmes that either do computationally what was traditionally done manually or generate image content ‘from whole cloth’. Just as recourse to digital technology in the making of a moving picture does not in itself result in an animated film, so such recourse in the making of still or moving images does not, pace Mitchell, necessarily involve a loss of indexicality. Gaut argues41 that many digitally produced images preserve indexicality, because, in the case of these images, digital technology is used only in the capture of pro-filmic events or in forms of ‘painting’ that reproduce in a digital key the kinds of ‘intentional rendering’ of a photographic trace familiar from the post-capture processing of analogue images. While, as Mitchell stresses, we may not be able to tell by simply looking at a digital image, still or moving, the extent of the digital processing involved in its genesis, indexicality depends not upon our possessing such knowledge but only upon the actual process productive of the image. But, even if we grant this, we might wonder whether Mitchell’s point can be made with respect to digital animation and, in fact, to animation more generally? Is it not distinctive of animated moving images that they lack indexicality and as a result cannot be sources of information about the pro-filmic world? And does not the receiver’s awareness of this fact call into question Sesonske’s claims about the subjective similarities between our experiences of live-action and of animated cinema? I shall conclude by making two points that support Sesonske’s claims, and in so doing, count against attempts to draw significant philosophical consequences from reflections on the presence or lack of indexicality in certain kinds of cinema. First, as we noted earlier, some animation processes, such as pixilation, preserve indexicality with respect to persons and objects, even if this is not the case for the events into which those persons and objects are represented as entering. Second, if it be claimed that most animation processes do not preserve this kind of indexicality, and at best involve an indexical relation between the film and the things entering into the animation  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 48–9.

41

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process—for example, drawings and cels in the case of ‘traditional’ analogue animation—we can reiterate what I take to be Sesonske’s main point against Cavell: in the case of live-action non-documentary cinema, many, if not all, of the pro-filmic objects or events ‘indicated’ by the film are not what the film is about: Truffaut’s film is about Jules and Jim, and neither Jules nor Jim exists independently of the constructed world of the film. They can no more stand in an indexical relation to the projected images than can Mickey Mouse.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolph. 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baxandall, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? Vol 1. Trans. H. Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. BBC. 2017. Documentary on the Making of Loving Vincent. https://www.bbc.com/ news/av/41422698/loving-vincent-the-first-fully-painted-film. Accessed 28 Sep 2017. Bell, Clive. 1913. Art. London: Chatto and Windus. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 1997. Film Art: An Introduction. 5th ed. London: McGraw Hill. Carroll, Noël. 1988. Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1971. The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1979. The World Viewed: Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1989. An Ontology of Art. New York: St Martin’s Press. ———. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2009. On the Very Idea of ‘Outsider Art. British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (1): 25–41. Gaut, Berys. 1997. Film Authorship and Collaboration. In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 149–172. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufman, Charlie. 2015. Interview about Anomalisa Broadcast on December 22nd 2015 on the NPR Programme Fresh Air. http://www.npr.org/2015/12/22/460632027/ frame-by-frame-filmmakers-make-the-mundane-miraculous-in-anomalisa. Accessed 30 Oct 2017. Lessing, Alfred. 1965. What Is Wrong with a Forgery? The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23 (4): 461–471. Levinson. 1998. Evaluating Music. In Musical Worlds, ed. Philip Alperson, 93–107. College Park: Penn State Press. Linklater, Richard. 2001. Interview with Spence D. on A Waking Life. http://ca.ign. com/articles/2001/10/20/interview-with-richard-linklater. Accessed 3 Sep 2017. Livingston, Paisley. 2009. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Carl Plantinga. London/New York: Routledge. Manovich, Lev. 1995. What Is Digital Cinema? Published Online in 1995. Accessed at http://manovich.net on 1 Nov 2010. No pagination.

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Maynard, Patrick. 1997. The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmerheim, Philip. 2014. Scepticism. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland, 413–419. London/New York: Routledge. Scruton, Roger. 1983. Photography and Representation. In The Aesthetic Understanding: Essays in the Philosophy of Art and Culture. London/New York: Methuen. Sesonske, Alexander. 1974. Review of Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. The Georgia Review 28 (4): 561–570. Shiner, Larry. 1994. ‘Primitive Fakes,’ ‘Tourist Art,’ and the Ideology of Authenticity. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52 (2): 225–234. Sparshott, Francis. 1985. Basic Film Aesthetics. In Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and M. Cohen, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Talbot, William Henry Fox. 1844. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Wells, Paul. 2002. Animation: Genre and Authorship. London: Wallflower Press. ———. 2006. Fundamentals of Animation. Lausanne: AVA. Wikipedia. 2017. Animation. Accessed 15 Aug 2017.

CHAPTER 9

Sound in Film Paloma Atencia-Linares

Introduction When we think about films nowadays, what comes to mind are typically audio-­ visual works; works where both sounds and images are constitutive of the experience we have of films. Yet, for decades, sound was neglected from theoretical writings on film. Many texts and courses on the Philosophy of Film lack entries or sessions on sound and, with remarkable exceptions, for a long-time film theory was mainly focused on the image. This is arguably not very different among practitioners—as Randy Thom, director of sound design at Skywalker Sound, claims: “probably the biggest problem with sound in film is that writers and directors […] tend to think in visual terms”.1 Fortunately, things are changing fast and, at least on the theoretical side, discussion on sound in film has become much more prominent. Professionals and academics from a variety of disciplines such as Musicology, Cognitive Sciences, Cultural Studies and Film Theory are engaging with the multifarious aspects of film sound—a wide range of books, articles, doctoral thesis, journals, blogs and podcasts specialized in film sound have proliferated. Unfortunately, though, Philosophy—at least in the analytic tradition—has not followed this trend, and even when the Philosophy of Film has been a prolific field in the last twenty years, research on the philosophy of sound in film is, comparatively speaking, very much underdeveloped.

 Randy Thom, interview with Glenn Kiser and Michael Coleman, Dolby Institute Podcast Series, podcast audio, August 25, 2015. https://www.dolby.com/us/en/dolby-institute/podcasts.html 1

P. Atencia-Linares (*) University of Mexico, Mexico City, Mexico © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_9

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This entry is focused on the philosophy of film sound in the analytic tradition and its limitations; drawing from current literature in other fields, it aims to complement some philosophical discussions typically centered on the image with their aural counterparts. The first subsection provides an overview of early skeptical views on the contribution of sound to the artistic status of films; the second subsection critically questions the status of sound in contemporary philosophical conceptions of film and suggests a revision that takes seriously the idea of film as an audio-visual medium. The second section provides a proof of concept: it deals with a central topic in the philosophy of film—realism— showing how the discussion of sound may open new directions along three different dimensions: illusion, likeness and transparency.

The Place of Sound in the Concept(ion) of a Film Our contemporary idea of a prototypical film involves sounds as well as images. These elements are not only integrated and part and parcel of what constitutes a given token cinematic work, but they are also significant contributors to its artistic value. The films Whiplash (Chazelle 2014), Blue Velvet (Lynch 1986) or Apocalypse Now (Coppola 1979), for instance, would not be the cinematic works of art they are if they did not have sound. However, as prominent and artistically significant sound seems to be in our current idea of films, this has not been reflected in many theoretical conceptions of film which frequently do not take sound as a constitutive element of the category. In the first part of this section (“Sound and Film as Art: The Early Days”) we will see that some early theorists were reluctant to consider sound as an integral part of the medium for purported expressive and aesthetic reasons.2, I will present their arguments as three conceptual challenges, for which the most forceful response came from History: the development of sound films swept away these theorists’ claims. In the second part of this section (“The Conception of Film in Contemporary Philosophical Writings: The Absence of Sound”) we will see that, although contemporary philosophers do not deny the expressive power of sound in film, the conception of film that transpires from some of their writings is one where the auditory component is simply absent. The moving image is not only much more prominent than sound, but it often figures as the sole defining feature of what counts as a cinematic work. I will analyze contemporary philosophical conceptions of film and will claim that the emphasis on the visual in current definitions of film may have led philosophers to neglect sound in film from their research. I will question these views and sketch a proposal for an alternative methodology regarding the conception of film and the inclusion of sound.

2  Most of these critics of sound in film did not oppose to the use of music as an accompanying element of film. What they rejected was the incorporation of dialogue and, to some extent, naturalistic sound effects.

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Sound and Film as Art: The Early Days The first two decades following the invention of cinema were a dialectical battleground: at stake was the recognition of film as a legitimate art form rather than a mere scientific curiosity or popular entertainment. Silent film had undergone remarkable progress toward this end, giving champions of film-as-an-art arguments to believe they were winning the battle. In this context, the incorporation of sound was considered a setback to this cause—especially in the form of dialogue, and to some extent also sound effects. There were at least three challenges that the then new technology faced in order to achieve the status of art. While all these affected the visual as well as the auditory elements of film, it was ultimately sound which was considered more problematic. Let us examine these three challenges separately.  he Challenge Against Mimetic Sound T According to a tradition of thought, something cannot qualify as art if it is a mere (mechanical) reproduction of reality. The status of photography as an art was questioned on the grounds that it was conceived of essentially as an automatic mechanism that recorded the appearance of reality. Since cinema was fundamentally photographic in nature, its status as an art faced the same challenge than photography. The addition of sound made things worse, for sound was just considered as a mere recording of voices and sounds of the world. As Sergei Eisenstein and others put it, “[sound] not only hinder[s] the development and perfection of the cinema as an art but also threaten[s] to destroy all its present formal achievements”.3 Eisenstein, as well as other filmmakers and theorists of the silent era, argued that far from being a mere reproduction of reality, film—and particularly its photographic substratum—transformed reality in a systematic way. In their view, sound, be it in the form of dialogue or realistic sound effects, did not achieve this transformation. Eisenstein appealed to the idea of neutralization with respect to the photographic image.4 When objects are photographed, he claimed, they are turned into neutral blocks of material devoid of their ‘real’ meaning; when reassembled in the cinematic montage, they acquire different significance. Cinema, through montage, does not mimic reality, it transforms it. Hugo Münsterberg held a similar idea: “the work of art shows us the things and events perfectly complete in themselves, freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that is, in perfect isolation”5 and “the photoplay [by which he meant basically the silent film]

3  Sergei M.  Eisenstein, Vladimir I.  Pudovkin and Alexandrov, “A Statement” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 83. 4  Sergei M.  Eisenstein, “Beyond the form”, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Taylor Richard (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 82–92. 5  Hugo Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A psychological Study”, in Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002), 117.

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tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of the outer world”.6 Now, (synchronized) sound, these theorists feared, threatens this process of isolation or neutralization. Dialogue and realistic synchronized sound effects, they thought, bring back the original meaning and context to the photographed objects. This, they surmised, makes films become more naturalistic or realistic, which, in turn, hinders their aesthetic or artistic character. If film was going to be conceived of as an art form, then it would be better off without sound.7  edium Specificity Challenge: The Case of Sound M Following the prescriptions of modernism, a medium justifies its becoming a proper art form if there is a specific characteristic, or a range of characteristics— expressive, representational or formal—intrinsic to that medium that distinguishes it from other media or art forms. Moreover, if artists want to excel in their practice of a given art form, the doctrine of medium specificity recommends that they should exploit the specific effects, features or possibilities that stand out in the medium.8 In the case of composite art forms that combine more than one medium of expression—such as opera or theater—there should be a predominant medium that represents the essence of such art form. In opera, for instance, the predominant medium would be dramatic music; in theater, it would be speech. Now, for critics of sound in film such as Rudolph Arnheim, the predominant medium of film is indisputably the moving image. It is this feature that distinguishes it from other art forms. Sound, in turn— especially in the form of dialogue—is not specific to film and thereby hinders its artistic vocation and represents a threat to the authenticity of the image. For Arnheim, “it was precisely the absence of speech that made the silent film develop a style of its own”, and “the predominance of the word would lead to the theatre”.9 Münsterberg held a similar idea. For him “a photoplay cannot gain but only loose if its visual purity is destroyed”.10 As critical as both Münsterberg and Arnheim were with the addition of dialogue, they were more permissive with the incorporation of music, since they saw in it some instrumental value. However, they emphasized that music as well as sound effects were not and should not be considered central or specific to film. As Münsterberg  Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A psychological Study”, 129.  Early critics of sound in film generally thought that the addition of sound in the form of dialogue and sound effects was a temporary trend eventually doomed to fail. However, if sound was indeed there to stay, they believed, the only way in which it could make an aesthetic contribution would be if it was not fully synchronized with the image (See Pudovkin 1985; Eisenstein et al., 1985). 8  For a criticism of the medium specificity thesis, see (Carroll 2008, 35–52). For a qualified defense of it, see (Gaut 2010, 282–307). None of these mentions specifically the case of sound in film. 9  Rudolph Arnheim, “The New Laocoon”, in Film as Art (California: California University Press, 1957), 224. 10  Münsterberg, “The Photoplay: A psychological Study”, 145. 6 7

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claimed, “we must […] disregard the accompanying music or the imitative noises […] they are accessory, while the primary power must lie in the content of the pictures themselves”.11 S ound and the Threat to Expression A third impediment that some early theorists believed sound imposed on film’s path to become an art form was a purported limitation on its expressive resources. Here again, the main criticism was directed at sound in the form of dialogue, and its main champion was, again, Rudolph Arnheim. For him, “not only does speech limit the motion picture to an art of dramatic portraiture, it also interferes with the expression of the image”.12 Silent film, he believed, had managed to perfect the art of expressing a dramatic situation by means of the posture and facial expression of actors and, in so doing, film had developed a style of its own. But the talkies came to replace “the visually fruitful image of man in action with the sterile one of the man who talks”.13 Moreover, one important achievement Arnheim ascribes to silent film in contrast to, say, opera or theater, is that since it is not constrained by dialogue, film does not emphasize the human figure but is more concerned with human beings set off against their natural setting. This, he claims, was “destroyed by the talking film: it endows the actor with speech, and since only he can have it, all other things are pushed into the background”.14 Siegfried Krakauer and Béla Balazs also shared, to a certain extent, the suspicion that the addition of sound might be a threat to film’s expressive powers.15 Balázs, as well as Krakauer, maintained that human beings have learned, by our use of language, to approach the world mainly by abstraction and conceptualization and have thereby lost connection with the expressivity of our bodies and gestures. One of silent cinema’s great achievements, they thought, is that it brought back our ability to read bodies and facial expressions. This, in turn, favors universal communication. Adding dialogue to films would be tantamount to going back to an impoverished language-centered communication.16 Unlike Arnheim, however, Balázs and Krakauer recognized that sound—even dialogue—when used wisely, could eventually contribute to the artistic value of a film. For this, sound has to be used cinematically, which for them meant mainly subordinated to the image. Film, they recommend, should de-­emphasize language in favor of the material qualities of sound and the irrational (non-­ literal or not clearly semantic); film should discover noise and the “acoustic environment. The voice of objects, the intimate language of nature” (my italics).17  Ibid., 83.  Arnheim, “The New Laocoon”, 228. 13  Ibid., 229. 14  Ibid., 227. 15  Béla Balázs, Erica Carter and Rodney Livingstone, Béla Balázs: early film theory: Visible man and The spirit of film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 183. 16  Ibid., and Siegfried Krakauer, “Dialogue and Film,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Weis Elisabeth and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 17  Balázs, Béla Balázs: early film theory: Visible man and The spirit of film, 185. 11 12

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In sum, for many practitioners and theorists writing on the early decades of cinema, the moving image, rather than sound, was the predominant medium, the element that should be favored, the most expressive and the one which ultimately determines the conception of film as an art form. If sound, especially dialogue, could not be avoided, then it should be asynchronous, subordinated to the image and preferably non-literal or emphasizing the formal aspects of sound rather than its semantic content. History has swept away these three challenges. In hindsight, it seems clear that early critics’ fears and conception of film as an art were misguided. They confused a period-specific situation of cinema with the essence of film. Time and the developing and sophistication of the cinematic practices have shown that film is an art form not in spite of the inclusion of sound, but partly because of it. However, it is worth noticing that, even nowadays, many filmmakers who are mostly praised for their creative and artistic use of sound in film exploit it in a way that is partly reminiscent of the recommendation of early theorists. Critics praise filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovski for emphasizing the materiality of sounds and noise—“the splashing of water, the crunching of glass underfoot, the haunting sirens of locomotives, the squeal of metal wheels”,18 Jean-Luc Godard’s use of asynchronous sound and sounds that mismatch with the image—such as sounds of animals or ambient sound replacing human voices, thereby also de-emphasizing the voice semantic content; David Lynch’s expressive use of noise and seemingly irrational voices, or Jacques Tati’s relegation of dialogue in favor of ambient sounds. The Conception of Film in Contemporary Philosophical Writings: The Absence of Sound In the past twenty years, the Philosophy of Film has become a prolific field of research. Unlike early theorists, contemporary philosophers writing on film are not preoccupied with proving that film, let alone non-silent film, can be art. This is a given. The discussion has focused on many other aspects of cinema. Remarkably, sound remains neglected in most contemporary philosophical texts on film, at least in the analytic tradition. One possible explanation for this is that, still today, philosophers conceive of cinema as an essentially visual medium. They might not deny that sound is an important element of film or doubt its contribution to the artistic value of cinema, but the way they define or think of the medium ultimately determines the priorities on their research agenda. What evidence do we have that philosophers have a visually centered conception of cinema? If so, why is this the case? Are they right? And if they are not, why does it matter? I will try to answer these questions in what follows. Defining concepts is a philosophical task par excellence—philosophers aim at clarifying the nature of a given object of study and the category of being under 18  Peter Green, Andrei Tarkovski. The Winding Quest (London: The Macmillan Press, 1993), 103.

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which it falls under. The philosophy of film is no exception and, while not all philosophers devote much space to analyze in detail the nature of film, they do, in one way or another, lay bare the boundaries of what they take their research object to be. And what we find is that they systematically conceive of cinema as a fundamentally visual medium. Here are some representative cases taken from three influential monographs on the philosophy of film written in the last twenty years. From the very introduction of the book A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Berys Gaut makes it clear what he takes his object of study to be: cinema is the medium of the moving image (…) ‘Movies’ and ‘motion pictures’ are terms that capture the phenomenon: we are discussing pictures that move (my italics).19

Similarly, when describing his conception of the essence of cinema, Gregory Currie claims the following: [T]he cinema, by which name I denote the medium to which particular movies belong, is a visual medium (…). Movies often have other properties, accessible through senses other than sight (…). Auditory properties are the most obvious and widely used (…) but all these, including sound, are incidental accretions so far as cinema itself is concerned, because there can be, and in fact there are, works in the medium which eschew all sensory engagement except the visual (my italics).20

A third case in point is the definition or conceptual analysis that Noël Carroll provides of the notion of film or moving image, as he prefers to call it: x is a moving image if and only if (1) x is a detached display or a series thereof; (2) x belongs to the class of things from which the promotion of the impression of movement is technically possible; (3) performance tokens of x are generated by templates that are themselves tokens; (4) performance tokens of x are not artworks in their own right; and (5) x is two-dimensional. Notice that each of these five conditions is alleged to be necessary and to be conjointly sufficient.21

Unlike Gaut and Currie, Carroll does not explicitly mention that moving images are essentially visual, but sound—or the possibility thereof—is certainly not considered a necessary or essential condition. Clearly, this does not mean that these theorists completely disregard sound in film, nor do they deny that the prototypical instance of film involves a sub-

 Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1.  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind. Film Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3. 21  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 72. 19

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stantial use of sound.22 The kind of definitions that are at stake here are not of the prototypical film or moving image. The task of these type of analyses—especially those like Carroll’s—is, on the one hand, to provide necessary (and sometimes sufficient) conditions that, as a matter of logic, identify the elements without which a given object cannot qualify as moving image; on the other, to distinguish instances of works that fall under a certain category, for example, moving images, from others. In Carroll’s definition, for instance, being a detached display distinguishes things shown in films from things seen face to face. The possibility of movement distinguishes film from other detached displays such as paintings or photographs. The fact that films are performances generated by templates and the token generated are not works of art themselves differentiates them from instances of theater plays—where tokens are generated by interpretations and not templates and each performance of a play is indeed a potential work of art. And being two-dimensional tell films apart from, say, moving sculptures. The use of sound, even when pervasive, is not an element of differentiation between films and other art forms. Moreover—and more crucially for contemporary theorists—there are instances of film without sound, so the presence of sound cannot be an essential or necessary condition for a work to be a film—or so people like Currie claim. But is this really so? And, even if it is, how useful or recommendable are these definitions for understanding film as an object of study? Let us begin with the first question. The obvious way to support the claim that there are instances of films without sound is to point to the silent film era.23 Now, although traditional history of film has made a sharp distinction between silent and sound film, stressing the idea of there being a break between the two practices has been a blunt simplification. It is arguable that silent film was ever fully silent.24 Music and sometimes sound effects were a “crucial component not just of silent film exhibition but of the industry as a whole”.25 Before the 1920s and the era of synchronized sound, not only there was a robust practice of accompanying films with live music (which was frequently composed for the film),26 22  Carroll, Currie and Gaut do discuss certain issues related to sound in their works, but the main focus remains on the image. 23  For a parallel argument, see Altman’s “Historical Fallacy”. See Rick Altman, “Four and a Half Fallacies”, in Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 35–37. 24  For more insight on the issue of sound in silent film, see Rick Altman Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), xi; Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology”, in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and James Buhler and David Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System”, in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 25  Buhler and Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System”19. 26  In this sense, it would count strictly as film music under definitions such as Jeff Smith’s or Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore’s. See Jeff Smith, “Music”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 84–195; Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore, “Music and Motion Pictures”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodor Gracyk and Andrew Kania (New York: Routledge, 2011), 456–467.

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but there were various technologies that managed to combine moving images with (separately) recorded sound. The fact that the soundtrack was not attached to the same physical object as the image or that sound was an element that had to be either played separately from a recording or performed live, does not necessarily mean that it was not a constitutive element of films. Making this assumption would beg the question. It would exclude sound as a constitutive element of film presupposing an idea of film (a physical substrate or recording that combines sound and image) that in itself excludes an in principle legitimate way in which sound could be an intrinsic part of film.27 It could be argued that it is an exaggeration to claim that accompanying sound (in cases where, say, musical scores were improvised or not made for the film) was an intrinsic part of the cinematic works. Also, even if it were, conceptually, one can think of purely silent films, and that would be a sufficient counterexample for the claim that sound is a necessary element of film. This is a fair claim. However, two things are worth considering.28 Firstly, it is conceivable also to think about a film without images—or at least representational images; for one thing, as Altman reminds us “[d]uring many periods when cinema was heavily marked by its relation to the music industry, music accompanied by a blank screen has regularly been recognized as cinema: the long overtures to the early Vitaphone sound-ondisk features, the intro of a film’s theme song before the images or its continuation after the post-credits, and the use of a totally black screen in recent music videos”.29 For another, there are films, such as Derek Jarman’s Blue where the only thing we see is a static shot of a saturated blue color filling the screen—no representational image—and, in the background we hear sounds, voice-over and music. Disqualifying this work as a film would certainly bead hoc. Now, even when we can conceive of films without (representational) images, authors never consider the possibility of not counting images as a necessary or essential component of films. Yet, they take a different attitude with respect to sound. Secondly, as Carroll mentions, there are also films without movement. Jarman’s Blue is again an example, but there are others such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée or Michael Snow’s One Second in Montreal. This, however, does not mean that we should disqualify movement—or the possibility thereof—as an essential element of film. Why is this? Well, according to Carroll, this is because movement “is a permanent possibility in cinema; (…) static films belong to the class of things where the possibility of movement is always technically available in such a way that stasis is a stylistic variable in films in a way that it cannot be 27  Notice that this is, arguably, what Carroll does when he claims that conditions 3 and 4 of his definition are necessary for the definition of film: “(3) performance tokens of x are generated by templates that are themselves tokens; [and] (4) performance tokens of x are not artworks in their own right”. If sound of “silent” films was counted as a constitutive element of films, as I have argued, then there would be a part of certain films whose performance would not be generated by a template but by an interpretation and whose performance tokens could eventually be considered artworks in their own right. 28  For a similar argument, see Altman’s “Ontological Fallacy”. Altman, “Four and a Half Fallacies”, 37–39. 29  Ibid., 38.

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with respect to still pictures”.30 Now, we could make a parallel argument in the case of sound. Synchronized sound recorded in the same physical substrate as the image only became a possibility in the 1920s, but live or recorded, but not synchronized, music and sound effects were a technical possibility from the beginning. Hence, if they were not used, it was perhaps out of a stylistic choice or general preference. It could be claimed that this statement is trivial, for accompanying music or sound conceived in such a way is a possibility for basically all art forms—a painting or a sculpture can always be accompanied by music—and this in no relevant sense means that we should therefore count sound as an essential or constitutive element of painting or sculpture. But this is not the case. The claim is not trivial because, unlike painting or sculpture, film had an aspiration to be an audio-visual media from the beginning. The first attempts to synchronize sound with image are as old as cinema itself31 and, even as early as the 1910s “Cameraphone, Chronophone, Cinephone and dozens of other competing systems were not only invented (…), they were installed in hundreds of theaters across Europe and from coast to coast in the United States”.32 In fact, one of the founding fathers of cinema, Thomas Alva Edison, declared as early as in 1894 the following: “the idea occurred to me that it was possible to devise an instrument which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, and that by a combination of the two all motion and sound could be recorded and reproduced simultaneously”.33 One could argue, then, that sound has always been, not only in one way or another a possibility for cinema, but also an element that was part of the idea of film since the beginning—the fact that the most appropriate, technically sophisticated and financially convenient technology only developed in the late 1920s is just a historical contingency. Now even if these arguments were not convincing, and theorists were right that, as a matter of logic, sound, unlike (the moving) image, is not a necessary element for some work to qualify as a film, one could ask the following question: to what extent does this conception of film help us to understand and appreciate actual films or current film practices? Certainly, none of the definitions provided are meant to help us appreciate films and, strictly speaking, they do not need to. Conceptual analyses and definitions can be pursued for a variety of purposes and one could argue that the only thing theorists are trying to do is delimit the boundaries of their object or study. But even if their definitions were right, they might have had pernicious consequences. Concepts are central for philosophers and, once the object of study—film, in this case—is defined fundamentally in visual terms, explicitly or implicitly, this sets the theoretical agenda and constrains it to the investigation of what is taken to be the  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 60–62.  See, for instance, the early experiment by William Dickson to synchronize sound in a short film for Edison’s Kinetophone project. This experiment dates from 1894–1895. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6b0wpBTR1s 32  Altman, “Four and a Half Fallacies”, 36. 33  Cited in Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 78. 30 31

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essential or necessary, which are issues related with the visual image. This, one could argue, has contributed to halt the progress of the research on sound in film within the domain of philosophy. Perhaps a better way to develop a philosophical conception of film could be to rely on the prototype theory—a theory of concepts whereby categorization is not about finding the essential elements or necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall under a concept. Rather, it relies on a sort of comparison between the constituents that instances of that concept typically have in common. So, for example, a prototype theory of film would count sound as well as the moving image as constituents of the class of things called film because both these elements are typical or recurrent in the prototypical film as we know it, even when there might be films which lack sound or movement. In the spirit of a prototype theory is the notion of Categories of Art as developed by Kendall Walton.34 Very roughly, categories of art are ways in which we classify representational works in terms of their standard, variable and contrastandard properties—standard properties are those that are typically present in works that fall into that category; variable properties are those that may or may not be present, but they are not particularly characteristic of the category and thereby do not typically play a role in categorization. Finally, contrastandard properties are those that are rarely found in instances of that class and tend to disqualify works as part of such category. The idea is that this way of classifying works guide our appreciation, since categories stand as contrast classes that help us compare works in that category relative to their properties. This is not the place to develop an alternative theory or philosophical conception of film along this line, but if such a line would be pursued, the idea would be to count sound as a standard property of films, along with others such as the presence of moving images or a narrative, and so on, that are typically present in films. Following the theory then, finding an instance of a work without sound—being it performed live or recorded and synchronized—would be a rarity and would therefore stand out in terms of appreciation: appreciators would then need to ask themselves what explains the phenomenon, whether it is a historical or technological limitation imposed by the time when the film was produced, a stylistic choice or a genre convention. This is, of course, a very schematic suggestion of how alternative conceptions of film could be developed. But the main point is that, if philosophical conceptions of film take seriously that film is an audio-visual medium, and that far from being an incidental accretion, sound is a standard property of film as a class, then we might expect more philosophical discussions on film sound.

 Kendall L. Walton, “Categories of art”, in Philosophical Review 79, 3, (1970): 334–367.

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Realism in Film Sound Let us now consider a topic in the philosophy of film where the discussion of sound, so far neglected, could play a significant role. The debate on realism in film has focused almost exclusively on the moving image—and specifically, on its photographic nature.35 Once again, the auditory dimension is, for the most part, ignored. This is remarkable because sound is frequently cited as an element that substantially contributes to generate the impression of reality that film has been said to confer. Moreover, sound in film raises similar, but, nevertheless, specific, concerns to those that have been noticed with respect to the (moving) image. There are many ways in which it is possible to talk about realism in film,36 but current discussions in analytic philosophy of film concentrate mainly on three specific approaches to the topic, and I will restrict my discussion to these37: (1) realism as the generation of illusions; (2) realism as perceptual likeness as opposed to conventionalism; and (3) realism as (photographic) transparency. All these three topics have been usually discussed with respect to the visual dimension of film, but there are relevant parallels in its auditory counterpart.38 Moreover, the case of sound can provide new insights into both current philosophical views and accounts coming from film theory and other disciplines. Film theorists and other scholars, for instance, frequently mention that sound generates various sorts of illusions and, unlike in many of the examples of the visual realm, where some philosophers have argued against there being any actual illusions, in the case of sound, it is indeed correct to talk about illusory experiences—or so I will suggest. The philosophical idea of perceptual realism, in turn, sheds light, among other things, onto the notion of fidelity—a notion that is frequently discussed in film theory with respect to sound in film—and provides an argument against views such as Chion’s who holds that fidelity is, to some extent, a matter of convention. Finally, although the notion of transparency has been developed mostly in relation to the photographic image, sound recordings can also be said to be transparent. Moreover, the case for transparency in the latter might be more appealing than in the former.

35  This does not mean that the issue of sound is completely absent—see, for example, Andrew Kania, “Realism”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 237–47. 36  Berys Gaut mentions up to seven distinct dimensions of realism. See Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 97. I restrict to these three because they are the most recurrent discussions. 37  I restrict my discussion to these three approaches not because others are less interesting or worth developing, but for the sake of focus. This chapter concentrates mainly on the analytic philosophy of film, and it aims to complement current visual-centric discussions with the aural counterparts; for this reason, I discuss realism in sound following the structure of current literature in the field. 38  The case of transparency is an exception. Although most of the discussion has focused on photographic images, the transparency of sound recordings has indeed been developed.

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Cognitive Versus Perceptual Illusion A recurrent effect that has been attributed to the use of sound in film is the generation of a variety of illusions. David Bordwell, for instance, claims that “offscreen sound can create the illusion of a bigger space than we actually see”.39 With recent multichannel technologies, the audience can hear sounds coming from the left and right sides, behind and even above them.40 Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis reiterate this claim when they affirm that “sound is a powerful tool for helping filmmakers create the illusion that the world of the story extends beyond the boundaries of the frame”.41 We can call this, the illusion of extended space. According to Chion, another effect of the audio-­visual illusion is that sound “raises the possibility of sleight-of- hand effects: sometimes it succeeds in making us see in the image [something] that isn’t even there”.42 Let us call this the illusion of addition. Other illusory experiences attributed to sound in film are the illusion of unity—that is, sounds and images come from different channels and location and yet are, nevertheless, perceived as coming from the same source. This, together with the power for engagement that film music, has also been recurrently claimed to promote, contributes to the audience’s sense of absorption in the world of the story which is frequently conceptualized in terms of suspension of disbelief. As Annabel Cohen puts it, “through music […] film spectators become part of the crowd watching the game, forgetting the theatre seat and the screen”.43 This is also an idea echoed by Claudia Gorbman who claims that “music removes barriers to belief; it bonds spectator to spectacle, it envelops spectator and spectacle in a harmonious space”.44 Now, contemporary philosophers of film have been very critical with the idea that the experience of film is in any sense illusionistic. Gregory Currie, for instance, has claimed that “film has considerable powers to engage and to persuade, but these powers are not accounted for in terms of illusion” (my italics).45 Currie distinguishes between two different kinds of illusion—cognitive and perceptual illusion—and denies that the experience of watching films engenders any of these. 39  David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “Fundamental Aesthetics in Sound in Film”, in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed., Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 193. 40  At the time this chapter is written, the most recent technology is Dolby® Pro Logic® IIz, which introduces two front height channels, so as, for example, re-create the experience of rain falling one’s roof. 41  Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 209. 42  Michael Chion, Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5 and 12. 43  Annabel Cohen, “Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology”, in Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flynn and David Neumeyer (New England: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 361. 44  Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 55. 45  Currie, Image and Mind, 19.

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Applied to the case of film, ascribing cognitive illusions to the audience would be tantamount to saying either that (1) the audience come to believe that the events shown in the film are present to them in the theater or that they are somehow present in these events while they happen on the set or (2) that when they see fictional things on the screen they believe they are really present to these things, or these things to them.46 The claims made by Cohen and Gorbman, mentioned above, that give voice to the idea of suspension of disbelief, could—if taken literally—be expressions of this type of illusion.47 But, strictly speaking, it does not seem to be the case that sound or music really makes us forget the theater seat and the screen or removes barriers to belief regarding the differentiation of the space occupied by the audience in the theater and the space of the story (be it fictional or non-fictional). As Currie mentions, this would be at odds with the behavior displayed by normal audience at the theater. If music really had the power to make us forget our current location and believe just for a moment that “we are part of the crowd watching the game”— as Cohen seems to suggest if we take her literally—one could expect, for instance, that when watching Rudo y Cursi (Cuarón, 2008), some member of the audience, believing that she is really in the presence of Gael García Bernal playing soccer, would feel compelled to approach him and ask him for an autograph. But this is certainly an unusual behavior that we rarely—if ever—see happening on a film theater. Moreover, as various philosophers have claimed, one just has to reflect on cases when we are watching a horror film in which someone is about to be killed by a machete-wielding mass murderer. If, by the effect of music or other formal filmic device, we really came to believe, even for a moment, that we are in the same space as the victim, we would either call the police, run or help the victim. But this is, again, something that hardly ever happens.48 The intuition behind the idea of suspension of disbelief and Cohen’s and Gorbman’s quotations are better understood by an appeal to the notion of transportation—49 a non-illusory experience of being carried away by a story due to induced empathy for the characters and the audience’s imaginings regarding the story.50 Music, as well as sound more generally, can certainly play  Kania, “Realism”, 238.  A charitable interpretation could be that Cohen and Gorbman’s phrases are merely figures of speech or exaggerations of the phenomenon, and one should take them with a grain of salt. However, it is, nevertheless, worth clarifying the phenomena. 48  Currie, Image and Mind, 24; Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe (Harvard University Press, 1990), ch.5; Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), ch.2. In addition to the argument from behavior, there are other arguments theorists put forward against the idea of suspension of disbelief or cognitive illusion induced by film. For the sake of economy, I restrict the counterexamples to the argument from behavior. 49  Moreover, at least in the case of Cohen, it is plausible to think this idea is closer to what she is proposing. 50  See Richard J. Gerrig, Experiencing narrative worlds: on the psychological activities of reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, “In the mind’s eye: Transportation-imagery model of narrative persuasion”, in Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations, eds. Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange and Timothy Brock (New York: Psychology 46 47

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a role in promoting this experience of deep engagement in the narrative by affecting our emotional reactions.51 Consistent with this view put forward by cognitive psychologists, philosophers have also suggested that a better way to explain this phenomenon is by appealing to the fact that the audience imagine rather than believe the events presented in the films.52 Alternatively—or complementing the idea of transportation—the phenomenon of deep engagement with the events presented in the film can be explained in terms of allocation of attention.53 Attention allows to deal with the brain’s restricted capacities, for example, to process a multiplicity of stimuli. It is frequently mentioned in the literature that one of the powers and functions of sound in film is to attract and guide the attention of the audience to different elements of the film.54 So, it is plausible to claim that sound, together with other formal and narrative devices put at play in the production and projection of a film, capture most of our attentional resources and direct them toward processing the events presented in the story at the expense of the thoughts about the actual situation of the audience in the theater. This does not mean, however, that we forget that we are in the theater or that we come to believe that the events depicted in the film are part of our current reality. Selectivity of attention by no means involves or entails cognitive illusions or suspension of current beliefs. It just means that our attentional resources are focused on the story and stimuli coming from the film and thereby diverted from the current state of the audience.55 Now, few theorists endorse the idea of suspension of disbelief when taken literally as the generation of cognitive illusions. But a more plausible view, and one that is reasonable to ascribe to most of the authors quoted above, is that sound generates perceptual illusions. Following Currie, a perceptual illusion occurs when you cannot help but perceive certain phenomenon as being in a certain way even when you believe that is not the case and that your experience Press, 2013),315–341; Tom Van Laer, Ko De Ruyter, Luca M. Visconti and Martin Wetzels, “The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and Consequences of Consumers’ Narrative Transportation”, Journal of Consumer Research 40, no. 5, (2014): 797–817. 51  See Lars Kuchinke, Hermann Kappelhoff, and Stefan Koelsch, “Emotion and music in narrative films: A neuroscientific perspective”, in The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J. Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 118–138; Annabel J. Cohen, “Music as a Source of Emotion in Film”, in Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Juslin, Patrik and John Sloboda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 879–908. 52  See Walton, Mimesis as Make Believe and Currie, Image and Mind. 53  Atencia-Linares, Paloma and Miguel Ángel Sebastián, “Narrative Immersion as an Attentional Phenomenon” (manuscript); See also Liao, Shen-yi, “Immersion is attention” (manuscript). 54  See, for example, Münsterberg, The Photoplay, 79–88; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art. An Introduction (New York: McGraw Hill, 2013), 268–269. 55  This is consistent with an idea that Cohen herself suggests, namely that the increased activation of mental resources involved in processing the musical element of film “heightens our sense of diegetic film world”. In Cohen, “Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology”, 366.

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is misleading.56 The Müller-Lyre example is a case in point: you are presented with two lines of equal length, but you perceive one as being longer than the other due to the fact that the arrowheads at their endpoints point to different directions. You may know that the lines are indeed equal—so you do not hold a false belief—but your belief does not penetrate or change your perception. Currie denies that watching films involves any kind of perceptual illusion either.57 However, arguably sound in film provides many cases of straightforward perceptual illusions. Take, for instance, the following case mentioned by Michael Chion whereby sound affects the way we see things presented in film: We find an eloquent example in the work of sound designer Ben Burtt on the Star Wars saga. Burtt had devised, as a sound effect for an automatic door opening (think of the hexagonal or diamond-shaped automatic doors of sci-fi films), a dynamic and convincing pneumatic “shhh” sound. So convincing, in fact, that, in making The Empire Strikes Back, when director Irving Kershner needed a door-­ closing effect he sometimes simply took a static shot of the closed door and followed it with a shot of the door open. As a result of sound editing, with Ben Burtt’s “psssht,” spectators who have nothing before their eyes besides a straight cut nevertheless think they see the door slide open.58

This, it seems to me, is a clear case where, even if we are told that the door does not really move, unless we watch the film in slow motion—with the ensuing sound distortion—which is not the normal condition of film viewing, we would still have the perceptual impression that there is movement where there is none. This, in other words, is a perceptual illusion induced by sound effects. But this is not the only case where sound in film engenders perceptual illusions. Sound effects, in most cases, are manufactured by Foley artists or synthesized in post-production rather than recorded in the pro-filmic scene. Moreover, the soundtrack is not only produced separately from the image, but the reproduction of image and sound occurs through different channels. The sounds’ effects and voices we hear on film do not come from the objects and events we see on screen, but from various speakers located around the theater. And yet, given some conditions, for example, that the sounds are properly synchronized and that they are congruent with the image,59 we cannot help but hear the sounds as coming from, or being emitted by, the objects, people and scenes we

 Currie, Image and Mind, 28–9.  In particular, Currie discusses the case of the purported illusion of movement and claims that this is not an illusion—images, for him, really move. (Currie 1995, 34–47). However, he seems to reject perceptual illusions generated by film in general. See (Currie 1995, 28). 58  Chion, Audio-Vision, 12. 59  Annabel J. Cohen, Kelti MacMillan, and Robert Drew, “The role of music, sound effects and speech on absorption in a film: The congruence-associationist model of media cognition” Canadian Acoustics, 34, 3 (2006): 40–41. 56 57

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see onscreen. This, we can call, the illusion of unity and is an instance of the very well-studied illusory phenomenon of the ventriloquist effect.60 These are two clear examples of perceptual illusions where sound affects what we see in the image and how we see it. Other cases mentioned by film theorists such as the purported illusion of extended space, where offscreen sound is perceived as an extension of the space of the story, might be more controversial, for it does not create the appearance that we perceive something that is not there or transforms our visual perception. One could claim that if we hear the sound of trees coming from the rear speakers, one is literally hearing this sound; we are not associating it to any object located in the image—so there is no illusion of unity and, one could argue, no illusion at all. However, one reason why this phenomenon can indeed be called illusory is because viewers do not hear offscreen sounds as external to the film—if we hear, say, a door knocking on the right-hand side of the screen, we typically do not think that there is someone knocking a door in the adjacent room. In a way, we cannot help but associate this sound to the space of the image, a space that we do not see but we, nevertheless, assume or imagine is there. In this sense, the offscreen extended space can also be understood as a perceptual illusion. These are only a few examples where sound may indeed show that, contrary to what philosophers like Currie have claimed, film does, in certain circumstances, generate perceptual illusions. Perceptual Realism Versus Convention Another dimension in which realism in film has been discussed is in terms of likeness. In a way, it is very intuitive to see why sound—in any of its forms: dialogue, music or sound effects—can contribute to convey a more life-like cinematic experience: the experience of the real world is one in which sound is omnipresent; things in the world like doors, explosions, falls or trains make noise. However, it also takes no more than a minute to realize that the idea of likeness is not entirely unproblematic: likeness, when applied to sound in film, cannot mean that sounds are ‘true to’ the world since, as we know, many sound effects are not recordings of the individuals we see on the screen but of entirely different things. For example, the flapping of a bird’s wings that we hear in some films is not typically produced by the actual bird flapping its wings, but by, say, some plastic gloves shaking.61 To make sense of the idea of likeness, given this phenomenon, film theorists appeal to the notion of fidelity:

60  Bjoern Bonath et al., “Neural Basis of the Ventriloquist Illusion”, Current Biology Volume 17, Issue 19, (2007), 1697–1703; Gregg. H. Recanzone, “Interactions of Auditory and Visual Stimuli in Space and Time” in Hearing Research, 258, 1–2, (2009): 89–99. 61  Frantzolas, Tasos “Everything you hear on film is a lie”, TED video, 16:33, filmed February 2016, posted October 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/tasos_frantzolas_everything_you_hear_ on_film_is_a_lie?language=en

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From the filmmaker’s standpoint, fidelity has nothing to do with what originally made the sound in production […] We do not know what light sabers really sound like, but we accept the whang they make in Return of the Jedi as plausible. If the viewer takes the sound to be coming from its source in the diegetic world of the film, then it is faithful, regardless of its actual source in production. Fidelity is thus purely a matter of expectations. (My italics).62

Realism, understood as fidelity, is not a question of indexicality—whether the sound is really a recording of the actual source or not—but a matter of fitness with the image, that is, whether the sound fits with the expectations of the audience. Expectations, following Bordwell, are sometimes generated by the perceived likeness of the sound heard in the film with what the sound that the audience associate with a given source, given their experience—for instance, if the sound of say a dog depicted on screen resembles in some way the sound of dogs that the audience has experienced—or simply by how convincing the sounds become when paired with an image, regardless of the audience’s previous experience or lack thereof. Now, for theorists such as Chion, fidelity is a “tricky term”,63 and the perceived realism is, to a great extent, a matter of convention: In order to assess the truth of a sound, we refer much more to codes established by cinema itself, by television, and narrative-representational arts in general, than to our hypothetical lived experience […] The codes of theater, television, and cinema have created very strong conventions, determined by a concern for the rendering more than for literal truth. We are all thoroughly familiar with these conventions, and they easily override our own experience and substitute for it, becoming our reference for reality itself […] film as a recording art has developed specific codes of realism that are related to its own technical nature.64

Following this view, fidelity or perceived realism has little to do with likeness and much more to do with codes and conventions with which we have become familiar throughout our experience with film and representational arts more generally. If we perceive these conventions as realistic, it is due to our familiarity with them. Now, some philosophers have resisted the characterization of the idea of this dimension of realism in conventional terms. There might be sounds or images that we may have indeed learned to associate to certain ideas and, to that extent, they can be taken to be conventional or codified—for example, the sound of a bell tolling with the idea of death. However, this is not the predominant case. When speaking about realism as likeness with respect to the image, philosophers have claimed that pictures are representational systems different from, say, language, inasmuch as they depend on our natural perceptual capaci Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art. An Introduction, 283.  Chion, Audio-Vision, 98. 64  Ibid., 107–8. 62 63

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ties, so that in order to understand them, we do not have to learn specific rules or codes, we just deploy our natural ability for perceptually recognizing objects.65 Applied to the case of sound in film, this notion can help to understand the notion of fidelity. The idea would be that sound in film is realistic, faithful or life-like not because it is “true to” its source, but because it triggers the same perceptual recognitional capacities that are triggered when we hear sounds in the real world.66 For example, when I hear the sound of a telephone ringing in real life, I use the same perceptual auditory capacities that I use to recognize the sound of a telephone in a film. These capacities allow certain plasticity or levels of tolerance. So, in the same way as we can recognize a woman in a portrait by Picasso, even when the shape does not entirely resemble a real woman, we can also recognize the sound of bones breaking when we hear the sound of a celery being cracked. This is not because we have learned to associate the sound of cracking a celery with the sound of breaking bones; this is not a convention; we need not have experienced this conjunction of sound and image before in any other film in order to experience the sound of the celery cracking as faithful or perceptually realistic. If we experience the sound as perceptually realistic, according to this view, it is because there are some acoustic features that the sound of bones breaking and the cracking celery share that trigger the same perceptual recognitional capacities. In this respect, arguably, our auditory system is even more flexible than our visual system for, as Chion points out, “the figurative value of a sound […] is usually quite nonspecific”,67 many sources produce sounds that, to the human average ear sound very much alike and “we rarely recognize a unique source exclusively on the basis of sound we hear out of context”.68 Also, and importantly, understanding fidelity in terms of perceptual capacities for sound recognition does not mean that we need to have prior auditory experience of the sounds that we hear in film. Just as I can recognize an echidna by seeing first a picture of an echidna,69 I can get an idea of how a shotgun sounds by listening to a given film—even when the sound we hear is not produced by an actual shotgun. Of course, sounds can be misleading and fail to match the real sound, like hearing synthesized “boings” when in a comic film, characters jump on a mattress. But the advocate of fidelity understood in terms of perceptual realism can claim that our auditory system functions in a way that, given certain conditions, sounds are perceived as fitting certain visual 65  See Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49–74; Currie, Image and Mind, 79–90; Dominic Lopes, Understanding Pictures (Oxford University Press, 1996). Currie does mention that this idea can be applied to the case of sound in film, but he does not develop it further. Currie, Image and Mind, 88). 66  For a more extensive application of this idea to the case of sound in film, see Birger Langkjær, “Making fictions sound real. On film sound, perceptual realism and genre”, MedieKultur 48, (2010): 5–17. 67  Chion, Audio-Vision, 23. 68  Ibid., 26. 69  For an argument in the case of images, see Currie, Image and Mind, 86–87.

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stimuli—and this is the case in film as well as in real life. For instance, when information from different sensory modalities—for example, auditory and visual—is synchronized in time, it tends to be perceived as unified. Moreover, “binding these two stimuli together is done naturally and effortlessly”.70 Synchronicity may not always be enough for perceiving a sound as fitting a given source in the sense required by the notion of fidelity. However, it is also possible to appeal to the idea of congruency. When sounds are perceived as congruent in structure with a given visual stimuli—where congruency can be interpreted in a variety of dimensions such as, say, rhythm, tempo or intensity of movement—they are usually associated in meaningful ways. For example, a pattern of music—or sound effect—fluctuating at a given tempo and pitch and a ball bouncing at a given height and speed can be perceived as congruent in pattern and, in turn, be experienced as faithful to the visual stimuli.71 Perceived congruency between visual and auditory information is a natural phenomenon of our perceptual system, not an ability that we learn by repetition, and it may provide an explanation as for why certain sound effects such as the whangs of the light sabers are perceived as fitting, or faithful to, the image. It is certainly true that filmmakers have adopted certain techniques throughout film’s history that have become conventional or standard due to the effectiveness in being perceived as realistic by the audience. But it is plausible to claim, in line with the perceptual-recognitional model, that they are perceived as realistic not so much because they are conventions with which the audience has become familiar. Rather, they have become conventional or standardized in the film practice because they “exploit and accommodate the cognitive processes people use to perceive the physical world”.72 Transparency A third dimension along which realism in film has been discussed concerns the photographic nature that underlies most films (although clearly not all). Inasmuch as sound recordings are also mechanical registers and bear a similar realistic phenomenology, claims regarding the photographic realism can be applied—with interesting qualifications—to the case of sound in film.73  Recanzone, “Interactions of Auditory and Visual Stimuli in Space and Time”.  See Cohen, “Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology”. The purpose of Cohen’s experiment with the bouncing ball is to show that sound—or music in her case—affect the (emotional) meaning or interpretation of images they accompany. However, the CongruenceAssociationist model she provides as an explanation for this phenomenon, can arguably also be applied to the case of fidelity. 72  Todd Berliner and Dale J.  Cohen, “The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System”, “Journal of Film and Video 63, no. 1 (2011): 44–63. Berliner and Cohen take this approach to explain classic editing devices for continuity in film. 73   These parallelisms—specifically regarding the claim of transparency—have indeed been explored to a certain extent in the literature. However, given that these discussions are scattered and not always in texts concerning film, it is worth compiling in this entry the arguments for transparency of sound recordings that can be applicable to film. 70 71

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Photographic realism has sometimes been understood in terms of transparency. The claim that photographs are transparent amounts to saying that, when you see a photograph of your  grandmother, you literally—although indirectly—see her.74 This does not mean that photographs are transparent in the sense that we do not see the photographic surface at all, or in the sense that we are under the illusion of seeing the object face to face. The point is, rather, that seeing things in photographs belong to the same natural kind as seeing objects in mirrors, through telescopes, microscopes or other prosthetic devices. In this sense, one could argue, sound recordings are also transparent, and the most compelling claim for the case of film are, probably, sound recording of voices.75 The idea would then be that, when we hear, say, an actress’ voice in the cinema, we literally hear her voice. Now, the objections raised against photographic transparency may also apply to the case of sound recordings. Here are some of them.76 (A) Hearing recordings, one could claim, unlike hearing someone speaking directly, fail to covary with respect to changes and movements in the egocentric location of the source of the sound. Hence, hearing people’s voices in recordings cannot literally be a case of hearing,77 (B) vision and audition enable us to locate ourselves in space with respect to the things we see or hear, but this is not the case with photographs or sound recordings78 and (C) the fact that a reproduction or representation is mechanical and preserves similarity relations as photographs or sound recordings do not entail that in seeing or hearing the reproduction one is literally seeing or hearing the actual object—when one sees a perfect cast reproduction of a Trojan column done by mechanical means, for instance, one would never say that one is literally seeing the real column.79 It is as difficult to establish the extent to which some of these objections are decisive against transparency of sound recordings as they are against the transparency of photographs, for it is not entirely clear what the necessary conditions for our concept of perceiving—seeing or hearing—ultimately are, and the intuitions around the very notions of literal perception are vague. However, there 74  Kendall Walton, “Transparent pictures: On the nature of photographic realism”, in Noûs 18, 1 (1984):67–72. 75  Andrew Kania has developed this point with respect to musical recordings. See Andrew Kania, “Musical recordings” Philosophy Compass 4, 1 (2009b): 22–38. I base part of this discussion on his. 76  Theorists cited pose these objections for the case of photographs. I “translate” them for the case of sound recordings, but, strictly speaking, the authors are only committed to these objections for the case of vision. 77  Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “On the epistemic value of photographs”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62, 2 (2004):197–210 and Bence Nanay, “Transparency and sensorymotor contingencies”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91, 4 (2010): 248–57. Nanay’s view is weaker than Cohen and Meskin but follow similar lines of argument. They pose the objection specifically to the case of images. 78  Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 61–2; Currie, Image and Mind, 65–9. 79  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 89.

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are plausible responses one can raise to cases (A)–(C). Objection (A) would entail, for instance, that we do not literally hear the voice of a friend when speaking through Skype, since while I move and change my position in my room with my computer, I change my position with respect to the source of the voice—my friend—and yet the sound does not change.80 This seems very unintuitive. (B) in turn, as Andrew Kania has noted, would mean that “you do not literally hear a person whispering in an echo cathedral, unless you can point to where they are”, which again, is unintuitive. Moreover, “it is not clear that one ever locates oneself spatially with respect to an object solely on the basis of one’s (…) auditory experience”.81 Finally, while (C) may be appealing for the case of photographs, it is not so much for the case of sound recordings since it is not clear that the object of perception in the case of the sound recording— the actor’s voice—is different from the object of perception in the case of the sound heard when the actor is in front of you, as it is in the case of photographs. As Gaut himself acknowledges, the transparency of sound recordings might, in principle, be more appealing for the following reasons: (1) sound recordings, unlike photographs do not have surface, so it is more intuitive to characterize the experience as literally “hearing the source of the sound, rather than merely hearing a sound image”82; (2) whereas even with the best quality photograph, it is very easy to distinguish a photograph of Morgan Freeman from Morgan Freeman himself, it can be very difficult to distinguish, just by listening, a very good recording of Freeman’s voice from actually hearing Freeman speaking (Gaut 2010, 95).83 Gaut, however, resists to accept these differences between sounds and images as decisive to support neither transparency in sound recordings nor in photography. He appeals to the case of virtual reality, where there is no perceived surface, and differentiating the image and the scene is not possible. And yet, he claims, the objection raised in (C) still holds—seeing the virtual reality images or listening to the sound recording does not amount to seeing or hearing the object itself. Now, the substance behind the response to Gaut’s objection might be deeper than Gaut assumes: there might be differences between the metaphysics of sounds and images that may make the case for transparency of sound recordings, indeed, more feasible than photographic transparency. Michael G. F. Martin, for instance, suggests that In sound recording, one captures and reproduces the very sounds that were made on some particular occasion, and there is no image or other representational device involved in the recording and reproduction. In photography, one captures and re-presents the visual appearance of an object, but the individual photo-

 Cf. Cohen and Meskin, “On the epistemic value of photographs”, 89.  Kania, Musical Recordings, 10–11. 82  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 94. 83  Ibid., 95. 80 81

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graphed and the event captured are not, themselves reproduced or now available for sight.84

For Martin, the object of perception in the case of the sound recording of a voice is the sound of the voice itself which is an individual,85 and it is the same individual that you could have heard had you been present when it was recorded—of course, it would have been a different instance of hearing but the content would have been the same.86 Photographs, on the contrary, he claims, do not reproduce the individual captured (the depicted person or event)—this is a metaphysical impossibility of images, including virtual reality images or holograms—but only represent its appearance. If Martin is correct and there is a metaphysical distinction between the objects of perception in the case of sound recordings and photographs, the case of transparency may be, indeed, more plausible for the former rather than the latter.

Conclusion Although analytic philosophy of film has been a prolific field of research in the last thirty years, sound is still substantially neglected in this domain of philosophy. This chapter provided a critical analysis of this limitation and suggested some ways in which current philosophical discussions typically centered on the visual image could be complemented and enriched taking into account their aural counterparts. Firstly, the chapter traced the historical roots of this theoretical oblivion—the reluctance of early theorists to consider sound as an integral part of the medium because it threatened to disqualify film as a legitimate art form (section “Sound and Film as Art: The Early Days”). Secondly, it tried to show that, although modern analytical views on film do not share the same concerns as early theorists, the conception of film they provide is equally ­essentialist, visual-centric and characterizes film in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions that aim to distinguish the medium from other art forms. These conceptions of film, in turn—I conjectured—, explicitly or implicitly, set the theoretical agenda and favor an emphasis on visual aspects of film at the expense of aural ones (section “The Conception of Film in Contemporary Philosophical Writings: The Absence of Sound”). The final part of section “The Place of Sound in the Concept(ion) of a Film” also suggests that a more promising line of conceptualizing film—and of giving sound a more prominent role—is to focus on prototypical (or standard) features of film rather than in essential or distinctive ones.  Michael G. F. Martin, “Sounds and Images,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 52, 4 (2012), 332.  The relevant individual here is not the person who emitted the voice, but the sound of the voice itself. 86  An objection to this view cannot be that the content of my perception in the case of the sound recording cannot be the same as the voice perceived directly because the sound recording, could, for example, be noisier (as an old recording). I can see my friend Pau sitting on the chair in front of me with and without glasses. In both experiences I would be seeing Pau—the same individual— even when in one case I see him blurrier. 84

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Subsequently, the section on “Realism in Film Sound” provides a proof of concept: there are various discussions on realism in film where sound could have been relevant  that have been neglected do to the overemphasis on the image. This section tried to show how the discussion of sound in film—partly incorporating ideas developed in other fields such as Film Theory or Cognitive Psychology—may shed light onto current discussion of central topics such as that of film realism. In particular, I argued, this can be done along three dimensions frequently discussed by analytic philosophers of film: (1) while philosophers have claimed that film does not generate illusory experiences, the case of sound may stand as an illustrating counterexample; (2) the notion of fidelity of sound as it has been conceived by some film theorists can be better understood along the lines of the notion of perceptual realism as it has been explained by philosophers; and (3) the controversial idea of transparency mostly applied to the photographic image may turn to be much more appealing to understand sound recordings.87

Bibliography Altman, Rick. 1985. The Evolution of Sound Technology. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 37–43. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1992. Four and a Half Fallacies. In Sound Theory, Sound Practice, 35–45. New York: Routledge. ———. 2004. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press. Arnheim, Rudolph. 1957. The New Laocoon. In Film as Art, 199–230. California: California University Press. Balázs, Béla, Erica Carter, and Rodney Livingstone. 2010. Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film. New York: Berghahn Books. Berliner, Todd, and Dale J. Cohen. 2011. The Illusion of Continuity: Active Perception and the Classical Editing System. Journal of Film and Video 63 (1): 44–63. Bonath, et al. 2007. Neural Basis of the Ventriloquist Illusion. Current Biology 17 (19): 1697–1703. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. Fundamental Aesthetics in Sound in Film. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. Film Art. An Introduction. New York: McGraw Hill. Buhler, James, and David Neumeyer. 2013. Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System. In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New  York: Routledge. ———. 1996. Defining the Moving Image. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 49–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 87  I am very grateful to David Teira, Miguel Ángel Sebastián and Shawn Loht for providing useful comments to improve this chapter.

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Carroll, Noël, and Margaret Moore. 2011. Music and Motion Pictures. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodor Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 456–467. New York: Routledge. Chion, Michael. 1994. Audio-Vision. Sound on Screen. New  York: Columbia University Press. Cohen, Annabel J. 1993. Music as a Source of Emotion in Film. In Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications, ed. Patrik Juslin and John Sloboda, 879–908. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2000. Film Music. Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology. In Music and Cinema, ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flynn, and David Neumeyer, 360–378. New England: Wesleyan University Press. Cohen, Jonathan, and Aaron Meskin. 2004. On the Epistemic Value of Photographs. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2): 197–210. ———. 2008. Photographs as Evidence. In Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, ed. Scott Walden, 70–90. West Sussex: Blackwell. Cohen, Annabel, Kelti MacMillan, and Robert Drew. 2006. The Role of Music, Sound Effects and Speech on Absorption in a Film: The Congruence-Associationist Model of Media Cognition. Canadian Acoustics 34 (3): 40–41. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind. Film Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, Sergei M. 1999. Beyond the Form. In The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Taylor Richard, 82–92. London: British Film Institute. Eisenstein, Sergei M., V.I.  Pudovkin, and Alexandrov. 1985. A Statement. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 83–85. New York: Columbia University Press. Gaut, Berys. 2004. Film. In The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. Jerrold Levinson, 627–643. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gerrig. 1993. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gorbman, Claudia. 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Green, Peter. 1993. Andrei Tarkovski. The Winding Quest. London: The Macmillan Press. Green, Melanie, and Timothy Brock. 2013. In the mind’s Eye: Transportation-Imagery Model of Narrative Persuasion. In Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie Green, Jeffrey Strange, and Timothy Brock, 315–341. New York: Psychology Press. Kania, Andrew. 2009a. Realism. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 237–247. New York: Routledge. ———. 2009b. Musical Recordings. Philosophy Compass 4 (1): 22–38. Krakauer, Siegfried. 1985. Dialogue and Film. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Weis Elisabeth and John Belton, 126–142. New York: Columbia University Press. Kuchinke, Lars, Hermann Kappelhoff, and Stefan Koelsch. 2013. Emotion and Music in Narrative Films: A Neuroscientific Perspective. In The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel J.  Cohen, Scott D.  Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall, 118–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laer, Van, Ko De Ruyter Tom, Luca M.  Visconti, and Martin Wetzels. 2014. The Extended Transportation-Imagery Model: A Meta-Analysis of the Antecedents and

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Consequences of Consumers’ Narrative Transportation. Journal of Consumer Research 40 (5): 797–817. Langkjær, Birger. 2010. Making Fictions Sound Real. On Film Sound, Perceptual Realism and Genre. MedieKultur 48: 5–17. Lopes, Dominic. 1996. Understanding Pictures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Michael G.F. 2012. Sounds and Images. The British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (4): 331–351. Münsterberg, Hugo. 2002. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. In Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale. New York: Routledge. Nanay, Bence. 2010. Transparency and Sensorymotor Contingencies. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (4): 248–257. Pramaggiore, Maria, and Tom Wallis. 2005. Film: A Critical Introduction. London: Laurence King Publishing. Pudovkin, Vsevolod I. 1985. Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film. In Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 86–91. New York: Columbia University Press. Recanzone, Gregg H. 2009. Interactions of Auditory and Visual Stimuli in Space and Time. Hearing Research 258 (1–2): 89–99. Smith, Jeff. 2009. Music. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 184–195. New York: Routledge. Walton, Kendall L. 1970. Categories of Art. Philosophical Review 79 (3): 334–367. ———. 1984. Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism. Noûs 18 (1): 67–72. ———. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 10

What Is a Screenplay? Ted Nannicelli

Putting aside a number of complexities about atypical forms and functions, most screenplays are, roughly speaking, written plans for the creation of motion pictures. The voluminous “how-to” literature testifies to this characteristic function. The best-known screenwriting “guru,” Syd Field, begins his recent book, The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting, by canvassing a number of plausible analogies or metaphors: “What is a screenplay? A guide, or an outline for a movie? A blueprint, or a diagram? A series of images, scenes, and sequences that are strung together with dialogue and description?”1 Eventually, he settles for the following description: “A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed with the context of dramatic structure.”2 Other how-to manual writers tend to concur, although often emphasize the screenplay’s typically intermediate nature as a story to be used as a plan for the creation of a motion picture. Consider the definition Alex Epstein offers in Crafty Screenwriting: Writing Movies that Get Made: “A screenplay is writing intended to be turned into a film. It’s a hundred-odd pages held together by brass bands, in which you have written down whatever you want the audience to see and hear in your movie.”3 Still within the realm of “how-to” manuals, but more theoretically sophisticated is Lance Lee’s A Poetics for Screenwriters. According to Lee, “A screenplay is a filmed, enacted, immediate, sequential symbolic imitation of an action with a complete Beginning, Middle, and End  Syd Field, The Definitive Guide to Screenwriting (London: Ebury Press, 2003), 9.  Ibid., 10. 3  Alex Epstein, Crafty Screenwriting: Writing Movies that Get Made (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 1. 1 2

T. Nannicelli (*) The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_10

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that falls within the larger fundamental story pattern, possessing an inherent significance, generated by the action of characters attempting to and ultimately resolving conflict-generating problems, whose outcome [i.e. a motion picture] embodies the vision of the screenwriter….”4 However, even the more theoretically informed, classroom-oriented “how­to” manuals also emphasize the intermediary nature of the screenplay—its status as a planning document. According to Craig Batty and Zara Waldeback, “A screenplay, whether for film or television, is a blueprint for the next stage of production; a document with words and actions ready to be realized.”5 Consider, too, Anthony Friedman’s description: “A screenplay or script is […] a visual blueprint for production, laying end to end the particular scenes employing the specific terminology of the medium to describe what is to be seen on the screen and heard on the sound track.” Clarifying Field’s description of a “story told with pictures,” with which we started, Friedman continues, “It is visual writing because it is the precursor to production in a visual medium.”6 For the purposes of teaching people what screenplays are and how to write them in the context of Hollywood motion picture production (and other national cinemas that share important features of Hollywood’s industrial organization), there is nothing wrong with the above definitions of the screenplay as a planning document whose story will be realized as a film. For one thing, such how­to manuals cater to people who want to be successful in the Hollywood system. For another, if manual readers do successfully sell a screenplay, they also need to be aware that, as they are often warned, once the screenplay is sold, their creative input is generally no longer welcome as the film moves into production. However, there are other traditions of filmmaking and other purposes for which people write and read screenplays—traditions and purposes that, understandably, are not represented in how-to manuals targeted at aspiring Hollywood movers and shakers. And although these alternative traditions and purposes of screenwriting are outside of the mainstream, they raise interesting philosophical questions about what an adequate definition of the screenplay would be. In previous publications, I have argued that a variety of screenplays that are written solely to be read as works of literature in their own right—rather than to serve as planning documents for motion pictures.7 For example, there is a genre of fan-fiction known as “script-fic,” in which fans of a particular story-­world use the screenplay as a form for sharing their stories with one another.8 Perhaps the most theoretically interesting sort of “script-fic” is that which continues the nar Lance Lee, A Poetics for Screenwriters (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), 30.  Craig Batty and Zara Waldeback, Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2. 6  Anthony Friedman, Writing for Visual Media (Burlington, MA: Focal Press, 2014), 199. 7  Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay, especially chapters 1, 2, and 9. 8  See Ted Nannicelli, “The Ontology and Literary Status of the Screenplay: The Case of ‘ScriptFic’,” in Journal of Literary Theory 7, no. 1–2 (2013): 135–153. 4 5

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rative of a cancelled television show, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Surely, the authors and readers of such screenplays are not under the illusion that their scripts will be “discovered” and used in production. Rather, their creations are intended to offer a reading experience that is worthwhile for its own sake. The use of the screenplay as a literary form is not unique to fan authors, however. For some well-known novelists, the use of the screenplay form appears to be a stylistic choice that is either particularly suited to the sort of story they want to tell or that functions to help them compose a distinct literary work— that is a novel. For example, in earlier research, I discuss the way in which Cormac McCarthy’s work on two screenplays in 1984 eventually led to the publication of his novels Cities of the Plain and No Country for Old Men.9 Here is one final example: I have on my bookshelf a handsome volume of screenplays, published in 2003, by E.L. Doctorow. Interestingly, for the purposes of the volume, Doctorow extensively revised the screenplay used to make the film Ragtime (1981)—evidently for the purpose of affording readers a worthwhile reading experience rather than for the planning of a remake of the film. Such examples constitute further objections to the intuition that screenplays have a kind of “proper function”—as certain other artifacts plausibly might.10 For the present purpose, however, let us focus on screenplays in their familiar, Hollywood-style industrial context, where they are safely characterized as having the primary or proper function of serving as plans for the creation of motion pictures.

Authorship One pre-theoretically plausible intuition that is sometimes voiced in popular critical discourse and that is worth exploring in a more sustained fashion is that screenwriters are, in at least some cases, the authors of screen works. According to a stronger and more tendentious version of this idea, a screenwriter is the sole author of a screen work. In practice, one rarely encounters this sort of claim, but it is advanced from time to time, often to counter a perceived overemphasis on the authority of the director and usually in reference to a putative screenwriting auteur.11 In such cases, the designation of authorship tends to have an honorific function: the screenwriter is dubbed the sole author to emphasize her or his artistic achievement. On this view, a screenwriter whose particular (critically lauded) signature style or sensibility permeates a screen work qualifies as an author. Now, the claim that a screenwriter may be the sole author of a screen work might immediately strike one as too strong: it is hard to think of possible examples even when considering plausible screenwriter  Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay, 17.  See Lynne Rudder Baker, “The Ontology of Artifacts,” Philosophical Explorations 7, no. 2 (2004): 99–112. 11  For a recent example, see David Kipen, The Schreiber Theory: A Radical Rewrite of American Film History (New York: Melville House, 2006). 9

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auteurs such as Ernest Lehman (whose scripts were directed by Robert Wise, Alexander Mackendrick, and Alfred Hitchcock) or Charlie Kaufman (whose scripts have been directed by Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry). However, the claim may gain some succor by considering screenwriter “showrunners” of serialized television programs. One interesting feature of contemporary serialized television is that the writing and directing of episodes tend to be rotated among a number of individuals. Partly for this reason, there has been a recent tendency to attribute authorship of such programs to the “showrunner”—the individual who is putatively responsible for the program’s overall style and storyline. Of especial importance for the present purpose is that most television showrunners are, first and foremost, writers. Consider, for example, Aaron Sorkin’s role on The West Wing and The Newsroom, Alan Ball’s role on Six Feet Under and True Blood, David Simon’s role on The Wire, Vince Gilligan’s role on Breaking Bad, and Nick Pizzolato’s role on True Detective. None of these showrunners directed more than a handful of episodes and, in some cases, did not direct any. There may be showrunner-directors as well: one thinks here of Lena Dunham’s Girls and Jill Soloway’s Transparent, for example. But for the moment, the point is simply that if there are any screenwriters who are the sole authors of screen works, they are likely to be television showrunners. Thus far, we have been operating on intuition. The above-mentioned showrunners might seem like plausible examples of screenwriters who solely author screen works based on what we know of their creative contributions and a tacit conception of authorship. We need to be careful here, though, because it is also in the industry’s interests to develop author-personas that can be used to brand and market products.12 That is to say, whether Aaron Sorkin really ought to be regarded as the author (or even an author) of The West Wing or The Newsroom demands that we appeal to a more nuanced conception of screen authorship and, possibly, adduce more specific information about his actual creative contributions. More broadly, in order to determine whether screenwriters are ever the authors of screen works, we need a clearer understanding of what screen authorship is. Although we have, thus far, considered screen authorship as pertaining solely to individuals, it is surely plausible that in a collaborative art form like motion pictures, authorship is often collective. Indeed, it is likely that a weaker claim about screenwriter authorship—namely that sometimes screenwriters are among a screen work’s co-authors—is the most defensible. In any case, in order to see whether we screenwriters are ever the sole authors or among the joint authors of a screen work, we need to first clarify our concept of authorship. 12  See, for example, Denise Mann, “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management TV: The Collective Author(s) of the Lost Franchise,” in Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, ed. Vicki Mayer, Miranda J.  Banks, and John T.  Caldwell, 99–114 (New York: Routledge, 2009). Note that one can accept this moderate claim without a wholesale endorsement of some of the more extravagant assertions of critical theory pertaining to the author as merely a construct of (post)industrial capitalism.

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In the philosophy of film, Paisley Livingston has provided the most compelling argument for the possibility of sole or single authorship of mainstream movies. Underlying the argument is Livingston’s subtle and cogent general account of authorship in the arts, according to which “the word ‘authorship’ is best used…to classify accomplishments that we evaluate as instances of expressive or artistic behaviour in various media, where authorship also involves exercising sufficient control over the making of the work as a whole.”13 This sort of “sufficient control” account of screen authorship, in particular, has a precedent in V.F.  Perkins’s classic Film as Film, but is given fuller elaboration in Livingston’s work. Further, on Livingston’s view, sufficient control is necessary but not sufficient for authorship to obtain. Also necessary, according to Livingston, is “the intentional realization of another type of goal in a work— namely, expression,” where “expression” is to be understood in the broad sense of “intentionally making an utterance or work that provides some indication that some psychological state or attitude, broadly defined, obtains in the author.”14 To make things a bit more concrete, a central question is whether a screenwriter ever successfully realizes her or his expressive or artistic aims while exercising sufficient control over the work as a whole. The recognition that many screenwriters meet the first condition seems to be what motivates familiar claims that screenwriters are among a screen work’s co-authors. This claim was perhaps first voiced in a sustained fashion by Richard Corliss, whose book, Talking Pictures, attempts to redress auteur theory’s oversight of screenwriters. Rather than arguing that screenwriters, rather than directors, are the sole authors of films, Corliss demonstrates that they are vital collaborators or (although he doesn’t use this term) among a film’s multiple authors.15 A more formal, sustained version of Corliss’s proposal might resemble something like Berys Gaut’s account of multiple authorship in the cinema. Gaut claims, “in light of the fact of art of artistic collaboration, we should admit that mainstream films have multiple authors.”16 More specifically, according to Gaut, “composers, set designers, directors of photography, and so on, can express their attitudes through their contributions.”17 Yet, as Livingston notes, it is implausible that any and every member of a production team who expresses her attitudes in the film is thereby one of its authors. The problem is not, necessarily, the practical one of an enormous proliferation of authors. Rather, it is that not all of these creative contributions are equal, so the people who make them do not deserve equal shares of praise or blame that would be 13  Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 71. 14  Livingston, Cinema, 70. 15  Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema (New York: Overlook, 1985). 16  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125. 17  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 121.

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implied by designating them all as authors. This is one reason why something like a sufficient control condition on authorship is also needed. The sufficient control condition advanced by Livingston should not be understood, as it sometimes has been, as motivated by a perceived need to designate a single person as the author of a screen work or to distinguish authored films from un-authored films.18 Livingston explicitly allows for the possibility of what he calls “joint authorship.”19 Whether an individual or multiple people are involved in the creation of a work, sufficient control over the work as a whole is necessary for authorship in part because it would seem that the successfully realization of an intention to express some attitude depends on it and in part because the attitudes actually expressed by the work are not simply the sum total of every collaborator’s contribution. Rather, the attitudes expressed by a work are a matter of how the different components of the work are structured—how they are organized in relationship to one another. And the ability to make decisions about those relationships—about the overall structure of the work—depends on having a certain amount of control over the work as a whole. Hence, the sufficient control condition. Whether a screen work is ever solely authored is, then, a question that needs to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. In principle, there is nothing to preclude a screenwriter from being the sole author of a screen work or one of the work’s joint authors. For example, Sarah Cardwell makes a plausible case that British television screenwriter Andrew Davies ought to be regarded as the sole author of many of the programs he scripted in virtue of collaborating with others in such a way that allowed him to retain control over the expression of his “ideas, intentions, and voice,” thus establishing “a discernible ‘authorial signature’ across his oeuvre.”20 Nevertheless, if we accept Livingston’s account of screen authorship, it seems that such cases are exceptional; more commonly, screenwriters often make essential contributions to screen works but are rarely the authors, individually or jointly, of those works. Why? Prima facie, most screenwriters appear to lack sufficient control over screen works as wholes. But this is another intuition that demands further analysis. In particular, its plausibility depends upon how we are to understand the idea of the work as a whole— that is, how we conceive of the ontology of screen works. In fact, Gaut claims that acknowledging the ontological differences between literature and film lends support to his multiple-authorship view. So, an excursion into the ontology of cinema can help us refine our thinking about screen authorship and the screenwriter’s relationship to it. It will also afford an opportunity to explore a question that is interesting in its own right: what is the ontological relationship between a screenplay and a screen work?

18  See C. Paul Sellors, “Collective Authorship in Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 263–271. 19  Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, 72–76. 20  Sarah Cardwell, Andrew Davies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 18.

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Screenplays and the Ontology of Cinema One intuitively plausible conception of the screenplay’s relationship to the film is as analogous to a blueprint’s relationship to a finished building. Moreover, there is historical evidence that this was (and still is) how screenplays function in relationship to screen works at least in Hollywood and similar industrial contexts. For example, Janet Staiger, perhaps the first contemporary film historian to note this analogy,21 writes of the continuity scripts for Hollywood feature films of the 1930s and 1940s: “These scripts, of course, were related to the written form of stage plays. However, their relationship to the finished film was much different from that of the drama script to a theatrical performance. The continuity script was a precise blueprint of the film for all the workers.”22 In this section, I will argue that there is something fundamentally right about this understanding of the screenplay’s relationship to a screen work, I will defend it from recent criticism, and I will try to sharpen the claim in such a way that illuminates our prior question about authorship. Recent theorizing about the screenplay’s relationship to screen work has greeted the blueprint view with skepticism. For example, according to Steven Maras, Staiger’s discussion of the screenplay as a kind of blueprint constitutes a “constraining frame” that “inadvertently set[s] up normative conceptions of the roles and functions of the script” insofar as it naturalizes an understanding of screenwriting as sharply divided from production and, thus, a particular, industrial mode of film practice.23 For the present purpose, we can leave Maras’s ideological objections to this putative shortcoming of the blueprint metaphor aside and focus on the supposed inadequacy of it as an account of the ontology of film (although these are intertwined on his view). Maras claims that the blueprint conception of the screenplay (and the conception of the screenplay as a “sovereign” form more broadly) “can…be said to de-legitimate a broader theory of scripting that includes the script, mise-en-scene and other aspects of filmmaking.”24 More specifically, the sort of broader conception of “scripting” (or “screen writing”) Maras has in mind “can refer to writing not for the screen, but with or on the screen. It can refer to a kind of ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic’ or audiovisual writing….”25 Somewhat ironically, this is a revisionist rather than descriptive account of screenwriting, which Maras at times seems to recognize: “[This approach] means rethinking the demarcation between creation and 21  To the best of my knowledge, the metaphor was first used in 1926 by Russian theorist and critic Viktor Shlovsky. See Denise J.  Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918–1935 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1991), 68. For a skeptical discussion of the history of thinking of the screenplay as a blueprint, see Steven Price, A History of the Screenplay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 22  Janet Staiger, “Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 173. 23  Maras, 41–42. 24  Maras, 43. 25  Maras, 1–2.

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interpretation, writing and performance, and the boundaries between what is a matter of style in cinema and what is a matter of screenwriting.”26 On Maras’s broad understanding of the concept, it seems that “screen writing” determines most or perhaps all of a screen work’s constitutive properties. That is, on Maras’s account, the properties that allow us to identify and individuate a particular screen work are established by “screen writing” in this broad sense. The distinctive color palette and muted tones of a film like A Most Violent Year (2014) are, on this account, the results of “screen writing” inasmuch as the concept includes “writing with light.” Likewise, the original dance routines of a movie such as La La Land (2016) are, on this view, the products of “screenwriting” insofar as the concept includes “writing with dance.” And, although Maras says nothing about music, and there is no English equivalent for “cinematography” or “choreography” in the context of music, perhaps the friend of the broad view of “scripting” would even want to claim that the score of a picture like The Hateful Eight (2015) is the upshot of “screen writing” to the extent that the concept encompasses “writing with sound.” Now, on the one hand, one could accept this broad view of “screen writing” but note that, nevertheless, it is “screen writers” in the broad, revisionary sense rather than “screenwriters” in the standard, descriptive sense who are responsible for many of the stylistic properties that are constitutive of screen works. Moreover, even the “screen writers” who are responsible for such properties (in standard terms, people like the cinematographer, the art director, the choreographer, the composer) seem unlikely to be the authors of a work if one accepts something like a sufficient control condition on authorship. On the other hand, there is good reason to reject the broad conception of “screen writing” on the grounds that it depends on an equivocation between two distinct senses of writing in play here—one literal and one metaphorical. The proposal seems to gain traction by leaning on the metaphorical sense of the term, but turns out to be uninformative because in this context, “screen writing” is just being used interchangeably with “filmmaking.” Moreover, the proposal muddies the conceptual waters by exploiting the ambiguity of our language rather than disambiguating the various concepts to which a single term may refer. However, accepting Maras’s broad conception of “screen writing” is not necessary to register a cogent point he makes—namely that screenwriting practices (in the literal sense) are heterogeneous and vary across filmmaking contexts. This is also one of Steven Price’s central objections to the blueprint metaphor: “[it] only makes sense in an industrial context, and cannot define all of the various kinds of text that circulate as ‘screenplays.’”27 When the blueprint metaphor is taken too literally—which, as Price’s research shows, it often is— this claim is true. Only in industrial contexts, such as that detailed by Staiger, does the screenplay function as a detailed plan for a film that “merely” needs to  Maras, 3.  Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 45.

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be executed by craftspeople. Even then, Price observes, screenplays tend not to specify precise technical detail in the way that blueprints do. Moreover, Price is correct to say that this sort of conception of the screenplay—as a mechanistic, ultimately disposable set of instructions—has blinkered us to the aesthetic qualities of screenplays as literary objects.28 Nevertheless, there is a crucial similarity between screenplays and blueprints, or architectural plans more broadly, at which Price hints but does not pursue. The analogy is most accurate in conceptualizing the ontological relationship between instructions and end product. Despite not probing it further, the point seems to have occurred to Price, who, at the end of his discussion of the blueprint metaphor, cites film theorist Peter Wollen contrasting the relationship between screenplay and film with that between musical score and performance. Price rightly senses that there is an important disanalogy here—an intuition I have tried to sharpen elsewhere with arguments outlined below.29 This is not to say that grouping together screenplays, architectural plans, and scores is in itself a conceptual misstep. On the contrary, there is at least one very good reason to consider these things as of a kind: they are all instructions for the creation (or, in metaphysically more neutral terms, the generation) of distinct artworks. They are, in Stephen Davies’s terms, “notations.”30 But although Davies remains agnostic about whether they are the same sort of notations, there are good reasons to make some further distinctions here. Davies convincingly argues that musical scores are “work-specifying” or “work-­ prescriptive” notations: “[A] score is a musical notation the main purpose of which is to serve as a work prescription. It records a set of instructions, addressed to performers, the faithful execution of which generates an instance of the piece it specifies.”31 Without becoming sidetracked by complex debates about the ontology of music, we can say that a plausible corollary of this view is the idea that musical works are abstract entities that are created in virtue of the composition of a score but which require a performance for their instantiation. Importantly, for our purposes, the work’s constitutive properties are established by the score, lending credence to the idea of the composer as the author of the work (if not performances of it). So far, so good. A trickier matter, as Davies notes, is whether architectural plans are work-specifying in this way. It seems implausible to regard architecture as a performing art, but, Davies, claims, “if we allow that the architectural work is created when the plan is done, whether or not the building is built, just as we allow for finished but unperformed musical works and plays, the plan

 Ibid., 44–46.  Ted Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks: Musical Scores, Theatrical Scripts, Architectural Plans, and Screenplays,” British Journal of Aesthetics 51, no. 4 (October 2011): 399–414. 30  Stephen Davies, “Notations,” in A Companion to Aesthetics 2nd ed., edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, and Robert Hopkins (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 441–443. 31  Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100. 28 29

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might best be regarded as work-specifying.”32 Again, there are complex ontological questions that need to be skirted here—in particular, whether architecture is a single-instance or multiple-instance art. Yet a brief examination of our appreciative practices suggests that architectural works (at least those in the Western tradition) are physical objects which are at least partly identified and individuated by the materials with which they are created and their spatiotemporal locations.33 Admittedly, it seems clear that architectural works can survive various sorts of restoration as the (numerically) same works. For example, the Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Lloyd Wright has been subject to several such restorations, and today, we regard the museum as the numerically same, continuous entity as that which was originally erected. But if the Guggenheim were levelled, it seems clear that we would regard the work as destroyed—as lost to us—whether or not Wright’s plans were extant. For following those plans to “rebuild” the Guggenheim would not, it seems, “re-­ instance” the same work, but rather create a distinct (albeit closely related) work. The upshot of the thought experiment is this: if works of architecture are at least partly identified and individuated by their physical qualities and spatiotemporal locations, then architectural plans are not work-specifying in the same way musical scores are. In contrast to musical works, which are purely abstract objects created in virtue of the completion of a score, architectural works are not created by the completion of architectural plans because they have physical qualities among their constitutive properties. If they did not, we would not value them as we do; we would not spend so much time and effort preserving and restoring old buildings if it were possible to simply generate equivalent “instances” of them. So, the architect’s role is not strictly equivalent to that of the composer. If an architect is to be regarded as “the author” of a building, her control must extend over the construction of an actual edifice; otherwise, she is the author of a work only insofar as her plans comprise paintings, drawings, sculptures, and so forth.34 In contrast, the composer is the author of a work simply in virtue of completing her notations. Because musical works are abstract entities, they are complete once the composer prescribes the conditions under which they can be instanced. Thus, in the context of music, the composition of a notation affords the composer control over the constitutive properties of the overall work in a way that the composition of a notation in architecture does not. In the former case, notations are work-specifying; in the latter, they are not. Thus, in the former case, one who composes a notation, thereby authors a distinct work; in the latter case, one who composes a notation is only the author of that notation.

 Davies, “Notations,” 441–442.  The following argument, advanced in more detail in Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks,” is indebted to Davies’s line of reasoning in “Is Architecture an Art?” in Philosophical Perspectives on Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–145. 34  On this point especially, I indebted Davies’s arguments in “Is Architecture an Art?” 32 33

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This line of reasoning clearly bears upon the crucial question for our purposes here: Are screenplays work-specifying notations akin to musical scores or are nonwork-specifying notations like architectural plans? Elsewhere I have argued that screenplays are not work-specifying because no cinematic work is created in virtue of the creation of a screenplay.35 The faithful execution of the instructions in a musical score will necessarily instantiate a single, self-same musical work in performance. Cinema, however, is not a performing art, and the faithful execution of the instructions in a screenplay will result in multiple, distinct cinematic works rather than multiple instances of a single cinematic work. This is so in part because cinematic works have, among their constitutive properties, features that are only established in the production and post-­ production processes. Qualities such as color palette, performance, camera movement, editing, and post-production special effects are all, plausibly, among a cinematic work’s identifying and individuating properties. Using the screenplay Carl Mayer wrote for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans to make a contemporary film in color and with synchronous sound would result in a new cinematic work rather than a new instance of Murnau’s masterpiece. Indeed, if all extant copies of Murnau’s film were destroyed, we would regard the film as lost to us; we could not generate a new instance of it by following the instructions in Mayer’s screenplay.36 This is the important sense in which screenplays are, indeed, like blueprints or architectural plans. Because screenwriters like Mayer typically have little or no input over many of the constitutive properties of the cinematic works made from their screenplays, let alone the organization of those features in the shaping of the work as a whole, it is implausible that they are correctly regarded among the authors of those cinematic works. Just as an architect would, on the current account of authorship, need to exercise sufficient control over the erection of the building as a whole to count as its author, a screenwriter would need to exercise sufficient control over the creation of a whole screen work in order to be regarded as its author. Because screen works are partly identified and individuated by features such as performance, camera work, editing, mise-en-scene, and so forth, over which screenwriters typically do not have control, screenwriters are rarely, if ever, among the authors of screen works. Nevertheless, screenwriters are authors in a more limited sense: they are the authors of their screenplays. But although screenplays are admittedly among the most central constitutive properties of screen works, the authorship of—no matter how original, distinctive, detailed, or whatever—does not entail the authorship of the distinct, cinematic work made from it.  Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks,” and Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay.  The argument in this paragraph should be understood as contingent upon our actual cinematic practices being as they are rather than involving a modal claim. That is, we can imagine our creative practices being slightly different such that cinema was a performing art, and the faithful execution of the instructions in screenplays resulted in multiple instances of the same cinematic work. In such a context, screenplays would correctly be regarded as work-specifying notations. See Nannicelli, “Instructions and Artworks.” 35 36

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Screenplays and the Artistic and Ethical Evaluation of Cinema The claim that screenwriters are typically not, if ever, the authors (or among the multiple authors) of screen works might strike some readers as counterintuitive. For example, one might insist that, despite the above arguments, it still seems implausible to deny a screenwriter authorship in certain cases where her or his “authorial signature” clearly overwhelms or, at least, matches the creative input by, say, the director. I suspect that something like this thought motivates Berys Gaut’s account of multiple authorship, according to which we ought to regard as authors all members of the production team who express their attitudes through their contributions. Although Gaut focuses on acting, I think certain screenwriting cases might constitute better support for his view. In this section, I will sketch a few examples that an advocate of the multiple-­authorship view could enlist to advance a counterargument to the account outlined thus far. I will try to show, however, that accurate, fine-grained artistic, and ethical evaluations of cinematic works necessarily depend upon a more restricted conception of authorship along the lines of what Livingston proposes—one that enlists sufficient control of the work as a whole as a necessary feature of authorship and, thus, entails that most screenwriters are not the authors of cinematic works. Consider, as a potential counterexample to the view I have advanced thus far, Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). The film’s most obvious association is with David Mamet, who wrote the screenplay, based on his own 1984 Pulitzer Prize–winning stage play. Moreover, at the time the film was made, Mamet was already an accomplished film director as well as a screenwriter, having written and directed the critically acclaimed House of Games (1987) and Homicide (1991) as well as the 1991 book, On Directing Film. Yet the director of the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross is James Foley, whose career is characterized by workmanlike efforts. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Foley had complete creative control over filming and post-production—that Mamet’s input did not extend beyond the writing of the screenplay. Do we still want to say that Mamet is not among the film’s authors? Perhaps in this sort of case, we may be tempted to think that if the sufficient control condition denies Mamet authorship over Glengarry Glen Ross, so much the worse for the sufficient control condition. Now, the intuition underlying this sort of objection would seem to be this: because Glengarry Glen Ross is a significant artistic achievement, because Mamet has a track record of achievement in writing and directing for the screen (not to mention writing for the stage), and because Foley is an improbable source of the film’s achievements, it seems as if Mamet ought to be regarded as at least one of the film’s authors. In other words, the motivation underlying the intuition that Mamet is the film’s author is that he deserves credit for the film’s artistic success. In response, we may note, first of all, that identifying individuals as the work’s authors is not necessary to properly credit them for their

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contributions to the work’s artistic merits. As a matter of fact, key contributors such as writers, actors, cinematographers, and editors are often recognized for their achievements by industry and guild awards, as well as, to a lesser extent, popular criticism. But in any case, it is simply a conceptual error to assume that denying such contributors the status of authors is tantamount to ignoring their artistic achievements. Secondly, although the multiple-authorship view Gaut advances is, in part, motivated by the desire to democratically spread the credit for artistic success, the sword cuts the other way as well: authors are responsible and sometimes blameworthy for artistic shortcomings or failures. Consider, for example, what is plausibly the most significant artistic demerit of Glengarry Glen Ross: the rapid cutting from one medium close-up to another during dialogue scenes. The editing is clearly intended to drive the scenes’ dramatic momentum and complement the clipped, punchy dialogue being delivered by the characters. However, the writing and the acting can both stand on their own. The cutting proves to be gratuitous and distracting, drawing our attention away from the dialogue and performances it is intended to complement. Now, for the sake of argument, accept the plausible assumption that Mamet had no say about the film’s editing. The problem with the multiple-authorship view is that it, nevertheless, burdens Mamet with the responsibility for an artistic demerit over which he had no control. Indeed, the gratuitous editing actually undermines the contribution Mamet did make—the writing—and detracts from its power. It makes little sense to saddle Mamet with responsibility for this artistic shortcoming. Yet this is just what the multiple-authorship view does because it attributes authorship, in a broad and coarse-grained fashion, to all of the members of a production collective of a work regardless of the nature of their contributions. Another sort of example to consider here involves bad movies that are made from good screenplays. Industry lore has it that one cannot make a good film from a bad screenplay, but one can make a bad film from a good screenplay. Such cases, like the case of Glengarry Glen Ross, again illuminate the pitfalls of attributing authorship to screenwriters with the hope of securing credit for their artistic achievements. For example, although Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is an excellent film directed by Michel Gondry from a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, Gondry’s first production of a Kaufman screenplay, Human Nature, was a mixed success. Although this is speculative, one gets the sense in the performances and overall tone of the film, that Gondry simply failed to successfully realize the balance between irony and whimsy that Kaufman’s scripts characteristically strike. Indeed, it is plausible that what ­artistic merits the film has are due to Kaufman’s script. This ostensible fact, along with Kaufman’s distinctive writing style, might seem to warrant the ascription of authorship of Human Nature to Kaufman as well as to Gondry (assuming, just for the sake of argument, that the alternative is that Gondry is the sole author of the film).

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However, identifying Kaufman as one of Human Nature’s authors would unfairly burden him with a number of the film’s artistic flaws over which he had no control whatsoever. As indicated above, one of the film’s chief weaknesses is plausibly the way inconsistencies in tone undermine its more thoughtful (if ironic) handling of serious questions about human nature and human society. This problem is most evident when the film slips into gross-out comedy mode—for example, the scene in which Puff visits a strip club and one of the dancers uses her legs to pull his head into her crotch. At such moments, the film sacrifices sly and intelligent commentary on the pretentions of societal mores for cheap humor that distracts our attention from its substantive themes. Importantly, the strip club scene is much subtler in Kaufman’s screenplay: it simply describes Puff sitting at the club in a drunken stupor. So, none of the artistic flaws that attend this scene in the film are in fact Kaufman’s responsibility. Yet ascribing authorship to Kaufman would place the responsibility and blame for just these sorts of artistic flaws on his shoulders. True, if we regarded Kaufman and Gondry as co-authors, Gondry would share in the responsibility for such artistic flaws. But why should Kaufman bear any responsibility at all when he evidently had no control over the shaping of the parts of the film in which the flaws in here? The multiple-authorship view’s inability to parcel out credit and blame in sufficiently precise ways becomes even more unsettling when a screen work suffers not only from artistic flaws but from moral flaws. For when screen works are morally blameworthy, the consequences faced by those held responsible can be much more serious. Although there is no space to properly review the literature here, there are plausibly a number of ways in which artworks, including screen works, may be subject to ethical criticism. Most notably, ethical criticism of screen works is warranted in cases where those works endorse or seek to elicit from the audience’s morally blameworthy attitudes.37 Now, certainly, in many cases of this nature, screenwriters, as much as—if not more—than any other members of the production team are responsible for such attitudes. Consider the typically sexist dialogue that is part and parcel of many classical Hollywood films. Many otherwise great films of this era suffer from moral blemishes insofar as they seek to elicit the audience’s sympathies for blatantly misogynistic characters or comic amusement at misogynistic actions or lines. Think, for example, the scene in The Public Enemy in which Tom Doyle tells Kitty, “You’re a swell dish. I think I’m going to go for you.” Or, later, just before he shoves a grapefruit in her face: “I didn’t ask you for any lip. I asked if you had a drink.” Indeed, men telling women to shut up and provide them with alcohol is a motif in classical Hollywood. In a similar, unfortunate scene 37  For good discussions of this sort of claim and the interaction between art and ethics more broadly, see Noël Carroll, “Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research,” in Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 235–271; and Berys Gaut, “Art and Ethics” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 3rd ed., ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 394–403.

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from an otherwise excellent film made about 20 years later, The Asphalt Jungle, Dix Handley asks Doll, “Why don’t you quit cryin’ and get me some bourbon?” For our purposes, the point here is that to the extent such scenes suffer from moral blemishes, it is plausible that the screenwriters are to blame because they are responsible for the dialogue. So, too, are any members of the production collective who had the power to change or remove the dialogue. However, it is not necessary for us to deem these screenwriters the authors of the films in order to criticize for the moral blemishes for which they are responsible. Furthermore, there are good reasons to refrain from identifying those screenwriters as authors. For there are other ways in which screen works may be morally flawed that are beyond the control of screenwriters and, thus, not plausibly their responsibility. Typically, once shooting begins, screenwriters have very little control over anything—if they are on set at all. The most visible work that happens on set is the collaboration between director and actors— oftentimes an intense, intimate, interpersonal activity. As such, while film sets are the sites of cooperative work and collaborative achievement, they are also sometimes the backdrop for disagreements, fights, slights, and ethical failings. Consider this example from the news cycle a few years ago: As The Hollywood Reporter recently noted, “One of the most notorious scenes in cinema history, the Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider butter rape scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, is making headlines once again, 44 years after the film’s debut. In a recently resurfaced video interview from 2013, Bertolucci confirms that Schneider, who died in 2011, did not know the details of the rape scene ahead of time, and that the graphic nature of the scene was improvised on set.”38 Now, Bertolucci and Brando did not actually rape Schneider, but it is plausible that they deceived, humiliated, and violated her. If we accept the account of events that both Schneider and Bertolucci offer, then what we see when we watch the film is a fictional rape, but a real violation of another sort and the real humiliation of Schneider. For this reason, it is plausible that the Last Tango in Paris itself is morally blemished and, perhaps, artistically flawed—that is, the film is morally and artistically flawed in virtue of what was done to Schneider during its creation.39 Now, given the plausible idea that authorship essentially involves control over the work as a whole and, as such, responsibility for the work as a whole, we 38  Ariston Anderson, “Hollywood Reacts With Outrage over ‘Last Tango In Paris’ Director’s Resurfaced Rape Scene Confession,” The Hollywood Reporter (December 3, 2016), available at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-reacts-disgust-outrage-last-tango-parisdirectors-resurfaced-rape-scene-confession-95 (accessed December 8, 2016). The video is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=021jNOEVytQ&feature=youtu.be 39  For a supporting argument in defense of this claim, see Ted Nannicelli, “Moderate Comic Immoralism and the Genetic Approach to the Ethical Criticism of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 169–179. I take it that in the Last Tango in Paris case, the genetic approach to ethical criticism ought to be especially plausible, given that the moral flaw inheres in the work’s manifest properties—that is, the actual violation and humiliation of Schneider is visible on the screen.

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ought to say that the author(s) of Last Tango in Paris (whoever they are) bear responsibility for the moral and artistic flaws that result from what Schneider experienced in the process of creating the film. (This is not to say the film’s authors are the only ones who bear responsibility; Brando clearly bears some responsibility but is not plausibly an author of the film.) Yet, surely, the responsibility for these ostensible moral and artistic failings belongs in no way to the film’s co-screenwriters, who may have scripted a fictional rape scene but had nothing to do with the real violation and humiliation that occurred during the filming of the scene. So, in this case, and others like it, attributing authorship to a film’s screenwriters threatens to unfairly burden them with responsibility for moral and artistic flaws over which they had no control. Cases like these constitute one sort of important reason that we ought not regard the co-­ screenwriters as among the film’s authors.

Conclusion Taken together, the above analyses of screen authorship generally, the ontology of cinema, and the artistic and ethical evaluation of cinematic works support the intuitions with which this chapter began: screenwriters are important creative contributors to screen works, but they are rarely the authors of those works. The reason, in summary, is that screenwriters rarely meet the plausible necessary condition of having control of and responsibility for the screen work as a whole. As we saw, this is, in part, because screen works have many of their constitutive properties as a result of creative activity in which the screenwriter has no involvement whatsoever, let alone control over. Moreover, we saw that in some such cases, it is right and proper that screenwriters are not regarded as authors because if they were regarded as authors, they would be unfairly burdened with responsibility and blame for artistic and moral flaws over which they had no control. Nevertheless, this conclusion may leave us wanting a bit more of a positive account of screenwriters’ roles in the creation of screen works. There are at least two points we can add. First, as hinted at the start of the chapter, the foregoing account allows for the conceptual possibility that a screenwriter may be the author (or among the authors) of a screen work. On the account of authorship endorsed here, authorship of a given work is determined on a case-­ by-­case basis, and there is nothing, in principle, to preclude screenwriters from authoring screen works if they meet the sufficient control condition and the expression condition. So, it remains possible and, perhaps, plausible, that, say, head writers of long-form television shows such as Louis C.K., Vince Gilligan, and David Milch are the authors of those shows, given the amount of creative control they reputedly have. However, we must also note that, in such cases, those individuals are not the authors of the television programs merely in virtue of being head writers. And the scripts for those television programs still leave many of the programs’ constitutive features unspecified and undetermined. That is, these programs, like all screen works, have constitutive features that are

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established after the writing of the screenplay and that are, therefore, beyond the control of the screenwriter qua screenwriter. If individuals like CK, Gilligan, and Milch are the authors of television programs, it is because they are not only head writers but also executive producers who have control over the shaping of the programs as wholes—and responsibility for them. This still seems to leave the screenwriter and the screenplay with less value and significance than what we often intuit they actually have. The second and final point may go some way to ameliorating this result. It is possible that the conclusion at which we have arrived doesn’t feel entirely satisfactory because, in contrast to the descriptive analysis of authorship accepted here, our appreciative practices often operate with a tacit, honorific conception of authorship. So, when we deny that a screenwriter like Mamet is the author of the film Glengarry Glen Ross, it may feel as if we are in some sense denying Mamet’s artistic achievement. Conceptually speaking, however, this need not be the case at all. We simply need to be clearer about what we mean when we use the term “authorship” and develop a finer-grained account of the agency behind the achievement of screen works. True, identifying an individual as the author of a screen work makes her a candidate for praise for the work’s artistic achievements. But it does not follow that the achievements are hers alone. For another possibility is that significant amounts of credit are due to creative contributors who are not among the work’s authors in the descriptive sense above, yet whose agency contributed to the artistic achievement of the work. Thinking in parallel terms about literature, it is plausibly the case that, say, Raymond Carver is the sole author of his short stories and poems, although his editor, Gordon Lish, undoubtedly deserves some of the credit for the artistic achievements realized by Carver’s works. We don’t need to make the overly strong claim that Lish is a co-author of those works in order to properly credit him for his contributions, though. Although only Carver had control over the works as wholes (and, as such, is the sole author of them), Lish deserves and can be allocated credit for his creative contributions by recognizing (1) that authors are not the only people responsible for the constitutive features, including artistically meritorious features of their works and (2) non-author creative contributors are candidates for praise and credit for such features insofar as they exercised agency over them. Elsewhere, I have advanced this sort of argument regarding the appreciation of television, and we can also apply it, mutatis mutandis, to the appreciation of the creative contributions of screenwriters.40 In appreciating the artistic achievement of any given feature of a work, we can ask how the feature happened to get there—how the work happened to be shaped in just that way. Authors deserve some credit for such achievements because they ultimately have control over the work as a whole. Yet in many cases, the artistic achievement that inheres in a particular feature of a screen work is a result of the creative contri40  The following discussion is drawn from Ted Nannicelli, Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017), 42–45.

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bution of some other agent who is not the author—say, an actor, the cinematographer, or the screenwriter. These contributions and the individuals who make them deserve credit, of course, and we do not lack a means to parcel it out if they are not among the works’ authors. We can acknowledge their creative contributions by noting that their actions—their agency—are the sources of the artistically meritorious features. Unlike authorship, which is an all or nothing game since someone either has control over the whole or does not, agency is a scalar concept, admitting of fine-grained degrees of distinction. Another analogy I have used elsewhere is with moral agency in the context of ethical criticism. We think of people like Tony Soprano, who has control over the planning and execution of a crime, as the “authors” of those crimes, and, as such, as bearing the most responsibility for them and deserving the most blame. Yet cases like this often involve other moral agents—accomplices—who have some lesser degree of responsibility and deserve a lesser degree of punishment. In such cases, we are, of course, interested in the “authors” of the crimes, but not exclusively so. We need the concept of moral agency to make the appropriate gradations of moral responsibility and parcel out the appropriate amount of blame and punishment to the accomplices of the crime. One virtue of focusing on agency as well as authorship in the appreciation of screen works (and other art contexts) is the analogous way in which it finely attributes credit and responsibility for a work’s artistic merits and flaws, respectively, among the relevant contributors, including its author(s). For example, attending to agency as well as authorship could potentially help adjudicate and resolve certain disputes such as that pertaining to the relative creative contributions Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz made to the screenplay for Citizen Kane. Plausibly, one of the sticking points in this case has been the way in which the dispute has assumed that only one of the men can be the screenplay’s author and, thus, deserving of all of the credit for its artistic achievement. An agential approach would recognize that, authorship aside, both men made important creative contributions and deserve credit.41 In short, a focus on agency might achieve what the model of multiple authorship unsuccessfully attempts: that is, it might allow us to more precisely assign credit for a work’s artistic merits. An emphasis on agency provides a cogent way of affirming the value of the contributions of individuals like screenwriters and assigning appropriate credit for them without simultaneously burdening those individuals with responsibility for features of the work over which they have no control. A focus on agency gives us the tools to acknowledge witty dialogue, intricate plotting, complex character development, and restrained subtext as artistic merits and contributions to a screen work’s overall 41  In this example, another option would be to recognize this as a case of joint authorship along the lines of what Livingston proposes. I am admittedly describing this particular case rather simplistically in the interest of space. For a sustained, detailed discussion, see Robert L. Carringer’s The Making of Citizen Kane, Revised Edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

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artistic value without becoming ensnared in debates about authorship. It allows us to more clearly and precisely appreciate and credit the artistic contributions that screenwriters make to screen works.

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———. 2013b. The Ontology and Literary Status of the Screenplay: The Case of ‘Script-Fic. Journal of Literary Theory 7 (1–2): 135–153. ———. 2014. Moderate Comic Immoralism and the Genetic Approach to the Ethical Criticism of Art. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72 (2): 169–179. ———. 2017. Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective. New York: Routledge. Perkins, V.F. 1972. Film as Film. Baltimore: Penguin. Price, Steven. 2010. The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2013. A History of the Screenplay. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sellors, C.  Paul. 2007. Collective Authorship in Film. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (3): 263–271. Staiger, Janet. 1985. Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood’s Continuity Scripts. In The American Film Industry, Revised Edition, ed. Tino Balio, 173–192. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Youngblood, Denise J. 1991. Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era 1918–1935. Austin: University of Texas Press.

PART III

Approaches and Schools

CHAPTER 11

Analytic Philosophy of Film: (Contrasted with Continental Film Theory) Richard Eldridge

The terms “analytic” and “Continental” are evidently enough mismatched: “analytic” more or less names a method, while “Continental” names a place. Not all practitioners of an analytic method work outside Europe, and not all of those whose work is more socially hermeneutic work inside Europe. A number of theorists both analyze the mechanisms of film construction and consider the social significance of film interpretively. Arguably, the most interesting and important theorists do both. Yet these terms have, nonetheless, passed into common-enough usage as markers of two distinct, broad overall styles of thinking about film. “Continental” generally indicates an interest in conceptions of an emergent, socially and historically formed human subject understood according to some combination of terms derived from Hegel, Freud, Saussure, and structuralism, in the regressive social functions of typical narrative films as such, and in avant-garde works taken as cutting against the grains of both Hollywood movies and ordinary social life. In contrast, analytic philosophers of film tend to be case-by-case pluralists. They are more likely to focus closely on things that happen in individual films and to pay attention to contingent decisions about shots, sequencing, lighting, dialogue, and so on, that are made in courses of production, embodied in particular cases, and aimed at producing specific effects. Their arguments are more immediately empirical, though their empirical descriptions often have theoretical presuppositions, implicit or explicit. Continental film scholars are more likely to call what they do to film theory, while analytic scholars are more likely to describe themselves as doing philosophy of film. This terminological arrangement mirrors similar distinctions R. Eldridge (*) Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_11

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between literary theory and philosophy of literature and between art theory and philosophy of art. The two styles of work on film are represented in two excellent but quite distinct summary anthologies: Critical Visions in Film Theory1 (2010) for Continental film theory and Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (2006)2 for analytic philosophy of film. Neither volume includes any essay or excerpt that is included in the other. Exceptions and qualifications to this distinction between Continental film theory and analytic philosophy of film are legion, but as these anthologies illustrate, there are these two broad, overarching, distinct stylistic tendencies in the academic study of film. The major early academic film theorists Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, and Erwin Panofsky were German emigrés who argued in favor of receiving film as a form of art. They challenged dismissals of films as nothing but cheap entertainments, and they were concerned to establish that film has distinct and striking powers of expression and artistic presentation. Hence, they attended simultaneously to properties of films as a medium of photographically produced moving images and to mechanisms of expression and of the presentation of meaning. As the reception of film as a medium of art became well established, however, partly through their arguments and, more significantly, through the achievements of major directors such as Orson Welles, John Ford, Jean Renoir, and Sergei Eisenstein, their arguments came to be taken for granted, and academic film studies began to split along stylistic lines that distinguished Continental from analytic approaches in studies of art and in the humanities generally. In part, this developing split responded to two more or less distinct traditions of directorial style and its theory. More avant-garde filmmakers were largely centered in Europe and were more influenced by montage editing and by silent film. Their work was more likely to call attention explicitly to the filmed image as artful construction and more likely to offer intellectual provocation than comfortable enjoyment. This directorial tradition includes Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, and Luis Bunuel, among others.3 Major American  Eds. Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White with Meta Mazaj (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s).  Eds. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell). 3  In his landmark essay, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” André Bazin contrasts (a) the relatively more montage-oriented style that derives from silent film, that “evoked what the director wanted to say,” and that “insidiously substituted mental and abstract time [in place of] … real time” with (b) the more explicitly realist style, developed through Orson Welles’ use of the deep-focus shot that built on “the realism of sound” (introduced in 1927) to develop “a reborn realism” (Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in Bazin, What is Cinema?, Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 23–40, at pp. 39, 38). Even here, however, enormous qualifications are necessary, many of which Bazin supplies. FrancoSpanish Surrealism (Bunuel, Dali), German Expressionism (Lang, Murnau), and Soviet Montage (Eisenstein, Vertov) are distinct avant-garde traditions. Realism in sound films was established in the 1930s well before Welles by Ford, Hawks, and Capra, among others working in Hollywood and by Jean Renoir and others working in France, all drawing on an earlier realist narrative style in Griffith, Flaherty, Chaplin, and others. There are strong narrative realist elements (along with intensive stylization) in Lang, Murnau, and Dreyer, and so on. Bazin’s broad defense of realism 1 2

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directors in contrast worked more centrally within the Hollywood studio system. Their work made special use of the powers of the movie camera to track the world—for example, the motions of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers shot in a single continuous take, or the unfolding of a landscape in a panoramic shot of Monument Valley in a Western—and it was more likely to offer narratives for enjoyment than immediate provocation. This directorial tradition includes Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Frank Capra, among others. This distinction between two directorial traditions is, however, likewise crude. There are often narrative elements, sometimes absorbing ones, in montage-­oriented European avant-garde films, and American narrative films experiment in shot angle, editing, and point of view. Jean Renoir is a European realist, and Stan Brakhage is an American hyper-experimentalist. Directors such as Welles, Hitchcock, Ray, Scorsese, Altman, and Kurosawa are major makers of narrative films that are formally innovative and provocative. Since thought can be invited and advanced by narratives, including entertaining ones, and avant-garde images can be narratively compelling, the distinction between narrative entertainment films and intellectual provocation films is far from absolute. Nonetheless, Continental film theory and analytic philosophy of film tend to be responsive in the first instance to one of these two broad directorial traditions, with Continental film theory taking its cues from the Eisenstein, avant-­ garde, montage tradition and with analytic philosophy of film guided by the Ford, narrative, continuous action tradition. But just as traditions of directorial style have increasingly overlapped and converged—where would one put Steven Soderbergh or Andrzej Wajda?—so too have Continental and analytic film theories begun to overlap and converge, with each style of analysis enriching the other.4 And as with directorial styles, there have always been theorists, such as Jean Mitry, who use both analytic and hermeneutic methods and are not fully locatable in either camp. The best practitioners of both analytic philosophy of film and Continental theory are concerned both with broad social and cognitive functions of film as a distinctive medium as such and with particular decisions made and particular effects achieved in particular cases. Continental theorists are more likely to focus on the social and ideological functions of film, and their arguments are likely to proceed from strong premises about subject formation and the political shaping of interests. Noël Carroll, the most important contemporary analytic philosopher of film, has rightly criticized what David Bordwell dubbed SLAB theory (after Saussure, Lacan,

against avant-gardism set the stage, however, for the reaction against realism and in favor of avantgardism that emerged in the 1960s’ structuralist and post-structuralist film theory. 4  As we shall see, the best contemporary Continental film theory that focuses on social meanings and embodied experiences of specific films is no longer “Continental” in the sense of the high structuralist and post-structuralist theory of the 1960s and 1970s practiced by Christian Metz and Stephen Heath, among others, just as the best contemporary analytic film theory is no longer dominated by appeals to cognitive science.

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Althusser, and Barthes)5 as practiced by film theorists such as Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, Kaja Silverman, and Terese de Lauretis for being “monolithic” in arguing that all films as such, just by presenting visual narratives that are to some extent intelligible, thereby reinforce already existing social ideologies involving the acceptance of such things as traditional gender roles, the existence of a real world that science is able to represent correctly, and the authority of a control-seeking rational economic agent. Why, Carroll reasonably asks, should we think that all narrative films do or must fulfill such ideological functions, when there is quite evidently an enormous variety of movies that are very different from one another? Why not go pluralistic and look at different films case by case?6 Against Carroll’s relaxed pluralism, SLAB theory argues that we ought to remember that at least the social world and its roles, and perhaps aspects of the natural world as well, are matters of construction and convention that can and perhaps should be changed. Why is an outcropping that reaches up five miles from the ocean floor just barely to break the water’s surface counted as an island, not a mountain? Why are the bodies of women presented more often than the bodies of men as objects of visual pleasure in films, and why are men more frequently the heroes of action films than women? Here, the guiding assumptions and questions of Continental film theory often have some kinds of empirical support, implicit or explicit, even if the readings of individual films that it generates are often (but not always) predictable, heavy handed, and monolithic. The bodies of women are more often presented as objects of visual pleasure than are the bodies of men (though there are exceptions: think of Cary Grant, the young Henry Fonda, or the young Brad Pitt, among others). Men are more often (but not always) the heroes of action films than women are. There are no films in which awkward women are saved by encounters with magic pixie dream boys. Arguably, then, there are two kinds or levels of phenomena that we would like to understand and explain: (a) what is more often or typically (but not always) the case in many (especially commercial successful) films, many of which (though not all) do reinforce widely prevalent ideological assumptions and (b) the distinctive successes—artistic, narrative-cognitive, and emotional-­ aesthetic—of some individual films,7 together with the production decisions that yield these successes in particular cases. 5  Bordwell coined the term Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes “(SLAB) Theory” in “Historical Poetics of Cinema,” in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R.  Barton Palmer (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 369–98, at p. 385. Bordwell and Carroll together discuss this approach under the title “Grand Theory” in their editors’ introduction to Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. xiii-xvii. 6  Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (pp. 37–68). 7  Contra what SLAB theory sometimes suggests, these successes are by no means limited to experimentalist or avant-garde works produced outside the (Hollywood) mainstream. Who would deny the artistic as well as commercial successes of Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Coppola, or Scorsese?

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The first major more or less analytic philosophical book on film is Stanley Cavell’s 1971 The World Viewed. Cavell draws significantly on already existing film theory, especially Panofsky and André Bazin, and he addresses the function of film as art in very broad terms rooted in his general philosophy of art, especially modernist art. Memorably, he writes that “Apart from the wish for selfhood (hence the always simultaneous granting of otherness as well), I do not understand the value of art.”8 Here, art in general is cast as offering us “the route back to our conviction in reality,”9 as though apart from the experience of art our lives were primarily matters of aimless drifting or the expenditure of labor in hyper-conventionalized and unsatisfying routines of work. Beyond this general view of the nature and value of art, however, Cavell develops a rich account (citing Panofsky) of “the unique and specific possibilities of the new medium.”10 This account emphasizes the ontological distinctiveness of the photographic image compared with the painterly image. About a photograph, it always makes sense to ask what was cropped out or otherwise left out of the frame, whereas a painting may include at whim anything a painter chooses to insert. A photograph is to a significant degree mechanically produced, so that it captures the world, while a painting is manually and artisanally produced. Adopting the tropes of Bazinian realism, Cavell remarks that the presentation of the real is achieved in a photograph, and so also in a film, “automatically, …magically, …without my having to do anything, …[thus] satisfying the wish for the world recreated in its own image,”11 so that I might experience its unfolding as meaningful without having myself to bear the burdens of responsibility and responsiveness within it. “The altering frame is the image of perfect attention”12 to the unfolding of significance within the real world, as the camera tracks the progress of a complete action.13 Second, film presentations (as Munsterberg and Arnheim had already noted) are strikingly different from theatrical presentations in having possibilities of close-ups, flashbacks, tracking shots, shifts in points of view, and so forth. No more, however, should we assume a priori that successful film must be primarily realist rather than avant-garde. Who would deny the artistic and commercial success and interest of late Godard, Maya Deren, Dziga Vertov, or Ang Lee? Neither avant-gardism nor realist narrative is either necessary or sufficient for artistic success. 8  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed [1971], Enlarged Edition, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 22. 9  Ibid. 10  Ibid., p. 30. 11  Ibid., p. 39. 12  Ibid., p. 25. 13  Cavell’s Bazinian realism about photography and photographically produced film (as opposed to cartoons or, more recently, computer generated imagery (CGI) movies) is consistent with—in fact, it presupposes and implies—the further thought that the presentation of the real that is achieved is itself also the result of directors’ and other producers’ decisions about angle of shot, lighting, focus, and so forth. See Richard Eldridge, “How Movies Think: Cavell on Film as a Medium of Art,” Estetika: The Central European Journal of Aesthetics, LIVIII, No. 1 (2014), pp. 3–20, for a full development of this point.

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Hence, their possibilities of presenting content resemble those of novels as much or more than those of stage plays. In addition, movies are “screened and viewed,” not “performed” like plays.14 As a result, film acting is distinctively different from stage acting. Again, developing a thought of Panofsky’s, Cavell writes that “For the stage, an actor works himself into a role; for the screen, a performer takes the role onto himself ”15 as the camera explores a particular actor’s actually existing physiognomy, bearing, mien, and gait, most prominently by way of close-up. Hence, it is natural for us to refer to Humphrey Bogart or Katherine Hepburn movies, in which they play different characters while we see them in each of them. Cavell’s talk of a broad function of film as art—answering to the wish for selfhood (to be achieved within worldly activity, in relation to others)—may seem to be in line with Continental film theory’s focus on functions of film as such, and, to some extent, it is. After all, Cavell draws significantly upon Bazin and Panofsky, who themselves are working within a recognizably Hegelian tradition of thinking about art and social life that also figures within Continental film theory. In addition, the major inspiration for Cavell’s work on the nature of the human subject is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who would have counted as a core analytic philosopher in 1971, but who also describes the lives of human subjects in terms that have some Hegelian resonances.16 But there are also some important differences that locate Cavell more firmly within a broadly analytic tradition of thinking about the arts. Cavell’s account of the powers and interests of art is distinctly modernist and individualist, in dwelling on successes in making meaning in the face of social ideologies, sometimes via traditional narrative means, rather than on the pervasive reinforcement of those ideologies by non-avant-garde art. While Cavell accepts that human subjects as bearers of discursively structured points of view are socially formed (along more or less Freudian lines), he does not indict the social world as a whole for thus forming and normalizing them, and his modernist picture of the achievement of full and authentic subjectivity is both anti-collectivist and normatively contentful, in contrast with European structuralist and post-structuralist thinking about social life. Second, Cavell proceeds primarily by way of readings of individual films, especially in his two later books on film genres: Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1984) and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1997). Third, Cavell offers a fairly explicit ontological-functional definition of film as art: a sequence of automatic world projections that invites and sustains the conviction of viewers in the meaningful reality of what is presented, and he identifies specific mechanisms of film production that enable films to fulfill this function in their distinctive ways: the  Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 122.  Ibid., p. 27. 16  On the role of Hegel and post-Kantian European thinking more generally in Wittgenstein’s thought, especially as Cavell receives and develops it, see Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 14 15

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close-up, the use of the star, the use of character types (the dandy, the military man, the clown), and deliberated genre elaboration and intertextuality. This detailed attention to definition, genre, and mechanism is significantly more prominent in analytic philosophy of film generally than in Continental film theory. Arthur Danto picks up many elements of Cavell’s definition of film. While Danto does not deny the magic of the experience of movies, he focuses somewhat less than Cavell does on a general artistic function of films as such, and he recasts Cavell’s points in a somewhat different vocabulary. Drawing on ideas that appear in his general philosophy of art in his 1981 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, many of which were worked out earlier in his 1964 “The Artworld” and 1973 “The Last Work of Art: Artworks and Real Things,” Danto argues that films, like art in general, present a world that is already fully formed by its makers and closed to the viewer’s intervention. It is, Danto, tells us, “essentially true of art …that it logically excludes its spectator from the space and often the time that it occupies.”17 In the case of films, the presentation of a world is visual, not verbal alone (as in literature). Like Cavell, Danto notes that films are mechanically screened or shown, not performed (like plays), and that two prints of the same film are two tokens of the same type (unlike two visually similar paintings that retain distinct-type identities and meanings as singular objects, despite their similarities).18 Unlike paintings, which are viewed, films are watched: they present, or in principle can present, unfoldings of events as things to be watched-for. Even a perfectly static film only of the title page of War and Peace is different from a projected slide image of that title page, since in the film, but not in the slide image, something could move, if the filmmaker chose to have that happen.19 Like Cavell, Danto more or less takes it for granted that the images presented by films are photographically produced. Cavell acknowledges the existence of cartoons, but he holds that they are different enough from (other) movies that a different account of their possibilities of artistic achievement is called for. In cartoons (and in pure CGI productions), there are, arguably, “no real laws [of nature] at all.” Characters may float, fly, or stand still in the air, and “their bodies are [or may be] indestructible, one might almost say immortal,”20 as in Wile E. Coyote’s eternal recoveries from being squashed by an anvil. The natural tendencies, as it were, of cartoons and CGI films are to take fantasy, dreams, science fictions, talking animals, and superheroes as their subject matters. Danto develops this point about the distinct artistic possibilities of (pri17  Arthur C. Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4, 1 (Winter 1979), pp. 1–21; reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Carroll and Choi, pp. 100–112, at p. 100. 18  Ibid., p.  101. In the terminology of Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976), film is an allographic medium of art while painting is autographic. 19  Ibid., p. 102. 20  Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 170.

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marily) photographically produced films by noting that photographs have a different kind of meaning or semantic content from non-photographically produced images. X is a photograph of Y if and only if (a) X is caused by Y (with some degree of automatism or mechanism) and (b) X denotes Y pictorially, so that the semantic value (its being true or false of something) varies with its semantic content (what it depicts). Though there can be blurry or misleading photographs of an object Y, and though photographic images are (normally) subject to manipulations by their makers, who make decisions about lens aperture, film stock, shutter speed, focus, and frame, there is no such thing as a false photograph of Y.21 Given its partly automatic-causal relation to what it depicts, the camera is especially well suited to exploring the looks of actual things. Danto distinguishes between the situation in painting, where an actual person (Mrs. Siddons, say) may be used as model for The Muse of Tragedy, and the situation in film, where an actual person (Harrison Ford, say) is used as an occasion for photographic exploration (as in close-up). In the latter case, according to Danto, the particular physical being of the actor can become foregrounded, in such a way that the actor can “swamp the role he or she is playing.” In general, “nothing counts as a different performance” of the same work by a different actor, as particular actors function as particular motifs to be explored by the camera.22 Were a new actor to play a particular role from an already existing film in a new movie, the result would be a remake, not a new performance of the same film. The result, according to Danto, of the fact that photographically produced films display a world narratively and visually by way of the camera’s exploration of really existing things, scenes, and people is a particularly intimate involvement on the part of individual spectators with unfolding meaning. Invoking a line from Proust’s description of the experience of theater, Danto remarks that in the experience of movies, “chaque spectateur regardait …un décor qui n’était que pour lui, quoique semblable aus milliers d’autres que regardait, chacun pour soi, les restes des spectateurs; each spectator viewed … a scene which existed for himself alone, though closely resembling the thousand other scenes viewed by the other spectators, one by one.”23 We can feel, that is, as if the movie is intimately unfolding in a meaningful way for us, one by one. Kendall Walton similarly argues that photographs and films, unlike paintings, possess an inherent realism, even when plots are fantastic. Unlike a painting, a photograph, and so too a film, functions as an aid to or “tool for vision”24 in seeing an actual thing, something like the way in which we see actual things prosthetically, as it were, through a telescope or a mirror. For example, when I  Danto, “Moving Pictures,” p. 104.  Ibid., p. 107. 23  Ibid., p. 101. 24   Kendall L.  Walton, “Transparent Pictures,” Critical Inquiry 11 (December 1984), pp. 250–273; excerpted as “Film, Photography, and Transparency,” in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1988), pp. 70–76 at p. 71. 21 22

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see Aunt Mabel grimacing in a photograph, “I actually see, through the photograph, the grimace that she effected”25 on the photograph’s occasion. As for Danto, a blurry photograph of X is still a photograph of X. Though intentional manipulations of lens aperture, shutter speed, lighting conditions, and so on are normal, it is also the case that “our photographic equipment and procedures happen to be standardized in certain respects,” and in any case, whatever mediations, mechanical or intentional, are in place, both photographs and films possess a distinctive “transparency”26 so that they put us in visual touch with an actual object. Moving photographic images—films—may then be used, according to Walton, as props in games of make-believe, as we are guided, for example, to imagine Han Solo shifting into hyperspace by actually seeing Harrison Ford move a lever.27 Against the emphases of Cavell, Danto, and Walton on the photographic basis of film and on the transparency of the photographic image in presenting its object, Noël Carroll has developed a more general definition of film that is meant to capture cartoons and completely CGI-produced movies as well as traditional, mostly photographically produced films. We do think of photographic films, cartoons, and CGI productions as movies. Moreover, in general, in the arts, the physical basis of an art form does not by itself determine artistic possibilities and success conditions. For example, visual images can be made from oils, tempera, or water colors, among other things, and they can be rendered on canvas, paper, wet plaster, wood, or cave walls, and yet the products are still paintings. We think of them as paintings, and we experience them as paintings, albeit that they also display various more specific modes of artistic achievement. Sculptures may be made of wood, marble, or cast bronze. Typically, there are both physical bases and “different, nonconverging potentials and possibilities”28 for any medium of art. Why not say the same thing about movies: many different physical bases, many different (related, but not convergent) possibilities of artistic success? Instead of thinking of physical bases  Ibid., p. 73.  Ibid., p. 76. 27  Gregory Currie has argued against Walton and all versions of a transparency thesis by noting that “seeing a photograph of X is a matter of seeing a representation of X rather than of seeing X itself ” (Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and the Cognitive Sciences [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], p. 51, emphasis added). While it is certainly true that what we see directly (Walton might say) when we see a photograph of X is the photograph, that is, a representation of X, it is also true that (as Currie concedes) “the representations photographs give us are certainly very different in kind from those we get by drawing and painting” (p.  51). The issue then is whether these differences can adequately be understood and explained without saying, as Walton does, that we also see X prosthetically (as it were) by or in our seeing of the photographic representation (of X). For more on visual depiction, with particular reference to Walton on making-believe and Wollheim on the twofoldness of representation (seeing the painting as a painting versus/and seeing what a painting is a painting of ), see Eldridge, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art, 2d. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 38–44. 28  Carroll, “Defining the Moving Image,” in Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 49–74; reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Carroll and Choi, pp. 113–133, at p. 116. 25 26

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of media as somehow determining possibilities of success, it is apt to take “stylistic ambitions [with respect to storytelling, audience involvement, compelling imagery, etc.] [to] dictate the production or choice of media.”29 Some films are photographically produced and transparent in presenting their objects, but some films (CGI, animated cartoons) aren’t. Given the comparative production costs of paying enormous salaries to stars to be photographed versus paying ordinary wages to teams of graphic designers, “photographic film may represent but a brief interlude in the art form.”30 Articulating the basis of this thought, Carroll then lists five conditions that are necessary for anything to count as a moving image (movie, film, television show, etc.)31: (a) an image is presented in a detached display (we are unable physically to orient ourselves in relation to or to enter the space of the presentation, as we can for a stage play); (b) motion on the part of objects presented within the image or on the part of the frame (camera panning, zooms) is a possibility (as Danto had argued); (c) this display is generated from a token, not via an interpretation (in the way in which plays are interpreted by directors, actors, set designers, etc.); everything is fully fixed within the unfolding images as screened or shown; (d) screenings or transmissions are not artworks in their own right (unlike stage performances, which involve additional art beyond the script alone); and (e) the display is two dimensional (this is true even for 3D movies, which are displayed on a 2D screen).32 This is all very sensible, and there is some point to emphasizing both the similarities between our experiences of photographically produced movies, cartoons, and CGI films and the freedom of filmmakers to use whatever physical bases they wish in order to achieve whatever effects they wish. At the same time, one may wonder (as Cavell does explicitly) about the extent to which our experiences of photographically produced movies and cartoons (and CGI) are similar. Each physical basis may offer its particular possibilities of distinct artistic magic, with the comparative realism of photographic movies contrasted with the freer fantasias of cartoons and CGI. One may also wonder, moreover, about the extent to which filmmakers consciously choose particular physical bases for their distinct artistic possibilities, which possibilities they explore and develop through the making of the work. The look and feel of successful photographically produced films do seem to vary together with choices of subject matter: the more directly transparent the presentation (with more continuity editing), the more realistic the narrative. Contrast, for example, the directly documentary, photographically produced Nanook of the North with the animation-­produced flights of fantasy of Fantasia or The Rabbit of Seville. It is, however, difficult to argue convincingly about the nature of film experience.  Ibid., p. 117.  Ibid., p. 122. 31  The five conditions are listed and argued for in Ibid. pp. 124–130. 32  This is true even for 3D movies, which are displayed on a 2D screen; this condition is necessary in order to rule out ballerina music boxes, for example. Ibid., p. 130. 29 30

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Some are likely to feel that the photographic film-cartoon-CGI similarities in their experience are obvious and important; others are more likely to be struck by differences. Moving beyond the question of definition and maintaining a pluralist stance toward the different kinds of successes, artistic and otherwise, achieved in many films, analytic philosophers of film have developed a piecemeal approach to analyzing both individual cases and genres. This approach, generally known as New Cognitivism for its frequent use of data from psychology about emotional response, was initiated by the film scholar David Bordwell’s 1985 Narration in the Fiction Film. Bordwell opens his book by reviewing Aristotle’s account in the Poetics of the aims of tragic drama and of the plot structures, choices of protagonists, and management of points of view that are crucial to achieving those aims. He includes “A Sketch for a Psychology of Filmic Perception and Cognition,” and he discusses distinct narrative strategies in a range of films, including detective films, melodramas, Westerns, and modernist art films. Together with his then University of Wisconsin colleague Noël Carroll, Bordwell edited the 1996 anthology Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies that functioned both as a manifesto for the approach and as a bringing together of work by major contributors to New Cognitivism, many of them analytic philosophers of film—Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, Cynthia Freeland, Flo Leibowitz, Jerrold Levinson, Paisley Livingston, and Alex Neill—as well as sympathetic major film scholars: David Bordwell, Carl Plantinga, and Murray Smith, among others. Carroll produced a range of monographs and essay collections that developed the approach from 1988 on: Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (1988), Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (1988), The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), Theorizing the Moving Image (1996), Interpreting the Moving Image (1998), Engaging the Moving Image (2003), and The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (2008), among others. Together with their collaborators, Bordwell and Carroll significantly reshaped contemporary film studies, even while Continental film theory remained dominant in many major film studies departments, where work continued to be oriented primarily by post-­ structuralist philosophy and literary theory and to be directed to broader questions about social functions and ideologies.33 33  But see note 4 on contemporary developments. In his important 2007 essay “An Elegy for Theory,” the film scholar D. N. Rodowick traces the emergence of the New Cognitivism not only to the invocation of ideas from cognitive science and experimental psychology but also both to a generalized frustration with failures of specificity in readings of individual films within Continental film theory and to developing interests in film history and in emerging new media, especially digital media. “Since the early 1980s,” as he puts it, film theory in Film Studies departments has been marked by “a decentering of film with respect to media and visual studies and by a retreat from theory.” Rodowick notes that Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film is shaped not only by his reliance on psychology but also by his engagement with “concrete problems of aesthetic practice” (“An Elegy for Theory,” October, 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 91–109; reprinted in Critical Visions in Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, pp. 1110–1126 at pp. 1111, 1113).

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The development of New Cognitivism has centered around three related but distinguishable broad topics: narration, genre, and emotion. As already noted, in his 1985 book, Bordwell outlined distinct narrative strategies that work effectively within different genres in order to maintain the emotional engagements of viewers. Subsequent work within the New Cognitivist approach goes into more detail. For example, Gregory Currie usefully distinguishes between character desires that focus on the fates of characters in a film and narrative desires that focus on the development of a film.34 Viewers of Casablanca may both wish for Rick and Ilsa to stay together (while recognizing, too, that it is better that they do not) and wish for Casablanca to end appropriately with Rick turning to Louis with the movie’s memorable closing line. Both character desires and narrative desires can arise with respect to both fiction and documentary films. Similarly, adapting insights from literary narrative theory, Murray Smith notes that it is important to distinguish recognition (of a projected image as an image of a character), alignment or focalization (in which the experiences and attitudes of particular character who may or may not be sympathetic are  presented via point-of-view shots or otherwise highlighted), and allegiance (when viewers’ sympathies for a particular character are motivated by a film).35 Though they often occur together, recognition, alignment, and allegiance are independent of each other, and they can and do come apart. There are often “complex patterns” of a film’s mobilization of recognition, alignment, and allegiance that “may preclude or transcend a single, strong engagement with a single character.”36 In general, in order to give a full and accurate account of viewers’ emotional engagements, it is important to distinguish multiple levels and foci of response, all of which may be in play simultaneously, rather than focusing only on a single dominant response to all films as such, as in some Continental film theory. In general, it is important to be clear about how, as a result of filmmakers’ decisions, movies guide and manage viewers’ responses through their narrative structures. Adapting terminology from Russian Formalist narrative theory, Bordwell distinguishes between the fabula of a narrative, or the events of a presented story as they actually occur (or are made-believe to have occurred) in chronological time, or the order of occurrence, and the syuzhet of narrative, or the order in which the events are actually presented by the film, or the order of telling.37 As Munsterberg and Arnheim noted, these can come apart, given the availability in film construction of flashbacks and flash forwards. These 34  Gregory Currie, “Narrative Desire,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 183–99; excerpted in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Wartenberg and Curran, pp. 139–47 at p. 140. 35  Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.  73–5, 81–95, 108; reprinted in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Wartenberg and Curran, pp. 160–69. 36  Ibid., p. 168. 37  Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 48–61.

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techniques can be used for either avant-garde experimental effects, as in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, or to motivate the viewer’s reflective engagement with a more directly commercial film, as in Marc Webb’s 500  Days of Summer. George Wilson has carried out a major study of how filmmakers manage points of view and viewers’ access to the events presented in a variety of ways. Wilson is interested in particular techniques of editing or shot sequencing that can give rise to impressions of causality on the parts of viewers. For example, a three-shot progression in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai suggests to viewers that a woman’s hand pushing a button mysteriously causes an in-fact spatiotemporally unrelated traffic accident involving a car driven by men. Since the causality here cannot be actual, we are forced either to take the sequence to be an editing error or, more likely, to take it “to make a kind of general, metaphorical statement, interjected here by the filmmaker, about, say, the uncanny power and influence of the woman over the men.”38 Wilson goes on to discuss in detail films by Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Max Ophuls, Josef von Sternberg, and Nicholas Ray, focusing on how viewers are guided in particular ways in their making sense of what is going on by filmmakers’ decisions about framing, lighting, close-up, and sequencing. Building on work by Aristotle and J. L. Mackie, Noël Carroll has developed a general theory of narrative, according to which a narrative, unlike an annal, chronicle, or mere list of events, must have “a unified subject” (however complex) and display (however indirectly) “perspicuously time-ordered” events that are connected in that earlier events in the fabula or chronological order must function as nonredundant members of a set of unnecessary but sufficient conditions for the occurrence of later events.39 More informally, earlier events must be presented (even if presented out of chronological order in the syuzhet) as relevantly causing or bringing about or producing later events. As Wilson’s work argues, there are a variety of techniques available to filmmakers for establishing the existence of relations of relevant bringing about between events and viewers’ uptakes on them. Causal connections may be shown directly, as in when we see Sam Spade shoot Canino in The Big Sleep, thereby causing his fall and death. Or they may be presented more indirectly, as in when we see close­up shots first of Bruno Antony’s highly polished two-tone wingtips, then of Guy Haines’ more ordinary, less polished brogues in Strangers on a Train—a sequence that suggests characterological differences that will play themselves out causally over the course of the story. In the actual world, and therefore too in the world that has been photographically captured on film, many events cause and are caused by a wide range of prior events (event-causality is overdetermined). The lighting of a match 38  George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 2. 39  Carroll, “On the Narrative Connection,” in Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 118–133, at pp. 121, 123–24.

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may initiate the smoking of a pipe, start a forest fire, or function as a signal to a confederate. A death may be caused all at once by a bullet, by a hand that pulled the trigger, and by offhand insult that motivated the trigger-pulling. No film can focus on all events related as causes and effects. Hence, filmic narratives that do focus on specific cause-effect relations must have some particular point in doing so. Carroll has argued that a narrative (unlike a chronicle) and, in particular, a narrative that “sustains closure” (unlike an indefinitely unfolding soap-opera), “is a network of questions and answers.”40 Directors and other constructors of film narratives exploit the fact that “some scenes or sequences evoke questions; others answer said questions directly.”41 Thus, we are directed by the presentation of Nanook and his companions as setting out on a seal hunt to wonder or ask whether they will succeed in killing a seal and so in acquiring the food, sealskin hides, and tusks that they need. Likewise, when Joan of Arc is arrested and put on trial for heresy, we wonder and ask whether she will be convicted and whether she will confess to heresy and fabrication in order to avoid severe punishment or whether she will rather remain faithful to her experience and accept being burned at the stake. Narrative closure occurs when (and only when) the most important questions that have been raised for the audience by the opening scenes have been fully and appropriately answered: the couple in the romantic comedy end up together (or not, if things haven’t “worked” between them), or we learn who shot Liberty Valance. Both fictional and documentary films often run from one to two hours, and they typically aim at narrative closure and achieve it, if they are minimally well done. More complex, interesting, and better-constructed films will raise more complex questions and arrive at answers in complex but satisfying ways. As Currie has noted, audiences typically narratively desire that a satisfying appropriate end be reached (however bad that end might be for the movies characters, as in the complete eradication of the conquistadors in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God), and moviemakers typically seek to satisfy this desire. But there are some exceptions: works that are more open-ended and episodic, without definite ends, such as Michal Apted’s 7 Up series of films (now at eight films and still possibly going) or Andy Warhol’s eight-hour, five-­minute Empire featuring continuous slow motion, fixed camera footage of the Empire State Building. Even in these cases, however, that lack full narrative closure, the audience is guided through a structure of multiple questions and answers: we wonder what has happened over the last seven years to each of Apted’s characters, what will happen to them next, and why; and we both wonder what is going on in the Empire State Building as its lights go on and off and why Warhol chose to present these incidents in this way (we struggle to find a thematic meaning for the movie that explains how and why it is minimally plotted as it is). In general, it is part of the structure of a film that it is experienced as an unfolding narrative whose events are to some extent held together by  Carroll, “Narrative Closure,” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007), pp. 1–15 at p. 5.  Ibid.

40 41

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­relations of bringing about through which initiated questions are answered (or revised, dismissed, and displaced by others). As already noted, Wilson42 and Bordwell have completed detailed studies of specific techniques through which films establish relevant relations of bringing about and reach their ends in narratively plausible ways. The same or similar enough narrative strategies of prompting questions or concerns and providing satisfying answers or resolution are frequently employed in many films that thus form a genre. Plausibly, uses of these strategies have both cognitive-psychological and social explanations. Carroll has attended closely to the ways in which filmmakers who make melodramas, horror films, and suspense movies both presuppose and mobilize cognitive and emotive processing capacities on the parts of individual viewers. Within these genres (and others), a filmmaker chooses subject, camera position, composition, lighting, editing, music, and dialogue in order to present an object or person as falling under a certain concept. For example, a person A may be presented as threatened by a dangerous (because dangerous-looking) ax-wielder around a corner. Carroll dubs this initiating presentation that raises concern in the viewer for the well-being and fate of the person thus threatened “criterial prefocusing.”43 This criterial prefocusing establishes an “emotive focus” on the part of the viewer: a pro or negative attitude, a concern, held by the viewer with regard to the possible or likely fate of the threatened character (as in Currie on character desires), and the movie reaches its end or ends in answering the question of what will happen, hence satisfying the viewer’s concern. Within specific genres, criterial prefocusing and emotive focus are established in more or less standardized ways. For example, in a horror film, an attractive protagonist will be presented as menaced or threatened by an antagonist that is disgusting or loathsome as a result of being in some way impure: that is, in being formless (a blob or slime), ontologically mixed (zombies, the living dead; reptilian quasi-­ human aliens), or unnatural (giant spiders or worms, sea monsters, outrageously insane madmen, werewolves, etc.)44 The use of standardized criterial prefocusing, emotive focus, and question-­ and-­answer narrative structure is more dominant in, and more explanatory of, quite standardized genre films than of the achievements of high art in individual cases. In singularly successful cases of film art, the presentation is likely to be more mixed. For example, we feel more sympathy for King Kong than we do for his captors and tormentors, despite the giant ape’s unnatural size. Yet here too the same cognitive processing capacities are called into play by the film: the reason we feel more sympathy for Kong is that he is presented as suffering his torments (and so having an emotional life with which we s­ ympathize)— 42  Wilson, Narration in Light; Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, and Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006). 43  Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views, eds. Plantinga and Smith, pp. 21–47; reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Carroll and Choi, pp. 217–33, at p. 222. 44  Ibid., pp. 227–29.

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criterial prefocusing—while his pursuers are presented as mostly anonymous, intersubstitutable functionaries. Still more complex, original cases that cross genre lines or that lie largely outside fixed genres will require detailed analyses of multiple devices of presentation in order to see how they guide the complex, modulating understandings and emotional responses of their viewers. Yet even in these complex, original cases, it is plausible to suppose that there are multiple uses of criterial prefocusing, emotive focus, and causal and question-­ answering narrative structures, as more complex, mixed trajectories on the parts of multiple, more complex, mixed characters are developed, so that more complex, mixed understandings and felt responses are set up in viewers. That is, it seems plausible to suppose that there are some useful generalizations available from cognitive psychology and the theory of emotions that characterize and explain how individual viewers understand and respond to at least some details of almost all films, and supplying these useful generalizations (that also guide filmmakers’ decisions) is exactly what Bordwell, Carroll, Wilson, Currie, and others have done. At the same time, it also seems reasonable to consider distinctly social and psychoanalytic causes of both film genres and narrative structures, as those working more within the style of Continental film theory have done. Taking as his “preliminary working hypothesis,” the thought that “the determining, identifying feature of a film genre is its cultural context”—that is, “its [presented] community of interrelated character types whose attitudes, values, and actions flesh out dramatic conflicts within that community,” the film theorist Thomas Schatz argues that the choice and the development of action within a presented film world are determined by “our shared needs and expectations as audience members …for animation and resolution of basic cultural conflicts.”45 Viewers expect and demand the presentation of various social conflicts between lived values (and types who embody them) that run through their actual lives: for example, honor-clan-family versus public order, democracy, and justice (as in The Godfather), or community-normality-stasis versus threat, impurity, corruption (as in horror and alien films), or marriage-settled town life-agriculture versus violence-nomadism-isolation-transgressive individuality (as in Westerns).46 In broad terms, the iconography of a film—its narrative and visual coding—is determined by an ideology (a sense of social and value conflicts and of routes of address to them) under which viewers actually live.47 Films will both sell better and be more readily enjoyed if they speak to value conflicts that are present in the lived social experiences of viewers.48 45  Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981), excerpted in Critical Visions in Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, pp. 454–65, at pp. 455, 460. 46  Ibid., p. 457. 47  Ibid., p. 456. 48  Rodowick notes that if the role of individual cognitive psychology is over-emphasized (at the expense of social facts) in determining the structures of films, then what results is a promotion of a “concept of the [decontextualized] rational agent [in production, spectating, and theorizing] …

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Nonetheless, despite the importance for successful films of a continuing basic “concern for certain basic cultural issues,”49 change and variation are both possible and normal. Though many social conflicts at an abstract level are “essentially unresolvable [and] irreconcilable,”50 the specific shapes these conflicts take within actual life may change, and so may attitudes toward them. In addition to these external, social causes of variations in film iconography, there are also internal, formal causes, as filmmakers seek to present cultural worlds on film in ever more original and complex ways.51 Frequently, a given genre will develop from an initial transparency and realism in presenting social conflict toward increasing opacity, formal concern, ambiguity, and thematic complexity, as those working within a genre question and revise its conventions (in ways that viewers recognize and even expect).52 Consider, for example, the development of the Western from Stagecoach and High Noon to Little Big Man and Dances with Wolves. Echoing Schatz’s account of increasing opacity, ambiguity, formal concern, and thematic complexity, Bordwell has described the so-called art-cinema that became prominent in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Godard’s Breathless, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Antonioni’s L’avventura and L’Eclisse, Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad) as a form of realism that both responds to and expresses a new sense of social life as alienating. These films have “a drifting episodic quality,” as they display a “broken teleologism” in tracking a “biography of the individual” that is marked by “picaresque subjectivity” rather than an encounter with a clear problem situation and the achievement of a solution to it.53 “Events may lead to nothing”; as these films reflect and present a “realization of the anguish of ordinary living” and a “dissection of feeling” as episodic and dissociated.54 Coherent trajectories on the part of protagonists through continuous, intelligible space-time are often dropped in favor of montage editing that presents flashbacks, fantasies, or directorially introduced analogies and in a perspective that strives to be free of ideological positioning and to assert an epistemology that is value neutral.” When this happens, “the activity of theory is given over to science,” ethical and political concerns are displaced, and “philosophy itself begins to lose its autonomy and identity” as a form of humanistic critique (Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” pp.  1114, 1115). Pointedly, Carroll denies any commitment to “film theory [as] a science,” and he urges a dialectical-critical conception of theory (Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory,” pp. 59, 56). 49  Ibid., p. 462. 50  Ibid., p. 461. 51  Ibid., p. 462. Recently, Robert Pippin, working from a Hegelian background, has completed two significant studies of film genres as embodiments of responses to socially shared political and moral anxieties and concerns: Hollywood Westerns and American Myths: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 52  Ibid., pp. 463–64. 53  David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 151–69; reprinted in in Critical Visions in Film Theory, eds. Corrigan, White, and Mazaj, pp. 559–73, at p. 561. 54  Ibid.

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symbols. A sense of the presence of the director as auteur is more prominent in the audience’s experience, as viewers are compelled to ask what the story is, who is telling it for which reasons, and why it is being told in this way (picaresquely, and through directorial “stylistic signatures,” often involving freeze frames, fast cuts, and unusual camera angles, as well as flashbacks).55 Whatever their prominent formal self-markings as works of directorial art, however, these films also present (often difficult) stories that viewers may be presumed to process and understand, however incompletely and improvisatorially, through the general cognitive procedures outlined in New Cognitivist philosophy of film. Moreover, more traditional, continuity-edited movies continued to be made alongside self-consciously art-cinema films. Today, the situation is that of a widened palette of possibilities of both plot (both problem encounters plus solutions and more episodic drifts by individuals) and presentation (both continuity editing and montage jump cuts, flashbacks, and freeze frames). Directors such as Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle, and Sam Mendes have learned to combine techniques of both continuity editing and montage editing to produce compelling movies that invite viewers’ attentions to their filmic surfaces while also remaining narratively and depictively coherent. Within an expanded palette of possibilities, the choices made by directors (along with screenwriters and other producers) will typically involve a mixture of cognitive psychological-­ information processing causes, social causes, and formal (originality-seeking causes). Both Continental film theory and analytic philosophy of film have begun to respond to these important, complex cases, so that they have begun somewhat to converge with each other in their attentions simultaneously to all of these causes. Drawing significantly on New Cognitivism, but going beyond it to discuss not only narrative, emotion, and genre but also affect, fantasy, social pleasure, and sensuality, Carl Plantinga, focusing primarily on the Hollywood fiction film, has developed a comprehensive account of the spectator’s experience. According to Plantinga, not all pleasure enjoyed in the experience of film is regressive (contra Freud), though some is; conversely, not all pure clarity of attention without emotion is progressive (contra Brecht), though some is.56 Instead of focusing on a single emotional experience of all films as such, we should pay attention to “the fundamental tenet of a cognitive approach …that the spectator’s affective experience is dependent on cognition, on mental activity cued not only by film form but also by story contents.”57 In addition, however, to involving cognition of both film form and story contents, the experience of viewers is also shaped both by the practices, institutions, and roles of movie-­ going, which involve “a continuous background experience of artificiality,”  Ibid., p. 563.  Carl Plantinga, “Notes on Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, eds. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 372–93; excerpted and reprinted as “Spectator Emotion and Ideological Film Criticism,” in The Philosophy of Film, eds. Wartenberg and Curran, pp. 148–59, at pp. 148–51. 57  Ibid., p. 152. 55 56

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and by “a striking sensual and perceptual experience not found in literature” (as both Murray Smith and Laura U.  Marks have emphasized).58 Plantinga goes on to distinguish at least 15 different aspects—the list has overlapping elements—of the viewer’s experience in responding to a film: cognitive processing (inference making, question asking, etc.), visceral responses [as to a loud noise on a sound track or a sudden burst of light filling the screen], character engagement (including sympathy, primitive empathic responses such as emotional contagion and antipathy), emotional responses to unfolding narrative scenarios and both artifact and meta-emotions, emotions elicited by the viewer’s idiosyncratic associations and memories, moods, pleasures, desires, sexual arousal, various kinds and degrees of kinesthetic turbulence, affective mimicry, …reflex actions, and other sorts of affect in response to narrative, spectacle, setting, music, and the spectator’s own prior subjective experience.59

In general, “affective experience and meaning are neither parallel nor separable, but firmly intertwined,”60 and their developing modulations in the viewer are shaped by a wide and interacting set of film features and devices. In this respect, as Berys Gaut has noted in arguing for the medium specificity of film experience and film achievement (against Carroll’s anti-medium essentialism, but including not only cartoons and CGI films along with photographically produced films but also potentially video games as works within the film medium), film “instantiates artistic devices that are distinct from those that are instantiated by other media.”61 Moreover, part of the viewer’s engagement can also be due, Plantinga notes (as Schatz argued), to the fact that some “popular narratives, in embodying virtual solutions to traumatic problems, …play a role in the development of what might be called distributed or social cognition”62 of the conflicts that run through some stretches of joint social life. Insofar as films can both address or thematize shared problems of individual and social life and can do so through distinct presentational means, it seems natural to wonder whether at least some films arrive at answers to issues about meaning, value, and knowledge in human life. That is, can films as films do philosophy—make progress not only in illustrating philosophical views or claims that might and must be argued for elsewhere and otherwise but also in lending argumentative support to them. In Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism, Thomas E. Wartenberg argues that “popular film …can be a locus for reflection on the sorts of issues that have traditionally been the 58  Ibid. See also Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 59  Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 140. 60  Ibid., p. 2. 61  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 300. 62  Plantinga, Moving Viewers, pp. 225–26; emphasis added.

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domain of philosophy.”63 Drawing on a range of films including It Happened One Night (also treated at length by Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness), Pretty Woman, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, Jungle Fever, Mississippi Masala, and The Crying Game, among others, Wartenberg argues that films can critique social hierarchies; they can challenge ossified expectations about couple formation through strategies of inversion, counterexample, transformation, and destabilization in presenting processes of unlikely couple formation to which viewers’ sympathies and allegiances are mobilized by the qualities of the characters’ specific interactions.64 Hence, contra some strains of over-essentializing Continental film theory that dwell on narrative film as primarily an instrument for the reinforcement of gender and class ideologies, films can do social criticism, and some films do it effectively. In Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy, Wartenberg extends this line of argument about the powers of film to “make arguments, provide counterexamples to philosophical claims, and put forward novel philosophical theories”65 to a wider range of philosophical topics, including exploitation (Modern Times), skepticism (The Matrix), autonomy (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and practical wisdom (The Third Man). It seems exactly right to say that these films address these issues, thematize them, and motivate conclusions about them on the parts of viewers. Here, philosophers who demand proof or deductively valid arguments for interesting conclusions from innocuous premises are likely to balk at the thought that these movies amount to doing philosophy in the central meaning of that phrase. Against them, however, one may also wonder whether canonical works of philosophy have ever succeeded in addressing significant issues about meaning, value, knowledge, and reality via demonstrative argument alone, without also relying on imagery, patterns of emplotment, and the mobilization of emotion in their audiences.66 Beyond, moreover, Wartenberg’s efforts strictly to show that some films conform to some of the canonical procedures of properly academic philosophical argumentation such as the supplying of counterexamples and the posing of thought experiments, one might wish more explicitly to broaden the understanding of genuine philosophical argumentation to include the distinctive powers of film to capture things on film, present narratives, mobilize allegiances, and so on. Perhaps film

63  Thomas E. Wartenberg, Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p. xv. 64  Ibid., pp. 236–40. 65  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 9. 66  On the limitations of demonstrative argument in philosophy in general and on the inevitability of at some point moving “beyond proof,” see Eldridge, Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism, especially pp. 1–15, 264–290, and Friedrich Waismann, “How I See Philosophy,” in Contemporary British Philosophy, 3d. series, ed. H. D. Lewis (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1956), pp. 445–90. Perhaps “learning to see” is as much or more central to philosophy as demonstrative argument.

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can not only do philosophy but also help us to understand how to do philosophy in more authentic and fulfilling ways.67 Some recent work has embraced all of the special presentational powers of photographic film as a medium of art; the wide range of viewers’ cognitive, emotional, and affective engagements with film (together with specific devices for achieving them) that have been explored in the New Cognitivism; and the ability of films productively to thematize and address issues about meaning, value, and knowledge as they are experienced in individual and social life. Robert Sinnerbrink draws on both Cavell and Deleuze in developing what he calls cinematic ethics or an account of film as a medium of ethical experience.68 Sinnerbrink is more interested in “film-philosophy,” that is, “a way of thinking at the intersection between philosophy and film, linking the two in a shared enterprise that seeks to illuminate the one by means of the other.”69 Sinnerbrink moves unhesitatingly from Deleuze on the action-image and the time-image, to Cavell on film as a sequence of automatic world projections that aid in undoing skeptical despair, to Carroll and Bordwell on devices for the mobilization of viewers’ emotions. Similarly, Daniel Martin Feige draws on Hegel on  See the sympathetic reviews of Thinking on Screen that also make this critical point by Cynthia Freeland, “Comments on Thomas Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3, 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 100–109, and Eldridge, “Philosophy In/Of/As/And Film,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3, 1 (Summer 2009), pp. 109–116, as well as Wartenberg’s “Response to My Critics,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 3, 1 (Summer 2009), pp.  117–25. Part I of Paisley Livingston’s Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) carefully surveys the film-as-philosophy issues. Livingston concludes his discussion and defends film as philosophy by arguing that “what must be rejected …is the idea that we must make a choice between doing philosophy with film and doing philosophy with the linguistic and conceptual tools with which philosophy has been done prior to the advent of cinema” (p. 56). Progress can be made by taking philosophy, filmmaking, and film criticism to be practices that work well when in dialogue with each other. Livingston goes to investigate Ingmar Bergman’s explorations of persistent human irrationality and cruelty in detail. 68  Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London: Routledge, 2016). Here, Sinnerbrink develops a suggestion of Rodowick’s that film theory and criticism in the style of both Deleuze and Cavell might amount to “intertwining projects of evaluating our styles of knowing with the examination of our modes of existence and their possibilities of transformation” in “a fluid, metacritical space of epistemological and ethical self-examination” (Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” p. 1118). Against Rodowick, Malcolm Turvey has argued that philosophy should have at best a propadeutic role in clarifying certain basic concepts in film theory such as perception. Against film theory as philosophy, Turvey specifically recommends that “we … use our expertise—gained from watching large numbers of films, observing them and the responses of viewers to them carefully, and learning about the contexts in which they were made and exhibited—to evaluate the theories we take from other disciplines in terms of whether they successfully explain (or not) film” (Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Reply to D. N. Rodowick’s ‘An Elegy for Theory,’” October 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 110–20 at p. 120). Here, Turvey goes too far in taking philosophy, contra Wittgenstein, to consist in observing and explaining rather than in clarifying (and potentially changing) conceptual and practical commitments—a critical activity that philosophy, film, and film criticism in dialogue might best exemplify in helping us to see our lives and our lives with films more clearly (See notes 65 and 66.). 69  Ibid., p. 14. 67

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r­ elations between art and life to develop a picture of film as a dynamic, processual, critical, open-ended interrogation of how we are doing in forming and undertaking to live according to cognitive, ethical, political, and moral commitments.70 Echoing Cavell, Martin Seel has emphasized both the “heightened passivity” of viewers, who typically (as in the experience of music) cannot withdraw their attentions from a filmworld that continuously unfolds before them temporally, and the ways in which movies can distinctively draw on and refigure presentational devices from other forms of art: images and spatial points of view from painting and photography, narrative and focalization from literature, scoring from music, and acting and dialogue from theater.71 In Film Worlds, Daniel Yacavone treats movies-as-art as all at once presenting a world on film (often captured photographically), as ordering and representing events in the film world diegetically, as engaging viewers’ emotions, as cognitively and symbolically thematizing the events they present, as ‘working through’ and disclosing existential truths about human commitments within worldly practices, and as formally achieving a global affective presence that invites and sustains an audience’s absorption.72 As this recent work illustrates (and as the work of Cavell established, along with the work of his predecessors Munsterberg, Arnheim, Panofsky, Bazin, and Mitry), it is both possible and fruitful in the study of film to attend both to specific films and specific presentational strategies (as in much analytic philosophy of film) and to the mesmerizing powers of (the best works within) the film medium as such, which powers are frequently deployed creatively to address matters of essential human concern (as in the best Continental film theory). The study of film as a medium and as a form of art has been immensely enriched by both analytic philosophy of film and the work of many film scholars who have been influenced by ultimately Hegel-­ derived theories of the formation of the subject and of the inextricably cognitive-­emotional-aesthetic-social functions of art. Film study as a whole is now in a more mature, richer, more interesting, and fruitful stage of its development than ever before.73

70  Daniel Martin Feige, Kunst als Selbstverständigung (Münster: Mentis, 2012), especially “Film,” pp. 171–90. 71  Martin Seel, Die Künste des Kinos (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 2013). 72  Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 73  I am grateful to Daniel Yacavone for spectacularly detailed, focused, and useful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

CHAPTER 12

When the Twain Shall Meet: On the Divide Between Analytic and Continental Film Philosophy John Ó Maoilearca

Introduction: Never Mind the Gap Let us begin with a rather dramatic scene, set by Joseph Westfall in the opening to his recent collection, The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader: In general, I do not think it is useful to respond to the claim that Continental philosophy is not really philosophy, both because the term ‘philosophy’ has been contested since the time of the Greeks (and thus what ‘counts’ as philosophy is not easily settled), and because, when the charge is made against Continental philosophers that they are not engaged in the practice of philosophy, it is not typically made as a means of opening a discussion, but of closing one. It is a dismissal of the relevance of what Continental philosophers have to say before what they have said has been seriously considered, and is thus not a position that invites (or even tolerates) a Continental response.1

The purpose of this chapter is neither to refute nor corroborate Westfall’s statement in full, but rather to help us see how we might move beyond its depressing prognosis. The reasons for this are based on recent evidence that, in fact, a conversation is taking place, if not between any particular Continental and Analytic figures, then at least between their ideas, their themes. In other words, 1

 Joseph Westfall, The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 6.

J. Ó Maoilearca (*) Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_12

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there is evidence that beyond certain fixations on writing style and a rather unfortunate history of hyperbole, Continental and Analytic philosophy of film have much to discuss in terms of what they actually do with their subject matter (even if not in terms of what they say that they do). In even other words, then, the differences are meta-philosophical—they concern how philosophy of film per se is seen, how it is defined rather than how it is practiced. And, as we shall see, that metaphilosophy has its roots in history, to be precise, the history of Analytic and Continental philosophy. It is that history that we investigate here, both to chart the genealogy of two philosophical “worldviews” so to speak, and also to update and temper the divide with examples of contemporary practice from working film philosophers of every hue.2 On this front, then, we would partly agree with the Analytical film philosopher Murray Smith when he writes that “the image of a mutually exclusive and exhaustive contrast between Analytic and Continental philosophy is in many respects misleading and inadequate as a picture of western philosophy, past and present.”3 In various ways, Smith is correct here, but still not completely—as we hope to show. Consequently, beyond fulfilling the much-needed function of surveying where film philosophy has come from alongside how it has developed more recently, the chapter also forwards the aforementioned thesis, namely that among contemporary practitioners of film philosophy, there is a vast amount to share from all sides in what they practice or actually do rather than in what they say about what they do (especially as the latter is aligned with certain avowed philosophical lineages). According to the Analytic philosopher Ilham Dilman, genuine philosophy is concerned with how we think, are aware of our surroundings, and speak and communicate, as well as the nature of language, mathematics, the empirical sciences, psychology, sociology, and, of course, philosophy itself. It attempts to “clarify” these topics, concerning itself with “sense or meaning” all the while.4 Brenda Almond, another Analytic, adds that it looks for continuities, structures, and patterns. It seeks to get nearer to truth. It also extols the virtues of honesty, openness, courage, impartiality, and respect for persons.5 Alternatively, according to the figure who is, for many, the consummate Continental philosopher, Jacques Derrida: “I must honestly say that now, less than ever, do I know 2  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, even our choice of the term “film philosophy” as opposed to “philosophy of film” (or “philosophy of cinema”) might be contested by some: it is adopted in order to maintain a bivalent sense where philosophy might reflect on film (captured in the more standard philosophy of film) as well as, at least as a nonstandard possibility, where film might reflect on philosophy. For more on this, see John Mullarkey, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3  Murray Smith, “Film Theory meets Analytic Philosophy; or, Film Studies and L’Affaire Sokal,” Institute for Cognitive Studies in Film and Video Electronic Newsletter – Special Edition, vol. 3 no. 1 (November 1997): 4. 4  Ilham Dilman, “Can Philosophy Speak about Life?” in The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. A. Philips Griffifths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118. 5  Brenda Almond, “Philosophy and the Cult of Irrationalism.” in The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. A. Philips Griffifths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 201, 215.

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what philosophy is. […] It is as impossible to say what philosophy is not as it is to say what it is. In all the other disciplines…there is philosophy.”6 Differences rarely come starker than that. Yet, one can also find the Analytic philosopher Stuart Brown partially agreeing with Derrida, taking the view that philosophy has no essence but, as a term, covers a range of diverse activities with only a family resemblance and nothing more substantial than that.7 One difference undone, then? How many more might there be to come? In what follows, we attempt to track down a good few more of various types, some residing in the history of philosophy, others in the practice of philosophical analysis, in attitudes to science and scientism, history and historicism, and finally in methodological concerns with argumentative rigor, and stylistic concerns with clarity of expression. When we subsequently look at how these variables manifest themselves within the field of film philosophy, our ecumenism will be given even further motivation: though not all of the oppositions will necessarily collapse, a number will certainly wobble, if not fall, under the strain of closer examination. And this is especially true of the most recent practitioners of film philosophy: the twain do indeed meet, but it is through their actual practice of film and philosophy, that it happens. For some, like Simon Glendinning, what lies behind the term “Continental philosophy” is in fact an Analytic (or Anglo-American) fantasy, a fabrication with no substance at all: efforts to find an internal unity to the Continental collection [of philosophies] will always either underpredict or overpredict because the only perfect predictor is one that acknowledges that the set comprises the distinctive ‘not-part’ part of analytic philosophy: it is a unity of exclusion, not a unity of inclusion.8

“Philosophically” speaking Glendinning is correct: there is no such thing as “Continental philosophy” per se, for what counts as “Continental” has always been flexible, changing, and strategically constructed to oppose its (equally mutating) Anglo-American “Other.” Moreover, the very names given to this dyad, “Anglo-American and Continental,” or “Analytic and Continental,” are either a sham geo-cultural distinction or a category error, as has long been recognized.9 The title “Continental Philosophy” is simply a name for the Anglophone reception of European ideas, which has mostly filtered out the parts 6  Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy, ed. Paul Moser and Dwayne Mulder (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 373. 7  Stuart Brown, “On Why Philosophers Redefine their Subject,” in The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. A. Philips Griffifths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 55, 57. 8  Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 116. 9  Three of the pillars of so-called Anglo-American thought, Frege, the Vienna Circle, and the Polish school of Logic, all flourished in Europe, whereas, conversely, there are numerous “Continental departments” in North America, not to mention one or two practitioners in Britain. And things become more confused when one realizes that Finland is strongly Anglo-American, and that Analytic philosophy can be found on various other continents. So much for maps.

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it finds indigestible (neo-Thomism, French spiritualism, French epistemology of science, or lebensphilosophie, for instance, being typically neglected outside of France and Germany). Fixing the extra determination of “post-Kantian” as an adequate descriptor of all philosophy on the Continent since 1804 only worsens this illusory metonym, for, though a good deal has happened in French and German philosophy after Kant, that does not mean it was because of Kant: “post Kant ergo propter Kant” is as fallacious as it appears.10 In addition, there are few philosophical themes that are exclusive to the European continent, nor any outside the continent that are confined to “Anglo-­ American” philosophy. The same can be said vis-à-vis method: pace the ill-­ coined name “Analytic philosophy,” we shall see that there are actually few methodological barriers that abide between the two traditions either (and especially as practiced in contemporary Analytic and Continental film philosophy). In fact, it is extremely difficult to make any distinction stand up to historical, methodological, or philosophical scrutiny (though we investigate each of these, nonetheless). The presence or absence of a host of properties, philosophical and non-philosophical, has been cited as a decisive causal factor in the origin and maintenance of the current partition in Western philosophy, some of them rather obvious, some less so. Among the more obvious we have national character, political history, geographical proximity, institutional procedure, the language barrier, methodology, or different philosophical interests; among the more subtle candidates are a difference in style or mood, different philosophical lineages (most often spawned by Frege and Husserl, one of which we return to later), the supposed fact that Analytic thought is uniquely objectivist, individualist, and attentive to science (or “scientistic”), or the supposed fact that Continental thought is uniquely subjectivist, collectivist, and attentive to history (or “historicist”). Yet, as many commentators have come to see, this segregation neither fully succeeds nor fully fails to map clearly onto any geographical, historical, methodological, or philosophical difference.11 If these factors are pertinent at all, then they are at best tendencies, directions more or less followed by both rather than substantive divides. Nonetheless, were one to accept Glendinning’s premise of Continental philosophy’s insubstantial content, such relational or differential meaning does have significance for many in the Anglophone world (both Analytic and “Continental”) all the same, even if only to mark, as previously mentioned, how philosophers view themselves and the consequences of this view: it has less to do 10  For more on this hyperbolic use of Kant, see John Ó Maoilearca and Anthony Morgan, “Transcendental Authority: A Conversation with John Ó Maoilearca” in The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy, ed. Anthony Morgan (Newcastle: Bigg Books, 2017), 223–35. 11  See Chase and Reynolds for two fairly recent attempts at a more ecumenical approach to themes in Analytic and Continental thought. James Chase and Jack Reynolds, Analytic versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy (Durham: Acumen, 2011); Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, ed. Jack Reynolds, James Chase, Edwin Mares, and James Williams (London: Continuum, 2010).

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with what they think about when they philosophize, than where they ­philosophize, with whom they philosophize, and what they say about their philosophical practice to each other. There may, in fact, be many, perhaps a majority, on both sides who want to believe that their camp is on the right side of history, but such a lack of mutual respect, if it persists, stems from earlier generations of philosophers (the attitudes of Anscombe and Ryle, or Heidegger and Derrida, being exemplary).12 Richard Rorty—himself something of an ecumenist on these matters—put it as follows: …students of analytic philosophy were encouraged to keep their reading in literature well clear of their philosophical work and to avoid reading German philosophy between Immanuel Kant and Gottlob Frege. It was believed that reading Hegel rotted the brain. (Reading Friedrich Nietzsche and Heidegger was thought to have even worse effects – doing so might cause hair to sprout in unwanted places, turning one into a snarling fascist beast.)13

Yet, following Glendinning’s relational stance, it is certainly very noticeable that the perceptions of what counts as non-Analytic thought have been ever changing. By the 1950s, for example, the work of Kant had entered into the Analytic fold and away from its previous position (according to some in the Vienna Circle) at the cusp of the philosophical rift; while Hegel, once the paradigm of nonsense for many in the Frege-Russell-Carnap school, has, since the 1990s, become a figure with whom Analytic thought can do business (in the work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, for instance).14 And perceptions evolve. In coming to the work of Paisley Livingston, Thomas Wartenberg, and Noël Carroll, say, or (for the “other” side), Robert Sinnerbrink, Catherine Wheatley, and Patricia Pisters, therefore, we are no longer dealing with the attitudes and “optics” of the older generation of Franco-German “masters,” be it Carnap and Frege or Lacan and Deleuze, whose no-go areas were immutable: these are practicing film philosophers arguing about the philosophy of film in extremely compatible ways (whether they know it or not)—as I endeavor to explain. Leaving aside for now what content might distinguish the Analytical from Continental, we can still ask why they became distinct, that is, we can finally turn to the question of historical origins. In doing so, however, we should take care to avoid anachronism: too may zealots of the Analytic and Continental divide have dabbled in spurious historical lineages, with false, retrospective images of continuity created in order to harden the divide, both synchronically and diachronically. As another ecumenist, David Cooper, writes: “Hume [a favourite forbear for some Analytic thinkers] needs to be translated, perhaps  See Eric K. Tranoy, Philosophy Today, Volume VIII (1964): 156–7.  Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 21. 14  For more on this, see Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). It was Peter Strawson who helped to rehabilitate the image of Kant for Analytic philosophy in the 1950s. 12 13

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inaccurately, into a more ‘formal’ idiom to count as an Analytical philosopher on the most favoured characterisations.”15 Indeed, on the question of personal identity, for instance, one can compare Hume as much with Derrida and Deleuze as one can with Russell (in fact, Deleuze’s first book was a study of Hume).16 So let us look a little harder at this history, all the time remembering that it may well be even more significant to intertwine this history with the self-­image of those philosophers who embody it.

A Long and Winding History For certain philosophers, the Continental-Analytic divide has a very simple historical origin: “It took Hitler to drive analytic philosophy out of Europe.”17 The ensuing geographical and institutional divides (which academics ended up in UK and US universities, which remained in Europe) may thereby have some part in constituting the identity of these traditions: departmental solidarity, group cohesiveness, or just mental inertia. Analytic philosophy, for instance, would simply be the philosophy which holds sway among philosophers teaching in Anglophone academies. It would be, as A.J. Mandt puts it, “a community of discourse” rather than an ideology.18 What is deemed non-genuine philosophy would simply be what falls outside a specific community of discourse. That community is historically produced through a range of variables, philosophical (shared convictions, texts, arguments, and analyses), and non-­ philosophical (overt political strategies/intrigues, shared teachers, journals, schools, buildings, seminar rooms, and so on). One might still argue, therefore, that beyond such historically produced divisive effects, there might remain between the traditions underlying arguments and positions that are shared. Alas, such a real continuity of philosophy would be difficult to entertain, according to Mandt, for few individuals (on either side) can have thought through every aspect of his or her historical inheritance: some, if not most of it, must be taken as given.19 One Analytic philosopher who did attempt to unearth such a conceptual archaeology was the renowned Analytic philosopher of language, Michael Dummett. In his account, it is Frege and Husserl who stand at the source of the conceptual divide between Continental and Analytic thought in the twen15   David E.  Cooper, “The Presidential Address: Analytical and Continental Philosophy,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 94 (1994): 1; and he continues: “Nietzsche and Kierkegaard had to await resurrection through the efforts of Jaspers and others before entering the mainstream of European philosophy.” 16  See Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 17  W.D. Hart, “Clarity,” in The Analytic Tradition: Meaning, Thought and Knowledge, ed. David Bell and Neil Cooper (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 198. 18   A.J.  Mandt, “The Inevitability of Pluralism: Philosophical Practice and Philosophical Excellence,” in The Institution of Philosophy, ed. A. Cohen and B. Desai (Chicago: Open Court, 1989), 83. 19  Ibid., 87–9, 95, 99.

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tieth century. According to Dummett, both sought to renew philosophy through foundationalist means, but each took that quest in a contrasting direction. In search of strong objectivity, Frege looked to linguistic sense, Sinn: he took the dispositional (or “mention”) view of sense to infer a Platonic third realm in which it resides. Conversely, Husserl utilized “meaning” in a more general manner beyond language alone: this meaning was later re-dubbed “noema,” something akin to a mental act that informs not only language but also any conscious, intentional act. This phenomenological intentionality is not psychological in the sense of being voluntary or an independent act separate from physical reality: the “meaning constitutive act” is composite—part mental and part physical. This was not sufficient for Frege, however: wanting the strongest objectivity possible, he placed Sinn or “Thought” (the sense of a sentence) in this Platonic, objective realm. For Frege, Thoughts are not in the mind: while being the contents of psychological acts of thinking, they themselves are not psychological. Thinking is a mental act, but a Thought, unlike a mental image or a sensation, is not a mental object. Hence, starting with the Fregean stance, an objective science of thought is possible. And this stance lies at the origin of Analytical philosophy, with all its concerns for objectivity, scientificity, logical analysis, and, of course, language (both formalized and ordinary). The road travelled from this origin has been long and winding (after the 1950s, few followed either the Platonism or logical atomism of the early Fregeans like Russell, for instance) but its abiding concerns remain. While Frege deposited Thoughts in a third realm beyond mind and matter, after the 1950s Analytic philosophy largely ignored that move and instead radicalized the connection between communication and thought: instead of language merely transmitting thought, it actually generated it.20 Not benefitting from Quine’s much later use/mention distinction, Frege took the dispositional (mention) view of sense to infer a third realm in which it resides, whereas an occurant (use) view would have led him to see sense as the grasp of a communal language.21 And this communal use leads us on, not to further formal, logical analysis, but to a more ordinary, lived approach. Hence, we find Wittgenstein, for example, saying, in a post-Tractarian mode, that “the investigation of grammar is fundamental in the same sense in which we may call language fundamental – say its own foundation.”22 Dummett’s account, though not without its critics, offers us a useful conduit to film philosophy.23 Though other histories are available (circling around e­ xistential  Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1993), 26.  Ibid., 13, 109. 22  Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Philosophy,” Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy, ed. Paul Moser and Dwayne Mulder (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 128. 23  See Chase and Reynolds, Analytic versus Continental, 2: “We can add to Dummett’s claims about origins. Early Twentieth-century analytic philosophy was also influenced by Polish logic, mathematics and associated philosophical work…and by ongoing developments in logic and the philosophy of mathematics in the German-speaking world (an enormous group, including among 20 21

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consolation, clarity, or even time itself ),24 Dummett’s version builds on an original difference in attitude to perception, one that could be taken as definitive, not only for the subsequent development of Western philosophy but also for the seemingly divergent attitudes taken by different traditions of film philosophy, as we shall soon see. Husserl claims that essences are grasped through intuited meaning; Frege claims that Thoughts are examined through an analysis of language: herein lies the future divergence of Continental philosophy (dominated by phenomenology) and Analytical philosophy (dominated by linguistic analysis and, subsequently, cognitivism), some say.25 Yet this bifurcation may also create a dilemma for the philosopher of film, for is she/he to take the object of cinema as essentially linguistic or as something that goes beyond language, making it more suitable to a Husserlian, phenomenological approach? Fregean Thoughts are objective on account of being communicable, unlike sensations or mental images. But are films linguistic or sensory, are they—at least for any potential philosophical purposes—conceptual and so linguistic, or sensational in a non-linguistic fashion? If the maxim attributed to Stanley Kubrick was correct, namely that “if it can be thought or written, it can be filmed,” then it would seem that the post-Fregean approach might be the wisest one to adopt.

Language, Analysis, and Description: On Various Methods The significance of language for Analytically oriented film philosophers is, of course, obvious. Here is Paisley Livingston as a case in point when tackling the Continental film philosophy of Daniel Frampton: …it is not simply false or incoherent to write, as Daniel Frampton writes, that ‘film possibly contains a whole new system of thought, a new episteme’. It is also coherent to say that possibly film does not contain any such new system or episteme. As such a new, ineffable system of thought cannot, in principle, be articulated verbally; what is ruled out is the possibility of having or providing any linguistically mediated grounds for believing in the existence of a particular case in which wisdom of this sort has been acquired.26 others David Hilbert, Kurt Gödel and Tarski again); by the mid-twentieth century Scandinavian analytic philosophers were also influential (consider Eino Kalla, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Jaakko Hintikka). In the other direction, much early-twentieth-century anglophone [sic] philosophy in the United States and United Kingdom fell outside the analytic movement, was openly hostile to it, and indeed was straightforwardly Kantian or Hegelian in inspiration. The analytic dominance in the United Kingdom and the United States after the Second World War is far too easily read back into the earlier twentieth-century philosophical history of both countries, filtering what we notice in the journals, appointments and monographs of the time.” 24  See Tranoy, “Contemporary Philosophy,” and John McCumber, Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought (Durham: Acumen, 2011). 25  Harold Durfee, Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 41. Naturally, Durfee’s point predates the cognitivist paradigm shift that really begins in the 1980s. 26  Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23–4.

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Thomas Wartenberg similarly writes that “philosophical arguments rarely involve empirical evidence that can be presented without verbal language” (even as he confesses to the immediacy that the visual element of film offers over its textual dimension).27 Gregory Currie’s Image and Mind also tussles with the word/image duality of film: while putting great emphasis on language for his evidence—discussing tense, meaning, and the languages of art—Currie pushes hard against seeing the combination of images in film being like that in language—contra the semiotic theories of Christian Metz. Yet it is precisely on account of such balanced approaches that we have a dilemma concerning the status, as analytic, of such film philosophers. For Dummett, Analyticism is that tradition of philosophy which holds that only a philosophical account of language leads to a philosophical account of thought. Sentence structure and thought structure hang together. This is Frege’s legacy (with or without the Platonism).28 So, if Analytical film philosophy is not so linguo-centric, must we conclude that Dummett is wrong, or is it that so-called Analytical film philosophers like Wartenberg and Currie have been miscategorized? As for the other, phenomenological side, the line of influence stemming from Husserl down along the “Continental” track of film philosophy is comparatively clearer. Aside from the strong phenomenological inheritance in film theory (such as Andre Bazin’s democracy of vision, which leans heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity), the use of phenomenology in film philosophy was much in evidence as early as Stanley Cavell’s The World Viewed, with its own Heideggerian inheritance of Weltanschauung (or “world picture”) as well as its unconcealed ontological ambition to discover the essence of the cinematic image.29 A good deal of the wider phenomenological inheritance, however, formed around Merleau-Ponty’s work in particular, given its emphasis upon describing the bodily, lived experience (of perception) and its priority over our language-based intellect. In 1945, Merleau-Ponty himself had said that “if philosophy is in harmony with the cinema…it is because the philosopher and the moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the world.”30 This emphasis has only been deepened by 25  years of subsequent phenomenological analysis and description, from Vivian Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye (speaking of how “our embodiments differ and our situations change, so the film’s activity of sign production and its meaning change for us”) to Laura U. Marks (on the “skin of film”), Mauro Carbone (the “flesh of images”), and, most recently, Jenny Chamarette (stressing how “phenomenologies of film inform phenomenological accounts of film, which are co-informed

 Thomas E. Wartenburg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), 80.  Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy, 4, 6–7, 10. 29  See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, second edition, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). 30  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Nonsense, tr. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press, 1964), 59. 27

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by encounters with film phenomena”).31 The latest phenomenological takes on film philosophy also incorporate descriptions of the “film world” (a notion going back to Cavell’s world views, but now updated), be it understood as “at once cognitive and immersive and ‘sensuous’” (in Dan Yacavone’s Film Worlds) or hermeneutically, as shown by Alberto Baracco’s Hermenenutics of The Film World, which demonstrates, via Paul Ricouer, how the “filmgoer’s perception and interpretation leads to the construction of a film world”.32 This prevalence of phenomenology in Continental approaches to film leads us to a further question of method, that of description versus analysis. The French Analytic philosopher Pascal Engel (one of a fairly rare species, as one might imagine) lists four principles by which the Analytic and Continental can be seen to separate: for the former, philosophy is a communal exercise (albeit avowedly contrarian); hence, it can progress if clarity and argument are pursued; nobody is a genius. For the latter, philosophy is a solitary pursuit; as there is no truth or objectivity, it cannot progress (making it closer to literature); anybody of worth is a genius.33 Most importantly, though, Analytic philosophers are said to follow formal analysis, while the Continentals pursue phenomenological description. But is this true? It can be argued that not all Analytics (or analyses) are equally “Analytical.” Of course, at least in its beginnings, Analytic philosophy claimed to be the logical analysis of language. To quote Joseph Owens: “Just as chemistry understands and explains molecules by dividing them into atoms of which they are composed, so logical atomism analyzes philosophical objects by breaking them up into their ultimate logical components.”34 G.E. Moore, for example, was famous for always asking “what exactly do you mean by that?”35 The call for exactitude brings discreteness with it: to analyze is to break up and thereby to clarify. According to Marjorie Grene, behind this view are four fundamentally empiricist assumptions: of data, of their logical separability, of Hume’s associationism (by which data are connected), and of a Hobbesian materialism (whence they came).36 And here, indeed, we have at least one Analytic film philosopher (Noël Carroll) being true to form in apparently 31  Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University, 1992), 305; Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 48. I could also here mention the work of Jennifer Barker, Kate Ince, Katharina Lindner, and Davina Quinlivan. 32  Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), xiv; Alberto Barraco, Hermeneutics of The Film World: A Ricœurian Method for Film Interpretation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 146, emphasis mine. 33   Pascal Engel, “Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy,” Philosophy, Volume XXI (1987):3–4. We will return below to the themes of progress through argument and clarity. 34  Joseph Owens, “Analytic and Continental Philosophy in Overall Perspective,” Modern Schoolman, Volume LXX (1993): 137. 35  See Marjorie Grene, Philosophy In and Out of Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 17. 36  Ibid.

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adopting this very stance: “Parts and relations, then, are basic ingredients of film form. When we make statements about the form of a film, we are speaking of relations between parts of the film.”37 So far, so analyzed. Yet not all Anglo-American philosophy might seem so “analytic” as its forebears—as Owens also reminds us: Subsequently, as analytical philosophy passed through the stage of logical positivism and the phases of ‘ordinary language’ and elucidation and therapy, it rejected the older logical atomism as in fact a metaphysics. Yet it retained the atomistic tendency towards ‘breaking up’ objects into their component elements.38

To understand analysis through atomism is to misconstrue the purpose of analysis. For instance, while rejecting the old logical atomism, even the likes of the later Wittgenstein can be found arguing that it is no use rummaging through problems unsystematically as one looks through a drawer: one must “examine one thing after another methodically.”39 And so we can have Thomas Wartenburg following in that same spirit of systematic analysis: While I disagree with Peirce’s attempt to model philosophy on the natural sciences, I do think that he made an important point about the conduct of philosophical inquiry. In place of the single chain, he suggested a series of interlocking strands, none of which might be able to bear the full weight of a heavy object, for the interlocking strands would distribute the load, thereby keeping the object supported even when one of the strands was weak or, even, broken.40

Neither a single chain nor an irreducible whole—but not a collection of atoms either: instead, we’re offered a set of interlocking strands. Yet, of course, evidence for systematic method can be discerned just as well within phenomenological description as any other approach.41 What might remain a crucial difference, however (and one that brings us back to the Frege-Husserl ­divergence in fact), is that where phenomenology pursues a rigorous analysis and description of subjective aspects of film experience (appearances or “phenomena”), Analytic film philosophy is after something more objective, grounded not solely in language but also in science.  Noël Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 137.  Durfee, Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, 5; Owens, “Analytic and Continental Philosophy in Overall Perspective,” 137. 39  Wittgenstein, “Philosophy,” 138–9. 40  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 133. 41  We need think only of Cavell’s descriptions in The World Viewed of color in various films, say, for an example of this: see Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, Expanded Edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 80–101. Cavell, of course, can be seen (like Rorty) as something of an overt bridging figure between Continental and Analytic tropes on a number of fronts, and as such, his film philosophy can be seen to prefigure what I am arguing has become an unacknowledged commonality of thematic interest among more recent generations of film philosophers. 37 38

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Of Science and Scientism The centrality of science actually raises problems for a certain view (such as Dummett’s) of where Analytic philosophical interests best lie. As Pascal Engel writes: there is the growing propensity of many (mostly American) philosophers to think that philosophy is a sort of subpart of science, either because they conceive philosophy as ‘naturalized epistemology’ in Quine’s sense, or because they see it as a part of cognitive science. There is a tension between the ‘basic tenet’ [of the primacy of language of analytic philosophy] and this second trend because according to the latter the philosophy of language becomes dependent upon the philosophy of mind, and maybe the science of mind.42

Be that as it may, Engel goes on to say that naturalism, seen as the position that all human nature and behavior is a part of nature as science explains it, has been a constant temptation of the Anglophone tradition.43 Russell, for instance, believed in two things: logic and physics—and we are bound to believe in modern physics, he said, “on pain of death”: “Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong, and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is, therefore, rational to accept it hypothetically.”44 In Analytic film philosophy, that commitment to the value of science can appear in various forms. Some of them are methodological, as when Carroll portrays the “scientific method as a useful guide to the sort of rational enquiry that film theorists pursue,” or when Wartenberg insists that [t]hought experiments themselves play another important role in natural science. Some scientific theories are themselves elaborate thought experiments in which an idealized model of the real world is created. It is argued that the idealization should be taken as an approximation to the real world that only adds more complexity to the idealized model.45

Others are more substantive in their approach, taking film experience to be best approached as a part of cognitive science, a view that (probably most famously) David Bordwell has argued for since the late 1980s alongside others including Torben Grodal, Paisley Livingston, Joseph Anderson, Carl Plantinga,

 Engel, “Continental Insularity,” 6.  Pascal Engel, “Interpretation Without Hermeneutics: A Plea Against Ecumenism,” Topoi (1991): 138. 44  Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (Nottingham: Spokesman, 2007), 17, quoted in Grene, Philosophy In and Out of Europe, 14–15. 45  Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996), 322; Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 64. 42 43

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and Murray Smith.46 Currie’s Image and Mind was one of the first substantial philosophical interventions in this mode, arguing that “cognitive science combines rigorous and clear argument with a commitment to the most demanding standards of testability we can devise,” while Smith’s recent work, Film, Art, and the Third Culture (subtitled A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film), indicates that this research “paradigm” remains in good health such that the “mirror” stage now has nothing to do with Lacan’s babies and everything to do with our brain’s neurons.47 By contrast, some traditional Continental philosophy stricto sensu, as seen in Heidegger’s work, for instance, infamously discounted science as a shoddy picture of the human condition: science busies itself essentially with “theorising the regulation of the possible planning and arrangement of human labor.”48 Science is about the manipulation of human reality. So, when Heidegger looks at death, for example, it is with little regard for biology or psychology; it is an existential analysis first and foremost.49 Yet Continental philosophers’ attitudes toward science actually range across a variety of positions, from the belief that it has a genuine but limited role (Bergson, Bachelard, Canguilhem), through the view that its subject matter represents an impoverished or abstract aspect of reality or the “life-world” (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and many other naturalistic phenomenologies), to the idea that its underlying ideology is probably (if we were to spend time finding out) replete with inconsistencies and aporia (Derrida), or that it is a mostly historical construct made to discipline and ­control the human subject (Foucault).50 On this view, science would be an instrumentalist, mathematizing, positivist, derivative, or even mythological

46  See David Bordwell, “A Case for Cognitivism,” Iris, vol. 9 (1989); Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman; Joseph D.  Anderson, The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Smith, “Film Theory meets Analytic Philosophy.” 47  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xv; Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Smith thinks of his naturalism as a broad stance (a “third culture”) that can accommodate artefacts of the “manifest image” or phenomenological perspective within the “scientific” one (to use the terminology of Wilfred Sellars, which he does) without reduction: this is a “synoptic” approach. But wherever there is irreconcilability, the scientific image wins (as Sellars would also conclude). The first-person perspective is often incorrect, and the illusions and errors it manifests are best corrected by a representational theory of mind (222), as Sellars too advocated, though one adopted by Smith via a hybrid form of cognitivism (“neuroscience and evolutionary theory,” 163). 48  Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, second edition (London: Routledge, 1993), 434. 49  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 292. 50   See John Mullarkey, “Philosophie au naturel,” Becoming Human, ed. Paul Sheehan (Connecticut/London: Praeger, 2003), 55–66.

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form of reasoning, one that has constructed an essentialist idea of “nature” through reduction, repression, and simplification.51 There remains, nonetheless, that particularly French empirical and epistemological tradition which cannot be ignored (the aforementioned Bergson, Canguilhem, Bachelard, but also Simondon and Serres). And this muddies the distinction. What they offered was a scientific philosophy with a double grounding in experiment and argument, interlinked by philosophical speculation. As Bachelard put it in The New Scientific Spirit, “to the extent that hypotheses have been linked to experiment, they must be considered just as real as the experiments themselves. They are ‘realized.’”52 This dialectic of experiment and concept, each subverting the sufficiency of the other with recalcitrant data, each supplementing the other without reducing itself to that other, can also be seen in the work of Bergson and, even, his protégé, Deleuze. This is evidenced in the number of post-Deleuzian and naturalistic contributions to Continental film philosophy. Patricia Pisters in The Neuro-Image, for example, is perfectly at ease when analyzing the neurological events underlying film experience, while Felicity Colman’s Film Theory: Creating A Cinematic Grammar is part of a trend in “new materialist” thought emerging not only within film philosophy but across the humanities.53 In this respect, what David Papineau writes is highly pertinent here: “nearly everybody nowadays wants to be a ‘naturalist’ but the aspirants to the term nevertheless disagree widely on substantial questions of philosophical doctrine.”54 “Nature,” it would seem, has many natures. Whether or not Analytic film philosophers would agree that this is the correct approach to take in our field toward the sciences is doubtless arguable, but that a new generation of Continental film philosophers are using science in a positive fashion, and that this is a significant development, is undeniable.

51  See Cooper, “The Presidential Address,” 10; Jacques Bouveresse, “Why I Am So Very UnFrench,” in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 24. 52  Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 6. 53  See Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012); Felicity Colman, Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar (New York: Wallflower Press, 2014). Where this materialism deems itself “new” (erroneously or not), is in its understanding of matter, which is not physicalist in the nineteenth-century sense, that is, with physics deemed the supervening science that deals with ultimately inert and atomistic quantities in calculable, determined motion. The new materialisms are “non-reductive,” taking matter as a complex, self-organizing phenomenon. Loosely following Gestalt principles, matter is deemed to form complex, irreducible wholes that are not the sum of their parts. The quantum mechanical language of “entanglement” and “superposition” is cited as contributing to this “intractive” nature (as in the work of Barad), as are slightly older vocabularies coming from the science of complexity which talks of “life” as comprising complex, material, and nonlinear dynamic systems. 54  David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1.

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A Short History of Historicism If a putative Analytic scientism is the would-be “Mr. Hyde” to the scientific approach of “Dr. Jekyll,” then historicism would be the evil alter ego to Continental philosophy’s abiding concern with history (both its own and in general). The charge of offering merely a “history of ideas” is often made against what Continental philosophy regards as an absolutely indispensable method. Using historical context to ground, debase, or pluralize an idea, is a constant characteristic of much Continental thought. There was an exception to this in the synchronic views of the Structuralists in the 1950s and early 1960s, yet, for the most part, and following Hegel, Continental philosophy has thought it possible to historicize everything—perception, knowledge, rationality, the body, gender, and, of course, “nature”—one of the most overdetermined concepts there is (according to Raymond Williams).55 And film experience too could be taken in this direction in various permutations of the “ways of seeing” thesis from Walter Benjamin to John Berger—what Bordwell dubs film theory’s “deeply Hegelian idea.”56 The Analytic charge against this is that the context of discovery is being confused with the context of justification: genealogical argumentation is genetic fallacy. So, while history is important, it is never a philosophical end in itself, being always either ad hominem or ad populem in essence. Rational argument (and logic) must remain immune to history if we are to acquire knowledge at all.57 Hence, as Joseph Margolis put it, “the sense of history within the Analytic tradition is remarkably thin”—and proudly so!58 Admittedly, to the philosopher enthralled by the resources of scientific analysis, the older approaches and ideas of philosophy must look extraordinarily crude.59 Behind this neglect of history within Analytic philosophy (outside of an overt “history of philosophy” setting) lies the assumption, according to Stuart Brown, that philosophy’s history is a site of error and confusion and that “the true identity of the subject has at last been identified in our own century.”60 Yet we may still ask: what are the consequences, if any, of this difference for contemporary film philosophy practice? Though the construction of gender can obviously be seen as historical (and cultural), the theme of gender is tackled with equal concern for its nuances and multiplicity by both sides, be it Tina Chanter, Lucy Bolton, or Davina Quinlivan in Continental film philosophy or  See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 165ff. 56  David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 10, 144. 57  Bouveresse, “Why I Am So Very UnFrench,” 23, 20; Grene, Philosophy In and Out of Europe, 27. 58  Joseph Margolis, “A Sense of ‘Rapprochement’ Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Volume II (1985): 224. 59  See Reedway Dasenbrock, Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 5. 60  Brown, “On Why Philosophers Redefine their Subject,” 45. 55

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Cynthia Freeland, Angela Curran, and Carol Donelan in Analytic film philosophy.61 Where they do nevertheless differ may well be in a certain political tone, however, but this would be connected with broader meta-philosophical differences concerning politics and reason. To begin with, in the Continental style of philosophy, there is frequently a political atmosphere attaching to its self-styled “master thinkers,” from Sartre to Derrida, Deleuze to Badiou. In France, it is said, the development of a political position remains the decisive test for any new philosophy, irrespective of its ostensible theme.62 Analytic thinkers, on the other hand, regard any political reflections they may forward as strictly separate from their philosophy (unless it be under the banner of “political philosophy”): it is politics “off duty,” according to David Cooper.63 The Analytic tendency to think of philosophy as a discrete activity, a tool kit that can be taken up and put down at will, is a marked further difference. By contrast, philosophy for many Continentals is omnipresent and everywhere: as we heard Derrida report: “it is as impossible to say what philosophy is not as it is to say what it is.” As such, philosophical practice comes closer to a sense of “ideology,” an omnipresent political dimension in thought. Hence, the need for constant political and cultural critique: philosophy must be engagé, simply because every power structure and cultural edifice is, in a certain sense, already philosophical (including gender, but also what counts as the human subject or human reason). This contested notion of the self or subject should give us pause. Of course, as a Humean legacy, the question of personal identity has long been central to Anglo-American thought, but only as a metaphysical matter (e.g., with occasional ethical implications, as in the work of Derek Parfit).64 But for Continental thinkers, the “deconstructions” of the subject are far more directly historical and cultural from the outset65: the self that is decentered is not simply a metaphysical continuity, but a social norm, a perceived standard of reason and moral responsibility, a socially and technologically created subject. Any Analytic ­presumption of a single type of subject (that does or does not exist) would be deemed naïve by comparison. Remember how Brenda Almond argued that philosophy extols the virtues of honesty, openness, courage, impartiality, and respect for persons? Indeed, she also argues that the vocation or “enterprise” of philosophy is that of liberalism: the ever-expanding enfranchisement of the 61  See Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema, and Thinking Women (London Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Tina Chanter, The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead (Boulder, Co. Westview, 2001); Davina Quinlivan, The Place of Breath in Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Angela Curran and Carol Donelan, “Gender,” in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009). 62  Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 7. 63  Cooper, “The Presidential Address,” 4. See Dummett, Origins of Analytic Philosophy, 194, on his own activities. 64  See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 65  Cooper, “The Presidential Address,” 16–17.

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marginalized into liberating (intellectual) activity. Philosophizing is a recognition of human “commonality.”66 The value of philosophy lies in what it does for “human thought and life.”67 Here we see the liberal humanism many Continental thinkers would repudiate as a form of essentialism profoundly open to historical deconstruction.

Arguing the Points: Clarity Clarified The reader might at this stage be wondering why we have pursued our discussion of science into an excursus of history and the construction of the self: what has this to do with the origins and differences between Analytic and Continental film philosophy? The reason is that such methodological concerns (science and/or history) merge into stylistic concerns because, for many, the Continental view is that style (or form) is central to thought, and that, moreover, it cannot be dissociated from “mental” content. Indeed, for Rorty, the differences between the Analytic and other forms of philosophy are “relatively unimportant – a matter of style and tradition rather than a difference of ‘method’ or of first principles.”68 Yet mere style might nonetheless remain an immovable obstacle to rapprochement between the two forms of film philosophy if rigorous argument and clarity of expression are intertwined with that style, as some have suggested.69 And, according to D.W. Hamlyn, argument is indeed (Analytic) philosophy’s “life-blood” and that it would be “nothing without that argument.” For Almond, the “single core element” of Analytic philosophy is its “use of argument.”70 Certainly, the centrality of argument to film philosophers like Thomas Wartenberg reflects not only in his style of philosophizing but also in his estimation of film’s very potential to be philosophical: “films can make arguments, provide counterexamples to philosophical claims, and put forward novel philosophical theories.”71 Murray Smith characterizes Analytic philosophy by its “explicitness, precision, and clarity in argument, in contrast to the ambiguity and obscurity that often besets writing inspired by the Continental tradition,” which is one reason why, he continues, “the questions that Continental philosophy seeks to answer are best answered by embracing the analytic modes of enquiry.”72 So, when Bordwell, for example, writes of Noël Carroll’s argumentative prowess in terms of how he “operates on a level playing field; anyone with an argument can get into the game, but then skill will be required to keep up,” his apparently starry-eyed endorsement is not unmoti-

 Almond, “Philosophy and the Cult of Irrationalism,” 214.  D.W. Hamlyn, Being a Philosopher: History of a Practice (London: Routledge, 1992), 173. 68  Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 8. 69  See Engel, “Interpretation Without Hermeneutics,” 137. 70  Hamlyn, Being a Philosopher, 168–9; Almond, “Philosophy and the Cult of Irrationalism,” 215. 71  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 9. 72  Smith, “Film Theory meets Analytic Philosophy,” 2, 3. 66 67

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vated.73 Contrast these views with that of a Continental master like Heidegger, who famously declaimed that “all refutation in the field of essential thinking is foolish,” and a gulf of understanding about argument might become evident.74 Yet, once again, we would be wrong to make this assumption, especially about the generation of Continental film philosophers who have been practicing their discipline for the past 10–15 years, as opposed to those French “masters” who have made occasional forays into film theory (Badiou, Rancière, Agamben, and even Deleuze). Take Robert Sinnerbrink, for instance. He is both a Hegel scholar and a film philosopher who writes about film and philosophy from the standpoint of metaphilosophy and philosophical ethics. In both cases, moreover, he is obviously adamant about the value of argument: I argue for greater interactive engagement between the rationalistic style of traditional philosophy of film, and the minor, interdisciplinary tradition of what I call film-philosophy, an alternative approach that combines aesthetic receptivity to film with philosophically informed reflection. My aim is to elucidate the productive possibilities for rethinking the film-philosophy relationship that are opened up by the encounter between new philosophies of film and film-philosophy, as contrasting yet complementary ways of exploring the philosophical dimensions of moving images.75

Similarly, Catherine Wheatley, who has written on both Michael Haneke’s cinema and Stanley Cavell’s film philosophy, argues on the theme of ethics with evidence drawn from various sources (at one point citing Simon Blackburn on ethics together with Hegel in the same paragraph).76 She also draws on the moral philosophy of both Kant and Cavell in order to examine the ethics of the film-­ viewing experience in order to establish an “ethical theory of spectatorship”: I shall demonstrate that in Haneke’s works aesthetic reflexivity is conducive to the spectator’s moral reflexivity. By placing reflexive techniques within new frameworks, I argue, Haneke is able to co-opt the spectator into a uniquely moral relationship to the film. […] On an implicit level, the films prompt their ­spectators to ask: How are we complicit with the apparatus? What are the moral consequences of this? Why, upon watching Haneke’s films, do we so often feel irritated, cross, even guilty?77

 Bordwell, “Foreword,” in Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, xi.  Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy,” 239. 75  Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film (London: Continuum, 2011), 3. Sinnerbrink has also written usefully on questions of style in what he dubs as a difference between the “rationalist and romanticist styles of thought” of Analytic and Continental modes respectively; see Robert Sinnerbrink, “Questioning Style,” in The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan (London: Routledge, 2011), 39. 76  Catherine Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 2. 77  Ibid., 5. 73 74

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Above all, she argues that Haneke’s work brings into play “the Kantian conception of the ethical agent as caught between two impulses: the impulse towards rationality and responsibility on the one hand, and the impulse towards pleasurable experience and away from unpleasure on the other.”78 So far, so argumentative—or to parody the philosophical behaviorist: if it looks like an argument, swims like an argument, and quacks like an argument, then it is probably an argument. Unless, of course, one decides that it is not a good argument—lacking evidence (of the right kind), being unclear, being too “inductive,” and so on. That, of course, is every critic’s prerogative, but it does smack of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy—permitting ad hoc redefinitions to preserve one’s position in the face of counterexamples, to wit, that Continental film philosophy does not, or cannot, argue. This is the reason why we spent time looking at historicism and the subject, because what counts as a good, clear, and rational argument (or reasoning subject) may not be one universal standard, but a fluctuating, historical set: not all Analytics argue like Rudolf Carnap or Richard Montague, but neither do Continentals argue (or not argue) like Heidegger or Agamben. Now this may appear to be begging the question in favor of the kind of historicism privileged by the Continental philosopher, but a very similar relativity is also found in Analytic thought. Take the old bugbear of clarity, for instance. For Murray Smith, the Analytic mode of enquiry offers “clarity in argument, in contrast to the ambiguity and obscurity that often besets writing inspired by the Continental tradition.” Certainly, clarity is often used as a stick like this to beat the Continental approach—but, we might ask, which clarity, and whose precision, are actually in question here? The early Wittgenstein, for example, was obsessed with Fregean clarity, a clarity that meant rigor, precision, and exactness (each with their own definitions). Subsequently, of course, he came to see clarity more in terms of perspicuity—a clarity that would lead to the disappearance of many philosophical problems. Indeed, perspicuity may be inversely related to rigorous explication, if resolution by perspicuity is not understood as finding an answer, but as evading a problem. It can even be argued that Wittgenstein certainly seems to be leaving the methodology of the sciences and approaching an epistemology of “understanding,” or Verstehen, a category closer to ontological themes (emotions, being-in-the-world, etc.).79 Some might conclude, then, that the notion of clarity itself needs clarifying, though if this were to be a foundational exercise, it would obviously be a circular one.80 What we can only provisionally deduce here is that notions of “clarity” are multiple, the privileging of any one being both highly contestable, and, at best, honorific (“yay” always being better than “boo”).

 Ibid., 7.  Hart, “Clarity,” 208, 210, 214–15, 219. 80  Durfee, Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology, 4. 78 79

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Conclusion: Beyond the Sinne of the Fathers It would be evident to the reader by now that this chapter is not tackling the notorious Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, Barthes “SLAB” (so-called) group of theorists who were supposedly so influential on film’s “Grand Theory” of the 1970s and 1980s. Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes were, of course, very important for Structuralist thinking, understood as the dominant theoretical paradigm in France through the 1960s, being eventually exported to the US and the UK a decade later. None of these figures wrote on cinema to any extent, however, and though Louis Althusser was a philosopher teaching at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris for much of his professional career, his original contributions were almost entirely to Marxist theory. Slavoj Žižek has, of course, brought Lacanian metapsychology into dialogue with German Idealism in his own film philosophical writings, but we are not going to look any closer at his work here.81 Indeed, neither are we going to address any of the forays into film by that generation of Continental philosophers prevalent from the 1980s onwards, that is, those of Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, and Agamben— and for the very same reason. It is not because their ideas are in themselves uninteresting, or that they do not flout some of the negative stereotypes generated around Continental film philosophy (but actually derived more from the SLAB theorists than these next-­generation thinkers), such that some of their work would be worth comparing with that of Analytic thinkers: it is simply because, on the one hand, if we are to compare like with like, then we should look at full-time film philosophers from both sides, Continental and Analytic, rather than at part-time incursions from any quarter.82 And, on the other hand, the figures of Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, Agamben, or Žižek actually constitute the thematic material for much contemporary film theory with Continental leanings, so to speak. Most of this, however, does not come from full-time film philosophers but from Deleuzian or Žižekian theorists, say, making contributions to film theory alongside many other areas. The question of thematics is a significant one, nonetheless. We have looked at the origins and influences on Analytic and Continental film philosophy in terms of philosophical history, science and anti-science, historicism, methodology, and style. But what of any general thematic distinction between the Analytic and the Continental? Are there different thematic choices made by the respective traditions? Are ethics or aesthetics, for instance, the property of one and not the other? Hardly, for ethical themes are as prevalent in the work of Mary Litch, Cynthia Freeland, or Daniel Shaw as they are in that of Robert

81  See Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (London: Routledge, 2001) for an example of this kind of work. See also Mullarkey, Refractions, 58–77, and for his “exchange” with Bordwell, Mullarkey, Refractions, 68–70. 82  This is why I have not looked at the work of Robert Pippin (see Pippin, Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011)), for example, as an Analytic film philosopher either.

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Sinnerbrink or Catherine Wheatley (as we saw).83 Conversely, Livingston, Smith, and Carroll all discuss film aesthetics in great detail, yet it is neglected by Wartenberg in Thinking On Screen (whereas aesthetic discussions loom large in the work of Daniel Frampton, John Ó Maoilearca, and William Brown).84 Besides, part of what appears to be a thematic separation may be merely a presentational issue.85 Where a Continental film philosopher might address issues titled “bodily intentionality,” the “multiplicity of the self,” the “radical contingency of the event,” or the “indeterminacy of the sign,” an Analytic film philosopher might more normally investigate areas going by the name “the mind-body problem,” “cognitive psychology,” “relativity physics,” or the “opacity of demonstratives.” Each might thereby see the other’s research interests as at best irrelevant, at worst arcane, even as, beneath the different terminologies (and style), they actually do not substantially differ. Across a long and supremely varied history, there have been myriad philosophies that have each looked so different to its peers and predecessors alike that it is conceivable that, all else being equal, there may only be two ways one can be sure of obtaining common ascent that X is a philosopher: if she writes about others who we are in agreement to call “philosopher”; or, if she writes about topics (subject matter) which we recognize as topics that our agreed philosophers have written about previously; and that, in both cases, she writes about them in a style which we recognize as a style that our agreed philosophers have used previously.86 This is an acutely reflexive or meta-philosophical criterion, such that when Pascal Engel goes so far as to identify the standards of Analytic philosophy simpliciter with “the standards of good, professional and serious philosophy,” we cannot but envy his certitude.87 We have argued instead that among many contemporary practitioners of film philosophy, there is much to 83  See Mary Litch, Philosophy Through Film (London: Routledge, 2002); Freeland, The Naked and the Undead; Daniel Shaw, Morality and the Movies: Reading Ethics Through Film (London: Continuum, 2012); Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film; Wheatley, Michael Haneke’s Cinema. We should also mention the Continental work of Sarah Cooper, Lisa Downing, and Libby Saxton: see, for example, Sarah Cooper, The Soul of Film Theory (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton, Film and Ethics (London: Routledge, 2009). 84  See Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (New York: Wallflower Press, 1996); John Ó Maoilearca, All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and William Brown, Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (New York: Berghahn, 2015). 85  The question of representationalism, as seen when Gregory Currie states (Image and Mind, 2) that “film is a representational medium,” might be one thematic difference between Analytic and Continental approaches (and certainly is one when considering “master” thinkers like Deleuze and Badiou, for example—see Mullarkey, Refractions, 55–7). But for full-time Continental film philosophers today, this too would overstep the mark if it were taken as a definitive contrast: many of the latter treat cinema as representation too, though not so much via the research paradigm of cognitive psychology as is true of the former. 86  I say “all else being equal,” in that I have left aside other variables such as institutional politics or racial and gender bias (unconscious or not) that would also influence this ascription. Of course, in most situations all else is not equal. 87  Engel, “Interpretation Without Hermeneutics,” 138.

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share in what they practice, irrespective of the different philosophical traditions with which they identify (if they do so at all). In other words, the commonality resides in what they do, not in what they say that they do (“I am Analytic, so I do x”—“I am Continental, so I do y”).88 In our still emerging interdiscipline, its later generations need no longer live by the outworn edicts of its putative elders, especially given that these old words, those of an irreconcilable twain, often belie our new deeds.89

Bibliography Almond, Brenda. 1992. Philosophy and the Cult of Irrationalism. In The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. Philips Griffiths, 201–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Joseph D. 1998. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Babich, Babette. 1994. Philosophies of Science: Mach, Duhem, Bachelard. In Twentieth-­ Century Continental Philosophy. Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney, vol. 8, 144–183. London: Routledge. Bachelard, Gaston. 1984. The New Scientific Spirit. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon Press. Baracco, Alberto. 2017. Hermenenutics of the Film World: A Ricœurian Method for Film Interpretation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press Books. Barker, Jennifer M. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bell, David, and Neil Copper. 1990. The Analytic Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell. Bolton, Lucy. 2011. Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema, and Thinking Women. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bordwell, David. 1989. A Case for Cognitivism. Iris 9: 11–40. ———. 1996. “Foreword” to Noël Carroll. In Theorizing the Moving Image, ix–xii. Cambridge: Cambridge University. ———. 1997. On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bouveresse, Jacques. 1983. Why I Am So Very UnFrench. In Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore, 9–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Stuart. 1992. On Why Philosophers Redefine Their Subject. In The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. Philips Griffiths, 41–58. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, William. 2015. Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age. New York: Berghahn.

88  We do not have the space here in which to extend this formative power of practice beyond film theory and through film practice itself, but two examples of theory being so formed after practice come in Ó Maoilearca’s All Thoughts Are Equal (which shapes its arguments around the structure of a film, Lars Von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions, 2003), and Brown’s Supercinema, which generates a concept of the posthuman on the basis of digital cinema. 89  I thank Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Catherine Wheatley for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter: their specific corrections and more general suggestions made it immeasurably better.

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Carbone, Mauro. 2016. The Flesh of Images: Merleau-Ponty Between Painting and Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press. Carroll, Noël. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Expanded edn. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press. Chamarette, Jenny. 2012. Phenomenology and the Future of Film: Rethinking Subjectivity Beyond French Cinema. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Chanter, Tina. 2008. The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chase, James, and Jack Reynolds. 2011. Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy. Durham: Acumen. Colman, Felicity. 2014. Film Theory: Creating a Cinematic Grammar. New  York: Wallflower Press. Cooper, David E. 1994. The Presidential Address: Analytical and Continental Philosophy. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94: 1–18. Cooper, Sarah. 2013. The Soul of Film Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Curran, Angela, and Carol Donelan. 2009. Gender. In The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 152–161. London: Routledge. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dasenbrock, Reedway. 1989. Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Nature. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Deconstruction and the Other. In Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy, ed. Paul K.  Moser and Dwayne H.  Mulder, 368–382. New  York: Macmillan. Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dilman, Ilham. 1992. Can Philosophy Speak About Life? In The Impulse to Philosophise, ed. Philips Griffiths, 109–124. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Downing, Lisa, and Libby Saxton. 2009. Film and Ethics. London: Routledge. Dummett, Michael. 1993. Origins of Analytic Philosophy. London: Duckworth. Durfee, Harold. 1976. Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Engel, Pascal. 1987. Continental Insularity: Contemporary French Analytical Philosophy. Philosophy XXI: 1–19. ———. 1991. Interpretation Without Hermeneutics: A Plea Against Ecumenism. Topoi 10: 137–146. Frampton, Daniel. 2006. Filmosophy. New York: Wallflower Press. Freeland, Cynthia. 2001. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder: Westview. Glendinning, Simon. 2006. The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Grene, Marjorie. 1976. Philosophy In and Out of Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Griffiths, Philips A., ed. 1992. The Impulse to Philosophise. Oxford: Blackwell. Grodal, Torben. 2000. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hamlyn, D.W. 1992. Being a Philosopher: History of a Practice. London: Routledge. Hart, W.D. 1990. Clarity. In The Analytic Tradition: Meaning, Thought and Knowledge, ed. David Bell and Neil Cooper, 197–222. Oxford: Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking. In Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell, 2nd ed., 431–449. London: Routledge. ———. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ince, Kate. 2016. The Body and the Screen: Female Subjectivities in Contemporary Women’s Cinema. London: Bloomsbury. Lindner, Katharina. 2017. Film Bodies: Queer Feminist Encounters with Gender and Sexuality in Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris. Litch, Mary. 2002. Philosophy Through Film. London: Routledge. Livingston, Paisley. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mandt, A.J. 1989. The Inevitability of Pluralism: Philosophical Practice and Philosophical Excellence. In The Institution of Philosophy, ed. A. Cohen and B. Desai, 77–101. Chicago: Open Court. Margolis, Joseph. 1985. A Sense of ‘Rapprochement’ Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy. History of Philosophy Quarterly II: 217–231. McCumber, John. 2011. Time and Philosophy: A History of Continental Thought. Durham: Acumen. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Film and the New Psychology. In Sense and Nonsense, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 48–59. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Montefiore, Alan, ed. 1983. Philosophy in France Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, G.E. 1994. What Is Philosophy? In Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy, ed. Paul K. Moser and Dwayne H. Mulder, 103–124. New York: Macmillan. Moser, Paul, and Dwayne Mulder, eds. 1994. Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy. New York: Macmillan. Mullarkey, John. 2003. Philosophie au naturel. In Becoming Human, ed. Paul Sheehan, 55–66. Connecticut/London: Praeger. ———. 2009. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ó Maoilearca, John. 2015. All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ó Maoilearca, John, and Anthony Morgan. 2017. Transcendental Authority: A Conversation with John Ó Maoilearca. In The Kantian Catastrophe? Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy, ed. Anthony Morgan, 223–235. Newcastle: Bigg Books. Owens, Joseph. 1993. Analytic and Continental Philosophy in Overall Perspective. Modern Schoolman LXX: 131–142. Papineau, David. 1993. Philosophical Naturalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Pippin, Robert. 2011. Hollywood Westerns and American Myth: The Importance of Howard Hawks and John Ford for Political Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pisters, Patricia. 2012. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quinlivan, Davina. 2014. The Place of Breath in Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Redding, Paul. 2007. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reynolds, Jack, James Chase, Edwin Mares, and James Williams, eds. 2010. Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides. London: Continuum. Rorty, Richard. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 1984. Deconstruction and Circumvention. Critical Inquiry 11: 1–23. Shaw, Daniel. 2012. Morality and the Movies: Reading Ethics Through Film. London: Continuum. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011a. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London: Continuum. ———. 2011b. Questioning Style. In The Language and Style of Film Criticism, ed. Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan, 38–53. London: Routledge. Smith, Murray. 1997. Film Theory Meets Analytic Philosophy; or, Film Studies and L’Affaire Sokal. Institute for Cognitive Studies in Film and Video Electronic Newsletter – Special Edition 3 (1, November): 111–117. ———. 2017. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tranoy, Eric K. 1964. Contemporary Philosophy – Analytic and Continental. Philosophy Today VIII: 155–168. Wartenburg, Thomas E. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Routledge. Westfall, Joseph. 2018. The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader. London: Bloomsbury. Wheatley, Catherine. 2009. Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image. New York: Berghan Books. Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1994. Philosophy. In Contemporary Approaches to Philosophy, ed. Paul K. Moser and Dwayne H. Mulder, 125–140. New York: Macmillan. Yacavone, Daniel. 2015. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York: University of Columbia Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 13

The Phenomenological Movement in Context of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures Shawn Loht

Introduction This chapter surveys some of the founding principles of phenomenology insofar as they pertain to the philosophy of film and motion pictures, broadly construed. In recent years there have been no shortage of applications of specific schools of phenomenology to film (e.g. Levinasian, Merleau-Pontyian, Husserlian).1 There have also been numerous comprehensive surveys of phenomenology’s application to film in the form of book chapters, journal articles, and dedicated journal issues.2 This follows multiple earlier waves of phenomenology’s influences on film criticism, theory, and philosophy, which variously  These include Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Hunter Vaughan Where Film Meets Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Allen Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 2  Dedicated journal issues include the 2016 volume of the journal Studia Phaenomenologica and a 1990 issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Other, single-author pieces include Vivian Sobchack, “Phenomenology,” in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy, ed. Carl Plantinga and Paisley Livingston (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 435–45; Daniel Yacavone, “Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and Expression,” New Literary History 47 (2016): 159–86; David Sorfa, “Phenomenology and Film,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. E. Branigan and W. Buckland (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 353–58. 1

S. Loht (*) Baton Rouge Community College, Baton Rouge, LA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_13

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arose in the twentieth century in the work of the Cahiers du Cinema circle, the theorists Christian Metz and Jean Mitry, and Stanley Cavell, among others. In some instances, these diverse contributions have been labeled as naive realism or stylized criticism3; in other cases, it has been recognized that phenomenology is a powerful tool uniquely qualified for this work.4 However, up to the present, most other surveys of phenomenology in the context of the philosophy of film have failed to give careful attention to the wide-lens concern of what phenomenology is, or the manner in which phenomenology’s historical guiding threads bear relevance for the philosophy of film. In the following, what I aim to do is highlight key aspects of phenomenology, considered in its own right, that are relevant for bread-and-butter issues in the philosophy of film. I shall do this by sketching the philosophical frameworks of three of the most important figures of the phenomenological movement—Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—and subsequently highlighting areas of theoretical import for the philosophy of film. In the course of my discussion, I wish to place some emphasis on phenomenology’s potential to address issues of film’s ontology. I begin by considering in general how phenomenology can be understood, and what relevance it holds for philosophizing about film. Phenomenology tends not to admit of a neat and tidy definition. This limitation is due to the fact that phenomenology constitutes more of a philosophical methodology than a circumscribed area of study.5 It concerns not a “what” for the philosopher to take up, but a “how.” As a result, one can usually at best provide a loose list of traits agreeably viewed as characteristic of phenomenology. It is often said that phenomenology is “the study of appearances.” Accounting for a phenomenon (i.e. that which appears) requires describing the first-person, subjective experience of that very phenomenon. Phenomenology entails describing the way things are given insofar as they appear or disclose themselves, while at the same time suspending or bracketing all preexisting theories that might otherwise prejudice judgment.6 Likewise, this approach entails describing the underlying conditions of the phenomenon or appearance to occur at all. For instance, to account for the phenomenology of space requires not just a description of one’s naive experience of space but also the conditions for space itself to be given. Phenomenology also takes up the conditions of the subjectivity underlying experience in general. Phenomenology involves articulating the relationality between the subject and thing, intending agent and intentional object.7 3   Christian Ferencz-Flatz and Julian Hanich, “Editors’ Introduction: What is Film Phenomenology?” Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 12–13; Sobchack, “Phenomenology,” 435. 4  Dudley Andrew, “The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory,” in Movies and Methods, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 625–32. 5  Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Ch. 13. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 3. 6  Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 11, 21. 7  Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 13. Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Right Heideggerians: Phenomenology vs. Crypto-Metaphysics,” Kronos VI (2017): 84–85.

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Among its most important commitments, phenomenology highlights the disclosive aspect of experiences, viz. that phenomena or appearances are disclosures to the dative, human agent. Phenomenology supposes an implicit unity of knower and known, such that the human agent is to be understood as fundamentally with things, enveloped in the world, rather than placed into it as an alien being. There is an inclination away from Cartesianism or Kantianism where the starting problem is to understand the conditions of mind’s penetration into world, its “transcendence.” For reasons such as these, phenomenologists tend to regard truth, language, and meaning as derivative upon subjectivity’s existential, world-borne character. A related feature of phenomenology’s emphasis on first-person subjectivity is the view that phenomenology can be equated with ontology. This is to say, the essences of things are coextensive with their description. A long-standing dictum of phenomenology that often gets parroted in this context is its claim that “consciousness is always consciousness of.” On the one hand, this statement refers to the fact that to be conscious of this or that thing means there is always some correlate to which an act of thought corresponds; in other words, there is no consciousness devoid of an object. On the other hand, crucial for phenomenology is the assumption that whatever one is conscious of, or can become conscious of, has a reality. The crux here is that what I can describe in my first-person experience, evanescent or fleeting as it may be, nonetheless has a truthful basis, as I am merely describing what I have become conscious of. Here lay a double-sided aspect of phenomenology that highlights both its appeal and its limitations. In Husserl’s major works, especially Logical Investigations and Ideas, it is proposed that human intellect possesses the power to intuit essences. The essences of things do not require scientific or conceptual analysis. Rather, essences are rock-­bottom, elementary phenomena available to the ordinary reflective mind. However, the intuition of essences does not equally claim the potential for absolute knowledge. Phenomenology operates with the stipulation that things always contain a hidden aspect, a “back” that is inaccessible to perception or intellection but still integral to the essence of the thing (given that we could not behold it any other way). Because phenomenology emphasizes the disclosive nature of appearances, viz. that appearances are given to the human agent, it posits that the essences that present themselves to intuition are limited to precisely this givenness. This is equally expressive of the embodied, existential finitude of the human agent to whom phenomena occur. One cannot step outside of oneself and realize a God’s eye view of the relation between herself and things.

Phenomenology for the Philosophy of Film? The question remains as to what use phenomenology might have for enhancing philosophical examination of film. First, insofar as film-viewing comprises a first-person, subjective experience of meaning, phenomenology is particularly suitable for addressing such experience. Indeed, film would seem to provide an exemplar case of the sort of phenomenon to which phenomenology can be

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applied because films operate as dynamic instances of disclosure over and above providing static, pictorial depiction. Films comprise appearances specifically rendered to and for a human viewer. In brief, films have their essence in being viewed. As Merleau-Ponty has commented on this score, films are “gestalts,” presenting worlds in irreducible, ready-made form.8 Consequently, to analyze film-viewing phenomenologically has less to do with metaphysical issues such as the ontology or nature of “moving pictures” because these issues do not feature into first-person experience of viewing a film. The same goes for neurological concerns one might leverage from a cognitive science point of view; my first-person experience of seeing King Kong carry Jane to the top of the Empire State Building simply has no truck with the firing of certain nerve fibers in my brain.9 Phenomenology generally aims to treat its subjects in a holistic fashion. This has the advantage of emphasizing phenomena as they occur in lived experience versus isolating and analyzing singular aspects removed from original experience. Because film-viewing consists of so many experiential potencies that work in tandem (e.g. emotional affect, suspense, visual association, narrative comprehension, sound), phenomenology can help to emphasize the holism in which these occur. Films are experienced; as experienced, their ability to foster meaningful disclosure transcends specific sensory elements that one might distinguish in analysis.10 A perk of this limitation is that a phenomenological approach to the philosophy of film also serves to highlight the unity of viewer and viewed. Insofar as phenomenology asserts the presence of the viewer with things, a phenomenological perspective can highlight the existential, middle-­ voiced relation in which viewer is present to film and film discloses to viewer. The screen-viewer relationship is not one of action at a distance, in which philosophy has the burden to account for how pictures zoom across space and into the eye and brain. It is therefore not inappropriate to conclude here that the phenomenology of film is just as much a phenomenology of the viewer.11 Finally, although much more could be said by way of introduction to this subject, a phenomenological account of film stands to help us better appreciate film’s character vis-à-vis other related art forms such as photography, painting, or theater. For, just like these art forms (and others), we can observe that film-­ viewing has its own brand of intentionality, viz., its own way of being directed toward its objects and constituting meaning.12 An example would be the inter8  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 48–62. Also see Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film (London: Continuum, 2011), 38. 9  Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 13. 10  Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 38. 11  Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich, “What is Film Phenomenology?” 13–14. 12  Robert Sokolowski, “Husserl on First Philosophy,” in Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. by Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 12, 17. Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 14.

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play of presence and absence fostered by film’s use of montage to foster meaning and convey a narrative. Another example is film’s use of shot/reverse shot editing.13

Husserlian Phenomenology Of the three historical philosophers I will treat in this chapter, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) has the least to say about film directly. Yet, the foundation his work provides for the phenomenological movement is surely the most crucial and broad to comprehend for our purposes. Moreover, central to Husserl’s program throughout his career is the nature of images, particularly as these relate to word and thought. In what follows, I dissect some general theoretical aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that have relevance for philosophizing about film, after which I take up his writings on the perception of images, what he calls “image consciousness.” Husserl’s first major work, Logical Investigations, aims to describe the a priori conditions of “ideality,” the notion that meaning is ideal, universalizable, and communicable. In his attempt to refute psychologism, Husserl’s interest is to illustrate why cognition—particularly in its guises of truth and meaning—is not the result of a mental act. In the first volume of the Investigations, entitled Prologemena to Pure Logic, Husserl observes that if cognition were merely a psychological phenomenon, then this would undermine the possibility for scientific knowledge because it would reduce truth to a psychological principle.14 Psychology would be defining what truth is, whereas, for a science to make truth claims ultimately requires truth to be grounded outside of that very science. Husserl wants instead to describe how truth and meaning are acts that a rational agent attains through intuitions, by which the agent achieves insight into the ideal or “categorial” structures of things.15 Much of Husserl’s focus concerns consciousness and, especially, the concept of intentionality, which Husserl regards as the underlying condition of any conscious state. Intentionality for Husserl refers to any state in which one is conscious of, or directed toward, objects or states of affairs. Intentionality is not simply epistemological but, instead, encompasses any way in which one might be minded toward something. It thus includes aesthetically oriented states such as hearing music or viewing a painting, examples which each refer to a specific kind of intentionality with its own locus and content.16 Husserl does not fret over the question of whether objects or reality are mind-independent. Decisive about Husserl’s conception of intentionality is its “existence-independency.”17 Intentionality originates in conscious acts, not objects. 13  Orna Raviv, “The Cinematic Point of View: Thinking Film with Merleau-Ponty,” Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 163–83. 14  Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume 1, trans. J.N. Findlay (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Books, 2000), 168–74. 15  Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 13. 16  Ibid., 14. 17  Ibid., 21

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Intentionality is coextensive with meaning. “Meaning” for Husserl refers to the relationship one constitutes with the objects of one’s intentionality.18 Furthermore, meaning always also hinges on intending the matter “as” this or that. Again, this is because of intentionality’s seat in conscious acts, not in any sort of realism with which things disclose themselves.19 Meaning read off of intentionality emphasizes the holism of concrete first-person experiences over and above the sense content out of which experiences originate. The meaning of an intention is the essence of that intention,20 whereas the raw sense content upon which my intention is founded is merely lived through, or as Husserl describes in Ideas, “apperceived.”21 Finally, intentionality in Husserl’s casting has a crucial teleological aspect. Husserl distinguishes two facets of intentionality in which meaning is realized, namely, “meaning-intention” and “meaning-fulfillment.”22 Meaning-intention characterizes intentional states to which some completion, or fulfillment, is outstanding. Any example of a film with an erotetic narrative structure nicely fits the bill here, in that such films convey their story by initiating meaning-­ intentional states where meaning, or in this case, narrative resolution, is gradually filled in for the attentive viewer. In meaning-fulfillment, one’s intentional object becomes “self-evident,” viz., what one was intentionally minded toward, perhaps questioningly, is now present and confirmed. Consider as an example the discovery in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) that Norman Bates is the killer. There is a meaning-fulfillment during the climactic final scene in the mansion, where Norman is revealed masquerading as his mother as he attempts to murder the detective. This meaning-fulfillment completes the various meaning-­ intentions leading up to this, where small clues lead one to suspect something fishy about Norman, the goings-on in the Bates house, and the hitherto unsolved murders. A further meaning-fulfillment comes in the explanation of Norman’s insanity conveyed by the psychiatrist during the film’s final scenes; the viewer’s meaning-intention toward Norman’s motivation and psychosis is fulfilled by the psychiatrist’s discourse. For Husserl, the broader, decisive fact about meaning-intention and meaning-fulfillment is that they comprise all intentionalities or conscious states.23 As Husserl describes, “All perceiving and imagining is, on our view, a web of partial intentions, fused together in the unity of a single total intention.”24 In terms of describing the film-viewing experience, these elements of Husserl’s phenomenology of intentionality help to articulate the cognitive structures underlying the projective, additive character of watching a film and forming an understanding, or meaning-fulfillment, of what the film presents. In this light, the viewer’s achievement consists in her realization  Ibid., 23.  Ibid., 24. 20  Ibid., 25. 21  Ibid., 26. 22  Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. I, 250. 23  Husserl, Logical Investigations, Vol. II, 707. 24  Ibid., 701 18 19

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of meaning via the intentional states afforded by cues a film presents in image, word, and sound. An important distinction is that as film viewers, we not only see the depiction of film images as, for example, those of Norman Bates, a cheap motel, and a creepy mansion, but also, through these, we realize meaning by fulfilling meaning-intentional states. For Husserl, the fact that intentional states typically behold their objects in partial or aspectual views, which can in turn be synthesized into single, comprehensive intentions of things, is of a piece with consciousness’ character of intentionally projecting beyond the merely present. Husserl says, “Only in this way can we understand how consciousness reaches out beyond what it actually experiences. It can so to say mean (emphasis mine) beyond itself, and its meaning can be fulfilled.”25 To my mind, this projective, beyond-reaching character of film-viewing is one of the most decisive aspects for describing the phenomenology of film. To view a film in its entirety provides a comprehensive, singular intentional fulfillment made up of a multiverse of smaller, synthesized meaning-intentions and meaning-fulfillments. A further feature of film illuminated by the Husserlian interpretation is the capacity of film images and sequences to convey meaning. This result is opposed to a classic argument in the philosophy of film that holds that photographs, and by extension, film and moving-image media, are incapable of representing anything, such that, for example, a photograph of a house simply comprises the image of whatever was in front of a camera when someone snapped the shutter. In this view, photographs have no meaning in their own right; it is simply that which is depicted, or the way it is depicted, which may contain some representative, meaningful content.26 From the Husserlian perspective, the deeper import lay in the fact that meaning is achieved through the object as a result of the intentional state occasioned by that object. The object for its part (e.g. the photograph, the film image), while certainly real, is simply a vehicle that carries sense-data, sense-data we see through or “apperceive,” such that we experience ideal meaning. On the whole, a suggestion we can leverage is that film’s meaning resides in the disclosive, meaning-fulfilled state fostered by viewing. It does not make phenomenological sense to characterize the meaning of films or their images without describing the holistic intentional structure they involve. To propose that films or their images possess meaning in the sense of a property, in the end, comprises simply an abstraction of a film removed from the first-­ person experience in which it has its life. Whereas the Logical Investigations provides an account of the experience of meaning and truth, Husserl’s second major work, Ideas, addresses the conditions underlying consciousness of these. The approach Husserl adopts in this text is often called “transcendental” phenomenology. A foundational notion is that of subjectivity, or the “transcendental ego,” regarded as fundamentally  Ibid.  Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7:3 (1981): 577–603. More recently, see Robert Hopkins, “The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representational Art),” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1:2 (2015): 329–48. 25 26

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constitutive of experience. Husserl arrives at this view through what are known as the various “reductions.” The “ontological” or “phenomenological” reduction establishes a distinction between consciousness of experience versus consciousness of reality.27 Stated concretely, as a subject, I am able to discern my consciousness of my own experience as fundamentally distinct from my consciousness of the things that occasion that experience. The disclosures I encounter in my first-person experience are thus to be considered the rock-­ bottom phenomena, behind which there is not a further unknown object for philosophy to posit. This discovery provides justification to the phenomenologist to give closer attention to the subjective aspect of experiences and the contribution subjectivity makes to these: “we do not simply focus on the object exactly as it is given, we also focus on the subjective side of consciousness, thereby becoming aware of our subjective accomplishments and the intentionality that is at play in order for the object to appear as it does.”28 A counterpart notion Husserl introduces alongside the phenomenological reduction is called the “epoche”; by this notion is meant the suspension or “bracketing” of all theorization and other modes of comportment that stand to color one’s perspective. In performing the epoche, we withhold any judgment about our subject matter, in order to allow the givenness of things in intuition to inform us. In brief, in using the epoche, we aim to have experience inform our theories.29 The epoche and the reduction afford us the ability to distinguish between our everyday, unreflective experience in the natural attitude and the consciousness of our experience of disclosure in the phenomenological attitude. Whereas the default human mode of everyday experience simply takes things for given as they appear, not questioning how they come to be and so forth, by performing the reduction, we are able to consider how things come to be disclosed to us in that everyday first-person experience. Husserl suggests that one aspect of experience we are better able to appreciate by virtue of epoche and reduction is the fact that the various ways we are conscious of objects each has an essence, an essential manner of constituting its meaning. In other words, just as we can colloquially say consciousness is full of various kind of experiences, for example, wishing, willing, remembering, perceiving, judging, so too do these sorts of experiences each involve a particular mode of relating to one’s object and, indeed, of having that object present itself.30 As Husserl describes it, each type of consciousness has an essence that we can isolate through taking up the phenomenological attitude. For instance, consider the modes of first-person givenness one can readily highlight in the experience of remembering. To experience remembering a past event entails re-presenting to oneself a past perception or series of perceptions. Yet, it is not  Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology, 50–51.  Ibid., 51. 29  Ibid., 45. 30  Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 235ff. 27 28

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a perception of events in the guise of seeing them right now in front of one. In remembering, we re-present the events as past, no longer present, while nonetheless still factual for us, as “having happened.” This method of describing remembering differs from a naturalistic account, where one might make an inductive claim that memory involves the burning of neural pathways in certain areas of the brain. The crux is that only the first-person account described in the phenomenological attitude can convey this mode of consciousness as it is experienced. What Husserl terms the “eidetic reduction” also speaks to this issue. The eidetic reduction is a method of paring intuitions down to their objects’ essential characteristics, their Platonic eidos. According to Husserl, one can perform the eidetic reduction by abstracting all nonessential features of the object in question, stripping the object to the features without which it would not be conceivable. Husserl describes the eidetic reduction this way: “whatever in purely immanent and reduced form is peculiar to the experience, and cannot be thought away from it, as it is in itself, and in its eidetic setting passes eo ipso into the Eidos, is separated from all Nature and physics.”31 The thrust of the eidetic reduction is that it comprises a method for thinking critically about the object one is engaged with, in first-person experience, and without recourse to extraneous theses or models. I suggest that Husserlian phenomenology offers fertile ground for considering film in these guises. For example, I suggest that film-viewing is a specific type of consciousness, that this consciousness has a unique essence, that this consciousness involves a specific way of constituting its object(s), and that this object has a unique essence. These claims stand to clarify long-standing dialogue about both what film is and whether film and motion pictures possess a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. A widely accepted view in today’s philosophy of film circles is that of the Carroll/Bordwell school, according to which film cannot be prescribed any sort of essence or aesthetic teleology.32 This view is largely a response to “grand theories” of film, in which past theorists and interpretive schools pitched sweeping theoretical apparatuses (e.g. Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis) as constitutive for film viewership. In Carroll’s account, film is best understood under the more inclusive category of “moving images,” where these are understood to be two-dimensional displays, detached from their subjects, containing the possibility to give the appearance of motion.33 Carroll highlights the scientifically justified concept of pictorial recognition as particularly apposite for describing the human facility to recognize the subjects of photographs and drawings as depictions of their originals.  Ibid., 240–41.  David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in PostTheory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 3–36; Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 37–68. 33  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), Ch. 3. 31 32

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In Carroll’s account, the film medium simply exemplifies the fact that human beings naturally see photographic and cinematographic images as images of this or that; there is not any great mystery to the phenomenon, nor any further penetration on the viewer’s part expressive of a deeper phenomenon (e.g. transparency, illusionism, the mirror).34 Vis-à-vis the Bordwellian/Carrollian position, I suggest that the phenomenological approach emphasizes describing the structures underlying the first-­ person experience, the intentionality bound up with film-viewing. But it also avoids construing films as self-standing objects that can be philosophically analyzed outside of the first-person experience they engender.

Husserl on Image Consciousness While Husserl’s extensive writings contain scant references to cinematic images or arts, a number of unpublished writings and notes address what Husserl refers to as “image consciousness.”35 These texts have been collected in Volume XXIII of the collected works (Husserliana), published under the title Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory.36 It is important to acknowledge at the outset that these texts do not comprise a unified view by any means. Husserl’s position on key issues changed over the decades that this subject occupied him. Nonetheless, one can extract several illuminating insights from Husserl’s various explorations on image consciousness and its variants in service of the philosophy of film. By “image consciousness” Husserl means our capacity for seeing images. He largely treats imagination in a mold similar to Aristotle, where this faculty enables one to represent objects via images.37 This representation can take place through either physically present images, for which Husserl reserves the term “image consciousness” proper, or through “phantasy,” the capacity for seeing images conjured through one’s own imagination. Naturally, memory also figures into this account, as memory comprises the reproduction of previously experienced events in the form of images. Decisive is Husserl’s phenomenological account of how images are constituted, that is, the act of meaning that underlies image consciousness.38 For Husserl, the constitution of images consists of three perceptual moments: the physical thing, the image object, and the image subject.39 The physical image is the material foundation, the physical thing in which the image occurs. In a sculpted bust, this would be the clay or bronze out of which the bust is made; in a painting, it would be the canvas and pigment. The image object occurs in  Ibid., 108ff.  Edmund Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). 36  Ibid. 37  Aristotle, De Anima, Book III. 38  Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 19–20 [18]. 39  Ibid., 21 [19]. 34 35

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the shapes, lines, or other visual cues that bear resemblance to a subject that is known or recognized. So a bust of a person’s head will contain shapes, lines, curves, and contours that resemble to the viewer the shape of a person’s facial features, forehead, hair, and the like. A photograph of a person will have the same effect, containing colors, contrasts of light and dark, and so forth, that convey to the viewer similarity to a person known in real life. And finally, the image subject is the matter of depiction, whatever is meant in the presentation.40 Husserl specifies that one sees the image subject in the image object; this is to say that the image subject is beheld intentionally, through the image object. The image “presents the subject but is not the subject itself.”41 Accordingly, if I view a portrait of America’s first president George Washington hanging on a museum wall, while the visual features of the portrait as image object convey to me a resemblance or likeness of George Washington, it is as the image subject that I actually intend George Washington the man. In the terminology of the Logical Investigations, the viewer’s meaning-intention toward the image subject is predicated on an intentional state of assuming the representation in the image object comprises how the subject Washington would appear if he were present.42 A crucial feature of image consciousness for Husserl is the conflictual nature bound up with viewing images. The framed picture of my wife that sits on my bookshelf coheres with its surroundings by virtue of being an inanimate object alongside other inanimate objects. Yet, this framed picture poses a conflict by virtue of its depicting power. It is not merely a physical thing, but also contains an image, particularly in a fashion that these two, while in mutual tension, do not cancel one another. I constitute the image object intentionally; it is an ideal object, different from the physical thing in which it occurs.43 Hence, there are two different types of perceptual apprehension, one of which involves something physically present and the other a perception of an image object I know not to be present.44 A second conflict lay in the fact that, as Husserl maintains, image objects do not exist; as he writes, they are constituted with “the ­characteristic of unreality.”45 Image objects are (speaking in terms of the real) actually nothing more than the material in which they occur. The black and white I perceive in an old photograph comprise the physical makeup of this photograph; the image object I intend has no actual reality. Husserl describes that whereas image objects certainly appear, fostering the appearance of the image subject in the image, image objects are an appearance of “a not now in the now.”46 As such, image objects are constituted ideally; they are not part of  Ibid., 19 [18].  Ibid., 20 [18]. 42  Peter Shum, “The Evolution of Husserl’s Concept of Imagination,” Husserl Studies 31 (2015): 216. 43  Ibid., 217. 44  Mion, “Husserl and Cinematographic Depictive Images,” 272. 45  Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 51 [47]. 46  Ibid., 51 [47]. 40 41

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the fabric of empirical experience but, instead, are meant intentionally.47 A third conflict distinguishes the image object and the image subject. As Husserl describes it, while image object yields only one appearance, its viewing involves two apprehensions (Auffassungen), viz., taking the image in two distinct ways. Image objects initiate one apprehension of a likeness and one of the actual subject depicted.48 Husserl writes: “We have only one appearance, the appearance belonging to the image object. But we have more than the one apprehension…in which this image becomes constituted for us. If this were not the case, nothing else but the image could be meant.” Husserl elaborates: “If the conscious relation to something depicted is not given with the image, then we certainly do not have an image.”49 What should we take from these explorations? As was observed earlier in a reading of the Logical Investigations, Husserl’s account of image consciousness reveals that the central act of meaning in beholding an image lay in one’s directedness toward the image subject, which occurs “in and with” the image object.50 The image subject makes itself felt to consciousness specifically as an image representation, viz. as one thing seen through another.51 How does this sketch graft onto the image consciousness involved with cinematic representation or film-viewing? On the one hand, there are some simple correspondences. Cinematic images appear through a physical substratum, usually a screen, which may be housed in a television set, smartphone, or other device. Cinematic images involve image objects. That is, they reveal perceptual content that represents through resemblance or likeness. For instance, the figures I see onscreen exhibit the same shape and color as the human beings I know from elsewhere. And cinematic images present actual image subjects, not merely blank image objects that I do not see through. For instance, I see and intend Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in the film The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) by way of the film’s image objects that resemble these real-life people. As noted already, Husserl never provides a robust account of cinematic representation. The passage in which he most directly speaks to issues of cinematic representation reads this way: “It pertains to an image that the depictive image, understood as image object, has a ‘being’ that persists and abides. This persisting, this remaining unchanged, does not mean that the image object is unchanging; indeed, it can be a cinematographic depictive image.”52 The context of this passage concerns the ontological status of image objects insofar as they are able to remain the same throughout a duration or other change, such as a depicted object remaining persistent in the course of cinematic frames. Husserl suggests that the constitutive act is the same in parallel examples, for instance, hearing a piano piece multiple times and each time hearing the same  Shum, “The Evolution of Husserl’s Concept of Imagination,” 217.  Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 29 [30–31]. 49  Ibid., 32 [31]. 50  Ibid., 29 [28]. 51  Ibid. 52  Ibid., 645 [546]. 47 48

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melody. The underlying condition Husserl is attempting to highlight in this discussion is that image objects contain a persistence of being, through which they can maintain their identity through changes. This persistence is constituted by the viewer ideally, which is to say, not in real empirical terms, but, instead, on the level of one’s intentionality, one’s mental directedness toward the object. As has been suggested in the literature, this passage indicates both that Husserl understands cinematic representation as a type of image consciousness following the three-moment structure outlined earlier and that Husserl understands the intentionality as directed toward ideal image objects that outwardly change while maintaining a persistent identity, a position that would not be out of place in Bazin’s observations regarding film as the preservation of objectivity.53 In this light, cinematic representation can be described in terms of the intentional ideality experienced in the image objects of cinematic photoplay.54 I will round out this discussion by highlighting some additional items in Husserl’s account of image consciousness that are especially apposite for film and phenomenology. A question that emerges out of the discussion of the world-bearing character of image consciousness concerns the sort of presence or actuality images bear, particularly if we observe that the images of film and other depictive media present self-contained worlds that seem real unto themselves.55 A crucial qualifier of Husserl’s later accounts of image consciousness56 is the attitude in which the viewer regards the image subject’s existence. In this account, image objects can be viewed “positionally” or “nonpositionally.” Husserl justifies this revision with the claim that every intentional state is positional or nonpositional,57 that is, entails a positing or nonpositing judgment regarding the existence of its subject. But this does not otherwise impact the objectivity of one’s intentional state toward what is depicted in the images. In this way, I can still be intentionally directed toward image subjects, including fictional ones, regardless of whether I believe them real or not. And my judgments about these image subjects still hold good as well, insofar as they remain under the governance of my original positing or nonpositing attitude. This distinction of Husserl’s separates one’s belief or “doxic attitude” toward the depiction from the intentions and judgments one can make about what is in the image. As a result, one can still comport oneself toward the image subjects as if they are actual within the nexus in which they appear.58 A broader result 53  Claudio Rozzoni, “Cinema Consciousness,” Studia Phaenomenologica XVI (2016): 305. Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. I, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14–15. 54  John Brough summarizes Husserl’s position on the cinematic arts. See John Brough, “Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology,” in Art and Phenomenology, ed. Joseph Parry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 192–93. 55  Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory, 50 [46–47]. 56  Circa 1912 and onward. 57  Ibid., 430–31 [358–59]. 58  Ibid., 486 [413], 537 [452].

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for image consciousness in the case of film-viewing is that one can relate to situations, scenes, and characters just as one does to those in real life. So, for instance, although I view the image object that depicts Jason Vorhees in the Friday the 13th movies (Various, 1980–present) in a nonpositional attitude, not taking his existence to be given, I can still take any number of other attitudes regarding Jason that are logically salient, for instance, that he cannot be killed, that no one can escape him, and so on. Likewise, I can fear for the characters in the film who will fall victim to Jason’s violence, just as I would in a parallel reallife situation of people being hunted by a crazed murderer. And the same goes for my jumping in my seat as a result of a scare in which the villain spontaneously appears without announcement, ready to strike. Husserl maintains that in each case such intentional states, emotional reactions, and the like are genuine; when these instances occur, I am not making-believe or mimicking a belief or emotion but actually undergoing these intentional states.59 A thesis Husserl expresses at various points in these texts is that any perception can be intentionally experienced “as if ” it were real, even those we consider imaginary. One can perceive a situation in a private fantasy, or in the image consciousness occasioned by a film or theatrical performance, and still experience fear, joy, excitement, arousal, and so forth just as if these were genuine experiences.60

Perceptual Phantasy A final, decisive revision of these ideas occurs in Husserl’s writings circa 1917–1918. In this later work, Husserl eschews depiction in his account of image consciousness. The motivation for this revision appears to stem from a deepened appreciation of how image consciousness occurs in works of art. On the one hand, Husserl suggests that image consciousness in an aesthetic attitude can take on the form of “perceptual phantasy,” where one directly perceives entities whose outward, phantastical look is self-constituted. The image object readily presents itself in a phantastic guise, without viewer contribution. Imagination is thus “immediate.”61 An exemplar instance for Husserl’s later thesis is theatrical performance. The viewer of a stage play does not view it through representative image consciousness; the play does not depict something represented from elsewhere, as it were (though peripheral elements such as a wall painted to look like the front of a castle may be depictive). One directly perceives the image subjects, in an “as if ” attitude. For instance, I take in the Shakespeare play King Lear and perceive the lead actor “as if ” he is King Lear. Or as Husserl sometimes puts it in these late texts, I “quasi-perceive” King Lear; I do not look at the actor and hold that he “represents” or “depicts” the true King Lear. Husserl writes that in the case of theatrical performance, “we live in a world of perceptual  phantasy; we have ‘images’ within the cohesive unity of one image,  Ibid., 554 [465–66].  Ibid. 61  Shum, “The Evolution of Husserl’s Concept of Imagination,” 218. 59 60

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but we do not for that reason have depictions.”62 Husserl elaborates that we can enact this comprehensive state of perceptual phantasy precisely because we can take the entire image world as null; we can perceive what we see as annulled (or in the earlier terminology, “nonpositionally”) with respect to reality. The presentative, illusory aspect of the play is temporarily concealed, while a selfconstituting productivity emerges.63 Following on this, Husserl observes that certain art media are effective in substituting performance for actual, lived reality. A real perception of a human being giving a speech, for instance, often has the same outward look as a theatrical performance experienced in the mode of perceptual phantasy, by virtue of each instance sharing a common stock of perceptual material, for example, a live human being giving a speech, employing cadence, affect, pauses, humor, and so forth. As Husserl describes, the perceptual appearances of certain things “easily change into other perceptual modes of appearance, and do so in a way that the stock of what is genuinely perceived is common.”64 In sum, for Husserl, perceptual phantasy is a mode of intentionality we activate by viewing images or performances as if they really were happening. Alternately stated, the human subject is able to annul for a time the perceptual attitude of actual experience in instances where the images or performances graft onto actual experience in one or more ways. It seems to me that film-viewing follows a similar mold—perhaps even tailor-made—of immediate imagination enabled by the annulling of reality, where one views images that have a shared, common stock with the images experienced in genuine perception. That is to say, film-viewing is predicated on immediate imagination because the images and performances of film are often comprised of the stuff of life (e.g. people, places, situations, plots), where these images are simply perceived by the viewer in an “as-if,” reality-­annulled guise. This last is especially apposite if we consider film images to be communicative images that present the perceptions of the filmmaker. Seen this way, film images can operate as perceptual phantasy by virtue of the viewer seeing the world as if they were the filmmaker, adopting the filmmaker’s attitudes or points of view. A key distinction of this later thesis is its highlighting of the relative passivity of the viewer, whose perceptual phantasy is by and large controlled by the “quasi-real” material provided in the performances or images. That is, only the later account of perceptual phantasy qua annulled reality seems to allow for my experience of immediately imagining, and thus, quasi-perceiving, for example, Clarice Starling as the main character of The Silence of the Lambs. Whereas the earlier tripartite model seems only to operate at the level of perceiving an image object who resembles the actress Jody Foster and the consequent intention of the image subject as, in fact, the actual Jody Foster. In truth, as we know, when the acting is sufficiently good and the drama sufficiently compelling, the actress disappears, and we do, in fact, see just the character. From the Husserlian  Ibid., 616 [514–15].  Ibid., 618 [516]. 64  Ibid., 619 [517–18]. 62 63

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standpoint, however, the key observation to make is that these results are features of the film viewer’s intentional consciousness, that is, constitutive structures through which filmic disclosure occurs. Is it fitting to discard the earlier tripartite model of image consciousness entirely in favor of the later pure phantasy/immediate imagination view? I suggest that phenomenologically speaking, we probably want to hold on to both. I say this under the auspice that a phenomenological approach in philosophy involves suspending judgment and examining subjects from multiple angles, where different, complementary points of view may come into focus, with no single account providing the whole story.

Heideggerian Phenomenology Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is not typically regarded as a philosopher whose work has relevance for the philosophy of film. This despite the fact that there have been numerous writings in philosophical film criticism that read Heideggerian philosophy into the narratives and themes of specific films and the bodies of work of specific filmmakers. Because Heidegger is regarded as an existentialist philosopher, his writing often serves to illuminate films that exhibit an existential bent or that grapple with life-and-death issues. The aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy that I aim to appropriate presently, however, stem from his analytic of subjectivity, or “Dasein,” in his early masterwork Being and Time. As with my account of Husserl earlier, my main interest is to highlight the theoretical aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy that stand to unravel the phenomenology of film as it pertains to film-viewing and the various structures this involves. Before doing this, however, it may be instructive to address a few of Heidegger’s central criticisms of film and picture media. Interestingly, Heidegger’s main criticism of film falls under the somewhat reductive notion that the advent of film and photography expresses modern subjectivity’s newfound capacity for representing anything and everything to itself, regardless of whether all things of the universe can and should be brought into view.65 For Heidegger, this attitude of the modern subject is fostered by the more pervasive sweep of technology. Technology expresses for Heidegger not simply an area of scientific knowledge—technology is a manifestation of being, in which all things reveal themselves as ready and available for human disposal. Film and photography are thus emblematic of this totalized availability of all things.66 For Heidegger, this state is problematic because it renders the film or photographic subject consumable and disposable. The film image cheapens what is depicted just by virtue of making everything picture-able. 65  See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert J. Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 163. 66  Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World-Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–72; Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, Second Ed., Revised and Expanded, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper, 2003), 307–41.

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Unlike in the ancient world, reality no longer refuses any point of view to the human agent. The challenge posed to a reader of Heidegger is thus to consider how film can be described phenomenologically in a fashion that avoids some of Heidegger’s objections.67

Dasein With Being and Time’s concept of Dasein, Heidegger means existence or, literally, “being-there,” as it pertains to a subject. Dasein does not specifically refer to the human being, but instead, it is meant to encapsulate any being with subjectivity. (The “replicants” of the Blade Runner movies  (Ridley Scott, 1982; Denis Villeneuve, 2017) can be understood as Daseins though they are not human.)68 A defining feature of Dasein is that it is concerned about its own being; its being is an issue for it.69 Furthermore, Dasein’s “being-there” expresses the notion that Dasein is ontologically constituted by outward “projection,” or ek-sistence, thrown open potentiality.70 Hence, the phenomenology of Being and Time is often labeled “existential” phenomenology. Heidegger takes up Dasein in Being and Time as a means for engaging what he deems to be the historically forgotten questioning into “the meaning of being.” As Heidegger sees it, philosophers in the present time no longer ask after the meaning of being as such but instead take being to be given in terms of substantial presence, or, following the Cartesian turn, subjective representation. Heidegger’s motivation for focusing on Dasein in Being and Time stems from the observation that the meaning of being is an issue posed by and for Dasein. Dasein is the being who asks after being’s meaning and to whom this meaning is intelligible.71 Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein takes shape in a description of the “existentials” or categories that comprise Dasein. These existentials are the ontological features comprising Dasein’s structure.72 In Husserlian terms, Dasein’s existentials are what is left over when one performs the epoche and reduces all extraneous features of Dasein back to its essence. Among these existentials are what Heidegger calls “being-in-the-world.” This concept describes the fact that Dasein always has a surroundings, a background frame of reference in which things have meaning. Dasein is never “worldless.” The term “world” is not meant in the sense of a container or vessel that holds everything; instead, it 67  For a fuller account of film in the context of Heidegger’s views on technology and art, see Shawn Loht, Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), Ch. 3. For additional commentary regarding Heidegger’s silence on film, see Brian Price, “Heidegger and Cinema,” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifenova (New York: Routledge, 2008), 108–121. 68  Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed., 19–30. 69  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh and Dennis Schmidt, Revised Ed. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 41 [40–41]. 70  Ibid., 43 [43–44]. 71  Ibid., 1–7 [2–7]. 72  Ibid., 44 [44–45]

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carries a notion simply of Daseins always having an abode or environment.73 According to Heidegger, the primacy of world in Dasein’s constitution is revealed in Dasein’s engagement with the tools and implements with which one performs everyday tasks.74 The use of tools to perform tasks is underwritten by Dasein’s engagement in its surroundings, or equally, its projected involvement in its world. For instance, I look for my car keys in order to drive to the supermarket, and this reveals my involvement in commerce beyond my household, my nutritional dependence on agricultural, mass-scale food production, and so forth. Heidegger highlights that world becomes most evident when the object I seek is not readily available to suit my need.75 If my car keys are lost, then the larger network of purposes and needs to which my keys afford me access reveals itself. My fundamentally world-oriented existence is revealed in this moment. Heidegger uses the discussion of Dasein’s being-in-the-world to draw out two other important world-oriented existentials, namely, Dasein’s spatial existence and Dasein’s co-existence with other Daseins. First, the phenomenology of lived experience reveals Dasein’s existence as spatial in the sense of the nearness and farness of one’s occupations, or of what is available in one’s lived surroundings; the notion is that lived experience does not present space in the guise of a Cartesian grid where objects have an objective, homogeneous distance from one another. Rather, things are near or far depending on whether one is engaged with them.76 For instance, talking to a friend via a Skype video call can bring this friend phenomenologically closer than, say, the neighbor at a house down the street who I am not thinking of at all. Heidegger labels Dasein’s capacity to bring things near “de-distancing” (ent-fernen); this concept expresses the phenomenon underlying any possibility of having “space.”77 Heidegger’s account of Dasein also describes Dasein’s existence as one of a shared world. Dasein is not to be understood as a solipsistic being. Rather, Dasein is fundamentally born into and oriented toward a world of other Daseins. Heidegger labels this existential “being-with” (Mit-sein), indicating that Dasein’s who-ness or personal identity is essentially public and shared.78 The phenomenological evidence for this view is, again, Dasein’s engagement in tasks. The tasks we perform are typically done in cooperation with other Daseins. Or if not, the tools and equipment we use are furnished by other Daseins. Our surroundings reveal the presence and activity of other Daseins as well. And our concerns overlap with those of others; we understand the other Daseins of our world to have the same or similar concerns as we do. The existence of these other Daseins is bound by self-concern in the same way ours is. Hence, we can exercise care toward others, by helping them to realize their  Ibid., 53 [53]ff.  Ibid., 67 [67]ff. 75  Ibid., 72 [72]ff. 76  Ibid., 99 [102]ff. 77  Ibid., 102 [105]. 78  Ibid., 114–17 [116–21]. 73 74

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interests (which, in turn, are often bound up with ours). Perhaps most important for Heidegger here is that Dasein’s self-understanding does not self-­ generate; instead, it derives from the everyday being of these other Daseins, whom Heidegger calls “Das Man,” or the “they.”79 Alternately stated, each of us does not derive our individual personal identity, our understanding of who we are, from ourselves. Rather, we each take the dominant strain of our identity according to the levelled-down norms in which others understand themselves.80 To sum up the Heideggerian elements enumerated thus far, while none of them speaks explicitly to film, the principal point to leverage from this perspective hinges on Dasein’s existentiality. Because the existentials of being-in-the-­ world, de-distancing, and being-with have their origin in Dasein’s own essence, they are part and parcel of Dasein’s being. As underlying structures of Dasein’s ontological constitution, these are not items added on to Dasein after the fact. Nor are they characteristics that one can choose to exercise or not. For me to be a Dasein entails that I am being in the world, de-distancing, and being-with. To consider the relevance of these items for the film-viewing experience, the existentiality of viewership seems nowhere more exemplified than in the de-­ distancing aspect upon which film-viewing is predicated. For films bring distant objects close and present them to us. As classical theorists such as Bazin and Cavell have observed, the film image has a way of rendering its subject present; in this vein, their meaning was largely about the existential presence to which the film image affords one, not the actual presence of the filmed object. What Heidegger’s concept of Daseins helps to illuminate is the projective character of the viewer. In Heideggerian terms, it is the viewer, by virtue of Dasein’s de-­ distancing, projective character who traverses the “distance” to what is depicted on screen. The screened content can become existentially near because Dasein’s existential character is just this, to remove distance. If this were not the case, then no amount of transparency or telescopic power in the film camera would have any effect for Dasein.81 In brief, the close proximity to the screened image in film-viewing is an existential feature of viewership. Following up on this equation, I suggest that film-viewing is existentially rooted in the viewer’s being-in-the-world. That is, I suggest that to view a film is an extension of one’s inherent world-oriented bearing. On the one hand, this is a matter of definition; Dasein simply is being-in-the-world, which is to say, its being is “worlded,” interpreting itself and its engagements with reference to its world, and vice versa. But I suggest that phenomenological observations of  Ibid., 123 [126].  Ibid. 81  I have in mind here Kendall Walton’s seminal argument regarding film images understood as transparent pictures, where the film viewer sees the actual thing just as in viewing through a periscope or telescope. Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (2) (1984): 246–77. This projective character is likewise what distinguishes the Heideggerian reading from Deleuze’s concept of cinema, which, while emphasizing a dimension of phenomenological disclosure, also relies on a decidedly more passive model of viewership. 79 80

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the everyday film-viewing experience also bear this out. It is evidenced by the hermeneutic dimension of appropriating or inhabiting a film’s world and, thus, by experiencing this world meaningfully. By and large, films in the traditional guise of Hollywood International present their stories and are composed with reference to singular, relatively cohesive worlds, worlds which oftentimes have a hypnotic, seductive, or otherwise immersive character of their own. In addition, these are typically worlds in which characters have tasks and plots, where they use practical wisdom and know-how to solve problems. And they are ostensibly worlds we interpret from our own situation. We judge characters, situations, and conflicts in terms of how you or I would react, what you or I would do, or what a “regular person” (Heidegger’s Das Man) would do, and so forth. Thus, insofar as Dasein entails being “with” other subjects, film worlds are both inter-subjective and intra-subjective. To recall Dasein’s literal definition of “being-there,” I am present to the world of a film and, mutatis mutandis, the film world is equally present to me. While there is no space here to provide an exhaustive list of examples, a few brief illustrations may suffice to render my account more concrete. The first-person perspective afforded by the camera eye provides one example of Dasein’s existential presence in the film world, for the film viewer does not see simply what someone else sees. The viewer sees it in the first person. By virtue of being-there, the film viewer cum Dasein appropriates the view of the camera eye. I suggest that a similar logic reveals our engagement with the “tools” or “equipment” appearing in the film world, when we consider the manner in which props often comprise meaningful objects for a film’s world. Consider the prominent placement of a large chest in the foreground of the principal shot throughout the 1948 Hitchcock film Rope. This film not only presents a narrative of two men trying to hide the murder of the man stowed in the chest; it also relies on the visual disclosure afforded by the chest itself. The visual obtrusiveness of the chest throughout the narrative becomes a constant throb of agony for the two protagonists as they attempt to weasel out of their situation by telling a suspicious Jimmy Stewart a series of elaborate lies. Important for our purposes, the chest becomes a point of suspense for the viewer, such that its problematic status (“What do I do with a dead body of a friend, whom I had clear motive to murder?”) reveals the larger, shared world of social commitments and norms to which both the characters and the viewer belongs. The wooden chest can emerge as a problematic item in the hermeneutic of the visual narrative just because of the conflict posed by its world-oriented significance.

The Existential Structures of Dasein’s Being-There The last set of concepts I wish to highlight in Heidegger falls under what he calls the “existential constitution” of Dasein’s “there.”82 Dasein has a constitution that fosters its specific ways of being present and, conversely, the ways  Ibid., 130 [134]

82

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things are present to it. Heidegger terms this general phenomenon “disclosedness” (Erschlossenheit), to emphasize Dasein’s character of, on the one hand, not being closed off but instead being open to the world, and on the other hand, bringing illumination to what it presences, bringing a clearing or lighting to what it encounters such that things can reveal themselves.83 In other words, phenomenological disclosure for Heidegger is actually bidirectional, not solely dependent on Dasein’s existential projection or dative disclosure to Dasein. The concepts at work here are three in number: attunement, understanding, and discourse. They are “equiprimordial,” in that they function as three overlapping, irreducible dimensions of Dasein’s constitution. “Attunement” (Befindlichkeit) is the ontological condition for having moods and for things to be present in mood-colored aspects.84 Heidegger observes that moods in the everyday sense comprise specific ways of being for Dasein, such that they can color one’s perception and judgment and can also cause emotional affect. At the same time, moods are not under Dasein’s complete control; they can assail from without,85 as would be familiar to those who suffer from anxiety or depression. Such moods come seemingly of their own power and cannot be instantly willed away. A mood such as depression is unpleasant not just because of the emotional affect it causes but also because it causes the things in one’s world to lose positive meaning. In this account, then, mood represents the “ontic” dimension of Dasein’s underlying ontological character of attunement. Attunement is the existential structure through which such disclosures occur for one. Heidegger uses fear as an example to flesh out this structure. The experience of fear demonstrates that one is attuned to one’s surroundings such that one understands harm to be possible for oneself or others.86 In my first-person experience of fear, what I fear is not simply an object such as a villain but, equally, the harm that can befall me from without. This experience of fear therefore reveals both my nonsolipsistic being-in-the-world and, in Heidegger’s locution, a specific structure of my being “there.” I suggest that this phenomenology is an essential aspect to the way films use moods as a means for presenting their situations and objects in guises that can affect us as viewers. To cite Rope again as an example, one mood that this film conveys is suspense. For a viewer to experience suspense during Rope is predicated on the narrative’s setup of a situation whose outcome is uncertain and, in any case, uncomfortable. The experience of suspense in turn colors what is disclosed during the course of the film. As viewers we constantly await the moment when the protagonists’ plot is discovered or when they accidently give up their secret. Our being-there, our presence in this situation, is one of disclosures that are suspenseful. Things appear to us in a suspense-driven light. Again,

 Ibid., 129 [132–33].  Ibid., 130 [134]. 85  Ibid., 133 [136]. 86  Ibid., 136 [140]. 83 84

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Heidegger’s point is that mood-driven disclosures would not occur if Dasein’s being-in-the-world were not constitutionally attuned, a mode of Dasein’s being. This structuration is similarly borne by the existential Heidegger labels “understanding” (Verstand). At its root, understanding comprises Dasein’s capacity to realize through its disclosures the possibilities of itself and its surroundings. Equally, it comprises Dasein’s character of projection (as with the existential of de-distancing, mentioned earlier), or in this case, to be forward-­ looking, able to envision goals and the ways of achieving them.87 In this light, Heidegger observes that understanding is the condition for a concomitant existential, “interpretation” (Auslegung), the capacity to understand things in this or that way and to appropriate them accordingly. Interpretation thus comprises activating possibilities disclosed in understanding and developing them further.88 For an example, one might think of the meaningful disclosures a child’s understanding reveals in a forest. The child encounters a stick as an interesting object and interprets the stick in a play-acting light, say, as a magic wand. More deeply, in order even to encounter the stick as a fallen limb broken from a tree branch, or to walk in the forest in the first place, requires an act of interpretation. At the root, understanding and its activation in interpretation express that every state of visual perception involves “seeing as,” that is, seeing the object and thus taking it as this or that.89 The existential of understanding recasts the earlier concepts of being-in-the-world, and especially de-distancing, by emphasizing that it is Dasein which projects itself into and illuminates its world, by virtue of disclosing the “there” as a possibility and meaningfully adopting it, interpreting it as containing one meaning or other. As noted earlier in the analysis of Husserl, film-viewing reveals this phenomenology on multiple levels. It has long been observed that film-viewing involves seeing a screen as a projection surface and seeing screened images as depictions of actual things. Films involve seeing a series of screened images to comprise a narrative, involving people one interprets as actors, in a setting one interprets as, for example, New York City, and so on. This is possible because Dasein has the existential capacity to interpret things and surroundings for this or that purpose. Over and above one’s interpretive engagement with the components of the screened image of film, however, as understanding, Dasein fosters the very potency by which films can present meaningful images, scenes, and narratives at all. This is because, existentially speaking, Dasein’s understanding is disclosure and realization of possibility. In simple terms, a film would not be able to present images, scenes, or stories if Dasein did not possess the potency for the projective, illuminating character that renders these elements meaningful. In this light, the Heideggerian model works in the opposite direction of the  Ibid., 138 [142]ff.  Mark A. Wrathall, “Heiddegger on Human Understanding,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Mark A.  Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 180ff. 89  Heidegger, Being and Time , 144–45 [149–50]. 87 88

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Deleuzian model, in which films reveal reality to us. Rather, in the Heideggerian casting, it is we who disclose reality in and through films because it is we as Daseins who exist projectingly. For an example, consider the opening scene of Sergio Leone’s film Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). This scene unfolds over the course of several minutes, during which the opening credits flash over images of three unfamiliar men sitting idly at a frontier railroad stop. In a certain sense, by virtue of its merely formal character, one cannot gather much from this scene, at least until the action ensues with the arrival of the assassin played by Charles Bronson. Nonetheless, my reason for highlighting this opening scene in which not much happens is precisely for purpose of calling out the projective, interpretive level of understanding upon which its viewing is predicated. To view this scene and experience meaning in it entails interpreting the setting as a rail stop, interpreting the men’s idle sitting as waiting for something, and interpreting the very mood as one of boredom. On a broader level, the viewer interprets this scene, disclosed via the projection of understanding, as one from which further events will follow. In other words, the scene is disclosed in terms of its possibilities. And in the other direction, on a more microlevel, these interpretations occur over and above the more fundamental and basic projection involved in simply appropriating the film’s images as, for example, a source from which a narrative will ensue. Finally, the existential Heidegger calls “discourse” (Rede) is in one way less important than the preceding two just outlined, but in another way much more so. Heidegger defines discourse as the articulation of intelligibility.90 This to say, discourse characterizes the disclosures through which the structuration of things can be expressed. In very simple terms, discourse represents the phenomenological character of experience in which one is naturally receptive to discerning language and able to respond in kind. A crucial qualifier is that discourse is not reducible to language; instead, it is the condition for the disclosures in which language occurs.91 Language has long figured into theoretical discussions of the film image and its meaning, with some holding that film images and shots contain their own kind of words or semiotics, and, likewise, that film’s use of editing, cutting, and montage comprises a kind of syntax. For present purposes, I suggest that Heidegger’s existential of discourse both underwrites the possibility for any notion of film as language, and on the flip side, the very possibility for images to be discursive at all. When Heidegger describes discourse as the articulation of intelligibility, this notion is more broadly indicative of Dasein’s capacity to experience intelligibility and to articulate it in accordance with its disclosure. In a manner of speaking, discourse is already there, before being expressed in words, symbols, or gestures, by virtue of Dasein’s very character of being-there and bringing things to meaningful presence. In summary, I suggest that this phenomenology is really at the root of the theoretical sensibility that cinematic images are able to express anything  Ibid., 155 [161].  Ibid.

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like language through their own power. I would also suggest that Dasein’s existential discursivity is the condition for what contemporary scholars of film as philosophy such as Stephen Mulhall and Robert Sinnerbrink (and farther back, Bazin and Cavell) conceive to be the discursive, philosophical power of cinematic images and narratives.92 In Heideggerian terms, the crucial distinction is that viewing Dasein is discourse, with the result that its disclosures occur in a discursive, intelligible light.

Merleau-Ponty, Sobchack, and the Embodied Film Viewer In the last section of this chapter, I wish to venture briefly into the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) as read through the writings of the contemporary theorist Vivian Sobchack. While it is true that of the three principal figures of phenomenology I have taken up in this chapter, Merleau-­ Ponty’s writings have the most to say about film, Sobchack’s influential adoption of Merleau-Ponty for the philosophy of film considerably advances what insights the latter was able to achieve. More than this, I will suggest in what follows that Sobchack’s cinematic adoption of Merleau-Ponty is decisive for reckoning with the question of film’s ontology as discussed in the earlier sections, especially as this is centered in the viewer experience.93 Before I take up Sobchack, a few words about Merleau-Ponty’s relevance to this subject. Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to phenomenology in the legacy of Husserl and Heidegger centers in the insight that human existence is not constituted simply in a Cartesian intentional consciousness but, equally so, that human existence is founded in the body. The intentional, world-oriented being of the human subject is phenomenologically given as embodied.94 Consciousness is a function of the sensible materiality of the world in which it finds itself. Because perception of the world and the things in it occurs through the senses, this entails that perception (and ultimately consciousness) is always an expression of the sensible. In this light, consciousness is existentially underwritten by a synaesthetic enfoldment into world. For Merleau-Ponty, the physical, material basis of conscious embodiment is therefore irreducible, as are the forms or Gestalts in which perceptual experience occurs. In general, although he significantly revises cornerstones of the phenomenological program, Merleau-Ponty shares with Husserl and Heidegger the position that, at once, subjectivity arrives in a ready-made world, and subjectivity and world are discursively bound to one another. 92  See Mulhall, On Film, Preface and Preface to Second Edition; Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), Ch. 6. Mulhall and Sinnerbrink both draw heavily on Cavell in particular. 93  In what follows, I cite Soback’s most recent synopsis of these views: Vivian Sobchack, “The Active Eye (Revisited),” Studia Phaenomenologica, XVI, 2016: 63–90. 94  Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, Vol. II (The Hague: Springer, 1972), 522.

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Also continuous with Husserl and Heidegger is Merleau-Ponty’s observation that the bidirectional character of embodied consciousness—of one’s own consciousness and the things with which one engages—extends into the topological, mobile aspect of human existence. The subject’s engagement with the things of its world is always a function of one’s embodied finitude. Perception is at once receptive and creative. While one can spatially move from this place to that place (because consciousness entails consciousness of one’s own bodily motility), one can never achieve a complete view of something, even by walking around it and examining every side. Unique to Merleau-Ponty’s view here, however, is that this impossibility of total perception comprises an ontological feature of the sensible as such. The world simply reveals itself as ambiguous, both visible and invisible, with embodied subjectivity implanted in both realms.95 This last also speaks to Merleau-Ponty’s own published writings on cinema, most notably his remarks in the brief text of a 1945 lecture entitled “The Film and the New Psychology.” In this text, films are described as “Gestalts,” ready-formed conscious states that are irreducible to raw sense material.96 In this light, Merleau-Ponty understands the images of film to enable a kind of surrogate consciousness that demonstrates the bond—not the divide—between mind and world by virtue of rendering intentional experience visible and communicative from the first-person perspective.97 For similar reasons, films for Merleau-Ponty possess the capacity to exhibit some of the “nascent” dimensions according to which ordinary perception receives meaning.98 This is to say, film images enable the communication of pre-sensory, prerational disclosures of meaning from filmmaker to viewer, in the same way Merleau-Ponty describes the work of painters such as Cezanne whose images convey the genetic moments underlying everyday perception of their subjects.99 A starting point for Sobchack’s adoption of Merleau-Ponty in service of the philosophy of film is the latter’s observation that the perception of motion is inextricably linked with embodied intentionality.100 To perceive motion, as in film’s moving pictures, requires a mental directedness on part of the viewer. One needs to be able to intend the object in motion, where it has come from and where it is going, because the perception of motion transcends a mere passive staring at a scene. And this perception likewise requires implicit bodily motility; to perceive something in motion entails that I am able to comport my body accordingly. I need to be able to adjust my bodily stance, including head, shoulders, and spine. I also need to be able to move my eyes, which in turn implicates the required functionality of pupil and iris. In brief, the very intelligibility of motion at all seems to presuppose an embodied, conscious state. As  Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, Vol. II, 548.  Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” 54. 97  Ibid., 55, 58; Ferencz-Flatz and Hanich, “What is Film Phenomenology?” 15, 28. 98  Yacavone, “Film and the Phenomenology of Art,” 167–69. 99  Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” 57–58. 100  Sobchack, “The Active Eye (Revisited),” 65. Much of my summary to follow is also informed by Sobchack’s longer work, The Address of the Eye. 95 96

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Sobchack holds, this feature of motion is decisive for both the motion of pictures that occurs in film and the motion in the pictures of film. In other words, this phenomenology involves not just the automatic character of film as a photoplay of static images run through a projector at 24 frames per second. This phenomenology also entails accounting for the intentional consciousness of the viewer who perceives things that move on screen. At the heart of Sobchack’s development of this viewer-centered phenomenology is the thesis that the film has a body, viz. that, phenomenologically speaking, the ontology of films is constituted in the communication of intentional, embodied consciousness from the filmmaker to the film viewer. In other words, a film’s ontology has its seat in the person-to-person sharing of embodied perception. Sobchack makes her case for this thesis by highlighting four specific, overlapping ways in which cinematic movement avails itself of and discloses an embodied intentionality. First is the observation that the film camera’s view, which we take up when we watch a film, is always directional. In traditional lingo, the film camera has a “subject”—it is directed toward a definite something, which it “looks at.” The camera’s view is not a blank stare conscious of nothing. In addition, the perception of movement or the possibility of movement implicates the camera view as one of a subject that is spatially situated. A filmed image or shot always occurs from a specific place, a place which is variously evidenced by what actually makes it into the shot.101 For instance, a moving, aerial view of a city entails that the camera is in a high-up place such as an airplane. Or, camera angles placed very close to the ground might communicate the embodied perception of a child. The second means by which cinematic movement conveys an embodied conscious state is the optical movement enabled by the camera, most notably zoom and focus, but also features such as color change and slow motion. To consider focus, for instance, this feature of films conveys the aspect of embodied consciousness in which the subject does not simply view this or that object point-blank; the subject focuses on aspects and parts of an object that command attention. To focus on one object in everyday visual experience entails a precise direction in which eye and mind work together; it involves a deliberate fading of the remainder of one’s field of vision. Sobchack’s point is that the mechanical capacity of focus employed in a film camera is communicative of an embodied, conscious state of focused vision.102 Third, Sobchack highlights that camera movement demonstrates responsiveness to what is seen through the camera, in the same fashion that embodied consciousness is not merely mentally aware of its surroundings but always visually and spatially engaged with them as well.103 From the dawn of the movable camera, the camera view has always been able to move, via unseen equipment such as the crane, dolly, or shoulder mount, with the result that film is often expressive of an embodied conscious view. In today’s film and television world,  Ibid., 69.  Ibid., 69. 103  Ibid., 70. 101 102

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this feature of camera movement often appears in the rapid pan of the camera to reveal characters or objects out of the frame, in order to show their reaction to something occurring in the scene. Another contemporary example occurs in the practice of a film camera following behind an actor, going where the actor goes, though they may appear to be exiting the field of the shot. Finally, the fourth feature Sobchack highlights in film’s movement as expressive of embodied intentionality is its realization and expression of physical finitude. In other words, the film camera’s occasional inability to move or to go where one would like is reflective of the finite, physically confined character of the conscious embodied state. As Sobchack puts it, visually perceptive motility becomes visibly expressive mobility.104 This feature of films conveys the phenomenological character of embodied consciousness by which one sometimes is unable to go where one pleases, or where the object of one’s intentionality can only present itself insofar as it exceeds one’s ability to view. Several of the films of Michael Haneke make use of this capacity. In Haneke’s Cache (2005), several views from static camera shots, filmed surveillance-style, assert a finite character through the camera’s very inertia. These shots reveal their surveilling aspect by virtue of the camera’s lack of movement. And consequently, an expressive aspect is borne by the surveilling shots’ ability to capture unwitting subjects (most notably, the main character Georges Laurent (Daniel Auteuil)  and his innocent son) precisely through the camera’s static, hidden placement. This assertive character afforded by the camera view’s inertia communicates a specific, embodied state of intentionality, in this case the intentional state of a voyeur who can see others from a hidden point of view. In sum, Sobchack’s most significant claim for bringing a phenomenological approach to understanding film is an ontological one, namely that film’s essence lay in the communicative power of embodied consciousness. Or, as she puts it, film comprises a “viewing view” (the embodied intentionality of the filmmaker, captured through the camera) functioning as a “viewed view” (the former, as experienced by the viewer, through the projected film image).105 Film allows one’s embodied point of view, one’s perception, and one’s intentionality to be shared from one person to another. To circle back to where this chapter started, Sobchack’s thesis provides an ontology of film—an account of what film is—by means of a phenomenological account. What makes her account phenomenological? Her account is framed around the descriptive first-person experience of film-viewing, subject to a phenomenological reduction that traces film viewership back to its source, namely the embodied view of the filmmaker. In terms of what we gleaned from Husserl and Heidegger earlier, then, Sobchack’s account is something of an apex to assessing film phenomenologically, insofar as it gives specific focus to the essence of the medium itself as this is disclosed in first-person experience. In view of this conclusion, I suggest that Sobchack’s work offers a genuine challenge to theories of film ontology that omit the first-­ person, descriptive dimension of film-viewing.  Ibid., 70–71.  Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 3–14, 23–24, 56–57.

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Bibliography Andrew, Dudley. 1985. The Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film Theory. In Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 2, 625–632. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bazin, Andre. 1967. The Ontology of the Photographic Image. In What Is Cinema? ed. Hugh Gray, vol. 1, 9–16. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, David. 1996. Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 3–36. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brough, John. 1992. Some Husserlian Comments on Depiction and Art. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXVI (2): 241–259. ———. 2010. Showing and Seeing: Film as Phenomenology. In Art and Phenomenology, ed. Joseph Parry, 192–213. Abingdon: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1996. Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 37–68. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden: Blackwell. Casebier, Allan. 1991. Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed. Revised ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chamarette, Jenny. 2012. Phenomenology and the Future of Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferencz-Flatz, Christian, and Julian Hanich. 2016. Editor’s Introduction: What Is Film Phenomenology? Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: 11–61. Heidegger, Martin. 2001. The Thing. In Poetry, Language, Thought, 161–83. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial. ———. 2002. The Age of the World-Picture. In Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 57–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings, Revised and Expanded, ed. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed., 307–341. New York: Harper. ———. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Revised edn. Albany: SUNY Press. Hopkins, Robert. 2015. The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representational Art). Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2): 329–348. Husserl, Edmund. 1962. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books. ———. 2000. Logical Investigations. Trans. J.N.  Findlay. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Books. ———. 2005. Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898–1925). Trans. John B. Brough. Dordrecht: Springer. Loht, Shawn. 2017. Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience. Lanham: Lexington Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The Film and the New Psychology. In Sense and Non-­ Sense, 48–62. Trans. Hubert L.  Dreyfus, and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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———. 1988. The Sensible World and the World of Expression. In In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays, 71–79. Trans. John Wild, James Edie, and John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. Abingdon: Routledge. Mion, Regina-Nino. 2016. Husserl and Cinematographic Depictive Images: The Conflict Between the Actor and Character. Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: 269–293. Price, Brian. 2008. Heidegger and Cinema. In European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova. New York: Routledge. Raviv, Orna. 2016. The Cinematic Point of View: Thinking Film with Merleau-Ponty. Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: 163–183. Rozzoni, Claudio. 2016. Cinema Consciousness: Elements of a Husserlian Approach to Film Image. Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: 295–324. Scruton, Roger. 1981. Photography and Representation. Critical Inquiry 7 (3): 577–603. Sheehan, Thomas. 2017. Heidegger and the Right Heideggerians: Phenomenology Vs. Crypto-Metaphysics. Kronos VI: 78–90. Shum, Peter. 2015. The Evolution of Husserl’s Concept of Imagination. Husserl Studies 31: 213–236. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. New  York: Continuum. ———. 2016. Cinematic Ethics. Abingdon: Routledge. Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2008. Phenomenology. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 435–445. Abingdon: Routledge. ———. 2016. The Active Eye (Revisited). Studia Phaenomenologica XVI: 63–90. Sokolowski, Robert. 2000. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Husserl on First Philosophy. In Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens, 3–30. Dordrecht: Springer. Sorfa, David. 2014. Phenomenology and Film. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. E. Branigan and W. Buckland, 353–358. Abingdon: Routledge. Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1965. The Phenomenological Movement. 2nd ed. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Vaughan, Hunter. 2012. Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking. New York: Columbia University Press. Walton, Kendall. 1984. Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism. Critical Inquiry 11 (2): 246–277. Wrathall, Mark A. 2013. Heidegger on Human Understanding. In The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Mark A.  Wrathall, 177–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yacavone, Daniel. 2014. Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2016. Film and the Phenomenology of Art: Reappraising Merleau-Ponty on Cinema as Form, Medium, and Expression. New Literary History 47: 159–186. Zahavi, Dan. 2003. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

CHAPTER 14

Ideology and Experience: The Legacy of Critical Theory Espen Hammer

The term “Critical Theory” has come to denote a number of different yet interrelated approaches in the humanities, ranging from gender and queer studies to postcolonial theory, cultural studies, various forms of Marxist and post-Marxist ideology critique, as well as poststructuralist and psychoanalytic modes of critical engagement in general. In this broad sense Critical Theory has exerted a profound influence upon film studies. Its narrow and original meaning, however, stems from the collaborative work of a group of Marxist philosophers and social scientists initially based in Germany but later operating out of New York: the so-called Frankfurt School. According to Max Horkheimer, one of the early directors of the later so illustrious Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), the purpose of Critical Theory was to unite philosophers and social scientists in the effort to understand and theorize modern society with a view to uncovering its emancipatory potentials. The research would be self-reflective, questioning itself and its conceptual foundations, yet it would also be collaborative, bringing theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence together. While attentive to the dangers of social regression (and with fascism being its most important topic), critical theorists would seek to understand the ambivalent nature of rationalized, social life—its effective causes as well its ideological self-representation. It would deal with social and political life, but also with psychic life and culture, including mass culture. Indeed, the researchers associated with the Institute for Social Research were pioneers when it came to analyzing and theorizing the new media of photography and film.

E. Hammer (*) Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_14

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The focus in this chapter is restricted to the Critical Theory provided by the Frankfurt School. Its aim is to interpret and discuss its contribution to film studies, emphasizing in particular its understanding of cinema and the cinematic image. I offer an overview of the Frankfurt School’s theoretical commitments. I then turn briefly to the accounts offered by two peripheral yet important associates of the Frankfurt School, namely Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. Both saw film as harboring an emancipatory, progressive potential. I also discuss Adorno and his conception, developed together with Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, of the culture industry. I argue that while the account of film on offer in the culture industry theory is deeply critical, associating Hollywood studio productions with propaganda and ideology, Adorno later formed a more positive view of film, arguing that it aspires to be a genuine art. While a number of subsequent theorists of film, including Alexander Kluge and Gertrud Koch, have identified with the early Frankfurt School’s project of critically considering film in its social contexts of production and reception, it would not be incorrect to point out that cinema became less of a preoccupation as the Frankfurt School re-established itself in Frankfurt after the war. As Jürgen Habermas and his associates in the 1960s started to form what later became known as second-generation Frankfurt School theorizing, the attention shifted from social and cultural studies, as well as ideology critique, to the more abstract activities of providing an account of rationality and a social theory geared toward combining interpretive and system-functionalistic perspectives. In its classical form, Frankfurt-style Critical Theory, which came into being in the early 1930s, seems to have come to an end around 1970.

Historical Background and Theoretical Assumptions As Rolf Wiggershaus, Martin Jay, and others have documented, the history of the Frankfurt School is extraordinarily complex, comprising the activities and interactions of a significant number of major thinkers, many of whose names eventually became household names of the humanities and social sciences.1 It was formed as an academic institution of the University of Frankfurt in 1923, predominantly oriented toward scholarly studies of Marx’s writings as well as research on the history of socialism and the labor movement, economic history, and the history and criticism of political economy. When Max Horkheimer acceded to the Directorship in 1930, the Institute changed its course by incorporating a more philosophical attitude while also intensifying its empirical research. In the period leading up to its forced exile in 1933 due to the establishment of Nazi rule and including the eventual re-establishment of the 1  Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998); Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973).

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Institute in New York, Horkheimer hired a number of researchers who in various ways would leave their marks on the Institute’s legacy. The most important participants included Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Friedrich Pollock, Leo Löwenthal, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, and Otto Kirchheimer. As has often been pointed out, the immediate research context of this eclectic group of left-wing scholars, philosophers, critics, social scientists, and psychoanalysts was the Weimar Republic in all its sprawling social, cultural, and political complexity. The members of the Frankfurt School deplored the failed 1918 November Revolution in Germany. Later, they were even more aghast at the rise of fascism and what to them looked like a large-scale regression of social and political life combined with the emergence of new forms of tyranny and barbarism. Few of the Frankfurt School theorists were drawn to Moscow-­style communism, which at a very early stage was seen as harboring totalitarian potentials. On the other hand, they seem to have agreed that the German progressive cause got hijacked as an increasing number of working-class and lowermiddle-class citizens came to endorse Hitler. In the midst of this social and political upheaval, they also tended to view capitalism itself with a great deal of suspicion, agreeing more or less that the economic system was becoming increasingly monopolized and, under fascism (and indeed also to some extent under Roosevelt’s New Deal), controlled by the government. Unlike earlier entrepreneurial forms of capitalism, late capitalism, they argued, is marked by a high degree of social integration, standardization, and bureaucratization. Much of the school’s research in the 1930s and beyond focused on phenomena linked to the idea of regression, in particular the weakening of the purportedly autonomous bourgeois subject in favor of an obedient, authoritarian character type. Central explanations of this tendency include psychoanalytic (predominantly Freudian) accounts of regressive mass behavior and various analyses of ideology. The researchers took an increasingly dim view of the prospects for an enlightened, free society of equals (the kind of view they associated with a liberated society) and conceived of contemporary society as a closed totality in thrall to irrational mechanisms of enforced integration. They all believed that in the new fascist and monopoly capitalist dispensation, the chances of being able to lead a free, rationally self-governed life were virtually non-existent. Unlike much Marxist thought, which considers the ideological superstructure to be a mere reflection of the socioeconomic base, the Frankfurt School— at least toward the end of the 1930s and into the 1940s, culminating with the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment—assigned a great deal of autonomy to the superstructure. Contrary to what Marx claimed in The German Ideology and elsewhere, they treated it as a relatively free-standing symbolic order that only in a very limited sense is dependent on the dynamic evolution of the productive forces. To be sure, the superstructure functions ideologically: while largely serving the interests of the ruling class, it (falsely, since it does not take into account people’s real needs) confers legitimacy on the social order itself and serves to integrate society. However, the Frankfurt School viewed ideology not only as

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legitimating and socially integrative but as shaping the individual and ­ultimately undermining his or her claim to rational and/or individual autonomy. Art, in particular, is highly likely to play an ideological role and contain psycho-­socially influential ideological content. All traditional art, Herbert Marcuse argued in an influential essay, tends toward the affirmative mode, endowing society with an illusory veneer of being just, harmonious, and reconciled.2 Its function has typically been to ennoble culture, elevating it beyond the material and social life of society, while attributing dignity to man as such regardless of his actual circumstances. Ideological thinking, he argued, penetrates deep into the structures of both society and psyche. That said, both Marcuse and other prominent members of the Institute, including Adorno, considered so-called “great” or “advanced” art (by which they often, though not always, meant modernist art practices) as pointing beyond contemporary social life, anticipating a more fully actualized, happy, or authentic state of existence. In this way, art is assigned with a truth claim capable of transcending the present, attaining and expressing, as the philosopher Ernst Bloch would argue, a utopian dimension.3 The Frankfurt School employed experts on several of the arts. In addition to being a philosopher and social theorist, Adorno was a musicologist and composer. Marcuse, Löwenthal, and Horkheimer, moreover, being more inclined toward literature, wrote pioneering, ideology-critical studies of the novel. The visual arts, however, were less well covered. This is especially true of film, about which they cannot be said to have harbored much expertise. The lack of knowledge in this field may have been tempered, however, by two factors. One is that the Frankfurt School approached the arts predominantly as a social fact, and, with the exception of Adorno, whose work testified to a breathtaking understanding of the constituents of music and literature, their analyses usually did not require much technical and aesthetic understanding. A second factor that helps to explain why the Frankfurt School, despite its limited expertise on film, has been able to inspire theoretical work in cinema studies is that prior to the 1930s, the discourse of cinema studies had, with the important exception of Kracauer, not yet been seriously established. While the German film industry had been tremendously successful, German academics (sometimes disparagingly referred to as “mandarins” because of their cultural conservatism) wavered about whether or not to view film as an art form and, even in their cultural analyses, tended to disregard it completely. With its social understanding of the arts, the approach displayed by the Frankfurt School seems to have taken place fairly independently of traditional aesthetic deliberation. Its great contribution was to have critically situated the new cinematic technology within the constraints set by the nature of mass culture and a mass society in social and political upheaval. 2  Herbert Marcuse, “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 88–133. 3  For Ernst Bloch’s conception of literature and utopia, see The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1989). Bloch was for a while quite close to Adorno and influenced him. However, he was never a formal member of the Institute for Social Research.

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The Benjamin-Adorno Debate Walter Benjamin was never a formal member of the Frankfurt School. However, in the latter half of the 1930s, while the Institute was based in New York, he did, in part because of his close friendship with Adorno, by whom he was held in very high regard, temporarily receive a salary from it. Remaining in Europe (especially Paris), Benjamin was supposed to conduct a series of interpretive studies of mass culture, something he did through a number of essays and, in particular, the unfinished Passagenwerk, a vast assemblage of reflections on the nature of nineteenth-century capitalism. In 1935, Benjamin published the highly influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” in the Institute’s research journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.4 In this complex philosophical and historical essay, Benjamin claims that with the invention of technologies of mechanical reproduction, including photography, phonography, and film, a seismic shift took place in the history of the arts. Prior to this invention, the arts were united in their capacity to display a so-­ called auratic quality. The aura, according to Benjamin, is the quasi-sacred, mystical quality of something appearing to be both close and far away at the same time. It can be apprehended only in the hic et nunc, as the viewer or listener finds herself in the vicinity of the work. Moreover, the experience of the aura is dependent on the existence of a community—a cult, as Benjamin calls it—in which the work is cherished and even “worshipped.” Crucial to this traditional mode of apprehending art is a demand for authenticity, transcendence, and uniqueness. The work of art is considered an autonomous object, withdrawn from psychological, social, or political pressures or concerns. It cannot be touched. It is there for the viewer’s disinterested gaze. Taking his lead from Marx’s emphasis on the importance of technical means of production for the explanation of social and cultural change, Benjamin maintains that reproducibility means that the age of auratic arts is over. Reproducible arts are intended for the masses, and rather than the integrity and uniqueness of the object, combined with aesthetic appreciation and absorption, what matters in such arts is first and foremost the communication of a message. While the auratic arts had a “cult value,” tying the value and appreciation of the work to an immemorial past, the reproducible arts have an “exhibition value.” On this basis, their significance lies not in their exceptional nature but, rather, in their ability to draw and address a large audience and engage it communicatively. Film, Benjamin claims, is the most powerful of the new arts. Influenced by the surrealists and by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, and Vertov’s techniques of montage, Benjamin considers film as especially prone to emulate and explore the shock experiences involved in modern, technologically mediated lifestyles. 4  Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 251–83.

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Film diverts the viewer from everyday life by making her attentive to aspects not otherwise discovered. Most significantly, however, for Benjamin, as a Marxist critic, is how film lends itself to much needed politicization. While the fascist propaganda machine attempted to employ a sense of aura for the purpose of sacralizing the social body, progressives should employ film in order to inform and activate the proletariat as a political force. Benjamin’s essay set the stage for much subsequent reflection on cinema in Germany. Referring to the demise of the aura, he rigorously distinguishes cinema from the older, bourgeois tradition of the visual arts. However, rather than condemning film for lacking key properties of traditional, “high art,” he ascribes to it a political role as a medium of proletarian self-reflection and mobilization. The sense of loss, explaining the melancholic tone of the essay, is counteracted by a progressive political vision, motivated in particular by the need to stand up to fascism. Like Kracauer, Benjamin interprets mass culture dialectically: while destructive of autonomous art, and harboring regressive elements, it anticipates a state of greater integrity beyond capitalist, technological modernity. Benjamin’s essay received praise among several of the Frankfurt School insiders residing in New York. However, it was severely criticized by Adorno, who in his 1936 correspondence with Benjamin expressed skepticism about a number of its key claims.5 The aura has not been eviscerated from art, Adorno retorts. Rather, it survives authentically in advanced, modernist art (which, thanks to its emphasis on technique, embodies its own practices of demystification) and, to the point of becoming exploited, has become standard fare in much of the culture industry (to which I will turn in a moment). Moreover, Adorno adds, Benjamin underestimates the immanent irrationality of film and attributes to its audience, the masses, including the proletariat, a greater capacity for reflection than it actually possesses. That this is true becomes particularly evident when considering Benjamin’s strong hopes for montage, a technique he especially found in Eisenstein’s films. Here is Adorno to Benjamin in a letter dated March 18, 1936: “When I spent a day in the studios of Neubabelsberg a couple of years ago, what impressed me most of all was how little montage and all the advanced techniques you emphasize were actually used; rather, it seems as though reality is always constructed with an infantile attachment to the mimetic and then ‘photographed.’ You underestimate the technical character of autonomous art and overestimate that of dependent art; put simply, this would be my principal objection.”6 Adorno developed his critical interpretation of mass culture in a number of essays, including most famously his 1938 “On Jazz,” in which he views the seemingly individual touch of jazz—the technique of improvisation in particular—as ideological. The performer gives off the illusion of being expressively 5  Theodor W.  Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 127–33. 6  Ibid., p. 131.

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free. In reality, according to Adorno, the music is controlled by conventions, making expressive freedom impossible. In analyzing a phenomenon such as jazz, Adorno made use of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács’s notion of reification, signifying the dominance of impersonal constraints and structures in social life, drowning out subjective response, sensuous engagement, and spontaneity. According to Lukács’s account in the highly influential 1923 History and Class Consciousness, the main explanans of reification is commodification and commodity fetishism.7 As organized capitalism increasingly applies monetary value (or, as Marx called it, exchange value) to objects and social relations, it fosters calculative and instrumental attitudes. Rather than orienting themselves toward use values inherent in objects of genuine human value, modern agents conform to market-driven modes of rational behavior, seeking to calculate the most efficient means to pre-given ends. For Adorno, this ultimately deprives the individual subject of freedom. Indeed, Adorno considers contemporary society to be “totally administered” (totalverwaltet), leaving virtually no room for behavior unstructured by market imperatives and bureaucratic control. In the (with Horkheimer) co-authored 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno generalizes this account, turning it into a pessimistic philosophy of history according to which human reason is nothing but an instrument in the service of human domination.8 Both inner and outer nature are objectivized and subjected to instrumental strategies. Moreover, in the techno-scientific culture of modernity, language has regressed to a system of mere classification. In the same study, Adorno also extends his Lukácsian ideas of a totally integrated capitalist system to culture, arguing that the logic of capitalist exchange has now turned contemporary culture into a mere industry for the production of ideologically saturated entertainment. Adorno summarizes his worries as follows: “In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a system almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration.”9 What used to be culture is now big business. Thus, in the famous chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment entitled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Adorno, among other things, targets the Hollywood studio system. The Hollywood film, he argues, is a commodity. Rather than providing genuine experience (and here Adorno 7  Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Merlin Press, 1971). 8  Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1979). 9  Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, trans. Anson Rabinbach (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 85.

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employs the important term Erfahrung, which involves the capacity for “transformative insight”), its raison d’être is to generate revenue: “The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto culture forms.”10 By virtue of being a commodity, catering for a mass market and its demand for entertainment, Hollywood studio productions are made according to rigid and industrial standards; they are formulaic and strikingly similar. Indeed, the culture industry, while perpetually generating new fads, does not let anything new or different emerge: as is true of any product made for mass consumption, everything is meant to fit into a pre-given system of expectations and demands. Adorno considers Hollywood studio production movies as propaganda. Like propaganda they create an illusory counter-world replete with heroes and stars with which to identify, social aspirations, and norms that together serve to bolster the legitimacy of existing social arrangements. Unlike propaganda, however, Hollywood movies do not carry a straightforward message. Rather, their social function is to create a habitus, a way of viewing the world and shaping behavior. Ultimately, this habitus carries with it a demand for conformity: it does not condone exceptions. Indeed, in an argument reminiscent of Benjamin’s melancholy reflections on how techniques of mechanical reproduction eliminate the aura, Adorno goes so far as to suggest that, by trivializing and packaging aspects of the world into items of visual consumption, film transforms and even destroys our sense of the uniqueness of things: “The colour film demolishes the genial old tavern to a greater extent than bombs ever could: the film exterminates its imago. No homeland can survive being processed by the films which celebrate it, and which thereby turn the unique character on which it thrives into an interchangeable sameness.”11 The world gets transformed by the onslaught of industrially produced images. Like the culture industry in general, Hollywood productions purport to entertain while obliterating all traditional distinctions between high and low art. Offering a kind of mock Gesamtkunstwerk, they also efface the distinction between the various arts as well as that between tragedy and comedy. Psychologically, movies are processed by individual viewers through complex acts of internalization and identification. Drawing on Freud, Adorno thus points to the masochistic pleasure supposedly arising from having the object of desire present yet perpetually withdrawn: “The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate: it represses. By repeatedly exposing the objects of desire, breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero, it only stimulates the unsublimated forepleasure which habitual deprivation has long since reduced to a masochistic semblance.”12 Viewers do not simply watch movies. As movies present objects of desire, viewers ultimately take pleasure in  Ibid., p. 86.  Ibid., p. 89. 12  Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 140. 10 11

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modeling their own behavior on what they see on the screen. Even though consumers see through the movies and intellectually are able to identify their modus operandi, they nevertheless feel compelled to submit to the imperatives being imposed on them by the industry. The Hollywood studio movie, Adorno concludes, offers regression manufactured on an industrial scale.

Cinema and Experience Adorno never fully accepted that the medium of film can aspire to be a serious art. With its inherent claim to both realism and immediacy, it will not be able to shed its seductive, ideological nature. Adorno’s friend Kracauer, however, who was formally peripheral yet scientifically associated with the Institute, took a more positive view of film. In his 1947 study From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Kracauer offered a psychological and ideological study of the early history of German film, arguing that certain very successful silent films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari both reflected and foreshadowed the rise of authoritarian attitudes in the German population.13 Drawing on psychoanalysis as well as techniques of ideology analysis, Kracauer further maintained that films express wishes, sometimes of a deeply regressive nature. For the relatively apolitical German middle class of the early Weimar Republic years, the cinematic experience functioned as a substitute for political developments that only later would fully transpire. There is a line, he argues, from the seductive authoritarianism of Dr. Caligari to Hitler’s insidious propaganda. Compared to From Caligari to Hitler, which insisted on viewing film in a social and political context, Kracauer’s magisterial 1960 Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality focused more directly on the nature of the medium itself, exploring all its features, from narration, camera techniques, editing, mise-en-scène, framing, lighting, and character to script, music, as well as its effects on the viewer.14 Although film always contains what Kracauer calls a form-giving tendency, it differs from the traditional arts in that its primary impulse is not to idealize but to represent physical reality in its contingent, transient, and potentially indeterminate nature. Founded upon the automatism of the photographic lens, film, which for Kracauer is a photographic medium, tends toward recording or transcribing reality, rather than shaping or distorting it. For the first time in human history, Kracauer emphasizes, human civilization has at its disposal an art form capable of dwelling on—and indeed objectivizing in a contemplative mode—the visual givenness of the world. In all its glory and misery, the world has finally been made fully available to the aesthetic gaze. To the extent that this is correct, however, the medium of film also 13  Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film (London: Dobson, 1947). 14  Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).

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releases the human subject from its previously constitutive embodiment: movies allow us to be “anywhere” and transport us into situations we would not otherwise be able to experience. Thus, films serve to “redeem” physical reality. Like Kracauer, the influential French critic André Bazin also took film to be based on the photographic image and hence to be fundamentally realistic.15 Together they influenced a generation of mainly European auteurs, including Marcello Antonioni, who, as if to retrieve a sense of responsiveness to a world potentially lost to the pragmatically oriented gaze of everyday life, often would let the camera dwell on seemingly insignificant details. Antonioni’s La Notte, for example, cultivates an aesthetics of stasis. Rather than accelerating and compressing time, as the typical Hollywood film does, it transforms time into an endless, discomforting now by inviting the viewer to attend to the frozen immobility of objects. In “Transparencies on Film,” written in the mid-1960s, Adorno (referring to Kracauer) points to film’s capacity to dwell on objects and their movement.16 Films, he argues, are a bit like dreams; they have the capacity to recreate sequences of interior images fraught with mysterious significance to the viewer. In this way, he adds, “film may become art. The technological medium par excellence is thus intimately related to the beauty of nature.”17 Adorno further claims that the photographic process of film is primarily representational and that it “places a higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous techniques.”18 Unlike autonomous art in general, it does not permit absolute construction: any aesthetic or formal dimension of film is necessarily beholden to its representational function. In part because of an interest in articulating the aspirations of a new and sophisticated generation of German directors (Volker Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz, Alexander Kluge, et  al.), Adorno in this late essay seems to be much more enthusiastic about the artistic and aesthetic potentials of the cinematic medium than he was when writing Dialectic of Enlightenment. It is worth dwelling for a moment on Adorno’s invocation of the category of natural beauty. In his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, Adorno criticizes the rejection of nature in the idealist aesthetics of thinkers such as Schiller and Hegel. As opposed to their anthropocentric valorization of rational autonomy over inert nature, Adorno claims that serious art is open to, and expressive of, the alterity of nature. Indeed, nature for Adorno functions as the other of identitarian and instrumental reason. Although it cannot be apprehended in an immediate sense, it stands as a correction to the aggressive domination of the world that, according to Dialectic of Enlightenment, must be considered fundamental to the modern project as a whole. Items of natural 15  André Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 16  Theodor W.  Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, pp. 154–61. 17  Ibid., p. 156. 18  Ibid., p. 157.

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beauty embody forms of significance irreducible to conceptual expression. To say, therefore, that the technological medium of film is “intimately related to the beauty of nature” is high praise. It implies that film harbors a potential for transcendence. Adorno indeed seems to have taken on board Kracauer’s idea of the redemption of physical reality. “Transparencies of Film” is, however, a highly dialectical essay. Adorno continues to hold that film’s very capacity to track and express forms of significance irreducible to conceptual expression—the registering of natural beauty and ultimately what Benjamin called the aura—can far too easily be exploited. Indeed, since film always displays what one might call a virtual reality, distanced from actual reality by its representational devices, including perspective, framing, coloring, focus, depth, and so on—and also since the objects of film are socially mediated—the immediacy it tends to invoke is “false.” According to Adorno, since representations in general are mediated (and ideologically coded), any appeal to the immediately given is bound to be illusory. Since the medium of film purports, as Kracauer points out, to establish a direct or iconic relation to reality, it more easily than any of the other arts falls into the trap of being misleading. We are led to think that film is in direct touch with reality, whereas in fact it is not. In his desire to establish markers for a kind of avant-garde (or what he calls “emancipated”) film-making, Adorno is particularly scathing in his discussion of techniques that deliberately undermine the realism inherent in the photographic process, claiming that they produce kitsch. Such techniques include soft-focus shots, superimpositions, and flashbacks. The guiding thought is that these techniques are fundamentally conventional; they manipulate the masses by appealing to their most unreflective, ideologically shaped, responses and prejudices. Kitsch aims merely at creating an effect; it never challenges the stereotypes of conventional film-making. Adorno’s view, however, is that advanced film-making may incorporate the critique of false immediacy while retaining the aspiration of tracking and expressing reality. Returning to the older Benjamin/Eisenstein doctrine, it can do this, he argues, by employing the technique of montage. In Adorno’s conception, successful montage “does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing.”19 It thereby fractures the fetishistic illusionism of narrative cinema. It is revealing that Adorno associates the concept of montage with that of constellation, which, while making some brief but important cameos in his earliest essays, continued to play an important role in his later philosophical work, including the 1966 Negative Dialectics. Indeed, throughout his work, Adorno struggled with the related question of Erfahrung, or experience in the emphatic sense.20 What must experience be like for it to be able to penetrate  Ibid., p. 158.  For an astute account of how the question of Erfahrung plays out in relation to Adorno’s understanding of film, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2012). 19 20

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the layers of ideological misrepresentation that characterize human existence in late capitalist society? In philosophy, this question gets interpreted epistemologically as that of how representation (Darstellung) is possible. In art, the question of experience becomes tied to the dualism of mimesis and construction that Adorno ascribes to modern art. In both cases, the notion of constellation plays a role. Unlike (in philosophy) traditional argumentation or (in art) enjoyment of beautiful images, constellations perform a kind of deconstruction of the well known or given such that its elements are re-arranged according to a syntax akin to that of language. The elements making up the constellation point its audience toward the specificity of the object, as opposed to the homogeneity and identity imposed by the general and universal determinations provided by concepts. In order to prevent the constellation from merely reflecting a subjective point of view, it is required that no interpretation of individual elements should be imposed. Constellations actively re-arrange the components of what we take to be real. However, to be able to speak and be significant they require a form of passive concentration. Constellations, one might say, are structures of non-intentional meaning. As such, they give to art what Adorno calls its truth content. Adorno also argues that advanced film-making should interact with other media, including music, painting, literature, and so on. As an example of such interaction, he mentions the television production Antithese by Mauricio Kagel. One may also think of Godard’s video production and later films of the 1980s and beyond, which reject linear, event-organizing narrative in favor of what seems like a free or at least disorganized play of sequences, blending image, ideology, analysis, music, and character depiction. Ideas from Brecht about Verfremdung also play into Adorno’s account. Emancipated cinema should not try to hide its representational techniques. Rather, it should acknowledge its own artificiality and seek to unravel its unified, illusory structure. Actors, for example, rather than naively playing a role, should display awareness of their status as characters in a movie. Thus, in Godard, characters occasionally turn directly to the camera, as if to acknowledge that they have an audience, that what the audience witnesses is not some immediate reality, and that for any genuine Erfahrung to occur, it will have to break out from the inside, as it were, through reflection and aesthetic contemplation.

Cinema as a Public Sphere Since Benjamin and Adorno’s early debates over the prospects for a progressive yet wholly non-auratic art, the tension between politics and aesthetics has structured much of the Frankfurt School’s attitude toward emancipated film-­ making. While Benjamin envisioned a film production devoted mainly to the promotion of political causes in the newly formed mass society, Adorno ­(following Kracauer) held on to a conception of film as able to embody aesthetic dimensions, in particular those related to his central category of the beauty of nature. In interesting ways, however, these two lines were united in

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their commitment to the use of montage and similar techniques for breaking up, and criticizing, ideological representations of reality. During the 1960s, a new figure, Jürgen Habermas, started to influence Frankfurt School theorizing. Initially one of Adorno’s research assistants, Habermas’s breakthrough came in 1962 with the publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, a now classical study of the rise and subsequent demise of the so-called bourgeois public sphere.21 Unlike Adorno, whose interests were at times elitist and esoteric, marked by deep cultural pessimism and even despair, Habermas displayed a more forgiving and optimistic attitude toward contemporary culture. In particular, Habermas turned toward a liberal understanding of politics, seeking to reconstruct not only the ideological dimension of political debate but also its rational ideals and presuppositions. Although Adorno continued to work on his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, the turn toward the public sphere seems to have realigned the Frankfurt School’s interest to a considerable degree toward politics at the expense of the older, more metaphysically and philosophically inclined critique developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Moreover, the 1960s was also the time when high modernism in the arts, which had played a crucial role for the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists, started to lose its status as a dominant cultural form, being challenged by conceptual and post-conceptual art practices—pop art, Fluxus, various forms of neo-avant-gardism, and so on. Although Habermas did not respond to this transformation of the art world until much later, his interest in structures of communication and the ideals informing an enlightened public sphere seems to have echoed many artists’ rejection of the implied elitism of the cultivation of aesthetic value conceived as an autonomous pursuit. The public sphere, as Habermas understood it, is informed by an imputation of equality: everyone (without restriction) is entitled to participate; its universalism requires that no voice should be excluded a priori. Whereas the art favored by Adorno is uncompromisingly exclusive, made for what inevitably will be a small, highly educated elite, the public sphere is by its very nature inclusive, ideally open to all those who find themselves affected by its concerns. Ideas of political and democratic participation became especially relevant for the German protest movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge’s 1972 Public Sphere and Experience, much of what Habermas had brought to the fore in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was critically received and applied to the new social movements, including women’s and gay movements, urban grassroots organizations, ­pedagogic and environmental causes, and so on.22 However, whereas Habermas 21  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991). 22  Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt, Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London: Verso, 2016).

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had been interested in the formal conditions under which a public could act and speak independently of social status, Negt and Kluge focused concretely and directly on what Bratu Hansen calls “the lived relationality of social and material, affective and imaginative re/production.”23 In thinking about the public sphere, the theorist should break through to subjects’ “context of living” (Lebenszusammenhang), seeking to articulate the collective experience (Erfahrung) of all groups, especially oppressed ones such as the proletariat, which Habermas, with his emphasis on the bourgeoisie, had neglected. For Negt and Kluge, the orientation toward contexts of living would translate into a deeply contextual analysis of experience as socially mediated as well as informed both by memory (including trauma) and by anticipation. Cinema, then, according to Negt and Kluge, is best considered a public sphere. To the extent that it is emancipated from the culture industry, it should encourage viewers to mobilize their own experience. Not only should advanced film-making be tailored toward the life context of the proletariat, but the viewer should play an active role in receiving the film—thinking and responding adequately. Ultimately, this entails the rejection of film as entertainment (which places the viewer in a passive relation to the medium) in favor of an understanding based on active and reflective participation among politically and socially minded citizens. It should also be noted how closely this program, which largely defined the aspirations of New German Cinema, is aligned with avant-garde accounts of art more generally. As Peter Bürger argued in a landmark essay from the same period, the ultimate aim of the avant-garde was always to break with the more traditional insistence on art’s autonomy and return art to the everyday.24 Unlike modernism, which emphasized art’s division from ordinary life contexts, the avant-garde seeks both to overcome the high-low distinction and to use art as a means to spur and provoke political reflection. It is easy to see that Negt and Kluge picked up the thread from Benjamin’s notion of the political mobilization of post-auratic art. However, another figure, equally important for the two thinkers, is Brecht, whose techniques of Verfremdung not only sought to make the medium manifest qua medium, but to transform theater into a space of reflection and political mobilization. In order to do this, the older, bourgeois model of the passive spectator relating to an elaborate system of techniques for successfully producing illusion had to be rejected. Theater, Brecht argued, does not take us out of society and into some alternative, illusory space; rather, it belongs to social reality and should be able to encourage viewers to respond to it. For Negt and Kluge, the same ideas apply to cinema.

 Bratu Hansen, Cinema and Experience, p. xiv.  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 23 24

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Critical Theory in/and New German Cinema New German Cinema is a movement that lasted from the late 1960s and into the 1980s. Including such directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Margarethe von Trotta, and Wim Wenders, it can in a number of ways be said to have arisen in an intellectual, political, and artistic environment shaped to a considerable extent by debates and intuitions stemming from the Frankfurt School. A proper understanding of the School’s contribution to cinema and cinema studies must take this connection into account. The first thing to note about New German Cinema is its intense awareness of history. In the 1960s, the Frankfurt School was instrumental in generating a strong interest, especially among the young, in questions concerning Germany’s role in the recent war and the nature and possible persistence of fascist attitudes. While the Adenauer period had been focused on rebuilding society, largely avoiding painful scrutiny of the past, the 1960s witnessed a great proliferation of critical reflection on Germany’s recent history. Inspired in part by key works of the Frankfurt School such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, artists, intellectuals, and academics started to discuss historical constraints on contemporary cultural production, whether the tradition of German thought can be accepted at face value, as well as issues related to the moral and political responsibility of intellectual work. In this vein, proponents of New German Cinema called to arms not only against their parents, many of whom had taken active part in the crimes of National Socialism, but against the traditional film industry as well, which they believed had acquiesced in a culture of silence. Thus, in the so-called Oberhausen Manifesto of 1962, Kluge and his fellow signatories, including Edgar Reitz, provocatively declared that “[t]he old cinema is dead. We believe in the new cinema” (Der alte Film ist tot. Wir glauben an den neuen).25 This new cinema should reflect on the past. However, it should also conduct immanent critique with a view to achieving social change. As in Max Horkheimer’s classical statement of Critical Theory, “Traditional and Critical Theory?” the proponents of New German Cinema refused to understand cinema as extra-social or extra-historical, existing on its own in a sphere of playful illusion. Rather, cinema is a socially constituted form of selfreflection. Film is a medium through which a society reflects on itself and its own values. In New German Cinema, historical consciousness meant that film-makers must dare to be openly political. They would have to make films with overt political content, expressed through theme, voice, or narrative angle. It also implied that directors identifying with the aims of New German Cinema would seek to avoid commercial methods of film-making, thereby hoping to transcend the mechanisms of depoliticization that characterize the culture industry. Several of Fassbinder’s movies, for example, regularly interrupt the narrative  The manifesto was initiated by Haro Senft.

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flow in order to conduct political discussions, typically dealing with political themes such as racism, sexism, and economic oppression. Possibly the most influential of these is the 1978 Germany in Autumn, a collaborative project involving not only Fassbinder but Kluge, Reitz, Schlöndorff, and others. It is also worth noticing that New German Cinema seems increasingly to have been bifurcated into two main movements, each corresponding to one of the two main Frankfurt School approaches to advanced film-making. In the first, paradigmatically exemplified by Kluge and Fassbinder, the emphasis, in line with Benjamin and Adorno’s theorizing, tended to be on the employment of montage. Fassbinder, for example, aggressively sought to attack procedures of continuous editing based on a presumed organic unity. Unlike Hollywood-­ style editing, his films juxtapose discontinuous, if not heterogeneous, elements, using script, mise-en-scène, framing, and editing to successfully achieve a unique combination of constructivist, discursive emphasis, on the one hand, and an overwhelming sense of contingency, on the other. The second tendency, exemplified most paradigmatically by Wenders, yet also to some extent by Herzog, seems to have been more beholden to the view of film espoused by Kracauer. Unlike Fassbinder, these two directors seem to have accepted film’s dependence on empirical reality. In characteristically long takes, often of natural scenery, they disconnect the perennial problem of experience (Erfahrung) from the construction of new meaning, tying it instead to the redemptive hope associated with the intentionlessness of mere existence. Landmark movies from this period, such as Herzog’s 1972 Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Wenders’ 1977 The American Friend and 1984 Paris, Texas, explore intense senses of alienation and ennui via their long and melancholic stills of landscape and cityscape, each of such vast proportion as to diminish any sense of active and individual human presence. Implicitly, at least, these films also seem to confirm Adorno’s assessment of the technical medium of film as being intimately related to natural beauty.

Ideology Critique and Experience The contributions to cinema studies provided by associates of the Frankfurt School were all shaped by a number of historical circumstances that have now come to pass. Three such circumstances are particularly evident: the widespread existence of a strong Marxist orientation, shaping both theoretical and political commitments; a reluctance to grant proper recognition to film as an art form; and, finally, while understood to be declining, perhaps into irrelevance, a sense of aesthetic modernism as a highly significant movement standing apart from, and (at least implicitly) criticizing, culture at large. With the waning of both Marxism and aesthetic modernism, and with the diminished interest in opposing “high” and “low” art along some axis of pre-­ given value, practitioners of cinema studies, philosophy, and cultural studies find themselves, when approaching the medium of film, faced with questions that are often very different from the ones that preoccupied the Frankfurt

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School. Gender, race, and ethnicity, for example, have become central, both as factors playing into the interpretation of movies and as parameters for exploring the nature and condition of production, and the Eurocentric approach cultivated by the Frankfurt School has long since been rejected by most theorists of film. The moralizing language typical of the early Frankfurt School’s analysis of the culture industry is today extremely rare, and “cultural criticism” has come to be seen as quaint, elitist, and reactionary. Indeed, in today’s highly technicized and digitalized environments, in which cinematic imagery is ever-­ present, the drama and skepticism surrounding the emergence of film as a medium has completely disappeared. So what might be the lasting legacy of the Frankfurt School’s contribution to our understanding of film? Even if most of its concrete claims and analyses remain indexed to their historical genesis and cannot be transmitted unchanged or unrevised, what kinds of commitments and research directions might still be open to us? I would like to suggest that two lines of inquiry, in particular, continue to prove relevant. One consists in the critique of ideology. Central to the Frankfurt School’s approach not only to film but to all cultural artifacts is the suspicion of ideology. With regard to film, this suspicion was felt most paradigmatically in connection with the analysis of the culture industry. However, the culture industry is just one form of ideology; attention to that industry does not exhaust what the Frankfurt School meant by ideology. In Marx’s original account, developed in The German Ideology and elsewhere, the term “ideology” refers to beliefs and values that functionally serve to uphold structures of domination, particularly at the level of class relations.26 They do so, according to Marx, by creating a false consciousness: ideologies screen negative implications of actual social relations by presenting them as universally valid or attractive. Moreover, ideologies, reflecting the interest and self-interpretations of the ruling class, tend to portray social relations as natural, unavoidable, or unchanging. By confronting them with the reality they purport to legitimate and justify, it was for Marx possible to conduct meaningful and effective immanent critique. Narrow interpretations of freedom, for example, as in much of the liberal tradition from Locke and Kant, could be challenged by highlighting exploitative working conditions. While the laws may protect the freedom of the entrepreneur, they may not function that way for the laborer. The liberal vision of freedom may in fact be emancipatory for only a small subset of the population: the owners of capital. As mentioned earlier, the Frankfurt School adopts Marx’ emphasis on ideology critique—and, in fact, some historians of the Frankfurt School have seen

26  Karl Marx, Early Political Writings, trans. Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 145–48. See also Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1981), pp. 118–21.

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ideology critique as its main contribution.27 However, unlike Marx, its ­theoreticians do not always think that effective critique is easily within reach. For one thing, the ideology at stake may be couched in a form that prevents any straightforward rendering of it in analytic terms. For another, the ideology may be totalizing in ways that cast doubt on whether its criticism can purport to be untainted by its operations. Finally, the ideological content may influence agents in subliminal, unreflective, or even unconscious ways, requiring the employment of more sophisticated interpretive strategies than those introduced by Marx. Indeed, the Frankfurt School pioneered precisely a kind of approach to mass culture that would expand and sharpen Marx’ methods of criticism to a considerable degree. Their combined employment of psychoanalysis and a wide range of critical practices continues to inspire contemporary work in film studies. In the neoliberal age of globalization, digitalization, and ever-increasing commodification and financialization, critique of this kind is bound to inform much work in the theoretical humanities. Moreover, as cinema in particular continues to be a highly commercial medium addressing mass audiences, sophisticated analyses of ideology are no doubt called for. The second commitment I would like to highlight as especially relevant for contemporary concerns is the Frankfurt School’s interest in rearticulating a notion of experience (Erfahrung). The notion of experience is important in part because it provides the dialectical response to ideology: experience is an engagement with the world that resists ideological delusion. However, its significance also stems from the nature of the cinematic medium itself, which, as we have seen, in the works of Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno, and others, seems to lend itself to reflection on what it is to experience the world veridically. In this regard, although he does not seem to have been directly influenced by the Frankfurt School, Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma springs to mind as particularly illustrative of precisely this kind of questioning. The central tension in this vast montage of reflections on the development of cinema can be described as that between ideology and experience. On the one hand, Godard invokes the many senses in which cinema ideologically shapes and distorts experience. In particular, it has powerfully, and for mass audiences, formulated the terms in which issues of gender, race, and class have been understood. Thus, the cinematic image is never innocent. On the other hand, Histoire(s) du Cinéma dwells on moments in which the viewer is invited to go beyond the ideologically saturated image—moments when a certain gravity and solemnity allow her a sense of presence to the world as ripe with opportunity. Scenes involving affectionate couples, for example, tend for Godard to incorporate precisely this ambiguity as between sentimental kitsch and a more authentic longing for real happiness beyond the image. 27  See, for example, Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 2–3: “The very heart of the Critical Theory of society is its criticism of ideology.”

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The question of experience may invite various types of approaches. Some may be audience related, and others may focus on the cinematic medium itself and its potential for reassessing and, in some cases, rejuvenating our capacity for experience. Such research would inevitably relate cinema studies to the classical question of art’s cognitive potential. Even more importantly, it would continue the legacy of Critical Theory’s ambition to locate art in society as both its reflection and its reflective ability. A society without art would be a society without self-awareness.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Trans. Anson Rabinbach. London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor W., and Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Complete Correspondence. Trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London/New York: Verso. Bazin, André. 1967. What is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. In Selected Writings, vol. 3, 251–83. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1989. The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habermas and the Frankfurt School. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. 2012. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Jay, Martin. 1973. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950. London: Heinemann. Kluge, Alexander and Oskar Negt. 2016. Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. London: Verso. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1947. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. London: Dobson. Lukács, Georg. 1971. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Merlin Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1968. The Affirmative Character of Culture. In Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, 88–133. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl. 1994. Early Political Writings. Trans. Joseph O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiggershaus, Rolf. 1998. The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance. Trans. Michael Robertson. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Wood, Allen W. 1981. Karl Marx. New York/London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 15

Stanley Cavell: What Becomes of People on Film? Paul Guyer

Introduction “What makes his work memorable is not its devotion to technical questions but to lived experience.”1 These words were written about the painter David Hockney, not about the philosopher Stanley Cavell. But they apply to Cavell’s work on film just as well. Cavell does not offer a general theory of film as a medium of art, one that would encompass all uses of film to project moving images on a screen, which would have to encompass cartoons, documentaries, newsreels, and more besides fictional narratives made by photographing human actors, nor does his account depend upon any assumption that the moving images and sounds of human actors with which he is concerned be recorded on and projected from film, as opposed to being recorded in and projected from electronic files. In that way, it would be better to call his theory one of cinema or more plainly of movies rather than of film. Neither does his theory purport to cover even all sorts of movies made by photographically recording human actors; he makes no attempt to philosophize about Westerns, detective, war, or spy movies, buddy or road movies, action movies, or many other recognizable  Deborah Solomon, “Yet Another Shift in Perspective,” New York Times, Sunday, September 10, 2017, Arts and Leisure section, p. 84. The misplaced “not” is that of the author and the New York Times. I had settled on the title for this chapter before I came across D.N. Rodowick’s statement that “Cavell asks … what becomes of things (or people) on film”; see Rodowick, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), p. 208. My point will be that what Cavell has to say about what becomes of things on film is only a way of leading up to what he has to say about what becomes of people in film. 1

P. Guyer (*) Brown University, Providence, RI, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_15

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genres of movies older or more recent. Cavell’s work on film is focused on although not entirely limited to two genres, what he calls “comedies of remarriage” and “melodramas of the unknown woman.” For Cavell, these genres deal with fundamental features of the human condition as he understands it and are to be taken as seriously as great works of art in other media, such as literature, drama, opera, and painting.2 What nevertheless makes Cavell’s work a philosophy of film or movies is that he is concerned with how specific features of the medium of projecting moving images of human actors with synchronized recordings of their speech (and other sounds, such as those of slamming doors or snapping golf clubs but also of music, in the background or foreground as the case may be) structure the way human beings may be presented to us on a screen and how we experience and respond to them intellectually and emotionally. This is what Cavell means by entitling his first and most theoretical book on movies The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film3: ontology here is to be understood in a Kantian sense, concerning not objects or their characteristics that might be supposed to exist independently of the way that human beings experience them, but rather essential features of the way that human beings experience their world, in this case the world of human beings themselves. William Rothman has written that “Cavell’s writings on film are capable of helping academic film study free itself  ” of such “largely unquestioned doctrine[s] … [as] that the stars projected on the movie screen are ‘personas,’ discursive ideological constructs, not real people; that the world projected on the screen is itself an ideological construct, not real; and, indeed, that the so-­ called real world is such a construct, too.”4 This is basically correct, although Cavell’s work is not directed just against academic film theory but is directed toward all those, including philosophers and ordinary movie-goers, who might be tempted to undermine their experience of the kind of movies that concern Cavell by excessive focus on the fact that what they are experiencing is flickering images of human beings on a screen in a darkened room, not flesh-and-­ blood human beings ten feet or yards away from them. The central feature of Cavell’s ontology of film is the paradox, or what we might, continuing in a Kantian vein, call the antinomy that we experience what appears on the screen as both flickering light and real people living real lives; or, to make the paradox even more complex, we experience flickering images that are produced by filming actors, whom we perfectly well know to be playing roles, and then projecting their images re-projected on a screen before us when they themselves are not present, as if they were nevertheless real people with real loves, fears, hopes, 2  However, Cavell makes no claim that these are the only genres of movies that are worthy of such attention. 3  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New York: Viking Press, 1971); enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). 4  William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), Introduction, p. xiv.

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and so on, about whom we develop strong feelings and which can in turn lead us to reflect upon our own lives. That there is something paradoxical about much aesthetic experience has hardly escaped previous writers. Richard Wollheim wrote about the “twofoldness” of our experience of painting, that we experience paintings as physical marks of pigment on canvas but also as images, whether of something as simple as a plane of one color standing in front of or behind another or of something as complex as the mythological scene represented on a painting by Nicolas Pouissin5; two centuries earlier, Moses Mendelssohn drew attention to features of artistic media such as the proscenium arch that allow us to juggle our recognition that what is before is just actors playing roles with our intellectual and emotional responses to the fictional world and its events they are creating for us, and Adam Smith noticed that a good part of our pleasure in “imitations” is the way in which a medium gives us the experience of something quite different from itself, as cold white marble can nevertheless give us an experience of a warm and living human being.6 Cavell does not cite such predecessors, although he could have done so and still claimed originality for his fundamental discovery about cinematic images, namely that it is the very fact that at one level we are experiencing just flickering light on a screen rather than real human beings, thus that we are shut out of the world depicted by these images, and moreover are fully aware of that fact that allows us, at another level, to immerse ourselves so fully in that world, without any concern that we might disrupt either the personages depicted or the actors that are playing them, and experience that world as if it were real. As Cavell put it in More of the World Viewed, a commentary on his original work included in its enlarged edition, “on film reality is not merely described or merely represented. But obviously it is not actually present to us either (anyway, obviously not present with us) when it appears to us on the screen. So I was led to consider that what makes the physical medium of film unlike anything else on earth lies in the absence of what it causes to appear to us; that is to say, in the nature of our absence from it; [yet] in its fate to reveal reality and fantasy (not by reality as such, but) by projections of reality, projections in which … reality is freed to exhibit itself.”7 This is the heart of Cavell’s “Ontology of Film,” on the basis of which he then constructs his interpretations of the comedies of remarriage and the melodramas of the unknown woman. One might well ask whether the “ontology” of film is so different from the “ontology” of other narrative arts, such as the novel or the theater. They differ from film, of course, in that what they put before us is not flickering images on a screen but words on a page or flesh-and-blood actors playing roles, but don’t 5  See Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art: Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1984, Bollingen Series XXXV.33 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 6  Moses Mendelssohn, “Rhapsody” (1761), in Philosophical Writings, ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 131–68, at pp. 138–9; Adam Smith, “On the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the Imitative Arts,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1790), ed. W.P.D. Wightman and J.C. Bryce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 176–213, e.g., p. 183. 7  Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged edition, p. 166.

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we respond to these too as if we were responding to real people? Lord Kames certainly thought so when, thinking about both reading and seeing a play performed in the theater, but of course not about watching a film, he introduced the concept of “ideal presence,” which “supplies the want of real presence” when “in idea we perceive persons acting and suffering, precisely as in an original survey,” and claimed that “the power of language to raise emotions” depends “entirely on the raising such lively and distinct images.”8 But nothing in Cavell’s argument turns on the claim that film is unique in its twofoldness, so I will not push this question further.

Skepticism and Perfectionism Cavell came to write on movies somewhat circuituously. Born in Atlanta in 1926 and growing up there and then in Sacramento, movie-going was a regular part of his childhood, as it was for many during the Great Depression.9 He went to college at Berkeley, but there his focus was on music. He then went to Julliard to study composition but started reading philosophy instead. So he returned to California, where he enrolled in graduate classes in philosophy at UCLA. Assisting at a conference, he met the Harvard pragmatist and intellectual historian Morton White—this was at the time when White was working with W.V.O. Quine and Nelson Goodman in attacking the analytic-synthetic distinction10—who encouraged him to apply for the Ph.D. program at Harvard.11 He did so, and subsequently became a junior fellow as well. It was during this period that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations was published and that Cavell was exposed to the person and work of J.L. Austin, who gave the William James lectures at Harvard in 1955 that became How to Do Things with Words. Both of these had a significant influence on Cavell’s work on skepticism, which would become his Ph.D. dissertation and eventually his magnum opus, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy

8  Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, sixth edition [1785], ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), Chapter II, vol. 1, p. 69. 9  Cavell describes his own history of movie-going in the Preface and first chapter of The World Viewed and in his autobiography Little Did I Know (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 10  For White’s own account of this period, see Morton G. White, A Philosopher’s Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 11  Several of Cavell’s earliest papers concerned pragmatism, but he never republished these. When I once asked him why, he said to me that pragmatism had no sense of the tragic, a view that he later expressed in the Introduction to Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004) by writing that “for my taste pragmatism misses the depth of human restiveness, or say misses the daily, insistent split in the self that being human cannot, without harm to itself (beyond moments of ecstasy) escape, and so pragmatism’s encouragement for me, while essential, is limited” (p. 5). In other words, pragmatism proceeds as if every problem can be solved, rather than recognizing that the insolubility of certain problems is a necessary condition of human life that cannot be successfully suppressed. What Cavell came to call “Emersonian perfectionism” is in this sense an alternative to the American pragmatist tradition exemplified by John Dewey.

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(1979).12 Upon completing his junior fellowship, Cavell returned to teach at Berkeley, and then in 1963 he was called back to Harvard to teach in the General Education Program, as the Walter M.  Cabot Professor (initially Associate Professor) of Aesthetics and General Value Theory. He spent the rest of his career teaching at Harvard. Cavell’s first book publication, the collection of essays entitled Must We Mean What We Say? (1969),13 displayed the career-long intertwining of reflection on conventional philosophical issues and texts with that on works of art that would remain characteristic of his work, but in that book he focused not on movies but on music and drama, with essays on musical modernism, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Beckett’s Endgame. This volume was followed by Cavell’s first book on film, The World Viewed, in 1971, and The Senses of Walden in 1972,14 a meditation on Thoreau’s book that signaled the increasing importance of originary American philosophy in Cavell’s work. The publication of The Claim of Reason in 1979 would be followed by Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in 198115 and then by essays in volumes in which the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and what Cavell came to call his “perfectionism” became central. Emersonian perfectionism became the leading theme in This New Yet Unapproachable American (1989)16 and Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (1990)17 and finally in Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (2004), a summa of Cavell’s work that alternates chapters on the philosophers who had been most important to him, whether as inspirations or as targets, throughout his career, with chapters on the films that had been most important to him throughout his life. This book recreates the lectures that Cavell had been giving in his course for the “Moral Reasoning” segment of the Harvard Core Curriculum during the last decade of his active teaching career (as well as during a visit at the University of Chicago), but the philosophy chapters are also descendants of the lectures he gave during his half of “Humanities 5,” the course he gave (with Rogers Albritton, who covered ancient philosophy) in the previous General Education Program during his earlier years at Harvard (and which this author took in 1965–1966). Meanwhile, Cavell’s third book on film and second devoted specifically to a classical genre of Hollywood movies, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, had appeared in 1996.18 I mention the relation between Cavell’s early lectures in “Hum 5,” some of the material of which, notably his essays on King Lear and Endgame, had made their way into Must We Mean What We Say?, and the philosophy chapters of Cities of Words, because this relation reflects both the deep continuities in texts  New York: Oxford University Press.  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; reprinted, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. 14  Both New York: Viking. 15  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 16  Albuquerque: Living Batch. 17  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 18  Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 12 13

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and issues throughout Cavell’s career but also the major development of that career, namely, his addition of his interpretation of what he calls “Emersonian perfectionism” to his earlier approach to skepticism. Cavell’s response to the traditional philosophical issue of skepticism was essentially completed with The Claims of Taste, but his conception of perfectionism and his argument that it is the perfectionist “register of the moral life” that is exemplified by the Hollywood comedies and melodramas with which he is concerned became his preoccupation only during the subsequent quarter-century, culminating in Cities of Words. Yet there is a deep affinity between Cavell’s response to skepticism and his version of perfectionism. To use some traditional terminology that Cavell himself does not use, we might think of the former as his theoretical philosophy and the latter as his practical philosophy, both built upon the conviction that neither in seeking knowledge nor in making moral decisions can we ever appeal to criteria or rules that could lend our judgments the kind of certainty of which Descartes once dreamed and put our conclusions beyond reproach. Instead, we must learn to accept and embrace the fact that both our knowledge claims and our decisions on how to live our lives are accompanied with risk, which is the price of being both epistemically finite and morally free. Cavell’s philosophy is ultimately a philosophy of human freedom, just as was Kant’s, and the films that engaged him throughout a lifetime were those that confronted issues of human freedom. Cavell’s work on movies was thus done against the background of his response to skepticism followed by the development of his conception of perfectionism, so some description of each of these is necessary before we turn directly to the work on movies. Cavell’s approach to skepticism was developed in The Claim of Reason, the work that preoccupied him for two decades before it was finally published in 1979. Cavell’s approach might be compared to the contemporaneous work on epistemology by Edmund Gettier in the 1960s. Gettier argued that the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief is inadequate because justification and truth can come apart: you can always cook up some special circumstances in which what would otherwise count as sufficient justification for the assertion of the truth concerned does not justify the assertion of what is nevertheless true. This sent people looking for alternative definitions of knowledge that would accommodate the contingent link between justification and truth, such as “reliabilism,” which would count as knowledge any claim that emerges from an ordinarily reliable method of justification or confirmation, even if in a particular case the ordinarily reliable result might not yield truth. The pragmatist definition of knowledge as “warranted assertibility” allows the same result. But for Cavell, there is no benefit to redefining knowledge so that we can always help ourselves to it; that is just a semantic sleight of hand that changes nothing. His diagnosis of skepticism is that it responds to uncertainty by refusing to deal with the world at all, while his own ­recommendation is rather that we acknowledge that certitude on many matters is always beyond our reach, and learn to live with this fact about the human

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condition.19 I say “on many matters,” because Cavell never argues against, for example, the possibility of our attaining certitude in matters of logic or mathematics; he is concerned with the possibility, or rather impossibility, of certitude in our knowledge of the external world, but above all in our knowledge of ourselves and each other. And learning to live with the epistemic limits of the human condition is not a trivial matter, neither just a shrug of the shoulders that leaves our conduct otherwise unchanged nor pulling in our horns, limiting our inquiries and actions so as to minimize our risk of error; it is rather a matter of learning how to forge ahead despite the risk, above all, in our interpersonal relations, as we might blandly say, that is, in our loves and friendships, as Cavell would more straightforwardly say. The argument of Cavell’s seminal work, The Claim of Reason, is more like an extended conversation than a textbook exposition, difficult to summarize and impossible to do so in a brief space like this. It may be regarded as beginning with an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s conception of criteria. Some thought that by criteria Wittgenstein meant conditions for the application of a concept that, if properly applied, would guarantee the truth of the claim thereby made. But in Cavell’s view, nothing can do that, except perhaps within the limited domain of analytical judgments. The satisfaction of the accepted criteria for the application of a concept makes the best case that can be made for the truth of the assertion thereby made, but the best case can still sometimes not be good enough. As Cavell puts it, “criteria are apparently necessary to our knowledge of existence or reality, and … they can be apparently out of necessity, repudiated … normally the presence of criteria (the fact that we say, truly, ‘that is what we call “suppressing anger”’) will insure the existence of its objects (he is there feeling angry), but not inevitably (deductively?).”20 Cavell’s position can be compared to that of Gettier, who argued that what might seem like the best possible justification for a knowledge claim might sometimes not be such; for example, one might be driving down a country road, on a sunny day, with a clear windshield and properly prescribed corrective lenses, and in such optimal circumstances confidently judge that one is seeing a series of barns, when one is in fact seeing a series of clever mock-ups. (To mix up authors, perhaps unbeknownst to one a Hollywood film company has just finished shooting in the area.) In Cavell’s terminology, what one ordinarily does in such a situation is to “project” from the surfaces that one does see to the parts of the object that one does not see but assumes to be there, but sometimes that projection can go wrong. For Cavell, however, this should not raise a general or Cartesian doubt that it is always wrong to project or that we should stop doing so. Worrying about that, not risking an occasional mistake that can in any case usually be corrected, would be insane; refusing to acknowl19  For a brief but penetrating account of Cavell’s stance toward skepticism, see Timothy Gould, “Stanley Cavell: Survey of Thought,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 27–33, at pp. 27–8. 20  Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 168.

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edge the reality of the world even if one cannot always be sure of it is not rationality but madness. However, knowledge of external objects is not Cavell’s real concern but only a way of introducing what is his real concern. That is how we know what the language that we speak means, thus whether we can be sure what others mean by what they say to us and even what we ourselves mean by what we say. (Thus the concern of The Claim of Reason is continuous with that of the lead essay of Must We Mean What We Say? ten years earlier.) More generally, his concern is how we can be sure what others mean by their full range of behavior, including but not limited to their speech, and likewise what we ourselves mean by our own full range of behavior. And here his basic idea is that while in learning a language we do learn what others typically mean by their words and thus what we can typically mean by those words, there can be no guarantee that in any particular case another means by his words what those words usually mean or that we ourselves mean by our words what they usually mean. So there is always an element of risk in going from words to meaning, yet we have no choice but to accept that risk, to take responsibility for it. In Cavell’s words, If I am to have a native tongue, I have to accept what “my elders” say and do as consequential; and they have to accept, even have to applaud, what I say and do as what they say and do. We do not know in advance what the content of our mutual acceptance is, how far we may be in agreement, how far responsibility for the language may run. But if I am to speak in my own voice, I must be speaking for others and allow others to speak for me. The alternative … is not: speaking for myself privately. The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute.21

(‍ This is in the context of a discussion of Wittgenstein’s “private language argument.”) In other words, one can have a voice, speak for oneself, be a person among persons, only by taking the risk that one does know what others mean by their words and what one means oneself, where risk means the possibility of risking disappointment when one discovers that one is not on the same page with others or not even on the page one thought one was on. In this case, however, insanity lies not in raising a general worry about the possibility of knowledge, but rather in failing to be mindful of the risk that words and meaning might not match up, and in loving whom one should not because one is taken in by their words or failing to love whom one could because one expects more from their words than they can deliver. Cavell applies this insight to King Lear in “The Avoidance of Love” in Must We Mean What We Say? and to Othello in the final part of The Claim of Reason. Lear’s tragedy is brought on by trusting or acknowledging the excessive a­ vowals of daughterly love by Goneril and Regan and failing to plumb the depth of love behind the modest avowals of Cordelia, and Othello’s tragedy is brought on by  Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p. 28.

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his excessive credit of the deceitful speech of Iago and by depriving Desdemona of her voice though she has never spoken falsely to him or not until she fails to say that she has lost the fateful handkerchief. In this case, Othello is deluded by a false conception of marriage, that in it two can genuinely become one and thus that there can be no possibility of distance, difference, and independence between one spouse and the other, and therefore no room for confusion or misunderstanding, and he ends up finding it unforgivable that Desdemona is even “separate from him, outside,” and in any way beyond his command.22 But this illusion about marriage is an instance of the illusion that we can be transparent to each other in general; the path to happiness, to put it mundanely, or to sanity, to put it more dramatically, lies only through the recognition and acceptance of the fact that we may not always be fully transparent to one another, or even to ourselves, but that we can love nevertheless. (Certainly neither Lear nor Othello understands his own motivations very well, in spite of their fancy words.) Our discussion of Cavell’s interpretation of the failed marriage of Othello and Desdemona could lead directly to his discussion of the comedies of remarriage, because the lesson of those movies is that marriages succeed—can be reaffirmed—only when each partner has learned that it is possible for each to be his or her own person within what is nevertheless a genuine union, that marriage is a relation in which each affirms the freedom of both within a framework of freely granted trust or acknowledgment. But before turning directly to that argument, we must also comment on Cavell’s conception of “Emersonian perfectionism,” as I suggested the practical philosophy that he builds upon his theoretical philosophy, for this comes to the fore in his discussions of these movies. “Perfectionism” is a potentially misleading name for what Cavell calls a “register of the moral life” rather than simply his moral theory, because Cavell’s point is that just as it is a delusion to expect that criteria can deliver complete certitude in our knowledge of external objects or words and gestures or complete certitude in our knowledge of each other and ourselves, so is it a delusion to expect perfection in human action and also a delusion to expect that any moral principle or theory can deliver fully determinate guidance for any situation. (That is Cavell’s criticism of both utilitarianism and the Kantianism of both Kant himself and Cavell’s long-time colleague John Rawls, and that is why he calls his perfectionism a “register of the moral life” rather than simply a moral principle or theory. It does not pretend that there is a unique solution to every moral dilemma or even, as Cavell points out several times, focus on moral dilemmas; it has more to do with how we live our lives on the whole.)23  See Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 486, 491.  In the contemporary typology of moral theories, if Cavell’s perfectionism is a version of neither utilitarianism or Kantianism, it must be a form of “virtue theory” or of “moral particularism.” But they too tend to assume that there is a right way to behave in every situation, even if that cannot be derived from a rule. Cavell’s perfectionism does not assume that. 22 23

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Rather, we must learn to accept that human efforts always fall short of perfection and learn to accept ourselves and each other in light of that fact. In that regard, Emersonian (or Cavell’s) perfectionism might better be called “imperfectionism.” At the same time, morality requires that we keep an ideal of a perfect life before us and continue to strive to attain it, and in that regard the position can be called perfectionism after all, or perhaps, would it not be an ugly neologism, “perfectingism.” As noted, Cavell began writing about perfectionism in a series of works both about Emerson and otherwise from the 1980s, but one of the clearest statements of what he means by it can be found in the introduction, “In Place of the Classroom,” to Cities of Words, his final statement about both philosophy and the films he had long cared about (except for his autobiography Little Did I Know). In one lucid sentence, he writes that In Emerson’s and Thoreau’s sense of human existence, there is no question of reaching a final state of the soul but only and endlessly taking the next step to what Emerson calls an “unattained but attainable self ”—a self that is always and never ours—a step that turns not from bad to good, but from confusion and constriction toward self-knowledge and sociability.24

‍ ith nods to both Plato and Kant, Cavell also describes perfectionism as based W on a “conception of a divided self and a doubled world, providing a perspective of judgment upon the world as it is, measured against the world as it may be.”25 That one may see oneself or others around one as inevitably falling short of some ideal might sound like a formula for disappointment and bitterness, and so it can be if there is something awry with one’s ideal in the first place (as is the case with the spurned groom George Kittredge in Cavell’s paradigmatic comedy of remarriage, The Philadelphia Story). But to finally come to understand that oneself or another about whom one cares, even if imperfect, is making progress toward an ideal that one can properly value, even if, as human, neither one will ever fully attain it, is the formula for such happiness as is available to human beings. In Cavell’s words, “Emersonian perfectionism … specifically sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfection”26 but, instead, and wisely, settles for an idea of progress toward an ideal. Othello is a non-­ Emersonian perfectionist, who will settle for nothing less than ultimate perfectionism but ends up with nothing at all; C.K. Dexter Haven is an Emersonian perfectionist and finally appears to convince Tracy Lord that she will be happy being one too. Cavell also often describes the “moral register” of perfectionism as that of making ourselves “intelligible” rather than coming up with unique solutions to moral dilemmas, “making myself intelligible to those concerned,” where that could mean making oneself intelligible to oneself as well as to others.27 We  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 13.  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 2. 26  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 3. 27  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 22. 24 25

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might understand this to mean that in this register of the moral life we do not pretend to be able to prove that we have done or not done, what we want and don’t want more generally, is the only possible response to our circumstances, but that it can nevertheless make sense to ourselves and to others, especially of course those we care about, in other words, that we are reasonable people, not lunatics. I put it this way, because the antics of the characters in the films that Cavell talks about can often seem like those of lunatics, indeed seem to other characters in the films as those of lunatics (think about Bringing Up Baby). But the films reach their resolutions when the protagonist couples finally discover that their actions are intelligible to themselves and to each other, however long it took them to get there and whether they are intelligible to the rest of the world or not. With that comment, we are already well on the way to Cavell’s interpretation of the Hollywood comedies of remarriages. But before we finally get there, let us look at the framework for this interpretation that is provided by Cavell’s “reflections on the ontology of film.”

The World Viewed: Automatic World Projections and the Hollywood Star The central, “ontological” concept in The World Viewed is that a movie presents itself to its audience as a “succession of automatic world projections.” Cavell sums up his own successive exposition of this idea thus: The material basis of the media of movies (as paint on a flat, delimited support is the material basis of the media of painting) is … a succession of automatic world projections. “Succession” includes the various degrees of motion in moving pictures: the motion depicted; the current of successive frames in depicting it; the juxtapositions of cutting. “Automatic” emphasizes the mechanical fact of photography, in particular the absence of the human hand in forming these objects and the absence of its creatures in their screening. “World” covers the ontological facts of photography and its subjects. “Projection” points to the phenomenological facts of viewing, and to the continuity of the camera’s motion as it ingests the world.28

I‍ t should immediately be obvious that this account cannot be meant to be a statement about how things are independently of the way that we humans experience them, such as a statement like “The sun is approximately 93,000,000 miles from the earth,” which may presuppose a human choice of the unit of measurement (miles rather than kilometers or leagues or fractions of a light-­ year) but the truth of which is otherwise independent of human experience. If the account were meant to be a straightforward statement, of objective facts, it would be self-contradictory, since the juxtapositions of cutting, for example,  Cavell, The World Viewed, pp. 72–3.

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are clearly products of human choice and therefore not automatic. You do not have to be an auteur theorist regarding films as if they were products of single artists like traditional easel paintings or lyric poems, which Cavell is not, in order to recognize that a typical movie is not produced by turning on a CCTV camera (or better yet, letting it turn itself on) that simply records whatever happens in front of it and then plays that back (although naturally some wise guy had to provide a counterexample, as Andy Warhol did in Empire).29 As Cavell clearly knew, since this was as true of the Hollywood classics about which he wrote as much as about any movies ever made, a movie is made by a director and cinematographer filming actors who have been made up, costumed, lit, and who are speaking lines written by others or sometimes improvised by themselves, on sets designed by art directors and built and decorated by many more craftspeople, the results of which are then edited, to which the recording of a score and other sound effects are also added, and so on and so on—all the results of a myriad of human decisions and actions. Rather, as the last line of the quotation from Cavell suggests, his claim is really about the phenomenology of film, how we human beings, or those of us who have been introduced to movies as part of our culture and learned how to, experience movies; or, if Cavell’s account is an ontology at all, then it is an ontology in a Kantian sense, that is, an analysis of the basic structure of how we human beings experience things—although Cavell does not go so far as to claim that the phenomenology of experiencing movies is a transcendental ontology, an analysis of the necessary conditions of the possibility of any experience of objects at all that yields synthetic a priori principles. He is rather analyzing a practice of movie-­ watching that was developed in Europe and North America at the very end of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, although it has now spread to almost all parts of the world. What Cavell’s account of movies as successions of automatic world projections says is that we experience movies as if they were presentations of real worlds of real people amidst real objects, doing and saying what they are doing as the people we experience them as being, as if without the intervention of all the other people whom we perfectly well know to have been involved in making the movie, and without any interaction with us, the audience, even without that varying but usually minimal degree of interaction we might have with live actors on a stage in a theater. That we experience the projections as if they were automatic means that we experience the figures projected to us by light on a screen as if they were real people; that we experience the succession of projected images as the projection of a world means that we experience them as real people really interacting with each other and their depicted environment; and that we experience all this as a projection means that we experience this world as one with which we cannot interact but from which we are screened off, although we can look at or into it.

29  See Cavell, “Crossing Paths,” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), pp. 361–82, at pp. 371–2. For a comment on auteur theory, see The World Viewed, p. 9.

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Paradoxically, however, the fact that we experience the projected world as if we are screened off from it, at best looking at it through a screen or window (an impression sometimes strengthened through the image of a window in the movie, through which we as audience or looking or through which even a character in the movie as looking, as Stella Dallas has to do to see her own daughter’s wedding),30 does not simply distance us from the projected world and its inhabitants; it is rather what allows us to immerse ourselves in that world like a fly on a wall or an eye behind a peephole, which can experience everything going on in that world, or as much as any human being can experience in other human beings, without those people noticing us or having their doings in any way disrupted by our presence. Our being screened off from the world of the film is precisely what allows us to experience the people in the film without self-consciousness on our side or theirs. The fact that the world is only projected on a screen and we are screened off from it allows us to experience it more rather than less fully. As Cavell puts this central point, To say that we wish to view the world itself is to say that we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such. That is our way of establishing our connection with the world: through viewing it, or having views of it…. Viewing a movie makes this condition automatic, takes the responsibility for it out of our hands. Hence movies seem more natural than reality. Not because they are escapes into fantasy, but because they are reliefs from private fantasy and its responsibilities; from the fact that the world is already drawn by fantasy. And not because they are dreams, but because they permit the self to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves. Movies convince us of the world’s reality.31

‍ hat we experience movies as successions of automatic world projections means T that we experience movies as if they were projections of real worlds, all the more real because the conditions of seeing movies free us from our own ordinary preoccupations and allow us to immerse ourselves in the world of the movie. That artistic media allow us to set aside our personal interests and thereby experience human realities that might otherwise be made unavailable by our own concerns is a traditional thought in aesthetics, not a novelty, although Cavell’s contribution in showing how this happens in movies is original. An earlier example of such a way of thinking about aesthetic experience can be found in the much-misunderstood and much-maligned work of Edward Bullough. His example in his 1912 paper “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle” of setting aside worry for our own safety so we can appreciate a fog at sea is often taken as an argument that aesthetic ­experience

 See Cavell, Contesting Tears, pp. 210–16, and Cities of Words, pp. 270, 275, 279.  Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 102.

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is properly only of surface features such as form, color, and so on.32 But as his discussion of viewing Othello later in that paper makes clear, that example is only meant to introduce his account of the experience of art, where one should set aside one’s own immediate concerns precisely in order to be able fully to experience the characters presented in the play and their emotions.33 And as Bullough’s 1907 Cambridge lectures on aesthetics further make clear, it is in this way that the experience of art makes it possible for us to expand our conception of human possibilities beyond the limited actualities of our own individual lives: “Æsthetically speaking, we must, I think, see the function of Art, its place in the economy of the Universe, as the enlargement and enrichment of our complete personality, the enhancement and quickening of our total conscious experience….Only ‘æsthetic culture’ educates our whole being, enriches all our faculties and expands our total inward life beyond the small holding which in practical life is allotted to each of us.”34 What Cavell’s ontology of film, his phenomenology of it as experience as if of a succession of automatic world projections, does is to show how this education is achieved through film. Another, more specific feature of film, or at least of the kind of movies with which Cavell is concerned, by means of which this effect is accomplished, is the “star.” As Cavell puts it, “For the stage, an actor works himself into a role; for the screen, a performer takes the role onto himself.”35 That is, in spite of the fact that all we are seeing from the physiologist’s point of view is some flickering light on a screen, we experience what we are seeing not merely as an image of a human being but as a real human being playing or “taking on” a particular role, although we also conversely define this real person by the various roles he or she has taken and takes on, not as he or she might be off screen. “After The Maltese Falcon we know a new star, only distantly a person. ‘Bogart’ means ‘the figure created in a given set of films.’”36 All of this—that we experience the movie star as taking on one role or another, but that we experience the person taking on the role as defined by the roles he or she takes on—might seem simply to distance us from the putative reality of the particular world projected by a specific film. How can we experience the flickering light on the screen as if it were really Sam Spade, that is, a real hard-boiled private eye named Sam Spade, when we are also experiencing that figure as Humphrey Bogart, or at least as “Bogart,” that is, the person that we think of as real although also think of as defined by his typical roles (rather than, say, as the loving husband that the real Lauren Bacall might have found him to be)? It might seem as if our conception 32  Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Æsthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5 (1912): 87–118, reprinted in his Æsthetics, ed. E.M. Wilkinson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957); the example is found there at pp. 93–4. 33  See Boullough, “‘Psychical Distance’,” in Æsthetics, pp. 97–8. 34  Edward Bullough, “The Modern Conception of Æsthetics,” in Æsthetics, pp.  87–9. For a more extended discussion of Bullough’s view, see Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. 3, pp. 150–7. 35  Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 27. 36  Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 28.

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of the star as a person might make the personae of his roles less real for us, not more real. But it could be that our knowledge that movie actors are real people, even if not exactly the people we imagine them to be on the basis of their typical roles, makes the flickering lights on the screen more real for us, rather than less. That we know that the images on the screen were produced by filming a real person helps make them more than mere images for us, and even if we typecast the star, by conceiving of him or her through her typical roles, and thus respond to “Bogart” rather than to Humphrey Bogart, that at least makes a type real to us. In Cavell’s words, “we must note the sense in which the creation of a (screen) performer is also the creation of a character—not the kind of character an author creates, but the kind that certain real people are: a type.”37 There is a sense in which the movie star is a fantasy, “Bogart” instead of Humphrey Bogart, “Stanwyck” instead of Barbara Stanwyck, or even more so Ruby Catherine Stevens (as she was originally named), but at the same time that the star is also a real human being makes the flickering images on the screen into human beings for us too. Of course, all this may be changed with the increasing use of computer-generated characters in contemporary movies, in at least some genres. But Cavell is not pretending to identify absolutely necessary conditions for any moving images projected on a screen. He is only identifying characteristic “ontological” conditions for certain kinds of movies, perhaps only in a certain period of their history. This will have to suffice for a suggestion of Cavell’s ontology of film or his account of the way in which the medium works. Now let us consider the contents of the two genres of movies with which he is most concerned.

The Comedy of Remarriage The comedies of remarriage are a group of romances in which a couple that has previously been literally or figuratively married but then separated because of various forms of mistrust, false expectations, and external pressures find that they belong together after all, but only after both partners have learned to accept each other and themselves with all the strengths and limits of the human condition, the chief strength of which is the freedom to be oneself while accepting the similar freedom of the other. The seven comedies that Cavell sees as constitutive of the genre, though there are other movies that share some of the characteristic features of the genre and in principle more could be made, are, in chronological order, It Happened One Night (directed by Frank Capra 1934), The Awful Truth (LeoMcCarey 1937), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks 1938), His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks 1940), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor 1940), The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges 1941), and Adam’s Rib (George Cukor 1949). Cavell regards The Philadelphia Story as in many ways the paradigmatic instance of the genre, for in it Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) and C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) have been previously married, then divorced,  Cavell, The World Viewed, p. 29.

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and end up remarrying, actually having the wedding they avoided by eloping the first time around, after Tracy’s recognition that she has picked an inappropriate groom (George Kittredge, played by John Howard) and a near misadventure with an interloping newsman (Mike Connor, played by Jimmy Stewart) finally convince her that she is not a goddess but, for all her wealth and beauty, a human being, finally ready to enter into a genuinely human relationship with her original husband, who, because of his former weakness for alcohol, has been a genuine human being all along, and was previously rejected by her for that reason. But the case could also be made that The Awful Truth should be considered the paradigm instance of the genre, because in this case the husband, Jerry Warriner, again played by Cary Grant, and the wife, Lucy, this time played by Irene Dunne, both have to learn to trust themselves and each other, in particular trust that each can risk making free choices without putting their marriage at risk, thus while freely choosing to remain committed to each other. In this case, it is not only the woman who is educated to her own humanity by the well-guided or misguided efforts of several men but both parties who are educated in what it means to be a truly human being by their own foibles as well as those of the other and others beyond him or her or who eventually become intelligible to themselves and to each other. One question that can be raised about these films is how they might be expected to educate the rest of us about the conditions of the possibility of combining human freedom and intimate love—their ultimate subject—when the characters are so remote from us in virtue of their beauty and wealth. A sociologically inflected answer to this question would be that movie-goers just wanted an escape from the poverty of everyday life during the Depression and the run-up to World War II. (All of these movies were made before the US entrance into the war in December 1941, except for Adam’s Rib, released in 1949, thus during the period in which at least some women were struggling to hold on to the advances in the workplace made under wartime conditions, although in this case the wife, Amanda Bonner, again played by Katherine Hepburn, is a glamorous lawyer, indeed a more glamorous lawyer than her assistant district attorney husband Adam (Spencer Tracy), and hardly an ordinary working woman.) Given his analysis of the ontology of film in The World Viewed, however, the Cavellian answer to this question is that the glamour of such stars as Katherine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Cary Grant and the wealth of their portrayed surroundings, such as the Lords’ ridiculously lavish Philadelphia Main Line estate, while in one way it precludes viewers from any thought of really participating in their world as effectively as does the fact that all that is actually before the viewers is flickering light on the screen, also makes it possible for the viewers to forget themselves and become fully immersed in the world and its doings that is being projected before them. It might further be argued that the combination of undeniable glamour and a touch of vulnerability in Hepburn, Dunne, and Grant, as well as in Henry Fonda, who plays the male lead in The Lady Eve, and the combination of those qualities with a certain everyman-ness in Jimmy Stewart, if not, say, in Hepburn or Grant, also

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make these characters and their doings accessible for us, the ordinary viewers, as well as making all of these the incomparable stars that they were. Cavell’s summary of what we could call in two senses the moral of The Philadelphia Story makes clear the way in which it is a presentation of the risks involved in love and of the premise that what is needed to become an adult is the willingness to risk love. Indeed, after Tracy has rejected the suspicious and controlling George but saves the wedding by agreeing to accept Dexter’s proposal, she asks whether he is willing to risk remarriage. They both avow that they are ready to take the risk. We can see the seriousness of this risk and the difficulty of becoming fully human—Tracy has just told her father that she wants to be a human being, not a goddess—in her inability to speak for herself to her wedding guests (although a less generous reading would be that although Tracy has indeed become human, that she has to be fed her lines by Dexter shows that she is still not fully adult).38 In Cities of Words, Cavell puts his interpretation in the language of his own mature perfectionism. Perfectionism as a register of the moral life, but also each of the lead characters in the movie, recognizes difficulties in the moral life that arise not from an ignorance over your duties but from a confusion over your desires, your attractions and aversions, over whether, for example, you want the duties associated with marriage at all, whether you can bear the sense of failure in another divorce, whether your inability to act on your self-confessed longing to be useful in the world is based on anything more than fear or your vanity in wanting to be perfect, intact, without the need of human company. Second, it proposes that such muddles essentially stand in need of the perception of a friend. Third, it underscores that for one to confront another with her confusion, especially when she has not asked for advice, requires the justification of one’s moral standing with her.39

‍ ot that exposing one’s desires and fears to a friend, that is, to a friend who is N finally to become a spouse or a spouse who is finally to become a friend, guarantees their successful resolution. Nothing does, and a movie can only show the commencement of the next stage of intertwined lives, like the concluding wedding scene in The Philadelphia Story, which is notably transformed into a snapshot, thus stopping the narrative, without either showing or saying that “they lived happily ever after.” But, as Emersonian or Cavellian perfectionists, the protagonists appear to have risked the step toward an ideal of adult, free yet loving life, that they now have some more reason to believe it is possible and moreover some idea how to achieve. That this calls for willingness to risk change on both sides is clear in The Awful Truth. The action of this movie starts with husband and wife Jerry and Lucy each leaping to conclusions about the other’s unfaithfulness, with Lucy immediately demanding a divorce and Jerry agreeing to it. Both just assume that where there is unfaithfulness there cannot be trust and without trust there  I owe this point in particular to Pamela Foa.  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 42.

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cannot be an intimate relationship, so divorce is necessary. After a series of misadventures, notably Lucy’s attempt to interest herself in the ludicrously unsuitable rich hick played by Ralph Bellamy, the pair is brought back to their senses, to their recognition of their love for each other with all the risks that this involves, just in time to void the final decree of their divorce. The final scene involves some of the most philosophical as well as wonderful dialogue ever written in Hollywood—it might have come straight from Heracleitus or, as Cavell says, Parmenides. Jerry and Lucy have ended up at her aunt’s country house, miles away from others—for Cavell a marker of their belonging with each other rather than with anyone else—but in separate rooms—a marker of the separation yet to be overcome by remarriage. Jerry keeps fleeing from his room to hers on one pretext or another (banging doors, squeaky bedsprings), until finally, moments before midnight when the divorce decree will become final, Lucy invites him into her bed, which voids the decree and restores their marriage. This is the context for the remarkable dialogue: Lucy says, “Things are just the same as they always were, only you’re just the same, too, so I guess things will never be the same again.” Jerry replies: “Things are different, except in a different way. You’re still the same, only I’ve been a fool. Well, I’m not a fool now. So long as I’m different, don’t you think things could be the same again? Only a little different.”40 Cavell interprets this dialogue as expressing the doubleness or more generally complexity of our natures, in Lucy’s case “her double nature as socially refined and as erotically risky,” which we have to understand in order, as he frequently says, to make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and each other. The dialectic of sameness and difference suggests another feature of perfectionism as well: at one level, each character is the same as always, with the same strengths and weaknesses, the same desire to combine freedom and love, but what has changed is that they now both better understand themselves and each other and understand that successful marriage must be a combination of freedom with its inherent risk of infidelity and trust in each other—they have made themselves intelligible. The awful but also awesome truth that they have come to understand is this. Cavell describes it as their recognition that human happiness requires both separation and togetherness: “It is an awful, an awesome truth that the acknowledgment of the otherness of others, of ineluctable separation, is the condition of human happiness.”41 All of the comedies of remarriage depend upon the recognition of this awful truth.

The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman But sometimes a marriage cannot be saved because there is not a sufficient basis for the requisite reconciliation of difference and identity. That is the moral of the melodramas of the unknown woman—a woman whose true nature becomes known to her but is destined to remain unknown to the man, whose true  Cavell, Cities of Words, pp. 377–8.  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 381.

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c­ haracter has however become known to the woman. These movies are not comedies, because they do not end in marriage or remarriage, at least for the protagonist woman. But neither are they tragedies, because they do not simply end in misery for her, even if she ends up unmarried. She ends up learning that she will have to find some form of happiness on her own, settling for the happiness of her daughter instead of herself, or finding her own happiness in her daughter’s, even if it is not what she would choose for herself, as in Stella Dallas (starring Barbara Stanwyck), or perhaps open to the possibility of another and different marriage in the future, as in the case of the younger Paula (played by Ingrid Bergman) in Gaslight. In the first case, happiness takes on a different form from that anticipated, and perhaps an imperfect form in light of ordinary expectations about the necessity of marriage; in the other case, it might be deferred to an undepicted future. But according to perfectionism, happiness is always imperfect and at least in part deferred, always unattained but yet attainable, so this is to be expected. Let us pause over Cavell’s reading of Stella Dallas. In this film, a young woman from a working-class family sets her hat on a factory manager from an upper-class family, who is slumming even in that position, and succeeds in marrying him. They have a daughter, Laurel, but separate, and he ends up remarrying a woman of his own class but one who is kind to Laurel, who grows up in their milieu and in turn marries a young man of what has now become her class too. Stella cannot attend the wedding without damaging her daughter’s moment of glory and instead ends up seeing it through an uncurtained window, like other gapers outside the wealthy home, then walking away from the scene but also toward the audience. An ordinary interpretation of this ending is that Stella has simply sacrificed her own happiness for that of her daughter. Cavell’s interpretation, however, is that Stella’s walk away from the scene “is the completion of her education: she learns that the world of the screen, whose education in the world of refinement had at the beginning made her cry with longing, is not for her,” “that the world Laurel apparently desires—of law, church, exclusiveness, belonging—is not to her own taste.”42 Of course, Cavell says “apparently,” because there can be no guarantee that what young Laurel thinks will guarantee her happiness will turn out to be so, any more than what her mother thought when young would guarantee her own happiness; according to perfectionism, happiness is possible but never guaranteed. In Cities of Words, Cavell adds that Stella’s “ratifying of her insistence on her own taste, call this her taking on the thinking of her own existence, the announcing of her cogito ergo sum, happened without—as in Descartes’s presenting of it, it happens without—yet knowing who she is who is proving her existence.”43 A little hard to follow, but the thought seems to be that she proves her own existence without entirely knowing who she is or what she is proving, or affirms her ­continued existence with all its imperfections and risks. That is the stance of the perfectionist who harbors no illusion of perfection.  Cavell, Contesting Tears, pp. 211–12.  Cavell, Cities of Words, p. 281.

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Reception Cavell’s writing on film did not fit any received paradigms when it began to appear, whether of analytical philosophical aesthetics, film theory, or film criticism. His subtle interpretation of the significance that a film presents a world that on the one hand seems to be produced by an automatism yet on the other seems to be screened off from us was not the same as André Bazin’s simpler thesis that film satisfies a craving for realism,44 nor did it fit with the formalism that dominated much philosophical aesthetics in the twentieth century, nor did it fit readily with ideological approaches dominant outside of analytical aesthetics, influenced by Theodor W. Adorno’s critique of the “culture industry.” But as some of those intellectual tendencies have weakened their grip, Cavell’s approach to film, like his approach to Shakespeare and his approach to philosophical skepticism itself, have found a wider audience, not only in English but in German, French, Norwegian, and more. The number of books on Cavell’s philosophy in general continues to grow, and a number of works have been devoted to his approach to film as well. Notable books on Cavell’s philosophy in general include Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (1994), Timothy Gould, Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell (1998), Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity and the Ordinary (2002), and, in German, Elisabeth Bronfen, Stanley Cavell zur Einführung (2009). Works on Cavell on film include William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film (2000), and Lawrence Rhu, Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy and Hollywood Movies (2006). A number of the journal Film-Philosophy was also devoted to Cavell’s work in 2014, with contributions by David Macarthur, Lisa Traheir, Robert Sinnerbrink, and others. D.N.  Rodowick’s Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (2015) places Cavell’s philosophy in general in the context of the debate over the difference between humanistic and natural-scientific modes of understanding that has gone on since the late nineteenth century and then compares his work on film to that of Gilles Deleuze, thus following the tendency of many to situate Cavell between the opposing camps of Anglo-American analytical philosophy and Continental, phenomenological philosophy, a tendency that is understandable in light of Cavell’s appeal to both Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin on the one hand and Heidegger on the other as sources of inspiration in both his general philosophy and his approach to film in The World Viewed. While during his career Cavell was considered something of an outlier by many in professional philosophy, by the time of his death in 2018, he was increasingly recognized as one of the enduringly significant American philosophers of the second part of the twentieth century as well as an original and inspiring voice on the significance of one of the century’s most important arts.45 44  See William Rothman, “Cavell and Film,” in Michael Kelly, ed., Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, second edition, 6 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), vol. 2, pp. 33–9, at p. 35. 45  My discussion on the risks inherent in freedom or what Cavell calls being or becoming human has been aided by analyses of The Philadelphia Story, The Awful Truth, and Othello by my wife Pamela Foa. I am also grateful for her careful reading of the whole chapter.

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Bibliography Books by Stanley Cavell A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. 1994. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell on Film. 2003. Edited with an introduction by William Rothman. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. 2004. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. 1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. 1996. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare. 1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; updated edition, In Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes. 2003. Stanford: Stanford University Press. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. 1988. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Little Did I Know. 2010. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Must We Mean What We Say? 1969. New York: Scribner’s Sons. Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida. 1995. Oxford: Blackwell. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. 2005. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. 1981. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, Tragedy. 1979. New  York: Oxford University Press. The Senses of Walden. 1972. New York: Viking; expanded edition. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. 1971. New York: Viking; enlarged edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes. 1984. San Francisco: North Point Press. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. 1989. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press.

Secondary Sources Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2009. Stanley Cavell zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag. Crary, Alice, and Stanford Shieh, eds. 2006. Reading Cavell. London: Routledge. Eldridge, Richard, ed. 2003. Stanley Cavell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eldridge, Richard, and Bernard Rhie, eds. 1989. Stanley Cavell and Literary Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Film-Philosophy 18. (2014). Special Section on Stanley Cavell. Fischer, Michael. 1989. Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fleming, Richard. 1993. The State of Philosophy: An Invitation to a Reading in Three Parts of Stanley Cavell’s the Claim of Reason. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

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Goodman, Russell, ed. 2005. Contending with Cavell. New  York: Oxford University Press. Gould, Timothy. 1998. Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2014. Stanley Cavell: Survey of Thought. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, vol. 6, 2nd ed., 27–33. New York: Oxford University Press. Hammer, Espen. 2002. Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity and the Ordinary. Oxford: Polity. Mulhall, Stephen. 1994. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rhu, Lawrence. 2006. Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy and Hollywood Movies. New York: Fordham University Press. Rodowick, D[avid] N[orman]. 2007. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2015. Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rothman, William. 2014. Cavell and Film. In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics ed. Michael Kelly, 2nd ed., 6 vols, vol. 2, 33–9. New York: Oxford University Press. Rothman, William, and Marian Keane. 2000. Reading Cavell’s the World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

CHAPTER 16

Film Art from the Analytic Perspective Deborah Knight

In this chapter I discuss some of the key approaches taken by analytic philosophers to the subject of film and motion pictures. Analytic philosophers arrived rather late to the rich discussion of film that followed the emergence of the invention of moving pictures in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent development of cinema through the twentieth century and beyond. Francis Sparshott once explained to a group of his graduate students that, in general, his teachers at Oxford and even his peers in analytic philosophy disdained art and the aesthetic.1 It is little wonder that film, viewed as not even an art form but rather a mode of mass entertainment, did not rise to the level of their attention. I argue that the early contributions to analytic philosophy of film begin from the consideration of film as art or at least as a form of art. This focus remains true even for Noël Carroll, who argues that film is a mass art, but an art form nonetheless.2 Analytic philosophy of film really emerges in the 1970s with seminal articles by Alexander Sesonske and Francis Sparshott. Sesonske’s long-standing love of movies brought him to write about film, while Sparshott’s “Basic Film Aesthetics”3 was written in response to a request from the Journal 1  Francis Sparshott, former president of the American Society for Aesthetics, taught at the University of Toronto from 1950 to 1995. I was one of those graduate students in his seminar on the philosophy of the dance in 1989. He was trained at Oxford, of which he said, “At Oxford in my day aesthetics ranked with phrenology and metaphysics among outmoded follies” (http:// www.philosophy.utoronto.ca/im-francis-sparshott/, accessed 23/05/2017). Francis told the story that Gilbert Ryle so despised art and aesthetics that he afterwards denied being taken to a local Toronto eatery called The Art Gallery during a visit to Toronto. 2  Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 3  F.E. Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 5:2 (1971).

D. Knight (*) Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_16

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of Aesthetic Education. These articles are, sadly, largely forgotten today, and this chapter looks closely at them in the spirit of reviving interest in their signal contributions to the task of establishing what analytic philosophy of film is about. I note that analytic philosophy of film has worked hard to dissociate itself from the sorts of film theories that came to dominate neighboring academic disciplines such as film studies and cultural studies in the 1980s and after. I draw attention to the fact that the question of film as art predates analytic philosophy’s interest in the area, being a theme that runs through discussions by early film theorists as well as film critics. In the later parts of this chapter, I consider other approaches adopted by analytic philosophers, for instance, Ian Jarvie’s4 approach from epistemology and aesthetics, Gregory Currie’s5 approach from cognitive science, and Berys Gaut’s6 approach from classical film theory. I also highlight what I will call, in the spirit of Noël Carroll and David Bordwell,7 the approach from mid-level theorizing. What unites these approaches is that analytic philosophy works to identify the features and practices that make film a valuable focus of philosophical attention. That work begins by recognizing and arguing for film’s status as art.

Film as Art The first task for analytic philosophy of film is to stake out the basic ground to be investigated. Contemporary philosophers of film typically agree that by “film” they mean mass-reproducible motion pictures produced across a number of media ranging from the original photo-chemical celluloid processes to the emergence of digital technologies. While some define “cinema” institutionally, as “the institutional structure in which films [are] produced, distributed, and viewed,”8 the term also commonly refers to “the medium of the moving image.”9 For the purposes of this chapter, “film” and “cinema” will be used interchangeably. But of course it is not the physical medium itself that is our focus. We do not study the exposed film stock but rather the range of perceptual-temporal worlds produced across a range of modalities, including fiction, documentary, experimental, and animation. For most of its history, film has involved celluloid film stock, meaning that cinematography has been based on photographic practices. Thus some questions in the philosophy of film concern issues such as the metaphysical status of the photographic image. But 4  Ian Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). 5  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 6  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 7  David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 8   Thomas Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/, accessed 22/05/2017. 9  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 1.

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more typically, the philosophy of film is oriented to the question of film as a form of art. From analytic philosophy’s nascent interest in film, which I trace to Sesonske and Sparshott in the 1970s, to the present, the question that unites analytic philosophers of film is: what makes film distinctly valuable? The answer has been worked out in relation to notions of art and the aesthetic. Indeed, the philosophy of film is a subfield of the philosophy of art10 and not, for example, a subfield of the philosophy of technology. The question of cinema’s status as art has been a guiding theme since movies became objects of general critical attention, and arose much earlier in film culture generally than in analytic philosophy. As early as 1916, the psychologist Hugo Munsterberg’s The Photoplay argued that silent films were the true cinematic art form.11 The 1950s produced a significant range of critical and theoretical work, mostly in Europe, including psychologist Rudolph Arnheim’s Film as Art in 195712 and André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?.13 Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Film Image” placed the metaphysical status of the cinematographic image center stage in film theory and criticism, arguing that cinematic realism was the defining feature of film art. Additionally, with his work on the emerging classics of Italian neorealism as well as his study of the Western, Bazin laid the groundwork for discussions of a wide range of films as works of art, even those that might otherwise have been dismissed as examples of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. A few years later, Jean Mitry’s The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema14 presented a phenomenology of film experience traced to the conditions or “basic structures” of film form and style. Film culture had already established the idea that at least some movies counted as works of art and that to understand movies at all required an understanding of film aesthetics. Analytic philosophy of film embraces the twin concepts of art and the aesthetic as a framework for the philosophical investigation of cinema. We might go so far as to say that the concept of “art” gives analytic philosophy of film its orientation. To conceptualize movies, broadly construed, as works of art—or, as George Dickie might say, as candidates for the status of appreciation as art15—is to approach filmmaking as a distinctive kind of practice with a presumptive value. To discuss cinema in relation to art rather than, as R.G.  Collingwood 10  See, for instance, Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film,” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ film/, accessed 22/05/2017. 11  Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, in Hugo Munsterberg on Film, ed. Allan Langdale (London: Routledge, 2002). 12  Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkley: University of California Press, 1957). This is expanded volume of the original published in Germany in 1933. 13  André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) and What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. H. Grey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). The two-volume English-language edition is derived from four volumes originally published in France between 1958 and 1965. 14  Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, trans. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). This was originally published in France in two volumes in 1965. 15  George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).

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might have done, as mere mass entertainment16 suggests that there is at least some central number of films that instantiate the values frequently associated with works of art: values that derive from being works of creative imagination that merit and reward serious attention and engagement because they embody humanly important themes and concerns as well as innovative styles and techniques. Thus film’s status as art, or at least as an art form, is closely associated with the task of determining its specifically artistic and aesthetic values. Along with more purely metaphysical questions—concerning, for example, the ontological status of the photographic and cinematographic image or the nature of imaginative engagement with works of fiction—these value-laden concerns are what motivate ongoing discussions. The concerns shared by analytic philosophers speak to the idea that certain questions matter, including: What conditions must be met for a film to count as a work of art? What exactly is involved in spectator engagement with film narratives as well as with film characters? How does a rich fictional world emerge from our viewing of at least certain sorts of moving pictures? How and to what extent does the concept of a film auteur allow critics to specify the guiding creative imagination in works of cinema? What grounds film interpretation and criticism?

Gaut’s Three Levels of Discussion and Beyond Berys Gaut’s 1997 review of the general shape of analytic philosophy of film made the important observation that we can distinguish “three levels of discussion.”17 We can see each of these three levels as describing an orientation and approach taken by analytic philosophers to the general question of film. The most basic level Gaut describes concerns the nature of the physical medium of film and motion pictures. The second level considers film narrative and aesthetics in general across a range of films. The third level looks more specifically at key philosophical themes as they appear in particular works of film art. I expand on these three levels, point out two new developments that don’t quite fit Gaut’s schema, mention ways that analytic philosophy of film differs from other approaches to film as art, and conclude by suggesting how Gaut’s second level of discussion can be expanded to more accurately capture the range of activities going on in that area. The first and most basic level of analysis concerns the physical medium which, in 1997, involved the technological processes of shooting with analogical film stock, editing, adding sound, and then ultimately projecting the completed movie through a projection system at the standard rate of 24 frames per second, thus using a sequence of still images to create the illusion of motion. Philosophers concerned with the film medium have asked, for example, whether  R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938).  Berys Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film: History, Issues, Prospects,” Analytic Philosophy 38:3, 1997: pp. 145–146. Gaut is one of the very few to draw attention to the works of Sparshott and, in particular, Sesonske. 16 17

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or not cinema as a form of art is identified by the specific nature of its medium. To name just two who contribute to this debate, Gaut argues in the affirmative18 for the centrality of the film medium while Noël Carroll argues against.19 Given that celluloid filmmaking involves projecting a sequence of still images at a speed that human perception interprets as being in motion, some philosophers, for example, Gregory Currie, have argued that what viewers perceive as movement in moving pictures is in fact real and not merely illusory.20 Not all films made of celluloid exploited its photographic properties. For example, Len Lye’s “Swinging the Lambeth Walk” (GPO Film Unit, 1939), a “scratch” film, literally scratched the visual images onto the film stock, while Norman McLaren’s “Blinkity Blank” (NFB, 1957) engraved the images or shapes we see onto celluloid. Lye also painted directly on film stock for his aptly named “A Color Box” (GPO Film Unit, 1935). Even in the days of celluloid, the photographic process was secondary to the labor-intense process of frame-by-­ frame drawing in the creation of animated films. Digital technologies do not displace the question of the film medium but rather recast it. New digital media have expanded our understanding of the nature of the film medium.21 The second level of discussion identified by Gaut considers how viewers engage with film narratives in terms of “cinematic point of view, narration, identification and viewer response.”22 This second level looks at, for example, the position and role of the film camera in establishing the conditions for what viewers see as well as the sequences in which they see unfolding events. Technical and stylistic issues emerge here, including questions such as framing, camera movement, and depth of field, on the one hand, and whether scenes unfold by means of long takes or, in contrast, by means of rapid editing. Work at this middle level typically ranges across a number of films, perhaps approaching them in terms of their genre, auteur, shared themes, or stylistic innovations. The outcome of one debate in this area is the general conclusion that, whatever the role and position of the cinematic camera vis-à-vis the recording of filmic events, viewers cannot be said to “identify” with the camera since the camera is not present in the fictional world of the film and in any case is not itself a narrative agent. Rather, viewers engage with a complex process of film narration. Film narration involves the unfolding of a film’s events over time and raises the question of how—and from what perspective—that unfolding is presented. Attention to film narration typically also brings to the fore the question of whether and how films might be said to feature narrators, whether  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, pp. 282–307.  For instance, see Noël Carroll, “Forget the Medium!” in his Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). 20  Currie, Image and Mind, pp. 34–41. 21  Arguments to this effect made by Gaut in A Philosophy of Cinematic Art and in “Cinematic Art and Technology” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 17–35. See also Katherine Thomson-Jones, “Movie Appreciation and the Digital Medium,” in Current Controversies, pp. 36–54. 22  Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film,” p. 145. 18 19

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­non-­diegetic or diegetic narrator figures who “tell” the story, or “implied” narrators where there is no designated narrative agency identified by the film. Studies of cinema narration examine how represented events are ordered in both the lived time of the viewer and the fictional time of the film’s story. Identification and viewer response are two sides of the question of viewer engagement. Identification asks how we become aligned with or otherwise attached to certain characters in film narratives or with recognizable perspectives offered by the film, while viewer response considers among other things the nature of emotional responses to characters and the various ways in which emotion can focus our attention on unfolding events and their possible outcomes. The third level Gaut identifies deals with interpretations of individual films, especially interpretations that address “perennial themes of philosophical interest.”23 This is the level at which critical analysis turns away from questions that obtain broadly across different films or even across films of different historical periods, genres, or stylistic movements. The sorts of perennial themes Gaut refers to will typically not be centrally focused on issues of film style or technique. Here we are no longer asking the more general interpretative question, namely, the question of the practices and mechanisms that allow viewers to transform sequences of visual images (and possibly sound) into comprehensible narratives.24 This more general question arises at the second level of investigation. Rather, at this third level we are dealing with a different interpretative question, namely one that links the practice of interpretation with critical analysis. We could say that the first form of interpretation concerns understanding the events of the film while the second deals with the film’s overall or thematic meaning. This third level of thematic interpretation operates either in relation to individual films seen to be particularly philosophically rich (Blade Runner, Memento, etc.) or to selected films by directors whose works suggest an artistic, aesthetic, or otherwise authorial vision that merits appreciation (Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen). This third level, concerned with perennial philosophical themes as they appear in specific films, can sometimes be thought of as philosophy in film rather than philosophy of film. Not all philosophers who contribute to discussions of perennial themes in films necessarily do so from the perspective of philosophy of film. Films can be used as a means of illustrating some philosophical point or other without necessarily locating that discussion in terms of the film’s status as a work of cinematic art. For example, Mary Litch’s Philosophy Through Film25 discusses philosophical questions such as skepticism, relativism, personal identity, and the problem of evil as they appear in a range of film examples. Two new developments have emerged in the philosophy of film since Gaut proposed his tripartite division of the field. One is the claim that at least certain  Ibid.  See Currie, Image and Mind, in particular “The Interpretive Problem,” pp. 225–259. 25  Mary Litch, Philosophy Through Film, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2010). 23 24

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films do more than just address perennial themes of philosophical interest but indeed themselves do philosophy, a position we could describe as “film as philosophy.”26 The second, extending this idea, argues that it is possible to consider film and philosophy as combining into a new area of investigation called “film-philosophy.”27 The kinds of thematic questions addressed by film as philosophy and by film-philosophy might arise from issues in metaphysics or ontology, as for example the question “What does it mean to be human?” asked of Rick Deckard in Blade Runner. Or the thematic questions might concern issues in moral philosophy, such as the specific question raised with respect to Carol Reed’s The Third Man by Tom Wartenberg, who interprets the film as an investigation into the nature of friendship.28 The distinction between the two positions, according to Sinnerbrink, is that film-philosophy pays greater attention to film aesthetics than does film as philosophy.29 While acknowledging these new developments, Gaut’s tripartite schema continues to provide a valuable way of characterizing the main tendencies in the analytic philosophy of film. Let me say a few more things about the general approach taken by analytic philosophers. Whatever position is embraced by particular philosophers, the core issue of how to understand the medium of cinema, especially as it undergoes sometimes dramatic technological change such as the shift from analogue to digital methods of rendering images, should remain foundational to discussions of what happens at “higher” levels of analysis. Cinema is more than its medium, but it is uniquely characterized by its medium. To state the obvious, the cinematic medium is significantly different from the media employed by other art forms. While many questions central to the philosophy of film cross over into discussions of other art forms (the question of narrative and narration being perhaps the most obvious), the philosophy of film needs to attend to film as film (to cite the critic V.F. Perkins’ apt title).30 Film is experienced in conditions very different from the normal viewing conditions of other works of visual art ranging from paintings and sculpture to dance and architecture. At the same time, abiding questions in the philosophy of film, including, for example, point of view, narration, identification, and viewer response, are shared across all the narrative art forms, and the connections and contrasts between film narratives and, in particular, literary narratives offer a rich and valuable field of investigation.31 Gaut mentions film genres in the context of second-level discussions. There has been rather less focused  Thomas Wartenberg, Thinking On Screen: Film as Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007).  Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011). 28  Thomas Wartenberg, “Moral Intelligence and the Limits of Loyalty,” in his Thinking On Screen, pp. 94–116. 29  Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, p. 9. 30  V.F.  Perkins, Film as Art: Understanding and Judging Movies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972). 31  See, for example, Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), and his The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 26 27

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­ hilosophical work on film genres than on other aspects of cinema. Notable p exceptions include Noël Carroll32 and Cynthia Freeland,33 who have written specifically about the horror genre, and Stanley Cavell, who famously identified two Hollywood film genres: the comedy of remarriage and the melodrama of the unknown woman.34 It bears noting that while Cavell aimed to establish a specifically cinematic genre, horror is not a film-specific genre even though many of the masterpieces of the genre are films. Whereas film genres such as the war film and the Western, the musical and the romantic comedy, have been at the center of attention in film studies since its emergence as a distinct discipline, analytic philosophy has not yet paid as much attention to the range of film genres as it might do, although its ongoing interest in the metaphysical and ethical questions of science fiction has remained strong.35 Many philosophers have contributed to discussions at the third level, dealing with perennial philosophical themes found in films. Here, too, we find parallel sorts of considerations directed toward other art forms, where not unexpectedly the sorts of perennial themes in question are typically ones that are most conducive to presentation in narrative form. Before moving on, let me briefly say something about issues and questions that analytic philosophy of film typically does not address. The philosophy of film is mainly averse to works that are primarily intended as mass-market entertainments: most franchise films, most tentpole films, most B-films (unless they have been appropriated as classics as in the case of, e.g., many Westerns and other genre films from the 1930s to the 1970s), and most blockbusters are not the analytic philosopher’s first choice for analysis or interpretation, least of all in terms of perennial philosophical themes. One interesting development that runs against this tendency is Noël Carroll’s previously mentioned work to relocate the philosophical discussion of film within the more general category of mass art. But even when recognizing film’s position as a mass art, philosophy of film is largely silent on questions of the film industry. When discussing filmmakers, analytic philosophy of film is comfortable acknowledging the work of recognized auteurs whether canonical (Orson Welles, Michelangelo Antonioni) or contemporary (Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan). Analytic philosophy of film seldom addresses questions of national cinema or of cinema history. And while the representations of gender, race, and ethnicity have been addressed by analytic philosophers of film, this has typically been approached from perspectives at the intersection of feminist, gender, or race studies and film.

 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990).  Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder: Westview Press, 2001) 34  Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and his Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 35  See, for instance, Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), especially the chapters on the Alien franchise and Minority Report. 32 33

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Since at least the 1970s, considerable effort has gone into creating a space for philosophy of film distinct from film and media studies and particularly from film studies under the influence of what Noël Carroll and David Bordwell have dubbed “Grand Theory”36—the methodology that emerged at the intersection of structuralism and poststructuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian Marxism and its later descendants. Carroll and Bordwell were at the forefront of the critical debunking of film theory. But it is noteworthy that it is not just Theory—or, more broadly, method—that distinguishes analytic philosophy and film studies. The range of topics considered by analytic philosophy of film is narrower than the topics that have been central to film studies even prior to the rise of Theory. One explanation for this narrower focus might be the priority philosophers have given to the idea of cinema as art. Yet the idea of film as an art form also helped to structure film studies in its earliest years. A classic and defining textbook in the emerging discipline of film studies—which has gone on to nearly a dozen editions—is David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson’s Film Art: An Introduction, originally published in 1979.37 A central theme of Bordwell and Thomson is that the appreciation of cinema depends upon understanding the basics of film aesthetics. In particular, Film Art addresses a range of types of films (both narrative and non-narrative), as well as styles and techniques of filmmaking, developments in the history of cinema, and how film analysis and criticism should be approached. Film studies emerged as an academic discipline in part by appealing to film’s status as art. Coincidentally, both film studies and the rise of analytic philosophy of film date to the 1970s. To conclude this section, I want to draw attention to a tendency within the analytic philosophy of film not quite pinpointed by Gaut’s otherwise extremely helpful idea of three levels of discussion. Gaut’s middle level of discussion could, I think, be better appreciated if we see this as the level that Noël Carroll advocates as “piecemeal theorizing”38 and David Bordwell defends as “middle-­ level research.”39 What we discover as the analytic philosophy of film develops is that considerable interest is directed toward the broad range of “mid-level” areas of inquiry. For both Carroll and Bordwell, a totalizing theory or philosophy of film seems unachievable not to mention undesirable. At the same time, a focus on so-called perennial philosophical themes in particular films can lose sight of how filmic presentation contributes to the significance of the themes in 36  See in particular David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory” and Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Bordwell and Carroll, eds., Post-Theory, pp. 3–36 and pp. 37–68. 37  David Bordwell and Kristin Thomson, Film Art: An Introduction, 11th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2016). 38  Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 39  David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in PostTheory, p. 3.

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­ uestion. While the focus on perennial themes is arguably too narrow for a q suitably developed philosophy of film, the questions “What is film?” and “What is film art?” may seem too broad. Fine-grained distinctions and other empirically rich nuances tend to be flattened in the creation of a single overarching account. Different film forms call for different interpretive strategies, so the resources we use to analyze narrative films are arguably not appropriate to the analysis of experimental film or even necessarily to documentary film. Middlelevel research encourages us to examine the features that make different film modes distinct without feeling the need to make more general claims. Carroll’s career as a philosopher of film illustrates how he thinks middle-level research should be conducted. He has written on the horror genre, the mode of suspense, the medium-specificity argument, the nature of the cinematic shot, narration and the question of film narrators, as well as the evaluation and criticism of films, among other topics. One thing Carroll is adamant about: that it is doubtful that there would be a philosophy of motion pictures at all unless the technologies that serve as the basis for filmmaking “had evolved into a genuine artistic practice.”40

The Emergence of Analytic Philosophy of Film: Sesonske and Sparshott Film’s emergence as a sustained focus of attention from an analytical perspective dates, as I am arguing, to the 1970s. This is also the period when film studies made a dramatic entry into the academy, with dedicated film studies programs developing as off-shoots of literature departments at a variety of institutions in Great Britain, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere. Philosophers had, of course, watched films prior to the rise of the analytical study of film. But it took the rise of an international movie culture in the 1960s and 1970s for cinema to be seen as a legitimate candidate for concentrated philosophical attention. It is not surprising that both the analytic philosophy of film and the new discipline of film studies were initiated by philosophers and film scholars who were part of a culture when regular attendance at the movies, often more than once a week, was the norm and where “art-house” and “repertory” cinemas expanded the appreciation of European and Asian filmmakers alongside a renewed interest in the classics of Hollywood cinema. In this rich environment of films, it is now unsurprising that even analytic philosophy would at last recognize film as meriting its attention. While they both emerged around the same time, film studies burst on the scene with vigorous developments in areas such as authorship studies, theory, and historiography, while philosophy of film remained rather longer in a gestational state. Thus it was possible in 1995 for Gregory Currie to write: “Film certainly has not been taken seriously by most philosophers of the kind in which I place  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (London: Blackwell, 2008), p. 33.

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myself.”41 A similar view was expressed in 1997 by Berys Gaut: “[T]hat the philosophy of film exists at all as a distinct discipline will come as a surprise to many philosophers.”42 The philosophy of film was not yet really on the horizon for many analytic philosophers, including many philosophers of art, even in the period from the 1970s to the late 1990s. The sea change in the philosophy of art that would lead to a radical broadening of the field, allowing it to include the so-called “technological” arts and the arts of “mechanical reproduction” (primarily film and photography) as well as mass arts and the popular arts more generally, had not quite yet taken hold in the analytic tradition. Yet key contributions in this period set out to defend the legitimacy of the philosophy of film. I trace the emergence of a philosophy of film within analytic philosophy to two papers by Alexander Sesonske43 and two by Francis Sparshott44 that approach the question of movies from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. Sparshott sets the tone: “The basic aesthetics of film as of any other art must be descriptive and analytic.” He continues: “[A]ny such account must be rooted in some notion, however imprecise, of what a work of the art in question is.”45 Here, Sparshott raises the philosophical question, what is a film? His answer is tied to what the current state of the medium was and its supporting technology. Sparshott concentrates on the mechanism of film that causes the illusion of motion. His focus on the film medium leads to the examination of the distinctly cinematic features he calls “film space” and “film time.” Sesonske begins by positioning the philosophy of film within philosophical aesthetics more broadly construed. Historically, Sesonske reminds us that aesthetics has had two not entirely converging tendencies. One is to attempt to provide a theory of art—which is to say, a theory of all the arts and what makes each form of art a member of the class art. The other turns its attention away from the pursuit of a general theory of art and asks instead what exactly characterizes particular art forms—Sesonske offers as paradigm examples the arts of architecture, poetry, painting, and dance.46 Sesonske’s interest in the aesthetics of film is in part an attempt to resolve the divergent tendencies of the two main approaches just described and to be able to say just what it is that makes some films works of art.47  Currie, Image and Mind, p. xiii.  Gaut, “Analytic Philosophy of Film,” p. 145. 43  Alexander Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film, or a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Movies,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33:1 (1974): pp. 51–57, and “Time and Tense in Cinema,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38:4 (1980), pp. 419–426. 44  Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics” and “Vision and Dream in the Cinema,” Philosophic Exchange 2:1 (1971), pp. 111–122. 45  Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” p. 11. 46  Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film,” p. 51. 47  Some consider Alexander Sesonske to be a phenomenologist, which would seem to place him outside the bounds of analytic philosophy. I simply claim here that Sesonske’s approach to film is analytic even though his focus of interest is how films are understood and, in that sense, experienced. Gaut, for example, describes Sesonske as offering a “phenomenological argument,” in “Analytic Philosophy of Film,” p. 149. 41 42

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Sesonske looks at the ways in which films are similar to and yet distinct from other forms of art. He asks whether film is a subcategory of literature, at least with regard to the centrality in many films of characters and stories, or whether its visual aspect makes it a “graphic” art, like painting. Perhaps film is like both painting and architecture, art forms where space is predominant, or perhaps what is most important is what film seems to share with drama, namely, the unfolding of action events in time. Sesonske argues that trying to see film in terms of other art forms misses what is centrally significant to film. Like Sparshott, Sesonske identifies what is most specific to film as an art form as its unique conjoining of space and time. Where Sparshott speaks of “film space” and “film time,” Sesonske speaks of “cinema  space” and “cinema time.” Discussed in this way, both philosophers are able to provide a characterization of the art of cinema that turns out not to depend upon any particular technological medium of production. They discuss narrative, non-narrative, and documentary films, films with characters and plots but also without them (think Warhol’s Empire [1964]). Sesonske and Sparshott both emphasize film form. Sesonske identifies the primary formal categories of film as space, time, motion, and sound.48 Even if an overwhelming percentage of films feature characters or, in the case of documentaries, actual people, this is not a fundamental requirement of film. Moreover, character and action are presented by means of the unique features of cinema space and cinema time. Film action takes place within cinema space. What is distinctive about cinema space as opposed to human lived space is that the former is “wholly and only visual.”49 Viewers cannot interact with or act within cinema space, which has two basic modes. There is the two-dimensional design space of what we see and the three-dimensional “action-space” that is presented by means of the two-­ dimensional image. While pictorial space in photographs and paintings can also be three dimensional, only cinema space presents an action-space. But the nature of cinema’s action-space has distinctive features that distinguish it from the action-space of the lived world: in cinema, action-space is discontinuous with normal world-space, since we cannot enter into it; it is discontinuous with itself since, thanks to editing, locations can change instantly. And perhaps most tellingly, the actions we see within cinema action-space are constrained for us visually by the image’s frame, yet we know that the potential space of cinema action is not thus constrained. Characters can move out of the frame and return just as the camera can pan or tilt away from characters to investigate other parts of the surrounding setting. Viewing time and cinema time are also distinct from one another. Narrative theorists distinguish between story (fabula) and plot (syuzhet): the presumed chronological order of events had they unfolded in “real time” as opposed to the order of events as narrated or presented to the viewer. Sesonske distinguished between “dramatic time” and “viewing time,” which in a later work he  Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film,” p. 54.  Ibid.

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redescribed as “action time” and “screen time.50” Editing “allows a film to move freely” in dramatic time,51 since dramatic or action time is as malleable within a film as action space. Sparshott’s observations run parallel to Sesonske’s and develop some points in greater detail. Three of Sparshott’s central contributions to the philosophy of film are his arguments that in viewing films, spectators should not and cannot understand themselves as surrogates for the film camera; that the viewer’s relationship to film time is less straightforward than might be thought; and that the “motion” we speak about when we speak of motion pictures is, likewise, more subtle and complex than it might initially appear. The question how viewers “identify” with films has sometimes been answered by arguing that viewers cannot, strictly speaking, always be said to “identify” with some particular character or other because, to take Citizen Kane as a classic example, the film’s central character is dead throughout most of the running time of the film. If viewers do not “identify” with a character, the thought goes, perhaps they identify with the camera instead. That is, in viewing the events of a film, we might imagine ourselves standing in the position of the camera, watching events from the camera’s position and in that sense “identifying” with the camera. This view has many obvious disadvantages, not least of which that the film camera stands on a film set in relation to actors portraying characters whereas what the film viewer watches is the fictional world of the film, in which no film camera fictionally exists. But Sparshott adds another telling argument against the “camera-eye” identity thesis: “An eye is not a camera, and a photographic image does not show what eyes see.” Furthermore, the photographic image does not “reproduce vision” but rather offers something like an “ideal” vision for the purposes of the film in question.52 Thus films shot in black and white are as appropriate to their purposes as films shot in any of the many color technologies that have been developed since the 1930s for feature-length filmmaking. As for the temporal involvement of film viewers in the events that unfold on screen, it is true that the viewing experience occurs in the real, ongoing time of the viewer, but it is more important that the engaged viewer is typically not concerned with her own time but rather with the film-time being presented. As Sparshott remarks, a certain type of confusion causes critics to claim that “film time is present time” and that “in watching a film one seems to see things happening now, as though one were present not at the film but at the filmed event.”53 This confusion, Sparshott notes, is on par with the mistaken claim that the viewer identifies with the camera. Insofar as film viewers are engaged in watching the film and its represented events, the better way to conceptualize the relationship is to say, with Sparshott, that “it is as though we were s­ pectators  Sesonske, “Time and Tense,” p. 420.  Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film,” p. 55. 52  Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” p. 15. 53  Ibid., p. 20. 50 51

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of the temporality of the films we see.”54 Thus, we are spectators of whatever temporal relations are presented to us by means of the organization of the film’s syuzhet, and this is the reason why with training and cueing viewers understand relationships such as flashback, parallel editing of sequences, flash-­ forwards, as well as the depictions of characters’ mental states such as dream and imagination. Viewers can negotiate the depiction of subjective states which may or may not take place in the film’s “present” and which may or may not depict events that are “true” in the film world. The varied possible interconnections between film space and film time “combine,” Sparshott observes, “to give film motion an endless complexity.”55 Film “motion” can refer to motion “within” the film frame captured by a static camera, or motion “within” the film frame of a moving camera (one that pans, sweeps, tilts, etc.), or again motion created by the camera moving around in action space (either physically with dollying or tracking shots or thanks to changes in the focal length of the lens). All of these possibilities are cross-­ modal, being equally possible in fiction, experimental, and documentary films. In fact, motion can be affected by the speed at which it is presented, which might involve acceleration or deceleration.56 Sparshott cites the famous slow-­ motion shooting deaths in Bonnie and Clyde as a particularly striking example of the deceleration of both time and motion. So what is typically referred to as film’s signature ability to offer us “the illusion of motion” turns out to be at best “misleading” and better explained by viewers’ possibly tacit knowledge of filmmaking techniques, including in particular editing techniques. Rounding out the views of Sesonske and Sparshott are their answers to the question of what, exactly, a film represents. Like many philosophers of film, the primary film examples discussed by Sesonske and Sparshott are classics of the Hollywood cinema, the new European cinema, or new World cinema. Speaking of films that appear to be “finally freed of all theatrical elements,” Sesonske mentions Norman McLaren and John Whitney, whose films have moved “toward the mere play of visual form,” and Andy Warhol, some of whose films are “wholly devoid of any dramatic action or interest.”57 But Sesonske’s primary examples are narrative films: Citizen Kane as well as films by “such masters as Renoir, Kurosawa, or Fellini.”58 Sparshott cites the inaugural debate between realism and fantasy dating back to the Lumières and Méliès,59 the conflation of realist and fantasist tendencies in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, as well as Disney’s animated cartoons.60 But the central film examples Sparshott invokes are also narrative ones: Rossellini and Italian neorealism, Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, and works by new auteurs,  Ibid., p. 21.  Ibid., p. 23. 56  Ibid., p. 25. 57  Sesonske, “Time and Tense,” p. 53. 58  Ibid., p. 56. 59  Sparshott, “Basic Film Aesthetics,” p. 13. 60  Ibid., p. 15. 54 55

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including Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider, Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and the films of Raoul Walsh. Narrative filmmaking occupies the center of the field of study for philosophy of film, with completely non-narrative films such as McLaren’s “scratch” animations on one side and Warhol’s anti-narrative films on the other. Animated films such as Disney’s count among the narrative films despite their origin as drawn rather than photographed images. Where we find narrative filmmaking in any of its forms, Sparshott and Sesonske agree that what compels our attention as viewers is the invitation to engage in the “world” of the film. Sparshott speaks of “film worlds” as distinct from the real world: knowledgeable film viewers do not mistake narrative films as being the real world because knowledgeable film viewers understand the “alienated spatiality of film”61 at least insofar as “film space and time are observed rather than lived.”62 But viewers participate imaginatively in the world of the film, which as it were we Gestalt from the numerous audio, visual, and structural cues the film provides. Sesonske credits even Warhol’s anti-­ narrative films with “present[ing] a recognizable world” despite the absence of character or meaningful action.63 In general, our engagement with films, and in particular with narrative films, is explained in terms of “[o]ur feeling of participation in the world of the film.”64 That viewers become imaginatively engaged with the “world” of the film returns us to the question of the degree of autonomy or specificity enjoyed by film as an artistic medium. Seeing narrative films as the paradigm for philosophical scrutiny means that the critical and interpretative resources we bring to the discussion and analysis of film will also be those employed in relation to other, non-film narratives. Sesonske and Sparshott have shown that films are not exclusively to be defined in terms of this or that mechanism or technology but rather by the fact that they offer us access to worlds created by means of the conjunction of cinema-space and cinema-time. As Sesonske observes, our philosophical fascination with film, which we share with most moviegoers, has to do with how we can become caught up in the represented action and how film form shapes and informs the “world of the film.”65 Arguably, this challenge means that we must place film within the broader category of the narrative arts in order to understand how viewers Gestalt films’ fictional worlds.

Highlights in the Analytic Philosophy of Film After Sesonske and Sparshott The groundwork laid by Sesonske and Sparshott still left open the question of how an analytic philosophy of film would develop and what approaches and methodologies it would embrace. Film studies was already in the grip of Theory  Ibid., p. 19.  Ibid., p. 24. 63  Sesonske, “Time and Tense,” p. 53. 64  Ibid., p. 54. 65  Ibid., p. 57. 61 62

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during the 1980s, and many philosophers of film during this period felt the need to first demolish Theory before undertaking the positive project of articulating a philosophy of film. For instance, Ian Jarvie’s Philosophy of the Film (1987) adopts to a large degree the perspective of a philosopher of science, balancing, as the book’s subtitle indicates, questions of epistemology and ontology with questions of aesthetics. Jarvie’s method expressly “forswear[s] esoteric vocabulary,” rejects “Frenchspeak,” aims for clear and precise writing, provides a general philosophy of film, and strictly “eschew[s] so far as possible all evaluative terms.”66 Jarvie offers a philosophical account of narrative fiction film broadly construed, citing an eclectic range of films from La Règle du Jeu to Rocky Horror Picture Show, from The Enigma of Kasper Hauser to Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask. In a telling methodological move, Jarvie illustrates “all the arguments and theses” of his philosophy of the film with reference to one example, Casablanca. This choice demonstrates that Jarvie believes that his analytic method applies equally to works by Renoir and to cult classics such as Rocky Horror as it does to classic Hollywood cinema: a philosophy of film does not require distinct methods for different styles and genres of film. That said, it deserves mention that Jarvie is not primarily interested in all modes of cinema but rather focuses on the narrative film, that is to say, the fiction film. So just what is narrative fiction film? How should we understand our subject of inquiry? Jarvie argues that film should be conceived as an abstract object rather than as a material object. To think about a film’s content—its images, its characters, its story—is to think in terms of abstract objects which are actualized in our experience as we “build up … an intelligible content, one we even might be tempted to call ‘a world’.”67 The film world is not, of course, the “real” world. As Sesonske and Sparshott have already demonstrated, our means of engaging with the film world is essentially different from our engagement with the real world, since we cannot enter film space or film time, and yet we imaginatively participate in the unfolding of film events. Jarvie speaks in terms of “suspension of disbelief,” which he treats as a straightforwardly learned ability to realize that we cannot cross into the world of film. Rather, Jarvie argues that, when watching films, “we are able to play at taking on-screen events for real.”68 Here he anticipates the theory of make-believe presented in Kendall Walton’s groundbreaking work which would be published three years later.69 Jarvie defends the claim that movies are (or can be) works of art against a range of objections that continued to have some currency in the last decades of the twentieth century: that movies are primarily only works of popular entertainment and therefore not works of art; that movies attain whatever art status  Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film, p. xiii.  Ibid., pp. 3–4. 68  Ibid., p. 33. 69  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 66 67

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they have only derivatively from other forms of art which they resemble (drama, the novel); that if movies were legitimately works of art we would have an established canon of great works but, in the absence of any consensus about a canon, movies are not (yet?) art; and finally, movies have “no established criteria of merit,” making it impossible to justify the category of works of film art.70 Critical judgments seem to change, and movies that might once have seemed supreme examples of film art seem later to have lost that cachet while one’s positive judgment about particular filmmakers might not be shared by “other cinéphiles.” Jarvie notes his own change of mind about the importance, for example, of L’Avventura, as well the fact that his admiration for Woody Allen’s films seems to run counter to much prevailing critical opinion.71 In the end, Jarvie’s discussion of philosophical problems on film—that is, the treatment of ethical and other philosophical questions by particular narrative films—set a precedent for much subsequent work and indeed helped create the conditions for the very idea of film as philosophy. Gregory Currie’s Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (1995) develops the argument that film is an essentially pictorial medium but one importantly different from non-motion pictures such as painting and still photographs. Currie brings into new focus the question of just how viewers experience this temporal medium of genuinely moving pictures—that is, how viewers understand what Jarvie would call the “world” of the film or what Sesonske and Sparshott would have described as cinema-space and cinema-­ time. Currie adapts insights from cognitive science to examine how exactly viewers understand films. Following ideas introduced in his The Nature of Fiction,72 Currie is mainly interested in fiction films, that is, films which function pictorially to present fiction.73 The philosophical challenge is to explain how viewers, watching images which have the typical properties of photographic representations, interpret those images as fictional stories involving fictional protagonists, settings, and actions. To use one of Currie’s own examples, in watching The Third Man, we see and hear Orson Welles, but we see Welles as Harry Lime, or more accurately, our experience of The Third Man centrally involves the fictional character of Harry Lime. But, Currie asks, what is it to experience a fictional character, acting in a fictional world? The answer cannot just be that we adopt the same attitude toward visual fictions as we do toward literary ones: our experience of Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s The Third Man is not the same as our experience of Harry Lime in Graham Green’s novel. Our imaginative experience of Green’s Lime is based on our ability to understand the text’s language, whereas our imaginative experience of Orson Welles as Harry Lime depends on our ability to interpret the film’s pictorial presentation of the fiction.  Jarvie, Philosophy of the Film, p. 178.  Ibid., p. 177. 72  Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 73  Currie, Image and Mind, p. 11. 70 71

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Currie’s argument, in summary, goes like this. There is an essence of “cinema,” where by “cinema” he just means “the medium to which particular movies belong.”74 That essence is representational and, indeed, pictorial. Because cinema is in essence pictorial, it is a primarily visual medium and thus unlike language-based media such as literature. Our primary access to cinema is through our visual experience of the visual medium, augmented perhaps by some or all of cinema’s distinctive modalities of sound, color, and even aspect ratio. Movies can be silent or in sound, black and white, or in a range of proprietary color technologies, and the projected images we see will be framed, whether in the more traditional ratio of 4:3 (also described as 1.33:1) or in wide-screen ratios such as 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 or higher. But in every case, cinema functions pictorially, and Currie’s most central concern is how it is that viewers experience fictions when they watch movies. Currie’s analysis takes advantage of the inquiry into folk psychology that developed through the 1980s and 1990s at the intersection of cognitive science and philosophy. Folk psychology refers to our capacity to predict and explain actions in terms of the attribution—to others but also to ourselves—of a complex system of mental states including beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, intentions, and so forth. The inquiry originally focused on how human beings understand themselves and one another in terms of mental states. The discussion that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s asked the further question: how do we explain the mechanics of folk psychological explanation and prediction? Is it because humans come to possess a theory of mind in terms of which such explanations and predications are possible? Or is it instead because humans possess a capacity for empathetic contact with conspecifics that allows us to, as it were, see what things are like for others? The emerging literature presented lively arguments between the two camps, with so-called theory-theory on the one side and mental simulation on the other. Currie defends mental simulation, the view that we represent others’ mental states by imagining what things are like for them, given what we understand about their situations and core mental states such as their beliefs and desires. Imagination thus plays a central role in mental simulation. This gives Currie the means to develop an explanation of our ability to engage with movie fictions in terms of our capacity for mental simulation. As Currie puts it, fiction films “authorize us” to imagine “the things which are parts of the story.”75 Mental simulation turns out to be the capacity that allows us to imagine fictional characters and events in a way that parallels our ability to understand and predict the behavior of other people. In the case of fiction films, our imaginative abilities are cued and constrained by the organization of the ongoing story as it is visually presented to us. By identifying imagination with simulation, and positioning cinema-specific imaginings in the context of viewers’ experiences of the moving visual image, Currie solves the problem of how it is that in watch Ibid., p. xxiii.  Ibid., p. 147.

74 75

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ing images of Orson Welles, we engage with a film narrative concerning Harry Lime. While it is true that our engagement with fiction films produces beliefs, they are beliefs of a specific sort. To properly engage with The Third Man, we do not primarily form beliefs about Orson Welles. Rather, we imagine what things are like for Harry Lime—indeed, we imagine what things are like for Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who believes that Harry Lime is his great friend. Because fictions “are devices which encourage and guide the imagination,”76 we are able to form beliefs about what is true in the fiction, but these are a special sort of belief, different from our beliefs of what is true in the world. As Currie puts it, “simulation transmutes beliefs into imaginings,”77 while the particular fiction film authorizes us to imagine what is “true in the story.” Currie’s approach establishes the mechanism—mental simulation—that both makes possible and explains viewers’ imaginative engagement with the fictional worlds of film. Viewers’ imaginings make sense of the fictional story-­ world as it is presented in cinema-space and cinema-time. Interpretation is crucial here in a specific sense explained by Currie. Interpretation is what happens when, by viewing a sequence of cinematic images (and sounds), we “end up with a story.”78 To end up with a story will necessarily involve coming to understand the film’s narrative, and may also involve postulating an intentional agent, the film author, who has undertaken to communicate the particular film narrative. Interpretation is what guides our understanding of the imaginative content of a fiction film. Currie makes imagination and interpretation central to the philosophy of film while foregrounding the film-specific features of cinematic narratives and cinematic narration—as distinguished from literary narratives and narration, which are linguistic rather than pictorial. By the time Berys Gaut publishes A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (2010), technological advances have changed the range of practices that can properly be considered cinematic. Most notably, digitalization has made any argument limiting cinema to celluloid-based film stock obsolete. But the range of questions that have been central to analytic philosophy of film over the preceding 30  years persist. Despite these ­developments in the physical medium of film, Gaut sees a continuity between the concerns raised by so-called classical film theory and the work of analytic philosophy. These include the by now venerable question of cinema’s status as art as well as an analysis of the nature of the medium of moving pictures and more specific questions such as how viewers understand films (in the global, interpretative sense described by Currie) and how viewers engage with film (in the narrower sense of how viewers become imaginatively involved with fictional characters and actions). Gaut addresses the role of the cinematic author, a topic that has been in the background of discussion throughout this period  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 149. 78  Ibid., p. 225. 76 77

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and which Jarvie in particular drew attention to. Gaut’s discussion is primarily a response to Paisley Livingston’s defense of the principle of single authorship in cinema.79 Cinematic authorship is considerably more complicated than literary authorship for reasons philosophy and film studies have both acknowledged. Because films are not typically the product of a single creative individual, the very idea of a cinematic auteur has inevitably been somewhat metaphorical. Even so, there have been challenges even to the literary concept of author. Notably, both Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have alleged the death of the literary author.80 But to the extent that this claim had any merit, it had to do with the question whether any author actually controls the meaning of the language he or she employs to construct the literary text. If not, it would seem that, as Barthes famously argued in “From Work to Text,” it is the reader who is the author of the text’s meaning.81 Because this argument centrally concerns linguistic texts, the implications for film are uncertain. In the meantime, as film studies has acknowledged since its early days, directors hardly have absolute control over all aspects of their films. Editors, cinematographers, actors, and others can be seen to contribute to the unique shape of any particular director’s work. To take just one example, Greg Toland’s cinematography decisively shapes both Citizen Kane and The Best Years of Our Lives. Cinematic authorship remains a topic of lively debate.

Persistent Questions Philosophers like Jarvie, Currie, and Gaut combine the two main ambitions noted by Sparshott and Sesonske: to provide an account of film (or cinema) art while simultaneously illuminating how more local questions can be analyzed in terms of film’s formal and aesthetic features. While we have finally moved beyond the sense that we somehow need to justify paying philosophical ­attention to cinema and motion pictures, there is nevertheless an intriguing persistence of central mid-level questions. Noël Carroll’s and Jinhee Choi’s Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures82 is divided into topics such as the status of film as an art, the nature of filmic narration, the question how films engage us emotionally, as well as more general issues concerning the ethical and cognitive dimensions of cinema. Paisley Livingston’s and Carl Plantinga’s The

79  See Paisley Livingston, Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 80  Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978), pp. 142–148, and Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F.  Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 113–138. 81  Barthes, Image-Music-Text, pp. 155–164. 82  Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).

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Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film83 discusses each of these topics and introduces a major section on film as philosophy. Katharine ThomsonJones’s Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film84 deals with film as art and technology, as a realistic medium, as narrative fiction, as a source of emotional engagement, and as a means of philosophizing. And this volume also divides up the territory into what are increasingly recognized subareas. So we can conclude that there is both convergence around and new dimensions emerging in these areas. At the same time, the major new development in orientation over the last decade or so has been the concentration on whether and how film might actually do philosophy as opposed to merely illustrate philosophical concerns. There is now as there has been throughout the history of the philosophy of film significant work addressing philosophical themes that appear in films. Questions from metaphysics, epistemology, and moral philosophy are addressed by many philosophers of film, sometimes with reference to the same film: Blade Runner and Memento, as previously mentioned, are loci classici for these sorts of reflections. The question whether film as an artistic medium is uniquely suited to the task of doing philosophy has created a new avenue of investigation. Analytic philosophy of film has developed into a robust subarea in the philosophy of art. It is now able to balance and combine a variety of questions and approaches and enjoys a wide scope for inquiry. From specific questions about the distinctive nature of the cinematic medium, to questions that connect the study of film to other arts, to issues that arise at the intersection of aesthetics and other philosophical subfields, notably metaphysics and ethics, analytic philosophy of film will continue to study the many ways that film merits philosophical attention. In pursuing these inquiries, analytic philosophy of film would do well to continue to reflect on the insights of Sparshott and Sesonske, notably their identification of the unique features of film-space and film-time. These fundamental concepts are central to our fascination with movies generally, but also ground what we value as film art.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolph. 1957. Film as Art. Berkley: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland. 1978. The Death of the Author. In Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, Trans. H. Grey. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1971. What Is Cinema? Vol. 2, Trans. H.  Grey. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

83  Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (New York: Routledge, 2009). 84  Thomson-Jones, Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film.

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Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson. 2016. Film Art: An Introduction. 11th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Carroll, Noël. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. London: Blackwell. Carroll, Noël, and Jinhee Choi. 2006. Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Oxford: Blackwell. Cavell, Stanley. 1984. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1997. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1990. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, Gregory. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickie, George. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is an Author? In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Freeland, Cynthia. 2001. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder: Westview Press. Gaut, Berys. 1997. Analytic Philosophy of Film: History, Issues, Prospects. Philosophical Books 38: 3. ———. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. Cinematic Art and Technology. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones. New York: Routledge. Jarvie, Ian. 1987. Philosophy of the Film: Epistemology, Ontology, Aesthetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Litch, Mary. 2010. Philosophy Through Film. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Livingston, Paisley. 2005. Art and Intention: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingston, Paisley, and Carl Plantinga. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. New York: Routledge. Mitry, Jean. 2000. The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema. Trans. Christopher King. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mulhall, Stephen. 2016. On Film. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Munsterberg, Hugo. 2002. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. In Hugo Munsterberg on Film, ed. Allan Langdale. London: Routledge. Sesonske, Alexander. 1974. Aesthetics of Film, or a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Movies. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 33: 1. ———. 1980. Time and Tense in Cinema. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38: 4. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London: Continuum.

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Sparshott, F.E. 1971a. Basic Film Aesthetics. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 5: 2. ———. 1971b. Vision and Dream in the Cinema. Philosophic Exchange 2: 1. Thomson-Jones, Katherine, ed. 2016a. Current Controversies. New York: Routledge. ———. 2016b. Movie Appreciation and the Digital Medium. In Current Controversies, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones. New York: Routledge. Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. New  York: Routledge. ———. Philosophy of Film. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/. Accessed 22 May 2017.

CHAPTER 17

Cognitive Theory of the Moving Image Carl Plantinga

An essential thing to know about cognitive theory of the moving image (hereafter “cognitive theory”) is that it is an “approach” to the theoretical study of moving image media rather than a unified set of assumptions or a single methodology. Scholars, researchers, and students who read and employ cognitive theory share a common goal: to understand the nature of moving image media. They hail from a variety of disciplines, however, including film and media studies, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and communication. The interdisciplinary nature of the approach pretty much guarantees a certain amount of disunity. The term “cognitive media theory” names a loose set of personal and institutional associations among scholars as much as it does a unified research project. That being said, the approach can be broadly characterized. In the introduction to their edited volume Cognitive Media Theory, Ted Nanicelli and Paul Taberham neatly summarize four salient characteristics of cognitive theory: 1. A “dedication to the highest standards of reasoning and evidence in film and media studies and other fields (including, but not limited to, empirical data from the natural sciences).” 2. A “commitment to stringent inter-theoretical criticism and debate.” (And intra-theoretical questioning, I would add). 3. A “general focus on the mental activity of viewers as the central (but not the only) object of inquiry.” 4. An “acceptance of a naturalistic perspective, broadly construed.”1 1

 (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 4.

C. Plantinga (*) Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_17

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Each of these four tenets will be further examined as this chapter progresses. But it should be noted that when conjunctively taken to characterize cognitive theory, they allow for diverse methodologies, from the conceptual clarification and logical argument of philosophy to the empirical investigations of the sciences. Cognitive theory is not intended to colonize film and media studies, but rather to provide tools and knowledge that can be combined with, or that can provide evidence for other theoretical approaches, and for interpretation, criticism, and history of moving image media. Thus, cognitive theory draws from the sciences when appropriate, but remains firmly rooted in the humanities.2 Some cognitive theory, then, emerges from the sciences; some melds scientific and humanistic inquiry; some employs solely humanistic methodologies. What, then, is cognitive media theory? Is it the project of tracing key elements of media to human nature as characterized by evolutionary psychology and biology, as in the work of Torben Grodal?3 Is it found in Margarethe Bruun Vaage’s investigation of the moral psychology of viewing television serials featuring anti-heroes as protagonists?4 Is it found in Tim Smith’s eye-­ tracking research, in which he traces the eye movements of viewers (and thus their attention) while watching various types of scenes?5 Is it found in David Bordwell’s intricate examinations of the poetics of cinema in relation to human perceptual and cognitive capacities?6 Is it found in Kathrin Fahlenbrach’s examination of audiovisual metaphors, James Cutting’s research into the psychology of movie viewing, or Uri Hasson’s “neurocinematics”?7 Is it found in Ted Nanicelli’s philosophical examination of the appreciation of television or his 2  David Rodowick has claimed that cognitive media theory is “scientistic,” perhaps meaning that cognitive theory wishes to turn film and media studies into a science. See his article “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (2007): 91–109; see also his subsequent book, An Elegy for Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). Such a claim is countered in Nanicelli and Taberham, 10–15, and in Malcolm Turvey, “Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Response to D.N. Rodowick’s ‘An Elegy for Theory’,” October (2007), 110–120. Also see Turvey’s review of Rodowick’s book in Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 9, 1 (Summer 2015), 96–103. 3  Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); see also Grodal’s Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4  The Antihero in American Television (New York and London: Routledge, 2016). 5  See, for example, Tim J. Smith, “Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Film Theory,” in Psychocinematics, ed. Arthur P.  Shimamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 165–192. 6  See, for example, Poetics of Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 2008) and The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 7  See, for example, Kathrin Fahlenbrach, ed., Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games (New York and London: Routledge, 2015); James M. Cutting, “Narrative Theory and the Dynamics of Popular Movies,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 23 (2016): 1713–1743, accessed 2 June 2017, doi: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1051-4; Uri Hasson et  al., “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2 (Summer 2008): 1–26.

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philosophy of the screenplay?8 Or in Noël Carroll’s extensive work in the philosophy of motion pictures?9 The cognitive approach in its broadest sense embodies all of these disparate projects and methodologies and many others, making a synoptic chapter such as this rather difficult to write.10 Given the broad array of research covered under the umbrella term “cognitive theory,” it would make sense to narrow the focus somewhat, and that is what I will do in this chapter. There is a sense in which many of the topics of the philosophy of film—medium specificity, the nature of interpretation and evaluation, the ontology of media, the nature of realism, whether films can be said to philosophize, and authorship and agency—all are topics of discussion in cognitive theory. For this chapter, however, I will concentrate on the third characteristic of cognitive theory listed at the beginning of this chapter. That is a focus on the kinds of mental and bodily experiences the media afford viewers and the design elements that foster those experiences.

Origins and History To get a better sense of cognitive theory, consider its history. The interest of cognitive theory in spectator psychology hearkens back to some of the earliest film theory. The best example of this is Hugo Munsterberg’s 1916 The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, which dealt with depth, movement, attention, memory, imagination, and emotion in the experience of films. In the 1970s, the field moved to embrace what I shall call “psycho-semiotic” theory.11 Film studies in the 1970s and 1980s was a much smaller and more homogeneous discipline than it is today. In those decades a certain theoretical approach became standard methodology. So-called psycho-semiotics was an amalgam of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, Barthesian semiotics, and Saussurean linguistics, with a pinch of critical theory and neo-Brechtian aesthetics thrown into the mix. The approach turned to Lacanian psychoanalysis 8  A Philosophy of the Screenplay (New York and London: Routledge, 2012); Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 2017). 9  See, for example, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); and Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 10  Indeed, other summary accounts of cognitive theory—including my own from the past—differ substantially from each other and from this one. See David Bordwell, “Cognitive Theory,” in Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 356–367; Gregory Currie, “Cognitivism,” in Toby Miller and Robert Stam, eds., A Companion to Film Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 105–122; Carl Plantinga, “Cognitive Film Theory: An Insider’s Perspective,” Cinémas 12, 2 (Winter 2002): 15–38; Ted Nanicelli and Paul Taberham, “Introduction: Contemporary Cognitive Media Theory,” in Nanicelli and Taberham, eds., Cognitive Media Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 1–24. 11  One of the unfortunate consequences of the emergence of psycho-semiotic theory as film studies dogma was the eclipse of an excellent book, V.F. Perkins’ Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Penguin Books, 1972). This often-brilliant book was overshadowed by these new trends and failed to win the attention it deserves.

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and Althusserian Marxism to provide an account of “subject positioning,” the process by which films—and especially mainstream films—psychically positioned the spectator as a bourgeois subject, using the lure of pleasure and regressive desire to promote docile and mystified capitalist citizens. From semiotics the theory derived the notion that film was like a language in the sense that its signs and symbols (its signifiers) had an arbitrary relationship to what they represent (the signified). Thus, film was thought to communicate based on a series of codes rather than relying on human perceptual, cognitive, and emotional capacities. From critical theory, psycho-semiotics inherited a deep suspicion of Hollywood and mainstream films, and from neo-Brechtianism an advocacy of difficult, alternative narratives that estranged or alienated the viewer, thus breaking the hold of the supposedly regressive psychic and ideological functions just mentioned. Cognitive theory was born in the 1980s out of a deep dissatisfaction with psycho-semiotics. Both that time and that dissatisfaction contributed strongly to the initial contours of the cognitive approach. In part because psycho-­ semiotic theory was also a political stance, opposing it risked the same sorts of responses accorded to heretics of a religious tradition.12 Thus two of the scholars who mounted the most serious challenge to psycho-semiotics, David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eventually found themselves outside of mainstream of academic film studies. Though they continued to produce some of the most important film theories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, they distanced themselves from film and media studies as an academic discipline. David Bordwell, who was deeply dissatisfied with many elements of psycho-­ semiotic theory, published his book Narration in the Fiction Film in 1985, the same year that Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 was released.13 Both books relied on then-contemporary cognitive psychology (as opposed to psychoanalysis) to understand the viewer’s mental activities in comprehending narrative films, and both were attempts to develop an historical poetics of film. Bordwell’s 1989 “A Case for Cognitivism,” however, led the clarion call for a new approach with a name and with common tenets. In that essay, Bordwell wrote of cognitive theory as wanting to understand mental processes such as “recognition, comprehension, inference-making, interpretation, judgment, memory, and imagination.”14 (It would be later that cognitive theorists began 12  Among his list of the five major impediments to film theorizing, Noël Carroll lists “political correctness,” and avers that critiques of psycho-semiotic theory are often treated as politically suspect. The effect is to insulate the theory from “sustained logical and empirical analysis by a cloak of political correctness.” See “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 45. 13  David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 14  Iris 9 (1989): 13.

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to write about emotion, affect, automatic and unconscious mental processes, and embodiment, as we shall see). Bordwell’s early work in cognitive theory not only established the interest in the mental processes of the spectator in relation to film form but also directed these studies toward a poetics of cinema more than an ethics or politics. While Bordwell, at least initially, maintained a diplomatic relationship with psycho-semiotic theorists, Noël Carroll had decided to leave the discipline of film studies altogether, and engaged in a full frontal attack on psycho-semiotic theory. The assault began with the 1983 “Address to the Heathen,” in which Carroll systematically and mercilessly dismantles the Theory as interpreted by Stephen Heath, then one of its major progenitors. Carroll followed up with his 1988 book, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory, which applies the same take-no-prisoners approach to psycho-semiotics, concluding that the Theory, which had become the lingua franca of a generation of film scholars, had “impeded research and reduced film analysis to the repetition of fashionable slogans and unexamined assumptions.”15 Carroll was able to be uncompromising because he obtained a second doctoral degree, this time in philosophy, and migrated to that academic discipline, which welcomed his approach and ideas. Although official film studies strongly reacted against Carroll’s claims, Mystifying Movies spelled the beginning of the end for psycho-­ semiotics as the field’s official Theory. Although some of the assumptions of psycho-semiotics remain embedded in current theory,16 the program as such counts few adherents today, and film and media studies is far more diverse in its methods and approaches. Bordwell and Carroll joined forces for the 1996 edited collection, Post-­ Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, a book meant to mark a decisive intervention in the field. Both Bordwell and Carroll offer introductory chapters in which they detail their critiques of reigning theory and offer careful descriptions of how they believe theory ought to be practiced.17 Bordwell calls for “middle-level” (as opposed to doctrine-driven) research that recognizes the value of empirical findings while maintaining a theoretical grounding. Carroll argues that film theory ought to proceed dialectically, in relation to competing theories. Carroll calls for “piecemeal theorizing,” which asks and answers manageable questions. Carroll writes that as “compelling answers are developed to small-scale, delimited questions, we may be in a position to think about whether these answers can be unified in a more comprehensive theoretical framework.”18 Carroll also describes the proper stance toward empirical inquiry as “fallibilist.” 15  “Address to the Heathen,” October 23 (1983): 89–163; Mystifying Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 234. 16  See David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 3–36. 17  Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” and Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Theory: A Personal Assessment.” 18  “Prospects for Theory,” 58.

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As Carroll describes it, “The fallibilist agrees that he or she may have to revise his or her theories in light of future evidence or in response to the implications of later theoretical developments, because the fallibilist realizes that theories are at best well-justified and that well-justified theory may turn out to be false.”19 Both chapters should be required reading for anyone wanting to learn more about the cognitive approach and what it reacted against. The 1990s also saw the development of the institutional branches of cognitive theory, both an academic society and a journal that serve as rallying points for cognitive theorists. In 1996, Joseph D. Anderson had published his book The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory, which offered a theory of human interaction with films based in part on a combination of cognitive science and the perceptual psychology of J.J. Gibson.20 But Joseph and Barbara Anderson also saw the need for a society of like-minded scholars and, thus, formed the Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image in 1997. They organized its first meeting at the University of Kansas for a dozen or so scholars from the United States and Europe. Since that time, what eventually became The Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image has continued to grow, attracting members from film and media, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and other disciplines. For the past decade or so it has held lively annual conferences in cities such as Budapest, New York, Berlin, London, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Ithaca, New  York. The society also sponsors Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, providing a forum for the publication of cognitive research. The influence of the cognitive approach has a strong interdisciplinary appeal, and the publication of books by cognitive theorists is increasing both in number and in frequency of publication. Since 2014 (to choose a recent and arbitrary beginning point), several published monographs and edited collections demonstrate that the approach is flourishing.21 In addition to film, cognitive theorists are also examining television, video games, and other media.22

Grounding Tenets: Cognition and Naturalism What is “cognitive” about cognitive theory? It would be wise not to read too much into the name “cognitive.” The cognitive approach has also been called “rationalist,” “naturalistic,” and “experiential-empirical,” and those terms fit equally well (or badly). In the 1980s, just as the broader field of cognitive science modelled cognition on computer-like information processing, so did early cogni19  Ibid., 60. Bordwell also expresses a commitment to such fallibilism in his “A Case for Cognitivism,” where he writes that the approach he describes, like all theories, “could turn out to be wrongheaded and useless” (33). Such is work of theory-building. 20  (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996). 21  See Berliner 2017, Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2015, Fahlenbrach, Hven, Kiss and Willemsen, Nanicelli and Taberham, Nanicelli 2017, Perron and Schroter, Plantinga 2018, Sinnerbrink, Murray Smith 2017, and Vaage. 22  See Fahlenbrach, Nanicelli 2017, Perron and Schroter, and Vaage.

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tive film theory. Lately we have witnessed an increased attention to emotion and to the body. Cognitive theorists have turned to the senses, the body and body metaphors, moods, features of brains such as mirror neurons, and neurological activity as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs). This turn may be interpreted as threatening to eclipse an interest in (what is taken to be) cognition proper. We experience movies with our bodies, as we sway with the action, erupt in laughter, or feel that knot of suspense in our stomach. These sorts of observations about the bodily nature of our experience sometimes lead theorists to conclude that certain theories or accounts of films are “too cognitive.” How can the word “cognition,” with its suggestion of logic-like information processing, account for moods, emotions, and bodily experiences such as flinching, swaying, and weeping? Furthermore, “cognition” seems to imply conscious, selfdirected mental activity rather than the automatic and involuntary processing that dominates our bodily responses to the world, and to movies in particular. Once we understand what cognition is and how it is studied, however, these objections fail to apply. Cognition, simply put, is the mental activities of gaining knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses, plus the results of such activities—comprehension, intuition, insight, perception, emotion, and so on. Cognition is neither singular nor linear, with multiple cognitive processes occurring simultaneously and connected in complex ways. Neither is cognition necessarily either conscious or rational. Psychologists write of the ‘cognitive unconscious’ to differentiate it from the Freudian unconscious. Much of cognition occurs beneath consciousness, and is seemingly automatic rather than voluntary.23 Moreover, cognition is neutral with respect to practical rationality, just as emotion is; in themselves, cognition and emotion are neither rational nor irrational. The word “cognition” has two different senses that ought to be differentiated. Sometimes “cognition” is used to designate rational and deliberative mental processes, such as inference-making, hypothesis-testing, and, more generally, thinking. As such, cognition can in principle be separated from affects such as moods and emotions; it can be conceived of as a “cool” phenomenon. Increasingly, however, we are coming to understand that cognition itself is affected by emotions and moods, for example, and has a firm grounding in bodily experience. With this in mind, cognition “proper” is “hot.” Making sense of the world around us, we employ body metaphors, we gauge physiological feedback, and we are influenced by emotion. What we should say now is not that cognition is separate from affect, the unconscious, and bodily and automatic processes; rather, a full account of cognition encompasses them. Cognition itself is infused with emotion, embodied, and, in part, automatic. Perhaps when we refer to the purely computational aspects of cognition, we can call those aspects “cool” cognition.24  On automaticity and the cognitive unconscious, see Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 48–53.  For more on the issue of the nature of cognition, see Carl Plantinga, “Putting Cognition in its Place: Affect and the Experience of Film,” in Katherine Thomson-Jones, ed., Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 131–147. 23 24

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Early work in cognitive theory tended to focus on cool cognition. We should not be so foolish as to dismiss such work for this reason, however. Cognitive processes such as inference, memory, anticipation, and mental schemas are not going away. Even within a broader conception of embodied cognition, these processes must still play a vital role. Cool cognition must be considered alongside cognition more broadly considered, and in relation to various sorts of affective and embodied responses. In asking the question, how do viewers make sense of moving image media, we must appeal to a model of the spectator. What sorts of activities and responses do spectators perform and have when viewing, playing, or otherwise consuming a work of media? Cognitive theorists tend to assume that a work of media is something like what Bordwell calls an “experience kit.” In other words, a film or television program or video game is something like “a pattern of prompts and prods that encourages the spectator to elaborate on what is given.”25 Nothing about a media work determines spectator response, but the work promises various sorts of rewards, chief among them various pleasures, to encourage “cooperation.”26 The so-called naturalistic perspective of cognitive theory holds that, since they have been designed for human uptake, these prompts and prods do their work through both natural and conventional means.27 Films and other media communicate, express, and elicit mental activity and response by appealing to both conventional meaning and to common cognitive, perceptual, and emotional capacities. The understanding of James Bond movies, for example, depends in part on cultural associations that must be learned. The various vehicles driven by Bond—the Aston Martin DB5 or the BMW 750iL, for example—are signs of wealth, prestige, and “cool.” The same can be said for Bond’s lifestyle, including his expensive suits, gambling, martinis, and womanizing. All of these things have cultural associations that are arbitrary and conventional, and that can be recognized only by a viewer familiar with those associations. Thus, some of the skills and knowledge required to understand such films are culturally specific. As Bordwell writes, however, other aspects of comprehending films depend on much broader human capacities: “Any viewer can recognize humans, grasp spatial and temporal relations, detect purposeful human action, understand certain facial expressions, build expectations, and the like.”28 Recognizing the contents of realist images, for example, relies on everyday perceptual skills and capabilities that many humans (and some nonhuman animals) share. Paul Messaris draws on empirical evidence to argue that what distinguishes images from language and other modes of communication “is the fact that images  “The Part-Time Cognitivist,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 4, 2 (2010): 10.  For a comprehensive study of pleasure in relation to Hollywood film, see Berliner. For a discussion of the various pleasures afforded by narrative film, see Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 19–39. 27  See Murray Smith’s Film, Art, and the Third Culture for the most thorough exploration of “naturalized aesthetics.” 28  “The Part-Time Cognitivist,” 10. 25 26

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reproduce many of the informational cues that people make use of in their perception of physical and social reality.”29 This is why pigeons, dolphins, and even some species of spiders can recognize and identify various representations in photographs. This suggests that object recognition in both still and motion photography is largely an untutored capacity and extremely widespread in humans.30 Understanding narratives also relies on basic human skills in what Lisa Zunshine calls “mind-reading adaptations” or “theory of mind.” Making sense of narrative requires that we invest fictional characters with thoughts, intentions, desires, and emotions, and that we try to predict their actions.31 Psychologist Daniel Levin and his collaborators argue that visual narratives “draw heavily on the everyday skills necessary to understand the mental representations inside the heads of human agents.” These skills are both cognitive and perceptual, since, as they note, such theory of mind has a strong foundation “in visual experience.”32 Among basic theory of mind skills drawn upon in our comprehension of movies are gaze following and the estimation of the beliefs, desires, emotions, and intentions of others. Visual narratives can also draw upon more complex theory of mind skills as well, such as the identification of false beliefs and the deciphering of ambiguous cues. Perhaps it is for this reason that some promote engagement with narratives as an activity that can develop and hone various social skills.33 One must guard against the strict separation of media conventions and what Bordwell calls “contingent universals,” as though nature and convention never meet; they are actually permanent partners in human expression of any type. Most conventional techniques have their roots in basic human capacities. For example, devices such as the shot-reverse shot couplet, one standard means of joining shots in the continuity system, are neither wholly natural nor wholly arbitrary. Bordwell defines “contingent universals” as common human skills and characteristics that “are contingent because they did not, for any metaphysical reasons, have to be the way they are; and they are universal insofar as we can find them to be widely present in human societies.”34 Conventions like the shot-reverse shot structure, Bordwell writes, are “norm-bound practices 29  Paul Messaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 165. Also see Stephen Prince, “The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies,” in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 8th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 70–88. 30  See Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 46–58. 31  Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). For a more general, popular account, see Lisa Zunshine, Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 32  Daviel T. Levin, Alicia M. Hymel, and Lewis Baker, “Belief, Desire, Action, and Other Stuff: Theory of Mind in Movies,” in Shimamura, Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, 244. 33  See, for example, Brian Boyd, The Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge: Belnap Press, 2009), 45, 106. 34  “Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision,” in Bordwell and Carroll, 91.

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that coordinate social activities and direct action in order to achieve goals.”35 Such devices draw from various sorts of skills, some of which are contingently universal, some of which are culturally specific, and some of which are mixed. The upshot of this is that the cognitive approach is not wholly naturalistic, strictly speaking, but rather recognizes a complicated mix of nature and convention in all media expression.36 Cognitive theory may seem to downplay culturally specific conventions, but according to Bordwell, that stems from “the assumption that these rest on a foundation of capacities and skills that are transcultural, if not universal.” Divergence in spectator response, he claims, “seems to depend on a more fundamental convergence.”37 In other words, viewers may disagree about whether Skyler White is a moral heroine or an emasculating wife in Breaking Bad (2008–2013), but almost everyone sees her as a person with two legs and a head, as female, as a mother with two children, as having intentions and desires, as sometimes being extremely upset, as being married to Walter White, as living in a house, and so on. This raises the issue of normativity and interestingness. Some might say that the normative elements of film and media, especially for considerations of media as artistic expression, are among the least interesting. What is fascinating are the deviations from the norm, the outliers, the outrageous and imaginative and original. Gilberto Perez, for example, takes issue with Noël Carroll’s claim that theory is focused on the general. Carroll writes: Film theory speaks of the general case, whereas film interpretation deals with problematic or puzzling cases, or with the highly distinctive cases of cinematic masterworks. Film theory tracks the regularity and the norm, while film interpretation finds its natural calling in dealing with the deviation, with what violates the norm or with what exceeds it or what re-imagines it.38

Perez responds by saying that he doesn’t think that film theory “should be divided from film criticism or interpretation in this or any other way.” Neither does he affirm the idea that film theory deals with the norm rather than the deviation. It is the deviation from the norm, the problematic case, the ­exception to the rule, that “leads to the questioning of old theory and the formulation of the new.”39 Perez’s own work in The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium and elsewhere is a good illustration that melding theory, interpretation, and criticism can be a fruitful enterprise. It is important to remember, however, that in making his claim about theory and interpretation, Carroll’s target was a particular sort of film interpretation masquerading as theory. It applied “the Theory”  Ibid., 92.  For Bordwell’s perspective on these issues, see Poetics of Cinema, 30–32. 37  “The Part-Time Cognitivist,” 10. 38  “Prospects for Film Theory,” 43. 39  The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 21. 35 36

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something like “a philosopher’s stone,” transforming every film into an interpretation that simply illustrates the a priori theory.40 For Carroll, theory-­ building and interpretation are different sorts of activities, though they need not be wholly segregated in all cases. As to the claim that norms are uninteresting, this is, of course, a subjective opinion. It emerges from the assumption, often taken in relation to the arts, that originality and uniqueness are to be valued over the usual and conventional. It must first be noted that the interests of theory extend beyond the arts, narrowly considered. Theorists are also interested in media as communication, in media ethics and socio-politics, and so on. What is usual and conventional may have tremendous ethical and socio-political significance. Moreover, the search for norms can be quite fascinating. The project of discovering what is conventional in respect to long-form television dramas with “bad” protagonists, for example, strikes me as a vital and interesting research project. Moreover, as Perez himself states, what is original and unique in a work of media can only be defined as such in relation to norms. When we ask, in what way is this film or video game original, we can only measure originality in relation to norms. Contra Carroll, then, it may be the case that theory should take an interest not only in the general case but also in exceptions to the norm. Either way, the interest in norms is fundamental to all theory-building and can also be quite fascinating.

Narrative Comprehension Cognitive theory is interested in the ways spectators make sense of media, and thus in comprehension. The first forays into comprehension built on structuralist theories of narratologists like Seymour Chatman and Gérard Genette.41 The structuralist approach examined narrative as a form composed of functioning parts or elements. Thus, Genette, in Narrative Discourse, writes of order, duration, frequency, mood, and voice. Chatman writes of the distinction between story and discourse, of story events and story “existents,” and of covert versus overt narrators. A few years later, in Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell introduced an examination of the sorts of mental activities elicited by narrative forms—inferences, anticipations, gap-filling, and so on. This is what makes Bordwell’s pioneering work “cognitive” rather than structuralist—the attention to the spectator’s mental activities.42

 “Prospects for Film Theory,” 43.  See Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) and Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 42   Another influential work of cognitive narratology is Edward Branigan’s Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). In this chapter, I will focus on Bordwell’s work due to the status of this book in the history of cognitive theory, and because Bordwell is more strongly associated with the cognitive approach, the topic of this chapter. 40 41

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In Narration in the Fiction Film, Bordwell takes a constructivist approach to the spectator-film interaction. In other words, as a series of prods and prompts to spectator activity, the film text is heavily underdetermined. It calls on the spectator to engage in significant mental activity to fill in the gaps and to actually construct the story (or what Bordwell calls the fabula). As Bordwell writes, a film “cues the spectator to execute a definable variety of operations” (29). Thus, film viewing is conceived as a “dynamic psychological process” (32) that incorporates human perceptual capacities, the spectator’s prior knowledge and experience, and the material structure of the film. Bordwell also introduced the notion of the schema to film studies. In constructing the fabula, the spectator employs a range of schema, general criteria, or frames of reference that “direct perceptual activity through anticipations and hypotheses” (34). He writes that in the fiction film, “narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet [or discourse] and style interact in the course of cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula” (53). He then identifies and describes the major modes of narration and their characteristic means of cueing spectator activity: classical, art-cinema, historical-materialist, and parametric narration. Bordwell’s interest in “reverse engineering,” or in other words, starting from plausible or empirically verifiable viewer response and then looking for elements of the work that elicit that response, has been foundational in cognitive theory. His constructivism, on the other hand, has been somewhat controversial. Many philosophers have questioned Bordwell on this account, including Katherine Thomson-Jones, who questions Bordwell’s contention that “Meanings are not found but made.”43 Thomson-Jones writes that the fact that perception is an active, inferential process “does not mean that the objects of perception—namely, the things we see around us—are constructed.”44 The critic who thinks that meanings are found and not made can still reasonably contend that the search for meaning is an active mental process. One of the four tenets of cognitive theory listed at the beginning of this chapter is a commitment to inter- and intra-theoretical debate and criticism. Bordwell practices this on his own work, now finding fault with some aspects of his early constructivism. He writes that in Narration in the Fiction Film he posited a “too-sapient” viewer, and now is closer in some respects to J.J. Gibson and Joseph Anderson’s ecological approach, which holds that viewers interact with and respond to, rather than construct, what is given.45 In 1985, Noël Carroll also presented a theory of the power of movies that relies on cognition and the cognitive emotions such as curiosity and interest. Carroll claims that the special power of movies to elicit widespread and intense 43  David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3. 44  See Thomson-Jones’ “Formalism,” in Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, eds., The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 139. 45  “Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory?” “David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema” http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/commonsense.php. Accessed June 7, 2017.

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engagement stems from three factors; (1) their employment of moving images, (2) erotetic narration, and (3) variable framing. Let us examine each of these in turn. First, movies are accessible in part because they employ moving photographic images that require no special learning for basic uptake. The recognition of objects in cinematography is not something learned above and beyond the recognition of said objects in actuality. If I can recognize a kangaroo or a beer bottle outside of a movie theater, I can recognize one on the big screen. Thus, motion picture photography enables object recognition for mass untutored audiences. Second, movies employ what Carroll calls “erotetic” narration, a type of storytelling first described by Soviet filmmaker and theorist Vsevelod Pudovkin. Erotetic narration mimics everyday practical reasoning, in that scenes follow each other as answers follow questions. Scene A may elicit questions in the audience, such as “Why does Teresa look so troubled, and where is she going?” Scene B reveals where she is going, but Teresa’s increasingly troubled demeanor carries the first part of the question—why is she so troubled—through to the next scene. Thus the flow of the narrative directs the viewer’s mental activity by raising questions, partially answering them, raising new questions, and, in general, eliciting anticipation, curiosity, and hypothesis-making. Third, movies employ variable framing, or in other words, variations in camera distance, angle, focus, and so on. Thus, movies are able to promote heightened intelligibility by making relevant details salient. Do we need to know that Teresa is entering an old mansion on a rainy night? If so, we will get a long shot. If a subtle facial expression reveals Teresa’s mental state, the narration will show it, either through close-up or by a slow track in, for example. We should certainly add to variable framing, the use of sound. If Teresa is in danger in that haunted house, off-screen sound, such as a creaking door or rattling chains, will make that apparent. In fact, filmmakers have a host of varied techniques available to provide information and elicit response. Carroll claims that these three characteristics—moving photographs, erotetic narration, and variable framing—contribute to the special clarity of movies, making them accessible to “mass, untutored” audiences. This clarity, in turn, “is the basis of our intense response to and engagement with movies.”46 Movies are intense, in part, because they foster an impression of coherence far greater than that which we experience in actual life; they are “hyper-coherent.” It is important to note that Carroll specifically rejects the idea that these three factors are a complete account of the power of movies. But they are necessary components of any full account. Thus he allows room for later developments in cognitive theory that recognize the essential importance of affect and emotion.

46  Carroll initially introduced this theory in “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus (Fall 1985): 79–103. The essay is also reprinted in Theorizing the Moving Image. He later expanded on the theory in Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. This quotation is from Mystifying Movies, 211–212.

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Notice that for both Carroll and Bordwell, the experience of a film—the activities and responses that it cues—is in large part rooted in film form and style, in the ways that the film is structured at the level of narrative and in the intricate and particular means by which the narrative is presented through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound, and so on. No one has offered more to the study of narrative structure and stylistics than David Bordwell, followed closely by Kristin Thompson.47 Their project is to develop a “historical poetics” of the cinema, characterized by an interest in thematics (motifs, genre patterns, iconography, subject matter), narrative construction, and stylistics, within an historical framework that pays close attention to institutional developments and constraints within historical modes and conventions of filmmaking. The work of historical poetics is closely tied to cognitive theory, in that Bordwell is one of the key founders of the approach. Bordwell is interested primarily in the poetics of cinema (as opposed to its ethics or politics), and one important feature of film poetics is its study of the means by which film form cues spectator activity and response. The psychological aspect of this poetics has been thoroughly addressed by a major research project of Cornell University psychologist James Cutting and various associates. The research is multifaceted, though focused on classical film form as related to cognition.48 For example, many of the studies he conducted demonstrate Kristin Thompson’s contention (in Storytelling in the New Hollywood) that popular Hollywood movies evince an implicit four-act structure. Interestingly, however, he also finds that a prologue in popular movies is ubiquitous, something that film researchers have tended to miss. Moreover, the use of underscoring, that is, music that plays under the images and bathes scenes in mood and emotion, is not bound to the four-act structure but rather to the structure of the movie in its entirety. Other aspects of Cutting’s research deal with the timing of character introductions, character conversations, genre divergence, and scene change. This sort of research is important because it describes the means by which movies, one of the most powerful means of communication of our age, cue and prompt viewers’ mental activities and responses.

“Hot” Cognition and Embodiment Many film theorists, including cognitive theorists, are increasingly convinced that “cold” cognition is an incomplete picture of how viewers make sense of media. Recently, there has been a turn to the body and embodiment. The interest in “bodies” and “embodiment” is characteristic of various approaches 47  See Kristin Thompson’s Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) and Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). A list of Bordwell’s many books can be found here: http://www.davidbordwell.net/books/ 48  For an overview, see James Cutting, “Narrative Theory and the Dynamics of Popular Movies,” Pyschonomic Bulletin and Review 23 (2016): 1713–1743.

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to film theory, including phenomenology. But here I will focus on how cognitive theory discusses embodiment. (Affect and emotion are also essential components of the experience of media; this will be discussed further later.) The early focus on “cold” cognition modelled cognition on the computer. Human cognition, however, occurs in a biological body. While phenomenological film theory sometimes seems content to discuss the media experience in terms of sensation and perception, cognitive theory is keen to relate embodiment—including sensation and perception—to cognition. In other words, how does the fact that the spectator is embodied contribute not only to the sensorial, affective, and perceptual experience of media; how does all of that contribute to cognition? It is cognition, after all, by which the spectator comprehends, interprets, categorizes, evaluates, and remembers interactions with media. Although we now believe that cognition is “hot” and thoroughly integrated with the body, any attempt to disregard cognition will distort the nature of the viewer’s experience.49 Cognitive theorists agree that studies of the experience of the spectator in relation to media must take the body into account. Aside from affect and emotion, then, cognitive theory has approached the bodily nature of film viewing in at least these four important ways, all of which are briefly described in what follows: (1) sensuous communication and multi-modality, (2) audiovisual and embodied metaphors, (3) neurology, and (4) eye tracking. This list is certainly not exhaustive but represents major directions of research. First, the moving images media are sensuous media, in that they communicate through visual images and sounds that are picked up by the human senses and subject to complex perceptual and cognitive processes. In Moving Viewers, Carl Plantinga contends that critics ought to avoid talk of “reading” films, because that downplays some fundamental differences between written linguistic discourse and the audiovisual discourse of the moving image. It also downplays the “pre-rational elements of spectatorship, in other words, responses [and activities] that are to some extent automatic, pre-reflective body responses, rather than the intentional and interpretive cognitions of the conscious mind.”50 Spectator responses to images, sounds, movements, colors, textures, and editing are largely preflective and, in part, automatic bodily responses. Yet they have significant implications for cognition. Joseph Anderson stresses that spectators perceive “multi-modally,” and search for patterns of meaning that “bridge modalities.”51 Charles Forceville suggests that film relies at minimum on these six modes of expression: visuals, spoken language, written language,

49  See Plantinga, “Putting Cognition in its Place.” Bordwell forcefully defends his interest in narrative comprehension in his Poetics of Cinema, 93–94. 50  Moving Viewers, 112. For an account of the sensuous elements of filmic expression, see Chapter 4 of Moving Viewers, “The Sensual Medium,” 112–139. 51  The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), 86.

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sound, music, and gestures.52 Media-makers may combine expressions in these modalities to create a gestalt with cross-modal fittingness, or “synesthetic affect,”53 and/or contrasting elements that are disharmonious and incongruous. Second, cognitive theorists examine the bodily nature of cognition through an interest in audiovisual, embodied metaphors. The roots of this interest are in conceptual metaphor theory, in which metaphors are seen not merely as linguistic tropes, but as conceptual tools with which humans make sense of the world. According to cognitive linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, cognition is fundamentally dependent on the metaphors we use to make sense of the world. These metaphors are heavily dependent on human bodily experience, form the schematic roots of language, and are seen by many media theorists as concretely instantiated in film.54 Visual metaphors come in many varieties, and I have no space to identify the typologies. One example Charles Forceville provides is from the scene in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) where Major Kong “rides” the atomic bomb downwards, toward his final destruction, as though it were a rodeo horse. In the use of metaphor, the source domain (here, rodeo horse) is compared to the target domain (atomic bomb) to express something about the target. The expression here can be construed in a variety of ways; perhaps Kubrick is commenting on American machismo in relation to militarism. A third way that cognitive theory recognizes the body is through neuroscientific studies of film and media. Various cognitive theorists have addressed the possible importance of mirror neurons in relation to media spectatorship.55 Perhaps no cognitive theorist discusses the embodied brain more thoroughly than Torben Grodal, whose later work regularly incorporates reference to the brain and brain processes, including not only mirror neurons and mimicry but also, for example, the parasympathetic and autonomic nervous system, and neurotransmitters such as adrenaline and dopamine.56 Neuroscientists have also turned their attention to film, with Princeton researcher Uri Hasson iden-

52  “Visual and Multimodal Metaphors in Film: Charting the Field,” in Kathrin Fahlenbrach, ed., Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 116. 53  Moving Viewers, 156–166. 54  See Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imaginatio, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Human Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Most prominent proponents of conceptual metaphor theory in cognitive theory would include Torben Grodal, Kathrin Fahlenbrach, and Charles Forceville. See, for example, Grodal 1997 and 2009; Karthrin Fahlenbrach 2016, and also her Audiovisuelle Metaphern. Zur Körper- und Affektästhetik in Film und Fernsehen (Marburg: Shüren, 2010); Charles Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisis, eds. Multimodal Metaphor (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009). 55  See, for example, Plantinga 2009, 123–125. 56  See Grodal 2009.

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tifying this research program as “neurocinematics.”57 With fMRI machines, neurocinematics traces human brain activity while viewing film scenes. Other brain researchers have developed approaches that combine affective neuroscience with film studies.58 And Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guera have made a strong case for the study of what they call “embodied simulation” in relation to film viewing.59 Fourth, cognitive theory relates embodiment to cognition through eye tracking, which has become an important research program. Eye tracking is the measurement of the movement of a viewer’s eyes in relation to a visual array; the measurement of eye movements in relation to the moving image typically occurs with a viewer seated before a computer or film screen. Eye tracking reveals that the viewer is active in processing a rapid flow of audiovisual information. Eye movements provide information about visual processing and about the spectator’s attention over the duration of a scene or film. Thus, eye tracking relates the physical body of the viewer to the viewer’s cognition.60 This interest in the body and in embodied cognition is subject to an important caveat. The term “embodied cognition” is redundant, because all cognition is embodied. That is, all human thinking, “making sense of,” anticipating, inference-making, calculating, and theorizing occur within the human body. Thus, to call higher-order cognition—that is, cognition that is not clearly grounded in embodied metaphors or in basic bodily experience—“disembodied cognition” would be a misleading error. Conversely, however, the focus on “embodied” cognition risks minimizing or even dismissing higher cognition that is not so clearly grounded in basic bodily processes. Humans have shown a remarkable capacity for abstract thought, extending their minds to mathematical and intricate theoretical problems that touch on the deepest problems in the universe and intricate phenomena such as quantum mechanics and relativity. To assume that all cognition must be immediately relatable to material bodily existence threatens to tie human cognition to a procrustean bed. In my opinion, contemporary media theory underemphasizes cognition generally (in favor of the body), so this new and important focus on the relationship of the body to cognition may lead us to falsely denigrate forms of cognition that are less easily relatable to the body. The fact that cognition occurs in bodies is a truism; it does not and should not imply that the only important forms of ­cognition are those most easily identified as emerging from fundamental bodily existence.

57  Uri Hasson et al., “Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 2, 1 (Summer 2008), 1–26. 58  See Gal Raz, Boaz Hagin, and Talma Hendler, “E-Motion Pictures of the Brain: Recursive Paths Between Affective Neuroscience and Film Studies,” in Shimamura, Psychocinematics, 285–313. 59  Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies,” Cinema 3 (2012), 183–210. 60  For an overview, see Tim J. Smith, op cit.

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Character Engagement, Sympathy, and Empathy It is widely thought that in relation to screen stories, that is, to stories presented audiovisually on screens of various sorts, viewer response to represented characters is one of the fundamental components of the spectator’s experience. Murray Smith has provided a cognitive account of the contours of that experience that has provided a template for much of the subsequent discussion of what we call “character engagement.”61 Smith identifies three components of such engagement: recognition, alignment, and allegiance. We should not take it for granted that we take certain of the images and sounds projected onto the screen as person-like. This in itself is a fascinating psychological phenomenon (110–141). The basic processes of recognition are at work in any film with fictional characters, and the prototypical classical film “quickly makes the central characters salient and legible” (125). Filmmakers can toy with those processes in interesting ways. Luis Bunuel, for example, casts two different actresses to play one of the central roles, alternates the two performers, and “provides no motivation whatsoever to explain the discontinuity” (131). Alignment, unlike recognition and allegiance, is strictly a function of the film and not of viewer response. When viewing a film, spectators are aligned with characters through “spatiotemporal attachment” and/or “subjective access.” Attachment refers to the way the narration follows one or more characters through the course of the film. The film attaches the viewer to a character to the degree that it literally uses the camera to show us (or sound to allow us to hear) the character. The narration may provide attachment to one major character or may disperse itself among several as in network narratives such as The Rules of the Game (1939) or Crash (2004). The second aspect of alignment—subjective access—refers to the knowledge spectators are given of the character’s mental state. It is provided through voice-over narration, subjective point of view shots, extended close-ups, and a host of other techniques. Attachment shows what characters do, while access reveals what they think and feel. Allegiance, the third aspect of Smith’s account of character engagement, is the “pro” attitude the spectator develops toward a character when the character gains the spectator’s moral approval. While alignment is structured into the film, allegiance is a spectator response. As such, it can be encouraged and elicited, but nothing guarantees success. According to Smith, allegiance is rooted in the spectator’s evaluation of the moral traits of the character. A central tenet of Smith’s theory is that alignment and allegiance, while often working together, are not necessarily coupled. We may be aligned with characters for whom we have little or no allegiance, as in Peeping Tom (1960) or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). One could also argue that this mismatch of 61  Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Cambridge: Clarendon Press, 1995). Further references to this book will be made parenthetically within the text.

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alignment and allegiance is characteristic of many of the recent long-form television dramas that feature “bad” protagonists, such as The Sopranos (1999–2007) and Breaking Bad (2008–2013). The most interesting issues in this regard have to do with the moral psychology of fiction. Murray Smith has written about the possibility of “morally perverse allegiances,” arguing that in cases where spectators do form allegiances with morally perverse characters, such characters are typically judged as less perverse than a spectrum of characters surrounding them. In other words, filmmakers can often elicit alliances with bad protagonists if they people the fiction with characters who are judged to be even worse.62 Carl Plantinga has questioned whether moral judgment is the sole factor in the development of allegiances with fictional character; he goes so far as to suggest that viewers may confuse or mistake moral and nonmoral judgment, accepting a character as good on the basis of glamor, vivacity, associations with physical beauty, and so on.63 Or alternatively, some spectators may fail to form allegiances with certain protagonists due to racism, a phenomenon Dan Flory considers in relation to “imaginative resistance,” whereby spectators fail or refuse to imagine what is stipulated by the text. In this case, a refusal to develop an allegiance with a character may be related to such resistance.64 Finally, in her recent book on anti-heroes in American television, Margarethe Bruun Vaage discusses the moral psychology of long-form television series with “bad” protagonists, with interesting discussions of the phenomenon of allegiances for immoral characters.65 The nature and implications of empathy for fictional characters are also major concerns of cognitive theory. In part, this is because empathy is often thought to have moral and political benefits; empathetic reactions to characters in screen stories are thought to enlarge our circle of concern, as we vicariously experience what it might be like to be someone else. Thus, empathy in fictions might be thought to cultivate tolerance and work against tribalism. Most theorists affirm the heuristic value of a distinction between sympathy as “feeling for” a character and empathy as “feeling with.” Thus I can sympathize with a character when I have concern for her, even when I do not share any of her emotions. Empathy, on the other hand, requires at least some shared affect. Amy Coplan defines empathy as a cognitive and affective process with three necessary features: affective matching, other-oriented perspective taking, and self-other differentiation. Affective matching, she claims, occurs when the 62  Murray Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, eds., Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 217–238. 63  Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 193–210. 64  “Race and Imaginative Resistance in James Cameron’s Avatar,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 7, 2 (Winter 2013), 41–63. 65  Vaage, op cit.

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observer’s affective states “are qualitatively identical” to that of the target character, although the affective states may differ in degree of strength of those affective states.66 This affirmation of the identity, or at least strong similarities, between the experience of a spectator and a favored protagonist is at the heart of Torben Grodal’s “PECMA flow” (perception, emotion, cognition, and motor action) theory of spectator experience. For Grodal, the experience of a visual narrative is something like a flight simulator for a pilot in training. As the narrative unfolds, the spectator experiences this “simulation” through the subjectivity of a character or characters. In other words, we understand the unfolding of the narrative from a first-person perspective, in the skin, so to speak, of a protagonist or other character. Thus, there would be an enormous importance to empathy and embodied simulation in Grodal’s theory. It is important to note that for Grodal, such simulation cannot be the entire story. There must be, he writes, “a decoupled understanding and intuitive modeling of other minds.”67 Some doubt that the distinction between sympathy and empathy plays out in our actual mental lives,68 and that typically when we sympathize with a character, we also share at least some elements of their affective state. Thus the distinction between sympathy and empathy may be conceptually useful, even if in practice it does not bear up. Others such as Noël Carroll argue that the qualitative identity of affect between viewer and character is rare, if not impossible, given the nature of the viewing situation. The viewer experiences the narrative and its characters from the perspective of an observer. Carroll claims that in standard cases of film and television viewing, we do not take on the emotions of the characters. In fact, we cannot have qualitatively or quantitatively identical emotions to those of any character, because of a fundamentally asymmetrical relationship between character and narrative situation on the one hand, and the viewer and narrative on the other. The character, for example, runs through the forest in an attempt to escape the axe murderer. The viewer, on the other hand, watches a film in which a character runs to escape the murderer. The viewer is twice removed from the character’s situation. First, she watches a film; second, she watches someone other than herself in the film. The character, on the other hand, watches nobody but is fleeing for her life. It seems unlikely that the viewer and character could have a qualitatively identical experience.69 Thus, Carroll and others assume that we standardly have sympathy for characters, but that empathy, defined as an identity of shared emotions, is rare.

66  Amy Coplan, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects,” in A. Coplan and P. Goldie, eds., Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 6. 67  Grodal 2009, 187. 68  See, for example, Plantinga 2009, 31–33. 69  See Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 259–261; also Plantinga 2016, 140–145.

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Emotion, Affect, and Mood The study of the means by which media elicit affect has become an essential component of cognitive theory. Affect is a vital feature of the experience of media, an essential element of the “making sense of” a work of media that characterizes cognition, and directly related to important questions about aesthetics, ethics, and socio-politics. It would help first to define our terms. Emotions can be thought of as “concern-based construals,” or in other words, as construals or appraisals of a situation as it relates to our concerns. Suppose that you are watching Titanic and see the passenger ship sinking, many of its passengers apparently drowning in the cold North Atlantic Ocean. You may feel fear and/or sadness because you perceive that their lives are in danger (or that many of them are doomed), your concern being for their survival.70 Suppose that a lifeboat makes its way toward one of the characters. You may become hopeful and feel suspense because you perceive that the character has a chance of being saved, but is rapidly losing strength and may perish before the boat arrives. Emotions are accompanied by feelings, tendencies toward action, and various felt physiological disturbances. Moods differ from emotions in various regards. It is often said that moods have causes and not reasons. I may be in a sad mood for no particular reason; generally we say that sadness, as an emotion, should have a reason. For example, I am sad because so many people lost their lives in the cold North Atlantic when the Titanic sank. Both moods and emotions should be distinguished from reflex responses and other baseline bodily affects such as indigestion, a clammy feeling in the hands, pain, and so on. The word “affect” can be misleading because, like “cognition,” it has two distinct senses. First, affect can refer to all of it—emotions, moods, felt physiological disturbances, and so on. But affect is sometimes used in opposition to emotion; where emotions are thought to have a strong cognitive component, and to express both a construal and a concern, affects are primarily noncognitive. All of these distinctions have been subject to discussion and debate, but it is probably best to leave this for another occasion.71 Emotions that are experienced by media consumers come in various sorts. In relation to screen narrative, global emotions such as suspense and interest span significant portions of the running time of a narrative, while local emotions such as startle and disgust occur in brief bursts. Direct emotions such as anticipation and suspense take as their object the narrative content as it unfolds, while sympathetic emotions such as compassion and admiration are responses to the characters of the narrative. Meta-emotions such as shame or disdain take  See Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 54–56. This conception of the nature of emotion is derived from Robert Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 71  For synoptic discussions of affect in moving image media, see Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art, 245–290; Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 147–191; Grodal, Moving Pictures; Plantinga, Moving Viewers; Plantinga and Smith; and Tan 1996. For a chapter-length summary of cognitive research on affect, see Plantinga, “The Affective Power of Movies.” 70

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as their object the spectator’s own responses, or those of other spectators. And artifact emotions are responses to the film as a constructed artifact, while fiction emotions are responses to the fictional world and its contents.72 All affect plays a vital role not merely in the pleasurable experience of the media but also in directing subsequent cognition. Emotions have a kind of searchlight function; once they are elicited, the spectator will anticipate and search out stimuli that correspond to the construal and concern of that particular emotion. If our fear is that characters may drown, we search the scene for lifeboats, floating objects, or anything else directed by the fear and ways to meet its concern—that the characters survive. Thus, emotions become a kind of gestalt, guiding the spectator’s mental processes during the unfolding of the narrative. Moods also play a vital role in the experience of media. Cognitive theorist Greg M.  Smith’s “mood cue” approach argues that “the primary emotive effect of film is to create mood.”73 To prepare viewers for the elicitation of brief and intense emotions, filmmakers create an orienting affective state that predisposes viewers to experience particular emotions. Smith also foregrounds the importance of stylistic cues in the creation of mood. The discussion of mood in relation to audiovisual narrative is somewhat tricky, however. Emotions like suspense and anticipation are often long-lasting, like moods, and can play a similar role in gestalting experience and predisposing viewers to notice and respond to specific stimuli. Also important to remember is that the moods that people have are not equivalent to the moods that screen stories have. The mood of a narrative film is its affective character, its “tone” or “feel” that arises from an amalgam of elements such as sound, music, lighting, character appearance, movement, and so on.74 The mood or affective character of a visual narrative can have marked influence on the experience of the viewer, by directing thought and predisposing the viewer to certain moods and emotions.75 Both moods and emotions figure into the pleasure, or delight, that motivates viewers to watch narrative films and television.76

Questions and New Directions What is the point of cognitive theory of the moving image? Why engage with this research program? Researchers have different goals and interests, of course. Film and the other media are important forms of art and communication and play an enormous role in the making of contemporary culture. One motivation to study the media is simply to understand them better. When Noël Carroll  Plantinga, “The Affective Power of Movies,” 96.  Smith, Film Structure and the Emotion System, 42. 74  Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories, 175–190. 75  For more on mood in film and art, see Noël Carroll, Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 301–328; also see Robert Sinnerbrink, “Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood,” Screen 53, 2 (2012): 148–163. 76  See Berliner, op cit. 72 73

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calls for “piecemeal theorizing,” he also writes that once researchers find answers to “small-scale, delimited questions,” they may eventually “be in a position to think about whether these answers can be unified in a more comprehensive theoretical framework.”77 Much of the time, cognitive theory is pursued disinterestedly, but with the hope that the research can be united with other research in the future and contribute to a broader project. For David Bordwell, the overarching project is a poetics of cinema, for which an understanding of the relationship of form to viewers’ mental activities is just one aspect. His poetics is interested in the art of cinema and in film form and style. Bordwellian poetics is not merely formalist, however, but asks how films came to have the forms and styles they have (history and culture) and how they work in relation to spectator psychology and artistic convention. It would be fair to say, then, that cognitive theory has progressed primarily, up to this point, in relation to these two domains: the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and cinema poetics. There is nothing inherent in cognitive theory, however, that limits it to these domains, as important as they are. Cognitive theorists are increasingly turning their attention to the ways in which cognitive theory can help us understand the ethical and socio-political implications of the moving image media. Philosophers have long been interested in art and ethics, and thus is it unsurprising that philosophers associated with cognitive theory have led the way in identifying the implications of cognitive theory for ethics. Noel Carroll’s philosophy and criticism, for example, consistently examines the relationship between film, ethics, politics, and ideology. For example, Carroll demonstrates that moral emotions can be marshalled in narrative films to alter the perspective of viewers on entire classes of people. He shows this in analyses of the elicitation of moral emotions in Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia (1994).78 Cynthia Freeland has argued that cognitive theory is better suited to assist feminist analysis and criticism than is psychoanalysis.79 Robert Sinnerbrink argues that the kind of experience granted by some films is subject to ethical evaluation, and finds that the cognitive approach (among others) assists us in determining the contours of that experience.80 Daniel Flory has long been interested in the relationship of character engagement and the elicitation of emotions to issues of race and racism.81 Cognitive scholars from the discipline of film and media studies are beginning to show more interest in ethical and socio-political issues as well. Margarethe Bruun Vaage carefully parses the moral psychology of “bad” protagonists in her The Anti-Hero in American Television; Carl Plantinga ­  Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” op cit., 58.  “Moral Change: Fiction, Film, and Family,” in Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey, eds., Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice, and Spectatorship (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 43–56. 79  “Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films,” in Bordwell and Carroll, 195–218. 80  Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 81  Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 77 78

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argues for the development of an ethics of narrative film and television rooted in the rhetorical power of emotion in his Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement; Dirk Eitzen and Stephen Prince examine the representation and ethics of violence on screens; Jane Stadler examines the ethical implications of empathy in film viewing.82 These are just a few examples, with apologies in advance to the many I have missed. The point is that although poetics has been a primary focus of cognitive theory, an interest in ethics and socio-politics has been a constant and is growing in importance. Cognitive theory began with the cinema, but it will not end there. We are also beginning to see increasing attention to television and video games, which will no doubt continue.83 Philosopher Berys Gaut has provided a good introduction to issues having to do with the interactivity that digital media brings to the media interface.84 Eventually, cognitive theory will likely move into the realm of social media and the Internet. The cognitive approach to moving image media is rapidly becoming too large and diverse to properly summarize. This chapter has identified some of its major tenets, interests, and debates.

Bibliography Anderson, Joseph. 1996. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Berliner, Todd. 2017. Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1989a. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Cinema. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1989b. A Case for Cognitivism. Iris 9: 11–41. ———. 1996a. Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 3–36. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1996b. Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 87–107. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2006. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. 82  Vaage, op cit.; Plantinga, op cit.; Stephen Prince, Screening Violence (Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Dirk Eitzen, “Cultural Effects of Cinematic Violence: Private Ryan and The Dark Knight,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 7, 1 (Summer 2013), 3–24; Dirk Eitzen, “Effects of Entertaining Violence: A Critical Overview of the General Aggression Model,” in Ted Nanicelli and Paul Taberham, eds., Cognitive Media Theory, 158–176; Jane Stadler, Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2008). 83  See Vaage, op cit., Perron and Schroter, op cit., and Nanicelli, Appreciating the Art of Television. 84  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224–243.

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———. 2008. Poetics of Cinema. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2009. Cognitive Theory. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 356–367. London/New York: Routledge. ———. Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory? David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema. http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/commonsense.php. Accessed 7 June 2017. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New  York: Columbia University Press. Boyd, Brian. 2009. The Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Belnap Press. Branigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension in Film. New  York/London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1983. Address to the Heathen. October 23: 89–163. ———. 1985. The Power of Movies. Daedalus Fall: 79–103. ———. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996a. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 37–68. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1998. A Philosophy of Mass Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2003. Engaging the Moving Image. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2010. Art in Three Dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1980. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Coëgnarts, Maarten, and Peter Kravanja, eds. 2015. Embodied Cognition and Cinema. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Coplan, Amy. 2011. Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. A.  Coplan and P.  Goldie. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Cognitivism. In A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam, 105–122. Malden: Blackwell. Cutting, James. 2016. Narrative Theory and the Dynamics of Popular Movies. Pyschonomic Bulletin and Review 23: 1713–1743. Accessed 2 June 2017. https:// doi.org/10.3758/s13423-016-1051-4. Eitzen, Dirk. 2013. Cultural Effects of Cinematic Violence: Saving Private Ryan and The Dark Knight. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 7 (1, Summer): 3–24. ———. 2014. Effects of Entertaining Violence: A Critical Overview of the General Aggression Model. In Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted Nanicelli and Paul Taberham, 158–176. New York/London: Routledge. Fahlenbrach, Kathrin. 2010. Audiovisuelle Metaphern. Zur Körper- und Affectästhetik in Film und Fernsehen. Marburg: Schüren.

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———, ed. 2016. Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games. New York/ London: Routledge. Flory, Dan. 2008. Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. ———. 2013. Race and Imaginative Resistance in James Cameron’s Avatar. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 7 (2, Winter): 41–63. Forceville, Charles. 2009. Eduardo Urios-Aparisi, eds. Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ———. 2016. Visual and Multimodal Metaphor in Film. In Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches, ed. Kathrin Fahlenbrach, 17–32. New York/London: Routledge. Freeland, Cynthia. 1996. Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 195–218. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Genette, Gérard. 1983. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grodal, Torben. 1997. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hasson, Uri, et al. 2008. Neurocinematics: The Neuroscience of Film. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 2: 1–26. Hven, Steffen. 2017. Cinema and Narrative Complexity: Embodying the Fabula. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kiss, Miklós, and Steven Willemsen. 2017. Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books. Levin, Daniel T., Alicia M. Hymel, and Lewis Baker. 2013. Belief, Desire, Action, and Other Stuff: Theory of Mind in Movies. In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura, 244–266. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Messaris, Paul. 1994. Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality. Boulder: Westview Press. Nanicelli, Ted. 2012. A Philosophy of the Screenplay. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective. New York/ London: Routledge. Nanicelli, Ted, and Paul Taberham, eds. 2014. Cognitive Media Theory. New  York/ London: Routledge. Perkins, V.F. 1972. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York: Penguin. Perron, Bernard, and Felix Schroter. 2016. Video Games and the Mind: Essays on Cognition, Affect, and Emotion. New York: McFarland. Plantinga, Carl. 1997. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2002. Cognitive Film Theory: An Insider’s Appraisal. Cinémas 12 (2, Winter): 15–38. ———. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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———. 2013. The Affective Power of Movies. In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura, 94–111. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. Putting Cognition in its Place: Affect and the Experience of Narrative Film. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 131–147. New York/London: Routledge. ———. 2018. Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement. New York: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, Carl, and Greg M. Smith, eds. 1999. Passionate Views: Films, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Prince, Stephen. 2000. Screening Violence. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2016. The Discourse of Pictures: Iconicity and Film Studies. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introduction Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 8th ed., 70–88. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raz, Gal, Boaz Hagin, and Talma Hendler. 2013. E-Motion Pictures of the Brain: Recursive Paths Between Affective Neuroscience and Film Studies. In Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P.  Shimamura, 285–313. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roberts, Robert C. 2003. The Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodowick, D.N. 2007. An Elegy for Theory. October 122: 91–109. ———. 2015. An Elegy for Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Shimamura, Arthur P., ed. 2013. Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2012. Stimmung: Exploring the Aesthetics of Mood. Screen 53 (2): 148–163. ———. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. London/ New York: Routledge. Smith, Greg M. 2003. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1999. Gangsters, Cannibals, and Aesthetes: or Apparently Perverse Allegiances. In Passionate Views: Films, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, 217–238. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2017. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Tim. 2013. Watching You Watch Movies: Using Eye Tracking to Inform Film Theory. In Psychocinematics, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura, 165–191. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stadler, Jane. 2008. Pulling Focus: Intersubjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics. New York: Continuum. Tan, Ed S. 1996. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Thomson-Jones, Katherine. 2009. Formalism. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 131–141. London/New York: Routledge. Turvey, Malcolm. 2007. Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Response to D.N. Rodowick’s ‘An Elegy for Theory’. October 122: 110–120.

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———. 2015. Review of An Elegy for Theory, by D.N.  Rodowick. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 9 (1, Summer): 96–103. Vaage, Margrethe Bruun. 2016. The Antihero in American Television. New  York/ London: Routledge. Zunshine, Lisa. 2006. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. ———. 2012. Getting Inside Your Head: What Cognitive Science Can Tell Us About Popular Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

CHAPTER 18

Aesthetic Criticism Andrew Klevan

The etymology of the word ‘criticism’ points towards an evaluative practice. The word is derived from the ancient word krínoˉ, ‘to judge’, and krités, ‘a judge’ or ‘juryman’.1 The word ‘critic’—kritikos—is then derived from krités.2 Over time, however, ‘criticism’ has become capacious, referring to all manner of commentary and study of texts, and consequently, what constitutes criticism is contested.3 One outcome of the expansion is that the evaluative dimension is no longer central and is in many cases non-existent. ‘Criticism’ includes, for example, scholarship, philology, contextual/cultural study, historicism, and critical theory. The word ‘criticism’ is probably now too encompassing and does not helpfully designate. The evaluative dimension would be less likely to be lost in the broad church if the other approaches referenced by the term went by their more specific and accurate names. As this is often not the case though, it would perhaps be helpful if the wing of criticism concerned with making claims for value is labelled ‘evaluative criticism’. Evaluative criticism would properly refer to any criticism that wishes to make, and substantiate, claims for value, and therefore includes some variants of ideological criticism, moral criticism, and cultural criticism. In the contribution to this anthology, I concentrate on aesthetic criticism: the branch of criticism that prioritises the evaluation of form and style. This is  René Wellek, ‘Literary Criticism’, In What Is Criticism?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 298. 2  Judy Pearsall, ed., The New Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 3  See Philip Smallwood, Reconstructing Criticism: Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press and Associated University Presses, 2003), for a lengthy and detailed discussion of this contestation. 1

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partly because other areas of evaluative concern are more likely to be dealt with from within the other domains of film and philosophical study. It is also because the principles and processes of criticism, and the philosophy of criticism—the philosophical field which analyses criticism—have tended to be formulated and developed in relation to aesthetic criticism.4 Although its differences from all these other disciplines, evaluative and non-evaluative, are distinct enough to constitute a particular identity, aesthetic criticism does not operate in a void: it draws on their material and insight, and it sometimes overlaps. Aesthetic criticism is the practical wing of evaluative aesthetics.5 Evaluative aesthetics came to fruition in the eighteenth century and most profoundly in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment.6 It concerns the philosophical study of artistic judgement and value, and more particularly the evaluative experience of a work’s form and style. It is important not to fall prey to a popular misconception that aesthetics is equivalent to formalism: an adherence to form at the expense of content. Nor is it equivalent to aestheticism if this is understood as an exaggerated devotion to beautiful forms, once again at the expense of content. Aesthetics does not discount or demean moral, political, emotional, cognitive, or conceptual content. It is important, and often essential, to an aesthetic evaluation, but the engagement will be with the value of its expression through the form of the work. This contrasts with those occasions where, for example, ideological, contextual, or conceptual content, even if it relates to formal or presentational matters, is the primary concern and the basis of the evaluation. The visual presentation of a feature, perhaps a character, might be worth congratulating as an instance of progressive politics even though the character (and the film) is of limited aesthetic value. Equally, not all values relating to the visual, aural, and sensory, the features ostensibly underpinning aesthetic interest, are automatically of aesthetic value. Something may be visually, aurally, and sensually of value to some of us at some time for some reason—pornography would be an extreme example—and be of little aesthetic value. Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that evaluation is ‘a complex process…of sampling, discriminating, classifying, comparing, assessing and selecting that constitute the ongoing activities of responsive creatures in their interactions

4  Despite the capaciousness and contestation, I sometimes refer to aesthetic criticism as simply ‘criticism’. This is because the philosophers and critics I cite often use the one word, and also because some of the matters discussed are also relevant to other forms of criticism (especially other branches of evaluative criticism). 5  This chapter repeats work from my book Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (2018), primarily from Part II entitled ‘What Is Aesthetic Criticism?’ Much of the chapter is not film specific because the characteristics of (aesthetic) criticism outlined are applicable to other arts and artefacts as well as film. Indeed, a main intention is to emphasise transferable aspects because my experience is that film studies is largely unfamiliar with the philosophy of aesthetic criticism. Explicit crossover is, and has been, rare although some of its concerns and insights have made their way into film criticism (or they have been discovered independently). 6  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987 [1790]).

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with their environment’.7 At the outset, it is worth clarifying a common misconception about evaluation in criticism. Although judgements are being made when one evaluates, and judgement is traditionally synonymous with evaluation in aesthetics (e.g. Kant’s Critique of Judgment), evaluation is more than making a judgement, and is usefully distinguished from it. Although the judgements of legal judges can be lengthy and involved, judgement may imply finality of decision and verdict rather than a complex process. Aesthetic film criticism, unlike much film reviewing, is not primarily interested in pronouncing discrete judgements nor would it wish merely to praise or find fault. Judgements made without careful evaluation may have worth, but as criticism, they are unlikely to be useful because they fail to elaborate sufficiently. F.E. Sparshott conceives criticism as qualitative not quantitative such that the interest is in the manner of the excellence—as distinct from simply the degree of excellence—that is to say not only in ‘how good a thing is’, but ‘how it is good’.8 Despite sharing an evaluative dimension with criticism, reviewing involves a limited number of words and viewings (often just one), and this disallows involved argumentation supported by close analysis of form. Equally, the reader of a review is often looking for tips about whether to see the film, not looking for interesting ways to regard the film having already seen it. For many commentators, the value of a work, abstractly conceived, is not the important concern of aesthetic criticism. The main aim, perhaps the fundamental aim, is to appreciate the work and encourage others to appreciate it. Stein Haugom Olsen sees appreciation as not something one might casually adopt but, more fundamentally, as a ‘mode of apprehension’ that starts with an expectation of value and proceeds as a ‘structured perception of value’.9 The belief is that paying the work the right sort of attention, something that may require training and experience, will be worthwhile, and lead to a valuable experience.10 Harold Osborne talks about criticism leading to ‘the stimulation and improvement of…appreciation’; criticism ‘stands or falls by its profitableness as an ancillary to direct appreciation’.11 Thinking in terms of people is helpful when understanding appreciation: saying that Andrew appreciates Vivienne is different to saying that he likes or even loves her. Appreciating her would mean that he takes proper account of her, understands her, and perceives her qualities. Appreciation is not equivalent to pleasure or enjoyment because Andrew could enjoy Vivienne’s company and take pleasure in it without properly 7  Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Cultural Evaluation’, in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford Art Online), ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), accessed April 19, 2017, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0200 8  F.E. Sparshott, The Concept of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 118. 9  Stein H. Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 137; Stein H.  Olsen, ‘Appreciation’, in Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford Art Online), ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), accessed March 30, 2017, http://www. oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0027 10  Olsen, ‘Appreciation’. 11  Harold Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism (New York: Philosophical Library, 1955), 21, 23.

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a­ ppreciating her. For Sparshott, criticism enables an ‘enlightened and instructed enjoyment’ where the enjoyment of a work is caused not simply by the phenomena, but by an ‘abstractive and appreciative skill’ that is ‘brought to bear’ upon the phenomena.12 For Noël Carroll, worthwhile criticism should aid appreciation by removing the ‘obstacles’ that may be restricting our view, and illuminating what is valuable in the work.13 Although appreciation often presents an admiring view of a work, it need not: appreciation may also carry the sense of taking sufficient account of the work rather than valuing it highly (as in appreciating a problem). Nevertheless, the seventeenth-century critic Joseph Addison believes that criticism should emphasise ‘Excellencies’ rather than ‘Imperfections’.14 This is true of most evaluative criticism which intends to reveal ‘excellences’, and only briefly acknowledges, and often downplays, ‘imperfections’. The work or aspects of it are accepted as good, and then the criticism explains ‘how it is good’. It provides a beneficent, qualitative profile of the work. * * * I am going to highlight ten important aspects that characterise aesthetic criticism. The first aspect is understanding. In order to evaluate soundly, aesthetic criticism endeavours to understand and interpret a work. What is the work’s point and purpose? What does it all mean? What is at stake? How do its different elements come together to make sense? Why is it designed as it is? Sometimes criticism will show understanding (and appreciation) implicitly through describing a film in a particular manner. At other times, criticism will be explicitly explanatory. It might, for example, explain an obscurity, a perplexity, a complication, a contradiction, or anything it considers mistakable. In addition to the difficult or cryptic, it might explain the apparently insignificant or simple, or anything it considers overlooked. It might also expound on something meaningful, a world view, a tonal demeanour, or anything it considers would benefit from elaboration. Sometimes global understanding is required, for example, disentangling, or grasping, a plot, discerning an overarching theme or a directorial vision, recognising a pattern of imagery or camera perspective, or making sense of a character; and sometimes local understanding is required, for example, about shots, location, continuity, or a character’s gestures (and if recondite, cultural or historical knowledge may be required). Global and local understandings dynamically inform each other. These understandings intend to show that the film is intelligible and significant perhaps in ways we may not have realised.  Sparshott, The Concept of Criticism, 113.  Noël Carroll, On Criticism (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 45. 14  Gary Day, Literary Criticism: A New History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 199. 12 13

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Understanding a work, important though it is to aesthetic criticism, is not equivalent to evaluation or appreciation.15 I may for practical or professional reasons wish to understand how my computer works, and this need not involve any appreciation of my computer (or its workings). It might be argued that artworks in particular invite and require an appreciative point of view rather than a functional understanding. Someone, however, may wish to write and read a type of scholarship about artworks that provides knowledge and understanding without evaluation or appreciation. Quite a lot of contemporary writing on the arts, especially within the academy, appears to be more comfortable with, for example, explaining the strategies or interpreting meaning than with evaluation. Merely explaining is not evaluating (although explanation may be helpful in situating or orientating an evaluation). Accounts of meaning (and other explanatory forms), without explicitly evaluating, may implicitly infer value, as will the ‘high interpretive yield’ of films of merit.16 Some canonised works such as Vertigo are now rarely challenged— although this was not the case on its release—and are like ‘inspired sacred text[s]’: they are assumed to be special and are mined for further, or more nuanced, meanings.17 Nevertheless, even beyond canonised works, meaning can easily become the central or only concern and, if the work is receiving an evaluative treatment, ‘the criterion of value’ (my emphasis).18 The first problem is that emphasis on meaning may occlude the recognition and analysis of aesthetic qualities, ‘the qualitative aspects of works of art’, such as ‘inventiveness’, subtlety, vibrancy, or eloquence.19 Many films of merit, while not meaningless, do not have substantial, complex, or profound meaning, nor do they express great truth or wisdom, for example, some musicals and comedies, and yet they are full of qualities and achievements (of timing, of pace, of rhythm, of performance, of presence, of energy, of interaction, and of visual and aural arrangement). Similarly, Susan Sontag argues—in an essay entitled ‘Against Interpretation’—that the emphasis on meaning eclipses affective merits, those that are sensuous or textural.20 She laments the obsessive search for meanings, polemically claiming that ‘to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world— in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings”’.21 Secondly, an interpretation  Olsen, ‘Appreciation’.  Walter Hinderer, ‘Literary Value Judgments and Value Cognition’, in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 54; Richard Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism (Elementa 29) (Amsterdam, K&N, Kindle Edition, 1984). 17  Graham Hough, An Essay on Criticism (London: Duckworth & Company, 1966), 1970. 18  Roger Seamon, ‘Criticism’, in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (Second Edition), eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic M. Lopes (London and New York, Routledge, 2005), 412. 19  Seamon, ‘Criticism’, 412. 20  Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 2009 [1961]). 21  Sontag, Against Interpretation, 7. There is now a strand in contemporary film studies, broadly labelled Affect Theory, which pays attention to sensation, the sensuous, and the textural in film (and Sontag’s essay is a prototypical example of it). Affect scholars believe that sensory qualities have been overlooked or disregarded. Instead, film studies has concentrated on, for example, signification (the meaning of elements), or narrative (the way the story is structured), or classifications 15 16

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or understanding of a work by itself does not necessarily explain its value. Thirdly, straightforward translating or decoding can ride roughshod over the aesthetic experience by simplifying the precise ways meaning operates in the scheme of a work. Stanley Cavell discusses the persistent use of double entendre in the film Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks US 1938), writing: While an explicit discussion, anyway an open recognition, of the film’s obsessive sexual references is indispensable to saying what I find the film to be about, I am…reluctant to make it very explicit…It is part of the force of this work that we shall not know how far to press its references…If it is undeniable that we are invited by these events to read them as sexual allegory, it is equally undeniable that what [Katharine] Hepburn says, as she opens the box and looks inside, is true: “It’s just an old bone.” Clearly George [the dog] agrees with her. The play between the literal and the allegorical determines the course of this narrative, and provides us with contradicting directions in our experience of it.22

For Cavell, an ‘explicit’ articulation or transcription would be unfaithful to the suspension and latency, or embedded condition of the meanings, which distinguishes the film, and his experience of it. Fourthly, the meanings of works can be too severely condensed or abridged in accounts, while nevertheless still being treated as germane, and this can lead to simplification, to the disregard or the misrepresentation of merits, and to inadequate foundations for further assessment. In the film Camille (George Cukor, 1936, US), there is a moment when Marguerite Gautier, a courtesan, played by Greta Garbo, is slapped by the Baron de Varville (Henry Daniell), and this triggers a series of facial transformations. There are approximately 15 seconds from the beginning of a close­up, immediately after the slap, to a fade-out to black. In this short space of time, she seems to express: a proud, frozen defence; shock kept in check by a steely comportment; astonishment; anger, indignation, and perhaps inhibited resentment; some hurt (to her feelings, to her body); relief, a gathering of the self, and resolve; and finally some pleasure in anticipation (of her separation from the Baron). There is a movement of meaning as each expression folds into the next.23 One could summarise the 15 seconds, for example, as being about the economic, physical, and emotional abuse of a woman (which it is also ‘about’), but this summary would not capture the finessed range of meanings achieved by the performer, or the particular form it takes: the way her response to the abuse is characterised, hence the way the abuse, and the consequences of (genre, periods, movements), or sociology (the cultural, historical, political contexts). Even when the concentration was on form and style, it was characterised by too much distance and was too cognitive. Affective, sensory, and pre-cognitive dimensions, and the value that arises from them, have been insufficiently embraced. According to affect scholars, some films make particularly productive use of film’s affective, sensory, and pre-cognitive dimensions. 22  Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 116–118. 23  Andrew Klevan, ‘Living Meaning: The Fluency of Film Performance’, in Theorizing Film Acting, ed. Aaron Taylor (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 34–35.

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it, are illuminated. Meaning is a vital component of many works, therefore, but aesthetic criticism is concerned with the way it is presented—its embodiment, tone, demeanour, density, prominence, gradation, dissemination, and local transformation—and the consequent merits. A second important characteristic of aesthetic criticism is its desire to provide an evaluative perception of the work’s presentation. There is often a revelatory component: the work is revealed so that its merits (or demerits) can be recognised. In general, it aims to awaken perception, drawing attention to aspects of the work; it clarifies, articulates, or enhances something we were partly or latently aware of, or brings us to see something new. It is interested in the missed, or dismissed.24 Arnold Isenberg considers ‘critical communication’ to be a special type of communication where critics want us to incorporate their perception.25 This critical communication depends not on accepting a truth or belief about the work, even if we do, but coming to perceive it for ourselves. The communication is an expression of an aesthetic experience, and the critic encourages us to acquire that experience.26 John Casey likens this critical communication to the psychoanalytical procedure where the patient should not automatically accept the psychoanalyst’s reading, but must undergo a ‘complex change in vision’.27 Healing will depend on the patient internalising, not on acquiescing, or obeying. The patient, like the reader of criticism, needs to experience a gradual rearrangement of the data. A third characteristic of aesthetic criticism is its reliance on experience. Aesthetic criticism is underpinned by the actual encounter between the critic and the work. Contrasting this to alternative disciplines is useful. Historical or other forms of contextual study illuminate the work by returning it to its origins. The primary relationship is between, for example, the film and its original context, whether that be place, culture, politics, institutions, or people. The individual’s aesthetic experience of the work—in the present—is downplayed and sometimes repudiated. Theoretical study illuminates the work by placing it within generalised systems and structures, abstracting it, and this too tends to detach it from the individual’s aesthetic experience. By contrast, aesthetic criticism is experiential all along the line: it recognises that artworks often express or embody experiences, and are often based on an appeal to experience; it is responsive to the experience as the work is encountered, and it intends, ultimately, to contribute to the reader’s experience of the work. It is mindful that the experience of the work may be beneficially modified by repeat viewings, by 24  Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press, 2005), 7–12; Andrew Klevan, ‘Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Criticism’, in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, eds. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 25  Arnold Isenberg, Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, eds. William Callaghan, Leigh Cauman, Carl Hempel, Sidney Morgenbesser, Mary Mothersill, Ernest Nagel, and Theodore Norman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 156–71. 26  Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 376–7. 27  John Casey, The Language of Criticism (London: Methuen, 2011 [1966]), 22–3, 34.

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new evidence, by other works, by experiences of life, by taking account of the experiences of other people, and by knowledge of a range of contexts (historical, theoretical, cultural, political, social). However, these potentially informing and illuminating contexts will not determine the perspective from which the work is viewed (or evaluated). Robin Wood contrasts the theorist with the critic: ‘The theorist erects systems, the critic explores works. For the theorist, questions of value will be determined by reference to a previously elaborated system; for the critic, a sense of value arises from placing this experience beside that experience in an endless and flexible empiricism’.28 Consequently, aesthetic criticism foregrounds those aspects of the work, discovered as the work is apprehended, that remain overlooked or reduced by relatively removed vantage points. Graham Fuller offers the analogy of attraction between human beings where there is an individuated reality that enveloping explanations find hard to capture. He argues that criticism is interested in this ‘individuated’ and ‘irreducible’ realm.29 Aesthetic criticism is specifically interested in the quality of the experience. For Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘aesthetic criticism…seeks to grasp and expose features of the work that either enhance or diminish the work’s power to give… an experience that is desirable on account of its character’.30 One valuable aspect of Beardsley’s account of experience is that it is tightly bound to the aesthetic qualities of the work, particularly its unities, intensities, and complexities.31 It is not simply about a viewer being affected by something. It does not give licence to measure the accomplishments of a work in terms of emotional reactions or feelings. They might be good indicators of some types of value, for example, personal value, affective value, or entertainment value, but not necessarily the aesthetic value of the work.32 Alan Goldman argues that aesthetic criticism will evaluate the form of the work for its capacities to ‘engage’ the faculties and to ‘challenge’ them.33 (He understands ‘challenge’ in the broadest sense to mean invite and stimulate, not 28  Robin Wood, Personal Views: Explorations in Film [Revised Edition] (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 17–18. Criticism would not simply apply a theory a priori, that is to say, in advance of the experience. However, it understands that some aspects of particular films may be revealed by theory, for example, Marxist or Freudian theory. This may be because the critic understands a film to be operating in the same or similar territory to the theory. Moreover, once the link to the theory has been made, it remains to be ascertained whether the relation is aesthetically meritorious or not. 29  Graham Fuller and Terry Eagleton, ‘The Question of Value: A Discussion’, New Left Review, I/142 (1983), 83. 30  Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Name and Nature of Criticism’, in What is Criticism?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 155. 31  Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981 [1958]), 527–9. 32  Personal, affective, and entertainment value, however, may also be, and often are, desirable outcomes of aesthetic value. 33  Alan H.  Goldman, ‘Evaluating Art’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).

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only confront or place demands.) According to Goldman, works of aesthetic merit engage on many levels: perceptually, cognitively, imaginatively, emotionally, and affectively.34 Goldman’s account generously includes all these modes of engagement and does not artificially prioritise. Works of high merit will engage and challenge all the faculties. Goldman considers that works that appeal too strongly to one of the faculties will often be inferior. In addition to failing to challenge the faculties sufficiently, they will be ‘one-dimensional’ and may prompt a limited response.35 Goldman’s account is flexible and responsive, but the quality and quantity of the engagement are not the only way evaluations are determined. Although a direct experience of the work will always be required for aesthetic criticism, many judgements concerning artistry—creative, genetic and functional aspects—such as the execution of a work, the techniques of performance, the relationship to artistic tradition, and originality of generic variation can be made in what Bohdan Dziemidok calls a ‘cool’ manner.36 The character of the response will be intellectual and relatively distanced. The two modes are difficult to disentangle because an understanding of artistry, for example, the techniques of performance, is partly based on the experiences they have elicited over time. Even if the immediate response is ‘cool’, the evaluation may still indirectly be drawing on, and appealing to, preceding experiential engagement.37 Nevertheless, it is useful to recognise the distinction. Furthermore, in aesthetic criticism, any reference to the experience will need to be supported by a detailed account of the workings of the work in order to justify the experience and allow it to be shared. The reporting of an experience through affective words—the work is ‘powerful’, ‘memorable’, ‘arresting’—and merely matching them to an instance in the work will not provide a secure or helpful evaluation. The fourth characteristic of aesthetic criticism is its responsiveness to particularity. Aesthetic criticism respects the singularity of the work (even if that leads to an antagonistic evaluation). Helen Vendler claims that the ‘aim of a properly aesthetic criticism’ is to describe ‘the art work in such a way’—its manner, temperament, and texture—such ‘that it cannot be confused with any other art work’ and never to ‘conflate’.38 John M. Ellis thinks that a work of merit will be ‘demanding’ in the sense of necessitating ‘respect for [its] unique emphasis and individuality’, and criticism should let the work ‘speak for itself, through close attention to its emphases’.39 According to David Fuller, literary  Goldman, ‘Evaluating Art’, 101.  Goldman, ‘evaluating Art’, 106. 36  Bohdan Dziemidok, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Evaluation’, in Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe Beardsley, ed. John Fisher (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 57. 37  Dziemidok, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Evaluation’, 64. 38  Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 2. 39  John M. Ellis, ‘The Logic of the Question “What is Criticism?”’, in What is Criticism?, ed. Paul Hernadi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), 24–25. 34 35

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critic William Empson avoids ‘any desire to trace a theoretical argument’ for fear that it might ‘smooth out the particular and local’ detail that only adherence to specific example will respect.40 F.R. Leavis, a major literary critic of the twentieth century, in addition to writing criticism, wrote penetratingly about the practice of criticism. He insists upon showing sensitivity for the irreducibility of the work, and warns about ‘abstracting improperly’.41 Michael Bell, making a link to the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger, considers Leavis’ approach to be phenomenological, concentrating on the detailed description of an experience that is specific, present, and active.42 Leavis continually emphasises ‘direct apprehension’: the critic is concerned with the work in front of him.43 His approach to criticism also joins hands with the philosophy of his contemporary Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein condemned the craving for generality in philosophy, arguing for the particular case and recognising that all elements—for example, words— were occasion sensitive. The meaning or effect of a word or thing shifts depending on the context—the particular sentence, speaker, and situation—in which it appears. The same principle applies to an image, a gesture, a cut, or a camera movement within a film. They are not equivalent to images, gestures, cuts, and camera movements in other films. This is why the critic needs to be phenomenologically responsive to the particular case. According to Leavis, the critic senses the significance of the work and then ‘it must be a matter, first of sensitive response, then of a delicate balancing of one suggestion or intimation against another until the whole, in one’s sense of it, has settled into the right inclusive poise’.44 George Steiner, in reference to Leavis’ work, describes this as ‘poised vulnerability’ where the critic should be ‘close’ and ‘stringent’, and ‘provisional’, always ‘susceptible to revaluation’.45 Leavis thinks that the critic should not simply consider the work, but ‘feel into’ it and ‘become’, taking the work as close to oneself as possible in order to ‘realize a complex experience’.46 ‘Realise’ was one of Leavis’ central terms, and it is multifaceted. The work should be successfully realised by its author so that its purposes and elements are fulfilled, brought to fruition. At the same time, the reader would need to realise this. By ‘realise’ Leavis is referring not only to a realisation of what the work is about or what is at stake in it but to a ­responsiveness that consummates. He talks of realising as sensitively and concretely as possible that which claims the attention. Evaluating would be implicit 40  David Fuller, ‘William Empson: from verbal analysis to cultural criticism’, in Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 156. 41  F.R. Leavis, F.R., The Common Pursuit (London: Hogarth, 1984 [1952]), 213. 42  Michael Bell, F.R. Leavis (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 35. 43  Bell, F.R. Leavis, 16. 44  Quoted in Bell, F.R. Leavis, 121. 45  George Steiner, ‘F.R. Leavis’, in 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London and New York: Longman, 1995 [1962]), 622–3. 46  Leavis, The Common Pursuit, 212–3.

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in the realising because as the critic’s relationship to the work develops, she asks questions such as ‘How does this stand in relation to…?’ and ‘How relatively important does it seem?’47 Because aesthetic criticism is responsive to the particularities of a work, description is one of its most important tools. Therefore, description is the fifth characteristic of aesthetic criticism. For Roger Scruton ‘aesthetic description is an immovable part of critical practice’ because without it judgements of value are ‘presumptuous’, emptied of content, and ineffectually isolated even if correct.48 The description is required because the reader needs to either undergo the experience for herself or credibly imagine someone undergoing the experience that has prompted the evaluation.49 Description is rarely a straightforward task, and it is especially challenging for film criticism because film is visual, aural, and moving. Film is also made up of many artistic forms: it is a narrative art (like novels); a musical art (like music); a dramatic and performative art (like theatre); a recording art (like photography); a framed and compositional art (like painting); a plastic art (like sculpture); and a condensed, contiguous art (like poetry). All of these forms demand specific descriptive requirements, and they frequently overlap. Aesthetic description also has many intentions. It aims to be accurate so as to reflect the work faithfully, evidence any claims, and make clear distinctions and discriminations (e.g. ‘the camera appears not simply to move, or even start moving, but to set off ’). It may aim to be telling, persuasively cementing a particular point of view. It may aim to be dramatic, reflecting the drama of the work: its emphases, pace, suspense, or tonal address. It may aim to be evocative and affective to reveal qualities, make their presence felt, and show how familiar figures and forms, perhaps a lateral panning movement, are distinctly characterised in a particular context (e.g. ‘the camera’s movement exhibits an ease, and a confident intent; the camera elegantly goes its own way, gliding past the nearby facades of the buildings, carried buoyantly by the music’). In addition, by using an associated set of descriptive terms, the critic can show how various features relate and reflect upon each other. At its best, description in criticism can convey the unified variations of the world of the work through deploying closely related vocabulary and exploiting the malleability of individual words (i.e. their capacity to shift meaning and effect according to context). Analysis, another important tool of aesthetic criticism, is related to description. A rough distinction would be that description tends to refer to how a work appears: its external, surface features; its qualities, tone, and mood; and its general character. Analysis tends to refer to how parts fit, and work, together, how features relate to structure and overall design. However, they overlap and inform each other: description already contains analysis, and it is partly used to convey analytical findings accurately and vividly. Analysis is often presumed to  Leavis, The Common Pursuit, 213.  Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 372–3. 49  Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, 372. 47 48

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be more secure and objective than description, which is more impressionistic and personal, whereas, as many scientists will testify, analysing is no less prone to subjectivity, preference, and bias than a description.50 Both may be more or less accurate, helpful, or penetrating when evaluating a work. I have seen marking criteria in schools and universities that (ostensibly) punish ‘description’ and reward ‘analysis’, whereas both are essential to aesthetic criticism, and can be executed well or less well.51 Nevertheless, what is sensibly discouraged is indiscriminate and unstructured description that is neither purposeful nor revealing. Functional or informational description that merely conveys features of the film—for example, points about plot or character behaviour—can substitute for description that improves or adjusts perception. This is encouraged by the fair assumption that the film may be unfamiliar to the reader of the essay or absent at the time of reading, but it can result, especially in work by students new to film study, in extended passages of obvious exposition. Ideally, the aspiration would be to achieve both at once so that perfunctory necessities are contained within revealing description. A related, but less recognised, pitfall of description is that in the understandable need to make things explicit and clear for the reader, the less definite or defined qualities of a work, for example, the indirect or implied, are lost. Aesthetic criticism has to take care that in highlighting and foregrounding in order to reveal, it does not distort significant variations in presence. The combination of describing and analysing the form and style of a work attentively, often moment by moment, is known as ‘close reading’. This is the sixth characteristic of aesthetic criticism. The practice of close reading for aesthetic criticism aims to adjust perception and bring to light the previously unseen (or unheard), explain inner workings, refine interpretations, justify and evidence evaluative claims, and deepen the experience. Proponents of literary close reading (1930s–1950s) reacted against what they understood to be an old-fashioned and amateur form of loose, impressionistic appreciation in Literary Studies. This amateurism was characterised by comments on the plot and character, references to ‘artistic touches’, and expressions of personal enthusiasms and moralistic prejudices.52 They, instead, argue for a forensic attention to the detail of the work. The work must be properly scrutinised. Rather than gliding over the surface of the work, close reading takes us inside its workings and inside the creativity, and this privileged position allows more to be perceived. Close reading specifies and articulates the precision of placement and conjunction. It is for those people who want to give a work pro50  David Daiches, ‘Literary Evaluation’, in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P. Strelka, (University Park & London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 167. 51  Contemporary ideological assumptions and prejudices probably influence this pedagogy. In different times and places, description, often referred to as ekphrasis, was regarded as a valuable skill requiring formal training. 52  William Logan, ‘Forward into the Past: Reading the New Critics’, in Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, ed. Garrick Davis (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2008), xi–xii.

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longed attention—dwelling on it; returning to it; and allowing the imagination, intellect, and emotions to work on it—so as to permit different qualities or aspects to emerge. It discourages premature understanding and judgement. It happens on different occasions and not commonly at one single sitting. Close reading should prevent paraphrase in critical accounts—the literary New Critics famously railed against the ‘heresy of paraphrase’—which inadequately summarises the content of the work and does not attend sensitively enough to its formal configuration. This disembodiment results in not only a simplification of the work but probably (perhaps necessarily) a distortion of it, and more worryingly an incorrect or inappropriate evaluation. Film evaluation is especially prone to paraphrase as shown by the ubiquity of the shrunken discourse of promotion, reviewing, and popular dissemination, and the form of this discourse can seep into more extended considerations. V.F.  Perkins writes that ‘attention must be paid to the whole content of shot, sequence and film…The extent to which a movie rewards this complete attention is an index of its achievement’ (my emphasis).53 This is why close reading is essential to aesthetic criticism because it endeavours to reflect and transcribe this ‘complete attention’ in order to articulate the film’s merit. Looking beyond the individual work is also a part of aesthetic criticism, and one aspect of this is the use of comparison (the seventh characteristic). Comparison is often implicit within discriminatory activity, and it draws upon cumulative experience. Awareness increases as films are viewed over time: the critic becomes more knowledgeable about variations within similar instances and about possibilities in the art form. Wayne Booth believes that ascertaining value in artworks is similar to ascertaining value in persons: ‘by experiencing them in an immeasurably rich context of others that are both like and unlike them’.54 The evaluative process is unavoidably comparative even when comparisons are not consciously being made, and is set against ‘a backdrop of [a] long personal history of untraceably complex experiences’.55 Comparison may also be more explicit as the critic highlights relative strengths and weaknesses of one work by situating it in relation to another. Kendall Walton believes we often evaluate works by comparing them within categories to see whether they are standard examples or interesting variations.56 Knowing the history of an art form allows the distinctive to be distinguished from the conventional. Features that were once original or radical deviations are now, with repetition, considered clichés. This will have evaluative ramifications unavailable to an immediate perception that lacked that knowledge. For E.H.  Gombrich, many critical terms, for example, original, experimental, clichéd, or derivative, require his V.F. Perkins, Film as Film (London: Penguin, 1991 [1972]), 79.  Wayne C.  Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1988), 70. 55  Booth, The Company We Keep, 71. 56  Kendall L. Walton, ‘Categories of Art’, in Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 [essay first published 1970]), 198–9. 53 54

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torical judgement.57 They are made against a background of knowing the traditions of the art form, and they involve an understanding that creative personnel operate within those histories, making aesthetic choices, or moves, within them. Recognising achievement is the eighth characteristic. An important part of evaluations is the recognition that the artwork has taken work, and is worked; it has been made, and made well, or not so well. Aesthetic criticism recognises that certain things may be achieved, or not, in the work, and sometimes this achievement will be dependent on the skills of the makers. (Part of being skilful will depend on learning a craft, and films involve great craft at every stage of the process.) It responds to how skilfully it considers a film has been executed, recognising, for example, that a difficult line of dialogue is delivered convincingly or fluently, a familiar situation is dramatised without collapsing into cliché, a sentiment is conveyed without tipping over into sentimentality, or a group of figures is arranged in the frame so that the composition does not look incongruously stilted. Some things are harder to achieve than other things, and the recognition of this, perhaps implicit, becomes part of the assessment. Patrick Doorly, drawing on the work of Gombrich, is eager to understand the history of fine art as high-quality endeavour where artists seek excellence. When an artist paints a face, she is not simply copying a face, before her or from memory, but creating a face by adapting, for her own present purposes, conventions, forms, schemes, and techniques learnt from other painters. The artistic tradition is one of accumulated experiences of how best, through an improvement in skills and a process of trial and error, to execute and achieve.58 Leavis believes that the critic should not only attend and react to ‘the completed work’, but respond to a sense of the author’s creativity and choices, to ‘the implied activity of [the work’s] composition’.59 He goes further to suggest that the critic will need to identify with ‘the impulse’ to make the work.60 It should be kept in mind that Leavis is specifically referring to literature with a single author. His suggestion has wider applicability, however, because he is suggesting that the critic identify not only with the personality of this author, implied or otherwise, or with their thematic preoccupations, but with the intentional process being enacted in the form of the work. The creative personnel will ‘struggle…to bring the material to a focus’ and this struggle is ‘re-­ enacted in every fully responsive’ engagement.61 This is suggestive because in film studies identification by a viewer is often thought to be predominantly with characters, or the stars, that play them. Yet, the identification can also be with the filmmaking (primarily the directing, but also with any other creative aspect—the screenwriting, the cinematography, or the performing). This is 57  E.H. Gombrich, ‘A Historical Hypothesis’, in History as a Tool in Critical Interpretation, eds. Thomas F. Rugh and Erin R. Silva (Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1978). 58  Patrick Doorly, The Truth about Art: Reclaiming Quality (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, 2013). 59  Bell, F.R. Leavis, 47. 60  Bell, F.R. Leavis, 47. 61  Bell, F.R. Leavis, 87.

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especially forceful in works that have a distinctive authorial style where the mark of the filmmaking can be a prevailing presence for viewer and critic. Trying to ascertain and assess the intentions of creative personnel has been a perennial challenge for criticism. Sometimes their actions can be observed directly, as with a performer, and sometimes they must be inferred, as with a director or screenwriter. Learning about what the filmmakers intended from interviews or commentaries can help the critic understand the work, and appreciate it better. Criticism uses whatever information will usefully contribute to a fair and reasoned evaluation. However, the statements of the creative personnel cannot be the authority. Not all creative personnel will give helpful or accurate accounts—after all, they have chosen to express themselves through the work and in a different medium—and some may mislead. Even if the information provided by the makers is accurate, an intention is not the same as an achievement within the work, because intentions may be unfulfilled or may lead to unintended consequences. In addition, it might be a problem for the work if, for its appreciation, there is too great a requirement to inquire elsewhere. The work may be solipsistic, failing to make its features intrinsically expressive to a satisfactory degree. It is therefore worth separating what a filmmaker does or means from what a film does or means—something that Beardsley frequently emphasised—and this is why criticism often refers to ‘the film doing, or meaning, or achieving this or that’ as if it were the intending agent.62 The film may achieve things that were not explicitly intended, and perhaps not intended at all. A director may intend a limited effect and end up unwittingly and unexpectedly achieving something multifaceted; equally, he may intend profundity and only achieve portentousness. A performer may wish to be powerful and rousing, and only end up being loud and tiresome. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Richard Wollheim talks of ‘fulfilled intentions’.63 Even if the intentions have been ‘fulfilled’, however, they may be anything from limited to abhorrent and thereby result in a negative evaluation. Leavis understood the critic as ‘someone able to respond fully to the author’s premises without being gulled by them’.64 A film may exhibit purposive, and praiseworthy, ‘patterns of intention’ that its makers deny.65 In the way that analysts (or friends) may better discern our intentions from the way we appear or behave, so too attentive viewers and critics may better discern intentions from the appearance and behaviour of the work. Critics often glean an intelligible and credible perspective hitherto unde62  See especially William K.  Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe C.  Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946): 468–88. Another advantage of this locution is that a film is the symbiotic result of many significant personnel, and disentangling attribution is often difficult and unnecessary when making an evaluative claim. 63  Quoted in Graham McFee, Artistic Judgement: A Framework for Philosophical Aesthetics (Heidelberg, London and New York: Springer, 2011), 93. 64  Bell, F.R. Leavis, 114. 65  Casey, The Language of Criticism, 149.

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clared. A negative appraisal often points out unintended consequences, while the appreciative side of criticism—the predominant version of aesthetic criticism—may provide an account of a work that is different from that claimed for it originally or later (by makers or by other critics). This is sometimes because it is seeking to provide an account of a work where it comes off best. Different people, at different times, will draw out different, and equally legitimate, aspects. The ninth characteristic of aesthetic criticism is the discernment of aesthetic qualities. Carroll believes that engaging in the ‘qualitative dimensions of the world at large’, including artworks, is a major part of the aesthetic experience, and that ‘a great deal of our attention to artworks is devoted to detecting their characteristic’ qualities.66 The famous aesthetic quality is beauty, but there are hundreds of other possible qualities. Beardsley divides them up into what he calls ‘formal qualities’ such as balance, unity, or tension and ‘regional qualities’, which are akin to characteristics applicable to humans, such as vivacity, serenity, subtlety, and gloominess.67 Individual elements, single parts, might have ‘local qualities’, often homogenous, such as darkness or green, but regional qualities cannot be found in individual parts because they result from combination.68 Qualities may also be divided up into broad ‘verdictive’ qualities, that is umbrella merit and demerit terms, such as good and bad, or beautiful, and into more precise ‘substantive’ qualities such as unified, balanced, integrated, lifeless, serene, sombre, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate, moving, trite, sentimental, or tragic.69 These are the exact adjectives used by Frank Sibley, the most cited and respected writer on aesthetic qualities.70 Sibley’s concepts are not only limited to adjectives but include critical ascriptions such as ‘telling contrast’, ‘sets up a tension’, ‘conveys a sense of’, or ‘holds it together’.71 Many qualities are explicitly evaluative. Some of them appear to be non-­ evaluative, and merely descriptive, such as sad. However, the implication in using sad to describe a work might be that the manifestation of this emotional quality is a merit. Sometimes a description is used misleadingly as a merit, especially when the quality happens to be favoured: praising a film for being ‘joyful’, or ‘dark’, or ‘dissonant’ does not alone reveal aesthetic value. Some descriptive attributions, stillness, for example, may indicate merit or demerit (tranquillity or inertness). Banality would be usually considered a demerit ­quality. Yet, many great pop songs have banal lyrics that are transformed by 66  Noël Carroll. Philosophy of Art: a contemporary introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 189, 199. 67  Beardsley, Aesthetics, 82–88. 68  Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 401–2. 69  ‘Verdictive’ and ‘substantive’ are terms used by Nick Zangwill, ‘Aesthetic Judgment’, in Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, accessed April 19, 2017, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ aesthetic-judgment/ 70  Frank Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, in Approach to Aesthetics, eds. John Bensen, Betty Redfern and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006 [1962]), 1. 71  Sibley, ‘Aesthetic Concepts’, 1.

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musicality and performance so that the banal component appears not merely something to overlook but embrace. It is arguable that the film Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986, US) conjoins banality with qualities of sincerity, conviction, and earnestness to create unsettling tensions. The reply might be that the film uses banality only as a means to an end and, as a whole, it is not banal— ‘banal’ is being used here descriptively, rather than evaluatively, about a feature of the film—but this is not necessarily an easy distinction to draw. An example using graceful and graceless is more clear-cut: gracefulness will often be a merit-­ inducing quality, but in some films, one that wishes to be raw or uncomfortable perhaps, it may detract. What is required is gracelessness. Alternatively, someone might claim a female character to be a merit in a film because she has ‘grace’ or her behaviour is ‘graceful’, and although this may be a merit in certain cases, it is not automatically so because gracefulness is also a clichéd or stereotypical mode of female characterisation and presentation.72 Aesthetic criticism values a work’s qualitative dimension and the formal underpinnings of that dimension. The recognition of a quality can be the route into examining and analysing how the film achieves it. The information on the Criterion DVD case for Secret Sunshine (Chang-dong Lee, 2007, South Korea) attributes to the film a ‘supple’ quality, and this, chiming with my own experience, prompts a consideration of how its form creates this suppleness. The tenth and final characteristic of aesthetic criticism is the deployment of evaluative criteria. Many good critics have favoured criteria, for example, coherence, complexity, vitality, irony, maturity, eloquence, subtlety, and subversion. This is partly because, without claiming universality or permanence, many of the criteria are relevant and rewarding beyond an isolated work or category, beyond the critic’s sensibility and preference, beyond one time and place, and beyond artworks. The criteria have turned out to be of repeated value in criticism and across different mediums: Perkins, for example, lauds precise tensional complexity in a selection of Hollywood films of the 1950s as the literary New Critics once had in the poems of John Donne. Nevertheless, despite their flexibility and extensive pertinence, there is no one criterion, or selection of criteria, that will ensure the perfect work. This is akin to the problem presented by Wittgenstein of defining a game: there are many games, all deserving of that categorical label, but it is impossible to come up with one definition that will include all activities accepted as games.73 Criticism is anti-essentialist and illuminates by example, context, and circumstance. For Wittgenstein, this manner of procedure is not inferior to, or less rigorous than, abstract definition and general statement. Appropriate criteria will often emerge as one engages with the work and its critical context (e.g. building on, or challenging, previous 72  Rather than being based on the requirements of the particular film, the meritorious ascription is perhaps based on an implicit assumption that women should be, and it is good if they are, graceful. 73  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M.  Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006 [1953]), 27, point 66.

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accounts of a film). Criticism evaluates whether a feature feels fitting and suitable: does it work here, does it seem right, why and in what ways?74 It is conditional, practical, and pragmatic. Rather than being armed with pre-ordained criteria and ready to pounce, the critic senses that something is or is not working in the work and arrives at the suitable criteria from the proximate experiential stimulus. Hence, Bell’s understanding, through his explication of Leavis’ work, that criticism is phenomenological—reacting to the phenomenon as experienced—rather than essentialist—coming to the work armed with essential criteria which must be fulfilled.75 Booth believes the critic should ask the question: is this device good for this task in this work?76 Rather than absolute or universal criteria, criticism abides by principles or standards of critical practice. Critical evaluations should be judged by the way the critic goes about his task. This is the astute insight of David Hume’s seminal work of the eighteenth century, Of the Standard of Taste, where he considers that judgement is grounded by the community of competent critics and it is the quality of their procedures that are paramount.77 * * * The lack of fixed criteria results in an indecisiveness that is productive. It requires that nothing can be taken for granted, and this means that each individual must take responsibility to work through the claims and evidence presented in any piece of criticism and test them for themselves (against the work). Far from being a limitation, criticism’s participatory character is democratic and invigorating. Although most critics seek, even crave, consent, for their own evaluations, they recognise that there will be varying, legitimate responses. Hume understood this as a ‘diversity’ that is ‘blameless’.78 Some have considered this irreconcilable aspect to be troublesome, even fatal, for criticism and have concluded that its findings are not objectively verifiable. In fact, although criticism is undoubtedly community and culturally dependent, as most discourses are, it has many features and procedures that might reasonably be called objective. Individual viewers may actualise aspects, but the potentiality of these aspects must lie within the work, and therefore are verifiable. Through skill and ­experience, wine tasters ‘discern real differences’ in the quality of different

74  Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination (London: Methuen, 1974), 247–8; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989 [1966]), 3, Point 8. 75  Bell, F.R. Leavis, 20. 76  Wayne C. Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 198–9. 77  David Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, eds. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008 [1757]). 78  Hume, ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, 110.

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wines.79 Some people are better at recognising things in particular arts than others, and we can train ourselves to be better; indeed, that is one of the aims of an aesthetic education. Even if aspect perception may vary—and many works of merit encourage a variety of aspects—some possibilities are more revealing than others and many can be excluded. The famous line drawing is both a duck and a rabbit, but it is clearly not a lion, a frog, or an elephant.80 Those who see the duck and the rabbit in the famous gestalt figure are both right and both (objectively) accurate. Roland Barthes believes that even if an evaluation is peculiarly idiosyncratic, it would need to be attuned to verifiable patterns of imagery, forms, and themes.81 In this sense, although good critics refrain from adopting pre-ordained systems, they are often systematic because they wish to think in an ordered way about the way the artwork has been ordered. Furthermore, although much good aesthetic criticism exhibits individual creativity and imaginativeness, both in engagement and in articulation, recognising that a film is subtle, or well-paced, or ill-conceived, and explaining why with reasons, is not accurately described as personally creative.82 Value judgements in the arts are frequently assumed to be damagingly ‘subjective’, in that they exist only as perceived, and not of, or in, the object; such judgements are dependent on the mind of the thinking subject or on an individual’s perception for their existence.83 Nevertheless, we assume (we hope) that it is not self-generating subjectivity that leads a judge or a jury, after examining and arguing over the evidence in a trial, to arrive at a judgement that a person is guilty. Whatever the faults in any particular legal system, there is supposed to be a procedure that leads to an ‘impersonal verdict’ that does not merely exist in the minds of the judge and jury, nor merely ‘express the[ir] feelings’.84 The legal analogy with criticism is instructive. The court is trying to understand the meaning of events that are rarely obvious or certain. Evidence needs to be presented and interpreted, and some (extrinsic evidence), even if factually accurate, is inadmissible if it prejudices the argumentation of the current case. The case is treated as special, but within a finely grained network of precedent. Judgements may be incorrect or unjust, and verdicts can be reversed when new evidence becomes known.85 79  Colin Lyas, ‘The Evaluation of Art’, in Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction, ed. Oswald Hanfling (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 372. 80  Casey, The Language of Criticism, 29. 81  Roland Barthes, Criticism and Truth, trans. K. Pilcher Keuneman (London and New York: Continuum, 2004 [1966]); Hugh M.  Davidson, ‘The Critical Position of Roland Barthes’, in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S.  Dembo (Wisconsin and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 99. 82  Joel J. Kupperman, ‘Reasons in Support of Evaluations of Works of Art’, The Monist 50, no. 2, (1966): 224. 83  One definition of ‘subjective’ given in Pearsall ed., The New Oxford English Dictionary. 84  Margaret Macdonald, ‘Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts’, in Aesthetics, ed. Jerome Stolnitz (New York and London: Macmillan, 1965 [1949]), 103. 85  This is an elaboration based on the legal analogy made by Macdonald in ‘Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts’. I also deploy it for different ends.

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Another lament is that aesthetic criticism is not scientific enough. It may, however, have more in common with science than is commonly supposed. The lack of a single truth does not mean that its procedures are not in some respects scientific. The critic often responds to a perplexity: she wonders about what the scene means, about the thematic purpose of the story or drama, or about why the moment seemed to be working well. Certain ‘hypotheses’ come to mind which are tested while looking closely at the work.86 These hypotheses might be supported or refuted by an ‘observation’.87 New pieces of criticism build on previously established understandings and might even overthrow them. Criticism may have different purposes and import to science, but at its best, like scientific research, it is ‘tentative, exploratory’, and responsive to data.88 In addition to being objective, aesthetic criticism also depends on the individual person and personality apprehending the work.89 Compared to some other approaches to artworks, it has a well-balanced combination of personal and impersonal, and this is one of its distinct attractions. Whether this personal perspective is described as subjective would depend on the extremity of the definition of subjective being offered. Criticism never only belongs to, or proceeds from, the person offering it. As previously discussed, a work is often multidimensional and indeterminate, and it leaves matters undone; different critics will realise and complete it in different ways. Any piece of criticism will be necessarily partial, but a partial view is not equivalent to an inadequate, inaccurate, or unjust one. Some individual imaginativeness—which is not the same as exercising an idiosyncratic imagination—will be necessary to recognise aspects and merits of the work that may not be obvious to others and communicate them eloquently.90 Beyond this minimal level, some have regarded criticism as actively creative, so like legal counsel, the critic does not simply represent the client’s case; she designs it, or at least constructs a particular version of it, and affects how it will be perceived.91 A less manipulative way of analogising this creativity is likening the critic to a concert pianist who draws out the ‘value of a sonata’ by playing it in her own particular manner (albeit while following the original score).92 This is similar to Leavis’ understanding that appreciating a work is akin to an inward performance of it. Aesthetic criticism is therefore also performative as well as analytic, descriptive, and prescriptive. Like other performances, it may be well done or not, and judged accordingly. When paraphrased, the interpretations and evaluations offered in several critical essays may be 86  Max Black, ‘“Perfection” as a Term in Aesthetics’, in Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 32. 87  Black, ‘Perfection’, 32. 88  Black, ‘Perfection’, 32. 89  This is also true of science where insights of great significance and value have depended on the personalities of individual scientists apprehending and interpreting the world. 90  James Grant, The Critical Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 91  The critic is a multi-faceted figure: detective, counsel, judge, and jury all rolled into one. 92  Macdonald, ‘Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts’, 111.

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broadly similar, but one may be preferred to the others, because, like a work of art, it may exhibit a range of admirable qualities (which enhance the work or the engagement with it): for example, coherence, clarity, insight, and sensitivity. Part of critical argumentation will require expressive rhetorical literary skills (or, in the case of the currently expanding world of video criticism, audiovisual ones). This rhetoric, more potent for being, perhaps, ardent and committed, might motivate somebody to examine and appreciate a film in a way that a detached account would not.93 This is one reason why some commentators believe that the critic should be personally invested in the work. Another reason is that an intense connection may well be more fertile than one that is dispassionate. Criticism often begins with an impassioned response to the work, positive or negative, or to somebody else’s response to the work. The critic is, for example, inspired or angered and then compelled to write. The account ‘draws forth… from a deep level of the self’.94 The personalities and preferences of critics will make them more or less suitable to tackle particular works. Some commentators believe that the critic must sympathise or empathise with the work because only then will its spirit be entered into, and only then will it be seen correctly, and evaluated fairly.95 Some go further and say there needs to be an identification with the work, even an initial surrender. If one begins in a doubtful, sceptical, or suspicious frame of mind, then the work will be inaccessible, essential data will not be recognised, and there will be no possibility for objectivity.96 Even a form of projection by a viewer, in the psychoanalytical sense, which might actively distort, could result in verifiable and shareable revelations.97 Oscar Wilde believed that the critic could penetrate further into the work only by ‘intensifying’ his own personality.98 This might be regarded as too solipsistic, but Wilde thought that a virtuous circle operates where the work gives ‘new insight into ourselves’, and that, in turn, opens up ‘new insight into the work’.99 Aesthetic criticism is relational at every level: it evaluates how different parts of a work relate and how the work relates to the creative personnel that made it, to other works, to the previous criticism upon it, and to the critic who engages with it. Everything is interrelated and each aspect unavoidably affects the others. Criticism embraces all the dynamics involved and does not aim for fixity or security. History shows that today’s consensus over works, or features within works, is tomorrow’s source of disagreement. Later generations modify or challenge the evaluations of previous ones. Even within generations, received  Shusterman, The Object of Literary Criticism.  Smallwood discussing H.A. Mason’s views on criticism in Reconstructing Criticism, 146. 95  For example, Johann Gottfried Herder cited by Wellek, ‘Literary Criticism’, 300. 96  Booth, The Company We Keep, 32. 97  Murray Krieger, ‘Literary Analysis and Evaluation – and the Ambidextrous Critic’, in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S.  Dembo (Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 34. 98  Day, Literary Criticism, 250. 99  Day, Literary Criticism, 250. 93 94

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opinion will be challenged. Critical positions and sometimes consensus inevitably become part of the way a work is perceived, in the long term as criticism on a work accrues, and in the short term as reviews and promotion are internalised. The latest criticism reacts to previous criticism, to established understandings, and reputation. Within film criticism, the Movie critics, for example, were motivated to challenge what they took to be establishment of taste best represented by Sight and Sound, the film journal of the British Film Institute. For all the radical changes to the media landscape, this context has not changed, and through, for example, social media bandwagons and incessant award giving, judgements about what constitutes aesthetic value in films—and not simply what is enjoyable or entertaining or socially valuable—are established and take hold. This is why there is still a necessary role for detailed, careful, aesthetic criticism, with space to elaborate, and test received claims, especially those that have been cemented too quickly in hurried contexts that are often capsulated, hyperbolic, and promotional. The critic feels the work has been overrated or not rated highly enough and this misjudgement needs rectifying in order to gain fair recognition. This is more than an academic intervention; it is felt to be an ethical imperative. Therefore, revaluation—the title of one of Leavis’ books—is a part of the critical process.100 Criticism depends on debate, exchange, and persistent questioning that leads back to an examination of the work. A piece of criticism might be thought of as a contribution, albeit a formalised and elaborate one, into a continuing conversation. This is one reason why aesthetic criticism operates within ordinary language—aside from using the terminology and language of its art—and resists being unduly determined by discourses from other disciplines.101 It is therefore able to maintain its continuity with two associated activities: the creative processes of making artworks and the everyday evaluative exchanges about them. Although the previous paragraph characterised the process as combative, criticism also operates productively within environments of ‘collective and cooperative seeing’, where understandings and evaluations are compared, refined, built upon, and transformed.102 The ideal is not a coterie or a clique, but a likeminded community—Ross calls them ‘critic clusters’—which may extend across periods and places where each individual within the community may not know (of) each other.103 Alternatively, the members of the community may be in direct collaborative contact—through journals, websites, or within seminars—where actual conversations and discussions can take place. Creative personnel are also part of these communities so that filmmakers make films that respond to other films and filmmakers, contemporaneous and his F.R. Leavis, Revaluation (Middlesex: Penguin/Pelican, 1972 [1936]).  Such discourses might be necessary to achieve alternative perspectives on artworks, for example, for radical critique. 102  Meyer Schapiro, ‘On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content’, in Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1966), 15. 103  Stephanie Ross, ‘When Critics Disagree: Prospects for Realism in Aesthetics’, The Philosophical Quarterly 64, no. 257 (2014). 100 101

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torical, working within contexts and histories of techniques, styles, and genres, to which critics, in turn, respond. In theory, such groups are accessible and open to renewal and diversification. Wittgenstein insisted that our statements only make sense against this background of our social practices. Herrnstein Smith thinks evaluative claims can be testable, plausible, and valuable, without them being ‘fixed’, ‘given’, ‘inherent’, ‘universal’, or absolutely true; and that conceiving of value claims in these ways is a distraction and false impediment to worthwhile evaluative practice.104 The fact that evaluations are context dependent and contingent is disciplining and exacting, and need not be destabilising. * * * Finally, I want to briefly highlight a set of concerns that figure when aesthetic criticism is endeavouring to evaluate a film: the employment of the medium, the discipline of constraint, the negotiation of convention, the determination of choices, the engagement of perception, the weighting of features, the character of recurrence, and the state of relationships. In turn: 1. Medium. Aesthetic criticism is attentive to the means by which the film communicates. The means of the film medium refers to its communication by images and sounds and more specifically to the physical materials that enable them, for example, the camera, the celluloid, the actors, the costumes, the décor, the sound technology, and the lighting. It is important to recognise, however, that the physical materials that make a film, and the viewing contexts, shift. This thing we call ‘film’ is inclusive, flexible, and historically contingent. Each feature, material, or circumstance has possibilities, and an evaluation will need to respond accordingly. Criticism is interested in the worthwhile ways in which filmmakers use the medium and its materials. 2. Constraint. Although constraint is sometimes conceived of as negative, because it restricts artistic freedom, all films will have, and need, constraints of some sort. Aesthetic criticism evaluates how well films work within their constraints. General forms like genres set constraints, but constraints are also self-imposed. One way of conceiving of a style is as a distinct and compatible collection of formal constraints. 3. Convention. The Film Studies Dictionary defines a convention as follows: ‘In any art form, a frequently used technique or content that is accepted as standard or typical in that tradition or genre’.105 There are, for example, conventions of narrative, character, costume, lighting, editing, and they differ depending on styles, periods, genres, and national cinemas. All films, even experimental or avant-garde films, work with conventions. As Andrew Britton writes, ‘All styles are “group styles”: that is to say, the style of any  Barbara Herrnstein Smith, ‘Contingencies of Value’, Critical Inquiry 10, no. 1, (1983): 27, 22.  Steve Blandford, Barry Keith Grant, and Jim Hillier, The Film Studies Dictionary (London: Arnold, 2001), 57. 104

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given artist is a more or less complex, adventurous, and idiosyncratic inflection of conventional cultural materials, which, by definition, precede and create conditions for the artist’s work’.106 A film may noticeably deviate, pertinently deploy, or boldly embrace and invigorate a convention. The difficulty for criticism is to detect the special occasions because conventions might appear to be operating merely conventionally. 4. Choice and Expectation. Criticism is aware of the proximity of other options and outcomes. John Gibbs writes that, ‘Every frame, every cut, every element of performance and every note on the soundtrack results from pursuing one option and refusing many others’.107 When evaluating a film, ‘a valuable approach is to identify a decision, or a group of decisions, and ask ‘what is gained by doing it this way?’’108 Alex Clayton argues that ‘we judge these choices in terms of what they offer, what they refuse, what they claim, and what they betray’.109 Options are understood as apposite or inapposite, and even damaging. A fine line often divides a good outcome from its opposite. There is a sense of roads not travelled, for better or for worse. A film might have a difficulty or a problem, explicit or implicit, and the achievement is measured in terms of how well the problem has been solved, overcome, or negotiated. (‘The problem for the film is that it needs to get to x without doing y…’) A film is tested based on the experience of other films and other artworks; a store of knowledge is built up about how things are often done and can be done. A film also generates its own prospects so it is also tested against the expectations it establishes itself. An initial scenario may end up not delivering the dramatic and thematic complexity it promised, or an apparently unpromising scenario may turn out to be unexpectedly fecund. A formal scheme may be seen through, or it may lapse. Expectations may adjust when the film is viewed in different ways. Some occurrence may prompt disappointment, but then later make sense, or fulfil a hitherto unnoticed aspect of the film’s design. 5. Perceptual Activity. Aesthetic criticism rewards films which stimulate perceptual activity and, in turn, imaginative and cognitive activities, for example, interpretation. Rudolf Arnheim thinks that good works of art should have some ‘cognitive difficulty’ requiring a viewer ‘to actively marshal their hermeneutic resources to comprehend the work’s sophisti-

106  Andrew Britton, Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry K. Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 433. 107  John Gibbs, ‘Filmmakers’ Choices’, in Close-up 01, eds. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (London and New York: Wallflower, 2006), 5. 108  Gibbs, ‘Filmmakers’ Choices’, 5. 109  Alex Clayton, ‘V.F. Perkins: Aesthetic Suspense’, in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, eds. Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 212.

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cated and subtle shades of meaning’.110 The work should find ways of leaving ‘gaps’ that a viewer fills by searching for clues in the visual and aural presentation.111 Equally, André Bazin discourages a form of presentation that thoroughly clarifies, and which too specifically directs perception. Consequently, he favours the continuous take and multifaceted composition because he considers them less determining. The freedom for a viewer that he advocates arises because the image is released from the requirements of easy telling or ‘efficient representation’ to become fruitfully indefinite.112 Aesthetic criticism has generally disapproved of moments in films pointing out one thing, or pointing out one thing at a time in case something is missed. Nor does it approve of point-making. Gibbs explains, in his history of British film criticism, that the critics working at the journal Movie disliked ‘point-making’ in films because it made things too easy for a viewer. ‘The central characteristic of “point-­making”’, according to Gibbs, is that the decisions the filmmakers have made serve ‘only the end that is the “point”’.113 This does not mean that these critics only value subtlety or discretion, and indeed, they celebrate directorial styles that have pronounced features. Rather, they desire that the filmmakers’ decisions ‘fulfil a number of functions simultaneously’.114 They warn against one-note effects that disallow ‘complexity of texture’ and, consequently, ‘complexity of response’.115 Therefore, claims for merit cannot depend on a tight fit between a device and its meaning or effect. A much-deployed simplistic example: a shot from a low angle in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, US) is claimed to be of merit because it is effective at making Charles Foster Kane look overbearing. It is a simple equation: the low angle equals overbearing equals good. The evaluation rests on one device successfully producing the one effect or the one point. The shot may well be of merit for reasons that pertain to Kane’s domineering stature, but for the Movie critics, an evaluative claim could not rest on this simple equation alone. Therefore, evaluative claims based only on the communicative efficacy of a device, for example, in ­successfully conveying a meaning, are insufficient because the effect might be

110  Meraj Dhir, ‘A gestalt approach to film analysis’, in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2011), 99; Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: California University Press, 1957). 111  Dhir, ‘A gestalt approach to film analysis’, 97. 112  Dudley Andrew, ‘Foreword to the 2004 Edition’, in What is Cinema? Volume 1, ed. Hugh Gray (California: California University Press, 2005), xx; Bert Cardullo, ‘Introduction’, in Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), xiii–xiv. 113  John Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène: Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946–78 (Manchester and London: Manchester University Press, 2013), 177. 114  Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 177. 115  Quoted phrases are taken from an interview by Gibbs with one of the Movie critics, Charles Barr. Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 180.

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l­ imited.116 The Movie critics scolded Ernest Lindgren who they believe falls into this trap in his book The Art of Film. He thought that achievement rested on an ‘uncomplicated process of communication between filmmaker and audience’ so that ‘the director’s task is to choose precisely [the viewpoint] which will be effective for his purpose’.117 The Movie critics, on the contrary, encourage a complicated process of communication; they look for ‘the qualification or shading that a figure of style will receive from its context’.118 In the poetic context, I.A. Richards discusses the problem of devices that are too decisive: a ‘heavy regular rhythm’, ‘the triteness of the close’, the ‘dead stamp’ of a rhyme, or ‘the obviousness of the descriptions’.119 All of them ‘accentuate the impression of conclusiveness’.120 There is a range of ways a feature might be obvious: it may be insufficiently complicated, over-familiar (a cliché), overstated, conceptually limited, inadequately integrated, or prematurely crystallised.121 Many critics have been attracted to states—suspension, uncertainty, poise, paradox, ambiguity, ambivalence, suggestiveness—that prevent a straightforward reception of the work. These states are admired because they honestly reveal or reflect complication; because interest is sustained if the work does not settle; because they often entail elements mutually informing, or interrogating, each other; because unusual connections can be forged especially when the elements are apparently contradictory; and because it is an achievement to hold alternative elements advantageously in play and make them cohere rather than clash. 6. Prominence. Aesthetic criticism aims to recognise the weighting of elements and, consequently, the difference between prominence and significance: some features may be highly prominent and have low significance, while some may have low prominence and be highly significant (see Perkins 1990).122 Once the significance of a feature is brought to recognition, perhaps with the help of alert criticism, it may appear as revelatory. Attention to prominence is more commonplace in arts such as 116  There may be instances of effects which despite being relatively one note have other merits. They might have been difficult to achieve, or the experience might be unusual or unconventional. 117  Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 180; then Lindgren quoted in Gibbs: 180. The problems in merely acclaiming the communicative efficacy of a device are similar to the problems in acclaiming the fulfilment of a filmmaker’s purpose. 118  Gibbs, The Life of Mise-en-Scène, 180. 119  I.A.  Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2001 [1924]), 187. 120  Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism, 187. 121  Interpretative and evaluative claims can be obvious for all the same reasons and, consequently, will not be persuasive. 122  V.F. Perkins, ‘Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation’, in Movie, no. 34 (1990).

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music and poetry where the stressed and the unstressed, of notes and syllables, are at the forefront of creation and appreciation. Although traditionally less articulated in relation to film (and other dramatic arts), sensitivity to emphasis enables a monitoring of how well aspects, such as meanings, are disclosed. 7. Pattern. Although examining the local detail of moments and their moment-by-moment execution are essential to aesthetic criticism, it is also important to look at a film as a whole. A work’s patterned arrangement of similar and corresponding parts and its prevailing characteristics, qualities, attributes, traits, and themes are particularly important in establishing its wholeness.123 Aesthetic evaluation is interested in how the work ‘deals with the problem of…[the] repeat’: how it ‘move[s] and spread[s] in a continuous and longer composition over the whole surface which is covered by the pattern’.124 Sometimes, discerning patterns is not straightforward because they may be recessive (and the rhyming between the instances may be ‘imperfect’ in the poetic sense). The recognition, however, will give each instance a meaning, weight, and relevance they do not have alone. Gibbs and Pye note that the illumination of pattern is important not only to reveal the aesthetic value of a film but also to ‘critical method’: ‘the degree to which [a critical argument] can identify significant patterns which give credence to the understanding of the part advanced…[is a] major factor…determining how persuasive it may be’.125 It should be noted that the occurrence of pattern, like many of the concerns listed here, is not in itself of merit: a pattern may be, for example, too regimented or irrelevantly decorative. 8. Relation. Relation is the most fundamental concern of aesthetic criticism (and pattern is a species of it). How do the internal parts of a film satisfactorily relate: for example, character, performer, dramatic action, and setting; one character, or performer, to another; one scene to another; a shot to the one before it and the one after; the components of a shot; the image to the sound; the style, tone, pace, or rhythm to the subject matter? How does a feature, for example, a scene, contribute to the overall structure, and in what way is its appearance now, at just this point in the layout, advantageous (or not)? How does it beneficially affect what went before and what is yet to come? Would it have benefited from coming 123  Another holistic concern is structure. For example, are a film and its internal sections of the right duration, and how is material advantageously introduced and developed, or withheld and released, over its length? Kenneth Burke encourages responsiveness to the structuring, and the formal movement, of material across a work, to the production of ‘crescendo, contrast, comparison, balance, repetition, disclosure, reversal, contraction, expansion, [and] magnification’ (quoted in Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony, 226). 124  J.W. Mackail quoted in Osborne, Aesthetics and Criticism, 279. 125  John Gibbs, and Douglas Pye, ‘Introduction’, in Style and Meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), 11.

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earlier or later? The quality of transitions is of associated importance: how does a film move from one shot to another (cut, fade, dissolve), one place to another, one person to another, or one tone to another. To recognise the importance of relation is not to prescribe a particular type of relationship because, as in life, there are many types of successful relationship.126 Perkins writes that the ‘understanding and judgement of a movie…will depend largely on the attempt to comprehend the nature and assess the quality of its created relationships’.127 He emphasises that one cannot take any element of technique, or feature of the medium, for example, editing, and separate it from other elements, for example, the movement of the actors, or the camera, or the setting, or the lighting because ‘each of them derives its value from its relationship with the others’.128 Aesthetic criticism is concerned with evaluating each film’s particular formal configuration and the qualities that it generates.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolph. 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley/Los Angeles/California: California University Press. Barthes, Roland. 2004 [1966]. Criticism and Truth. Trans. K.  Pilcher Keuneman. London/New York: Continuum. Beardsley, Monroe C. 1981 [1958]. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. 1981. The Name and Nature of Criticism. In What Is Criticism? ed. Paul Hernadi, 151–161. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bell, Michael. 1988. F.R. Leavis. London/New York: Routledge. Black, Max. 1966. ‘Perfection’ as a Term in Aesthetics. In Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook, 32–35. New York: New York University Press. Blandford, Steve, Barry Keith Grant, and Jim Hillier. 2001. The Film Studies Dictionary. London: Arnold. Booth, Wayne C. 1975. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley/Los Angeles: California University Press. Britton, Andrew. 2009. In Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, ed. Barry K. Grant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Cardullo, Bert. 1997. Introduction. In Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo, ix–xvi. New York/London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 2002. Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2009. On Criticism. New York/London: Routledge. Casey, John. 2011 [1966. The Language of Criticism. London: Methuen. 126  Although it is the particular arrangement of a film’s features that are of primary concern, this does not entail severing it from other films or the world outside. 127  Perkins, Film as Film, 118. 128  Perkins, Film as Film, 23.

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Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge/London: Belknap Press. Clayton, Alex. 2015. V.F. Perkins: Aesthetic Suspense. In Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, ed. Murray Pomerance and R.  Barton Palmer, 208–216. New Brunswick/London: Rutgers University Press. Daiches, David. 1969. Literary Evaluation. In Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P.  Strelka, 163–181. University Park/London: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Davidson, Hugh M. 1968. The Critical Position of Roland Barthes. In Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S.  Dembo, 93–102. Wisconsin/London: The University of Wisconsin Press. Day, Gary. 2010. Literary Criticism: A New History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dhir, Meraj. 2011. A Gestalt Approach to Film Analysis. In Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins, 89–106. New York/Oxford: Routledge. Doorly, Patrick. 2013. The Truth About Art: Reclaiming Quality. Winchester/ Washington: Zero Books. Dziemidok, Bohdan. 1983. Aesthetic Experience and Evaluation. In Essays on Aesthetics: Perspectives on the Work of Monroe Beardsley, ed. John Fisher, 53–68. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Ellis, John M. 1981. The Logic of the Question “What Is Criticism?”. In What Is Criticism? ed. Pual Hernadi, 15–29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Fuller, David. 2006. William Empson: From Verbal Analysis to Cultural Criticism. In Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia Waugh, 152–165. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuller, Graham, and Terry Eagleton. 1983. The Question of Value: A Discussion. New Left Review I/142: 76–90. Gibbs, John. 2006. Filmmakers’ Choices. In Close-up 01, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 1–87. London/New York: Wallflower. ———. 2013. The Life of Mise-en-Scène: Visual Style and British Film Criticism, 1946–78. Manchester/London: Manchester University Press. Gibbs, John, and Douglas Pye. 2005. Introduction. In Style and Meaning: Studies in the detailed analysis of film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 1–15. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press. Goldman, Alan H. 2004. Evaluating Art. In The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy, 93–108. Oxford: Blackwell. Gombrich, E.H. 1978. A Historical Hypothesis. In History as a Tool in Critical Interpretation, ed. Thomas F. Rugh and Erin R. Silva, 39–42. Utah: Brigham Young University Press. Grant, James. 2013. The Critical Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guyer, Paul. 2014. A History of Modern Aesthetics Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Herrnstein Smith, Barbara. 1983. Contingencies of Value. Critical Inquiry 10 (1): 1–35. ———. Cultural Evaluation. In Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford Art Online), ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/ subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0200. Accessed 19 Apr 2017.

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Hinderer, Walter. 1969. Literary Value Judgments and Value Cognition. In Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P.  Strelka, 54–79. University Park/London: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Hough, Graham. 1966. An Essay on Criticism. London: Duckworth & Company. Hume, David. 2008 [1757. Of the Standard of Taste. In Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology, ed. Steven M. Cahn and Aaron Meskin, 103–112. Oxford: Blackwell. Isenberg, Arnold. 1973. In Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism, ed. William Callaghan, Leigh Cauman, Carl Hempel, Sidney Morgenbesser, Mary Mothersill, Ernest Nagel, and Theodore Norman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1987 [1790]. Critique of Judgment. Trans. Werner S.  Pluhar. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett. Klevan, Andrew. 2011. Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Criticism. In New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, 48–64. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012. Living Meaning: The Fluency of Film Performance. In Theorizing Film Acting, ed. Aaron Taylor, 33–46. New York/Abingdon: Routledge. Krieger, Murray. 1968. Literary Analysis and Evaluation  – And the Ambidextrous Critic. In Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S.  Dembo, 16–36. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Kupperman, Joel J. 1966. Reasons in Support of Evaluations of Works of Art. The Monist 50 (2): 222–236. Leavis, F.R. 1972 [1936]. Revaluation. Middlesex: Penguin/Pelican. ———. 1984 [1952. The Common Pursuit. London: Hogarth. Logan, William. 2008. Forward into the Past: Reading the New Critics. In Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, ed. Garrick Davis, ix–xvi. Athens: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press. Lyas, Colin. 2002. The Evaluation of Art. In Philosophical Aesthetics: An Introduction, ed. Oswald Hanfling, 349–380. Oxford: Blackwell. Macdonald, Margaret. 1965 [1949. Some Distinctive Features of Arguments Used in Criticism of the Arts. In Aesthetics, ed. Jerome Stolnitz, 98–112. New York/London: Macmillan. McFee, Graham. 2011. Artistic Judgement: A Framework for Philosophical Aesthetics. Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer. Olsen, Stein H. 1987. The End of Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. Appreciation. In Encyclopaedia of Aesthetics (Oxford Art Online), ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t234/e0027. Accessed 30 Mar 2017. Osborne, Harold. 1955. Aesthetics and Criticism. New York: Philosophical Library. Pearsall, Judy, ed. 1998. The New Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Perkins, V.F. 1990. Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation. Movie 34: 1–6. ———. 1991 [1972. Film as Film. London: Penguin. Richards, I.A. 2001 [1924. Principles of Literary Criticism. London/New York: Routledge. Schapiro, Meyer. 1966. On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content. In Art and Philosophy: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook, 3–15. New  York: New  York University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1974. Art and Imagination. London: Methuen.

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———. 1999. The Aesthetics of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seamon, Roger. 2005. Criticism. In The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic M. Lopes, 2nd ed., 401–415. London/New York: Routledge. Shusterman, Richard. 1984. The Object of Literary Criticism (Elementa 29). Amsterdam: K&N Kindle Edition. Sibley, Frank. 2006 [1950–93]. Approach to Aesthetics, ed. John Bensen, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smallwood, Philip. 2003. Reconstructing Criticism: Pope’s Essay on Criticism and the Logic of Definition. Lewisburg/London: Bucknell University Press/Associated University Presses. Sontag, Susan. 2009 [1961. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin. Sparshott, F.E. 1967. The Concept of Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Steiner, George. 1995 [1962. F.R.  Leavis. In 20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader, ed. David Lodge, 622–635. London/New York: Longman. Vendler, Helen. 1988. The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Walton, Kendall L. 2008 [1970. Categories of Art. In Marvelous Images: On Values and the Arts, 195–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wellek, René. 1981. Literary Criticism. In What is Criticism? ed. Paul Hernadi, 297–321. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wimsatt, William K., Jr., and Monroe C.  Beardsley. 1946. The Intentional Fallacy. Sewanee Review 54 (3): 468–488. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1989 [1966. Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2006 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wollheim, Richard. 1987. Painting as an Art. London: Thames and Hudson. Wood, Robin. 2006. Personal Views: Explorations in Film (Revised Edition). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Zangwill, Nick. Aesthetic Judgment. In Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. http:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetic-judgment/. Accessed 19 Apr 2017.

CHAPTER 19

Poststructuralism and Film Robert Sinnerbrink

Poststructuralism is an ambiguous and contested term. On the one hand, it is a recognisable quasi-historical/theoretical category encompassing the work of a range of highly influential French philosophers of the 1960s–1970s (Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard). On the other, it designates a pluralistic, even syncretic theoretical perspective, critically responding to but also departing from the movement known as ‘structuralism’ (referring to the work of preceding French thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes). In Anglophone countries in particular, it has developed into an independent, pluralistic approach involving, for example, the deconstructive ‘reading’ of texts, the critique of humanist conceptions of subjectivity, of (Western) universalism and theoretical scientism, an affirmation of difference, ‘play’, and critical questioning of claims to truth and objectivity. During the 1980s and 1990s, it exerted a profound influence in Humanities disciplines, first in literary theory and then later in film studies, including cultural studies, media theory, sociology, anthropology, history, and political theory. Coupled with elements of German critical theory (deriving from the work of Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin), poststructuralism (sometimes confusingly equated with ‘postmodernism’) influenced film studies in ways that are methodologically diffuse, critical in spirit, while providing a general theoretical orientation.1 One could better describe it as a critical 1  Some theorists distinguish poststructuralism as a more philosophically grounded critique of structuralism as well as key assumption of Western metaphysics, and postmodernism as a more historically oriented critique of principles of Enlightenment rationality prevailing in modernity. See Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism?, trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray, Theory and

R. Sinnerbrink (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_19

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mode of approaching film theory rather than a specific doctrine or theoretical position. Famously described by Bordwell and Carroll as a key component of ‘Grand Theory’ or SLAB (Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and Barthes) theory,2 it remains a highly influential perspective or approach that continues to shape and influence film theory, perhaps in ways today that are less explicit, emphatic, or influential than in previous decades. Despite their obvious commitment to exploring the philosophical aspects of literature, and fascination with visual art, it is curious that poststructuralist thinkers—with the notable exception of Deleuze—for the most part ignored film or mention it only very briefly. As Richard Smith observes, we should not forget that ‘poststructuralist philosophy has, until Deleuze, completely forgotten to think cinematically, except either critically or dismissively’.3 Derrida, for example, wrote about almost everything but the cinema, a point noted by Peter Brunette and David Wills, authors of one of the very few studies (Screen/ Play) to propose an explicitly ‘Derridian’ deconstructive approach to film.4 In his early work, Roland Barthes, for example, focused on literary texts, or on the bourgeois ‘mythological’ (ideological-semiotic) aspects of popular culture (including film), but his most famous text, Camera Lucida, focused exclusively on photography and dismissed cinema as lacking the aesthetic power or philosophical interest of photography.5 Michel Foucault, despite writing on literature and painting, discussed film explicitly only in one interview,6 whereas History of Literature, Volume 45 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge MA.: The MIT Press, 1985); Patrick Fuery, New Developments in Film Theory (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1989); Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA. and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 2  David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 3  Richard Smith, “The Philosopher with Two Brains”, Film-Philosophy 5, no. 34 (November 2001): http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/655/568 4  Brunette and Wills identify Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier as the sole ‘Derridian’ deconstructionist film theorist. Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). As Robert Stam notes, despite the important influence of poststructuralist theory in looking for ‘moments of rupture or change’, it has not been an especially explicit presence in much film studies: ‘Perhaps because it was intimately linked to language-based disciplines (literature and philosophy), Derridian poststructuralism has been a quiet but hardly overwhelming presence within film theory’. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction (Malden, MA. and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 181. Brunette nonetheless offers a decidedly ‘Derridian’ account of poststructuralism in film studies. See Peter Brunette, ‘Post-structuralism and deconstruction’, in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 91–95. For an impressive recent version of Derridian feminist film theory, see Sarah Dillon, Deconstruction, Feminism, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 5  See Colin Gardner, ‘Roland Barthes’, in Felicity Colman (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Durham: Acumen Press, 2009), 109–121. 6  Michel Foucault, ‘Film and Popular Memory: An Interview with Michel Foucault’, Radical Philosophy 11, no. 11 (1975): 24–29.

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Kristeva focused principally on poetry, literature, and painting, leaving cinema in the dark.7 Even Jean Baudrillard, whose speculative theses on simulation, hyperreality, and influence on films like The Matrix, only treated popular cinema critically, as exemplifying the kind of simulacral proliferation of audiovisual images leading to a loss of referentiality and sense of connection with a social reality definitive of the hyperreality of postmodernity.8 As remarked, only Deleuze dedicates two volumes to cinema, but that only in the 1980s, after two decades of publishing philosophical works dealing with literature and visual art.9 The fact that poststructuralism has been such an important influence on film theory in recent decades, yet poststructuralist thinkers themselves (save for Deleuze) have more or less ignored film, invites further reflection. Rather than lumping poststructuralism in with other intellectual approaches that were synthesised in ‘Grand Theory’ (such as psychoanalytic theory, structuralist/Althusserian Marxism, semiotic linguistics, etc.), I shall offer an account of poststructuralism’s most distinctive and recognisable features (such as the critique of structuralist universalism, the championing of a philosophy of difference, and the shift from work to text). I then turn to the contributions of key poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze who have written on film and explore why poststructuralist thinkers themselves may have eschewed reflecting on the medium. I then consider key elements of the critique of poststructuralist contribution to film theory (notably by Bordwell and Carroll, and Allen and Smith), suggesting what elements of that critique remain pertinent and which do not.10 Finally, I consider the case of Deleuze, the only poststructuralist thinker to have focused on cinema, and argue that much of his philosophical approach to film implies a critical distancing from many of the recognisable features of the psycho-semiotic/poststructuralist approach to film theory that represented, until recent decades, one of the dominant paradigms in film theory.

7  See Patricia MacCormack, ‘Julia Kristeva’, in Felicity Colman (ed.) Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Durham: Acumen Press, 2009), 276–285. 8  Catherine Constable, ‘Jean Baudrillard’, in Felicity Colman (ed.) Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Durham: Acumen Press, 2009), 212–221. See also Constable’s Adapting Philosophy. Jean Baudrillard and ‘The Matrix Trilogy’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009) for a helpful account of Baudrillard’s relationship with cinema, which gained traction during the 1980s and 1990s thanks to the cultural studies’ fascination with ‘simulacra’, and again came to prominence following the release of The Matrix (L and L Wachwoski 1999). 9  After a series of strictly philosophical-historical studies (of Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Kant, and Spinoza) published during the 1960s, Deleuze published Proust and Signs in 1964, an essay (‘Coldness and Cruelty’) on Sacher-Masoch in 1967, co-authored a book on Kafka with Felix Guattari in 1975, and published a book on the paintings of Francis Bacon (Logic of Sensation) in 1981. 10  David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Richard Allen and Murray Smith (eds), Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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What Is Poststructuralism? Much like the term ‘film noir’, ‘poststructuralism’ is a term coined by American/Anglophone literary and critical theorists during the 1980s to describe the work of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ generation of French philosophers and theorists (the late Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, etc.).11 The post-war generation of French philosophers of the 1960s—most notably Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault— challenged the prevailing philosophical and theoretical orthodoxies of existential phenomenology, Hegelianism, Hegelian-Marxism, humanistic social sciences, and structuralist linguistics.12 The term ‘poststructuralism’ designates not only an historical marker of the critical theoretical approaches in France that arose explicitly in response to structuralism, but also the yoking together of often quite distinct theoretical projects or philosophical perspectives into a synthetic critical approach to the conceptual and methodological assumptions shaping the human and social sciences. By the mid- to late 1960s, French thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault were challenging the foundations of structuralist thought and launching critiques of structuralism’s claims to universality, scientificity, objectivity, and truth.13 As many theorists note, a decisive role was played by Jacques Derrida’s paper ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences’ (published in Derrida’s 1967 book, Of Grammatology), delivered to the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man in October 1966 at Johns Hopkins University.14 This event introduced Derrida to American academia, and many scholars credit it with laying the seeds of what was to become the poststructuralist turn in literary and cultural theory during the 1970s and 1980s. As Bensmaïa remarks: ‘With this paper the incipient poststructuralist movement was effectively launched: for the first time the elements of the poststructuralist program were laid out as part of an inquiry that was utterly different from the one that had prevailed under the name of structuralism in the strict sense’.15 Inspired by Nietzsche’s critique of truth, Freudian theories of the unconscious, and Heidegger’s ‘Destruktion’ of the history of ontology, Derrida launched a deconstructive critique of the theoretical foundations of structuralism. He emphasised the decentred character of all structures; the importance of non-­ sense, disruption, and ‘play’ in processes of signification; the ‘decentred’ non-­ autonomous character of the human subject; and the self-undermining 11  See Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1989). 12  See Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L.  Scott-Fox and J.M.  Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 13  See Frank, What is Neostructuralism? and Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism. 14  See Reda Bensmaïa, ‘Poststructuralism’, in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 92–95; Fuery, New Developments in Film Theory, and Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism. 15  Bensmaïa, “Poststructuralism”, 93.

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character of conceptions of being as ‘presence’, that would have profoundly influential effects on the development of the poststructuralist programme. As Bensmaïa observes: Derrida portrayed the theoretical practice that was then being elaborated in France as a crucial moment in the history of ideas, a break not only with the notion of a centred structure but also with all the ideas that had governed the conception of being as presence as well as with all the meanings that had been given to the notion of foundation, principle, center, and truth—in short, a disruption, to use Derrida’s term, intended to undermine the key concepts of [structuralism] in their entirety.16

Much of the ‘spirit’ of this kind of poststructuralist critique was taken up within and, in some respects, continues to influence, film theory, even if the latter tended to ignore the ‘letter’ of what particular poststructuralist thinkers claimed about language, signification, and representation. As I discuss later, the question is how adequate did poststructuralist theory prove to be for film theory, given that Deleuze remains the only poststructuralist thinker of note to theorise cinema in any philosophical depth.17

Saussure and Structuralism From a theoretical point of view, the simplest way of defining poststructuralism is as a philosophical critique of the structuralist paradigm in French thought but one that also involves a creative transformation of it.18 Structuralism itself can be described as a broad movement within different humanities disciplines that looked to invariant semiological structures in order to account for a variety of linguistic, social, and cultural phenomena.19 Interestingly, the primary inspiration for structuralism was offered by the work of turn-of-the-century Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, whose 1911 lecture course on ‘General Linguistics’ eschewed semantic, logical, or psychological accounts of language

 Bensmaïa, ‘Poststructuralism’, 93.  I leave aside here the work of Bernard Stiegler—influenced by Derrida and Heidegger, but also Gilbert Simondon, Henri Leroi-Gourhan, and others—since his work marks an independent critical project in the philosophy of technology that encompasses audiovisual media and its relationship to subjectivity and individuation. Jean-Luc Nancy, whose work draws on Derrida and Heidegger, is another French philosopher to have written specifically on cinema (see his 2001 book, L’Évidence du film/The Evidence of Film (Paris: Yves Gaevert, 2001)), but his work belongs to the generation following, but also critical of, the 1960s/1970s ‘poststructuralist’ generation of French philosophers. See Claire Colebrook, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy’, in Colman (ed.) Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, 154–163, for a fine discussion of Nancy’s contribution to film-philosophy. 18  See Frank, What is Neostructuralism? 19  Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, Second Edition (London and New  York: Routledge, 2003). 16 17

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in favour of an analysis of signs constituting formal systems of signification.20 The Prague linguistic circle (notably Roman Jakobson) and the Russian Formalist analysts of literary texts (Schklovsky, Propp, and Jakobson again) were also significant influences. As a movement, structuralism encompassed work by theorists across a variety of disciplines including Louis Althusser, the early Barthes, A.J.  Greimas, Jakobson, the early Lacan, and Claude Levi-­ Strauss. It developed out of the generalisation of Saussure’s model of semiological analysis to encompass not only the analysis of signification in language and social institutions but also cultural myths, subjectivity, knowledge, ideology, and politics.21 Indeed, one of the defining features of both structuralism and poststructuralism—and a notable point of difference with Anglophone traditions of linguistics and philosophy of language—was the primacy given to Saussure’s semiology rather than other approaches to language (e.g. Chomskyian, functionalist, semantic, pragmatist, or cognitivist approaches). Saussure’s starting point is to understand language as a system of signs, where he defines a sign as the unity of a signifier (material inscription, image, or verbal utterance) and a signified (idea). For Saussure, the relationship between the sign (signifier/signified) and its referent (object in the world) is an arbitrary one. In English, for example, we use the word ‘dog’ to refer to canines, whereas in French one uses ‘chien’, and in German, ‘Hund’: the link between each of these signs and actual dogs is arbitrary, a function of history, culture, linguistic conventions, lexical borrowings, contingent usages, and so on. Signifiers and what they signify, moreover, derive their meaning from the principle of opposition (‘dog’ is not ‘bog’ or ‘log’—the differences between ‘d’, ‘b’, and ‘l’ being merely arbitrary, while the idea of a dog is clearly not the same as that of a cat or a cow). In short, from a semiological point of view, language can be understood as a system of differences defined by terms that are in themselves relational and that bear only an ‘arbitrary’ relationship to extra-linguistic reality. Saussure thus focused on the processes of signification: the manner in which signifiers, defined negatively and relationally in a network of signs, refer to other signifiers in open-ended chains of signification. In doing so, Saussure eschewed accounts of speaker intentionality, semantic reference, or communicative expression in favour of impersonal structures of signification, relying on differential elements that again are understood as ‘arbitrary’ (e.g. the phonetic differences between letters or phonemes). Saussure claimed, moreover, that all human social and cultural phenomena are ‘structured like a language’, which is to say that they depend upon semiological systems of signification underpinned by universal structures of meaning. This led Saussure’s followers to search for invariant structures of signification that could be applied to diverse contexts, from lan20  Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959 [1913]). 21  See Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, and Stam, Film Theory.

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guage, myth, and culture, to ideology and subjectivity (the idea of subject positions within a structure that individuals could occupy). A ‘structure’ simply refers to a series of formal relations between elements, whatever these elements might be, which function within a system in order to organise signification. Structures can therefore be very general and disparate across different signifying systems (e.g. the grammatical and semantic rules in a natural language, axiomatic rules in mathematics, rules governing harmony in music). Structuralism takes this definition of a structure and uses it to analyse and reveal the underlying rules governing the functioning of signifying systems. Such analyses generally follow a limited number of simple principles: reducing a significatory field to its constituent elements; establishing paradigmatic classes that organise these constitutive elements; and articulating the syntactic rules that govern the organisation of these paradigms (rules that generally function according to binary oppositions). Because structures are formal, they can be identified across different signifying systems, even those that seem very different (e.g. kinship relationships, economic relationships, linguistic relationships, symbolic relationships). Structuralist analysis thus looks for isomorphic structures that are functionally equivalent across different signifying systems. Such analyses aim to uncover the underlying basic functions within different systems that explain the rules governing the functioning of those systems. It is irrelevant whether these systems refer to different (social/cultural) realities, since the aim of the structuralist analysis is to compare different systems and uncover their underlying invariant schemata of signification. Saussure’s conception of semiology had a profound influence on structuralism, and it continues to influence poststructuralist critiques of structuralism. The defining structuralist axiom is that all human (socio-cultural) realities are structured in a language-like manner (governed by syntagmatic and paradigmatic structures). If everything is ‘structured like a language’, semiology (or the science of signs) could be applied to all human social-cultural phenomena. Hence, there were structuralist analyses of linguistic signification, cultural practices, and myths (Saussure, Greimas, and Levi-Strauss); the structures of subjectivity and operations of the unconscious (Lacan); knowledge formations, social institutions, and scientific theories (Foucault and Michel Serres); and of ideology as a way of constructing subjectivity and organising society (Althusser). Drawing on Saussure’s hypothesis (every aspect of human social reality is structured like a language), structuralist theorists posited a series of claims that would prove essential for the later generation of poststructuralist thinkers. The first is that language should be understood as a code or as a system defined by codes: conventional ways of defining, articulating, and thus limiting what can be said about experience and thus of structuring the significance or meaning of experience itself. Structuralists thus rejected the phenomenological understanding of meaning as expressing a pre-given content or practical intelligibility belonging to the world itself. Meaning does not derive from experience but, rather, from the learned use of a code or codes, which delimit and constrain what subjects can express or communicate about experience (note the omission

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of any role for practical engagement with the world, e.g. via communicative practices). Not only is the referential function of language set aside but the signifier (word, image, speech utterance) is given precedence over what is signified. Meaning or signification does not concern the referent or idea but rather the ‘materiality’ of the signifier in its functional operations. How, then, can novelty be introduced into a semiological system? For poststructuralist thinkers, the only way is by subverting the dominant codes of meaning. Authentic meaning or sense (in French, sens, which has the connotation of directed meaning) has its origin in non-sense: that which resists, remains outside, or is unintelligible within the dominant codes of meaning. Hence, the structuralists’ (and poststructuralists’) fascination with modernist art and literature, in which the subversion of linguistic and artistic codes, and exploration of non-sense as dialectically related to sense, became a thematic area of experimentation.22 This subversion of codes, however, is not a matter of speakers or writers autonomously intervening in language and mastering it (say through literature). Rather, since language is a code, governed by structural rules, speakers are ‘subjects’ of language (subjected to, subjects of, subjectified through, the dominant linguistic codes). We do not speak language; rather, language speaks us.23 According to poststructuralists, when we speak, we are always already subjected to the dominant codes of meaning, which constrain, organise, and direct what it is possible to say (hence, think or experience). This linguistic critique of the idea that the human subject masters meaning implies that (theoretical and moral) humanism, which posits the freedom of human consciousness, the autonomy of the human subject, was therefore fundamentally misguided or mistaken. Human subjectivity is not the source but rather the effect of structures of meaning. Consciousness is not an essence expressing itself in language and other cultural symbolic forms; rather, these symbolic forms (cultural values, moral beliefs, social institutions, ideological convictions) ensure the primacy of the code over the users of codes, of the community (of speakers) over the individual, and of institutions over subjects of these institutions. Social and cultural institutions are ways of structuring meaning and organising subjects; they subjectify individuals via dominant codes and ensure that they occupy pre-given subject positions. In this sense, they are essentially ways of reducing difference or diversity to identity or unity, of reducing the Other to the Same. Poststructuralist theorists targeted precisely these claims, convicting structuralist theories of a reduction of difference to identity, the reduction of the Other to the Same.24 They took this to be the fundamental flaw of humanistic ideology (including the human sciences): it was one of the key philosophical as well as ideological underpinnings of Western (Eurocentric) culture, and thus the primary target of the poststructuralist turn against structuralism. 22  See Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990 [1969]). 23  A poststructuralist variation on Heidegger’s ontological remark, ‘language is the house of Being’. See Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism, in Basic Writings, Second Edition, ed., David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 213–265; remark at 236, 237. 24  See Descombes, Modern French Philosophy.

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The Critique of Structuralism and Poststructuralist Turn The poststructuralists’ critique of structuralism was not simply intellectual or theoretical but strongly influenced by historical, political, and cultural-­ ideological factors.25 We could list here, among other things, the aftermath of World War II and historical shock of Nazism and the death camps; the end of Stalinism, influence of Marxism, and support for the French Communist Party; the problem of Algeria and the end of French colonialism; the cultural-political events of ‘May 1968′ and related students’ and workers’ revolts. In philosophical terms, the reigning influence of the ‘three Hs’ in French philosophy (Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl) was challenged by new philosophical inspirations (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) and contemporary intellectual currents (structuralism itself, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis).26 Much of this intellectual-­ philosophical spirit could be summarised as a generalised ‘anti-humanism’: a thorough rejection of notions of the centrality of the human subject, of theoretical and moral humanism, of the role of the dialectic in theory and practice, and of the primacy of unity, identity, and universality in knowledge, morality, and politics. Gilles Deleuze summarises all of these key elements in his Preface to his magnum opus—and key text of philosophical poststructuralism—Difference and Repetition (published in 1968): the subject dealt with here is manifestly in the air. The signs may be noted (Heidegger’s ontological difference, structuralism, modern novels, power of repetition in psychoanalysis, linguistics, art, etc.). All these signs may be attributed to a generalised anti-Hegelianism: difference and repetition have taken the place of the identical and the negative, of identity and contradiction. For difference implies the negative, and allows itself to lead to contradiction, only to the extent that its subordination to the identical is maintained. The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born out of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of the substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same, and the relation of different to different independently of those forms which make them pass through the negative.27

Deleuze identifies here both philosophical and cultural-historical factors significant for the poststructuralist turn, which not only challenged structuralism but Hegelian dialectics, phenomenological theories of subjectivity, e­ xistentialism,  Bensmaïa, ‘Poststructuralism’, 93.  See Descombes, Modern French Philosophy. 27  Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]), 1. 25 26

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Marxist philosophy, and the ‘scientism’ of the human sciences. The ‘generalised anti-Hegelianism’ to which Deleuze refers encompasses all notions of dialectical thinking (analyses of phenomena that are revealed to develop by way of negativity, that is, positing and then negating their opposite and reintegrating what is ‘other’ at a ‘higher’, more complex level of conceptual unity).28 Whether in the sphere of philosophy, history, and politics, the poststructuralist turn challenged conceptions of dialectical thinking that aimed at universality, progress, and truth centred on the autonomous rational (human) subject. Philosophically speaking, poststructuralism challenged the dialectical subordination of difference to identity (Hegel’s dialectical notion of identity as the ‘identity of identity and difference’). The real task of philosophy was not to reduce the ‘Other’ to the ‘Same’ but to think ‘difference in itself’: to liberate difference from the yoke of identity, singularity from the rule of universality, the Other from the dominance by the Same, in ways that subverted the philosophical foundations of Western (Eurocentric) culture. The key elements of this critique, typically accompanied by commitments to radical politics and artistic modernism, were the following. First, a strong suspicion of structuralism’s ambitions to constitute a totalising universal science, which was the explicit goal, for example, of Levi-Strauss. Such a ‘totalising’ approach to knowledge, modelled on the idea of a universal science, carried the risk of reducing difference to identity, or the Other to the Same, a relationship of conceptual binary opposition that paved the way, so it was claimed, for social domination or political subordination. Second, a critical attitude towards the ahistoricism of structuralist analyses, coupled with a renewed concern with historical specificity and a critical suspicion of Western ethnocentrism or Eurocentrism. Ahistoricism reduced complexity and diversity to an empty universalism and contributed to the ethnocentric imposition of Western knowledge as the standard against which other forms of knowledge were subsumed. Because of its claims towards scientific status (within the human sciences), structuralism retained a commitment to notions of truth and objective knowledge, and thus remained within what poststructuralist thinkers would criticise as the ‘logic of representation’ (Deleuze) and the idea of ‘being as presence’ (Derrida). Structuralism, moreover, relied on the idea of demonstrable facts and the objectivity of scientific knowledge claims, both of which were cast into doubt by the poststructuralist (sceptical) critique of notions of truth, the idea of objective facts, and the separability of knowledge claims and the operations of power (Foucault). Drawing on but also criticising Saussure, poststructuralists challenged the idea of binary oppositions (e.g. male vs. female, where female is defined as non-male): far from being neutral conceptual or logical operations, binary oppositions, it was claimed, establish a hierarchy between the primary, central, or defining term, taken as paradigmatic, and the secondary, marginal or subordinate term, taken as derivative. These conceptual 28  See Robert Sinnerbrink, Understanding Hegelianism (London and New  York: Routledge, 2007).

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­ ierarchies, moreover, were taken to provide conceptual foundations for varih ous forms of social and political forms of domination (male over female, Western over non-Western, etc.); hence, they needed to be identified and deconstructed. Finally, poststructuralists attacked the rationalism of structuralism, its reliance on the supposed neutrality and objectivity of Reason, which was alleged to mask an ethnocentric conception of universality (‘man’) and a particular form of rationality (Western), that once again served as a means of reducing difference to identity or the Other to the Same. The methods of structuralism, relying on rationalistic analyses of underlying universal structures of signification organised via binary oppositions, therefore had to be criticised or deconstructed in favour of a pluralist conception of knowledges, alternative rationalities, and the development of pluralistic/non-binary forms of logic that could articulate genuine difference or otherness in a non-reductive, non-hierarchical manner. Such was the proposed ethical agenda or theoretical-political orientation of the poststructuralist critique of structuralism.

Poststructuralism in Film Studies The poststructuralist generation (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, late Barthes, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Kristeva, Irigaray) was inspired by the so-called masters of suspicion (Nietzsche, Marx, Freud) to launch a critique of structuralism that was also critical of the reigning dialectical, phenomenological, and existential currents in philosophy (the three Hs—Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger). Inspired by modernist art, anarcho-revolutionary politics, and incipient social movements of the 1960s, the French philosophers of the 1960s launched powerful critiques of basic tenets of structuralism: its emphasis on the static, ahistorical, universalism of structures, its emphasis on unity and identity (rather than difference and singularity), but retained its anti-humanist, anti-subjectivist stance towards theorising subjectivity. They introduced instead a strong emphasis on the ‘decentred’ model of the subject (decentred by language, power, history, ideology, being, the unconscious, and difference) and an open-ended, temporally dynamic, historically relativistic account of ‘structures’ (no longer regarded as revealing invariant, isomorphically related codes, or universal structures of meaning). Poststructuralists took all of these elements to be linked to the attempt to shore up a conception of ‘Man’ belonging to an ethnocentric universalism, taking specificities of Western cultural discourses of knowledge as representative of humanity in general. The philosophical inspiration from Nietzsche served to challenge received theoretical pieties concerning morality, humanism, knowledge, and truth and motivated poststructuralists (inspired also by modernist literature, art, and politics) to propose instead experimental, performative, and sceptical modes of theorising. Methodologically speaking, there was a broad shift from (structuralist/formalist) analyses of works to the (symptomatic) interpretation of texts. Whereas works are unified, demarcated by art-form, and presuppose an author, texts are dispersed, defined by discursive practices of signification, and are not tethered

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to authorial intention but constituted ever anew by contextually bound, critical reading (interpretative) practices (where interpreters, rather than authors, produce texts via open-ended interpretations). Theorists were no longer concerned with universal invariant structures of meaning but with symptomatic interpretations of texts as open-ended ensembles of discourses (and ideologies). Texts not only revealed fissures, breaks, and irruptions of ‘difference’ within seemingly universal or univocal discourses but also imbricated authors, readers/spectators, and critics/readers within a broader dynamic textual/contextual matrix of (displaced and deferred) meanings. This methodological shift from work to text (Barthes, Derrida) or from structures to discourse and power (Foucault) did not mean abandoning semiotic analyses altogether. Rather, it led to an eclectic fusion of semiological approaches (Barthes on ‘mythologies’), coupled with psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity (Lacan’s rereading of Freud), structuralist Marxist theories of ideology and subjectivity (Althusserian apparatus theory), and philosophical critiques of identity, representational thinking, and the privileging of presence and meaning (Deleuzian philosophy of difference and Derridian deconstruction). Different strands of these broad theoretical critiques were synthesised and consolidated into the ‘French theory’ that was to be taken up and valorised by literary theory, cultural studies, and film studies. Turning to accounts of poststructuralism in film studies confirms the picture of a broad methodological shift from certain structuralist ideas (concerning signification, the subject, and language) to an emphasis on difference, subjectivity, culture, and politics. As a critical transformation of structuralist ideas, poststructuralism was brought to bear on the theorisation of film, film spectatorship, and film analysis, less as a specific theoretical position than as a broad methodological orientation.29 True to the poststructuralist turn, Fuery confirms the critical transformation of structuralist tenets concerning signification now liberated via a critical concern for difference and the critique of presence.30 The broad-sweeping claims made for poststructuralism not only as a theoretical project but as a functional critique of the foundations of Western philosophical and cultural hegemony are also evident in its uptake within film studies.31 Aitken affirms the cultural-political mission of poststructuralist theory, arguing that ‘it emerged across a range of disciplines as part of a perceived need to 29  Drawing a link with earlier traditions of film theory, Fuery claims that poststructuralism and postmodernism ‘are vital to the study of film because it is through the complex ideas of these theories that we might come to better understand the nature of the cinematic apparatus’. Fuery, New Developments in Film Theory, 1. 30  Cf. Fuery, New Developments in Film Theory, 2: ‘Gone is a sense of certainty, wholeness, resolution, and completion. They have been replaced by restless signs, driven by certain passions towards a status of the question and absence, rather than answers and presence’. 31  As Fuery remarks, ‘[t]he intellectual projects of poststructuralism and postmodernism, such as the interpretation and re-evaluation of topics such as subjectivity, culture, meaning, gender, power, discourse, pleasure, language (to name but  a few), represent a profound shift in the climate of Western thought’. Fuery New Developments in Film Theory, 2.

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oppose both “dominant” institutional and ideological structures of power and authority; and foundationalist, realist or humanist conceptions of the self, reason, intentionality, and knowledge’.32 Empowered by this grand theoretical and political project, poststructuralism gained authority and influence within film studies as a key element of what Bordwell and Carroll were to criticise as ‘Grand Theory’.

Poststructuralism and Carroll’s Critique of ‘Grand Theory’ Poststructuralism not only strongly influenced approaches to the study of the Humanities but also served, along with ‘postmodernism’, as a target of so-­ called culture wars polemics during the 1980s and 1990s—the two often being yoked together under the catch-all rubric of ‘French theory’. Bordwell and Carroll identified the shift from auteurism to structuralism within film theory of the 1970s, followed by the shift from structuralism to an amalgam of related theoretical approaches—psychoanalytic theory, semiotics, poststructuralism, and critical theory (Althusser and Brecht)—that together comprised what they dubbed ‘Grand Theory’, the prevailing paradigm during the 1980s and 1990s. The highly eclectic, even syncretic, character of Grand Theory is evident in Carroll’s provocative description of it as: a classy continental number, centrally composed of elements of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes, often with optional features derived, often incongruously, from Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, and (maybe sometimes) Jacques Derrida, along with contributions from French cinéphiles like Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, and Jean-Louis Baudry, although generally filtered, albeit with a difference, through exegetes like Stephen Heath, Kaja Silverman, and Teresa de Lauretis.33

Noël Carroll’s critique of ‘Grand Theory’, encompassing varieties of psychoanalytic-­semiotic, critical theory and poststructuralist-influenced theories of film, marked an important, if polemical, intervention in the shift from the prevailing paradigm of film theory during the 1990s.34 In addition to targeting its uncritical commitment to various eclectic strains of so-called Continental philosophy, Carroll challenged both the argumentative mode and methodological commitments of this paradigm, which relied heavily on assumptions deriving from poststructuralist theory. Overall, there are two features of so-called Grand Theory deemed most suspect or troubling by 32  Ian Aitken, European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 113. 33  Noël Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment”, in Bordwell and Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 37. 34  Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment”, 37–68.

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a­ nalytic-­cognitivist critics, features that are closely linked with the poststructuralist influence on its development.35 The first is the ‘decentred’ conception of the human subject whose claims to rational autonomy are undermined not only by the role of the unconscious in psychic life but also by the shared background structures of language, culture, and ideology. The second related point is the conviction that film is best approached as texts open to critical analysis, offering an important site for deconstructing dominant forms of ideology and social and cultural representation (in particular, of gender, sexuality, class, race, and cultural identity). The upshot of these two theses—the challenge to rational autonomy and the ideologico-political function of film—was to suggest that film theory provided a privileged site for the deconstruction of ‘Cartesian’ conceptions of the rational human subject and for the related polemical critique of the foundations of Western cultural hegemony. Carroll articulates five objections to the psychoanalytic/semiotic/ poststructuralist approach to film, difficulties which all stem, he claims, from the flawed argumentative approaches of Continental philosophical theory36: (1) a monolithic conception of film theory, according to which a foundational theoretical paradigm has to account for all relevant aspects of film; this foundationalism is linked with an implausible ‘medium-essentialism’, which sought to explain all relevant phenomena in terms of essential features of the film medium. There is some truth to the claim that Grand Theory relied on all-encompassing theoretical models, although they were not ‘monolithic’ (homogeneous or univocal) but usually involved a syncretic synthesis of various theoretical perspectives. The motivation for doing so, as remarked, was to account for the two assumptions outlined earlier: that human subjects are subject to ‘irrational’ forces that conflict with our rational capacities, and that film is not only an accessible medium of mass entertainment but also a complex instrument of ideological influence. Nonetheless, the sweeping claims of poststructuralist thinkers—such as the need to deconstruct Western philosophy as a ‘metaphysics of presence’ (Derrida), to reverse the subordination of ‘difference’ to the reductive frameworks of representation (Deleuze), or to pursue genealogical-­critical analyses of discourses as revealing social networks of power (Foucault)—all left their mark on Grand Theory, shaping its assumptions, methods, and implications and shoring up its cultural-political claims. (2) the conflation of film theory with film interpretation, in which theorists adopt a theoretical framework (e.g. Lacanian psychoanalysis), and then ‘confirm’ the theory in question by finding its concepts or ideas instantiated in specific film examples. According to critics, Grand Theory conflates film theory with film criticism, taking hermeneutic claims about the interpretation of  See Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 13–27.  Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment”, 38–56.

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­ articular films to provide evidence for theoretical claims about film in generp al.37 Here again we can identify the influence of the poststructuralist thought, namely the valorising of literary and artistic texts as themselves philosophically significant, an endorsement of the view that the boundary between philosophy and literature remains porous, coupled with a critical-hermeneutic approach to theorising in general (emphasising discursive or textual accounts of knowledge). (3) political correctness, in which the radical and progressive claims of film theory were bolstered via solidarity with emancipatory socio-political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Shorn of its unpleasant rhetorical aspect, the term refers to the manipulating of theory or rejection of valid inquiry due to implicit ideological commitments; the assumption that political progressivism provides some kind of confirmation of theoretical validity. Carroll’s complaint echoes those of other critics, who charge poststructuralist theories with overemphasising the political implications of theory, as though all knowledge claims, arguments, and theoretical debates in the end only reflect politically or ideologically charged struggles of power (Foucault, Althusser). The political and ideological dimensions of cinema remain as important as ever, but this does not mean that all attempts to theorise cinema are necessarily ‘political’, reflect a hidden, dogmatic ideological agenda, or express a power struggle pursued by conceptual means. (4) charges of formalism, in which ways of theorising about film without a political or ideological focus are dismissed as ‘formalist’ or as lacking substantive content. This is a complaint that was often levelled at Bordwell and Carroll, one that they have responded to at length, rejecting the claim that any theoretical analysis of film that does not explicitly deal with politics must therefore be ‘formalist’ or empty of substantive content. Finally, (5) biases against truth, which refers to the postmodernist dismissal of truth as an ideological construct, a claim that rests on an untenable ‘argument from absolute truth’ (any truth claim about film presupposes an absolutist concept of truth; there is no such concept; ergo truth claims about film are false or ‘ideologically suspect’). Nietzsche’s questioning of the value of truth can be readily recognised here, whether in the guise of a Deleuzian ‘constructivist’ model of philosophy as the affirmative ‘creation of concepts’; a Derridian deconstruction of truth and meaning, as cognate concepts belonging to the metaphysics of presence; or a Foucaultian genealogical critique of notions of truth and knowledge as covert expression of modern discursive regimes of power. When such theoretical assumptions and positions are implicitly used as bases for theorising, without due acknowledgement of their role or explicit justification of their claims, the result is theoretical opacity or dogmatism, both of which were key criticisms of so-called Grand Theory. Taken together, Carroll argues, these five objections hampered philosophical theorisation of film, prompting the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ towards 37  Richard Allen and Murray Smith (eds). Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 6.

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more analytic-cognitivist forms of theory.38 The polemical character of Carroll’s critique was intended to challenge the dogmas of a once dominant paradigm in crisis and to advocate in its stead a more empirically and rationally defensible model of film theorisation. At the same time, it also echoes, to some extent, some of the ‘culture wars’ political rhetoric of the 1990s, in which critical theory and poststructuralism were targeted not only as intellectually dubious but as morally and culturally pernicious. Although it clearly draws on psychoanalytic, semiotic, and critical theory, it is clear that much of what Carroll attacks in Grand Theory is shaped by poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. We can identify here, in particular, their emphasis on difference, the ‘decentred’ (rather than rational, autonomous, ‘Cartesian’) subject, and performative strategies of deconstructive interpretation (identifying moments of rupture, anomaly, marginalised, or suppressed meaning that symptomatically reveal the ‘totalising’ tendencies but also inherently self-undermining character of ostensibly rational theoretical texts or forms of argumentation). At the same time, however, it is important to recognise that there are elements of the poststructuralist paradigm that do not readily lend themselves to approaching film. The fact that few poststructuralist thinkers wrote much of substance on cinema—with the notable exception of Deleuze, as I discuss presently—suggests that there are elements of this paradigm that in some ways clash with the theorisation of film. Indeed, given its non-linguistic, audiovisual, temporal-experiential, and affective-emotional qualities, but also its phenomenologically rich and culturally and historically significant qualities, cinema challenges a number of the structuralist- and poststructuralist-derived assumptions of Grand Theory. Let me identify four such features here: 1. Cinema is not a language, nor does language—or linguistic signification—provide the best model for understanding cinema, despite the numerous attempts, within semiotic-structuralist strains of film theory, to adapt the ‘film as language’ thesis. The audiovisual, temporal, kinetic, and mimetic qualities of cinema, moreover, do not fit the linguistic idealist or textualist model of poststructuralist analysis very well, with its emphasis on the manner in which ‘language constructs reality’ or that subsumes (literary and cinematic) works into textual nodes within discursive-­ideological networks of signification. Hence the paucity of strictly ‘textualist’ approaches to cinema, say from a Derridian/deconstructive perspective. 2. The model of the ‘decentred subject’ at the heart of poststructuralism only fits some aspects of cinema spectatorship: the overly ‘formalist’ conception of the semiotic/psychoanalytic/ideological/textual ‘subject’ posited by Grand Theory was suitable for, and tended to encourage, critical analyses of the manipulative ‘subjectifying’ operations of the cinematic apparatus and its pernicious ideological effects. It overlooked,  Carroll, ‘Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment’, 56–68.

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however, the thoroughly affective, emotionally engaged, cognitively stimulated, morally reflective, and aesthetically expressive dimensions of cinematic spectatorship, hence suggesting the need for a return to theories of affect, embodiment, emotion, and critical (cognitive) reflection evident in contemporary film theory. 3. Poststructuralist theories were concerned to situate texts within cultural-­ historical as well as philosophical-ideological lineages, genealogies, and discursive contexts, but they neglected, as a consequence, phenomenologically enriched descriptions of film experience, or close detailed analysis of the thoroughly temporal, affective, aesthetic quality of film spectatorship. The turn to phenomenological theories of spectatorship, affect theory, as well as aesthetic and expressive analyses of film style can all be viewed as responses to some of these tendencies in the received model of Grand Theory. 4. The instrumentalisation of aesthetic qualities into either philosophical-­ ideological or textual-semiotic features of theoretical analysis also proved limiting for understanding and appreciating cinema. Despite the late Barthes’ attempts to engage with the aesthetic dimension of (photographic) images—using his contrast between the socially conventional studium (codes of representation) and the aesthetically expressive, subjective punctum (evoking an incommunicable bliss or jouissance)39— poststructuralist theories of film tended to avoid the aesthetic dimensions of cinematic style or else subsumed these under ideologically ‘symptomatic’ textualist readings of film. Again, the dearth of detailed aesthetic or medium-specific analyses of cinema by poststructuralist thinkers suggested the need to move beyond the poststructuralist tendency to one-­ sidedly ‘symptomatic’ readings of film and to explore more aesthetically nuanced, phenomenologically rich, and historically specific analyses of film.

Deleuze’s (Post-Poststructuralist) Film-Philosophy Gilles Deleuze is exceptional among poststructuralist thinkers for being the only philosopher to take cinema seriously as a philosophical problem. Having worked on literature and visual art, he published the first of his two books on film and philosophy in 1983, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (English translation, 1986), followed by the sequel in 1986, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (English translation, 1989). In their ambitious attempt to conceptualise the ‘essential’ concepts of cinema, and to develop a conceptual taxonomy of cinematic signs, Deleuze’s Cinema books would seem to qualify as prime examples of Grand Theory. Yet there are intriguing parallels between Deleuze’s approach 39  See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981).

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and the Bordwell/Carroll critique of the older paradigm of film theory. Deleuze, for example, is critical of psychoanalytic film theory and of linguistic models of the moving image that assimilate it to an utterance.40 Moreover, Deleuze was an early enthusiast of the way the ‘sciences of the brain’ might be able to open up new connections between film and philosophy, devoting a section in Cinema 2 to what he calls the ‘cinema of the brain’.41 On the other hand, Deleuze is also sceptical of simply applying philosophy to film, arguing that cinema has no need of an overarching explanatory framework, since it is capable of responding to problems in its own way, namely through images.42 In all of these respects, Deleuze differs from other poststructuralist philosophers in taking cinema seriously as exploring problems in its own right but also for posing significant challenges to philosophy. Indeed, cinema, for Deleuze, is an art form that could be said to ‘think’ using movement-images (and time-­ images), the expression of a ‘cinematic thinking’. In the context of exploring poststructuralism and film, however, the most pertinent features of his film-­ philosophy concern the key tenets of poststructuralist theory that Deleuze seems to reject, challenge, or transform. There are four elements of poststructuralist-­oriented film theory that are relevant here: (1) Deleuze rejects semiology/semiotics as the preferred theoretical model for analysing cinema; (2) he refuses psychoanalytic theories of film and film spectatorship; (3) he is against the ‘film is structured like a language’ structuralist-linguistic paradigm (Metz) of film theory; and (4) he questions the reduction of film to object of a purely theoretical investigation or philosophical reflection. He focuses, rather, not only on what is specific to the medium (namely, movement and time) but explores the idea that film responds, by its own means, to problems that are of philosophical interest, and may do so in ways that challenge traditional philosophical approaches. Rejecting prevailing linguistic and representationalist approaches to film, Deleuze adapts a Bergsonian ‘process metaphysics’ of movement and time, developing a novel philosophical analysis of cinematic movement, and brings to cinema a Peircean semiotics (rather than Saussurean semiology), an approach that yields a complex typology of movement-images (and time-images) that compose cinematic narratives as open-ended wholes. This account of cinema applies whether we are dealing with movement-image narratives (governed by a sensory-motor schema linking perception, affection, and action) or with a ‘crystalline’ regime of time-image narrative (typified by post-war European cinema), no longer bound by the sensory-motor action schema but constituted through non-localised links, ‘irrational’ cuts, temporal flows, and aberrant movements. This kind of ‘parametric narrative’, as Bordwell calls it, opens up an experience of time and duration, an expression of affect and of thought, that has  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 25–28; Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, 366.  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 204–215. 42  Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, 367. 40 41

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many philosophical resonances, not least the idea that cinema can c­ ommunicate thought by non-conceptual means. This is a philosophical encounter between cinema and philosophy that attempts to extract or construct the concepts of cinema in a manner that is complementary with film, while also recognising how cinema can ‘think’ or explore problems of relevance to philosophy by its own means. Deleuze’s film-philosophy is therefore neither a standard philosophical theory of cinema nor a formal analysis of cinematic structures nor a symptomatic-ideological reading of cinema in regard to history, culture, or politics. Rather, it stages an immanent encounter between philosophy and cinema as alternative yet complementary modes of thought (concepts and images). In this sense, Deleuze is the only ‘poststructuralist’ thinker to philosophise through film in an explicit and thoroughgoing manner. In doing so, however, his two Cinema books implicitly suggest limitations in the poststructuralist approach to film theory. These include the ‘linguistic’ bias in theorising cinema, the lack of attention to cinematic ontology, and the reductive tendency towards programmatic critiques of universalist structures (e.g. of subjectivity, language, signification, and power) that overlook the specificities of the cinematic medium and thus remain blind to the challenges that it poses to philosophy itself. In the Preface to the English translation of Cinema 1, Deleuze remarks that his book aims to ‘isolate certain cinematographic concepts’, which are neither technical (referring to shots or camera movements) nor critical (referring to various genres).43 Deleuze specifically rejects ‘linguistic’ concepts as well, ‘in the sense in which it has been said that the cinema was the universal language, or in the sense in which it has been said that the cinema is a language’—a clear reference to the tradition of Saussurean and structuralist-influenced psychoanalytic-­semiotic film theory. Instead, Deleuze describes cinema as ‘a composition of images and signs’, more specifically the composition of a ‘pre-­ verbal intelligible content’.44 The problem with linguistically inspired semiology, he claims, is that it ‘abolishes the image and tends to dispense with the sign’—in other words, it eschews what Deleuze defends as a pure semiology specific to the moving images and the variety of signs that constitute it.45 Deleuze’s aim, therefore, is to articulate cinematographic concepts, which means offering a typology of images and signs specific to cinema, namely to compositions of movement-images and its basic types (perception-images, affection-images, and action-images). Such compositions, moreover, offer an indirect representation of time through the montage of movement-images. Deleuze adopts two key philosophical references to enact this shift in conceptualising cinema: Charles Peirce, whose general classification of images and signs offers a more comprehensive and image-specific taxonomy than the linguistic models of semiotic film theory; and Henri Bergson, whose process  Deleuze, Cinema 1, ix.  Deleuze, Cinema 1, ix. 45  Deleuze, Cinema 1, ix. 43 44

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metaphysics responds to the ‘crisis’ in psychology and posits the equivalence of movement (in the physical world) and image (‘as psychic reality in consciousness’). Despite Bergson’s own critique of cinemas as producing a ‘false’ representation of movement via the recomposition of static poses, Deleuze argues that Bergson’s conception of the movement-image—which presents a direct image of movement ‘in itself’ rather than an indirect representation of movement—still remains to be elaborated fully in order to develop an alternative ontology of moving images.46 Deleuze’s film-philosophy is marked by three critical points that indicate a distinctive distancing from some of the key tenets of poststructuralist film theory. The first is his rejection of semiotic and phenomenological approaches in favour of a Bergsonian analysis of movement and time. The second is his positing of Bergsonian-Peircean ontology and typology of movement-images (and time-images) rather than a psychoanalytic-semiotic analysis of cinematic representation. And the third is his rejection of the linguistic model of signification, and the structuralist-derived semiotics that developed on its basis, in favour of an analysis of cinema as a ‘signaletic material’, composed of non-linguistic aesthetic elements directly expressing affect and thought through movement- and time-images.47 I shall consider each point briefly in turn and offer some remarks on their significance for understanding Deleuze’s movement beyond the poststructuralist paradigm of (film) theory. The first point is Deleuze’s return to Bergson in order to recast the ontology of cinema according to the primacy of images expressing movement and time rather than linguistically derived semiotic systems of representation. He adopts three theses from Bergson’s process metaphysics that emphasise the primacy of movement (and centrality of time as duration), the shift from fixed to mobile conceptions of movement in relation to time, and the manner in which cinematic movement-images, when composed into a discrete whole, simultaneously express a greater whole that goes beyond them. Let us consider each briefly in turn. (a) Movement is distinct from the space covered Bergson’s first thesis, according to Deleuze, holds that movement as such is qualitative, and so cannot be divided up without changing qualitatively.48 Space, on the other hand, is quantitative and so can be divided indefinitely. Space is homogeneous, movement heterogeneous.49 This implies that movement cannot be recomposed out of individual positions in space or instants in time; static sections (positions and instants) can only be synthesised in succession to create an ‘illusory’ movement. This is what happens in cinema, according to Bergson, which synthesises static images, passing in rapid succession, in  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1–11.  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29. 48  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1. 49  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 1. 46 47

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order to generate a ‘false movement’: the illusionistic impression of movement on screen. However, what we experience in film, Deleuze claims, is not an illusory movement but rather a ‘mobile section of duration’: a genuine ‘movement-­ image’ that moves in itself, enabling genuine movements to be captured and extended over time through the cinematic devices of framing, editing, cutting, montage, and so on.50 (b) Ancient versus modern conceptions of movement According to Deleuze/Bergson’s second thesis, there are two ways of composing ‘illusory’ forms of movement (i.e. recomposing movement from static instants or ‘poses’). For the Greeks, movement was composed via intelligible elements or eternal Forms; for the moderns, following modern science, movement refers to generic temporal instants or what Deleuze calls the ‘any-instant-­ whatever’.51 Time is taken as an independent variable, which allows movement to be measured and quantified. Cinema inherits this quantitative conception of movement and of time, and can therefore be defined as ‘the system which reproduces movement by relating it to the any-instant-whatever’.52 (c) Movement expresses a qualitative change in the Whole According to the third Bergsonian/Deleuzian thesis, what we take to be temporal instants are only ‘immobile sections’ of movement; movement itself, on the contrary, is a ‘mobile section’ expressing a qualitative change in a larger Whole.53 From this holistic perspective, movement is an expression of qualitative change; it is an expression of what Bergson famously called duration (durée). What we take to be static images are really ‘frozen’ movements or ‘immobile sections’ of movement, frozen moments of durée.54 An important distinction comes into play here: that between mobile sections of duration, which Deleuze calls movement-images, and direct images of duration (time-­ images), in which movement is no longer subordinated to time but appears ‘for itself’. The key points that Deleuze derives from his analysis of Bergson on movement are these: (1) that cinema produces movement-images depicting movement as such within the image itself; (2) that film expresses movement between composed images (montage); and (3) that this composed series of images expresses duration across the Whole of the film, while also opening to an ‘outside’ extending beyond the film to world itself.55 These three Bergsonian theses on movement provide Deleuze with a conceptual framework for analysing and  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 2–3.  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 3–4. 52  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 6. 53  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 8. 54  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 8–9. 55  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 11. 50 51

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classifying cinematic images (namely as varieties of movement-image and time-­ image). They also mark a strong shift away from semiotic theories of cinematic representation, as well as phenomenological accounts of spectatorship, in favour of a processual ontology of images as direct expressions of movement, indirect (through montage) expressions of time, or, in the case of time-image cinema, direct expressions of duration. To this Bergsonian ontology of movement-images, Deleuze adds a Peircean typology of images and signs, which marks another critical point that distances his film-philosophy from poststructuralist approaches. As Deleuze remarks, C.S. Peirce, the ‘founder of semiology’, is the philosopher ‘who went furthest into a systematic classification of signs’.56 Although Deleuze’s adaptation of Peirce’s typology of images and signs is loose, and applied to a fundamentally Bergsonian ontology of movement-images, it is clear that this Peircean framework offers a distinctive alternative to the prevailing psychoanalytic-semiotic framework of cinematic representation. Indeed, for Deleuze, a sign can be defined, along Peircean lines, as ‘a particular image which represents a type of image, sometimes from the point of view of its composition, somethings from the point of view of its genesis or its formation (or even its extinction)’.57 More generally, Deleuze rejects the linguistically centred paradigm of Saussurean as well as structuralist semiologies that have prevailed, until not so long ago, in modern film theory. On the contrary, ‘semiotics’, for Deleuze, refers to ‘the system of images and signs independent of language in general’.58 Cinema is not a language, nor are moving images signs to be understood according to a linguistic model of signification; rather, ‘the language system’ itself ‘only exists in its reaction to a non-language material that it transforms’.59 The three principal types of movement-images—perception-images (showing perceptually salient elements of a milieu), affection-images (showing qualitative and expressive aspects of not only faces but objects, landscapes, and places), and action-images (showing action-orientated presentations of movement or relational dynamics of directed action)—will have corresponding signs or image variations, which Deleuze articulates in great detail throughout the Cinema volumes. One example is his use of the Peircean categories of firstness to describe the qualitative and expressive character of affection-images (the direct expression of powers or qualities ‘considered by themselves’, e.g. Falconetti’s face in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc). He uses the Peircean category of secondness to describe oppositional forces and antagonistic conflicts within defined situations as expressed by the action-image (e.g. the ‘Mexican standoff’ scene in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs). And he adopts the Peircean category of ‘thirdness’ in order to conceptualise relations articulated via moving images, including reflection-images and thought-images that  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 69.  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 69. 58  Deleuze, Cinema 1, 69. 59  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29. 56 57

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Deleuze finds elaborated in complex ways in Hitchcock’s films.60 For our purposes, the main point is that Deleuze combines a Bergsonian ontology of movement-images with a Peircean typology of images and sign. This enables Deleuze to construct a cinematic ontology that moves beyond the prevailing psychoanalytic-semiotic as well as nascent phenomenological approaches to film (which Deleuze rejects because these assume the standpoint of ‘natural consciousness’ that cinema both adapts and subverts). Finally, there is Deleuze’s emphasis on the immediate or direct qualities of cinematic presentation, cinema as a ‘signaletic material’61 rather than linguistically/semiotically mediated representation. This marks a further shift from the symptomatic approach to cinematic representation that prevailed in the psycho-­ semiotic and poststructuralist models of film theory (which emphasised either the unconscious, semiotic-discursive, or textual-ideological significance of film understood as symptomatic of ‘deeper’ forces/structures or encompassing discursive frameworks). The components of the movement-image, rather, are non-linguistic expressive elements; they constitute a signaletic material ‘which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written)’.62 Far from activating semiotic codes of representation, or being articulated via discursive regimes of signification, cinematic images comprise a non-linguistic, expressive ‘plastic mass’: ‘an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically, and pragmatically’.63 There is a semiotic dimension to cinema, to be sure, but this involves images and signs expressive of movement and time rather than linguistically modelled processes of signification or the deciphering of cinematic ‘codes’. The cinematic expression of movement and time, moreover, evokes complex varieties of affect and can even provoke thought. Indeed, contra semiotic and textualist theories of representation in poststructuralist theory, Deleuze emphasises the power of cinema to directly stimulate the brain and nervous system: far from deconstructing cinematic codes, Deleuze stresses cinema’s powers to provoke corporeal sensation and the transfer of affect and excitation by the expression of movement and evocation of time through audiovisual images. Contra ideological theories of cinematic representation, which regard film as symptomatic of ‘deeper’ ideological meanings to be critically deciphered by deconstructing prevailing ‘codes’, Deleuze argues for the capacity of cinema to affect the body and brain directly so as to provoke thought.64 For Deleuze, the breakdown in prevailing models of narrative cinema defined by the sensory-motor action schema (structuring psychologically  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 30–34.  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29 ff. 62  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29. 63  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 29. 64  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 189–211. 60 61

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­ otivated action and causal plotting) opens up the direct expression of duram tion via time-images (e.g. in post-war European cinema).65 By ‘blocking’ the action-­orientation of perception, and reorienting our perspective towards time rather than movement, such new forms of cinema, defined by time-images rather than movement-images, are conducive to new forms of affect and the expression of complex thought. In emphasising direct corporeal as well as neurological engagement, rather than highly reflective representation or symptomatic critical interpretation, Deleuze marks another key point of critical distance from the linguistically-centred, symptomatic and discursive, claims of poststructuralist semiotic theories. To conclude, cinema can directly evoke movement and duration, expressing forms of affect and of thought that cannot be readily theorised from within the framework of semiotic or psychoanalytic film theory. Moreover, in its affinity with philosophy, responding to problems via cinematic means, film moves beyond the ‘symptomatic’ readings favoured by many poststructuralist approaches. Deleuze’s return to movement and time, a semiotic typology of movement-image types, and exploration of the philosophical encounter between image and concept, suggest that, for all its contributions to contemporary film theory, the poststructuralist appropriation, critique, and transformation of structuralism remain inadequate for conceptualising cinema. Indeed, Deleuzian film-philosophy, with its emphasis on time, affect, embodiment, and thought, could be understood as a key moment in the overcoming of poststructuralist approaches to film—or alternatively, as a philosophical experiment in attempting to think cinema anew.

Bibliography Aitken, Ian. 2001. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Allen, Richard, and Murray Smith, eds. 1997. Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bensmaïa, Reda. 2005. Poststructuralism. In The Columbia History of Twentieth-­ Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, 92–95. New York: Columbia University Press. Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Brunette, Peter. 1998. Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction. In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 91–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brunette, Peter, and David Wills. 1989. Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 1–24.

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Carroll, Noël. 1996. Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. D.  Bordwell and N.  Carroll, 37–68. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Colebrook, Claire. 2009. Jean-Luc Nancy. In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. F. Colman, 154–163. Durham: Acumen Press. Colman, Felicity, ed. 2009. Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers. Durham: Acumen Press. Constable, Catherine. 2009a. Jean Baudrillard. In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. F. Colman, 212–221. Durham: Acumen Press. ———. 2009b. Adapting Philosophy. Jean Baudrillard and ‘The Matrix Trilogy’. Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959 [1915]. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw Hill. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 [1983]. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson, and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1990 [1969]. Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1994 [1968]. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The Brain Is the Screen. An Interview with Gilles Deleuze. Trans. Marie Therese Guirgis. In The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman, 365–373. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modern French Philosophy. Trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1975. Film and Popular Memory: An Interview with Michel Foucault. Radical Philosophy 11 (11): 24–29. Frank, Manfred. 1989. What Is Neostructuralism? Trans. Sabine Wilke and Richard Gray. Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 45. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fuery, Patrick. 2000. New Developments in Film Theory. New York: St Martin’s Press. Gardner, Colin. 2009. Roland Barthes. In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. F. Colman, 109–121. Durham: Acumen Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hawkes, Terence. 2003. Structuralism and Semiotics. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Letter on Humanism. In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 2nd ed., 213–265. New York: Harper Collins. MacCormack, Patricia. 2009. Julia Kristeva. In Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers, ed. F. Colman, 276–285. Durham: Acumen Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2001. L’Évidence du Film/The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami and Jean-Luc Nancy in Conversation. Bruxelles: Yves Gevaert Editeur. Poster, Mark. 1989. Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London/New York: Continuum. Smith, Richard. 2001. The Philosopher with Two Brains. Film-Philosophy 5(34), November. http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/655/568 Stam, Robert. 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell.

PART IV

Philosophy Through Film

CHAPTER 20

Thoughtful Films, Thoughtful Fictions: The Philosophical Terrain Between Illustrations and Thought Experiments E. M. Dadlez

There is nothing wrong with your television. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are now in control of the transmission. We control the horizontal and the vertical. We can deluge you with a thousand channels, or expand one single image to crystal clarity and beyond. We can shape your vision to anything our imagination can conceive. For the next hour, we will control all that you see and hear.

All of my Contemporary Moral Problems students are too young to remember any iteration (1963–1965, 1995–1999, 1999–2002) of The Outer Limits, science fiction’s answer to The Twilight Zone. But they are completely stoked about watching a film instead of having a regular class. They would munch popcorn if they could. The episode titled “A Stitch in Time” stars barely recognizable younger versions of Amanda Plummer and Michelle Forbes. Michelle Forbes plays FBI agent Jamie Pratt, who is investigating 17 murders, all committed with the same gun. Amanda Plummer plays scientist Theresa Givens, who has, unknown to anyone, invented a time machine. She uses it to go back in time to kill serial killers before their killings begin. She waits until a serial killer and rapist is caught, makes sure the evidence is irrefutable, reads about the execution in the paper, and then opens the doorway into the past. Pratt catches up with Givens through a predictable sequence of confusions involving a gun that has killed both before and after its date of manufacture. Once she is on the verge of being convinced of the reality of the time machine and how the

E. M. Dadlez (*) University of Central Oklahoma, Edmond, OK, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_20

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scientist is using it, the central conflict between the characters emerges. Givens’ targets haven’t done anything yet, Pratt points out. They’re innocent. They would have, says Givens. This is a stellar illustration of the conflict between deontologists and utilitarians and makes their cases rather better than pitching a couple of trolley examples would do. I like using this film in class for several other reasons as well. It passes the Bechdel test: the two protagonists are women, and the mandatory romantic subplot about the FBI agent and her nerdy but deserving co-worker is minimal. The scientist is motivated by having been raped as a young girl, so there is at least a gesture in the direction of rape awareness and consequences for victims. There is an intriguing complication when the time travelers rescue the teenaged scientist from her rapist, causing her to lead a less trauma-filled life in which she, being a genius, still invents the time machine, but doesn’t dream of using it to kill anyone (since she is now a popular science professor with mental stability and much better hair). So in the new timeline in which the scientist has been rescued, all serial killers have gone unchecked. The FBI agent cannot live with this, however, and the episode ends with Jamie Pratt approaching a serial-killer-to-be, gun drawn. The hard-core utilitarians among my students are immediately identifiable by their suggestion that the scientist go back even further in time and thrust the prospective serial killers into therapy at an early age, or that she go further yet and do something to disrupt their being conceived in the first place, should their deadly inclinations prove congenital (sneaking Plan B into their mothers’ water supply, for instance). I have purposely selected a film that has modest artistic aspirations but that is nonetheless a respectable example of its type. Amanda Plummer got an Emmy for her role in 1996. It is well written and well performed, gripping enough to make my students leave their cell phones alone, engaging enough to arouse a variety of emotions, and intellectually challenging enough to furrow a few brows as students sort out the time travel paradoxes. I wouldn’t want to call it a thought experiment in the very narrow and demanding sense adopted by some philosophers, but I think that it does more than present us with an illustration that we can do some philosophy on after the fact. I think that “A Stitch in Time” is an intuition pump, a kind of low-stakes, low-impact thought experiment that isn’t designed or intended exclusively to promote a single line of reasoning, but that nonetheless prompts particular kinds of philosophical reflections and understandings in its audience. There is a wide-ranging contemporary debate about whether films can do philosophy in the same way that journal articles or other philosophical texts can, about whether films can contribute to philosophy by characteristically cinematic means. This debate is often subsumed by the larger debate about the capacity of fiction, in general, to make concrete philosophical contributions.1 1  Indeed, a part of what follows, especially material in Section III, initially involved my investigations of the capacity of literature to function as a species of thought experiment. I have adapted those investigations, initially published in conference proceedings, to the present project involving

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This chapter will focus on one aspect of the preceding debate, namely the ­specific question of whether films (and, sometimes, fictions in general) can, in some respects, function as thought experiments. It will focus further on the question of whether so-called cinematic illustrations of philosophical points can make cognitive contributions of their own to the arguments and stances so illustrated. Many philosophers maintain that works of art, in particular films and novels, cannot function as thought experiments. Most who take such a stand make their case by setting the bar for what can count as a philosophical thought experiment very high. It will be argued here not that these positions are necessarily mistaken, but that there is a large gray area that is seldom acknowledged between what counts as a philosophical thought experiment tout court, when this is taken to signify something that is exclusively an embellished argument, and what counts as “being used to illustrate a philosophical point,” where the fiction is imported into an already complete external argument. Accepting the latter as applying to films and novels is taken to concede that they make few if any non-trivial contributions to knowledge and cognition. Trying to make a case for the role of narrative and filmic fictions in the former sense is difficult and saddles one with the implausible stance that such fictions ought only to function as arguments and that all features extraneous to those arguments be regarded as, in principle, expendable. Since the majority of films and novels would be thought to lack clarity and coherence if regarded as conveyers of argument alone, and since any with aesthetic merit would doubtless possess many additional and equally worthwhile aims and effects as well, the narrow account of what a thought experiment is seems inapplicable to film and literature. I will contend, however, that these are not the only alternatives available, that intuition pumps and variant case arguments provide better grounds for comparison than has been acknowledged, and that there are uses to which filmic illustrations in particular may be put that make distinctive and cognitive contributions of their own.

I This chapter cannot rehearse at any great length the many arguments in the literature against the cognitivist position that the film (and the novel) can, in fact, yield non-trivial philosophical knowledge. Objections to cognitivism of this kind are legion. Paisley Livingston, Murray Smith, and David Egan, for instance, all present disanalogies between thought experiments and films or novels.2 However, many philosophers with cognitivist sympathies have underfilm. See “Literature, Ethical Thought Experiments, and Moral Knowledge,” Southwest Philosophy Review 29:1 (2013): 195–209. 2  Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:1 (2006): 11–18. Murray Smith, “Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:1 (2006): 33–42. David Egan, “Literature and Thought Experiments,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74:2 (2016): 139–150.

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taken the task of challenging them. Noel Carroll, David Davies, Aaron Smuts, Robert Sinnerbrink, and Thomas Wartenberg3 (again, to name only a few) have ably responded to some of these objections. All suggest that there may be more to the business of illustrating a philosophical idea than the provision of the cognitive equivalent of a side panel with a caption. The anti-cognitivist line of argument proposed by Livingstone stipulates that any legitimate example of filmic philosophy must do more than illustrate previously published philosophical ideas. It must, rather, “illustrate historically innovative philosophical contributions.”4 Further, it must do so via exclusively cinematic means. However, “if it is contended that the exclusively cinematic insight cannot be paraphrased, reasonable doubt arises as to its very existence. If it is granted…that the cinematic contribution can…be paraphrased, this contention is incompatible with arguments for a significantly independent, innovative and purely ‘filmic’ philosophical achievement, as linguistic mediation turns out to be constitutive of (our knowledge of) the epistemic contribution a film can make.”5 That is, all the philosophical work would be done in the course of the paraphrase or translation or interpretation rather than in the process of experiencing the film. Davies, Smuts, and Carroll each point out that film is a mixed art to begin with and therefore shares elements with other arts. Even such means as might be initially considered exclusive to cinema, Carroll suggests, (montage, for instance) could play a role in photography and in fine arts as well.6 Moreover, the paraphrase or interpretation only seems to create the difficulty above if it is somehow external to one’s experience of the film.7 But need the process of “taking the film philosophically” be so strangely detached from watching it? If it needn’t, it is difficult to see how the film’s content drawing on knowledge and resources we already possess in the course of being comprehended should disqualify it as a source of knowledge. Most explicitly, philosophical arguments draw on much that has gone before. If some or most philosophy is indeed a footnote to Plato, it would seem not to count as philosophy on a very strict construal of Livingstone’s originality requirement. Murray Smith stresses the different aims of art and philosophy, arguing that they aspire to achieve distinct ends and employ incompatible means to do so. Engaging with films involves the employment of what Richard Moran would call the dramatic imagination rather than the hypothetical imagination invoked 3  Thomas Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:1 (2006):19–32. Noel Carroll, “Movie-Made Philosophy,” (draft) pp.  1–26. David Davies, “Can Philosophical Thought Experiments Be ‘Screened’?” in Thought Experiments in Science, Philosophy, and the Arts ed. Melanie Frappier, Letitia Meynell, and James Robert Brown (NY: Routledge, 2012): 223–238. Aaron Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67:4 (Fall 2009): 406–420. Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (NY: Routledge, 2016). 4  Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” p. 11. 5  Ibid., p. 12. 6  Noël Carroll, “Movie-Made Philosophy” (draft), p. 10. 7  Davies, “Can Philosophical Thought Experiments Be ‘Screened’?” p. 235.

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in the course of philosophical thought experiments.8 Further, the kind of ambiguity requisite for proper artistic engagements is likely to be at odds with the clarity philosophy requires.9 David Egan’s argument for distancing literature from thought experiments is not dissimilar. Philosophical thought experiments are means to ends with more or less replaceable parts (provided the replacement does the same philosophical work), whereas works of narrative art are clearly not. We read thought experiments allegorically, more or less the way we read maps, to make a certain conceptual territory clear, whereas in art, the particular elements are irreducible. Literature (or film, Smith might add) does not exhaust itself once some particular conceptual distinction is made salient. Reading fiction (or watching a film) in the way we read a thought experiment, allegorically, as Egan puts it, while it could be informative, would probably also be detrimental to any number of other ways in which art could prove rewarding or inspiring or generative of insight. The distinction here is reminiscent of Smith’s distinction between hypothetical and dramatic imagining. The cold detached intellect will be inimical, it seems, to the steamy, emotional nature of artistic engagement. Everyone seems to forget that emotions are often characterized as cognitive in themselves. Even anti-cognitivists about emotion will allow that emotions have frequent cognitive concomitants, that they can be characterized as propositional attitudes or construals or evaluations. And if that is the case, two points are raised to challenge anti-cognitivist stances about films and novels. First, the emotions films and novels are acknowledged by everyone to arouse guarantee at least some level of cognitive investment. This will be explored shortly. Second, certain kinds of thought experiments, intuition pumps in particular, themselves rely not exclusively on theoretical presumptions but on some fairly basic emotional responses. No one has to my knowledge made the claim that films and novels are nothing but thought experiments, and that certainly will not be attempted here. Cognitivist arguments, rather, tend to suggest that films can contain or convey thought experiments, not that this is all there is to them. The position defended here is even more modest: viz., that the analogy between some films (or novels) and the kind of low-stakes thought experiment exemplified by the intuition pump is somewhat more apt than anti-cognitivists seem disposed to acknowledge. Let us initially turn to the question of emotion. It is uncontroversial to assume that most emotional responses are accompanied by thoughts or beliefs about their intentional objects. That is, fear is usually accompanied by a thought or belief about a given situation’s being dangerous, and anger at an individual by the assessment of that person’s action as unjust or inappropriate. In the case of fictional film and literary fiction, thoughts about characters and fictional events are entertained in imagination rather than believed, but they still pretty clearly constitute assessments and evaluations and thereby a species of activity 8 9

 Smith, “Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity,” p. 39.  Ibid., p. 40.

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that could be loosely construed as cognitive. Furthermore, general beliefs about universals underlie both our emotional and imaginative responses to fiction. We would not fear for and pity Ripley on account of her situation vis-à-vis the hideous alien depicted in Ridley Scott’s film Alien, unless we believed that being trapped in an enclosed space with a powerful, hostile predator was dangerous and horrible. If this were one’s idea of an exciting way to spend an afternoon, one wouldn’t fear for Ripley. Likewise, we would not be angry on Desdemona’s behalf, unless we believed it was particularly despicable to accuse people of things they hadn’t done on the basis of insufficient evidence. If we believed instead that honor can only be preserved by punishing the appearance of misconduct, we would be less likely to pity Desdemona or feel anger on her behalf. So there are at least two kinds of cognitive activity involved when we respond emotionally to a fictional film that no one will be inclined to contest. There is the doxastic repertoire that the fictional events tap into (and occasionally alter), and there are the evaluations we make of fictional characters and their situations. These underlying universal beliefs and concepts are closely connected to what it is we imagine. Since we cannot imagine what we cannot conceive, we would not be able to imagine as dangerous, say, some situation that we believed was always and only safe, unless, of course, we were to modify that belief about safety by allowing for an exception. The relevant point to make here is that the thoughts and beliefs in question aren’t simple awarenesses of fictional entities and events, but rather evaluations of them as admirable or despicable, as dangerous or desirable, as right or wrong. Approbation and disapprobation are described by David Hume as sentiments that occur prior to and that give rise to moral judgments. Whatever one’s stance in that regard (for some prefer accounts in which the emotion and judgment are identified outright), it seems reasonable at least to include approval and disapproval along with all the other emotions to which fiction may give rise. And these are a species of assessment. It may be objected that, if assessment is indeed involved, it is neither deliberative nor considered. But it is this very kind of non-deliberative, non-considered approval or disapproval that is deployed in ethical thought experiments time and again. I have in mind, of course, the variety of thought experiment that is most often referred to as an intuition pump. What is an intuition pump? Daniel Dennett calls them “lovely thought experiments. Like Plato’s cave, and Descartes’s evil demon, and Hobbes’ vision of the state of nature and the social contract, and even Kant’s idea of the categorical imperative. I don’t know of any philosopher who thinks any one of those is a logically sound argument for anything. But they’re wonderful imagination grabbers, jungle gyms for the imagination. They structure the way you think about a problem. These are the real legacy of the history of philosophy. A lot of philosophers have forgotten that, but I like to make intuition pumps…. I coined the term ‘intuition pump,’ and its first use was derogatory. I applied it to John Searle’s ‘Chinese room,’ which I said was not a proper argument but just an intuition pump. I went on

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to say that intuition pumps are fine if they’re used correctly, but they can also be misused. They’re not arguments, they’re stories. Instead of having a conclusion, they pump an intuition. They get you to say ‘Aha! Oh, I get it!’”10 So, intuition pumps are stories—stories that, in ethics, are most often intended to contest or to illustrate the effectiveness of some particular moral principle by eliciting an emotional response of disapprobation or approbation. In normative and applied ethics in particular, a lot of the debate between the deontologist and the consequentialist takes place in an arena of competing intuitions. Deontologists tell stories about utilitarians who steal people’s organs in the name of morality and the greater good, while consequentialists spin similar tales about the consequences of blind adherence to rules in life-or-death cases. Stories like these will not assume the truth of the teller’s ethical position, since this cannot be done without begging the question. Neither do they assume the truth of the principle they are designed to refute. Clearly, thought experiments of this type are designed to present auditors with cases to which they react disapprovingly or approvingly. They are designed to get people to see a given alternative as wrong or as right, by offering a dramatic illustration of the inadequacy of the principle under review or by offering an illustration of the contrary. Given that auditor reactions will depend neither on the principle at which aim is taken nor on the rival principle, it is evident that the emotional reaction of the subject is the crucial factor in this process. The way in which ethicists make use of intuition pumps can be taken to assign a pretty serious role in ethics both to fiction and to emotion. Hume, as has already been indicated, maintained from the outset that the source of morality can be found in sentiment and that our emotional reactions of approbation and disapprobation provide the key to identifying virtue and vice. Anyone even a bit keen on the Humean approach to ethics will have no immediate objection to this species of thought experiment as an adjunct to ethical reasoning.

II With this in mind, let us consider the kinds of objections to the comparison of thought experiments and films (or novels) raised by Smith and Egan. Both offer us accounts of the thought experiment that characterize it as cerebral in a way they regard as inimical to many of the purposes of art. Recollect that we are said to read thought experiments the way we read maps (Egan) and that they make use only of Richard Moran’s hypothetical imagination (Smith) rather than the ‘dramatic imagination’ Moran says is deployed in fictional contexts and that involves something other than the mere entertainment of propositions. Let us begin with Egan. Egan stresses that we use thought experiments to make arguments, first and foremost, and that this exhausts their purpose. 10  Daniel C.  Dennett, “Intuition Pumps” (Chapter 10) Edge 5/7/96. Accessed 6/7/16: http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/r-Ch.10.html

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The particulars of such narratives are in principle replaceable in a way that the particulars of films and novels are not, and liable to forms of criticism that fictions are not (whereas aesthetic criticism would not apply to thought experiments at all—something that will be contested presently). Thus, he believes, no analogy between thought experiments and artworks can be sustained. Since Egan has in mind the kinds of thought experiments that I regard as falling into the general category of the intuition pump, it is worth considering two of them in some detail. Judith Jarvis Thomson’s narrative about the violinist, from “A Defense of Abortion,”11 and Peter Singer’s narrative about the drowning children whom no one feels inclined to save, from “Famine, Affluence and Morality,”12 are both discussed. In discussing these thought experiments, and in pointing out that the kind of criticism applicable to them is the criticism of arguments, Egan implies that both are nothing more than inductions. That is, he refers to Thomson’s argument as an induction/analogy and treats Singer’s the same way. This is a picture of thought experiments that simply treats them as arguments with bells and whistles. But there is reason to think that the case isn’t quite as simple as that. It will be maintained that Thomson’s and Singer’s thought experiments can be most fruitfully regarded as variant case arguments. Variant case arguments, in particular those deployed in applied ethics, are intended to function in more or less the way a certain kind of fiction is intended to function. That is, both can present cases (some more detailed than others) intended to elicit moral approval or disapproval prior to the adoption of any particular position or principle. The reaction, in a laudably Humean fashion, is intended to give rise to the judgment rather than to arise from it. Such arguments are very frequently employed in order to provide counterexamples, by demonstrating what a commitment to some principle or position could entail, that is, by showing a variant of that principle’s application. So, for instance, Peter Singer’s shallow pond example and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s example of the desperately ill violinist for whom one is expected to provide life support both employ the technique of variant cases. In what follows, the characterization of variant case arguments as defective inductions will be challenged, and their prospects for increasing moral insight (as well as the concomitant prospects of fiction) will be explored. Thomas Metcalf has written a provocative and intelligent paper in which he considers characterizing variant case arguments as instances of induction across cases.13 I will argue that this misconceives the nature of such arguments, and will attempt to show that the variant cases under review need not be characterized as inductions. Instead, 11  Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1: 1 (1971): 47–66. 12  Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1: 3 (1972): 229–43. 13  Thomas Metcalf, “Against the Technique of Variant Cases: The Problem of Applied Ethics Induction,” Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, October 2011. This paper is the source of some of my suggestions above.

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they function more or less in the same way that classic intuition pumps function. In what follows, most of what is said about ethical thought experiments will apply to fiction as well. There is reason to think that examples like Singer’s and Thomson’s do not involve an induction across cases. Let us consider the two variant case arguments canvassed. In the first case, a candidate must allow herself to be plugged into the circulatory system of Thomson’s violinist for nine months (since she alone has the right blood type), or else the violinist will die. Singer’s drowning children are victims whom no one can be bothered to rescue, despite the ease with which it could be done. Such cases, while clearly geared to elicit particular moral responses from auditors, are also intended to highlight those features of situations that make actions permissible or impermissible. In other words, it’s not that things like leaving easily rescuable people to die just happen to coincide with wrongness in one case, leading us to infer illegitimately that such a coincidence will occur in others. Pace Hume (on the matter of continual conjunction), it seems rather that those constructing such arguments are presenting uncontroversial ground zero cases that seem to many indisputably to show a relation like supervenience or identity or a necessary connection (pick your favorite relation) between one characteristic of the cases on the one hand and permissibility or impermissibility on the other. They present us with moral reasons. The intention, in other words, is to do much more than to point to the coincidental occurrence of properties on the basis of which we can argue for the ubiquity of the coincidence. The intention is to put the focus on the wrongness-making characteristic of an action, or the permissibility of a decision. That’s not quite the same as the expectation that two freestanding (as it were) characteristics will always coincide. Variant cases are usually resorted to in order to sidestep the ones that tend for one reason or another to blind people to the moral reasons being explored. Metcalf proposes this when he takes into consideration and rejects the claim that variant cases might be less open to bias or prior belief. How might that work? The Thomson violinist case is about the permissibility of abortion, of course. It is intended to test our intuitions about not only our obligations to others but our right to bodily self-determination. It avoids the entire personhood debate by provisionally conceding personhood, but also undercuts the (I believe mistaken, but nonetheless common) tendency to identify early gestation fetuses with born infants and so takes off the table the kind of special obligation we may feel in regard to protecting children. That is, it takes off the table the presumption of an obligation in order to explore what might warrant one in the first place (which seems, on reflection, entirely fair). Likewise, Singer makes his drowning victims as unfreeriderlike as possible. The tired Randian assumption about fostering dependency and incompetence by offering aid can’t be applied to children even by the most radical libertarian. Further, Singer’s example offers us both proximity and, by extension, community. He replaces distant, foreign “Others” with immediately proximate individuals, whose sufferings we are expected to visualize. Finally, he makes their rescue

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from drowning relatively effortless, (sometimes provided that group action is taken). Here, Metcalf might point out that Singer replaces one kind of bias with another, by presenting victims with whom we’re inclined to sympathize. He might further indicate that Thomson has removed an ethically salient predisposition from the equation by eliminating the kind of protective response that the association of fetuses with infants can arouse. Yet these cases are supposed to be less open to bias. They’re supposed to remove the biases, not replace them with new ones. “If these doubts are correct,” says Metcalf, “then they seem to apply just as well to the initial ‘observation’ concerning the variant case; why aren’t people going to be biased about their intuitions about the variant case?”14 Metcalf is correct in noting the manipulation of biases. But the tactic used here does not appear illegitimate. The point is to get people to see the moral reasons that are more or less invisible to them in those situations from which the sample at issue is a variation. And then the point is, further, to challenge them to devise a rationale explaining why those reasons are not operational in the situation in which the presenter of our example would claim they were overlooked. Why should there be a legal obligation to have one’s body used as a life support system in one case but not another? Are only women obligated to provide life support? Should men be forced to donate kidneys against their will to needy offspring? Or is the provision of life support a distinctively and exclusively maternal obligation? Members of the Oklahoma state legislature certainly seemed to agree with the latter when debating the personhood bill on which they voted. An amendment making the father financially liable for prenatal care was shouted down, even though the mother’s uterus was conscripted by law to the fetus’ service.15 In the Singer case, we might ask whether distance or unfamiliarity justifiably erode the extent of our obligation to aid another. Thus, the idea is certainly not that all intuitions are equal, but that intuitions may reveal reasons that were formerly not in evidence or that were formerly overlooked. It should go without saying that particular kinds of fictions arouse moral intuitions and can give rise to moral insights in not dissimilar ways. They differ from ethical thought experiments, of course, in offering a wealth of detail, and far greater prospects of emotional and imaginative engagement. However, they can possess quite similar structures. Michel Faber’s Under the Skin is a variant case argument against factory farming that swaps out the victims and perpetrators in the process and keeps the profit motive intact.16 Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey follows the rules of the gothic novel in such a way as to demonstrate its ultimate inferiority. Catherine Morland is a variant on the gothic heroine whose experiences gradually come to demonstrate the superiority of realist depiction.  Ibid.  Jennifer Mock, “Bid halted to revise child support law,” NewsOK April 20, 2007. Accessed December 27, 2017: http://m.newsok.com/bid-halted-to-revise-child-support-law/article/3043042 16  Michel Faber, Under the Skin (NY: Harcourt, 2001). 14 15

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More generally, morally freighted fictions very frequently offer counterexamples to established generalizations. The recognition of a counterexample or a new, hitherto unacknowledged moral reason is something that reflection on both thought experiments and fiction can provide. That fiction does more than this doesn’t mean there’s no resemblance to be considered. And variant case arguments are not in any case the only intuition pumps on offer. Thomas Wartenberg gives us a splendid discussion of the way in which The Matrix brings essential features of the thought experiment in Descartes’ first Meditation to life, and then goes further, by requiring the viewer “to confront the question of whether it might not be the case that all of her perceptual experience could be what it now is without there being a world that resembles those perceptions.”17 The Cartesian thought experiment was intended to demonstrate that something was possible. The film shows us how such a possibility would look if it were actual. That is, the film fools us about Neo’s physical circumstances, just as Neo is fooled about them. We are mistaken in our beliefs about what is fictionally the case just as Neo is mistaken about what is actually the case. Our ordinary interpretive schemes are subverted by the film, just as Neo’s interpretations of his sensa are mistaken. So films and novels, like thought experiments, can establish possibilities, offer counterexamples, and establish necessary connections. That not being all they do shouldn’t somehow signify that it isn’t, in fact, done. Egan’s argument for drawing a sharp distinction between thought experiments and fiction seems largely to rest on conceiving of thought experiments as purely intellectual exercises, approachable as arguments, and calling for a variety of attention and rigorous criticism that would usually rob us of artistic appreciation and satisfactions, were such tactics applied to the arts by forcing us to read (or screen) them allegorically. Murray Smith’s earlier work is more or less in harmony with the latter point, emphasizing that treating films as thought experiments, compulsively disambiguating and clarifying them, prevents our embracing their ambiguities and appreciating them as art. In the preceding reply to these objections to cognitivist positions about fiction, it has been suggested, first, that thought experiments are not uniformly cerebral and that many aspire to elicit pre-theoretical emotional responses of approval and disapproval in order to motivate intuitions. Of course, thought experiments will often present us with reasons for accepting this or that conclusion. But it would be difficult to deny that fiction very often, among many other things, does exactly this, and can provide additional reasons that thought experiments cannot, in virtue of its ability to get viewers or readers to imagine what certain experiences are like from a first-person perspective.

17  Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 67.

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III The stress on distinct types of criticism being appropriate for art and philosophy, respectively, is of particular interest, because there are grounds for thinking that taking a leaf from aesthetics and aesthetic reflections on fictional worlds can actually disambiguate certain thought experiments and the confusions to which they give rise. That is, prototypically aesthetic evaluation can expose ambiguities and inconsistencies in philosophical thought experiments. In this section, I will argue that, just as it is possible to approach fictions philosophically (at least in some modest respects, as indicated) it is also possible to bring considerations to bear on philosophical thought experiments that have hitherto been principally deployed in literary, cinematic, and artistic contexts. This again shows that the structure of filmic and other fictional narratives has more in common with that of intuition pumps and similar varieties of thought experiments than might at first have been supposed. Let us consider a possible example. As has already been indicated, one of the key areas in ethics in which intuition pumps proliferate is the conflict between the deontologist and the consequentialist. And one of the bones of contention between these two involves a question (on which I myself have published, and that I therefore feel competent to discuss) about whether there is, in fact, a morally significant difference between doing and allowing, that is, between action and omission, or killing and letting die. An enormous number of contributions to this debate rely almost in their entirety on the presentation of contrasting cases: matched pairs of stories in which the only difference is said to be one that presents us with an act in one case and an omission in the other. One of the most famous of these is James Rachels’ example of drowning six-year-olds. In the first abbreviated story, Smith stands to inherit if his six-­ year-­old cousin dies. He drowns the child in the bath, arranging things so that it looks like an accident. In the second story, Jones stands to inherit if his six-­ year-­old cousin dies. He is, in fact, planning to drown the child at bath-time, but a fortuitous accident causes the child to bump its head and fall face down into the water. The delighted Jones stands by, ready to push the child under if it should revive. Rachels’ example is intended to demonstrate that there is no morally significant difference between action and omission in properly symmetrical cases. Duncan Purves and others have teased out the line of reasoning that moves us from the initial intuition pump to a full-blown ethical conclusion in cases of this kind: (i) We establish that the only difference between the conduct of Smith and that of Jones is that one is a doing while the other an allowing. That is, we establish that the cases are in all other respects symmetrical. (ii) Most people’s reacting with the same degree of disapprobation to both Smith’s and Jones’ conduct is taken to be strong evidence that their conduct is actually morally equivalent.

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(iii) Assuming that Smith’s and Jones’ conduct is morally equivalent, it follows that the difference between doing and allowing is not relevant in any distinctively moral way to these two cases. (iv) If a difference (between doing and allowing, say) is morally relevant, then it must make a moral difference in each pair of cases where the difference is present. (v) (from ii and iii, MP) The difference between doing and allowing is not itself morally relevant with regard to this pair of cases. (vi) (from iv and v, MT) The difference between doing and allowing is not itself morally relevant.18 The above doesn’t seem at all a bad argument, especially if one has a soft spot for intuition pumps. Premise (ii), above, seems to give intuition pumps their due, permitting them to count as evidence. Premise (i), which will prove crucial to the assessment of cases attempting to establish the rival conclusion, mandates that the contrast cases in question be properly symmetrical. To borrow from Michael Tooley,19 the following represent criteria which, if met, would yield a letting die that is symmetrical to a killing: • the motive of the agent who refrains from saving the victim is the same as that of the agent who kills the victim; • the rescue which the agent refrains from performing in the case of letting die would have been as easy and safe to perform as the killing would have been to resist; • the agent is aware that his failure to perform the rescue will result in the victim’s death (which no other agent she/he knows of is in a position to avert). If we isolate the interfering variables and eliminate them—thereby eliminating cases in which motives differ, cases in which the rescue’s performance is more burdensome than it would be to refrain from killing, cases in which the agent lacks foreknowledge of the consequences of inaction—then we may yet discover that a killing and letting die are morally equivalent. Rachels, of course, makes the case for the consequentialist. But it should go without saying that every deontologist in the western hemisphere seems to have come up with sample cases involving trains and trolleys and poisoned arrows (Kai Draper, Fiona Woollard, Philippa Foot, Warren Quinn, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, etc.) that are especially designed to appeal to the diehard deontologist in us all (except for those of us who have had this surgically removed). Consider the following example, which I adapt with liberties from Draper: 18  Duncan Purves, “Still in Hot Water: Doing, Allowing and Rachels’ Bathtub Cases,” Southwest Philosophy Review 27 (2011): 129–137. 19  Michael Tooley, “An Irrelevant Consideration: Killing Versus Letting Die,” in Killing and Letting Die, ed. By Bonnie Steinbock and Alastair Norcross (Fordham University Press, 1994):103–111. See also, Judith Lichtenberg, “The Moral Equivalence of Action and Omission,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8 (1982): 19–36.

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Smith: A poisoned arrow is headed straight for Smith, its effects bound to be immediate and fatal. The only way for Smith to save himself (in this example and all similar ones Smith is apparently incapable of ducking or running) is to interpose the body of Donald Trump between himself and the arrow, by grabbing him and using him as a human shield. Smith uses Trump as a human shield. Jones: A poisoned arrow is headed straight for Donald Trump, its effects bound to be immediate and fatal. The only way for Jones to save Trump (who is in this example and all similar ones impervious to reason or clear evidence of impending disaster) is to leap in front of Trump and take the arrow in his stead. Jones refrains from shielding Trump. Those producing such arguments maintain that most, if not all, will react in a way that ascribes more moral responsibility to Smith than to Jones. The sponsoring deontologist—who, I must concede, tends to deploy a victim that the world would not rejoice in losing—holds it to be plain moral common sense that it’s more blameworthy to shove someone in front of an arrow than it is to refrain from sacrificing oneself for another. This is seen as a palpably obvious intuition that only cognitively deficient consequentialists might lack, though deontologists quarrel among themselves interminably about whether the moral distinction to which such cases make us privy is due to distinctions in causation, or rights, or some such factor. The deontologist would, of course, deploy the intuition to which his cases gave rise in an argument that paralleled the preceding, but which concluded that the difference between doing and allowing was clearly relevant in these and other scenarios, since, if the difference were irrelevant, it would make no moral difference in any properly symmetrical pair of cases. So now we have arguments with opposing conclusions but precisely the same structure. Things look very bleak for the intuition pump, one might think, when its deployment leads to outright contradictions. It cannot be true both that it is and that it is not the case that the difference between doing and allowing is never morally relevant. However, analyses employed to resolve aesthetic questions offer us a way to salvage things without having to jettison the intuition pump. Before we embark on that investigation, it is worth noting that in many cases offered in support of a distinction between doing and allowing, including the one I have just offered, symmetry conditions are flagrantly violated. When Phillipa Foot contrasts cases of failure to give to charity with outright murder to elicit reactions in support of the distinction, the foreknowledge condition for symmetry is clearly not met, since the deaths contingent on failure to donate would have to be known for symmetry to obtain. In the Trump case, symmetry is achieved at the expense of credibility. The only way to save oneself is to interpose a hefty object between oneself and the deadly projectile, something that, it is stipulated, can be done in less time than ducking or darting aside. The stipulations are intended to make the cases symmetrical: Trump’s rescue is exactly as costly to perform (since it entails suicide) as his killing is to

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resist (since not using Trump as a human shield guarantees one’s death). But the symmetry is forced on the example by artificially restricting available options. Arguably, a failure of verisimilitude this gross constitutes a failure of symmetry. I suppose that enough far-fetched explanations could be introduced in order to limit the options available to the fictional agents in these types of cases, but this is usually not attempted. Without those explanations, different moral intuitions arise. Naturally, using someone as a human shield seems worse when options like ducking and running are the natural default options in most readily imaginable situations. It feels as if there should be alternatives, despite stipulations that we do not have them. That is, making one’s case only in virtue of stipulations, despite ordinary imaginative inferences, can constitute a flaw in a certain type of thought experiment. Indeed, an article just published in Cognitive Science cites seven studies demonstrating “that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes.”20 We can also borrow here from David Lewis on fictional worlds, since cases like those of Smith and Jones can be treated as abbreviated fictions. Lewis’ principle of minimal departure suggests a method by means of which we can establish what is true in the world of a work beyond what is explicitly indicated by the author: “A sentence of the form, ‘in the fiction f, {p}’ is non-vacuously true iff some world where f is told as a known fact and {p} is true differs less from our actual world, on balance, than any world where f is told as a known fact and {p} is not true.”21 States of affairs we take to obtain in the fiction are those that would occur, were those explicitly indicated in the work to occur. In the Outer Limits episode, for instance, we are expected to imaginatively infer that Dr. Givens’ own serial killing of serial killers is motivated by childhood trauma. We are also expected to infer perfectly ordinary things about people’s having hearts and livers, about there being gravity, and so on, without their being explicitly mentioned. But the case of the thought experiment canvassed earlier is more vexed. Barring science fiction scenarios which would require us to extrapolate on the basis of derivative states of affairs, it seems clear that Lewis’ principle would not be overly friendly to thought experiments such as these, since an auditor’s or reader’s extrapolations would be likely to undercut or outright contradict the requisite symmetry conditions, whether consciously or not. 20  Arseny Ryazanov, Jonathan Knutzen, Samuel Rickless, Nicholas Christenfeld, and Dana Kay Nelkin, “Intuitive Probabilities and the Limitation of Moral Imagination,” Cognitive Science 42 suppl 1 (May 2018): 38–68. 21  David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction,” APQ 15 (1978): 37–46.

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Part of the difficulty in constructing such examples involves their brevity, of course. Unlike a typical work of fiction, they offer a relatively small arena within which to flesh out the scenario intended to give rise to the intuition. Thus, a lot of the work is done by stipulation rather than evocative description. My concern here is that the audience response can be to personal imaginative extrapolations that can be at odds with authorial stipulations. Consider the example of Smith and Trump. When Smith interposes Trump between himself and the lethal arrow, certain obvious—if not entailments, then at least probabilities (as demonstrated in the Cognitive Science studies cited earlier)—spring into the imagination. Because ducking or darting aside are in nearly all possible circumstances less effortful than lugging a pudgy and unwilling businessman-­ turned-­politician into the line of fire, one could readily draw the imaginative conclusion that the selection of the more onerous option signaled Smith’s desire of a fatal outcome for Trump, a desire not at all evident in the case of Jones (since Jones merely fails to interpose himself between Trump and the arrow). Of course, the example stipulates that the only way for Smith to save himself is to use Trump as a human shield. But it doesn’t (and this is relatively typical of the kind of ethical thought experiment under review) tell us why that is or how it could be. In the absence of any plausible explanation of how it is that apparently readily available options for action are not available at all, I suggest that we extrapolate in the way we always do in the case of fiction, considering what would (or would most likely) be the case if it were the case that someone were to interpose Trump between himself and lethal projectile, and thereby import the deadly motive contingent on such extrapolations into the imaginative scenario that elicits our response. That, of course, creates an asymmetry that makes the first premise of the deontologist’s argument for the doing/allowing distinction false, and the argument itself unsound. Why wouldn’t the auditor simply extrapolate in such a way as to imagine what would occur, were Smith’s interposition of Trump between himself and the arrow the only way for Smith to save himself? Here I want to claim just as an empirical matter that the auditor will be highly unlikely to put himself to the trouble of inventing imaginative scenarios involving, say, everyone’s being strapped into some mechanical contrivance equipped with buttons, the pushing of one of which will enable Smith to use Trump as a shield. Philosophers sometimes invent such examples (which do not appear to give rise to exactly the same intuitions as the ones where options for action are restricted by stipulation alone), but auditors seldom will. The claim that listeners or readers will probably not invent highly improbable scenarios to imaginatively corroborate authorial stipulations dovetails with the contentions of a lot of aestheticians. Many point out, for instance, that our typical perusal of fiction involves our dropping states of affairs out of consideration when they confront us with potential contradictions or impossibilities or improbabilities. A lot of our ­emotional responses depend on our failure to attend to distractingly problematic or confusing states of affairs.

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If we do not go to the trouble of inventing some highly improbable state of affairs that makes sense of an authorial stipulation, it seems that many of us will be inclined to imagine and respond emotionally to an inference or supposition that is, in fact, at odds with that stipulation, just as recent studies demonstrate. That is, we respond with disapproval to Smith’s interposing Trump between himself and the fatal arrow because we’ve imaginatively inferred that Smith has taken special pains to do so, instead of just ducking or running. These special pains make him appear more blameworthy than Jones who merely refrains from shielding Trump. But our inference runs counter to the stipulation that Smith’s only option for survival is to use Trump as a shield. The inferences which are most natural to make are entirely at odds with what is stipulated. If it is our involuntary reaction that attests to whether cases are morally on a par or whether they are not, then we must acknowledge the existence of occasional competing stimuli—stimuli that may elicit different reactions. Automatic imaginative extrapolations may alter the situation to which we respond and make it differ significantly from the one stipulated. When contrast cases require suppression of the kinds of background assumptions that Lewis tells us lead to the fleshing out of fictional worlds, we can’t count on the truth of premise (i) in the deontological version of the argument for a moral distinction between doing and allowing, since it won’t always be clear whether what the auditor is reacting to is fueled to some extent by background assumptions or fueled by authorial stipulations alone. What I’m suggesting is that a virtually automatic Lewisian extrapolation may sometimes smuggle in asymmetries. And I see these more often in contrast cases supporting a distinction between doing and allowing than in cases against it. Whatever the ultimate judgment about the role of intuition pumps in ethics, it seems clear that there are some straightforward criteria for their construction that could eliminate a few of the problems discussed earlier. I do not attempt to deny the very real difference between works of fiction and ethical thought experiments that can be characterized as intuition pumps. However, it is also clear that, whatever the difference, the latter are still stories. Moreover, they are stories intended to elicit very particular emotional responses of approbation or disapprobation from their readers or auditors. Because of that, it would be shortsighted to ignore the quite large and useful body of literature that tells us about our emotional responses to stories and about what it is we imagine when we so respond. This literature does in fact apply to the criticism of certain kinds of thought experiments. Imaginative extrapolation and inference of the sort most often discussed in accounts of fictional worlds occurs in the case of any narrative, even a philosophical one. So it will not do to say that films or novels must be liable to entirely different forms of criticism than thought experiments of certain kinds. Just as we may occasionally criticize a film like American Sniper for stipulating an identification of heroism with following orders that is not inferable from presented evidence, so we may criticize a thought ­experiment for resorting to stipulation in an effort to counter defects in narrative structure.

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IV Next, let us turn to Murray Smith’s employment of Richard Moran’s distinction between the dramatic and the hypothetical imagination. The dramatic imagination is the kind that is relevant to emotional engagement, not the kind associated only with simple counterfactual reasoning—it can involve the “trying on” of a point of view and attempts to determine what it is like to inhabit it. So emotion, empathy, perspective taking, concerned investment, and imaginative immersion are all involved in the dramatic imagination, which is at one point described as a manner of imagining. However, unlike anti-cognitivists, Moran appears convinced that both kinds of imagination can yield knowledge: And we understand very little of how exercises of imagination relate to learning anything about the world, or about our concepts, or about ourselves. Yet we rely on something we call imagination all the time, in and out of philosophy, to inform us about quite weighty matters: the nature of necessity and possibility, the specification of our heart’s desire, moral right and wrong. For better or for worse, we seem committed to the idea that imagination is a vehicle of knowledge of various kinds. If this is so, then in such exercises we are not taking our engagement with the world imagined (the fictional world) to be sealed off from what matters to us in the real world. The realm of our emotional responses provides one of the clearer cases in which imagination is not so much a peering into some other world, as a way of relating to this one.22

Fiction, for Moran, is a fruitful source for the acquisition of at least some kinds of knowledge: knowledge of what some kinds of experiences are like, perhaps, empathetic knowledge, knowledge of one’s own motivations and impulses (those aroused by the fiction), and moral knowledge. Anti-cognitivists cannot invoke Moran without recognizing these possibilities. As has already been indicated, films and novels tap into a preexisting repertoire of beliefs and concepts. These are as much in play in our encounters with art as they are in our contemplation of thought experiments. Like many thought experiments, films and novels also often arouse moral responses, confront us with exceptions to generalizations, and show us what might be possible. They may clarify our concepts, for instance, by suggesting what justice might on occasion consist in. Very frequently, they also show us what it is that might motivate someone to adopt a particular stance, or how it is that one could come to possess a particular attitude, or what it really is that adhering to that stance amounts to. Consider the example of low-budget but respectable science fiction offered at the beginning of this chapter. “A Stitch in Time” doesn’t embody a full-blown argument. It embodies a kind of clarifying distinction between deontological and utilitarian concerns and nonconcerns: it shows the governing motivations of utilitarian and deontological agents. As 22  Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” The Philosophical Review 103:1 (1994): 75–106, 106.

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indicated, Dr. Givens the scientist travels back in time to exterminate serial killers before they begin to depopulate the regions they inhabit. She is invested in making absolutely certain of their guilt, waiting until they are executed by the state. She addresses the serial-killer-to-be Jerome Horowitz as follows: Givens: On July 17, 1996, after a murder spree lasting 16 years, claiming 17 victims, you were executed at a state penitentiary. Horowitz: Executed? Givens: Yes, and you were glad to die…. I am here to carry out that just and legal sentence. There is obviously a real investment in providing a justification for her actions and a further investment in the number of lives involved. She shoots Horowitz twice. Before he dies, he whimpers, “I haven’t done anything,” the central objection to Givens’ course of action that is also voiced by FBI agent Jamie Pratt. Pratt tracks Givens down in her office, since a gun registered in Givens’ name is implicated in a murder Pratt is investigating. After a slip on Givens’ part, she decides to confess, explains about the time machine (which at first makes Pratt write her off as insane), and tries to recruit Pratt to her cause: “What matters and what you want to know is whether I killed those men. Well, I did. I killed all 20 monsters and because I did 83 women are still alive!” It matters a great deal to her, and much less to Pratt, how many lives are actually involved, and how much pain she has prevented. Seeing that Pratt is about to arrest her, Givens activates the time machine. It is her last chance to rewrite her own history by stopping the man who assaulted her as a child. Pratt shouts at Givens to stop, but to no avail. The agent begins to believe in the time machine after seeing a giant circle of fire form as the mechanism is activated. This is when the moral qualms set in: Pratt: Even if this were possible, why would anyone do such a thing? Givens: An opportunity to kill the killers before they can kill? What the hell could be wrong with that? Pratt: But you’re talking about killing innocent men – they haven’t done anything! Givens: They would have! This is first and foremost an example of the conflict between the utilitarian and the deontologist. But it is an illustration that is careful about motives, that is true to a concern with numbers or lack thereof, that casts the utilitarian as a scientist concerned with the big picture and the deontologist as a law enforcement officer entirely invested in enforcing and following the rules, finally showing us what might motivate a shift from one stance to the other. In other words, it is an illustration that allows us to try on the perspectives being clarified by mobilizing reasons for action we already possess and showing how they might fit into distinctive stances. Illustrations that clarify matters in this way are not cognitively trivial.

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Cinematographic tactics reinforce and add to such effects. The camera repeatedly focuses on snapshots of preemptively executed serial killers on the FBI bulletin board, showing us how the numbers add up, fall short, and transpose with every shift in the timeline. Every timeline altered by Givens’ execution of another serial killer is made apparent not just by overt changes (such as the presence of a friend targeted by a serial killer in a different timeline), but by the camera’s focus on minor changes in the characters’ environment: the color of the tulips on Pratt’s desk, the newspaper headlines, and the folders strewn about her cubicle. This is a rich and subtle way of conveying assumptions about human freedom, about the arbitrariness of certain choices, and about the kind of impermanence that time machine scenarios bring into focus. Much of the ethical freight is carried by the narrative itself, but much of the metaphysics underlying the story is conveyed by the cinematography rather than the script. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that many conventional illustrations are not cognitively trivial. In “Beyond Mere Illustration,” Thomas Wartenberg presents us with a range of pictorial illustrations that are central to the meanings of the texts that accompany them. Some illustrations of classic texts, such as Tenniel’s Alice illustrations and, I would like to add, Pauline Baynes’ illustrations of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, end up being truly iconic representations of the books’ characters. The illustrations determine what we imagine in such cases about how characters and places look, in a way that goes beyond what is indicated in the narrative. Indeed, Adamson’s 2005 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe owed at least part of its success to its amazing faithfulness to those original illustrations. Narnia was just as we had imagined it: Lantern Waste, the White Witch’s castle, the Stone Table. More to the point, Illustrations in birding books involve even more cognitive investment than this. Wartenberg demonstrates that birding books and the like provide crucial content in their illustrations that cannot be conveyed by text alone.23 So, to illustrate a theory can be to add to the philosophical discussion. Wartenberg, Carroll, and Davies all provide examples of films that are far more than simple adjuncts to preexisting arguments. The Matrix shows us a fictional world in which the Cartesian deception hypothesis is true, and shows us what it would be like to be so deceived by deceiving us, as has already been described.24 Noel Carroll contends that the reverse narration in the film Memento fosters in viewers a keen awareness of the sort of constructive activity they must undertake in order to make sense of and take in a filmic story. Thus, “the film focuses our attention upon the kind of constructive activities that audiences need to engage in response to any cinematic narrative, although these processes usually fly beneath our radar screen.”25 David Davies maintains that Blade Runner in some senses surpasses dry philosophical discussion about when we can attribute consciousness and about what constitutes personhood  Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” pp. 25–26.  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, pp. 55–75. 25  Carroll, “Movie-Made Philosophy,” pp. 20–21. 23

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or humanity. The film shows us some of the things that are at stake in making such ascriptions or refraining from doing so, and it does it in a way a thought experiment cannot.26 Films can, moreover, convey salient points by entirely cinematographic or audiographic means. Obvious examples are ready to hand. Films can mimic a character’s state of consciousness by showing us the world from that character’s perspective, by altering focus, camera stability, or sound quality. Temporary deafness on the part of a character consequent on an explosion can be illustrated by muffling ambient noise. Dizziness can be illustrated by destabilizing camera motion. That is, cinematography and audiography alone can convey something about what certain experiences are like, and can do so in a way that is sometimes philosophically salient. My focus has been on the narrative aspects of film and their possible philosophical contributions, but these can incorporate purely cinematic and audiographic elements. The claim supported here is less ambitious than those advanced by Carroll, Davies, and Wartenberg. Films and novels can, in the course of being experienced, involve viewers and readers in doing some unassuming low-stakes philosophy on a par with that involved in the kind of philosophical thought experiment referred to as an intuition pump. Given that the latter are seldom exercises of pure intellect unleavened by emotion and that the former marshal existing beliefs and conceptual schemes simply in the course of eliciting the responses they do, it seems possible to make a modest case for the cognitivist, that is, for an enhanced understanding of what philosophical “illustrations” may consist in, and for staking out a little legitimate philosophical terrain between such illustrations and philosophical thought experiments when narrowly defined.

Bibliography Carroll, Noël. Movie-Made Philosophy (Draft), pp. 1–26. Dadlez, E.M. 2013. Literature, Ethical Thought Experiments, and Moral Knowledge. Southwest Philosophy Review 29 (1): 195–209. Davies, David. 2012. Can Philosophical Thought Experiments Be ‘Screened’. In Thought Experiments in Science, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. Melanie Frappier, Letitia Meynell, and James Robert Brown, 223–238. New York: Routledge. Dennett, Daniel C. 2016. Intuition Pumps, (Chapter 10) Edge 5/7/96. http://www. edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/r-Ch.10.html. Accessed 19 Jun 2019. Egan, David. 2016. Literature and Thought Experiments. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2): 139–150. Faber, Michel. 2001. Under the Skin. New York: Harcourt. Lewis, David. 1978. Truth in Fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15: 37–46. Lichtenberg, Judith. 1982. The Moral Equivalence of Action and Omission. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8: 19–36. Livingston, Paisley. 2006. Theses on Cinema as Philosophy. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 11–18.  Davies, “Can Philosophical Thought Experiments Be ‘Screened’?” pp. 229–230.

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Metcalf, Thomas. 2011. Against the Technique of Variant Cases: The Problem of Applied Ethics Induction. Mountain-Plains Philosophy Conference, October 2011. Mock, Jennifer. 2007. Bid Halted to Revise Child Support Law. NewsOK, April 20. http://m.newsok.com/bid-halted-to-revise-child-support-law/article/3043042. Accessed 27 Dec 2017. Moran, Richard. 1994a. The Expression of Feeling in Imagination. The Philosophical Review 103 (1): 75–106. ———. 1994b. The Expression of Feeling in Imagination. The Philosophical Review 103 (1): 75–106. Purves, Duncan. 2011. Still in Hot Water: Doing, Allowing and Rachels’ Bathtub Cases. Southwest Philosophy Review 27: 129–137. Ryazanov, Arseny, Jonathan Knutzen, Samuel Rickless, Nicholas Christenfeld, and Dana Kay Nelkin. 2018. Intuitive Probabilities and the Limitation of Moral Imagination. Cognitive Science 42 (suppl 1, May): 38–68. Singer, Peter. 1972. Famine, Affluence and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3): 229–243. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. New York: Routledge. Smith, Murray. 2006. Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 33–42. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (4, Fall): 406–420. Thomson, Judith Jarvis. 1971. A Defense of Abortion. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1): 47–66. Tooley, Michael. 1994. An Irrelevant Consideration: Killing Versus Letting Die. In Killing and Letting Die, ed. Bonnie Steinbock and Alastair Norcross, 103–111. New York: Fordham University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas. 2006. Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1): 19–32. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 21

Contemporary Philosophical Filmmaking Thomas E. Wartenberg

The topic of this chapter is contemporary philosophical filmmaking. A filmmaker counts as contemporary if they are still alive and making films. The topic of philosophical filmmaking has been broached by philosophers of film and film theorists using a variety of different rubrics, such as film as philosophy, cinematic philosophy, and even filmosophy. I use the phrase “philosophical filmmaking” to leave open exactly how to characterize the nature of the relationship between a film and its philosophical content in such filmmaking practice. What makes a film an instance of philosophical filmmaking? One plausible account asserts that for a film to be an example of philosophical filmmaking, it must contain an explicit reference to a philosophical text or author. So, to choose one plausible example of philosophical filmmaking, Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Conformist (1970) satisfies this criterion, for its main character, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), actually quotes at length Plato’s famous description of the Cave from The Republic. In doing so, he creates a parallel between the deluded dwellers in Plato’s Cave and Italian Fascists prior to the Second World War, applying Plato’s allegory to the Italian political context. Because of its explicit invocation of Plato, The Conformist is an example of philosophical filmmaking, at least on this account of it. This proposed criterion for philosophical filmmaking is, however, both too inclusive and too restrictive—too inclusive because a film that simply refers to a philosophical text or author does not necessarily engage the philosophical ideas or theses in a way that would make it appropriate to characterize the film as an instance of philosophical filmmaking. When we invoke the notion of philosophical filmmaking, we intend to signify thereby that the film involves philosophy in a significant way. The project of this chapter is to specify what types of engagement of philosophy by a film should qualify the film as ­involving T. E. Wartenberg (*) Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_21

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philosophical filmmaking, that is, what the criteria are for asserting that a film has employed a philosophical theory or claim in a substantive manner. On the other hand, limiting philosophical filmmaking to explicit references to philosophers and their texts is also too restrictive, for many films in which there are no such specific references should still be recognized as involving philosophical filmmaking because of the manner in which they engage with philosophical questions. A broader conception of philosophical filmmaking is required to account for the many different ways in which films involve philosophical content. In this chapter, I use the following criterion for philosophical filmmaking: Filmmaking will count as philosophical, I shall say, when the best interpretation of a film includes an essential reference to at least one philosophical claim or issue. This criterion is an improvement over the earlier one precisely because it refers to interpretations of a film and the role of philosophy in the interpretation. For the most part, such references to philosophy in an interpretation of a film are justified when the filmmaker(s)—the director, the screenwriter, sometimes even the actors, and so on—intends their film to address one or more issues that are explicitly philosophical.1 The filmmaker(s) does not have to conceive of those issues as philosophical, however, for it is up to the philosophical interpreter(s) of a film to note when an issue portrayed by a film is actually a philosophical one. A filmmaker might address an issue without being aware that, in so doing, they are raising a philosophical issue. Nonetheless, in such cases the filmmaking will still qualify as philosophical. Although some philosophers have argued that there can be films that have significant philosophical content that is not intended by their makers, I leave that question aside here. Since the chapter is focused on philosophical filmmaking, indeed on contemporary philosophical filmmaking, I will simply assume that the philosophical content of the films I discuss has been placed in the film intentionally by their maker(s) in order to engage with an issue(s) that we recognize as philosophical.2 I will simply not consider other, less central examples of philosophical filmmaking. This general characterization of philosophical filmmaking does not specify the manner in which an individual film might engage with philosophical issues. There are, in fact, a variety of different ways in which films do this. The least substantial cinematic engagement with philosophy occurs when a film raises for 1  The issue of who exactly the makers of a film are is subject to debate among philosophers of films. See, for example, Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 98–151. 2  There has been a rich discussion of the validity of this point of view. See, for example, the exchange between myself and Richard Nunan in Film and Philosophy: Nunan “Film as Philosophy in Memento: Reforming Wartenberg’s Imposition Objection,” Film and Philosophy 18 (2014): 1–18; Wartenberg “The Imposition Objection Reconsidered: A Response to Richard Nunan,” Film and Philosophy 19 (2015): 1–14; and Nunan, “Authorial Intent, Alien3, and Thomas Wartenberg’s Alleged Necessary Condition for Films to Do Philosophy,” Film and Philosophy 21 (2017): 52–73.

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its audience a philosophical issue, such as whether only flesh and blood creatures like us count as humans or persons or whether robots should also if they are complex enough. This is clearly a philosophical issue that many philosophers have discussed, and we can also see it as present in many science fiction films (and even television shows) that involve aliens, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).3 There is a great deal of controversy about how much philosophy can legitimately be attributed to a film. Since the debate surrounding this question is explicitly addressed in another chapter of this book, I will simply assume that there are a number of different types of philosophical filmmaking. To invoke one that I will subsequently discuss, a film might actually present and defend a philosophical thesis, such as that euthanasia is morally permissible. Since seeing how a film can do this will require some discussion, for now it is sufficient to note that the variety of modes of philosophical filmmaking forms the topic of this chapter.

Some Preliminaries Before delving into an exposition of the different varieties of philosophical filmmaking, there are a number of issues that need to be discussed to avoid confusion. The first is terminological. In this chapter, I use the term “film” to refer to a group of related technologies that employ moving images and sounds, both linguistic and not, and that are all historically derivative of the use of celluloid film stock, to which the term “film” in the narrow sense properly applies. These include videos, DVDs, digital films, and a variety of other moving-image technologies. The idea is that all of these technologies can be employed in the making of audiovisual works that are best thought of as specific versions of the single art form called “film” in the generic sense. The discussion concerning philosophical filmmaking has the peculiarity of being focused primarily on narrative fiction films and, indeed, Hollywood films. This one-sided focus will partially account for a similar emphasis in this chapter. I do want to acknowledge, however, that non-fiction filmmaking does also broach philosophical issues. I will therefore include in this chapter a discussion of one documentary film, The Act of Killing (2012), because of its distinctive way of addressing the philosophical issue of moral evil. Since I will not include an extended discussion of the work of experimental films, despite the fact that their films also sometimes address philosophical issues, I will briefly mention one now. Tacita Dean’s 2001 work, The Green Ray, is a 2 minute 30 second long celluloid film that captures the natural phenomenon referred to in its title, an unusual light that occurs when the last ray of the setting sun creates a green flash just as the sun disappears below the horizon. What is particularly interesting about this short film is that, while 3  Stephen Mulhall discusses Blade Runner as a form of philosophical filmmaking in Mulhall, On Film, second edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 29–40.

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viewers can see this phenomenon in it, videos made at the same time fail to register the flash of green light. For Dean, this entails that the celluloid-based film medium is capable of capturing visual phenomena that videography cannot. The suggestion is that we need to think more carefully about the amalgamation of various moving-image technologies under the umbrella term “film,” as I have just suggested, for there are features of celluloid film that are lost when we move to other forms of film media. One problem resulting from the one-sided emphasis on narrative fiction films in the discussion of philosophical filmmaking is too little attention paid to how the medium of film has been employed philosophically and too much emphasis on the philosophical aspect of the films’ narratives. While it is informative to show how a film’s narrative raises philosophical issues and even makes philosophical assertions, philosophers of film need to pay more attention to the way in which the film medium, and in particular its combination of visual and audio tracks, allows films to engage their audiences philosophically. As I discuss different types of philosophical filmmaking in this chapter, I will make an effort to show how filmmakers employ the medium of film in innovative ways for philosophical purposes.

Raising a Philosophical Question: Waking Life The most widely acknowledged way in which a film can be philosophical is for it to present audiences with a philosophical problem or issue for them to reflect on. This is the case with Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), a film that raises the philosophical issue of the relationship between dreams and our everyday reality, the “waking life” of the film’s title. Rather than explicitly taking a stand on this issue, it problematizes the relationship between dreams and reality for its audience, thereby getting them to reflect on an important philosophical issue. Waking Life gets audiences to reflect on how problematic their assumptions are about the relationship between dreams and reality by destabilizing many of the assumptions they have. This is done not just thematically but by the very structure of the filmmaking itself. First, there is the striking visual nature of the film. Waking Life is notable for its innovative use of rotoscoping. This is a technique in which computer technology is used to create an animated film out of a live-action recorded one. Waking Life was created from a digitally recorded video by means of this technology. Because the animated film bears evidence of its origin in live-action shots of real people and actual scenes, the result is a rather uncanny film that straddles the boundary between a recorded and an animated one. Part of what gives the film its uncanny feeling is that the animated film does not simply reproduce the live-action film in animated form. For many of the shots, the animated version of the scenes throbs, vibrates, and undulates in a wave-like and quite unrealistic fashion. In general, the images we see are unstable and often contain elements that are clearly animated, as when a character

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floats away into the sky, an event that was clearly achieved via animation even if it remains based on a live-action image. The instability introduced into the film’s images by Linklater’s use of rotoscoping is one means through which the film raises the philosophical question of the relationship between dreams and everyday waking reality, the core philosophical question addressed by it. The unusual nature of its images makes viewers uncertain about what they are seeing: Are the images showing the actual experience its central character undergoes as he wanders the streets of Austin, Texas, or are they a record of his dreams? The instability of the images—their fluidity and distortions—introduces into the minds of its audience members doubts about how they should take what is being portrayed on screen. This lack of assurance about the nature of what is being shown is exacerbated by the film’s episodic structure, which also leaves viewers puzzled about the film they are watching. Standardly, narrative films—and this is a narrative film even if the nature of its narrative remains unresolved in the minds of its viewers—employ various techniques that give the audience cues that help to interpret the images and sounds they are seeing and hearing. One example is the use of an establishing shot, that is, a shot taken from some distance that shows enough elements in the setting to give the audience an understanding of the context for the action that will subsequently be portrayed through less distanced shots. Another technique is the use of a dramatic structure that provides similar interpretive clues for the audience. Noël Carroll characterizes this structure as “erotetic.” This term signifies that the film’s narrative poses questions to its audience that the film goes on to provide answers for, keeping viewers involved in wondering about those questions and then finding answers to them.4 Waking Life does not employ this form, making it an unusual narrative film in its structure as well as its visual character. The film has no clear plot line, no sequence of events that develop an ongoing story. Instead, the film consists of a series of episodes that are loosely linked to one another by the presence of the unnamed main character played by Wiley Wiggins as well as a similarity in the content of at least adjacent episodes. Because there are no clear links established between all the different episodes, the film’s narrative structure further unsettles its audience, which is unable to see a clear developmental line proceeding through all the episodes. In order to demonstrate how the film raises the question of the relationship between dreams and reality, I want to look carefully at how it begins. Initially, we see a young boy and girl playing a game called “fortune teller.”5 The girl 4  Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78–93. 5  References to the film are drawn from its transcript (Linklater, Waking Life). The transcript divides the film into 19 episodes and provides titles for them. Doug Man (http://publish.uwo. ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm) divides the film into 34 episodes. The transcript gives an obscure name to the game. I use its more familiar one. Doug Man. Nd. “Buddhists, Existentialists, and Situationists: Waking Up in Waking Life,” http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm. Accessed 1/27/2017.

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holds a folded piece of paper upon each of whose sections are written different colors and numbers, and opens and shuts the paper in accordance with numbers chosen by the boy. After a few such repetitions, she lifts one of the folds and reads the message that was concealed: “Dream is destiny.” This oracular pronouncement cannot but puzzle the film’s viewers. How are they supposed to interpret it? Is this a serious announcement of the film’s theme? If so, what exactly does it mean? Do our dreams contain truths that our lives subsequently live out? What of the context for this pronouncement, that is, an ordinary children’s game? How seriously can we take messages that are written down in such a game? Any more seriously than the fortunes in Chinese fortune cookies? Although the film doesn’t supply any clear answers to these questions, it has registered the subject of dreams as its philosophical concern quite explicitly, even if we remain uncertain about how seriously to take its pronouncement that dreams are destiny. These questions facing the film’s audience only multiply as the film proceeds. First, there is a sudden cut to the boy at night walking out of his house and seeing a comet traversing the sky. In this scene, the boy’s eyes are the most pronounced elements in his face, extending past their natural borders and brightly colored blue. As he approaches a car parked in the driveway, he begins to elevate, starting to float up into the sky. Only grasping the door handle of the car keeps him from floating away as his feet rise over his head and point upward. Another abrupt cut results in our seeing the man who becomes the film’s main character seated on a train. As he opens his eyes, it appears that he has just awakened, resulting in our taking the previous scenes to have been records of the dream he has just dreamed. Another cut takes us to the film’s title sequence. So not only does the film explicitly if confusingly announce the problem of dreams and their relationship to everyday “waking life” as its concern by means of the fortune “Dreams are destiny,” it also gets its audience to see that its initial sequence was in fact a dream sequence, one dreamed by the main character asleep on a train. The only way that the audience is able to interpret the initial sequence of the film as a dream is by its relation to the subsequent one, when the awakening of the dreamer supplies the necessary evidence. Even though I have said that Waking Life does not in general employ an erotetic narrative structure, it does close to employing one here. That is, some of the questions raised by the opening sequence get resolved once it becomes clear that what was being shown was a dream dreamed by the main character. My claim is that the film, although it clearly raises some philosophical issues about dreams, never takes a clear stand on those issues. Rather, it simply strives to get its audience to reflect on those problems, to see them as significant philosophical issues. The topic of distinguishing between dreams and reality is a philosophical issue that has been discussed at least since the time of Descartes. In his first Meditation on First Philosophy, Descartes proposed that there was no intrinsic feature of a dream that could distinguish it from a perception of actual reality.

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This claim plays an important role in his skeptical argument that led to the conclusion that there was no certain means to determine that any of our perceptions were true. Waking Life approaches the question of dreams in a less single-minded manner, raising not only the question of what distinguishes them from reality, but also on what the significance of dreams is, whether they tell us something important about ourselves. In a post-Freudian world, this is not surprising. Many of the characters in the film make different comments on the nature of dreams and what their relationship to reality is. The film itself takes no stance on the issue but only presents a variety of different views, thereby encouraging its audience to think about what the nature of dreams is. For example, in one of the next scenes in the film, the main character is picked up by a man in an amphibious car. This scene is quite odd, for such a vehicle seems incongruous in Austin, which is far from the ocean. When the film subsequently cuts to the main character apparently waking from a dream, it again suggests that he might have been dreaming the previous episode. This dynamic is repeated throughout the film, as scenes that appeared to be of the waking life of the main character get subsequently reinterpreted as dreams. On his peregrinations through Austin, Texas, the main character encounters a variety of different characters, each of whom discusses issues that are broadly philosophical. Some of these interlocutors are actually academics playing themselves—philosophers like Robert Solomon, a chemist, a writing professor, and so on—although others are professional actors playing parts. Here again, the film transgresses some borders, namely that between a documentary and a fiction film. When we see the rotoscoped image of the late philosophy professor Robert Solomon giving a lecture on Jean-Paul Sartre, we appear to be watching a documentary film. But later scenes are clearly fictional, as the film refuses to sit firmly in one cinematic category or the other. In the various interactions that the main character has with different people, the subject of dreams comes up with increasing frequency. Different people have distinct takes on the nature of dreams, and the film presents them all without any explicit endorsement or critique. Instead of developing a particular theory about the nature of dreams, the film seeks to get its audience to realize how important the issue of their nature is and how little understanding they have of the complexity of the question. The film’s refusal to take a specific position on the nature of dreams and their relationship with waking life is underscored by the film’s final scene, a reprise of the one in which the young boy appears to levitate. The setting is identical. This time, however, the main character is unable to actually grasp the car’s door handle. We see the silhouette of his body as it rises higher and higher into the sky, with clouds and trains depicted in overlapping images, until the image of his body completely disappears. A final cut inaugurates the loopy final credits with Linklater’s name appearing. Now, however, there is no further scene to allow us to take this scene to be a dream sequence or, at least, not a specific dream. Rather, in a way that paral-

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lels other scenes, we are simply left with the impression that this must be a dream. In addition, if we recall the opening claim that dream is destiny, we could take this scene of repetition to be a rendering of the man’s destiny foretold by his dream. The problem is that this can’t be a realistic destiny, so the film ends as inconclusively as it began, with many questions remaining in the audience’s mind. This irresolution is part and parcel of Waking Life’s attempt to get viewers to think about the philosophical issue of distinguishing dreams from reality and to reflect further on the role and function of dreams in their life. In so doing, Waking Life places a philosophical conundrum at the center of its concerns, thereby qualifying itself as an example of philosophical filmmaking. The film’s refusal to accept our usual understanding of this dichotomy is also registered in different aspects of the film itself, making it a film that undermines many dichotomies that play a role in our thinking without thereby establishing a view of its own.

Presenting a Counterexample to a Philosophical Thesis: Crimes and Misdemeanors A counterexample to a philosophical thesis is a specific narrative that contradicts a universal philosophical claim. For example, in Plato’s Republic, Socrates presents a counterexample to Cephalus’ claim that justice (or morality) requires living up to your legal obligations and being honest, a traditional Greek conception of what being just amounts to. Socrates asks Cephalus whether he thinks it is just to return a weapon one has borrowed to the person who lent it if that person has gone mad in the interim. Socrates’ claim is that, even though the madman owns the weapon, it would not be in accord with justice to return it to him, so the general definition of justice proposed by Cephalus is inadequate. Films can present narratives that function as counterexamples to philosophical claims, and doing so is an important form of philosophical filmmaking. One prominent example is Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). The general philosophical claim targeted by the film also comes from the Republic, namely that people who are just will be happy, while those who are unjust or immoral will not be. This claim is central to Plato’s defense of morality against those who claim that the only reason people act morally is their fear of punishment. To the contrary, Plato holds that justice is something that is good both in itself and in its consequences. The aspect of the narrative of Crimes and Misdemeanors that is relevant as a counterexample to Plato’s claim about justice involves Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau), a prominent Jewish businessman, who is having an affair. When his mistress threatens to make the affair public and thus threatens Judah’s standing within his community as well as to end his marriage, he takes out a contract to have her killed. After she has been eliminated, Judah is wracked by guilt. Eventually, however, he overcomes his remorse, partially through the aid of his

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gangster brother who has arranged the murder, and he realizes that the only threat to his happiness is his own feeling of guilt, based partially on residual beliefs in the existence of God. But in a world without God, there are no punishments handed out for evil actions, and at the end of the film Judah’s marriage has been reinvigorated and he is truly content with his life. The viewer who finds Judah’s story plausible realizes that Plato’s claim about evildoers is not universally valid. The film’s fictional story of Judah Rosenthal triggers viewers’ intuitions about the consequences of acting immorally, getting them to realize that the connection between happiness and being moral is not as strong as Plato believed. An immoral person can enjoy the fruits of their evil deeds, so long as they do not find themselves overcome by feelings of guilt. And this is precisely what Judah is shown to be able to do. Although a philosopher could describe Judah’s case, as I have done here, in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of Plato’s claims about the relationship between being moral and happiness, the film provides a much fuller, more detailed, and filled-out visualization of the case. This is part of why films have an important role to play in developing philosophical ideas: Their dramatic presentation of specific cases allows viewers to really see such cases as plausible and not just examples cooked up by philosophers to support their own views. Philosophical filmmakers provide a real service by presenting such fully worked-­ out philosophical counterexamples to philosophical claims and theories.

Illustrating a Philosophical Thesis: Anomalisa Philosophical theses tend to be abstract, universal claims, such as that acting morally ensures one’s happiness, the thesis for which we saw Crimes and Misdemeanors provides a counterexample. This raises the intriguing question of how a film might be able to illustrate a philosophical claim or thesis rather than providing a counterexample to it. That is, is a general thesis—such as that linking virtue and happiness—the sort of notion that can be illustrated in a film? At first blush, this seems improbable, for films, especially ones presenting fictional narratives, tell the story of individuals and don’t make the general claims characteristic of philosophical theses. So, it’s puzzling to think that such a narrative might illustrate a general philosophical claim. But there is a solution to this puzzle. When I argued that films could present counterexamples to general philosophical theses, I purposefully did not point out that such counterexamples functioned as philosophical thought experiments, that is, fictional narratives about individual cases. Such cinematic thought experiments functioned as counterexamples precisely because they presented imaginary stories of individuals who did not satisfy the general philosophical claims for which the stories functioned as counterexamples. The fact that fictional narratives can function as thought experiments is central to the idea of philosophical filmmaking. Filmmakers can use fictional ­narratives as thought experiments that have different roles in the establishment of philosophical theories. What’s relevant here is that a filmmaker can use a

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narrative that presents a cinematic thought experiment to illustrate a general philosophical claim or theory. Of course, just presenting an illustration of a claim does not establish the truth of that claim. Nonetheless, illustrating a philosophical idea or thesis cinematically, another mode of philosophical filmmaking, can lend plausibility to that idea or thesis. The best way to explain how a film can illustrate a philosophical theory is to look at an example. I shall focus on Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, 2016), another innovative animated film. I will argue that the film illustrates the philosophical theory of pessimism. In ordinary parlance, a pessimist is someone who looks at things negatively, what we colloquially refer to as a “glass half empty” sort of person. In any situation, a pessimist will always view things in the worst possible light, emphasizing the negative aspects of the situation and underplaying the positive ones. The philosophical theory of pessimism is related to this psychological attitude but also differs from it. A philosophical pessimist believes that human life is inherently unfulfilling, that happiness is an unattainable goal. Making this metaphysical claim about human life distinguishes philosophical pessimism from its psychological counterpart. One philosopher who embraced, if that’s the right word, philosophical pessimism was the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. From Schopenhauer’s point of view, pessimism is grounded in an important feature of human life: that all of our desires can never be adequately satisfied. Take hunger. You find yourself hungry and you eat something that appears to satisfy that desire, say a bowl of ramen. Shortly after doing that, what happens? Your hunger reappears and you need to find something else to satisfy that rekindled desire. Will a bowl of ramen do? Perhaps. But you might also find yourself thinking that ramen won’t satisfy your desire again, for you’ve just had some. So, you need to find something different that will actually satisfy you. But what? Although this repetitive pattern of desire and satisfaction might not seem to be very significant to you, for Schopenhauer it demonstrates an important truth about human beings, namely that, desire—which he called will in accordance with traditional philosophical terminology—can never really be satisfied. No matter what you do to fulfill a desire, Schopenhauer claims you will find that such satisfaction is fleeting so that you wind up on the treadmill of desire satisfaction, a treadmill that never ceases and never truly satisfies. It’s not my intent here to argue for the validity of Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, only to outline it so that we can see how Anomalisa illustrates it. So, let’s turn to the film itself in order to see how it does so. Like Waking Life, Anomalisa is an unusual animated film. It employs 3D models in stop-motion animation, a very different technique from that used in Waking Life. Although the film is composed of still photographs of the models as their positions are very slowly altered, thereby giving a very realistic picture when the stills are projected at the standard rate of 24 frames per second, there are no shots of real people or real scenes. Everything is animated.

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The one departure from the film’s “realism” is in the faces of the models of human beings or puppets. The puppets have a visible seam between their eyes and around their hairline, a feature that would normally be obscured in postproduction. For the film, however, Kaufman and Johnson decided to leave them in, making us aware that we are watching puppets rather than something else. The central character in Anomalisa is Michael, a British customer sales agent who arrives in Cincinnati to give a speech at a sales conference. Aboard a plane en route at the beginning of the film, he hears the voice of his former girlfriend Bella as he reads a letter she wrote him: November 12, 1995. Dear Michael. Fuck you. Just fuck you. You just walk away? After all you said to me? After all we did? After all those fucking promises? After all that fucking fucking?6

Clearly, Bella is angry with Michael for ending their relationship. But what’s remarkable about her voiceover is something that many viewers will not notice, as they are absorbed in deciphering the narrative: that her voice is that of a man (played by Tom Noonan). Nor is she the only character who is voiced by Noonan. With the exception of Michael (voiced by David Thewlis) and, for a time, Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), all of the characters are voiced by Noonan, a fact that dawns upon viewers at different moments during the film. Why is this? It turns out that the sameness of the voices of everyone with whom he interacts explains the boredom that plagues Michael. We see this when Bella agrees to meet with him. She wants to know what happened, why he suddenly ended their relationship, which seems to have catapulted her into serious depression. And all he can do by way of response is to ask her if something changed, if she noticed something different about herself before the relationship ended. As becomes clear later in the film, the problem is with Michael. As in the example I gave of ramen no longer satisfying your hunger, Michael finds himself repeatedly dissatisfied with his relationships with people who all eventually turn out to be just versions of the same being, a fact registered by the near omnipresence of Noonan’s voice. All this becomes clear through Michael’s relationship with Lisa. Initially, what attracts Michael to her is simply her voice, which is unlike the voices of all the other people with whom he interacts. Alone in his hotel room after the disastrous encounter with Bella, he hears a feminine voice and rushes out of the room to try to track her down. After a few unsuccessful attempts, he finds Lisa and her friend Emily. Lisa is, as Zadie Smith puts it in her insightful essay on the film, “a lovely, homely girl, perfectly average.”7 To Michael, however, her distinctive voice allows him to see her as an individual, someone who promises to answer his 6 7

 Kaufmann, Anomalisa, 2.  Zadie Smith, “Windows on the Will,” New York Review of Books, March 10, 2016: 48.

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desperate need to alleviate his boredom. And, at first, this promise is fulfilled. Lisa and Michael open up to one another and connect on a deep level. Lisa is surprised that Michael is interested in her, for most people find her friend Emily much more interesting. Not Michael, however. Why is that? In response to Lisa’s asking him why he’s interested in her, he responds in a way that has more significance than Lisa realizes: “It’s your voice, Lisa. Keep talking. Tell me everything.”8 We realize that Lisa’s voice signifies to Michael her uniqueness, her individuality, her standing out from the crowd of the mass of humanity who are all the same, at least to Michael. As such, Lisa alone offers him the promise of actually satisfying his desire, of alleviating his loneliness. But, of course, as every pessimist knows, such satisfactions are inevitably shortlived. As Michael and Lisa talk about being together and Michael ending his marriage, Michael begins to notice some annoying habits Lisa has: She clicks her fork against her teeth when she eats, and she talks with food hanging out of her mouth. As they make plans, at Lisa’s suggestion, to go to the zoo after his speech, Lisa’s voice (i.e. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s) first merges with and then is replaced by that of all the other characters (i.e. Tom Noonan’s). What this signifies is that, as he has come to know Lisa better, Michael can no longer see her as an individual, for her voice turns into that of all the other people with whom he interacts. And this means that she no longer satisfies his desire. In the next scene, Michael has returned home and picks up his life, doomed once more to boredom and loneliness. My suggestion is that Anomalisa illustrates the fundamental thesis of pessimism: that human desires are not capable of abiding satisfaction, that our lot is one of pain and misery. Quite brilliantly, the film uses puppets and voiceovers to tell the story of one person, Michael, whose story illustrates the insatiability of human desire and the inevitability of dissatisfaction. Now one might claim that Michael’s dissatisfaction is the result of a psychological problem and thus can’t be used as an illustration of the pessimistic thesis. This claim finds support in the name of the hotel at which Michael is staying, the Fregoli. As an author’s note at the head of the screenplay states (in one of the great spoilers of all time), “It is the author’s intention that Michael views and hears everyone in the world (other than Lisa) as one person. This is a reference to a psychiatric disorder called the Fregoli Delusion.”9 Clearly, if Michael were just a “case,” it would be inappropriate to take him to be an example of a general philosophical position such as pessimism. The problem with taking Michael just to be delusional is that, as Zadie Smith puts it: A narrowly neurological interpretation of Anomalisa (i.e. the trouble with Michael is he has a brain legion) can’t account for the profound identification the viewer feels with Michael’s experience, or the strong part desire plays in the scheme of his suffering.10  Kaufman, Anomalisa, 49.  Kaufman, Anomalisa, 1. 10  Smith, “Windows,” 46. 8 9

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Her point is that, as we watch the film, we feel that Michael’s experience demonstrates a general truth about human experience, namely that desires can never really be satisfied, that people always eventually reveal themselves to be less than the individuals we took them for. That is, we see in Michael an example of the truth of pessimism. If this account of the film is persuasive, it shows that a film is able to illustrate a philosophical thesis. Why is this an accomplishment? What’s so significant about illustration of a philosophical thesis cinematically? The reason that a cinematic illustration of a philosophical claim or thesis is important is that it can help us understand the significance of that claim or thesis. David Davies asserts that films, because they involve what he terms “dramatic imaginings,” can help us “deepen our understanding of the philosophical issues, and it is in virtue of this deeper understanding that our intuitive responses to these issues are placed on a firmer rational foundation.”11 The point is that a cinematic illustration of a philosophical thesis flushes out the nature of the thesis in a way that helps us assess its truth and, at least in the case of Anomalisa and pessimism, assists us in seeing the justification for what might seem like an arbitrary worldview. I end this section by addressing an important objection to the claim that a film can illustrate a philosophical claim or theory. The Imposition Objection asserts that the philosophy posited in a film by a philosophically informed interpretation is actually the work of the interpreter rather than the film itself. In relation to Anomalisa, the claim would acknowledge that my interpretation of the film contains philosophy, but that is just because I’ve done the philosophizing, not the film. A full refutation of the Imposition Objection is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say that, in this case, there is some evidence of Kaufman’s interest in Schopenhauer. As Zadie Smith points out, there is a reference to Schopenhauer in Kaufman’s screenplay for Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), although the line does not appear in the film itself. When Erroll is informed that he can be John Malkovich, he remarks: “Malkovich! King of New  York! Man about town! Most eligible bachelor! Bon Vivant! The Schopenhauer of the twentieth century!”12 Kaufman’s reference to Schopenhauer establishes his interest in the philosopher. While this does not legitimate the claim that Anomalisa was intended as an illustration of Schopenhauerian pessimism, it does show that Kaufman is familiar with this philosophical position. More generally, one does not have to show that a filmmaker is aware that a philosopher has addressed the very issue their film raises. What is crucial is only that it is legitimate to take a film to be referring to the same philosophical problem that a philosopher has discussed in his work. That Anomalisa is concerned 11  David Davies, “Blade Runner and the Cognitive Value of Cinema,” in Blade Runner, ed. Amy Coplan and David Davies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 151. 12  Kaufman, Being John Malkovich, 51.

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with its central character’s despair, his inability to find life engaging and interesting, is beyond doubt. That Schopenhauer also theorizes this entails that the film and the philosopher both address the same philosophical problem. For our purposes, that is sufficient.

Providing Empirical Support for a Philosophical Thesis: The Act of Killing In the penultimate scene of Joshua Oppenheimer’s brilliant and disturbing documentary, The Act of Killing, one of the perpetrators of the 1965–1966 Indonesian genocide, Anwar Congo, returns to the rooftop on which he had committed many murders.13 Earlier in the film in this very location Congo had explained exactly how he and his associates had killed their victims. With evident pride, he explained how they had altered their earlier technique in order to limit the huge amount of blood that resulted from slitting their victims’ throats. He gleefully demonstrated how he had used a wire attached to a pipe with a piece of wood on the end to garrote his victims, a method he had derived from Hollywood gangster films. After admitting to drinking and using drugs to put “all that” behind him, Congo breaks into a dance, attempting to show how those horrors no longer affect him. As we watch and listen to him, we cannot but be shocked by what he did and how he has reacted to his own crimes. Now, toward the end of the film as well as Oppenheimer’s filming of him, Congo’s return to the rooftop takes place with a very different emotional and moral tenor. First, the camera focuses on Congo as he ascends the staircase to the rooftop on which he had killed so many of his victims, dressed stylishly in a yellow sports jacket. “This is the place where we tortured and killed the people we captured. I knew it was wrong but I had to do it,” he tells Oppenheimer—and us. At this point, he seems to choke on his own bile and he attempts to retch, as if so doing would purify him. “Why I had to kill him?” he asks rhetorically and then answers, “My conscience told me to do it.” After explaining again the manner employed to kill his victims and once again retching, Congo descends the staircase slowly, alone with his own conscience. Before cutting to the final scene of the film, the camera lingers on Congo in a long shot framed by the walls of the stairs and the exterior of the building. What accounts for the change in Congo’s demeanor, the loss of bravado and the accompanying acknowledgment of his own depravity? The answer is to be found in a sequence that takes place between the two I have just discussed and which depends on the film’s central conceit: Oppenheimer, at the suggestion of the victims of the Indonesian genocide who were still afraid of appearing on camera, has gotten the perpetrators to agree to take part in making a film about their role in the genocide. Amazingly, they find this an oppor13  The film has two co-directors, Cynthia Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian, whose identity is kept secret to protect him.

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tunity to tell their own stories, thinking that this will cement their positive place in Indonesian history. The Act of Killing consists largely of scenes orchestrated by the perpetrators as well as Oppenheimer’s record of their reactions to those scenes. The revolutionary method that Oppenheimer and his co-directors developed involved having the perpetrators restage scenes of their own misdeeds before the camera. In the crucial scene reenacting the interrogation and killing of one of his victims, Congo plays the role of one of the victims. We see him being made up, with blood placed on his face to lend realism to his portrayal. An interrogator, playing himself, sits facing Congo, with a desk between them, as two of the other perpetrators stand on either side of Congo, threatening him, making loud noises with wooden boards, and placing knives at his neck and stomach. Congo appears to actually be shaken up, indeed so much so that one of his fellow perpetrators/actors tells him not to cry for it’s just a show. After a break, they resume the filming and blindfold Congo, placing a wire around his neck in the precise manner he had previously shown us he used to kill his victims. Congo appears to faint and tells his comrades that he “feels funny.” Again, the comrade advises him not to think too much about the character he is playing, but after they resume the fake strangulation, Congo breaks things off, saying, “I can’t do it again.” Given the emotional impact that playing one of the victims of his violence has on Congo, we are surprised to see his pleasure as he watches the scene again on a television in his home in a subsequent scene. Even more startling, both to us and to Oppenheimer, who is filming Congo’s reactions, is his desire to have his two grandsons watch the scene with him. Brushing off Oppenheimer’s suggestion that the scene is too violent for the young children, Congo proudly discusses his acting with the two young boys as they cuddle on his lap. Once they have left, Congo suddenly squints, as if he now sees something more in the film he has been watching. “Did the people I tortured feel the way I do here?” he asks Oppenheimer. “I can feel the way the people I tortured felt because my dignity has been destroyed. My pride has gone and then fear comes right then and there,” he continues, as he looks at his own image on the screen. “All the terror possessed my body. It surrounded me and possessed me.” Oppenheimer responds to Congo quite harshly: “Actually, the people you tortured felt far worse because you know it’s only a film. They knew they were being killed.” Congo appears puzzled by Oppenheimer’s reaction, something we note as he cocks his head slightly to the side. He then looks down, as if he’s considering the truth of Oppenheimer’s words. “But I can feel it, Josh. Really, I can feel it,” he responds. Slowly, as if a light is dawning, he says plaintively, “I did this to so many people, Josh.” He cries. “Is it all coming back to me? I really hope it won’t. I don’t want it to, Josh,” he says, as he wipes the tears from his eyes with his right hand. He shakes his head as if to dispel the horror of his realization. The scene ends with a cut to the still of Congo in his role as victim displayed on TV.

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On the face of it, these remarkable scenes show us the impact that this documentary film’s innovative strategy of filming and screening reenactments of terror can have on a person’s understanding of the morality of their actions. Congo, who has clearly thought about his role as a perpetrator of genocide a great deal since 1965, only recognizes the enormity of what he did then as a result of both acting in the reenactment of the events in which he played such a pivotal role and then watching his own acting as the scene he was in plays on his television set. Here, as in the film as a whole, Oppenheimer shows us that the perpetrators are enamored of film, especially Hollywood film, so that seeing oneself on screen seems an occasion for celebration no matter what it is that is being portrayed. Hence Congo’s bizarre desire that his grandsons watch him as he is beaten during the reenactment. But Congo’s engagement with the film also results in a radical shift in his understanding of his own role in the Indonesian genocide. Although he admits to being troubled at the start of the film, he also is proud of what he and his colleagues accomplished, for they are now celebrated by their fellow citizens and some have achieved political power. And yet, when he acts in the film, he finds himself experiencing to some degree what it must have been like to have been one of the victims of his cruelty. Apparently, this empathetic reaction was not one that he had previously had and, indeed, it would have been hard to carry on with his task had he put himself in their place in 1965–1966. We need to ask whether its presentation of the reenactments of the Indonesian genocide qualifies The Act of Killing as a work of philosophical filmmaking.14 In order to justify this claim, I want to briefly turn to Hannah Arendt’s important work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In that work, Arendt rejects what she takes to be the standard understanding of the nature of moral evil. According to Arendt, on the usual understanding, moral evil can be attributed to the free actions of human beings.15 Basing her claims on Shakespearean characters such as Iago, Arendt holds that traditionally evil has been thought to stem from truly malevolent human beings whose characters are deeply vicious. It is the vicious nature of such individuals that accounts for the presence of evil in the world. What struck Arendt about Eichmann was his ordinariness or, as she puts it, his “thoughtlessness.” As Ned Curthoys summarizes her view, Arendt claims that Eichmann was “unable to ‘think,’ to see the world imaginatively and empathetically from the standpoint of others, and thus ‘did not know what he

14  For a related account of the film as making a philosophical contribution, see Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 165–184. I discuss the film’s contribution to our understanding of moral evil more fully in my “Providing evidence for a philosophical claim.” Wartenberg, “Providing evidence for a philosophical claim: The Act of Killing and the banality of evil,” NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (2017). https://necsus-ejms.org/ providing-evidence-philosophical-claim-act-killing-banality-evil/ 15  Moral evil, the result of the actions of human beings, is distinguished from natural evil, events that have purely natural causes and that result in great devastation, such as an earthquake.

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was doing’ in organizing and ordering the deaths of millions of Jews.”16 This is the central thesis she puts as the banality of evil, for a killer like Eichmann lacks the interesting personality of the Iago-like villains traditionally associated with evildoing. At the center of Arendt’s view of Eichmann is a psychological incapacity, an inability to put oneself in the place of others. Arendt’s observations of Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 provide the evidence for her innovative philosophical analysis of the nature of evil. But it is precisely the evidential basis for her claim that has come to be doubted in recent years. The problem is that Arendt underplays Eichmann’s anti-Semitism. Critics of her work, such as Bettina Stangneth, have asserted that Eichmann was actually motivated by his antipathy toward Jews.17 If that is the case, then he resembles Iago more than Arendt thought, and her thesis of the banality of evil lacks its central confirming instance. The Act of Killing is a work of philosophical filmmaking because it provides the empirical support Arendt’s thesis requires. Of course, there are important differences between Congo and Eichmann. After all, Eichmann did not personally kill the millions of Jews for whose deaths he was responsible, while Congo brutally murdered at least many hundreds of innocent people. Nonetheless, the character trait that Arendt takes to be decisive in her analysis of Eichmann—his inability to put himself in the place of others, including his victims—is a trait that The Act of Killing decisively demonstrates to have been true of Congo as well. The difference between Arendt’s prose description of Eichmann and the film’s audiovisual record of Congo’s recognition is that the film is able to provide the viewers with actual documentary evidence of Congo’s psychological incapacity. As I have just argued, in the decisive scenes in the film, viewers are brought face-to-face with Congo’s acknowledgment during the reenactments that took place nearly 50 years after the actual genocide of what his victims must have been feeling. And what this demonstrates is what Congo was unable to feel during the murders he committed that enabled him to perpetrate such enormous evil. So, The Act of Killing is a work of philosophical filmmaking because it provides empirical evidence for Arendt’s thesis of the banality of evil. Using an innovative cinematic strategy of filming and rescreening reenactments of brutal crimes, the film demonstrates that evil can be the result of a failure of imagination and empathy, the precise claim that Arendt makes but for which she is unable to provide adequate empirical evidence.

16  Ned Curthoys, “Selbstdenken, Remembrance, and the Future of Civil Courage in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012). On the Psychogenesis of the ‘Banality of Evil,” Screening the Past (41) 2016: xxiii–xxv. Accessed at www.screeningthepast.com/issue-41/ on December 22, 2016. 17  Curthoys, “Selbstdenken,” xxiii–xxv.

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Presenting and Supporting a Philosophical Thesis: Amour The Austrian director Michael Haneke has often addressed anxieties of upper-­ middle-­class people in his films. Examples of films focusing on such anxieties are Funny Games (1997)—the issue is home invasion—and Caché (2005)— where the concern is being illicitly videotaped. These films portray the deleterious effects on well-to-do couples of finding their not-so-paranoid anxieties realized. For this reason, despite critical acclaim, many of the films have had trouble finding a sympathetic audience. His 2012 film Amour is noteworthy for directly addressing issues facing such a couple as its partners age. In particular, the film raises the question of whether euthanasia can be justified in the face of irreversible decline in one’s health. The provocative claim made by the film is that not only is euthanasia permissible, but in certain circumstances it is morally required. It is the presentation and defense of this claim that make this film a paradigmatic example of philosophical filmmaking. The dilemma of  whether to euthanize his wife faces Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) when his wife Ann (Emmanuelle Riva) becomes progressively more debilitated from a series of strokes. Georges and Ann are an elderly upper-­middle-­ class couple. Ann had been a concert pianist and Georges was likely a teacher, though that is never made clear in the film. They live in a lovely apartment in Paris and, at the outset of the film, are able to live independently despite their age. Gradually, as the film progresses, Georges comes to the realization that he will no longer be able to care for Ann on his own, so he has to face the question of how to provide for her care. Georges also has to decide whether to honor Ann’s request that she not be returned to a hospital, for she never liked having to deal with doctors and her recent stay in a hospital has only strengthened her resolve. Although they have a daughter, Eva (Isabella Huppert), she is self-­ centered and neither Georges nor Ann thinks she can be a helpful presence for Ann. The question that the film foregrounds is how a person’s dignity can be maintained as they endure a physical and mental decline due to aging. The importance of maintaining a person’s dignity is emphasized in the film, especially through its portrayal of two nurses Georges hires to help him with Ann’s care. Both nurses are shown to treat Ann inappropriately, acting as if her physical decline, which entails an inability to speak, entails a concomitant mental one. And, in any case, they are insensitive to her need to maintain her dignity in the face of her illness, one treating her roughly and ignoring her cries of pain, the other acting as if she is a child, talking down to her. The film’s portrayal of health-care professionals is tendentious, certainly, but is part of what is necessary to establish Georges’ dilemma: As Ann continues her decline, he is committed to preserving her dignity, something that is clearly important to her. No one he can turn to for help is able to assist in the mainte-

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nance of that dignity, but he lacks the strength to care for her on his own. Hence the question of euthanasia arises. Euthanasia is sometimes also referred to as mercy killing. The idea is that, in certain dire circumstances, as when someone is in constant pain and has no hope of recovering and enjoying a reasonable amount of satisfaction in their life, it is morally permissible to end that person’s life, so long as that accords with what the person wishes.18 There has been ongoing debate about the morality of euthanasia and the conditions that might be required to make it morally permissible. What’s striking about Amour is that it supports not just the permissibility of euthanasia but its necessity in certain cases. Since Ann has explicitly gotten Georges to promise not to send her back to the hospital, and since there is no one that can provide him with the assistance to care for Ann himself, there is no way for him to maintain her dignity during her decline. As a result, he decides to kill her and subsequently himself as well. This appears the only way that he can maintain her dignity in the face of her illness and its debilitation. Ann’s killing is depicted very graphically in the film. After a touching scene in which Ann and Georges sing together, Georges grabs a pillow and presses it down violently to cover Ann’s mouth and nose. Rather than going gently into the night, Ann is shown to struggle violently against being smothered, as if her body rejects the death that she has seemed to desire and despite the fact that she has been shown to be nearly completely paralyzed. Part of the reason for this must be Haneke’s desire to get the audience to appreciate that euthanasia is not something to be undertaken lightly. So instead of having Georges resort to pills or some other less brutal form of killing, the film insists on having us witness the violence involved in taking another’s life, even if doing so is morally justified. It’s important to be clear on what the film’s position on euthanasia is. As opposed to most philosophers, who only argue for the moral permissibility of euthanasia, the film endorses the stronger claim that, in certain circumstances, the centrality of dignity to human life requires that a person’s life be taken to spare them the humiliation they would inevitably face. This is a very strong and controversial position, one that most philosophers would reject. But this does not mean it should not be taken seriously. Indeed, the film’s boldness in this regard is part of why it qualifies as such a significant example of cinematic philosophy. On the other hand, as I have noted, the film’s case for the necessity of euthanasia in Ann’s case relies on its presentation of health-care professionals as not able to assist Georges in his quest to maintain Ann’s dignity throughout the process of her dying. In this respect, the film is unrealistic. Many health-care professionals do not manifest the objectionable behaviors of the two nurses Georges hires to assist him. And had there been nurses available to him who 18  For an excellent summary of the morality of euthanasia, see https://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/euthanasia-voluntary/, accessed on 12/19/2016.

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would have provided the necessary care to Ann without demeaning her, Georges would not have been placed in the situation where euthanasia is the only means of maintaining Ann’s dignity, though the question of whether Ann’s dignity could be maintained as her physical decline continues needs to be answered. One of the brilliant touches in this film is the puzzling opening scene whose significance is only revealed toward the end of the film, once it has become clear to the film’s audience that Georges has euthanized Ann. The film opens with a small crowd gathered before a locked apartment door. An awful smell is emanating from the locked apartment, so the local police and firefighters have to break into the apartment. After they do so, Ann’s body is revealed displayed on a bed, as if she were lying in state, for she is beautifully made up with flowers scattered about her body. At the same time, her face has begun to decompose, adding a macabre element to the scene. As the scene ends, and the narrative picks up prior to the onset of Ann’s illness, the audience’s curiosity is aroused: What exactly is the significance of this oddly displayed body? Why has it been left in this state? What are we to make of these unusual circumstances? The balance of the film provides answers to these questions, which it resolves in a philosophically ingenious manner, providing a clear instance of the erotetic filmmaking I discussed earlier in this chapter. Amour is one of the most ambitious examples of philosophical filmmaking I know of. It develops a striking and quite controversial thesis, that is, that in certain dire circumstances euthanasia is morally required. It justifies this claim by reference to the importance of maintaining a person’s dignity even or especially in the face of a debilitating disease. Although there are significant problems with the generality of its claims, this film clearly develops an argument in favor of a highly contentious philosophical position. And insofar as it does so, Amour serves as a paradigm of philosophical filmmaking.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have canvassed a number of important forms that philosophical filmmaking can take. Beginning with the idea that a film can involve philosophy simply by making its audience aware of a philosophical problem or issue, I have looked at a number of different ways in which films can include philosophical content. In considering the diversity of modes of philosophical filmmaking, I have not made an attempt to be comprehensive.19 Rather, I only wanted to survey significant attempts by filmmakers to give their films philosophical content and to engage their audiences in philosophical reflection. The question of how filmmaking can be philosophical is, in large part, an empirical one, for philosophical filmmaking is limited only by the imagination 19  I attempted a more comprehensive investigation of the forms of philosophical filmmaking in Thinking on Screen, though I did not recognize there some of the forms I discuss in this chapter.

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of filmmakers and the receptivity of their audiences. Especially as the development of digital technology forces the broader public to confront philosophical issues, such as whether robots can be human, filmmakers can be counted upon to provoke audiences with films that engage with philosophical issues and capture their audiences’ interest with those questions.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. 1963. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Carroll, Noël. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curthoys, Ned. 2016. Selbstdenken, Remembrance, and the Future of Civil Courage in Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt (2012). On the Psychogenesis of the ‘Banality of Evil’. Screening the Past (41). www.screeningthepast.com/issue-41/. Accessed 22 Dec 2016. Davies, David. 2015. Blade Runner and the Cognitive Value of Cinema. In Blade Runner, ed. Amy Coplan and David Davies, 134–154. Abingdon: Routledge. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufman, Charlie. 1999. Being John Malkovich. http://readwatchwrite.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/BeingJohnMalkovich.pdf. Accessed 11 Jan 2017. ———. 2015. Anomalisa. Burbank: Anomalisa LLC. http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/index.php/scripts-writing/scripts-writing/film-scripts. Accessed 11 Jan 2017. Linklater, Richard. 2001. Waking Life. Transcribed by James Skemp. http://wakinglifemovie.net. Accessed 26 Jan 2017. Man, Doug. n.d. Buddhists, Existentialists, and Situationists: Waking Up in Waking Life. http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/waking_essay.htm. Accessed 27 Jan 2017. Mulhall, Stephen. 2001. On Film. 2nd ed. London/New York: Routledge. Nunan, Richard. 2014. Film as Philosophy in Memento: Reforming Wartenberg’s Imposition Objection. Film and Philosophy 18: 1–18. ———. 2017. Authorial Intent, Alien3, and Thomas Wartenberg’s Alleged Necessary Condition for Films to Do Philosophy. Film and Philosophy 21: 52–73. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The Essay of Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism. Trans. T.  Bailey Saunder. http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10732/pg10732images.html. Accessed 16 Jan 2017. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. London/New York: Routledge. Smith, Zadie. 2016. Windows on the Will. New York Review of Books, March 10, 45–49. Stangneth, Bettina. 2014. Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wartenberg, Thomas. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. The Imposition Objection Reconsidered: A Response to Richard Nunan. Film and Philosophy 19: 1–14. ———. 2017. Providing Evidence for a Philosophical Claim: The Act of Killing and the Banality of Evil. NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies. https://necsus-ejms. org/providing-evidence-philosophical-claim-act-killing-banality-evil/

CHAPTER 22

Filmosophy/Film as Philosophy Robert Sinnerbrink

Despite some passing attention from philosophers of note—such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—twentieth-century philosophers, even within aesthetics, tended to neglect the study of cinema. Indeed, it was not until the late 1970s and 1980s that major philosophers such as Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze dedicated book-length studies to the topic.1 Since the mid-­ 1990s, following the decline of the so-called ‘Grand Theory’, philosophy of film or philosophical film theory has developed into a dynamic and diverse field of inquiry.2 One of the most interesting recent developments in this field—and the subject of this particular entry—is the rise of what has been described as ‘filmphilosophy’, ‘filmosophy’, ‘film as philosophy’, or simply, ‘film and philosophy’. 1  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge MA./London: Harvard University Press, 1979 [1971]) and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1986 [1983]), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (1989 [1985]). 2  See Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds, Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, eds, New Takes in FilmPhilosophy (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Felicity Colman, ed., Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers (Durham: Acumen Press, 2009); Cynthia Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds, Philosophy and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Paisley Livingston, and Carl Plantinga, eds, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (London: Routledge, 2009); Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough, eds, Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Thomas E.  Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film”, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/ (2011), and T. Wartenberg, “On the Possibility of Cinematic Philosophy”, in Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, eds, New Takes in Film-Philosophy (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–24.

R. Sinnerbrink (*) Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_22

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The terms refer to a cluster of approaches to the philosophical engagement with film theory, encompassing both philosophy of film (often indebted to analytic aesthetics and/or cognitivist approaches) and film-­philosophy (often aligned with a range of Continental philosophical approaches).3 In what follows, I explore the idea of ‘film-philosophy’ or ‘film as philosophy’, suggesting that it has a long history going back to key figures in early film theory. I then focus on the seminal work of Cavell and Deleuze, often described as the inaugurators of the ‘film as philosophy’ approach. Finally, I examine recent proposals concerning the idea of ‘film as philosophy’, and some offer concluding reflections on how we might respond to some of the objections raised against this approach.

Film-Philosophy/Film as Philosophy How should we approach the relationship between film and philosophy? Here we can make a useful distinction between two ways of doing ‘film and philosophy’: (1) philosophy of film, an analytical or explanatory approach to conceptualising and theorising the nature of film and our experience of it, and (2) film-philosophy, a self-reflexive, aestheticist, constructivist, or pragmatic approach that puts philosophy into dialogue with film as an alternative way of thinking. Noël Carroll’s work, or contemporary cognitivist approaches, might be examples of the former, whereas the work of Cavell or Deleuze might serve as examples of the latter. In the ‘philosophy of X’ approach, philosophy analyses its object, precisely because the latter cannot engage in conceptual self-­ reflection. Philosophy of film is a traditional philosophical ‘theory of X’ that seeks to provide, for example, a conceptual definition of, empirical investigation into, or philosophical analysis aiming at theories claiming to account for X (where ‘X’ means film, motion pictures, moving images, etc.). The alternative position, ‘film-philosophy’, questions the common tendency to privilege conceptual theorisation over film aesthetics. Film-philosophy is a particular way of practising philosophical film theory, one which stages an encounter between film and philosophy that has the potential to alter how we understand both. It is ‘a way of thinking at the intersection between film and philosophy, linking the two in a shared enterprise that seeks to illuminate the one by means of the other’.4 Inspired by the work of Cavell and Deleuze, film-philosophers claim that film and philosophy are intimately related, sharing problems to which they respond in distinctive ways and thereby opening up new possibilities of thought. In what follows I shall focus on film-philosophy (or ‘film as philosophy’), ­situating this approach historically, examining the key contributions of Cavell and Deleuze, and exploring the ‘film as philosophy’ debate. 3  Compare the different approaches in the volumes edited by Livingston and Plantinga, Read and Goodenough, and Carel and Tuck. For a discussion of film-philosophy, see Robert Sinnerbrink, “Film-Philosophy”, in Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland, eds, The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 207–213. 4  Sinnerbrink, “Film-Philosophy”, 207.

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Early Film-Philosophy The recent ‘philosophical turn’ in film theory is often described as commencing during the 1990s, thanks to the growing reception of works by Stanley Cavell and Gilles Deleuze. Thomas Elsaesser, for example, credits Deleuze’s Cinema books as having inaugurated the current wave of interest in film and philosophy, while Cavell is credited as the first major Anglophone philosopher to make cinema central to his philosophical work.5 Although it is true that Cavell and Deleuze are key sources here, what I am calling ‘film-philosophy’— the idea that film has the potential to express a ‘philosophical’ kind of thinking via cinematic means—has a much longer history that can be traced back to early film theory. Recent proposals, such as Frampton’s idea of ‘filmosophy’, owe much to this neglected historical legacy. As Francesco Casetti has shown, the history of early film-philosophy (1907–1930), spanning the consolidation of early cinema, emergence of avant-­ garde films, and the transition to narrative and talkies produced an array of fascinating texts on films by figures such as Giovanni Papini, Ricciotto Canudo, György Lukacs, Béla Balázs, and Jean Epstein.6 As Casetti points out, many of the essential motifs, tropes, and concepts that we can identify in recent philosophical film theory were articulated in early film-philosophy.7 These include the idea of cinema as mind, cinema as writing, cinema as brain, cinema as thinking, cinema as philosophy, and cinema as gesturing towards the overcoming of traditional philosophical discourse.8 With the rise of avant-garde cinema and cinematic artist-auteurs, what we could describe as an experimental or ‘speculative’ film-philosophy began to emerge in the 1920s. This was accompanied by both theoretical and practical explorations of the idea of a ‘cinematic thinking’: a specifically cinematic expression of thought that challenged traditional philosophical aesthetics and called for new forms of expression more suited to the dynamic temporal and kinetic qualities of cinema (a call that has been taken up again in Daniel Frampton’s idea of ‘filmosophy’). As Frampton remarks, French filmmaker, theorist, and critic Germaine Dulac (1978, 46) was probably the first author to use the term ‘cinematic thought’ (in 1925), although she used it, he notes, ‘without particular explanation, and only in relation to avant-garde or pure cinema’.9 5  Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010), 8–12, 187. 6  Francesco Casetti, “Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory”. Keynote Presentation for the Film-Philosophy Conference, Kings College London (Sept 13, 2012), available online: http:// backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/09/francesco-casetti-philosophical-issues-in-early-film-theory/. See also F. Casetti, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 7  Casetti, “Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory”. 8  See Robert Sinnerbrink, “Early Film-Philosophy: A Dialectical Fable” Screening the Past 38 (December2013): http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/early-film-philosophy-a-dialecticalfable/ 9  Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 49.

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French filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein, however, developed the most radical version of a ‘cinematic thinking’: a thinking through the medium of moving images that is the expression of a nonhuman, technological, ‘cinematic brain’, a technologically mediated thinking that is at once intuitive, visual, and kinetic. Epstein’s views are radical, applying an avant-garde experimental approach to theoretical reflection on cinema as much as to his cinematic practice.10 The technological possibilities of the medium, he claimed, opened up new forms of perceptual-imaginative experience stretching the boundaries and possibilities of everyday consciousness. Indeed, for Epstein, cinema was no less than a machinic expression of energy, a photochemical transduction, a technological medium that revealed a luminous life of things that usually remained invisible to the habituated human eye.11 This machine aesthetic, far from ‘deadening’ our perception of reality, reanimates it by revealing hitherto obscured, unconscious, or neglected dimensions of experience, especially our aesthetic-­ imaginative pleasure in expressive movement, which he and others described as photogénie: ‘The click of a shutter’, Epstein observes, ‘produces a photogénie which was previously unknown’.12 The filmmaker-artist now becomes an element within the audiovisual system, operating the prosthetic mechanical ‘eye’ that surpasses and supplements our unaided human vision and ‘sees waves invisible to us’.13 As Epstein remarks, ‘the screen’s creative passion contains what no other has ever had before: its proper share of ultraviolet’.14 Cinema synthesises technology and humanity, consciousness and camera, transducing the energy that manifests as light, life, and movement. Epstein’s radical version of film-philosophy emphasised the distinctive revelatory powers of cinema to extend ‘natural’ consciousness, to capture the dynamism of modern experience, and to reveal what ordinarily remains concealed or ‘invisible’ in everyday life.15 In doing so, Epstein not only defended the utopian potential of cinema as a revelatory artform, gesturing towards its power to alter everyday consciousness and to overcome an overly rationalistic experience of the world. Epstein’s radical transformation of the film-philosophy relationship thus posits cinema as capturing an anonymous thought process via the ‘metal brain’ of the camera, one that forms a circuit with our own embodied consciousness. After the historical, cultural, and technological shocks of WWII, however, the aesthetic ‘essence’ of cinema, as a medium expressing photogénie, gives way to what Epstein famously called the ‘intelligence of the machine’—a thinking machine with its own potentialities. As he writes in a section entitled ‘The Philosophy of the Cinematograph’, from L’intelligence d’une machine (1946): 10  See Jean Epstein, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2011). 11  Epstein, Essays and New Translations, 311–312. 12  Ibid., 244. 13  Ibid. 14  Ibid. 15  See Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008) for a critique of the ‘revelationist tradition’ of cinema practice and theory.

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Cinema is one of these intellectual robots, still partial, that fleshes out representations—that is to say, a thought—through photo-electrical mechanics and a photochemical inscription. One can here recognize the primordial frameworks of reason, the three Kantian categories of space, duration, and causality. This result would already be remarkable if cinematographic thought only did what the calculating machine does, to constitute itself in the servile imitation of human ideation. But we know that the cinematograph, on the contrary, marks its representation of the universe with its own qualities, with an originality that makes this representation not a reflection or a simply copy with conceptions, of an organic mentalitymother, but rather a system that is individualized differently, partly independently, which contains the incitements for a philosophy so far from common opinions, the doxa, that one should perhaps call it an anti-philosophy.16

Epstein breaks here with the idea that film is an object that invites philosophical reflection or that it serves as a means of expressing ideas that find their proper expression in philosophy. Rather, cinema is an ‘intellectual robot’ that ‘fleshes’ out thought by means of a camera, capturing images to be cut and projected on screen. It is no longer a ‘servile imitation of human ideation’ but a projection of thought that cannot be reduced to familiar forms of representation. It is a thinking machine with a ‘post-human’ or machinic intelligence that requires a new kind of poetry and philosophy in order to be understood. The radicality of this ‘cinematographic thinking’ is such that Epstein calls it an ‘antiphilosophy’, even as he attempts to articulate philosophically the elements of this ‘machinic’ thought. This radical ‘antiphilosophy’ of cinematographic thought remains little explored today. Nonetheless, through his speculative idea of ‘cinematic intelligence’, Epstein opens up a line of thinking, expressed in experimental form, that will be taken up again by proponents of the idea of ‘filmosophy’ or ‘cinematic thinking’. It offers a striking anticipation of recent philosophical thinking on the relationship between cinema and the brain, from Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy (his remarks on the brain as a screen) to neuroaesthetic strands of cognitivism.17 It is no surprise that critics of the idea of ‘film as philosophy’—the ‘bold version’ of the film as philosophy thesis, as Paisley Livingston calls it—cite Epstein’s as the most radical vision of film-­ philosophy, namely film as the expression of cinematographic thought.18 There are, nonetheless, difficulties with Epstein’s proposals concerning the idea of a cinematic intelligence or the idea of cinematic thinking. The main challenge is to define ‘cinematic thinking’ and to make explicit the mode and significance of this expression of thought. There are at least three ways we might take what Epstein describes as the ‘intelligence of the machine’:  Epstein, New Essays and Translations, 311–312.  See Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 18  Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy”, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E.  Wartenberg (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 11–18. 16 17

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1. the use of the cinematic medium to communicate or express thought via moving images (including expressive features of individual images and the operations of montage); 2. the use of the cinematic medium to stimulate or elicit thought or thinking in spectators, who are induced to adopt particular perspectives or undergo certain aesthetic experiences conducive to (cinematically mediated) forms of thought; and 3. the idea that the automatism of the medium, and the ‘inhuman’ elements of the cinematographic apparatus, are themselves the means via which cinema ‘expresses thought’ (cinema as an artificial intelligence machine that offers prosthetic enhancement, alteration, or extension of human consciousness). Malcolm Turvey offers a more general critique of Epstein’s central claim—that cinema is a medium that enables the revelation of elements of visual perception and sensuous experience that would otherwise remain ‘invisible’ or inexpressible—arguing that it is overstated and implausible.19 For Turvey, whatever cinema does reveal can be experienced by ordinary human consciousness (hence is not ‘nonhuman’ vision), and what is supposed to be invisible or inexperienceable is defined metaphorically rather than with reference to actual perception. Turvey takes a literal view of Epstein’s claims concerning the ‘revelatory’ powers of cinema, applying a Wittgensteinian critique of the ‘misuse’ of ordinary language concepts of ‘seeing’ as used by Epstein and others (such as Deleuze). One can question, however, Turvey’s rather narrow interpretation that Epstein’s claims are principally epistemological or analytical in intention and meaning (concerning the physiological capacities of human vision and semantics of the concept ‘to see’), rather than exploring the aesthetic possibilities of cinema and expansion of our horizons of visual experience. What does Epstein mean by cinematic thinking or the ‘intelligence of the machine’? The first two interpretative options—cinema expressing thought or ideas via moving images and cinema eliciting thought on the part of spectators—are both defensible positions. Both options take ‘cinematic thinking’ to refer to the capacity of the medium to express and to elicit thought (while leaving open the source of such ideas and the parameters of interpretation concerning the meaning of such audiovisual expressions). On other hand, the third option—cinematic images as ‘inhuman’ expressions of thought no longer reducible to a human subject or as having their origin in the apparatus itself—is a more speculative, controversial, less plausible account of how we are to understand cinematic thinking. For any attribution of agency or intentionality to the cinematic apparatus or indeed ‘the film itself’, inevitably faces the objection that this involves personifying the medium or taking a metaphorical expression (‘film thinks’ or ‘the brain is the screen’) for a literal description providing the basis for theoretical claims. These two objections—the ambiguities involved in  Turvey, Doubting Vision, Chapter Two.

19

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defining what ‘cinematic thinking’ means and difficulties with any ‘autonomous’ conception of cinematic thinking—will return in Frampton’s ‘filmosophy’ and in the ‘film as philosophy’ debate.

Film as Philosophy: Cavell and Deleuze Cavell and Deleuze have been described as the founders or inaugurators of the film-philosophy approach.20 What they share, beneath superficial differences, is a concern with why film matters philosophically. Their responses take different but related paths. For Deleuze, (modern) cinema is a way of exploring the relationship between thought and cinema, which can provide aesthetic reasons ‘to believe in this world’, a response to the problem of nihilism via the invention of new images (like the time-image and non-standard forms of narrative). For Cavell, film is an implicit response to scepticism that enacts a retrieval of the ordinary and thus provides an image for what philosophy strives to overcome but also struggles to express. Cinema is philosophical, for both Deleuze and Cavell, because of the way it reveals and reconceives experience, gives us existential ‘reasons to believe in this world’, and thereby fosters the creation of new perspectives or modes of existence. Cavell Cavell describes his conception of the film-philosophy relationship as challenging received definitions of what philosophy can be: A way to put the difference in what I might like to see become the field of Film and Philosophy, anyway in how I have conceived my writing on film to be motivated philosophically, is that it takes the fact of film itself to become a challenge for philosophy.21

‘Film and philosophy’, according to Cavell, is distinguished by how the ‘fact of film’—its artistic potentials and philosophical possibilities—poses a challenge to philosophy’s claims to knowledge and to self-knowledge. Cavell contrasts this with the more conventional ‘Philosophy and Film’, which uses films as examples of established problems and arguments, whether from the history of philosophy or from ‘recent analytical philosophy arranged by topic’.22 Cavell’s imagined field of ‘Film and Philosophy’, which his work has helped inspire, takes film to pose questions to philosophy, to challenge philosophy’s claims to best articulate what art—especially the art of moving images—endeavours to 20  Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London/New York: Continuum, 2011), 4 ff. 21  Stanley Cavell, “Foreword: On Eyal Peretz’s Becoming Visionary”, in Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian de Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), xiv. 22  Ibid.

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show. Cinema enacts a more vivid disclosure of aspects of experience than philosophy can do by means of argumentative discourse alone. It can disclose the everyday in ways that bring to our attention many things: the unfamiliarity of the familiar, the difficulty of acknowledging others, the meaning of being human, the problem of scepticism, the meaning of love, or the pursuit of happiness. These are all things that philosophy has traditionally asked about and that film has now rediscovered and reanimated in its own ways. Film and philosophy begin to intersect as different ways of thinking through issues—aesthetically and conceptually—that concern both philosophers and artists or indeed any thinking human being. They respond to shared questions and problems that open up a cultural space of engagement that brings together aesthetic experience and conceptual reflection. Cavell can thereby claim a common ground for cinema and philosophy as different yet complementary ways of confronting scepticism, retrieving the ordinary, re-enchanting the world, and transforming the self. As he writes in the Preface to Contesting Tears: to my way of thinking the creation of film was as if meant for philosophy—meant to reorient everything philosophy has said about reality and its representation, about art and imitation, about greatness and conventionality, about judgment and pleasure, about scepticism and transcendence, about language and expression.23

This passage is often taken as a statement of Cavell’s theoretical ‘position’ on the film-philosophy relationship. Cavell’s suggestion, however, is that some of the received problems of philosophy—above all the problem of scepticism—are transfigured, thanks to philosophy’s encounter with cinema. The invention of film is an event of thought, an audiovisual technology, and artistic medium capable of exploring some of the problems and questions that have preoccupied philosophy. This reorientation not only concerns how we think but the means by which thinking can happen; it implies a reorientation in the way one does or communicates philosophical thought. Cavell is one of the few prominent Anglophone philosophers who has explored cinema’s philosophical and ethical potential. Commencing with The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1979 [first edition 1971]), Cavell placed the problem of scepticism—our loss of belief or conviction in our capacity to know the world, to understand oneself, and to acknowledge others—at the centre of his philosophical engagement with cinema. Scepticism is typically articulated as an epistemological problem concerning the foundations of knowledge or the relationship between belief, knowledge, and certainty, but it is also a moral concern with our capacity—or otherwise—to know others, to understand their perspectives, and to have conviction in the normative values that guide our social relations. For Cavell, film both stages and reframes the 23  Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), xii.

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sceptical situation of knowing a world that remains independent of us. It shows us a world that is present to us but where we are not present to it, a world that is known insofar can be represented and viewed as an image but is also thereby reduced to what Heidegger called the ‘world-picture’ [Weltbild]. If images (and moving images) become the most significant way of representing reality and subjective experience in modernity, then a sceptical chasm opens up if we question the foundations of our knowledge, the meaningfulness of the world, our understanding of others, or the foundations of our moral-ethical norms. This is not just an epistemological problem but a moral-ethical, cultural-­ historical one. By projecting a virtual world of images—a world of images independent of us, yet meaningful, rejuvenating our attenuated sense of reality, one that reconciles us with a more ambiguous, uncertain, contingent sense of the world and of others—cinema both enacts and overcomes the modern experience of scepticism in a manner that has clear philosophical affinities. To make sense of this claim, we should recall the underlying realism informing Cavell’s ontology of film. Following Panofsky and Bazin, Cavell argues that the photographic basis of moving images means that they are fundamentally images of a world (‘of reality or nature’).24 They are images of things that are not present yet that have a certain presence through the image, images composed, projected, and screened as a meaningful whole (a cinematic ‘world’) that is both a part of our world and in important ways distinct from it. The ‘automatism’ of the moving image, its mechanical basis as a ‘manufactured’ artefact dependent on the relationship between an object, light, and the camera, is a defining element of its ontology and of the medium’s ambiguous claims to realism.25 This applies whether we understand this realism subjectively or objectively (capturing images emulating our conscious experience but also views of the world, selected and stylised aspects of reality independent of us). Photography and cinema reveal that we maintain a connection with the world even though it exists independently of us. It shows that we can maintain our ‘presentness to the world’ by accepting our absence from it, and it shows how the cinematic world, in this play of presence and absence, is experienced as a world ‘past’.26 Cinema’s lesson is that scepticism is an ineliminable possibility of our (always partial or finite) experience, one that can be ‘worked through’ only by acknowledging the finitude of our experience and fallible knowledge of the world. For these reasons Cavell describes film as ‘a moving image of scepticism’27: a world of moving images that both presents and dissolves scepticism. From this perspective, film shows us how we can retrieve a sense of the ordinary, revealed in its ambiguity and contingency, reconnecting us with the world via 24  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge MA./London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 16. 25  Ibid., 20. 26  Ibid., 23. 27  Ibid., 188.

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the very medium of images that might otherwise alienate us from it. This is a conception of the film-philosophy relationship that will resonate with Deleuze, who also regards film as expressing thought and as responding to scepticism or nihilism. Deleuze Gilles Deleuze is the most significant ‘Continental’ thinker to have given serious philosophical attention to film, a philosopher who argues that film explores problems in its own domain that are of direct relevance to philosophy. Indeed, it is no surprise that a philosopher concerned with ‘making thought move’ would discover the philosophical attraction of cinema: ‘How could I not discover cinema, which introduces “real” movement into the image? I wasn’t trying to apply philosophy to cinema, but I went straight from philosophy to cinema. The reverse was also true, one went right from cinema to philosophy’.28 The point, for Deleuze, is neither to merely apply to film a readymade philosophical theory or conceptual framework, nor to simply reflect upon film as a theoretical object. The encounter between film and philosophy happens, rather, ‘when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other’.29 Both philosophy and cinema respond to problems posed by experience, problems to which they respond in different, yet related, ways, using concepts or images as diverse ways of expressing thought. Both philosophy and art are ways of thinking that use different means to respond to experience (philosophy thinks with concepts, art with ‘percepts’ or blocs of sensation communicated through artistic works). Philosophy can respond to cinema by constructing its concepts, where these concepts refer to ways of experiencing the world that the cinema explores in its own manner (movement, time, memory, expression, the body, the brain, politics, history, and film itself). Thus, Deleuze analyses, for example, how the films of Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais succeed in creating a cinema of time, inventing genuine time-images, putting time into the image by arresting movement, interrupting conventional narrative schemata, and dissolving the sensory-motor links governing conventional cinematic representation and causally organised narrative form. Philosophy and film become related practices of thought, the one creating concepts that belong to the other but which do not reduce the other to simply illustrating the former. The encounter between them, rather, offers new ways of thinking philosophically and new ways of experiencing and understanding film. 28  Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain is the Screen. An Interview with Gilles Deleuze”, trans. Marie Therese Guirgis, in Gregory Flaxman, ed., The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 366. 29  Ibid., 367.

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Thought and Cinema Deleuze’s most explicit treatment of the cinema-thought relationship is in Chapter Seven of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, although elements of this account recur throughout his work.30 Deleuze refers here to French actor, author, and filmmaker Antonin Artaud as well as to the theoretical work of Sergei Eisenstein, both of whom stressed the capacity of moving images to enact a sensuous and affective ‘shock’ capable of provoking thought. Drawing on Jean-Louis’ Schefer’s experimental work, The Ordinary Man of the Cinema, he develops the concept of the ‘spiritual automaton’ (the subject of logical thought, according to Spinoza and Leibniz), which is applied to our ‘involuntary’ cinematic experience of being subject to the concatenation of images as they appear in film.31 The ‘logical’ subject of rationally connected thoughts is now transposed into the ‘inhuman’ cinematic subject of temporally connected moving images (movement-images composing a film), temporal moving images that offer an indirect expression of ‘the Whole’. What Deleuze emphasises here is the power of cinema, with its imposition of an ordered sequences of images, to create a circuit between moving images and the brain/subjectivity of the viewer, a circuit with the power to induce a perceptual-affective ‘shock’ that provokes thinking. As we saw, Epstein and Eisenstein also believed in the power of cinema to provoke a shock-inducing thought (its power to induce a transformation of experience or a revolutionary consciousness), but this ‘modernist’ idea of an expanded cinema soon gave way to disappointment. Far from bringing about revolutionary change, the transformational power of cinema was used, more often than not, to support fascism, distraction, and ideological manipulation, the unholy alliance between the forces of fascism and those of mass entertainment or the bringing together of ‘Hitler and Hollywood, Hollywood and Hitler’: ‘The spiritual automaton became fascist man’.32 What did remain viable, however, was the idea of the cinematic sublime as an expression of a shock that forces thought: the collapse of the imagination as it is pushed to its limit ‘and forces thought to think the whole as intellectual totality which goes beyond the imagination’.33 Deleuze’s example here is Eisenstein’s account of an intellectual montage: there is the perceptual shock from moving image to conscious thought (percept to concept), then from concept to affect, which returns, via an affective

30  Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [1985]), 156–188. 31  See Hunter Vaughan, “Mutants We All: Jean-Louise Schefer and our Cinematic Civilisation”, SubStance 41, no. 3, Issue 129 (2012): 147–165; and Patrick Ffrench, “Memories of the Unlived Body: Jean-Louis Schefer, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze”, Film-Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2017): 161–187. 32  Deleuze, Cinema 2, 164. 33  Ibid., 157.

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shock, from thought to the image.34 This experience of cinematic ‘sublimity’ links intellectual cinema to emotional intelligence: it expresses a non-verbal ‘internal monologue’ or ‘primitive language’ articulated through the concatenation of images, where the whole film is now understood as a ‘spiritual automaton’—or nonhuman quasi-subject—expressing thought and affect through an image montage.35 The third moment of this dialectic between image and concept is the ‘identity’ of concept and image: a dialectical combination of image and thought or an action-thought that expresses our relationship to the world and nature more generally.36 For Deleuze, Eisenstein’s dialectical model of the relationship between thought and cinema is paradigmatic for the movement-­ image regime of narrative cinema (defined by the sensory-motor action schema linking perception, affection, with action). It offers an active conscious expression of the sensory-motor relationship between world and man, nature and thought37: an action-oriented mode of thought aiming at a revolutionary transformation of consciousness and of the world itself. Such utopian revolutionary hopes, as remarked, were soon dashed, as the harsh realities of twentieth-century history and politics shattered the faith of early theorists and filmmakers in the transformative power of cinema. Deleuze thus turns to Artaud in order to explore the post-war transition from the movement-­image regime to that of time-image cinema (images that subordinate movement to time, that disrupt the action-oriented sensory-motor schemata and rational, causally organised montage in order to express time directly). Like Eisenstein, Artaud explores the movement from image to thought via a ‘shock’ or vibration acting directly on our nervous system and then the movement from thought to image again via visual ‘figures’ articulating an ‘internal monologue’, expressed through images, which gives rise in turn to an affective shock. Unlike Eisenstein, however, Artaud recognises the impotence or ‘powerlessness of thought’ that cinema is also apt to express: the inherent passivity of the cinematic experience, the inability of thought alone to effect action or transform consciousness in the manner that Eisenstein envisaged. This shift, which anticipates, for Deleuze, the shift from movement-image to time-image cinema is linked to breakdown in the idea of an organic unity or totality expressing the Whole (the breakdown in the sensory-motor regime of action-thought). Rather, Artaud emphasises cinema’s potential to enact an experiential r­ evelation of the disruptive failure or ‘impower’ of thought that nonetheless calls forth thought—through the perceptual-affective shock of images acting directly on our nervous system—and the indirect presentation of the Whole as a disruptive experience of cognitive breakdown (via what Artaud calls the ‘crack’ or ‘fissure’). What cinema reveals is not that we are capable of thinking the Whole

 Ibid., 158.  Ibid., 159. 36  Ibid., 161. 37  Ibid., 163. 34 35

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but, on the contrary, ‘the fact that we are not yet thinking (Heidegger)’.38 Like Maurice Blanchot in regard to modern literature, Artaud points to modern cinema’s revelation of the impower [impouvoir] of thought, its failure to comprehend a disarticulated, dispersed, fragmentary existence: ‘the figure of nothingness, the inexistence of a whole which could be thought’.39 Cinema’s essence, Deleuze concludes, ‘has thought as its higher purpose, nothing but thought and its functioning’,40 even where this cinematic thought remains incapable of encompassing any organic unity, whether of human beings and nature or of individual and society. Artaud offers a challenging account of the disruptive experience of thought in modern cinema, an experience of the impotence or failure of thought to effect action, and an experience of crisis following the breakdown of the sensory-­ motor/action-image regime. The sensory-motor break, which disrupts the link between perception, affect/reflection, and action, is a response to the traumatic experiences defining modernity (especially that of war). At the level of culture, it is expressed in a new kind of cinema that ‘makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought’.41 The intolerability of the world results in a failure to think of a meaningful world or indeed for us to think at all (beyond cliché and stereotype). It precipitates a crisis in experience that transforms us from actors to seers; it shifts the task of cinema from satisfying our need to know the world to acknowledging the need for an existential ‘belief in the world’. For Deleuze, the task of thinking in modern cinema (for which we might read ‘modernist cinema’) is to affirm our existential belief in ‘a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought’.42 Amidst the nihilistic aftermath of the war, the loss of conviction in the prevailing moral and political narratives, we need an existential affirmation of our bodily/corporeal connection with the world, an aesthetic experience of shock, or cognitive disorientation through which we might learn ‘to discover the unity of thought and life’.43 Much like Cavell, for Deleuze, cinema can still show us the link between man and world, even though we may be suffering from a nihilism today in which ‘we no longer believe in this world’, a broken world that appears to us like a ‘bad film’44:

 Ibid., 167.  Ibid., 168. 40  Ibid., 168. 41  Ibid., 169. 42  Ibid., 170. 43  Ibid., 170. 44  Ibid., 171. 38 39

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Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world’.45

What Deleuze describes here is a cinematic version of the Nietzschean problem of nihilism: the loss of belief in the inherited, prevailing sources of normative value and moral-cultural meaning in modernity. The central ethical question, Deleuze maintains, is whether cinema can give us ‘reasons to believe’ in a world mediated by manipulative or stereotypical images, especially where cinema’s power to elicit conviction has waned. The task of art is to reanimate the existential-­vitalist belief in the link between human beings and the world, in the immanence of thought and life, a thinking that finds expression in modern cinema. Philosophy can thereby join forces with film as cultural practices with the power to reveal possibilities of existence and provide reasons to maintain fidelity with the world. Both Cavell and Deleuze thus emphasise cinema’s potential to serve as an aesthetic response to cultural scepticism or moral nihilism, whether via creative self-transformation or an existential affirmation of our embodied being in the world. There are three difficulties I would note here that arise in response to Deleuze’s account of the relationship between thought and cinema. The first is an ambiguity in the meaning of ‘thought’ itself, which refers both to the conventional sense of cognitive engagement and to Deleuze’s non-­ representationalist account of thought attempting to conceptualise ‘difference in itself’.46 Attempts to think of ideas like the ‘unity of man and nature’ are not the same as attempts to think of a non-representationalist notion of difference via the disruptive shock experience of a modernist cinematic encounter. Thought, moreover, appears to be ambiguous between the creative positing of (non-­representationalist) concepts and an agentless or subjectless, even ‘inhuman’, activity, even though it is only through ‘thinkers’—which is to say, articulated conceptual discourse, linguistic expressions, or artistic works—that such thought can be at all expressed. The second is that Deleuze’s account of the essential link between cinema and thought remains wedded to a certain discourse of ‘political modernism’ that many will find questionable today (the critical transformation of consciousness through revolutionary forms of art). His account of the manner in which cinema ‘thinks’ retains a belief in the power of cinematic art to effect a transformation of experience or alteration of consciousness, which is itself put under question by the kind of scepticism or nihilism defining contemporary Western cultural-historical sensibilities.47 Can we still believe in the power of cinema to restore belief in the world and overcome or restore the ‘broken link’  Ibid., 172.  See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]). 47  See Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 64–69. 45 46

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between human beings and the world? And on what basis should we accept the idea of such a ‘broken link’ or that the best response to nihilism involves positing existential ‘reasons to believe in this world’? Indeed, the idea of the transformative power of cinema—in the tradition of a revolutionary transformation of consciousness or reinvention of the ‘human’—may well be one of the beliefs that has become questionable in our sceptical age. This is not to deny the possibility that cinematic art might still play this redemptive or transformative role in modernity, but to make this the essential task of modern cinema is to overlook the myriad other ways films, whether time-image or movement-image cinema, can contribute to philosophical understanding and ethical experience. The third is to ask whether Deleuze’s existential wager—affirming belief in the world through our aesthetic engagement with the immanent possibilities of embodied experience—is enough to overcome contemporary forms of nihilism. How does this existential-aesthetic wager deal with the very concrete cultural-­ historical dimensions of the contemporary ‘crisis’ afflicting moral, social-political, and ideological narratives? Can a film-philosophy committed to the idea that cinema can offer an aesthetic remedy to nihilism and scepticism respond to the ethico-political dimensions of this crisis? It is hard to see how a time-image cinema devoted to contemplative seeing and the aesthetic-­ existential affirmation of existence, however important in other ways, can at the same time respond to the ethical and political demands of our current normative crisis.48 Whatever one makes of these difficulties, Deleuze’s conception of the possibilities afforded by a ‘cinematic thinking’, the idea that film itself ‘thinks’ or that the expression of thought is inherent to cinematic images, continues a tradition of film-philosophical thinking that has been revised and renewed in Daniel Frampton’s idea of ‘filmosophy’.

Frampton’s Filmosophy Frampton offers perhaps the most radical contemporary version of the idea of film as philosophy or, more specifically, as cinematic thinking. He defines ‘filmosophy’ as ‘the study of film as thinking’49: a non-technicist, phenomenologically rich, and aesthetically attuned approach to conceptualising our experience of cinema. To this end, filmosophy posits the concept of a ‘filmind’ as the originator of the images and sounds composing the film and the concept of ‘film-­ thinking’ as a theory of film-form, ‘whereby an action of form is seen as the dramatic thinking of the filmind’.50 This is not an empirical claim but a conceptual understanding of the origin of a film’s actions and events51; it offers a creative conceptual lens through which we can watch film, experience it more  Ibid., 72–76.  Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 6. 50  Ibid., 6. 51  Ibid., 7. 48 49

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richly, and thereby theorise it more precisely. Eschewing auteurist and formalist approaches, Frampton’s proposal is that we conceptualise film itself as an ‘organic intelligence’: ‘a film being thinking about the characters and subjects in the film’, a thinking is expressed through the very images and sounds composing the film.52 From this point of view, the filmind is a way of conceptualising ‘the film itself’, presenting a distinctive film-world in particular ways through the composition of moving images with distinctive affective and aesthetic qualities. Frampton situates the idea of filmosophy as a renewal or reconfiguration of a philosophical idea that has a long historical pedigree: what Carroll has called the ‘film-mind analogy’.53 Figures both well known (like Münsterberg, Eisenstein, Cavell, Deleuze) and obscure (like the ‘mysterious early French theorist Yhcam’)54 are part of this minor history of film-philosophy, focusing on the various attempts to draw parallels between, or sometimes even equate, film and thinking. As Frampton points out, from its inception, film has been compared with the mind, ‘whether through analogy with human perception, dreams or the subconscious’.55 As Frampton observes, film has been 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).56 Others have explored how film depicts the subjectivity of characters’ thoughts (Antonin Artaud, Bruce Kawin), whether film is a ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ medium (Hugo Münsterberg), or how film ‘perhaps reveals another kind of thought, a future kind of thinking’, one no longer bound to ordinary perceptual limitations (Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Béla Balázs).57 Although he draws inspiration from these approaches, Frampton criticises the fundamental anthropomorphism of the film-mind parallel: film-thinking is modelled on human thought (which restricts what can be shown by means of image and sound), whereas film images and sequences are modelled on human perception (a questionable parallel, since film editing does not correspond with visual saccadic movements). We should consider instead, Frampton proposes, whether film has its own unique kind of thinking, which is poetic, affective, and intuitive but also expressive of an ‘organic intelligence’, namely, the film itself. Such an approach raises two questions: What is this thinking about? Who or what is doing the thinking? Frampton’s answers are bold and provocative. As remarked, ‘filmosophy’ is the study of film as thinking, which comprises a theory of film-being (what film is) and film-form (how it is composed). Film-thinking is thinking concerning the  Ibid., 7.  Noël Carroll (1998). ‘Film/mind analogies: The Case of Hugo Munsterberg’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46, no. 4 (1998): 489–499. 54  Frampton, Filmosophy, 3. 55  Ibid., 15. 56  Ibid., 16. 57  Ibid., 16. 52 53

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composition and expression of a film-world: a virtual cinematic reality with its own rules and consistency. Film does not simply reproduce reality but creates its own world, its own reality: ‘it is its own intentions and creativities. Cinema is the projection, screening, showing, of thoughts of the real’.58 The ‘source’ of the film’s sounds and images is no longer an auteur, or the apparatus, or a putative grand imagier (George Wilson) but rather the filmind or the film itself, understood as an intending, thinking ‘subject’. The concept of the filmind, moreover, is also a response to the integration of computer-graphic imaging technology in contemporary film-making practice. The more fluid, creative, and plastic the relationship between digital image and recorded reality—attenuating the ontological link between the image and the act of recording a performance—the more free digital cinema is free to show or ‘think’ anything, to compose and create whatever it wishes, the more it requires a fluid conception of film-being, such as the metaphor/concept of the filmind. Once again, this is not to claim that the film is actually ‘thinking’ or ‘conscious’; rather, it is a way of conceptualising the manner in which we experience the film as if it had ‘a mind of its own’, as if it were expressing itself through images, drawing our attention to certain elements of the film-world, imbuing this world with certain sensuous and aesthetic qualities, evoking certain kinds of moods, emotions, and reflections, and so on. Frampton’s theory of ‘film-­ thinking’ thus replaces the familiar, technical talk of camera shots, editing techniques, directorial decisions, and so on, with the more supple talk of film-form as dramatic thinking (the film feels this or that, thinks such and such about a character, who is shown in this or that way). The point here is conceptual rather than empirical: an alternative conceptualisation of the origin of the sounds and images that compose a film such as we experience it (rather than theorise about it). In this view, all moves within a film are intentional and meaningful; style encompasses action, film-form is dramatic rather than technical.59 Instead of narratological models (which cannot account for the creation of film-worlds) or phenomenological approaches (which tend to model film too strictly in terms of human perception), filmosophy posits a filmind as part of ‘an organic philosophy of film’.60 Frampton draws on phenomenological approaches to film (the work of Vivian Sobchack in particular) but is also inspired by Deleuze’s conceptualisation of the relationship between cinema and thought; not only can there be cinematic ‘thought-images’ that show relations between objects, subjects, and events (as in Hitchcock’s work) but cinema is capable of enacting a shock to thought, a provocation to think. Frampton, however, rejects phenomenological versions of the film/mind analogy and modifies Deleuze’s ‘modernist’ conception of cinematic thinking, suggesting that ‘filmosophy does not make a direct analogy between human thought and film, because film is simply differ Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 7–8. 60  Ibid., 7. 58 59

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ent to our ways of thinking and perceiving’.61 Film’s expression of form, for example, appears at once ‘objective’ (e.g., depicting narrative events) and ‘subjective’ (expressing a character’s point of view or emotional state). Nonetheless, there is a functional parallel here in that the film’s ‘attitude’ towards characters, spaces, and so on, much like human consciousness, is expressed through the particular images and sounds, following each other and interacting in time. In this sense, film-thinking resembles a non-verbal human ‘proto-thinking’: ‘a combination of idea, feeling, and emotion’.62 The point of shifting to a filmosophical perspective, Frampton argues, is to sensitise the filmgoer to the complexity of image and sound within film (rather than technique and story). It strives for a new language of image description and thereby opens up new possibilities for experiencing the cinema. It is also a critical response to recent work in philosophy of film that explicitly yokes film to philosophy, most often merely as a source of useful pedagogical ‘examples’ that illustrate a given argument, concept, or problem. Filmosophy, by contrast, seeks to restore the non-conceptual, poetical, affective thinking of film to its rightful role as a companion to philosophy in ‘concept creation’.63 Indeed, filmosophy might have something to offer philosophy more generally, Frampton suggests, namely, a model of the kind of postmetaphysical, metaphorical imaging of concepts and ideas that he identifies as inspiring certain strands of European philosophy (Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida). Frampton does this in order to make the case that filmosophy is a hybrid form of filmic thinking more appropriate to conceptualising our experience of the allegedly postmetaphysical world. But Frampton’s brief reprises of the great (European) thinkers only reinforce the more traditional idea that film-­ philosophy ultimately takes its lead from philosophy rather than film. Coupled with the rather thin film examples of filmosophy in action, one can question whether filmosophy really does break with the metaphysical hegemony of philosophy over art in the ways that Frampton insists.

Film-Philosophy/Film as Philosophy As remarked earlier, the idea of film-philosophy (or ‘film as philosophy’) has gained recognition in recent years as a dynamic strand of contemporary film theory. As the hyphen suggests, it expresses a way of thinking at the intersection between film and philosophy, linking the two in a shared enterprise that seeks to illuminate the one by means of the other. Inspired by Cavell and Deleuze, film-philosophers claim that film and philosophy are related intimately and productively, sharing problems to which they respond in distinctive ways, thereby opening up new possibilities of thought.64 More generally, we  Ibid., 7.  Ibid., 7. 63  Ibid., 11. 64  See Cavell, The World Viewed, and Deleuze, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. 61 62

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can understand film-philosophy as a style or ‘genre’ of philosophical film theory with close links to film aesthetics as well as earlier traditions of film theory. It seeks to explore the relationship between philosophy and film in a non-­ reductive, mutually transformative manner and thus overlaps with, but is not reducible to, more traditional philosophy of film. More recently, film-­ philosophers have claimed that films can make innovative contributions to our philosophical understanding by cinematic means.65 From this point of view, one might call Cavell a film-philosopher and Carroll a philosopher of film; they are both concerned with similar problems but philosophise on (and with) film in distinctive yet complementary ways. We can gain a better understanding of the specificity of film-philosophy by examining two of the more influential recent texts that played a key role in the ongoing ‘film as philosophy’ debate: Mulhall’s On Film and Wartenberg’s Thinking on Screen.66 Both of these works argue that film can make creative contributions to our philosophical understanding via cinematic means. These and other works defending the ‘film as philosophy’ thesis generated a vigorous debate with other theorists who questioned whether film can make genuine contributions to philosophy.67 This debate opens up important questions concerning our assumptions about the practice of philosophy, about the power of film to transform our horizons, and about the language we should use in philosophising on film.68

‘Bold’ Film-Philosophy (Mulhall) Inspired by the work of Stanley Cavell, Stephen Mulhall’s On Film is one of the more influential versions of contemporary film-philosophy. In his ‘Introduction’, Mulhall outlines his reasons for selecting the Alien quadrilogy—Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992), 65  Stephen Mulhall, On Film (London: Routledge, 2002); Robert Sinnerbrink, “Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy”, in In New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 25–47; Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film; Aaron Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defence of a Bold Thesis”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 67, no. 4, (2009): 409–420; Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 2007). 66  Stephen Mulhall, On Film, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 2008), 3–11; and Thomas E.  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 15–31. 67  See Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy”, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 11–18; Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Bruce Russell, (2006). “The Philosophical Limits of Film”, in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden MA./Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 387–390; Murray Smith (2006). “Film, Art, and Ambiguity”, in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E.  Wartenberg (Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 33–42; Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film. 68  See Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 120–135.

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and Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997)—as a case study demonstrating the idea of ‘film as philosophy’.69 These fascinating genre films are distinguished, for Mulhall, by their sustained interest in questions of human identity and embodiment, concerns that have been central to the modern philosophical tradition since Descartes. Far from being trivial, Mulhall argues that these films treat identity and embodiment with a ‘sophistication and self-­ awareness’ that suggest they are ‘making real contributions’ to our philosophical understanding.70 In an oft-quoted passage, Mulhall restates this claim as describing his own approach to film-philosophy: I do not look to these films as handy or popular illustrations of views and arguments properly developed by philosophers; I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the ways that philosophers do. Such films are not philosophy’s raw material, nor a source for its ornamentation; they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as philosophizing.71

This passage has provoked a storm of debate, with both critics and defenders of film-philosophy arguing over its meaning and implications. Many have taken it as defining Mulhall’s ‘position’ as a film-philosopher, treating his remarks as representative of a general thesis or methodology for the study of cinema, one that remains in need of theoretical justification and conceptual elaboration.72 Mulhall has since defended his approach, rejecting ‘theory’-based approaches on Wittgensteinian grounds and maintaining that the real argument is to be found in his sustained philosophical interpretations of the Alien films, a point mostly ignored by his critics.73 Mulhall presents this passage at the conclusion of a paragraph, highlighting the Alien films’ philosophical interest in the problem of ‘the relation of human identity and embodiment’.74 These films’ thematic exploration of ‘the bodily basis of human identity’, in turn, raises the question concerning the conditions of cinema; for it is a medium dependent upon ‘the projection of moving images of embodied human individuals presented to a camera’.75 These two issues, for Mulhall, suggest that a film like Alien explores questions about ‘the nature of the cinematic medium’ which one might otherwise expect to find in the philosophy of film.76

 Mulhall, On Film, 1–11.  Ibid., 2. 71  Ibid. 72  See Julian Baggini, “Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film”. Film-Philosophy 7, no. 3 (2003): http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/745/657 Smith, “Film, Art, and Ambiguity”. 73  Mulhall, On Film, Second Edition, 130–134. 74  Mulhall, On Film, 2. 75  Ibid., 3. 76  Ibid., 3–4. 69 70

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This Cavellian insight leads Mulhall to specify three senses in which film can be said to ‘philosophize’. We can describe films as akin to the philosophy of film, exploring issues that philosopher-theorists might consider (like ‘the nature of the medium’). We can also talk of film as philosophising, where films explore recognised philosophical ideas, themes, or problems (like human identity and embodiment). And finally, we can talk of film in the condition of philosophy, where films reflect upon their own conditions of possibility or the presuppositions of their own practice (the dialectic of ‘originality and inheritance’, e.g., inherent to the creation of cinematic sequels). These are overlapping concerns and the distinctions between them are not always sharp, but they help us articulate the different ways in which we might speak of ‘film as philosophy’. There are some ambiguities, however, in Mulhall’s account. He cites Alien’s concern with human embodiment and identity as suggesting that it engages in ‘film as philosophizing’77 but also as what relates it to the ‘philosophy of film’.78 Reflection upon the nature of the cinematic medium, by contrast, is a sign that the Alien films emulate the ‘philosophy of film’79 but also that they are instances of ‘cinematic modernism’,80 which he then identifies with ‘film in the condition of philosophy’.81 Is ‘art in the condition of modernism’ to be identified with art that exists ‘in the condition of philosophy’?82 If so, this would seem to exclude non-modernist cinematic works from enjoying philosophical status. Conversely, any work that exhibits elements of self-reflection—say, episodes of The Simpsons or recent horror movie franchises—would count as modernist and so as philosophical. Film-philosophy, however, need not be tethered to modernist self-­ reflection; nor should self-reflection be assumed as the only hallmark of a philosophical work. Mulhall’s Cavellian emphasis on the power of cinema to explore philosophical questions, even contribute to philosophical understanding, by cinematic means, continues to provoke debate, as does his insistence on the ‘primacy of the particular’ in aesthetics and his Wittgensteinian claim that his approach does not offer a philosophical theory of cinema so much as question our assumptions about the film-philosophy relationship.83

 Ibid., 2.  Ibid., 4. 79  Ibid., 3–4. 80  Ibid., 6. 81  Ibid., 6. 82  Ibid., 6. 83  In response to critics of his book On Film (2002), Mulhall remarks that his aim, in the Second Edition of On Film (2008), is ‘to identify and put in question a range of assumptions about what film and philosophy must be whose apparent prevalence has helped to occlude the kinds of possibilities my book always aspired to realize’. Mulhall, On Film, Second Edition, 155. 77 78

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‘Moderate’ Film-Philosophy (Wartenberg) Thomas Wartenberg has also addressed these criticisms and defended what he calls a ‘moderate’ version of film-philosophy (or cinematic philosophy, to use his term). In Thinking on Screen, Wartenberg questions whether there are good reasons to accept the Platonic ‘philosophical disenfranchisement of film’ that underpins the most common criticisms of film-philosophy, ‘a priori criticisms’ that ‘do not refer to actual films, but make general claims about what films cannot do’.84 As a consequence, Wartenberg remarks, critics have tended to posit ‘a fundamental theoretical problem’ at the heart of film-philosophy, rather than questioning their own assumptions about the relationship between philosophy and film.85 Wartenberg summarises these criticisms as the explicitness, generality, and imposition objections.86 The first objection turns on the claim that film, as a visual rather than linguistic medium, ‘lacks the explicitness to formulate and defend the precise claims that are characteristic of philosophical writing’.87 Films are taken to be ambiguous, rhetorically driven, and hence epistemically inferior to philosophy, or they are taken as making implicit philosophical claims that critics must then make explicit.88 The idea that only interpreters make arguments in relation to film, however, is misguided. Although viewers or critics may make such arguments explicit, this does not mean that they, rather than the film, are the source or bearers of the arguments as such. Even if arguments are implicit in films, they do not necessarily have to be imprecise; many philosophical arguments are ambiguous, so ‘ambiguity’ is not a sound criterion for distinguishing between the claims of film and those of philosophy.89 What such criticisms end up showing, rather, is that film-philosophy is difficult rather than impossible, that it requires not only a capacity for theoretical arguments but an ability to engage in philosophically-oriented film interpretation. The generality objection, however, challenges this idea: philosophy deals with issues characterised by their ‘abstractness and generality’, whereas narrative film deals with the particularity of characters, situations, and events.90 Wartenberg responds, however, by pointing to non-fiction or documentary films, which can make important contributions to our understanding of historical events or social issues.91 What of fictional film? Wartenberg underlines in response the significance of narrative film as a way of screening complex ‘thought experiments’ involving hypothetical narrative situations that prompt

 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 16.  Ibid. 86  Ibid., 16–31. 87  Ibid., 16. 88  Bruce Russell, ‘The Philosophical Limits of Film’, quoted in Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 19. 89  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 19–20. 90  Ibid., 21. 91  Ibid., 22–24. 84 85

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us to reflect upon the plausibility and coherence of our beliefs, moral assumptions, or philosophical commitments.92 The third and most common complaint about film-philosophy is the ‘imposition objection’: that film theorists are often guilty of ‘imposing’ inappropriate or unintended theoretical meanings upon their chosen films. This can be reformulated, however, as a maxim that ought to guide philosophical interpretation: namely, to avoid imposing inappropriate interpretations on a cinematic work and to ensure that any interpretation attributed to it could have been intended by its creator.93 Here Wartenberg usefully distinguishes between creator-­ oriented and audience-oriented interpretations: reconstructing the meaning that an author of a work could have intended versus that which audiences might find relevant to understanding or appreciating a work. Only the former, Wartenberg claims, ‘can justify the claim that the film itself is philosophical’, a point he takes up in his Aristotelian interpretation of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1948) as an exploration of the philosophical concept of friendship.94

Conclusion So how can films ‘do philosophy’? There are two ways in which philosophers have sought to show this: a global or ‘universalist’ approach, which posits an intrinsic connection between film and philosophy (Cavell on film and scepticism, e.g., or Deleuze on thought and cinema), and a local, particularist, or empirical approach, which ‘investigates the question of film’s relationship to philosophy by paying attention both to individual films and specific philosophical techniques’.95 Along with other film-philosophers like Mulhall, Wartenberg champions the latter approach, examining what philosophical questions a film raises and how, in specific terms, films screen these philosophical issues.96 Such an approach implicitly raises a meta-philosophical question, namely, what conception of philosophy as such participants in the film-philosophy debate hold or assume. Wartenberg identifies three distinct conceptions that are pertinent here: philosophy as a discipline addressing basic human concerns or ‘eternal questions’; philosophy as a discipline that asks questions of other disciplines; and philosophy as a distinctive mode of discourse involving ‘the argument, the counterexample, and the thought experiment’.97 There are, moreover, many ways in which films can ‘screen’ philosophy: they can illustrate philosophical ideas in innovative ways; they can make arguments concerning philosophical and moral issues; they can reflect upon the medium of cinema; and they can stage cinematic thought experiments that serve as philosophical  Ibid., 24–25; Chapter Four.  Ibid., 26. 94  Ibid. See also Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 95  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 26. 96  Ibid., 28. 97  Ibid., 30. 92 93

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counterexamples or provoke reflection on our assumptions and beliefs. From this perspective, a ‘moderate’ film-philosophy can be defended against the standard objections and can show, in particular cases, how films make creative contributions to our philosophical understanding using cinematic means. Wartenberg thus rejects ‘bold’ versions of film-philosophy (like Mulhall’s), which risk assuming a conception of philosophy that is either too encompassing (anything counts as philosophy) or too esoteric (assuming a ‘controversial’ definition of philosophy, like that of Heidegger or the later Wittgenstein). Mulhall’s strong claim that films can philosophise in ‘just the ways philosophers do’, for example, is criticised for failing to explain ‘how a cultural form other than philosophy itself [namely film--R.S.] can make a substantial contribution to the specifically philosophical discussion of an issue such as that of human embodiment’.98 In a similar vein, more radical exponents of film-philosophy are criticised for claiming that film’s expressive capacities sometimes outstrip what can be readily articulated in standard philosophical discourse, which means we require a new kind of idiom—perhaps a new kind of thinking—in order describe and conceptualise what film enables us to experience.99 Can we defend a bold or radical version of the idea of film-philosophy? Arguments over the relationship between film and philosophy always assume a given conception of what counts as philosophy and hence how cinema may (or may not) contribute to philosophical understanding. If film can contribute to philosophy by showing what philosophy finds difficult to state, then the demand that we need to ‘paraphrase’ the relevant content of a film into a recognised philosophical discourse might overlook precisely how film can question our conception of philosophy and how it ought to be communicated.100 Some philosophical and ethical problems, for example, may be articulated more subtly or richly in the form of a narrative film than in a philosophical debate; there may also be films that challenge the idea that there are philosophical ‘solutions’ to moral problems or that one can produce an ethical argument to decide whether a given course of action is right or wrong.101 In short, this is both an aesthetic and a meta-philosophical debate: one that not only challenges us to think through the philosophical significance of cinema but to entertain the possibility that cinema may also enlarge our conception of philosophy. Indeed, the idea of film-philosophy or film as philosophy invites us to explore how our philosophical thinking might be transformed through our encounter with film. If the aesthetic ‘form’ of a film is intrinsic to its philosophical meaning, then we require a language that is at once aesthetically receptive and philosophical reflective if we are to do it justice as a work of art. What counts as a philosophical contribution, and the manner in which such thinking is best communicated, are therefore questions that film can force us to  Ibid., 37.  See Frampton. Filmosophy, and Sinnerbrink, “Re-enfranchising Film” and New Philosophies of Film. 100  See Livingston ‘Theses on Cinema as Philosophy’, and Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film. 101  See Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics. 98 99

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consider. This experience, both aesthetic and philosophical, is what brings film and philosophy together in a mutually productive encounter. This is especially so in cases where films enact a ‘resistance to theory’, which makes them challenging test cases to explore the idea of cinematic thinking—a non-conceptual or aesthetic thinking in images that resists cognitive closure or theoretical subsumption.102 It is still important to clarify the ways in which films do not always philosophise ‘in just the ways philosophers do’: how they express thought in non-­ philosophical ways (by aesthetic means, through affect, sensation, or emotion; via cinematic style, using visual ideas or aesthetic abstractions; and through narrative form, deploying all the devices of the narrative arts). Indeed, it might be better to speak of films ‘thinking’ or expressing thought in ways that embrace both philosophical and non-philosophical means of expression. This openness to the ‘non-philosophical’ manner of cinematic thinking might make us more attuned to transforming our horizons of meaning, questioning what was hitherto familiar and opening up new paths for thinking—all of which contribute to the practice of film-philosophy or of what it might become.

Bibliography Allen, Richard, and Murray Smith, eds. 1997. Film Theory and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baggini, Julian. 2003. Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film. Film-Philosophy 7 (3). http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/view/745/657 Bordwell, David, and Noël Carroll, eds. 1996. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Carel, Havi, and Greg Tuck, eds. 2011. New Takes in Film-Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Carroll, Noël. 1998. Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Munsterberg. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (4): 489–499. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Casetti, Francesco. 2005. Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2012. Philosophical Issues in Early Film Theory. Keynote Presentation for the Film-Philosophy Conference, Kings College London, September 13, 2012. Available online: http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2012/09/francesco-casetti-philosophical-issues-in-early-film-theory/ Cavell, Stanley. 1979 [1971]. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: Chicago University Press. ———. 2007. Foreword: On Eyal Peretz’s Becoming Visionary. In Becoming Visionary: Brian de Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses, ed. Eyal Peretz, xi–xvii. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 102

 Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 139.

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Colman, Felicity, ed. 2009. Film, Theory and Philosophy: The Key Thinkers. Durham: Acumen Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986 [1983]. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1989 [1985]. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galatea. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 1994 [1968]. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New  York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2000. The Brain Is the Screen. An Interview with Gilles Deleuze, trans. Marie Therese Guirgis. In The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman, 365–373. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dulac, Germaine. 1978 [1925]. The Essence of Cinema: The Visual Idea, trans. Robert Lamberton. In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: New York University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas, and Malte Hagener. 2010. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses. New York: Routledge. Epstein, Jean. 2011. Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Ffrench, Patrick. 2017. Memories of the Unlived Body: Jean-Louis Schefer, Georges Bataille, and Gilles Deleuze. Film-Philosophy 21 (2): 161–187. Frampton, Daniel. 2006. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press. Freeland, Cynthia, and Thomas E.  Wartenberg, eds. 1995. Philosophy and Film. London/New York: Routledge. Livingston, Paisley. 2006. Theses on Cinema as Philosophy. In Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, 11–18. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Livingston, Paisley, and Carl Plantinga, eds. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film. London: Routledge. Mulhall, Stephen. 2002. On Film. London: Routledge. ———. 2008. On Film. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Pisters, Patricia. 2012. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Read, Rupert, and Jerry Goodenough, eds. 2005. Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Russell, Bruce. 2006. The Philosophical Limits of Film. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 387–390. Malden/ Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011a. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London/New York: Continuum. ———. 2011b. Re-enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy. In New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, 25–47. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2013. Early Film-Philosophy: A Dialectical Fable. Screening the Past 38 (December). http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/12/early-film-philosophya-dialectical-fable/ ———. 2014. Film-Philosophy. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland. London/New York: Routledge.

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———. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. London/ New York: Routledge. Smith, Murray. 2006. Film, Art, and Ambiguity. In Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, ed. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg, 33–42. Malden/Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. Film as Philosophy: In Defence of a Bold Thesis. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (4): 409–420. Turvey, Malcolm. 2008. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vaughan, Hunter. 2012. Mutants We All: Jean-Louise Schefer and Our Cinematic Civilisation. SubStance 41 (3 Issue 129): 147–165. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2011a. Philosophy of Film. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/film/ ———. 2011b. On the Possibility of Cinematic Philosophy. In New Takes in Film-­ Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, 1–24. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

PART V

Auteur Theory, the Avant-Garde and New Filmmakers

CHAPTER 23

The Auteur Theory in the Age of the Mini-Series Douglas Lackey

There was a time when “the director” meant something. That is how it was when I started going to films in the early 1960s. Film directors, for us, were like spiritual pioneers, leading us into new realms of experience, and we happily rushed off to see their latest.1 From Italy, we had Fellini and Antonioni and Visconti; from France, Godard and Resnais and Truffaut; from Sweden, Bergman; from Poland, Wajda; from India, Satyajit Ray; from Japan, Kurosawa; from England, Stanley Kubrick. Even brain-dead Hollywood could serve up a great director: in those same years we got “Psycho” and “The Birds” and “Marnie.” So many films in such vividly personal styles. Even staying within a national group, any ten minutes of Truffaut looked very different from any ten minutes of Resnais; any ten minutes of Antonioni looked very different from any ten minutes of Fellini. It is not surprising, then, that this decade of directors was the decade of the Auteur Theory of Cinema. It was planted in the 1950s and it bloomed in the 1960s. But in fact there was no “it.” The “Auteur Theory” was a cluster of theories, united loosely by the cult of the director as filmmaker. For example, there was Auteur Theory #1, that not just “art films” are works of art: the various genres, gangster films, Westerns, horror Films, and so 1  Paul Mazursky caught the excitement of those days in “Willie and Phil” (1980), an homage to “Jules et Jim.”

D. Lackey (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA Baruch College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_23

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on are full of important, exciting works of art, served up by skilled directors without high-culture pretense. This is how Truffaut presented the Auteur Theory in the mid-1950s, when all the young Cahiers critics in Paris were more in awe of Hawks’s “Rio Lobo” than Bergman’s “Seventh Seal.” We had an American premonition of Theory #1 in Robert Warshow’s seminal essays on “The Westerner” and “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” published in the early 1950s, before there were any Cultural Studies to say these things. Then there was Auteur Theory #2, that films as works of art need not be produced by director-rebels outside the studio system but could be generated by gainfully employed directors inside the studios, who cleverly converted the studio resources of Hollywood to their own artistic purposes. This is some part of what Sarris did in his magisterial treatise “The American Cinema” (book version, 1968), which, among other things, celebrated the achievements of two genres neglected by the French, the movie musical (Donen, Minelli), and the melodramatic tearjerker (Ophuls, Cukor). In architecture, Venturi proclaimed, “Main Street is almost all right.” In film, Sarris proclaimed that the mainstream is almost all right. I have described Auteur Theory #1 and Auteur Theory #2 in the language of an outsider, worrying about which films are “works of art,” whether we should think of D.W. Griffith as a kind of Giotto and Frank Borsage as a tender Raphael and Samuel Fuller as an upstart Caravaggio. The auteurists did not share these worries. Au contraire, one thing that united the auteurists was their insistence that the primal sin in film was artiness. It was as if the auteurist had discovered an aesthetic paradox parallel to the paradox of hedonism. You can’t get happiness by seeking happiness; you can’t get art by seeking art. Value just had to fall into your lap. So when Belmondo asked Sam Fuller “What is film?” (in Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou”) he got an auteurist’s answer “Love, hate, action, violence, death-- in a word—emotion.” He didn’t get Rudolph Arnheim’s answer, that film is art, an art form. I protest against this allergy to the word “art” and I still think that there is something to be gained by worrying about which films are works of art and which are not. My clock is ticking, and, as George Clooney remarked about seniors in “Up in the Air,” “They never seem to realize how little time they have left.” There isn’t time in my life for what isn’t art. So this leads to Auteur Theory #3, spawned not by French proto-directors or American film critics but by the academic discipline of aesthetics. Auteur Theory #3 says that works of art are made by artists and so if a film is a work of art there must be an artist who made it. The director is summoned to be that artist. Paul Schrader’s book, The Transcendental Style: Ozu, Dreyer, Bresson falls into the area of Theory #3. One of the many presumptions of Auteur Theory #3 is that for each work of art, there is a single artist. The model for this idea is probably the painter, one painter, standing before one canvas, fiercely pouring his soul into it, like

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Seurat “finishing the hat” in Sondheim’s play. This model seems so obviously wrong that it is worth pausing and thinking how it might be right. To begin with, works of art are the products of human beings and human minds. Spiders make pretty webs and bower birds make pretty nests, but they do not put their souls into webs or nests. Second, each human mind involves subjectivity, the seeing of things from a point of view. One of the things that a work of art can do is make the subjectivity of others available to us. A work of art is a mind exposed. Third, if a work of art is a mind exposed, not just a product of spirit but a reflection of it, it will have only such unity as mind can provide. And here’s the rub: one mind can be unified in a way two minds cannot. The universe is an aggregate of particles but my thought of the universe is a splendid coherent thing, and your thought of the universe is a separate splendid coherent thing. There is no reason to presume that our thoughts will mix well with each other. There is no aggregate. The whole idea of “mixing” different thoughts of different people seems like a misplaced chemical metaphor. We will just get two thoughts, my oil and your water. Now this idea, that the unity of the work of art depends on the unity of the mind that made it, was an articulated premise of the early nineteenth-century cult of genius (they had geniuses then) but in twentieth-century aesthetics it has sunk to a kind of subliminal status. It is not believed or disbelieved. But in the 1960s it was revitalized to give auteur theory a background haze of plausibility. Did Sarris realize, when he presented his list of 14 “Pantheon Directors,” that he was working in the tradition of Carlyle and elevating great men to divine status? And did he not realize that when one of his gods, Robert Flaherty, mixed with another of his gods, F.W. Murnau, the resulting jointly directed film (“Tabu,” 1932) had to be an uneasy mess and not an important credit for either director? A single great film must be the expression of a single great mind, insisted Theory #3. It followed that it was of more aesthetic interest to study the poor films of a great mind than the good films of a small mind. Academic presses began to sag under monographs devoted to such marginal films as “A King in New York,” “Mr. Arkadin,” “Gertrud,” and “Seven Women,” as if the minds of Chaplin, Welles, Dreyer, and Ford, their views of the world, were more important than any particular films they made. By 1970, the various European new waves were starting to sink in the sand. Audiences gloomily realized that Truffaut was never getting back to “Jules et Jim,” that Fellini was never getting back to “8 ½, nor Godard to “Weekend,” nor Bergman to “Persona,” nor Antonioni even to “Deserto Rosso.” For a while it looked as if Auteur Theory #3 would perish for lack of auteurs or perhaps get converted into a theory of film history, a story told by aging critics about dead directors.

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As if in response to the decline of directors, European film theory turned away from autuerism. The new theories of Metz and Deleuze2 focused on the materials of the medium, and Deleuze and Metz held sway for decades. What they said about cinema: the production of virtual reality, the coding of meanings, and so forth, applied to all films, good and bad. This included very bad films. I remember going to a film conference in those days devoted the late films of Ed Wood, Jr. “The same refrigerator is seen in all three films,” the lead speaker intoned hilariously. Yes, it was all a joke. But was the joke on semiotics, Auteur Theory, or both? Cinema proved to have its own world historical surprises. American films, newly liberated from the production code and shaking free of the sword and sandals elephantiasis of the 1950s and 1960s, gave us in an eyeblink Altman, Allen, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, and Spielberg, a new crop of auteurs, auteurs without subtitles! For a few blessed years, American directors could write their own ticket, and even the genres were revitalized: “Ulzana’s Raid,” and “Alien,” genre masterpieces, were both products of the 1970s. But the films of the American 1970s never quite galvanized the intelligentsia, and there was something more to the doubts of the intellectuals than their routine distrust of what is popular. (In those years, after all, the Keaton features reemerged, to be hailed as masterpieces despite their popularity.) Was Spielberg a great artist or a great craftsman? Should kiddie movies like “Star Wars” distract us from “Rules of the Game?” Could there be a credible book about “The Mind of Robert Altman”? When the smoke cleared, there was only “The Godfather” to be sent into the future as proof of Arnheim’s thesis that film is art. The rapport between viewers and American directors did not recover the ecstatic relationship of the vieweraudience rapport of the 1960s. When you went to the movies to see the latest Woody Allen, you didn’t go to experience a vision, just to see a well-­made movie. In the 1970s, Europe had generated its own crop of striking new directors: Fassbinder and Herzog in Germany, Szabo and Kieslowski in Eastern Europe. But the new film theorists, trolling for hidden symbols, did not embrace the new directors as the auteurs they were. Perhaps you couldn’t theorize about Herzog’s films because his films were already theories. The filmmaker who came the closest to restoring the excitement of the 1960s was Andrei Tarkovsky, the last of the great twentieth-century auteurs. Once again, a director was operating between the known and the unknown, shining a light into what was darkness, proving it was still possible to create great films in the age of the music video. I remember emerging from the American premiere of “Nostalghia” (New York Film Festival 1988) listening as the one-third of the audience that got to the end (two-thirds walked out) discussed the film with the same awesome regard that had greeted Antonioni premieres back in the 1960s. Tarkovksy was the real thing, l’autore assoluto. But a new threat was looming. Tarkovsky died in 1996. In 1999, HBO aired the first episode of “The Sopranos” on cable TV. 2  Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of Cinema. Gilles Deleuze: Cinéma I: Le Movement-Image (1983); Cinéma II: L’image-temps (1985).

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When “The Godfather” appeared in 1971, Pauline Kael hailed “the new tragic realism that is altogether extraordinary.” Much the same praise was bestowed on “The Sopranos,” and its crew of small-scale hoodlums trying to preserve the vestiges of loyalty and honor in the diminished landscapes of New Jersey. The gravitas of “The Godfather” was still there, but the whole series was wrapped in a post-modern joke. The lead characters are trying to remain sane in a world afflicted with problems and stress. But “remaining sane” in this story means the pursuit of in unimpeded crime. Whatever the diagnosis, nothing like it, and nothing this good, had ever been seen on American TV. Now, “The Sopranos” was created by David Chase, who sold the idea to HBO. Without his vision, “The Sopranos” would not exist. Chase also directed the first episode and wrote the first two. But is Chase an “auteur?” The gap between “The Sopranos” and Chase’s “The Rockford Files,” his best-known previous effort, yawns far wider than the gap between, say, “Citizen Kane” and “Touch of Evil.” Nor can we find much unity of vision between “The Sopranos” and Chase’s post-Sopranos efforts. But most of all, we have to consider “The Sopranos” as a dramatic work consisting of 86 episodes aired over 8 years, 84 of which were not directed by Chase. What is the role of the director in the whole series? The first ten episodes of the Sopranos had ten different directors: David Chase, Dan Attias, Nick Gomez, John Patterson, Allen Coultier, Alan Taylor, Lorraine Senne Ferrera, Tim Van Patten, Andy Welk, and Matthew Penn. Many of the first ten directors went on to direct further episodes, but only three directed more than ten: Tim Van Patten did 20, John Patterson did 13, and Allen Coultier did 12. The most active director did less than a fourth of the whole! To see the theoretical problem here, imagine that we had the Mankiewicz screenplay for “Citizen Kane,” and four different directors were hired to film it: the first director does half, the last three split the remaining half. There would be no “director’s vision,” such as we have now, no auteur. The “multiple directors” problem presented by “The Sopranos” is a problem for almost every recent TV mini-series. (I am appropriating the term mini-­ series for any TV program, the episodes of which have a narrative connection.) “The Wire,” a justly celebrated police procedural (2002–2006), had eight directors for its first ten episodes; the hyper-stylish “Mad Men” (2007–2015) had seven. Some kind of reductio ad absurdum was reached with the fifth season of “Homeland,” episode 1, which listed one director for the first half of the episode, a second director for the second half. Nearly gone were the days of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” made for German television in 1980, when Fassbinder wrote and directed all 14 Alexanderplatz episodes. You cannot solve this problem by saying that each episode of “The Sopranos” with one director is itself a work of art. If you viewed Sopranos’ episode 47, without seeing any of the others, what you see is pretty unintelligible. Nor can you solve the problem by saying that the real auteur in the mini-series is the screenwriter, not the director. The first ten episodes of “the Sopranos” had 12 different screenwriters, though to be fair, I must note that David Chase wrote

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the first two. A similar, slightly less severe, division of labor is found in other key jobs: 2 different cinematographers split 85 episodes and 2 different editors split 61 episodes. One gets the impression, from the shifting credits on “The Sopranos,” that the director serves as a kind of hired help, a skilled craftsman, a replaceable part, very often replaced. Consider, furthermore, that the director cannot cast the episode for which he or she hired and that, so far from imposing a personal style, the directorial hired hands must adjust their individual styles to the overall directorial style of the series. So if you are a director-infatuated auteur theorist, you are faced with a dilemma. Either “The Sopranos” is a great work of dramatic art, and the auteur theory is wrong, or the auteur theory is right, and “The Sopranos” is not a great work of dramatic art. There are ways around the dilemma. One could say that the auteur theory was devised for theatrical films and not for extended television series. This is a pretty desperate measure. Any manual of “the materials of film” (or these days video) will tell you that basic materials (time stretches of moving images cut together into longer discontinuous montages, using long shots, medium shots, close ups, etc.) are used in movies and TV. TV, movies—it’s the same way of telling a story. Another way around the dilemma is to say that “The Sopranos” is not great art, but NOT because the series lacks an auteur. There are inherent aesthetic problems in a TV series that do not afflict feature films. For example, there is the problem that TV shows and TV mini-series are “open ended”: they almost always end only when audience interest lapses, not when dramatic structure insists. They do not end, they just stop. If, as Aristotle said, dramatic works must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, the ends of TV shows, their final episodes, invariably lack the sense of a decisive ending. The widespread consternation that greeted the last episode of “The Sopranos,” weakly set in an Upper Montclair diner—life goes on, we get it—shows that even the fans are on Aristotle’s side. The dramatic arc that made the Claire Danes-Damien Lewis relationship in “Homeland” so compelling ended when Lewis was hung by the Iranians. But that was season 3, and the series ended with season 8. There have been, of course, imaginative final episodes. Who can forget (of them that saw it) Bob Newhart being knocked out cold by a golf ball in “Newhart” and waking up in his previous sit-com? But these brilliant flourishes are not a culmination of all that has gone before; they do not fulfill the premonitions of the beginning. They do not, like “Citizen Kane,” begin and end with the same word, closing the circle. That is one reason “Citizen Kane” tops the list and why no mini-series, even those that do have official auteurs, like “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” and the recent “Twin Peaks,” can compete with “Kane.” So there are problems with the mini-series as art, and these are different from the problems of the feature film as art. Nevertheless, “The Sopranos” is manifestly an art work, and we seem to be in a century when there are more serious TV shows than serious movies. People are more in awe of HBO than they are of Michael Haneke, the Coen brothers, and the other revered direc-

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tors of our time. This is not a bad thing. (Do we really want books on the mind of Lars von Trier? Who wants go in there?) The reflex shift of attention from the film to the director was so twentieth century. We knew all along that films are collective efforts, that we cannot imagine Truffaut with Delerue’s music, Welles without Toland’s deep focus, Hitchcock without Bass’s titles, or Keaton without gags concocted by Bruckman, Havez, and Mitchell. Films are not products of Cartesian selves but Hegelian team spirits. If we are going to worship something, we should worship the film and not the filmmaker. When you go to the movies, idolatry is preferable to theism.

CHAPTER 24

The Question of Poetic Cinema Tom Gunning

What does it mean to call a film “poetic”? Critics may refer to a film or a sequence in a film, as “poetic” or lyrical. The visual style of some filmmakers has been described as “poetic,” such as Terrence Mallick, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Andrey Tarkovsky or Federico Fellini. Further, some non-mainstream filmmakers, such as Maya Deren or Jean Epstein, have described their films as cinematic equivalents of poetry and claimed this set them apart from most commercial filmmaking. Can we sort out such uses of the term “poetry”? In this chapter, I hope to consider this range of meanings and to consider the possible usefulness (as well as the perils) of the term “poetic cinema” for critical analysis. But, first, we must ask what is meant by the term “poetry.” In literary criticism and theory, it would seem, poetry can be fairly clearly differentiated from prose or other literary forms through certain discernable formal aspects— rhyme, rhythm, layout on the page. To understand what a poetic cinema might be, we must first examine this literary tradition. Applying the adjective “poetic” to cinema involves an analogy, a comparison between two different realms of expression—the linguistics or literary and the complex weave of visual, aural and linguistic elements that make up cinema. Such comparisons can be valuable, but the leap they represent and enable must be borne in mind. I cannot give an exhaustive summary of the literary theorization of poetry in this brief chapter, but hope to indicate some of the history of the term. I have relied a great deal on the succinct and synoptic article M.H.  Abrams wrote on this topic for the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

Humbly dedicated to Annette Michelson, critic and mentor T. Gunning (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_24

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What Is Poetry? Definitions of poetry have shifted historically and often been subject to debate. The Greek root of poetry, poiesis, has a broad meaning, not limited to literary production, but referring rather to the process of making something, the act of production. Plato and Aristotle did, however, apply the term to literary production, both the epic poetry of Homer and the works of Greek dramatists. According to Aristotle, poetry could be differentiated from other arts by its reliance on words, employing linguistic signs rather than directly presenting, for example, colors (as does painting) or bodily movements (as in dance) (Aristotle, p. 137). Aristotle in The Poetics and Plato in The Republic declared poetry a form of mimesis, the process of imitation. As mimesis, poetry creates a representation of the world through words (Plato, 638–646). According to Plato, the process of mimesis necessarily involves a distance from the Real, the realm of Ideas or Forms. Since in the Platonic system the material world itself presents an imitation of this divine realm, any artistic mimesis of things in the world simply presents an imitation of an imitation, two steps removed for true reality. For Plato, poetry distances us even further from the Real (Plato, 821–833). Aristotle, who eliminated a separate divine realm of forms from his understanding of reality, did not view mimesis—or poetry— with the same suspicion of its ontological inferiority. Nor does Aristotle limit the concept of mimesis to a slavish copying of appearances but rather claimed poetry could (should) seek to imitate aspects of the ideal surpassing actuality (Aristotle, 153). Poetry for Aristotle is different from history because it does not deal with real events but fictional ones (Aristotle, 163–64). Thus, poetry is truly poiesis, an act of creation. At the risk of simplifying a complex and often contentious classical tradition, we could say that for the Greeks and Romans, literary poiesis denoted broadly the act of fiction, creating through word representations of objects, people and their actions. But if this classical understanding of poetry seems broad, it was hardly undifferentiated. From Aristotle and Plato on, the various genres of poetry were distinguished, the forms and devices of poetry, its rhetoric, were defined and classified. The neo-classical tradition, established in the Renaissance based on a reordering of the classical concepts, defined a hierarchy of poetic genres and their respective rules, with the epic and tragedy drama as the supreme forms of poetry and lyric poetry and other forms of lesser prestige (Abrams, 642). The Romantic era challenged this hierarchy and its understanding of poetry. This revolution still affects us. Longinus, the late Greek author of On the Sublime, had claimed that poetry essentially expressed emotions. The early nineteenth-century German and English Romantics embraced this understanding and made it central to the modern definition of poetry, understanding poetry as the expression of a poet’s feelings. Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Abrams, 645–46). The Romantics overturned the previous hierarchy,

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promoting the lyrical as the essence of poetry, and moving the source of poetry, as M.H. Abrams puts it, from the mimesis of the world to the emotions of the poet (Abrams, 643). This led to a more general claim that poetry’s language of feeling could be contrasted with the referential and rational language of science. This distinction between poetry as the language of feeling and the referential rational language of science, pushes poetry further away from mimesis. Especially in modernist practice, poems became defined as self-sufficient and self-referential, utterly opposed to the purposeful use of language in law or philosophy or daily life. In 1788, Karl Philipp Moritz, as a harbinger of Romantics—and, indeed, modernist—theory of poetry, declared that a poem “needs no end, no purpose for its presence outside itself, but has its entire value, and the end of its existence, in itself” (Abrams, 646). This view of poetry as autonomous rather than communicative led in the twentieth century to what Abrams calls the “objective” theory of poetry, with a focus especially on the linguistic structure of poems, their various devices, to use the term employed by the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky (Abrams 647; Shklovsky). A poem was a unique and specific arrangement of language, one which subordinated language’s instrumental task of communication to a formal display of an artistic use of language. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the literary critics and theorists associated with Russian Formalism defined poetry specifically in opposition to the communicative tasks of language. As Shklovsky stated in his famous essay “Art as Device”: “Poetic speech is formed speech. Prose is ordinary speech— economical, easy, proper…” (Shklovsky, 23) For Shklovsky, “form” means in effect “de-formed”—rendered strange and unfamiliar. In this avowedly avant-­ garde theory of poetry, Shklovsky claimed defamiliarization defined the technique of art in general, including the artful use of plotting or figures of speech in novels and short stories, as well as the use of rhythm and rhyme more traditionally associated with traditional poetry (Shklovsky). Essentially, this modernist theory extends Moritz’s claim that poetry is an end in itself. Poetry, according to the Formalists, directed attention to words and their formal characteristic, such as sound (rhyme, assonance, meter, stress), rather than their ordinary meanings. Zaum, the “nonsense” poetry of the Russian Futurists, which created new words based purely on sound, exemplified this radical understanding of poetry (Steiner, 144–51). Linguist Roman Jakobson, who had close ties with the Russian Formalists (and the Futurists) in his youth, defined what he called the “poetic function” as one aspect of linguistic statements, which he understands as always multifunctional (i.e. one function need not eliminate others). The poetic function, according to Jakobson, directs attention to the statement itself, its existence as a series of signs, of words. This does not abolish the communicative function of the statement, but for the statement is to be understood primarily as poetic, the words—their sounds, their associations—dominate over their meanings (Jakobson,“ Linguistics”, 69–72). Jakobson admits that this poetic function also occurs, without being dominant, in other contexts (his famous example is

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the political slogan “I Like Ike” from Eisenhower’s presidential campaign), which conveys support for the candidate, but takes its punchy effect from the poetic function of rhyme, alliteration and other aspects of sound (Jakobson, “Linguistics,” 70). As a bold avant-garde intervention into the theory of poetry, Shklovsky’s defamiliarization both opens new perspectives and introduces new ambiguities. The process of making words and language strange and unfamiliar creates an art of language that may extend beyond what is usually defined as poetry. Defamiliarization as the essence of poetry can be applied to non-linguistic practices such as film. But does poetry simply become a synonym for all artistic practice, and does this evacuate the term of specificity? Likewise, the characterization of ordinary language as narrowly devoted simply to unambiguous communication may create an artificial dichotomy. Within the Formalist tradition, Boris Eichenbaum questioned this understanding of ordinary language, stating, “It is quite doubtful that there actually exists a type of speech in which our attitude toward the world would be exclusively a ‘sign’”(quoted in Steiner, 167). Jakobson’s concept of the poetic function as focusing our attention on the means of communication, its forms, rather than its meaning provides an understanding of poetry that can reach across media.

Filmed Poems: Adaptation, Illustration? This highly selective review of the definition of poetry in literature provides some orientation to our question: what is a poetic film? While critics applying the term “poetic” to films may have used the term loosely, filmmakers and critics have offered theories of the poetic film. Most of these have followed either the claim that poetry consists of a specific language of emotional expression or the Formalist claim that film as poetry would foreground formal qualities—or theories that combine aspects of both of these. Can we relate a poetic film to poetry as a literary phenomenon? Is a poetic film best approached as one that derives directly from a poem that exists in words? Since films can include both images and words (whether spoken or written), is the best example of a poetic film one which incorporates a language-­ based poem? Early on in film history, films were made which had a direct relation to written poems. In the era before the feature film, such films were not uncommon. In the years before WWI the famous American director D.W. Griffith made a number of films adapting poems with strong narrative content, such as Robert Browning’s “Pippa Passes” (1909), Charles Kingsley’s “The Sands of Dee” (1912), or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Enoch Arden” (1911). Each of these films included intertitles which quoted lines from the source poems, along with shots that staged the action each poem described (Gunning). Even after WWI, such adaptations of poems were produced, such as the Australian A Sentimental Bloke (1919) based on C.J. Dennis’ verse novel, or the first film of director Frank Capra, The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding House (1922), based on Kipling’s poem. While it certainly makes sense to consider

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these films as poetic, they raise questions about the meaning of the term. These films all adapt narrative poems, and one might ask if, other than the quotes in the intertitles, their filmic portrayal of action is substantially different from other narrative films. However, excluding intertitles is hardly a responsible critical practice, and that the relation between words and images in these films creates a unique effect, different from the usual use of intertitles as explicatory or dialogue. There are examples of filmic adaptations in the sound era, such as the film of The Rime of Ancient Mariner (1977) by experimental animator Lawrence Jordan, which animates illustrations by Gustave Dore as Orson Welles reads Coleridge’s poem in voice-over. Perhaps films such as these should be considered less as poetic films than as illustrations of poems through film images. There is a long tradition of images illustrating poems, and these films perhaps are closest to this practice. Curiously, when interviewed about the practice of illustrating poems late in his life (and early in film history), the French modernist poet Stephan Mallarme responded, somewhat tongue in cheek, that if you wanted to illustrate literature, perhaps cinema was the most effective means since it could produce so many images automatically! (Quoted in Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry, 61–62) Nonetheless, the Griffith films cited above achieve a certain lyricism by juxtaposing the images and intertitles quoting the poems. In The Sands of Dee, the story of a young girl who drowns herself after being abandoned by her seducer, repeatedly stages scenes against the background of the sea. To announce the death of the heroine, Griffith shoots sea waves lapping onto a shore bereft of human presence, as if swept clean by the tide. This shot was preceded by an intertitle quoting the Kingsley poem: “The creeping tide came up along the sea/And o’er and o’er the sea/ And round and round the sea/And never home came she.” The mournful beauty of this shot blends with the poignant lines to create an effect that surpasses mere illustration (Gunning, 277–278). Man Ray’s L’Etoile du mer (1928) raises several issues and opens onto the tradition of avant-garde cinema that often is described as a form of poetic cinema. The film was a collaboration between Man Ray, photographer and filmmaker, and Robert Desnos, poet and novelist, both with ties to the Surrealist movement. Although Man Ray has indicated he heard Desnos read his poem before he undertook the film, it was not published by Desnos and exists only as part of this film (Sitney, Modernist, 26–29). But even if the poem did preexist the film, the film remains quite different from the adaptation of established classics discussed earlier. Those films stage the narrative action of the original poems in a coherent manner. In contrast, the action, such as it is, of L’Etoile de mer remains ambiguous and difficult to grasp. The first third of the film seems to present a simple incident: a young man and woman meet, they mount stairs to a room where the women undresses and lies on a bed, but the man rises and leaves. In the street, he encounters a woman hawking newspaper and buys from her a starfish in a glass cylinder which he takes to his room and contemplates. This action, however, is obscured by being filmed through a stippled piece of glass. Further, intertitles do not explicate the action, but instead

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­ rovide reflections or metaphors. After the man contemplates the starfish, the p film no longer follows any continuous action but seems randomly assembled, sometime around themes (e.g. travel: with images of trains and boats) or hints at actions which remain uncompleted (e.g. a woman mounts the stairs with a knife in hand but never stabs anyone), while starfish recurs as a repeated image. I do not attempt to explicate these images (P. Adams Sitney offers a brilliant reading (Sitney, Modernist, 28–34)) but, rather, stress that L’Etoile de mer assembles images and words first teasing us with a potential drama and then shaking off this expectation with a series of images and titles that call forth associations rather representing action. The central image of the starfish recurs and the intertitles describe successively flowers of glass, flesh and fire, metaphorically invoking the woman and the power of desire. The opening in which the young man avoids sleeping with the woman and instead stares at the glass-­ enclosed starfish may well reference not only Freudian displacement by fetishism but visualizes the logic of metaphorical replacement of images and words around the gaze of desire. The contrast between filmic adaptations of narrative poems and a film that presents a series of images that seem not to cohere into a story presents the poetic film as an alternative to dominant narrative films. This raises a central question: in what way can the cinematic image be thought of as poetic? Theories of poetic cinema address this.

Theories of Film Poetry: Deren, Piotrovskij, Pasolini and Epstein Maya Deren Various theories of poetic cinema have appeared over the years. A poet, in fact, wrote one of the earliest works of film theory, Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of the Moving Picture published in 1916. Perhaps the clearest and most influential theory of poetry of film appeared, not as a book, but as oral comments offered in a public symposium on the topic of Poetry and the Film held in New York City in 1953. The participants included poet Dylan Thomas, playwright Arthur Miller, film critic Parker Tyler, poet and filmmaker Willard Mass, but it was filmmaker Maya Deren who was willing to go beyond random comments and offer what could be considered a theory of the poetic film. Although her comments were somewhat extemporaneous (and were greeted with misogynist hostility by most of the participants), Deren lays out one of the most compelling approaches to poetic cinema (Michelson, “Poetics”, 79–83). Like many modernist theories of poetry, Deren’s approach offers a central opposition between poetry and narrative action. Deren’s comments remained brief and succinct, but I believe they can be glossed responsibly. First, she describes the “horizontal attack,” of narrative, which portrays action and its development: “one action leads to another action.” This “logic of action” requires a strong sense of temporal order and a

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vectorization of the image through following a causal chain or the simple unfolding of an act. One shot leads to another through the completion of actions. It is this logic of action that the poetic image, which Deren describes as offering a “vertical approach,” breaks (or perhaps brakes). Deren describes the vertical structure of poetic images: “They are held together by either an emotion or a meaning they have in common, rather than the logical action” (“Poetry and”, 178). In place of a logic of the consequences of action and their temporal progression that defines the horizontal attack of narrative, the vertical approach of poetry “probes the ramification of a moment, its qualities and its depth” (“Poetry and”, 174). The lyrical moment of poetry suspends time, and, rather than tracing a vector of unfurling action, plunges into a realm of associations. Deren’s graphic opposition of the vertical and horizontal allows the possibility of films that could plot a compromise trajectory between the two poles. As examples Deren cites certain sequences within narrative films, such as montages setting up a locale or dream sequences, in which the vertical approach intervenes or interrupts narrative action. Describing such sequences as vertical indicates that, instead of following a clear action or temporal progression, their images develop a chain of associations or metaphors. Thus, Deren’s theory of film poetry makes a fundamental opposition between poetry and narrative. Classical theories of poetry had not excluded narrative. Romanticism, however, identified poetry primarily with the genre of lyric poetry rather than the epic of the drama which the neo-classical tradition had privileged. Deren identifies film poetry with the genre of the lyric (she explicitly compares short avant-garde films as “completely vertical” and as “comparable to lyric poems” (“Poetry and…” 175)). Deren offers a theory of the lyrical film, a poetic cinema composed of highly evocative and resonant images, linked together by associations rather than progressive action and the unfolding of a story. Piotrovskij Although rarely cited, Russian Formalist Adrian Piotrovskij’s extraordinary essay, “Towards a Theory of Cine-genres” (published in 1927 as part of the anthology the Formalist put together on cinema, Poetics of Cinema), offers important theoretical considerations of cinema and poetry from a Formalist perspective. Piotrovskij discussed a genre he described as “not yet fully worked out” of “plotless” films, which rejected conventional narrative and “recognize that that the linear progression of time is immaterial.” Such films “base their works on exclusively cinematic forms, on new and unexpected juxtapositions of images, employing non-narrative, intrinsically cinematic devices, such as associative montage” (Piotrovskij, 145). Piotorvskij’s examples come from the Soviet cinema, specifically works by Eisenstein and Vertov, especially One Sixth of The World (1926). One Sixth of the World not only used the devices of montage Piotrovskij mentions, but its intertitles intone a paean to the vast expanse of the Soviet Union in a Whitmanesque poetic diction. Piotorvskij’s brief comments on this new genre apply as well to Man Ray’s L’Etoile de mer made

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shortly after the essay was published. Piotrovskij also anticipates Deren’s understanding of the poetic film in substituting the association of images for narrative action. True to his Formalist principles, Piotrovskij adds the concept of Shklovsky’s defamiliarization to this genre through the “new and unexpected juxtapositions of images.” If both these theories define film poetry in opposition to narrative, this does not necessarily require an absolute dichotomy between them. Deren makes it clear that films can move between lyrical and the narrative registers: “One of the combinations that would be possible would be to have a film that is a dramatic construct, visually accompanied by a commentary that is essentially poetic; that is, it illuminates the moments they occur…”(“Poetry and the…”, 175). This conception of certain films having poetic sequences is also implied by Piotrovskij when he includes films by Eisenstein in his “plotless” category. Piotrovskij also described a cine-genre he called “lyrical” which he claimed departed from narrative and dramatic conventions, especially through the use of close-ups. “It was only natural with the introduction of close-ups that lyricism started to supplant with increasing success the dramatic and narrative moments…” (Piotrovskij, 144). His examples, however, come from films that have a narrative line but seem to abandon it for purely visual lyricism, such as sequences in the films of D.W. Griffith, which introduce “minute close-up details of farm life: the pensive images of little pigs and puppies dozing on the straw; children’s little feet splashing through spring puddles; or the sun’s rays reflecting from these puddles” (Piotrovskij, 144). He includes in this genre the films of Mary Pickford, not only because they contain similar lyrical sequences but for dwelling on the beauty of the star’s face and physical movements. Describing the attraction of the star as inherently lyrical, Piotrovskij declares, “She is the living negation of plot on the screen”(Piotrovskij, 145). Although he finds these American lyrical films to be petit-bourgeois, Piotrovskij maintains they, nonetheless, offer important formal innovations. But he adds that the recent films by French filmmakers such as Louis Delluc, Marcel L’Herbier, Jean Epstein and Rene Clair push this lyrical tendency even further, with atmospheric sequences that “move completely away from the narrative” (Piotrovskij, 145). He particularly praises Clair’s The Crazy Ray (1924) which “reaches such a degree of freedom from narrative” that it has been called “plotless”(Piotrovskij, 145). The apparent chaos of classification that this promiscuity of poetry and narrative within the same films offers may be sorted out with the Formalist concept of the dominant. As developed by Jakobson, the dominant recognizes the multiple functions of any text, but it claims that one of these serves as a dominant, aligning the elements toward its aims (Jakobson, “Dominant,” 41). Thus, a lyrical poem may have religious context, but the aesthetic—that is poetic—function dominates, while in the case of “I like Ike,” the political context dominates, even if the poetic aspect plays a role in the slogan’s effectiveness. Jakobson indicates the dominant can shift within a text, so that various sequences may have different dominants (Jakobson, “Dominant,” 44). This

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would seem the case for Deren’s Hollywood film whose opening sequence might be a poetic invocation of a big city, but which eventually shifts to the action of the plot. Pasolini One of the most controversial theories of poetry was offered in the 1960s by Pier Paolo Pasolini, both an important Italian poet and a major filmmaker. His essay “The ‘Cinema of Poetry’” was first delivered as an address in 1965 and was published in Pasolini’s 1972 anthology Heretic Empiricism. Pasolini appropriated the methodology of the then-current semiotic strain of critical analysis, although his mastery of the concepts was uncertain, or at least eclectic. However, as commentators have pointed out, especially P. Adams Sitney, who has strongly influenced my understanding of the essay, Pasolini’s insight need not be evaluated for its contribution to semiotics, but, rather, as containing important insights into 1960s cinema and its unique relation to narrative and poetic structures (Sitney, The Cinema of, 2015, 17) Pasolini stressed the inherent difference between the linguistic signs of traditional poetry and the visual signs of cinema (he calls these respectively, “lin-­ signs” and “im-signs”) (Pasolini, 167–168). Like the major cinematic semiotician, Christian Metz, Pasolini stressed that whereas linguistic signs form a lexicon (or dictionary), the images of cinema possess no such bounded set of existing signs (Pasolini, 169). Although Pasolini’s comments of the nature of the im-sign are not entirely coherent, it is clear that the unique quality of the cinematic sign establishes cinema’s affinity to poetry. The filmmaker, Pasolini claims, takes his signs not from the dictionary but from chaos (Pasolini, 169). These signs wrested from chaos give the cinema an irrational, oneiric quality that persists no matter how the im-signs may be ordered by the filmmaker. According to Pasolini, this persistence of the chaotic and oneiric makes the language of cinema poetic by nature. However, if cinematic signs are rooted in a primal poetry, the history of cinema has moved it in a different direction: “after a few attempts that were immediately cut short, the cinematographic tradition which has developed seems to be that of a ‘language of prose’ or at least that of a ‘language of prose narrative’” (Pasolini, 172). Like Deren and Piotrovskij, Pasolini makes an essential differentiation between film poetry and the dominant tradition of narrative cinema. But Pasolini further claims that this distinction overlays and indeed represses the essential poetic nature imbedded in the cinematic sign, claiming, “the fundamentally irrational nature of cinema cannot be eliminated.” Cinema remains inherently poetic, albeit subliminally: “all its irrational, oneiric, elementary and barbaric elements were forced below the level of consciousness” (Pasolini, 172). This repressed poetic energy persists, running beneath the surface of commercial narrative films. While Pasolini acknowledges that with some films, such as Bunuel’s Une Chien andalu (1929), “the poetic quality of the language is foreground beyond all reason,” he primarily locates the intentional (as opposed to

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subliminal) poetic aspect of cinema in certain narrative films (Pasolini, 174). He identifies this poetic element with the literary technique of indirect free discourse: “Thus I will temporarily transform the question, ‘is a language of poetry possible in the cinema?’ into the question, ‘is the technique of free indirect discourse possible in the cinema?’” (Pasolini, 175). What is “free indirect discourse” and what does Pasolini intend in his identification of it with a cinema of poetry? In literary criticism, “free indirect discourse” refers to a stylistic device in narrative fiction whereby the author narrates the thoughts or statements of a character without actually quoting them but in such a way that the character’s voice and manner of speaking are conveyed. Free indirect discourse blends the language of a character with that of the author, avoiding direct quotation, but giving a sense of the character’s tone or style of speech. Indirect discourse differs from direct discourse, which marks the speech of a character with quotation marks. Indirect discourse conveys characteristic language without transcribing it directly. Pasolini also relates free indirect discourse to the technique of interior monologue which conveys a character’s unspoken thoughts, often through a stream of consciousness (Pasolini, 175). Applying a linguistic phenomenon to cinema involves analogy. Pasolini equates direct discourse with the cinematic technique of the point-of-­ view shot and claims that a free indirect point of view also exists. Pasolini admits that this device is not based in the language of a character as free indirect discourse is. Instead, the basis of free indirect point of view, Pasolini states, is stylistic (Pasolini, 178). It is not always clear what stylistic devices Pasolini is referring to as expressing free indirect point of view, presumably because they seem to be contextual. His references to Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) and Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution (1963) and generally (but with reservations) the films of Godard and his invocation of the gaze and contrast with the traditional point-of-view shot gives us some clues. The stylistic elements he does cite include the use of color, editing and framing, so that it is evident no single device (such as the point-of-view shot) can define this indirect point of view (Pasolini, 178–180). Free indirect point of view would seem to indicate an approach to a narrative in which the images profoundly reflect the subjectivity of a character without in any simple sense denoting a shot as purely subjective (e.g. point-of-view shots, dream images, flashbacks). Rather, the filmmaker presents the world in such a manner that the experience of the character is fused with this presentation (such as the neurotic experience of Giuliana in Red Desert, which is conveyed by the ways Antonioni shows the world she wanders through). I find Pasolini’s concept of the free indirect point of view as a key to the possibility of poetry in cinema hard to pin down. However, although he shares Deren’s and Piotorvskij’s contrast between a prosaic film language and a poetic one, his claim that cinema possesses an inherent poetic language which has been repressed by dominant practice opens another approach to poetic cinema. Pasolini claims the free indirect point-of-view shot “frees the expressive possibilities compressed by traditional narrative convention through a sort of return

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to the origins until the original, oneiric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary quality of cinema is found through its technical devices” (Pasolini, 178). In contrast to Deren and Piotrovskij, Pasolini does not locate poetic cinema in specific use of cinematic devices or structure, but rather claims that certain devices can uncover a repressed poetic energy inherent in the cinema. Pasolini does not oppose poetic cinema to narrative generally, but opposes a cinema of prose narrative, a conventional style. The lack of interest Pasolini showed in American avant-garde films seems to indicate he located true poetic cinema in the new approach to character subjectivity appearing in art cinema of the 1960s (Sitney, The Cinema of, 32–33; 103–107). Epstein I believe Pasolini’s claim that a primal poetic cinema lurked in all films (at least potentially, even if repressed by prosaic narrative), resonates with the earlier radical theories of French filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein, especially his elaboration of the concept of photogénie. Epstein began as a medical student, but by his early 20s had been captivated by the modern transformations in art, literature and technology in post-WWI Paris. (Wall-Romana 5–10) A protégé of the modernist poet, Blaise Cendrars, Epstein wrote literary theory beginning with his 1921 book La Poésie d’aujourd’hui un nouvel état d’intelligence published by Cendrars’ avant-garde press Éditions de la sirène. In this avant-­ garde polemic, Epstein declares the uniqueness of modern poetry as both a reaction to and, in a sense, a cure for, the transformations of modern life. Epstein describes the condition of modern life as dominated by a fatigue that had transformed consciousness. The revolutionary aspects of modern poetry, its lack of syntax and grammar, its substitution of association for logic, its brevity and rapidity—were signs of a “new state of intelligence” one provoked by fatigue, which short-circuited traditional logic in favor of more immediate forms of communication. (Epstein, La Poésie; Wall-Romana, Epstein, 19–24) Epstein’s understanding of mental and physical fatigue roots his understanding of the new poetry in physiological processes and the subconscious (Wall-­ Romana rightly stressed the difference of this more physiologically understood subconscious—from Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of the “unconscious.” Gerard Leblanc indicates its source in the French neurologist Pierre Janet) (Wall-Romana, Epstein, 20; Leblanc, 26). This theory of modern fatigue and its poetic effects was expanded in a book Epstein published the following year, Lyrosophie. Katie Kirtland succinctly summarizes the book’s argument: In La Lyrosophie, Epstein claims that the general intellectual fatigue that follows from the speed and telescoping of space in modern life, and a concomitant increase in the speed of thought, contributes to a mode of subjectivity he calls lyrosophie. (Kirtland, 281)

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Epstein offers less a specific theory of poetry than a theory of a modern poetic revolution and its psychological and sociological roots. The new poetry is lyrosophic but so—Epstein claims—is cinema. La Poésie d’aujourd’hui un nouvel état d’intelligence includes a section entitled “Cinema and Modern Literature,” which proclaims: “Cinema saturates modern literature” (Epstein, “Cinema and Modern,” 271). Epstein details the congruence between modern literature and cinema. The close-up creates a succession of details that undermine old-fashioned literature’s contemplative description and sentimentality. Cinema relies on speed of movement, thereby increasing the speed of thought of the viewer. “fast-paced films lead us to think quickly. It’s a kind of training, if you will” (Epstein, “Cinema and Modern”, 274). Both the new poetry and cinema address—and foster—the fatiguing pace of modern life and supply the lyrosophic means of creating within it. “A rush of details constitutes a poem; and the editing of a film gradually intertwines and combines shots…Cinema and literature moves” (Epstein, “Cinema and Modern”, 273). Wall-Romana sums up this theory of the mutual role of poetry and cinema: The solution [to fatigue] consists in finding new routes to and from the subconscious. This is what modernist literature and especially poetry proposes to do… and the paradigm for such a new art is very simply cinema. (Wall-Romana, Epstein, 20)

Cinema for Epstein becomes the means of overcoming the deadening of modern human experience. As he reiterated in an essay toward the end of his life, cinema “contains a threat against a rationalism that has become totalitarian” (Epstein, “The Fluid” p. 393). Between these two books focused on literary theory, Epstein published (again with Éditions de la sirène) a book not only devoted to cinema but exemplifying the transformation cinema had brought to poetic practice. Bonjour Cinema exemplifies modernist book design. Epstein folds between its highly cubistic covers: two of Epstein’s most important essays on cinema; six poems devoted to cinema, which use modernist typography to create a visually complex layout; visual montages of photographic images and words; and a number of cubistic drawings. The table of contents mimics a program for a film screening, complete with entre-act and a “bonsoir” at the end. Bonjour Cinema is not only devoted to cinema, it performs acts of devotion, especially to the stars of the medium, jumbling their images and the typographies of their names: “Charlot” Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Nazimova, Sessue Hayakawa and Charles Ray. The book highlights the term which will become central to Epstein’s theory of cinema and its poetic possibility: photogénie. One page of Bonjour cinema proclaims: “This is the litany of all the photogénies:” (Epstein, Bonjour, n. pag). Initially a technical term, photogénie referred to certain effects of light and was related to the process of photography. As an aesthetic term, it was applied to cin-

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ema by the French film critic and filmmaker Louis Delluc. By the 1920s, photogenic commonly referred to a subject enhanced by photography (Abel, “Photogénie,” 107–111; Wall-Romana, Epstein, 25–26). The two essays reprinted in Bonjour Cinema use the term photogénie repeatedly to indicate the revolutionary possibilities of cinema. Pushing beyond Delluc’s use of the term to indicate the expressive possibility of the photographic image, photogénie for Epstein becomes a nearly magical term, in many ways the equivalent of the complex effects of lyrosophy, especially in cinema’s ability to access the subconscious. But the shift from lyrosophy to photogénie also signals cinema’s revelatory relation to the world it films. For Delluc, and our common use of the term photogenic, the term highlights the enhancement a photograph might give to its subject. But for Epstein, photogénie does more—it transforms, revealing aspects of the subject ordinary vision could not see. A new revelatory mission is attributed to cinema. Epstein acknowledges that photogénie is not only difficult to define but actually resists linguistic meaning: One runs into a brick wall trying to define it. The face of beauty, it is the taste of things I recognize it as I would a musical phrase from the very specific intimations of emotion that accompanying it. Elusive … the human eye cannot discover it directly, unless after long practice, A lens zeros in on it, drains it, distilling photogénie between its focal plans. (Epstein, “The Senses,” 243–244)

Photogénie has to be seen to be recognized. Many of the aspects that related cinema to the new poetry for Epstein reappear in photogénie: brevity (“It can be brief because the value of the photogenic is measured in seconds” (Epstein, “Magnification,” 236)); movement (“Photogenie, pure photogenie, cadenced movement” (Epstein, “The Senses,” 243)); and the close-up (“The close-up, the keystone of the cinema, is the maximum expression of this photogénie of movement” (Epstein, “Magnification,” 236)). Later writings will especially stress on the photogenic possibilities of slow and accelerated motion, as well as the manipulation of sounds. Photogénie for Epstein indicates cinema’s ability to convey the instability of experience, as opposed to the fixed meanings that language sets for the world. As he phrased it in a late essay: “…the fondness of cinema for mobile aspects of the universe quickly came to transmute nearly all the stable forms into the unstable” (Epstein “The Fluid” p. 383). Photogénie persists as a theme throughout Epstein’s three decades of writings and seems to absorb the discussion of cinema and poetry. Epstein’s later writings increasingly attribute the possibilities of the cinema to its mechanical nature. An essay included in the post-humous anthology from 1955 Esprit de cinema, “The Delirium of a Machine,” reaffirms his earliest ideas about cinema and poetry, but places greater emphasis on the role of the cinematic apparatus: In cinematographic poetry, the function that in other species of the poetic devolves more from the human subconscious is in part pre-accomplished by a machine. It combines unexpected interpretations, delivers resemblances foreign

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to and stronger than logical relations, and creates visual metaphors having the forceful status of objects and engines for daydreaming. (Epstein, “Delirium,” 378)

The four theorists I have discussed by no means exhaust the theories of cinematic poetry, but I do think each represents an essential argument. While I have tried to indicate differences between them, certain positions recur. Poetic cinema tends to be contrasted with narrative, although many theorists believe narrative films can include poetic passages. Further, Pasolini and Epstein in particular claim cinema contains an inherent poetic quality, even if suppressed in most commercial narrative films.

Poets and the Cinema: Surrealism To detail the reception of cinema by twentieth-century poets would demand a weighty tome, and several fine books have treated some aspects of this subject, so I will not attempt to cover it in this summary chapter. Poets comparing poetry become numerous from the late 1910s on. Numerous poems, such as H.D.’s “Projector I and II” (1927), beautifully invoke the power of cinema, and an anthology of these would be a great contribution to our question but beyond the scope of this chapter (McCabe, 49–50). Further, Christophe Wall-­ Romana has shown how considering the cinema transformed modern French poetry (Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry). However, I do want to consider particularly rich encounters between the Surrealist movement and the cinema. The most influential poetic films are associated with Surrealism from the late 1920s and early 1930s. I have discussed one of these, L’Etoile de Mer by Man Ray and Robert Desnos. The Surrealist movement can be understood as theory of poetic production, especially in the manifestos of its self-proclaimed founder, poet Andre Breton. But it is an error, one Breton denounced, to view surrealism primarily as an aesthetic movement. Surrealism proclaimed an attitude toward life and even politics, in which the states of dream and waking would be merged. Surrealist techniques sought a trance-like automatic surrender to unconscious impulses: aimless walks through Paris; automatic techniques of writing or drawing; entirely gratuitous acts, whether violent or anodyne; and even dedication to revolutionary politics. But Breton’s manifestos redefined poetry, its sources and processes, based in the transformative possibilities of the image and its links to the unconscious. Breton’s emphasis on the role of the image, however irrational it strove to be, places Surrealist poetry in the tradition of modern lyricism. Film often classed as surrealist—Bunuel’s and Dali’s Une Chien Andalu (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930); Man Ray’s L’Etoile de Mer and Mystery of the chateau of Dice (1929); Georges Hugnet’s La Perle (1929); and arguably, Germaine Dulac and Artaud’s Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) and Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet, (1932)—could all be described as image-driven films. They correspond to Deren’s vertical approach of poetic cinema, exploring the ­resonance of an image rather than following narrative action and character

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development. Each of these films has central characters and some degree of action, even if only a passage through space (the priest wandering in Seashell; the man pursuing the woman in Une Chien Andalu; the poet’s voyage through the mirror into the corridor of the Hotel follie-dramatique in Blood of a Poet), and even sequences of action: the priest’s struggle with the general in Seashell; the party and its disruption in l’Age d’or; and the exploration of the modernist house in Mystery of the Chateau of Dice. But these trajectories of movement and erotic and/or violent action all unfold within an illogical environment in which space is uncertain and even the identities of characters subject to transformation. These films, especially Une Chien Andalu and The Blood of a Poet, shaped Deren’s concept of the poetic film. Epstein was a contemporary of the Surrealist movement, both a precursor (and indeed rival and critic of the authority asserted by the movement (Wall-Romana, Epstein, 174–175)). Pasolini’s 1965 essay referenced Bunuel’s and Dali’s films as pure examples of the poetic film. The use of striking even disturbing images in these films, their shuffling of space and time and their aura of mystery, veering into the erotic and violent, provided an influential model for the poetic film. Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet emblazons its relation to poetry with its title. Outside the “official” Surrealist movement, Cocteau understood himself as a poet working in several genres (poetry, novels, drama). This film allegorizes the process of the poet’s inspiration, passion and martyrdom. Cocteau’s enactment of the poet’s vocation employs the illogical images one associates with Surrealism: the poet’s hand bearing a mouth that breathes and speaks: a statue that comes to life; a mirror which becomes permeable allowing the poet to enter into a dream-like space; children who defy gravity clinging to the ceiling. The poet, after passing through the mirror, proceeds down a hotel corridor and peers though keyholes to witness a series of bizarre tableaux. At the end of the corridor, a woman’s hand offers him an automatic and instructs him to place it at his temple and pull the trigger. He complies and blood spurts from his wound as a wreath of laurel crowns his head. Cocteau’s succession of images portrays the stations of the poet’s passion and suicide. This sequence offers a narrative progression, but the radical discontinuity of the scenes, their lack of coherent space and time defeat narrative logic with the irrationality that Epstein and Pasolini saw as characterizing the poetry of cinema. The discontinuous power of the images recalls Deren’s vertical poetry, resonant with associations but lacking causality or continuous action to fuse them. This structure of presenting a series of highly symbolic but unrealistic images witnessed by a protagonist as he or she moves through a symbolic landscape provided the template for what critic Parker Tyler and Sitney have called the trance film and which reappeared in the American avant-garde film from the 1940s on, including the early films of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington and early Stan Brakhage (Sitney, Visionary, 20–24). Surrealism’s devotion to the irrational power of images provided inspiration for poetic ­cinema including not only the American avant-garde, but feature filmmakers such as Jodorowsky and David Lynch.

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American Avant-Garde Cinema In perhaps the subtlest and most erudite treatment of the confluence of poetry and cinema, The Cinema of Poetry, P. Adams Sitney deals with Pasolini’s theories, narrative films of post-1950s European art cinema (Bertolucci, Bergman, Tarkovsky) and the American avant-garde tradition, which Maya Deren inspired and described in her theory of the vertical approach of the poetic film. Sitney quotes Pasolini’s dismissive reaction to some American avant-garde films in an essay entitled, “I segnie viventi e I poeti morti”: “…I have even been the first to speak explicitly of a cinema of poetry, However, speaking of a cinema of poetry, I have always meant to speak of narrative poetry” (Sitney, The Cinema, 106). I turn now to this alternative mode of filmmaking which has frequently invoked a relation to poetry. As important as the differentiation of lyric poetry from narrative has been for most theories of poetic cinema, separating the two modes absolutely might distort rather than clarify our understanding of poetic cinema. The theories of Piotrovskij, Epstein, the Surrealists, Deren and even Pasolini place the poetic and narrative in creative tension rather than logical exclusion. A seemingly simple film made in the 1930s not only brings these conflicting energies into focus but serves as a bridge between the European Surrealists and the American avant-garde film: Joseph Cornell’s 1936 Rose Hobart. Cornell emerged on the New York art scene in the early 1930s as a collagist influenced by the works of the Surrealists (one of his earliest collages had appeared as the cover to an exhibit of Surrealist art at the Julian Levy Gallery In New  York in 1932) (Guigon, 52–53). Like most collagists, Cornell created his own archive, including material from a 1931 adventure film from Universal East of Borneo starring Rose Hobart. Cornell followed a via negative in transforming this material into his film: he eliminated the soundtrack and dialogue, substituting an unrelated recording of pseudo-Brazilian jazz; he eliminated most of the original film and ignored chronological order in reassembling shots; and he added a few shots from other sources (Michelson, “Rose Hobart,” 152–164). Although East of Borneo had a coherent, if somewhat fantastic, story line, Cornell’s transformation erases it (indeed, when I finally saw the source film, I was surprised how wrong I had been in my speculations on what its plot might be!). In Deren’s terms, Cornell eradicated the horizontal development East of Borneo, destroying its logic of space and time, its connective actions. Finally, by manipulating the film’s projection, Cornell further transformed the experience of the film. Projecting this sound film at silent speed (16 frames per second rather than 24) gave the action a nearly imperceptible retardation, as if the actors were moving underwater. In addition, Cornell projected the film through a deep blue piece of glass which bathed it in nocturnal light similar to the tinting for night scenes in silent films (Solomon, 118). By obscuring narrative action and rendering scenes enigmatic, Cornell detours the original material from serving a banal narrative to producing blue-­ tinged poetry. Tinting and slowed motion direct our attention to formal aspects

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rather than narrative development. Cornell’s alchemy demonstrates Epstein’s and Pasolini’s claim that poetry lurks beneath the surface of even the most banal commercial film. Breton claimed he used to transform his experience of commercial movies by entering a screening at a random point, watching a film until it began to make sense, at which point he exited and went to another movie where he repeated the same routine (Breton, “As in a Wood,” 42–43). In effect, Cornell’s film reproduced this experience of fragmenting a movie to overcome its narrative logic and liberate an enigmatic poetry. Rose Hobart had a disastrous premiere at the Julian Levy Gallery when one of the guests, Salvador Dali, disrupted the screening and accused Cornell of stealing his thoughts. (Solomon, 118–119) The film remained in Cornell’s closet for the next two decades until he showed it to a young filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who recognized its originality and began to share it with other avant-­ garde filmmakers. Jacobs was one of the new generations of filmmakers whose contact with Cornell was vital for their work. The second half of Sitney’s formidable and inspiring The Cinema of Poetry treats the filmmakers of the American avant-garde, and he uses Cornell’s film to introduce this shift in focus (Sitney, The Cinema of, 113–137). These filmmakers of the American avant-garde not only explore the relation between film and poetry in their work but engage with the literary traditions of poetry. Daniel Kane’s penetrating book We Saw the Light details the rich context of conversation between some of these filmmakers and American poets who were their contemporaries. Sitney explores their deep interaction with poets such as Garcia Lorca, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Sitney has explicated the profound influence the poetry of Pound, Stein and Charles Olson on Brakhage’s filmmaking. Few movements in film history have so profoundly considered poetry as a source. Maya Deren, who devoted herself to experimental filmmaking without sponsorship or commercial ties, has been named as the founder of this movement. But perhaps the most transformative figure of this movement, profiting greatly from his interaction with both Deren and Cornell, was Stan Brakhage. Brakhage’s early films show the influence of Deren and the trance film in portraying scenes of psychological crisis through strongly metaphorical and intensely visual images that seem to explode the logic of psychological drama. But a decisive reorientation came when Cornell hired Brakhage to make a film record of the Third Avenue elevated train in Manhattan scheduled for demolition. With this film. Brakhage abandoned narrative/psychological premises and, as he put it, made a film entirely “from eye-sources” (Brakhage, “Interview”, 203). Although the resulting film Wonder Ring could be described as a documentary (in a long tradition of lyrical documentaries), including Joris Iven’s Rain (1929) Ralph Steiner’s H20 (1929) or the city films of Jean Vigo, Walther Ruttmann, Jay Leyda or Helen Levitt, Brakhage did not document the El as a social fact, but rather engaged with it visually, capturing the play of light in reflection and transmission and especially in movement as the train traveled its route.

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Kane convincingly claims: “Perhaps no filmmaker was quite as invested in the conversation between film and poetry as Stan Brakhage” (Kane, 51). His early films move from highly symbolic dramas to an exploration of visual experience, seeking an alternative to language and the means of articulating vision expressively. The title of Brakhage’s famous 1963 manifesto Metaphors on Vision proclaimed a search for visual analogues to the processes of figuration and comparison that poetic metaphor provides. Passages from the opening of Brakhage’s credo announce its faith in a poetry of moving images that could achieve things impossible in a poetry based in verbal language: How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green?” …Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word.” … I suggest there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication… (Brakhage, “Metaphors on Vision”, 12)

In his radical approach to the cinematic image, Brakhage eliminated (in all but few films) spoken dialogue or explanatory intertitles. After 1958, the vast majority of his films no longer stage dramatic action. Instead, as in Wonder Ring, Brakhage drew his images from encounters with visual experience. His films destabilize the cinematic image as radically as he overthrew narrative logic, often challenging recognizability with rapid editing, unsteady hand-held camera movement, blurred focus and obscuring the film image with paint or scratches or layers of superimposition. These practices recall Epstein’s beliefs that the cinematic images destabilize our perception of the world, and perhaps even access Pasolini’s “original, oneiric, barbaric, irregular, aggressive, visionary quality of cinema.” Brakhage’s technique not only plunges into the emotional resonances of the image that Deren identified with the vertical approach of poetry but probes deeply into the materiality of film itself, including textures of emulsion and the qualities of celluloid, radicalizing Jakobson’s understanding of the poetic function as turning attention to the sensual qualities of the signs themselves beyond their communicative function. If so many theories of poetic cinema assert cinema as an alternative to language, why does “poetry,” a term deriving from literature, persist? Brakhage expresses a suspicion of language as limiting our understanding while promoting the visual aspects of film. But Brakhage also seeks out cinematic equivalents to the figures and devices of poetry. In a 1977 lecture on “Poetry and Film,” Brakhage spoke of hearing a poem by Rabindranath Tagore read in the original Bengali: I realized how important to approach poetry first through sound. And then I learned, later, that was a way for some people to approach film first, just through its vision. (Brakhage “Poetry and Film”, 174)

Brakhage discovered that both poetry and film can foreground the formal (and indeed material) aspect of their signs, sound and rhythm in poetry, light and rhythm in film. Brakhage was not simply rejecting the limitations of language,

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but rather aspiring to find a visual equivalent to verbal poetry, one that explores not only visual experience in all its flux, but produces metaphors of vision. Deren supplied a model for a generation of American filmmakers (including Brakhage) of filmmaking inspired by poetry; Brakhage opened a vista onto a filmmaking based firmly in the exploration of vision. Even the American avant-­ garde filmmakers of the 1960s, whose use of minimalist or systematic forms (structural filmmakers, such as Michael Snow or Ernie Gehr) deviated strongly from Brakhage’s lyrical stance, based their films in vision in motion. This later generation seemed more engaged in analytical projects, questioning the nature of the image more than reveling in it; we can recall the close connection forged between poetics and avant-garde poetry. Abigail Child, who moves between writing poetry, making films and theorizing on the nature of both, described a collection of her writings: This is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film approaches film and writing with a concern for their materiality, meaning, syntax and form. Questions such as how meaning is made, how elements join together, how far elements can stand apart and still connect, how resonance and meaning are created, how putting together fragments of the world can create new forms, new ways of thinking the utopian aspect and the problematic of that desire are some of my concerns. (Child, This is Called, xxi)

Child’s writings and films make it clear that her practice not only informs but founds her theory. The question of a poetic cinema probes how the mobile and evasive quality of the film image provides a new way of conceiving of poetry— by other means than simply language. A survey like this leaves many topics of poetic cinema either untouched, or simply alluded to. A few neglected but essential topics are worth listing in this conclusion: the issue of rhythm and meter in film, from the montage experiments of the Soviet filmmakers to the films of Peter Kubelka; the lyrical documentary, whether Paul Strand and Charles Sheller’s Manhatta (1920), the films of Vertov or recent works such as Leviathan (2012) by the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University or the visionary documentaries of Nicholas Geyrhalter; the strongly image-based cinema narratives of Terence Mallick of the late Godard; the animations of Lewis Klahr, Jodie Mack and Janet Geiser. The variety of genres that can be approached as poetic indicates that the poetic film encompasses more than a circumscribed set of non-­narrative films. As I hope my discussion shows, poetic cinema opens onto the very nature of cinema and allows us to reconsider the nature of poetry itself.

Bibliography Abel, Richard. 1988. Photogénie and Company. In French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. I, 95–124. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Abrams, M.H. 1965. Theories of Poetry. In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alan Preminger. Princeton: University of Princeton Press.

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Aristotle. 1951. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. Trans. with critical notes by S. H. Butcher. New York: Dover Publications. Brakhage, Stan. 1970. Interview with P.  Adams Sitney. In Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 201–229. New York: Praeger Publishers. ———. 2001a. Metaphors on Vision. In Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage, 12–134. New York: Documentext. ———. 2001b. Poetry and Film. In Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking by Stan Brakhage, 174–191. New York: Documentext. Breton, Andre. 1969. Manifestos of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Hellen Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1978. As in a Wood. In The Shadow and it Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema, ed. Paul Hammond, 42–45. London: British Film Institute. Child, Abigail. 2005. This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Elder, H. Bruce. 1998. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press. Epstein, Jean. 1921a. La Poésie d’aujourd’hui un nouvel état d’intelligence. Paris: Éditions de la sirène. ———. 1921b. Bonjour Cinema. Paris: Éditions de la sirène. ———. 1988a. Magnification. In French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel, vol. I, 235–241. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1988b. The Senses i (b). In French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel, vol. I, 241–246. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012a. Cinema and Modern Literature [1921]. In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, 271–276. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2012b. The Fluid World of the Screen. In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, 383–394. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2012c. The Delirium of a Machine. In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, 372–381. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Guigon, Emmanuel. 2015. With Hidden Noise. In Joseph Cornell and Surrealism, ed. Matthew Affron and Sylvie Ramond, 48–57. Charlottesville: The Fralin Museum of Art. Gunning, Tom D.W. 1991. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Cinema: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Hauptman, Jodi. 1999. Joseph Cornell: Stargazing in the Cinema. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1987a. Linguistics and Poetics. In Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 62–94. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 1987b. The Dominant. In Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 41–46. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kane, Daniel. 2009. We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kellerman, Sarah, and Jason N. Paul, eds. 2012. Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Kirtland, Katie. 2012. Introduction: Lyrosophie. In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N.  Paul, vol. 281. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

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Leblanc, Gérard. 1998. La poétique epsteinienne. In Jean Epstein Cinéaste, Poète, Philosophe, ed. Jacques Aumont, 25–38. Paris: Cinematheque français. Lindsay, Vachel. 1970. The Art of the Moving Picture. New  York: Liveright. (originally 1916). McCabe, Susan. 2005. Cinematic Modernism: Modern Poetry and Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Michelson, Annette. 2017a. Poetics and Savage Thought: About Anagram. In On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film, 79–108. Cambridge: MIT Press. ———. 2017b. Rose Hobart and Monsieur Phot: Early Films from Utopia Parkway. In On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film, 137–164. Cambridge: MIT Press. Morra, Anne. 2015. Unforgettable: How Joseph Cornell Wrested Rose Hobart (1936) from East of Borneo (1931). In Joseph Cornell and Surrealism, ed. Matthew Affron and Sylvie Ramond, 122–133. The Fralin Museum of Art. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 1988. Cinema and Poetry. In Heretical Empiricism, 167–186. Trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K.  Barnett, ed. Louise K.  Barnett. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Piotrovskij, A. 1981. Towards a Theory of Cine-Genres. Trans. Anna M.  Lawton in Russian Formalist Film Theory, ed. Herbert Eagle. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. Plato. 1961. The Republic in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 575–844. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Poetry and the Film: A Symposium. 1970. Film Culture Reader, ed. P Adams Sitney, 171–186. New York: Praeger Publishers. Shklovsky, Victor. 1965. Art as Technique. Russian Formalist Criticism. Trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 3–24. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sitney, P.  Adams. 1974. Visionary Films: The American Avant-Garde. New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1990. Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2015. The Cinema of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solomon, Deborah. 2015. Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. New York: Other Press. Steiner, Peter. 1984. Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Wall-Romana, Christophe. 2013a. Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinema in French Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2013b. Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

CHAPTER 25

Avant-Garde Films as Philosophy Malcolm Turvey

Perhaps more than any other kind of cinema, avant-garde filmmaking has been informed by philosophy, and avant-garde films are often said to be “philosophical.” Although one might question his characterization of the aims of art and philosophy, Murray Smith is surely right to protest that they are usually different. “While philosophy seeks to clarify our understanding of the world,” he maintains, “the vocation of art is to deliver an adventure in perception, cognition, and emotion.”1 Avant-garde cinema is, however, a notable exception, given that many avant-garde filmmakers have used their work in an attempt to “clarify our understanding of the world.” Epistemic or cognitive goals, in other words, are more central to avant-garde filmmaking than most other kinds of cinema. This is in part because avant-garde films emerged in the 1920s when Western art was becoming more preoccupied with philosophical issues. Much like philosophers, avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp were increasingly questioning the meaning of the concept of art, and many of their works— Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) being a notorious example—challenged prevailing notions of art and helped bring to light previously unacknowledged criteria for defining art, such as institutional and social criteria. It was in this climate that avant-garde cinema took root. Avant-garde artists were also interrogating definitions of artistic media by creating works that pushed art forms in new ­directions and thereby prompted consideration of their putatively essential

Dedicated to Annette Michelson 1  Murray Smith, “Film, Philosophy, and the Varieties of Aesthetic Value,” in Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomas-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2016), 185.

M. Turvey (*) Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_25

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properties. Duchamp’s singular avant-garde film Anémic Cinéma (1926) alternates between ten different rotating spirals that to varying degrees create an illusion of depth and flat revolving disks on which are inscribed alliterative texts containing often-obscene puns. In foregrounding the illusion of depth that is a common feature of the moving image as well as the dependence of cinema on language, Anémic Cinéma has been interpreted as occasioning reflection on the nature of the film medium, and medium-reflexivity has remained a constant preoccupation of avant-garde filmmakers ever since.2 As Jinhee Choi has shown, more recent avant-garde films continue to make a “philosophical contribution” by suggesting to their audiences “new philosophical hypotheses regarding the film medium itself,” a topic I take up later.3 Avant-garde filmmakers’ philosophical ambitions have not been confined to questioning the definitions of art and artistic media, however. As Annette Michelson was the first to argue in the context of Minimalism in the 1960s, many modern artworks pose for us, after all, the conditions of experience, of perception and apperception, eliciting, within our culture, a response to those perceptions which is cognitive. Our perception of the work of art informs us of the nature of consciousness. This is what we mean when we say—as I do say—that, although art no longer means or refers, it does have a deeply cognitive function.4

Art as the “exploration of the conditions and terms of perception… converges with philosophy and science upon the problem of reality as known and knowable,”5 Michelson contended, and she applied this insight to film, maintaining that “The illusionism of the new, temporal art reflects and occasions reflection upon, the conditions of knowledge; it facilitates a critical focus upon the immediacy of experience in the flow of time.”6 Michelson was the first to systematically demonstrate that many avant-garde films are philosophical in the sense that they prompt consideration of philosophical topics such as our perception and consciousness of reality in addition to definitions of art and artistic media, and philosophers such as Shawn Loht have recently echoed her

2  Dalia Judovitz, for example, thinks that the film “challenges the definition of both traditional and abstract cinematic image [sic]” (“Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade,” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], 46). 3  Jinhee Choi, “Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 165. 4  Annette Michelson, “Art and the Structuralist Perspective,” in On the Future of Art (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a Viking Compass Book, 1970), 57. 5  Michelson, “Bodies In Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge’,” Artforum VII, no. 6 (February 1969): 58. 6  Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), 172.

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­ phenomenological” or “reflexive” view in claiming that “films operating in “ the guise of philosophy do their work by occasioning insight in the viewer.”7 In this chapter, I suggest this is one of four strong senses in which avant-­ garde films can be described as philosophical. There may be others too, but I suspect the four I outline here are the main ones, historically speaking.8 Much of the debate about the relation between film and philosophy has been narrowly preoccupied with the question of whether films can “do philosophy” just like the written texts of philosophers. Some have argued that films “do philosophy” by illustrating pre-existing philosophies, while others that they make original philosophical claims, and both theses have surfaced in work on avant-­ garde film.9 I will spend some time working through these issues in order to highlight the hurdles faced by those who contend that films, avant-garde or otherwise, can “do philosophy.” Certainly, in addition to Michelson’s “reflexive” sense of occasioning philosophical reflection, some avant-garde films are philosophical in the sense that they creatively illustrate pre-existing philosophical theses, and I will use Dziga Vertov’s experimental documentary A Sixth Part of the World (1926) and its exemplification of Marxist philosophy as my example. More contentiously, a few avant-garde films can be described as philosophical in that they create innovative philosophy, as Noël Carroll has claimed about Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970) and Aaron Smuts about the “God and Country” sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1928). While I am skeptical of both of these examples, it may be there are less ambiguous ones, and I will point to a possible contender in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). However, I suspect that genuine instances of avant-garde films originating philosophy are few and far between if they exist at all, while examples of avant-­ garde films that illustrate philosophy or prompt consideration of philosophical topics are far more common. More importantly, the attempt to equate film with verbal philosophy in its capacity to originate philosophical theories risks overlooking what is distinctive about cinema’s engagement with philosophy, which is its powerful experiential dimension. Films don’t just communicate meaning, philosophical or otherwise. They offer viewers audiovisual experiences, and while avant-garde cinema may only rarely if ever be able to create innovative philosophy, we will see that it excels at producing rich, philosophically informed perceptual experiences for viewers. This brings us to the fourth sense in which films can be philosophical, which I call “enactment.” Avant-­ 7  Shawn Loht, “Phenomenological Preconditions of the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 2, no. 2 (2015): 180. 8  There are also perhaps weaker senses as when we speak of an avant-garde film as philosophical because we can detect the influence of philosophy in it. However, there are more interesting and robust connections than mere influence between avant-garde cinema and philosophy, and it is these connections that I explore in this chapter. 9  Rebecca A. Sheehan, for example, maintains that the avant-garde films of Stan Brakhage “philosophize in a way similar to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” (“Stan Brakhage, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Renewed Encounter with the Everyday,” Screen 53, no. 2 [Summer 2012]: 118).

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garde filmmakers not only illustrate philosophical arguments, they sometimes put them into practice, and I turn to the work of Jean Epstein as my example. By definition, when illustrating a philosophy, a film explains or makes it clear, as we shall see in the case of Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World. The philosophy is there for all to see. But in instances of enactment, the philosophical thesis is often not apparent in the film, even though aspects of the film are motivated by it. Instead, the filmmaker, who typically believes devoutly in the philosophical theory, enacts it on-screen to varying degrees, often using innovative cinematic techniques. The filmmaker in effect approximates what the world would look and sound like if the philosophical theory were true, thereby enabling audiences to experience the philosophy perceptually and not just cognitively as in verbal philosophy. Smith, along with Paisely Livingston, rightly worries that focusing on the cognitive or philosophical content of films runs the risk of overlooking their aesthetic value and thereby failing to appreciate them properly. “An analysis of the film that fails to acknowledge the interplay between cognitive and aesthetic value—whatever form that interplay takes—is apt both to overstate the significance of the film’s philosophical ideas and to fail to register the distinctive, sensuous embodiment of these ideas that is the special vocation of art to render,” Smith writes.10 However, in the case of those avant-garde films that are philosophical in the senses described here, a grasp of their philosophical meanings is essential to properly appreciating their aesthetic achievement. This achievement lies partly in the creative means their makers find to communicate or generate philosophical ideas. It is, therefore, important to understand their philosophical content in order to fully appreciate the means used to articulate it. As David Davies puts it, “an interest in how a film articulates its content surely presupposes some grasp of what that content is. If the content is indeed philosophical, then grasping this will surely require some philosophical contextualization.”11 This, of course, does not mean we have to agree with the philosophical theories informing avant-garde films, and it is often the case that these theories are specious. Indeed, I contend that, in many respects, they are not important for their own sake but because they occasion aesthetic innovation. This is why we can appreciate avant-garde films regardless of whether we concur with the philosophies animating them, and this points to a major difference between art and philosophy. Unlike works of verbal philosophy, which are evaluated in terms of their truth-value and whose significance is primarily epistemic, avant-garde films like other avant-garde artworks are admired mainly for their artistic inventions.12 We don’t dismiss, say, Vertov’s Man with a Move 10  Smith, “Film, Philosophy, and the Varieties of Aesthetic Value,” 195. See also Paisley Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter two. 11  David Davies, “Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium?” Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 5, no 2 (August 2008): 5. 12  Of course, verbal philosophy can be appreciated for its aesthetic qualities and its historical importance, much like a work of art, even if the verbal philosophy is no longer thought to be per-

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Camera because we find its Marxist philosophy unpersuasive, as we might Marx’s philosophy itself. Rather, the film is rightly valued because of the extraordinary formal and stylistic means Vertov uses to communicate Marxist theses, not because these theses are necessarily true, and in the pages that follow, I highlight how avant-garde filmmakers have employed imaginative and often novel techniques to instantiate philosophy. I also define the avant-garde broadly to mean filmmakers who experiment with the film medium in radical ways in the creation of new forms and styles, and I, therefore use examples of films made both within the film industry, such as Vertov’s, and outside it, such as Duchamp’s.

Avant-Garde Films Illustrating Philosophy Thomas Wartenberg has argued that films can “do philosophy” by creatively illustrating philosophical theories. For example, Wartenberg claims that the scenes of the Tramp working in the factory in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) exemplify Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. But they go beyond Marx’s theory by imaginatively adapting it to the contemporary context of the assembly line, which did not exist in Marx’s day. Furthermore, these scenes show in detail how factories turn workers into machine-like entities, whereas the notion of the worker as a machine remains a brief metaphor in Marx’s writings. Hence, the film “interprets and updates Marx’s claim about the mechanization of the human,” thereby displaying some “deep thinking” of its own about the issue.13 It doesn’t slavishly copy Marx’s theory but thoughtfully extends it in a new direction. In this sense, Modern Times is “actually doing philosophy”14 because it is making “a contribution to the philosophical discussion of a problem or issue.”15 One criticism of this conception of film as philosophy, which has been articulated most forcefully by Paisley Livingston, is that it may be Wartenberg doing the philosophy, not Modern Times or the other films he analyzes. How do we know that Wartenberg isn’t reading Marx’s theory into Modern Times based on a fortuitous similarity between them? What licenses his contention that the film itself is philosophizing in the sense of creatively illustrating Marx’s theory? Moreover, films like books are not the sorts of things that can do philosophy, ontologically speaking. They are not agents that can communicate, think, argue, and so forth. Even though we might on occasion say that the Philosophical Investigations or some other work of philosophy “states” or “proposes” something, this is merely shorthand for referring to Wittgenstein or another author’s suasive. My point is simply that verbal philosophy, unlike art, is primarily valued for its epistemic contribution, which accounts in part for the different ways we behave toward and treat the two. 13  Thomas E.  Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 30. 14  Thomas E. Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” in Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, 167. 15  Wartenberg, “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy,” 20.

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statements and propositions in their philosophical works. It is not the Third Critique that philosophizes about the aesthetic, but Kant by way of the Third Critique. Wartenberg must mean, therefore, that it is the author of the film who is using it as a vehicle for philosophizing and not the film itself that philosophizes, and in fact Wartenberg acknowledges that “only people can do philosophy.”16 “When I say that a film philosophizes,” he writes, “it is really a shorthand expression for stating that the film’s makers are the ones who are actually doing philosophy in/on/through film.”17 But if this is so, “evidence pertaining to the filmmaker’s actual [philosophical] sources and attitudes” is required, according to Livingston, to forestall his objection that Wartenberg may be reading philosophy into films rather than finding it there.18 Without some confirmation that Chaplin really intended to illustrate Marx’s theory of alienation through Modern Times, we have no way of knowing whether Chaplin is philosophizing in the film. Livingston’s criticism is of a piece with his broader theory of artistic interpretation, which is a version of a philosophical position known as actual intentionalism and which argues that an author’s intentions, when successfully realized in a work of art, constrain if not determine the correct interpretation of her work. In the context of film-as-philosophy, Livingston’s actual intentionalism has been criticized by Robert Sinnerbrink, who writes: “Artistic (and philosophical) meaning, for Livingston, is anchored exclusively within the author’s explicit intentions; but this ignores the contextual and cultural-­historical dimension of the work’s production, as well as the active role of audiences, viewers or critics in interpreting the work.”19 For Sinnerbrink, an interpreter can legitimately find philosophical meaning in a film “whether or not the filmmaker expresses any such philosophical intention (as many filmmakers refuse to do), or where such philosophical sources are absent, questionable or obscure (as is typically the case in the interpretation of artist’s intentions).”20 Although Sinnerbrink misrepresents Livingston’s view (Livingston does not claim that artistic meaning is exclusively determined by an author’s intentions), and does not develop his own position in depth by, for example, stipulating whether there are any constraints on interpretation (can an interpreter ascribe any philosophical meaning she chooses to a film?), his position seems to be close to the “value-maximizing” theory of interpretation defended by Stephen Davies among others. This is “the view that interpretation is a matter of considering the meanings that can be put upon a work with the aim of maximizing its value” regardless of whether the work’s author intended these meanings or not.21 Without getting into the vexed issue of which of these theories of interpretation is correct (and there are others,  Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 167.  Thomas E. Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007), 12. 18  Paisley Livingston, “Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy,” Philosophy Compass 3/4 (2008): 595. 19  Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (London: Continuum, 2011), 129. 20  Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 131. 21  Stephen Davies, “Authors’ Intentions, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Value,” British Journal of Aesthetics 46, no. 3 (July 2006): 240. 16 17

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too, such as hypothetical intentionalism), it is certainly the case that interpreters as a matter of fact read all manner of philosophical (and other) meanings into films and other artworks irrespective of whether they were intended by their makers. Indeed, for better or worse, this anti-intentionalism is probably standard operating procedure in contemporary film, literary and art scholarship whether or not it is philosophically sound. However, it is worth noting how far this anti-intentionalist approach takes us from the view that films can “do philosophy” just like verbal philosophy. Works of verbal philosophy are vehicles of communication through which one or more agents intentionally seek to convey philosophical clarifications, concepts, ideas, thought experiments, arguments, theories, and so forth to an audience. And, as with other forms of verbal communication, we are typically concerned with what philosophers intend to communicate in their works, which is why exegetes debate their intentions and turn to external evidence for them, such as letters and diaries. If one maintains that film-as-philosophy consists of reading philosophical meanings into films notwithstanding their authors’ intentions, it becomes much harder to hold that films are like verbal philosophy in that they can be used by agents as vehicles to communicate philosophical content, given that this content is being found in the film by an interpreter rather than conveyed through the film by its maker. Philosophical agency, in other words, passes from the filmmaker to the interpreter on this construal of film-as-philosophy. If you believe that films can philosophize like verbal philosophy, then you should be interested in establishing what philosophical content filmmakers intend to communicate by way of their work just as interpreters do with verbal philosophy. This is perhaps why Wartenberg contrasts “audience-oriented” interpretations with “creator-oriented” ones and argues that only the latter demonstrates that film is being used as a medium for genuine philosophizing. “For a philosophical film interpretation to be at least prima facie plausible,” he states, “it needs to posit a meaning that the filmmaker(s) could have intended…Only [such] creator-oriented interpretations of a film can justify the claim that the film itself is philosophical.”22 However, as Livingston points out, filmmakers could intend many different, even incompatible, meanings.23 What we want to know are the meanings they actually intended, and Wartenberg doesn’t provide any evidence for these. For example, in responding to Livingston’s ­criticism, he maintains that “The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1948) both illustrates and supplements some of the claims that Aristotle makes about loyalty to a friend in The Nicomachean Ethics.”24 However, he offers no evidence that Reed and his collaborators intended to do this, instead objecting that “it does not have to be the case that the filmmakers…intended to illustrate Aristotle’s theory” for it to be true that “the film…illustrates a thesis of Aristotle’s.”  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 26 (my emphasis).  Livingston, “Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy,” 594–95. 24  Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 176. 22 23

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Rather, the film simply has to show “us the very phenomenon that Aristotle discusses.” “The film presents us with an instance of loyalty [to a friend] that Aristotle also discusses without the filmmakers having to be aware that they are treading on territory first explored by Aristotle.”25 Given that he acknowledges it is filmmakers and not films that philosophize, I take Wartenberg to mean that it is the makers of The Third Man who intentionally illustrate a philosophical theory of friendship that happens, perhaps unbeknownst to them, to be the same as Aristotle’s. Yet, if this is correct, evidence is still needed that the filmmakers intended to illustrate a general philosophical claim about friendship, rather than simply telling a story about friends, otherwise Wartenberg remains vulnerable to the charge that he is reading philosophy into the film rather than finding it there. Wartenberg could respond that we often lack information about authors’ intentions and have to reconstruct them based on salient patterns and other evidence in their works. However, he doesn’t point to evidence in The Third Man to show that it is illustrating a philosophical theory of friendship as opposed to simply depicting a character who is loyal to a friend. What makes this (very common) narrative scenario illustrative of a more general philosophical claim about friendship? He doesn’t say. Nor does he establish criteria for determining when a film is illustrating a philosophical thesis by way of a narrative scenario. This is a problem that bedevils philosophical interpretations of films, which often fail to explain how the film itself (rather than the interpreter) is extrapolating a general philosophical claim from a specific fictional situation. Despite these problems with his examples and arguments, Wartenberg has clarified one possible conception of film as philosophy, which is when a film is used by its authors to creatively illustrate a philosophical claim by extending it in new directions. All that is needed is a film for which there is evidence its makers intentionally utilized it this way, and Vertov’s avant-garde documentary A Sixth Part of the World is just such a film. It was commissioned by Gostorg, the Soviet State Trade Organization, to advertise Gostorg’s role in the Soviet and world economy, and much of the film is devoted to educating its audience about the mutual benefits of trade among the more than 100 million people dispersed across the Soviet Union at the time. For example, a ship from the State Trade Organization is shown transporting goods to a trading post in the far north of Russia. These goods, we are told by an inter-title, are exchanged for furs with the local population, and the same ship then takes the furs to “the land of the capital” where they are “traded for machines for the Soviet Union.” The film is demonstrating that goods available in remote regions of the Soviet Union, such as furs, can be exchanged for goods from other regions within the Soviet Union and then traded for valuable machines from the West. Vertov goes beyond depicting trade, however, and uses the film to illustrate the Marxist thesis that, in a society that has abolished private property, citizens are common owners of the means of production. He does so through an inno Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 177.

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vative use of inter-titles intercut with shots of people from many of the nationalities and ethnicities living within the Soviet Union’s borders. Following the opening section, which takes place outside the Soviet Union in “the land of the capital” and contrasts decadent Western bourgeois enjoying themselves with workers and slaves toiling “in the service of the capital,” the film begins intercutting shots of people throughout the Soviet Union with inter-titles that address them directly. A title reading “You, bathing sheep in the waves of the sea,” is accompanied by shots of men bathing sheep. It is followed by another that reads “And you, bathing sheep in the stream,” and we then see different men washing sheep in a stream in another part of the Soviet Union. This continues for over ten minutes as the film moves quickly across great distances and depicts a wide variety of people. Finally, after shots of women spinning and an inter-title that hails them (“You, spinning your wool in the mountains”), a series of inter-titles in large bold letters concludes “You/all/are the masters/of the Soviet/land.” A shot of jubilant workers facing the camera and cheering is followed by another series: “In your hands lies/the sixth/part/of the world.” We then see a crowd looking at a globe and clapping, and the film begins to display the vast lands and resources that, it insists in inter-titles, belong to the peoples of the Soviet Union. For example, a title announces, “Yours are…the buffalo,” and we see shots of buffalo. The same structure is repeated with goats, camels, and other animals and assets. There is plenty of evidence both internal and external to A Sixth Part of the World that its makers intentionally drew on Marx’s philosophy. The film’s inter-titles explicitly state that the inhabitants of the Soviet Union own the means of production it depicts, and there is abundant evidence from his writings and context that Vertov, a committed Marxist working in a socialist system, aimed, as he put it, to make “it possible for every worker to acquire, through evidence, the conviction that he, the worker, creates all these things himself, and that consequently they belong to him.”26 Moreover, much like Modern Times according to Wartenberg, A Sixth Part of the World isn’t merely restating Marx’s theory but updating it by creatively extending it to a new context that didn’t exist in Marx’s day, namely the one-sixth of the world encompassed by the Soviet Union and its immense array of peoples and lands. It is concretizing what was for Marx a purely abstract thesis, making visible to its Soviet audience the enormous resources putatively now in its collective ­possession. And it does so through innovative techniques, juxtaposing footage from throughout the Soviet Union with inter-titles that directly address and implicate the people depicted in that footage. This includes the film’s viewers, for at one point we are shown footage of spectators in a movie theater watching A Sixth Part of the World. As I noted in the introduction, whether or not we subscribe to the philosophy being illustrated in the film, part of what we aesthetically appreciate about this and other philosophical avant-garde films is the 26  Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 34.

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inventive means they find to instantiate a philosophical thesis. A Sixth Part of the World can, therefore, be said to be doing philosophy in Wartenberg’s sense that its authors are creatively illustrating a philosophical claim by extending it in new directions. Yet, Livingston might not accept this example because he could see it as running afoul of the requirement that films use exclusively cinematic means to philosophize, which leads in turn to what he calls the “insoluble problem of paraphrase.”27 As he points out, for a film to “do philosophy” it is not enough for it to simply record a person philosophizing, for then it would be the person who is doing the philosophy, not the film. Rather, the film must use what Livingston calls “the cinematic medium’s exclusive capacities” to communicate its philosophical content, which include techniques such as editing, camera movement, and focus but exclude language, except when verbalizations are juxtaposed with images. “The cinematic medium’s exclusive capacities involve the possibility of providing an internally articulated, non-linguistic, visual expression of content, as when some idea is indicated by means of the sequential juxtaposition of two or more visual displays or shots,” he writes.28 Although this exclusivity requirement is usually associated with the bolder thesis that films can originate as opposed to merely illustrate philosophy, Wartenberg concurs that, for a film to “do philosophy” even in the more modest sense of illuminating a pre-existing philosophical theory, it cannot simply record someone expounding the theory because then “the film itself has not contributed to the philosophy.”29 Rather, features of the cinematic medium must be used to clarify the theory. According to Livingston, the problem of paraphrase arises from the exclusivity requirement because, if we have to verbally paraphrase the philosophical content of a film in order to articulate it, then this content is not being expressed using exclusively cinematic means. Rather, it is dependent for its communication, at least in part, on the verbal paraphrase. If, on the other hand, we don’t verbally paraphrase a film’s philosophical content, then film-as-­ philosophy advocates have to “fall back on appeals to an indescribable cinematic je ne sais quoi that they believe they have experienced, in the hope that others may have a similar experience.”30 Livingston’s point seems to be that, if it is the cinema that is doing philosophy, then it must use its own means, which are non-linguistic. A film cannot rely on verbal paraphrases to communicate its philosophical content, otherwise it would be the person articulating the philosophy verbally, and not the film itself, that is philosophizing. However, in the absence of verbal paraphrases, we have no way of confirming the existence of a film’s philosophical content let alone its meaning. We are, therefore, impaled on the horns of a dilemma. In its dependence on inter-titles, Livingston might complain, A Sixth Part of the World is resorting to non-cinematic, linguistic  Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 21.  Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 14 (my emphasis). 29  Wartenberg, “Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position,” 168. 30  Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 22. 27 28

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means to express the Marxist thesis about common ownership of the means of production, and, in addition, I have had to paraphrase this thesis in order to show how the film indicates it, thereby also drawing on non-cinematic, linguistic means. It is highly contentious, however, to assume that cinema’s exclusive capacities are non-linguistic, for there are ways in which language can be used cinematically, and Livingston himself points to one, which is the juxtaposition of images and verbalizations. He gives as an example a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) in which a nurse reads a philosophical essay to her patient, and Bergman cuts to “images of a desolate, stony beach…[that] seem to function rhetorically to corroborate the reflections that are read out.”31 For Livingston, this is cinematic because “the overall philosophical import of the sequence is not a function of the verbal discourse alone, but arises at least in part through the combination of different sorts of expressive elements.”32 Similarly, in A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov is combining inter-titles with moving images by referring to and directly addressing the people in the images by way of the titles. Furthermore, the meanings of the images are modified by the inter-titles, as when they tell us that the natural resources we see in the images belong to the Soviet peoples. Without getting into the vexed issue of precisely what is meant by “cinematic,” the juxtaposition of image and text creates meanings in A Sixth Part of the World that are not “a function of the verbal discourse alone,” and, therefore, counts as cinematic in Livingston’s sense. As for the problem of paraphrase, it is hard to see how A Sixth Part of the World runs afoul of it because its philosophical content is so clearly articulated through its cinematic combination of inter-titles and images. Paraphrase is surely not needed to communicate the meaning of a title that states “Yours are …the buffalo” followed by shots of buffalo. But let us suppose that the film’s inter-titles were less explicit, or that Vertov had tried to illustrate Marx’s theory of common ownership without titles, as he famously did a few years later in Man with a Movie Camera. Would the film thereby become dependent on verbal paraphrase to communicate its philosophical meaning? At least two responses to this question are possible. One could accept the premise that in this case, verbal paraphrase would be necessary to fully articulate the film’s philosophical content and yet still argue that the film is doing philosophy in Wartenberg’s sense. After all, philosophy can be multimodal. There is no requirement that it be confined exclusively to one medium when it is expressed. Wittgenstein’s reliance on the duck-rabbit and other schematic figures to make his claims about aspect-dawning does not negate the philosophy he is doing in the linguistic portions of section xi of the Philosophical Investigations. The philosophical content of this section is communicated through both text and image. Similarly, the necessity of a non-cinematic linguistic paraphrase to express the philosophical contents of a film does not annul the philosophizing  Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 15.  Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 15.

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in it. Rather, the film and the paraphrase, it could be argued, supplement each other. In Man with a Movie Camera, as Annette Michelson was the first to show, Vertov uses cinematic visual techniques instead of inter-titles to articulate the Marxist thesis that Soviet citizens are common owners of the means of production. The film’s “visual analogies” between workers in different sectors of the economy along with its rhythmic editing are “the formal instantiation of a general community, of the common stake,” she asserts,33 and once again, there is plenty of evidence from the film and his writings that Vertov intended these techniques to function this way. Perhaps it is the case that nobody understood the philosophical meaning of the film’s visual analogies and rhythmic editing until Michelson penned her seminal analysis, and her paraphrase was, therefore, required to communicate this meaning. But Michelson is still pointing to cinematic techniques in the film that illustrate this philosophical content as well as supporting evidence confirming Vertov’s intentions. The film is, therefore, doing philosophy (in Wartenberg’s sense of creative illustration) using exclusively cinematic means even though it must be supplemented by Michelson’s paraphrase in order for its philosophical content to be fully articulated. As long as a film uses some means exclusive to cinema to do philosophy, it could be maintained, it is not necessary that it only use such means.34 However, it could also be argued that the premise is false, and there is no problem of paraphrase at all. In maintaining that verbal communication about the philosophical content of a film shows that the film is dependent on non-­ cinematic, linguistic means to do philosophy, Livingston, it might be claimed, is conflating the visual articulation of (philosophical) meaning within a film or other visual work, and retroactive verbal communication about that meaning by responders. In fact, visual expressions of meaning and verbal communication about it are distinct, and the former is not necessarily dependent on the latter. Dancers, for example, often express emotions through movements, such as the emotion of being in love. In order to communicate about that emotion once the dance is over, viewers will typically discuss it along with its place in the dance and the means with which the dancers articulated it. Yet, this does not mean the dancers are dependent on this ex post facto verbalization to express the emotion of love, because it is communicated in the dance through their movements. I might indicate my displeasure at a rude and unruly student by throwing him a menacing look, and the student could then tell his friends about it. But it is not the student who is expressing my disapproval when discussing it with his friends. I am through my look. Similarly, we usually communicate about the philosophical content of a film using spoken and written  Annette Michelson, introduction to Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, xxxvii.  As David Davies has astutely pointed out, there is an ambiguity in Livingston’s employment of the term “exclusively cinematic.” By it, he seems to mean both the capacities that are used to do philosophy in film and the requirement that only those capacities be used. But the latter is not warranted, as philosophical expression does not need to be confined to one medium at a time. Davies, “Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium?” 13. 33 34

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language, as I have done with A Sixth Part of the World. However, the film is not relying on my words to express its philosophical thesis about common ownership of the means of production because this thesis is clearly enunciated by its titles and images. Yes, it is true that we typically have to rely on verbal language to communicate about the meaning(s) of images, moving and otherwise, but this does not mean images are dependent on our verbalization to express meaning(s). Unless one subscribes to the view that all meaning is imposed on images by responders and that images, therefore, never communicate, one can allow that images can articulate meanings (including philosophical ones) visually, while acknowledging that interpreters often read meanings into images that are not there. Given there is so much evidence to support the contention that Vertov intentionally used exclusively cinematic means such as innovative combinations of image and text to creatively illustrate Marx’s philosophy in A Sixth Part of the World, there is no reason to think that the film succumbs to the problem of paraphrase just because analysts such as myself verbally paraphrase its philosophical content. It is, therefore, Vertov through A Sixth Part of the World who is doing philosophy in Wartenberg’s sense of creatively illustrating a philosophical claim, not me.

Avant-Garde Films Originating Philosophy Livingston might accept that the makers of A Sixth Part of the World are in some sense independently illustrating philosophy, but he would reject Wartenberg’s argument that they are thereby “doing philosophy.” For Livingston, genuine philosophizing involves making “historically innovative philosophical contributions” rather than merely illustrating “previously published philosophical ideas” such as Marx’s theory.35 Of course not all philosophy is original in this way. But his point is that, if it were really possible to do philosophy in film, filmmakers should sometimes be able to make novel contributions to philosophical knowledge such as arriving at new philosophical arguments or proofs, as happens all the time in written philosophy. Extending a pre-existing philosophical theory in a new direction, as valuable as that might be, hardly qualifies as innovative in this sense, meaning that A Sixth Part of the World isn’t doing philosophy. Noël Carroll agrees, claiming that to be “an instance of moving-image philosophizing, a specimen must develop an original philosophical idea—rather than merely illustrate, recount, or record one,” and he concurs with Livingston that “it must do so in such a way that the art of the moving image plays some role in the articulation of the philosophical point at issue.”36 Meanwhile, Livingston might admit that the requirement that films use exclusively cinematic means to communicate philosophical content does not necessarily result in the problem of paraphrase as I have contended, yet still  Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 13.  Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 174. 35 36

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maintain that in practice it does. Verbal philosophy usually articulates meaning independently of any supplemental or external paraphrase, and the same should be true of film at least some of the time if it is genuinely capable of doing philosophy in the sense of making original philosophical contributions. “What must be found,” as Livingston usefully puts it, “is a case where a filmmaker uses cinematic devices alone successfully to formulate an innovative and sophisticated philosophical line of thought or argument,”37 and Livingston doubts that there are any such cases. Both Carroll and Aaron Smuts disagree, claiming to have found examples of avant-garde films that make (or in Smuts’s case could have made) original philosophical contributions using exclusively cinematic means. Smuts suggests that the famous “God and Country” sequence in Eisenstein’s October is just such an example because it employs montage to advance a philosophical argument by way of analogy. The sequence occurs between the February and October revolutions of 1917 when the Russian Bolsheviks are being enjoined to defend Petrograd against a counterrevolutionary general, Kornilov, who is advancing on the city with his troops “In the Name of God and Country.” The narrative pauses as we are presented with a series of shots of religious buildings and objects, beginning with recognizably Christian ones, followed by more “pagan” and “primitive” artifacts, and then the narrative resumes. Much like Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morals, Smuts believes, “Eisenstein is offering a genealogy of sorts, comparing Christianity to its supposed precursors. The viewer understands that the two classes of artifacts are being compared, and the overall suggestion is that the Christian artifacts are no better than pagan statuary… The visual similarity between the artifacts lends support for the atheist conclusion.”38 Smuts acknowledges that Eisenstein’s argument is hardly original in Livingston’s robust sense, given that it is merely promulgating the Marxist critique of religion. Yet, he maintains, it could have been innovative if others had not anticipated it. Moreover, despite appearances to the contrary, it is independent of its Marxist context and verbal paraphrase because the sequence would be “comprehensible in a climate not so steeped in Marxism.”39 This example is hardly convincing. Any film would be novel if its philosophical content hadn’t been anticipated. The point is that, in recapitulating the familiar Marxist critique of religion, the actual “God and Country” sequence doesn’t offer an original philosophical argument in Livingston’s sense (although it might do so in Wartenberg’s sense of extending a pre-existing philosophical 37  Livingston allows that “some avant-garde filmmakers have used their films to make implicit and insightful interventions in ongoing debates about the very nature of the cinematic medium.” But he continues: “That a few non-fiction and avant-garde films have been used to make points in debates over the nature of cinema hardly instills confidence about the cinema’s capacity to make exclusively cinematic and innovative epistemic contributions on philosophical topics more generally” (Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 35–36). 38  Aaron Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 4 (Fall 2009): 415–416. 39  Smuts, “Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis,” 416.

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claim in a new direction). It, therefore, isn’t an example of a film doing philosophy (again in Livingston’s sense). Furthermore, as Livingston points out, it is not the case that the sequence can be understood independently of verbal paraphrase, given that the juxtaposition of Christian with pagan imagery “does not on its own specify what the intended relation between these images is meant to be.”40 The intended meaning of the sequence, in other words, is hardly clear, and it can easily be understood differently, as I know from teaching the film. Those of my students unacquainted with Marxism often interpret it as an affirmation of religious diversity rather than a critique of religion, and I must paraphrase its meaning to set them straight. Indeed, arguably, Smuts himself misinterprets the sequence in claiming that its viewer is supposed to compare the Christian with the pagan artifacts. In fact, Eisenstein maintained that it was our concept of God with which the images were supposed to be contrasted: Here a conflict arises between the concept “God” and its symbolisation. Whereas idea and image are completely synonymous in the first Baroque image, they grow further apart with each subsequent image. We retain the description ‘God’ and show idols that in no way correspond with our own image of this concept. From this we are to draw anti-religious conclusions as to what the divine as such really is.41

Either way, while the sequence uses exclusively cinematic means, it is hardly an unambiguous example of original philosophical theorizing that can be understood independently of verbal paraphrase. Carroll turns to Ernie Gehr’s Structural film Serene Velocity as his example. As a Structural film, Serene Velocity foregrounds its own structure in an effort to make its viewers reflect on the nature of film and their experience of it. The film consists of a shot of an empty hallway filmed with a zoom lens. The film has been stopped every four frames to alternate the lens back and forth between different focal lengths. At first, the distance between the focal lengths is small and the resultant image appears relatively static, but gradually it increases until the image seems to pulsate violently. The effect of apparent motion is created not by the zoom lens, which never moves during the filming, but by the quick alternation between still images lasting a sixth of a second (four frames), each shot at different focal lengths. This contrast between stillness and movement, Carroll contends, alerts the viewer to the difference between still and moving images and to the fact that the rapid juxtaposition of still images is “the secret behind the movement in all films.”42 The film thereby “proposes movement as an essential feature of cinema” using exclusively cinematic means, and it is also a “significant piece of original philosophizing” because it precedes the first philosophical articulation of this proposal in print in Arthur Danto’s 1979 paper “Moving Pictures.”43

 Livingston, Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, 27.  Sergei Eisenstein, S.  M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings 1922–34, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), 180. 42  Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 178. 43  Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 178. 40 41

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Carroll’s example perhaps does a better job than Smuts’s of meeting the originality requirement for films to do philosophy, and it certainly employs characteristically cinematic techniques. But it is not clear that it makes a philosophical claim about the essence of cinema, or that it does so independently of verbal paraphrase. Although it foregrounds the distinction between still and moving images, and shows how the latter arise from the former in cinema, it is by no means obvious from watching the film that it is advancing an argument about the nature of cinema. After all, it simply juxtaposes still shots of an empty corridor taken at different focal lengths. How does it thereby assert that movement is a feature of all moving images? Carroll responds that the film is equivalent to a thought experiment in philosophy that asks us to imagine a hypothetical situation illustrating a broader philosophical point. Just as philosophers offer thought experiments as a “form of argumentation” so, too, can artists, and Serene Velocity counts as one.44 Furthermore, when presenting their work at conferences, philosophers often don’t spell out the meaning of a thought experiment. Nevertheless, “everyone familiar with the context of the debate sees its putative significance,” and the same is true of Serene Velocity.45 Although Carroll acknowledges that average filmgoers lacking knowledge of experimental film would not have understood it, “those who followed the conversation of avant-garde, experimental film knew right out of the gate, so to say, what was at stake in Serene Velocity.”46 It seems unlikely, however, that philosophers would present thought experiments in the absence of any contextualization at all. While they may not always explicitly elucidate them, thought experiments are usually included within a larger presentation of a thesis or position in a written text or talk, and it is hard to think of a work of philosophy consisting exclusively of a single thought experiment. Serene Velocity is, therefore, dissimilar to most, if not all, philosophical thought experiments because it is not contained within a broader philosophical theory or perspective. Moreover, whereas the thought experiment, in Carroll’s words, “is an argumentative strategy that works by guiding the reasoning of the listener to the desired conclusion ineluctably,”47 Serene Velocity does not lead viewers to the inescapable conclusion that movement is essential to film. One may agree that it suggests how movement is derived from still images. But nothing about this directs us to conclude that movement is an essential feature of all cinema. Carroll would probably reply that the context of avant-garde filmmaking of the period would have made it clear to informed 44  Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 180. However, as David Davies points out, the cognitive value of thought experiments has been questioned in the philosophy of science, something that has been overlooked by philosophers of art who appeal to the analogy between thought experiments and films to bolster the cognitive value of the latter. Davies, “Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium?” 16. 45  Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 181. 46  Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 181. 47  Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” 180 (my emphasis).

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viewers that Gehr was making a claim about the nature of cinema in general, given that other Structural filmmakers were engaged in a similar task, which they often acknowledged verbally and in their writings. However, as we shall see, Structural filmmakers were engaged in other cognitive tasks at the time too such as investigating consciousness and perception. How do we know Gehr wasn’t illuminating our capacity to see still images as moving rather than the essence of cinema? More importantly, this means that, once again, we have an example of an avant-garde film that fails to meet Livingston’s independence requirement because it depends on verbal paraphrase to communicate its philosophical meaning. It is only because Gehr and like-minded filmmakers independently verbalized their intention to make statements about the nature of cinema in their films that we are aware of these films’ metaphysical ambitions. Rather than making a philosophical argument about the essence of cinema, I suspect that Serene Velocity is an example of a film that, in Jinhee Choi’s more cautious formulation, “demands philosophical reflection from the viewer… with regard to the film medium.”48 Due to the vivid experience it affords of apparent motion created by still images, the film might lead viewers to contemplate the nature of cinema. As Shawn Loht puts it in advancing his “phenomenological” conception of film-as-philosophy, “there are conclusions Serene Velocity seems to permit, insofar as it permits any conclusions at all. What is decisive is not what the film concretely presents, so much as the possible insight engendered by the viewing experience.”49 Either way, we are still in search of a film that can express its philosophical content independently of verbal paraphrase, like written philosophy. Perhaps a sequence in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera fits the bill. Although it is deservedly one of the most famous avant-garde works in the history of cinema, unlike Gehr’s film, Vertov’s was designed for a general viewership unacquainted with the avant-garde’s philosophical interest in the nature of art and media. In many respects, it is also an attempt to advertise the benefits of socialism to a partly illiterate audience ignorant of abstract Marxist theory, which is one reason it eschews inter-titles. It, therefore, doesn’t presuppose knowledge of a specialized theoretical context on the part of its viewers, and in order render Marxist theses comprehensible, it translates them into a concrete visual form (such as the earlier examined Marxist contention about common ownership of the means of production which is conveyed through visual analogies and rhythmic editing). Yet, like Gehr’s film, it tries to show its spectators something about the nature of cinema (along with filmmaking more broadly). I have in mind the well-known sequence in which Vertov suddenly brings to a halt a shot of a fast-moving horse-drawn carriage, leaving us with a still image of the horse for a few seconds. This is followed by several still images from shots that we see in motion elsewhere in the film, including of the women riding in the carriage. We are subsequently shown close-ups of strips of celluloid  Choi, “Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy,” 168.  Loht, “Phenomenological Preconditions of the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy,” 177.

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along with a film editing lab and table with reels of film carefully catalogued by subject matter on the shelves. A woman (Elizaveta Svilova, Vertov’s wife and collaborator), is working at the editing table, and a close-up reveals her cutting into a reel of film containing a series of still frames of a woman’s face. We then see the animated shot derived from these frames as the woman in the shot smiles. This pattern is repeated two more times. On each occasion, a close-up of a strip of celluloid consisting of still frames of a face is followed by the shot resulting from these frames, now animated. We cut to another still image of an old woman’s face and one of the city streets before briefly returning to one of the animated shots of a face we have just been shown. The shot of the old woman’s face comes to life as it begins moving, as does the shot of the city street, and we end with the horse-drawn carriage with which the sequence began, now in motion again. Like Gehr, Vertov is clearly trying to distinguish between still and moving images and demonstrate how the latter are derived from the former in cinema. Unlike Gehr, he does so in a far more comprehensible fashion by contrasting shots in motion with the still images from which their movement arises. Three times we see strips of celluloid containing still frames followed by the animated shots resulting from these frames being set in motion. Even for somebody previously unacquainted with film technology, it would be hard to escape the conclusion that these moving images consist of the still images contained in the strips of celluloid that have subsequently been made to move. Vertov also broadens this conclusion by showing still images from other shots that are then set in motion, thereby encouraging us to infer that moving images in general, not just these shots, consist of still images that are made to move. Other aspects of the film also prompt this inference, such as the opening sequence in which a projectionist in a theater threads up a movie projector with a reel of celluloid that consists of still frames while an accompanying orchestra and audience wait in the theater’s auditorium for the movie to begin. Once the reel moves though the projector, the orchestra starts playing and the film commences. Even for Vertov’s least educated viewers it would be difficult to come away from Man with a Movie Camera without some sense that moving images are created by still frames that are set in motion by a projector, and that movement is what transforms still images into cinema. The film, therefore, does a better job of meeting Livingston’s independence requirement than Serene Velocity. If Carroll is correct, it also is an example of original philosophizing about the nature of cinema, given that it anticipates Danto’s paper by 50 years, and it most assuredly employs what Livingston calls exclusively cinematic techniques to press its case, principally editing. Yet, the fact that it is so difficult to alight upon unambiguous examples of avant-garde films in which their makers “do philosophy” in Livingston’s sense of using “cinematic devices alone successfully to formulate an innovative and sophisticated philosophical line of thought or argument” suggests that avant-­ garde films do not, for the most part, originate philosophy unlike the verbal communications of philosophers. This might be because, as Carl Plantinga has

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argued, “film images alone may imply or suggest propositions, but cannot assert them with the directness of verbal language. Films without words can communicate conceptual information, but cannot match the efficiency, intricacy, directness, nuance, and complexity of argument that words allow.”50 Whatever the reason, we need to look elsewhere for more common ways in which, along with illustrating philosophy, avant-garde films can be philosophical.

Avant-Garde Films Enacting Philosophy While films that fall into this category could be said to be illustrating a philosophy, it seems to me they differ from works such as A Sixth Part of the World. To illustrate means to shed light on something and illuminate it, to elucidate and explain it perhaps by giving an example. In A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov illustrates the philosophical thesis that inhabitants of the Soviet Union are common owners of the means of production by stating it in his inter-titles and then displaying instances of the animals, lands, and other resources they own. However, in some avant-garde films, there is no attempt to illustrate a philosophical claim in this sense even though the film is deeply informed by it. Rather, the filmmaker accepts it as truth and puts it into practice in the film. It is the results or effects of the philosophical argument that the film makes manifest, not the philosophy itself. The filmmaker thereby enables the viewer to experience an approximation of what the world would look and sound like if the philosophy were true.51 The work of French Impressionist and avant-garde filmmaker Jean Epstein provides a good example. Due to the influence of Henri Bergson and other philosophical and scientific sources, Epstein believed that reality is constantly changing in time, that it is in a perpetual state of becoming rather than being. Furthermore, he maintained that the mobility of reality, the fact that it is constantly changing in time, is invisible to the naked human eye, and that the cinema had revealed it. As he put it, “Such also is the clairvoyance of cinematography which represents [the] world in its overall, continuous mobility. Faithful to the etymology of its name, it discovers movement where our eye sees nothing but stasis.”52 The reason film is able to uncover the mobility of reality, Epstein argued, is because it lays bare the fourth dimension of time, which we cannot access unassisted. “But the specific quality of this new projected world is to make another perspective of matter evident, that of time,” he claimed. “Time is the fourth dimension of a universe of space-­ time. Cinematography currently is the only instrument that records an event according to a system of four reference points. In that, it is proving superior to 50  Carl R.  Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 73. 51  I have borrowed the following two paragraphs from my essay “Epstein, Sound and the Return to Classical Film Theory,” Mise au Point no. 8 (2016). 52  Jean Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 2: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 189.

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man, who seems constitutionally unsuited to capture a continuous event in four dimensions all by himself.”53 In his later writings, Epstein extends, with qualifications, this theory of cinema as revealing the mobility of reality to film sound. The principal visual techniques Epstein recommended in his writings and used in his films for revealing the mobility of reality were the close-up as well as slow and fast motion. As he writes about these latter techniques, “slow and accelerated motion in particular reveal to us a world suddenly deprived of one of its most evident material qualities: solidity. It becomes a thoroughly fluid world, where the permanence of forms has vanished into a space that no longer knows any symmetry and a time that has ceased to be uniform.”54 It is not surprising, therefore, to find him exploring the application of these techniques, especially deceleration, to sound for similar reasons. The eye has to resort to a closer position and to spatial magnification with a telescope to realize that a fence, which seemed like a continuous surface, is in fact made of posts fixed at intervals. The eye has to use deceleration, that is magnification in time, to see that the jab of a boxer, which looked like a simple, rectilinear movement, is in actuality a combination of multiple muscular movements with infinite variations. Likewise, the ear needs a magnifying glass for sound in time— that is, slowed-down sound—to find out for instance that in a finer reality the monotonous and confusing howling of a storm is made up of a host of very different sounds never heard before: an apocalypse of screams, cooing, rumble, cheeping, detonations, tones and accents, most of which do not even have a name.55

In his late film Le Tempestaire (1947), Epstein puts this theory into practice in the climactic scene when the storm master takes control of the storm and the sound of the storm is slowed down on the soundtrack. By slowing it down, the sound is revealed to consist of a number of different, constantly changing, sounds, which for Epstein offers proof of the fundamentally temporal, mobile nature of reality. Epstein gives as well the “more modest example” of “the noise of a door opening or closing. Slowed down, this humble, ordinary noise reveals its complicated nature, its individual characters, its possibilities for dramatic, comic, poetic, musical signification.”56 By slowing down the sound of the storm, Epstein is enacting his philosophical belief that film can reveal the mobile nature of reality. He, thereby, enables the viewer to experience something like what the world would sound like if it were mobile. This seems different from merely illustrating the philosophical thesis that reality is mobile, and it is doubtful that audiences would be aware  Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” 189.  Epstein, “Photogénie and the Imponderable,” 189. 55  Jean Epstein, “The Slow Motion of Sound,” in Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N.  Paul (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2012), 382. 56  Jean Epstein, “The Slow Motion of Sound,” 382. 53 54

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that the slowed-down sound is exemplifying an antecedent philosophical proposition. Rather, Epstein’s goal is to make his spectators experience the mobility of reality, or at least a representation of it, firsthand so that they can see for themselves that the universe is mobile. In this respect, Epstein’s work is similar to an avant-garde filmmaker like Stan Brakhage’s. Like many in the Romantic tradition, Brakhage believed that language acquisition inevitably blinded people to the visual richness of the world. Once we possess language, he argued, we no longer see things fully because we categorize them using the concepts bequeathed to us by language. “Imagine an eye,” he stated, “which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?”57 In his films, however, Brakhage doesn’t so much illustrate this philosophical claim as enact it by trying to approximate a visual experience that is “foreign to language.”58 He puts it into practice by employing techniques that attempt to recover some of the visual abundance of the world that is lost with language-learning. As with Epstein’s slowed-down sound, a viewer of Brakhage’s films might not be aware that they are motivated by a philosophical theory. Rather, Brakhage’s intention is not to illustrate a theory, but to make audiences experience the visual lushness of the world by way of his films and thereby realize that their ordinary perception of reality is impoverished. My argument about avant-garde films enacting philosophy may seem similar to Thomas Wartenberg’s claim about mainstream films such as The Matrix (1999). Wartenberg believes that The Matrix “screens Descartes’ skeptical deception hypothesis by showing us a fictional world of which the deception hypothesis is true.”59 This is because the world its characters appear to inhabit and believe to be real is in fact an interactive computer-generated illusion fed to their minds by computers in order to distract them while energy is extracted from their bodies. Wartenberg sees this as an updating of Descartes’s famous thought experiment to the effect that the world around him may be a perfect illusion created by a demon. Like Le Tempestaire, The Matrix doesn’t simply illustrate this philosophical content, however. According to Wartenberg, it puts it into practice by forcing its viewers to experience it too. This is because spectators are placed in the same epistemic position as the film’s major protagonist, Neo, and only discover when he does that the world he inhabits is a computer-­ generated illusion. The diegetic world audiences take to be real at the beginning of the film turns out to be a deception. According to Wartenberg, this firsthand experience of being deceived about the ontology of Neo’s reality leads the spectator to question whether the reality she inhabits might also be an illusion, much like Descartes’s original thought experiment does.

 Stan Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” in The Avant-Garde Film, 120.  Brakhage, “From Metaphors on Vision,” 120. 59  Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 67. 57 58

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I have no doubt that The Matrix might lead viewers to question their reality, especially when they are made aware of the relevant philosophical issues. However, Wartenberg provides no evidence internal or external to The Matrix that its authors are intentionally updating “Descartes’s skeptical deception hypothesis,” or that its narrative scenario is intended to illustrate philosophical content of this kind. Nor does he explain why, in the absence of a philosophical interlocutor, the film’s viewer “must confront the question of whether it might not be the case that all of her perceptual experience could be what it now is without there being a world that resembles those perceptions.”60 It is perfectly possible for audiences, even philosophically informed ones, to understand the film as a story about the dangers computers might pose to human beings in the future without wondering whether the world they inhabit now (including, presumably, the movie theater in which they are sitting and the film they are watching) is a perceptual and epistemic illusion of some kind. Moreover, in insisting that the film is a thought experiment like Descartes’s, Wartenberg overlooks significant disanalogies between the two, not the least of which is that Descartes’s thought experiment is explicitly presented as such within a larger philosophical discourse (the Meditations) that addresses metaphysical issues and arrives at metaphysical conclusions (cogito ergo sum, etc.), while The Matrix completely lacks such a context and conclusions. Meanwhile, unlike Wartenberg, I have provided evidence that filmmakers such as Epstein are intentionally enacting philosophical theories in their films, and I have not claimed that viewers are necessarily made aware by their films of these theories. In fact, I suspect that most viewers of Le Tempestaire would have no idea from watching the film that it is motivated, in part, by a Bergsonian conception of reality.

Avant-Garde Films Occasioning Philosophical Reflection We have already seen how avant-garde films can prompt the viewer to reflect on the nature of the cinematic medium and potentially, in Choi’s words, “reconsider and revise his or her own conceptions of film.”61 While this may not count as “doing philosophy” in a robust sense because it doesn’t involve creatively illustrating or originating a philosophical thesis about the medium, it is certainly of philosophical or cognitive value. In addition to challenging spectators’ preconceptions about film, it can aid those who construct philosophical theories about the nature of cinema, just as avant-garde artworks have assisted philosophers in building definitions of art. In particular, avant-garde films can help theorists avoid going down the wrong path by providing vivid “counterexamples to proposed necessary truths” about cinema’s essence, as Bruce

 Wartenberg, Thinking on Screen, 67.  Choi, “Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy,” 168.

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Russell has claimed of films in general.62 For example, while I doubt that Serene Velocity is itself making an argument to the effect that movement is an essential feature of cinema, it could well suggest this to theorists of the moving image who might otherwise be tempted not to include motion in their definitions. As Trevor Poench astutely suggests about the avant-garde films he draws on in proposing his ontological theory of cinema: Using various instruments, materials, and physical magnitudes, [these films] intuitively explore cinema’s ontology. These explorations are not works of philosophy. They are hardly rigorous truth-seeking procedures providing evidence and arguments in support of their authors’ conclusions. Rather, they are vehicles for their makers’ philosophically pertinent ideas about cinema’s nature. By putting these ideas into practice and giving them form, the artists supply us with concrete as well as conceptual resources that we can mobilize to debate and refine our ontological hypotheses.63

As noted before, avant-garde film’s capacity to provoke reflection on philosophical issues has not been confined to definitions of art and artistic media but extends to, among other topics, perception and consciousness, as Annette Michelson was the first to show. For instance, according to Michelson, Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow’s Structural film Wavelength (1967), consisting of a gradual, uneven, 45-minute zoom across a SoHo loft, can be seen as exemplifying “in the splendid purity of its one, slow movement, the notion of the ‘horizon’ characteristic of every subjective process and fundamental as a trait of intentionality.”64 The zoom can be said to demonstrate that, following Edmund Husserl, “to every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past.”65 Michelson’s point is that, because we only gradually become aware of what it is zooming into on the opposite wall of the loft, the zoom functions as a slow-motion “analogue of consciousness”66 that foregrounds the intentionality of perception, the fact that perception is “directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world.”67 The viewer is forced to experience the intentionality of perception by the zoom, and she, thereby, becomes acutely aware of its “aboutness.” By creating an extreme, exaggerated, drawn-­ out version of a fundamental feature of consciousness and making the spectator partake of it, the film manifests this feature to the audience, thereby prompting philosophical contemplation of it.

62  Bruce Russell, “The Philosophical Limits of Film,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, MA; Blackwell, 2006), 390. 63  Trevor Ponech, “The Substance of Cinema,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 187. 64  Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 174. 65  Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 174–175. 66  Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 172. 67  John R. Searle, Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 13.

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One could object that, like Wartenberg, Michelson might be reading this philosophical meaning into the film. However, Michelson’s thesis is not as vulnerable to this objection because it is not a claim about filmmakers intentionally communicating philosophical theses through their films. When he states that a film is philosophizing, it will be recalled, Wartenberg means that “the film’s makers are the ones who are actually doing philosophy.” When he asserts that The Matrix “screens Descartes’s skeptical deception hypothesis,” he is saying that those who made the film, the Wachowski Brothers, are conveying this hypothesis through their film (even though he provides no evidence that they are doing so). Although Snow maintained that Wavelength is “all about seeing,”68 it is unlikely that he deliberately sought to illustrate a philosophical proposition about the intentionality of consciousness. Rather, Michelson’s argument is that avant-garde filmmakers, like other modern artists, are interested in investigating our perception of reality. They therefore devise innovative cinematic structures in their films as analogies for perception and consciousness. Through her own perceptual experience of these structures, the viewer reflects on the nature of perception and consciousness and potentially arrives at philosophical conclusions about them. It is “our perception of the work of art [that] informs us of the nature of consciousness,” Michelson believes, not the work itself.69 Unlike, say, a film such as Modern Times that might occasion consideration of a philosophical theme like alienation on the part of spectators because one or more of its characters are alienated, avant-­ garde films such as Wavelength require viewers to experience the philosophical problematic themselves. Such films adopt a first-person as opposed to third-­ person perspective on the philosophical subject at hand. Viewers of Wavelength actually experience the intentionality of perception by way of its zoom rather than witnessing it being experienced by others. Michelson felt that cinema is uniquely equipped among the arts to occasion such philosophically rich experiences because it possesses techniques that function as direct equivalents for consciousness and perception: “There are cinematic works which present themselves as analogues of consciousness in its constitutive and reflexive modes, as though inquiry into the nature and processes of experience had found in this century’s art form, a striking, a uniquely direct presentational mode.”70 Although Michelson initially tended to focus on perception and consciousness in her writings, avant-garde films can promote reflection on other philosophical topics too. Take Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971), a 35-minute Structural film consisting of 13 shots (exclusive of titles), each depicting a different photograph resting on a hot plate. Each shot lasts several minutes as the initially intact photograph burns to ash while we hear a man, presumably Frampton himself, describing the often-amusing autobiographical circumstances surrounding the making of the photograph. However, we soon realize  Quoted in Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 173.  Michelson, “Art and the Structuralist Perspective,” 57. 70  Michelson, “Toward Snow,” 172. 68 69

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that image and sound are out of synch. The description we are hearing is about the photograph we will see in the next shot (with the exception of the final description, whose subject we never see). The photograph we are currently observing was the subject of the previous shot’s commentary (with the exception of the first photograph, whose description we never hear). The film, therefore, forces the audience to perform a complex cognitive operation in which we compare the description we heard in the previous shot to the photograph we are now viewing, all while anticipating the photograph we will see in the next shot based upon the commentary we are now hearing. Like Wavelength, the film makes the viewer undergo an unusual temporal experience, one in which she is recalling the past while observing the present and anticipating the future, and its structure can, therefore, be thought of as an exaggerated “analogue for consciousness.” It also arguably highlights the incommensurability between language and images, given that the photograph we foresee based on the description we are currently hearing inevitably diverges from the photograph we eventually see. We repeatedly experience a discrepancy between the photograph we imagine from its verbal description and the one we are subsequently shown. In addition, the disjunction between image and sound creates a number of ironic mismatches concerning the theme of identity persisting through time. The photograph in the second shot is of the artist Carl Andre. Frampton’s soundtrack, however, announces that the face in the photograph is “my own, or rather, it was my own” because it is describing the photograph we will see in the subsequent shot, a self-portrait of Frampton. Meanwhile, it turns out that it is the filmmaker Michael Snow intoning the descriptions on the soundtrack, not Frampton, and these descriptions often make reference to the mutability of identity, as when Frampton (through Snow’s voice) confesses that he takes “some comfort in realizing that my entire physical body has been replaced more than once since it made this portrait of its face.” Indeed, the film is about Frampton’s transition from a still photographer to a filmmaker. By burning the photographs, Frampton both says goodbye to them and turns them into moving images as they curl up and disintegrate on the hot plate. Inasmuch as the question of how identity persists through time as well as the relation between words and images are venerable philosophical topics, the film is, therefore, prompting viewers to reflect on philosophical issues beyond perception and consciousness. It could be argued that films such as Wavelength and (nostalgia) are “doing philosophy” at least in Wartenberg’s sense of illustrating philosophical theses about consciousness, identity, and so forth, much like A Sixth Part of the World illustrates Marx’s theory of common ownership. However, whereas Vertov’s film intentionally and clearly illuminates a specific philosophy, these films don’t present pre-existing philosophical claims to the viewer. Wavelength does not assert that intentionality is a fundamental trait of consciousness, nor does (nostalgia) state that the relation between words and images is incommensurable. Nor, of course, can they be said to “do philosophy” in the sense of originating

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a theory because the philosophical ideas with which they are associated are hardly novel. Nor, I suspect, can they be described as philosophical thought experiments because nothing in them leads viewers to arrive at inescapable metaphysical conclusions, and they are not contained within broader philosophical theories or perspectives. Rather than philosophizing themselves, these films ask the spectator to “do philosophy” in the sense of thinking about philosophical issues suggested by their structures. To paraphrase Ponech, they are vehicles for their makers’ ideas about philosophical topics such as consciousness and the relation between words and images, and they supply viewers with resources for contemplating these topics. Nevertheless, they have cognitive value, in that they can occasion reflection on these topics due to their powerful experiential dimension. It may well be that we leave a screening of (nostalgia) with a strong sense of the incommensurability between language and images because we have just repeatedly experienced this incommensurability for ourselves. (nostalgia) illustrates how, even though film cannot compete with verbal philosophy in its capacity to originate philosophical theories, it outshines verbal philosophy at generating philosophically rich perceptual experiences for viewers. Furthermore, the aesthetic value of films like Wavelength lies partly in the inventiveness with which they prompt philosophical contemplation and is therefore connected to their philosophical or cognitive value. In this respect, they are like the other films examined in this chapter that are philosophical in the sense that they illustrate, enact, or, putatively, originate philosophy. Whether or not we agree with the philosophical ideas they communicate or prompt—and it is usually the case that they don’t stand up to scrutiny—it is the ingenuity with which avant-garde films accomplish this cognitive task that we admire aesthetically. This shows not only that there are robust connections between philosophy and avant-garde film, but that philosophy has functioned as an engine of creativity for avant-garde filmmakers, propelling them to new aesthetic heights. For this reason, if nothing else, the role philosophy has played in avant-garde filmmaking should be valued.71

Bibliography Brakhage, Stan. 1987. From ‘Metaphors on Vision’. In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 120–128. New York: Anthology Film Archives. Carroll, Noël. 2006. Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 173–185. Choi, Jinhee. 2006. Apperception on Display: Structural Films and Philosophy. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 165–172. Davies, Stephen. 2006. Authors’ Intentions, Literary Interpretation, and Literary Value. British Journal of Aesthetics 46 (3, July): 223–247. 71  Thanks to Ted Nannicelli, Noël Carroll and Shawn Loht for their comments on earlier versions of this text.

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Davies, David. 2008. Can Film Be a Philosophical Medium? Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics 5 (2, August): 1–20. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1988. S.  M. Eisenstein: Selected Works, Writings 1922–34, vol. 1. Trans. and Ed. Richard Taylor. London: BFI. Epstein, Jean. 1988. Photogénie and the Imponderable (1935). In French Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, 1907–1939, vol. 2: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel, 188–192. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. The Slow Motion of Sound. In Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, ed. Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul, 381–382. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Judovitz, Dalia. 1996. Anemic Vision in Duchamp: Cinema as Readymade. In Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 46–57. Cambridge: MIT Press. Livingston, Paisley. 2008. Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy. Philosophy Compass 3 (4): 590–603. ———. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loht, Shawn. 2015. Phenomenological Preconditions of the Concept of Film-as-­ Philosophy. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 2 (2): 171–185. Michelson, Annette. 1969. Bodies in Space: Film as ‘Carnal Knowledge’. Artforum VII (6, February): 53–64. ———. 1970. Art and the Structuralist Perspective. In On the Future of Art, 37–59. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a Viking Compass Book. ———. 1984. Introduction. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, xv–lxi. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1987. Toward Snow. In The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney, 172–183. New York: Anthology Film Archives. Plantinga, Carl R. 1997. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ponech, Trevor. 2006. The Substance of Cinema. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 187–198. Russell, Bruce. 2006. The Philosophical Limits of Film. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 387–390. Malden: Blackwell. Searle, John R. 2015. Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sheehan, Rebecca A. 2012. Stan Brakhage, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the Renewed Encounter with the Everyday. Screen 53 (2, Summer): 118–135. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2011. New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. London: Continuum. Smith, Murray. 2016. Film, Philosophy, and the Varieties of Aesthetic Value. In Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomas-Jones, 182–201. New York: Routledge. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (4, Fall): 409–420. Turvey, Malcolm. 2016. Epstein, Sound and the Return to Classical Film Theory. Mise au Point 8. https://journals.openedition.org/map/2039. Accessed 11 July 2017.

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Vertov, Dziga. 1984. In Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2006. Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can be Philosophy. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (1, Winter): 19–32. ———. 2007. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. ———. 2016. Film as Philosophy: The Pro Position. In Current Controversies in the Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomas-Jones, 165–181. New York: Routledge.

PART VI

Documentary

CHAPTER 26

Show and Tell: The Identification of Documentary Film Vitor Moura

The congress is over and you are back in your hotel room. The weather outside is damp and cold and you feel tired after three intense days filled with plenary lectures and panel discussions. You are lying in your bed, zapping through the TV channels. Suddenly, a film catches your attention and you hesitate to press the remote-control button again. You are taken by a long travelling through the ruins of a Western-looking palace in India—empty rooms, shattered windows, broken china, wind, dust.1 You increase the volume and start to hear a soundtrack of bird song, the wind whistling in the broken glass, footsteps and creaking wood floors, even though the house looks deserted and dilapidated. Unfamiliar with the local language and the setting of regional cable channels, you have no immediate means to conclude anything about the film’s identity. Is it fiction or nonfiction? Cinéma d’auteur or a poetic documentary about post-colonialism? Still under the influence of all the speculative atmosphere of the congress, you digress about the proper distinction between these categories. “Necessary and sufficient conditions,” “ontological demarcation” and “intentionality” are terms that pop into your mind while you softly wonder at the mesmerizing images of a long-abandoned garden. After a while, you realize that you can’t determine what kind of film you’re watching just by looking at it and you start considering several hypotheses. Still trying to assimilate your colleagues’ rigorous arguing, you think you could solve the riddle by using a kind of dichotomous key. A or B? You ask yourself again the question “Does it matter whether I’m watching fiction or nonfiction?” 1

 Zarina Bhimji, Yellow Patch (2011).

V. Moura (*) Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_26

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“No, it doesn’t matter” You imagine three ways of considering the inexistence of a distinction between fiction and nonfiction film: either because all film is fictional or because all film is documental, or because “fiction” and “nonfiction” are modes of reception and not ontological categories, and it is up to you to decide which one to adopt. In order to follow these possibilities, “documentary film” becomes a more useful and constrained concept than that of “nonfiction film.” Documentaries are also the paradigmatic case of nonfiction film and the debate on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction film usually takes the form of a debate on the conceptual boundaries (or lack thereof) between fiction film and documentaries. Arguably, no other concept in film theory has been more discussed and scrutinized. Ever since the first manifestations of the genre, its definition and value have been the matter for debate among film scholars and philosophers. Naturally, documentaries do not exhaust the full extension of the “nonfiction film” concept, and there are other genres that participate in that extension—such as propaganda film, the early Lumière actualités, ciné-poems, metacinema, commemorative and autobiographical films—but none has been so deeply connected to the possibility of identifying the proper boundaries that separate fiction and nonfiction film. The idea of subverting the viewing of “documentaries” qua documentaries strikes you as particularly intriguing. They are perceived by many people as objective renderings of events and thought to serve an important didactic function. Besides, you can’t minimize the political role that documentaries may acquire and the militant impact that many have upon their audiences. They seem to constitute the quintessence of what cinema is all about, fulfilling the mission of an essentially realistic medium and paying due tribute to its photographic basis, which was, as someone suggested, Nature’s own way of returning to us (to itself) the “visible reality” that disappeared in the cosmology of modern scientists such as Einstein or Heisenberg.2 But photographic realism was never a consensual view, and the charisma of documentary films seems to have followed the ups and downs of the reputation of realism within the community of film artists and theorists. For a moment, you consider the fascinating thought that documentaries are just a sub-genre of fiction films. They could be perceived as constituting a fictional mode, only somewhat more homogeneous and complex. They are more homogenous because normally the person who conceives it is also the one who directs it, whereas most fiction films are adaptations of someone else’s literary work. Documentaries are also more complex because they are usually contrived as a series of heterogeneous images with distinct provenances and distinct ­symbolic functions.3 There is also the claim that all representation is essentially 2  Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 3  Jacques Rancière, La Fable Cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 203: “Le cinéma ‘documentaire’ est un mode de la fiction à la fois plus homogène et plus complexe. Plus homogène parce

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fictional, and film necessarily involves a number of stylistic, narrative and perspectival choices that should make anyone rather skeptical of the traditional realist view according to which photography and film share this special ability to deliver the full extent of the “pro-filmic event” that generated it, that is, the original state of affairs of which the photographic rendering is a remaining trace—just like fingerprints are causally linked to the fingers that generated them. After all, every scene involves a “point of view,” and not every shot of an object will be able to represent that object in an identifiable way, which means that even the most “natural” and verisimilar photographic rendering involves a stylistic choice, which means that “realism” is, above all, the name of a style.4 Choices and points of view entail subjective manipulation, and subjective manipulation implies that every film is fabricated. But to create a proper representation requires that its fabricated structure has to be concealed, and thus, every film is essentially an illusion and a lie.5 Also fascinating would be to consider the opposite notion that every single film holds some sort of documental value, and thus, even the most formulaic Hollywood movie could be watched as primarily a documental trace (of the actors performing in it, or the stage of development of a given mode of production, or the overall Zeitgeist).6 You may even combine both views and adopt a sort of subjectivist theory of nonfiction film by claiming that the difference between documentary and fiction film is not in the object-film but in the mind of the spectator.7 In fact, if you consider the tremendous creative freedom with which authors of both fiction and nonfiction films manipulate their respective materials, you may wish to conclude that the “philistine bifurcation” between both genres cannot reside in the inherent textual features of each film but must be rather a matter of the mode of reception in which each spectator decides to view the film. The question you should ask yourself, then, is not “what is a documentary” but rather “when is a documentary” because it all depends on who is viewing the film and que celui qui conçoit l’idée du film est aussi celui qui le réalise. Plus complexe puisqu’il enchaîne ou entrelace le plus souvent des series d’images hétérogènes.” 4  Cf. Noël Carroll, “From real to reel: entangled in nonfiction film,” in Theorizing the moving image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 243. After discussing the proper way of photographing a cube, Rudolf Arnheim concluded that “[A]s a preliminary, people who contemptuously refer to the camera as an automatic recording machine must be made to realize that even in the simplest photographic reproduction of a perfectly simple object, a feeling for its nature is required which is quite beyond any mechanical operation.” (Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: California University Press, 1957), 11). 5  Carroll, “From real to reel,” 246. 6  Cf. Richard Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 7  Dirk Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” Cinema Journal, 35–1 (1995); Edward Brannigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, New York: Routledge, 1992; Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited, London: British Film Institute, 1995. For a critical survey of subjectivist theories of nonfiction film cf. Carl Plantinga, “The Limits of Appropriation – Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction / Nonfiction Film Distinction,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film, ed. David LaRocca (London: Lexington Books, 2017).

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how she is viewing it. Audiences should be given carte blanche to “perversely” comprehend fiction films nonfictionally, and vice-versa, by subverting the conventions by which reference and causality are assigned to the images they see on the screen. It is entirely up to you to watch the film on your hotel TV as a radical ghost story or as a documentary on the politics of post-colonial India. However, the fact that this difference is transposed to “the mind of the audience” does not deflect the fact that a difference is supposed to exist. It is no longer a difference in the manifest properties of the object but rather in the mode of reception you decide to adopt. Genres and types of film are difficult to define and apparently hybrid films—such as JFK or F for Fake—make this task even trickier, but modes of reception are just as difficult to circumscribe.8 Also, the kind of mannerist film genre known as “mockumentary” manipulates precisely that which usually locks the spectator onto a prescribed mode of attention from which she very hardly moves, and creates variations on recognizable prototypical genres. An entire sub-genre of film is planned on the assumption that the spectator’s viewing protocols are heavily determined and controlled, and play with the subversion of that which conditions her reception: Zelig, The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, or Cloverfield. And even if the film’s indexing eliminates some of the hybridness and fuzziness that would affect the spectator’s attention, we could speculate about the existence of a film that would be impossible to track down, a more extreme case than No Lies or Daughter Rite. Why this is so difficult to imagine is part of the story about your hotel room night. In fact, cases where moviegoers watch a film outside its standard indexation and mode of appreciation must be pretty rare indeed.9 But even if heterodox viewing would become standard practice, it still seems odd that spectators would decide to adopt a given viewing mode without sufficient knowledge of what “fictional” and “nonfictional mode” stand for or require, or why are those the only two viewing options available. Besides, the fact that there is always the possibility of a “shift” between modes of reception implies that a comprehensive distinction between both concepts should be possible. How? Well, maybe the distinction is established by the social practices and cultural conventions (including viewing schemas) that belong to our culture or “form of life.”10 However, this seems to constitute a subjectivism of a higher order because if social practices were to change so would our normal indexing of film. The shift would not be so idiosyncratic and immediate as initiated by each spectator individually, but it would still be, in a way, a subjective move. On the other hand, how often does such a category-shattering cultural shift occur?  Cf. Plantinga, “The limits of appropriation,” 119.  Cf. Eitzen, “When is a Documentary,” 95. 10  This corresponds to the view defended by Eitzen and, in part, by Carl Plantinga: “the distinction between fiction and nonfiction does not reside in the minds of the audience, but in the objective social practices and viewing schemas of a culture.” (Plantinga, “The limits of appropriation,” 121). 8 9

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While you think through these questions, you remember the case of one of your favorite classic documentaries, Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922), and you recall having read that in one of the scenes Nanook was not actually towing his line against a fish but rather reenacting a fishing scene with the assistance of several off-screen helpers.11 You remember feeling a bit disappointed when you found out about this and you realize that there seems to be some kind of epistemic resistance to the fact that the history of production of documentaries and fiction films should be considered indistinct because, if indistinctionalists are right, all depends on some kind of attention to the neutral film X that is being shown. However, what the Nanook example shows you is that, in a very significant way, the respective history of production does seem relevant in the case of documentaries (and nonfiction film, in general), whereas it doesn’t strike you as relevant in the case of fiction film. For one, there is a normative constraint: documentaries should not deceive the viewer, which means that they invite a sort of inquisitive viewing mode that simply does not apply to the case of fiction film. This is so because documentaries necessarily involve a tension between what is being shown and what is being told. In the case of Nanook’s fake fishing, what is being shown does not correspond to what is being told. But is this epistemic dissonance sufficient to prevent the amalgamation between fiction film and documentary? You could decide to watch Casablanca as if it were a documentary about Humphrey Bogart. But the fact that the film isn’t actually telling you anything about Bogart means that no epistemic dissonance of that sort can arise. And if this is not possible, it probably means that you won’t be motivated to adopt a nonfictional viewing mode while watching Casablanca. The benefits would be trivial, at best, and you’d be just mistaking the documental value of the film for its putative documentary status. On the other hand, you could decide to watch Nanook of the North as a fiction film. But can you really become indifferent to the film’s history of production and comfortably accommodate that feeling of slight disappointment whenever you watch the fake fishing scene? You seem to be on to something here. The fact that spectators of documentaries reserve for themselves the possibility of digging for dissonances between what is shown and what is told seems to be an attitude you cannot adopt vis-à-­ vis fiction film. Consequently, another question arises: what triggers you into adopting this attitude? And this leads you into considering the second alternative reply to your original question:

11  Cf. Gregory Currie, “Documentary Traces: Film and the Content of Photographs,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film, ed. David LaRocca (London: Lexington Books, 2017), 110.

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“Yes, it is important to know whether you’re watching fiction or nonfiction film” So you assume that there is a distinction between fiction film and documentaries and that it can be identified within a normative account of film, that is, a distinction that needs to be taken into account in order to interpret and assess correctly any film. The terms in which such distinction is established, however, are not yet clear to you. So, what is a documentary? You could start on by looking at the kinds of film that have been traditionally classified as such. Film scholar Bill Nichols has proposed a useful typology of documentaries divided into six categories: the poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative documentary.12 The most clear-cut case is that of Expository Documentaries that include the typical voice-over narrator who follows a script, providing explanations and arguments in favor of a given interpretation. Images and sounds are simply used to illustrate or provide a loose (i.e., non-essential) evidence for what is being stated by the narrator. Also significant is the Observational Documentary, where traditional narrative cues—like voice-over narration—are eschewed in favor of a more straightforward presentation of the state of affairs—some call this the pro-filmic event—via the simple juxtaposition of visual and sonic traces, and a more open-ended and ambiguous treatment of the subject. But, naturally, a descriptive approach of this kind begs an important question: first of all, there has to be a prototypical concept of “documentary” required in order to start collecting and classifying its multiple instances. That is, we are still in need of a normative account of the application of the concept.13 At this point, you may want to consider two ways of tackling the issue: either that the distinction is intrinsic to and manifest in the film or that it is some kind of framing or indexing of the film that sets its status in a way that spectators cannot fail to notice. Considering the first option, you start imagining what a Realist Theory of Documentary could be like. You want to justify the distinction between fiction and nonfiction by appealing to the essential and manifest properties of the film and by establishing a set of sufficient conditions that immediately determine whether a given film is fictional or not. Your best option here seems to be to consider the special appeal and objectivity of documentaries based on the assumption that they show us their respective subjects in the most direct ­manner  Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).  Bill Nichols identifies three basic assumptions involved in our common “sense that a film is a documentary”: documentaries are about reality, about real people, and they tell stories about what really happened. Thus, he assumes that our most widespread intuitions about the ontology of documentaries are all based “on the indexical capacity of the photographic image, and of sound recording, to replicate what we take to be the distinctive visual or acoustic qualities of what they record” (Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 34). We shall address this view when we examine the theories that portray documentary as a kind of indexical record. 12 13

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possible, namely in the way they act as indexical records of their subjects by being photographic traces left behind by the relevant events.14 If you favor the second option, then you move toward a Relational Theory of Documentary based on the conviction that nothing is conclusively fictional or nonfictional solely on the basis of their inherent or textual features. In order to draw that distinction, one needs to look for the non-manifest, relational properties of film, which means that one has to consider the way each film is in relation to something else.15 So, now, you have to find out what that relevant “something else” is. It seems true to say that documentaries carry with them a certain assertive force and a quasi-scientific aura, and this seems to be induced by the way these films are intended to be seen. So maybe your best bet is to look for that something else in the intentions surrounding the creation of these films. Not so much in what they show us, but in the way they tell us things, in their propositional mode, so to speak. Show or Tell? This seems to be your basic option at this stage. Your first impression is that you seem to be covering the two most important aspects that you yourself find alluring in documentaries. First, a Realist Theory of Documentary stresses and explains the importance of the phenomenological dimension of documentaries, or at least of an important portion of all documentaries produced. Certain films (namely, Observational Documentaries) grant their viewers with a particular affective and cognitive connection to the events, objects or people that happen to be the topic of the film. They are the second best thing next to actually being there—because the camera was actually there, “like the veil of Veronica pressed to the face of human suffering.”16 Part of this sense of immediacy is explained by the fact that photographs—like footprints, death masks or tree rings—are naturally counterfactually dependent on their referents, meaning that any change in the referent would automatically produce a change in its photographic rendering.17 Hence, they are independent of their author’s beliefs and may indeed survive beyond authorial expectations and beliefs, given that unexpected findings may occur through the 14  Gregory Currie, “Documentary Traces”. This article constitutes a revisitation of his classic piece “Visible traces: documentary and the contents of photographs,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57–3 (1999). When comparing the more recent text to the original version of his theory, the most striking difference consists in the way Currie seems to drop his previous, and most controversial, requirement that in documentary the meaning flows from the image to the narrative, whereas in fiction film meaning flows from the narrative to the image. In its place, a different requirement becomes more salient, namely that documentaries invite the spectator to engage on an assessment of the “degree of coherence” between the photographic trace and the expository narrative. This epistemological shift fits the kind of integrated theory our accidental philosopher is trying to compose. 15  Noël Carroll, “Fiction, non-fiction, and the film of presumptive assertion: a conceptual analysis,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. R. Allen et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 179. 16  André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Cerf, 2010), 34. 17   Kendall Walton, “Transparent pictures: On the nature of Photographic Realism,” in Photography and Philosophy – Essays on the Pencil of Nature, ed. S. Walden (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 36–39.

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spectator’s inspection, as celebrated in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. This caption of the phenomenological qualities of the event or object involved—its raw feel, if you will—and the corresponding special sense of affective access, of “nearness,” “intimacy” or “proximity,” explains much of the power of documentaries and should be acknowledged by any definition of the genre.18 Ultimately, it is this phenomenological trait that makes it possible for documentaries to resist their assimilation to the realm of fiction film. However, if taken alone, it does not seem sufficient to prevent dissolving the prototypical documentary within the realm of nonfiction film. After all, last year’s autobiographical video of Ms. Smith’s trip to Rome also retains some level of phenomenological intimacy with the pro-filmic event. Second, a Relational Theory of Documentary provides a better way to explain the special kind of reception we reserve for documentaries—you decide to call it the epistemological reception mode—and the assessment criteria that audiences inevitably follow when viewing films that are indexed as “documentaries.” However, you anticipate that much of what the average spectator is doing when assessing a documentary is based on the way the film acts as a proper natural counterfactual (re) presentation of its subject (the way it is presented as “evidence” for the facts at hand). This seems to suggest a possible integration or at least a reflective balance between both accounts. But before you consider this balance, you decide to take some time to think about each option separately. Showing: The Realist Approach The idea at stake here is that there is something that intrinsically differentiates documentaries from other film genres, namely the way they put us in phenomenological contact with the facts at hand. You hold this in part accountable for that mesmerizing effect that is still holding you in contemplation of the images on your hotel room TV. The “showing” dimension of documentaries, by which the spectator is allowed to apprehend the “phenomenological qualities” of the subject, is an important characteristic of the genre and finds support in all those theories of film that insist in returning cinema to its photographic basis. The phenomenological intensity of being exposed to actual visual traces of events, people or objects is justified by two main reasons: an emotive and a cognitive one. The first relates to the way the spectator is given a special kind of affective access to the facts, manifested in that sense of close contact provided by actual traces of the events. The cognitive reason tells us that, unlike fiction film, documentaries are intrinsically misleading and constitute therefore permanent challenges to the spectator’s powers of cognition. This is due to the fact that they are based

18  Cf. Mikael Pettersson, “Depictive traces: On the phenomenology of photography,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69–2 (2011), 185.

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on traces and not on testimonies.19 Testimonies—like a witness’ reconstitution of a car accident—are intentionally counterfactually dependent on their subjects, which means that the way they represent depends on the author’s mentation, for instance, in the way it mediates the seizing of visual information. Traces don’t depend on what we think we saw or heard, they are naturally counterfactually dependent on their referents: any change in the referent would immediately imply a change in the trace. In other words, traces are non-­doxastic representations—they are independent of their author’s agenda of intentions and may lead to revelations directly concerning the referent—whereas testimonies are doxastic forms of representation—they represent what the author thinks was the case and may never lead to surprises. Thus, because the author cannot erase their “brute causation,” traces are involuntary renderings of their subjects and can be further scrutinized leading to unexpected findings, namely of details that weren’t supposed to be there, like the murder inadvertently photographed by the character of Thomas Hemmings in Blow-Up. Because they elude the author’s creative control, trace-based documents have a “special capacity to undermine themselves,”20 and they retain the possibility of discovering inconsistencies between the film traces and whatever the author may believe and/or wants us to believe, namely through the narrative she creates. In a concealed or conspicuous way, the question “might it be lying?” is always part of the way we view documentaries because we are always aware of possible dissonances between what is shown and what is told.21 Thus, documentaries are open to falsification as a result of the spectator’s inquiry. How often this falsification occurs is, of course, another matter. Nevertheless, the fact that this remains a possibility seems to be a clear ontological difference in regard to fiction film. Naturally, inconsistencies within the narrative structure of a fiction film may always be detected, and continuity mistakes or visual bloopers are often spotted, but their possibility is not constitutive of the filmic genre in the way the possibility of epistemic inconsistencies is essential to documentaries. This may help us to explain, at least in part, why documentaries are chosen as a communication medium for scientific theses: they hold the potential for being tools of discovery. Now you start to speculate that the fact that mere existence of filmic traces prescribes a given epistemic attitude may be a hint that this kind of theory can be made compatible with theories that describe documentaries as a kind of veridical assertion.22  Currie, “Documentary traces,” 97.  Currie, “Visible traces,” 291. 21  Eitzen, “When is a documentary,” 91. 22  Carl Plantinga has already presented a way in which theories of documentary as indexical record and theories of documentary as assertion may be drawn together (Carl Plantinga, “What a documentary is, after all,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63–2 (2005)). His proposal is that documentaries involve asserted veridical representations, and that these may assume the form of visual traces or veridical assertions. In the case of Expository Documentaries or, more generally speaking, documentaries whose propositional content is directly or implicitly at stake, the veridical representation aims at truthfulness. In the case of Observational Documentaries, that is, 19 20

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The possibility of inconsistencies leads you to consider yet another trait of documentaries vis-à-vis fiction film. Because they constitute traces left by their pro-filmic events, photograph and film hold two different layers of representation.23 They represent-by-origin that “of ” what they are (they offer a “physical portrayal”), and represent-by-use that of which they are “about” (they produce a “nominal portrayal”).24 That of which they are is that of which they are a trace; but when used in a fictional context, photographic representations can be about something different from that of which they are. Casablanca represents-­byorigin Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood’s star system during the Second World War, besides representing-by-use Rick Blaine, Ilsa Lund and their fictional world. Documentaries are distinctive in this respect because their constitutive images are made to work exclusively on the first layer.25 Thus, in documentaries, meaning is fully determined by representation-­by-­use and the consequent narrative cannot interfere with the fact that the image only represents by way of being a photographic trace of the original state of affairs. In this respect, one could even think heuristically about a putative “ideal documentary,” that is a sustained narrative whose images only represent photographically: they only represent that of which they are. This is a seductive account but some doubts start to cross your mind. First, this realist take seems to remove from the realm of documentary any film that is not causally based upon a set of visual traces. After all, what else could supply that sense of phenomenological awe and close contact to the event apart from actual footage? A strict distinction between testimonies and traces, and the fact that only the latter can afford that potential self-defeating quality inherent to proper documentaries, makes it hard to accept within the genre films that are more saliently based on historical testimonies or scientific speculation, like historical documents about Neanderthal men or cosmological hypotheses such as the Big Bang. Accordingly, docudrama and historic re-enactments, for instance, documentaries with a more sensual character, veridical representation is to be found in the way the documentary provides a “reliable guide to relevant elements of the pro-filmic scene.” What Plantinga offers, then, is the gathering of both theories under the overarching concept of “veridical film representation.” What I propose is somewhat different: the necessary interconnection of the aspects of documentary highlighted by both theories—show and tell, the phenomenological and the propositional—as a general theory of the prototypical documentary. So prototypical, in fact, that more peripheral or category-defiant films are assessed in the way they meet or transgress the set of conditions that characterize the more standard film. 23  On the phenomenology involved in the ability to either collapse or segregate these two layers—the “story told” and “the events filmed”—cf. Robert Hopkins, “What do we see in Film?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66–2 (2008). 24  Cf. Gregory Currie, “Pictures of King Arthur: Photography and the Power of Narrative,” in Photography and Philosophy – Essays on the Pencil of Nature, (Scott Walden (ed.)), Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2008, 263–283. The distinction between “representation-by-origin” and “representation-by-use” corresponds to Monroe Beardsley’s difference between the way each shot is a “physical portrayal” of its source and the way it may be taken to be a “nominal portrayal,” that is, taken to represent a state of affairs (person, object or event) that is different than its photographic provenance (Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1958), Chapter VI). 25  Cf. Currie, “Visible traces,” 290.

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shouldn’t be listed as “documentaries,” properly speaking. In many cases, like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, there simply can be no photographic traces of the subjects involved (such as the primordial Big Bang). Ultimately, “the first sixty-five or so years of documentary history”26 would not count as such, since the kind of film favored by this account—direct cinema or cinéma vérité—is relatively recent and dates back to the 1960s. You may be ready to accept this consequence and propose a category other than “documentary” reserved for those films that are assertive but without the awe of intimacy and the epistemic resilience that only photographic traces can provide. But you could also try an alternative doxastic explanation for that sense of proximity by looking at the way the belief that photographs enable that sense of proximity is produced in the viewer.27 You could describe this as a three-step process: (1) the viewer has good reasons to believe the photograph provides epistemic access, namely (but not exclusively) natural counterfactual dependency; (2) by accepting those reasons, the viewer believes that photographs grant her epistemic access to the phenomenon depicted; and (3) it is that epistemic confidence that causes the sense of intimacy. This doxastic account could accept other sources for that sense of intimacy. In order to take step 1 without photographs, the viewer could use relevant standards for assessing the way testimonies or intentional counterfactual representations may provide proper epistemic access to the event or, in other words, constitute the “second best thing” to actually being there. Arguably, if no camera was or could be present at the unravelling of the event, first-person testimonies, nonphotographic traces or even intentional counterfactual depictions may acquire a level of epistemic reliability that cause a similar sense of intimacy. You recall the case of the famous drawing of Marie-Antoinette conduite à l’échafaud by David and the way Stefan Zweig described its “sinister power” as a kind of intimacy with the actual event. It is obviously an intentional counterfactual representation, since virtually nothing that is on the paper escaped David’s mentation. However, there is also something of a quasi-indexical nature that seems to match the “brute causation” of photographs. What could possibly work as a set of “good reasons” that would lead the viewer to consider the drawing as grating epistemic access to the event? Consider these: (1) the materials before our eyes were actually present at the time Marie Antoinette was being taken to the scaffolding; (2) the drawing is a literal trace of its author’s activity, and the work’s auratic dimension is a powerful surrogate for the phenomenological sense of proximity inspired by indexical records; (3) we are aware of the speed with which David drew his subject, passing swiftly before his friend’s window at Rue Sainte-Honoré, and the velocity of the representation must have affected the author’s mentation toward producing a first-catch depiction; and (4) the drawing is without competition from other counterfactual representations. If we accept that these are good reasons for accepting that  Plantinga, “What a documentary is,” 109.  Pettersson, “Depictive traces,” 192.

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(a) David’s drawing grants the viewer epistemic access to the last moments of Marie Antoinette; (b) the drawing offers epistemic resilience against any other interpretation of the facts involved; and (c) the drawing may be submitted to interrogations that would be pointless to ask, in face of other representations, namely indexical questions such as those concerning the exact geographical position of David and Marie Antoinette at the time the drawing was being made, then you are closer to admit that documentaries based on non-indexical records may also share that “special capacity to undermine themselves” we find in the more prototypical Observational Documentaries. Second, when you consider the thought that in proper trace-based documentaries “meaning passes from image to narrative,” and no matter how loosely you interpret this formula, it seems clear that what is suggested is that meaning originates ex photograph and then fully determines the film’s form and content—including stylistic options—overshadowing any initial hypothesis, previously researched historical testimonies, scientific arguments and so on. Again, what ultimately justifies this bold consequence is the fact that we cannot find inconsistencies in testimony-based films or films that are not fully determined by their photographic traces, as are those involving dramatic reconstructions of the historical past.28 If this viewing affordance is not inherently present, then these kinds of films drift closer to the category of fiction film since the trace content never fails to cohere with the narrative. Moreover, it is projected not to conflict with the narrative, something that negates the main epistemic peculiarity of proper documentary: to be either revelatory or deceptive. But surely, inconsistencies may also be discovered in testimonies, and objective theses can be falsified independently of the medium used to convey them, if we employ the valid standards for correction and objectivity. If we remove the “special” from the formula that characterizes documentaries as having a “special capacity to undermine themselves,”29 we get closer to an account that perceives documentaries, more generally, as film that prescribes an assertive stance (the relational view) or, more specifically, as film that affords the spectator with a falsifying experience (by asking “might it be lying?”). Also, when you start imagining the spectator’s phenomenology presumed in this account, something of a reductio ad absurdum pops in your mind. It is being assumed that (1) trace-based films hold that affective quality that makes us feel specially connected to the represented fact, and that (b) they afford the  This is an argument reinforced in Currie’s most recent version of his theory: “Deception is often possible in such cases because of the presumption we have that, when the documentary is telling us something controversial, it will do so, unless there is indication to the contrary, with the aid of images the trace contents of which reflect the claims being made (…). Accounts of documentary that do not make the idea of a trace central to the concept cannot accommodate this important fact about documentary.” (Currie, “Documentary traces,” 100). 29  Currie, “Documentary traces,” 291. 28

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spectator the chance to assess the coherence level between the evidence offered by the photographic trace and the explanation elaborated by the narrative. However, these two attitudes vis-à-vis the film seem to lead to contradictory consequences because there seems to be an incompatibility between the phenomenological appeal of the documentary and the fact that we are led to assess the congruence between trace and narrative. On the one hand, the spectator that loses herself in contemplation of the event as such will doubtfully be willing and able to engage on an interrogative concern about the film’s veridical coherence. On the other hand, the spectator that adopts the inquisitive attitude immediately prescribed by any film that includes traces will not remain an absorbed witness to the quasi-event being presented. Also, once that inquisitive attitude is adopted, why should the narrative be the only segment under scrutiny? Why should the trace itself remain immune to the spectator’s interpretative powers? Why can’t this be the segment that “might be lying,” as in the case of Nanook’s false fishing scene? Third, there is the question concerning the higher degree of objectivity attributed to trace-determined films. Photographic images are said to be more “reliable”. However, photographic images that can be perfectly objective and reliable if taken “at the canonical level of description”30 specified by the narrative, can be deceiving if scrutinized under another, say, more literal level of description. This is the case in many documentaries that are filled with stock-­ footage shots that don’t exactly command or are even strictly related to the narrative. For instance, a documentary on the role of the Sherman tank during the Second World War may narrate at one point that we are seeing a “Sherman tank in Normandy,” which is the canonical level of description set out by the narrative, while the image being shown is revealed at the literal level of description as constituting stock-footage of a Sherman tank filmed in Germany.31 How “reliable” is that? And given the sudden importance granted to the narrative as responsible for establishing the proper description level under which we are to assess the degree of coherence between trace and narrative, is the flow of meaning still running from trace to narrative? You may consider the reply that there are different grades of narrative correspondence and that as long as the trace content corresponds to the canonical level of description established by the narrative, the spectator is perfectly capable of tolerating failures of correspondence.32 Taking the example above, in view of the overarching narrative, and as long as the tank shown is a Sherman, its image constitutes a reliable trace without awakening any concern about its specific location. This response, however, poses two problems. First, it seems to run against that special potential for incongruity that can only be found in  Currie, “Documentary traces,” 103.  Noël Carroll, “Photographic traces and documentary films: Comments for Gregory Currie,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58–3 (2000). For an expanded view of this criticism, cf. Jinhee Choi, “A reply to Gregory Currie on documentaries,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 59: 3, Summer 2001, 59:3. 32  Currie, “Documentary traces,” 103. 30 31

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documentaries that are based on the fact that traces cannot be subjugated by narrative and whose presumptive possibility induces spectators to contrast what is being shown to what is being told. Apparently, this is only true at some level because the discovery that the Sherman tank is not located in Normandy is not part of the unexpected findings that turn the viewing of documentaries particularly rich and phenomenologically distinct (vis-à-vis fiction viewing). What is even more intriguing is that it is up to the narrative, and not the trace, to determine what the “canonical level description” is and—oddly enough—what are the inconsistencies to which the spectator should be attentive (that the tank is not a Sherman), and those that she should disregard (that the location is Germany and not Normandy). Thus, it seems that it is not only the meaning but also the spectator’s cognition that is being heavily conditioned by the narrative. Second, this view dismisses the kind of films Bill Nichols classified as “performative documentaries” consisting mainly of re-enactments and performances.33 According to this view, if considered qua documentaries, then these films should be viewed as being of the “performances” that took place before the camera and not about the events to which they are related. But in a way, the footage of the Sherman tank in Germany is not of the “Sherman tank in Normandy” but about the “Sherman tank in Normandy.” It is being used to represent a “Sherman tank in Normandy” the same way that the body of a given actor may be used to represent Napoleon in a reconstitution of the battle of Waterloo. In fact, they both open up two layers of representation—by use and by origin—which defies our initial assumption that documentaries should be entirely based on visual traces. Therefore, why should an historical re-­enactment be treated differently from the stock-footage of a Sherman tank in Germany since neither constitutes an actual trace of the significant objects or events? And if narrative is responsible for establishing that the Sherman tank footage be accepted in a more coarse-grained level of analysis can’t it also calibrate the level of analysis with which the spectator interprets the performative documentary? By allowing the narrative to impact on the perspective with which the spectator regards each shot, you are forced to conclude that the meaning of each shot should be decided in light of the film as a whole and not the other way around, and this implies that one should always bear in mind the overarching intentionally produced narrative. You concentrate again on the film being shown on the TV. Although the film still defies classification, it could easily be placed under the category of Observational Documentaries. It exemplifies the awe unique to that sense of intimacy that constitutes one of the clearly distinctive traits of trace-based documentaries. Although the author is not showing us any people, the spectator cannot help but feel that there are many stories surrounding all those abandoned objects and empty rooms. The uninhabited space conjures the feeling of a presence just like the apparent disappearance of the author makes her presence even more prominent. Imagine now that someone else would turn this  Cf. Plantinga, “What a documentary is,” 109.

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wandering set of scenes into a fiction film via a voice-over narration of a story about colonial India.34 Visual traces would still determine the diegetic path, but the film could no longer be classifiable as a documentary. You conclude that there are many ways in which film traces can determine the narrative, and you still lack sufficient criteria for deciding what is the correct manner of deriving such a narrative. Even further, this shows you that these criteria cannot be derived simply from the film traces precisely because they are non-doxastic in nature and thus epistemologically neutral, and may support different types of narratives. Thus, if we assume that these criteria do exist then we have to look for them in that which induces the spectator into adopting the sort of evaluative viewing—in particular, the search for inconsistencies between film traces and whatever the author “may believe and/or want us to believe”35—that is characteristic of documentaries. This is exactly the interface that binds together a realist theory like the one you are considering and the view that documentaries are simply another way of producing veridical assertions, triggering the same kind of attitude and meaning-extraction tools that spectators use in their daily life. The assertive force both theories recognize in documentaries36 manifests itself in the way the connection between film trace and narrative was designed, so as to allow the spectator to assess the level of coherence between traces and narrative. Telling: The Relational View Some of the most promising contemporary approaches to film theory partake the idea that watching a film is very much like following a conversation or trying to make sense of someone else’s behavior.37 When you go out to the movies or whenever you zap your way through the cable channels in your hotel room, you are aware that you are watching the product of several intentional agents (directors, photographers, actors, stage designers, etc.). Thus, you are spontaneously led to activate the daily cognitive tools you normally use to attribute mental states to the people with whom you interact. In a way, it is a process similar to that of making sense of a conversation in which a certain event is described. By assessing your interlocutor’s intentions, you use your experienced ability to integrate that round of information relatively aware that it may include distortions, ellipses, ambiguities and false clues.38 Your reception and interpretation of the film is constituted, to a large extent, by the way you spontaneously reconstruct the intentional agenda that framed its origin. ­ Therefore, no matter how diverse the reception of a film may be, it remains, 34  This is a variation on the example of “My own Vietnam” proposed in Carroll, “Photographic traces,” 305. 35  Currie, “Documentary traces,” 291. 36  Cf. Currie, “Documentary traces,” 103. 37  Cf. Francis Sparshott, “Vision and Dream in the Cinema,” Philosophic Exchange (1971); Alessandro Pignocchi, Pourquoi aime-t-on un film? Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015. 38  Sparshott, “Vision and dream,” 121.

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nevertheless, true that the original intentions behind the film constitute an external criterion for judging which ways of watching the film are valid and fair, and which are not. A fairer reception and interpretation of the film will make the viewer’s attribution of mental states to the author look more plausible, and the viewer’s propensity to attribute a more and more rich set of intentions to the author improves her powers of interpretation—even if some (probably most) attributions are later abandoned as incongruent. The fact that spectators are often involved in this kind of intention detection and response explains why so many of the terms we use to evaluate film are intentional concepts: “sincere,” “subtle,” “heavy,” “light,” “pretentious,” “didactic,” “bold,” and so on.39 Now, some of these intentions are attributed in face of the film’s diegetic content and provide the audience with a basis for drawing semantic meaning from that object. You may call them meaning or authorial intentions. Other intentions, however, relate to the indexing of the film, or the kind of viewing attitude the audience recognizes as being intended by the author through the intentions that establish the category of the film: the categorical intentions. The first kind of intentions is recognized and attributed to the author in the course of the viewer’s reception and interpretation of the film and affect the film’s hermeneutics. They comprise items such as the author’s political, moral or philosophical views; the rationale behind some character’s psychology; or the plausibility of some allegorical interpretative reading. The second kind of intentions determines the film’s ontology, meaning that they establish the category to which the film belongs and therefore prescribe a given viewing stance. There are two fundamental viewing stances easily apprehensible on a coarse-­ grained reading of the film: the fictive stance and the imaginative stance. The fact that documentaries are so viewed because they are related to their author’s categorical intention means that their status is established by a relational quality and not by a manifest property, such as trace-dependency.40 Relational properties are those properties that connect a given object to something else, like the intentions surrounding its creation. In the case of documentaries, the relevant property is that of having been created by someone for some actual audience with the intention that the audience recognizes the film as an assertion (as opposite to a supposition). In other words, documentaries are projected to establish a specific kind of relation with their viewers, appealing not to their imagination (as fiction films do) but to their powers of e­ pistemic evaluation.41 Whenever you wish to communicate some information to some Cf. Pignocchi, Pourquoi, 26.  The distinction between theories of art based on manifest or relational properties of the objects involved can be traced back to Maurice Mandelbaum’s seminal paper “Family Resemblances and Generalizations concerning the Arts,” American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (1965). For a detailed criticism of the way relational theories of art were presented as a suitable comprehensive alternative to the family resemblance theory of art, cf. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, “Relational Theories of Art: the History of an Error,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 52–2 (2012): 141–151. 41  The shift from a theory of manifest properties of film to an account based upon relational characteristics seems to parallel a similar shift in philosophy of art, from traditional theories seeking 39 40

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one else, you make manifest that information (there is an informative intention), but you also transmit an intention of transmitting such information in a given manner (a communicative intention).42 Part of this communicative intention is composed of cues that will allow your respondent to recognize the way in which you wish her to respond to that information, and namely whether you wish her to take it as a supposition or as an assertion, in other words, to which speech category the text belongs (the categorical intention). Film is an intentional communicative device. The audience’s response is activated mainly through the recognition of the author’s categorical intention, but for this to be successful, the author also has to include a reflective component by which she gives reasons as to why the audience should engage with the content in the prescribed way. The categorical intention is commonly conveyed through the film’s previous indexing (e.g., the fact that you are watching this film on the History or AXN channels means that you are probably watching a documentary or a fiction film), and in the majority of cases, moviegoers are a priori aware of the kind of film they are about to watch. The fictive and the imaginative stances constitute two different viewing protocols that significantly filter the spectator’s overall expectation and attitude toward the film, basically telling her what to look for and what kinds of questions she should be asking in order to make sense of the film. In view of the author’s cues and indexing, if the spectator adopts a fictive stance vis-à-vis the film, she activates her “suppositional imagination” and considers the film’s propositional content as a license to imagine, instead, of a prescription for belief. On the other hand, the acknowledgment that the author has prepared the film under the intention that it should be considered through the adoption of an assertive stance triggers proper belief in the film’s “meaning-bearing signs” and prevents the viewer from suppositionally imagining that meaning.43 It should be noted that the relevant relational property in this account resides not in the spectator’s adopted relation to the film but rather in the author’s “assertoric intention” that a given film be taken as a “putative fact” and was as such planned and filmed. It is then the relation between the film and this assertoric intention that is significant, and this connection remains a an essentialist definition of art to theories that looked for the identification of artistic phenomena by selecting a relational property common to all those phenomena. Inspired by Nicholas Wolterstorff’s theory of projected worlds, Carl Plantinga proposed a definition of nonfiction film as the category in which a filmmaker makes “an assertive stance toward the world projected by the film” (Plantinga, “What a documentary is,” 107). Using the speech act theory, Plantinga argued that as soon as a film is recognized as a documentary, this “mobilizes relevant expectations on the part of the audience.” This discovery of a defining relational property based on a Gricean intention-response model of communication was then further developed by Trevor Ponech and especially by Noël Carroll. 42  Cf. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, “Pragmatics, modularity and mind-reading,” in Mind and Language, 17 (1–2) (2002). 43  This is what identifies the class of films that Noël Carroll names “film of presumptive assertion”—a category in between “nonfiction film” (a broader class that includes nonassertive films such as Serene Velocity) and “documentaries” (cf. Carroll, “Fiction, non-fiction,” 185).

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defining characteristic of the film irrespective of the circumstance—perfectly admissible—that viewers may not be able to determine the viewing stance in which the film was supposed to be interpreted.44 The ontological demarcation of this category of films is not affected by the epistemological problems that may prevent spectators from adopting the intended attitude. Therefore, the fact that you are still unsure of the kind of film you’re watching does not affect the fact that the film was conceived with the intention of being watched in a given way. The fictional intention is particularly effective in distinguishing fictional film from other kinds of film. But if we look now at the multifarious domain that is opened up by the assertoric intention, we realize that a specific difference is required in order to set apart documentary film within the larger genus of “film of presumptive assertion.” After all, propaganda film or Ms. Smith’s video of her trip to Rome also seem to share an assertoric intention. The specific difference is to be found in the special kind of objectivity that may be attributed to documentary film—and that too is a relational quality. The discrimination between the two possible representational layers of film (representation-by-origin and representation-by-use) and its stylistic qualities qua depiction does not suffice to characterize documentaries because the author is free to manipulate all three components in her project: none of them is intrinsically alien to assertion. What distinguishes documentary film within the class of films with an assertoric intention is an intended commitment to “the standards of argument, evidence and exposition” that are valid for the kind of information it presents.45 Those standards may include the criteria used in the respective scientific domain (History or Cosmology, for instance) for assessing the information being conveyed. It does not matter whether this commitment is sealed on the basis of trace evidences of the events, as in the case of Observational Documentaries, or whether it is assumed through historical re-enactments, digital imaging or voiced testimonies, as in the case of Expository Documentaries. An important assumption here is that nonfiction film is capable of meeting the same criteria for objectivity that are met by nonfiction writing. Once a film is indexed as objective nonfiction, the viewer is prompted to use the same relevant standards of evidence and argument and the same intersubjective criteria for assessing the data selection and interpretations proposed by the author. When you start comparing this view to the realist theory based on the centrality of traces, a relational theory of this kind seems to offer a better ­explanation of what documentaries are on at least three accounts. First, it presents a relational property that seems to be valid throughout the extraordinary variety of films under that label. Moreover, it is this relational property (the assertoric 44  This deflects a common objection (e.g., Plantinga, “What a documentary is,” 108) according to which Carroll’s definition makes the audience’s response a necessary condition for categorizing any film, and therefore if the audience would fail to recognize the assertive stance, then the film would not qualify as a documentary. 45  Cf. Carroll, “From real to reel,” 242.

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objective intention) that explains the family resemblances one may find among the many diverse instances of documentary film, especially in cases where no common manifest properties (like trace-dependency) exist. They manage to explain why some manifest similarities exist between films A and B (e.g., that they both have a strong documental basis with photographic traces leading the way to the narrative), and between films B and C (e.g., that they both present dramatized re-enactments of events), but not between films A and C, although they all belong to the same film category. This is an explanatory advantage. Second, they manage to identify a set of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions that rule over the application of the concept. What matters here is not just the fact that documentaries are identified within a framework of cultural institutions and communication practices but rather that documentaries, and documentaries alone, stand in a unique relation to that framework, precisely the trait that the relational theory is able to define.46 And this is a definitional advantage. Third, as you already detected, a realist theory is more vulnerable to counterexamples, not only coming from instances already in the extension of what we commonly call “documentaries” but also from an unsuspected range of films that may emerge in the future. As Bill Nichols’ taxonomy shows, what today counts as documentary is already extremely heterogeneous. This heterogeneity should prepare us for the fact that what counts as “documentary” today is probably going to change over time. As a matter of fact, back in 1995, Brian Winston was already predicting that the introduction of digital imaging would bring the “documentary project” to an end by destroying the indexical evidence of the cinematography (its trace-dependency) and consequently the “lexical bond” between spectators and documentaries.47 Relational theories hold this advantage over realist theories that they seem to fare better with the fact that unforeseeable counterexamples to the definition may arise in the future. They do so by accommodating the fact that the manifest qualities of documentaries are essentially changeable: they will change in the future, and we simply cannot predict what documentary practices are yet to be invented.48 Call this a latitudinarian advantage. 46  Particularly since they draw our attention to the tutorial role that “indexing” plays in guiding, or at least predisposing, the spectator’s attention, relational theories of documentary attribute a fundamental role to the framing of the film. A double framing, to be precise, since the genre “documentary” is defined by appealing to two contextual frameworks—first, the categorical context, that is, the assignment of film to the assertive stance—ranging from full awareness of the author’s assertive intention to the varied practices that assist the indexing of films (e.g., the fact that it is being shown in a specific cable channel)—and then the epistemic context, that is, the set of standards of correction valid for the scientific domain in which the film is inscribed. Now, the fact documentaries are so regarded out of a complex crisscross of institutions and practices is not enough for a proper definition. In fact, a family resemblance theory of documentary film could be offered on the same basis. 47  Winston, “Claiming the real,” 6. 48  Consider the case of a film such as Face (2013) by German media artist Christoph Korn. The artist used the remaining 23-minute fragment of Terezin: A Documentary Film of the Jewish

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However, there seems to be a tension between the ability to explain and the ability to leave open the future admission of documentaries by way of not stipulating what their manifest properties might be.49 It is harder for a relational theory to provide the sense of closure we look for in a proper definition, if compared to a realist theory based on manifest properties. A realist theory is also an essentialist theory, which means that once a manifest property is tracked down as permeating the entire extension of tokens of a given concept, it becomes the necessary condition that sustains such a concept. If that same manifest property is also exclusive of the members of that set, then it is also the condition that suffices to segregate them from the rest of the items in the universe. The explanation is closed. But relational theories don’t work like that. They consider, for instance, that the conceptual and institutional framework of film is a more fundamental factor for its proper identification than the nature of film as film.50 This is in part justified by recognizing that there is no unique manifest property common to all the items within the concept’s extension—not even trace-dependency. All there is, at best, are some family resemblances between phenomena, and under that metaphor, trace-­ dependency is just like “the nose of the Robinsons”: you may find its anatomic configuration in most members of the Robinson family (maybe even in all the members you know) but surely not in all of them, nor only in them. What is required then is that we find out a feature that is responsible for all the patterns of similarity that have been drawn between the items within the concept’s extension. It is not enough to find yet another pattern of similarity albeit a more pervasive one, like the property that authors produce documentaries with the intention that viewers acknowledge them as assertions and thereby use relevant standards to assess the quality of that assertion. In order for the explanation to count, one has to show that that feature is what makes us use the concept in the first place and then look out for possible similarities between the items underneath it. However, in order to do so, a relational theory of documentary would have to refer, sooner or later, to the manifest properties of film, and show, for instance, how that relational feature causes a given manifest trait. For example, the fact that photographic traces are so often dominant in docuResettlement, a propaganda film made by the Nazis in 1944, decelerated it several times and turned it into a 12-hour film with a soundtrack consisting of a conversation between the artist himself and producer Antoine Beuger. This artistic strategy accomplishes two things. First, it stretches the visual traces of the original footage to unprecedented levels and intensifies the viewer’s phenomenological connection to the 1944 events. The title Face is justified because both the prisoners’ and their guards’ faces, both meant to be mere examples serving a propagandistic function, acquire a clear protagonism when observed in slow motion. Second, it turns the viewer’s attention to a sort of meta-documental level by making manifest the temporal gaps and holes that affect the apparent homogeneous structure of the original film, a novel insight into the propaganda production system. 49  Neill and Ridley enumerate three requirements to be met by any definition of open concepts: the explanatory, the conditions and the openness requirement (“Relational theories,”146–148). They also draw attention to the contradiction between the explanatory and the openness requirements in relational theories of art. 50  Carroll, “From real to reel,” 245.

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mentaries is because they are a powerful way of communicating that an assertion is at stake. However, if this is carried out, then the relational theory no longer fits that latitudinarian advantage we were praising before. In order to be open to future developments in documentary practices, the theory should be quite agnostic in respect to present or future manifest properties of documentaries. It should not even mention them if it wishes to remain compatible with any properties that “documentaries” have or may acquire in the future and, indeed, compatible with any similarity pattern that may be found among them.51 If the relational theory falls under the temptation of pronouncing a connection between the relational property and the manifest properties, and starts adding more details about actual documentaries, then it is already jeopardizing its chances of accommodating future developments of the genre. But if it does resist, then it fails to provide a proper explanation of the way we go about applying such a concept. Explanation leads to constriction, and openness leads to fuzziness. Thus, we cannot have a relational theory of documentaries that is both explanatory and open to future developments. The abstinence to consider questions about the nature of film as film, namely through the assessment of its manifest properties, also makes it possible to draw a parallel between objective assertive film and written essays or scientific papers.52 But given this parallel, why should one prefer to use film to communicate veridical assertions instead of writing a book or publishing a paper? You can’t provide an answer to this question unless you start referring to the manifest properties of film. On the other hand, if you resist making that reference, then you fail to explain the possible appeal of assertive film because one may argue that, for the most part, the potential audience that is fully aware of the standards of correction required for assessing the objective assertive film content would rather weigh that information in scientific books or articles.

Show and Tell The film is over and you switch off the TV. While you lie in your bed with your eyes shut, you go back to your previous question: was that fiction or nonfiction? However seductive, its artistic character did not erase the two dimensions that attract you to documentaries. First, the phenomenological appeal (some) documentaries have and, second, the assertive value of the genre that makes you ask whether what you’re watching is indeed true or not. The realist account of documentaries explained why the first is so important, and the relational account made it clear why the second dimension cannot be dismissed. Interestingly, however, the objections raised against each of them present them as complementary theories of documentary. They both agree that the spectator’s proper response to documentaries involves a kind of falsificatory assess Cf. Neill and Ridley, “Relational theories,” 148.  “[…] [N]onfiction films can be and are supposed to be objective in the same sense that nonfiction writing is” (Carroll, “From real to reel,” 236). 51 52

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ment: “Might it be lying?” This is prompted either because trace-based intention-independent representations offer “nonconceptually mediated contents”53 against which spectators are able to judge the level of coherence of the narrative, or because the audience responds to the author’s assertoric intention. If you remove all the questionable aspects of the realist view, there are two interconnected intuitions that seem to remain true: (1) that documentaries afford the possibility of unexpected findings and (2) that documentaries may deceive. If you transfer these two characteristics to the context of a relational theory, you may come to the conclusion that the epistemic tension between what is being shown and what is being told is arguably the most important cue through which the author’s assertoric intention is conveyed. In a way, what lies at the core of that intention is not exactly an assertion (“This is true”) but a question (“Is this true?”). We owe to the images’ epistemic resilience—the fact that they may resist against and disprove erroneous interpretations and narratives—the possibility of examining documentaries by splitting them into two representational levels: what is actually shown—the representation-byorigin or physical portrayal—and what is intentionally meant—the representation-by-­use or nominal portrayal. Playing with this split—first of all, making it stand—is arguably the best way to prompt the viewer into assessing the information being conveyed, namely by using appropriate standards of objectivity. The difference here, however, is that, unlike the realist account, there is no reason to grant the trace with a heavier epistemological weight visà-vis the narrative or take it to be the final standard of correction. The sense of phenomenological proximity is a key component of the photograph’s epistemic resilience, which, in turn, is a fundamental component of the viewer’s quest for falsification. But now think of a documentary without anything remotely similar to a photographic trace of the relevant events, not even photographic traces of the locations and people that were the background of the events.54 In what way could it lead to unexpected findings or “self-defeat”? The realist theory was quite convincing in showing that a major factor of the documentary’s potential for self-defeat lies in the way photographic images retain a “distinctive epistemic power” that holds against any possible narrative and may be subjected to inquiries that would be pointless to make in the case of non-indexical records.55 It is this epistemic quality that induces in the viewer that phenomenological sense of “being there.” But you have tried a doxastic explanation of the sense of phenomenological proximity of photographs that makes it possible to extend this sense beyond the realm of indexical records. And if you succeed in extending that sense of intimacy, you also manage to extend the viewer’s quest for falsification to the realm of Expository 53  Gregory Currie, “Preserving the Traces: An Answer to Noël Carroll,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 58:3 (2000): 307. 54  Cf. Currie, “Documentary traces,” 101. 55  Cf. Currie, “Preserving the traces,” 308: “Close inspection of some piece of film shot that day in Dallas may shed light on where the fatal shot was fired from: nothing comparable is true concerning an image based on reconstruction.”

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Documentaries, including docudrama and historical re-enactments. If you accept that such epistemic power is, above all, something of which the viewer is convinced based on good reasons, then you may also want to widen the range of good reasons that may induce phenomenological proximity and epistemic resilience. They would include the fact that photographs are natural counterfactual representations of events that would register any minute change in the event being represented but also the fact that standards of correction, before constituting assessment criteria, are guidelines that assist and are tested throughout the film’s production. Before you fall asleep, you notice how the judicial metaphor abounds when it comes to explain the nature of documentary film. People talk about photographic traces as evidences and of intentional representations, such as historical records, as testimonies. No doubt, this is explained by the fact that documentaries hold the possibility of unexpected findings because they can be subjected to objective questions that would be senseless to ask in view of fictional film (“How heavy was the tank?” or “How many shooters were there?”). But also because they ignite the falsificatory inquiry of viewers, exerting their powers for detecting errors, mistakes and deceptions. However, if you think through the analogy, then maybe it would be better to compare documentaries to court simulations in the way they seem to bring together, in weighed proportion, actual traces and the narrative reconstruction of the event. The re-enactment of a murder scene, for instance, offers the chance of comparing distinct testimonies, which get to be clarified, falsified or proved right. Traces are often used in this process, and their relative significance is established by weighing them against the narrative composed on the basis of other sources. Some traces, such as fingerprints or bloodstains, are irreplaceable, while others may be replaced, like a missing gun substituted by a similar model. The production of the re-enactment may be itself revelatory, and unexpected findings may occur though the crisscross of traces and testimonies—the exact trajectory of a bullet in a murder scene, for instance. And a situation where sudden discoveries may occur—whatever their cause may be—induces a sense of closeness to the actual state of affairs that fosters the jury’s judicative powers. Peacefully but inexorably, your own judicative powers abandon you as you now drift off to sleep.

Bibliography Arnheim, Rudolf. 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley: California University Press. Barsam, Richard. 1992. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bazin, André. 2010. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Cerf. Beardsley, Monroe. 1958. Aesthetics. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Brannigan, Edward. 1992. Narrative Comprehension and Film. New York: Routledge. Carroll, Noël. 1996. From Real to Reel: Entangled in Nonfiction Film. In Theorizing the Moving Image, 224–251. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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———. 2000. Photographic Traces and Documentary Films: Comments for Gregory Currie. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (3): 303–306. ———. 1997. Fiction, Non-fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis. In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen e Murray Smith, 173–202. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Choi, Jinhee. 2001. A Reply to Gregory Currie on Documentaries. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (3): 317–319. Currie, Gregory. 1999. Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (3): 285–297. ———. 2000. Preserving the Traces: An Answer to Noël Carroll. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (3): 306–308. ———. 2008. Pictures of King Arthur: Photography and the Power of Narrative. In Photography and Philosophy  – Essays on the Pencil of Nature, ed. Scott Walden, 263–283. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2017. Documentary Traces: Film and the Content of Photographs. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film, ed. David LaRocca, 95–112. London: Lexington Books. Eitzen, Dirk. 1995. When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception. Cinema Journal 35 (1): 81–102. Hopkins, Robert. 2008. What Do We See in Film? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2): 149–159. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1960. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. New York: Oxford University Press. Mandelbaum, Maurice. 1965. Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts. American Philosophical Quarterly 2: 219–228. Neill, Alex, and Aaron Ridley. 2012. Relational Theories of Art: The History of an Error. British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2): 141–151. Nichols, Bill. 2010. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pettersson, Mikael. 2011. Depictive Traces: On the Phenomenology of Photography. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (2): 185–196. Pignocchi, Alessandro. 2015. Pourquoi aime-t-on un film. Paris: Odile Jacob. Plantinga, Carl. 2005. What a Documentary Is, After All. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2): 105–117. ———. 2017. The Limits of Appropriation  – Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/ Nonfiction Film Distinction. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film, ed. David LaRocca, 113–124. London: Lexington Books. Rancière, Jacques. 2001. La Fable Cinématographique. Paris: Seuil. Sparshott, Francis. 1971. Vision and Dream in the Cinema. Philosophic Exchange 1: 111–122. Sperber, Dan, and Wilson Deirdre. 2002. Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-Reading. Mind & Language 17 (1–2): 3–23. Walton, Kendall. 2008. Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism. In Photography and Philosophy  – Essays on the Pencil of Nature, ed. Scott Walden, 14–49. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Winston, Brian. 1995. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute.

CHAPTER 27

The Autobiographical Documentary Laura T. Di Summa

Lotjie Sodderland, the protagonist and co-director, with Sophie Robinson, of the autobiographical documentary My Beautiful Broken Brain (2014) is “obsessed with recording, unable to remember.” Sodderland narrates the story of her stroke and shows, on camera, its effects on her ability to learn, speak, remember, and, basically, live. Her work is, as her story, unique and poignant, but her obsession with recording and memory (whether remembering is a possibility or not) seems to be a largely more common preoccupation in what is a complex and emerging documentary sub-genre: the autobiographical documentary. In its literary form, autobiographical expression has seen, in the past two decades, an incredible rise in popularity. Memoirs dominate the landscape of nonfiction: they can be found on the New York Review of Books list of best books of the year as well as in the commercial section of the local Hudson News. They are varied, and they continue to vary: from more standard narrative approaches, to Smith magazine’s “Six words memoirs” project,1 to the six volumes in which Karl Ove Knausgård2 has made the ordinary an experimental affair. It has become increasingly evident, however, that literature does not have a monopoly on personal expression. Numerous other autobiographical practices are also on the rise; virtually, everyone seems to be concerned about or, at the very least, share an interest in the pronoun “I,” a pronoun that has become  Smith Magazine Six Words Memoir: accessed March 19, 2017, http://www.sixwordmemoirs.com/  Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle, trans. Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). 1 2

L. T. Di Summa (*) William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_27

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accustomed to telling its story through a variety of different media. In fact, such is the need for and number of different forms of autobiographical expression that scholars Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser have coined the term automediality,3 an umbrella term covering works as varied as Mona Hatoum’s installations, Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits, and the less praiseworthy Instagram “selfie.” Among these forms and modalities of autobiographical expression, the autobiographical documentary is certainly one of the most intriguing. First, the autobiographical documentary joins the literary memoir in a reflection on some of the questions that are inherent to the discussion on autobiographical practices, from the connection between autobiography and philosophy to the fascinating ways in which autobiography challenges us to reconsider the boundary, and distinction, between fiction and nonfiction to, lastly, metaphysical and cognitive concerns on identity and memory. Secondly, and in light of the analysis that I will present in this chapter, the autobiographical documentary needs to be analyzed in relation to the overall practice of documentary filmmaking. I am not strictly concerned with the actual definition and classification of this practice; I am not, to clarify, interested in focusing on the debate within analytic philosophy and cognitive analysis of film on whether we should simply refer to these works as documentaries—which John Grierson originally defined as “the creative treatment of actuality”—or if, as Carl Plantinga,4 Noël Carroll,5 Trevor Ponech,6 and others have shown, we should, instead, rely, in the classification of nonfiction film, on the relational properties exhibited by such works. Rather, the problem I find more pressing is to understand the autobiographical documentary in relation to the mission of the documentary (as arguably attempted by Bill Nichols7 in his identification of six modes of documentary filmmaking), an analysis that, albeit somewhat speculative, given the number of themes and aesthetic solutions chosen by each work, can help us isolate and describe their leading features and the ways in which they manage to deliver what autobiographies are created to deliver: life (in moving pictures). Specifically, I want to argue that the autobiographical documentary cuts across several debates on what documentaries are and that it problematizes the very question of what an autobiography may be. The “autobiographical act”— a locution I will unfold later in the chapter—is, in the autobiographical ­documentary, a rather unique one: unique because of its distinction from other

3  Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 167–168. 4  Carl Plantinga, “What a Documentary is After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring, 2005): 105–117. 5  Noël Carroll. “Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: Conceptual Analyses,” in Engaging the Moving Image. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 193–224. 6  Trevor Ponech, What is Nonfiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999). 7  Bill Nichols. Introduction to Documentary. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

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autobiographical practices, such as memoir, but unique also in its contribution to the debate on what counts as the personal recounting of a life. The following is an outline of the chapter. In the section “Narrative: On the Differences Between Filmic and Literary Autobiographies”, I will discuss the use, in autobiographical documentaries, of narrative structures and how such structures do, at times, diverge from the more traditional narratives we find in memoirs, their literary counterpart. Moving from considerations related to the comparison between literary and filmic autobiographies, the section “Fiction and Nonfiction: Perspectives Within Documentary Filmmaking” will review the debate on the definition of the documentary (broadly construed)8 with a specific focus on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The choice of this debate is motivated by the pivotal role played, in this debate, by autobiographical documentaries that are at times affected by a certain fictive strand. The  section entitled “The Autobiographical Act” narrows the focus on the autobiographical documentary as a distinct sub-genre of the documentary. Beginning with a short history of the autobiographical documentary in North America,9 I analyze how autobiographical documentaries stand in relation to the so-called “question of evidence” and whether the “evidentiary status” of documentaries may be compromised by the inevitable presence of a strong subjective slant—after all, leading character, direction, content, and point of view belong to the same person: the autobiographical documentarian. I will conclude the chapter with my own assessment of the questions and perspectives that scholars, as well as filmmakers, are likely to contemplate in the near future, for it is hard to doubt that the autobiographical documentary has a future. Not only do we have—and collect—an unprecedented amount of autobiographical evidence, from emails to pictures snapped with smartphone cameras, we are also ultimately reliant on their ability to encompass our identity—albeit somewhat loosely construed. Social media has become the public scrapbook of a global society where self-expression is coupled with an obsession for self-exposure. As Lotjie, the protagonist—and director—of My Beautiful Broken Brain, we are obsessed with recording. The recording of our lives, whether in the 140 characters of a tweet or through one of the numerous social media platforms that are today offered to us, is quick and affordable, so affordable that one may suspect it has already begun to replace a rather costly and complex procedure: remembering.

8  While it is inevitable, when discussing the autobiography, to refer to this debate, its treatment in this chapter is rather scant and succinct. For a more comprehensive treatment of the debate, the reader should refer to Vitor Moura’s chapter, which appears in this section of the anthology (SECTION + PP). 9  Most of my examples are taken from North American autobiographical documentaries. While partial, my choice is motivated by the strong connection between the theoretical issues covered by this chapter and by their intimate connection to the evolution of this genre both in relation to historical contingencies and in relation to the technology and cinematic possibilities that are at the basis of the emergence of this sub-genre.

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Narrative: On the Differences Between Filmic and Literary Autobiographies Memoirs—the term most frequently associated with literary autobiographies— abide, for the most part, by classical narrative conventions. They typically, in other words, rely on the causal organization of life events, a causal organization10 that aims at responding to the question underlying our understanding of who we are as persons: “Who am I?” This is, needless to say, a rather scant and skeletal description of both what a narrative may be and of what narrative conditions may better suit autobiographical works. Modifications and addenda to this model are plenty,11 and while I cannot, here, provide a comprehensive review of alternative positions, it is worth exploring the ways in which narrative is treated in the autobiographical documentary: the ways in which standard narrative conventions have been used, modified but also, as I aim to show, somewhat abandoned. Not all autobiographies are based on a narrative structure12 and, even when a narrative is indeed present, it is still possible to observe a certain desire to challenge both its structure and, in the specific case of autobiographical documentaries, its connection to the somewhat pompous promise to deliver a more rounded understanding of who we are. This does not mean, it should be specified, that narrative is to be entirely dismissed. Autobiographical documentaries based on a narrative structure that is likely to be both causal and dependent on an emotional arc are numerous, and yet, the acceptance or, as I aim to show, availability and reliability of such a structure is not to be taken for granted. It is worth noticing, in this respect, the development, and popularity, of autobiographical documentaries that privilege, as their mode of expression, a combination of an “investigative” model—a model that remains loyal to more classical narrative conditions—and of a style, language, and aims that, because of their similarity to techniques associated with psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, largely distance themselves from such narrative conventions. Allow me to consider a few interesting cases. The combination of an investigative stance and the idea of doing self-­ therapy, on camera, animate documentaries, such as Doug Block’s 51 Birch Street (2005) and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003) and his later Walk 10  I am here loosely referring to Noël Carroll’s characterization of narrative connections as erotetic. See Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus Vol. 114, No. 4, The Moving Image (Fall: 1985): 79–103. 11  David Velleman, for example, challenges the requirement of causality and favors, in its place, the idea according to which narratives find their “rhythm” and organization thanks to a mechanism of “emotional cadence.” David Velleman, “Narrative Explanation,” The Philosophical Review Vol. 112, No. 1 (Jan., 2003): 1–25. See also, in relation to narrative and autobiography David Velleman, “The Right to a Life,” in On Life Writing, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 12  See, for instance, Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts. (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press: 2015).

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Away Renee (2011). In these documentaries, the narrative is constructed as to simulate an investigative journey featuring past footage, family videos, letters, unsuspected discoveries, and, in Caouette’s case, his impersonations, re-­ enactments, and video diaries. Caouette and Block’s focus is on the lives of their mothers and the effect those lives had on theirs: the mystery and puzzles of their mothers’ existence becoming the mysteries and puzzles that, once solved, can shed light on their own. In “The Movie-Picture Cure: Self-Therapy Documentaries,” Paul Arthur13 recognizes, in these and several other autobiographical documentaries, a series of psychoanalytical topoi; while Block’s reconstruction of his mother’s diaries collapses in a form of “retribution” against his parents (ultimately an alternative to psychic growth), Caouette’s fast-paced collage of videos and rambling confessions testifies to a psychic condition by which he (or so he tells us) is affected: depersonalization disorder. While these works offer a window into the mind, and psychology, of both directors, they are also compelling examples of how standard narrative conventions can be altered. Laura Marcus, who has worked on the connection between psychoanalysis and autobiography, has touched upon the problem of psychoanalysis and narrative in relation to literary autobiographies. Starting from the most immediate disparities such as confiding into an analyst as opposed to an audience, and moving to similarities such as the almost inevitable recurrence of a certain degree of selectivity if not falsification (a topic on which I will return), one of Marcus’ strongest claims remains the contrast between the controlled narrative structure of memoir and the free associations that are both an essential clue to psychoanalytic interpretation and the channel connecting analysand and analyst.14 Works such as Tarnation and Walk Away Renee are interesting because they stand at the intersection of these two modalities of self-expression: personal narrative and therapy. For, in these cases, the distinction between carefully woven autobiographical narratives (which, as mentioned, often take the form of investigations) and the associations, reports, and disclosures that characterize psychoanalysis are frequently blurred. The tight links of an investigative narrative are repeatedly broken by the radically anti-narrative disclosures that distinguish psychotherapy. Caouette is a case in point, given that his intention, which he makes explicit, is to replicate his thought processes—as well as his mother’s schizophrenic episodes—on camera. But, one must add, he is not alone in his emphasis on the importance of thought itself, un-narrativized, as a central component of autobiographical expression.15 13  Paul Arthur, “The Moving Picture Cure: Self-Therapy Documentaries,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 94 (2007): 865–885. 14  Laura Marcus, Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Cinema. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 15  Such as concern is equally urgent in several other autobiographers, from Lotjie Sotherland’s obsession with her mind to Chantal Akerman’s films, which, she claims, are based on nothing but her own feelings. See, for example, Charles Warren, “Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 495.

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A certain closeness to psychoanalytical procedures is then a reason why narrative, in autobiographical documentaries, is not always likely to follow the more organized and predictable unfolding that we typically encounter in literary autobiographies. A second reason leading to the breaking of standard narrative conventions is the ability of autobiographical documentaries to move largely beyond the solipsistic sphere of literary works: the not so faintly Cartesian display of subjectivity that accompanies the autobiographical quest is tempered by a more practical and committed look at what surrounds the “thinking” mind of the documentarian, from her physical presence to the “others” that participate in her life, to the environment: the homes, locations, and objects that populate life. While in literary autobiographies these elements often play an ancillary role, filmic autobiographies push them forward: quite simply, they make them visible. The inherent complexity of propositional language is trumped by the overt presentation of images—images that move with the autobiographer and that remind the audience of how much is objective and factual in the recounting of a life. Autobiographical documentaries are, in brief, far less dependent on personal recollections than their literary counterparts and rely, for their creation, on a much wider array of sources. Autobiographical documentaries began to emerge when filming, thanks to lightweight, portable cameras and on-site recorders, became popular, fast, and cheap, a phenomenon that is being replicated in our contemporary world of social media, online platforms, and so on. While the problem in the case of the literary autobiographies is mainly how to deal with the recollection of memories, the problem with the autobiographical documentary is how to sort out, classify, and gauge evidence. Evidence has, in the case of autobiographical documentaries, a twofold connotation: while the autobiographer has the task of selecting significant episodes, she is also somewhat forced to understand and accept their independency from the narration and their inability to be fully personalized or altered. There is something in the events and episodes filmed by the documentarian, differently put, that remains fundamentally factual, objective. The first instance of such an “objective” vein is the very body of the autobiographer. In the autobiographical documentary, appearance is crucial—it distinguishes and defines. The body has undeniable communicative power and, even if it can, it should be conceded, evoke a narrative, it obviously does not follow the same rules of storytelling in which propositional expression is embedded. On the one hand, a body is quintessentially a physical presence: corporeality. It is the body that ages, the body that has a shape, and that occupies that shape in the world. On the other hand, the appearance of the body has social ­significance: the way a body looks is tied to social constructs, cultural beliefs and prejudices, historical associations, and so on. Autobiographical documentaries have creative and compelling ways of working at the intersection of these two strands. Think of Sherman’s March

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(Ross McElwee, 1986), where the body assumes significance, thanks to McElwee’s comedic impersonation of General Sherman. There, the body becomes its own mocking masquerade—it transforms, and by ridiculing itself, it exposes its fears, from manic nuclear anxieties to McElwee’s complicated, and perhaps just plainly wrong, relation with women and the female body. Joel Gold and Maxi Cohen’s 1978 documentary Joe and Maxi or the exceptional Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989), where images are so densely physical and overwhelmingly beautiful to make it both a poetic oeuvre and a manifesto for black homosexuality, are among the most significant examples of how the body of the autobiographer can tell a personal story while also addressing larger social and political narratives. In another striking documentary, Silverlake Life: The View From Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993), the physical presence of the documentarians gives one the impression that narrative construction may, in the end, be far less important than the acceptance of the bare unfolding of life and, with it, of the inevitability of death. While telling the story of their relationship, Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, a gay couple of filmmakers who have both been diagnosed with HIV, construct their video diary as a mosaic of tender daily moments, love, humor, and pain. While it does portray suffering, it also offers a candid look into what in life remains beautiful—no matter how tragic the circumstances may be. As a diary, the film accepts the unstructured passing of time as the leading narrative force, and, as a diary that moves past the death of Joslin, it denies closure. Passing hands from Joslin, to Massi, to Peter Friedman—a student of Joslin who completed the documentary—the film tells us something paradoxical about life and illness: there are ways of going past it. The body of the filmmaker, and protagonist, is then certain to affect the narrative choices made by the documentarian; yet, autobiographical documentaries are significant also in light of the attention they devote to a second “factual” component, namely what surrounds the documentarian: family members, friends, cities, houses, and all the objects, however minuscule, that are, at times, far more than the background against which life takes place. Evidence of the past (but also, frequently, of the filmmakers’ present, as in works that document an ongoing autobiographical investigation) has significant implications on the nature of autobiographical documentaries as there is a certain duplicity inherent to it. On the one hand, it retains an intimate but also objective quality. Family videos, pictures, letters, and so on, were often not originally meant to serve a strict autobiographical purpose, and they thus strike us as being also part of our world and of our past—they are objectively real, evidence. On the other hand, while a family may have naïvely and unobtrusively recorded a moment in life, the use of that video by a documentarian relates to the desire to see in it a ­fragment of her own identity. This conflict is at the heart of documentary practices, but it assumes special significance in the case of the autobiographical documentary where the primary focus is not only to report but to report from a first-­person viewpoint the first person.

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A much-discussed autobiographical documentary, Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012) exemplifies such duplicity by investigating both the presence and absence of autobiographical evidence. To reconstruct the story of her mother, and her own, Polley confides in the memories of her siblings—whom she interviews—and on her encounter with what will later be revealed as being her birth father, Montreal producer Harry Gulkin. Polley’s relation to evidence of the past, however, is far more complex than the direct, albeit difficult, confrontation with the viewpoint and the memory of others, for in addition to tapping into the question of the reliability of testimony by offering diverse and often conflicting accounts, Polley relies heavily on re-enactments. Borrowing from the documentary tradition inaugurated by Erroll Morris in The Thin Blue Line, Polley re-enacts family videos which are filmed as to resemble original Super-8 footage, thus creating “make-believe” evidence, evidence that is, however, invested with a sense of authenticity, discovery, and intimacy. Re-enactment has the power, by juxtaposing the present to the past, to make one re-live time. When re-enacted, the past provides the documentarian with a second chance for analysis and understanding, no matter how heavily fabricated it may be. Robert Sinnerbrink,16 in his analysis of The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012), makes a similar point. By allowing the perpetrators of the Indonesian massacre to make a movie where they would re-enact their crimes, Oppenheimer triggers in them a powerful mechanism of self-­ recognition, one that seems to bring the brutal and heartless killers to a moment of psychological arrest and recoil where, while not fully repentant, they find themselves dumbfounded by the revolting nature of their actions. The Act of Killing and The Thin Blue Line are not autobiographical documentaries and Morris and Sinnerbrink do not address the autobiographical documentary specifically, but re-enactments can be crucial in this sub-genre of documentary filmmaking. In the autobiographical documentary, re-enactment becomes a self-imposed process, one that needs to be taken into consideration when looking at the aims, but also at the difficulties, of filming a documentary about oneself. Re-enactments doubly inform the viewer of the significance that given events must have had on the autobiographer and of the desire to re-assess those moments, to take a second look at something that is potentially revealing. In Stories We Tell, the revelation may be that, in the end, no revelation is available. Not only does Polley refuse to privilege one storyline among the many she introduces,17 she also seems to be far more comfortable in her role as 16  Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film (New York: Routledge, 2016). 17  Polley relies on re-enactments but also on the testimonies of friends of her mother, her siblings, her father, and so on.

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a storyteller than in what, arguably, is one of the ideal autobiographer in search of confession and truth. As Karen D. Hoffman has pointed out, Polley is interested in the “discrepancies” we find in stories,18 discrepancies that we can keep investigating, that we can perhaps justify, but that are more likely to remain stories—stories that can only be re-enacted. There is also, undoubtedly, the feeling that such re-enactments may serve a therapeutic rather than investigative function, that, differently put, they may not simply aid rethinking the past, but that they may instead modify it: a sort of wishful thinking or “what if” exercise. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003), an autobiographical documentary featuring the shocking trial that followed the discovery that Arnold, Jarecki’s father, and his son Jesse had abused and raped dozens of boys taking computer classes in the family home, likely points in this direction. Two of the sons, Jesse and David, insist on re-­ enacting scenes of apparent family bliss—scenes that distance themselves from the video diary, following the dramatic vortex of events associated with the trial. Re-enactment is, in their case, an attempt to fabricate an alternative past, the past that could have been, and that, however, remains unattainable, a past that, in being merely a re-enactment, cannot wear the present’s outfit. That past may sound, to some, like a concession to fiction. Is re-enactment then comparable to cinematic wishful thinking? Or better, are autobiographical re-enactments there to introduce an artificially built version of life, one that is similar, in many ways, to a fictional story? An answer to these questions may be just as ambivalent as the autobiographical documentaries I mentioned in this section. To introduce my position, I first need to briefly turn to how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction has been understood, broadly, in reference to the documentary tout court.

Fiction and Nonfiction: Perspectives Within Documentary Filmmaking In the previous section, I considered a few variations over standard narrative conventions that characterize the autobiographical documentary as well as some of the implications, on both narrative and content, that the physical presence of the documentarian and the world around her have on this genre. Ending on reenactments in documentaries stirs the discussion in a different direction, offering us a different set of problems concerning the relation between the autobiographical documentary and the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. In documentary studies and philosophy of film, the debate on the relation and nature of fiction and nonfiction traces back to John Grierson’s early defini Karen Hoffman, “Deceiving into the Truth”: The Indirect Cinema of Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing, in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 525. 18

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tion of the documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality,” a definition that comprises two apparently contrasting themes: creativity, which is usually associated with fictional works, and actuality, which is instead more directly linked to nonfiction. To what extent can a documentary be creative? What is its relation to the truth, to facts? To what extent is the documentary to convey evidence and to what extent is such an evidentiary mission to be dismissed as utopian? Broadly, it is possible to identify two competing tendencies. The first, which has been championed by analytic philosophers and that typifies a cognitive reading and classification of the documentary, focuses on the assertive quality of this genre: on its ability to not only document but to also communicate something that is taken to be veridical. The second, which can be attributed to scholars such as Christian Metz, Brian Winston, Elisabeth Cowie, Michael Renov, and Dirk Eitzen is, instead, characterized by a more visibly postmodern and poststructuralist vein. While highlighting different concerns, these positions emphasize either that the structural similarity between fiction and nonfiction can be seen as a proof of their similarity (if not, more strongly, of their interchangeability) or that the ability to recognize something as a documentary may ultimately be a matter of reception, as more distinctively in the case of Winston and Eitzen.19 A key component of the first branch is the importance given to assertions and, more narrowly, to how documentaries make assertions. In Gregory Currie’s account of the “ideal documentary,”20 what carries assertive power is what he identifies as the “traces” of a documentary or the kind of non-­ intentional evidence that can be attributed, for example, to historical photographs. Appealing to traces, however, has proven difficult. As both Carl Plantinga21 and Keith Dromm22 have noticed, the definition of an ideal documentary is simultaneously too broad and too narrow: too broad as it is not impossible to see it, including virtually anything that is broadcasted live, and too narrow in excluding the large number of documentaries that, as seen in the previous section, rely on re-enactments, staging, and other sources that do not qualify as traces. Noël Carroll’s “films of presumptive assertions” and Carl Plantinga “documentaries as asserted veridical representations” can be seen as two attempts to 19  George Winston, Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Dirk Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Autumn 1995), pp. 81–102. 20  Gregory Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” 285–297. See also Gregorie Currie, “Documentary Traces: Film and the Content of Photographs,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017). 21  Plantinga “What a Documentary is After All,” 105–117. 22  Keith Dromm, “Understanding (and) the Legacy of the Trace: Reflections after Carroll, Currie, and Plantinga,” in The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, eds. David LaRocca & Timothy Corrigan (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), 413–429.

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solve this problem without sacrificing the centrality of assertion. In Carroll’s account, assertions are understood according to a Gricean paradigm that emphasizes the connection—inherent to language—between the communicative intention of a speaker and the audience’s understanding of such intention. This model applies to nonfiction films where the intention of the filmmaker is to assert something and to have such an intention understood as such by the audience. Importantly, Carroll specifies that such intention is “presumptive” as to allow for re-enactments, reconstruction, cognitive guided instruction (CGI), and so on. Further elaborating on Carroll’s account—while narrowing the focus on documentaries as opposed to the rather broad spectrum of nonfiction films— Plantinga’s account departs from Carroll’s strict adherence to assertions by remarking how documentaries both say, through narrative and words, and show, thanks to the phenomenological complexity of their images. Assertions, their intentional nature, and the overall emphasis on the evidentiary nature of the documentary have, instead, been rejected by a number of positions within film and documentary studies. Interestingly, for our purposes, such a rejection is often justified in light of the challenges that typically affect autobiographical works, from the multifaceted nature of subjectivity to the presence of potentially fictional components, as often highlighted when tracing  the movement from cinema vérité to the first autobiographical documentaries. Brian Winston, in this respect, reports an exchange between L.M.  Kit Carson and D.A. Pennebaker after a screening of David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride’s 1967 fake autobiographical documentary featuring Carson as a man filming a documentary about himself) where Pennebaker accused him of “having killed cinema vérité,” to which Carson had allegedly responded: “truthmovies are just beginning.”23 Similarly, Chantal Akerman has reportedly refused to see her films as either fictional or nonfictional, claiming that, quite simply, her films were based exclusively on her feelings.24 Further fueling the disagreement between these two theoretical strands is the debate concerning the role that should be given to viewers in the understanding and interpretation of the aims of the documentary. While Carroll believes in a “savvy” audience capable of understanding the assertoric intention of a filmmaker, Winston believes that being “savvy” is precisely what makes us question the assertions made. Contemporary audiences, he claims, “can no longer look at photographs as windows of the world whose panes have been polished to a prenatural transparency by the glazier/photographer. Our ­sophistication is such that we will always see the marks on the glass,” that we will, simply put, question the truth, its epistemological validity, and any assertion we might detect.25  Winston, Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond, 202.  Warren, “Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films,” 501. 25  Winston, Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond, 230. 23 24

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I am not sympathetic to this latter position, and I am specifically doubtful of strategies aiming at distinguishing fiction and nonfiction by focusing on the audience’s reception. Yet, the audience’s reception is something that the analytic tradition may want to consider in addition to the already present discussion on assertions and their linguistic, epistemic, and phenomenological nature—I will return on this point, and on a clarification and assessment of these two strands of debate in the last section of this chapter.

The Autobiographical Act In the introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled The Philosophy of Autobiography, Christopher Cowley26 outlines the process leading to the composition of autobiographical works. He isolates three levels, or what may be referred to as the three stages of autobiography. The first is “thought,” a solipsistic moment in which the autobiographer begins to recollect but also, as one should expect for a genre that relies so much on one’s ability to remember, to reconstruct the events of a life. The second, and here Cowley is, I believe, adding something central to the creation of autobiographical works, is “speech” or the moment in which the author (and protagonist) begins to share the autobiography with, say, a close friend or a relative. Cowley links this stage to our nature as storytellers as well as to the need, often explicit in the case of personal memories, to double check and fact-check information. Lastly, we have the moment in which the story becomes public. Publicity can be achieved through writing, the “graphia” stage, or, as I am exploring in this chapter, through film. This last stage is not only important because it solidifies, in the form of a finished autobiographical work, the intention expressed in the first two stages, it is also crucial because it is typically what makes autobiography problematic if not paradoxical. For the personal, the hidden, and the intimate are to become public; for the uniqueness underscoring personal expression—and with it its solipsistic nature—are to become intelligible to a larger audience; for once something is filmed or written or recorded, time is stopped and reified: subjective expression is made objective. Cowley’s analysis is largely based on literary autobiographies, but it would not be mistaken to apply the three stages to the analysis of autobiographical documentaries. Specifically, while the previous section, with its focus on narrative and on how autobiographical documentaries are inevitably engaged with both the physical presence of the documentarian and what surrounds her, partly satisfies a discussion of the first two stages, thought and speech, the last stage, graphia, has only been marginally explored. The goal of this section is then to focus on this last component, on the stage, in other words, in which autobiographical documentaries become public, on their impact, and on how they position themselves within the autobiographical 26  Christopher Cowley, ed. The Philosophy of Autobiography (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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and documentary traditions. I like to frame this investigation as one concerned with what in the introduction to this chapter I labeled the “autobiographical act.” The reason, and rhetoric, behind this term is rather simple, with three main points justifying my emphasis on the “act” of the autobiographical documentary. The first is that what we are seeing, when watching one of these works, are present actions, recorded actions (as in the case, for example, of family videos), or re-enactments of the past. Something is done and something is performed in ways that are radically different from the remembering of past actions we find in literary autobiographies. The second is that it is through those actions that the autobiographer portrays her life and puts herself in a relationship with the audience. Those actions become what we are ultimately called to evaluate. The last reason is that it is through actions that the autobiographical documentary contributes to the question of identity. These works remind us that you are what you do, that you are the body who does certain things and not others, and that you are, lastly, an agent whose actions have personal but also social and political consequences. In autobiographical documentaries, you do not only narrate your life, you live it. I will begin with a brief description of the emergence of the autobiographical documentary—with a specific focus on the North American tradition—and then move to an analysis of the autobiographical documentary in light of the broader debate on the nature of documentary filmmaking sketched in the previous section. The assessment of such debate will allow me to better flesh out the nature of the autobiographical act. A Brief History of the Autobiographical Documentary in North America While I am not, in this chapter, strictly interested in the history of the autobiographical documentary, a brief look at its origin and at the movements that led to its emergence is essential for a better understanding of the debates that surround it. The autobiographical documentary emerges in the late 1960s, and it is informed by other traditions and genres, from, quite obviously, the documentary tradition, to a genre that often shares boundaries with the autobiographical documentary, namely the essay film. Jim Lane27 isolates three movements that, together, are responsible for the emergence of autobiographical documentaries in North America: the American avant-garde of experimental filmmaking, the “direct cinema” movement, and the French tradition of the politique des auteurs.28 27  Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 11–32. 28  Auteur theory, albeit stemming in France, found a fertile ground in the New York movement of the 1960s and 1970s and specifically in the work of Andrew Sarris who is largely responsible for the “Americanization” of auteur theory and for its North American success. Andrew Sarris, “Notes

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From the American avant-garde of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas—whose work is often explicitly interwoven with autobiographical themes—autobiographical documentaries inherit a rejection of commercial filmmaking that is embodied, from a technical standpoint, in the introduction of minimal production techniques and, from an artistic standpoint, in the newfound attention to everyday life and to autobiographical themes. Yet, as I will similarly emphasize with respect to the other movements that jointly led to the first wave of autobiographical documentaries, shared themes and techniques are also often what most distinctively separates autobiographical documentaries from the tendencies that inspired them. For despite a commonality of interests and means, only a fraction of autobiographical documentaries aims at the artistic complexity of avant-garde works; a large part of their appeal and aesthetic force, in fact, runs contrary to the esoteric and experimental nature that characterizes the avant-garde favoring instead more explicit and relatable aesthetic solutions. Such “directedness” is echoed by the second movement mentioned above, namely the direct cinema of the Maysles Brothers, D.A. Pennebaker, Frederick Wiseman, and so on. But in this case too, a partial embrace quickly translates into criticism: while direct cinema mandates the withdrawal of the filmmaker from the presentation of the events, autobiographical documentaries, on the contrary, enforce her presence by cementing the importance of the first-person viewpoint. The last movement contributing to the development of the autobiographical documentary, the essay film, further highlights the multifaceted nature of this genre. The essayistic tendency, born with Alexandre Astruc and the concept of the camera-stylo,29 led to both the adoption—crucial in the development of the documentary—of voice-over narration, as famously in Jean Rouch’s cinema vérité, and to the work of filmmakers, such as Jean Luc Godard, who saw in the essayistic the essence of filmmaking. The essayistic brought what Timothy Corrigan aptly summarizes as a tendency toward “thinking out loud”:30 thinking out loud about the subject, of course, but also about filming, about the society autobiographers inhabit, and about the possibility of seeing that subject thinking, acting, and living in that society. While these three movements are essential for the development of the documentary, they are not jointly sufficient. For it is virtually mandatory to mention the historical, social, and political milieu that surrounds their emergence. The young and technically skilled filmmakers who started the autobiographical documentary movement saw filmmaking as a form of activism which is manifested in political awareness, as, for instance, in the rejection of the Vietnam war but also in their capacity to give voice to minorities in a way that is as informed as it is revolutionary. on Auteur Theory in 1962.” In Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy & Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 451–454. 29  Alexandre Astruc. “Du Stylo à la Caméra et de la Caméra au Stylo,” L’Écran Française, March 30, 1948. 30  Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film. From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.

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The Question of Evidence The above summary of the movements that together led to the beginning of the autobiographical documentary—both in relation to film and in connection to the historical milieu that welcomed, in North America, the autobiographical documentary—is not for the sake of completeness, or most definitely not only because different degrees of adherence to each of these tendencies, from the essayistic to the influence of the avant-garde and cinema vérité, to the political, economic, and social aims of the autobiographical documentary can also be seen as contributing to what is a rather marked critical disagreement on the nature and interpretation of this sub-genre and on how to assess its subject: the filmmaker and protagonist. The reader may recall, in this respect, the mentioning, in the previous section, of the discussion on the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, and of two contrasting views on the issue: a more openly cognitive and analytic branch which tends to privilege a definition of nonfiction films as fundamentally assertoric and a second which is instead reliant on largely poststructuralist claims and that, for this reason, appears more inclined toward the blurring of the fiction/nonfiction divide. Such theoretical dispute is, I believe, particularly interesting when analyzed through the lens of autobiographical documentaries which, as the works I have so far used as examples show, offer us somewhat ambiguous assertions and scenarios, from the use of re-enactments, to the fragile subjectivity of the documentarian, to the inevitable complications that accompany the recollection of the past, and the processes through which such recollections are tied together in a cohesive work. To what extent do these factors affect the nature of autobiographical documentaries and the assertions thereby made? And, more broadly, what is that that distinguishes the autobiographical “act” when the act in question is not exclusively propositional but dependent on cinematic means? A first strategy to respond to this question is to rely on one of the most well-­ known attempts at cataloguing documentaries: Bill Nichols’ analysis of different “modes” of documentary filmmaking. Nichols’ vast contribution to the study of documentary filmmaking centers on what he labels the “question of evidence.” The evidentiary nature of the documentary, which can be achieved by means such as indexical d ­ ocumentation, but also flexible storytelling and rhetorical strategies (Nichols maintains that “facts become evidence when they are taken up in discourse”31) frame the creation and reception of documentaries as a form of epistephilia, a love for knowledge. Documentaries embody a “discourse of sobriety,”32 they are “…the 31  Bill Nichols, Speaking Truth With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 99. See also: Bill Nichols “The Question of Evidence.” In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong (Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2008). 32  Nichols, 1999.

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vehicles of action and intervention, power and knowledge, desire and will, directed toward the world we physically inhabit and share.” Nichols’ account is non-normative and, as a non-normative account, it has the limitation of not outlining rigid structural conditions but also the advantage of allowing for richer and more nuanced descriptions of different modes of documentary filmmaking. It is within this framework that we can then begin to define the boundaries of the autobiographical documentary. It should be noted upfront that Nichols does not see the autobiographical documentary as a distinct mode. Autobiographical documentaries are, instead, treated in a more indirect fashion, as a blend of modes and, more directly, as “documentaries of personal portraiture.” With respect to the former solution, autobiographical documentaries appear to share boundaries with at least two or, as I will argue, three modes. The first two, the performative—which emphasizes the expressive quality of the filmmaker’s engagement with the film’s subject and addresses the audience in a forthright manner—and the participatory—where the filmmaker interacts with social actors and participates in shaping what happens before the camera through interviews and other means33—are particularly prominent. Examples of the first are the work of Nick Broomfield, Tongues Untied (Riggs, 1989) and My Puberty (Ilene Segalove, 1987) where the filmmaker is seen acting, talking, and often also directing the work. Participatory documentaries, because of their reliance on the testimony of others, inform autobiographical documentaries such as Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012) or Tomboychick (Sandi DuBowski, 1993), which gives a prominent role to DuBowski’s “Nana,” the grandmother of the filmmaker and the vehicle through which DuBowski examines her own sexuality. Autobiographical documentaries, however, also relate to reflexive documentaries—which call attention to the conventions of documentary filmmaking and methodologies of fieldwork and interview.34 Experimental and avant-garde leaning documentaries such as the ones directed by Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage, which I have mentioned in relation to the origin of the autobiographical documentary, championed this mode, but, perhaps, we can also see it in less esoteric examples as, for instance, in animated autobiographical documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi, 2007). Nichols’ treatment of documentaries of personal portraiture is less extended than his analysis of different modes of documentary filmmaking, but it is interesting for it acts as a confirmation of his belief in the evidentiary power of documentary—in the idea of documentaries as discourses of sobriety. Documentaries of personal portraiture, he claims, are singled out by their ability to expose social and political issues as objectively as possible. While they illustrate the events as seen from the standpoint of the documentarian, they must also leave room for the audience to develop an independent perspective. The protagonists of these works are social subjects that treasure and abide by the rules of political, social, and economic realism: their strength (their = the  Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 149–153.  Ibidem.

33 34

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protagonists? the works) is to make the viewers conscious of the situations and scenarios presented to them, and to realize, with them (who does them refer to, unclear: the viewer alongside the protagonists?), their epistemological and, so to speak, “activist” dimension.35 Nichols’ position and, specifically, his emphasis on the evidentiary status of the documentary, have encountered criticism; interestingly, a considerable portion of such criticism appears to stem from a reflection on autobiographical themes. Michael Renov’s work is, in this respect, particularly significant. Largely rejecting the idea according to which nonfiction is characterized, primarily, by an assertive stance, he focuses on the effects of autobiographical documentaries (and of what has been defined—mistakenly, he assumes—as “art documentaries”36) in shaping the boundaries of documentary and documentary practices. Writing with an eye on documentary production after 2000, but consistently relying on the tradition of scholars such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault, Renov claims that “The VERY IDEA of autobiography reinvents the VERY IDEA of the documentary [emphasis in the text],”37 thus pointing to a radical shift in both the documentary tradition and its aims: from Nichols’ “discourse of sobriety” to the documentary as the “site of instability.”38 The “instability” Renov refers to is twofold. On the one hand, instability relates to the subjective quality of the autobiographical documentary: fi ­ rst-­person narratives are fundamentally distant from a more traditional recounting of facts and cinematic means accentuate the manipulation of facts and evidence (think, for instance, of what is seen in relation to re-enactments). On the other hand, the rhetoric of instability finds support in a reflection on how documentaries are received. As we have started seeing in the previous section, this latter point, the emphasis on the reception of documentaries, is of special interest as it is one of the most relevant grounds for disagreement between the cognitive tradition and the (largely) poststructuralist tradition to which Renov, Winston, Cowie, and so on, belong. Winston, for example, has explored the relevance of this issue in autobiographical klutz documentaries as in, for example, the work of Nick Broomfield, 35  While Nichols has softened his view on the importance of evidence, the message has not fundamentally changed. In Speaking Truths with Film, where he considers irony, paradox, and fictive techniques, sobriety seems to prevail. What prevails, in these films, is the desire to communicate something about the subject and something about how the subject interacts with everyday reality, no matter its uncertainty or the rhetorical stratagems it hinges upon. 36  Noël Carroll “Nonfiction film and postmodern skepticism.” In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 293. 37  Michael Renov “First Person Films: Some Theses on Self-Inscription.” In Rethinking documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, eds. Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong (Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill, 2008), 42. 38  Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 110.

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Alan Berliner’s 2006 documentary on insomnia, Wide Awake, and the already mentioned Sherman’s March. What Winston finds interesting about these works is that they focus heavily on the documentarian, while championing an irony-laden self-reflective process that calls for audience participation.39 As Broomfield himself claims: “there is no point in pretending the camera’s not there. I think what’s important is the interaction between the film-makers and those being filmed, and that the audience is aware of the interaction so they can make decisions of their own…it is not the presence of the camera that changes people’s behavior, it’s the relationship they have with the people behind it [my emphasis].”40 Further evidence of the importance of the audience’s reception and involvement in autobiographical works comes, according to Winston, from new filming techniques. The “camcorder” culture of the 1990s, platforms such as YouTube or Vimeo, and the widespread culture of “sharing”41 that scholars such as Clay Shirky so often praise,42 depend on the audience’s participation and are key steps in the evolution of autobiography and autobiographical practices. Autobiographical works are becoming more interactive, and they are most definitely moving away from the idea of personal and intimate recollection. Allow me to consider some of the intuitions I have outlined in this section. The Autobiographical Act: An Alternative Perspective My goal, in this last section of the chapter, is twofold. First, to provide an assessment of the debates mentioned in the previous section with a focus on the assertoric intention of the documentary and the disagreements concerning its evidentiary mission. In this respect, I argue that while there are inevitable subjective tendencies in the autobiographical documentary, such tendencies are not sufficient to justify Renov’s insistence on instability or other highly subjectivist accounts of the documentary. My second aim is to return to the “mission” of the documentary and to what I have earlier introduced as the “autobiographical act” and to outline the characteristics of the actions that lead to the creation of an autobiographical documentary, that put the documentarian in touch with the audience, and that, in turn, are essential to the portrayal of her identity. For, I argue, in the autobiographical documentary, identity and the narration of identity are tackled in ways that are specific to this sub-genre

39  See also: Jon Dovey, Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television (London: Pluto Press, 2000). 40  Jason Wood (ed.), Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 229. 41  Think, for example, of the 2010 “Global Lives Project” or of new technologies such as Florian Thalhofer’s Korsakow, a software for interactive narratives and at how fast their popularity is growing. 42  Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus. Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. (New York: Penguin Press, 2010).

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and that are, for this reason, fundamentally distinct from literary autobiographical narratives and autobiographical practices we encounter in other arts. Beginning with the first issue, it is important to assess two claims. On the one hand, whether subjectivity, as argued by Renov, can truly imperil the evidentiary nature of the documentary and lead to the aforementioned shift from evidence to the documentary as “the site of instability.” On the other hand, it is worth pausing on the importance that reception plays in the documentary and the extent to which it affects its interpretation. It is not incorrect to claim, and here I side with Renov, that autobiographical documentaries are often filled with uncertainty, with questioning subjects, and with fact-deforming rhetorical stratagems, from irony to technical manipulations, but I do not take these elements to be enough to deem the documentary a “site of instability.” Autobiographical documentarians may not have, as their primary goal, the portrayal of a candid identity. In fact, the emergence of the autobiographical documentary in North America can even be seen as a crucial step in questioning the attainability, even the relevance of such a mission. It can be argued, in this respect, that their strength may instead be to denounce this mission—the Augustinian mission of autobiography—as fundamentally unattainable if not flawed. Rather than aiming at Augustinian clarity, documentarians present us with alternatives to how to portray the self and question whether such a portrayal is ultimately possible. Labeling the documentary, however, as  a “site of instability” misses the mark. While it may not be possible to clearly draw the contours of the self and while there is a certain instability through which subjectivity is understood, there is noticeable decisiveness in asserting, quite simply, that it is not easy to capture life in moving images. Renov’s criticism of assertoric intentions ignores a delicate point. Autobiography has not, as Renov argues, revolutionized the nature of the documentary by erasing its focus on evidence and assertion. Documentaries remain assertoric, with assertions being made propositionally, but also through the ampler possibilities offered by the cinematic medium. Those assertions are about the difficulties posed by autobiographies and about the solutions and compromises that are introduced, often uniquely, by the cinematic medium. Autobiographical documentaries are not changing the face of the documentary: what they are changing is how we think of autobiography and autobiographical practices. Autobiographical documentaries have problematized the notion of confession, and I am confident that the development of autobiographical practices, and especially their extension to the web and internet-based platforms, will further complicate their aims. But at the same time, it is important to remark that the popularity of autobiographical practices has not led to the dissolution of the weight given to the portrayal of identity and, perhaps even more urgently, to a rejection of the evidentiary nature of the documentary. The popularity of autobiographical practices has, instead, in certain cases, sharpened the importance of a bond between

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the subject and the collective dimension or the broader public. Autobiography is hardly anymore a solitary endeavor, and it is steadily becoming a collective practice with the ability to alter social arrangements on both the private and public level. While life on camera can be semi-fictitious and almost jokingly unstable, it can also be invested with responsibility. Young autobiographers, in the movie industry but also on the web, want to be taken seriously and want their assertions to be taken for what they are. This is most definitely the case when social issues—think of race, gender, community building, and so on—intersect autobiographical practices: here, the importance of portraying something objective and factual in relation to the self, and to how the self inhabits the social and global community, has become stronger rather than weaker. The documentary mentioned at the very beginning of this chapter, My Beautiful Broken Brain, exemplifies such concerns. It wants to communicate honestly and wants the audience to embrace such intention. It is interesting, in addition, to observe how the importance of evidence, and with it the desire to communicate something that is to be taken as reliable, as facts about life, is not lost even when little attention is given to pressing social and cultural issues. Take, for example, Ice Poseidon. Ice Poseidon is the fictitious name used by one of the leading YouTube live streamers in the United States, Paul Denino. Live streaming is an interesting practice when considering autobiography and where it may be heading. A large portion of live streaming is dedicated to life, to the quotidian. Beginning in the mid-1990s, live streaming benefited from video game culture (it still does), but it quickly grew into a profession with top streamers uploading hours after hours of content. They have fans and chat rooms and their videos—and relative success—largely depend on the audience’s comments and reactions, no matter whether those reactions are positive or bordering on hate speech. Ice Poseidon is both hypnotic and almost unwatchable. It can be funny and tremendously boring, and it certainly makes one question our culture of hyper-visibility. With the exception of a few moments in which Ice Poseidon stages encounters with some of his fans, very little happens. It is a striking rejection of the culture established by Instagram and Meitu where everything—people, places, food, clothes, and so on—is to be aesthetically enhanced, photographed, or filmed for pleasure. Following Denino is following banality, daily life, dirty apartments, and chores. Things look real, and they almost certainly are. Moving even closer to autobiographical issues, it is crucial to observe that Denino—very much despite the use of a fictitious name—is brutally honest and emotionally open. Part of the success of his stream is that there are no barriers. He acknowledges past mistakes, psychological uncertainties, and relationships: he is emotionally present. He has absolutely no interest in being someone else, in masking his identity: not being someone else is the promise he makes to his audience and ultimately the reason why thousands of young adults keep following him religiously.

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The contribution brought by the contemporary audience is hardly the postmodern flurry of interpretations. While it is true that content is analyzed, dissected, and evaluated, undeniable attention is given to the evidence provided by the documentarian and to how that evidence is presented. For what is valuable is the bond between the documentarian and the audience, one in which the documentarian acknowledges the role of the audience as a “collaborator” and in which the audience recognizes the documentarian as the carrier of a message that is autobiographical while affording a larger social scope. To conclude, and in light of what is discussed in this section, allow me to go back to the notion of the “autobiographical act” and to summarize its leading characterizations as they have emerged in this chapter. I have begun my analysis of the autobiographical documentary by looking at some of its structural features and at the kind of narrative(s) that are more typically employed. Autobiographical documentaries often combine an investigative narrative with an exploration of the thought processes of the documentarian, which allows for the bracketing of the more rigid narrative connections that are, instead, typically found in literary autobiographies. Several factors condition the making of an autobiographical documentary and the acts and actions we see on screen. First, autobiographical documentaries are about seeing a body, the one of the documentarian. The crucial “act” in autobiographical documentaries is to appear in front of the camera, as a physical presence. In autobiographical documentaries, we are to see the body of the documentarian and are in turn immediately reminded that identity is not just a matter of thought and memories. Narratives are not, or not only, a collection of things past: they unfold in the present for the present is about life and identity as much as it is about the past. The present is, more than the past, the tense of documentary filmmaking. Or so it appears when we see the documentary as a report on what is happening, on present actions, and, in the case of autobiographical documentaries, on how those actions affect the director and protagonist. This is shown by the frequent need to dwell on social and cultural issues, but it is also a way of nodding to the public mission of the documentary, a public mission that is hardly lost even when personal and intimate themes are central. More than its literary counterpart, the autobiographical documentary points to the inescapability of the world around the documentarian and of how much that world makes the autobiographical mission possible. The tradition of documentary studies has often seen the autobiographical documentary as exemplary of a rejection of the assertoric and evidentiary aims of the documentary. The rhetoric of “instability” and the emphasis on the elusiveness of subjectivity coupled with the audience’s freedom to interpret (and reinterpret) what is shown by the documentarian have been used as weapons against the ability of the documentary to communicate, if not entirely objectively, at least honestly the desires, needs, and thoughts of the ­ autobiographer.

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Yet, as I have tried to show, the assessment of autobiographical documentaries that dominates this theoretical strand is hardly correct. I have mentioned the importance of the physical body of the documentarian, and attention has been given to what surrounds her and to the presence of a world that not only cannot be ignored but that is also often hard to fully manipulate. The autobiographical documentary is rarely a solitary endeavor. It is engaged and engaging. Historical and social events are often intertwined with the narration of personal episodes, calling for the attention and participation of the community surrounding the documentarian. The autobiographical act is, in the autobiographical documentary, often the very act of showing, of making reality visible and transparent. While memoirs tend toward the inside, autobiographical documentaries privilege an outward look. After all, we see two things: the documentarian and everything around her. Additionally, as seen in the last section, it would be impossible to talk about the autobiographical documentary—especially in its most recent unfolding— without acknowledging the importance played by the audience. For that audience is hardly passive. New web-based platforms have made the interaction between the documentarian and the audience rather intimate to the point of making one ponder over the extent to which building a documentary about one’s life should be seen as a collective and not as a personal endeavor. The culture of visibility combined with the one of sharing makes the telling of a life a social need. It is tremendously hard not to record (obsessively).

Bibliography Arthur, Paul. 2007. The Moving Picture Cure: Self-Therapy Documentaries. The Psychoanalytic Review 94: 865–885. Astruc, Alexandre. 1948. Du Stylo à la Caméra et de la Caméra au Stylo. L’Écran Française, March 30. Carroll, Noël. 1985. The Power of Movies. Daedalus 114 (4, The Moving Image, Fall): 79–103. ———. 1996. Nonfiction Film and Postmodern Skepticism. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2003. Fiction, Nonfiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: Conceptual Analyses. In Engaging the Moving Image, 193–224. New Haven: Yale University Press. Corrigan, Timothy. 2011. The Essay Film. From Montaigne, After Marker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowley, Christopher, ed. 2015. The Philosophy of Autobiography. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Currie, Gregory. 2017. Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs, 285–297. See Also Currie, Gregorie, Documentary Traces: Film and the Content of Photographs. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca and Timothy Corrigan. Lanham: Lexington Books. Dovey, Jon. 2000. Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto Press.

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Dromm, Keith. 2017. Understanding (and) the Legacy of the Trace: Reflections After Carroll, Currie, and Plantinga. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca and Timothy Corrigan, 413–429. Lanham: Lexington Books. Eitzen, Dirk. 1995. When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception. Cinema Journal 35 (1, Autumn): 81–102. Foley, Mary Ann. Forthcoming. Missing Links in the Study of Autobiographical Memory Appraisal: Appraisals of Scene Making in Recollection & Narrative Construction Processes. Goldie, Peter. 2003. One’s Remembered Past. Philosophical Papers 32 (3, November): 301–319. ———. 2012. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, & the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hoffman, Karen. 2017. “Deceiving into the Truth”: The Indirect Cinema of Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca and Timothy Corrigan, 525. Lanham: Lexington Books. Knausgård, Karl Ove. 2009. My Struggle. Trans. Don Bartlett. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Korsgaard, Christine M. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lane, Jim. 2002. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marcus, Laura. 2014. Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Cinema. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nelson, Maggie. 2015. The Argonauts. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. Nichols, Bill. 2001. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2008. The Question of Evidence. In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill. ———. 2016. Speaking Truth with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary. Oakland: University of California Press. Olney, James. 1998. Memory & Narrative. The Weave of Life-Writing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Plantinga, Carl. 2005. What a Documentary Is After All. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2, Spring): 105–117. ———. 2017. The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/ Nonfiction Film Distinction. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca and Timothy Corrigan, 113–124. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ponech, Trevor. 1999. What Is Nonfiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication. Boulder: Westview Press. Renov, Michael. 2007. The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2008. First Person Films: Some Theses on Self-Inscription. In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma De Jong. Maidenhead: Open University Press/McGraw Hill. Sarris, Andrew. 2009. Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962. In Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 451–454. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Schechtman, Marya. 1996. The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 2008. Stories, Lives and Basic Survival: A Refinement and Defense of the Narrative View. In Narrative and Understanding Persons, ed. Daniel Hutto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shirky, Clay. 2010. Cognitive Surplus. Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin Press. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. New York: Routledge. Smith, Sidonie, and Julie Watson. 2010. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, 167–168. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Strawson, Galen. 1999. The Self and the SESMET. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (4): 99–135. ———, ed. 2005. The Self? Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2015. The Unstoried Life. In On Life Writing, ed. Zachary Leader, 284–301. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Velleman, David. 2003. Narrative Explanation. The Philosophical Review 112 (1, January): 1–25. ———. 2005. The Right to a Life. In On Life Writing, ed. Zachary Leader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Warren, Charles. 2017. Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films. In The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, ed. David LaRocca and Timothy Corrigan. Lanham: Lexington Books. Winston, George. 2008. Claiming the Real. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wood, Jason, ed. 2005. Nick Broomfield: Documenting Icons, 229. London: Faber and Faber.

PART VII

Movies and Society

CHAPTER 28

Feminist Philosophy of Film Zoë Cunliffe

The depiction of women in films has received considerable attention since the 1970s, from both film theorists and philosophers of film. This chapter aims to survey and evaluate various approaches to feminist philosophy of film thus far, and to offer suggestions of new topics and directions for research. I focus on feminist philosophy of film as it pertains to current popular cinema: contemporary Western cinema that has enjoyed box office success or mainstream critical acclaim. In assessing past feminist work, classical Hollywood films will inevitably come into the picture—but my central focus is contemporary cinema and on applying to it both past and present-day feminist thought. Of course, just as the definition and goals of feminism itself are fiercely contested, so too is it difficult to define feminist philosophy of film, or to identify within it unified methodologies and priorities. In fact, feminist critiques and analyses of motion pictures are so wide ranging and varied that a full treatment would require a stand-alone anthology, which could include topics such as feminist postcolonial cinema, the pornography debate, and the feminist sociological exploration into women’s suppressed influence in cinema’s history. Even within my focus on mainstream films, the scope of feminist analysis is hugely varied, so ‘feminist philosophy of film’ is best understood as signifying a broad cluster of philosophical work that takes a feminist slant in its approach to the study of cinema. Furthermore, as in philosophy of film and aesthetics more broadly, disciplinary boundaries are blurred, and philosophically significant feminist analyses can be found in film studies, cultural studies, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of film more generally. In what follows, I therefore assume an interdisciplinary approach.

Z. Cunliffe (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_28

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Given the recent explosion of the #MeToo movement in Hollywood, and a political climate in which feminist conversations surrounding cinema have gained cultural prominence—if not necessarily industry or audience uptake—it is a particularly appropriate time to survey the literature available to feminist philosophy of film. The chapter is split into two parts: the first focuses on feminist critique of mainstream films and the second engages with the question of how mainstream films can contribute to a constructive feminist philosophy of film.

Feminist Film Critique This section comprises an overview of approaches that feminists have taken to critiquing mainstream films. I examine five broadly construed areas of interest: images of women, spectatorship and the male gaze, audience-text negotiation, cognitivism, and ideology critique. These five kinds of critique are roughly chronological, and there is inevitably some overlap between them. Images of Women The earliest theoretical investigations into gender in film theory took what has come to be known as an ‘images of women’ approach. Examples of this approach can be found in Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus and Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape.1 Both works focus on Hollywood films and take a broadly sociological approach in order to detail the changing images of women being presented in such films. In doing so, both Rosen and Haskell assume that films are simplistic reflections of reality; the feminist critique therefore revolves around the various ways in which women in films are depicted falsely, or through a distorting and thus patriarchal lens. Both texts explore Hollywood movies from the silent period through to the 1970s, but Rosen and Haskell come to slightly different conclusions about the depiction of women throughout these decades.2 Rosen analyses Hollywood representations as portraying negative stereotypes about women, designed as such to shape female audiences into compliant and willing victims of male dominance.3 In making this analysis, she draws on Kate Millett’s conception of gender ideology as conscious male conspiracy. Haskell’s analysis is less pejorative than Rosen’s, in that she does not posit a conscious attempt to subjugate women through film. However, she does trace a trajectory from a revered portrayal of the pure and helpless woman in silent films through to a portrayal rife 1  Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973); Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974). 2  Karen Hollinger, Feminist Film Studies (London: Routledge, 2012), 8. 3  Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Arnold, 1997), 14.

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with misogynistic violence in the 1970s, arguing that the latter be seen as a reactive backlash against women’s progress. The images of women approach is significant for its role in drawing feminist attention to film and in pursuing certain lines of thought that would later be elaborated on by other feminist critics.4 However, overall, the approach has been roundly and thoroughly critiqued for its theoretical simplicity. In focusing on representations of women in Hollywood films as stereotypes, Rosen and Haskell fail to account for the way that representations are mediated and constructed by filmic conventions of camerawork, editing, and narrative or to offer any positive account of the relationship between women on-screen and women in reality. The constructive advocacy of the images of women approach—that films ought to offer more positive female representations—therefore falls flat, as it lacks the philosophical concepts and tools needed to make sense of such a suggestion. Furthermore, the way in which Rosen and Haskell conducted their analyses was somewhat scattershot, relying heavily upon detailed explorations of films from different genres and time periods. The absence of any kind of sophisticated or cohesive theory to tie these disparate films and the observations about them together undermines both the credibility of the observations and the approach’s utility in critiquing new films.5 Despite the obvious failings of the images of women approach, its shortcomings and the open questions it raised led feminists to poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, and to developing a more theoretically sophisticated account of how the formal conventions of Hollywood films reflect and deepen patriarchal values. Spectatorship and the Male Gaze Largely in reaction to the images of women approach, in the mid- to-late 1970s, a cluster of British feminist theorists began to focus on viewers’ motives in watching mainstream films and on the psychological effect that these films have on spectators. Instead of focusing on stereotypes of women in films and assuming that films reflect reality, this approach employed psychoanalysis to argue that cinema constructs the woman ideologically through male fantasies and wants. Perhaps the most influential essay to emerge from this period was Laura Mulvey’s trailblazing ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in 1975, which

4  For example, Haskell calls attention to the subversive potential of the genre of the woman’s film, which had up to this point been dismissed as frivolous. A burgeoning and productive literature on the genre was subsequently instigated. 5  Note that Nöel Carroll launched a defence of the images of women approach in his article ‘The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm’. However, his account clearly requires consideration of more than image alone—also of narrative conventions, cinematography, and so on—and thus should be treated separately to the 1970s theories.

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had a remarkable impact and shaped feminist criticism for some years.6 In the essay, she draws on Freudian and Lacanian concepts to argue that men and women are positioned differently by film, and that the visual pleasure afforded by cinema panders to the male gaze. Mulvey argues that mainstream cinema and its formal conventions reflect and are constituted by the patriarchal preoccupations of society, such that the viewer inevitably takes up and endorses a male perspective. Men look, and women are objects of the look; in cinematic narratives, men are active and push the plot forwards, whilst women are passive and inert. The male viewer is encouraged to identify with the male protagonist, thereby gleaning pleasure from the consumption of the female form—this type of pleasure in gazing is Freud’s concept of scopophilia. For Mulvey, films are written, staged, lit, edited, and directed so as to maximise the presentation of women as erotic objects. Yet whilst psychoanalytic theory deems scopophilia a source of pleasure, it also proves a source of displeasure, since the female form also signifies sexual difference and evokes castration anxiety. Mulvey therefore argues that Hollywood narratives are constructed such that this threat can be displaced either through voyeuristic punishment in which the woman is investigated and demystified or through fetishistic looking in which the woman is idealised and transformed.7 Mulvey’s essay generated much debate and disagreement, and remained the focus of feminist film theory throughout the 1980s. Her analysis and utilisation of a psychoanalytic framework have received significant criticism. I outline four of the primary objections here. One objection levelled at Mulvey’s account is that it is overly cynical in its analysis of female characters in mainstream films, since it casts all women as mere projections and manipulations of male desire. For Mulvey, cinema is inescapably patriarchal, since language and culture are predominantly male and thus pervaded by a patriarchal logic; popular on-screen depictions of women are by necessity passive objects of the male gaze. Yet this seems too totalising— it erases the agency that might be exercised by women on-screen and denies the possibility of female desire and thought being reflected in film. As Laurie Shrage has argued, some classical Hollywood films have virtues that feminist thinkers overlook if they see the male gaze as all-encompassing.8 Furthermore, in addition to obscuring the possibility of women being depicted in a non-­ patriarchal way, the totalising male gaze of Mulvey’s analysis precludes positive engagement with the role women can play in the creation of cinema. It fails to acknowledge women’s existing and potential agency in the making of films, whether as directors, producers, screenwriters, or actors—to the extent that 6   Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 833–844. 7  Ibid., 840. 8  Laurie Shrage, ‘Feminist Film Aesthetics: A Contextual Approach’, Hypatia 5, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 137–148.

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Mulvey’s account can acknowledge such women, they are complicit with an unrelentingly masculine context. A second, related, critique against Mulvey is that her account leaves no space for the female spectator and her engagement with film.9 As put by B.  Ruby Rich, on Mulvey’s analysis “[w]oman is absent on the screen and she is absent in the audience”, which neglects the experience of female viewers and their dialectic, non-passive interactions with films.10 A number of feminist theorists sympathetic to Mulvey’s psychoanalytic framework developed accounts of the female spectator. Mary Ann Doane argued that women overidentify with their cinematic depictions and are thus insufficiently detached to occupy the fetishistic male gaze, and Linda Williams described the female spectator as juggling multiple, conflicting points of view.11 However, since such models maintain a psychoanalytic approach, they retain the assumption that the viewer is constructed by patriarchal language and discourse, rendering genuinely critical responses to film impossible or at least unclear. Critics such as Rich are calling for recognition of female spectatorship as resistance or negotiation, as will be discussed in the next section—and psychoanalysis cannot accommodate this. Furthermore, Mulvey’s approach also cannot account for the female viewer who enjoys watching mainstream films other than to patronisingly judge her as unknowingly emulating the male gaze. Third, it has been complained that in purporting to offer a unified theory of film that applies to all women, Mulvey and those working within her psychoanalytic framework exclude non-dominant voices from their analysis. The spectator in psychoanalytic theory is fixed, and implied or constructed by the film; the focus is on the film itself and its formal features rather than on actual audience members. This means that Mulvey’s essay and others in this vein disregard the way that factors such as race, disability, and sexuality inform viewing experiences. As bell hooks points out, a black female spectator would have related to early Hollywood films differently to a white female spectator, since for the black woman there is “a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence”.12 Analysis and critique both of black women as portrayed in film and of black women as spectators requires a different toolkit, since for a long time if black women were present in film at all it was to serve and sustain white 9  Mulvey did address this issue in her ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”’, wherein she proposed that women could either identify with the passive woman on-screen or engage in a kind of identification with the male protagonist. However, this amendment fails to escape the totalising analysis of the male gaze and has been further critiqued by feminist film theorists. 10  B. Ruby Rich, ‘The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 45. 11  Mary Ann Doane, ‘Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator’, in Film and Theory: An Anthology, eds. Robert Stam, and Toby Miller (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 495–509; Linda Williams, ‘“Something Else Besides a Mother”: “Stella Dallas” and the Maternal Melodrama’, Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1984): 2–27. 12  hooks, bell, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 250.

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womanhood as the object of the male gaze. The fundamental problem is that the psychoanalytic approach assumes that all women experience oppression in the same way, which invokes problematic and outdated notions of what it is to be a woman. Elizabeth Spelman has explicated the hazards of providing generalised, unified theories about women; she comments that this inevitably “confuse[s] the condition of one group of women with the condition of all”.13 Generalised statements about women in cinema are likely to universalise the experiences of the most privileged, resulting in theory that prioritises the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gendered, and middle-class woman at the expense of other women. The fourth criticism that has been levelled at Mulvey—and at subsequent theorists working within her framework of analysis—is methodological, and questions her reliance upon psychoanalysis. One way of lodging this objection is to charge Mulvey with misusing psychoanalytic concepts in some way. For example, David Rodowick argued that Mulvey’s analysis involves a misunderstanding of Freud’s analysis of desire, and Clifford T. Manlove has argued that Mulvey’s reading of castration anxiety in Lacan is erroneous.14 However, more fundamental criticisms of Mulvey’s employment of psychoanalysis have been raised by philosophers such as Cynthia Freeland and Nöel Carroll, who both challenge the reliance upon psychoanalysis in general. Freeland raises doubts about psychoanalysis’ empirical underpinnings and argues against its dominance in the field of feminist film studies, commenting that its dominance is hugely disproportionate to its status within feminist theorising in general.15 Carroll deepens these doubts by observing that Mulvey never provides reasons for her embrace of psychoanalysis, other than that feminist film critics needed a theory of visual pleasure and psychoanalysis had one.16 This suggests that unless the psychoanalytic approach to spectatorship and the male gaze can be demonstrably argued to be philosophically richer or more appropriate than other approaches, we should be cautious of it. Whilst Mulvey’s essay, and work that it inspired, should be praised for pushing feminist thought in new directions, the objections levelled against it make it clear that this framework for pursuing feminist critique has severe limitations. Some of the ideas raised by this approach are fruitful, however, and can be detached from their constraining psychoanalytic foundations. The basic notion of a ‘male gaze’ pervading contemporary mainstream films can be employed productively. The concept has evolved beyond Mulvey’s psy Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), 4.  Clifford T.  Manlove, ‘Visual “Drive” and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchock, and Mulvey’, Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 83; David N. Rodowick, ‘The Difficulty of Difference’, in Feminism and Film, ed. E.  Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 181. 15  Cynthia Freeland, ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films’, in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 746, 748. 16  Nöel Carroll, ‘The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 351. 13 14

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choanalytic conception, and it is used widely both in and beyond formal academia to discuss varied genres of visual media. For example, it might be useful to talk of the male gaze when discussing particular scenes in a film wherein the way that a female character is blocked, lit, and framed by the camera clearly invites us to see her as an object of sexual desire. A notorious illustration of this is the depiction of Princess Leia in a skimpy gold bikini in the third original Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi (1983). One might talk, too, of the male gaze functioning in films in which female characters are written such that their primary function is to further a protagonist male’s plot. For example, Rachel Dawes’ death at the end of the second film (2008) in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy serves to motivate Bruce Wayne’s actions in the third film (2012). Note that in both of these cases, importantly, utilising the concept of the male gaze does not commit one to the claim that the character in question is fully constituted or defined by the male gaze. Whilst Princess Leia’s notorious bikini scene subjects her to the male gaze, it would be overly reductive to declare that she is thus a mere erotic object throughout the entire Star Wars trilogy. Although in this usage the male gaze is only a cousin to its original intended theoretical meaning, this, nonetheless, shows that the limitations of psychoanalysis need not render all of Mulvey’s insights irrelevant. Audience-Film Negotiation In the 1990s, frustration with the psychoanalytic approach’s shortcomings and focus on the constructed spectator prompted a move towards new theoretical tools, namely those found in cultural studies. In contrast to the images of women approach and the psychoanalytic approach, cultural studies urged that attention be paid to social and political context. The audience-film relationship was given increased attention, according to those with marginalised identities—whose experiences had been neglected by Mulvey—a more prominent position in feminist film theory. Perhaps the most important concept to arise from cultural studies was that of negotiation: the idea that meaning and interpretation are not inherent to a film text, but emerge from a back-and-forth struggle that includes active and historically placed viewers. Feminist film critics drew on the work of Stuart Hall, whose analysis of television included a discussion of the negotiated position of the viewer, wherein one simultaneously accepts and rejects components of a work’s dominant message.17 In ‘Pleasurable Negotiations’, Christine Gledhill brought this notion to bear on mainstream cinema, contending that to talk meaningfully about a film’s meaning, one must consider the way it evokes “negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation and

17  Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding, decoding’, in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 102.

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experience” in a diversity of viewers.18 Negotiation is a notable concept since it gives the viewer agency and allows the possibility of resisting patriarchal ­representations and discourses in films. Since negotiation is described as an ongoing give-and-take process between opposing sides and ideas, it acknowledges that an audience member can maintain or create critical distance between themselves and the underlying ideology of a sexist or patriarchal film. The idea that a productive negotiation can occur in watching films containing patriarchal ideas has been taken up and expanded by various theorists. For example, in rejecting Mulvey’s account of the implied and fixed spectator as erasing the experiences of black women, bell hooks argues for a black female oppositional gaze with the potential to cultivate awareness and contest dominant ideas or stereotypes.19 In queer theory, Alexander Doty has identified queerness as offering a fruitful and resistant position from which to view mainstream films, and contends that both queer people and allies can endeavour to consume cinema in this way.20 Cultural studies theorists argue that it is contradictions or ruptures within films that allow and facilitate negotiation— moments in which cracks or confusions in the film’s patriarchal ideology become more apparent. Such a contradiction might lie in a female character’s actions clashing with the viewer’s expectations of how, in reality, a woman might more plausibly be imagined to act; or in a film conveying an evaluative judgement of a female character that the viewer finds incongruous. However, little has been said about the interaction between a film’s formal features and the production or emergence of negotiation, or an oppositional gaze. The cultural studies approach has not fully explored whether some films might be better suited to engendering negotiation than others, nor has it considered, if this is so, what it is about these films that make some viewers respond to them in a critical way. Note that a viewing experience that includes negotiation, an oppositional gaze, or a queer viewing position is not inevitable in any sense. The suggestion is not that all women will have a cinematic experience rife with struggle upon watching a sexist film—this would return us to an overly generalised understanding of female spectatorship and erase actual viewing experiences. Since films’ sexist messages often play into and are fed by dominant societal norms and understandings, it is to be expected that for many women, the sexism goes unnoticed and unchecked. In addition, on some occasions, women might choose to ignore or not fully attend to a film’s underlying ideological message in order to more fully enjoy their cinematic experience.21 18  Christine Gledhill, ‘Pleasurable Negotiations’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 169. 19  hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, 254. 20  Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 21  The cultural studies approach is able to argue that in some circumstances, the choice to suspend critical faculties is precisely that: an active choice. It is overly burdensome to demand that women be alert and critical at all times and write them off as passive otherwise.

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Cultural studies’ focus on audience-text negotiation yields certain advantages over the methodologies employed by the images of women and psychoanalytic spectatorship approaches—primarily, that its analysis aligns far more closely with actual cinema-going practices and experiences. The dense and abstract theoretical machinery of Mulvey and her counterparts is jettisoned, as is the search for a unified analysis of how all mainstream films relate to gender and the representation of women. The audience-text negotiation model for examining film is more nuanced, in allowing for multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings, interpretations, and viewing experiences. This is a constructive attitude to feminist film analysis, since it avoids flat, black and white interpretations of female characters on-screen. For example, it allows us to reject an unhelpful dichotomy between seeing Star Wars’ Princess Leia as either a helpless damsel in distress, whose eroticisation and propensity to get herself captured render her weak, or as a resourceful, pioneering feminist icon without shortcomings. This kind of false dichotomy is common in the reception of mainstream films with female protagonists or leads, and it is evident in the media reaction to recent films such as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), and Wonder Woman (2017).22 There is a tendency to either champion such films as steadfastly and unequivocally feminist or to condemn them as mere patriarchal ideology under the guise of feminism. The audience-text negotiation approach urges that the truth is surely more complicated, that films can be simultaneously feminist in some ways and sexist in others, and that these things can coexist. Whilst the flexibility and multiplicity of the cultural studies approach to feminist film critique grant certain advantages, it has been judged by some as overly relativistic. Audience-text negotiation has been accused of seeing any meaning given to a text as right; of being overly populist in recognising any film as good if enjoyed; and of promoting excessively redemptive readings of both films and viewers.23 Although cultural studies theorists clearly could fall foul of these complaints, and some surely have, I want to reject the idea that the audience-­ text negotiation approach is inherently guilty of them. To the first point, allowing multiple interpretations of a film does not necessitate a free fall into absolute relativism. One can permit that meanings emerge from complex interactions between film texts and audience members, yet still assert that some interpretations are wrong, since unsupported by source material or by cultural context. As for cultural studies being overly populist—whilst there is a focus on the interaction between film text and viewer, these are again not the only factors employed in determining a film’s worth. The final point is perhaps the most pressing, since it is a worry that if negotiation is overemphasised, audiences 22  For a demonstration of this dichotomy, see the following Wonder Woman review: Lina Abirafeh, ‘Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon or Symbol of Oppression?’ HuffPost, June 23, 2017, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entr y/wonder-woman-feminist-icon-or-symbol-ofoppression_us_594d30bbe4b0f078efd980e3 23  Hollinger, Feminist Film Studies, 18–19.

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might be analysed as disproportionately, optimistically self-aware; films themselves might be unduly praised for evoking negotiation, despite their patriarchal roots. However, this concern can be guarded against if due caution is taken, and it serves as a productive antidote to Rosen, Haskell, and Mulvey’s understanding of mainstream cinema as unyieldingly anti-women. Cognitivism Whilst the cultural studies approach introduced useful theoretical tools to feminist analyses of film, it does not provide an explanation of how and why viewers engage with films. That is, it does not offer an alternative to psychoanalysis in linking films’ formal features and conventions to viewer responses, instead, focusing on moments of critical distance within those responses. This is where cognitivism comes in. Cognitivism represents a recent and growing trend in philosophy of film and uses techniques from cognitive science and philosophy of mind to investigate cinema’s effects as grounded in processes of perception, inference, and judgement.24 There has been a particular focus on cognitivist research on emotional responses to film and on the potential for this research to explain the psychological effects cinema has on audience members. Cognitivists construe emotions as cognitive processes used to make sense of everyday encounters in reality, and argue that we use the same cognitive processes in responding to films.25 Feminist film critics employing a cognitivist approach have also tended to focus upon the emotions, perhaps because this has allowed them to engage with questions that previous critics had worked on but from a new and more productive angle. Furthermore, feminist philosophy more broadly has championed a cognitivist understanding of emotion—women have historically been identified more strongly as emotional than as rational, and cognitivism enables one to argue that since emotions are appraisals of situations, they therefore are rational.26 Feminist philosophy of film can thus be seen as operating within this feminist tradition. Nöel Carroll offers one method for applying cognitivist insights to feminist critique of mainstream cinema, drawing on Ronald de Sousa’s theory of emotions as responses elicited in association with ‘paradigm scenarios’.27 On this account, learning to use the vocabulary of emotions involves attaining paradigm scenarios in which emotion terms are evoked, and Carroll argues that films are capable of providing, reflecting, and reinforcing these paradigm scenarios. Since these scenarios are likely to influence our behaviour, they might 24  David Bordwell, ‘Cognitive Theory’, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley Livingston, and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 356. 25  Carl Plantinga, and Greg M.  Smith, eds. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 26  See, for example, Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 27  Carroll, ‘The Image of Women in Film’, 356.

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shape emotional responses to women in various circumstances. Carroll thus recommends the identification of certain paradigm scenarios involving women in film, and their effects, as a fertile project. He poses Fatal Attraction (1987) as an example, which offers a paradigm scenario advising male viewers that the correct emotional response to a past lover’s claim to fair treatment is to treat her as irrational and unworthy of attention. In his article, Carroll’s focus is on male emotional responses to women and the investigation of paradigm scenarios governing these responses. I would like to suggest that this project be broadened to include paradigm scenarios that women themselves use in emotionally navigating the world and their place in it. For example, it is common for films to depict female leads whose lives are in some way unsatisfactory to them as finding profound fulfilment in entering into a relationship with a man. This constitutes a patriarchal paradigm scenario in which the start of the romantic relationship elicits a happy response from the women, virtually without regard to the man’s identity or the circumstances of the relationship. Critiquing the emotional responses of both men and women to paradigm scenarios in film is important, since patriarchal norms can just as easily be internalised by women as they can be held by men. Another way in which cognitivism about emotion is pertinent to feminist philosophy of film is in its application to female viewers and the analysis of their emotional responses to film. Identifying emotions as appraisals allows evaluations according to which the female viewer is active rather than passive, and is capable of a critical response to dominant patriarchal meanings and discourses. This is in stark contrast to a psychoanalytic approach, according to which emotional responses—when discussed at all—are unconscious processes and reflective only of underlying patriarchal ideology. It also goes theoretically beyond cultural studies’ focus on audience-text negotiation, potentially supplementing that account by explaining the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate negotiation and the oppositional gaze. An example of this kind of analysis of spectatorship can be found in Flo Leibowitz’s investigation of certain forms of melodrama, wherein she argues that viewer responses of pity and admiration towards female characters might constitute a form of rational reflection.28 Yet whilst cognitivism clearly establishes a productive approach to feminist philosophy of film, there is one pertinent concern about its methodology.29 Cognitivism comprises an alternative to psychoanalysis and rejects the psychoanalytic framework as attending to overly abstracted and ahistorical implied spectators, such that actual audience members and their affective responses are neglected. Nevertheless, in examining the psychological responses brought about by films, cognitivist theorists tend to invoke a generalised and ahistorical mind that lacks race, class, and gender. As with the charge of relativism levelled 28  Flo Leibowitz, ‘Apt Feelings or Why “Women’s Films” Aren’t Trivial’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Nöel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 219. 29  Curran and Donelan, ‘Gender’, 149.

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at cultural studies, however, I maintain that this problem is not inherent to cognitivism’s methodology. A cognitive approach to feminist film critique could investigate the cognitive effects of various films or genres of film upon a variety of socially situated viewers. It is possible to theorise meaningfully about a given identity group—women, black women, disabled women, trans women, and so on—without adopting exclusionary assumptions.30 Projects utilising a cognitivist methodology are still within their infancy in feminist philosophy of film, but there is reason to believe that, insofar as the cultural studies emphasis on a historically and socially situated viewer is borne in mind, the approach could open up thus far unexplored directions for research. Ideology Critique In some sense, all of the approaches to feminist film critique discussed in the preceding sections invoke ideology in their analyses. However, these approaches do not take ideology—understood in a Marxist vein, in this context as ideas and beliefs that feed into a false consciousness about women and serve a patriarchal purpose—as their central focus.31 Feminist ideology critique as a distinct strand of film criticism, then, is a methodology that takes as its primary function the analysis of the relationship between the construction of mainstream films and gender ideology. In her article ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films’, Cynthia Freeland lays out an instructive agenda for feminist ideology critique, which is applicable to mainstream cinema more broadly.32 Central to this approach is the identification and analysis of naturalised patriarchal messages, meanings, and themes within film. Akin to cultural studies, there is a rejection of the overly abstract psychoanalytic preoccupation with the implied spectator and an emphasis on social situatedness and on the way that films interact with and feed into culture more generally. However, instead of focusing specifically on audience reactions as cultural studies theorists—and to some extent, cognitivists—do, the scope is broader such that a myriad of ways in which films convey, reflect, and perpetuate sexist ideas can be examined. Freeland also stresses that ideology critique is more complex than the images of women approach, since, in addition to visual representations, it considers both formal and technical features—such as lighting, sound, costuming, and visual point of view—and features shared with literary works such as plot, dialogue, and narrative structure. Ideology critique is particularly useful when it comes to recognising patriarchal patterns that consistently reoccur both in culture and in film, and in identifying gaps and presumptions in film. As Freeland notes, often, films that 30  bell hooks’ previously discussed analysis of the black female oppositional gaze is an example of this. 31  For more on defining ideology, see Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1981). 32  Freeland, ‘Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films’, 751–752.

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appear to present positive images of women conceal underlying ideologies, whilst films that appear problematic contain surprisingly insurrectionary meanings.33 For a contemporary illustration of feminist ideology critique, I turn to the recent Hollywood trend of gender reversal films. This refers to films such as Ghostbusters (2016) and Ocean’s 8 (2018), which are remakes of earlier Hollywood films that feature women in the lead roles instead of men. These films are superficially a reflection of feminist progress in cinema, since they involve diversified casts and female protagonists; however, ideology critique here reveals underlying problems. First, gender reversals cast women as reliving and reinterpreting roles originally performed by men rather than creating new roles for them—this denies them their own stories, and results in their performances being judged against their male predecessors, instead of on their own merit. Second, as New York Times critic Amanda Hess has noted, gender reversal films place a high burden on their female characters, since they require them to neutralise the sexist politics of the originals.34 Ultimately, whilst gender reversal films give the appearance of a progressive feminist politics, their female characters are severely constrained by the preceding male-led films, and would be better served if provided with original stories. The ideological critique approach to feminist philosophy of film has the potential to overlap with and be complemented by the cognitivist approach previously outlined. As Carl Plantinga remarks, one reason to care about emotions and the cognitivist study of them is because emotional responses to a film have a powerful rhetorical function that contribute to its ideological effects.35 For example, Freeland argued that in evoking emotions of fear, dread, and anxiety, horror films have the potential to promote a reflective attitude towards patriarchy and its institutions.36 Another way to formulate ideology critique that embraces a cognitivist methodology would be to investigate which emotional responses make viewers to some extent complicit in a film’s patriarchal assumptions. For example, when the musical Grease (1978) concludes with the character Sandy transforming her appearance from virginal ‘nice girl’ to ‘sexy’ in order to win a man back, it is clear that the viewer is supposed to be pleased and respond happily; it could be argued that this marks out a patriarchal element of the film. Invoking cognitivism is one way to give theoretical depth to feminist ideology critique—but there are many other philosophical resources that can be drawn upon for this purpose, particularly in feminist philosophy more broadly. Kate Manne’s Down Girl offers a persuasive framework and analysis of patriar-

 Ibid., 756.  Amanda Hess, ‘The Trouble With Hollywood’s Gender Flips’, The New York Times, June 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/movies/oceans-8-gender-swap.html 35  Carl Plantinga, ‘Emotion and Affect’, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, eds. Paisley Livingston, and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 86. 36  Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000). 33 34

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chal ideology, which provides a compelling supplement to ideology critique.37 She argues that misogyny and its effects upon women are obscured by a cultural tendency that encourages the exoneration of men; to encapsulate this ideological emphasis on the male point of view at the expense of the female perspective, she coins the term ‘himpathy’. Manchester by the Sea (2016) provides a pertinent illustration of himpathy in the portrayal of its male protagonist, Lee Chandler. The film focuses on Lee’s struggle to deal with his tragic past, in which his negligence and intoxication caused the deaths of his three children. Women such as Lee’s ex-wife are on the sidelines of this story, given no background context and included only insofar as they are pertinent to Lee’s storyline. By design, viewers empathise with Lee’s character—who deals with his grief in an archetypally masculine way, through outbursts of irrational violence and emotional stoicism—whilst the perspectives of the female characters remain elusive. This emphasis on male interests and their sympathetic nature is a deeply entrenched habit, and can be found in more and less subtle instantiations. An examination of how mainstream cinema reflects and encourages himpathy is a productive line of inquiry for the feminist critic and considers women’s roles and absences in films as part of a broader patriarchal logic. In general, applying different feminist accounts of patriarchy to feminist ideology critique is beneficial, since it will yield varied and hopefully original lines of analysis.

Constructive Feminist Philosophy of Film Feminist work in philosophy of film has two predominant strands of interest: the first in critiquing mainstream films for their patriarchal undertones and sexist failings, and the second in the search for alternative, non-patriarchal films. Often, this latter focus has involved the positing of a ‘counter-cinema’ standing separate to Hollywood, with various feminist thinkers arguing for the radical potential of avant-garde and documentary filmmaking to oppose mainstream cinema.38 However, here, I want to focus on the underexplored issue of analysing how existing and forthcoming mainstream films themselves might contribute to a constructive feminist philosophy of film. This involves an examination of various ways in which mainstream cinema can be feminist and of the potential for feminist filmmakers to offer correctives to those films that do invoke patriarchal themes. Since film critique and the positing of an alternative kind of filmmaking have dominated the feminist philosophy of film literature, this section, by necessity, brings theoretical tools from diverse areas of philosophy into the conversation. I focus on three ways in which mainstream films can further feminist thought: subversion of patriarchal ideas, development of a resistant imagination, and expansion of the feminist imagination.  Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).  For examples of this approach, see Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen (London: Wallflower, 2002); Claire Johnston, ‘Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema’, in Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 22–33; and Linda Williams, ‘Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary’, Film Quarterly 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 9–21. 37 38

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Subversion of Patriarchal Ideas One way films can contribute to a positive feminist project is through the subversion of common patriarchal ideas, conventions, and stereotypes. There has been extensive debate amongst feminist film critics about the supposed tension between the determining force of patriarchal ideology in the mainstream and the potential for feminist subversion, with many arguing that meaningful subversion is not truly possible.39 However, taking this argument seriously requires an acceptance of mainstream cinema as straightforwardly and inescapably male and an understanding of language and culture as unquestionably masculine. These are the kinds of assumptions that featured heavily in psychoanalytic frameworks, and that garnered significant criticism for their overly totalising methodology, and their inability to engage with actual contemporary filmmaking. Instead, Lucy Fischer suggests that a constructive way to think about the relationship between ideology and feminist films is to see the films as engaged in an argumentative discourse with patriarchal culture.40 In discussing the subversion of patriarchal films and ideas, feminist film theorists have largely focused on the 1930s and 1940s genre of the woman’s film. My aim, here, is to highlight two ways in which films can be subversive in the context of contemporary cinema. First, mainstream films can be subversive through the depiction of female characters whose plot lines and characterisations invoke authentic, concrete realities and lived experiences. That is, female characters who are realistic and believable; women whose everyday experiences are presented richly and defined as separate to male experiences and desires. For example, Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) is a coming-of-age film following the precocious and opinionated Christine—self-assumed alias Lady Bird—in her final months at a Catholic high school in Sacramento. Lady Bird is a flawed yet hugely likeable teenager with a strong sense of wilful entitlement and ambition, who cannot be reduced to a stock character or trope.41 Her deepest and most impactful relationships are those she has with her mother and her female best friend. Whilst she does date two teenage boys in the course of the film, and loses her virginity to one of them, these plot developments are never indicated as central to her trajectory or sense of self. In fact, the film consciously denies viewers the conventional romantic resolution scene in which girl and boy attend prom together, instead, subverting this moment into a reconciliation between Lady Bird and her best friend. It is also significant that Lady Bird was written and directed by Greta 39  Mulvey is usually credited as kick-starting this debate, since in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, she argues that the male gaze is intrinsic to mainstream cinema, and that an alternative form of filmmaking thus must be found. 40  Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 12. 41  This is not a recommendation that all female characters be likable and relatable. Indeed, insisting upon this would adhere to a patriarchal logic wherein female protagonists must be nice and cannot be abrasive or unpleasant.

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Gerwig, a young female creator. This demonstrates the importance of female voices and influence behind the scenes as well as on-screen, something historically lacking in mainstream cinema—as well as the importance of women crafting and telling their own stories. The idea that the mere presentation of the female every day is itself a form of subversion has its roots in feminist thought more broadly, wherein the importance of grounded female subjectivity has long been recognised.42 One way of providing a deeper analysis of how richly drawn female characters in mainstream cinema are subversive is to see such characters as implicitly challenging or contradicting patriarchal stereotypes about women. Lady Bird challenges the stereotype that women’s lives are incomplete if they are not involved in a heterosexual pairing, and that female friendships are superficial and competitive in nature. Since much patriarchal ideology involves one-dimensional assumptions and norms about what women can and cannot do, the portrayal of complex, nuanced female characters is hugely important. Note that this kind of analysis could also be done using Nöel Carroll’s paradigm scenario framework, where the argument would then be that feminist films are subversive in providing constructive paradigm scenarios, in which positive emotional responses towards women are offered. Lady Bird exemplifies various paradigm scenarios in which mothers and daughters, female friends, and men and women interact with and respond to one another in emotionally rich and sympathetic ways. A second way in which mainstream films can subvert patriarchal ideology is by directly turning such ideology on its head: both by drawing attention to patriarchal ideas and writing them off, and by purposefully upending our expectations regarding those ideas. George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road exemplifies both of these points. The film follows a soldier named Furiosa as she rebels against a dystopian warlord, who keeps women locked away as brood stock to be milked for their breastmilk, and attempts to lead his five ‘wives’ to freedom. This dystopian setting draws attention to patriarchal claims to women’s bodies, and amplifies this idea of male entitlement over women to absurd extremes; as the warlord ineffectively chases Furiosa and his defiant wives, he periodically screams that they are “my property!”. The viewer is clearly supposed to find the warlord and the demands he has of women utterly ridiculous. There are a number of ways in which films can represent and critique patriarchal themes—painting them as bizarre and senseless is one effective way to do this. As Miranda Fricker puts it, “[f]inding something potentially authoritative to be absurd gives one critical courage”; in this case, the idea is that a sense of absurdity might carry over to men’s attempts to police and control women’s bodies in reality.43 In general, subverting various conventions of masculinity in the way 42  See Chapter 2 of Susan Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) for an overview of this. 43  Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 167.

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that Fury Road does is an important feminist pursuit for films, since damaging ideas about femininity are inextricably bound up in toxic ideas about masculinity. Fury Road is also subversive in constantly overturning expectations set up by patriarchal norms and conventions. From the very outset, it defies the action film norm that men drive the action, since the eponymous Max spends the first quarter of the film chained up and wearing a face cage, unable to speak. Instead, the action of the film is largely driven by women—by Furiosa, the wives, and the evocatively named Vuvalini, a battle-ready matriarchal band of older women. It also resists various norms about femininity. One of the wives is pregnant throughout the film, which usually is assumed to make a woman weaker, and more of a liability in a dystopian scenario; yet in Fury Road, pregnancy is shown to have power, since breastmilk is a viable food in the desert, and, at one point, the wife uses her pregnant body as a human shield to protect Furiosa. This challenges patriarchal norms about pregnancy, and also offers a reimagining of women’s bodies and worth. Just as Lady Bird challenges damaging stereotypes through its depiction of the everyday, Fury Road challenges stereotypes through its more direct invocation and destabilisation of patriarchal norms. Through analysis of the films Lady Bird and Mad Max: Fury Road, I hope to have illuminated how mainstream cinema can subvert patriarchal ideas and thereby contribute to a constructive feminist philosophy of film. Both of these examples are notable in the extent of their popularity—both were met with box office and award success, and in each case, their feminist content was a major factor in this success. Examination of mainstream cinema’s subversive potential is a promising avenue of thought, since it aligns with actual filmmaking practices of late, and opens up new possibilities in feminist philosophy of film. Further analysis should be done into the role that specific formal features or components of film contribute to their subversive impact; cognitivist tools might be fruitfully utilised to investigate audience responses to subversive films. Development of a Resistant Imagination Another constructive role for feminist philosophy of film is to examine the way in which feminist films might contribute to the development of a resistant imagination. The notion of the resistant imagination comes from José Medina, who defines it as an ongoing process that challenges hegemonic discourse and meanings, and is pluralised, polyphonic, and experimentalist.44 Applied to feminist philosophy of film, it can fruitfully be seen as a more theoretically developed extension of cultural studies’ oppositional gaze. The cultural studies emphasis tends to be upon the resistance that a viewer can feel towards cinema, invoking patriarchal assumptions or ideas. This is clearly valuable, but it neglects the other side of the story: how films can be analysed as actively encouraging this kind of viewing experience. I will further outline Medina’s concept of the 44  José Medina, The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 252.

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resistant imagination and then demarcate two ways mainstream films could nurture this kind of sensibility. Medina’s account is epistemological, such that having a resistant imagination is not merely a state of mind, but an ongoing methodology employed when approaching distorted, dominant social structures, in order to avoid falling prey to these distortions. Central to the exercise of a resistant imagination is lucidity: the ability to recognise existing ideological assumptions and to locate blind spots in ideologies.45 For the feminist, then, a resistant imagination is one that constantly queries, contests, and seeks alternatives to dominant patriarchal understandings and conventions. However, whilst the feminist might be particularly interested in resisting gender-centric oppression, on Medina’s framework, it is crucial that one resists all forms of oppression. We all have identities constituted of multiple components; in addition to being women, people are black, white, straight, queer, rich, poor, and so on. Being resistant to forms of oppression that one does not personally suffer from is important, since different forms of domination are inextricably intertwined. Medina stresses that if one’s resistant imagination is not kaleidoscopic and multilayered, it will be unable to attain genuine lucidity, as certain experiences and distortions will be obscured. A kaleidoscopic resistant imagination avoids the exclusionary problems that some approaches to feminist film critique—as discussed in the first part of this chapter—were guilty of. One way in which mainstream films can cultivate a resistant imagination is by embracing ambiguity and encouraging audience members to interpret them as ambiguous. In discussing audience-text negotiation, the permissibility of multiple, contradictory interpretations of films emerged; here, I want to go one step further and advise that such contradictions be actively taken up. This is because films that are purposefully ambiguous, and constructed such that they deny straightforward interpretations, are well-designed to promote in a viewer traits or virtues of open-mindedness and reflectiveness. These traits are highly complementary to Medina’s resistant imagination, which is characterised by its restlessness and its refusal to accept overly simplistic understandings of social identities. An emphasis on ambiguity also aligns with the analysis of Hilde Hein, who recommends that feminist aesthetics aim to expand questions rather than reduce answers, and cultivate instead of suppress instability.46 Take as an instructive example Sean Baker’s The Florida Project (2017), which tracks six-year-old Moonee and her young single mother Halley, as they live a hand-to-mouth existence in a budget motel in the shadow of Disney World. The film follows Moonee closely and shows her and her friends roaming the motel and its surrounding countryside with abandon. Baker clearly condemns the system that traps and victimises families like this one in a cycle of  Ibid., 44–48.  Hilde Hein, ‘The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1990): 285. 45 46

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poverty, yet the way viewers are supposed to respond to the character Moonee is left purposefully open. The response to her actions in the film oscillates between a joyous sense that her wild childhood represents a more genuine kind of playfulness and enjoyment that is missing from Disney World itself and the sense that her childhood is a very deprived one, in which she is a victim of her circumstances. These conflicting layers of meaning encourage a multidimensional understanding of the character, one that does not allow the viewer to slot Moonee or Halley into stereotyped roles, and pushes the viewer to search for a more nuanced interpretation. In its rich and complicated depictions of the two central two characters, The Florida Project is clearly feminist, and in its refusal to gift to the viewer a straightforward message, and its portrayal of a marginalised experience, it also engenders a resistant imagination. A second way mainstream films can contribute to a resistant imagination is through the mobilisation of empathy. Empathy is defined by Amy Coplan as a complex imaginative process that centrally involves ‘role-taking’ or ‘perspective-­ taking’, whereby one imagines how someone else must be feeling or thinking and thus gains a greater understanding of that person.47 Empathy is popular amongst feminist philosophers for its transformative potential, whereby it is analysed as a tool that could amplify understanding of women and the problems they face, and it could be used to forge closer connections between women. A raised capacity to empathise with others can be seen to nurture the resistant imagination by encouraging an increased understanding of female characters, which interferes with dominant patriarchal meanings. If the viewer is able to empathise with Halley in The Florida Project and see her not as an immorally promiscuous and neglectful parent figure but instead as a loving mother making the best of a bad situation, they may thus become slightly less susceptible to upholding dominant, pejorative ideas about working-class single mothers. Through empathy with female film characters, viewers are urged to contrast filmic depictions with dominant cultural understandings, thereby moving towards Medina’s resistant imagination. Both ambiguity and empathy are established tools in feminist thought generally, so their recommendation as furthering a feminist resistant imagination follows in this tradition. Both urge an acknowledgement of the complexity of different female lived experiences. Before moving on, it is important to emphasise, as with the notion of negotiation in cultural studies, that a film’s capacity to engender a resistant imagination is by no means inevitable. Viewer reactions and responses vary from person to person and between different social positions. The most that can be said is that feminist films can aid in the development of a resistant imagination; the rest is up to the viewer and to broader cultural circumstance.

47  Amy Coplan, ‘Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects’, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, eds. Amy Coplan, and Peter Goldie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

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Expansion of the Feminist Imagination A final way films might play a constructive role is in expanding feminist hermeneutical resources and, therefore, expanding the feminist imagination. Subversion and resistance are both valuable functions that films can perform, but unless films are also capable of producing or enabling the emergence of alternative meanings, the theoretical tools needed to analyse feminist films as more than merely reactionary are absent. This is not to say that the subversion of patriarchal ideas, the development of a resistant imagination, and the generation and spread of alternative meanings are all distinct projects; indeed, the former two surely facilitate and partly constitute the latter. Hermeneutical resources are best understood as the collective interpretive terminology available to someone in helping them to make sense of and articulate their social experiences.48 Since dominant social groups have the most influence in the generation of hermeneutical resources, many of these shared concepts and ideas are likely to be patriarchal. The creation and distribution of new, nonpatriarchal meanings and concepts are thus crucial, since, without these, women are unable to fully articulate and understand their own lived experiences, let alone communicate them to others. This development of feminist hermeneutical resources marks an expansion in the feminist imagination as it allows women a sharper awareness and appreciation of their social experiences, enabling both better theory and better praxis. It is productive here to draw a parallel between the potentially constructive role of feminist film and the role played by consciousness-raising in the feminist movement of the 1960s. Consciousness-raising was a form of activism that involved communally sharing personal anecdotes in order to reach political conclusions; my suggestion is that well-crafted feminist films might evoke in a female viewer this sense of shared or relatable experience, and provoke them to reach politically significant conclusions. One way of theorising films’ potential to enlarge feminist thought is through Murray Smith’s notion of expansionism. Expansionism refers to the claim that the process of watching a film can involve an expansion of ordinary experience, wherein the film pushes everyday perception and cognition beyond their standard manner of functioning.49 Smith focuses on the potential for films to expand our capacity for empathy, in both scope and intensity. However, whilst empathy is valuable for feminist projects, thinking of expansionism in epistemological terms might, here, serve feminist purposes better. That is, expansionism could be theorised as expanding the collective hermeneutical resources available to women.50 For example, in depicting its eponymous figure as a willful teenager whose characterisation is deeper and more complex than that usually afforded to teenage girls in mainstream cinema, Lady Bird creates new cultural meanings surrounding what it is to be a teenage girl. This generates  Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, 153.  Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7. 50  Note that in referring to collective hermeneutical resources shared by women, I do not mean to imply that all women utilise and are in need of precisely the same hermeneutical toolkit. 48 49

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hermeneutical resources that might have until then been unavailable, or certainly less visible or accessible, to female teenage viewers. Another way in which films have the potential to expand the feminist imagination is by spreading non-dominant hermeneutical resources. Rebecca Mason distinguishes between dominant and non-dominant hermeneutical resources, such that sometimes women belonging to a particularly marginalised social identity are able to access appropriate interpretive terminology themselves, but this terminology is not widely accepted and acknowledged by others.51 Films therefore have a constructive role to play insofar as they can utilise and represent the non-dominant hermeneutical resources of marginalised women. I have already argued that in portraying women’s everyday lives, films can be productively subversive; it turns out that the portrayal of the everyday lives of marginalised women is not only subversive but also epistemologically constructive. For example, in following the experiences of those living on the margins, The Florida Project encourages the spread of hermeneutical resources necessary to better understand a certain type of underprivileged single motherhood. Sean Baker’s preceding film, Tangerine (2015), offers an even more compelling example of the spread of non-dominant hermeneutical resources. It tracks two trans women in a ‘buddy comedy’ adventure, and its depiction of Los Angeles’ trans street culture does a lot to spread non-dominant resources around trans identities to a mainstream audience. These two suggestions about film’s potential to expand hermeneutical resources go some way in delineating how it is that cinema can offer new, transgressive possibilities for the feminist imagination. In continuing to theorise the feminist imagination, feminist philosophers of film must pay sustained attention to developments in contemporary filmmaking and to advances in theoretical tools available within philosophy more widely.

Conclusion Feminist philosophy of film is a fledgling field, but one that is expanding rapidly. I hope to have shown that it can offer us a variety of theoretical tools and approaches, useful both for the critique of mainstream films and for constructive analyses of cinema and its feminist potential. The field has historically embraced an interdisciplinary approach, and must continue to do so—both in order to develop new questions and methodologies and in order to ward against overly narrow or exclusionary analyses. In particular, feminist philosophers of film are well served by engaging with feminist philosophy more broadly and bringing these external accounts and considerations into dialogue with philosophy of film. The prominence of the response to the #MeToo movement, and a heightened critical awareness in societal and media conversations about the depiction of women on-screen, provide some reason to be optimistic about the general  Rebecca Mason, ‘Two Kinds of Unknowing’, Hypatia 26, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 294.

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trajectory of mainstream cinema in relation to feminist concerns. However, this must not be overstated. Filmmakers and creators are largely dependent upon Hollywood for the development of their films, an institution infamously conservative in its creative choices, and whose progressive potential is significantly hampered by the pursuit of profit. Indeed, in comparison to the television industry, which is currently undergoing a noticeable shift and diversification in its means of distribution and production, feminist progress and representation in film is glacial. All the more reason, then, for philosophers to continue to develop theoretical tools and methodologies to critique patriarchal meanings in films, and construct alternative meanings where possible. As mainstream films and their depictions of women change and evolve, so too must feminist philosophy of film.

Bibliography Abirafeh, Lina. 2017. Wonder Woman: Feminist Icon or Symbol of Oppression? HuffPost, June 23. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wonder-woman-feminist-icon-or-symbol-of-oppression_us_594d30bbe4b0f078efd980e3 Bordwell, David. 2009. Cognitive Theory. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 356–367. New York: Routledge. Brison, Susan. 2002. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Butler, Alison. 2002. Women’s Cinema: The Contested Screen. London: Wallflower. Carroll, Nöel. 1990. The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (4, Autumn): 349–360. Coplan, Amy. 2011. Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 3–18. New York: Oxford University Press. Curran, Angela, and Carol Donelan. 2009. Gender. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 141–151. New York: Routledge. Doane, Mary Ann. 2000. Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator. In Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, 495–509. Malden: Blackwell. Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fischer, Lucy. 1989. Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Freeland, Cynthia. 2000. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder: Westview Press. ———. 2004. Feminist Frameworks for Horror Films. In Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 742–763. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Geuss, Raymond. 1981. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Cambridge University Press. Gledhill, Christine. 1999. Pleasurable Negotiations. In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, 166–179. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1993. Encoding, Decoding. In The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, 90–103. London: Routledge.

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Haskell, Molly. 1974. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Hein, Hilde. 1990. The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (4, Autumn): 281–291. Hess, Amanda. 2018. The Trouble With Hollywood’s Gender Flips. The New  York Times, June 12. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/movies/oceans-8-gender-swap.html Hollinger, Karen. 2012. Feminist Film Studies. London: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1996. The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. In Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton, 247–267. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Johnston, Claire. 2000. Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema. In Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 22–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leibowitz, Flo. 1996. Apt Feelings or Why ‘Women’s Films’ Aren’t Trivial. In Post-­ Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Nöel Carroll, 219–229. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Manlove, Clifford T. 2007. Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchock, and Mulvey. Cinema Journal 46 (3, Spring): 83–108. Manne, Kate. 2017. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mason, Rebecca. 2011. Two Kinds of Unknowing. Hypatia 26 (2, Spring): 294–307. Medina, José. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1999a. Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, 122–130. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 1999b. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 833–844. New York: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plantinga, Carl. 2009. Emotion and Affect. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 86–96. New York: Routledge. Plantinga, Carl, and Greg M. Smith, eds. 1999. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rich, B. Ruby. 1999. The Crisis of Naming in Feminist Film Criticism. In Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham, 41–47. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rodowick, David N. 2000. The Difficulty of Difference. In Feminism and Film, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 181–202. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosen, Marjorie. 1973. Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies and the American Dream. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. Shrage, Laurie. 1990. Feminist Film Aesthetics: A Contextual Approach. Hypatia 5 (2, Summer): 137–148. Smith, Murray. 2017. Film, Art, and the Third Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spelman, Elizabeth. 1988. Inessential Woman. Boston: Beacon Press. Thornham, Sue. 1997. Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory. London: Arnold. Williams, Linda. 1984. ‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: ‘Stella Dallas’ and the Maternal Melodrama. Cinema Journal 24 (1, Autumn): 2–27. ———. 1993. Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary. Film Quarterly 46 (3, Spring): 9–21.

CHAPTER 29

Race in Film Lewis R. Gordon

Race, despite emerging as a concept before cinema, meets the movies with the baggage of the subject of both being a primary focus, with rare exception, of film: people. Even where the subject may be a place or “nature,” the frame through which they are seen haunts the subjects with human eyes and, later on, ears. Those sensory media are themselves mediated by a world influenced by theater, where one looks at and processes what happens on a stage and, in so doing, faces decisions in the moment of what often transcends it. After all, the stuff that happens on the stage or the screen can only be interpreted through having some grasp of the society through which they are produced and to which they are offered. Given such conditions, race and its sinister partner, racism, haunt cinema, even where its presence at times seems irrelevant. On the one hand, there is the technical decision of visual representation in photograph, where color is historically based on white normativity.1 In effect, dark people appear through such technologies as other than they are in person. Where lightness is normative, darkness becomes darker. Similarly, where darkness is normative, there is an exaggerated brightness when one switches to the light. One must adjust one’s visual experience. Although the invention of the light bulb and film was not exclusively through the inventiveness of whites, the capital through which both were brought to the experience of many across the globe was premised on the presupposition of white audiences

1  See the history of Kodak and the white models used for “normal” coloring. See, for example, Mandalit Del Barco, “How Kodak’s Shirley Cards Set Photography’s Skin-Tone Standard,” Morning Edition, NPR (November 13, 2014): https://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/ for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard

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with ­white-­affirming stories.2 There is, thus, already a racial element of cinema, and that continued through to much of contemporary misrepresentations of the world in film, where even multiracial cities such as London, New York, or Paris are often portrayed on the screen without a single dark image beyond the initial dark screen and what remains after the credits. This is not to say there were never efforts to offer alternatives. Analogous to societies built by racial apartheid, there was cinema beyond the veil, so to speak. To discuss race in cinema, then, requires addressing several themes. The first is historical—namely the story of racial portraits in film. The second is hermeneutical—that is, interpreting the portrayal of race in film. The third is philosophical— pertaining particularly to the aesthetic quality of film where race emerges. And the fifth is political—whether race can be in film without subordinating aesthetic aims to political imperatives.

A Brief History of Race in Cinema The history of race in film warrants a study of its own. I only offer some brief historical observations here. I have already hinted at race in film as already being there from the emergence of cinema. What complicates matters, however, is race itself, since it could be present where it is not made explicitly so. Further, there is the added difficulty of addressing race in and of itself when it cannot exist in and by itself. In straightforward terms, no one actually sees a race walking. Racialized subjects are embodied, which means they are also engendered, manifest sexual orientations, class, and a variety of identity classifications.3 This, too, is the case with cinema, where the moving characters, the subjects, manifest these elements. Their convergence is affected, however, by the norms of the society producing and viewing them. Where certain subjects are normative, they do not stand out and are thus part of what pragmatist philosophers, such as William James and Charles Sanders Peirce, would call the ordinary stream or nonevents. It is the story of their lives where disruptions of genre—for example, comedy, drama, horror, or suspense—emerge. Where the subjects are illicit, however, the normative field is affected. The sight of those who should not be seen disrupts it. In a world of white normativity, this means that the situation of race always exemplifies at minimum a double disruption— the avowed plot of tension and the underlying societal expectations of recovery through reclamation of racial submergence. Put plain, race appearing as race supposedly calls for resolution through its elimination. This observation about reintroduced submergence is the familiar story of monstrosity. It thus means, in effect, that in a racialized society, most monster stories are ultimately race stories. “Monster,” after all, emerges from the Latin 2  For the curious about my remark about the light bulb, I am speaking of Lewis Howard Latimer, the African American who worked in Edison’s lab and who invented the filament. 3  For discussion, see “Thinking through Some Themes of Race and More,” Res Philosophica 95, no. 2 (2018): 331–345.

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monstrum, which from the infinitive—monere—means “to show” or “to warn.” Think of a related word “admonish,” in which a variation of “monstrum” is embedded. A monster is, in fact, something that shows or announces something, which makes monsters always linked to the world of signs and warnings, which Jane Anna Gordon and I have analyzed as forms of disaster.4 Our argument is that a disaster is also an omen—as the term’s etymology points to a fallen star or planet. To fall from the heavens is a catastrophe (another word for falling), and in such circumstances, the compulsion is to ask what the fall means, with all the mythic significance in many traditions from antiquity. As a sign, the question emerges of whether those who see it also become it. In short, if one carries the sign to others, one becomes a sign and, in effect, a warning. One becomes a monster. As the appearance of that which should not appear—illicit appearance—race functions as a disaster and thus monstrous. Race stories are not, however, as simple as the appearance of race. After all, racialized subjects are of many kinds. They could be black, which is the most prominent ones in the cinema of the Americas, Australia, and some African countries. In others, such as much of Europe for most of the twentieth century, where the primary signifier of race is not black people but, instead, Jewish people, the illicit appearance would be whatever stereotypes of Jews that society harbors. This is also the case with Roma (Gypsies) and where xenophobia dominates, the racialized immigrant follows. This affects contemporary European cinema. Additionally, in settler societies, the Indigenous populations are also part of the racial economy. And to make matters more complicated, race, where made explicit, often demands justification through rationalization. This often takes the form of what could be called gender and miscegenation anxiety. These abstractions could be made concrete as follows. Although D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) is known as an epic and a cinematic masterpiece of its day, it stands on the black side of American society as a horror film through which the plotline was given for blacks in hegemonic cinema for the remaining century. Seen as a binding force of national integrity by whites, Woodrow Wilson being chief among them, the film stimulated increased membership in the Ku Klux Klan and a rise in lynchings and white destruction of black communities. That lived terror was chronicled and analyzed by black intellectuals of the day. There are many stereotypes about black people in the film, but none had greater impact than a black male ­character—portrayed by a white man in black face—attempting to rape a white woman who protected her virtue by leaping over a cliff to her death. The Klan came to the rescue of the South through corralling the black menace and purging governing institutions of their presence. Such is the film’s portrayal of Reconstruction and the rise of the US apartheid policies known today as Jim Crowe.

4  See Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R.  Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2009).

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So, the basic script was set. Black men are dangerous. They lust for white women, who, of course, to establish a lack of consent, have no desire for them. A form of national theodicy follows in which systemic integrity is restored through placing black men in their proper place—outside. The story is often complicated where black women appear since they do not represent the danger of rape, and the disavowal of desiring them elides the historical reality of how so many children of white descent were born to black women.5 Often portrayed in the figure of the maid, her obsession is the welfare of the white family she serves. In this racial drama is also the figure of the mulatto, though in film it is properly the mulatta since the character is nearly always female. The racial term is premised on racial scientific fantasy of species instead of racial difference between black and white. Thus, like the mule, which is an offspring of a donkey and a horse, the mulatto is supposed to be sterile. Racist anthropology of the nineteenth into early twentieth centuries varied on this issue, but for the most part, a mulatto was an offspring specifically born of a white woman and a black man. Offspring of white men and black women were fertile—as there was ample evidence on slave plantations—which occasioned complicated questions for their status.6 Despite the fact of white women who had fertile children from relations with black men, the general logic erased that history at least in history as presented in cinema. What is shared by what are today called biracial offspring in film is the ongoing thesis of nonbelonging, despite historical evidence showing otherwise. In the world of film, such mixed people belong to neither community, though, historically, they simply lived in black neighborhoods. It is a dramatic scene that continues to contemporary portraits, such as the recent popular film (2014) and television series (2017–) Dear White People. With regard to the portrait of desire, it took some time until Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner (1967) offered a white woman who was actually in love with a black man, with Sydney Poitier being the trail blazer in that role as he was in others such as A Patch of Blue (1965) and To Sir, with Love (1967). I mentioned Birth of a Nation as ultimately a horror film. The theme of a white woman as an object of illicit black male desire is there in the classic villain, even when in the form of a white actor often dressed in black and is older (signifying impropriety) who bizarre as it is ties his female victim to train tracks where she is rescued in the proverbially nick of time by her white male hero. In this case, which is our going ahead of ourselves, the scene is psychoanalytical, since the train engine is dark, phallic, and will clearly destroy her when it goes  See Katarzyna Bryc, Eric Y. Durand, J. Michael Macpherson, David Reich, Joanna L. Mountain. 2014. “The Genetic Ancestry of African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans across the United States,” American Journal of Human Genetics (December 18): http://www.cell.com/ ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5 6  A classic critical discussion of this embarrassing feature (among others) of Euromodern science is Anténor Firmin, De l’égalité des races humaines: anthropologie positive (Paris: Librairie Cotillon, 1885). 5

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through her. In all racial forms, as the philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon later showed in his classic Black Skin, White Masks, the racialized rapist emerges even if not explicitly avowed as a “negro.” Fanon adds complexity to the story, however, through arguing that the demand for the white female victim’s lack of desire leads to an investment of desire in her black pursuer. He, in effect, becomes an expression of her desire. A film that beautifully explores this complicated relationship is the first installment (1992) of the Candy Man trilogy. Although originally a story about class written by Clive Barker, the cinematic portrait brings the reality of class to the fore in the American context, where it is always raced and engendered. Thus, the story shifts to a white female doctoral student’s ethnographic efforts leading to her confrontation with a black apparition with a hooked hand eviscerating those whom she claims to protect. The culminating scene of her returning as the hooked apparition affirms Fanon’s observation. This portrait is, however, peculiar to the Americas. The cowboys’ and Indians’ films are also racial portraits, but they offer the logic of legitimate settlement and the rationalization of primitivism imposed on the Indigenous peoples. Here, the work of Vine Deloria, Jr. is instructive.7 The system of enslavement placed blacks as legitimate only when serving whites. Without the institution of slavery, the notion of free black appearance was, and continues to be, obscene. For Native Americans, however, the fundamental question is the land. The unfolding drama required the principle of terra nullius, in which the people on the land were illicitly there. Thus, each portrait of Indigenous peoples has a form of temporary character, as though they were squatters passing through and then committing the injustice of blocking settlers either passing through or choosing to put their stakes in transforming supposedly unclaimed land into property. The logic there is that the violence that follows is unjust, with the settlers engaged in nothing short of self-defense. Since the aim was not to keep Indigenous people in their place but, instead, to move them, the logic was not about trespassing or transgression but instead removal. Thus, although white women emerged in these dramas as threatened, rape was not the primary signifier. Deloria observed how many contemporary whites would consult him about their Indian status through pointing to distant Indigenous great-great grandmothers: Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother’s side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.8

7  Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988 [original 1969]). 8  Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins, 3.

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The absence of an appeal to an Indigenous male descendant in the majority of cases brings to the fore the importance of keeping gender in mind when studying how racial dramas unfold. In Europe, the cinematic drama is similar. Bram Stoker’s hatred of Jews is well known, and his novel Dracula (1897) raises the question of the Eastern European interloper refusing to stay in his place and, of course, away from proper Christian and white Jewish ladies. Denied the rights to produce the cinematic depiction of the novel, Henrik Galeen transformed the famous vampire into Count Orlok for F.W.  Murnau’s Nosferatu (1929). He substituted Bremen for London and offered an image of the lustful villain akin to the imagined rich Jews of the day who, of course, wouldn’t stay in their place. Despite the realities of working-class and peasant Jews of the period, the whole point of the rich Jew is that it could not be legitimate, which makes that Jew the exemplar of what is feared about Jewish appearance. He would take your property and then your women. Asians varied according to east and west. Those to the west were invariably brown and had roles of loyal servants and, with regard to then Asia Minor and North Africa, reenacted the cowboys’ and Indians’ script in terms of the French Foreign Legion. To the east, there was, at first, servant characters and then, because of World War II, menacing reptilic creatures threatening American and British security. The reference to reptiles emphasizes an initial radical alien portrait of East Asians that eventually took form in science fiction depictions of alien invasions. A major shift in those characters emerged with the success of martial arts films, especially through the progressive politics and philosophical insights of their greatest star: Bruce Lee. Although many of those films offered images of heroes and heroines fighting against class and racial oppression, there were some, such as the controversial Shigehiro Ozawa’s film The Street Fighter (1974), starring Shin’ichi Chiba (aka Sonny Chiba), which drew on racial stereotypes such as the black male rapist whom the hero castrates while protecting Japanese female virtue. Now, although this is a familiar history, it has many problems. First, it’s a portrait of race in cinema, primarily from the point of view of white normativity. People of color—such as the pioneer Oscar Micheaux (1884–1951) and artistic filmmakers from the 1970s such as Charles Burnett and Haile Gerima, and even some in the Blaxploitation productions from that same decade, and others such as Julie Dash, who produced what is still perhaps the greatest work of independent Black feminist cinema—offered different portraits and at times brought irony to stereotypes.9 There were also filmmakers in the Francophone world, such as Euzhan Palcey, whose Sugar Cain Alley (1983), stands as a 9  Oscar Micheaux was the first African American filmmaker. He produced 44 films; see Patrick McGillan, Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: the Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). For discussion of the lives and films of the others and more, see Manthi Diawara (ed.), Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993) and Michelle Boyce Gillespie, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).

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c­ lassic portrait of the struggle for dignity amid poverty in Martinique. And, of course, there are the film industries in countries of predominant populations of color such as the Bollywood industry in India, the Nollywood one in Nigeria, and, of course, those in China, Japan, and Korea.10 These major cinematic industries in various countries and the independent filmmakers who vie for audiences who seek something unique through the cracks created a vast array of films through which issues of class, race, gender, sex, and sexuality could be mined for understandings of, if not the popular imagination of those societies, the marketplace of how these identities unfold. Elsewhere, I argue that although each converge in every human being in some form, given the globality of Euromodern capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century, different groups highlight certain features more than others.11 The logic of race, for instance, always takes the form of obsession over quantity. There are always “too many” blacks, for instance, where the logic of the situation demands their absence. In racialized cinema, that means the presence of one black—particularly where the black is male—counts for the presence of all. The logic of indigeneity, as a struggle over land in a world in which the future supposedly belongs to the settlers transforms Indigenous peoples into creature that haunt the present. As ghosts must be exorcised, so, too, are the unfolding dramatic scenes of Native presence often acted out in cinema. The gendered element is primarily about speech and voice. Although, like the others, it is more a matter of emphasis in one group than another, the overwhelming literary portrait of women in cinema is of in effect speaking unheard words. This is not to say that there aren’t representations with “talkative” female characters, but the significance of being heard as a function of male responses has few exceptions. There is a political thesis at work here, which culminates in an epistemological point: knowledgeable or knowing subjects are nonracialized, non-Indigenous males. They thus stand as legitimate political actors. The already mentioned trope of the white man who rescues women from lascivious men of color is one implication of this form of political subjectivity in cinema. Another is corollary best exemplified in the fictional character Tarzan (brought from Edgar Rice Burrough’s novels to cinema from 1918 onward). A product of British and Congolese imperialism, Tarzan takes Robinson Crusoe a step further and posits the supremacy of a white baby marooned in the African jungle. The animals and local Africans all immediately recognize his supremacy, and he emerges as “Lord of the Jungle.” Despite imagining he was an ape, he ignores all the female apes in his community and, by extension, given the racist logic of the storyline, the local black females as well. His romantic urges are aroused when the white woman Jane falls into his midst, and from that point 10  For a general critical discussion, see Shekhar Deshpande and Meta Mazaji, World Cinema: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2018). 11  Lewis R.  Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Giroux, Strauss, Farrar, forthcoming).

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on the first trope returns. Both tropes have been templates for most cinematic portraits, straight through to, with few exceptions, contemporary superhero fantasies. It means, then, that race in cinema was always there in plain sight, as it were, as a form of normality of racial hierarchies. It is only made more visible or explicit when racialized, Indigenous, and engendered characters are added. This brief history, then, is simply to set some context for the next sections, which move more explicitly to the terrains of interpretation and philosophical analysis. Additionally, I did not distinguish genres such as adventure, comedy, drama, horror, musicals, and science fiction, since the relevance of each would come to the fore in various contexts in what follows.

On Interpretation Inspired by the trickster messenger god Hermes, the term “hermeneutics” reveals much. A message is delivered, but it may not be the message, and when brought to the level of metatheory, there is the question of whether the transfer of avowed translation can ever work or be exact. The difficulty pertains to the investments already in the message, and as is already evident with the question of race, those investments may be such that they disavow their own efforts. Race, after all, is suspect in liberal democracies—the countries in which much hegemonic cinema emerged—which makes its appearance a form of what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “problem.”12 This concern is already identified in my remarks about systemic integrity. The presupposition of an intrinsically just system means that any form of unjust differentiation demands an external account. In effect, this forces the lived reality of racialized subjects into the realm of the external, which jeopardizes their validity. The situation becomes worse as well through the problem of interpretation since that, too, poses the question of perspective through and from which a form of relativism of perspectives results. How, in other words, can a racial interpretation gain validity when racial presence is disavowed? One way out of this conundrum is to raise the question of interpretation as a concern of meaning through which, because focused on human subjects, interpretive practices are ongoing. From this perspective, one doesn’t see or know an audiovisual or only visual story but instead is seeing or learning it. This means one can return to the aesthetic experience of viewing it with additional resources one brings to the viewing. Additionally, one should also bear in mind that there are shared phenomenological elements in establishing a relationship with a film that presupposes being a member of a wider community of viewers engaged in communicative practices. The Ghanian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu regards this consideration as requiring a humble and critical 12  W.E.B. Du Bois W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches Chicago (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg and Co., 1903). For elaboration, see Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), chapter 4: “What Does It Mean to be a Problem?”

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relationship with translation.13 There is a fallacy in presuppositions of absolute or radical translation. It would require a completeness through which each language could be mapped onto another. This could only work if the experiences and conditions through which each language is developed are identical. This presupposition would fail on at least two counts. The first is that it is empirically refuted by virtue of there being different cultural histories and points of development. The second, however, is more radical. If there weren’t such difference and there were identical developments, there would be no need for translation. This is because there would never be a condition of difference in one language that is not in the other. That there are ordinary or everyday languages that are different from others mean that there will be terms in one that are not in the other. Where this occurs, that means each language would have exhausted parity. What, in such situations, can be done? Wiredu’s answer is wonderfully pedagogical: learn the new term. Learning any language inaugurates the practice of learning languages. One doesn’t begin with an original language mapped onto the acquired language. One simply learns it. That process of learning, in fact, continues in the life of each human being. We come then to a series of important insights about viewing film, many of which are adopted from viewing live plays and other forms of public performance all the way back to initial practices of storytelling. To bring a theory to this activity already has embedded in it elements of what was to come in cinematic viewing. It brings together concerns of allegory, theory, and myth. Taken literally, allegory means to speak openly about something other than what is offered to say it. It’s from a conjunction of the Greek words allos (“another,” “something else,” and, at times, “beyond”) and agoreuein (“to speak openly”). Think of the agora, the open meeting place, in ancient Athens. In his Republic, Plato used allegory, in his famous example of ascent from the cave of deception and ignorance, to illuminate a movement from a world of shadows to the one of seeing the light. That we could refer to the allegory as illuminating makes it a double movement of allegory—an allegory about allegory, so to speak. This question of illumination raises questions of what is being illuminated or shined upon and what is achieved in making it apparent. Plato’s answer was resolute: the really real or the Forms the understanding of which is Truth. Seeking truth is not, however, a simple matter, and the history of such efforts is marked by tensions across many divides in which the proponents represent, roughly, a conflict between theory and myth in which philosophers and scientists tend to support the first and artists, especially poets, the second. The philosophers of old protested that the poets—who in antiquity included rhapsodes (reciters of epic poems), storytellers, playwrights, and poetic composers— beguile the people with fiction. We should bear in mind, however, that that which is not factual is not necessarily that which is false. A nonfactual story 13  Kwasi Wiredu, Cultural Universals and Particulars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

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simply means the events didn’t happen. What is offered in the story, however, could be a truth about what would unfold if the event were to occur. What, then, is it that the quest for truth offers that myth does not? This requires some exploration of the distinction between theory and myth. In simple terms, theory involves moments of estrangement through which illumination occurs. Myth, however, demands familiarity to the point of radical intimacy. Theory demands explanation and understanding. Myth seeks meaning. Theory ultimately adheres to evidence and facts. Myth, in contrast, addresses a peculiar must that haunts unreflective action. The stuff of myth appears from its retelling. Indeed, the word is derived from the ancient Greek muthos (sometimes spelled mythos), which means told or recounted from the mouth or word of mouth. It moves from one mouth to another. One repeats myth, which diverges a little in each retelling. Eventually, there are myths beneath myths, the inner or subterranean life of myth. The telling of myth is, thus, also part of myth. The act of theorizing suggests, then, that one must evaluate the truth status of myth. The word “theory” emerges from the Greek word theoria (contemplation, speculation, viewing, seeing), from theoros (spectator), from thea (a view, interestingly from which we also get the word “theater”) and horan (to see), which in the Greek infinitive is theorein (to see, consider, or to look at). The interesting double moment of viewing what one sees offers reflection: not only to see but also to see that one sees. It is a meta-reflective move of double comprehension. To see what is seen and to see also that one sees offers the impression of seeing all. The primordial model of such is already embedded in the root theo, which refers to god. As gods, especially when fully invested with power, bridge gaps between potency and conceptual reach, the conclusion should be clear: embedded in theory is the effort to see what a god would see. Theory, then, begins with a rather lofty goal for which theorizing faces, at least for human beings, an endless task. Yet seeing and looking and pointing require intelligibility. This is where myth returns. To see or to look without meaning is equivalent to forms of pure sense that collapse into nonsense. Separating off myth or sources of meaning therefore jeopardizes theory despite the efforts of some theorists to unshackle that connection under the banner of demythologizing. The implications for cinema are many. First, famed “silent” cinema focused on telling stories visually, but music and motion were crucial for intelligibility. It required the audience’s ability to read actions and behaviors. Those readings were infused with varieties of mythic tropes, despite efforts not to hear them as spoken from the mouth but, instead, read them from statements posted on the screen. Second, the fusion of sound and visuals brought elements to the fore that both challenged and expanded the scope of interpretation. One could close one’s eyes and still follow a cinematic story simply by listening to the music, dialogue, and sound effects. There will be elements missing, especially where characters don’t say things, such as referring to the color of a dress or shirt or furniture or people standing in the background, but a fair enough

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amount of intelligibility can be there to make the visual one of an enhanced experience. There is, as well, the experience of the deaf viewing a film without subtitles or closed caption. Again, much could be followed while other elements are lost. What is not lost in any of these formulations, however, is the importance of meaning as a condition of intelligibility, which makes the question of truth in meaning, instead, of truth versus meaning a central feature through which the aesthetic question comes to the fore. Here, we return to allegory, since what is sought through aesthetic engagement under some understandings of aesthetic practice is the reading of works of art according to expectations outside of the framework of art. Another model is to read a work of art in terms of its own domain, and as every logician knows, where there is a domain, there are conditions of truth that could be met so long as one sticks to its scope and rules of interpretation. Today, that understanding has become commonplace in the expression “cinematic universe.”

Aesthetics of Race in Film Addressing the aesthetics of race in film therefore raises a conundrum. Is race inside the cinematic universe or is it a domain in which cinema functions as a subset or subtext? The analysis I have been offering thus far suggests the latter. We should, however, bear in mind that where the film is explicitly a “race film” or a film “about race,” there is a convergence of the two possibilities since race would be both inside the film and outside through viewers’ framing of or access to intelligible norms through which to speak about race, especially in light of the observations of race’s fundamental relationality. With regard to human identities, there is always the given identity’s relationship to other identities. This insight could be called the “structuralist critique,” where rules in relation to constellations of other rules are bases of intelligibility. Conceding the fundamental relationality of race entails, then, understanding the shifts in normative relations where race is explicitly introduced in films or serve as such where racially excluded groups are at the center. Paul Taylor argues that such questions are features of Black Aesthetics in general, since somatological, epidermal significance, hair, tonal (more bass tends to be in black music, ranging from blues and jazz to rhythm and blues, soul, hip-hop, reggae, samba, and varieties of African popular music), and other considerations come into play for an aesthetic relationship with black peoples and their aesthetic productions.14 Nollywood cinema is a good place to explore such themes, but we should bear in mind that African-centered cinema is not necessarily black-centered cinema. The outsider may see “race films” only because of the mistake of treating the racial context of blackness as universal. Inside the 14  See Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016) and for a critical discussion and elaboration of some of the themes I offer here, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Black Aesthetics, Black Value,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (2018): 19–34.

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world of Nollywood, where Nigerians and people from nearby African countries are normative, other themes—such as class mobility, religious conviction, romance, or political corruption (in other words, what are at times called simply “human concerns”)—become significant. In other African cinematic ­industries—except for South Africa’s because of its ideological debts to US racism and its similar eugenicist history, in addition to its own history of British and Dutch colonialism and racism—the situation is similar. For proper explorations of race in aesthetic terms in films, one must have racial contexts. This makes the situation difficult also because of a basic fact: race is a political matter masked as primarily a moral one in the societies that produced it. It is, after all, a fundamental feature of avowed liberal democracies. Such societies are embarrassed about race and thus try to submerge it through appeals to individual moral convictions. In cases where such societies lean to the right of the political spectrum, their racial currents turn into tidal waves. If toward the left, as the history of socialist countries show, they tend to address racism directly as something to be eliminated, as seen in, for example, the limited cinema in Cuba and depictions of people from different racial backgrounds in former Czechoslovakia, Soviet, and Yugoslavian cinema.15 Yet when those societies fall, it is often into avowed liberal, often neoliberal, democracies or something to the right.16 Thus, race and racism—in addition to homophobia and sexism—are familiar recurrences. Class, after all, is often redemptive only when presumed white not only in those societies but also in Western Europe and across the Americas north and south.

Double Consciousness of Race in Cinema A consequence of divides imposed by racism is the emergence of a form of cinematic double consciousness. W.E.B. Du Bois famously formulated the concept in the context of race as seeing oneself through the normative eyes of racists.17 For blacks, this meant seeing the black self as a negative term. Frantz Fanon later identified this phenomenon in his experience of going to the cinema.18 He often watched films waiting, with trepidation, for this negative figure to arrive on the scene. It’s a world offering an alienated version of the self as real, an imago of the popular imagination. It’s an array of stereotypes and, additionally, a special role for those stereotypical figures as obsequious, sacrificial, and subservient on the one hand, and often dangerous and untrustworthy 15  For a brief overview, see World Cinema: A Critical Introduction and Mark Winokur and Bruce Holsinger, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Movies, Flicks, and Films (New York: Alpha Books, 2001). 16  See Paul Hockenos, Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1993). See also, more recently, Rastko Močnik, “Beyond Fascism?: Historical Parallels and Structural Specificities of Post-Socialism,” Tiempo devorado: revista de historia actual 4, n. 1 (2017): 146–165. 17  Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. 18  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 131, n. 15.

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on the other. Such black viewers therefore see themselves as seen through the normative eyes of whites. Some adopt that perspective as a principle of reality. Others reject it, and when they do, they offer a critique of the society that produces such degrading portrayals of black people. In Du Boisian language, they offer a critique of the conditions that make blacks—and other people of color— into problems on the screen. Where such people enter the scene, the prevailing ideology proclaims, problems follow. The critique of that tendency recognizes a form of theodicy of cinema, where white perspectives function as godlike points of view. Where such investments are hegemonic, the problem of race on the screen must be because racialized subjects are problems. In other words, the problem must be intrinsic to such people, which makes their cinematic portrayals “accurate” and not a fault of cinema, directing, or writing. These presuppositions unravel, however, when the society and the cinema it produces are held under account. Where that society is not treated as intrinsically just, its cinematic universe is called into question and the possibility of alternative portrayals emerge. For instance, if the point was that black people are not problems but are, instead, human beings who face problems, then even their plight—whether discrimination, poverty, or violence—would gain nuance. Additionally, their humanity coming to the fore means their lives need not be metonymic of pathology but instead for social maledictions to serve as they do for the lives of human beings across genres. This critical consciousness, which is a dialectical critique of the misrepresentations of a world premised on black and white as contraries, is potentiated double consciousness.19 It is a form of social critique and also imaginative exploration of what could be otherwise. Potentiated double consciousness is already there in what many black viewers tend to see when they view and produce films. For instance, the police, which is the first line of racial violence against racially subordinated people in racist societies, are rarely cheered on as heroic. In fact, many managerial institutions of racist countries function differently for black audiences than they do for white ones. Oppressive for the former, they are protectors and agents of order for the latter. This, of course, means that so-called Blaxploitation films, which were often low-budget productions, brought black audiences to the theaters because of, for the most part, the truth they offered beneath what may appear absurd in some instances. I say absurd because they often focused on “the life,” which is the world of crime or the illicit economy in which many black people have contact due to structural exploitation across much of white society. Although, at times, reaching levels of minstrelsy, the underlying 19  This formulation is from the work of Jane Anna Gordon, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). It is her reformulation of Paget Henry’s concept of “potentiated second sight”; see Page Henry, “Africana Phenomenology: Its Philosophical Implications,” in Paget Henry, Jane Anna Gordon, Lewis R.  Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha, and Neil Roberts (eds.), Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 27–58. I offer a similar reading of the dialectical movement from first-stage double consciousness in chapter 4 of Existentia Africana.

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e­ lement of addressing causes of such behavior denaturalized them from the ordinary white racist portrayals.20 Double consciousness and potentiated double consciousness also raise critical questions of mimesis and its transcendence. The motif of mimetic iconography extends beyond cinema, where even historically black and brown peoples are whitewashed in history to the point of accurate portrayals of them appearing as imitation. A paradigm case is the presupposition that a black or brown actor playing Jesus of Nazareth must be an imitation of a historically white figure. There is thus the need for the adjective “black,” which appears in a long line of mimetic and derivative offerings such as “black Jesus,” “black Santa Claus,” and the comically “Blacula” and “Blackenstein.” Yet potentiated double consciousness shines through even in these avowed acts of mimicry, as Blacula takes on the police and observes the effects of slavery on the black diaspora.21 There are, of course, other manifestations of double consciousness beyond the sphere of mimicry. Gordon Parks’s Shaft (1971), after all, was a detective film whose sequel, Shaft in Africa (1973), directed by John Guillermin, explicitly examined continued slavery in the Francophone world with images portending what is making the headlines today in North Africa. And there are unusual gems such as Bill Gunn’s Ganja & Hess (1973), which explores the horror genre through the complexity of the lives of blacks—in this case, a black anthropologist played by Duane Jones from Night of the Living Dead (1968)— who could indulge in the collection of African antiquities. Haile Gerima’s Bush Mamma (1979) and Sankofa (1993) offer portraits of resistance against police brutality and enslavement through black female protagonists. And then there is, by way of potentiated double consciousness, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991), which challenges expectations of genre and viewership through offering the story of a day in the lives of a black family deciding to depart from their Gullah St. Helena Island home off the coast of South Carolina to the travails of the mainland while being, through the spirit of a not yet born daughter who is also the narrator, paradoxically haunted by the future. This list is US-centered, as a global portrayal would take us afar, especially as our focus is 20  For more detailed discussion of such films, see, for example, Mikel J. Koven, Blaxploitation Films (Harpenden, UK: Oldcastle/Kamera Books, 2010) Yvonne D. Sims, Women of Blaxploitation: How the Black Action Film Heroine Changed American Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2006). 21  See Blacula (1972) and Scream Blacula Scream (1973). See also Blackenstein (1973). For analysis of Frankenstein’s creature, see Elizabeth Young, Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor (New York: NYU Press, 2008) and Jane Anna Gordon and Lewis R. Gordon, Of Divine Warning: Reading Disaster in the Modern Age (New York: Routledge, 2009), chapter 4: “Creatures.” See also Corinna Treitel (ed.), “Frankenstein at 200,” special issue of The Common Reader: A Journal of Essays, no. 10 (Fall 2018). The reader should bear in mind that Boris Karloff, the actor who wore the iconic makeup that is the dominant image of the Creature in Hollywood films, was born William Henry Pratt of Anglo-East Indian ancestry. The point about Santa Claus is that the historical St. Nicholas was born in Turkey in 270 ACE and was, by today’s standards, a man of color.

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race, and, as we’ve already seen, it’s not the case that race is everywhere a statement of racial degradation. A spectacular case of this is, for instance, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (1959). Although at first a clear example of the mimetic motif, what is unusual about this film is the beauty and depth of the characters and their performance. It is a tragedy that could easily be renamed, to refer to the popular adage channeled by Paul C. Taylor, Black Is Beautiful.

Political Aesthetics of Race in Film We come, then, to a thorny issue in aesthetics, which is the relationship of politics to art. Although it is possible for great art to offer political insight, political aims don’t guarantee great art. We have already raised this issue through the question of continued presence and repetition. Where art “works,” the viewer or listener is compelled to return to it. This may be so even where the politics of the film may not be clear or, in some cases, even repugnant. As an exploration of the imagination, for instance, cinema faces the question of license, and this boils down to whatever a filmmaker could get away with. Where there are constraints, however, there is always the problem of collapsing into proselytizing and, at least from an aesthetic perspective, boredom. Propaganda films, for instance, place their aesthetic qualities secondary, but an artist can, as we know, find a way to transform the banal into the majestic. In the case of music, the elements are, at times, aligned in this respect. The survival of such works of art emerge primarily from their aesthetic resonance, as their political urgency in some instances has long gone. Our discussion of myth raises an additional consideration. Where myth is transformed into mythopoetics, there is the quality of repetition through which life is brought to past and shared human experiences in their retelling. In such cases, mimicry is not the goal so much as the tale beneath the tale or, as we have seen, myth beneath myth. This unveiling through retelling already creates the aesthetic experience of repetition. It thus brings to the fore a question of truth in poetics and, by extension, the question of a meeting of meaning and truth or truth in meaning or meaning as truth. Where race is added, the situation becomes complicated because racism avoids displeasing truths. Offering theoria (the visual medium) through mythos (narration, dialogue, story, voice) requires, in this case, an alliance with allegory. Indeed, potentiated double consciousness raises the question of a Black Aesthetics of cinema as a form of meta-­ critique. In effect, it places the viewer into the experience of seeing race in the discomfiting situation of defanging its existential seriousness. What this requires is the ability to see what one sees, which occasions a form of aesthetic crisis in the classical sense of facing decisions to be made. At this point, I’m offering more than an analysis of race in cinema. I am also raising the question of demands to consider in the evaluation of race in cinema, and in what terms. If in political terms, the answer is straightforward: does the film meet one’s political goals? If in aesthetic, however, the question is complicated by the possibility of the hybrid in political aesthetic or in aesthetic political

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terms. There is, if one takes the imaginative potential of art seriously, a meeting of such possibilities where politics is distinguished from governing or rule and offered as the free exploration of power. In such cases, power—defined as the ability to make things happen with access to the means of doing so—becomes a subject of aesthetic performance through which the work itself could stand as a statement of public record. In effect, the work of art thus stands, as would eloquence in the senate, as an aesthetic expression of what should be discussed beyond the moment it becomes part of the public record. This is where a debate in film continues into everyday life. As race is part of everyday life in racist societies, it stands to reason that the constellation of problems, with their nuance and many dimensions, could gain allegorical insight from cinema and thus achieve the quality of art (instead of mere entertainment). More recently, this consideration is coming to fruition in a series of popular films that in effect break many rules of their genre because people of color do not fit its conventional norms. Challenging the scope of genre isn’t new—as we have seen with some of the films I have already mentioned such as Daughter’s of the Dust and Ganja & Hess. What is different is that old stories are being transformed into different kinds of stories. For example, the superhero genre for the most part amounts to three storylines: origin of the hero’s powers; the hero uses his powers to secure his (sometimes but rarely her) love through overcoming a villain; the hero loses his way, and in doing so, at times, loses his power (and the girl), and then achieves redemption and regains his powers (and the girl) through regrounding the self. There is a new set with mostly white female heroines that unfortunately mimic much of the white male ones, heterosexual, and all with protecting and securing her white man, though there are exceptions and I expect others to come.22 We have already discussed that story and the script for race it offers. The recent blockbuster The Black Panther (2018) challenges this motif through replacing the love interest with political responsibility. It also brings to the fore the question of power as allegory through making the hero’s actual power his abilities of leadership instead of his physical prowess. This is clear as he is part of a community of gifted women and men who can easily defend themselves. It is also clear that the layers of myth in the film move from those of the Euromodern world to resources of ancient Africa, where the resurrection is offered through the ancient Kmt/Egyptian myth of Horus, Isis, Set(h), and Osiris. In effect, the film breaks the expected norms of mimesis through calling forth African origins all the more powerful because they are actual African myths. In effect, the film’s myth about myths is an allegory about possibilities offered from myths. There is not enough space to spell out the debates 22  In Wonder Woman (2017), Diana rescues and eventually loses her heroic white man. The Netflix adaptation of Jessica Jones (2015) has Luke Cage, an African American who is also a superhero, as her lover. In the comics, they eventually bear a child. That genre is also being transformed in interesting ways, as the recent Deadpool 2 (2018) illustrates well with a multiracial cast and fluidity of sexual orientation.

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about this film here. I will therefore just offer the observation of its primary thesis, which is that there is an option beyond the false dilemma of conquering or being conquered. One could fight against a world premised on conquest. I would like to conclude these reflections through a short discussion of a film that does not stand on a par aesthetically with a production such as Black Panther or Jordan Peele’s extraordinary horror-comedy Get Out! (2017), as I offer detailed discussions of those films elsewhere.23 Instead, given these reflections on the meeting of politics and aesthetics, I would like the reader to consider the Boots Riley film Sorry to Bother You (2018). It is a film in which another genre—hip-hop—whose relationship to politics brings to the fore the difficulties outlined in this meditation on race in cinema. Boots Riley (aka Raymond Lawrence Riley) is the founder of the rock hip-­ hop group The Coup. The group is an exemplar of political art. In Sorry to Bother You, he brings class, gender, race, and sex together in a meditation on contemporary capitalism. Recall that myth brings to the fore what must be told, which are not only stories but also rituals of repetition through which a story is told and retold. A myth Sorry to Bother You retells is Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), though most readers will be familiar with Walt Disney’s version, Pinocchio (1940). In his quest to become “a real boy,” his friends and Pinocchio endanger themselves through going to The Land of Toys (Pleasure Island in the Disney version). The children are lured there with the promise of pure liberty without responsibility. The unsuspecting children devolve into donkeys, where they are then sold into slavery. The tale of being turned into donkeys and then sold into slavery isn’t unique to Pinocchio. The second-century North African Roman Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, most popularly known by St. Augustine’s preferred title of The Golden Ass, explored similar themes of transformation, wherein the protagonist Lucius is transformed into a donkey, enslaved, and suffers through a series of misadventures. Boots Riley updates this tale of exploitation and enslavement at every turn, especially through the medium of names. There is the corporation, WorryFree (Land of Toys/Pleasure Island). There are all-too-obvious metonyms, metaphors, and play on words such as Cassius Greene (“cash green” as a way of saying green cash), Steve Lift (perhaps Steve Jobs through a signification of uplift standing for employment without wages), Squeeze (for the union organizer), Detroit (the city devastated by neoliberal policies but making its comeback through activism, art, and urban agriculture, in addition to being where Boots Riley lived in his childhood before moving to Oakland), Diana 23  See “A Conversation on the Black Panther,” questions posed by Gregory Doukas, American Philosophical Association Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (February 20, 2018): https://blog. apaonline.org/2018/02/20/black-issues-in-philosophy-a-conversation-on-the-black-panther/ and “A Conversation on Get Out,” questions posed by Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, The APA Blog Series Black Issues in Philosophy (April 3, 2018): https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/04/03/blackissues-in-philosophy-a-conversation-on-get-out/. I elaborate those discussions in Lewis R. Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, forthcoming).

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DeBauchery (debauchery), Mr. ____ (a “Power Caller” with one right eye, or a Cyclops, as opposed to the radical group, “The Left Eye,” who vandalizes WorryFree advertisements), Langston (complicated here, but most likely Langston Hughes, the great blues poet); Coke (both the cola and cocaine), the RegalView (the monarch’s view and kingdom), “stick to the script,” which is the telemarketing motto for communicating social consumption and submission, and, of course, the title, since “Sorry to bother you” doesn’t only refer to the annoying catch-phrase of telemarketers but also the relationship political reality has to those who prefer to live life with, as the late Stanley Kubrick put it, eyes wide shut. The expression “sorry to bother you” is also a meta-­cinematic self-reference to what the film is actually doing to many viewers, which means it is also a breaking of the Fourth Wall—a device with increased use in contemporary cinema. The Golden Ass/Pinocchio tale is there throughout Sorry to Bother You through the theme of transformation. It begins with the bedroom garage door opening unexpectedly and thus spoiling intimacy as the outside world witnesses Cassius and Detroit in foreplay; it concludes with the door smacking him in the face when he attempts to shut out the world. What happens between the initial opened door and the last is a process that begins with the search for employment at first through deception. Remember Pinocchio’s nose betrays him through elongating whenever he lies. Cassius brings a large fake trophy to the job interview. He is offered the job despite the exposure of his lies. This seems at first to be good fortune, but as such matters go, one should always be careful for what one wishes. The next stage of transformation occurs at the level of voice, where Cassius opens the door to his success through, at the encouragement of Langston, using his “white voice.” Next come questions of class struggle whose racial and engendered elements become increasingly clear as the telemarketers organize. Cassius’s transformation continues, however, as his white voice in black skin leads to his promotion to “Power Caller,” where he eventually discovers transformations of workers into workhorses under the scientific nomenclature of “equisapiens.” This movement is also dialectical and reminiscent of a crucial understanding in Marxism, which, as both critics and proponents know, is all about social transformation and the overcoming recalcitrant enslavement. Marxism is critical of transformation for its own sake. The warning is that some kinds of transformations could involve the radicalization of enslavement. Revolutionary transformation requires responding to contradictions through changing the conditions that maintain them. Steve Lift, for instance, offers Cassius an opportunity to become the Martin Luther King, Jr. of the equisapiens. He doesn’t, however, mean the Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated half a century earlier while fighting for workers’ rights in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis, Tennessee, as part of his Poor People’s Campaign. Lift means, instead, the King caricatured and memorialized in portrayals of a moralistic pacifist dreamer, instead, of the historic political fighter he was.

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The Cassius whom Lift beckoned versus the one who emerged from transformation, however, is a leader more in stream with the Dr. King whose affinities were with revolutionary fighters such as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X) and the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay). Muhammad Ali is especially pertinent here, since his “slave name” was in honor of a white abolitionist. His life was also one of transformation, and as a fighter, he also changed his religion through converting to Islam and being anointed with names in Arabic that means being praiseworthy and most high, or, appropriately, worthy of praise from the Most High.24 Although Cassius Greene at first thought he was “woke” (politically conscious) when he joined the telemarketers’ union, his expectation to return to his community with modest reforms was naïve. When he attempted to close the garage door on the world near the conclusion of the film, it literally smacks him the face and reveals the revolutionary community to which he actually belongs—the equisapiens. The equisapiens also raise the psychoanalytical implications of capitalism. Capitalism’s quest to gobble up everything for the maximization of profit makes workers as human beings a necessary inconvenience. The desire is for nonhuman labor. (The word “robot,” for instance, is from the Czech robota, which means “forced labor” or “slave.”). The equisapiens, for instance, are all males with large limp penises. Their organ is devoid of the proverbial phallus. Lacking erection, they allude to their perverse creator, neither uplifted nor upright. Beyond psychoanalysis, there is also provocative nuance in characters such as Langston, Squeeze, and Detroit. Langston is likely the invocation of Langston Hughes, the African American blues poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes was part of the radical left. He was publicly supportive of the Communist Party USA, even though his biographers say he wasn’t a formal member of the party. For our purposes, Hughes’s literary achievements gave him access to white commodification, which he rejected through his political commitments. The character Langston also functioned as the mythic guide Virgil from Dante’s Inferno. Virgil leads the protagonist through limbo and the many levels of hell to its cold center to see what he needs to see to be released from his fears and hatred and thereby find his way out. Langston always sees what is beyond appearance. A crucial indication of who he is becomes apparent when he joins his comrades for a drink at a bar, where he demands the bartender to serve him “the good stuff,” which is in a bottle hidden within another bottle. Squeeze is a Korean American union activist. According to cultural theorist and literary critic Brian Locke, American films tend to structure Asian Americans, particularly Asian American males, as a threat to security through which a bonding of blacks and whites would save the American nation. (This is not a phenomenon that bears out in real life, as the Trump Administration’s white supremacist ideology focuses on East Asians and black, brown, and red 24  For elaboration, see Lewis R. Gordon, “Continues to Rise: Muhammad Ali (1942–2016)”: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36862-continues-to-rise-muhammad-ali-1942-2016

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peoples as a threat.) We are, however, speaking about the world of cinema. Squeeze breaks this and other stereotypes of Asian American males in Hollywood cinema. He is a courageous leader whose speech is not marked by presuppositions of foreignness, and he is not only a sexual being but also a desirable one. He works across class and racial lines. And the proposed deal of a capitalist bond between Lift and Green, wherein the unionization and a revolution of equisapiens are the threats, is derailed through alternatives already set in play because of Squeeze’s unionizing efforts across class, gender, and race. In short, working-class people of color and white people who believe capitalists are on their side are delusional. Squeeze’s relationship with Detroit is a complicated one. The impact of Korea and Japan in relation to the American automobile industry was felt in Detroit since the 1970s perhaps more than in any other American city. That Detroit and Squeeze understand each other in relation to WorryFree/Steve Lift makes sense, if we think through how the plutocrats and kleptocrats in Russia and the United States collaborate against China, Canada, the European Union, and pretty much the rest of the world since the British vote to exit the European Union (Brexit) and the problematic US presidential election of Donald Trump. Squeeze’s name also offers an additional meaning. He not only squeezes the bosses but also is a “squeeze” in the sense of a lover. Detroit, then, has her main squeeze (green cash) and her other squeeze (who squeezes The Man). China is not a liberal democracy, but unlike Russia, it continues to devote its energy to bringing nearly a billion people out of poverty. And South Korea and Japan, we should remember, represent similar projects of industrialization in the East. So, we come to the specificity of Detroit. She is, as we know, a performance artist. In addition to her performance art with protest signs in the streets and her defacing efforts against WorryFree, and her work includes a performance in which she cites, in a black, leather-gloved bikini, lines from the Berry Gordy-­ produced Last Dragon (1985) while audience members throw old cell phones, bullet casings, and balloons filled with lamb’s blood on her. Since Gordy was the mogul who founded and ran Motown Records, which was in the city of Detroit, is one reference, and the lines are from a scene in his 1985-produced film, a conclusion is this: How far are we willing to go for material wealth? The answer of the plutocrats, oligarchs, and kleptocrats is clear: at the expense of reality, truth, and, ultimately, the future. We have come full circle to the critical dialectical function of potentiated double consciousness of race in film. It raises, through race, questions that transcend the immediacy of viewing. The visual aspects of the film—camera angles, color, sharpness, and so on—offer elements through which the many at times shocking images offer their own aesthetic qualities. They linger after viewing as well, which is the whole point of calling for repetition of aesthetic contact. Sorry to Bother You, thus, clearly offers much on which to reflect. Its long-term impact is now in the hands of history, but what is worth considering is how much it offers for reading and rereading, viewing and reviewing.

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And Yet to Come A concluding challenge in the study of race is that it is a human phenomenon. What this means is that it is a subject with possibility, which also means, despite the efforts of those who may wish for its erasure, it could take new forms as people see fit. This also means that the challenges and interpretive resources offered in this analysis are far from exhaustive, and the themes they may bring to the fore—such as transraciality and new kinds of races with unique social problematics—may affect not only the content of future cinema but also extend the already expanding genres further. What this would mean for cinema to come is in the making. How could it not be otherwise?

CHAPTER 30

How Do We Look So Far? Notes Toward a Queer-Film Philosophy David A. Gerstner

I In Elegy for Theory, D.N. Rodowick teases out the diaphanous yet paradoxically opaque relationship between theory and philosophy. Rodowick argues that “the concept of theory has a long pedigree in the history of philosophy, where theory is often in contest or competition with philosophy.”1 At the same time, theory and philosophy share a historical impulse toward meditation, contemplation. By the early nineteenth century, the intimate, commingled relation frayed when aesthetics and science (à la Hegel) arrived on the scene. The “boundaries [that mark theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and science],” Rodowick concludes, “are unstable, fluid, and often blurred and indiscernible or exchangeable” (xiv). In short, “it may be that our relation to theory always has been, and perhaps always will be, contingent and historical” (xiii). Similarly, Matthew Tinkcom reminds us, “Queer theory can thus be understood as asking questions that are historical and questions that are philosophical, and the two modes of question are interrelated and inform each other.”2 In his study that bridges theory and the film Brokeback Mountain (Lee 2006), Tinkcom’s remarks raise the provocative specter that haunts Rodowick’s concept of theory: Theory itself is nothing less than queer. In its very writing, queer

1 2

 D. N. Rodowick. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, xiii.  Matthew Tinkcom, Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 6.

D. A. Gerstner (*) The Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_30

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theory—and, by extension, queer-film theory—dramatizes the relation between theory and philosophy as supple, unsettling, troublesome, and “contingent.” As a mode of writing, queer (film) theory expresses the slippage between theory and philosophy, between the abstract and the material. Écriture cannot be overlooked for queer theorists. In a tradition stretching back to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic decadence (deconstruction avant la lettre), queer theorists delight in heightening theory, in making perverse consecrated theoretical discourses that assert absolutes. Queer theory tears at the seams of discourse where hetero-normative ideology naturalizes itself within the crevices of language. Queer theory plays a game of hide and seek with hetero-ideology; it unmasks its partnership with language that asserts itself as common-sense. Theory is therefore queer because it de-naturalizes language. Queer theory lays bare the (heterocentric) device. All along, queer theorists have embraced theory precisely because the language of theory is queer. It is performative. When theoretical language is referred to as “jargon,” queer theorists, like feminists, remind their critics that to use common-sense terminology or a popular vernacular is to participate in the very logocentric discourse that forbids queer écriture. And since, as Derrida reminds us, écriture extends itself beyond the limitation of the pen, (queer) film theorists write in relationship to a malleable art form—cinema.3 For queer-­ film theorists this is vital since it keeps in play queer theory, more generally, as a critically vibrant adventure. What, then, does queer-film theory propose? Is it enough for the queer-film theorist to state: “I will queer a film”? If so, what does such a “queer” activity involve? How does one know whether one has successfully “queered” a text? What film language—ciné-écriture—provocatively, yet “contingently,” theorizes the relation between “queer” and film? And if queer-film écriture is meant to keep things on the move, what are the risks for queer (film) theory becoming institutionalized in the halls of academia and, to be sure, popular culture? When, in her essay “New Queer Cinema,” B. Ruby Rich announces that “queer [was] hot” at international film festivals during the early 1990s, and it showcased “art for our sake,”4 did her newly minted categorization—“new queer cinema”—simultaneously signal its own death knell? What, on the one hand, are the implications when the enthusiasm for the “queer film phenomenon” successfully “[renegotiates] subjectivities, [annexes] whole genres, [and revises] histories in their image” (15)? On the other hand, what are the challenges when that enthusiasm is subsumed into deep pockets of consumer culture? Indeed, it would be foolish to claim that queer (film) theory bypasses culture-­industry ideology or to insist that it is immune to capitalist absorption. 3  See Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; 9). On Derridean theory and cinema, see Peter Brunette’s and David Willis’s Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989) and Tom Conley’s essay, “Site and Sound,” Modern Language Notes 121 (2006): 851–61. 4  B. Ruby Rich, “New Queer Cinema,” in New Queer Cinema: A Critical Reader, ed. Michele Aaron (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 15–22; 17 (emphasis added).

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The culture-industry breeds and reproduces itself through “radical” difference. It quickly and seductively packages cultural variations under the sign of the “new,” brilliantly marketing identity difference as if it was a new model of automobile. Insofar as the culture industry depends on reproducibility through difference, it is driven by hetero-normative ideology. This is to say, hetero-­ normative and culture-industry ideologies work hand in hand since their fusion profits by the wish to sustain a progressive future. The “new” requires negation. How might queer (film) theory resist such appropriation? “Queer theory’s opposition is precisely to any such logic of opposition,” Lee Edelman argues; “its proper task [is] the ceaseless disappropriation of every propriety.”5 To be on the move, therefore, does not necessarily mean progress. Queer-film theory’s movement is more akin to an unexpected pulsation or a disconcerting tremor. The Archive. Representation. Deconstruction. Feminism. Psychoanalysis. Identification. Identity. Modes of address. Camp. And so on. Arguably, and precisely because it is a multimedia art form, the cinema lends itself to wide-­ ranging methodological and theoretical investigations. In this way, cinema studies pairs well with queer theory’s core commitment to inter-disciplinarity. The cinema, however, provides something else for queer theory: movement. Because the heart of cinema’s conceptualization sits squarely in its relation to movement, the idea of the cinematic benefits queer theory’s “proper task [for] ceaseless disappropriation of every propriety.” With queer-film theory on the move, the aporia it invariably reaches is the fertile meeting ground where queer-film theory discovers its critical energy. If, as Tinkcom rightly claims, “the condensation of the categories of lesbian-gay-bisexual-trans-queer into the now institutionalized abbreviation ‘LGBTQ’ … might seem to dissolve the differences among those names,” then it is crucial to [derive] its energies at the theoretical impasse (“those very tensions,” to use Tinkcom’s phrasing).6 Indeed, the aporia appears as the layover site where queer identities and queer thought gather and then move on. Queer-film theory is thus a philosophical inquiry in which concepts unfold, disrupt, and regenerate because of uniquely erotic and political circumstances.

II From where does queer-film theory launch? What are its activating and, to be sure, active antecedents? It is commonplace to mark Teresa de Lauretis’s essay, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, An Introduction,” as the work that introduced the term “queer theory.” Her essay is also significant for its place in film and media studies. Published in the journal Differences (derived from the proceedings of a conference held in February 1990 at the University 5  Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 25. 6  Tinkcom, Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain, 11.

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of California, Santa Cruz), de Lauretis does not directly address film, which is nevertheless her academic métier. Instead, her essay focuses on the broader implications for academic queer theory. The essay asks how differing sexualities and gender identities might be theorized and “imaged”; it describes the work in the edited collection as “intended to articulate the terms in which lesbian and gay sexualities may be understood and imaged as forms of resistance to cultural homogenization, counteracting dominant discourses with other constructions of the subject in culture.”7 As a highly regarded scholar in film and feminist studies, and by emphasizing a conceptualization of sexuality through imaging, de Lauretis’s contribution to queer theory can thus be viewed as coterminous with her work in gender and cinema studies. Indeed, her participation in an earlier 1989 conference at Anthology Film Archives in New York resulted in the publication How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video.8 Focusing on the film, She Must Be Seeing Things (McLaughlin 1987), de Lauretis forcefully argues that to reimagine cinematic looks—via the camera, the filmmaker, and the spectator—is to, in fact, queer the gaze.9 In his review of How Do I Look?, Alex Doty notes that de Lauretis opens “a search for queer desire, representation, and spectatorship as distinct from lesbianism (or gayness) expressed from within, or in relation to, various straight paradigms.”10 For de Lauretis, theorizing queer sexualities and gender cannot be “understood,” therefore, without analyzing the way they are cinematically “imaged.” Although de Lauretis marks the entry of “queer theory” into academic parlance, identifying historical “firsts” is nevertheless a bit troublesome. She undoubtedly deserves recognition as the premier scholar who rigorously integrated and transformed feminist theory and queer theory into queer-film theory. But an overview of queer-film philosophy would be remiss if it did not mark earlier queer-film theorizing, in advance of what we now refer to as queer-­ film theory. Alfred Kléber (aka filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein) and cultural critic, Parker Tyler, both conceptualized their own queer sexual desire as 7  Teresa De Laurtetis, “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, An Introduction,” differences 3.2 (1991): iii–xviii, iii (emphasis added). 8  Bad Object-Choice Collective, ed. How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991). 9  “In Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis,” Kaja Silverman explains in The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), Lacan “insists emphatically upon the disjunction of camera and eye, but instead of deploying the camera as an independent optical apparatus, he uses it as a signifier of the gaze. The passage in which he introduces this metaphor locates the subject firmly within spectacle, and attributes to the camera/gaze a constitutive function with respect to him or her” (131). As it turns out, “the gaze would thus seem to be as old as sociality itself ” (132). 10  Alexander Doty, Review of How Do I Look? Film Quarterly 46.1 (1992): 36–37. It is worth noting, furthermore, that Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is not once cited in the 1991 issue of Differences that de Lauretis edited. Butler’s well-known book, published in the year the Santa Cruz conference took place, is oft recognized as the launch pad for queer theory more generally. Around matters of imaging queer sexualities, however, de Lauretis had already envisaged a paradigm shift for gay and lesbian studies in film and video.

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critical components to their film theories. And, like Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein redirected his homosexual impulses into his cinematic theories that invariably wended their way into his filmmaking and drawings.11 Germaine Dulac, Tami Williams points out, introduced queer sensibilities in her films through content and form, while Judith Mayne reveals the 1930s’ Hollywood director, Dorothy Arzner, through the lens of lesbian auteurism.12 Studies in camp are also a major precursor to queer-film theory. Hollywood films are high on the list for scholars of camp, since it is through these texts that camp icons reigned supreme (Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford). Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1986) and anthologies such as Campgrounds: Style and Homosexuality (David Bergman, ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) with its assortment of early essays devoted to camp theories from the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for concepts such as the “performative” that would soon appear in the pages of 1990s queer-film theory. Finally, it is important to note that “queer-film theory” follows in the wake of conceptual frameworks designed by queer-artists-of-color. Anticipating a later generation’s use of language to express queer desire as mobile and malleable, queers-of-color engaged the cinema-as-place and cinema-as-concept in their writing so as to design language that could blunt the presumptive whiteness that permeates the terms for sexuality. In the 1980s, for instance, Gloria Anzaldúa consistently turned to cinematic metaphors to channel her lived experience as a queer-feminist Chicana.13 Earlier, James Baldwin experimented 11  See, for instance, Jean Epstein’s Ganymède, essai sur l’éthique homosexuelle masculine (Écrits complets, Volume III, 1928–1938. Paris: Independencia Éditions, 2014). Christophe Wall-Romana’s introduction to this volume, as well as his essay, “Epstein’s Photogénie as Corporeal Vision: Inner Sensation, Queer Embodiment, and Ethics,” importantly links the filmmaker’s homosexuality with his filmmaking (in Sarah Keller and Jason N.  Paul’s Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012; 51–71). For his elaboration on cinematic “pansexuality”—a book originally published in 1972—see Parker Tyler’s Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993). Eisenstein’s film ¡Que Viva Mexico! is the most direct exploration of homosexual/homoerotic desire through his filmmaking, although Strike! and Battleship Potemkin also hold their own in this regard. Peter Greenaway’s film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato, drives the point home (on this, see Gerstner’s “In Excess of the Cut: Peter Greenaway’s Eisenstein in Guanajuato” (Los Angeles Review of Books April 15, 2016: https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/in-excess-of-the-cut-peter-greenaways-eisenstein-in-guanajuato/)). 12  Williams, for instance, highlights Dulac’s L’Invitation au voyage (1927): “heterosexual and homosexual longing, feminine passivity versus illicit desire, are set in opposition and rendered through metaphors of transport (taxi, ships, dance), orientalist exoticism (musicality, associative superimpositions), looking patterns (homosociality/homoeroticism, direct camera), authorial intertextuality, and rhythmic abstraction” (Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014; 149). On Arzner, see Judith Mayne’s Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 13  See Gloria Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987]. 3rd Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2007). For a discussion about and specific reference to Anzaladúa’s use of cinematic language in Borderlands, see my Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 219–20.

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with cinematic language to render multiracial characters who discovered a sexual awakening in cinematic places (movie theaters in particular).14 The professionalization of queer theory as an academic enterprise, particularly in North America and the United Kingdom, took hold throughout the 1990s. In short time, academic presses—particularly Duke University Press and the quasi-academic press, Routledge—poured queer volume after queer volume into university libraries, as well as independent and national bookstores. Edited collections were assembled that, in part or in whole, analyzed film through the vernacular of queer theory. Anthologies from the period that brought film and queer theory together include Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Diana Fuss, ed. New  York: Routledge, 1991); Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (Martha Gever, John Greyson, Pratibha Parmar, eds. New York: Routledge, 1993); and Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film (Ellis Hanson, ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). At the same time, numerous monographs authored by smart and eager queer theorists flooded the marketplace. Among the many monographs that supported the new discipline were key works that either reinvigorated or launched academic careers: Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film (Richard Dyer. London: Routledge, 1990); Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (Lee Edelman. New  York: Routledge, 1994); Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Juan Suárez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Patricia White. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).15 La fin du vingtième siècle proved to be a watershed moment for queer-film theory. A perspicacious group of thinkers reconceived academic disciplines and, in doing so, revised—sometimes controversially—the long-standing principles to which traditional disciplines had become inured. In this way, queer theory captured the imagination of young doctoral candidates, newly minted junior faculty, as well as seasoned full professors. In many ways, film studies was the most inviting discipline for the queer-academic shake-up. Why? From its beginnings as a scholarly pursuit and, as noted above, because the cinema crosses multimedia platforms, the discipline maintained an “open-door” policy to its conceptual approaches. For many this is a draw while, for others, it identifies cinema’s second-class status in academia. Moreover, cinema studies deal in an expressive art form that evaporates with its very presentation; nonetheless, it is an affective and materially realized art form. Because philosophy of queer theory reformulates theoretical language so as to express abstract, if not i­ nexpressible  See Gerstner, Queer Pollen, chapter two.  My shortlist is obviously not meant to be comprehensive. Since libraries have fruitfully put digital-age technology to excellent use by creating resource guides by subject area, and to provide a current link to research, I include one library’s offering for studies in queer theory: http:// fordham.libguides.com/c.php?g=354894&p=3004496 14 15

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as such, experiences around the materialization of queer sexual desire, queerfilm theory provocatively “images” the complexities of sexual desire. And though it is mired in hetero-normativity and culture-industry ideologies, the philosophy of cinema that shores up queer theory has nothing to do with procreation and everything to do with pleasure. Yet, the excitement generated around queer theory and queer-film theory occurred in direct relationship to political urgency: AIDS and a feminist movement at risk. The critique of “second-wave” feminists by “third-wave” feminists who emerged during the 1980s allowed for 1990s queer and feminist theorists to reconceive the historical and ideological terms for gender identity, sexual desire, and race. By fusing 1970s’ second-wave feminism (poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and sexual difference) with 1980s’ third-wave feminism (cultural studies, race theory, and gender identity), a fresh eye was turned toward the theoretical terms for gender, race, class, and sexual desire. To be sure, the theoretical and political tenets associated with feminism served as critical tools for queer theory and, as it turns out, intersected with AIDS activism. The stakes were—indeed, are—high. As the AIDS crisis unfolded during the 1980s, women’s rights were simultaneously under threat. Conservative Republicans in the United States and Tories in the UK ignored or did little to fight AIDS while anti-choice movements such as Operation Rescue in the United States blocked women’s clinics and raised the volume on their homophobic rhetoric. Again highlighting the critical link between historical materiality and the abstract conditions of ideology, feminists and queers took to direct action and theoretical concepts. On the streets and in the academy, scholars fended off bodies that blocked abortion clinics while their comrades scattered the ashes of loved ones on the front lawn of the White House. (As I write these pages, texts, and emails from the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reaffirm their commitment to Planned Parenthood as the Trump administration tears at a woman’s right to choose. Following years in which gay marriage drove gay and lesbian political interests—under the auspices of beltway organizations such as the HRC—the link between LGBTQ rights and women’s reproductive rights is finally, once again, brought into focus.) The implications for film and video theory were immediate during the 1980s and 1990s. Like feminists before them, queer-feminist activists wrestled with content and form. What were the aesthetic/political consequences for queer filmmaking? Although content was relatively easy to agree on (people were dying, laws were passed to stymie women’s rights), the matter over how to represent this content remained highly contentious.

III The central force that defines the philosophical currents that give rise to queer-­ film theory is without question the political and cultural stakes raised around AIDS activism. By the time ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was founded in March 1987, AIDS had taken its toll on gay men in the United States. The first cases were reported in 1981. By the end of 1984, 7699 AIDS

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cases and 3655 AIDS deaths were reported in the United States. By the end of 1987, as AIDS activism moved into full gear, the World Health Organization reported 71,751 AIDS cases in 85 countries with an estimated 5–10 million people living with HIV.16 The impact on the gay community—across racial and class boundaries—precipitated a cinematic response that was as emotionally charged as it was politically driven. Collective queer mourning generated wide-­ ranging creative-media responses that were meant to shatter what had become the activist’s mantra against government inaction: Silence = Death. In a collection of essays, entitled AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, the authors considered the ways media representations of AIDS (video, the press, photography, etc.) were entangled in hetero-inflected discourse. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp and published by MIT Press in 1987, opened the discussion on what counted as queer images.17 What use of media at once expressed political acumen, collective, and personal grieving, while signaling a break from hyper-mediated hetero-ideology? How was one to decipher “good” from “bad” queer images? Engaged this way, representations of the disease were revealed as spectacles shaped by homophobic ideology in which—among other things—AIDS was stigmatized as the “gay disease.” This did not mean, however, that a consensus was formed around “queer” representation. Nevertheless, what was agreed on was that homophobia unconsciously and consciously permeated media institutions. Hence, because gay men practiced anal sex, AIDS was posited through a malicious cause-and-effect scenario: homosexual sex = transmission of AIDS.  For all the political and scientific pushback that argued that HIV also spread through heterosexual sex and intravenous drug use, the homophobic narrative quickly cemented itself in the public’s imaginary. Leo Bersani’s radical essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” (included in Crimp’s anthology), forcefully ripped open the psychical dimensions behind hetero-masculine homophobia that framed the discussion around AIDS, HIV prevention, and government funding.18 Crimp’s important anthology went some way to greatly altering the terms for queer representation and aesthetic form. In an essay published soon after AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy” was another significant intervention.19 I quote this passage in full since it resonates with the cultural drives that gave shape to the creative energies surrounding AIDS activism, energies that politicized and aestheticized loss: Seldom has a society so savaged a people during their hour of loss. “We look upon any interference with [mourning] as inadvisable or harmful,” warns Freud. But for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our  https://www.avert.org/professionals/history-hiv-aids/overview (accessed June 24, 2017).  Originally published as an issue of October (AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. 43 (Winter 1987)), the volume was republished with the same title through MIT Press. 18  Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” In October 43 (1988): 197–222. 19  Douglas Crimp, “Mourning and Militancy,” October 51 (winter 1989): 3–18. 16 17

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bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times. The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder. Because this violence desecrates the memories of our dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning becomes militancy (8–9, emphasis in original).

And yet, the question remained: What does mourning as militancy look like in the work of art? How does one represent loss and anger through the filter of politicized identity? Filmmakers and video-makers took the creative and intellectual challenge to the heart of their political activism. The activists’ cinematic and theoretical responses made for vigorous debate and a magnificent array of film and video. Indeed, the theoretical inquiry into what amounted as a proper political aesthetic for queer film became an international debate among queers. If agreement existed that cinematic representations of queers and HIV/AIDS were problematic in film (to say the least), arguments over cinematic form proved even more intense and acrimonious. While some film and video-makers turned to avant-garde traditions to shape queer images (Brecht, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and Barbara Hammer were exemplary), others relied on the generic and narrative norms associated with classical Hollywood. For instance, Jean Carlomusto, Ellen Spiro, Alexandra Juhasz, Rosa von Praunheim, David Wojnarowicz, Gregg Bordowitz, Barbara Hammer, and the collective Damned Interfering Video Activists (DIVA-TV) took their political and aesthetic cues from feminist-film theory, generic codes of documentary, and experimental filmmaking. Queer filmmakers such as John Greyson merged Hollywood (including tropes from the musical) with experimental form in such films as Zero Patience (1993). Queer theorists also took strong positions on the matter, especially where the “AIDS film” was concerned. Writing with hindsight in 2006, Chris Bell’s and Robin Griffith’s entries in Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture demonstrate the theoretical tensions that were, and remain, active for what defines “queer cinema.”20 “To be sure,” Bell writes, “there is often a vast difference between ‘mainstream’ films and ‘independent’ films about AIDS— the former frequently obfuscate issues of race, class and gender (see It’s My Party [Kleiser 1996] and Long-time Companion [René 1989]), while the latter often foreground these very issues (Tongues Untied [Riggs 1989])” (29). In whatever form the films take, Bell argues, “the American AIDS film has worked as a tool for AIDS prevention as well as for compassion, encouraging the audience to act decisively in terms of support for the everyday necessities of people with the disease, as well as working towards stemming the tide of new HIV infections” (29). He concludes, “In either case—as a form of mainstream, 20  Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture. David A.  Gerstner, ed. (London: Routledge, 2006). “Thematic List of Entries” provides a comprehensive list of film-and-videorelated topics that are useful signposts for the discussion here (see pp. xxiv–xxvi).

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­ arrative entertainment or a call to action—the AIDS film has proven an n important cultural response to the disease” (29). Robin Griffiths’s entry in the encyclopedia represents what he sees as a more nefarious ideological concern with, especially, American queer cinema. As such, he holds out hope for international filmmakers against the tide of global capitalism and its absorption of queer cinema: “Like the United States during the 1990s, queer filmmaking across the globe has evolved, albeit in multifarious ways, in response to both the AIDS crisis and the oppressive transcultural social representational regimes of a restrictively policed, mainstream, right-wing hetero-­normativity. But rather than become absorbed into the cinematic cultural Zeitgeist of pre-millennial late capitalism, as did the likes of Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant, et al., international queer cinema has maintained its commitment to explore national and cultural specificity in its negotiations of queerness that resist both the universalist narrative of gay liberation/cultural assimilation and the commodification of a transnational queer culture, aesthetics, and politics” (426). The jury remains out over what constitutes “accurate” queer images and, indeed, cinematic sounds. Yet, perhaps, the jury remaining out is precisely that which “energizes” the aporia where queer-film theory negotiates hetero-­ ideology and where it works to understand the images called “queer.” The editors of Critical Visions in Film Theory make the case this way: “though film viewers are positioned by the gendered language and dynamics of desire deployed by the movies, they are also able to fantasize other possibilities.”21

IV “Fantasy is the mise-en-scène of desire.”22 LaPlanche and Pontalis’s well-­ rehearsed axiom delivered the terms for feminist-film theory in such a way as to open perverse, pleasurable, and problematic possibilities for analyzing narrative cinema. Because Hollywood is wrapped in ideological paradox, feminist-film scholars such as Elizabeth Cowie and Kaja Silverman resisted any oversimplified theoretical dismissal of the industry’s firm commitment to narrative-driven cinemas. Instead, they placed their sights on Lacanian theory precisely for the paradoxes it unveils.23 Not subscribing to a celebration of, nor a refusal to reckon with, the “culture industry,” feminist-film scholars set out to grasp the ideological and psychoanalytical tensions that bear on the representation of women as well as their role as spectator. 21  Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, with Meta Mazaj, eds. (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 708. 22  Jean Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (London: Karnac and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1988), 318. 23  See Elizabeth Cowie’s Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Silverman’s contributions are many in this area. For now, see The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

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By refusing hasty judgments on the spectacle—an event that purportedly confined women to the deleterious effects associated with the cinematic apparatus—the likes of Cowie and Silverman (and, as noted, de Lauretis) prepared the way for feminist-queer-film theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman.24 Edelman’s deconstructive legerdemain, in Homographesis and No Future (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), uniquely reimagines the queer dynamic at work in classical Hollywood cinema. His sensual and playful penetration and his tearing into the queer seams at the outer reaches of Laura (Preminger 1944) and North by Northwest (Hitchcock 1959), perversely delight in the phantasmatic where the “mise-en-scène of [queer] desire” unfolds. In Edelman’s hands, Derridean and Lacanian écriture is choreographed in a magisterial pas de deux. He is, therefore, less concerned with “queer” representation than with the ways a text fails to abide the ideology of reproducibility. Edelman’s theoretical snake-dance charms the reader by drawing out a film’s queer, disturbing textual spell. Camp also makes its return through queer-cinematic fantasy as unpacked through feminist psychoanalysis. By 2000, Brett Farmer reminded us that, first, a “gay camp reading emphasizes how the excessive female star-image recodes the star performance as a performance, a masquerade that does not correspond to the subjectivity on which it is played.”25 In conjuring camp’s historical imprint and fusing it with the language of feminist semiotic and psychoanalytic theory (“masquerade,” “subjectivity”), Farmer complicates gay-male subjectivity. “In relation to issues of gender and sexual categorization,” he concludes, “the effects of this gay camp reading of the star performance as artifactual [sic] masquerade denaturalize and destabilize hegemonic visions of gender as anatomically fixed and instead instate a polysemic scenario of gender ambivalence and queer transgressions” (150). Second, echoing the remarks cited above by the editors of Critical Visions in Film Theory, Farmer emphasizes that camp readings “allow gay spectators not only to project and affirm their own psychocultural ‘experiences’ of sexual ambivalence and gender dissonance but also to articulate their own fantasmatic productions of regendered desire” (150). In effect, through the filters of camp and feminist psychoanalysis, Farmer critiques the idea that the masculine cinematic spectator is far from always heterocentric.26 The relationship between classic camp and queer theory, therefore, puts into relief the very paradoxical elements queer theorists highlight when studying 24  Along with Edelman’s works cited above, see Lauren Berlant’s Desire/Love (Brooklyn: Puntum Books, 2012). “For de Lauretis,” Berlant rightly tells us, “the fetishistic ‘perversion’ of lesbian desire is productive, not destructive, of love” (41). 25  Brett Farmer, Spectacular Passions: Cinema, Fantasy, Gay Male Spectatorships (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 150. 26  This is, of course, a critique of Laura Mulvey’s cornerstone essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which the cinematic apparatus and its attendant spectator are always already male. Steven Neale and others questioned the concept that all men’s desire could be simplified as the same (i.e., heterosexual). See Steven Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Screen 24.6 (1983): 2–17.

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Hollywood cinema. The “entertainment” industry is rendered queer precisely because it functions as ideological containment while, and precisely for this reason, it generates pleasure.27 Interconnected as such, camp/queer theory during the 1990s redirected its critical light onto the perverse aesthetic and narrative turns that John Waters, Bruce La Bruce, and Cheryl Dunye bring to Hollywood’s generic formulas. What is distinctive, with these three filmmakers, is that they raise the textual surface on unrevealed sexual, gendered, and racial desires that queer spectators often translate when “reading” Hollywood cinema. Recent re-readings of The Boys in the Band (Friedkin 1970) through queer critical discourse and filmmaking confirm the point.28 Whether described as “to camp” or “to queer,” new textual and historical encounters occur. “The work,” the “author-creator,” and the spectator frolic with one another in Rabelaisian delight yielding unanticipated readings of the text.29 Matthew Tinkcom’s Working Like a Homosexual astutely draws attention to this productively pleasurable force derived from Hollywood cinema. Through a Marxist reading, Tinkcom “explore[s] camp as a philosophy in its own right, one that offers explanations of how the relation between labor and the commodity is lived in the day-to-day by dissident sexual subjects who arrive at their own strategies for critique and pleasure.”30 Writing post-millennium, Farmer’s and Tinkcom’s books thus ushered in twenty-first-century queer-film theory through fresh readings of feminist Marxism and Freudianism. Queer-film theorists thereby make queer their fellow feminists’ work. To paraphrase remarks made by Thomas Elsaesser and Élisabeth Roudinesco (albeit in other, but nonetheless related, contexts): Queer theorists bring plague to the Hollywood home by inviting Marx and Freud to the table.31

27  Viewed this way, Foucault’s import for queer theorists becomes strikingly clear. The relationships between power and knowledge and discipline and punish, are the crucial tensions where the subject discovers pleasure. Foucault’s homosexuality, lived-world experimentation with sex, and death by AIDS made him, as David M. Halperin puts it, “Saint Foucault.” Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 28  See, The Boys in the Band: Flashpoints of Cinema, History, and Queer Politics, ed. Matt Bell (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016). Bell’s introduction to the collection is an invaluable overview of the decade-long transformation of the critical discourse around the play and the film. 29  The textual ronde described here derives from Bakhtin’s concept of “author creator”: The work of art, he writes, is a “single but complex event that we might call the work in the totality of all its events [including] the giveness of the work, and its text, and the world represented in the text, and the author-creator, and the listener or reader.” “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, eds. Carly Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 255. 30  Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) 4; emphasis in original. 31  I play on, first, Thomas Elsaesser’s subheading “Where Freud Left His Marx in the American Home” from his seminal essay “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama” (in, among other places, Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 68–91); and, second, Élisabeth Roudinesco’s opening statement for the preface of Jacques Lacan: “Jacques Lacan sought to bring plague, sub-

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Indeed, it is seductive (and not incorrect) to surmise that feminists and queers embrace continental philosophy, particularly as it is filtered through French postwar theory. Sudhir Hazareesingh suggests that the trademark for French thinking involves a love for “conceptual juggling acts [that] have produced delicious oxymorons and nourished yet another cherished feature of Gallic thinking: the love of paradox.”32 Intertwining the critical discourses of camp and “grand theory” (often derogatorily dismissed as “pretentious”) is certainly a “delicious … juggling act.”33 But there is something more. Queer-­film theorists understand writing as a performative. It is an act deeply entwined with the bodies in which they live. Whether through Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, or Derrida—to name only four highly recognized names—queer theorists toggle between the corporeal and psychical dimensions of pleasure and pain. They rigorously play in the unsettling crosshairs where Eros and Thanatos convene. And because the cinematic apparatus prompts sensual and decadent pleasure precisely through its phenomenon as apparatus, the cinema is a “desiring machine.”34 The cinematic apparatus thus enables a site for desire or, specifically, it enables a site where desire may be imaged as the death drive. Queer theory is a theory of jouissance.

V In 1995, while at the “Lesbian and Gay History” conference at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York, Susan Stryker recognized a glaring omission about the panelists: From my perspective, with a recently claimed transsexual identity, [the conference’s “intellectual stars”] all looked pretty much the same: like nontransgender people. A new wave of transgender scholarship, part of a broader queer intellectual movement was, by that point in time, already a few years old. Why were there no transgender speakers on the panel? Why was the entire discussion of “gender diversity” subsumed within a discussion of sexual desire—as if the only reason to express gender was to signal the mode of one’s attractions and availabilities to potential sex partners?35 version, and disorder to the moderate Freudianism of his time.” Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xv. 32  Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 9. 33  While Hazareesingh reminds us time and again that paradox represents French thought tout court, he hastily dismisses Derrida’s writing as a “dead-end alley.” This is especially unfortunate just as queer theory and cultural studies make headway in French academic settings. Many non-queer writers miss the queer significance of Derridean écriture (as well as other interventions made by notables such as Lacan, Althusser, and so on). We are, as the black queer James Baldwin consistently confirmed, “in trouble with language again.” 34  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983), 34. 35  Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1.

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Confronted by, at best, dismissal and, at worst, outright disgust by gay liberationists in the audience who hailed from the Stonewall era, Stryker listened to a diatribe from an activist who railed against “transsexuals” who believed they belonged to the “new queer politics.” And because, the activist continued, “transsexuals … were profoundly psychopathological individuals who mutilated their bodies and believed in oppressive gender stereotypes and held reactionary political views …” they were intent on “destroying” the gay and lesbian movement. For Stryker, this was an “iconic moment in [her] public life.” She firmly responded that she “was not sick” and need not listen to such reactionary and oversimplified politicized noise. Stryker, however, was invigorated by the moment because she publicly presented a “new interpretation of gender diversity” (2) to a queer audience. Ten years later (2005), and in the same auditorium at a conference entitled “Trans Politics, Social Change, and Justice,” Stryker heard again—from the same liberationist no less—that “a new transgender hegemony” now pushed a “revisionist history of sexual liberation” that was “marginalizing and erasing experiences” of a generation who long struggled for gay and lesbian rights. What stood out for Stryker at this point was what a strong force transgender studies had become in academia and in the political arena. Armed with ten years of trans-scholarship, Stryker realized that trans-studies not only developed a vast amount of critical and creative work, it also confirmed for her that “transgender” pushed all the right political buttons. Hence, along with Stephen Whittle, Stryker published the first volume of The Transgender Studies Reader. Things continued to move quickly. In 2013, Stryker, with Aren Z. Aizura, edited and published a second collection, The Transgender Studies Reader, 2.36 The speed at which trans-scholarship and activism moved forward was certainly “cause for optimism.” At the same time, a “measure of caution” was necessary (6). Likening trans-studies to the commodification of queer theory, Stryker and Aizura recall Teresa de Lauretis’s 1994 disavowal of the very academic theory she named. The field, according to de Lauretis, was “a conceptually vacuous creature of the publishing industry.”37 As the editors viewed it, queer theory “survived [de Lauretis’s] disavowal.” Indeed, marking the end of queer-­ theory history—as de Lauretis ostensibly does—is not much different than gay liberationists refusing entry for transgender culture and politics in the LGBTQ movement. In both cases, doors are effectively closed by those who assume a privileged position in discourse. For Stryker and Aizura, however, queer theory remains a “source of much of the important thinking on non-normative sexuality and deviant modes of life; it has been transformed by two generations of scholars who both creatively pervert it and contribute to its continuity as a framework for understanding the world.” “Transgender studies,” the authors  Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, “Introduction: Transgender Studies 2.0” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 6. 37  Quoted in Stryker and Aizura, 6. 36

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offer, “should therefore actively participate in the proliferation and articulation of new modes of embodied subjectivity, new cultural practices … rather than becoming an enclosure for their containment” (7). The two Transgender Studies Readers are, therefore, invaluable and comprehensive collections that open queer theory toward unforeseen, yet necessary, philosophical tensions. Film, however, does not find a significant place in these readers and, to date, trans-film theory is still only discovering language to explore the critical dimensions that give rise to trans-cinematic content and form. In offering some preliminary thoughts on trans-cinema, Helen Hok-Sze Leung in TSQ poses the primary question: “What counts as a trans film?”38 Readers by Stryker et al. present a handful of trans-readings of films. Judith Halberstam (aka J. Jack Halberstam in volume two) focuses on matters of trans-representation, plot, and narrative structure (i.e., “good”/“bad” representation).39 Eliza Steinbock delivers the most rigorous and promising conceptualization for trans/queer-film theory in her essay “Groping Theory: Haptic Cinema and Trans-Curiosity in Hans Scheirl’s Dandy Dust [1998].” Here, Steinbock draws upon a diverse palette of classic and feminist-film theory in order to introduce a trans-film theory that bridges psychoanalysis and phenomenology. As such, she “[explicates] Dandy Dust in relation to Freudian notions of curiosity about sex difference [while underscoring] the difference between a haptic (and anal) curiosity and Freud’s own optical (and penile) approach.”40 Through psychoanalytic discourse Steinbock writes that she is curious about Freud’s case study, “Little Hans.” In her recounting of Freud’s analysis, the little boy’s desire for pleasure overrides his mother’s admonishment when she discovers the boy playing with his penis. When caught touching himself, his mother scolds him and tells him that she will call for a doctor to “cut off [his] widdler.” And then what will he “widdle with?” she demands to know. Hans, ignoring his mother’s threats, tells her that his “bottom” will nicely suffice. For Steinbock, Hans cares less about what body part he fondles; he is more than happy to identify 38  In the premier issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1. 1–2 (2014): 86–89, Helen HokSze Leung contributes a handy overview in the “Keywords” section that covers film. Smartly presented by subsections—for example, “Critically Trans,” “Trans Auteurs”—Leung takes as her point of departure the “deceptively simple question”: “What counts as a Trans Film?” Her outline in TSQ reminds us that the response is, indeed, not so simple.  More recently, Cael M.  Keegan expands on a cinematic  concept, “*trans,” to explore Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s filmmaking (Lana and Lily Wachowski. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).  39  In her writing on film, Halberstam does turn to the work of feminist-film theory, specifically psychoanalysis in relation to suture. Because the terms “gaze” and “look” are often conflated in the writing, it is difficult to know where the corporeality of the look is distinct from the ideological implications of the gaze. Nonetheless, suture theory opens promising avenues for questioning the way cinematic form and representation entangle (if not disentangle) the relation between gendered body and ideology. See, along with the articles in Stryker et al., chapter four (“The Transgender Look”) in In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); “Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs,” Camera Obscura 3.27 (September 1991): 36–53. 40  Eliza Steinbock, “Groping Theory: Haptic Cinema and Trans-Curiosity in Hans Scheirl’s Dandy Dust,” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2, 101–118.

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other sources of pleasure. In this way, he “pleasurably ‘gropes’ towards knowledge through the kinesthetic exploration of his own embodiment” (103). The child’s ambivalence toward genitalia and their hierarchical place in an erotic economy is precisely the point where Steinbock homes in on perverse trans-cinematic aesthetics that conjoins spectatorial perception. Following film scholars Laura Marks, Vivian Sobchack, and Ann Rutherford, “groping theory” demonstrates the way two senses—sight and touch—facilitate a trans-­ cinematic experience. In “groping” for sensual knowledge, film “can orient spectators toward a haptic visuality” (103). In doing so, it re-orients the viewer yielding unanticipated sensations. Rather than insist, as Freud does, that Hans’s dismissal of the usual-genitalia suspects is “faulty perception,” trans-cinema theory raises the stakes precisely on corporeal curiosity. As such, “the corporeally-­involved spectator is poised to exploit the bodily pleasures of being touched by the folds of filmic space” (103). In Dandy Dust, we are touched by the “transgendered arsehole” (105), the unimaginable site for queer pleasure. To be “poised” and, thus, affectively “touched by the folds of filmic space” involves a particular turn on cinematic aesthetics. The film’s director, Hans Scheirl, in other words, critically rehearses cinematic properties to explore opportunities that re-conceptualize queer eroticism. Dandy Dust’s experimental form moves the spectator to and fro, “groping” for knowledge in their state of curiosity. The film’s director “implores the viewer to open up the film, to try to assert meaning and infer connections” (112). The dazzling cinematic imagery that augurs a radical trans-cinema in Dandy Dust “manifests a body that cannot be said to be composed with any sense of finality, but always remains in a state of composing” (115). These, as Steinbock sees it, are the terms for “transgender politics” and, therefore, for trans-cinema.41 But is this the final word on trans-cinema? Is Dandy Dust the film that “counts” as a trans-film? I am little concerned that Steinbock wishes to create a trans-cinema pantheon and breezily set aside “mainstream” films such as The Crying Game (Jordan 1992), Boys Don’t Cry (Peirce 1999), or Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Mitchell 2001). More remains to be said. Kate Bornstein, for instance, turns the tables on representations that have accrued in trans-cinema. She wonders what to make of the non-trans character’s “revulsion” toward trans-bodies. In her critique of The Crying Game, Bornstein finds herself drawn to (curious about) the revulsion-as-desire we witness in these films. When the “straight” character, Fergus (Stephen Rea), encounters genitalia in the charac41  The film, Community Action Center (Burns and Steiner 2010), is noteworthy in this context. Called a “sociosexual video,” we partake in sexual romps where multiple variations of bodies and sexual pleasure take place. The Video Data Bank website joyfully describes the project: “This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes, and the body politic of a particular time and place. Community Action Center is a unique contemporary womyn-centric composition that serves as both an ode and a hole-filler” (http://www.vdb.org/titles/community-action-center; accessed July 3, 2017).

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ter of Dil (Jaye Davidson) that does not meet his expectations for gender identity and, thus, his sexual fantasy, Fergus’s “vomiting,” Bornstein reasons, “can be seen not so much as a sign of revulsion as an admission of attraction, and the consequential upheaval of this gender identity and sexual orientation … the poor man’s cognitive system had really been shaken up!”42 Beyond questions of representation, and as the terms for cinema transform (as they have always done), new language is required to rethink queer cinema. Changes in television viewing and programming coincide with how we might reconceive the cinematic in relationship to trans-culture. While, on the one hand, the genre of the “television series” makes room for trans-representation in films such as Transparent and RuPaul’s Drag Race, on the other hand, “television”-as-concept raises the theoretical ante on how we might rethink a trans-cinematic. To be sure, “television” foregrounds complex theoretical propositions that, while taken up by new-media philosophers more generally, have not yet been explored by trans-theorists. “Television,” Samuel Weber notes, “does not merely allow the viewer to ‘see at a distance’ things that otherwise would be invisible. It transports vision as such and sets it immediately before the viewer. It entails not merely a heightening of the naturally limited powers of sight with respect to certain distant objects; it involves a transmission or transposition of vision itself.”43 Trans-television theory is tantalizing for the ways one reimagines LGBTQ as a trans-mediated experience/event, a concept of identity on the move and “transposition.” A final word on trans-cinema must be made about documentary filmmaking. This genre is as critical for transgender people and filmmakers as for many social movements, especially for the LGBTQ movement. From Word is Out (Adair 1977) with its wide-ranging “coming-out” interviews with 26 gay men and lesbians to United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Hubbard and Schulman 2012) with its wealth of archival footage and interviews, the genre’s historical relationship to political engagement across civil rights’ movements has remained invaluable. The theoretical investigation into changing political and cultural landscapes now continues for the trans-movement. Tara Mateik’s Toilet Training: Law and Order in the Bathroom (2004), for instance, merges experimental (certainly, playful) cinematic and televisual form with political and legal information regarding public restroom use and the limitations placed on transgender people. In short, these variations in cinematic aesthetics reveal the necessary tensions that Matthew Tinkcom encourages us to tackle when studying queer film. Queer-film theory owes much to trans-studies insofar as its puts into perspective the thrills and the perils that any avant-garde movement confronts. To what extent can queer film and queer-film theory be said to be avant-garde? 42  Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1994), 73. 43  Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996): 108–28, 115–16 (emphasis in original).

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What queer critiques are available to filmmakers and film theorists to think conceptually and to think radically? To bring this chapter to a close, I’d like to consider a queer-cinematic spectacle that invites both avant-garde and classical cinema as a way to reroute possibilities for queer-film theory.

VI Is queer film the neo-avant-garde? What theoretical concepts help to sift through the complexities that define avant-garde—let alone, a queer avant-­ garde? If, as we have seen, “queer film” quickly finds its way into consumer culture, what claims to radicalness can “queer” maintain? Following the publication of his book, Theory of the Avant-Garde, in 1976 (translated in 1984), critics took Peter Bürger to task for, among other things, his concept of “false sublation” in which Hegelian sublation is understood as the aesthetic tension between preservation and transformation. Bürger contended that the Hegelian paradox lent itself to the historical avant-garde, insofar as the movement’s mission to dismantle bourgeois institutions of art, while revolutionizing praxes of everyday life, ultimately failed. Because the avant-­ garde’s radical gestures reified the artist as a unique individual, and hence subsequently commodified “the artist,” the avant-garde’s critique failed. In effect, Bürger finds that the avant-garde’s critique of the institution failed on two counts. First, the “category of individual production” was unable to negate “individual reception” (i.e., bourgeois autonomous, or contemplative, art). In this way, Duchamp’s signature on the work of art served as “a kind of provocation that cannot be repeated indefinitely” (whether as R. Mutt on Fountain (1917), as Rrose Sélavy on the film Anémic Cinéma (1926), or as the unmarked “Marcel Duchamp” delivered by the artist as a gift for his patron, Katherine S.  Dreier (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass, 1915–1923)). Once a provocation, the Duchampian gesture “no longer provokes; it turns into its opposite.” The artist’s signature does not “eradicate the idea of individual creativity, it affirms it, and the reason is the failure of the avant-gardist intent to sublate art.”44 To be sure, spectators regularly line up for tickets to visit the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection of Duchamp’s artwork at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Nevertheless, according to Bürger, Duchamp, the Dadaists, and the Surrealists failed to revolutionize the relation between art and life, and “only in Brecht do we find elements of an aesthetic theory of engaged literature” and creative practice (91). Bürger cautions, however, that Brecht’s avant-gardist practices emerged only after the critical “attack of the historical avant-garde movements” had been made (90). He further cautions, “one will have to take care not to adopt Brecht’s and [Walter] Benjamin’s solutions … and to transfer them ahistorically to the present” (90). 44  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 52–53.

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For many artists and critics who were raised on (often-reductive) theories of “postmodernism,” Bürger’s critical theory augured the end for any conception of a “neo-avant-garde.” In responding to his critics’ “attacks” and, thereby, resisting foreclosure on a possible history for a “neo-avant-garde,” Bürger offers the following: We have to accept that avant-garde texts have become literature [institutionalized], but we should also not lose sight of their originally intended effect, that is, to draw out the claim to authenticity in the seemingly most unserious products. A nonpositivistic treatment of the products of the avant-garde would have to keep both perspectives in mind without playing them off against each other. The difficulty of fulfilling this demand underscores how far removed the avant-garde’s impulse to transform real social relationships is from us today. This does not exclude, but rather includes, the possibility that the avant-garde could gain a renewed relevance in a future that we cannot imagine.45

Although this response is published in 2010, it is noteworthy that Bürger does not consider the politicized, often campy, international art movements spawned by ACT UP. If a neo-avant-garde is to be defined for its sublation of the encounter between art and life, AIDS artists (from DIVA-TV to Gran Fury) indeed enacted provocative art-life praxis (recognizing their project as “a kind of provocation that cannot be repeated indefinitely”). AIDS activist art, Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston asserted at the height of the movement, “[functions] as an organizing tool, by conveying, in compressed form, information and political positions to others affected by the epidemic, to onlookers at demonstrations, and to the dominant media.”46 The success of AIDS art made the movement highly visible but, Crimp and Rolston ask, “visibility to whom?” For AIDS activist artists, rethinking the identity and role of the artist also entails new considerations of audience. Postmodernist art advanced a political critique of art institutions—and art itself as an institution—for the ways they constructed social relations through specific modes of address, representations of history, and obfuscations of power. The limits of this aesthetic critique, however, have been apparent in its own institutionalization: critical postmodernism has become a sanctioned, if still highly contested, art world product, the subject of standard exhibitions, catalogues, and reviews. The implicit promise of breaking out of the museum and marketplace to take on new issues and find new audiences has gone largely unfulfilled. AIDS activist art is one exception, and the difference is fairly easy to locate (19).

Seen through this filter, Bürger hints at something unexpectedly queer: “we should also not lose sight of their originally intended effect, that is, to draw out the claim to authenticity in the seemingly most unserious products.” Bürger’s 45  Peter Bürger, “Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde: An Attempt to Answer Certain Critics of Theory of the Avant-Garde,” New Literary Criticism 41 (2010): 695–715, 705 (emphasis added). 46  Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston. AIDS Demographics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), 20.

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remarks give pause because they evoke the specter of camp, something I could hardly equate with his “theory of the avant-garde”. His glimmer of hope for a neo-avant-garde, then, gives purchase to a “renewed relevance in a future that we cannot imagine.” To be sure, a queer avant-garde has imagined such a future precisely through an integration of art and life. From Wildean aestheticism to Warholian POP art, the materiality of the body folds inextricably into and out of aesthetic practice. Here, just when radical aesthetics appears to stall, the aporia crackles with divergent and kinetic energies. As such, queer avant-­ garde practices surmount the aestheticized distance Bürger posits between Duchamp and Brecht. Arguably, Andy Warhol embodies and thus commingles Duchampian and Brechtian aesthetics, specifically through his queer cinematics. It is well known, for instance, that Warhol conceived the Factory as a cinematic site. The Factory housed the “Superstars,” about whom Warhol enthused: The Superstars “became part of my movies, and of course the movies became part of their lives; they’d get so into them that pretty soon you couldn’t really separate the two, you couldn’t tell the difference—and sometimes neither could they.”47 If the culture-industry cinema dissolves the political dimension for the “real,” Warhol’s queer-film practices brought into relief the imbrication—the frisson—that is life and art itself. Herein lies the performative reimagining of the cinematic as queer praxis. Indeed, a history of queer art and artists involves the contradictory acts to at once preserve and transform—sublation. Variations on camp and feminist-­ queer theories have driven this particular critical and political turn from the end of the nineteenth century to our current time. To highlight queer sublation through a concept of the cinematic I turn to Tara Mateik’s cinematic performance There’s No Place … (2011–).48 There’s No Place … is a long-term and ongoing project for the trans-artist. It re-conceptualizes L. Frank Baum’s own long-term book-series project that unfolded over 18 years (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900–1918)). In this way, and like Baum’s series, Mateik’s There’s No Place … takes on a sustained theme where he engages queer and trans-theory as artistic practice in which works of art, artist, and spectator are active forces in making queer canonical texts. With the project’s launch in 2008, There’s No Place … committed itself to transforming and making perverse the well-worn theme of “home.” Immersed in “no place” that nonetheless inscribes itself as the ideological centerpiece for every place (“home”), Mateik’s performance takes “home” on the road and presents it in a range of venues (galleries, theaters, etc.). In doing so, the mobile event-space recreates place for politically troubled/troubling bodies—African Americans, Latinos/Latinas, drag queens, and more. There’s No Place … is the search for an ever-elusive but desired place called “home.”  Pat Hackett, ed. The Andy Warhol Diaries (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 180.  Launched in 2011, There’s No Place … involves a trilogy of multimedia performances and installation projects: Army of Revolt, Friends of Dorothy (Judy Garland Screen Test), and Friends of Dorothy (Diana Ross Screen Test). 47 48

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To keep the privileged site called “home” on the move, Mateik stitches together the cinematic adaptations of the Baum books (The Wizard of Oz (Fleming 1939) and The Wiz (Lumet 1978)) along with multiple drag performances that continually revive life on the yellow brick road. Like Baum, Mateik extends and reworks the theme of “home” or the endless reimagining of an ideal place. Integrating Baum’s “Wizard of Oz” series with the iconic camp films that followed on the books’ heels, Mateik’s queer lens rewraps the diverse media of literature and film through new-media technology, queer politics, and queer-film theory. As the space between stage and audience collapses during the show, the spectators for There’s No Place … participate directly. Along with the tech crew (camera people, sound, and lighting technicians) and the actors, audience members join the scene. Each performance of There’s No Place … is, therefore, never quite the same. While the performances conjure the fixed historical works (an MGM musical and canonical literature), they simultaneously put them under erasure, in the Derridean sense of sous rature.49 In effect, the works are turned into texts. The works are, in other words, queered. By pressing multimedia technology into service for There’s No Place …, a multi-mediated queer body is envisioned. Mateik’s aesthetic form, coupled with his own performance in the work, is thus critical. For example, Mateik’s aesthetic concept involves drag queens lip-syncing so as to re-perform an “original” recording of, say, Judy Garland speaking or singing. Not insignificantly, Mateik himself steps into the performance. He lip-syncs to audio recordings of Director, Sidney Lumet, on the set of The Wiz as he instructs Diana Ross how to deliver the best possible Dorothy. In this way, Mateik throws the highly recognized and recorded voices onto the queer figures—including himself—who populate his films and performances. In a queer theoretical context, lip-syncing carries historical significance (consider the renowned performance artist, Lypsinka, who trots out the recorded remains of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford). Lip-syncing is historically noteworthy in queer culture and a critical attribute for camp performances. When, for example, a white gay boy hits the dance floor to dance and gesture in homage to a black performer (such as Donna Summer, Beyoncé, and Diana Ross), queer cultural practice in relation to gender and race is made starkly queer. Brian Currid describes moments such as this; “queer performativity of that white boy in the disco is thus possible only inside the matrix of meanings that race and gender provide, while, in the practices of lip-syncing and dance, comments on the racializing regime of gender by ironizing its effects and queer49  In an important footnote, Derrida defines his understanding of sous rature this way: “It is a common error to equate the phenomenological reduction, ‘putting out of play,’ and the sous rature, ‘putting under erasure’ …. The distinction is simple: The gesture of bracketing implies ‘not this but that,’ preserving a bipolarity as well as a hierarchy of empirical impurity and phenomenological purity; the gesture of sous rature implies ‘both this and that’ as well as ‘neither this nor that’ undoing the opposition and the hierarchy between the legible and the erased.” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 374–75, fn 34.

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ing its content.”50 Irony, humor, sarcasm, and the swift and cutting bon mot are rich and ample devices for the queer avant-garde. To queer is to make uneasy the “real.” It is to disable—if only contingently—a culture of hetero-normative constraint. By reincorporating and re-envisioning mechanically recorded voices, gestures, and images from movies and records, There’s No Place … reveals the disjointed relation between the original and copy (i.e., the copy of a copy of a copy …). The queer-cinematic “home” is where life and art remain indissoluble. In bringing queers “home,” Mateik guides them into the sensual uncertainty of the aporia.

VII Looking back at my course outline for the seminar “Queer Culture, Theory, and Media,” I am reminded that one topic or another is missing. Hence, in the outline I include an apologia to my students and offer additional subjects for their studies in queer cinema and queer-film and media theory. And here, again, I must apologize to the reader for my inattention to the “B”—bisexuality—that holds the center for “LGBTQ.” “To a surprising extent,” Maria San Filippo laments in her book The B Word, “bisexuality remains the orientation that dares not speak its name.”51 The “invisibility” and “elusive quality of bisexual representation” in film, San Filippo rightly points out, is at once startling as it is anticipated. In other words, “cultural fascination-anxiety about bisexual desire and sexuality” is firmly maintained to uphold standards of monogamy—whether heterosexual or homosexual (11). Monosexual relations thus simplify the terms for representing what are, in fact, an endless parade of sexual desires. American film, especially, finds it difficult to make cinematic human, abstract complexities. Reluctantly, San Filippo identifies her own subject position as “queer bisexual.” Perhaps “redundant,” she nonetheless finds the malleability of the terms useful because it draws on flexible desires associated with “queer,” while indicating the distinct areas of study necessitated by “the B word”—“bi-­ epistemology” (243). Yet, because San Filippo’s study concentrates on the limits of bisexual representation, the book’s theoretical shortcomings await redress. What rigorous approach to film theory might query bisexual desire through the relation between representation and cinematic form? Is a traditional narrative format an appropriate model for touching elements of desire that are not readily identifiable as such? Queer-film theorists continue their philosophical journey so as to respond to these inquiries, keeping in mind that queer delight arises when asking penetrating questions and not answering them once and for all. There is, indeed, no place like “home.”  Brian Currid, “Disco and Dance Music,” in Gay Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 2, George Haggerty, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 256 (emphasis added). 51  Maria San Philippo, The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 4. 50

CHAPTER 31

Film, Art, and Pornography Jacob M. Held

Pornographic movies exist. Beyond this obvious truth very little else is agreed upon. In the academic discourse surrounding pornography in general, and pornographic film in particular, questions persist from “What is pornography?” to “Can porn be art?” This chapter does not resolve these issues. The objective of this chapter is modest: to clarify the issues surrounding these debates in order to orient the reader and perhaps refocus our collective energies in a more productive direction. This chapter begins with the question: What is pornography? By surveying historically provided and contemporarily used definitions of pornography we will find that in answering this question most theorists have offered definitions that are either too broad, too narrow, normatively loaded, or some combination of all three. Such definitions fail to assist us in better comprehending the nature of pornography and placing it within a comprehensive theory of art or film. To remedy this situation a definition is offered that defines pornography by picking out its essential attributes without reliance on normative conceptions of sex or sexuality. The definition offered is devised by distilling the family resemblances of artifacts universally accepted as pornographic, using anchor cases to define the necessary, essential characteristics of pornography. In so doing some things previously conceived as porn may turn out not to be, and some things previous thought non-pornographic may turn out to be more fittingly defined as pornography. However, since the definition proffered is merely descriptive, such a declaration will be non-evaluative. Unfortunately, given the realities of our social circumstances, to denote something as pornographic is to make an implicit judgment about its merit. That brings us to our next two questions: Can porn be art, and is porn valuable?

J. M. Held (*) University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_31

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The debate surrounding the question of whether porn can be art revolves around some fundamental questions in the philosophy of art. First, what is art? There is no clear or authoritative definition, although cluster theories tend to capture the cultural practice of creative endeavors and the public and private use of art objects better than alternatives. With a working definition of art and a working definition of pornography at hand it should be a matter of course to determine whether porn can be art. One could simply look at what an art object is, look at what porn as an artifact is, and see if there is overlap. However, the debate quickly becomes contentious. Interrogating extant approaches to the classification and evaluation of pornography, all of which seem oriented toward the same goal, to disqualify porn from the artworld, one quickly notices that porn as an artifact is treated with a different level of scrutiny than other art objects. The debate appears to be about why we are allowed to disregard porn as legitimate art, not if we are justified in doing so. One must wonder why theorists are so intent on expelling porn from the artworld when it otherwise meets the criteria of being an artistic creation. The motivation behind such machinations seems to be simple moral disapproval. So can porn be a valuable or important contribution to the artworld? Beyond simple aesthetic musings, there is the question of impact. Is porn good? Does pornography provide a positive value to the individual consumer or to society as a whole? The ethical debate surrounding pornography surveys various issues including discrimination, objectification, and the silencing of women. From the perspective of the philosophy of art the question becomes whether, or to what extent, the perceived harmful externalities surrounding the production and consumption of pornography affects the evaluation of pornography as an artistic production. This chapter does not resolve these issues. This chapter aims to serve the reader well as an introduction to the discourse surrounding pornography as both an art object and a social phenomenon.

Definitions, or What Is Pornography? In order to begin an inquiry into the aesthetic standing and value of pornography, one must begin from the simple question: What is pornography? A definition of pornography must pick out pornography, in this case as a genre of film, from other instances of the genre that are not pornographic. It ought to be neither too broad nor too narrow, and it must be purely descriptive. Defining pornography is distinct from evaluating it and so the definition needs to be value neutral, not carrying within it an implicit evaluation of either the social or artistic value of ostensive pornographic artifacts. This exercise is paramount when dealing with pornography in the philosophy of art. As Hans Maes notes, this is not “the philosophical equivalent of shadowboxing.” The impact of designating something as “pornographic” is real. “[I]f a work is branded as pornography it will usually have to forgo any serious critical or academic attention.

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Worse still, the work may become the victim of censorship and be banned from museums, book stores, movie theatres…”.1 But defining a genre of film is difficult as genres are not steadfast and are prone to fuzzy borders, blending, and crossover. However, determining whether something is or is not a token of a particular genre is determinable within reason. One simply begins from clear, indisputable anchor samples that provide a baseline, namely, those essential characteristics that will form the basis of the definition. These anchor samples provide the standard from which the definition will be crafted, and application allows the definition to be refined until it is effectively accurate, that is, until it picks out what is clearly within the concept, excludes what is clearly outside, and allows borderline cases to be adjudicated according to a reasonable, consistent, and functional rationale. With regard to pornographic film, the obvious anchor samples will be undisputed pornographic films from the “Golden Age” of porn, as well as contemporary, uncontested pornographic films from recognized producers. The primary claim of this section is that pornographic film, as a genre, is marked not by explicit sex, not by visual penetration, or “money shots,” but rather by a marked lack of narrative cohesion such that the film becomes a mere delivery system for the spectacle of sex as a spectacle. In pornographic films sex is present for sex’s sake alone, whereas in non-pornographic narrative films, which may or may not include non-simulated, explicit sex, the sex serves a diegetic role. In a pornographic film, the spectacle of sex is the sine qua non of the film. In non-pornographic, albeit sexually explicit, narrative cinema, the sex is part and parcel to the narrative and enhances it in such a way that the lack of it would detract from and leave incomplete the narrative. However, before crafting a new definition of pornography it is necessary to engage and interrogate historically used definitions. These definitions, although taken by many as authoritative, suffer from significant defects. These definitions tend to be insufferably vague, reference contingent or incidental characteristics, or include normative criteria. A new definition is needed that will describe accurately what a pornographic film is, thereby distinguishing it from non-pornographic film, while not evaluating its merit in the process. The question is “What is pornography?” not “Is pornography valuable or good?” The latter question can only be adequately dealt with once the first is determined. One thing that connects several extant definitions of pornography is that they are motivated by a particular conception of sex and sexuality. Defining pornography has historically been about regulating the discourse over sexuality. As one scholar notes, “If people were not trying to pass laws against pornography, a definition might not be so crucial…Whoever controls the definition…will determine which words and images the law will suppress. They will decide the framework of future debate over pornography.”2 In this regard, 1  Hans Maes, “Who Says Pornography Can’t Be Art?”, in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by Hans Maes and Jerold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 38–9. 2  Wendy McElroy, XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 41.

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the issues involving pornography often become conflated with issues of the obscene, where obscenity is the legal term connoting sexually explicit materials of limited or no redeeming value. These definitions are laden with evaluative terms such as “prurient,” “degrading,” “demeaning,” or “serious merit.” One such definition of pornography focuses on the classification of pornography as a form of discrimination. Two of the most vocal and well-known proponents of this view are Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. MacKinnon and Dworkin’s basic claim is that pornography “eroticizes hierarchy, it sexualizes inequality…It institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”3 As a practice, pornography reinforces a hierarchy of inequality and perpetuates a culture that excuses and rationalizes sexual aggression and male dominance. In 1983, MacKinnon and Dworkin drafted an amendment to the Minneapolis Civil Rights Ordinance that would construe pornography as discrimination. Pornography was defined as: The graphic sexually explicit subordination of women, whether in pictures or in words, that also includes one or more of the following: (1) women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or (2) women are presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or (3) women are presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt, or as dismembered or truncated or fragmented or severed into body parts; or (4) women are presented as being penetrated by objects or animals; or (5) women are presented in scenarios of degradation, injury abasement, torture, shown as filthy or inferior, bleeding, bruised, or hurt in a context that makes these conditions sexual; or (6) women are presented as sexual objects for domination, conquest, violation, exploitation, possession, or use, or through postures or positions of servility or submission or display.4

Wendy McElroy notes, rightly, that this is not a definition but a conclusion.5 Consider the phrase “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women.” Who determines if a representation is “subordinating”? Whether or not a depiction represents an inappropriate power relation is very much open to debate and one’s conclusion ultimately rests on one’s views of sexuality and interpersonal relationships. To illustrate the problem this standard raises consider MacKinnon and Dworkin’s own view on the matter. Dworkin has claimed, “It’s very hard to look at a picture of a woman’s body and not see it with the perception that her body is being exploited.”6 Likewise, “MacKinnon has 3  Catharine MacKinnon, “Frances Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” in The Problem of Pornography, edited by Susan Dwyer (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995), 59–60. 4  American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. William H.  Hudnut, Mayor, City of Indianapolis, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Circuit, 1985). 5  McElroy, XXX, 46–8. 6  Andrea Dworkin, “Where Do We Stand on Pornography?” (Roundtable) Ms., Jan/Feb 1994. Cited in Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 23.

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c­ ondemned pornography specifically because it shows that women ‘desire to be fucked.’…MacKinnon also echoes Dworkin’s thesis that women who believe they voluntarily engage in, and enjoy, heterosexual sex are victims of ‘false consciousness.’”7 What the definition shows is not what porn is but how the author of the definition views women and sexuality. “Such descriptions are normative, or biased. They embody the viewer’s reactions, and their desire to condemn pornography.”8 The above definition relies on an ideological view of sexuality. As such this definition is unhelpful in understanding what porn is. The ostensive purpose of a definition is to describe a phenomenon, not evaluate it. A similar problem is present in the discussion over the distinction between pornography and erotica. Gloria Steinem recommends understanding erotica as “mutually pleasurable” or sexual expression among equals, whereas pornography is “violence, dominance, and conquest.”9 What is the point of the distinction: to vindicate erotica while condemning pornography. If the purpose was not to condemn pornography it would be hard to find a reason for maintaining the distinction. Pornography and erotica are often indistinguishable except that some find the message of one abhorrent and the other acceptable. The distinction between erotica and pornography only matters if the point of classification is regulation. In fact, in no other genre of film do we reclassify some members of a group because of the ideas present. Horror films or musicals do not shift genre merely because they may be misogynistic or racist. They are simply racist or anti-Semitic musicals, racist or misogynistic horror films. Pornography should not be treated any differently. The problem, therefore, is not simply that a definition is hard to come by. It is that many definitions begin from the idea that the presentation of sex is itself problematic. The definition begins from a sexual ethic. Beyond obviously evaluative definitions, many descriptive definitions of pornography have been offered. Consider contemporary definitions compiled by David Andrews: “the explicit depiction or representation of human beings engaged in sexual activity;” “a certain content, explicitly sexual representation, with a certain intention, sexual arousal;” “flagrant erotic display designed to excite the spectator, reader, or listener;” and “the presentation in verbal or visual signs of human sexual organs in a condition of stimulation.” Andrews proceeds to highlight the myriad problems with these definitions, such as ­reliance on concepts like “explicit” or “arousal.”10 Other suggested definitions include Wendy McElroy’s “Pornography is the explicit artistic depiction of men and/or women as sexual beings”11 and Linda Williams’s definition of film por Strossen, Defending Pornography, 111.  McElroy, XXX, 43. 9  Gloria Steinem, “Erotica and Pornography: A Clear and Present Difference,” in The Problem of Pornography, edited by Susan Dwyer (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995), 31. 10  David Andrews, “Toward a More Valid Definition of ‘Pornography,” The Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 45, No. 3 (2012), 470. 11  McElroy, XXX, 51. 7 8

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nography as “the visual (and sometimes aural) representation of living, moving bodies engaged in explicit, usually unfaked, sexual acts with the primary intent of arousing viewers.”12 Of note is also the definition proffered by Bernard Williams: “A pornographic representation is one that combines two features: it has a certain function or intention, to arouse its audience sexually, and also has a certain content, explicit representations of sexual material (organs, postures, activity, etc.).”13 Finally, Michael Rea offers the following definition, “For all x, x is pornography iff it is reasonable to believe that most of x’s target audience will use (or treat) x as pornography, i.e. as a communicative material (picture, performance, etc.) that the user treats primarily as a course of sexual arousal and does not use because of any belief that the material was intended to foster intimacy between himself/herself and the subject(s) of x.”14 These definitions rely on troublesome aspects of the artifact in question, such as its function, namely to arouse, whether that be with reference to the intent of the author or the expectation or response of the consumer, or the presence of “explicit” sexual content. However, a definition must refer to the essence of the thing. Relying on viewer response is problematic. As noted by Simon Fokt with regard to art in general, “[W]hile it seems reasonable to consider the context of a work’s creation in determining its status, the context of its reception is rarely taken to be relevant to its arthood.”15 For example, whether or not the audience laughs, a film is still a comedy, given its nature as a film. Likewise, audiences may no longer be frightened by the now campy and well-worn tropes of the Friday the 13th movie franchise, but they are still horror films. Thus, contemporary pornography will not lose its status should in the distant future people become so sensitive to exploitation, degradation, and objectification that contemporary examples of pornography no longer arouse sexual desire but instead inspire disgust or moral outrage. Even if no one were aroused by Deep Throat, it would still be a pornographic film. Viewer response, in this case arousal, is irrelevant to whether a given artifact is or is not pornographic. No other genre of film is defined by viewer response and/or whether or not the film in question is successful in arousing that response. The same ought to be true in the case of pornography. Authorial intent is another matter. Is it necessary that the creator of the artifact desires or aims at the arousal of the audience in order for the work to be pornographic? Consider the following hypothetical. Were one to create a gorgeous and well-produced advertisement for hand lotion with the intent of arousing fetishists who are under normal circumstances aroused by the presen12  Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 30. 13  Maes, “Who Says Pornography Can’t Be Art?”, 31. 14  Simon Fokt, “Pornographic Art – A Case from Definitions,” British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 52, Number 3 (July 2012), 289. 15  Fokt, “Pornographic Art,” 291.

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tation of a pair of hands, one’s recent commercial for the latest skin rejuvenator or dish soap would not thereby become pornographic. It’s still a simple soap commercial by the nature of the content present on the screen. The nature of the object is what determines its placement among other artifacts, not why it was made, for whom, or with what intent. Intention and reception do not affect the nature of the object, they merely indicate the cultural circumstances in which it was produced and the use to which it would conventionally be put. Locating essential elements of porn is where problems with many extant definitions arise. Consider the claim that pornography has to include “explicit” depictions of sex or sexual themes. One could object that “explicit” is insufferably vague. But any definition is going to be at some point vague. Any definition will be tentative and must be evaluated based on how it helps us conceptualize and deal with the phenomenon at hand. As John Rawls notes, “The merit of any definition depends upon the soundness of the theory that results; by itself a definition cannot settle any fundamental question.”16 Under current consideration is a definition of pornography that allows us to distinguish it from other non-pornographic films or artifacts without unduly denigrating or otherwise implying a foregone conclusion as to the merit or value of pornography. We are attempting to do so to facilitate a better understanding of film theory and properly place pornographic film within that theory. One must then ask, does a definition that includes “explicit” do this? Does explicit sex demarcate the pornographic from the non-pornographic? The use of “explicit” no matter how well-defined will include some idea that the sex being presented is being presented clearly, with nothing hidden. In terms of sexual themes this implies penetration or at a minimal full-frontal nudity. However, the fact that we distinguish between soft-core and hard-core pornography where the differentia between the two is the presence or absence of penetration seems to indicate that the inclusion of “explicit” leaves out members of the ostensible porn family. If there is such a thing as soft-core pornography, which it seems there is, then the use of “explicit” is infelicitous. Soft-­ core pornography is not explicit in any sense, yet it remains pornography in reality, not figuratively. Any definition of porn must be able to accommodate for this. One might define down “explicit” to include soft-core presentations of sex and sexual themes but at that point it would lose any meaning since all presentations of sex or sexual themes would then become pornographic. At that point one would be better off excising the term from the definition as a whole and just claiming porn is the depiction of sexual themes. If we remove “explicit” from given definitions we are left with something like “Pornography is the artistic depiction of men and/or women as sexual beings.” At this point anything dealing with sex becomes porn, and this does not comport with our considered judgments of film. So “explicit” seems an infelicitous component within a definition of pornography. 16  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 112–3.

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Unfortunately, “arousal” and “explicit” are the two most used and least helpful desiderata when distinguishing pornography from its relatives in the film world. In order to find a feasible definition, one should begin by looking at anchor samples of porn and asking, “What is the family resemblance between all of these obvious, incontestable examples of what we call ‘porn’?” If we look at uncontested, paradigmatic examples of porn, from Golden Age classics such as Deep Throat (Dir. Gerard Damiano, 1972), Behind the Green Door (Dir. Artie and Jim Mitchell, 1972), Taboo (Dir. Kirdy Stevens, 1980), and The Opening of Misty Beethoven (Dir. Radley Metzger, 1976), to the oeuvre of 1980s porn icons such as Ron Jeremy or Christy Canyon, to the 1990s shift to video and the rise of stars such as Jill Kelly, Kaitlyn Ashley, and most notably Jenna Jameson, all the way to contemporary pornography and its stars such as Bree Olsen, James Deen, or Jesse Jane, the protagonist in the venerable Pirates (Dir. Joone, 2005), we do see a commonality. Throughout the history of porn there are certain tropes and iconography that are consistent, and that seem to define the genre. Some claim that the genre can be marked by the essential presence of the money shot17 or perhaps a more inclusive list of standard shots including not only the money shot, but the meat and beaver shots, close-up penetration, and nearly medical-grade photography of genitalia.18 Porn as a genre seems to be denoted by the presence of a hyper-visuality of the sex act with framing and blocking orchestrated to maximize visibility of the sex act, the “very functioning” and “hydraulics of sex.”19 Yet to frame the genre so narrowly would be to exclude other films that are less than fully visible such as recognized soft-core pornographic films including classics like Emmanuelle (dir. Just Jaeckin, 1974) and the ensuing series of follow-up films, as well as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (dir. Just Jaeckin, 1981) and recent work by Candida Royalle and Femme Pictures where the absence of hard-core pornographic conventions is the norm and in fact the raison d-être for these “female friendly” productions. What I propose is looking not at what type of sex is present or how it is shot but rather the role it plays in the narrative structure of the film as a whole. The commonality that quickly becomes apparent between these samples of films is that pornography seems to be sex scenes loosely connected, if at all, by a narrative. It is not the presence of explicit sex that makes a film pornographic but instead the role sex plays in supporting or furthering the narrative of the film. Consider Deep Throat or The Opening of Misty Beethoven. These are indisputable representatives of Golden Age pornographic films. We call films these “porn.” Why? Because regardless of how much one wants to read into the narrative, the plot, and the characters, they are delivery systems for the presentation of sex on the screen. The idea that through the prism of nostalgia they get  Williams, Hard Core, 121.  Eithne Johnson, “Excess and Ecstasy: Constructing Female Pleasure in Porn Movies,” The Velvet Light Trap, Volume 32 (Fall 1993), 31. 19  Linda Williams, Screening Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 5. 17 18

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elevated to a status among narrative film is interesting and perhaps problematic.20 But that retroactive elevation does not make them narrative films. Consider Deep Throat. The plot is banal at best: A woman’s clitoris is located in the back of her throat, so in order to achieve orgasm she must perform “deep throat” oral sex. Even if Linda Williams wants to defend the plot21 her account strains credulity. Is Deep Throat about the gender binary and the opposition being posed “as pure anatomical difference, with the resolution coming through the right number with the ‘right’ man, though in fact the fellatio ‘solution’ really works for the male”,22 or is the banal plot at best a ploy to skirt obscenity laws by positing a modicum of artistic value in order to rationalize the presentation of sex in the film? The narrative allows one to skirt the legal definition of obscenity by providing a necessary minimum of artistic merit and thus an excuse for presenting sex on film.23 Even being generous and granting that the plot is not worse than most contemporary action or horror films, the place of the sex is at question. Grant to the authors the plot and ask what role the sex plays in it. Is it a commentary on female pleasure? No. The story would move along as well without the prolonged, hyper-visual sex scenes as it does with them. So what is the role of sex? Consider screen time. In Deep Throat, roughly 60 percent of the screen time is hard-core sex scenes, leaving merely 24 minutes of film to the narrative, 5 of which are opening credits. The narrative becomes peripheral to the spectacle of sex. Or rather, the narrative is an excuse to present sex on film. The sex is the sine qua non of Deep Throat, not the narrative. This is evidenced by the fact that Deep Throat as well as its contemporaries were often aired without published air times and people would enter and exit the movie theater as they pleased.24 It is not simply that these films were intended to be consumed as porn or that they were taken up as pornographic, there simply was no significant narrative element, and what was present was incidental or superfluous. The primary focus of the film was the presentation of sex. Once home video became popular the façade of narrative integrity dissolved entirely. Pornographic films are delivery systems for the spectacle of sex. These films isolate the sex and allow it to dominate the film.25 A viewer can get the same meaning and content from watching Linda Lovelace fellate Harry Reams in a clip as he can seeing it in the context of Deep Throat as a whole. In addition, removing a specific act of fellatio does not detract from the film as a whole. The sex in porn is superfluous to the narrative, or rather the narrative is 20  Susanna Paasonen and Laura Saarenmaa, “The Golden Age of Porn: Nostalgia and History of Cinema,” in Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, edited by Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 23–5. 21  Williams, Hard Core, 99. 22  Williams, Hard Core, 139. 23  Eric Shaefer, “Gauging a Revolution: 16 mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature,” Cinema Journal, Volume 41, Number 3 (Spring 2002), 3–4. 24  Peter Lehman, “Revelations about Pornography,” in Pornography: Film and Culture, edited by Peter Lehman, (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 4–5. 25  Krzywinska, Sex and the Cinema, 222.

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superfluous to the presentation of sex, and the time devoted to sex versus narrative, as well as the stock positioning and presentation during sex scenes, indicates as much. Building from the above observations and from anchor cases, we can craft a definition of pornography. Such a definition should be value neutral. It should not include assessments of sex and sexuality. It should not be about explicit sex, arousal, or other non-essential characteristics. Most important, it must be functional: Does it capture most porn and exclude most non-porn as conventionally conceived? Any definition will be at some points inaccurate and should be tentative. After all, it seeks to classify something that is at root ephemeral and ever changing, a genre of film, and genres are a constant work of negotiation.26 So the proffered definition will stick to substantive generalities based on an analysis of indisputable anchor cases of recognized pornographic films. One commonality seems clear, porn is inherently non-narrative.27 This is not to say that porn lacks a narrative. All pornographic films, excepting compilations, have some narrative element, no matter how weak or superficial. The narrative, weak when present, may revolve around a girl or woman’s sexual awakening, the bored housewife, sexual experimentation, or be parasitic on extant narratives present in mainstream film, as in the case of porn parodies. There is some narrative component to pornographic film. What it means to call porn non-narrative is to say that the narrative of a porn film is not overly concerned with causal chains and coherent character developments. Nor is the narrative component of the film the driving or motivating force for the creation of the film. The narrative is incidental to the film. The presentation of sex is the motive, the sine qua non, of the film and the narrative elements are excuses for the placement of stock sex scenes that include all the standards shots, framing, blocking, and conventions present in mainstream hard-core pornography. Most of these numbers take a considerable amount of screen time over and above narrative development often occupying over 70 percent of the film, with 5 or 10  minutes of narrative interposed between 25–30-minute sex scenes. These scenes follow a similar patterning regardless of the narrative of the film. One begins often with female to male oral, moves to penetration of various kinds, and ends with a cumshot, usually across the woman’s face, with internal “creampie” cum shots becoming more popular in recent years. The ­interchangeability of these scenes among films speaks to their stock nature and lack of narrative meaning. The lack of narrative in hard-core porn is not contentious for most. A definition can begin from this fact. I propose the following definition of pornography (focusing on porn as a genre of film specifically): “A film is pornographic if considered as a whole the sine qua non of the film is the presentation of the 26  Kevin Esch and Vicki Mayer, “How Unprofessional: the Profitable Partnership of Amateur Porn and Celebrity Culture,” in Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture, edited by Susanna Paasonen, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 101. 27  Johnson, “Excess and Ecstasy,” 33.

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spectacle of sex for its own sake.”28 To claim that the sine qua non of the film is the presentation of the spectacle of sex is to assert that the existence of the film is predicated on the presence of sex as a spectacle, that is, sex as the act itself. “Sex” in this case must be defined broadly to include not simply penile-­ vaginal intercourse, as well as other forms of penetration, but also non-­ penetrative presentations of sexuality where a “presentation of sexuality” is taken to be the presentation of the other as an object for sexual consumption or appreciation. Such a broad definition would thus include non-penetrative examples of pornography such as nude photographs as well as BDSM and lactation porn, where the material is presented as a sexual spectacle for consumption as a spectacle even though explicit, penetrative sex is lacking. So a more refined definition may be the following: “A film is pornographic if: considered as a whole, that is, taken in its entirety, the existence of the film is predicated on the presentation of the spectacle of sex as spectacle, for its own sake, without reliance on or other fundamental connection to an overarching narrative, that is, the sex as presented serves no diegetic function.” This definition has several strengths over competitors and seems to capture something both true and illuminating about pornography. It claims that the essence of these films, the reason they exist, is to present sex as a spectacle. Yet it does so without having to classify the sex as mutual or degrading, or as explicit. It merely states that sex is presented as sex, without reference to or added elements of narrative integrity. Although pornographic films may have narrative components they are inessential to the essence of the film and in fact distract from it when given too much attention. Pornographic actor Ron Jeremy has noted, “Porn is about the sex, not the punch lines…you’re not trying to distract from the action.”29 Another way to understand the same point is to consider the role of the sex in the film. The fact that stock shots and techniques permeate porn film, that the same positions, framing, positioning, and blocking occur regardless of theme or narrative, indicates that the film is primarily about presenting the spectacle of sex in the way the viewer has come to expect it to be presented. This definition captures hard-core and soft-core porn; it covers all forms of pornography from feminist and female friendly to the most extreme. It does not rely on producer or authorial intent, nor does it rely on consumer attitude or response. It does not matter why someone makes it, or why others consume it. What matters is what is present on the screen, the sex, and its relation to the film considered as a whole. In addition, it does not prejudice against pornographic films since it is neutral on the value of the presentation of sex or sex in general and the value of pornographic films among other genres of films. Porn films present sex in a particular way while eschewing 28  See Jacob M.  Held, “What is and is not Porn: Sex, Narrative, and Baise-Moi,” in Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema, edited by Lindsay Coleman (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 36. 29  Ron Jeremy with Eric Spitznagel, Ron Jeremy: The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz – Horny Women, Hollywood Nights, and the Rise of the Hedgehog (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 207), 168.

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the central diegetic role of plot or narrative. One thus has a functional definition that serves the purpose of distinguishing, without thereby denigrating, pornographic from non-pornographic films derived from incontestable anchor cases. Importantly, this definition also guarantees that the mere presence of sex in a film, even explicit, titillating sex, is not enough to designate a film as pornographic. This is an added benefit. Whether we agree or not, classifying a film as pornographic is to condemn it to the dustbin of film history. But there are films that contain explicit sex, both simulated and real, that merit assessment as narrative films.30 In addition, sex, as content, deserves to be interrogated through film as a crucial element of the human condition. Films that delve into this area ought not to be relegated to second-class citizenship merely because they present sex on screen. There are films in which the sex means something, it adds to or even becomes the narrative. The definition proffered above is neutral and so does not prejudge the film merely due to sexual content, it asks about why there is sexual content in the film and then classifies the film based on the relationship between the sex as presented and the narrative, without judgment. Looking at sex as spectacle in pornography is not morally evaluative but descriptively accurate, and using this as an essential differentia allows us to appreciate better how sex can function in a narratively driven film without making the film about the sex act itself, just as one may do with humor or violence. In addition, this definition recognizes that some films are mere spectacles whether that be violence in so-called torture porn or humor in nonsensical, slapstick-style comedies such as the classic “Three Stooges.” Perhaps one could figuratively refer to such comedies as “tomfoolery porn.” In these cases the humor, which might be used to great narrative effect in other venues, is presented on its own and for its own sake. It is the same with sex in pornography. This understanding would also make sense for why some films are called “torture porn,” when the defining component, violence, has taken on the role of spectacle while the narrative has withered or atrophied to a point of near non-­ existence. Thus, “porn” is already used in common parlance to indicate spectacle without narrative, albeit figuratively, and that insight is simply recast here. Figuratively, action porn is a film where the narrative, as meager as it may be, is an excuse for car chases, explosions, and lots of CGI effects. Torture porn is an excuse to present simulated mutilations and gore on the big screen, the story being irrelevant. A true pornographic film is sex as spectacle. So the proposed definition does not presume that sex is inherently pornographic, it rather asks for the context. Is the sex a spectacle, or is the sex a constitutive narrative element? It is a simple truism that stories and plot were porn’s alibi when obscenity law was the reigning law of the land. Porn has always been about the sex. Contemporary trends demonstrate an increase in the types of spectacle that is presented, from BDSM to “cuckold” or interracial 30  See, for example, Sex and Storytelling in Modern Cinema: Explicit Sex, Performance, and Cinematic Technique, edited by Lindsay Coleman (London, I.B. Tauris, 2016).

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pornography. In this way sex is presented in new ways, the spectacle is presented in new ways. But even with new contexts or backdrops, it is still the spectacle that is front and center and the reason for the existence of these films even if a new context frames it. So beginning from the idea, that one now knows what porn is, one can ask the following: Can porn be art? And if so, can it be good art?

Can Porn Be Art? The simple answer is, “Yes.” Of course porn can be art; it is created in similar media as other forms of art, painting, photography, film. It covers a subject matter—sex—that is common among all genres and periods of art, and it is readily consumed by the masses. But to simply dismiss the question with a one-­ word answer is to dismiss the motivations behind the question. The motivations driving the inquiry are about the place of sex and sexuality in art, the place of arousal and sexual desire in the artworld, and the true heart of the matter, not the question of whether porn can be art but whether it should be allowed in the same spaces as art. The question thus becomes the following: Is porn worthy of the appellation “art?” Before addressing the question of whether pornography can be art, art itself must be defined. Art is an ephemeral concept and has as many definitions as there are authors willing to offer them. One might begin quite vague and offer a florid definition, echoing William Butler Yeats, and ponder, “What is art but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident?”31 Although referencing literature, Yeats’s point is well taken. Is art simply expression through various media? Or one could aim at precision. Perhaps art is “(1) an artifact (2) a set of aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).”32 Here, the reception by the artworld is essential for something being denoted art. Others have noted how this type of definition, although sure to exclude much pornography, since it is not presented to the artworld for appreciation, does not necessarily exclude pornography from being art. Were it presented in the right manner and accepted by the artworld it would easily meet the definition.33 If one were wary, however, of deferring to the artworld and instead wanted to ask what type of experience an object must produce in order to be an art object one might use a definition of art such as that offered by Monroe Beardsley, “an artwork is either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with 31  William Butler Yeats, “A Teller of Tales,” in The Celtic Twilight (Forgotten Books, 2007), 5. In the original quote, Yeats asks, “What is literature” not “What is art.” 32  From George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, cited in Simon Fokt, “Pornographic Art – A Case from Definitions,” British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52, Number 3 (July 2012), 292. 33  See Petra Van Brabandt and Jesse Prinz, “Why Do Porn Films Suck?” in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 161–190.

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marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity.”34 Here, although the content is not explicitly referred to, it is implied that the content would be capable of providing the prototypical aesthetic experience taken as definitive of art. There seems to be no reason why sex would be ruled out of hand. Finally, if one wanted to refer to the content and the means by which that content is delivered one might offer a cluster concept of art. A cluster theory of art claims that there is no single essence of art but instead a conjunction of prototypical features, which when summed, count toward something being considered art. Such a list might include “First, artworks are made in a range of media that have been used throughout history…: painting, sculpture, and more recently, photography, and film. Second, artworks tend to have aesthetic properties…‘beautiful’…‘stunning’, ‘lovely,’…Third, artworks are generally exercises of the imagination: they do not merely reproduce reality…Fourth, artworks are characteristically executed with skill, or at least aspire to be so-executed…Fifth, artworks often belong to identifiable genres and obey genre conventions…Finally, artworks engage us emotionally, by either expressing emotions or arousing them in us.”35 Resolving which definition best captures the nature of art is beyond this chapter. But our goal requires that we operate under a functional definition of art in order to progress. Thus, with no argumentation to support the choice, I stipulate that a cluster theory of art best represents the history of humanity’s creative endeavors, their intentions, reception, and modes of production. It should also suffice to simply say that were one to accept any of the alternative definitions above it would be possible to articulate how pornographic representations fit that definition given that any media of art also has pornographic examples of it, and even if a pornographic example of art under some alternative definition was not extant that does not exclude the possibility of one being produced in the future. So if any working definition of art would seem to allow pornography to be counted as art, why is the issue so contentious? Hans Maes puts it succinctly, “Being awarded the status of art brings with it social prestige…In contrast, if a work is branded as pornography it will usually have to forgo any serious critical or academic attention.”36 To be art is to be validated, to be porn is to be vilified. The denotation is laden with connotation and so the label is of great import. The distinction is further elaborated by Maes when he indicates that “Pornography is explicit and represents people as objects, while art invites us 34  From Monroe Beardsley, “Redefining Art,” in The Aesthetic Point of View, edited by Michaels J. Wreen and Donald M. Callen, cited in Fokt, “Pornographic Art,” 295. 35  Brabandt and Prinz, “Why Do Porn Films Suck?” 163–4. For other Cluster Theory accounts see: Berys Gaut, “‘Art’ as a Cluster Concept,” in Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll; Jeffery Dean, “The Nature of Concepts and the Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61 (2003), 29–35. 36  Hans Maes, “Who Says Pornography Can’t Be Art,” 38.

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into the subjectivity of the [other]…pornography focuses on sex…whereas in art…love, passion, and equality…are of crucial importance…Art is concerned with beauty, while pornography is …‘smutty.’”37 Pornography is defined as less than, inappropriate, or degenerate even when presenting the same subject matter otherwise present in legitimate art. But a definition ought not be normative, as noted above. Porn does not cease to be art because it is bad art, nor does it cease to be art because art critics find much of it distasteful according to their conceptions of sex and sexuality. Morality does not determine the status of an art object, although in the pornography debate this seems to be the case.38 As Simon Fokt notes, “Virtually no definitions of art pay any attention to the work’s moral value, and while feminists and moralists might have a good normative point with regard to art evaluation, it is at least not obvious that it should have an impact on classification. Furthermore, holding that great art never objectifies seems simply wrong or hugely revisionary.”39 Beyond morality, others claim pornography cannot be art, not because of how it presents sexuality, but rather because it lacks some necessary characteristic of art. Some dismiss pornography as not being art with the claim that it lacks merit, is not intended as art, or is repetitive and derivative. But, as Matthew Kiernan notes, in many genres such as fantasy, romance, or sci-fi this is equally true, yet this does not preclude some instances of these genres from being art.40 In fact, if pure originality or novelty were required to be art, art would fail to exist. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot says, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Every work of art and every human creation and activity is “derivative” within the context of the extant conventions in which it occurs. Others argue that the problem with pornography being art is the response it elicits. Pornography stirs up emotions, arouses the viewer, and unlike proper art speaks to our animalistic natures, our baser drives and instincts. Art, on the other hand, is about disinterested appreciation, it is about the beautiful, as an intellectual or imaginative exercise. However, as one scholar notes, “Viewed historically and cross-culturally, the very idea of artworks as artefacts intended principally to be appreciated ‘for their own sake’ is somewhat of an aberration, historically grounded in the misunderstanding of ‘German Aesthetics’, and in

37  Hans Maes, “Drawing the Line: Art versus Pornography,” Philosophy Compass Vol. 6, Number 6 (2011), 385–6. 38  For more on this, see Christopher Bartel, “The ‘Fine Art’ of Pornography? The Conflict Between Artistic Value and Pornographic Value,” in Porn – Philosophy for Everyone: How to Think with Kink, edited by Dave Monroe (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 153–165. 39  Fokt, “Pornographic Art,” 291. 40  See Matthew Kiernan, “Pornographic Art,” Philosophy and Literature Volume 25, Number 1 (April 2001), 31–45, at 33.

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particular of Kantian talk of ‘disinterested pleasure’ in the Third Critique.”41 Much art appeals to emotion, triggers a receiver’s response, and is appreciated for that fact, not in spite of it. “Some artworks are prized because they make us cry, others because they frighten us or make us laugh. In general, when an item created using a traditional art medium incites strong emotions in us, that indicates, all else equal, that is it an artwork, and, indeed a good one.”42 So beginning from a working definition of art, and then considering whether pornography may fit such a definition, some things become clear. If we draw the line too clearly and make too rigorous a distinction between art and pornography by referring to authenticity or originality, or proper presentations of sex and sexuality, or appealing to or instigating emotive responses, then “there are many undisputed artworks that would fall on the ‘wrong’ side of the divide.”43 If one seeks to exclude art by applying an overly rigorous definition of art, one may find that the artworld shrinks significantly as some otherwise well-regarded art objects become too tawdry or “smutty,” or elicit the wrong response, or do so to an improper degree. In addition, whereas we might find that some art misses the mark it is not clear that all pornography would be excluded, at least in theory. Fokt concludes from his prolonged discussion of this point that “either (1) pornographic art can and does exist, or (2) all of the currently most seriously treated definitions of art are wrong.”44 If all of our working definitions of art, which seem to capture most of what is indisputably considered art, also seem to include some examples of what we would also denote as pornographic, then why not simply admit the existence of artifacts that are both pornographic and art? Clearly there is some reason, for a great deal of ink has been spilt on the topic. Yet when pursuing the topic it is crucial to begin from the position that “the possibility of pornographic art cannot be ruled out by definitional fiat.”45 If one is to offer a bona fide attempt at delineating the pornographic from other forms of artistic expression and then assess the merits of these works against a working definition of art in an attempt to decipher where these works fit within the full range of creative human endeavors, to begin with a definition that ­precludes the possibility of works deemed pornographic from being art is to prejudice the investigation as a whole and serves only to reinforce extant prejudices. So if one is to deny the status of arthood to pornographic works, it must be that an otherwise independent and viable definition of art delineates the concept in such a way that pornographic works happen to not be included, perhaps contingently based on the fact that no extant pornography can meet 41  David Davies, “Pornography, Art, and the Intended Response of the Receiver,” in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 80. See also, J. Wilcox, “The Beginning of L’art pour l’art” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11(4), 360–77. 42  Brabandt and Prinz,” Why Do Porn Films Suck?” 165. 43  Maes, “Drawing the Line,” 389. 44  Fokt, “Pornographic Art,” 299. 45  Kiernan, “Pornographic Art,” 32.

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the definition, or essentially, in the sense that no pornographic work could ever possibly meet such a definition of art. The arguments rehearsed below argue that something cannot be both pornographic and art due to the nature of art and pornography. Thus, there is some essential characteristic about pornography that precludes it from ever being the kind of thing that art is. We consider the most prominent arguments, those of Jerrold Levinson and Christy Mag Uidhir. Jerrold Levinson’s argument that something cannot both be pornography and art hinges on the response of the viewer. Considering a work such as a photograph or painting, Levinson argues that pornography’s fundamental orientation to arouse the viewer is fundamentally at odds with the possibility of the necessary aesthetic experience required to denote an artwork as art. Hans Maes reproduces his argument succinctly: 1. Art is centrally aimed at aesthetic experience, which essentially involves attention to form/vehicle/medium/manner and so entails treating images as in part opaque. 2. Pornography is centrally aimed at sexual arousal, which essentially excludes attention to form/vehicle/medium/manner and so entails treating images as wholly transparent. 3. Aesthetic experience and sexual arousal are incompatible. 4. Nothing can be both art and pornography. Or, at least, nothing can be coherently projected as both art and pornography.46 The key distinction necessary for Levinson’s argument is the distinction between an image being opaque and transparent. Levinson explains the distinction while contemplating erotic art, “One induces you, in the name of arousal and release, to ignore representation so as to get at the represented [Pornography as transparent] …the other induces you, in the name of aesthetic delight, to dwell on the representation and to contemplate it in relation to the stimulating or arousing qualities of what is represented. [Art as opaque].”47 Art, as it were, invites contemplation of the artwork in terms of the mode of presentation of the artwork for the sake of appreciating the mode of presentation, for example, the skill with which the lines are drawn, the subtlety of light and shadow, the use of color, and so on, whereas pornographic presentations merely present the image to get you to the sex act as a means of arousal. The presentation, the mode of representation, is tertiary to the consumption of the sex act as sex act for arousal and release. As Levinson further explains, “[t]he aims of true pornography and the aims of art, erotic art included, are not compatible, but war against one another.”48 Important to note in this distinction  Maes, “Drawing the Line,” 392.  Jerrold Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” Philosophy and Literature, Volume 29, Number 1 (April 2005), 234. 48  Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” 234. 46 47

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are the claims, not simply that art is about disinterested enjoyment as noted above in relation to the Kantian tradition, but also the implicit claim that a singular artwork cannot aim at separate audiences or have separate designs based on the audiences for whom it was created. If a work is pornographic it is fundamentally transparent, that is, there is no way to receive it as opaque, no way to appreciate it in terms of form or vehicle or manner. Such a work is simply the transparent presentation of sex for arousal. Likewise, if an artwork is opaque it is fundamentally so. To consume art in order to induce arousal is to misuse the artwork, and to treat pornographic works as if they were opaque is to read into them something that is not present. Levinson adds to this the idea that one must also consider the intention with which the work was created. Thus, in distinguishing, for example, a Victoria’s Secret photo spread or a gynecological textbook from pornography, he notes that the textbook is “not intended to interest viewers sexually.”49 Focusing again on intention, Levinson concludes, “What usefully defines and differentiates pornography and art are their central aims, and those aims are incompatible.”50 So Levinson offers two claims: (1) pornography is defined by the intention of the producer to induce arousal51 and (2) works so produced are necessarily transparent and hence preclude the possibility of dwelling on or appreciating the features of the image itself. Both claims are problematic. The idea that pornography can be defined by the intention of the author, in this case to arouse, has been dealt with above so it need not be rehearsed again here. The second claim, that an artwork produced to induce arousal cannot otherwise be appreciated artistically, implies an inability to approach a work from various perspectives which seems intuitively false and demonstrates simply a lack of imagination on Levinson’s part. More on this is discussed later. Christy Mag Uidhir offers an alternative approach. Uidhir’s argument rests on the aim of the artwork, not the reception of the audience, but his claims amount to very much the same as Levinson’s. Uidhir’s arguments are the following. 1. If something is pornography, then that something has the purpose of sexual arousal. 2. If something is pornography, then that something has the purpose of sexual arousal and that purpose is manner inspecific. 3. If something is art, then if that something has a purpose, then that purpose is manner specific. 4. If something is art, then if that something has the purpose of sexual arousal, then that purpose is manner specific.  Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” 230.  Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” 237. 51  See Jerrold Levinson, “Is Pornographic Art Comparable to Religious Art? A Reply to Davies,” in Art and Pornography: Philosophical Essays, edited by Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83. 49 50

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. A purpose cannot be both manner specific and manner inspecific. 5 6. Therefore, if something is pornography, then it is not art.52 Uidhir’s argument rests on the distinction between something, in this case a work of art or other artifact, being purposive, and that purpose being achieved in either a manner-specific or manner-inspecific way. The key distinction between art and pornography is not simply whether the thing in question is designed to achieve sexual arousal, but how it achieves arousal, whether in a manner-specific or inspecific way. The distinction is paramount to Uidhir’s argument. Uidhir explains: “for a purpose to be manner specific is for a purpose to be essentially constituted both by an action (or state of affairs) and a manner, such that the purpose is to perform the action (or bring about that state of affairs) in that particular manner…For a purpose to be manner inspecific is just for it not to be manner specific.”53 So under Uidhir’s definition, to be pornography something has to have the intention or be designed with the purpose of achieving sexual arousal, and in a way that is manner inspecific. Uidhir is assuming that pornography, as well as art in general, is intention dependent, that is, it is defined by the intentions of the creator. Thus, the distinction is about how that intention is achieved. The claim that pornography achieves its ends in a way that is manner inspecific indicates that the state of arousal need not be generated or achieved through any particular manner. Uidhir thus offers a teleological definition of pornography and faults Levinson for focusing too much on reception, noting that the success or failure of something achieving its intended response contributes nothing to its being what it is, in this case, pornography.54 Pornography does not have to be successful to be pornography. For Uidhir, it is how the object is structured to achieve its intended purpose, in this case arousal that denotes it either porn or erotic art. Pornography is a creative endeavor with the intention of sexually arousing its audience by manner-­inspecific means. The difference between porn and art is that art is manner specific; thus, even with the same intention or purpose, the means by which they achieve them, their structure, differentiates them. Although their final causes might be identical, they have the same goal, their formal cause, or the structure by which they achieve the shared end, differs. From what Uidhir offers, manner specificity appears to denote that the work must achieve its ostensive end through specific or intended means, not by accident. Somehow the end is achieved due to a necessary connection between the end and the means of producing it. In this way one might say manner s­ pecificity implies felicity conditions for an artwork being successful. Uidhir gives an example of Jeff Koons’s “Red Butt.” Here he indicates that although one may be aroused by the pictorial presentation of the sex act, the proper response in 52  Christy Mag Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” Philosophy and Literature, Volume 33, Number 1 (April 2009), 194. 53  Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” 194. 54  Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” 197.

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order for the work to be successful is for that arousal, or appreciation, to be a result not simply of the depiction of a sex act but one specifically between Koons and his wife Cicciolina.55 Thus, the end state, arousal, is manner specific insofar as it is only successful if achieved through the proper reception of the artwork, in this case the proper contextualization of it. Since this is the intention of the artwork, that is, this is Koons’s intention in creating the piece, manner specificity is written into the structure of the piece as part and parcel to achieving the end; thus, it is art, the purpose is to be achieved in a manner-­ specific way. Pornography is different. With pornography, on Uidhir’s account, although arousal is still the goal or intention, the manner, or the “how,” is irrelevant. The authors of pornography know that certain conventions do arouse, and that patrons or consumers use their work for arousal, but they are not inherently constructing or designing their work to achieve a specific end through a specific manner. The end is contingently tied to the means of producing it. Pornographers do not intentionally design their artworks to arouse a specific end state in their viewers through a specific medium of presentation. Why the viewer is aroused, or how the presentation will generate that arousal, is irrelevant to the creative process. Sex arouses viewers, so pornographers merely put sex on the screen for their consumption. However, it is not clear if this is true of all pornography, at least not essentially. It is conceivable that some pornography, perhaps pornography based on specific fantasy scenarios, does require a specific manner to achieve its specific end state of arousal in its viewers. An important point to note about Uidhir’s case is that, although it is not reliant on the reception of the viewer, it still does rely on the idea that sexual arousal is a necessary condition of pornography. In fact, Uidhir doubles down on that claim by stating not simply that porn is about sexual arousal but that it is about achieving that arousal in a manner-inspecific way, thus implying that sexual arousal can be artistic if done so properly. There are several ways one might approach the arguments offered by Uidhir and Levinson, the best approach is exploratory. We approach Levinson and Uidhir not in the spirit of refutation but rather in an attempt to problematize their accounts over and against alternatives that at first blush appear to offer more fruitful ways of considering pornography. We begin with Levinson. One way to respond to Levinson is to simply point out that his criteria, as stringent as they are, are sure to exclude many cases of legitimate art as well as pornography. Consider, alongside Mans Maes, the example of the literary masterpiece, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.56 Here is a case of a work of art, sexually arousing to the reader, often read for its ability to induce desire or arousal and so in this regard transparent. But this book is also able to be read for its literary merit and thus appreciated opaquely. Here is a case where we have a work that can be entertained either way depending on the audience,  See Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” 198.  See Maes, “Drawing the Line,” 389.

55 56

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pace Levinson’s contention. Levinson does consider such instances; in fact, he laboriously attempts to draw the line between erotica, erotic art, and other variations such as pornographic art or artistic pornography, trying to demonstrate a way to acknowledge such phenomena while still maintaining a distinction between pornography and art. He states, “I suggest, then, that we treat similarly the honorable – or perhaps not so honorable – category of pornography, and exclude from its scope productions in which the pornographic element is significantly overlaid by the artistic element, often to the detriment of the former. The term ‘artful quasi-porn’ is perhaps an apt designation for productions of this sort, constituting a distinct category of items which are, strictly speaking, neither art nor porn.”57 However, all his attempt demonstrates is his adamant refusal to accept pornography as art. Is Lady Chatterley’s Lover artistic quasi-porn? And at what point does this distinction make sense, and so why is he so intent on making it? What should be clear is that Levinson is not intent on the clarification of concepts or the effective use of these concepts to better adjudge humanity’s creative works. His intention is to segregate the artworld into the decent and the smutty. If the conceptualization of his distinction no longer makes sense, and if his account lacks coherence, then the only thing driving him forward is a foregone conclusion that porn cannot be art. He has ruled out pornography by definitional fiat. If one finds a counter-example to his definition his response is to rewrite the definition to continue to exclude pornography or redefine the example in question so it fits his preconceived categories that maintain the porn-art distinction. There are other approaches that equally demonstrate the weakness, or rather implausibility, of this approach. Consider the ability of multiple audiences to appreciate works from various perspectives, and in fact for artists to aim at two distinct audiences successfully, thus producing something both appreciate from their respective  perspectives. Maes uses the example of Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s films can appeal quite readily to an audience that does not appreciate his lineage or the homages to classical samurai or Western film genres but merely enjoys the action, violence, and often over-the-top cinematics. But likewise, he can insinuate such references and cinematic components into his films intentionally, thus appealing to a more literate film consumer. Maes concludes, “films like Kill Bill and Death Proof are aimed at both audiences that ignore matters of form/vehicle/medium/manner and audiences that precisely focus on those features.”58 Considering other cinematic examples such as The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) or The Bourne Ultimatum (Paul Greengrass, 2007), Maes notes, “It sometimes happens that people first treat images as transparent and only afterwards attend to matters of form/vehicle/medium/

 Levinson, “Is Pornographic Art Comparable to Religious Art?,” 91.  Maes, “Art and Pornography,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Volume 43, Number 3 (Fall 2009), 113. 57 58

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manner – a process that can be anticipated and planned by the artist.”59 There is no a priori reason why pornographic films or paintings or photographs could not be produced in a similar vein. That is, there is no conceptual impossibility to producing a work of pornography as conceived by Levinson, transparent and produced to induce sexual arousal, and in fact doing so, as well as being produced with the intent that it will be appreciated opaquely, as a cinematic masterpiece or masterclass in presenting sex as a spectacle, and so appreciated in terms of its form, vehicle, medium, and manner. That we have yet to see such a thing is not proof that it is impossible, nor is Levinson in a position to declare it impossible when examples of such artworks exist in ample supply within the artworld. One needs to only consider pop music to see further examples where this phenomenon appears as the rule more than the exception. Artists like Madonna, Lady Gaga, David Bowie, and R.E.M speak to massive popularity, at least in their relative times, among audiences that clearly appreciated their work transparently, as catchy, lighthearted, or otherwise aurally pleasing music for mass consumption, while other audiences found in their work social criticism, musical experimentation, homages to past masters, all intentionally placed there by the artist. The phenomenon is not rare, and so its presence in film, and pornographic film, should not be contentious. Yet Levinson will contest that the central aims of art and pornography are distinct, and thus the distinctive interests war against each other, making something being both pornography and art impossible. Levinson considers Courbet’s The Origin of the World, among others, as a case in point, trying to once again clarify his distinction. He claims, “Were these, perhaps, the pornography of their day, despite the fact that they now grace the walls of our finest museums of fine art? Only, I suggest, if we are speaking hyperbolically. The arousal of male viewers was undoubtedly part of the intention with which they were painted…But surely the makers of those paintings intended as well that the attention of viewers be directed to features of the works themselves – the handling of paint, the arrangement of forms, the play of perspectives – and the relation of those features to manifest sexual content.”60 So a tightly framed beaver shot, The Origin of the World, is art because the painter was highly skilled in producing a realistic close-up of a vagina. This is not pornography. Even though it was commissioned for a pasha’s private viewing. Would Playboy cease to be pornographic if it were shot in sepia tones? Does Levinson’s case really reduce to the fact that pornography would not be pornographic if it were simply done more artfully? He continues, “There are, from my perspective, two ways to deal with this fact. The first is simply to accept that, on the conception defined here, those drawings must be accounted pornography, but pornography that it is uncommonly aesthetically rewarding, and otherwise justifiable to treat as erotic art. The second is to posit for those drawings an 59  Hans Maes, “Art or Porn: Clear Division or False Dilemma?” Philosophy and Literature, Volume 35, Number 1 (April 2011), 52. 60  Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” 237.

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implicit artistic intention as robust as the explicit pornographic one…in virtue of which they can be accounted, though uneasily, erotic art.”61 Levinson considers these counter-examples as rare, artistically rewarding examples of porn, but he is clearly uncomfortable doing so. Yet one does not want to relegate Courbet to the world of the pornographic, at least one does not want to if one has already decided that pornography is less than and Courbet is to be rescued from such a fate. Or, and this Levinson seems more willing to accede, one can find an implicit, artistic intent and thus call the work, even if “uneasily,” erotic art. So his solution to examples of art that seem to be both pornographic and art is to claim they are erotic art. The simplest solution would be to accept that they are pornographic and art without the use of euphemisms. Again, Levinson’s casuistry betrays his prejudice. It bears reiterating, “Levinson does not just say that pornographers produce bad art. Rather, he claims that what pornographers produce has nothing to do with art, that it is impossible for them to create something that is pornography and art at the same time.”62 Uidhir’s account is equally problematic. Remembering that the focus of Uidhir’s objection to the same thing being both pornographic and art is that pornography achieves its ends via a manner-­ inspecific presentation of the subject matter, whereas art is manner specific. Mimi Vasilaki presents several counter-examples. One may consider Duchamp’s Fountain, or various other “ready-mades,” and note “there is no transformation from being a shovel or a urinal to being an artwork and not being a shovel or urinal.”63 A thing can be both, regardless of how it began or continues or ends its life as an artifact. To drive the point home, regarding the distinction between manner-specific and manner-inspecific creations, Vasilaki uses the example of culinary art and food.64 She notes, rightly, that food achieves its end in a manner-inspecific way. Food merely is a delivery system for calories or a flavorful experience. Whereas culinary art requires attention to manner and form, and so culinary art is manner specific. However, this does not entail that food cannot be culinary art. In fact, culinary art could not exist without food. Nor does the material of culinary art cease being food simply because it is now being treated as culinary art. Something can occupy both positions, as with the urinal and the shovel. Uidhir’s distinction thus fails to capture a fundamental aspect of human artifacts and reality. One could, of course, dissolve the conundrum by denying the existence of such a thing as culinary art, but one could not resolve the issue by denying film as art. So we are still left with pornographic film where a thing could conceivably be created to arouse sexual desire and be a piece of artistic film. Objects can move from category to category and  Levinson, “Erotic Art and Pornographic Pictures,” 238.  Maes, “Art and Pornography,” 111. 63  Mimi Vasilaki, “Why Some Pornography May Be Art,” Philosophy and Literature, Volume 34, Number 1 (April 2010), 232. 64  See Vasilaki, “Why Some Pornography May Be Art,” 231. Maes makes a similar argument in “Art or Porn,” noting that something can be both a sofa and art. 61 62

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occupy multiple places in our world regardless of intention, purpose, design, or reception. The artworld is more fluid than Uidhir recognizes. At this point one might also note that Uidhir maintains that sexual arousal is a necessary condition of something being pornography. The problem with this approach is that it is possible to conceive of pornography not intended to arouse its audience. Consider a hypothetical world wherein the misogynistic pornography of today fails to exist due to increased sensitivity and empathy such that no one is actually aroused by depictions of gender inequity, abuse, degradation, or otherwise misogynistic presentations of sexuality. However, in this world the presence of such pornography is known and the acknowledgment of a time when it was prevalent and did arouse, where misogyny was eroticized, is viewed as a historical curiosity. In this world, film theorists, critical theorists, literary theorists, and others may appreciate or even reproduce these types of pornography for educational purposes, merely to demonstrate what had been commonplace in the past and inform contemporary society of the unseemly past from which it had grown. In this case, this pornography would not be generated to arouse, it would be generated to educate, but its content would be identical to pornography that had been generated to arouse and effectively did so in a less enlightened time. Would Uidhir claim that this new porn was no longer pornography since its intention was different, even though its content was identical to what otherwise would have been pornography had the intention been to arouse? Again, one is left wondering, with so many counter-examples, why Uidhir, alongside Levinson, is so vested in excluding pornography from the artworld. If any reasonable, workable definition of art includes pornography why struggle to redefine art, unsuccessfully, merely to exclude the pornographic? If there are workable, effective definitions of pornography that capture most or all pornographic content, yet which also leave open the possibility that pornography may be art, and if the best, most viable definitions of art also include pornography, then why try to redefine pornography or art to the point of incoherence merely to exclude the possibility that some pieces of art may be both art and pornographic? The answer would appear to lie in the word itself, or perhaps the origin of the word. As Vasilaki notes, “The term pornography is a nineteenth-century neologism from the Greek porne [prostitute] and graphein [writing]. Pornography means ‘the writing of whores.’”65 Perhaps some theorists simply cannot envision or accept that either whores can make art or art can take as legitimate subject matter, whores. Perhaps, among all of our emotions or responses that art may trigger or elicit, we are still so puritan as to find sexual arousal as inherently filthy, dirty, or infelicitous. Whatever the underlying motivation behind the furtherance of this debate, one thing seems apparent, it is not motivated by pure conceptual analysis or necessity, as resultant conversations lead to further obfuscation.

 Vasilaki, “Why Some Pornography May Be Art,” 232.

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However, relegating pornography to the dustbin of film theory does us all a disservice. The subject matter of pornography, sex and sexuality, is as essential to the human experience and as fundamental to our shared self-understanding as humor, violence, love, compassion, generosity, fear, or any other “legitimate” topic of mainstream and artistically ideal or superior film. As one theorist notes, “sex is too important to be left to the sex-film industry.”66 Of course, what is so obvious as to not need stating is that a great deal of pornographic film is bad. That is, even if one were to acknowledge porn as legitimate cinematic art focusing on the presentation of sex and sexuality as a spectacle for its own sake, a great deal of pornographic film is poorly executed. From poor production quality, to shoddy acting, to repetitive narratives, when present, and stock shots and framings of sex scenes, much pornography is the worst type of offender when it comes to popular art or rather art for popular consumption. But this should not be surprising. Pornography is a huge industry, a multi-billion dollar industry and it is primarily operated by production companies seeking to make money by selling what they know will sell. “Most porn films are made to give their target group what they want without delay, surprise, or ambiguity.”67 So most porn films are bad for the same reasons most movies are bad. They are money-making enterprises meant to appeal to the widest possible audience by giving them what they tend to want in the way they tend to want it. But this does not mean that pornographic films cannot be art. The presence of a great deal of bad pornography does not preclude pornography in general from being artfully done. But this does mean that viewers have to look harder, and producers need to be given time and leeway, as well as support. So long as pornography is dismissed out of hand, no potentially good or actually great film maker is going to venture into that territory. If one knows from the outset that one’s product will be decried without even a cursory glance, why would one vest the time, energy, and resources necessary to produce that artwork? So the relegation of pornography to the periphery of film precludes the possibility of experimentation, of legitimate film makers taking up the topic, or entering the genre.68 Recognizing sex and sexuality as legitimate in itself, and recognizing its presentation as legitimate, opens up a new genre of film, namely, pornography, for artistic consideration, experimentation, and evaluation. One could thus take an aesthetic interest in pornography as a genre, as the presentation of sex for sex’s sake. Consider, alongside Christopher Bartel, the example of an editor for a pornographic magazine.69 The editor perceives the picture, not in order to arouse himself, not to consume it as a customer or purchaser of the magazine will, but as a photographer, as an artist. The editor views the picture and 66  Richard Corliss, “In Defense of Dirty Movies.” Time Magazine (July 5, 1999). Cited in Maes, “Art or Porn,” 63. 67  Brabandt and Prinz, “Why Do Porn Films Suck?,” 179. 68  See Brabandt and Prinz, “Why Do Porn Films Suck?,” 175. 69  Bartel, “The ‘Fine Art’ of Pornography,” 158.

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­ onders if it presents the body, the sex act, the image in the proper way. One p can view pornographic pictures and films with the eye of a critic, with the eye of an artist, because the objects are susceptible to artistic reflection, so long as sex and the presentation of sex are taken as legitimate subjects for photography, film, or various other media. One could then envision what good pornography would consist in. If pornography is about the spectacle of sex, presented as spectacular, then a quality pornographic film would be one where the sex presented is done so in its purity, or in a relevant context where the event of the sex act itself can be appreciated as a sexual act, in the same way one may appreciate a beautiful instrumental solo from a virtuoso on its own, even outside of the context of the masterpiece of which it is part. One could appreciate the sex act as presented, as a pure presentation of sex. In addition, one could envision varied presentations, alternative framings or settings, diverse contexts, and so forth that help present a more sweeping or panoramic vision of sex and sexuality. A more constructive approach to pornography would be to adjudge pornography as good or bad in terms of exemplars of its kind. But this approach requires that pornography be accepted as legitimate art. Unfortunately, a great many are reticent to allow pornography into the artworld. One prominent and compelling reason is that pornography as a social artifact has been perceived to be socially harmful and does not deserve to be elevated to the status of art.

The Value of Pornography Beyond its value as art, pornography is contentious for its social utility. Most arguments against pornography maintain that it facilitates discrimination, leads to inequality, or otherwise has deleterious social effects. In response, some contend that the value of pornography lay in its interrogation of alternative or transgressive sexualities or its educational or experiential benefits while acknowledging the fact that it is protected as free speech. In what follows, we quickly traverse this ground highlighting the major arguments in this debate. The legal history of pornography in the United States is intimately tied to, yet not exhausted by, the discourse surrounding obscenity and free speech. The first federal law restricting obscene material was the “Comstock Act.” Passed in 1873 by the 42nd Congress this act restricted the trade, possession, manufacture, and distribution of “obscene” materials and materials of an “immoral nature.”70 The ability of the government to regulate such material went unquestioned until Roth v. United States (1957).71 In Roth, the Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C 1461 which made punishable the mailing of “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy” materials.

 17 Stat. 598 (1873).  Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).

70 71

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Justice William Brennan, delivering the opinion of the court, claimed that the first amendment does not protect “obscene” speech.72 As justification he offered a brief history of state and federal laws that prohibited various forms of speech, from obscenity to blasphemy.73 Brennan concluded that the First Amendment was never meant to protect every utterance. Its ostensible purpose is to assure “unfettered interchange of ideas for bringing about political and social changes desired by the people.”74 Thus, exceptions to First Amendment protections apply to those ideas or expressions that do not possess “redeeming social importance.”75 Obscenity is unprotected, according to Brennan, since it is not valuable. Justice Brennan offered the following definition of obscenity: “The standard for obscenity…is whether, to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.”76 Brennan’s intention was to offer a definition that was neither too broad nor too narrow. Brennan wanted to include all and only obscene material. He was sensitive to the problem that a vague, evaluative definition could lead to overbroad applications, undue suppression of free speech, and perhaps even violate fair notice and tried to be as precise as possible. He was also clear that obscenity and sex were not synonymous. He did not want to suppress legitimate contributions to public discourse. The problems Roth created were numerous, and the court spent almost two decades wrestling with them. The definition of obscenity was adapted as new cases were adjudicated. In one decision the court claimed obscene materials must be “utterly without redeeming social importance.”77 The justices labored for years with defining obscenity, until one justice finally claimed in exasperation, “I know it when I see it.”78 In 1973 the court revisited the issue of obscenity in a pair of rulings, Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) and Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slayton, 413 U.S. 49 (1973). In Miller, the court offered new guidelines for the determination of obscenity. The new guidelines consisted of three criteria for the determination of obscenity: “a) whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary standards’ would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”79

 Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957).  Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957) at 482–484. 74  Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957) at 484. 75  Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957). 76  Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957) at 477. 77  Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964). 78  Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964), (Stewart, J. concurring). 79  Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). 72 73

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Justice Brennan appears to have had a change of heart and in Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slayton recanted his support for the court’s definition and application of obscenity standards. He claimed that this new standard, particularly the claim that a work merely needs to be shown to lack “serious” value, causes the statute to be overbroad and so suppresses a great deal of what ought to be protected expression.80 In addition, this standard failed “to provide adequate notice to persons who are engaged in the type of conduct the statute could be thought to proscribe,” and invited “arbitrary and erratic enforcement of the law.”81 Brennan concluded, “in absence of some very substantial interest in suppressing such speech, we can hardly condone the ill effects that seem to flow inevitably from the effort.”82 These concerns continued to guide the legal discourse over pornography and obscenity. In 1986, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Attorney General Edwin Meese’s commission on pornography released its report. The commission considered several categories of pornography including pornography denoted “sexually violent,” “non-violent depicting degradation, domination, subordination, or humiliation,” and “non-violent and non-degrading.” The findings were as follows. In regard to the first two categories of sexually explicit material noted above it was found that viewers exposed to such material demonstrated “attitudinal changes.” “The attitudinal changes are numerous. Victims of rape or other forms of sexual violence are likely to be perceived by people so exposed as more responsible for the assault, as having suffered less injury, and as having been less degraded as a result of the experience.” In addition, they are “likely to see the rapist or other sexual offender as less responsible for the act and as deserving of less stringent punishment.” Finally, viewing such materials leads to “a greater acceptance of the ‘rape myth’ in its broader sense – that women enjoy being coerced into sexual activity, that they enjoy being physically hurt in sexual context.”83 Works denoted “non-violent and non-degrading” failed to show a similar impact on viewers. The question in terms of governmental regulations is whether pornography crosses over from being speech to being conduct, that is, does it incite violence or immanent lawless action. Is there a causal link between the consumption of pornography and sexually violent, criminal behavior? Here the commission was clear, “We have not found…that the images people are exposed to are a greater cause of sexual violence than all or even many other possible causes.”84 So although the attitudinal changes are worrisome, and perhaps some connections between “substantial exposure” to this kind of material and sexual violence or coercion may be possibly determinable, so much so that the commission does  Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 47 (1973), (Brennan, J. dissenting).  Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 47 (1973), (Brennan, J. dissenting), at 86, 88 respectively. 82  Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 47 (1973), (Brennan, J. dissenting), at 103. 83  “From Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report,” in Doing Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues, 2nd edition, ed. Lewis Vaughn (New York: W.  W. Norton & Company, 2010), p. 358–359. 84  “From Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report,” 358. 80 81

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think pornography is “on the whole harmful to society,”85 the causal connection is not significant enough to warrant regulation of pornography. But public safety and health concerns do not end at sexual violence. In 1983, Harold Freeman, president of the Hollywood Video Production Company, was arrested and prosecuted for five counts of pandering during production of his adult film Caught from Behind, Part II, one count for each of the actresses hired to perform in the film. In 1988, his case was brought before the California Supreme Court, and his conviction was overturned when the court ruled that paying acting fees to perform in an adult film was not pandering. The issue raised in People v. Freeman was whether the sex in pornographic films, as conduct, is protected by the First Amendment, or is it strictly conduct, that is, sex for remuneration in which case it is prostitution and procuring such services pandering. The court concluded that the fee paid was for acting services, and since the act itself, sex between consenting adults, “when considered aside from the payment of the acting fees [is] itself lawful,”86 there was no lewd act performed and so no pandering. In addition, “the fact that the People concede that a film identical to that in this case could be made lawfully if the performers were not paid also belies the asserted ‘public health’ interest.”87 Thus, pornographic films are not forms of prostitution, nor does the production of such films pose a public health risk. The court noted, “the prosecution…under the pandering statute must be viewed as a somewhat transparent attempt at an ‘end run’ around the First Amendment and the state obscenity laws.”88 And should such a prosecution have been successful the impact on speech would have been significant. They noted, “to subject the producer and director of a nonobscene motion picture depicting sexual conduct to prosecution and punishment…would rather obviously place a substantial burden on the exercise of protected First Amendment rights.”89 Insofar as there is no public health interest, and the actions are not in themselves illegal, the production of a pornographic film is not an illegal act, nor does it include the illegal acts of pandering or prostitution. As films, then, pornography has had to distinguish itself as non-obscene, proving that it offers some redeeming value or serious merit. In addition, as film, it has been defended against charges of pandering insofar as the performances paid for, namely sex acts, were paid for as performances in a film, as performance art, not as paid sex acts equivalent to prostitution. In both instances what has been noted is that pornography, and in specific, pornographic film, has a redeeming value and is a performance not of pure sexual

 “From Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Final Report,” 359–361.  People v. Freeman (1988) 46 Cal. 3d 419. 87  People v. Freeman (1988) 46 Cal. 3d 419. 88  People v. Freeman (1988) 46 Cal. 3d 419. 89  People v. Freeman (1988) 46 Cal. 3d 419. 85 86

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gratification. Yet, beyond free speech and artistic merit, others worry that pornography has deleterious effects on its consumers and society as a whole. One classic and influential position against porn is Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin’s claim that pornography “eroticizes hierarchy, it sexualizes inequality…It institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, fusing the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”90 As a practice, they contend, pornography reinforces a hierarchy of inequality and perpetuates a culture that excuses and rationalizes sexual aggression and male dominance. Insofar as the discourse of pornography sets and maintains expectations it creates a narrative about what women are and how they fit into society. Insofar as these expectations are adopted and reified through our subsequent decisions and interactions they create a reality of gender inequality. Andrea Dworkin reiterates, “Pornography is the material means of sexualizing inequality; and that is why pornography is a central practice in the subordination of women.”91 Rae Langton’s work focuses on a similar claim. Langton claims that pornography silences women insofar as it disables the illocutionary effectiveness of certain speech acts. Working from J.  L. Austin’s speech act theory, Langton offers an account of how words do things, one notable instance being illocutionary statements where words affect a change in the world. Illocutionary statements only function in a socially constructed world of symbols if felicity conditions are met, that is, if the authority exists to utter such an illocution and it is taken up in the right context, namely, the utterance is recognized by the addressee in its original intention and the authority of the speaker is recognized and respected. One is only able to perform an illocutionary act if one has the authority to perform such an act and the addressee recognizes and respects that authority. Silence is the result of having the felicity conditions of one’s otherwise functional illocutionary utterance removed; one is thus effectively disabled from being able to achieve with one’s words what one otherwise might have been able to so achieve. This can occur for two reasons: first, the intention of the speaker may be misinterpreted such that the illocutionary act attempting to be effectuated is misconstrued; second, the intention of the speaker can be clear and clearly understood but the addressee may fail to recognize or respect the speaker’s authority to make such an illocution. The idea that pornography is discriminatory is tied to the idea that pornography limits women’s capabilities through various forms of illocutionary disablement.92 Consider, along with Mary Kate McGowan, the example of sexual refusal. She contends that women are often the victims of sexual assault and violence because their refusal is misrecognized. This disablement can be accounted for 90  Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Frances Biddle’s Sister: Pornography, Civil Rights, and Speech,” in The Problem of Pornography, ed. Susan Dwyer (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1995), pp. 59–60. 91  Andrea Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood,” in Feminism and Pornography, ed. Drucilla Cornell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 30. 92  Langton, Sexual Solipsism, especially Chapters 1 and 3.

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in the two ways indicated above. One could claim that when the dominant narrative in pornography, wherein women utter “No” but mean “Yes,” is taken as authoritative, uptake is denied to women’s sexual refusals. That is, the intention behind a woman’s refusal is misconstrued since the addressee has been acculturated to interpret women’s refusals as coded messages to be more persistent. But the problem is not solely one of uptake. It is not simply that the intention of the female speaker is misinterpreted. The problem is that often these illocutions fail because women are not recognized as having the authority to refuse sexual advances. McGowan, borrowing from Austin as well, notes that some authoritative speech acts “set the boundaries of permissibility through ‘the exercising of powers.’”93 These speech acts are denoted “exercitives.” Sexual refusal is a form of exercitive where a woman is not authorizing sexual access to her body. When this capacity is denied it is not that the addressee misunderstands a woman’s intention when she refuses sexual advances, it is that he does not recognize her authority to exercise this type of control over her body. If for MacKinnon porn discriminates through the sexualization of power, here it silences by reinforcing the narrative where women never refuse and, in fact, lack the ability to do so. If porn is able to delineate the scope of exercitives by dictating who is and is not able to make these kinds of claims, it can silence women through illocutionary disablement. The silence that Langton is concerned about, and the discrimination that MacKinnon militates against is the result of a dominant narrative, one that sexualizes women, objectifies them, and thereby diminishes their position in society. This kind of discourse arguably does silence women by both interfering with uptake and denying women the authority to exercise control over their sexual destinies, as McGowan iterates. However, pornography is not the sole culprit. The discourse that demeans and degrades women is the discourse that sexualizes them. This discourse is ubiquitous in contemporary culture from Barbie to Girls Gone Wild, from hard-core pornography to beauty pageants. Women’s lowered social status and their subsequent silence is a result of a narrative that reduces them to sexual objects, and this narrative is pervasive in the media. Recent work focusing on sexualization highlights “pornification,” or how porn sensibilities infiltrate all aspects of culture, often focusing specifically on the problem of the over-sexualization of girls and young women.94 In this regard, many of the issues that have motivated the discourse on pornography seem to indicate that a shift from the classic debate regarding free speech and 93  Mary Kate McGowan, “Debate: On Silencing and Sexual Refusal,” in The Journal of Political Philosophy 17:4 (2009): p. 489. 94  See: M. Gigi Durham, The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It (New York: Overlook Press, 2008); Diane E. Levin and Jean Kilbourne, So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009); Patrice A.  Oppliger, Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in American Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2008).

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discrimination as exemplified through the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon to encompass a much broader phenomenon is needed. Pornification is the term given to the influence porn culture has on mainstream media sometimes referred to as “pornification,”95 as culture becoming “porned,”96 “pornified,”97 or simply denoted as “raunch culture.”98 This influence is taken as part of the trend in culture to sexualize childhood, specifically the childhood of young girls. Sexualization occurs when “a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior…a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness…with being sexy; a person is sexually objectified…[and/or] sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.”99 The sexualization of girls in our culture negatively impacts them in several ways. The definitive effects of sexualization are unclear; however, preliminary data indicate the effects are far ranging and far from negligible. Self-­ objectification, that is, treating oneself as a commodity, a sexual object to be assessed and ultimately consumed, can lead to a fragmentation of one’s consciousness, leading to difficulty concentrating and so lowered performance on tests and in other academic pursuits, perhaps leading many young women to not pursue these endeavors since they subsequently find them unfulfilling or difficult.100 Focusing on one’s body image and imposed expectations, often unachievable or downright harmful if met, can lead to feelings of shame, anxiety, and self-disgust.101 One would suspect that this mentality would lead to myriad problems beyond those catalogued such as eating disorders, low self-­ esteem, and depression or depressed mood.102 These effects have been noted by several authors.103 Girls surely bear the brunt of sexualization, but the effects are felt throughout culture. The effects of sexualization can negatively impact boys and men through setting up unrealistic or harmful expectations about masculinity, sexual relationships, and female sexuality resulting in most notably, a lack of empathy for women. Such dispositions can harm not only men’s capacity to form

95  Susanna Paasonen et  al. Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 96  Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M.  Scott, The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008). 97  Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography is Damaging our Lives, our Relationships, and our Families (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005). 98  Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005). 99  American Psychological Association, Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007), 2. Retrieved from www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html 100  APA, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, 22. 101  APA, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, 23. 102  APA, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, 24. 103  Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Levin and Kilbourne, So Sexy, So Soon.

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meaningful relationships but promote and reinforce sexism through the acceptance of sexual harassment and the dismissal of women’s issues as legitimate.104 What these studies emphasize is that one of the foundational concerns about pornography, that it foments an atmosphere hostile to women and women’s interests, is not unique to pornography. In fact, given the prevalence and content of contemporary sexualized media, mainstream media outlets are greater purveyors of harmful or demeaning gender stereotypes than hard-core pornography. Alternatively, many claim that pornography can be beneficial. Wendy McElroy notes that pornography “provides sexual information…it gives a panoramic view of the world’s sexual possibilities; it allows women to ‘safely’ experience sexual alternatives; and, it provides a different form of information than can be found in textbooks or discussions.” In addition, pornography “breaks cultural and political stereotypes…is the great leveler of shame…[and] can serve as sexual therapy.”105 Others have noted similar points. For example, Ariane Cruz notes that some minority pornographers use their platform to represent “marginalized sexualities.”106 Likewise, elliptically criticizing MacKinnon while discussing the benefit of the presentation of alternative sexualities in pornography, such as trans∗ individuals, Joy Bradley claims, “Rather than simply tolerating pornography as a form of free speech, problematic though it may be, there is the value in showing how pornography itself, as a ‘cultural form of sexual representation,’ can pose a powerful challenge to normative and compulsory sexualities and gender presentation.”107 The value of pornography may reside in the presentation of alterative sexualities, and access to more rather than less information in such cases would arguably be beneficial to adult consumers. The fact that people oppose the images in pornography or sexualized media should be because they view sex as an important element of our lives, a fundamental aspect of our natures, and a foundational way in which we engage with each other. But as a foundational element of our lives we cannot a priori reject as demeaning and degrading sex acts some may interpret as violent, misogynistic, or otherwise untoward expressions of sexuality but which others find fulfilling. Rough sex can be mutually fulfilling. Bondage can be a legitimate expression of one’s sexuality.108 Thus we need a more comprehensive, more  APA, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, 29–35.  McElroy, XXX, 129. 106  See Ariane Cruz, “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves: Black Women and the New Pornography,” in The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Lindsay Coleman and Jacob M. Held (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). 107  Joy Simmons Bradley, “In the Arms of the Angel: Playfulness, Creativity, and Porn’s Possibilities,” in The Philosophy of Pornography: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Lindsay Coleman and Jacob M. Held (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 265. 108  For discussions on mutual, beneficial BDSM sex, see Maria Chavez, Chris Gavaler, and Nathaniel Goldberg, “Loving Lassos: Wonder Woman, Kink, and Care,” In Wonder Woman and Philosophy: The Amazonian Mystique, edited by Jacob M.  Held (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017) and Shaun Miller, “BDSM,” in The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings, edited by Raja Halwani, Alan Soble, Sarah Hoffman, and Jacob M. Held (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). 104 105

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engaged discourse on pornography. Recognizing pornography as simply the presentation of sex and sexuality for its own sake, without thereby decrying or vilifying it, opens up the discourse on a topic fundamental to our lives but too often hidden from view.

Conclusion Pornography exists. Pornographic films exist. There are, and probably forever will be, films that feature sex as the dominant theme, that present sex as a mere spectacle with little or no context or only a nod to narrative. This is simply what pornographic films are. Narrative has always been secondary to pornography. The story was an alibi, a maneuver to avoid obscenity laws. But to point out this fact is not to decry pornographic films or to denigrate them. To do so would be to denigrate sex itself. Pornographic films are simply a medium in which to present a particular presentation of sex. This description does not invite any specific evaluation. Yet the response of many people to pornographic films is evaluative and often more indicative of their attitudes regarding sex and sexuality than the artistic value of pornography itself. Likewise, some films are art. Given any workable definition of art, film as a medium will fall under that aegis, and specific instances of films within various film genres will meet that definition and so deserve the appellation “art.” Even so, there will be films that even if art are bad art, just as surely as some will be good. The subject matter is irrelevant. Love, humor, relationships, sex…all of these topics are possible topics of films and so possible topics of art. Sex is a legitimate topic of art, it is a topic in film. So it does not seem problematic to acknowledge that a topic of art, handled in a recognized artistic medium, can be art. Pornographic films can be art, even if the vast majority of them are bad. Knowing what porn is and having a criterion of evaluation allows us to discern the good from the bad, the ideal example of a film that presents the spectacle of sex well, as opposed to one that does so poorly. There is no reason why a film that presents sex in and of itself cannot also be art, even if many of them do so poorly and so are bad art. The evaluation of an artwork from a social, political, legal, or moral point of view comes after the initial work of discernment. Once we know what counts as art or a particular member of a genre of art, then we can assess that specific token for its relative merit. Unfortunately, in the case of pornographic films, the processes become conflated, and one’s negative moral or social or political evaluation of pornography often prejudices the initial inquiry and demands that nothing that is “smutty” or “filthy” be deemed “art.” However, whether something is art is one question, whether it is good art another, and whether it is valuable or provides some component of social utility yet another inquiry altogether. With a working definition of pornography we can evaluate good porn versus bad porn, in terms of films that exemplify the genre versus also-­ rans. We can also look at those instances of both good and bad examples of porn and evaluate them in terms of moral criteria. But the processes are distinct.

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Sex plays an important role in our lives. It is a definitive characteristic of the human condition. We are sexual beings. Art is humanity’s creative endeavor to interrogate and forge meaning into our lives. Sex and sexuality have always been themes in these endeavors. Pornographic film deals with a fundamental aspect of our lives. To be sure, much of it is tasteless, crass, and consumed for the obvious reason of sexual arousal. But this should not foreclose the possibility of it being artfully done and received as art. We ought not relegate all pornographic presentations of sex as “less than.” In so doing, we limit the free exchange of ideas, our discourse over sex and sexuality, and subsequently hinder our capacity to further our own self-understanding.

CHAPTER 32

Propaganda and the Moving Image Sheryl Tuttle Ross

Introduction When thinking about propaganda and the moving image, one readily calls to mind Nazi propaganda films Olympia (1935) and Triumph of the Will (1938) with its fetishized images of Aryan beauty or perhaps Johnson’s famous Daisy Commercial (1964) where a little girl picks the petals off a flower, the soundtrack bellows a countdown that ends with images of mushroom clouds, nuclear bombs detonating. However, the moving image’s role in propaganda is not merely limited to films and commercials but extends to movie theaters, online content and to the social space of the cinema. Nearly 100 years before Internet bots were accused on swaying elections, in cinemas across the United States, there were men who would offer speeches, in favor of the US military entering World War I, during the intermissions between films to unsuspecting moviegoers. One example, “while we sit here tonight, enjoying a picture show, are you aware that thousands and thousands of people in Europe—people not unlike ourselves—are languishing in slavery under Prussian masters?”1 Most people, who could afford it, would go to the cinema at least once a week in order to view Hollywood’s latest and to catch up on the Newsreels.2 The unsuspecting audience, simply awaiting the next screening, would be encouraged to buy Thrift Stamps and War Savings Stamps and exhorted to remain alert and vigilant with the slogan: Make the world safe for

 Stuart Ewen PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 102.  Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 1994), 82. 1 2

S. T. Ross (*) University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_32

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democracy!3 This propaganda campaign was made to seem like spontaneous acts of civic engagement, but it was actually highly coordinated, conducted by the US Committee on Public Information (CPI) run by, then famous ad-man, George Creel; the CPI was established by President Woodrow Wilson after the European Alliance had declared war on Germany. Known as the Four Minute Men (presumably because of the length of their speeches), the orators’ persuasion has been credited with shifting public opinion about the wisdom of entering the war.4 The rise of mass media or mass culture, including magazines, radio and the moving image—film, television and eventually digital images— corresponds with a rise in concerns about propaganda’s power. Around the same time as the Four Minute Men speeches, and having the distinction of being both the first Hollywood blockbuster and the first film ever shown inside the White House, Birth of a Nation (1915) was purportedly described by President Wilson as “Writing history with lightning.”5 The graphically racist film offers a historical revision of Reconstruction in order to promote the birth of the Aryan nation. This film is important in the history of film because of the groundbreaking advances in editing, but it is also important to consider it as a propaganda—the first of its kind, paradigmatically a propaganda film. In contrast to what happened with the Four Minute Men audiences, the propaganda here is with the content of the film itself. Overtly political and highly misleading—the so-called lightening-written history is an ideological fever-dream intent on demeaning and degrading an entire population. The worldwide commercial success of the film would influence the history of film and propaganda. Propaganda is a larger phenomenon than film propaganda; it also encompasses the written and spoken word, music, pictures, and as technology advances propaganda’s reach likewise advances to include YouTube videos and Gifs. Propaganda can involve the moving image in all its complexity. Hence, as a broad social phenomenon, propaganda and the moving image reward philosophical contemplation, and it is important to have a rather broad conception of philosophy when subjecting the moving image to philosophical analysis because much of the scholarship about propaganda and the moving image occurs across several academic disciplines. The task here is to integrate a large body of scholarship in order to give an overview of how thinking about propaganda can enrich our understanding of film and how thinking about film (and the moving image more generally) can deepen our insights into propaganda’s machinations.

 Ewen, PR!, 104.  Ewen, PR!, 104. 5  Mark Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and Like Writing History with Lightening,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, vol. 9 No. 4, October 2010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20799409 3 4

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Propaganda Simpliciter The first step in providing a philosophical analysis of propaganda and the moving image is to identify what makes propaganda, propaganda. That is, we must address the metaphysical question: what is propaganda? There may be some who object to this way of proceeding by suggesting that propaganda itself does not have an essence, per se, but, instead, it has a history. Others might complain that the metaphysics are messy or that the word itself lacks seriousness, and it is simply used to discredit a political opponent by name-calling instead of engaging in sincere political discourse. However, the objections contain within them a hint on how we might proceed metaphysically. If propaganda is usefully contrasted with sincere political discourse, perhaps propaganda is at its heart some sort of political discourse. Moreover, considering propaganda’s history may provide insights into its nature. To be clear, in order to address the question of propaganda’s nature, we do not need to make grand metaphysical commitments—it need not have a Platonic form nor Aristotelian essence. The task of identifying propaganda is important because it offers us a heuristic device, a way of figuring out how propaganda functions and its impact on the way we live. We are investigating a social practice that has and continues to have a wide range of social effects and political consequences. Philosophers have been worried about propaganda at least since Plato recommended that most poets be banned from the just state, and Socrates quarreled with the sophists and rhetoricians. Although Pope Gregory XV coined the term “propaganda” in 1622 to refer to the Roman curia who endeavored to win back support for the Catholic Church by prayers and good deeds as Protestantism took hold, the term did not enjoy its contemporary currency until the rise of mass culture at the end of the nineteenth century.6 “Propaganda” in its classical sense meant something along the lines of mere persuasion, preaching or education.7 It crucially involved the study of communication: rhetoric and oratory. Rhetoric and oratory were contrasted with philosophy in Plato’s Ion and Gorgias with philosophy being concerned with the truth of the matter, whereas oratory and rhetoric were merely concerned with the formal features and flourishes—mere appearances. The idea that deception is a necessary part of maintaining social order has its philosophical roots in Plato’s Noble Lie and continues through the advice that Machiavelli gives in The Prince that it is better to be feared than to be loved because love is fickle and fear is constant. When describing the attributes necessary to be a good ruler, Machiavelli writes, “it is necessary to be a great feigner and dissembler; and men are so simple and so ready to obey present necessity that one who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”8 Rousseau’s Emile articulates a conception of education that goes  Robert Jackall, introduction to Propaganda (New York: New York University Press, 1995) 1.  Jackall, Propaganda, 1. 8  Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Penguin, 1952) 93. 6 7

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beyond the mere rational and suggests that one’s educational charges be protected deceptively from unseemly influences until the child is suitably prepared through moral and emotional education. In contrast, the pursuit of truth and justice seems to be inextricably interlinked in political philosophy, perhaps most prominently liberal democratic political theories. The liberal democratic theories of John Locke and Immanuel Kant stress that rational discourse and the ability of humans to reason is central to any just state. The importance of ideal rational discourse is germane to John Rawls’ original position for articulating the principles of justice and likewise important to Jurgen Habermas’ strong communicative action where one must have shared rationally informed goals that are indeed worthy of pursuit. Even libertarian, Robert Nozick’s economic version of justice is dependent upon rational actors behaving in their own economic best interest. In short, the history of political philosophy is one where the meaning of justice is dependent upon a conception of human beings as inherently being rational and a conception of justice that can be elucidated through philosophical methods. If liberal democratic states depend upon the voices of a rationally informed electorate, and if propaganda can subvert rationality, then it looks as if the social stability required for rational debate to occur is called into question. On the face of it, propaganda seems to be the polar opposite of philosophy—is the meaning of propaganda as simple as being anti-philosophical? Given that there are as many ways to be “anti-philosophical” as there are ways of doing philosophy, this suggestion is not immediately helpful. If we start with the definition of propaganda, we can isolate the features that make film or moving images propagandistic. Definitions of propaganda offer a philosophical way forward, by considering what the features of propaganda are entailed by the definitions. Since film has been a major medium of propaganda, it can provide us with examples for generalizations about propaganda and counterexamples to demonstrate that some definitions of propaganda require further theorizing. Hence, our approach to the topic might proceed philosophically, even dialectically. To do so, it is useful to group theories of propaganda in the following categories: Neutral, Negative, Omnipresent, Top-down and Heterogeneous. This allows us to ascertain how films and the moving image more generally have been used propagandistically and how mass media theorists have forwarded ideas about the moving image’s propaganda value.

Neutral Propaganda The idea that propaganda is simply another name for mere persuasion is fairly common. There is often an assumption that propaganda is didactic or necessary part of any dialectic in which the truth will be out. Bertrand Russell, Alfred Lee, William Hummel and Keith Huntress all mention or allude to persuasion in their definitions of propaganda:

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• “Propaganda is any attempt to persuade anyone of any belief”9 (Hummel and Huntress); • “Propaganda may be defined as any attempt by means of persuasion to enlist human beings in the service of one party to any dispute”10 (Bertrand Russell); and • “Propaganda is an expression overtly set forth or covertly implied in order to influence the attitudes and through the attitudes, the opinions and actions of a public”11 (Alfred Lee). All of these definitions have in common that propaganda is a species of persuasion and the idea that the persuasion would be causally effective in influencing others’ beliefs, desires or actions. There is nothing inherently bad or especially sinister about propaganda according to these definitions. In fact, by these lights, propaganda might even be a vehicle for truth and justice. These definitions account for the fact that propaganda has been involved in community health campaigns from Slip, Slop, Slap to reduce the risks of skin cancer from overexposure to the sun in Australia to the worldwide Silence = Death protests by AIDS activists to increase awareness and funding for medical research in order to reduce the stigma affiliated with HIV-positive status and to combat the spread of and damage caused by the HIV virus. Propaganda in this sense may be necessary for any form of government or social order that depends upon persuasion to develop rules or policies. Filmmakers, especially documentary filmmakers, were sympathetic to this view that cinema is a form of persuasion, one which reveals truth. In the film Le Petit Soldat, Jean-Luc Goddard suggests “Photography is truth; the cinema is truth 24 frames per second.” The premise that photography merely captures an underlying reality and that filmmaking is essentially a type of photography makes this quip seem nearly tautological. Early films such as Lumière’s Exiting a Factory or Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) or even Baby’s Lunch (1895) seem to support this view. Moreover, many of the actualitiés of early cinema provide historical evidence as we can see the appearance and demeanor of a US president in President McKinley at Home (1897) or the damage done by San Francisco: Aftermath of an Earthquake (1906). One of the earliest films (arguably, proto-cinema) addresses an empirical question: when a horse gallops, do their hooves ever leave the ground at the same time?12 We know that they do because of the evidence that photography and early cinema provide. Early cinema was predominately documentary in genre (although A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Great Train Robbery (1903) are notable exceptions). The intuitive idea that the mechanical capture of the world represents evidence 9  William Hummell and Keith Huntress, The Analysis of Propaganda (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Wilson, 1949) 2. 10  Betrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1953) 126. 11  Alfred Lee, How to Understand Propaganda (New York: Rinehart and Company, 1953) 18. 12  Dean W. Duncan, Landmarks of Early Film (Film Preservation Associates, 1994).

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to justify beliefs, gave rise to the credence afforded documentary films. John Grierson, often regarded as the father of documentary film and founder of the National Film Board of Canada, wholly embraced film’s propaganda potential as an integral part of education. He holds that film provides students with more than simply reading, writing and arithmetic, but a so-called fourth R, rooted belief.13 Although not a perfect documentary, films such as Nanook of the North (1922), Grierson maintained can “widen the horizons of the schoolroom and give to every individual each his place and work, a living conception of the community which he has the privilege to serve.”14 Grierson suggested that there was positive political good to be gained through documentary film. “We can take his imagination beyond the boundaries of his community to discover the destiny of his country. We can light up his life with a sense of active citizenship. We can give him a sense of greater reality in the present and a vision of the future.”15 The sort of politics Grierson has in mind is relatively generic “ties that bind” or the creation of a sense of community. It turns on the idea that a shared history will forge a shared future. The Moscow Film School, known as the VGIK, was formed after the Bolshevik Revolution in order to unite a vast geographical area under a new government. Film’s visual component was seen as an efficient way to convey information and to consolidate the audience’s emotional reactions thought to be critical for this political purpose.16 Inspired by D.W.  Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), and motivated by a lack of film stock in post-War Russia, Lev Kuleshov famously experimented with the ordering of shots of that film in order to create an intended effect in the viewer’s mind, reasoning that the ordering and placement of shots can create different meanings and more robust meanings than the simple shots contain. In another sequencing experiment, Kuleshov discovered when the image of a plain-faced man is put before the image of a bowl of soup, he is regarded by the audience as hungry, whereas the same image shown first and then the image of him in front of a pointed gun, the audience regards the man as brave.17 Kuleshov’s insights had a profound effect on a fellow Russian filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, and his views on the power of the cinema. One of the fathers of agitprop cinema of the Soviet Union, Eisenstien’s Potemkin (1925) is 86  minutes long, but it contains 1346 shots.18 He developed the montage theory of film editing to parallel Marxist dialectical reasoning—thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The sequencing of the films can be ordered through metric,  Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on Documentary (New York: Praeger, 1971) 246.  Hardy, Grierson on Documentary. 15  Hardy, Grierson on Documentary. 16  John P.  Hess, “The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage,” Filmmaker IQ (2014). 17  Hess, Filmmaker IQ. 18  Hess, Filmmaker IQ. 13 14

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rhythmic, tonal or intellectual montages.19 That is, different scenes can be edited together by paying attention to the length of the cut, the spacing and visual continuity or the feel of the image, but perhaps, most importantly, in term of propaganda, is the creation of visual metaphors through intellectual montage. So, for example, the juxtaposition of the slaughtering of the bull with “herds of workers” gives rise to the visual metaphor that workers are being treated like meat or worse than chattel. To put Eisenstein’s films in context, David Bordwell writes, “Eisenstien’s films can usefully be understood as part of a broad tendency toward ‘heroic realism’ in 1920s Soviet art. This trend had its immediate sources in the Civil War period, which generated lyrical, episodic portrayals of collective action.”20 This goes much further than Grierson’s ties that bind as Bordwell notes, “Like other Left artists, Eisenstein enthusiastically acceded to demands for Soviet mythology that would stir proletarian consciousness. All his silent features start with quotations from Lenin, and the Leader’s image is central to the last two of them.”21 At this point, we can distinguish between montage as Eisenstein’s aesthetic filmic innovations and the specific politics of his films. There does not have to be anything specifically political about using montage editing to signal the passage of time which is extremely common from Hollywood releases to art house films. If Grierson and Eisenstein are correct about films’ potential to educate, it is necessary for there to be the possibility for miseducation as there is no pedagogical equivalent to the philosopher’s stone leading only to enlightenment. The association of propaganda with miseducation is the most prevalent negative sense of propaganda.

Negative Propaganda In 1937, Yale University’s Institute for Propaganda Analysis was formed in order to combat what they deemed to be the harms of propaganda to a democratic society. Propaganda, on this view, was irrational, essentially harmful and only had a pejorative sense. The negative view of propaganda is likewise illustrated by one of Frank Capra’s, Why We Fight (1942–1943), films where a cartoon Nazi propaganda factory is shown with smoke-imaged “lies” spewing from the smoke stacks. There are definitions of propaganda that focus on its negative qualities which, on this view, are akin to manipulation and brainwashing. Harold Lasswell, Leonard Doob and Randall Marlin all have definitions of propaganda that focus on the pejorative sense or the characteristics that make propaganda something to avoid.

 Sergei Eisenstein, trans. Jay Leyda, The Film Sense (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1942).  David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 1993) 40–41. 21  Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein, 41. 19 20

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• “Propaganda is concerned with the management of opinions and attitudes by the direct manipulation of social suggestion rather than by altering other conditions in the environment of the organism”22 (Lasswell). • “Propaganda can be called the attempt to affect the personalities and to control the behavior of individuals toward ends considered unscientific or of doubtful value in a society at a given time”23 (Doob). • “Propaganda = (def.) The organized attempt through communication to affect belief or action or inculcate attitudes in a large audience in ways that circumvent or suppress an individual’s adequately informed, rational, reflective judgment”24 (Marlin). Each definition offers a slightly different diagnosis of propaganda’s negative qualities. For Marlin, it circumvents rational, reflective and informed judgments. Given that modern liberal democratic states presuppose that citizens have both the capacity for rational reflection and free will, propaganda seems to cut at the very core of one political paradigm. Given many of the decisions we make in spite of there not being the time or the seeming need for “rational, reflective judgment,” the scope of propaganda is immense under Marlin’s view. For example, the technique of upselling which can be as simple as asking: “Do you want fries with that?” at any given fast-food restaurant is but one example of propaganda under Marlin’s definition. Doob worries about the influence on our personalities, behaviors such that we come to value things that are not valuable or trust what is unscientific. This definition accounts for the kind of weight-loss advertisements that promise astonishing results with no changes to one’s diet or exercise regime. Finally, Lasswell advances the view that peer pressure is likely influential in what we believe and desire and that savvy propagandists can exploit our social psychology through, among others, the bandwagon fallacy. Film, on this view, is seen as especially well-suited to propaganda’s nefarious aims. The huckster James Vicary exploited the fear that the moving image is an inherently irrational form of persuasion. In 1955, the film Picnic prompted widespread panic about the moving image’s power to persuade its audience irrationally.25 Vicary, an advertising executive, boasted that he designed the movie to contain subliminal messages “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke” by placing the message in a single frame of the film so as to be too quickly revealed for conscious appreciation of its message.26 Vicary “claimed that this had increased Coke sales by 18.1% and popcorn sales by 57.7%.”27 The widespread 22  Harold Lasswell, “Propaganda” in Propaganda ed. By Robert Jackall (New York: New York University Press, 1995) 13. 23  Leonard Doob, Public Opinion and Propaganda, 2nd ed. (Hamden, CT: Archon) 240. 24  Randal Marlin Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (Toronto: Broadview Press 2002) 22. 25  Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1991) 199. 26  Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Persuasion, 199. 27  Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Persuasion, 199.

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publicity after the event led to the practice of subliminal advertising being outlawed by several countries including Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.28 However, it turned out to be a cruel hoax. Vicary admitted as much in a retraction. Subsequent empirical studies to verify so-called subliminal persuasion have failed to demonstrate its effectiveness.29 In fact, subliminal persuasion has become a comedic punch line on Saturday Night Live and mocked in the movie Fight Club. This does not mean films cannot be effective propaganda, even in the pejorative sense of propaganda, but rather that films do not operate subliminally in the straightforward way Vicary purports. However, films can still endeavor to affect behavior or modify beliefs. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis’ primary method for combatting propaganda was the distribution of pamphlets and books that reproduce a list of propaganda devices—or trick of the trade. In philosophical terms, these are the sorts of fallacies that propaganda uses to persuade its targets. They catalogued seven devices: name-calling, glittering generalities, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, bandwagon and card staking.30 Although these devices are not specific to film, they can be found in a wide variety of moving images. The political commercial that drapes its settings in the American flag, the endless new cycles that focus on name-calling or the testimonial of policy wonks still show that these devices have not gone out of style. The transfer of good feelings can be as generic as politicians kissing babies or as specific as a congressperson from Northern Wisconsin donning lumberjack clothing and participating in log-­rolling contests. While the negative connotation of propaganda is indeed a part of how propaganda functions and can be applied to the moving images, it is not sufficient to capture all the complexity and seeming ubiquity of propaganda in an era saturated by the moving image. Moreover, if it is simply to be identified with fallacious reasoning, the phenomenon itself is not sufficient to undermine democracy, unless combined with other authoritarian or anarchical political moves. The negative definition of propaganda does not exhaust propaganda’s possibilities, nor does it seem as inherently harmful as the negative definitions seem to assume. One way of identifying propaganda as a problem is by focusing on its ubiquity.

Omnipresent Propaganda There is a family of theories which endeavor to account for the most negative elements of propaganda by claiming that it is actually changing who we are as human beings and the whole shape societies. Jacques Driencourt and Jacques Ellul are among the theorists whose approach tends toward a ubiquity or omnipresent model. Driencourt once predicted that future historians would regard  Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Propaganda, 200.  Pratkanis and Aronson, Age of Propaganda, 201. 30  Institute for Propaganda Analysis, “How to Detect Propaganda” in Jackall, Propaganda 217–225. 28 29

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our age as the “age of propaganda.”31 Motivated in part by the rise of mass culture, they were principally concerned about the scope of propaganda’s influence, regarding propaganda as an all-pervasive force, and what that meant for the stability of future civilizations. Driencourt worried, “Propaganda reigns triumphantly. Everything is propaganda. It saturates all; it deforms all. It leads one astray by working on how one thinks, how one acts an how one reacts. The reign of propaganda is a fact. This is one characteristic of a new form of civilization.”32 It is worth noting that Driencourt is writing 60 years before the advent of the smartphone and digital data mining whose influence on the dissemination of propaganda has yet to be reckoned and around the time that television sets were becoming the mainstay in households, and well after families gathered around the radio to listen to news and entertainment. Driencourt holds that the advent of mass communication systems has irrevocably altered not only the way we receive news about the world but also the way that we think about such news. That is, Driencourt claims that news sources give us both the information and the very conceptual apparatus by which we comprehend states of affairs. He further argues that propaganda influences the very way that society itself is structured. “Everything within the political and economic spheres is molded by this force.”33 In the same spirit as Driencourt, about ten year later, and after having theorized extensively about the philosophical importance of technology, Jacques Ellul adopts an omnipresent view of propaganda. In his book entitled Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Ellul echoes Driencourt when he writes: It is a matter of reaching and encircling the whole man and all men… Propaganda surrounds man by all possible routes….It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides him immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda tries to impose a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique, one-­ sided, and precluding divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every area of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude. They myth has such motive force that, once accepted, it controls the whole of the individual, who becomes immune to any other influence.34

Propaganda, and “organized myth,” is the social determination of thought that provides individuals within a mass society a cognitive map and a coherent worldview. Thus, for Ellul, propaganda becomes the very basis upon which 31  Jacques Driencourt, La Propagande Novelle Force Politique (Paris: Libraire Armand Colin, 1950) 18. 32  Driencourt, La Propaganda Novelle Force Politique, 16. 33  Driencourt, La Propaganda Novelle Force Politique, 16. 34  Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Man’s Attitudes, (New York: Vintage, 1973) 12.

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individuals in society think or act. It is inescapable, ubiquitous and again not necessarily limited to persuasion. In the Preface of the same book, Ellul remarks about the difficulty of translating the work into English as the word “propaganda” in French is plural “propagandes.”35 A sympathetic interpretation of Ellul’s work might note that sometimes what Ellul has translated “propaganda” seems to be what we might call “ideology.” Therefore, we might conclude that Ellul is suggesting a necessary connection between propaganda and ideology. Ellul further categorizes propaganda as follows: . political or sociological. 1 2. agitation or integration. 3. vertical or horizontal. 4. rational or irrational.36 These categories speak to the purposes whether to promote political agitation or social cohesion, and to whether the propagandist is a peer or authority figure using argumentative or purely emotional means of influencing its audience. Ellul’s theory is not specifically concerned about film or the moving image. However, he does suggest “The movies and human contact are the best media for sociological propaganda in terms of social climate, slow infiltration, progressive in-roads, and overall integration.”37 He wants to argue for a more systematic approach toward film; “For example, an American producer makes a film, he has certain definite ideas he wants to express, which are not intended to be propaganda. Rather, the propaganda element is in the American Way of life with which he is permeated and which he expresses in his film without realizing it.”38 Ellul continues to describe the consequences of this kind of propaganda, “We see here the force of expansion of a vigorous society, which is totalitarian in the sense of the integration of the individual, and which leads to involuntary behavior.”39 Pessimism about the state of society and an almost nihilistic acceptance of what they take to the power and prevalence of propaganda are two overarching themes of these theorists. A similar skepticism is voiced by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School whose philosophical importance lies primarily with their cultural critique. Their diagnosis of what is wrong with society cuts deeper than the previous theorists and makes the case that practically everything is propaganda. On their view, modernity has created an iron system where oppression and false consciousness are ubiquitous—the prime culprit is instrumental reason where nearly everything is a means to some other end, and intrinsic value  Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, xviii.  Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 61–84. 37  Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 20. 38  Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 64. 39  Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 64. 35 36

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is lost. The culture industry arose from a mentality that reinforces economic value as the prime value and in its wake diminishes humanity. The culture industry leaves us with only kitsch instead of art; it traffics in terrible laughter— the mechanical laughter of the laugh track is needed because there is “nothing to laugh at.”40 The audience must be tutored, and their emotional response coaxed. They frequently deride all cartoons with special scorn for Daffy Duck. Cartoons are not the only culprits of terrible laughter. Terrible laughter is a “medicinal bath which the entertainment industry never ceases to prescribe.”41 That is, it allows us to cope with a rationally assimilated life by “defecting to the agencies which inspire it. This is not a happiness.”42 In short, all of the culture industry, movies, commercials, horoscopes in the newspapers and pop songs on the radio serve to replicate the conditions of decline inherent in late capitalism. An important feature of their account is that it is not based upon an analysis of any specific content of television shows, but rather propaganda for them is a formal feature of the media, an inescapable reality caused by instrumental reasoning. In so far as art has a redemptive purpose, it is high modernist art that holds the promise of integral freedom befitting human nature. Although one might be critical of the dystopian vision presented in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic in Enlightenment, there is no denying that this sort of critical theory approach had a broad influence on film theory. There were many media theorists, following along the trail of the Frankfurt School, who were critical of capitalism and who would develop accounts that rejected the formal features of film as propagandistic. Perhaps best known is feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey who would articulate theories about the ideological function of film that focuses upon the merely formal features of film, devoid of specific content. In her canonical essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey writes, “As an advanced representation system, the cinema poses questions about the ways the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures ways of seeing and pleasure into looking.”43 Mulvey develops a rather complicated theory of the male gaze in order to explain how mainstream Hollywood cinema replicates patriarchy. Roughly, the gaze amounts to an erotic pleasure which capitalizes upon in the way that the camera captures the action on the set, which in turn captures the way that the male protagonist is encouraged to gaze upon female characters, which in turn instructs the spectator how one should view the world. A straightforward example of this male gaze occurs during televised, football or basketball games, the camera frequently cuts to the cheerleading team prior to commercial and essentially ogles them as the screen dissolves to commercial. 40  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.  Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. By John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1993) 112. 41  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 112. 42  Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 112. 43  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) 15.

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Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze seems to borrow from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing the mantra, “men act, women appear. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women, but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus, she turns herself into an object, and most particularly an object of vision, a sight.”44 As she embellishes her theory with a psychoanalytic account of spectatorship, Mulvey writes, “psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form.”45 (14) On a meta-level, one might argue that Mulvey is using psychoanalytic theory propagandistically. Although Mulvey considers films like Vertigo (1958), Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1944) as being paradigmatic of the kind of Hollywood mainstream movies responsible for the replication of patriarchy, her account is broad enough to purport to explain how any Hollywood movie functions politically. Since Mulvey published Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, there has been an extended discourse—both extending and intensely critical of her approach. It is worth noting that although the Frankfurt School and Mulvey’s psychoanalytic feminist film theory have very different assumptions, both eschew a kind of homely realism as politically regressive and favor a modernist aesthetic as being politically satisfactory. Among the problems for accounts of propaganda that are purely formal or suggest that propaganda is uniformly ubiquitous is that such theories do not explain adequately how specific propaganda works. On the one hand, it would seem to be an empirical matter how cinema affects the mind, and yet all of the omnipresent models of propaganda either rely upon scientifically dubious notions of the unconscious or claim to use a psychoanalytic theory of the mind strategically, without any regard for the truth of the matter. These sorts of theories also fail to account for the kind of moral judgments we make about propaganda and how different instances of propaganda give rise to different evaluative assessments. Moreover, they do not adequately distinguish between ideology and propaganda such that it seems that all products of the culture industry or appeals to mass audiences are inherently propagandistic regardless of the filmmaker’s artistic intentions. If they reject the possibility that mass artists can have aesthetic achievements, it only serves to highlight the elitism that has so frequently tagged this family of theories. Another way of thinking about propaganda claims that it is in fact a way for the elites to maintain social control. The top-down versions of propaganda by and large maintain that the propaganda is in some sense bad, with some of the theorists considering it a necessary evil, while for others it is just plain evil.

 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1990) 47.  Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures, 14.

44 45

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Top-down Propaganda Journalist Walter Lippmann coined the phrase “manufacture of consent” to describe the burgeoning fields of advertising and public relations. The cornerstone of this view is that only an elite few are capable of manufacturing the consent of the herd of unwashed masses by structuring the “pictures in our minds.”46 With echoes of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Edward Bernays writes, “but clearly it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically. In the active proselytizing minorities, in whom selfish interests and public interests coincide, lie the progress and development of American.”47 If everyone has a vote, but neither the time nor the disposition to be adequately informed about any number of issues, then propaganda becomes a quick and dirty way to keep the formal features of democratic input in the absence of an ideally informed populace. Lippmann describes the problem, “since the general opinions of a large number of persons are almost certain to be a vague and confusing medley, actions cannot be taken until these opinions have been factored down, canalized, compressed and made uniform.”48 The way to do so involves both art and science as Bernays was a pioneer of involving psychologists and psychological research into the public relations industry. According to Lippmann, it requires “the use of symbols which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas. Because feelings are much less specific than ideas, and yet more poignant, the leader is able to make a homogeneous sill out of a heterogeneous mass of desires.”49 It should be noted that so far this view of propaganda accounts for films as diverse as Birth of a Nation (1915), An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017) and Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) as well as the US Army training film series Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942–1943). It also accounts for the role of 24/7 television for events such as Live Aid (1986), a concert held in different cities worldwide simultaneously broadcast to raise funds for famine relief.50 As technology has changed, this account with its focus on the image-makers or king-makers can be used to show how the few were able to bamboozle the many, even if that few involved Internet bots or trolls. One of the features of the way Bernays and Lippmann conceive of propaganda is that it is not limited to the same “few” in every instance instigating the persuasion, nor does it entail that all propaganda is successful. Bernays himself represented a wide variety of clients from the CPI where Bernays created the Four Minute Men campaign to American Tobacco Company as well as the

 Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public (New York: The Macmillan Company 1927), 47–48.  Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1928), 31. 48  Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public, 47–48. 49  Walter Lippman, The Phantom Public, 47–48. 50  The propaganda value of Live Aid is discussed in Luis Velasco Pufleau, “Reflections on Music and Propaganda” Contemporary Aesthetics Vol 12, 2014. 46 47

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NAACP  (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).51 Moreover, on digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, just about anyone can create a viral post, including it seems Internet bots aiming to sway elections. Not everyone is sanguine about propaganda in this top-down sense—as the persuasion by those in power to an audience with inchoate ideas. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky draw from Lippmann’s and Bernay’s work in order to be harshly critical of them. Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model is tailor-made to account for mass media where those in power are primarily the wealthy without the rest of society having access to those opportunities that are open to all. That is, for Herman and Chomsky, those on top of the top-down model are beneficiaries of undeserved power. They write, “A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices.”52 That is, Herman and Chomsky locate at least part of the power of propaganda in the power of those who have wealth and through their wealth power to control what appears on mass media. Herman and Chomsky suggest that it is important to “trace the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and public interests to get their messages across to the public.”53 The elites for Herman and Chomsky are not necessarily the more intelligent individuals in a society, but rather those few who have wealth and power whether it be corporate or governmental. They exercise their power by shaping public discourse: selecting the topics of national focus, framing the issues and restricting access to information.54 Herman and Chomsky use this model extensively to describe the differences in reporting between the relatively saturated reporting of the atrocities occurring in Vietnam versus the near media blackout of the atrocities occurring in Cambodia.55 This model helps to explain the rise of partisan television in the United States as Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes teamed up to form Fox News with the consequence that regular viewers of Fox News are more poorly informed than those who do not consume any television news. Steven Classen uses this sort of model to describe how television stations in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era would flash “stand by, technical difficulties” instead of showing news reports of civil rights protests or nearly any anti-segregationist viewpoint.56 That is, Herman and Chomsky’s model can account for times in which news is censored outright as well as cases where there is a mere slant in coverage through surreptitious selection.  Ewen, PR! The Social History of Spin, 3–17.  Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books 1988) 2. 53  Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 2. 54  Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 2. 55  Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 292. 56  Steven D. Classen Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 51 52

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Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model consists of five media filters. They are: (1) the size, concentration of ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on the information provided by the government, business and “expertise” funded and approved by these primary sources of power; (4) “flak” as a means of disciplining the media; and. (5) “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.57 Clearly, it is as if Sinclair Broadcasting were using Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model as a checklist. According to its website, “Sinclair Broadcast Group, Inc. is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasting companies in the country. Sinclair owns and operates, programs or provides sales services to more television stations than anyone and has affiliations with all the major networks.”58 They boast about their size and the scope of their influence, “In addition, Sinclair is the leading local news provider in the country, as well as a producer of sports content. Sinclair owns a multicast network, four radio stations and a cable network. Sinclair’s broadcast content is delivered via multiple-platforms, including over-the-air, multi-channel video program distributors, and digital platforms.”59 They are a commercial enterprise so condition 2 is met. What made Sinclair so controversial are the reports that, in 2016, US election, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, reportedly struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcasting to secure better media coverage. The campaign would offer Sinclair Broadcasting access, and “in exchange, Sinclair would broadcast their Trump interviews across the country without commentary, Kushner said. Kushner highlighted that Sinclair, in states like Ohio, reaches a much wider audience—around 250,000 listeners—than networks like CNN, which reach somewhere around 30,000”60 Thus fulfilling condition 3. Conditions 4 and 5 are most clearly instantiated after the election as comedian John Oliver reports, Sinclair Broadcasting has a right-wing slant and a pro-Trump varnish on nearly every political story. Moreover, Mark Hyman and Boris Epshteyn, ultra-conservative commentators, produce commentary that are must-airs on all Sinclair-owned stations.61 This seems to be the sort of yellow-journalism or propaganda that the Fairness Doctrine was established to eradicate. Established in 1927, the Fairness Doctrine required that news programs devote some time to controversial issues  Herman and Chomsky Manufacturing Consent: 22.  Sinclair Broadcast Group Website: http://sbgi.net/ 59  Broadcast Group Website: http://sbgi.net/ 60  Josh Sawsy and Hadas Gold, “Kushner: We Struck Deal with Sinclair for Straighter Coverage,” Politico 12/16/2016. 61  John Oliver, “Sinclair Broadcast Group” Last Week Tonight, HBO 7/2/2017. 57 58

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and do so from a variety of perspectives. Moreover, individuals who were attacked on a program needed to be offered a chance to offer a rebuttal. Ronald Reagan eliminated many of the provisions of the Fairness Doctrine with the remaining statues struck down by the Obama administration.62 The Herman-­ Chomsky model of propaganda seems well positioned to address the fall-out from the decline of the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was not the US government’s only quiver in the regulation of propaganda, but the regulation of propaganda is nearly always fraught. The propaganda film Hillary: The Movie, a tendentious biopic about the then candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, was ruled in violation of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, officially, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which prevented its distribution in January 2008. The film offers a portrayal of Hillary Clinton in the most negative light.63 The group who financed the film, Citizens’ United took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Citizens’ United vs. FEC was decided in 2010 that opened the floodgates of money in politics. As a consequence, the amount of money spent on US elections has skyrocketed, and in battleground states, no media space is safe from the constant onslaught of political ads. Herman and Chomsky’s view that the moneyed—interests of those on the top—are whose interests will be served by propaganda. However, there are cases where governmental regulations can stem the tide of propaganda. For example, there are strict rules in the United Kingdom that forbid American-style political campaigns.64 Another example is a mandatory media blackout of campaign reporting 72 hours prior to French Elections. This French law is credited with avoiding the kind of foreign meddling by Wikileaks into the 2017 Prime Ministerial election.65 While top-down theories of propaganda have many resources to account for how it is that media and the moving image can be propaganda, they are not as robust as they might be in accounting for all of propaganda’s facets. The focus on the ownership and distribution of propaganda runs the risk of ignoring the specific content and the measurable consequences of particular propaganda campaigns. It also lacks the theoretical resources to account for why some endeavors to engage in propaganda are successful, whereas others fail. For a more robust account of propaganda, we turn to what might be called heterogeneous theories of propaganda—those that recognize that propaganda itself spans a wide range of cultural practices and that can be evaluated as being along a range from benign to harmful.

62  Dylan Matthew, “Everything You Need to Know About The Fairness Doctrine in One Post,” Washington Post, 8/23/2011. 63  FEC vs. Citizen’s United, http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-vfederal-election-commission/ 64  Library of Congress, “UK Campaign Finance Law” U.S. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/ campaign-finance/uk.php 65  Library of Congress, “French Campaign Finance Law” https://www.loc.gov/law/help/ campaign-finance/france.php

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Heterogeneous Propaganda Propaganda has changed immensely in the roughly 100  years since the Four Minute Men were standing in theaters giving their speeches. The changes have come about due to the developing fields of advertising, public relations, crisis communication and political consultancy. The changes have also been a result of changing technologies from the smartphone to cloud computing and platforms such as Periscope, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter that allow almost instantaneous access to billions of people. The changes have also been a consequence of the changing tastes and moral sensibilities of the audiences. Propaganda itself has made some of those changes possible for better and worse. The fight for marriage equality was strengthened when rainbow flags turned into emoji’s so that engendered an online community to fight oppression. The Arab Spring which fomented a revolution in the Middle East was made possible by the ability of those who opposed the government to connect on social media, and for the protest to be filmed and shared on YouTube. The same technology was used by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) to make and release hostage videos where their caged captors were gruesomely drowned—a horror to the world. A heterogeneous account of propaganda should be able to deal with a wide range of propaganda, including the ways that the moving image has been deployed propagandistically. What makes a heterogeneous account different from the merely neutral ones is that the definitions seem to require an evaluative piece which is broad enough to recognize a continuum of propaganda from the morally atrocious to the morally beneficial. Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell offer a heterogeneous approach to propaganda starting with their definition: “propaganda is a deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”66 Here, propaganda is intentional which contrasts it directly with what might be regarded as ideology, and the purpose of propaganda informs the content. They offer a ten-point plan of analysis that synthesizes many of the major features of propaganda. 1. The ideology and purpose of the propaganda campaign 2. The context in which the propaganda occurs 3. The identification of the propagandist 4. The structure of the propaganda organization 5. The target audience 6. Media utilization techniques 7. Special techniques to maximize effect 8. Audience reaction to various techniques 9. Counterpropaganda, if present 10. Effects and evaluation67 66  Garth Jowett and Victorial O’Donnell, “How to Analyze Propaganda” in Propaganda and Persuasion (Los Angeles: SAGE, 2012) 269. 67  Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, 270.

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While this model is not specifically designed to identify how the moving image is mobilized in propaganda campaigns, it is compatible with theories of film or media interpretation that call for the content of the materials to be analyzed. That is, unlike, say, Mulvey’s theory, there is nothing specific about the formal features of the moving image that are rendered inherently ideological on this model. This a decidedly neutral model of propaganda; there is nothing specifically negative about attempting to persuade someone in any given context. Although it does not quite account for the pejorative sense of propaganda that is frequently associated with the term, the model has some descriptive resources, when applied, to describe what might be wrong with a particular propaganda campaign. There are other heterogeneous models that endeavor to account for both the neutral and negative senses of propaganda. One attempt to come to grips with both the positive and negative aspects of propaganda is advanced by Jason Stanley in his book, How Propaganda Works. Stanley has defined two types of propaganda: • Supporting Propaganda: a contribution to political discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet it is of a kind that tends to increase the realization of those ideals by either emotional or nonrational means. • Undermining Propaganda: a contribution to political discourse that is presented as an embodiment of certain ideals, yet it is of a kind that tends to erode those very ideals.68 Supporting propaganda, on Stanley’s definition, is reminiscent of the neutral sense discussed earlier in this chapter, in that propaganda in this sense is a “contribution to political discourse.” Stanley’s undermining propaganda with its emphasis on what might be called an internal contradiction has a vaguely Marxist feel, calling to mind the accusations of “false consciousness” to those who are deemed not sufficiently down with the cause or resonant with the subliminal persuasion of the Vicary hoax. The suggestion that undermining propaganda must involve an internal contradiction seems overly narrow and widely implausible as an account of how propaganda works. In fact, while Stanley’s work offers a serviceable description of the last two decades of research in epistemology and a pragmatist strain of philosophy of language, it does not sufficiently engage with the considerable research about propaganda conducted in film theory, rhetoric, cultural studies or media history. Hence, it has little to offer those who are interested in identifying, interpreting or evaluating propaganda and the moving image. Finally, the last heterogeneous theory of propaganda we discuss is what I call Epistemic Merit Model (EMM).69 It shares a commitment to pragmatic lin Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) 53.  Sheryl Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2002, 16–30, Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333623, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333623 68 69

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guistics and applied epistemology with Stanley’s work; however, it adds considerably more constraints on its definition. The model was first developed to account for the pejorative sense of propaganda and later refined to account for propaganda across the board.70 The Epistemic Merit Model (EMM) has been proposed in order to deal with the pejorative sense propaganda has come to have, and the fact that works of art, such as Guernica, have been used propagandistically.71 Although this model is intended to capture the pejorative sense of propaganda, the model contains insights into the general phenomena, and with slight revisions, it could be descriptive of both the pejorative and neutral senses of propaganda as well as its application to a broad range of works of art and other cultural artifacts. The EMM captures the pejorative sense of propaganda with the following definition: “Propaganda = an epistemically defective message used with the intention to persuade a socially significant group of people on behalf of a political institution, organization or cause.”72

The term “epistemically defective message” can be identified as: “An epistemically defective message = a message is false, misleading, inappropriate or connected to other beliefs in ways that are inapt, misleading or unwarranted.”73

Each condition above is a sufficient condition for a message’s being epistemically defective, and as such, it is not necessary for the message itself to be false for it to be so. To illustrate, we can consider the slogan “no one other aspirin is proven more effective.” The sentence itself is a true sentence; however, the message is epistemically defective because it is intended to lead its audience to believe that Bayer aspirin is the best aspirin, whereas we are only warranted to believe that, given the same chemical component, it is no better or worse than other brands, including generic ones. The defectiveness of the message captures the pejorative sense that propaganda has come to have.74 Propaganda need not be lies, but, instead, it relies upon the connection between the mes70  Sheryl Tuttle Ross, “The Propaganda Power of Protest Songs: the Case of Madison’s Solidarity Sing Along,” Contemporary Aesthetics, Vol. 11, 2013, http://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=667 71  Sheryl Tuttle Ross, “Art Propaganda: The Many Lives of Picasso’s Guernica,” Biblos, Vol. 11 2013 455–474, https://digitalis-dsp.uc.pt/bitstream/10316.2/35517/1/BIBLOS%20XI_ cap20.pdf 72  Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda” 20 The idea of “Epistemic Defectiveness” was first introduced in Noël Carroll’s “Film, Rhetoric and Ideology” in Theorizing the Moving Image (1997). 73  Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda” 20. 74  Tuttle Ross, “Understanding Propaganda” 20.

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sage and the beliefs, desires, emotions or other mental content that the audience is likely to have. So, although the definition itself is not specific to the moving image, we can make use of Eisenstein’s observations about film editing to evaluate how visual metaphors might convey knowledge or mislead. Propaganda as species of political persuasion is a specific complex action which is to say that it is goal-directed, and an interpretation of this complex action may require identifying how the immediate action is tied to some further ends. The purpose of propaganda is to influence the beliefs, desires, imagination or other mental content of its audience in order to accomplish some further political feat. There are four parts to EMM which are necessary and jointly sufficient: (1) epistemically defective message, (2) used with the intention to persuade, (3) a socially significant group of people and (4) on behalf of a political institution, organization or cause. All four components work together in concert in order to form a specific kind of speech act. And, actions themselves might be regarded as communicative, following Paul Grice’s notion of natural meanings, we might suggest that someone’s tapping their foot might indicate that they are impatient.75 Hence, the EMM captures the sort of propaganda that Edward Bernays was involved with in his Four Minute Men campaign because it was the coordinated actions utilizing the social space of the cinema to create the false impression of seemingly spontaneous civic concern. The EMM can deal with the Marlboro Man commercials where a seemingly fit cowboy proclaims that “Marlboro tastes good like a cigarette should” which creates a faulty association of smoking cigarettes with goodness and health. The Swift Boat campaign in order to smear 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry fulfills conditions 1–4 as the audience was led to believe that Kerry’s service in the Vietnam War as less than honorable even though he won medals of acclamation. A US audience who generally view Democrats as being anti-military was part and parcel of the background beliefs that gave rise to the uptake of the epistemically defective message. I agree that as currently formulated, the epistemic merit model captures the pejorative sense of propaganda, precisely because it identifies propaganda as an act or a speech act with an epistemically defective message. Since it is the defectiveness of the message that accounts for the term’s pejorative valence, a neutral definition of propaganda might still invoke the insights of speech act theory, while not being committed to the message’s being epistemically defective. A neutral definition of propaganda could likewise admit of the following four necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: (1) a charged, epistemically merited message (2) used with the intention to persuade, (3) a socially significant group of people and (4) on behalf of a political institution, organization or cause. That is, the conditions are identical with the exception of the first one. There are two parts to the message in the neutral sense: the first is that it is epistemi75  Paul Grice, Studies in the Ways of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) 213–215.

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cally merited and the second is that it is charged where charged could be read as meaning roughly the same as Austin’s “total speech act.” This contrasts with the first condition of the pejorative sense in which the message is epistemically defective. The difference between a charged, epistemically merited message and an epistemically defective message apart from the message’s relation to knowledge (broadly construed) is that a “charged message” would necessarily involve all three acts of Austin’s speech act theory: locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. In short, each charged message would have signs or symbols that were intended to express meaningful content (locutionary act); it would intend to do something further by means of the charged message (illocutionary act), and the message would have some sort of uptake whereby the audience recognizes the locutionary and illocutionary acts (perlocutionary act). We should be clear that the uptake does not necessarily involve that the audience believes the message but instead that the audience recognizes the intent of speaker in conveying a specific message. A charged message is overt about its being propaganda.76 One might object that epistemic merit or defectiveness is one of degree and hardly the sort of sortal property necessary to separate different kinds of propaganda. I would respond that all propaganda is of the same species, that is, it is all a species of political persuasion. What serves to differentiate all propaganda from other forms of persuasion are the conditions 2–4. There may be some overlap between the epistemically merited messages and the epistemically defective messages, but this is what one would expect of a category that admits of degrees. If there were a blue-yellow spectrum for shades of green, one might expect that a particular shade might appear either more bluish or yellowish depending on other features within the context; however, it does not entail that there is not a meaningful distinction made between blue and yellow. This sense of propaganda offers us a fuller sense of the phenomena of propaganda and can be applied to a wide variety of contemporary exemplars. So, we might be able to place the 2008 Obama Campaign video Yes We Can along that spectrum.77 After losing the New Hampshire primary to rival Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama gave an inspirational and defiant speech to supporters captured on video. There were many artists who were involved in the campaign, and Will.i.am set the speech to music with a chorus of stars and ordinary people uniting to proclaim, “Yes, We Can!” The video was posted on Facebook and soon became viral. The Obama Campaign itself sent out the link to ­supporters with their appeals for money. It is (1) an epistemically charged message in that the meaningful content connects the campaign for the first black president in the historical context of the struggle for civil rights generally in the United States (locutionary act); the message is aspirational in its quest for justice (illocutionary act) and the uptake of the video, its viral spread had the  J.L Austin, How to Do Things With Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).  Barack Obama, Yes, We Can! https://youtu.be/jjXyqcx-mYY

76 77

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intended effect of getting young people involved in politics to change the party in power (perlocutionary act). (2) It is intended to persuade (3) a socially significant group of people, in this case all who support those who are disenfranchised and what an inclusive politics that aims toward justice (4) on behalf of a political institution, organization or cause, in this case, the presidency of Barack Obama. By covering the spectrum of propaganda acts, the EMM can be used to identify, interpret and evaluate a wide range of moving image propaganda that currently exists and has yet to come.

Bibliography Austin, J.L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Benbow, Mark. 2010. Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and Like Writing History with Lightening. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9(4). http:// www.jstor.org/stable/20799409 Berger, John. 1990. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. Bernays, Edward. 1928. Propaganda. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Bordwell, David. 1993. The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carroll, Noël. 1997. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Classen, Steven D. 2004. Watching Jim Crow: The Struggles Over Mississippi TV, 1955–1969. Durham: Duke University Press. Doob, Leonard. 1949 Public Opinion and Propaganda. 2nd ed. Hamden: Archon. Driencourt, Jacques. 1950. La Propagande Novelle Force Politique. Paris: Libraire Armand Colin. Duncan, Dean. 1994. Landmarks of Early Film. Film Preservation Associates. Los Angeles: Image Entertainment Publisher. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1942. The Film Sense. Trans. Jay Leyda. New  York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Ellul, Jacques. 1973. Propaganda: The Formation of Man’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage. Ewen, Stuart. 1996. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books. FEC vs. Citizen’s United. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-unitedv-federal-election-commission/ Grice, Paul. 1989. Studies in the Ways of Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hardy, Forsyth. 1971. Grierson on Documentary. New York: Praeger. Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books. Hess, John P. 2014. The History of Cutting: The Soviet Theory of Montage. Los Angeles: Filmmaker IQ. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1993. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Hummell, William, and Keith Huntress. 1949. The Analysis of Propaganda. New York: Holt, Rinehart, Wilson. Institute for Propaganda Analysis. 1995. How to Detect Propaganda. In Propaganda, ed. Jackall. New York: New York University Press. Jackall, Robert. 1995. Introduction to Propaganda. New York: New York University Press. Jowett, Garth, and Victorial O’Donnell. 2012. How to Analyze Propaganda. In Propaganda and Persuasion. Los Angeles: SAGE.

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Lasswell, Harold. 1995. Propaganda. In Propaganda, ed. Robert Jackall. New  York: New York University Press. Lee, Alfred. 1953. How to Understand Propaganda. New York: Rinehart and Company. Library of Congress. UK Campaign Finance Law. U.S. https://www.loc.gov/law/ help/campaign-finance/uk.php ———. French Campaign Finance Law. https://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaignfinance/france.php Lippman, Walter. 1927. The Phantom Public. New York: The Macmillan Company. Machiavelli. 1952. The Prince. New York: Penguin. Marlin, Randal. 2002. Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion. Toronto: Broadview Press. Matthew, Dylan. Everything You Need to Know About The Fairness Doctrine in One Post. Washington Post, 8/23/2011. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Obama, Barack. Yes, We Can! https://youtu.be/jjXyqcx-mYY Oliver, John. Sinclair Broadcast Group. Last Week Tonight, HBO 7/2/2017. Pratkanis, Anthony, and Elliot Aronson. 1991. Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company. Pufleau, Luis Velasco. 2014. Reflections on Music and Propaganda. Contemporary Aesthetics 12. Russell, Bertrand. 1953. Free Thought and Official Propaganda. New  York: B.W. Huebsch. Sawsy, Josh, and Hadas Gold. Kushner: We Struck Deal with Sinclair for Straighter Coverage. Politico 12/16/2016. Sinclair Broadcast Group Website. http://sbgi.net/ Stacey, Jackie. 1994. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. New York: Routledge. Stanley, Jason. 2015. How Propaganda Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tuttle Ross, Sheryl. 2002. Understanding Propaganda: The Epistemic Merit Model and Its Application to Art. Journal of Aesthetic Education 36(1): 16–30. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333623, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333623. ———. 2013a. The Propaganda Power of Protest Songs: The Case of Madison’s Solidarity Sing Along. Contemporary aesthetics 11. http://contempaesthetics.org/ newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=667 ———. 2013b. Art Propaganda: The Many Lives of Picasso’s Guernica. Biblos 11: 455–474. https://digitalis-dsp.uc.pt/bitstream/10316.2/35517/1/BIBLOS%20XI_ cap20.pdf.

PART VIII

Movies and the Arts

CHAPTER 33

Film and Fine Art: Automatism, Automata and “The Myth of Total Cinema” in The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann Kristin Boyce

The philosophy and theory of film begins with questions about film and fine art, specifically with the question of whether film is a fine art and, if so, how it is related to and distinguished from other more established ones. These questions, when first posed, had a skeptical edge, for it seemed outrageous to more than a few to suggest that film could be art, given the mechanical way its moving pictures were produced. Such skepticism created difficulties for those who believed that they recognized in film new and exciting artistic possibilities, saddling them with the task of showing how film could be understood to meet the criteria of prevailing orthodoxies about what art is. Although the battle for artistic status has, by most accounts, been decisively won, theorists such as Noël Carroll and Victor Perkins have persuasively argued that the legacy of its defensive beginnings continues to haunt both philosophy and theory of film. In this chapter, I aim to contribute to the ongoing investigation of film as a fine art in a way that is cognizant of the effects of this legacy and furthers a collective effort to overcome them. I focus on three such effects in particular: (1) a tendency to theoretical top-heaviness, (2) a tendency to pay the wrong kind of attention to the “medium” of film and (3) a tendency to default to painting and theater as the art forms most likely to afford objects of comparison that can shed light on the nature of film. As we will see in Part One, the pressure to explain how film fits prevailing orthodoxies about art produced theories of film that were unable to account

K. Boyce (*) Mississippi State University, Starkville, MS, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_33

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for many of those individual films that were most uncontroversially considered to be masterpieces. My strategy in this chapter will be, following both Perkins and Carroll, to focus considerable attention on two such films, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and, to a lesser extent, The Tales of Hoffmann. These films invite comparison not to painting and theater, the most venerable and established of the other fine arts but, instead, to film’s youngest and nearest sibling, dance. This shift to a less familiar object of comparison, I argue, invites new kinds of questions and facilitates a different kind of insight into the possibilities of film as an art form. One powerful way in which it does so is by taking us back to some very old questions about the “mechanical basis” of film in a new way. Because it was the “mechanical basis” of film that fueled skepticism about its artistic status, questions about film as an art form have, for better and worse, been especially closely tied to questions about its medium. When such questions are raised, though, attention is almost always focused on the mechanical process involved in producing the motion pictures’ pictures, that is, on the way in which a camera can be used to produce images of the world. By contrast, The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann direct attention to and explore the camera’s potential not as a maker of pictures but as an automaton, that is, as a machine that produces the illusion of the movement of a human or animal movement. When we shift attention to this particular potential of the camera, it creates a vantage from which to reconsider one of cinema’s founding myths, the “myth of total cinema.” This vantage, I argue, sheds new light not only on how film hangs together as an art form but also on how film as an art hangs together with other arts as well.

Part One: The Defensive Legacy of Orthodox Film Theory In the early stages of what turned out to be the development of a new art form, it was not obvious that there was artistic potential to be realized in the “curious hybrid” of two new machines, the camera and the projector, which had developed as “fascinating scientific curiosities.”1 For those with the conviction, however initially inchoate, that these scientific curiosities harbored exciting artistic potential, the mechanical basis of this burgeoning art form was a formidable stumbling block. According to prevailing orthodoxies about art, it was a necessary condition for something’s being art that it be a particular kind of creation: one that manifests the presence of the artist’s hand-imposing form on whatever material she/he chooses to manipulate, be that material paint, marble or sound. The products of the camera, by contrast, were produced mechanically or

1  Victor Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Penguin Books, 1973), 12 & 42.

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­ automatically” as the “formless flow of reality” passed before its lens.2 How “ could images so produced meet the criteria for something’s being art? Early apologists for film sought to overcome this stumbling block in one of two ways. The first strategy was to argue that the “hand of the artist” was, in fact, to be found in film, albeit in different ways than in other, more established art forms. Some such apologists treated the camera’s images as in effect the “matter” upon which form was imposed in the editing room. Others focused on the way that filmmaker such as Murnau imposed form upon the “reality” that was recorded by the camera. If some early apologists aimed to show that the hand of the artist was in some new way “present” in film, others, instead, insisted upon the artistic significance of its absence. As André Bazin puts it, “All the arts depend on the presence of man; only photography [and therefore film] lets us delight in his absence.”3 By the lights of such theorists, the human intervention essential to the other arts was a mark not so much of their power but of their limitations. In virtue of the mechanical process by means of which it reproduces the world, film and photography are able to free it from the “grime” of the ideologically distorted purposes and desires to which we seek to bend it: “Only the impartiality of the lens can clear the object of habit and prejudice, of all the mental fog with which our perception blurs it, and present it afresh for our attention and thereby our affection.”4 So understood, the mechanical basis of film is not something to work around or finesse in order to establish that film is like other arts, it is, instead, something to be embraced as the very source of film’s unique artistic power. Perkins and Carroll argue convincingly that the legacy of both these early strategies has been the persistence of top-heavy theories that “not only fail to provide a coherent basis for discussion of particular films but actively obstruct understanding of the cinema.”5 Both agree that this problem cannot be overcome without a new and better attention to particular films. This, though, is where the similarities between them end. When it comes to the question of how best to move things forward, they point in very different directions. As Perkins sees it, the problem is that early theorists are so concerned about the camera that they do not pay enough attention to the projector. This is perhaps understandable, given that the “automatisms” of the camera were the original obstacle to recognizing film as an art, but the result is theories of film that are “both theoretically misleading and historically false.”6 He aims to 2  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures ((Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 8. For a critique of this kind of view of photography, see Joel Snyder, What Happens by Itself in Photography? In The Pursuits of Reason, eds. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Joel Snyder (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 361–374). 3  André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume I (Berkley: University of Califonia Press, 1967), 15; quoted in Perkins, Film as Film, 29. 4  Bazin, What is Cinema?, 18, quoted from Perkins, Film as Film, 31. 5  Perkins, Film as Film, 11. 6  Perkins, Film as Film, 42.

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c­ orrect this by grounding his own account in a more complex and nuanced exploration of the medium of film that gives no less weight to the projector’s magic than to the camera’s special relation to reality.7 If Perkins faults early theory for failing to do justice to the medium of film, Carroll faults it instead for investing the medium with a significance that it does not have. What bothers him most about early film theory is that even theorists like Bazin who challenge one orthodoxy do so by embracing another, namely the assumption that artistic quality is a function of how purely a given work embodies possibilities that are unique to its particular medium. The operating assumption here is that each individual art form has its own proper purview, some artistic purpose or set of purposes that its particular medium suites it to fulfill better than any other art form. In the best cases, the advent of a new art form functions to further clarify the proper purview of existing arts. Thus, for example, George Bernard Shaw contends that the advent of film will “kill the theaters which are doing what the film does better, and bring to life the dying theater which does what film cannot do at all.”8 Or, as Bazin more famously characterizes the relationship between painting and photography: In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.9

So understood, film is the art form that is uniquely suited to the aim, which Bazin terms the “myth of total cinema,” of creating a technologically enabled “illusion of reality” so complete that “audiences will come to watch a motion picture performance as though the screen were eliminated entirely.”10 The more fully cinema realizes this aim, the more other art forms are “freed” to realize others to which their own media better suite them. In this way, the advent of film affords (in the best cases) an opportunity for self-reflection to the other arts, making it possible for theater and painting in particular to understand more deeply and realize more fully their own distinctive possibilities. Carroll’s argument against this second orthodox assumption is complex and multifaceted and, as we will see in the final section of this chapter, it leads him to urge theorists not to a more nuanced treatment of film’s medium but, instead, to “forget about it.” In what follows, I seek to split the difference between the conflicting recommendations of Perkins and Carroll. Taking a cue from Perkins, my treatment of  Perkins, Film as Film, 40.  George Bernard Shaw, Bernard Shaw on Cinema, edited by Bernard F. Dukore (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 25. 9  Bazin, What is Cinema?, 12. 10  Perkins, Film as Film, 45. 7 8

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The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman focuses on what new insight into the possibilities of the medium of film these particular films might afford. At the same time, and following Carroll, I argue that these films provide a powerful critical vantage on orthodox ­assumptions about the proper purview of the individual arts as well as the relationships between them. Both The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann invite comparison between film and the other arts, but they are quite unorthodox in their choice of which art form they take as the principle object of comparison. Instead of inviting comparison between film and painting or theater, that is, they instead direct our attention primarily to questions about the relationship between film and dance. While there has been some philosophical attention to the artistic status of dance recordings, and some theoretical attention to dance films, there has been little philosophical or theoretical attention paid until recently to questions about the relationship between the art form of dance and that of film.11 This is not hard to understand, in light of the defensive legacy to which Carroll and Perkins direct attention. It makes sense to invite comparison between film and painting or theater, if one aims to contribute to a defense of film as art. For to invite such comparisons is to place film in the company of the oldest and most venerable of art forms, whose pedigree stretches back to the first uncontroversially canonical philosophy of art, Plato’s Republic. To compare film, by contrast, to dance is, instead, to explore its relation to its nearest and most vulnerable sibling. As Carroll himself makes clear, dance was absorbed in its own battle for legitimacy in the early stages of its development.12 Indeed, many of the early criticisms of dance as an art form, as well as many of the defenses offered on its behalf, bear a striking, albeit largely unexplored, resemblance to both the criticisms made of film and the defenses offered on its behalf. Perhaps most intriguing, dance anticipates film as an art form whose relationship to immediacy is alternately conceived as that which distinguishes it from the other arts and that 11  In recent work on Loïe Fuller, Tom Gunning has argued that both theory and film itself have neglected the utopian possibilities that come into view if one directs attention to the relationship between the art form of dance and that of film. Cf. Tom Gunning, “Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion,” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, eds. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003) and Tom Gunning, “Light, Motion, Cinema!: The Heritage of Loïe Fuller and Germaine Dulac,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and media 46.1 (2005), 106–29. 12  Describing one of the earliest proponents of dance, Jean-Georges Noverre, Carroll writes, Noverre “was a man with a mission. As a choreographer, he was committed to getting dance taken seriously … he wasn’t interested in describing dance as it was. He was concerned with saying what dance should become—what dance should become in order to be considered art,” and this committed him to making dance which could be understood to meet the specifications of the “presiding theory of art” at the time: the imitation theory (Noël Carroll, “Art History, Dance and the 1960s,” in Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, ed. Sally Banes (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 90–1).

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which precludes the very possibility of its being accorded artistic status at all. Thus, for example, Susan Langer, one of the earliest “philosophers of dance,” seeks to establish dance’s credentials as a serious art form by arguing against the widespread conviction that expression, which in other art forms is a distinctive achievement, happens by itself in dance because of the “natural expressiveness” of the human body.13 And theorists like Frank Kermode, on the other hand, seize on this very “natural expressiveness” as what is artistically most distinctive about dance,14 allowing it alone (to adapt the quotation from Bazin) to give us emotion “clear of the habit and prejudice, of all the mental fog with which our conceptions blur it, and present it afresh for our attention and thereby our reflection.” As we will see, the kind of comparison between film and dance, which is invited—perhaps even required—by these two films, sheds quite a different light on film as an art than do the kinds of comparisons to painting and theater that were so central to the legacy of orthodox film theory.

Part Two: Automatism, Automata and the “Myth of Total Cinema” The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann are both centrally preoccupied with a specific type of dance, the art form of ballet. The Red Shoes explores the creation of a new ballet out of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, “The Red Shoes” and the creation of a prima ballerina out of a woman, Victoria Paige, played by Royal Ballet Principle, Moira Shearer.15 The Tales of Hoffmann is a film adaptation of Jacque Offenbach’s opera fantastique of the same title, which is based on three short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann. Under the influence of the Muse of Poetry, who wants Hoffman to abjure all other loves to devote himself fully to her, Hoffmann recounts the story of his life’s three great loves to an audience of students at a tavern. The Archer’s film adaptation transforms Hoffmann’s current love interest, Stella, and two of his past interests into ballet dancers played by Shearer and Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s Ludmilla Tchérina. It uses choreography by Fredrick Ashton as one of the means through which the story is told. Not only do these films revolve around and depend upon dance and dance artists, both are preoccupied with the relationship between film and dance. This preoccupation is especially pronounced in The Red Shoes. The obvious model fictional ballet company at the film center, Ballet Lermontov, is the Ballets Russes, which Powell had followed during his years in Paris with great appreciation. Like the Ballets Russes, Ballet Lermontov centers upon a c­ harismatic 13  Susan Langer, “From Feeling and Form.” In What is Dance?, ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 28–46. 14  Frank Kermode, “Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev,” in What is Dance?, Ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 145–60. 15  Footnote about the Archers’ identification of other models, most importantly Alexander Korda.

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and domineering impresario, Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrooke), and depends upon the collaboration of composers, visual artists, choreographers and dancers.16 However, just as obviously the structure of Ballet Lermontov reflects the distinctive and, within film unprecedented, collaboration upon which both The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann depend: a collaboration that involved not just Powell and Pressburger themselves but leading visual artists (including Hein Heckroth and Jack Cardiff), composers, conductors and musicians (including Offenbach, Sir Thomas Beecham and Robert Rounseville) and dance artists (Ashton, Helpmann, Massine, Schearer and Tchérina among others). Not only does The Red Shoes draw attention to the Ballets Russes as an important precursor to and model for the collaborative process that distinguished the Archers from other filmmakers. It also invites us to compare the artistic power of the films that this collaboration produced and the power afforded by the kind of dance performances that the Ballets Russes at its best produced. This invitation is extended most explicitly during the course of a roughly 20-minute sequence,17 which lies at the heart of the film and is considered by many to be its artistic high point: the first performance of The Red Shoes ballet. The sequence begins by carefully establishing the pretense that we are watching a dance performance that is captured by the camera. After a series of shots that underscore the contributions made by various other arts to the performance we are about to witness—last minute repairs to props and to the frayed nerves of the production designer, a last minute reminder that “nothing matters but the music” and one last shot of Vicky poised to enter the stage through a prop door—silence descends and the camera draws back to take in the frame of the proscenium stage and the curtain that is about to rise. The opening shots of the ballet continue the pretense that the camera is recording a live performance. After cinematic artifice magically transports the feet of the Vicky’s character into her new red shoes, though, the sequence moves progressively further from anything that could plausibly pass for such a recording and ever more deeply into a distinctively cinematic form of surrealist fantasy. For example, we see a newspaper in the street rise to take the shape of a human partner for the increasingly frantic, exhausted and isolated dancer. Or again, changing camera angles afford the illusion of seeing things alternately from her point of view and that of an observer. What is most interesting about this sequence is that the further the film moves from something that looks like a dance performance, the closer it comes to affording the viewer something like the kind of experience she would have watching one. Darcey Bussell, former principal with the Royal Ballet, captures 16  Ballets Russes dancer and choreographer, Leonide Massine, danced in and choreographed for both films. 17  The sequence begins at 1:01:56 with a close-up of a Program and ends at 1:22:33 with Vicky’s curtain call to thunderous applause.

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the significance of this transformation, when she is asked to characterize the power of the Archer’s sequence: I’d say … that it would give you the same sort of magic as seeing a live performance. Ballet doesn’t come across very well on screen, on TV or in films and to see something like that … that’s just as good as seeing it live, you know, I thought, ‘Well, that’s brilliant … God … if you can do those sorts of things on film!18

As the sequence progresses, then, the camera gradually relinquishes its role as witness to the performance and assumes the mantle of inheritor of it. One can see this passing of the mantle worked out, tragically, in the content of the narrative itself. As the film draws to a close, the tension between Vicky’s love for composer and husband, Julian Crastor, and her devotion to her art reaches fever pitch. Vicky tries to approach the stage, but the red shoes, no longer under her control, resist, drawing her inexorably to follow Julian, who has just stormed out, to the train station. Once there, her body is thrown—by her? By the shoes?—in front of Julian’s departing train. In the closing shots of the film, the camera first lingers over her bloody, broken body then shows us the circle of light, projected onto the screen of the proscenium stage, which will take over Vicky’s role in the second and final performance of the Red Shoes. As part of the audience who waited with baited breath for the first performance to begin, we are left to wonder what could possibly count as pulling the curtain down on this horrifying second one. It is worth pausing to appreciate just how far afield The Red Shoes has taken us from orthodox assumptions about the relation between film and the other arts, or, indeed, between any one art form and another. It is not the suggestion that film might take over some of the aims associated with another art that places this film at odds orthodox assumptions. As we saw, even the most orthodox of approaches makes room for that possibility. For instance, we saw that Bazin conceives of film as taking over what had been one of the animating ambition of painting. And Shaw, as we saw, conceives of the relationship between film and theater along similar lines. But the possibility that preoccupies both these thinkers is the promise that cinema will free painting and theater from ambitions and obligations that were never proper to them in the first place—ambitions and obligations that detracted from their true artistic potential. The possibility that The Red Shoes explores, by contrast, is not the possibility that film unburdens dance of an obligation that never properly belonged to it in the first place. It is rather the possibility that film might inherit from dance artistic ambitions that are and remain at the heart of the art form of dance at its most powerful. They figure out how to make a film that, without ceasing to be a film, succeeds in standing comparison with great dance works of the past whose quality is uncontroversial.

 Darcey Bussell, Interview in Profile of The Red Shoes. (Criterion Collection 2010, disc 2).

18

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My way of formulating this last point is indebted to the writings on modernist art that Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried developed together.19 As Cavell and Fried characterize it, a modernist artist like sculptor Anthony Caro finds himself in a peculiar position: in order to make sculpture (or painting, or dance …) that, as Fried puts it, “can stand comparison with [sculpture or painting or dance or …] of the modernist or premodernist past whose quality seems to him beyond question,” he has to discover new ways of working that are so different that previous ways of “making sculpture” that they may not be easily recognizable as ways of making sculpture at all.20 The fact that we are, as Cavell puts it, “stuck with the knowledge” that what results is sculpture requires rethinking what sculpture itself is, why we call “any object, [even] the most central or traditional a piece of sculpture.”21 My suggestion is that, strange though it may be, the Archers have positioned themselves as filmmakers with respect to the past of dance in something like the position that Caro as a sculptor finds himself in with respect to the past of sculpture. To take this seriously is to recognize that that one cannot fully appreciate the power or quality of Shoes or Hoffmann without seeing them in their relation to the past tradition not, or not just, of film but also of dance. Questions about medium certainly do not drop out of this project. However, whatever role medium is playing, it is certainly not that of delimiting the proper and non-overlapping purviews of the individual arts. Instead, the relationship between the arts—specifically here between dance and film—emerges as something open-ended, something that cannot be worked out in advance of the work of individual films and dances. One direction to turn in order to explore this idea further is to Martin Scorsese, arguably the films’ longest standing and most ardent admirer.22 Scorsese first saw The Red Shoes when he was nine years old and he credits it with inspiring his desire to be a filmmaker: I think it’s very clear in this film, the sense of creativity and obsession. That’s what it’s really about. And I think that’s maybe what I caught. I want to have, in a 19  I explore Cavell and Fried’s conception of modernism more fully in “In the Condition of Modernism: Philosophy, Literature and The Sacred Fount,” in Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism, eds. Karen Zumhagen-Yekple and Michael LeMahieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and “the Thinking Body: Philosophy, Dance and Modernism,” in Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance Performance and Practices, eds. Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes and Bonnie Rowell (Hampshire: Dance Books, 2012). 20  Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 99. 21  Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 216. 22  Scorsese’s admiration for the Archers eventually led him to seek out Powell himself, who was living in a trailer at the time and astonished to learn of the interest that the Archers’ films had inspired not only in Scorsese and Romero but also Spielberg, Schrader, Coppola and de Palma as well. Scorsese worked tirelessly to re-establish Powell’s position within the film industry and, after his death, continued to foster his legacy by financing and overseeing the restoration of The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann among others.

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sense, the same creative experience that these people seemed to be having, the characters in this film. The world that they were in seemed to be uncompromising. It’s a matter of feeling strongly for something that you have to do. Not that you want to do it.23

His admiration for The Tales of Hoffmann, though developed later, was equally passionate. As his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, recalls, Scorsese watched the film obsessively during the making of Raging Bull and vied with Oscar Romero for access to the one print that was available at the time.24 Although Scorsese is clearly moved by the uncompromising commitment to art shown by both films, it is not immediately obvious that the particulars of the Archers’ preoccupation with ballet would be of special interest to him or important for his own work. Homages to Powell and Pressburger are not difficult to spot in Scorsese’s films (the use of the color red in Raging Bull, the eyes of De Niro in Taxi Driver that evoke Robert Helpmann’s hypnotizing gaze in Tales of Hoffmann, the rediscovery and acknowledgment of a forgotten filmmaker in Hugo), but dancers and dance are as absent from the violent, gritty worlds of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull as they are ubiquitous in the rarified worlds of the Archer films that especially capture Scorsese’s imagination. However, when Scorsese and Schoonmaker seek to account for the importance of these films for their own cinematic achievement, they take us more deeply into questions about the relationship between film and dance specifically that mattered so much to the Archers.25 In their discussion of the Archers, Scorsese and Schoonmaker repeatedly draw attention to the unprecedented ways that they find to use the camera. In their hands, as he puts it, camera movement becomes a form of choreography: The music and choreography are both the dancers and the camera, which told the story, and this is something that stayed with me in my work over the years, in all my films the choreography of the camera played to the music and how the two are combined, complementary of each other.26

If Powell and Pressburger begin to explore this potential of the camera in The Red Shoes, they deepen and continue it in The Tales of Hoffmann by decoupling camera and sound. In this “composed” film, the Archers use a pre-­ recorded score in order, Schoonmaker explains, to render the camera more mobile: “A Technicolor camera was huge, with three strips of film running 23  Dave Itzkoff, “‘Red Shoes’ Stirs Martin Scorsese’s Cinematic Passion,” in The New York Times 11/04/2009: https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/cinema-as-music-martinscorsese-on-the-red-shoes/ 24  John Hopewell, “Schoonmaker, Scorsese on Powell and Pressburger’s ‘Tales of Hoffmann’,” in Variety (November 15, 2014): http://variety.com/2014/film/festivals/shoonmakerscorsese-talk-up-tales-of-Hoffmann-1201329816/ 25  Acknowledge Schoonmaker’s independent interest in dance and film, which is evident in her involvement in the collaborations with the Judson Dance Theater—her earlier collaboration. 26  Hopewell, “Schoonmaker, Scorsese on ‘Hoffmann’.”

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through it, because they needed a blimp to cover the sound. On this movie, they could take it off, and the camera could fly! … The camera was dancing to the music.”27 It is this aspect of Tales, Schoonmaker recalls, that accounts for Scorsese’s obsessive viewing of the film during the making of Raging Bull: “When he first saw the movie and started becoming entranced by it—that was the first thing that grabbed him … He’d thread up the print over and over again, and watch it obsessively, because it was teaching him so much about how to make the camera fluid.”28 If the Archers find in their dancing camera a way to create in film something that afforded the kind of experience that dance at its best can afford, Scorsese sees the potential to adapt and develop this technique to the end of recreating the beauty and mesmerizing power that great boxing has. Once one sees Scorsese’s film in their relation to the Archers’ quite different masterpieces, it becomes possible to watch and to appreciate both films in a deeper way, inviting questions that would not have arisen before: questions, for instance, about the relation between the power and beauty of ballet and boxing, about the juxtaposition of beauty and brutality in the worlds that they, respectively, give rise to, and so on. If we pay the right kind of attention to them, the terms that Scorsese and Schoonmaker find to account for the artistic significance of these two Archer films, both make possible and require a reconsideration of the “automatism” that creates such difficulties for early film theorists. As we saw, the issue of automatism, as it is traditionally formulated, is that of what to make of the capacity of a camera to produce “automatically” an image of reality (a photograph) that is more “realistic” than that produced by even the most skilled of human hands. So understood, the emphasis falls on the capacity of the camera to produce images of “reality” or the world. Thus, for example, Cavell seeks to illuminate the artistic possibilities of what he calls “automatic world projections.”29 Similarly, Perkins argues that a more adequate treatment of the possibilities of the medium of film will require attention not just to the camera (and its capacity to produce realistic images or ‘projections’ of the world) but also that of the projector: “The projector’s magic is fundamental to the movie’s mechanical nature and should not be given less weight than the camera’s special relationship to reality.”30 In the work of the Archers (as well as that of Scorsese and others insofar as they succeed in inheriting this aspect of the Archers’ legacy), the issue of “automaticity” is parsed differently. The emphasis falls not on the “automaticity” of the process by which a camera captures an image of the world or reality, but, instead, on the camera as an automaton, a mechanical machine or toy whose 27  Sheila O’Malley, “From ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ to ‘Taxi Driver’: An Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker”: https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/from-tales-of-Hoffmann-to-taxidriver-an-interview-with-thelma-schoonmaker 28  O’Malley, “From ‘Hoffmann’ to ‘Taxi Driver’.” 29  Stanely Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 72, emphasis mine. 30  Perkins, Film as Film, 42.

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interest lies in its potential to create the illusion of human movement, to, as it were, dance.31 One important question to ask is with what artistic significance the Archers are able to invest what, in their hands, becomes a possibility of the medium of film as an art form? We can begin to get one answer to this question in view by considering how Vicky herself articulates the artistic significance of dance. When Lermontov asks Vicky why she wants to dance, she counters with a different question, which appears to stop the arrogant impresario in his tracks and leads him to offer her a chance to prove herself with an audition: “Why do you want to live?” By Vicky’s lights, dance does nothing more nor less than afford dancer and audience alike a distilled and concentrated experience of what is to live, to be full of life. What the Archers find, indeed what they recover, by means of their investigations of the camera as automaton is the potential that film has to afford this kind of experience. In early formulations of the “myth of total cinema,” one can hear this ambition as a kind of counterpoint beneath the dominant melody of an illusion of the world so realistic that the audience will forget about the screen. Consider, for instance, Bazin’s formulation of it: The guiding myth, then, inspiring the invention of the camera, is the accomplishment of that which dominated in more or less vague fashion all the techniques of the mechanical reproduction of reality … namely an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time.32

The resonance and power of Bazin’s formulation here come from its biblical overtones in the phrase, “a recreation of the world in its own image.” It is worth noting though that Bazin’s formulation condenses into one what figures in the relevant passages of Genesis as separate divine actions, namely the creation of the world, and the creation of men and women. That which God creates in God’s own image is not the world but these individuals with life. Bazin makes other remarks that connect the “myth of total cinema” not just to the ambition to create a realistic reproduction of a world but also to create the illusion of life. Consider, for instance, a passage in which he ties that myth to L’Eve Future, Villiers de I’Isle-Adam’s symbolist rewriting of Frankenstein in which a fictionalized Thomas Edison creates not a new Adam but rather a new Eve: There are numberless writings, all of them more or less wildly enthusiastic, in which inventors conjure up nothing less than a total cinema that is to provide the complete illusion of life which is still a long way off. Many are familiar with that passage from L’Eve Future in which Villiers d l’Isle-Adam, two years before

31  footnote re: the literature about the relationship between automata and dancing as well as to the role of the automaton in Scorsese’ Hugo. 32  Bazin, What is Cinema?, 21.

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Edison had begun his researches on animated photography, puts into the inventor’s mouth the following description of a fantastic achievement: ‘ … the vision, its transparent flesh miraculously photographed in color and wearing a spangled costume, danced a kind of popular Mexican dance. Her movements had the flow of life itself …33

This particular formulation of the myth helps to shed special light on the particular way in which it animates The Red Shoes. If Bazin moves quickly to equate the “flow of life itself” with “a faithful copy of nature,” we can see the Archers maintain an awareness of them as distinguishable if not separate and keep their eye primarily on the former. The “Eve” of their film is the agent of her own (re)creation. With Lermontov, she creates life, not by transforming a statue into a woman, but by transforming a woman into a dancer. And like Victor Frankenstein, she finds the success of her endeavor terrifying. She comes only slowly to recognize the genuine implications of giving herself such genuinely independent “life.” For that life, figured in the movement of her own body, proves to be just as independent of the purposes, plans and desires of the woman who gave birth to it as is the child of any flesh and blood parent. The birth of this dancer, the emergence of this new, uncontrollable “life,” is figured as the emergence of an automaton. This process begins in The Red Shoes with the increasingly ordered perfection of the dancers’ movements that culminate in the uncontrollable “movement” that leads to Vicky’s death. It is completed, though, in The Tales of Hoffmann, in which the same dancer, Moira Shearer, appears as an automaton whose motions exhaust and threaten the man who brings her to “life” and is swept up into her driven, frenzied “dance.” This exploration of dancer and camera as automata, which stretches across both films, returns us to questions about the relation between art and machine but from a different vantage than that afforded by either Arnheim or Bazin. From this vantage, the questions that press are not those about how to resolve an apparent contradiction between the “free” expression essential to art and the determinism of automated processes. Neither are they questions about the power of mechanical process to free the world from increasing oppressive ideological interests and habits of perception. Instead, what presses are questions about a fundamental ambivalence that animates and unites both artistic and scientific activity: the desire to create life and the fear of doing so.

Part Three: The “Possibilities” of Film and Philosophy I have argued that the right kind of attention to The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman can shed new light on those broad traditional questions about what film is and how it is related to the other fine arts with which the philosophy and theory of film began. However, even if these films can afford new insight into

 Bazin, What is Cinema?, 20–1.

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relatively untapped “utopian possibilities”34 of cinema’s automatisms, and even if the right kind of attention to them helps to further undermine orthodox assumptions about the relationships between the arts that linger, a troubling possibility remains. Insofar as my interpretation of these films has been guided by the broadest of traditional questions, the possibility is raised that my approach continues to take its cue from orthodox approaches—that it remains primarily part of the problem instead of part of a solution. The warrant for this worry is found in Carroll’s writings. By his lights, the tendency to focus on questions about the possibilities of the medium, however “utopian” those possibilities are imagined to be, is of a piece with the tendency to focus on “big picture” questions about what film and art are. Taken together, he argues, these two tendencies represent what is perhaps the deepest and most pernicious effect of the orthodox legacy. Carroll highlights a deep connection between what he takes to be a misguided focus on the medium of film and what he takes to be the misplaced priority accorded to “big picture” questions about what film is. It is only insofar as philosophers and film scholars understood their aim to be a unified and comprehensive “theory of film” from which all critical judgments about individual films could be derived, Carroll argues, that they took such an interest in the “possibilities” of the medium of film. “The history of film theorizing,” he writes: Has been dominated by a conception of what a film theory should be in terms of the model of a unified body of ideas with certain core propositions from which conclusions about concrete cases follow in various ways, once certain empirical possibilities are considered.35

Guided by this essentialist ambition, Carroll argues, orthodox theorists turn to the “unique possibilities of the medium” to provide the “axioms” of this unified theory. Medium, he argues, simply cannot play this role and, indeed, the search for such a unified theory is a quixotic one that has led to the neglect of less flashy but more fruitful questions that aim at “local,” “piecemeal” theories instead of comprehensive ones.36 As he sees it, giving up the quixotic quest for a unified film theory and “forgetting about the medium” are of a piece. While I take Carroll’s criticism of the illusory search for a comprehensive theory of film to be decisive, I am not convinced that giving up this illusory search requires either forgetting the medium or turning away from those “big picture” questions with which the theory and philosophy of film began. It behooves us, I would argue, to at least consider another possibility: that it requires us instead to reconsider (1) what it means to be a “possibility of an artistic medium” and (2) what kind of questions those broadest of traditional question are. What needs to be given up, I would argue, is not the questions  Owe this phrase to Gunning.  Carroll, Moving Image, 359. 36  Carroll, Moving Image, 359 & 362. 34 35

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themselves, but the assumption that they are “theoretical,” that is, that an adequate response to them will take the form of an (empirical) theory, whether BIG or local. Let’s start by reconsidering what it means to be a “possibility of an artistic medium.” The term “possibility” admits of different categorical inflections. The first sense of possibility has its home in formal logic. Think, for example, of the sense in which a certain finite set of possibilities are given with any truth function, that is, a compound statement whose truth value (i.e., its truth or falsity) depends upon the simple statements of which it is composed. So, for example, the statement, “My rabbit’s name is Francis and he is 2 years old” is composed of the simple statements “My rabbit’s name is Francis” (S1) and “Francis is two year old” (S2). The compound is true if both simple statements are true and false otherwise. As I tell Introduction to Logic students, the enormous power packed into this sense of “possibility” lies in its clarity and specificity. With respect to any given truth function, one can know exactly what possible cases there are (in my example, there are four: either both S1 and S2 are true, they are both false, or S1 is true and S2 is false or vice versa), and I know how to calculate the truth value of the function in each of these cases. The only thing I may not know is which of the cases corresponds to the way the world is. It is quite natural, then, to want this sense of “possibility” to have application to other aspects of our lives. For example, it is enormously tempting to picture ourselves as practical beings as likewise presented with finite sets of possibilities and to picture the exercise of our will as a well-defined matter of deciding which to actualize. Carroll, in effect, points to a similar desire to simplify things by imagining that artistic mediums—paint, celluloid strips, words, whatever—likewise come with a finite set of possibilities built in. The work of figuring out what those possibilities are, and making sure that you’ve formulated them all, might be a bit more difficult than it is in the case of truth functions, but the difference is only a matter of degree. Thus, for example, if Panofsky is right that the possibilities for film are “dynamization of space” and “spatialization of time,” then any successful movie is going to realize one or the other of these “possibilities.” Powerful though this very familiar sense of “possibility” is, it is not the sense of “possibility” that animates Scorsese’s attention to The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffmann. It makes little sense to picture the use of the camera as an automaton as one of a finite set of “possible” uses of the camera that could be specified in advance, if only one paid sufficient attention. When Scorsese sees in the Archers’ camera work the possibility of a “dancing camera,” and then goes on to actualize this possibility in a masterful film about boxing, he invests the Archers’ own camera movement with a significance that it did not have before. When, in her turn, a groundbreaking playwright like Annie Baker becomes captivated by that same camera work, the artistic potential she sees in it is quite different. Where Scorsese sees a camera that unburdens itself of sound in order to dance, Baker focuses instead on the artistic significance of the new and

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­deliberate silence that results. What interests her are the possibilities she sees in such chosen silence for the new theatrical forms that she is in the process of ­creating.37 It makes little sense to think of a Scorsese or a Baker as choosing among a finite set of specific artistic possibilities that are given in the camera work of Powell and Pressburger, let alone in camera movement itself. It is only in virtue of the ways that such artists find to use what they see in the Archers’ camera work to make powerful film and theater that such camera work remains a “possibility” of an artistic medium at all. Cavell highlights this point in The World Viewed by distinguishing between the “possibilities” of the artistic medium of film and the “actualities” of film mechanics.38 Considered in and of themselves, he argues, cutting, editing or taking shots at different distances are mere actualities of film mechanics; every newsreel and home movie depend on them. It is only insofar as someone finds a way to use these mechanical actualities to make artistic sense that cutting and editing become and remain possibilities of an artistic medium at all. It is not a foregone conclusion that someone will find a way to invest these processes with artistic significance. Nor is there any way to determine in advance what the artistic possibilities of these mechanical actualities are. If we take seriously the sense in which the “possibilities” that a Scorsese or a Baker see in the work of a Powell and Pressburger, it is clear that Carroll is right that there is little sense to be made of the orthodox search for a deductive theory that could definitively answer that broadest of questions, “What is film?” For what the “possibilities of the medium” are evolves over time in light of the possibilities that artists find for making artistic sense with and in response to film and the “actualities of film mechanics.” As Carroll argues, this gives the theorist of film a compelling reason to turn her attention from general questions such as “What is film?” to more specific questions that lead to “local” as opposed to global theories. I want, though, to suggest that the philosopher of film need not follow suite. In his seminal paper, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image,” Wilfred Sellars characterizes philosophy as concerned with how things “in the broadest possible sense hang together in the broadest possible sense.”39 I do not take myself to have formulated a general “theory” of film in this chapter. (Certainly, I would be guilty of the fallacy of hasty generalization were I to move from my attention to two or three films to such a theory.) However, I do take myself to have done some work to further illuminate how film as an art form “hangs” together. This has involved exploring how certain individual films “hang together” with each other as well as how film does or might hang together with the art form of dance. The questions that have guided that effort are not ori37  Annie Baker, “Annie Baker’s Top 10,” at https://www.criterion.com/explore/241-anniebaker’s-top-10. 38  Cavell, World Viewed, 31. 39  Wilfred Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Limited, 1967), 1.

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ented by the goal of formulating exhaustive generalizations about film. But neither are they accurately characterized as more modest theoretical questions that aim at the production of local or midlevel theories. A local theory is one whose scope is limited in clear and specific ways. There is, though, no way of determining in advance what individual films, or even what art forms, will fall under the scope of the light shed by an effort like Scorsese’s to do justice to the aesthetic power of The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann. Such shedding of light is, indeed, “piecemeal,” but it is not theoretical, and its horizon is still described by those most traditional of general questions about what film, and art more generally, is and can be.

Bibliography Baker, Annie. Annie Baker’s TOP 10. https://www.criterion.com/explore/241annie-baker’s-top-10 Bazin, André. 1967. What Is Cinema? Volume I. Berkley: University of California Press. Boyce, Kristin. 2012. The Thinking Body: Philosophy, Dance and Modernism. In Thinking Through Dance: The Philosophy of Dance Performance and Practices, ed. Jenny Bunker, Anna Pakes, and Bonnie Rowell, 256–272. Hampshire: Dance Books. ———. 2016. In the Condition of Modernism: Philosophy, Literature and The Sacred Fount. In Wittgenstein and Literary Modernism, ed. Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé and Michael LeMahieu, 153–175. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bussell, Darcey. Interview. Profile of “The Red Shoes,” on The Criterion Collection (2010), Disc 2. Carroll, Noël. 1998. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003. Art History, Dance and the 1960’s. In Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible, ed. Sally Banes, 81–97. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Cavell, Stanley. 1971. The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2003. Must We Mean What We Say. New York: Cambridge University Press. Christie, Ian. Interview. Profile of “The Red Shoes,” on The Criterion Collection (2010), Disc 2. Fried, Michael. 1998. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gunning, Tom. 2003. Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion. In Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, 75–89. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 2005. Light, Motion, Cinema!: The Heritage of Loïe Fuller and Germaine Dulac. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 46 (1): 106–129. Hopewell, John. 2014. Schoonmaker, Scorsese on Powell and Pressburger’s ‘Tales of Hoffmann’. Variety, November 15. http://variety.com/2014/film/festivals/ shoonmaker-scorsese-talk-up-tales-of-Hoffmann-1201329816/ Itzkoff, Dave. 2009. ‘Red Shoes’ Stirs Martin Scorsese’s Cinematic Passion. The New York Times, November 04. https://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/ cinema-as-music-martin-scorsese-on-the-red-shoes/

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Kermode, Frank. 1983. Poet and Dancer Before Diaghilev. In What Is Dance? ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 145–160. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Langer, Susan. 1983. From Feeling and Form. In What Is Dance? ed. Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 28–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Malley, Sheila. From ‘Tales of Hoffmann’ to ‘Taxi Driver’: An Interview with Thelma Schoonmaker. https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/from-tales-of-Hoffmannto-taxi-driver-an-interview-with-thelma-schoonmaker Perkins, Victor. 1973. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New  York: Penguin Books. Sellars, Wilfred. 1963. Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Limited. Shaw, George Bernard. 1997. Bernard Shaw On Cinema, ed. Bernard F.  Dukore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

CHAPTER 34

The Sonic Art of Film and the Sonic Arts in Film John Dyck

Sounds are some of the most intimate and memorable aspects of films. When I think of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo (1996), I remember how it looks— those shots of the austere North Dakota landscape, the wood chipper, and the blood splattered on the snow. But I remember its sounds, too. I love how Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) says, “Oh you betcha, yeah.” I remember Carter Burwell’s terrifying theme, played first by a fiddle then swelling to a full orchestra. I remember the sound of that wood chipper. When we watch movies, we hear music, actions, and objects; we hear ambient atmospheres, and we hear voices of characters and narrators. In fact, speaking is an essential part of much film acting. (When we imitate actors, we usually imitate their voices, not their faces.) Nearly every film, high or low, is made for seeing and hearing—often together. Sound is almost always synchronized with the images on screen. Despite how important audition is to our experience of movies, however, we naturally speak about film in visual terms: as “moving images” (from which “movies” is derived) or “film.”1 We don’t hear movies; we see movies. We watch movies. We use ocular terms for a related artform, too—“television” and “TV shows.”

1  Even “cinema” is derived from the Greek word for “movement”—presumably visual movement. One exception here is “talkies.”

J. Dyck (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_34

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This focus on the visual is reinforced in philosophical accounts of film. Discussions of film tend to focus on what film’s visual medium could be and how film could visually represent its objects. Discussions of empathy in film tend to focus on visual close-ups. In his book The World Viewed, a classic philosophical study of film, Stanley Cavell begins by thinking of film as an art of photography.2 Cavell proceeds by contrasting photography (and therefore, film) against auditory recording! He appears to forget that many films themselves involve sound recordings. If your only knowledge of film was from that chapter, you might get the impression that films are seen and never heard. This bias toward the visual might come from a general philosophical bias that Casey O’Callaghan calls “visuocentrism”—a tendency to focus on visual perception.3 This point falls in line with Martin Heidegger’s criticism that Western ontology is overly focused on the visual.4 Whatever the cause, research in philosophy of film lacks a sustained focus on sound in film. The only aspect of film sound that philosophers discuss is film music. The discussion of film music is inventive, but it does not address sound in film as such. My goal in this chapter is to think broadly and systematically about sound in film. I present three big ideas. The biggest of these ideas, first, is that film is a multimodal art. We should think of film as an art, not just of sights, but also of sounds. I also briefly argue, independently, that attention to sounds in film enriches philosophical work on film. The second big idea is that there are several arts of film sound. Most philosophical attention to film sound focuses on music, but music is not the only aural art of film. The final big idea considers film music as it relates to philosophy of music. A prominent definition of music seems to imply that film scores are not instances of music at all. I show that film music really is music. Before I start in on these three ideas, however, I shall start by considering the existing philosophical literature on film music. I provide an overview both of film music and of the philosophical literature on film music. A caveat: Throughout this chapter, I focus primarily on work by philosophers on film. As Thomas Wartenburg has said, philosophy of film ought to be an interdisciplinary endeavor.5 But, from what I can tell, the lay of the land regarding sound in contemporary philosophy of film looks much different than in neighboring disciplines such as film studies. The problem I address here may be unique to philosophy.

2  Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 16–23. 3  Casey O’Callaghan, Sounds: A Philosophical Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–4. 4  Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 5  Thomas Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (CSLI, 2017).

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Two Overviews: Film Music and Philosophy of Film Music Philosophers of film have not considered sound generally very often, but they have considered film music. In this section, I first provide a brief taxonomy of film music. I then provide an overview of its philosophical treatment. Familiarly, there are two kinds of film music. One kind of film music is diegetic: It occurs within the fictional world of the film. This includes music sung by characters. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) opens with a main character singing a ballad. Diegetic music also includes recordings that are played in the fictional world of the films. Remember in Say Anything (1989), when Lloyd (John Cusack) is holding up a boom box outside of Diane’s (Ione Skye) window? The boom box is blaring Peter Gabriel’s song “In Your Eyes.” Contrast diegetic music with non-diegetic music—music that occurs outside of the world of the film. Characters do not hear this music. Non-diegetic music is the subject of most philosophical work on film music; it occurs in film scores. The distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music is porous. For one thing, themes in the fictional world of the film often bleed into the non-diegetic film score. This often happens in musicals. It is used to great effect in Swiss Army Man (2015): A melody is first played on a lifeless body and then heard in the score.6 Jerrold Levinson calls such instances “quasi-diegetic.”7 The line is also porous because many films are ambiguous about whether a sound is a sound effect or part of a non-diegetic soundtrack. Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) mixes sound effects with music. K.J. Donnelly, a film scholar, argues that this ambiguity is crucial to the design of sequences in several horror films, including Saw (2004).8 Let’s introduce another distinction. Some film music is not written for the film; it is reused or repurposed. This is true of diegetic music, like the Peter Gabriel song in Say Anything. It is also true of non-diegetic music. Famously, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) uses the brass fanfare from Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896). Cold Mountain (2003) uses the classic sacred harp song “Idumea” to great effect, played while Civil War soldiers dismember each other in battle. Or think of the opening scene of Magnolia (1999): Aimee Mann’s cover of “One” plays while the various characters are introduced. More familiarly, film music is composed or written for the film. This includes songs for diegetic use: Audrey Hepburn’s character sings “Moon River” in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). It includes songs for non-diegetic use: “Eye of the Tiger” plays during a montage in Rocky III (1982). But when we think of

 Thanks to Ben Sellick for pointing out this case to me.  Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 254–288, at 269. 8  Donnelly notable sequences in other films, such as Se7en (1997), Ju-On: The Grudge (2003), and The Fog (2005). Donnelly, “Saw Heard,” 112. 6 7

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music written for films, we usually think of film scores—non-diegetic accompaniments to film. Film scores are often symphonic. Carol Flinn and William H. Rosar both argue that film music is typically romantic; it is symphonic in the specific style of Wagner.9 But film scores can be generally “classical” without being symphonic per se. Lesley Barber’s gorgeous score for Manchester by the Sea (2016) involved innovative choral pieces. Film scores are often non-symphonic; many use synthesizer sounds. Apocalypse Now (1979) had a synth score composed by Coppola’s father, who borrowed techniques from composer Isao Tomito. Synth music was common in many films of that time, including John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981).10 A synth sound still occurs in recent films, for example, Oneohtrix Point Never’s score for Good Time (2017), Cliff Martinez’s score for Drive (2011), and Disasterpeace’s score for It Follows (2014). So, there are two distinctions. One is between diegetic and non-diegetic music, and the other is between music written for a film and music repurposed for a film. With those two distinctions in hand, let’s review the philosophical literature on music in film. The philosophical literature on film music pertains largely to two questions. First is a functional question: What is the function of film music in general, or of film scores in particular? (This functional question often blurs into a distinct explanatory question: Why do we have film music?) Second is a definitional question: What is film music?11 Much of this literature focuses on film scores, but some accounts are meant to be fully general across all instances of film music.12 I start with the functional question: What does film music do? Aaron Copland suggested that film scores have several different functions, including establishing atmosphere, giving continuity to editing, and building up a scene.13 Noël Carroll provides a more general account of the functions of film music in general. Carroll argues that, whatever else it might do, music in film has a modifying function. “The music possesses certain expressive qualities which are 9  See Carol Flinn, “The Most Romantic Art of All: Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema,” Cinema Journal, 29 (1990), 35–50; William H. Rosar, “Film Music—What’s in a Name?” The Journal of Film Music 1 (2002), 1–18. 10  Tangerine Dream, a German electronic group, scored films such as Thief (1981) and Near Dark (1987). 11  Some philosophical discussion of film music concerns diegetic music; Peter Kivy provides a taxonomy of certain kinds of songs in film. Peter Kivy, “Realistic Song in the Movies,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (2013): 75–80. 12  The role here is, of course, not unique to film, since it also occurs in opera. See Kivy, “Music in the Movies: A Philosophical Enquiry,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 308–328. 13  Aaron Copland, “Tip to the Moviegoers: Take off Those Ear-Muffs,” The New York Times, 6 November 1949, section six. Jeff Smith provides a helpful summary of Copland’s view in “Unheard Melodies: A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed., David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 232.

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introduced to modify or to characterize onscreen persons and objects, actions and events, scenes and sequences.”14 Through its modifying role, Carroll argues, music has an epistemic function and an ontological function: Allows the audience to gain access more easily to the expressive qualities of the film, and it bestows clarity upon the events depicted.15 Carroll’s account gives us a general account of film music; this covers diegetic and non-diegetic film music, songs, and film scores. The functional question intersects with questions about agency introduced by Jerrold Levinson.16 If film scores modify action or emotions, whose actions or emotions do they modify? Who is “responsible” for the music? The narrator, the author, or the character? Levinson argues that film music is attributable to a variety of sources on different occasions. Levinson’s conclusion shows how music can modify aspects of film. The functional question intersects another question, an explanatory or genealogical question regarding film scores: Why do we have film music in the first place?17 Peter Kivy argues that film has the function of making up for the lack of real presence created by a real person, since film contains only representations. The lack of real presences of persons creates an “expressive vacuum.” Musical scores, then, have the function of filling this expressive vacuum by reinforcing expressive cues.18 In a different vein, psychoanalytic theories of film have attempted to understand both the subconscious functions of film and the explanatory question of why we have film music. Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler argue that film scores are subconsciously ghostly.19 Film images involve bodies that move without life—we see a moving image of Carey Mulligan, but she is not there. Adorno and Eisler posit that, just as music generally has played a role of appeasing ghosts, film music appeases subconscious film ghosts.20 This account, too, intersects with the explanatory or genealogical question. More recently, psychoanalytic film scholars have argued for a less spiritual function that film music plays in the subconscious. Claudia Gorbman and Carol Flinn have argued that film music is not supposed to be consciously heard.21 On this view, film music ought to be transparent; it should never draw a­ ttention 14  Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 219. 15  Carroll, Mystifying Movies, 223. 16  Jerrold Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency.” 17  Peter Kivy, “Music in the Movies: A Philosophical Enquiry,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 18  Kivy, “Music in the Movies,” 324–5. 19  Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (Revised Edition, London: Athlone Press, 1947/1994). 20  Both Carroll and Kivy discuss this theory in more detail. Carroll, Mystifying Movies, 214–216, and Kivy, “Music in the Movies.” 21  Claudia Gorbman, “Narrative Film Music,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 183–203, and Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Flinn, “The Most Romantic Art of All.”

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to itself. This suggests another functional role for film music: an essentially selfeffacing role. If music is a modifier, as Carroll suggests, it ought to be necessarily covert in its modification—at least, according to this theory. Although this is an intriguing theory of one aspect of film music, it is doubtful that it suffices as a one-size-fits-all theory of film. It follows from this account that noticeable film music is bad film music, but that is patently false. As Jeff Smith notes, this view results in a “monolithic conception” of film music. It may fit some instances, but it is overly simplistic as a fully general account of film music’s function.22 Smith argues that film music is better understood using cognitivist theory.23 The second question is how to define film music. What is film music, and what counts as film music? Jeff Smith proposes the following cluster account of film music, as follows: (1) music specially composed for use as part of a recorded audiovisual medium; (2) music used to accompany cinematic depictions of peoples, places, things, ideas, or events; (3) music used to underline aspects of a film’s setting; (4) music used to communicate a film character’s traits; (5) music used to signify emotion or mood in a filmed scene or sequence; (6) music used to convey a film character’s point of view; (7) music used to accent depicted actions in a filmed scene or sequence; (8) music used to reinforce a film’s formal features, such as its editing; and (9) music that sounds like film music.24

Call this account “the cluster account.” Following Gaut’s cluster account of art, this account is meant to pick out salient aspects of film music and guide us toward central cases of film music. The more of these properties something exhibits, the more it is a central case of film music. If something exhibits only one property, it is at the border of film music. According to the cluster account, film music includes music written for film, music playing a function in film, and music that sounds like film music. Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore argue that the cluster account is “redundant and incomplete.”25 It is redundant because multiple of Smith’s functions are examples of simpler modifying music. It is incomplete because there may be more functions. Carroll and Moore also take issue with Smith’s ninth ingredient, the claim that film music is anything that sounds like film music. They point out that Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler sounds like film music but is not film music.26  Jeff Smith, “Unheard Melodies,” 239.  Smith, “Unheard Melodies,” 240. 24  Jeff Smith, “Music,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge), 190. 25  Noël Carroll and Margaret Moore, “Music and Motion Pictures,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, edited by Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania (New York: Routledge, 2011), 457. 26  Carroll and Moore, “Music and Motion Pictures,” 458. Carroll and Moore use the phrase “motion-picture music,” but I use the phrase “film music.” 22 23

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Carroll and Moore propose a simpler account with three conditions: x is motion-picture music if: 1. x is a piece of music composed for use in a movie… or 2. x is an arrangement or re-orchestration of existing music made specifically for inclusion in or accompaniment to a movie… or 3. x is a recording of pre-­ existing music appearing in a movie…27

Call this account “the disjunctive account.” This account is extensionally straightforward. It includes music composed for films, music arranged for films, and recordings of music that occur in film. The first two conditions are intentionalist conditions, requiring that music be made for film. The third condition is an actualist condition, stipulating that all actual recordings of music in film are instances of film music. Peter Gabriel did not intend for his song to be film music, but it is film music because it appears in Say Anything. On the disjunctive account, some film music is not in any film; for some music written for films does not actually occur in films, yet it satisfies the first condition. The first score that Jóhann Jóhannsson wrote for mother! (2017) was not used for the film. Yet it was written for the film, so it counts as film music on this view. Carroll and Moore have the intuition that it is film music. Some may have the intuition that it is not film music. To accommodate this intuition, one might have a view that film music is all and only music that occurs in films. Call this the strict actualist account. The strict actualist view says that Jóhannsson’s score is not film music. Carroll and Moore are liberal; they include music “composed for use in a movie.” Both accounts of film music face a problem: Some music was written for film and occurred on film, but it seems to transcend its status as film music. Think of well-known songs which were written for unpopular movies: The movies fade, but the songs remain. Stevie Wonder wrote his classic song “I Just Called to Say I Love You” for the 1984 Gene Wilder romcom The Woman in Red. Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was written for Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 flop Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. We probably don’t think of either of these songs as film music. But they count as film music under either account, since they were written for films and they occurred on films. There are two strategies to deal with this problem. One strategy is to hold that songs like “I Just Called to Say I Love You” are in fact pieces of film music. They belong to multiple categories; they are in fact instances of film music, but they are also instances of song simpliciter. The reason we don’t think of them as film music, one might say, is that they are not widely known as film music. Another strategy is to say that these songs transcend their original uses and are no longer movie music. If this second option is right, then the disjunctivist account (or any actualist or intentionalist account) needs revision.28  Carroll and Moore, 458.  There is also a question about whether film scores are musical works. Jeff Smith argues that they are not. Musical works are the kinds of things that are instantiated in performances. But film 27 28

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Turn It Up: Music Matters to Movies In this section, I argue that sound deserves more attention in philosophy of film. First, I argue that sound itself is essential to film; the nature of film is multimodal. Second, and independently, I briefly show that sound is relevant to research in philosophy of film. The standard position among philosophers of film is that film is essentially a visual art.29 Berys Gaut says: “Cinema is the medium of the moving image.”30 Carroll also defines cinema as the art of the moving image.31 Carroll and Gaut disagree on whether film is an art or a medium. But let’s set that aside. Both Gaut and Carroll are committed to a view I shall call perceptual monism about film—monism, for short. According to monism, film is an artform or medium that essentially involves one modality of perception: vision.32 Monism might seem obviously false. Sound obviously plays an important role in film. First, sounds are essential to individual films. What would The Shining be without Jack Nicholson saying, “Here’s Johnny!”? What would Eyes Wide Shut be without György Ligeti’s soundtrack? Sounds make these films the films that they are. Second, sound can play crucial functions; they give information that is not on the screen. In a horror film, one may hear (but not see) a knock on the door from inside the house. Film scores help us know how we should feel. Third, sounds play an important role in genres of film. Lush strings let us know that we’re in a drama or a romance. Stabbing strings let us know we’re in a horror film. And, finally, sound is important for film generally. As Katherine Thomson-Jones notes, the introduction of sound in film may be the most significant development in the art of film; the digitization of film, she claims, is rivaled only by the appearance of the talkie in importance.33

scores, Smith argues, are not performances—they are recordings of performances. Jeff Smith, “Music,” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009). For an argument that films are not works for performance, see David Davies, “Ontology,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, edited by Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009). 29  One exception is Gerald Mast, who defines film as an art of projected images and recorded sounds. Mast, Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 30  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 302; see also 18 and 307. 31  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden: Blackwell, 2008). 32  Interestingly, one might argue that “moving images” are not to be understood in a strictly visual sense, since images are not just visual. Consider, for example, Aristotle’s definition of images, according to which images are any sensory representation of an object. On this view, there can be auditory images. If one held an account of “image” that was not modality-specific, one could hold that an account of film as moving images can allow for audition, since there are auditory images. See Aristotle, De Anima, translated by C.D.C.  Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017), II.2 and III.3. Thanks to Shawn Loht for this point. 33  Katherine Thomson-Jones, “Movie Appreciation and the Digital Medium,” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, edited by Katherine Thomson-Jones (New York: Routledge, 2016), 37–38.

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Yet monists can allow that films involve other modalities like audition. I discuss two arguments for perceptual monism about film—both allow that films have sounds. The first argument comes from an essay by Rudolf Arnheim, “A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film.” Arnheim endorses a general view about the specificity of artworks to media: Artworks in some medium ought to take forms that are most appropriate to that medium. Arnheim admits that both sight and sound are appropriate to theatrical plays. But they are not both appropriate to cinema. Here’s what he says: The practical experience of what goes on in the movie theater would demonstrate to everybody that a true fusion of word and image is impossible if the image on the screen were ever shut off so that the dialogue could try to ‘take over.’ The visual action is always complete—at least technically, although not artistically. The complete visual action accompanied by occasional dialogue represents a partial parallelism, not a fusion. The fragmentary nature of the dialogue is the fundamental defect.34

Arnheim argues here that a “true fusion” of two modalities is impossible in film. The argument is that, in film, sight and sound are not fused. Sight and sound might run together (in parallel), but they are not truly united, since sight always dominates. Arnheim’s reason here seems to be that sound is often stilted and infrequent; films have parts without sound. In those instances, the film is purely visual. But films could not have parts without images. So, sound and sight are not truly fused. But, the argument continues, in order for a medium to be properly multimodal, it must fuse modalities. So, film is not a truly multimodal medium. We should deny Arnheim’s claim that sight and sound are not properly fused in film. Perhaps sound was stilted and inconstant when Arnheim first wrote the essay in 1938, when complete silence would occur between lines of dialogue. One can still hear the awkward introduction of sound in films from that time. But that is no longer true. Sound is a constant feature of film in contemporary cinema, just as images are, and the two are fused together.35 This second argument for monism is not an argument about what features best suit the medium of film, but an argument about the essential properties of film. In Currie’s book on philosophy of film, tellingly titled Image and Mind, Currie argues that “The cinema… is a visual medium.”36 Currie’s argument is straightforward. 34  Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 210. Arnheim goes on to say that words interrupt silence, but images do not interrupt. 35  Indeed, for many sequences of film, we would do better to hear rather than to see the film. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3–4. 36  Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 3.

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Movies often have other properties  [besides visual ones], accessible through senses other than sight, and appropriate contact with those movies requires acquaintance, through the right sense, with those properties. … all these, including sound, are incidental accretions so far as cinema itself is concerned, because there can be, and in fact are, works in the medium which eschew all sensory engagement except the visual. Visual properties are what cinematic works have to have.37

Currie’s extensional analysis of film is meant to isolate the essential properties of the medium film by examining what properties all films necessarily have. Some films do not have sound. If some things can be films without having sound, then the property having sound must not be essential to film-hood. Katherine Thomson-Jones offers a brief defense of monism along similar lines: “Sound is important but not essential, since a film can be complete without sound.”38 This extensional analysis does not imply that sound is a trivial or meaningless aspect of film, nor does it imply that all aspects of films are purely visual. It can accommodate the important role of sound in film. The important move here is just to hold that sound is an optional property of the medium of film. If something lacks sound, it can still be a film. If something lacks images, it can no longer be a film. There are familiar objections to focusing on the medium of film from Carroll; since that objection is familiar, I am not going to lay it out here.39 There are four other objections. The first objection pertains to Currie’s claim that some films are silent. Perhaps he has in mind silent movies from early Hollywood. But these films were rarely silent; they involved live  musical accompaniment.40 There are examples of truly silent films: films that are not made for hearing audiences. Consider The Tribe (2014), which contains no spoken dialogue; the film is in Ukrainian Sign Language, made with a deaf audience in mind. To properly see The Tribe, you don’t need to hear it. The point here is that, while there are silent films, there are probably far fewer of them than we might have thought. The second objection is a reductio. Currie’s strategy can also be used, with some modification, to show that visual components are not essential to film. A film of pure sound is conceivable. For some films have sounds without images— at least, during some part of them. Raising Arizona (1987) begins with several seconds of sound without anything on screen. Arguably, one could make a whole movie without anything being seen. This is especially important, given  Currie, Image and Mind, 3.  Katherine Thomson-Jones, Aesthetics and Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 12–13. 39  Noël Carroll, “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 19 (1985): 5–20. I suspect, however, that, using Lopes’ account of art kinds as appreciative kinds, it will follow that the art kind of film, as it exists today, depends essentially on sound. 40  Gerald Mast writes: “The movies have never been silent… The piano was as essential to the early nickelodeons as the projector.” Mast, Film/Cinema/Movie, 206. 37 38

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the prominent role of surround sound in theaters. If there could be a sound-­ based movie, then not all films need to have images. Third, Currie’s extensional strategy forecloses on the possibility that the medium of film might have changed their nature over time. Suppose we agree with Currie that early films are silent films. It is natural to say that, simply because of the way culture and technology developed, film went from being a visual (unimodal) art to being an audiovisual (multimodal) art. It is natural to say that the nature of film changed. But one could not say this on Currie’s extensionalist analysis. Finally, there are worries about an extensional method in general, especially for anything like an artform. Compare an account of desserts. You might think that desserts are necessarily sweet. But extensionally, that’s false. Someone served me a tomato tart dessert last night; as it happens, the tart was not very sweet (nor was it intended to be). Extensionally, sweetness is optional when it comes to desserts. Surely, however, it is a salient fact that so many desserts are sweet. One might say that there is still something essentially sweet about desserts, even if not all desserts are sweet. The concept ‘desert’ essentially requires the fact that most desserts are sweet, even if not all desserts are. If we build a theory to accommodate every instance of something, we can miss important elements of the thing. My suggestion, then, is that we ought to approach the nature of film by considering what is most central and salient to the artform—not necessarily what properties every instance of film has. And the nature of film today involves sonic properties. Sonic properties, in general, are  absolutely crucial for the criticism, appreciation, and creation of film. There are examples of contemporary films, like The Tribe, which do not involve sound. But these films are far from the norm. To consider how crucial sound is to film, consider the examples adduced at the beginning. The practice of film, as it exists, essentially involves sight and sound; it is an audiovisual artform. Indeed, monism may be a dogma. In his Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Gaut acknowledges that “film is an auditory-visual medium.”41 Both before and after, Gaut claims that cinema is the medium of the moving image! So far as I can see, this is a blip; Gaut does not try to explain this claim.42 But it is a revealing blip. The point so far is that monism is false; film by its nature is not just seen, but heard. But sound matters to philosophical research about film even if film were essentially visual and not aural. Carroll himself provides a purely visual, five-­ pronged account of moving images.43 But Carroll argues that this analysis is not profoundly revealing of film itself. “I do not think that [these five  Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 221.  Presumably, Gaut is following Currie’s line of reasoning here, for he writes earlier that sound is an “extra capacity” of film, presumably inessential. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 37. 43  “we will regard something as an instance of the moving image if and only if (1) it is a detached display or a series thereof; (2) it belongs to the class of things from which the production of the impression of movement is technically possible; (3) performance tokens of it are generated by templates which are tokens; (4) performance tokens of it are not artworks in their own right; and (5) it is a two-dimensional array.” Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 78. 41 42

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c­ onditions] are particularly central to our understanding of how moving images function. For example, we don’t—at least as far as I can see at present—derive any deep insights into the effects of movies or into film style by contemplating these five conditions.”44 Carroll’s thought is that theorizing on the essential characteristics of film is not the only task for philosophy of film. Presumably, sound in film involves deep insights into movie effects or film style. So, a focus on sound in film is illuminating even if monism is true. There are several ways in which contemporary philosophical discussions of film will benefit from more attention to sound. I briefly mention three. Consider the vast discussion of whether film is transparent. This discussion focuses largely on whether images are transparent. In discussing transparency, Gaut notes an asymmetry between the transparency of recorded sounds and the transparency of images: For recorded sounds, there is no surface.45 This is a deep question. It is addressed in philosophical discussion in the cognition and aesthetics of sounds, for example, by M.G.F. Martin.46 And it has consequences for discussions of film’s transparency—in particular, for whether and how film can be transparent in a multimodal way. For instance, if individual films essentially involve both sight and sound, then, those films can be transparent only if both vision and audition are transparent. It is not enough to show that if pictures have surfaces but sounds don’t, how does this affect our multimodal processing when we watch a film? Such research would be aided by the flurry of recent work in philosophy of sound.47 Furthermore, auditory features of film give rise to additional representational capacities. The representational capacities of sound outstrip the representational capacities of vision. As Michel Chion notes, there is an important spatial contrast between hearing and seeing: “Human vision, like that of cinema, is partial and directional. Hearing, though, is omnidirectional. We cannot see what is behind us, but we can hear all around.”48 Discussions of the phenomenology of film seem to allow a greater role for sound in film. According to phenomenological analyses of film, films involve reproductions of embodied states by the filmmakers. On this account, it could be that films are not simply a union of sound and image, since the two modalities are not distinct in film. Instead, just as in real life, sounds and images are fused together.49 Finally, in naturalistic studies of film, a budding research program has investigated the importance of how films generate affect and empathy in the audi Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72.  Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 94–95. 46  M.G.F. Martin, “Sounds and Images,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2012): 331–351. 47  For introductions to these issues, see Casati and Dokic (2010) and O’Callaghan (2009). 48  Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17. 49  See, for example, Vivian Sobchak, The Address of the Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Carnal Thoughts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). I thank Shawn Loht for bringing this point to my attention. 44 45

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ence.50 While these are admirably clear, they often focus on visual perception—twofolded seeing, facial expression, and (visual) mirror-neurons. It seems likely that various auditory elements—the human voice, the sonic close-up, and film music—help to generate empathy, too.

The Sonic Arts of Film I argue here that there are multiple arts of sound in film. Drawing on some distinctions about sounds from an essay by Andy Hamilton, I propose that there are six arts of sound in film.51 The main upshot is that sound in film is more than music. There are two aesthetic arts of sound, according to Hamilton. Obviously, music is one. Music is sound organized along certain dimensions: tone, rhythm, and harmony. But not all aesthetic sounds are organized along these dimensions. Sound art, argues Hamilton, is a distinct aesthetic art of sound. It presents certain sorts of timbres or textures as objects of aesthetic consideration—sound art is subject to different formal constraints than music. It is obvious that music appears in film. But sound art does, too. For example, in Arrival (2016), Jóhann Jóhannsson uses a low drone throughout the film. This drone doesn’t involve any formal dimensions of music; arguably, as a toneless drone, it is sound art. (Jóhannsson also splices and manipulates recorded sounds, typical of sound art.) K.J.  Donnelly shows that the score for Saw employs many techniques of musique concrete, an early form of sound art.52 Hamilton suggests that, besides aesthetic sounds, there is another category of sound. Hamilton calls this category “sound design,” but I refer to it as functional sounds. Functional sounds are meant to carry information. Hamilton distinguishes explicitly functional sounds from implicitly functional sounds53 Explicitly functional sounds carry information in an overt way. Examples are ringtones, car horns, and doorbells. These sounds “have a practical function, and a non-natural meaning.”54 Implicitly functional sounds, on the other hand, give subliminal information. An example: “the satisfying clunk of a car door on

50  See, for example. Amy Coplan, “Catching Character’s Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction,” Film Studies 8 (2006): 26–38; Carl Plantinga, “Putting Cognition in Its Place: Affect and the Experience of Narrative Film,” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, edited by Katherine Thomson-Jones, 131–147 (New York: Routledge, 2016); Dan Shaw, “Mirror Neurons and Simulation Theory: A Neurophysiological Foundation for Cinematic Empathy,” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, edited by Katherine Thomson-Jones, 148–162 (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Murray Smith, Film, Art and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 51  Andy Hamilton, “Music and the Aural Arts.” British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (2007): 46–63. 52  Donnelly, “Saw Heard,” 112. 53  I diverge from Hamilton’s original wording here. Hamilton’s terms are “non-significant sound design” and “significant sound design.” 54  Hamilton, “Music and the Aural Arts,” 62.

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an expensive model is crafted with the intention of conveying sumptuousness and quality.”55 The sumptuousness is conveyed implicitly. This distinction delivers two more arts of sound in film: functional arts. (Hamilton does not claim that there can be functional arts, I assume this myself.) The art of sound effects corresponds to explicitly functional sounds. Sound effects represent things on and off screen. Of course, much of this information is meant to be seamless; sound effects often work best when we don’t consciously register each of them. But they are still explicit. Sound effects represent objects in different ways. Some sound effects are caused by the objects on-screen, at the time of recording—the sounds we hear are the very sounds made in filming. Robert Altman often avoided adding sound effects in postproduction; instead, he recorded the actual sounds made during filming, finding innovating ways to hide microphones throughout the sets. More commonly, sound effects are added in postproduction.56 Some of these are recordings of the kinds of objects that they represent, as when stock footage of crickets represents crickets on screen. Other sound effects are the sounds of different objects. In Wall-E (2008), for the sound of wind, sound designer Ben Burtt recorded the sound of fabric pulled across a carpet.57 The art of sound design corresponds to implicitly functional sounds. Sound designers control the sonic atmosphere of films. This includes how loud voices are heard, but it also includes background ambient sound. Next time you are streaming a movie at home, try jumping back and forth between several different scenes. You’ll notice that, in some scenes, there are sonic “close-ups” of characters—you hear more white noise. The voices are more amplified, and the voice seems to be recorded closer to the source. These effects are often not explicit, and they are often made to convey information about sonic atmospheres and moods—information that is not explicit. The line between sound design and sound effects is porous—not just in practice but also theoretically. Indeed, the line between sound design and film scoring, in general, is often porous. I noted above that it is sometimes intentionally unclear whether something is part of the soundtrack or a sound effect—this unclarity is exploited in horror films. But the line is porous also because sound design has become bolder, intersecting more closely with sound art. I mentioned earlier that Jóhann Jóhannsson originally wrote a traditional film score for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017). After the score was complete, Aronofsky decided that a traditional score was not appropriate; instead,  Hamilton, “Music and the Aural Arts,” 62.  Several films are themselves about how sound effects are produced in films, for example, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012). 57  Many films draw explicit attention to sound design. Miguel Gomes’ film Tabu (2012) involves heavy fictionalization and stylization of sounds. In Michael Haneke’s Cache (2005), background sound is often amplified for indoor scenes, whereas it’s drowned out for outdoor scenes. The Coen Brothers are famous for their attention to sound in film, working closely with their sound designer Skip Lievsay; their films often include noticeably stylized sounds. 55 56

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he asked Jóhannsson to help create the sonic atmosphere of the film. The house, an important element in the film, is supposed to feel alive. The ambient sound design reflects organic sounds—a heartbeat, breathing, groaning, and so forth. Jóhannsson employed novel sounds: clicks of saxophone keys, an instrument made of glass. The sound doubles both as representing the nature of the house and as supplying a kind of score in general. Jóhannsson, in the end, was credited as “Music and Sound Consultant” in the film. The result is sound art or music that engages closely with the film’s sound design. The line between aesthetic arts of sound in film and the functional arts of sound in film is porous. Another example is from Brian McOmber’s score for Krisha (2016). In the film,  Krisha, the main character, is visiting her family over thanksgiving; the visit is fraught with tension, given Krisha’s estrangement from her family. At one point, Krisha comes downstairs after a nap, clearly overwhelmed. We hear the sound of several family members talking loudly and excitedly. But we can’t hear any words—their talking is morphed through electroacoustic technology into a clangy, frenetic sound. It comes from the original voices of the actors, but it has been modified so that it is no longer recognizable. It’s a well-­executed instance of musique concrete, a form of sound art involving manipulated sound recordings. It is something between sound art, sound design, and sound effect. They express the frenetic way that Krisha herself is processing the sounds and her family members, but they also represent, more dimly, the actual sounds in the fictional scenario. So, Hamilton’s distinctions provide us with four arts of sound in film. I can think of two more arts of sound in film that do not fit neatly into either of these four categories. A fifth art of film sound is sound mixing. It has a different goal than either of the four arts of film sound mentioned earlier: It is meant to combine various sounds into a coherent whole. On the one hand, this helps to convey information better. When sounds don’t clash with each other, they are clearer for the audience. But it also plays an aesthetic role; the virtue of a good mix isn’t necessarily that it adds any information, just that it combines sounds in an aesthetically pleasing way. Usually, a good mix is self-effacing. A final art of sound in film is the voice: characters’ and narrators’ voices. Surprisingly, this art of sound is apt to pass us by. Yet, as Michel Chion notes, the voice is foundational to most films. Film, claims Chion, is “vococentric”; “it almost always privileges the voice.”58 There can be no doubt that this is an art. Actors practice their diction, their accents, their enunciation, and their phrasing. Just like sound mixing, vocal acting does not seem to fit neatly into either functional or aesthetic categories. I have argued here that there are six arts of sound in film: music, sound art, sound effects, sound design, sound mixing, and the vocal acting. This list might not be exhaustive. Certainly, these categories are not exclusive.

 Chion, Audiovision, 5.

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Film Music and Theories of Music Philosophical work on music has overwhelmingly focused on musical works— repeatable entities that are the things we perceive in performances. There is less work on what music in general might be—music in this more general sense includes one-off improvisations and recordings. However, a prominent definition of music threatens to show that film music is really not music at all. Consider Jerrold Levinson’s aesthetic definition of music. Music, on Levinson’s account, is defined as sounds temporally organized by a person for the purpose of enriching or intensifying experience through active engagement (e.g., listening, dancing, performing) with the sound regarded primarily, or in significant measure, as sounds.59

Levinson’s definition is based in thinking of music as involving an aesthetic experience. Levinson includes both an intentional and a formal requirement— music is organized sound, and it must be organized by somebody. But the intention must be to create an aesthetic experience—it must “enrich or intensify experience through active engagement.” Furthermore, the sound must be regarded as sound—this borrows language that says that aesthetic experience is appreciating something for its own sake. Discussing the aesthetic account of music, Andy Hamilton sums up the view as follows: “Musical sounds are those that are felt to be particularly rewarding as objects of aesthetic attention.”60 Let’s call this account of music the aesthetic experience account. In arguing for the aesthetic experience account, Levinson claims that it has the happy result that Muzak is not in fact music. For Muzak is meant to not be heard—it is meant to induce a relaxing state of mind in its listeners. Music, on this definition, is meant to be heard. So Muzak cannot be music. The aesthetic experience account also implies that film music is not music. For one thing, recall the psychoanalytic account of film music: Film music is written to not be listened to—it’s meant to be processed subconsciously. Of course, as we saw, this is not true of all film music. But it is surely true of some music. Call these instances of covert film music. If the aesthetic experience account of music is true, then covert film music is not music at all. Levinson claims that music must be created for active engagement. But covert film music is not meant for active engagement. For another thing, recall the functional accounts of film music. Consider Carroll’s claim that film scores modify certain aspects of films. If this is true, then film music is meant to modify action on the screen. If we listen to film music to modify action on the screen, then we do not listen to it as pure sounds. Indeed, it has not been created for the purpose of being listened to as 59  Jerrold Levinson, “The Concept of Music,” in Levinson, Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 273. Notice that Levinson’s account of music diverges from Hamilton’s formalist account of music. 60  Hamilton, “Music and the Aural Arts,” 54.

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pure sounds. But, on the aesthetic experience account, music is created to be listened to as pure sounds. So, if the aesthetic experience account of music is true, then film music is not music at all. One response is to bite the bullet and accept the consequence that film scores are not really music. But I doubt that this is plausible. I take it that something has gone wrong when film music, or much of it, is not music at all. A defender of the aesthetic experience account might say that film music is grandfathered in as music under an aesthetic attitude. Presumably, this kind of theorist would hold that films themselves were also characterized by an aesthetic attitude. If we are viewing the film as a whole with an aesthetic attitude, and this is what makes it count as an artwork, then perhaps our aesthetic attention to the film as a whole distributes to aesthetic engagement with its parts— including the film music—however unconscious this engagement may be. And thus, we listen to the music with an aesthetic way. But it doesn’t seem that attention distributes this way. I can regard a painting in an aesthetic way, but it doesn’t follow that I appreciate every single part that composes the painting with an aesthetic attitude. Perhaps a defender of the aesthetic experience account of music could draw a contrast between Muzak and film music. “The reason to reject Muzak as music,” they might say, “is because Muzak is decidedly anaesthetic—it is there to leave us blankless, to drain us of feeling. But film music is not supposed to drain us of feelings—it is there to emphasize our feelings!” Two points are worth making in reply. First of all, it is not clear that this is enough to show that film music is music on the aesthetic experience account. Even if active listening is not required for aesthetic attention, we are still not appreciating these sounds as sounds. We are appreciating them as adding to the filmic narrative. Second, it mischaracterizes Muzak. Muzak isn’t meant to drain us of feeling; it’s meant to make us feel vaguely happy and blandly pleasant. The objection here relies upon characterizing Muzak as depriving us of feeling—as affectively anaesthetizing us. I doubt that this is how Muzak works (or the way that feelings work). Muzak augments our attitudes; it doesn’t eliminate them. If Muzak isn’t music, then film music isn’t music, either.61 An alternative view of music says that music has many uses, not all of which are aesthetic. According to Stephen Davies’s more liberal account of music, music involves the intentional use of structural/generative principles viewed historically against the background of musical traditions that are construed sufficiently broadly that they take in not only the immediate practices connected with music making but also the cultural forces that facilitate and structure this.62

61  See Christopher Bartel, “Music without Metaphysics?” British Journal of Aesthetics 71 (2011): 383–398, at 390. Bartel is responding to Aaron Ridley’s argument that musical ontology is useless. See Ridley, “Against Musical Ontology,” Journal of Philosophy 100 (2003): 203–220. Bartel argues that Muzak might be really bad music, but it’s music, nevertheless. That’s exactly the problem with it! 62  Stephen Davies, “On Defining Music,” The Monist 95 (2012): 535–555, at 552.

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Davies’s definition here doesn’t require any particular aesthetic attitude or formalist constraint; it is open to any of the modifying functions that Carroll proposes. So, film music gives us a reason to prefer Davies’s account of music. In this section, I have considered a problem for aesthetic arts of sound, most notably music, in film: Film music is not made to be heard with a pure aesthetic attitude. I have argued that we should therefore conclude that any purely aesthetic account of music must be wrong. But this leaves us with a question about how to distinguish “aesthetic” arts of sound from “functional” arts—indeed, music plays a functional role in film. I have not answered that question here. I hope that I’ve shown that film music matters to philosophy of music. It is worth noting that some philosophical accounts of music do not just allow for music to exist in conjunction with other arts; they allow it to flourish. Nietzsche, for example, held the operatic combination of music and drama— particularly, Wagnerian opera—in high regard as a cultural artform.63

Conclusion This chapter is meant to explore the various roles that sound plays in film. I hope it encourages philosophers to explore the hypothesis that some films are multimedia—they use not only arts of sight but also arts of sound. I hope it also encourages philosophers to think more carefully about the way films represent through auditory means and how these means interact with visual representations. Finally, I hope it sparks philosophical work on thinking about the sonic arts of film. I want to close in a slightly different direction, by noting the enormous effect that film music has had on our own everyday engagement with music. Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker, has frequently commented on this phenomenon over the years. Gopnik writes: “recorded sound supplies a soundtrack for modern life.”64 When the Walkman came out in the 1980s, Gopnik says, it personalized sound. And by personalizing sound, it “made every block your own movie.”65 Most of us engage with music primarily by streaming it on our phones. This music is personal since we choose the music ourselves—whatever we want, whenever we want it. This music is also personal because we listen alone, through private earbuds  or earphones. Through these personal sounds, we 63  Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77–80. I thank Shawn Loht and Katie Brennan for helpful comments and discussion on this point. 64  Adam Gopnik, “Music to your ears: The quest for 3-D recording and other mysteries of sound.” The New  Yorker, January 28, 2013. Accessed at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/28/music-to-your-ears 65  Adam Gopnik, At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New  York (New York: Alfred A.  Knopf, 2017), 227.

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have a sense of our lives as having a soundtrack. And when we see music as our soundtrack, we see our own lives as a movie—one we’re both watching and starring in. This sense of life having a soundtrack is possible only because we go to the movies, and only because movies have soundtracks.  Movie music has changed the way we see ourselves.66

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor, and Hanns Eisler. 1947/1994. Composing for the Films, Rev. ed. London: Athlone Press. Aristotle. 2017. De Anima. Trans. C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett. Arnheim, Rudolf. 1957. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barnes, Richard. 2007. The Sound of Coen Comedy: Music, Dialogue and Sound Effects in Raising Arizona. The Soundtrack 1: 15–28. Bartel, Christopher. 2011. Music without Metaphysics? British Journal of Aesthetics 71: 383–398. Branigan, Edward. 1989. Sound and Epistemology in Film. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47: 311–324. Carroll, Noël. 1985. The Specificity of Media in the Arts. Journal of Aesthetic Education 19: 5–20. ———. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads & Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1996. Theorizing the Moving Image. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden: Blackwell. Carroll, Noël, and Margaret Moore. 2011. Music and Motion Pictures. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music, ed. Theodore Gracyk and Andrew Kania, 456–467. New York: Routledge. Casati, Roberto, and Jerome Dokic. 2010. Sounds. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sounds/ Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Enlarged ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. Chion, Michel. 1994. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Trans. and Ed. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Trans. and Ed. Claudia Gorbman. New  York: Columbia University Press. Coplan, Amy. 2006. Catching Character’s Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction. Film Studies 8: 26–38. Copland, Aaron. 1940. The Aims of Music for Films. In the March 10. Currie, Gregory. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davies, David. 2009. Ontology. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingstone and Carl Plantinga, 217–226. New York: Routledge. Davies, Stephen. 2012. On Defining Music. The Monist 95: 535–555.

66  I’m grateful to Ben Sellick for guiding me to interesting instances of sound in film, and for his illuminating reflections on them. Thanks also to Noël Carroll, Laura di Summa, Shawn Loht, and Katie Brennan for their help at various points.

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Donnelly, K.J. 2009. Saw Heard: Musical Sound Design in Contemporary Cinema. In Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, ed. Warren Buckland, 103–123. New York: Routledge. Flinn, Carol. 1990. The Most Romantic Art of All: Music in the Classical Hollywood Cinema. Cinema Journal 29: 35–50. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. Cinematic Art and Technology. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 17–35. New York: Routledge. Gilmore, Jonathan. 2011. A Functional Account of Artistic Evaluation. Philosophical Studies 155: 289–305. Gopnik, Adam. 2013. Music to your Ears: The Quest for 3-D Recording and Other Mysteries of Sound. The New Yorker, January 28. Accessed at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/28/music-to-your-ears ———. 2017. At the Strangers’ Gate: Arrivals in New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Gorbman, Claudia. 1980. Narrative Film Music. Yale French Studies 60: 183–203. ———. 1987. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hamilton, Andy. 2007. Music and the Aural Arts. British Journal of Aesthetics 47: 46–63. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Age of the World Picture. In Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovett. New  York: Harper & Row. Kivy, Peter. 1997. Music in the Movies: A Philosophical Enquiry. In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 308–328. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Realistic Song in the Movies. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71: 75–80. Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. The Concept of Music. In Music, Art, and Metaphysics, ed. Levinson. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1996. Film Music and Narrative Agency. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 254–288. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Martin, M.G.F. 2012. Sounds and Images. British Journal of Aesthetics 52: 331–351. Mast, Gerald. 1977. Film/Cinema/Movie: A Theory of Experience. New  York: Harper & Row. Nietzsche, Freidrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Essays, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Callaghan, Casey. 2007. Sounds: A Philosophical Theory. New  York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2009. Auditory Perception. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-auditory/ Plantinga, Carl. 2016. Putting Cognition in Its Place: Affect and the Experience of Narrative Film. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 131–147. New York: Routledge. Ridley, Aaron. 2003. Against Musical Ontology. Journal of Philosophy 100: 203–220. Rosar, William H. 2002. Film Music—What’s In a Name? The Journal of Film Music 1: 1–18. Shaw, Dan. 2016. Mirror Neurons and Simulation Theory: A Neurophysiological Foundation for Cinematic Empathy. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 148–162. New York: Routledge.

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Smith, Jeff. 1996. Unheard Melodies: A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 230–247. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2009. Music. In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga, 184–195. New York: Routledge. Smith, Murray. 2017. Film, Art and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. New York: Oxford University Press. Sobchak, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Stilwell, Robynn J. 2007. The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic. In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 184–202. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomson-Jones, Katherine. 2008. Aesthetics and Film. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2016. Movie Appreciation and the Digital Medium. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 36–54. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 35

Adaptation, Translation, and Philosophical Investigation in Adaptation Garry L. Hagberg

The conceptual model of adaptation that most readily presents itself is that of translation: we think of the written work—the historical book, the novel, the memoir, the romance, the biography, the work of political journalism, the religious text—as the statement in the original language and the film version of that original as its translation into a second language.1 It is easy—but as we shall see, interestingly misleading—to think of the translation model in word-­ to-­word terms: “dog” into “hund”, “house” into “haus”. On that atomistic level, a criterion of accuracy is in play that may insinuate itself into our ­larger-­scale thinking on this topic: that criterion is direct transliteration or 1  There are of course far too many exemplary cases of film adaptation to list, but a few can be mentioned along the way of the development of this evolving artform. (This is also the background of the artform within which Kaufman’s analysis resonates.) Such a list (both disputable and extendable by anyone) might include Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet of the Western Front of 1930; Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps of 1935; David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind of 1939; William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights of 1939; John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon of 1941; David Lean’s Great Expectations of 1946; John Boulting’s Brighton Rock of 1947; Sir Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet of 1948; John Huston’s Moby Dick of 1956; Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird of 1962; Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep of 1946; Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita of 1962; David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago of 1965; Ronald Neame’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie of 1969; Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather of 1972; Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now of 1973; Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest of 1975; Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner of 1982; Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs of 1991; James Ivory’s The Remains of the Day of 1993; Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence of 1993; Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility of 1995; Curtis Hanson’s L. A. Confidential of 1997; David Fincher’s Fight Club of 1999; Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain of 2005; The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men of 2007; and Thomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy of 2011.

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transcription into the second language word by word. Moving up to the level of the sentence, we then might implicitly expect the same criterion of transcription-­matching to be in play. And we then, by a kind of conceptual inflation, move up to the third level, carrying the criterion of accuracy from the level of the word to the (much larger, and as we will see, much more unwieldy) level of the work. And so the relation between original and translation is, on this simple or first-intuition model, one of mirroring: we get the original in view, turn to look at its translation, and immediately discern the content of the original at one remove, that is, in the mirror of the second language. But translators and linguists also call that second language the “target language”, and this instructive terminology immediately complicates the picture. Targets have bull’s-eyes and then ever-larger circles surrounding them. One can hit dead on, one can get a near miss in the first circle, one can hit farther out, and one can miss the target entirely. So while “house” to “haus” may provide a guaranteed bull’s-eye, a full sentence may make a bull’s-eye possible but not guaranteed. And a paragraph, a page, a chapter may open the range of translation to allow an outer-circle hit, while a book may then make an entire miss possible. Or perhaps better: on the scale of the book, there is no single target. (And as we shall see, in representing something as complicated as a human being, it is a moving target—but we come to that later in the chapter.) So the criterion of accuracy that would depend on a process of one-to-one matching reveals itself to be impossible even on first reflection. Yet we do have an established (albeit non-unitary and irreducible to a simple criterion) practice of adjudicating the accuracy of an adaptation from book to film, just as we have an established practice of debating and adjudicating the accuracy, or the faithfulness, of translations from one language to another. There are good, indeed excellent, adaptations, just as there are excellent translations. What makes them so? How might we better understand this?

I We might begin with the observation that a full film version of a work of literature, say Tolstoy’s War and Peace, word for word would not make a successful film. The obvious reason is length—it would be obviously impossible within the scale of a film. But the less obvious reason is the more interesting one: we expect of an adaptation that it will capture and convey not only the letter of the original but its spirit as well. That is to say, what we want conveyed from the original to the target lies beyond what a mere transcription could capture. Rather, (i) we want the atmosphere of the setting, (ii) we want to imagine our way into the environment within which the characters we get to know make choices and take action, (iii) we want enough background behind any given words to be able to comprehend or at least sense the resonance of those words for that character, and (iv) we want there to develop as the adaptation proceeds an awareness of why the characters do what they do and say what they say and how their words and deeds are revelatory of who and what they are. We do not

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want merely the projection on a screen of dead words, a mere recitation of a transcription. Olivier does not read Hamlet’s words aloud. So even if a simple conception of adaptation as translation cannot survive a few initial reflections, nevertheless, translation, or something deeply analogous to it, is at work in the case of adaptation. So a closer look at translation, as a foundation for a closer look at the complexities of adaptation to come shortly, seems in order. The first thing to say is, as any translator knows, it is not only that a simple model of translation cannot accommodate what we want of an adaptation, it is also that a simple model of translation cannot accommodate what we want of a translation. It was W. V. O. Quine2 who coined the phrase “the indeterminacy of translation”,3 and we see that this concept applies with equal force to an indeterminacy of adaptation. And we see that this indeterminacy opens the space for the creative work that we find in this genre of screenwriting. Quine, starting from an idea drawn from logical positivism of “observation sentences”, discusses whether there is any possibility of a direct or in a sense unfiltered observation sentence, where it is “whatever would be attested to on the spot by any witness in command of the language and his five senses” (Quine 1992, p. 6). As one can imagine, the issue is one of layered complexity within the philosophy of science, but in any case Quine recognizes that some of these will be “relative to one or another limited community rather than to the whole speech community” (p. 6). And this is directly connected to his famous discussion of whether or not what we take to be direct observations of a given phenomenon are theory-laden or not. (He concludes that in one sense all are, and in another sense none are, p.  7). But for present purposes, the first of two major elements that we want to draw from Quine is the sense in which they all are and the way in which a set of observations sentences are relative to one or another limited community. This, I want to suggest, characterizes the first half of the position of the adapter that I want to underscore here. That is, the very idea of looking to the original, from which the likeness in the adaptation is to be drawn or on which it is modeled, is in Quine’s sense theory-laden and relative to a limited community (where that can in the case of single-authored adaptation be a community of one—although one working in and against the backlog and background of the established history of the field). To look at the original is thus not to passively gaze upon it and then turn to the creative work within the sphere of the adaptation; rather, the creative work begins within that look itself, where we have at work (i) selective attention, (ii) highlighting and backlighting, (iii) foregrounding and backgrounding, (iv) discernment of lines of plot connections and developments of character, (v) perceptions—or projections—of backstory and the imagined past behind what we see as witnesses to the narrative in play, and (vi) decisions concerning what is explicit, what is 2  See W. V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 3  See especially Quine, Pursuit of Truth, Chapter II, Section 18.

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implicit, and the often large and variable gray area between. And so one could say, given a consideration of Quine’s first point in connection with adaptation, the very idea of a measure of the veracity, or the accuracy, or the faithfulness, of an adaptation is very much in question. Again, we do make distinctions between good and bad, successful and unsuccessful, adaptations but not in a way that proceeds from an innocent eye looking upon the original as its standard of comparison. Just as, in one of his two senses, all observation sentences are theory-laden, so all perceptions of originals are, in Quine’s sense, theory-laden. Moreover, if one of the aspects of an adaptation that we want, and that we critically evaluate, is the extent to which the atmosphere and mise-en-scene are captured in the adaptation, one asks: is this a matter of direct perception of a kind an observation sentence could describe? Indeed, could it be that mode of perception in the perception of either the original or the adaptation? And if not, how then do we get so far as to make a comparison in the first place? We do in fact make comparisons, but the philosophical question gaining greater specificity is, how is this possible? We come to that issue shortly (and as we progress we should keep this question in mind), but next we need to consider what is for us Quine’s second point. One way to characterize determinacy is to say that it involves a bounded object or event with a finite set of properties that we identify as the whole and complete set making up that object or event. Its contrast, then, would be an unbounded, or varyingly bounded, object or event, with a non-specifiable collection of properties that, however we assemble them in our perception or understanding or analysis of the object or event, do not constitute the whole and complete set of defining properties. Fixity, in such a circumstance, would be an illusion, and thus the search for it would be misbegotten. Indeterminacy thus involves the recognition that, although we may have pragmatic ways of proceeding in any particular case, we should not mistake that circumstantial solution, or in Quine’s sense an answer relative to a limited community, for a case transcending one or for an analysis that outlives the particular exigencies of its context. In the discussion of translation, then, Quine advances a thesis that is the linguistic analogue to the perceptual version of indeterminacy I have just sketched. Quine writes, “The meaning of a sentence of one language is what it shares with its translations in another language” (p. 37). Setting aside for the moment Wittgensteinian and Austinian questions concerning who is asking a question concerning meaning here (so that the context tells us what the criteria for the question’s answer might be and so that we are not speaking of meaning at a level of disorienting generality), it is important to note that Quine’s first sentence appears to be a single, determinate verbal entity but as quickly this is unsettled: he uses the plural “translations”, not the singular “translation”, yet he uses the singular “in another language”, not the plural “in other languages”. These phrases themselves capture the indeterminacy he has in view: these phrases suggest that there is such a thing as meaning but that such meaning does not translate in any single correspondent sentence. And this circumstance

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on a sentential level captures precisely the situation of the adapter on a larger scale. If there is no single correspondent sentence in the target language, then there is no single determinately bounded meaning of the original sentence. Yet there are still correct and incorrect translation sentences, and there will be a multiplicity of sentences that articulate different aspects, different ranges of awakened associations, different resonances with previous sentences, different ways of voicing the sentence that reveal character, different points of emphasis that express inward psychological states, and different levels of elegance, bluntness, refinement, crudeness, directness, indirection, and many other determinants of aesthetic quality and features. Quine writes, “Each of us learns our language by observing other people’s verbal behavior and having his own faltering verbal behavior observed and reinforced and corrected by others” (p.  38). This describes, for Quine, the position of any speaker within a community of speakers. I am suggesting here that this also quite precisely describes the position of the adapter working in the space between the original and the adaptation. The adapter perceives the “other’s verbal behavior”—the original text, and then in a complex and unfolding dialogue with that original content, fluidly—for Quine, falteringly—has the language of the adaptation as it unfolds in this dialogical sense “reinforced and corrected”. But that content is itself determined by a creative engagement operating between the original text and the adapter, so (to remind ourselves of the points just above preventing the simple correspondence or mirroring model from working, from adequately capturing the process of adaptation) the text here as well cannot be construed itself as determinate. And it is this fact that makes the multiplicity of correct, or good, or acceptable adaptations possible— both the source and the target are indeterminate. Imagining two translators who go into a community of speakers of a language utterly unknown to the translator, Quine writes that, given the variables we have seen, each may produce after working through basic to more intricate verbal interactions translation manuals: “Their manuals might be indistinguishable in terms of any native behavior that they give reason to expect, and yet each manual might prescribe some translations that the other translator would reject. Such is the thesis of indeterminacy of translation” (p. 48). Epistemologists have long made a distinction between correspondence and coherence theories of knowledge. Correspondence theories concern verified or falsified correspondences or matching-relations between a proposition, a claim about the world made in a sentence, and the state of the world independent of that sentence; if they correspond, the sentence is true, if not, it is false. This is atomistic or sententially isolated in structure: each proposition has to stand or fall on its own. Coherence theories, by contrast, see truth as a matter of the relations, the connections, between sentences; the way they work together or fail to do so is in central focus—the claim that the world is flat does not cohere with many other established sentences, and were that one claim true the epistemic shock wave would run through countless other sentences.

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Quine’s point above concerning a rejected translation by the other translator and author of the competing manual concerns the kind of coherence that is internal to the manual. And this (the concept of internal coherence and the reason for rejecting an entry incoherent with the rest), I want to suggest, captures the work of an adapter in accepting or developing one line of adaptation and rejecting another—while that very same line of adaptation might well fit, might well cohere, and might well be perfectly acceptable in a competing adaptation. Calling this situation—our situation in language—one of “radical translation” (p. 49), Quine writes, “What the indeterminacy thesis is meant to bring out is that the radical translator is bound to impose about as much as he discovers” (p. 49).4 Insert the word “adapter” in place of “translator” and this sentence would function well as a summary of what we might now call the radical adapter. But there is one last point to make before moving forward: I mentioned above how scale can be changed, where the relation between the word and the sentence provides a microcosm of the relation between the sentence and the paragraph, page, or chapter. With the notion of coherence and the possibility of cross-manual unacceptability yet internally acceptable translations behind us, consider Quine’s remark: “In this matter of understanding language there is thus a subtle interplay between word and sentence. In one way the sentence is fundamental: understanding a word consists in knowing how to use it in sentences and how to react to such sentences” (p. 58). In one way the sentence is fundamental: moving up a scale, if the relation between the word and the sentence provides a microcosm of the larger relations, the story, the narrative section, the act, the scene, the soliloquy, the section of dialogue, then, it is they that are fundamental, and so the adapter then positions what on this larger scale corresponds to the word—the sentence or group of sentences at hand or under creative consideration—into that larger frame. Given the multiform demands (as we will see them in the following) of preserving coherence on the larger scale, the adapter will work with the “subtle interplay”, showing her understanding of that sentence or sentences in knowing how to use them, and her finished adaptation shows that she knows, and has within the creative work known, how to react to such sentences. It is all precisely what Quine is talking about, transferred to the adapter’s relation to the original text and to the words and sentences and paragraphs out of which the adaptation is made. So we turn directly to the work of the adapter.

II There have of course been excellent analytical studies of adaptation, but among the most astute studies of this translational creative process, a study that is at once most intricate and most alive to the conceptual issues in play in this region 4  This concept has been insightfully and powerfully discussed in a way directly relevant to the issues here in Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation”, in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: 1984), pp. 125–139.

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of filmmaking is not about film but rather in film.5 Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay6 for Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, conducts a layered investigation into the philosophical considerations above. From the outset the film maintains an awareness of the relation between the Darwinian conception of adaptation—evolution as a function of responses to the environment in order to maximize survival values—and film adaptation, where content moves or migrates in order to maximize the lifespan of that content. The film, at the point of its origin at the beginning of scriptwriting, was to have been an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. But the philosophical issues within the project overpowered Kaufman’s intention to write the adaptation in a reasonably conventional manner. Thus the very ­concept of adaptation mutated in order to preserve its life (prior to this conceptual adaptation Kaufman nearly despaired of the entire undertaking), and the film became a philosophical investigation. The result is that it tells us a great deal about the process and the product of film adaptation and the con5  Studies that have pursued and developed a theory of film adaptation include Brian McFarlane’s Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) and Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2012); studies and collections that have discussed various aspects of adaptation include Thomas M. Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), Hester Bradley and Imelda Whelehan’s Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and works by Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), and Jack Boozer, ed. Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). In this chapter, rather than presenting and critiquing the available theoretical views, I am following the long-established precedent (a precedent beginning with no less than Aristotle using Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as his case study in Poetics) of examining a subject in philosophical aesthetics in close connection with one of the defining achievements in that genre, drawing out a comprehensive philosophical view of the subject from that. Adaptation won very many major awards around the world as the best screenplay of its year, has been included on the list of the best screenplays of all time, was nominated for many more awards, and has taken its place as a modern classic of the genre of a kind (as we shall see) that, like much of the deepest and most self-aware philosophical work (e.g., Wittgenstein), investigates its own internal method as a sub-theme of its primary project. For an explanation and detailed examination of how films can themselves seem to philosophize, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015). 6  I am using here the published script of Adaptation, by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman, adapted from the book The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, Second Draft, September 24, 1999, in The Internet Movie Script Database. I should mention that there were (as there ordinarily are) a number of changes made to the script in shooting: in the film the ending is altered so that Charlie and Donald, fleeing, drive away, collide with a ranger’s truck, and Donald dies there. Charlie then tells his former love interest Amelia that he still loves her and shortly thereafter finishes the script (this differs from what I discuss below). But the great majority of the film stays true to this second draft, and it is in this second draft (and its conclusion, changed in shooting) that the issues of selfhood and the analogy between the process of composing an adaptation and the process of selfcomposition in life are most pronounced; one could argue that the script version does more philosophical work than does the finished film. Uncredited cameos include Spike Jonze, (the actual) Charlie Kaufman, John Malkovich, and others in a scene where they are seen working on the set of Being John Malkovich.

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ceptual issues at work within it. The purpose of this reading of the film will thus be to identify, articulate, and piece together into a coherent mosaic the conceptual issues woven within the practices of adaptation. The filmscript opens with a play on adaptation and evolution from the first moment: “Endless barren landscape. No sign of life. The atmosphere is hazy, toxic looking. Volcanoes erupt. Meteors bombard. Lightning strikes, concussing murky pools of water. Silence”. This is followed by a subtitle: “Hollywood, CA, Four billion and forty years later”, with a shot of a large empty living room. And, visually introducing the theme concerning doubles, concerning questions about which is the original, concerning the relation between two versions of one thing, we see two identical birthday cards, each one for one twin, on the mantle: “To Our Dear Son on His Fortieth Birthday”. But—as if a filmic representation of the perceptual indeterminacy above—we see that one of the two twin brothers, Charlie Kaufman (Donald is the brother that the real-life adapter invents within the world of the film—so Charlie has from the start “twinned” himself, that is, he is a character in the film but also the person writing the character, to which we will return), in his voiceover describes himself as old, fat, bald, and repulsive. But the theme of perceptual indeterminacy is voiced this way: “How repulsive? I don’t know for I suffer from a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder”. So he knows that what he sees is not what is. Having thus opened space for a range of differing perceptions of himself, he speculates: “I am fat, but am I as fat as I think? My therapist says no, but [here now introducing the verbal analogue of perceptual skepticism] people lie. I believe others call me Fatty behind my back. Or Fatso. Or, facetiously, Slim”. But Kaufman (in this chapter I refer to the actual author of the filmscript as “Kaufman” and the character within the world of the film as “Charlie”) makes this introduction to his character more complicated still: Kaufman introduces a form of self-reflection into Charlie that shows Charlie negotiating competing descriptions of himself as a self-composing personal analogue to the negotiations of (what we will increasingly see) the complex relations between the original text and adaptation. So Charlie’s voiceover continues from the word “Slim”: “But I also believe this is simply my own perverted form of self-aggrandizement, that no one really talks about me at all”. What Charlie tells himself is not direct, not unquestioned, not guaranteed by any immediacy of transparent introspection. They are words of self-description that will have to be evaluated—but not by being measured against a fixed original truth. The simple picture is insufficient to the situation within Charlie, just as it is insufficient within the artistic project of Kaufman’s. And in our first view of Susan Orlean we see a delicate woman of “melancholy beauty” at a desk piled with books about orchids typing, that is, working with words. The ­original is thus, within this labor, itself a kind of adaptation from a set of written sources and, in a different way, from a set of experiences. Speaking with Valerie, the film producer who in part is guiding the movie project, Kaufman has Charlie articulate a fundamental principle of adaptation: “And Orlean makes orchids so fascinating. Plus her musings on Florida, orchid

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poaching. Indians. Great, sprawling New Yorker stuff. I’d want to remain true to that, let the movie exist rather than be artificially plot driven”. And when questioned by Valerie about what this actually means, Charlie replies “It’s just, I don’t want to compromise by making it a Hollywood product. An orchid heist movie. Or changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running. Y’know?” Listing other Hollywood-adaptation clichés (“sex, or car chases, or guns. Or characters learning profound life lessons”), Charlie, voicing Kaufman’s imperative, starts “sweating like crazy”, and after a moment of uncomfortable silence, Valerie says, “See, we thought maybe Susan Orlean and Laroche [previously identified by her as a fascinating character] could fall in love during the course of…” It is at this perspiring, agitated, aesthetically threatened moment that we see the possibility of Kaufman as a screenwriter bifurcating himself in thinking about how to adapt himself into the character of Charlie within the larger study of the adaptation of a book into a filmscript. A part of him remains, in and throughout the creative act, both a person of authorial integrity and a person preserving a stance of respect toward the original. And a part of him is splitting off (or being independently or separately personified) in response to the very real demands of commercial success and pragmatic imperatives of real-world film studios. In his exchange with Valerie, Charlie says he needs to challenge himself as a writer and that he has “arrived at an age where I want to think differently about the world in a different way”. Compressing one of the central features of a screenwriter thinking her or his way into the mind of the original author in order to find non-simple criteria for the evaluation of quality in adaptation, she says, “Adapting someone else’s work is certainly an opportunity to think differently”. Yet as an articulator of complexity that makes his own script real, that makes his meta-script mimetically accurate to its subject (i.e., the subject of adaptation itself and not only the subject of Orlean’s book), Kaufman does not leave this exchange where it is. In forming and solidifying his aesthetic intention with ever-greater specificity, Charlie assimilates, adapts, an image and way of speaking from William Blake: “Yes. And I welcome the challenge of taking a small subject, like orchids, something that would never draw people into a theater and making that fascinating. I want to show people heaven in a wildflower”. As Blake wrote, Charlie’s identity is solidifying within the adapted words of others. Just as a film’s identity will solidify through the stabilization of language that is coherent unto itself (as discussed above in terms of cross-sentence coherence rather than correspondence) and that assumes a textual identity analogous to a personal style or to the integrity of a psychological state of being or a perceptual style. For the conceptual understanding of adaptation this is not a small matter: it is through such analogies that we will come to see how the criteria for the evaluation of an adaptation actually work beyond the simplistic models of direct correspondence. But before turning to that we need to identify more of the philosophical themes that Kaufman is discovering within his authorial process and representing within the film.

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We see the origin of what I have just called a perceptual style in a flashback to childhood (in which the boy Charlie selects a turtle to take home), with his mother telling him—essentially planting the seed of looking for much larger significance in seemingly small things and seeing that systems of belief can radically differ (like Quine on translation)—that some have believed that the whole world rests on the back of a turtle. We see the adult Charlie cover heartbreak when a potential love interest, having just agreed that she will attend an orchid show with him, mentions that she’ll bring the man she has been seeing along too—so Charlie is masking his real persona inwardly and controlling appearances outwardly. That is, he mediates the appearances of his inner life to adapt them to circumstances. A discussion of Hegel emerges, in which Hegel’s conception of history spiraling forward and “building upon itself” is actually a model of how both coherent self-construction and the coherence of script-­ adaptation proceed. However, these are all strands that weave together to tell us about the psychology of the character Charlie as that character struggles to find a way to adapt Orlean’s book. The next major event is the appearance of Charlie’s twin, Donald. Or the appearance in the text of the full psychic splitting of Charlie that represents the tension between the deep artistic integrity of Kaufman on the one hand and the need to produce an acceptable and ultimately successful filmscript by Kaufman on the other. (One can also see this as an interesting act of self-editing: the commercial demands for demonstrable material success are excised and removed into another character.) This internal dynamic, for Kaufman part and parcel of this entire project, again shows the larger creative process Kaufman is investigating in microcosm: the author bifurcates to adapt. This is captured perfectly in a simple but powerful line: Donald says “I’m gonna be a screenwriter! Like you!” Charlie is the original, Donald the adaptation. There are repeated fleeting scenes in which Charlie’s experience (he hears or thinks he hears teenage girls say “Fatso” and then giggle) awakens the perception-­or-projection problem. He himself is in the position we considered earlier with Quine on translation: do these scenes represent the accurate perception of what transpired, or is this projection onto indeterminate data that can be refitted into a mold cast by neurotic expectation? And so we do not have as viewers a stable or fixed version of Charlie or of events in Charlie’s world that serve as criteria of accuracy; Kaufman has thus put us as viewers into the position of Charlie within the film and (as we will see more clearly later) into the position of the adapter. Quine and Kaufman are working together. (And we are beginning to both witness and experience how adaptation works.) But then as mentioned above, Charlie as original does increasingly stabilize, and he does this through his encounters with his alter ego, with his excised twin. And this then stabilizes, through an ongoing process, our ability to say what is true or would be true of Charlie and what is not. So criteria of evaluation are in fact emerging here, but only in the emergent and irreducible (hence no simple correspondence model of veracity) context of our growing understanding of Charlie and our parallel growing understanding of the conceptual

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issues Kaufman is facing within the writing of what we increasingly understand as the film. These self-defining exchanges, made in a way that Picasso spoke of paintings (every stroke changes the painting and newly both determines and restricts the possible directions of its subsequent development), include Charlie objecting to Donald’s use of the word “industry” (so as not to demean his project to the level of a business and erode his self-image as an artist); Charlie’s objecting to Donald’s enthusiasm for the lessons taught by a famous teacher of screenwriting (“Anyone who says he’s got ‘the answer’ is going to attract desperate people. Be it in the world of religion…”, and “There are no rules to follow”); and his asserting to Donald, “Writing is a journey into the unknown. It’s not building a model airplane”. The word “industry” demotes art to business; the word “rules” demotes the creative to the formulaic. And the idea of an answer is precisely the reduction to a simple model that it is Charlie’s mission to avoid as a writer inside the text and Kaufman’s mission to avoid outside it. But where do we clearly see the relation between the original and the adaptation represented within the relation between Charlie and Donald in such a way that light is shed on the central question—the philosophical question—of the nature of an adaptation? Charlie, “bored, looks over at Donald, whose cheeks are stuffed with food”. And as Donald is eating he is silently reading, and we hear in his voiceover one of the rules from his screenwriting teacher: “The most memorable, fascinating characters tend to have not only a conscious but an unconscious desire. Although these characters are unaware of their subconscious need…”. Charlie interrupts Donald’s reading: “Maybe you should watch what you eat, Donald. Did you ever consider maybe you’re a bit fat? Does it ever occur to you, you kind of represent me in the world? That people look at you and think, he’s Charlie’s twin, therefore that’s what Charlie must look like?” The adaptation is the original’s “twin”, and people look at the adaptation and think that they thereby know the original. The adaptation represents the original in the world, and people draw conclusions from it. A “fat” adaptation—overblown, exaggerated, inflated, undisciplined—fails in its obligation to the original, and if governed by an “industry” rather than its internal developmental teleology, and if produced from formulaic rules, only shows the original in (what will be called shortly) a funhouse mirror. Kaufman is having Charlie give voice to the ethical imperatives and responsibilities emergent within the relation between original and adaptation, to the ethical imperatives he (Kaufman) struggled with in the now-famously-­ difficult process of writing Adaptation. But the adaptation can, in a way deeply instructive about the nature of coherence (as in Quine) within an adaptation, fight back. In the context of a disagreement (and in which Charlie, offended, tells Donald not to use another debasing word—“Jesus, don’t say ‘pitch’”), Donald rises up, saying, “You think you’re so superior, Charles. Well, I’m really gonna write this. And you’ll see. And, and…you suck, okay?” At this point in the script, the aesthetically polemical twins glare at each other—the original and

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the adaptation can square off where the adaptation rebels against subservience, and each goes back to his books. And significantly, the original goes back to real sources, while the adaptation goes back to the formulaic guidebook to screenwriting. Kaufman, in Charlie, is delineating the profound difference between the genuine “life” of the artistic project and the “Frankenstein” variety of pseudo-life one sees in a cheapened adaptation. It is clear by this point that this adaptation, as itself an analysis of the intricacies of adaptation, is one as I said above of layered complexity. Kaufman will not stop short of a full or finished analysis that identifies all the pieces of the larger mosaic (we will enumerate these below). Not long after the preceding exchange Charlie says to Donald, “Look, the only idea more overused than serial killers, is multiple personality”. So we have an internal commentary on the method employed in this film—the film can act as its own critic. But still more: “On top of that you explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person”. I have suggested above that the relation between Charlie and Donald is a microcosm of the relation between the original and adaptation, and we have considered aspects of the process of adaptation within that conceptual frame. But now the film, in becoming ironically detached from itself, is also functioning as a model of the relation between original and adaptation, and we will see still more aspects of adaptation within this recursive frame. When Charlie asks Donald if he has thought about how he will shoot his film where a character holds himself hostage, Donald replies off the cuff: “Trick photography?” This, of course, is the central technique of this entire film with Nicholas Cage appearing in trick or doubled screen throughout, and one might reasonably suggest that Kaufman, in modeling the relation between original and adaptation in the relation between Charlie and Donald and then regenerating—or once again adapting—that relation with increasing complexity in the relation between the film and its own internal ironic commentary, is thereby putting into the script a mimetic depiction of his own mind in the pressured state of working through this adaptation. I think that suggestion would be correct, and there is more to say there. But for present purposes (and to develop the linguistic issues of translation and language considered above) I want to underscore another deep and central aspect of this film (or as one might now with equal accuracy call it: film-study). The character Laroche (the expert orchid hunter) who is in the midst of a court trial concerning the illegality of his nighttime orchid thieving, in speaking with the character Susan Orlean (who has introduced herself as a New Yorker writer interested in his situation), says of the piece she is writing: “Yeah? Put this in: I don’t care what goes on here. I’m right, and I’ll take this all the way to the Supreme Court. That judge [presiding over his case presently] can screw herself”. And then the script reads: “Orlean scribbles on her pad. Laroche twists his head to see that she’s writing, ‘Judge can screw herself ’”. And his dialogue continues: “That for real would go in?” What, exactly, is this? This is a character not only taking a special interest in how he will be represented, but

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also a character in the process of being written taking a special interest in the precise language in which he is being created. There are thus two levels of dialogue here: the first is of course between the characters Laroche and Orlean. But the second is between the character Laroche and the mind of Kaufman. Wittgenstein said that most of his philosophical work takes the form of dialogues with himself; this is the relation Kaufman has here with Laroche—in such a way that there are two terms of the exchange (despite the obvious fact that this is Kaufman writing). And it exemplifies the power—in a sense the wonderfully strange power, as Kaufman is showing—that sentences have in their interaction of precisely the kind Quine articulated. Like Wittgenstein, Kaufman is listening as well as creating. This exacting sensitivity to sentence-­ level interaction provides an ideal model for the best relation between original and adaptation, and we see many examples of this within the film, for example, where Charlie says something and then as quickly inwardly agonizes over what he has just said and then changes its formulation (see his exchanges with the film producer earlier as well as his exchanges with Alice, the waitress at the Pizza shop.) But here again there is more concerning the great difference for Kaufman between the ideal adapter (one exquisitely sensitive to, respectful of, and able to work with the actual power of words) and the debased commercial mis-adaptation of those words. Donald needs a way to kill someone in his script. Charlie replies, “Um, okay, killer’s a literature professor who cuts off little chunks of his victims’ bodies until they die. He’d be known in the tabloids as ‘The Deconstructionist’”. Donald replies, “That’s kinda good. I like that”. A morally exhausted Charlie replies in turn, “See, I was kidding, Donald”, and, losing complete control of the words he has just spoken with one determinate intention and seeing them run utterly out of control right in front of his eyes (this in microcosm is the uncontrollable trajectory of a bad adaptation), Donald replies, “Oh, okay. Sorry. You got me! Heh-heh. Do you mind if I use it, though?” So we are now in a position to see (and Kaufman cleverly exploits this) how Quine’s claim about our ability to recognize or identify a bad or incorrect translation is plausible without thereby implicitly claiming that there must thus be one single correct translation against which that bad translation is compared. It was the individual sensibility that came into play here and the context within which the translation is functioning (in coherence-preserving relations with other sentences) and within which the translation can express an individual perspective (yet, while individual, still admissible in terms of accuracy). In hearing Susan Orlean describe the ways in which orchids look sometimes like a German shepherd, sometimes like an onion, sometimes like an octopus, and so on, Charlie drifts off to thinking about the women he does not have: “all different shapes, some in garish clothing, all glowing”, and the script describes him as “sick with adoration for the women, who pay him no mind”. He sees this in considering the varying imagination-assisted perceptions of the orchids, and to understand him on this score is to understand what his mind moves through within the context of those perceptions. Direct perception, as we saw in the

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discussion of Quine and the simple model of adaption with which we started, is not any route to understanding who the character that we witness thinking and speaking actually is. (By contrast, to understand his words and the thoughts associated with them is to understand him.) And so Charlie says to his therapist, “But I want someone to like me. For me. Y’know?” Or he wants to be understood and appreciated as the original that he is—not, on the level of human understanding, as an adaptation of himself. Wittgenstein’s dialogue with himself needs to be honest, respectful, attentive, responsible, and acute, all in a most sustained way. And so now seeing the film we are watching being written from inside itself, Charlie finally begins his adaptation: “Okay, opening of movie. Four billion years ago. Life has not begun. Endless, barren terrain. Silence, silence”. And repeatedly Charlie mentions or alludes to the ethical demands in play here: to his agent Jerry, he says, “It’s someone else’s material. I have a responsibility…. Anyway, I wanted to grow as a writer, do something profound and simple. Show people how amazing flowers are”. His intention as stated to do this thing also works as a statement of precisely what Susan Orlean did in her book, in the original. Hence it is distinctively his intention as a screenwriter—yet its articulation in language doubles as a verbal encapsulation of her achievement. Within the film, a criterion of accuracy has flickered into life here. And Kaufman as quickly contrasts this with the dark side: in response to Charlie’s expression of his difficulties with the adaptation, Jerry says, “Look, what I tell a lot of guys is pick another film and use it as a model. I always thought this one could be like Apocalypse Now”, where the journalist “has to travel deep into the darkest swamps to find the mysterious ‘Laroche’”. Kaufman has captured here a debased technique of pollution in film adaptation: adapt the original by bending and warping it into the mold of another film that it is not and should not be in order to impose a familiar backbone plot structure upon its material, its content. This, in the world of adaptation, is the moral equivalent of restating what was a heartfelt utterance from the depth of a human soul in the form of a tired cliché. In response, and now all the more morally exhausted, Charlie says, “I need you to get me out of this”. Charlie sees himself—Kaufman has Charlie seeing himself—on a continuum ranging from the ideal adapter to the miserable diluter, with Charlie of course constantly aspiring toward the former and fearing himself slipping toward, or vulnerable to the forces pushing him toward, the latter. This theme is woven throughout the movie, and it directly connects to the issue of the individuality of sensibility. At one point Orlean says, “Maybe the ghost orchid [the ideal, most rare, and hardest to find kind of orchid] only blooms in the minds of people who’ve walked too long in the swamp [in search of it]”. And then: “What I didn’t say to him [Laroche] is that life seemed to be filled with things that were just like the ghost orchid – wonderful to imagine and easy to fall in love with but a little fantastic and fleeting and out of reach”. The ideal may be of the mind, but its role in perception, in the project of adaptation, can be central, and it lives in the gap between the object and its perception as

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discussed above—it is Charlie’s ideal, he is as a writer in love with it, and despite the fact that it seems fleeting and out of reach he tries to stay true to it. One can say a good deal in general ethical terms about the integrity of an adapter; this film shows it in all the grainy particularity that is Charlie. So, in terms of identifying and examining from the inside the elements of the concept of adaptation, what do we have here? We see (i) the film descending back into itself repeatedly (Laroche saying that he would like to play himself in the film adaptation of Orlean’s book); we see (ii) the idea of the survival of an idea or concept through its repetition; we see (iii) the original repeatedly sitting in judgment of its adaptation (“You can sit here and pretend to be a writer, mocking the seriousness of what I do, like some kind of fucking funhouse mirror version of me! But let me tell you, you don’t know what writing is!”); we repeatedly see (iv) the film writing itself, adapting its own sentences, from its own previous script (“How repulsive? I don’t know for I suffer from a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder”); we see (v) the criterion of honesty woven together with the unavoidability of the individuality of experience (“This is more honest than anything anyone’s ever done before in a movie, I’ll tell you that. The only truth we can offer is the truth that’s our own experience of the world”.); we see, layer upon layer, (vi) Kaufman having Charlie mimetically depict his own authorial process (“I’m Ourobouros”); we see (vii) the film repeated critiquing itself (having now gone to the writing seminar in desperation himself, Charlie, in voiceover, calls the seminar teacher McKee a “bag of wind”, his fellow attendees “desperate idiots”, and sees himself as pathetically there because his “jaunt into the abyss brought me nothing”, followed immediately by McKee saying “…and God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends”); we see (viii) the theme of bad adaptation as violation; and we see (ix) the problem of competing interpretations, all seemingly viable and yet significantly different (in Charlie’s dream the “daguerreotype Darwin, the Aristotle sculpture, the Hegel engraving, and the Orlean book jacket photos are alive and in the middle of a brutal and bloody fist fight”). But it is the emergence of the final theme, actually a twist in the plot, that reveals Kaufman’s most profound thought about the nature of film adaptation and that in a sense rests beneath his painstaking analysis.

III We see that (x) the process of film adaptation is itself a mimetic representation of the process of creating ourselves. And, if initially surprising, it is in this connection that we find the criteria for the judgment of adaptations of an ­appropriately complex kind that transcends any criterion dependent upon a model of simple matching. After a scene in which Donald says that he (as an identical twin) could approach Susan Orlean in place of Charlie, and the two of them finding some common ground and working together to an extent, they break into a joint rendition of the song “Happy Together”, in the end falling into each other’s

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arms in a state of combined hilarity and relief. This is an image of self-re-­ integration and the culmination of a process of working through competing elements—and corresponding competing descriptions—of a self that resisted parts of itself in the name of the ideal image of purity that we saw above. Charlie is awakening to the fact that the aesthetic impulses and intentions of Donald are not all bad, not in bulk objectionable as instruments of compromise. Running from a crazed Orlean and Laroche (who have decided that Charlie and Donald must die in order to keep the fortune-making drug they have discovered to exist within orchids that causes utter, profoundly absorbed fascination with anything or anyone being perceived and are driving in their van shooting at them), Donald is shot. Charlie says, “You’re gonna be okay”, but Donald is seriously wounded and with a weak smile says, “No. But don’t let them get you too. You got a fucking awesome third act”. Donald, mortally wounded, has last thoughts directed at preserving the life of the script—the essence of Charlie. Kaufman paints this re-integration in a powerful way: Charlie says, “Donald, this is an awful, bizarre thing to say and an awful time to say it, but I’m sorry I didn’t get to know you better. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry”. Donald: “It’s really…You’ve been really nice”. Charlie: “See, it’s just I thought I knew you already. I thought you were me. And I hated me”. Donald, touching Charlie’s face, says, “Well, don’t do that anymore. Okay?” Charlie says, “Okay”, and Charlie believes Donald, who appears dead, dies in his arms. The late-stage acceptance of Donald by Charlie is a result of what has happened within the filmscript: there has been a dangerous tour into dark alligator-­ infested water in search of, in not Laroche, then the most-special orchids. And Laroche is killed in this trip up the river. And the orchids have been turned into drug-delivering flowers. And there has been a murderous chase scene. And there has been a love story between Orlean and Laroche. And there is a fleeting (drug-induced) love-interest switch, with Orlean expressing (until the moment the drug wears off: “I can’t let you go, fatty”.) profound love for Charlie (“I can see inside your soul. It glows with orange sadness. It’s so beautiful. I love you”, etc.). And there is a surprise shock when Donald suddenly lurches in to knock down Orlean who is about to shoot Charlie. Orlean, before dying in a pile with Donald, criticizes Charlie’s abilities as a writer, and the re-integrated Donald voices his defense just before the gun goes off and they (truly this time) die. The project has been saved by integrating and developing themes and episodes and incidents that, taken as single “sentences” in Quine’s sense, or as single scenes not considered in the larger context of their interactions and their unfolding logic or dramatic teleology, the purist Charlie initially despised. The life of the script, properly respected and properly investigated for its internal dramatic possibilities and thematic interweavings, turned itself into this.7 7  I have referred throughout to the “life” of a film adaptation and how (as Kaufman has shown, on a Darwinian model) it adapts the original content in order to give it new or extended life for a new generation or audience. That distinctive “life” is I think analogous to what is often seen as the “life” of language on a broadly Wittgensteinian model. (see, e.g., Wittgenstein and the Creativity

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Gazing down with a policeman upon the pile of bodies—Laroche, Donald, Orlean, and the creature that killed Laroche—Charlie says of Donald, “He saved my life”. The other self, first rejected, is in truth his salvation. The elements of the script, first rejected, save the adaptation. The policeman says, “You two really look alike”. Charlie proudly answers, “Yes we do”. When Orlean was on the drug (but as yet unbeknownst to Charlie), Charlie said to her that he had gazed longingly at her book-jacket photo. And “I figured you could look at me and see something, even with all my flaws you could look at me and find something, you could maybe someday write a description of me that would be nicer than the one I write day in and day out in my head”. And he adds, hopefully, “Would it be?” This is a matter of self-description, revisions to that description, a request and hope for a better description, a hope that one’s individual perceptual style, one’s individual sensibility, will see something of deeper value. And then that person, of discerning sensibility, will express that, capture that, in language. This is a self in the act of rewriting, but not only that: it is a self transfigured and transformed by that process. This is an unsimplified model of selfhood, and simultaneously it is a model of adaptation. A self can find, and work through, various formulations of descriptions, and it can emerge over time by developing themes that are organically interrelated to what came before. But then those changes in description have retrospective power—they can change the way we see, the way we understand, past events from which our narrative line emerged. There is an internal teleology of a self and its descriptions, and the criteria we use to choose one set of descriptions are not reducible to a simple matching of word to life. It is a far more complex process; it is a dialogical one in Wittgenstein’s and Kaufman’s sense; and it makes (or works over time to make) sense as a coherent and interrelated set in Quine’s sense. Quine closed the discussion above with the observation that the indeterminacy of translation shows that the idea of internally fixed sentence meanings is not tenable—the truth of the matter is more complex and more a matter of justifiable, sense-preserving interrelations. And he said that this indeterminacy shows “that there are various defensible ways of conceiving the world” (p. 102). But this is not, as he shows, at all to suggest that thus any way of conceiving, or of translating, is as good as any other. But the criteria for such judgments will emerge as they are employed and appealed to by qualified of Language, ed. S.  Greve and J.  Macha, London: Palgrave, 2015). And I referred to Stephen Mulhall’s discussion of the way a film itself can be seen as a thinking or creative agent. It is perhaps not as fanciful as one might initially think to suggest that within the intentional world of the character Charlie, and the intentional world of Kaufman, these variations on the stereotypical Hollywood “chase scenes” are included ironically. If so, the film transforms them into integral parts of the whole; it is as if the movie itself subverts the ironic intentions of Charlie and Kaufman, and so, within the world of the film’s intentions—within the life of the project—it fully and genuinely integrates these scenes into the whole as essential parts. But if that is too fanciful, let us say that it is probably Kaufman who is knowingly doing this against the intentional world of Charlie— and in doing so he is showing something deep about the necessity of this kind of “life” for a successful adaptation.

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experts as they are speaking together inside an established community of sense. We do the same within ourselves, dialogically, as a self develops and evolves. This is a process of finding material, seeing with an individual sensibility into its recesses, and making coherent sense across time, across a long-form narrative, with it. In short, this is the process of adaptation. And the ways we choose and order a sense-making life-narrative are the ways an adapter sees into the details and nuances and recesses of original material and both creates and discovers newly internally coherent organically unified life from it. Lastly, it is time to inventory the ground covered, the pieces of the mosaic analyzing the concept of adaptation that Kaufman has brought out into the open. They include (1) the challenge to any model of direct correspondence as a criterion for success in adaption; (2) analogies between differing senses of “adaptation”—Darwinian and filmic; (3) perceptual indeterminacy, so that the very idea of the original text becomes informed or inflected by individual sensibility; (4) the idea of “twinning” a character in order to independently personify differing and initially competing aspects of a person; (5) the idea of self-perception as itself unreliable (which further destabilizes any “correspondence” model); (6) the distinction between genuinely internally driven and artificially imposed plots; (7) parallels between adapting a book and adapting a self to changing circumstances; (8) adapting the words of others as genuine and deep expressions of oneself or as solidifications of one’s identity; (9) an analysis of the authorial process in all its psychological complexity; (10) the role of a perceptual style in working out the content of the original; (11) the way in which the criteria for an evaluation of the quality of an adaptation emerge from within the work rather than being imposed from outside it as an invariant or uniform set; (12) the deadening effect of formulaic composition; (13) the need to find, protect, and let develop the genuine internal teleology (or “life”) of an adaptation; (14) the often subtle ethical responsibilities the adapter has to the original and the demands of uncheapened representation; (15) the way that coherence evolves within an adaptation (analogous to, or as an instance of, what Quine discussed); (16) the way an adaptation can fight back; (17) the way an adaptation can undertake its own internal ironic commentary upon itself; (18) the way an adaptation can become, within itself, an essayistic film-study; (19) the way in which a character writing himself (Laroche) offers a microcosm of an adaptation, as we say, “writing itself”, propelled by its internal teleology; (20) the possibility of a tripled dialogue all working together: between original and adaptation, between character and character, and between author and character; (21) the way an adaptation can “listen” to the demands and requests of its original, how this generates quality, and how it constitutes one ideal model of adaptation; (22) the way a debased or over-commercialized adaptation can “deafen” one to the “voice” of the original; (23) the relation between a person wanting to be recognized for who they are and an original “wanting” to be recognized for what it is; (24) how a film can adapt and develop its own content inside itself, doing this as a model or demonstration of the creative process of adaptation; (25) the role of individual perception and sensibility in

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conveying the truth-content of an original in an adaptation; (26) the way the preceding element opens the possibility (like Quine on translation) of significantly differing yet equally true, equally apt, adaptations; (27) the profound observation that the process, the project, of film adaptation is a mimetic representation of the process of self-creation; (28) the realization, emerging from the previous element, that the criteria for film adaptation correspond to the criteria for self-realization and will be as complex; (29) that the “life” of a script can seem to itself integrate, successfully and meaningfully, elements of plot that, taken by themselves, seemed objectionably cliché or stereotypical (and thus in a sense the film’s judgment can overrule the initial or premature judgment of the adapter); (30) both selves and texts, originals, can be transformed through the art of rewriting, with all that this implies concerning a self-directed inwardly contained dynamic dialogical creativity and discovery. With all this brought into view within this film-study, one could say that Kaufman’s philosophical project is far more Wittgensteinian than it is Platonic—it surveys the full range and reach of the concept of adaptation and captures through this kind of investigation the differentia that, assembled into a conceptual overview, make up the concept. It is not a project of extracting or defining a single universal essence that all members of the class “adaptation” share; the kind of conceptual or philosophical progress made within Kaufman’s film is of a different and far richer kind. When Charlie is back at the pie counter with Alice, he will shortly say that he now sees that “Life is a miracle. All life, from the flower to the human being. You. Me. And I want to show people that”. The flower, the human being, adapting a book about a flower, writing, or “writing” within the autobiographical mind, an adaptation of a “book” of experience—these connections are the substance of Kaufman’s insight as Quinean radical adapter, and although the elements of the analysis—what I have called the pieces of the mosaic—can be precisely identified, they remain irreducible in their complexity. Alice asks Charlie what his screenplay is about. “That’s tough”, he says—but then says, “about being yourself”. In the last frame, Kaufman dedicates the film to the memory of Donald Kaufman. As we saw at the outset of this discussion, Quine showed how it is that translation opens what might be called a creative space between original and translation or, for us, between original and adaptation. Kaufman has shown what is contained therein.

PART IX

Emotions and Psychology

CHAPTER 36

Imagination and Film Jonathan Gilmore

Introduction This discussion will address some of the explanatory virtues and limits of contemporary theories of the imagination in our understanding of films. We will begin with a preliminary sketch of the general tenets of those theories, which are largely drawn from cognitive psychology, and then turn to their use in addressing such topics as the role of the imagination in our learning of what facts hold within a fictional film, including what characters’ motivations, beliefs, and feelings are; how our perceptual experience of an actor enters into the visualizing of the fictional character he or she plays; how films exploit the imagination to generate certain affective and evaluative responses; and how such responses compare to those we may adopt toward analogous circumstances in real life. We will not discuss the creative imagination, that is, the discovery of original techniques or contents.1 Rather, our discussion will be oriented around what has been called the recreative imagination, when our imaginative activity is guided by and responsive to the prescriptions to imagine that typify our engagement with film.2

1 2

 Gaut (2003a).  Currie and Ravenscroft (2003).

J. Gilmore (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USA Baruch College, City University of New York, New York, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_36

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Cognitive Theory of the Imagination Recent philosophical and empirical literature on the imagination addresses its role in a vast range of activities, from playing games, fantasizing, dreaming, hallucinating, manipulating symbols, problem-solving, planning for the future, performing thought experiments, inquiring into metaphysical possibility, wishing, remembering, empathizing, adopting another person’s point of view, to, of course, responding to works of art. It’s disputed whether a univocal concept of the imagination can serve in such diverse explanatory contexts. Here, I will describe just those dimensions of the theory of the imagination about which there is both a good consensus and which are especially relevant to the philosophy of film. Described very generally, the imagination is a capacity to mentally represent something (an object, a state of affairs, an event, etc.) where one’s representation need not be counterfactually dependent on any independent state of its target. A dominant line of thought identifies such representations in functional terms: imaginings, like other mental states such as beliefs and desires, are to be individuated from one another, not by their contents, but by the pattern of causal interactions they exhibit in our mental economy.3 For example, if I desire that p I will typically behave in ways, ceteris paribus, to bring p about; if I believe that p and I believe that if p then q then I will also typically believe that q. If I imagine that p, I may act in ways that are consistent with p being false. If I believe it’s a holiday, I’ll sleep late; if I only desire or imagine that it’s a holiday, I’ll get up for work. Here, imagining exemplifies a distinctive or sui generis type of mental attitude not reducible to other attitudes such as beliefs.4 Although there is no canonical set of the factors that would serve in all contexts to individuate imaginings from other kinds of mental states, some important distinctions are as follows: 1. Our imaginings are normally—although not exclusively—caused and constrained by our will, unlike occurrent beliefs and perceptions which depend much more on our other beliefs and perceptions. 2. Connected to the previous point, beliefs, perceptions, and other factive mental states such as remembering are normatively characterized as “aiming” at what is true. Imaginings, by contrast, are not essentially constrained by the truth, even if in some cases they can be employed for truth-tracking purposes, as in thought experiments.5 3. Given the presence of a motivational state such as desire or emotion, beliefs and other truth-apt states tend to have behavioral consequences that are not typical of imaginings sharing the same contents. If I desire to

 On functionalism about mental states, see Block (1996).  Nichols (2006, 8). 5  Velleman (2003). 3 4

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stay dry and believe it is raining, I will open my umbrella. If I only imagine it is raining, no such action would be expected. 4. Finally, imaginings, unlike beliefs, tend to be context-dependent.6 What I imagine depends on the particular circumstances that motivate and causally sustain the imagining: watching a film provokes one set of imaginings, reading a novel, planning a trip, and daydreaming provoke different imaginings. By contrast, beliefs tend to be context-independent: once formed, if suitably connected to my other beliefs, they remain stable elements in what I believe. That imaginings are not combined to form a single generally applicable stock makes it possible to imaginatively represent many different states of affairs (say, the New York City of Marathon Man, Annie Hall, and Ghostbusters) without any impetus to reconcile their mutual inconsistencies. Focusing on forms of imagination itself, one important distinction is between propositional imagining and sensory imagining. The first of these involves adopting a mental attitude of imagining toward some propositional content, as when one imagines that such and such is the case. As we will discuss below, such imagining exhibits a ready parallel to believing; indeed, some theorists speak of this form as “belief-like imagining.” Sensory imagining, by contrast, involves an imaginative attitude toward some content that is of the kind that could be the object of perception. Just as I might see some object in my environment, I might “visualize” it in a self-generated way. A distinct form of imagining—treated by some theorists as a third kind but by others as a subset of sensory imagining—is experiential imagining. To engage in sensory imagining of a cat in a tree is to form a visual mental representation of it. However, to experientially imagine the cat in the tree is to imagine my seeing it thus—to imagine what I visualize as belonging to my egocentric space. Such experiential imagining requires a sensory dimension, but also involves, at least implicitly, a commitment to the sensory experience belonging to oneself as one sees, hears, feels, and so on, whatever it is that is the content of one’s thought. We will return to what sort—sensory or experiential—best characterizes our experience of film, but let us first discuss the more fundamental role imagination plays in coming to know what is true in the story a film represents.

Fictional Truth in Film One of the essential dimensions of our engagement with a film is determining what facts hold in the scenarios that it represents. Many theorists characterize this process as coming to understand what is “fictionally true” in a story, but this should not be taken to refer to a special kind of truth; rather, it only marks out a class of statements that are represented as true according to the story. 6

 Currie and Ravenscroft (2003, 18).

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Some of what a film represents as true—say that the Empire State Building is in New York City—is indeed true, other things that the film represents as true—that King Kong climbs the Empire State Building—are not. Our determination of what is true in a film is conceptually prior to, and provides the grounds of, symbolic, allegorical, or other sorts of interpretations of the work that we may defend. However, there may in practice be a reflexive relationship between what we take to be true in a film and what interpretation of the story we find apt. At the end of Christopher Nolan’s Inception audiences are left unsure whether what Dom Cobb, the main protagonist, undergoes is the content of a shared dream. How we answer that question about what is factual within the story of the film and what interpretative meaning we attribute to the work may be internally related. In principle, one could explain the discovery of much of what is propositionally true in a film without adverting to the imagination. One could, for example, determine that such and such is the case by reading a detailed plot summary or discovering that the work’s creators stipulated that some truth is held within its story. However, the perceptual truths within a cinematic fiction seem much less determinable independent of our imaginative engagement. For perceptual and experiential imaginings are much more inflected than propositional ones by dimensions of the vehicle of representation—such as the medium, technique, style, and tone—in and through which a film tells its story. The same natural setting can look soulless and forbidding or warm and inviting according to the color rendering of the depiction. The procedures by which we discover such truths within the fictional world of a film parallel in many ways those by which we discover truths about the real world. (Note: in what follows “world of a film” is just a façon de parler referring to what is true according to the film.) For example, just as inferences among our propositional and sensory beliefs can lead to new beliefs about the actual world, so such reasoning among our propositional and sensory imaginings of what is true in a fictional film can lead to new imaginings of what is true in it. We also tend to monitor departures from consistency among our imaginings in relation to a given story, just as we do with our beliefs, sometimes giving up what we thought was true when contradictory, but more reliable information emerges as a film narrative unfolds. However, no fictional story can represent all the facts that it asks us to entertain as true. Thus, much of what we know to be the case in a film is imported from our beliefs about the real world, such as beliefs about physics, human psychology, and how things look, taste, or feel. If a character is in London one day and New York the next, we assume without needing to be shown that he traveled by plane. Here, our everyday beliefs allow us to infer new imaginings of what is true in the fiction from the imaginings that we already have. Beliefs that saliently contradict what a film asks us to imagine are not typically admitted into our inferences among those imaginings. For that would

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result in our imagining contradictions to exist in even the most quotidian naturalistic representations. Furthermore, we may hesitate to import certain beliefs into a fictional story if it represents a world highly dissimilar to the one we know. We are on shaky ground, for example, in attributing everyday psychological states to the pleasure trippers in Antonioni’s L’Avventura, who have an affectively muted constitution that seems to be significantly different from our own. Imaginings, of course, are typically quarantined from playing a role in inferences among our beliefs.7 One may concurrently imagine that p and believe that not p, without feeling any rational pressure to hold one of these thoughts to the exclusion of the other. Relatedly, what we imagine to be true does not tend to motivate the behavior that it would if we believed it. There are also important asymmetries between our patterns of forming imaginings about a fictional world and beliefs about the real one. These are explained by the internal and external perspectives that, when conjoined, are exclusively applicable to the contents of fictional representations.8 We take the internal perspective when we refer to facts in the film that motivate us to imagine certain other propositions as true within the story; we adopt the external perspective when we refer to factors outside the fictional content that perform that imagination-generating function. We might, from an internal perspective, explain that the protagonist exploring an abandoned house is in danger through appealing to facts within the story, such as the house being haunted; however, from an external perspective we can explain that fact through appeals to the conventions of the film’s genre and the eerie soundtrack that accompanies shots of the house’s exterior. In general, the external stance on a cinematic work explains its contents in terms of its identity as an artifact, with reference to the functioning of its plot, style, medium, tone, lighting, point of view, duration of shots, depth of focus, color, and other aspects of the vehicle of representation. The internal stance, by contrast, identifies the content of that representation as if it were real. It isn’t always easy to determine whether a feature of a film that we note from the external stance makes a difference in the facts of the story considered from an internal stance. Two actresses, Carol Bouquet and Angela Molina, play the role of Conchita in Buneul’s That Obscure Object of Desire, alternating from one scene to another and sometimes switching places in the middle of a scene. Whether this phenomenon is to be imagined as a fact in the world the film presents, or recognized as only a feature of the cinematic representation of that world, is unclear. In any case, only some grounds of what we determine to be true in a fiction lie within the scope of the operator “it is to be imagined that.” Other sources lie outside. We can usually assume, for example, that no one is seriously hurt in  Gendler (2003).  For discussions of internal and external stances on a fiction, see Lamarque (1996), Chapters 2 and 8, and Currie (2010, 49–64). An analogous distinction is noted by Walton (1979, 21). 7 8

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the wreckage caused by an automobile chase in a comedy. We make that assumption not because the film gives us any final tally of the damage but because bodily injury to bystanders would be inconsistent with the light-­ hearted aims of that genre. In general, a fiction’s overt descriptions of what is true supply an opportunity to make an indefinite number of potential inferences about what else is the case. That only a much smaller subset of mostly shared inferences are in practice activated in our engagement with a work is explained by how its descriptions manage our attention and interests, making certain conjectures and conclusions relevant to us in our experience of the fiction.9 Indeed, a film can frame its contents in ways that divert us from inferences that would reveal inconsistencies in the story or potential explanations of events that compete with those that the film prescribes for us to imagine. The preceding addressed how we recognize what is true within a film representation. But what makes such things true? Some approaches treat truth within a fiction very broadly, so as to incorporate whatever would be true if a fiction were a veridical representation of actual events. (David Lewis suggests this approach in relation to literature but it can be adopted to film.)10 Here, what is true within a film (or other fiction) is conceptually prior to what an appropriate audience is elicited to imagine. But that kind of construal tends to mischaracterize our identification of what happens in a story. For it wrongly directs us to identify as true within a story many aspects of a film’s representational content that we are meant to ignore or at least not take as indicative of states of affairs within the film. For example, we would have to attribute a superhuman ability of visual recall to adult characters whose memories of their childhood are represented on screen. Or if we see an American actor’s measles inoculation scar in an epic set in the eighteenth century, we would need to imagine that he traveled back from the future. Other theories respond by narrowing the scope of what counts as true within a representation, construing it as the product of an engagement wherein only certain dimensions of the fiction count as generating facts within it, while others are to be ignored. One approach that has gained widespread acceptance characterizes this engagement as involving a structured pretense akin to a game of make-believe. There, what is true in the fiction is identical to what audiences are prescribed to imagine in their engagement with it. In Kendall Walton’s influential theory of fictions, works such as films, paintings, and novels serve as props in such a pretense, what Walton calls a game of make-believe.11 A simple game of that sort is exemplified by children pretending to duel with wooden sticks as if they were swords. Some of the rules that 9  Nichols (2006), cites some of the large empirical literature showing that differences among readers’ goals (e.g., entertainment or knowledge) in engaging with a narrative text explain differences in the kind and degree of inferences they make as they read. These findings can be generalized to all fictional works, including films. 10  Lewis (1978). 11  Walton (1990).

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structure this game may be formally agreed upon, but others may have a naturalness in that context such that, without being explicitly stipulated, they ­govern what counts as properly playing the game. If a stick breaks, so has the sword it represents. Walton proposes that all works of fiction, including films, can have analogous roles as props in more tightly constrained forms of pretense, where, for example, we imagine seeing a visual recording of actors and studio sets, that we are witnessing actual events. Whereas the rules of a children’s game are often ad hoc and readily revised, the rules that structure our engagements with works of art tend to be relatively stable. Among those rules, of course, are those specifying that certain features of a fictional representation (e.g., that the narrator has miraculous powers of recall) are not counted as facts in the make-believe world of the story. As noted above, a standard part of the experience of any fiction is importing propositional and perceptual beliefs from our experience of the real world into our imaginative representation of the fictional world. In the case of a visual work of fiction such as a film, we may import elements of what we literally perceive on screen into the imagined visual representation that the film elicits. In some cases, we imagine of an actor that he is a character who looks very much like the actor himself, inheriting the latter’s beauty or charisma. In other cases, a fiction prescribes an imagining of perceptual features that depart from or are inconsistent with what we literally see represented. Dustin Hoffman was 29 and Anne Bancroft 35 at the time of the filming of The Graduate but audiences are not supposed to import that comparatively small difference in how old the actors appear into the film’s prescription that her character is (and could appear to be) twice his age. It is generally true of works of fiction that we import only some facts about the vehicle of representation into the content of the representation. But what is distinctive of works of fiction that essentially depend on perceptual properties of their vehicles is that there is often a question of which features of what we see (or hear) belong solely to the work’s vehicle of representation and which are (also) to be attributed to the content of what the work elicits us to represent in our imagination. Let us now turn to some debates about the formal structure of that imaginative engagement.

The Nature of the Imaginative Experience Elicited by Film In watching a traditional film, we are placed in immediate contact with a changing pattern of light projected onto a screen from a recording of actors pretending to be individuals who typically don’t exist in real life. However, the most natural way of describing this experience is to say that we see the characters that those actors play, the scenarios that constitute the film’s fictional content. The imagination is widely acknowledged to play some role in this experience, but what role is that? There are two forms of visual experience here that need to be examined: the first concerns our tendency to see the shifting patches

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of light and color as the objects and persons they serve to depict and the second is found in the tendency to see in the moving picture the fictional character, not the actor who plays him, or the fictional location, not that in which the film was made. Let us address these in turn. The first form of visual experience exemplifies what Richard Wollheim has identified as the phenomenon of seeing-in.12 Seeing-in describes an experience common to all forms of depiction in which we see things in photographs, films, drawings, and paintings. In Wollheim’s characterization, the phenomenon involves a viewer both recognizing (in a minimal sense) what is depicted in a picture and being aware of the marked surface of the representation in virtue of which such depiction is achieved—a single experience composed of two parts that he calls twofoldedness. Some of Wollheim’s remarks suggest that twofoldedness is a necessary condition of seeing-in. For without any conscious awareness of the surface, one’s experience is not as of a depiction but is rather taken to be as of the thing itself (e.g., in trompe l’oeil), and, without seeing the object depicted “in” the painting, one doesn’t have a depiction, only an abstract design.13 In any case, it is not clear that the imagination plays an essential role in seeing-in. Gregory Currie, for example, argues that recognizing what a cinematic image represents depends on the same sub-personal, largely automatic processes that are involved in recognizing that thing in the flesh.14 My recognition of a train rolling toward me on screen involves the same subpersonal capacities (the activation of feature-detectors indexed to my concept of “train”) as recognizing a train in real life. I see an x in an x representation via the same capacities that allow me to see an x. The kind of visual experience in which the explanatory power of appealing to the imagination is more likely indispensable is that which occurs once seeing-­in has done its work: where we don’t just see the actor but see the actor as the person he portrays. One proposal for how to describe the connection between these two forms of experience—seeing-in and visually imagining would be to say that we first literally see the actor in the pattern of light project on a screen and only subsequently imagine of that actor that he or she is the fictional character. That may occur sometimes, especially in cases in which we are not yet absorbed in an ongoing imaginative experience. But a more typical experience is one in which such literal seeing and sensory imagining are reflexively related. Once I am engaged in an imaginative exercise, my perceptual attention will be directed both by dimensions of that experience, for example, what features are relevant to the story, and by dimensions that are external to the fictional world (such as lighting, focus, point of view, music, and mood) that affect what I find salient in it.  Wollheim (1980).  Another characterization would be that he sees twofoldedness as a normative requirement on seeing a depiction as a depiction. It is a norm that is not constitutive of, for example, the proper perception of clouds, even though they can support seeing-in as well. 14  Currie (1995, 20). 12 13

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Is there a common formal structure of such content? One significant dispute is over whether, in our experience of film, all visual imagining is imagined seeing. Participation theorists argue that our imagining is of the experiential sort described in section “Cognitive Theory of the Imagination”: in watching a film, audiences imagine themselves seeing the events depicted. They imagine being part of the fictional story, an invisible or inert presence in the scene. Thus, George Wilson explains “[t]he spectator knows that he is in the theater, but it is make-believe for him that he is watching from within the space of the story.”15 Proponents of the participatory theory argue that we imagine seeing (and hearing) what is presented as occurring in a film because, more generally, we imagine we are located in some sense in the space represented by the film—specifically, we are said to imagine occupying the position that is, in fact, occupied by the camera. A feature of films that contributes to the intuitive plausibility of this thesis is that the point of view we are given on the scenarios visually represented in a film is an internal part of the representation, independent of where we happen to sit in relation to the screen. From this, it is natural to assume our visual imagining of the film’s goings-on is identical to imagining seeing that content from that internal point of view. Currie disagrees, arguing that except in unusual cases imagining in cinema is impersonal: viewers do not imagine themselves in sensory contact with the film’s represented content.16 His objection is that if visual imagining is always personal or participatory, this would result in our being forced to attribute absurd or impossible states of affairs to even the most mundanely naturalistic films. For example, if a shot is taken from a point of view of looking down on a bed, the participatory theory implies that we are to imagine ourselves as not only seeing the state of affairs thereby presented, but doing so while somehow suspended from the ceiling. Comparably, some events in a film are shown as occurring unseen by anyone; to impute a viewer into those contexts creates a contradiction—the event is both witnessed and unwitnessed; finally, although the point of view furnished by the camera seems a natural place to locate ourselves within the film, the participatory thesis is hard to square with cases in which what we are presented is the point of view of a character—in which case we would be forced to conclude that it is true in the film that we and the character are co-located. Walton’s general reply to such worries is the point noted above (section “Fictional Truth in Film”) that fictions may ask us to imagine something without prescribing us to imagine all its causal or conceptual consequences. Also, most fictional representations make salient certain lines of inference at the expense of others that could in principle be followed, and our desires and interests in engaging with the fiction—which are motivated by the fiction—also 15  Wilson (1986, 55–56). See also Walton (1990), Chapter 8; Levinson (1993); and Smith (1997). 16  Currie (1995), Chapter 6.

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shape which lines will be pursued. However, the nature of the dispute is not clear. Walton and Wilson appear to make a conceptual claim that depiction is necessarily imagined seeing, whether we are talking about depictions in paintings, drawings, or films, whereas Currie argues just that it is exceedingly rare for the visualizing involved in the experience of a film to be imagined seeing. One point in favor of participatory imagining being contingent, if not rare, is that if we conclude that all visual imagining is imagined seeing, we are unable to explain why overt indications of participatory imagining seem to have significant thematic import. If participatory imagining is a default mode of engaging with a film, how are we to explain the distinctive kind of content it may play in a work such as Michael Haneke’s Caché, where audiences seem to be asked to imagine that they exist within the film’s fictional world voyeuristically following the goings-on of a justifiably paranoid couple through their window? If participatory imagining is constitutive of all visual imagining, this would implausibly render all such clandestine observations unremarkable.

Affective Response We noted earlier three modes of imagining that films elicit from us: propositional, sensory, and experiential. Each of those forms presents a fictional world as being in a certain way. In doing so, they can make it true within the fiction that the grounds for a given emotion are present. To elicit anxious suspense in audiences, a film may foreshadow a potential disaster; to elicit pity in audiences, a film may show someone they care about suffering; to elicit disgust, a film may present a close-up view of exposed viscera or bodily contaminants. These are not merely responses triggered or caused by our confrontations with fictional films; rather, they instantiate evaluations of the states of affairs represented therein. A plausible psychological explanation of why we respond emotionally to what we know to be fictional is that this tendency reflects a general capacity serving practical rationality to affectively respond to imagined representations.17 This mode of emotion elicitation via imagining might thus instantiate the way psychological systems can be exapted, or redeployed, to operate beyond the domain in relation to which they initially developed.18 Here, systems employed for the registration of the value of actual states of affairs may have widened their scope to realize the benefits of counterfactual thinking and from there come to serve the multifarious functions of fictions. A discrete emotional response is directed toward a particular object (a person, an event, a state of affairs) and presents that object as bearing qualities that would justify or explain the emotion—as fear presents its object as dangerous, sadness presents its object as being a significant loss, and so on. By contrast, moods, a distinct kind of affective response, are much more diffuse, exhibit a  Damasio (1994). See also Harris (2000, 86–7); and Gendler and Kovakovich (2006).  Sterelny (2003).

17 18

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greater temporal (less episodic) extension, and seem to color one’s whole environment with congruent qualities.19 Because they lack a particular object, moods tend not to have the force or vividness of ordinary emotions, but that global applicability allows them to have broad effects in shaping audience responses to any particular objects to which a work directs their attention.20 Specifically, when a given mood is expressed by and elicited in audiences of a work of art, it lowers the threshold for the particular mood-consistent (directed) emotions a work is designed to provoke.21 Moods not only serve as a scaffolding for the particular intentional or directional emotions that a work elicits— lowering the threshold for their evocation—they also help sustain over time the attentional and informational processes that those emotional experiences depend upon.22 Feeling a given mood, one continually “discovers” grounds for and confirmation of the mood outside of oneself, a phenomenon exploited by filmmakers who, through setting a mood, can cause us to project some property into some fictional scenario (e.g., a threatening presence) without directly visually or verbally describing that scenario as possessing that property. Indeed, that such moods can be elicited by processes whose workings are outside of conscious awareness allows them to affect our evaluations and judgments in ways that might not be possible if the grounds of those responses were cognitively assessed. Sound, lighting, and editing techniques of films, for example, can express and elicit moods that direct the attention of viewers to the film’s mood-congruent visual features, invoke mood-congruent expectations, and promote particular evaluations of characters.23 If a viewer is unaware of the source of these effects in the mood developed through such techniques, she is much more likely to attribute them to evaluative facts about the imagined states of affairs in the film. (A third source in the imagination of emotional responses—identification with characters—is discussed in section “Simulation and Identification”.) Those who adopt a widely held pre-theoretical stance on emotions and moods—call them realists—take it for granted that both sorts of emotional responses are genuine. Indeed, substantial sources of emotional elicitation in empirical studies designed to probe real-world emotions are fictional films and stories.24 However, some philosophers—call them irrealists—argue against that assimilation of fiction-directed emotions to those based on beliefs, perceptions, and other factive attitudes. All parties to the debate acknowledge that there are typically qualitative differences between the emotion-like responses we have to what we take to be real  Griffiths, Sizer argue for the predominant view that moods have no intentional objects.  For the role of moods in altering our attention to focus on those elements of a filmic representation that would fit with or justify the mood, see Smith (2003). 21  Ekman (1994). 22  On affective states as being experienced as giving information about objects in one’s situation, see Clore et al. (2001). 23  See Tan et al. (2007). 24  For illustrations, see Coan and Allen (2007). 19 20

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and those elicited by fictional representations. Fear evoked by the refined techniques of a horror film may be more powerful than that which is typically evoked by ordinary experiences. Grief over the death of someone one cares for in a fiction isn’t typically as long standing as sadness over a real friend. Furthermore, we may regulate or tamp down our emotions according to social norms and practical expediency, while giving full vent to them when—in the context of fictional entertainments—such social and practical demands are suspended. Irrealists about fiction-directed emotions go further in arguing that our respective behaviors in response to fictions and facts are not different in quality or degree but different in explanatory kind. For example, that we know that the monster in the movie that provokes our fear is a fictional creature doesn’t just diminish our tendency to flee, it forecloses the relevance of any such motivation. And whereas our grief over the loss of a real person seems to suffuse our thoughts and feelings about unconnected states of affairs, our grief over the death of a beloved protagonist in a novel is compatible with being full of cheer once our attention is directed away from the fictional representation. In order to explain these, and other behavioral and affective asymmetries between our emotional responses to what we take to be real and what we know to be only imagined, irrealists argue that we must posit that the relevant feelings we have in responses to fictions are, as a class, distinct from ordinary or genuine emotions.25 Irrealists acknowledge that genuine emotions can be provoked by a work of fiction—as when the misogyny expressed in a novel leads to resentment toward its author. Yet they argue that those emotions that are felt in virtue of imagining that the contents of a work of fiction are actual are not literally experienced, despite often being accompanied by the standard physiological and phenomenological dimensions of emotions prompted by what we take to be true. Instead, irrealists situate our experience of such fiction-directed emotions as within the pretense or imaginings that fictions elicit from us. It is part of our participation in a pretense involving the fiction’s contents that we make-believe we feel sad. One argument advanced by irrealists is that there seem to be significant differences between fiction or imagination-directed emotions and those based on beliefs with respect to such features as their respective motivational potential or behavioral effects. Pity felt for a person who is hurt in the real world tends to be accompanied by a motivation to help alleviate her suffering, even if other motivations forestall that concern from being acted on. Pity felt for a character in analogous circumstances within a play appears to carry no such motivation. One problem with this distinction is that if the motivation in question is a conscious desire, the distinction between the presence of such motivation in the real-world case and its absence in the fictional case can be explained by the fact that desires depend on relevant beliefs to be acted on, and there is no such

 The case for such pretend or “quasi-“emotions was introduced by Walton (1978).

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belief in the fictional case.26 That is, we don’t need to posit a different kind of affective state operative in the fictional and real cases in order to explain their different motivational character; we can appeal instead to a difference in the accompanying beliefs. Alternatively, if the motivation in question can be identified with an unconscious desire-like state, it is not clear that it is absent in the fictional case. A widely studied phenomenon is how imaginatively representing one’s own or another’s behavior initiates activity in brain regions that are engaged when actually performing the analogous behavior: we exhibit a motor readiness to act in a way consistent with the behavior that we merely imaginatively represent.27 Also, a belief with some content and an imagining with that content may not entrain similar behavioral or affective consequences because of the influence of other beliefs and content bearers, as well as motor routines, behavioral scripts, and other inhibitory factors that constrain the affective and behavior-generating output of our imagining.28 In any case, contra the irrealist’s assumption, spectators who are absorbed in experiencing fictions may indeed feel motivated to perform actions congruent with the emotions those fictions elicit. As Susan Hurley notes, “movements can be induced by actions you actually perceive or by actions you would like to perceive – as when moviegoers or sports fans in their seats make movements they would like to see.”29 As we watch the characters in a film try to find their way out of some fix, we don’t (typically) shout to them from our seats, but we may make judgments about where, within the fictional scenario, they ought to seek recourse, scanning the scene, for example, to see where they can take shelter. No doubt, such behavior can sometimes be classified as part of the activity of understanding the content of the fiction. Yet, the process of making such judgments is a kind of helping behavior, the only sort available to audiences excluded from the fictional world. Peter Goldie notes that with fictions we “allow ourselves to a considerable degree to indulge our profound feelings for humankind, and let our sentiments run away with us without concerns about their connection to action.”30 The implication is that with respect to fictional representations we allow ourselves to experience emotions that we would inhibit, because of their behavioral consequences, if the representations were of real things. But that doesn’t describe a distinction between emotional responses to fictions and to real life so much as emotional responses that would justify relevant actions and those that would not. When there are no behavioral consequences to our emotions this may not be because they are directed at fictions but because acting from those emotions can serve no point.31 One might be appalled by the treatment of enslaved  Carruthers (2006).  Munzert et al. (2009). 28  The hypothesis here is that the inhibitory mechanism that prevents acting from the motor preparation is generated in parallel with the preparation for motor activation. Lotze et al. (1999). 29  Hurley (2008). 30  Goldie (2003, 62). 31  Gaut (2003b). 26 27

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people one reads about in a historical representation, but that feeling, even though directed at real individuals, can no more motivate behavior to alleviate their condition than can emotions felt for fictional characters lead to actions that would help them. Realists thus point out that there is something unsatisfyingly ad hoc about treating emotions that are fiction-directed as only pretend in virtue of their lack of behavioral effects, when emotions directed at the contents of a wide range of other sorts of representations that don’t have motivational potential, or for which actions would be beside the point, are uncontroversially counted as genuine.32 This point can be generalized to say that emotions may be supported or partly constituted by mental attitudes other than belief. Fantasies, desires, anticipations, perceptions, acknowledged hallucinations, and, most relevantly here, thoughts that need not be truth apt such as imaginings can serve to represent an emotion’s target.

Simulation and Identification One important dimension attributed to our capacity to imagine counterfactual states of affairs is the role it plays in understanding other people’s minds. Simulation theorists argue that understanding someone else’s experience sometimes involves imaginatively representing their beliefs, desires, perceptions, and other mental states, as if they belonged to oneself. Because we share with others similar ways of processing the contents of such mental representations, we can imaginatively entertain having another’s beliefs and desires and discover from those inputs to one’s theoretical and practical reasoning mechanisms what outputs in behavior are likely to result.33 Although initially posited as an explanation of how we can predict the behavior of others, simulation theories are often appealed to in explanations of our ability to discover and imaginatively experience others’ emotions. The proposal is that I do not typically become aware of a person’s affective state solely through inferential reasoning about her beliefs and desires. Rather, I also, or instead, more directly just imagine having her beliefs and desires and can attribute to her the emotions or other states that this process generates in me “offline,” that is, disconnected from their usual behavioral consequences.34 Unsurprisingly, such simulation theories have been posited to explain how we understand the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of fictional characters as well.35 Critics of simulation as an explanation of our understanding of fictions do not claim that it never occurs. Rather, they argue that its scope is limited. First, simulating the minds of fictional characters, unlike simulating those of real  Moran (1994).  Some representative treatments are Heal (1995); Gordon (1995); and Goldman (2006). 34  The alternative “theory-theory” places greater stress on our reliance on a tacit body of knowledge of how people think. See the papers collected in Carruthers and Smith (1996). 35  See Feagin (1996), for an application of this approach to literature. 32 33

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persons, seems cognitively onerous in ways that would limit its prevalence: for I must not only imagine that what I see on the screen or read in the novel represents some real state of affairs, I must also imagine what it is to be in the shoes of those characters whose existence I must entertain as part of the larger imaginative project. Second, we can plausibly account for much of what we know of a character’s thoughts and feelings in a film from descriptive information the work provides about the mental state of the character and via inferences from what the character says and does. We may also come to understand the mental state of a character, as well as predict her behavior, because we recognize in the fictional state of affairs reasons she would have for those thoughts and behaviors we attribute to her. Finally, as noted above, some of our knowledge of what is true in a fiction, including how a character thinks and behaves, comes from our familiarity with the genre, style, period, and so on, to which the work belongs. One can typically predict that when a film features a babysitter hearing strange noises coming from the attic, she is unaccountably not going to flee the house. There are other notions of identification with fictional characters that draw on the imagination but do not presume the explanation of our knowledge of other minds favored by simulation theory. One is the proposal that our identification with a character is not a global imagining of being the character or occupying her situation in all respects but rather partial and aspectival. Here, to identify with a character may be to imagine sharing only one or some of her dimensions: for example, her perceptual experience but not necessarily her beliefs or her feelings.36 A point-of-view shot, for example, invites us to perceptually identify with a fictional character, but that identification (as in shots from the killer’s perspective in horror films) need not entail that we identify with the character in other respects, such as his desires.37 A related notion of imaginative identification posits that it gives us not only knowledge of how a character feels, but a similar experience of those feelings themselves. In a process that is sometimes identified with empathy, one’s imagining of oneself in the shoes of another—including a character within a ­fiction— can lead to feeling what the other feels. As Shelley Duvall’s character flees Jack Nicholson’s in a hedge maze in The Shining, we don’t only fear for her but with her, responding with the racing pulse, shortness of breath, and greater skin conductance that, no doubt, the character undergoes according to the fiction. Sometimes, such affective identification can induce us to adopt a character’s or narrator’s emotional appraisal of what his circumstances require (say a mobster’s need to eliminate his rivals) even when the facts in the story would not justify that evaluation if the circumstances they describe were real.38

 Gaut (2010, 258).  For criticisms of point-of-view shots as constituting an identification with the relevant fictional character, see Currie (1995, 174–6), and Smith (1995, 157). 38  Gilmore (2011). 36 37

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A critic of such notions of simulation and identification who sought an alternative explanation of such emotions could point to the phenomenon of affective contagion, an automatic, largely unconscious, tendency to mimic expressions, postures, and movements with those of another person, which leads to a sharing of the other’s affective state.39 Such mimicry has been shown to be reliably caused by exposure to a wide range of emotional responses such as laughter, embarrassment, and disgust and is especially salient in relation to facial expressions of the emotions.40 Such subdoxastic mimicry is particularly effective in eliciting emotions from film spectators, as our visual experience of the face of an actor on film can be significantly similar, with respect to emotional contagion, as the experience of perceiving a person in the flesh.41 If such motor mimicry were merely a case of a spectator adopting the physical appearance of a target in a given emotional state, it would not be relevant to explaining the actual triggering of emotional feelings among audiences. However, performing such motor mimicry can cause, or at least prime, one to experience the emotions of one’s target, even when one is unaware of their source. That point distinguishes such mimicry from the more self-aware processes of identification involved in empathy and simulation.42 The apparent low-level, automaticity of emotional contagion makes it possible for a work to evoke affective reactions, and their concomitant evaluative perspectives, that may conflict with conscious and more reflective affective responses. As Goldie notes, “what is typical of contagion is that the agent is not aware of the contagion: the agent takes his experience as original and not as caught from another.”43 This means that, when “infected,” one may look for, and end up identifying, the putative justification of one’s emotion in some state of affairs, even though the emotion is arationally caused. Of course, empathetic identification can explain only some of the emotions we experience in watching a film. For often our emotional responses do not match those of the character with whom we putatively empathize: he feels wildly optimistic about the plan, we feel wary of its pitfalls. Indeed, there our imagining would not be central or participatory but acentral—an imagining from the outside.44 In such a case the proponent of imaginative identification as a source of emotions may observe that our wariness is felt in virtue of our recognition of the character’s optimism, and it is that latter feeling that is generated empathetically. However, other emotions we may feel for a fictional scenario are sufficiently decentered that they may not refer to any particular emotions of characters in the fiction. That the contents of a story are amusingly grim may be due to the mordant way it is framed or represented, not to the feelings of any individual ­represented  Hatfield, et al. (1992).  Dimberg et al. (2000). 41  Coplan (2006). 42  Adelmann and Zajonc (1989). See also Cacioppo et al. (2010). 43  Goldie (2002, 191). 44  On central and acentral imagining, see Wollheim (1984, 74). 39 40

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therein. We can thus laugh at the physical torments of a character in a comedy but feel revulsion if we were to learn of them occurring to a real person. For facts in a scenario that are criterial for one kind of emotion can be highlighted, while those criterial for contrary emotions can be diminished.45 Determining what a film expresses about its contents involves attending to the particular form in which that content is represented—for example, grimly, parodically, disgustingly, joyfully, and so on. It need not involve imagining having the attitude of some other real or fictional person, except perhaps in the sense that in experiencing that content in accord with the emotional perspective made salient by the film, we may imagine possessing an evaluative outlook highly alien to our own.

Bibliography Adelmann, P., and R.B. Zajonc. 1989. Facial Efference and the Experience of Emotion. Annual Review of Psychology 40 (1): 249–280. Block, N. 1996. What Is Functionalism? In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement. London: Macmillan. Cacioppo, J., et al. 2010. The Psychophysiology of Emotion. In Handbook of Emotions, Michael Lewis, ed. Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 179–184. New York: Guilford Press. Carroll, N. 1997. Art, Narrative, and Emotion. In Emotion and the Arts, ed. Hjort and Laver. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carruthers, P., and P.K.  Smith, eds. 1996. Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carruthers, P. 2006. Why Pretend? In The Architecture of the Imagination, ed. Sean Nichols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coan, James A., and John Allen, eds. 2007. Handbook of Emotion Elicitation and Essessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clore, G.L., et  al. 2001. Affect as Information. In Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition, ed. J.P. Forgas, 121–144. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum. Coplan, A. 2006. Catching Characters’ Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film. Film Studies 8: 26–38. Currie, G. 1995. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, G., and I. Ravenscroft. 2003. Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books. Davies, M., and T. Stone. 1995. Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Blackwell. Dimberg, U., et al. 2000. Unconscious Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions. Psychological Science 11 (1): 86–69.  Carroll (1997).

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Ekman, P. 1994. Moods, Emotions, and Traits. In The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions, ed. P. Ekman and R. Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feagin, S. 1996. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gaut, B. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003a. Creativity and Imagination. In The Creation of Art, ed. B. Gaut and P. Livingston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2003b. Reasons, Emotions, and Fictions. In Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes, pp. 15–34. London: Routledge. Gilmore, J. 2011. Aptness of Emotions for Fictions and Imaginings. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92: 468–489. Gendler, T. 2003. On the Relation Between Pretense and Belief. In Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. M. Kieran and D. Lopes, 15–34. London: Routledge. Gendler, T., and K.  Kovakovich. 2006. Genuine Rational Fictional Emotions. In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell. Goldman, A. 2006. Simulating Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldie, P. 2003. Narrative, Emotion, and Perspective. In Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Robert. 1995. Folk Psychology as Simulation. In Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate, ed. M. Davies and T. Stone. Oxford: Blackwell. Harris, P. 2000. The Work of the Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell. Hatfield, E., et  al. 1992. Primitive Emotional Contagion. In Emotion and Social Behavior, ed. Margaret S. Clark, 151–177. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Heal, J. 1995. Replication and Functionalism. In Folk Psychology, ed. M.  Davies and T. Stone. Oxford: Blackwell. Hurley, S. 2008. The Shared Circuits Model (SCM): How Control, Mirroring, and Simulation Can Enable Imitation, Deliberation, and Mindreading. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31: 1–58. Lamarque, P. 1996. Fictional Points of View. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lamarque, P., and S.  Olsen. 2002. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Levinson, J. 1993. Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies. The Philosophical Quarterly 43: 70–78. Lewis, D. 1978. Truth in Fiction. American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1): 37–46. Lotze, M., et  al. 1999. Activation of Cortical and Cerebellar Motor Areas During Executed and Imagined Hand Movements: An fMRI Study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11: 491–501. Moran, R. 1994. The Expression of Feeling in Imagination. The Philosophical Review 103: 75–106. Munzert, et al. 2009. Cognitive Motor Processes: The Role of Motor Imagery in the Study of Motor Representations. Brain Research Reviews 60 (2): 306–326. Nichols, S. 2006. Just the Imagination: Why Imagining Doesn’t Behave Like Believing. Mind & Language 21: 459–474. Roberts, R. 2003. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Smith, G. 2003. Film Structure and the Emotion System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, M. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1997. Imagining from the Inside. In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 412–430. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sterelny, K. 2003. Thought in a Hostile World. New York: Blackwell. Tan, S.-L., et al. 2007. Viewers’ Interpretations of Film Characters’ Emotions: Effects of Presenting Film Music Before or After a Character Is Shown. Music Perception 25 (2): 135–152. Velleman, D. 2003. On the Aim of Belief. In The Possibility of Practical Reason. New York: Oxford University Press. Walton, K. 1978. Fearing Fictions. Journal of Philosophy 75: 5–27. ———. 1979. How Remote Are Fictional Worlds from the Real World? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37. ———. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, G. 1986. Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wollheim, R. 1980. Seeing-in, Seeing-as and Pictorial Representation. In Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1984. The Thread of Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 37

Empathy and Sympathy: Two Contemporary Models of Character Engagement Daniel Jerónimo Tobón

What does it mean to get hooked by a narrative fiction? Among other things, it means to engage with its characters; to care for them and be intrigued and moved by their adventures; to respond to the emotions and affects expressed in their voices, bodies, and faces; and to imagine the situation they are in and wish them success, closure, or punishment. This experience is pervasive and has major relevance for the theory of narrative cinema.1 It conditions how characters are designed and how actors portray them, as well as the cinematographic, narrative, and emotional structure of films. The ability to bring forth this kind of engagement is one of the most common criteria in judging the success of a movie, analyzing its structure, and considering its ethical or political implications. A common phenomenon, however, is not necessarily a simple one, as attested by the multiple theories that have tried to explain character engagement. In part, the difficulties derive from the fact that what is usually called “empathy” or “identification” or “sympathy” is actually an assorted collection of relationships with characters. In its center is some form of concern for and liking or disliking them, but beyond that there are enormous variations in terms of motivation, structures, and emotional and cognitive mechanisms

1  Character engagement, of course, is important for all narrative fiction, from epic poetry to video games, but each medium offers different possibilities and limits for its development (e.g. interactivity in videogames, long-term familiarization with characters in TV series, stream of consciousness in novels, etc.).

D. J. Tobón (*) Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Medellín, Medellín, Colombia © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_37

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involved.2 This entails that theoretical understanding of character engagement demands coining concepts that allow us to differentiate its varieties. In this chapter, I sketch a map of current discussions on character engagement through the concepts of empathy and sympathy and the models of analysis built around them. I will focus on the cognitive tradition, which since the 1980s has offered the most intense and collaborative research on these engagements, their multiple varieties, and their cognitive and ethical importance, but I will also consider some contributions from phenomenology. This map should allow readers to orientate themselves and connect and compare research from different theoretical frameworks. It is not my intention (and it is not possible) to legislate on which terminology should be used but to facilitate decisions regarding the most promising tools to study this multifaceted phenomenon (or rather this group of interacting phenomena), as I think there is enough common ground to make dialogue possible and fruitful. I do argue, however, that pluralist proposals that give priority to the concept of sympathy have the comparative advantage of offering a framework for analysis that is wide ranging, clearly articulated and flexible. The “structure of sympathy” model (following Murray Smith’s terminology) allows a comprehensive account of the plurality of phenomena that make up character engagement and facilitates understanding their distinctions and interactions. It also accommodates better the relative importance of symmetrical and asymmetrical engagements with characters. Before getting there, however, a brief discussion of the concept of identification is in order.

A Note on Identification “Identification” is perhaps the preferred term in both film criticism and everyday life to refer to a positive and close relationship with characters. Of course, “identification” may mean many things: liking a character, sharing a relevant experience with her, sharing a feeling with her, admiring her, wanting to be like her, or somehow becoming her for a little while. Normally, communicative context helps deciding which sense is relevant in each case, but there is a clear need for conceptual clarification if this term is to have descriptive and explanatory value in a theory, as it probably refers to several phenomena. Today, most 2  Noël Carroll, “On Some Affective Relations Between Audiences and the Characters in Popular Fictions,” in Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 330–32; Amy Coplan, “Empathy and Character Engagement,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 97; Carl Plantinga, “Putting Cognition in Its Place: Affect and the Experience of Narrative Film,” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 16; Jane Stadler, “Empathy and Film,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 317; Ingrid Vendrell Ferran and Malte Hagener, “Einleitung: Empathie im Film,” in Empathie im Film: Perspektiven der Ästhetischen Theorie, Phänomenologie und Analytischen Philosophie, ed. Malte Hagener and Ingrid Vendrell Ferran (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017), 8–11.

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of these phenomena are treated and studied as forms of empathy or sympathy, as I will try to show in the following sections. However, there is one way of understanding identification that demands separate treatment, as it gives expression to the most influential intuition on the nature of engagement throughout history: that spectators somehow lose their identity and adopt that of the character. This notion of identification-as-identity is omnipresent in the history of thinking about art, especially popular art, from Plato to media studies. In media studies the term is widely used, although rarely discussed theoretically.3 In cinema studies this idea was re-introduced during the 1970s and 1980s by authors like Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, and Laura Mulvey, who drew on Freudian theories of perversion and Lacanian theories of the psychological genesis of the subject and hypothesized that the spectator loses her own identity to identify herself with the camera (or apparatus) and then, in a second step, with the character.4 There has been widespread criticism against this thesis.5 For my purposes, it might be enough to underline that conceiving of identification as a literal loss of identity and the adoption of that of a character are of little use to understand the effects of fiction. The reason is that it just does not describe the relationship between spectators and fictional characters— probably there is no identification-as-identity phenomenon to analyze in the first place. Spectators do not become characters nor behave like them in any literal sense. Even when experiencing the deepest absorption in a film, they will not act as if transported into another world. Neither will they be able to make the character act according to their wishes, nor will they instantly acquire all the abilities, beliefs, and desires that make up the character.6 In all probability, spectators sometimes desire they could become the character and enter the world of fiction. This phantasy has a long and illustrious history in fiction, but 3  Jonathan Cohen, “Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences with Media Characters,” Mass Communication and Society 4, no. 3 (August 1, 2001): 246, 250, 254, https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0403_01 4  Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier (London: Macmillan, 1985), 42–57; Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le dispositif,” Communications 23, no. 1 (1975): 56–72; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Springer, 1989), 14–26. See also Michael Fuery, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema,” in The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, ed. James Donald and Michael Renov (London: SAGE, 2008), 228–29; Arlindo Machado, El sujeto en la pantalla: la aventura del espectador, del deseo a la acción (Barcelona: Gedisa, 2009), 91–100. 5  Richard Allen, “Psychoanalytic Film Theory,” in A Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 131; Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 174–76; Alex Neill, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 247–59; Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 93–96; Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 88–93. 6  Noël Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 311–19; Neill, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction”; Carroll, Philosophy of Horror, 88–93.

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that is different from actually becoming, say, a heroine for the duration of the movie. In addition, there are important asymmetries between spectators and characters that the concept of identification cannot explain. First, there is normally a cognitive asymmetry between characters and spectators. In a large majority of film fictions, spectators know both more and less than the protagonist, and their global understanding of the situations is much more complete than that of any character. This is especially evident in films with multiple storylines. Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2001), for example, follows three simultaneous storylines connected only by a car accident. While the characters’ perspective is strongly limited to their own storyline, the spectator’s position allows her to draw parallels among these love stories and treat them as variations on a theme, shifting her attention from one character to another and comparing their situations, composing a complex architecture of perspectives that cannot be equated to that of any character. Opaque characters, so frequent in modernist cinema, present an inverse asymmetry. When viewing Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976), the spectator may assume that the eponymous protagonist has an inner life, but she certainly is not granted access to it.7 There is also emotional asymmetry. This can depend on cognitive asymmetry, insofar as the spectator’s evaluation of the situation is different just because she holds a different view on it, and this evaluation gives rise to different emotions, as is frequently the case in suspense films. The asymmetry is also intrinsic to other-directed emotions, such as compassion, envy, Schadenfreude, and so on, because in that case the object of the emotion is necessarily someone different from oneself: the distinction of self/other is, so to speak, an internal component of the emotion and a part of its identity. Also, the spectator’s desires are not necessarily those of the protagonist. The spectator’s desires are based on her own perspective of the situation, and they are also strongly affected by her interests regarding the totality of the narration.8 She may believe that the character’s desires are ill informed, given what she knows, or she may deem a happy ending narratively incoherent or aesthetically unsatisfactory.9

7  The usual rhetoric in talking about films like this suggests that they actively prohibit character identification, as has been discussed by Murray Smith, “The Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 130–48. However, such exception doesn’t count in favor of the concept: it simply reveals another reason to consider it insufficient to capture the diversity of our relationships with characters. 8  Gregory Currie, “Narrative Desire,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 183–99. 9  Some media, such as first-person novels and video games, are more hospitable to narratives strictly limited to the character’s point of view, but even a perfect symmetry of perspective does not guarantee an identity of desires or knowledge. The character-narrator may be repulsive (John Self in M. Amis’ Money), blind to the meaning of the events she or he recounts (Stevens in K. Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day), or maybe trying to deceive the reader or spectator.

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Other considerations might be added, but these should suffice to show that coincidences of perspective, affects, perceptions, and desires between spectators and characters are much less common than is usually thought and that film fiction usually creates simultaneous relationships with multiple characters, not only one protagonist. That alone would entail that the concept of identification-­ as-­identity, literally taken, cannot describe the ways in which we relate to characters. Gaut has proposed saving the concept of identification from these and other critiques by reformulating it as aspectual identification, which doesn’t require identity. Gaut maintains that to identify with a character means either (a) imaginatively assume her epistemic, perceptual, or imaginative perspective on the fiction or (b) empathetically share her emotions inasmuch as the spectator puts herself in the character’s position. He considers that only the concept of identification does justice to those aspects of cinematographic experience that depend on the symmetry of feelings and/or knowledge between characters and spectators.10 However, and given the previous considerations, it is not obvious that symmetrical relationships with characters are the most important ones in film viewing. Also, it is disorienting to gather in a single concept such a dissimilar set of processes, as it seems to postulate a unity between them that has not been demonstrated and might not exist: the differences between seeing what the character sees, admiring him for his courage or wit, rejoicing over his victories, or feeling sorry for his suffering are big enough to doubt that we are talking about varieties of the same process. In fact, Gaut himself has argued that “We need more distinctions, not fewer, in constructing an adequate theory of cinematic engagement.”11 I would contend that this objective is better attained through other conceptual frameworks, particularly those offered by the concepts of empathy and sympathy.

Empathy In everyday language, “empathy” tends to encompass virtually the same meanings as “identification.” But since its origins “empathy” has also been a technical term in philosophy and aesthetics, and these origins are relevant for the discussions on character engagement. It was coined from two Greek words (en and páthos) to translate the German Einfühlung, a philosophical term created in the mid-nineteenth century that implies the idea of penetrating through feeling into a landscape or in an object. Its core use soon shifted from the 10  Berys Gaut, “Empathy and Identification in Cinema,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34, no. 1 (2010): 136–157, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00211.x; Berys Gaut, “Identification and Emotion,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 200–216. See also Torben K.  Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 84–86. 11  Gaut, “Empathy and Identification,” 156.

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appreciation of objects to the understanding of people and began to designate a kind of imaginative and tentative projection that would grant us experiential access to the way in which the world is presented to other people in a determinate context, an internal imitation or reenactment of what others may feel, perceive, or think in a certain situation.12 This description might give a rough idea of the type of phenomena that have been investigated under this name during the last 30 or 40 years, but it is far from doing justice to their diversity, which ranges “from the conscious, imaginative effort to “perspective take” or put oneself in another’s shoes, to affective mimicry and emotional contagion, whereby we “catch” the emotions of others through a process of low-level, non-conscious, involuntary mimicry.”13 All these phenomena share family resemblances but resist a common definition. Perhaps we should rather talk of empathy as an interdisciplinary research field at the intersections of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and ethics, each one with its own theoretical frameworks and specific interests. To present some of the contributions developed in this field to the theorization of character engagement I will begin with more basic forms of empathy (emotional contagion and kinesthetic mimesis) and progress to cognitively more complex forms (affective empathy and imaginative simulation).

Basic or Lower-Level Empathy: Emotional Contagion and Kinesthetic Mimesis Philosophical and psychological interest in empathy was revived in the 1990s by the discovery of mirror neurons. These neurons and circuits of neurons in the brain activate both when we perform certain actions or feel certain basic emotions and when we see other people perform and express them or even when we simply imagine them vividly. Experiments with electroencephalograms, tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging have shown that watching someone manipulate an object or facially express fear tends to turn on automatically the same brain circuits that light up when we execute these actions or feel that emotion. These reactions do not seem to require linguistic or conceptual processing. According to Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, they constitute a specific and modular system of understanding that 12  On the history and contemporary developments of the concept of empathy, see Karsten Stueber, “Empathy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, Spring 2017 (Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2017/entries/empathy/; Heidi L. Maibom, “Introduction: (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Empathy,” in Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 2–40. Concerning film empathy, Stadler’s “Empathy and Film” and Coplan’s “Empathy and Character Engagement” are useful reviews. 13  Murray Smith, “‘The Pit of Naturalism’: Neuroscience and the Naturalized Aesthetics of Film,” in Cognitive Media Theory, ed. Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 37.

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would connect our body with other bodies through an internal and automatic imitation of what they do and feel, in such a way that it would allow us to feel the phenomenological tone of their experience.14 Insofar as their gestures activate our own body repertoire, for example, we would capture immediately the nature and even the basic intentional tendencies of their actions.15 This kind of empathy is often dubbed “basic” or “lower level,” as it does not require the intervention of abstract representations nor conscious cognitive work. Its most characteristic forms are emotional contagion and kinesthetic empathy. Kinesthetic empathy occurs when other people’s actions trigger the viewer’s bodily representations and the neural structures related to those movements. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia maintain that this would not only result in a weakened and internal reproduction of these movements but would also allow an immediate grasp of their meaning, without mediation of abstract representations. Emotional contagion, as the name suggests, involves an unintended resonance with emotions that others express bodily. Christine G. Guo affirms that research has focused on pain and some forms of disgust and sadness, probably due to the difficulties of the experimental study of cognitively more complex emotions and affects in dynamic environments.16 No doubt cinema can trigger effects of this kind. Amy Coplan has stressed that cinema is more effective than other media in arousing emotional contagion due to the rich and multimodal perceptive information it offers.17 Techniques such as the extended close-up, fast camera movements, marked sound environments, music, and voice tone trigger reactions that are automatic, involuntary, and often unconscious, and these allow to sync the spectator’s state of mind to that expressed by a person or a character,18 or perhaps a group of characters, as suggested by Héctor J. Pérez.19 The image of a tearful

14  Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 124–31. Remy Debes offers a more skeptical reading of what these experiments demonstrate in “Empathy and Mirror Neurons,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 54–63. 15  Vittorio Gallese, “Finding the Body in the Brain: From Simulation Theory to Embodied Simulation,” in Goldman and His Critics, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Hilary Kornblith (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 297–317. 16  Christine G. Guo, “The Neuroscience of Empathy,” in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L. Maibom (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 47. 17  Amy Coplan, “Catching Characters’ Emotions: Emotional Contagion Responses to Narrative Fiction Film,” Film Studies 8, no. 1 (2006): 26–38, https://doi.org/10.7227/FS.8.5; Amy Coplan and Derek Matravers, “Film, Literature, and Non-Cognitive Affect,” in New Takes in FilmPhilosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 117–134. 18  Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 239–55; Smith, Engaging Characters, 98–102. 19  Héctor J. Pérez, “Group Empathy? A Conceptual Proposal, Apropos of Polseres Vermelles,” in Emotions in Contemporary TV Series, ed. Alberto Nahum García-Martínez (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 71–84.

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or distressed face can elicit a sudden outbreak of anguish or sadness, even involuntarily or against the spectator’s will. Another form of basic empathy is kinesthetic mimesis (sometimes referred to as motor empathy or motor mimesis). We have an innate tendency to accompany with our own bodies the movements of other people, especially if those movements are apparently difficult or painful, as in acrobatics, sport, dance, boxing, martial arts, or combat, which tense the body to its limits. Moving images arouse our motor and tactile memories, and when we contemplate bodies in action, our own body offers sensations that mimic (but do not have to be identical to) theirs. This effect is of the utmost importance for genres such as horror, action, adventures, physical comedy, and the musical. This may also be the reason why the earlier theories of realism in cinema posited an affinity of this medium with the presentation of the body in movement.20 Christine N.  Brinckmann has inventoried the multiple situations and means that Hitchcock employs to awaken these motor trends.21 An especially important one is showing fingers and hands amid difficult and urgent tasks, through relatively long takes with clear spatial orientation that facilitate apprehending the goal and the complications of the action. Adriano D’Aloia has explored the role of these phenomena of quasi-movement in cinema through a conceptual framework that combines neuroscience and phenomenology.22 He argues that the activation of our own bodily repertoires generates internal representations in a process he calls embodied simulation. D’Aloia also postulates that this process is conducive to psychological closeness with the characters, to the point, in extreme cases, of giving way to a momentary “fusion of personalities.” This last hypothesis, however, has been strongly criticized by other authors of a phenomenological bent, like Jane Stadler.23 It is worth remarking that these effects depend not only on the vision of bodies, but also on sound effects, visual texture, relative camera motion, and, in general, many of the expressive qualities of movies, as they all contribute to the way it is bodily felt.24 20  Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41–46; Béla Balázs, Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 9–15, 63–64. 21  Christine N. Brinckmann, “Motor Mimicry in Hitchcock,” in Color and Empathy: Essays on Two Aspects of Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 135–43. 22  Adriano D’Aloia, “Cinematic Empathy. Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience,” in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), 91–108; Adriano D’Aloia, “The Character’s Body and the Viewer: Cinematic Empathy and Embodied Simulation in the Film Experience,” in Embodied Cognition and Cinema, ed. Peter Kravanja and Maarten Coëgnarts (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2015), 187–199. 23  Stadler, “Empathy and Film,” 320; Jane Stadler, “The Empath and the Psychopath: Ethics, Imagination, and Intercorporeality in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal,” Film-Philosophy 21, no. 3 (September 14, 2017): 420–21, https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2017.0058 24  Although it is theoretically necessary to separate empathy and expression, in practice they often interact. The clearest case is perhaps that of subjective and semi-subjective camera, or a cam-

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Both contagion and kinesthetic mimesis can function in isolation, as moments of intense bodily or emotional excitement that require little or no connection to the narrative structure of the film, especially in genres such as horror and action. More often, however, they interact with other forms of access to the subjectivity of characters. Carl Plantinga has studied what he has called “scenes of empathy,” when the camera lingers on the faces of the characters, usually in dramatic high points of the narrative, for much longer than it would be required for the mere communication of information on the character’s subjective state.25 In discussion with Dan Shaw, Plantinga has argued that affective mimesis and facial feedback mechanisms serve to tune, enhance, and give an experiential and felt quality to the understanding of characters’ emotions offered by the narrative.26 Neuroscientific studies on empathy have focused on involuntary, autonomous processes that do not require imagination or cognition, perhaps because they are much easier to study experimentally. This emphasis on relatively modular mental processes has afforded the exploration of the neurophysiological mechanisms and psychological functions underlying the experience of film. This is a welcome correction to over-idealized conceptions of cinematic experience, as it underlines its embodied character; this correction is thus a project that has facilitated convergence with phenomenological approaches to film.27 It has also provided tools for studying it from a naturalistic perspective and favored the development of theories that incorporate and are consistent with the body of knowledge and methodological constraints of the natural sciences, a concern of growing importance for contemporary philosophy.28 However, this kind of analysis cannot offer a full explanation of the artistic role of empathy in cinema. Certainly, many of these effects can operate in isolation and are based on independent and autonomous brain modules; however, its artistic use era that takes the position of a spectator between the characters, as properties of this image putatively depend on the psychological state of an imagined observer and are to be considered expressive of those states. Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra have contributed to the analysis of these interactions in “The Feeling of Motion: Camera Movements and Motor Cognition,” Cinema & Cie 14, no. 22–23 (2014): 103–12; “Corpo a corpo. Simulazione incarnata e naturalizzazione dell’esperienza filmica,” Psicobiettivo XXXIV, no. 1 (2014): 156–77. 25  Carl Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy”; Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 26  Dan Shaw, “Mirror Neurons and Simulation Theory: A Neurophysiological Foundation for Cinematic Empathy,” in Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 148–61; Plantinga, “Putting Cognition in Its Place.” 27  Coplan, “Catching Characters’ Emotions”; Vivian C.  Sobchack, “Is Any Body Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 179–204. 28  Grodal, Embodied Visions, 3–19; Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 21–56; Sigrid Weigel, “The Heterogeneity of Empathy: An Archaeology of Multiple Meanings and Epistemic Implications,” in Empathy: Epistemic Problems and Cultural-Historical Perspectives of a CrossDisciplinary Concept, ed. Vanessa Lux and Sigrid Weigel (New York and Berlin: Springer, 2017), 1–23.

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requires integrating them into broader meaning structures, making them resonate with narrative, visual, or rhetorical elements and the global impression the work creates and also with cultural patterns of understanding and ethical reflection. At least inasmuch as the film aspires to some artistic coherence, empathy must be seen as an ability of a person and an element of an artwork, not just as an isolated mechanism or a fragmentary detail. There is an ongoing discussion on how to profit from these discoveries without overlooking the historically and culturally determined character of cinema.29

Higher-Level Empathy It seems necessary to draw a distinction between lower- and higher-level empathy in at least three dimensions: automaticity, relevance of correction criteria, and the importance of the self-other distinction. Emotional contagion and kinesthetic empathy are relatively automatic processes that don’t require recognizing the reasons behind the other person’s behavior, her cultural context, personal history, or the details of her situation. As a matter of fact, they don’t even imply recognizing that the affects and bodily echoes experimented come from another person: they can be felt indistinctly, without any consciousness of its origins outside of the self, as a kind of tension or relaxation of our bodies or background moods that surreptitiously modify our attitude and thinking. That is not the case with higher-level empathy, which is usually meant to refer to a set of mental activities that endeavor to attain a qualitative and experiential understanding of what it is to be another person or what it means to be in her situation.30 What does she feel? How does she see the world? What moves her to act like that? What will she do next? Trying to answer these kinds of questions usually demands a voluntary and prolonged effort, as well as the assistance of imagination, memory, judgment, deductive powers, and any available knowledge.31 Also, given that higher-level empathy seeks knowledge, it is subject to a correction criterion absent from lower-level empathy. Emotional contagion and motor mimesis just happen or not. Attempting to understand another person, on the other hand, implies the possibility of getting things right or wrong, of grasping the other person’s mind with greater or lesser depth and precision. Most authors writing on higher-level empathy also consider that one of its characteristics—either in normative or in descriptive

 Smith, Film, Art, And…, 45–50.  Kendall L. Walton, “Empathy, Imagination, and Phenomenal Concepts,” in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–16; Amy Coplan, “Understanding Empathy: Its Features and Effects,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3–18. 31  Ed Tan, “The Empathic Animal Meets the Inquisitive Animal in the Cinema: Notes on a Psychocinematics of Mind Reading,” in Psychocinematics: Exploring Cognition at the Movies, ed. Arthur P. Shimamura (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 351. 29 30

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terms—is that it maintains the self/other distinction.32 It implies that “one both imagines what it is like to be in the sufferer’s place and, at the same time, retains securely the awareness that one is not in that place.”33 Higher-level empathy is frequently thought of as primarily oriented to understanding emotions. In that capacity it is sometimes called affective empathy: an imaginative activity that allows grasping the subjective, felt quality of other people’s affective states, offering an experiential knowledge that would resist a purely conceptual approach. In contrast with emotional contagion, which is putatively limited to a small number of basic emotions, this kind of empathy is in principle directed at the totality of possibilities and nuances of human affective life, from the simplest to the most sophisticated. This understanding of empathy remains very close to the historical core of the concept. In most recent discussions, however, empathy is understood as a form of imagination that is not limited to affects. Depending on the theoretical frame— and there are many—it has been equated to imaginative simulation, central imagination, and in-their-shoes imagining or perspective taking. These terms are not synonyms, and the phenomena they refer to have somewhat different shapes and structures.34 However, they share an idea that has been most famously developed by simulation theory. This theory maintains that, when trying to understand other people’s actions and decisions, we do not necessarily appeal to a theory of mind, that is, we do not make use of an array of generalizations on human nature and behavior that would allow us to deduct how anyone would act in such and such situations. Rather, we can use our own mind as a model in which we simulate their situations by assuming their beliefs and desires and run them “offline” in our own decision-making and emotional mechanisms. If done right, this would yield an emotional state or an offline belief that, allegedly, should coincide with what the other person feels or believes.35 This theory has encouraged the revitalization of empathy research in aesthetics, giving it a new conceptual framework and a new understanding of 32   Coplan, “Understanding Empathy”; Murray Smith, “Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113 s.; Tan, “The Empathic Animal.” On this view, contagion and motor mimesis can be considered at most precursors or subcomponents of (proper) empathic processes. Other researchers have opted for a broad definition of empathy that includes both basic and complex forms. See Plantinga, “The Scene of Empathy”; Stadler, “Empathy and Film”; Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Fiction Film and the Varieties of Empathic Engagement,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34, no. 1 (2010): 158–79, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00200.x 33  Martha C.  Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 328. 34  Coplan, “Empathy and Character Engagement,” 103; Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, “Introduction,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), ix-xlvii; Peter Goldie, “How We Think of Others’ Emotions,” in The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 176–219; Weigel, “The Heterogeneity of Empathy,” 3. 35  Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft, “The Simulation Programme,” in Recreative Minds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 49–70.

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its processes and objects, for simulation can be directed to any aspect of other people’s mental life, not only emotions and affects but also thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, desires, decisions, and so on. It would seem evident that empathy-as-simulation has a role in cinema, a possibility explored and defended by many authors.36 Is it not obvious that movies incite the spectator to imagine certain events from the point of view of the character and that this leads her to feel what the character feels? This is, at the very least, one of the most deeply entrenched intuitions about the experience of fiction in general, one that also has frequently been mobilized in the defense of its value as a source of moral knowledge.37 However, the scholarly discussion from the 1990s onward offers reasons to reevaluate this intuition and limit the role of empathy-as-simulation in the conceptualization of character engagement. Murray Smith and Berys Gaut have studied which cinematic structures tend to trigger this kind of imagination in the spectator.38 They postulated that cognitive and perceptive alignment with a character would tend to encourage empathy: knowing only what the character knows and perceiving only what she perceives would make more probable empathizing with her. Particularly, the point-of-view aspect (POV) would “prompt” the spectator to simulate what the character perceives and feels, thanks to its combination of subjective and reaction shots. This thesis has been called into question by Jinhee Choi, on the basis that precisely this wealth of information makes it unnecessary for the viewer to resort to imaginative simulation. Indeed, simulation (like any tool for reconstructing other people’s mental states) is cognitively taxing and therefore more likely to be prompted by the lack of explicit information about the mental life of the character.

36  A few samples: Amy Coplan, “Empathic Engagement with Narrative Fictions,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (2004): 141–152, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1540-594X.2004.00147.x; Currie, Image and Mind; Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Murray Smith, “Engaging Characters: Further Reflections,” in Characters in Fictional Worlds, Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider (Berlin and New  York: De Gruyter, 2010), 232–58; Stadler, “Empathy and Film”; Stadler, “Empath and Psychopath.” 37  Gregory Currie, “The Moral Psychology of Fiction,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73, no. 2 (June 1995): 250; Susan L.  Feagin, Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), chapter 4. 38  Murray Smith, “Imagining from the Inside,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 417; Gaut, “Identification and Emotion,” 208–13. Smith’s position in this paper implies a departure from his previous considerations on point of view (POV) in Engaging Characters, 156–65, which underline two narrative functions of this technique unrelated to central imagining: marking a shift in alignment and restricting the viewer’s knowledge so as to avoid, for example, that she recognizes the identity of the character whose perspective she has taken.

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There appears to be an inverse relationship between the extent of the viewer’s background knowledge and the viewer’s need to employ folk psychology or a simulation: the more the viewer’s knowledge is restricted, the greater the need for the viewer to engage in one or the other process.39

Margrethe Bruun Vaage uses Choi’s thesis to draw a distinction between two types of films: mainstream films that try to generate a sense of being near to the character through lower-level empathy (embodied empathy, for Vaage) and films in the modernist dedramatized tradition. The tradition typically drains the drama from charged situations by not using or by minimizing use of nondiegetic music, POV editing and close-ups. The acting style is muted, and characters often turn away from the camera at moments of dramatic intensity. The dedramatized tradition in art film uses almost no subjective narrative techniques, but leaves it up to the spectator to engage imaginatively to make sense of the characters without expressive help.40

This suggests that character engagement cannot be understood as the effect of isolated cinematic devices or techniques—like first-person shots or voiceover narration. It should rather be studied considering the patterns that pertain to the film as totality or even to film kinds or traditions. Moreover, if the above-­ mentioned qualifications are correct, simulation would only be relevant to a relatively restricted range of movies or narrative situations and in consequence could not be the basis for a general model of character engagement. Even authors who believe that higher-level empathy is relatively common in film and concede it the greatest importance recognize that a complete picture of character engagement should include asymmetrical relationships.41 39  Jinhee Choi, “Leaving it up to the Imagination: POV Shots and Imagining from the Inside,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 1 (2005): 23, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00177.x. Carroll has advanced analogous and further objections to simulation theory as a model for understanding fiction in general and, above all, popular fiction in “Simulation, Emotions and Morality,” in Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 313; The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden: Blackwell, 2008), 171–77. 40  Vaage, “Varieties of Empathic Engagement,” 162. Even more, the attempt to simulate the characters’ mental and emotional states would imply subverting the intended reception of many modernist films in the Brechtian tradition, as they often preclude empathetic involvement with their characters in order to promote a more impersonal perception of the situation and the historical forces that determine it. See David Bordwell, “Modernism, Minimalism, Melancholy: Angelopoulos and Visual Style,” in The Last Modernist: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos, ed. Andrew Horton (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997), 11–26. 41  For example, Currie, Image and Mind; Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics; Smith, Film, Art, And…; Jane Stadler, “Affectless Empathy, Embodied Imagination, and The Killer Inside Me,” Screening the Past 37 (October 21, 2013), http://www.screeningthepast.com/2013/10/affectless-empathy-embodied-imagination-and-the-killer-inside-me/; Jane Stadler, “Cinema’s Compassionate Gaze: Empathy, Affect and Aesthetics in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in Cine-Ethics: Ethical Dimensions of Film Theory, Practice and Spectatorship, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mattias Frey (New York: Routledge, 2013), 27–42; Stadler, “Empath and Psychopath.”

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That does not mean that the concept of simulation—or empathy-as-­ simulation—lacks interest. The previous arguments show that simulation is probably less common than it is sometimes thought, but they don’t entail that it never takes place. Moreover, I would argue that this theory has fulfilled an important heuristic role, insofar as it has helped to bring out and problematize the ethical and political dimensions of our involvement with characters. To name a few, Robert Sinnerbrink and Jane Stadler, working on empathy from a philosophical perspective strongly informed by phenomenology, have defended the possibility that cinema refines the spectator’s empathic abilities and helps her overcome its ordinary barriers. Sarah Kozzlof and Carl Plantinga have explored the rejection of empathy in much modernism and have criticized its political assumptions and objectives.42 Dan Flory has investigated how black films could push empathy across the race divide and make visible the effects of racism on the perception of black characters and black people, even against the powerful psychological defenses that usually conceal it.43 A full account of the ever-­growing research on cinematic empathy is beyond the scope of this review, so suffice it to note that authors in this line of research normally do not intend to offer a full account of character engagement, nor consider it a monolithic and automatic phenomenon. Instead, they offer a refined model for analyzing and understanding symmetrical relationships with characters that can be integrated into more encompassing models.

Sympathy The contemporary usage of “sympathy” in philosophy and psychology of film contrasts with its vernacular use. In English, “sympathy” often designates a form of compassion, that is, a feeling for someone’s suffering.44 But it was re-­ introduced in the theory and philosophy of fiction as a technical term circa 42  Sarah Kozloff, “Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement: Reevaluating the Politics of Film,” Projections 7, no. 2 (December 1, 2013): 1–40, https://doi.org/10.3167/proj.2013.070202; Carl Plantinga, Screen Stories. Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 99–116. 43  Dan Flory, Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008). 44  Lauren Wispé maintains that, following etymology and ordinary usage, “sympathy” should be limited to negative emotions that respond to the suffering of other people as something to be alleviated, which makes it synonymous with compassion. The Psychology of Sympathy (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), 78 f. This is also the point of view of Howard Sklar, The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013), 26–28. However, this etymology neither accommodates previous philosophical use of the term, nor does it reflect its important transformations during the eighteenth century, which are the most relevant antecedents for contemporary debates. See Ryan Patrick Hanley, “The Eighteenth-Century Context of Sympathy from Spinoza to Kant,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 171–98; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 301–4; Eric Schliesser, “Introduction: On Sympathy,” in Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–14. Adam Smith, for instance, drew an explicit distinction between compassion and sympathy and proposed that the last could “be made use of

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1990, with a much wider scope.45 Its core idea is that character engagement should be considered mainly in terms of the spectator’s attitudes, that is, how she evaluates them and whether she sides with them. This idea has a central role in discussions related to the theories of suspense and humor, the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of cinema, and the appeal of antiheroes, among others. These have contributed to build a model that, I contend, is more powerful than those that favor concepts like identification or empathy. Carroll’s definition of sympathy offers a good starting point for presenting discussions on this subject: For our purposes, we will construe sympathy roughly as nonfleeting care and concern, or, more broadly, as a nonpassing pro-attitude, toward another person (or a fictional character).46

Sympathy is defined then as a pro-attitude toward a person or character, that is, a favorable disposition and concern for her well-being, a desire that things go well for her, a tendency to take her side, and in some cases a tendency to try to help her—normally not actualized in fiction. It also involves an emotionally charged response to her situation, through compassion for her misadventures, vicarious joy when things go well for her, hope that she succeeds, or anger when she is treated unfairly. This description of sympathy coincides with what Smith calls allegiance.47 Some authors argue that sympathy should also be considered, in this sense, an emotion or a set of emotions that have this pro-attitude toward other person in its core.48 Unlike identification and lower-level empathy, sympathy is always directed toward other people. And, unlike higher- and lower-level empathy, it does not require feeling or even imagining their emotional or mental states. In fact, sympathy can occur in cases where empathy is hardly imaginable: it is possible to feel sympathy for the dead, for animals of any kind, for insects or plants, or for characters with such minimal descriptions that it would seem arbitrary to attribute them much of an inner life. It is enough that they can be subsumed in the schema of a person and act as agents that seek some goal. Conversely, it is also possible to empathize without sympathizing, for instance, if gloating in a revenge phantasy or if imagining in detail the suffering of a criminal for a

to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.” The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11. 45  Carroll, Philosophy of Horror; Noël Carroll, “Toward a Theory of Film Suspense,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 94–117; Feagin, Reading with Feeling, chapter 5; Smith, Engaging Characters. 46  Noël Carroll, “The Ties That Bind. Characters, the Emotions, and Popular Fictions,” in Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 51. 47  Smith, Engaging Characters, 62–65, 188. 48  Carroll, “Ties That Bind,” 51; Goldie, “How We Think,” 213.

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well-deserved punishment.49 Nor is there a necessary coincidence between the desires of the viewer and those of the people or characters for whom she feels sympathy. This attitude is guided by the sympathizer’s understanding of the other’s well-being, which may differ from the other’s self-understanding, both in fiction and in daily life. In other words, sympathy for a character is conceptually independent of the spectator’s access to the character’s subjectivity and of the extent in which her knowledge of the events of the story exceeds or falls short of the character’s knowledge. Despite common belief, the spectator’s access to the fiction world may be almost entirely limited to the perspective of a character without automatically triggering sympathy for her. This difference has been conceptualized by Smith through the contrast between allegiance (which, as already mentioned, roughly equates to sympathy) and alignment (the measure in which the film follows a particular character and the access it provides to her subjectivity).50 The fact that there is no conceptual connection between alignment and allegiance does not mean that there is never an empirical connection between them. It just means that this connection is not necessarily simple and proportional. There may be alignment without allegiance and allegiance without alignment. Normally, however, transformations in alignment correspond to transformations in allegiance, either understood as artistic marks that signal shifts in the narrative construction of allegiance or as psychological prompts that favor the development of allegiance.51 Unlike everyday sympathy for people, sympathy for fictional characters is normally paired with antipathy to other characters, especially in popular fiction, where antagonists serve the narrative function of generating conflict. This is in part because these two attitudes complement and promote each other: insofar as their objectives are contradictory, sympathy for a character generates or strengthens antipathy for their opponents in the world of fiction and vice versa. The co-dependency of these two phenomena is widely recognized and plays an important role in that model of character engagement that has been called sympathy-cum-antipathy (Carroll), structure of engagement (Plantinga), or structure of sympathy (Smith). These authors differ on the details of the model, but here I will focus on the shared principles. This model puts emphasis on asymmetrical and plural engagements. These authors agree that narrative fictional characters should not be thought of as 49  Goldie, “How We Think,” 213–18; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 329. Alessandro Giovannelli and Carl Plantinga reject a strong distinction between empathy and sympathy, but their proposal is hard to square with the fact that there are pure examples of empathy without sympathy and sympathy without empathy, which indicates that both are conceptually different. Alessandro Giovannelli, “In Sympathy with Narrative Characters,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67, no. 1 (2009): 83–95, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2008.01337.x; Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 99–101. 50  Smith, Engaging Characters, chapters 5 and 6. 51  David Bordwell, “Alignment, Allegiance, and Murder,” Observations on Film Art (blog), May 16, 2011, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/05/16/alignment-allegiance-and-murder/

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alter egos but rather as fellows or companions: the spectator considers the characters’ situations with interest, cares for them, and as a result is emotionally affected by their predicaments, losses, and victories. They also agree that ­non-­identity of mental states among audience and characters is the norm and sets up the general framework in which other forms of engagement take place, be it lower- or higher-level empathy or some form of cognitive symmetry. As I now think of it, empathy functions in part as a ‘subroutine’ within the frame of sympathetic engagement. Our basic stance towards characters is not an empathic one in which we experience the fictional world consistently from their imagined perspectives; but through simulation (and related processes, like emotional contagion and mimicry) we flit rapidly in and out of characters empathically, moving with imaginative agility through a variety of perspectives which are then aggregated and interrelated to produce the structure of sympathy  – that integrated, dynamic picture of the characters populating the fiction in terms of their moral-emotional appeal.52

There is also a notable contrast with models centered on empathy or identification. Both these concepts track a structure that consists of two elements and a relationship between them that varies mostly in degree. There is a spectator, a character, and a relationship of greater or lesser bodily, emotional, or psychological convergence. The structure of sympathy, on the other hand, tracks a dual relationship (favor or disfavor) with multiple characters and their interactions. This does justice to the more typical—even archetypal—narrative forms, which usually present a protagonist in the middle of a network of characters that collaborate or compete with her, that constitute obstacles, or are themselves part of the goal to attain. How do narratives generate sympathy for their characters? There is ample agreement that the most important variable in this regard is moral evaluation; the division between sympathetic and antipathetic characters matches roughly the division between good and evil, whether this division is rigid or allows degrees and gray areas.53 Carroll and Plantinga argue that the significance of morality in this context is due simply to humans’ evolutive interest in the moral conduct of others, which is essential for survival within a group.54 Whatever its source, the fact remains that humans are “tireless moral monitors.”55 Also, any  Smith, “Further Reflections,” 254.  Smith, Engaging Characters, 207–12. 54  Carroll, “Ties That Bind”; Plantinga, Screen Stories, chapter 7. The importance of moral evaluation in character engagement is also a central tenet of affective disposition theory (ADT), a line of research in media psychology with questions and results that closely parallel those of the theory of sympathy. See Arthur A.  Raney, “Media Enjoyment as a Function of Affective Dispositions toward and Moral Judgment of Characters,” in The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media, ed. Katrin Doveling, Christian von Scheve, and Elly A. Konijn (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 166–78; Dolf Zillman and Joanne R.  Cantor, “Affective Responses to the Emotions of a Protagonist,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 13, no. 2 (January 1977): 155–65, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(77)80008-5 55  Dolf Zillman, quoted in Plantinga, Screen Stories, 145. 52 53

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fiction that aims to reach a large audience is forced to create an interest in the fate of its characters, the desire that things go well or bad for them. A conflict between characters with different moral statuses or the possibility of morally differentiated outcomes generates a preference for one of them over the other. If so many stories appeal to the struggle of good and evil, this is simply because it offers a very effective way of making spectators care about characters and arousing their interest in the narrative. The thesis that sympathy and antipathy are primarily determined by moral assessment has reached, as already noted, a certain consensus, but this consensus has been neither easy nor automatic. There are cases in which it is not intuitively clear that our engagement with characters is mediated by sympathy. In some films—usually art films—characters seem to lack moral valence and the narration is not driven by moral conflict. If they inspire sympathy, it must have another source. In other cases, it is not clear that moral assessment explains how films allocate sympathies and antipathies. Comedy characters are generally sympathetic or antipathetic, but frequently along twisted moral axes, in which cruelty, wickedness, and violence are objects of laughter and admiration. This suggests that some sort of suspension or even a reversal of moral evaluation might take place in those cases.56 I will leave these matters aside to concentrate on the “sympathy for the devil” problem, a range of problematic cases that has generated a productive theoretical exchange. Any film viewer will recognize the experience under discussion: it is surprisingly easy to take the side of a character that she has good moral grounds to reject and repudiate—and would in all probability avoid and condemn in real life. The powerful cinematic appeal of these antiheroes—or rough heroes or flawed heroes—is attested by that long series of charismatic villains and monsters that begins perhaps with Fantômas (1913–1914) and seems far from exhausted. Recent empirical research suggests that these characters can be even more attractive and sympathetic than pure heroes.57 This appeal, however, seems to contradict the thesis that spectators grant their sympathy to those characters they find morally preferable. This apparent paradox has given rise to lively critical exchanges on how fiction films encourage sympathies—though some of the paradigmatic examples come from television series. It might be useful to distinguish four ways of responding to these theoretical puzzles. Resolving the Paradox Carroll has argued that there is no real opposition between the spectator’s moral judgment of characters like Hannibal Lecter and her sympathy for them.58 Moral judgments follow a relative and comparative 56  Ward E. Jones, “Transgressive Comedy and Partiality: Making Sense of Our Amusement at His Girl Friday,” in Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E.  Jones and Samantha Vice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 91–113. 57  Arthur A.  Raney and Sophie H.  Janicke, “How We Enjoy and Why We Seek out Morally Complex Characters in Media Entertainment,” in Media and the Moral Mind, ed. Ron Tamborini (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 155. 58  Noël Carroll, “Sympathy for the Devil,” in The Sopranos and Philosophy. I Kill Therefore I Am, ed. Richard Greene and Peter Vernezze (Illinois: Open Court, 2004), 121–136.

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logic, both in fiction and in real life. Actions or characters are not to be measured against an absolute ideal but relatively, against the background of a concrete moral universe. When deciding which side to take in a moral conflict the relevant question is which one is better, especially if choices are limited—which they usually are. That makes it perfectly reasonable to desire the victory of a person or character who would be despised or rejected in favor of a better alternative, if there were one. Instead, narrative fiction usually assembles scenarios where the antihero confronts even worse characters The antagonist sets, so to speak, a minimum bar of morality for the film. If the protagonist is just a little better, that might be enough to grant him some sympathy. When a drug-crazed cop murders an entire family and chases the surviving 12-year-old daughter with the same intention, a disciplined and honorable hitman that protects her is the morally preferable option.  Of course, sympathy does not have to be full and unconditional. It can be mixed with a certain degree of repulsion and antipathy for the same character, it may be hesitant or may shift to antipathy midway. This way of tackling the problem does not imply abandoning the basic tenet that moral evaluation regulates sympathy to fictional characters; it just clarifies the relative character of moral judgment and specifies how it could be applied in certain cases. Indeed, it is remarkably difficult to find examples of antiheroes or sympathetic villains that are not somehow morally justified, either by comparison with an even worse character, by foregrounding that her actions try to contribute to a legitimate good, by showing how her history or personal situation decrease her responsibility, and so on.59 Sympathy Engendered by Non-moral Qualities  There are, however, some reasons to doubt that strict moral evaluation fully explains the phenomenon. In everyday life, sympathy does not depend only on moral qualities: it is possible to like someone and prefer her to other people just because she is fun, smart, tenacious, or strong, even if she is no paradigm of moral rectitude. Why would it be different in film? In fact, antiheroes tend to possess a plethora of non-moral qualities that make them attractive and even admirable: personal charisma, intelligence, stardom aura, personal beauty, willpower.60 If these qualities fulfilled no function, why would antiheroes be so frequently endowed with them? This suggests that non-moral qualities can tip the balance in favor of a character or, in any case, nuance the rejection she might provoke. Smith has introduced this intuition in his theory and prefers to speak of a partial and multidimensional 59  Alberto Nahum García-Martínez, “Moral Emotions, Antiheroes and the Limits of Allegiance,” in Emotions in Contemporary TV Series, ed. Alberto Nahum García-Martínez (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 52–70. 60  It is not very clear what precisely distinguishes moral and non-moral qualities and how to determine this distinction in the case of fictions, and certain character traits—particularly what might be called “sublimity”—occupy a liminal position. This has somewhat muddled the discussion, as Flory has pointed out in Black Film, Film Noir, 74. However, it is clear that some of the relevant traits are not moral, and that is enough to see that there is a problem with the classical thesis.

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sympathy (allegiance). At its center would be moral evaluation, but it would also be secondarily affected by non-­moral qualities. It would be “a multi-dimensional evaluative field in which our judgments operate, in which both moral and non-moral criteria come into play, and where characters may fare well against some criteria and poorly against others.”61 Plantinga holds a similar thesis.62 This doesn’t imply denying the central role of morality. It is hard to find antiheroes who command full-fledged sympathy from the audience without any morally redeeming trait, that is, based on non-moral qualities alone; also, the antagonist may possess a myriad of non-moral attributes without being sympathetic. This suggests that non-moral qualities on their own are not enough to generate sympathy and their effect should be considered subsidiary to moral evaluation. Sympathy Engendered by Moral Illusions  Plantinga and Vaage have recently explored another possibility that takes advantage of Arthur Raney’s revamping of affective disposition theory, as well as the revival of moral intuitionism and recent empirical research on moral psychology.63 They argue that sympathy for a character can be stimulated by non-moral reasons that, however, are perceived as if they had moral force. Moral evaluations, especially if they are fast, depend mostly on intuitions, and not in deliberate moral reasoning, and these intuitions are susceptible to distortion by mechanisms that work at a sub-personal and semi-automatic level. There is a halo or framing effect, according to which the order of presentation of the positive or negative traits of a character determines the favorability with which the character is seen: once characters have been presented in a favorable light, the spectator is much more willing to continue thinking well of them and sympathizing with them, even against new evidence. The familiarity effect suggests, caeteris paribus, that humans favor people and characters that they know better and that have accompanied them for a longer time. Vaage even suggests that antihero narrations allow for interesting twists and turns, that they promote interesting and unpredictable narratives and allow the spectator to interrogate her own moral standing, and also that they give place to exhibitions of histrionic virtuosity by the actors portraying them. All these pleasures bleed into the spectator’s evaluation of the 61  Smith, “Further Reflections,” 244. He also discusses this proposal in “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 226–28. 62  Plantinga, Screen Stories, chapter 10; Carl Plantinga, “‘I Followed the Rules, and They All Loved You More’: Moral Judgment and Attitudes toward Fictional Characters in Film,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34, no. 1 (2010): 34–51, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00204.x 63  Arthur A.  Raney, “Expanding Disposition Theory: Reconsidering Character Liking, Moral Evaluations, and Enjoyment,” Communication Theory 14, no. 4 (November 1, 2004): 348–69, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00319.x; Raney, “Media Enjoyment”; Raney and Janicke, “Morally Complex Characters”; Plantinga, Screen Stories; Margrethe Bruun Vaage, The Antihero in American Television (New York: Routledge, 2015).

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a­ntiheroes and make her feel sympathy for them. Insofar as she enjoys the ­narrative and does not want it to end, she will desire the antiheroes’ exploits to go on, which would incite her to justify their actions beyond what reflective moral reasoning would probably admit.64 It is worth noting that this development does not contradict the thesis that sympathy has a fundamentally moral determination but rather complements it. It emphasizes the intuitive nature of moral judgment of fiction, how easily it can be distorted through various rhetorical strategies, and the tensions it maintains vis-à-vis a normatively binding judgment. Affirming the Paradox: The Appeal of Transgression  Smith has argued for a more radical alternative: that in some cases immoral qualities themselves can be attractive and prompt sympathy for the character.65 He suggests that Tony Soprano’s strength, his ability to bypass the rules to take what he wants, and his recklessness when it comes to deceive or defraud others may not be morally praiseworthy, but that doesn’t keep them from being desirable and enviable. The spectator would take pleasure in the exhibition of those qualities and, given that fictional characters do not represent a direct threat to her well-being, this pleasure would be enough to mobilize her sympathy for Soprano. Smith acknowledges that these two forms of sympathy are not consistent, but that would be a consequence of our paradoxical moral psychology, which allows us to sympathize both for moral and for immoral reasons, not a defect in the theory. The key point to recognize here, however, is that the appeal of Soprano is paradoxical, conjoining the attraction of regularity (and morally grounded sympathy as part of that) with the allure of the transgressive (including moral transgressiveness).66

Smith also holds that the attraction of transgression does not usually work by itself but in combination with the attraction of positive moral qualities. This distinguishes his proposal from theses framed in Freudian theory, which derive the attractiveness of these kinds of characters from perversion.67 64  Vaage, The Antihero, 74–77, 103–4. Héctor J. Pérez has suggested a similar thesis in “Los tres cuerpos de la narración: una poética cognitivista de la actuación,” L’Atalante, no. 19 (2015): 17–26. 65  Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes”; Smith, “Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer?,” in Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E.  Jones and Samantha Vice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 66–90; Murray Smith, “(A)Moralische Monstrosität,” Montage AV 21, no. 2 (2012): 48–75. This idea has also been defended by Anne Eaton when discussing the related—but ultimately independent—problems of the connections between ethic and aesthetic merit in “Robust Immoralism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 3 (2012): 281–292, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01520.x 66  Smith, “Just What Is It,” 80. 67  Smith’s solution to the paradox seems to need some further elaborations, as it risks depriving the model of the structure of sympathy of much of its explanatory power. If both moral and trans-

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Conclusions The structure of sympathy is a model currently under construction. There is much research to do in areas such as the effects of non-moral qualities on sympathy; the dynamics of sympathy in different genres; the interactions between sympathy, empathy, and specific emotions;  or the development of character engagement in film sagas and serial TV shows. This model, I maintain, should replace the model based upon the concept of identification, as it allows a better understanding of phenomena such as the intense interest we can take in characters and the emotions we share with them, without obscuring the fact that these are only a few among our many ways to engage with characters. It offers a pluralistic framework within which to study diverse forms of character engagement, including both symmetrical and asymmetrical engagements, and their interactions. The structure of sympathy also has the advantage of focusing on a type of engagement that has a decisive importance in narrative cinema, both in terms of its breadth and its depth. In contrast to empathy and identification, sympathy is not punctual or momentary, but extends throughout the film, normally in a dynamic and fluctuating way, covering all the story arc of the characters. And it is deep insofar as virtually any aspect of film fiction may be mobilized to create or modify attitudes toward characters. For these reasons, the structure of sympathy is also a good candidate to become a higher-level model that integrates current research on empathy in fiction. It is not—nor is it intended to be—a universal model, but it aspires to be very general: it applies to much of popular and art cinema, as well as narrations in other media, from literature to TV series and videogames, which also facilitates inter- and trans-medial research. It also offers an approach that communicates well with the interests and methodologies of disciplines such as narrative analysis, cognitive, and moral psychology and film criticism. These connections have proven particularly useful for the analysis of the rhetorical effects of fiction and, through it, for considering the ethical and political implications of cinema.68 gressive qualities are sources of sympathy, wouldn’t it be necessary for some other general principle to decide which qualities are responsible for sympathy in each individual case? Or do these mixed characters sit outside theory, and should they be treated on a purely individual basis? The mechanism behind this process could also benefit from clarification. Smith maintains that the crucial link here is between the spectator’s transgressive desires and the character’s transgressive actions: “An important part of the pleasure we take in the scene, I submit, consists in imagining acting transgressively but with impunity, as Soprano does.” Ibid., 79. We could call it “imaginative wish-fulfillment.” This would be easy to explain in terms of identification theory, but Smith has been too critical of identification to allow for such a reading, so it would seem necessary to make clear how this mechanism works. In a personal communication, Smith has suggested that empathy could do the job. 68  I must thank Noël Carroll and Álvaro Andrés Villegas for comments on previous versions of this chapter and Murray Smith for taking the time to discuss some of its arguments. The writing of this chapter was supported by a Doctoral Scholarship from Colciencias/Colfuturo and the Project “Pensar el cine: realismos en el cine Colombiano” (Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Medellín).

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Coplan, Amy, and Peter Goldie. 2011. Introduction. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, IX–XLVII.  Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coplan, Amy, and Derek Matravers. 2011. Film, Literature, and Non-Cognitive Affect. In New Takes in Film-Philosophy, ed. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck, 117–134. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Currie, Gregory. 1995a. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1995b. The Moral Psychology of Fiction. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 73 (2, June): 250. ———. 1999. Narrative Desire. In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M.  Smith, 183–199. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Currie, Gregory, and Ian Ravenscroft. 2002. The Simulation Programme. In Recreative Minds, 49–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. D’Aloia, Adriano. 2012. Cinematic Empathy. Spectator Involvement in the Film Experience. In Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, 91–108. Bristol: Intellect. ———. 2015. The Character’s Body and the Viewer: Cinematic Empathy and Embodied Simulation in the Film Experience. In Embodied Cognition and Cinema, ed. Peter Kravanja and Maarten Coëgnarts, 187–199. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Debes, Remy. 2016. Empathy and Mirror Neurons. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L. Maibom, 54–63. London/New York: Routledge. Eaton, A.W. 2012. Robust Immoralism. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (3): 281–292. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6245.2012.01520.x. Feagin, Susan L. 1996. Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation. Ithaca/ London: Cornell University Press. Flory, Dan. 2008. Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Fuery, Michael. 2008. Psychoanalysis and Cinema. In The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, ed. James Donald and Michael Renov, 226–243. London: SAGE. Gallese, Vittorio. 2016. Finding the Body in the Brain: From Simulation Theory to Embodied Simulation. In Goldman and his Critics, ed. Brian P.  McLaughlin and Hilary Kornblith, 297–317. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Gallese, Vittorio, and Michele Guerra. 2014a. Corpo a corpo. Simulazione incarnata e naturalizzazione dell’esperienza filmica. Psicobiettivo XXXIV (1): 156–177. ———. 2014b. The Feeling of Motion: Camera Movements and Motor Cognition. Cinema & Cie 14 (22–23): 103–112. García-Martínez, Alberto Nahum. 2016. Moral Emotions, Antiheroes and the Limits of Allegiance. In Emotions in Contemporary TV Series, ed. Alberto Nahum García-­ Martínez, 52–70. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Gaut, Berys. 1999. Identification and Emotion. In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith, 200–216. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2010. Empathy and Identification in Cinema. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34 (1): 136–157. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00211.x.

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Giovannelli, Alessandro. 2009. In Sympathy with Narrative Characters. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67 (1): 83–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1540-6245.2008.01337.x. Goldie, Peter. 2000. How We Think of Others’ Emotions. In The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, 176–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grodal, Torben K. 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guo, Christine Cong. 2016. The Neuroscience of Empathy. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, ed. Heidi L.  Maibom, 44–53. London and New  York: Routledge. Hanley, Ryan Patrick. 2015. The Eighteenth-Century Context of Sympathy from Spinoza to Kant. In Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser, 171–198. New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Ward E. 2011. Transgressive Comedy and Partiality: Making Sense of Our Amusement at His Girl Friday. In Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E.  Jones and Samantha Vice, 91–113. New York: Oxford University Press. Kozloff, Sarah. 2013. Empathy and the Cinema of Engagement: Reevaluating the Politics of Film. PRO 7 (2, December): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.3167/ proj.2013.070202. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1997. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Machado, Arlindo. 2009. El sujeto en la pantalla: la aventura del espectador, del deseo a la acción. Barcelona: Gedisa. Maibom, Heidi L. 2014. Introduction: (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Empathy. In Empathy and Morality, ed. Heidi L. Maibom, 2–40. New York: Oxford University Press. Metz, Christian. 1985. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier. London: Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In Visual and Other Pleasures, 14–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Neill, Alex. 2006. Empathy and (Film) Fiction. In Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi, 247–259. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Nussbaum, Martha C. 2003. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pérez, Héctor J. 2015. Los tres cuerpos de la narración: una poética cognitivista de la actuación. L’Atalante (19): 17–26. ———. 2016. Group Empathy? A Conceptual Proposal, Apropos of Polseres Vermelles. In Emotions in Contemporary TV Series, ed. Alberto Nahum García-Martínez, 71–84. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Plantinga, Carl. 1999. The Scene of Empathy and the Human Face on Film. In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith, 239–255. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2009. Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2010. ‘I Followed the Rules, and They All Loved You More’: Moral Judgment and Attitudes toward Fictional Characters in Film. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 34 (1): 34–51. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.2010.00204.x.

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———. 2016. Putting Cognition in Its Place: Affect and the Experience of Narrative Film. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 131–147. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2018. Screen Stories. Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement. New York: Oxford University Press. Raney, Arthur A. 2004. Expanding Disposition Theory: Reconsidering Character Liking, Moral Evaluations, and Enjoyment. Communication Theory 14 (4, November): 348–369. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00319.x. ———. 2010. Media Enjoyment as a Function of Affective Dispositions toward and Moral Judgment of Characters. In The Routledge Handbook of Emotions and Mass Media, ed. Katrin Doveling, Christian von Scheve, and Elly A.  Konijn, 166–178. London/New York: Routledge. Raney, Arthur A., and Sophie H. Janicke. 2013. How We Enjoy and Why We Seek out Morally Complex Characters in Media Entertainment. In Media and the Moral Mind, ed. Ron Tamborini, 152–169. London and New York: Routledge. Rizzolatti, Giacomo, and Corrado Sinigaglia. 2008. Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press. Schliesser, Eric. 2015. Introduction: On Sympathy. In Sympathy: A History, ed. Eric Schliesser, 3–14. New York: Oxford University Press. Shaw, Dan. 2016. Mirror Neurons and Simulation Theory: A Neurophysiological Foundation for Cinematic Empathy. In Current Controversies in Philosophy of Film, ed. Katherine Thomson-Jones, 148–161. London/New York: Routledge. Sinnerbrink, Robert. 2016. Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film. London/New York: Routledge. Sklar, Howard. 2013. The Art of Sympathy in Fiction: Forms of Ethical and Emotional Persuasion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Smith, Murray. 1995. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1996. The Logic and Legacy of Brechtianism. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 130–148. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 1997. Imagining from the Inside. In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 412–426. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances. In Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith, 217–238. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, Adam. 2004. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Murray. 2010. Engaging Characters: Further Reflections. In Characters in Fictional Worlds, Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film, and Other Media, ed. Jens Eder, Fotis Jannidis, and Ralf Schneider, 232–258. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. ———. 2011a. Empathy, Expansionism, and the Extended Mind. In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie, 99–117. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2011b. Just What Is It That Makes Tony Soprano Such an Appealing, Attractive Murderer? In Ethics at the Cinema, ed. Ward E. Jones and Samantha Vice, 66–90. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. (A)Moralische Monstrosität. Montage AV 21 (2): 48–75.

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CHAPTER 38

Affect and Motion Pictures Jesse Prinz

Emotions play at least three key roles in cinema. First, many motion pictures present highly emotional situations, involving characters who fall in love, who endure unbearable loss, and who become hell-bent on revenge. To make sense of movies, we must identify the emotions that drive their characters. Second, motion pictures seem to arouse emotions. We go to tearjerkers that make us cry, splatter films that make us writhe, and action films that keep us at the edges of our seats. Third, these emotional experiences are, ostensibly, part of cinema’s allure; we value movies that evoke strong feelings. One might summarize these three observations by saying that movie-going involves emotion attribution, arousal, and motivation. Each of these has been a domain of philosophical contestation. How are emotions attributed when experiencing a cinematic fiction? Are genuine emotions really aroused? And do emotional experiences really bring us to the box office? This discussion explores controversies along these three dimensions. Though no single thesis will be advanced here, there will be unity at the level of methodology: philosophical puzzles will be approached naturalistically, drawing on both theoretical and empirical work. This method belongs to the research tradition known as cognitive film theory. Cognitive film theory is sometimes regarded with skepticism because empirical research tends to emphasize universal psychological laws. The approach recommended here will try to avoid that charge. Reference will be made to shared psychological mechanisms but also to culture, suggesting that cinematic experiences are influenced by social processes. To understand the roles of emotions in our experiences of motion pictures, it will help to begin with a review of approaches to emotions and other affective

J. Prinz (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_38

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states. After recommending an approach to emotions, debates about ­attribution, arousal, and motivation are considered. In addition to a literature review, positive proposals are advanced. To anticipate some of the main conclusions: emotional attribution in movies cannot be fully explained by innate recognition capacities, emotions experienced at movies tend to differ from those in real life, and our motivation to seek out evocative films is, in part, a form of self-expression.

Emotions and Other Affective States Theories of Emotion Emotions are one of the most intensely studied psychological phenomena, but there is no consensus about what they are. After over a century of intensive empirical investigation, no shared view has emerged, and theoretical divisions are so deep that competing views often appear not merely different but even opposite. Here I survey four of the leading approaches that have emerged in psychology and the social sciences. All of these have supporters in philosophy as well. Each also enjoys evidential support, and each has been subjected to powerful lines of critique. In the next subsection I will suggest that we may be able to extrapolate a plausible theory from these vociferous debates. Let’s begin with what has become known as the James-Lange Theory, after William James (1884) and Carl Lange (1885). Both authors independently arrived at an embodied view of the emotions. According to folk wisdom, emotions cause bodily changes; for example, sadness is said to cause tears, anxiety is said to cause irregularities in breath, and excitement is associated with a racing heart. For James and Lange, these are not effects but rather causes or constituents of emotions. James defines emotions as perceptions of bodily changes, and Lange sometimes implies that emotions are constituted by visceral responses. Call this the embodiment thesis. Evidence linking emotions and bodily responses is easy to come by. It has long been observed that emotions are associated with changes in the body, and just about every language has emotion terms that make direct references to changes in organs (e.g., heart, skin, liver, spleen), muscles (e.g., “tense”), and digestive (“queasy”), respiratory (“breathless”), circulatory (“pumped up”), endocrine (“hormonal”), nociceptive (“pained”), or thermoregulatory systems (“burning”). There is also evidence that a number of emotions are associated with distinctive bodily changes (Kreibig 2010; Kragel and Labar 2013). In addition, many studies have shown that changing one’s bodily configuration (e.g., facial expressions, breathing, and posture) leads to recognizable changes in felt emotions (Duclos et al. 1989; Philippot et al. 2002; Price and Harmon-­ Jones 2015). James offers similar lines of support, noting that we can alter emotions by manipulating our bodies: we can whistle to increase courage, he says, and stand erect to treat symptoms of depression.

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James and Lange also make another controversial claim about emotions: they say that emotions can be elicited without any prior thought or judgment. Call this non-cognitivism. As evidence, Lange mentions examples of emotions induced by drugs, such as alcohol, opium, or hashish, which he took to act directly on the body without cognitive intermediaries. James offers various examples in support of non-cognitivism: he notes that some emotions are instinctive and perceptually triggered (sexual attraction, wrath at snakes, and fear of precipices). Other perceptual triggers that he mentions include music, sudden movements in the woods, the sight of blood, and the sound of knife blades crossing. Such considerations have not persuaded everyone. In a critique that seriously undermined support for the James-Lange theory, Cannon (1927) argued that visceral changes are too slow and too difficult to detect to ground our emotions. He also worried that visceral changes can arise without emotions (as in the case of fever or chills), suggesting that they are not sufficient for emotions. Such worries lose some force if we recall that viscera are not the only bodily changes that might contribute to emotions. Large-scale patterns including viscera, musculoskeletal changes, and even molar behaviors may help with emotion differentiation (e.g., Damasio 1994). Still, one might worry that some bodily patterns will be shared across emotions (e.g., anger and indignation) and that some emotions will be associated with many bodily patterns (e.g., fear) (cf. Cacioppo et al. 2000). Such worries have led some researchers to think that bodily responses are not sufficient for emotion differentiation. This has led to the development of several other families of theories. The most widely discussed of these are cognitive theories, which claim that each emotion is constitutively related to a corresponding judgment or collection of judgments. On some versions, these judgments may be relatively simple: fear may involve judgments about danger, sadness about loss, anger about offenses, and so on. On other versions, there are multiple dimensions of cognitive appraisal, including assessments of goal congruence, ego involvement, and coping potential (see Scherer et al. 2001, for various versions). Cognitivism has the resources to finely differentiate emotions. It also enjoys support from the obvious and experimentally demonstrable fact that thoughts can impact and instigate emotional responses. If I form the belief that there is a ticking bomb in my vicinity, it will cause panic, and if I reflect on the loss of departed loved ones, I will grow sad. Critics, however, wonder whether cognitivist theories are too intellectually demanding, especially dimensional appraisal theories, which associate each emotion with a complex collection of thoughts (Zajonc 2000; Prinz 2004). These theories also say too little about the many apparent examples of non-cognitive induction, including induction by instrumental music (Ellsworth 1994a). Others have argued that non-cognitive views can more easily explain the phenomenon of emotional recalcitrance; emotions can be intensely felt even when we explicitly reject the associated appraisal (Tappolet 2012). It might also be objected that cognitivist

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accounts underestimate evidence for the embodiment thesis. They often downplay or neglect bodily concomitants of emotions. Some philosophical defenders of cognitive approaches vehemently deny that bodily changes are necessary for emotions (e.g., Solomon 1976). This seems too extreme. To my knowledge, there is not a single study of emotion induction in all of psychology that measures physiological changes and finds none. Even patients with spinal cord injuries show brain activity consistent with bodily sensations during emotion induction (Nicotra et al. 2006). One way to meet these objections to standard cognitivist theories is to reduce the amount of cognition required and to increase the role of the body. There is a family of theories that do just that. According to these “two-factor” accounts, each emotion consists of a bodily state together with a conceptualization of that state. The seminal version was advanced by Schachter and Singer (1962). They assume that the bodily states in question were largely uniform across emotions. For them, emotions are labeled states of arousal. Another view argues that emotions each fall somewhere on two underlying dimensions: valence and arousal. Russell (1980) calls this a Circumplex Theory. By treating arousal as a dimension, which can range from low to high, the Circumplex Theory allows for more physiological variation than on Schachter and Singer’s account. It also adds valence and stipulates that valence is an orthogonal dimension to arousal. Valence can be defined in different ways. One option is to say that negatively valenced states are those that impel us to cease and avoid, while positively valenced states impel us to maintain or pursue (cf. Prinz 2010). Together with arousal, valence allows for considerable emotion differentiation, but the resulting categories may still be too coarsely grained to capture important differences (e.g., rage and terror are both negative states with high arousal). Thus, like Schachter and Singer, the Circumplex Theory also requires labels to make fine-grained distinctions. The most developed view in this family is the Conceptual Act Theory (Barrett 2011). It states that each emotion involves a conceptualization of bodily states that are highly varied, but neither necessary nor sufficient for emotions. These bodily states can include arousal, but also action patterns, such as the flight or freezing responses. Because different bodily patterns (flight or freezing) can correspond to the same emotion (fear), defenders of the Conceptual Act Theory argue that conceptualization is what gives emotions their identity. A freezing response in an animal without a concept of fear would not be fear (Barrett 2017: Chap. 12). The Conceptual Act Theory is classified as a “constructionist” theory, since emotions are constructed through conceptualization. It differs, however, from a more familiar class of constructionist theories called “social constructionism.” Social constructionists argue that emotions are created by cultures and socially transmitted. According to the most popular versions, emotions are rules for behavior or “scripts.” Scripts can be defined as “rules that generate organized scenes” (Tomkins 1962: 984), “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1983: 56), and temporally sequenced interpersonal events (Fehr et al. 1999: 300). Others have

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referred to emotions as having “plot structures” in which “actors” enact “dramatistic roles” (Sarbin 1986: 92). For example, in Western cultures, romantic love involves flirting, courtship, dating, intimate contact (which itself is scripted), and perhaps co-habitation, marriage, and procreation (cf. Averill 1982: 8–9). Such scripts can be varied (e.g., long-­ distance relationships), embedded (a lover’s quarrel), and contextually adjusted based on known attributes of those involved. There are also scripts associated with emotions that have been regarded as biologically based (Shaver et al. 1987). For example, the script for anger includes behaviors such as yelling, blaming, pouting, and demanding apologies or reparations. There may also be culturally mediated, context-specific variants such as anger at a store, anger at a child, anger at a lover, anger at a news broadcast, and so on (Eickers and Prinz forthcoming). Such scripts will also apply different to different actors in accordance with social norms regarding ethnicity, gender, class, age, culture, and other aspects of social identity (Eickers 2018). Social constructionism is, thus, able to accommodate aspects of behavioral variations that are ignored on other accounts. In equating emotions with scripts, however, such social constructionists tend to underplay the body. This suggests that we might do well to combine some of the foregoing theories. An Integrative Approach We’ve just looked at four major approaches to emotions: the James-Lange theory, cognitivism, the Conceptual Act Theory, and script-based social constructionism. These are not just distinct; they are often said to be diametrically opposed. Consider the James-Lange theory. Cognitivists reject its core commitment to non-cognitivism, Conceptual Act Theorists reject its commitment to physiological differentiation, and social constructionists tend to eschew embodiment. Here I want to suggest that these divisions are not as unbridgeable as they might appear. First, consider the contrast between cognitive and non-cognitive theories. Non-cognitivists say that emotions can arise without thoughts, but they do not deny that thoughts can, or regularly, cause emotions (Ellsworth 1994b). They can also allow that, even when emotions arise without thoughts, they still have meaning for those who experience them. Consider the flight response, which is an embodiment of fear. Since this response ordinarily arises under conditions of danger, it can indicate to those who undergo it that there may be a danger present (Prinz 2004). The flight response also prepares an organism for action, so it inherently carries a meaning that can be captured in the language of affordances: flight conveys that the situation affords escape (Shargel and Prinz 2017). In these ways, emotions without cognition can still qualify as embodying non-cognitive analogues of appraisals. The James-Lange theory can also accommodate lessons from the Circumplex and Conceptual Act approaches. From Circumplex Theory, it can co-opt the dimension of valence, which is given inadequate attention by James and Lange.

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As for the Conceptual Act Theory, the main point of contention concerns the observation that there is a many-to-one mapping between bodily states and emotion labels. As Gendron and Barrett (2009) note, James actually recognized this fact and claimed that, with respect to the body, we have many more emotions than emotion names. In this respect, labels represent conceptual abstractions. There is no single state in the body that we can call fear. But it doesn’t follow that emotions need labels to exist. We can simply say that labels name superordinate classes of emotions, while insisting that there are many unlabeled variants in each labeled class (by analogy, color terms refer to classes of unlabeled colors). Conceptual Act Theorists might protest that embodied responses need labels for another reason: different emotions, they claim, can have the same embodiment (Wilson-Mendenhall et  al. 2011: 1008). To this, James-Lange theorists can reply by drawing on resources from social constructionists. While it is true that simply physiological responses, such as a racing heart or quickened breathing, may fail to differentiate all emotions, socially learned rules can embed such responses into elaborated behavioral repertoires or scripts. By internalizing context-specific routines and culturally specific action tendencies, we can expand from biologically prepared responses into an open-ended range of highly differentiated behaviors. Such variations can be elaborated into what Marcel Mauss (1935) calls “techniques of the body.” We can acquire methods of bowing, kissing, or weeping that convey precise meanings about different forms of respect, affection, or sadness. These elaborated bodily performances may be conditioned through conceptualization, but they need not be accompanied by concepts in every instance. Though learned, a passionate kiss can arise without an inner voice saying, “this is how to express sexual attraction.” In this way, the James-Lange view can allow for a high degree of emotion differentiation through the body without recourse to labels. All this can be summarized as emotions are culturally scripted, valenced, embodied appraisals, which can be initiated both cognitively and non-­ cognitively. This account would not satisfy everyone; it’s essentially an enhanced version of the James-Lange theory. It nevertheless builds on lessons from different theoretical frameworks. All of its components will be invoked when we turn to motion pictures. Other Affective States Before moving on to the main topic, we should briefly pause to consider some other “affective states.” This term is often used as an umbrella to cover a range of constructs related to emotions (Carroll 2003: Chap. 3; Prinz 2004). These include moods, drives, desires, pleasant and unpleasant sensations, and certain reflexes, such as the startle response. One might say that affective states are any states that are valenced. I will not offer detailed analyses of any of these, though I want to touch on moods and drives, since both make cameos in the discussion that follows.

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The distinction between moods and emotions has been debated, but a standard and plausible story can be stated in terms of a distinction between formal and particular objects. Emotions have both. The formal object is the kind of situation with which an emotion of a given type is concerned. So, fear is generally concerned with dangers or threats to well-being, for example. The particular object is the situation that an instance of an emotion concerns, such as fear about an upcoming surgical procedure. Emotions have particular objects insofar as there is something, whether real or imagined, that elicits them and which might be taken as a reason for feeling that way. With moods, we tend to say there is no particular object. A mood might be initially triggered by an emotion, but it can linger after the particular object is no longer relevant. Moods can be caused by weather, noise, sleep deprivation, and many other things that are regarded as causes rather than reasons. This is often a blurred distinction, however. Moods and emotions can involve similar or identical bodily states, making them phenomenologically alike. An emotion can fade into a mood and a mood can dispose us to feel corresponding emotions. One might think of moods as free-floating emotions. The distinction between emotions and drives is also somewhat blurry. Drives are motivations to act that can be initiated from within without the need for an external eliciting condition. Hunger, sex drive, and the desire for sleep are examples. But these can also be externally triggered: seeing something tasty or attractive or relaxing can cause drives. Like emotions, drives are valenced and embodied. Moreover, emotions are drive-like insofar as they impel us to act. Fear might drive us to pursue safety. So, drives might be defined as emotions that do not require external elicitors in their ordinary occurrence, even if they often have such elicitors. The blurriness of these distinctions illustrates why it is useful to have an umbrella term such as affect. The blurriness also suggests that moods, drives, and emotions will interact and that lessons about one will often apply to the others, as we will see later.

Attribution Biology Versus Culture Having discussed the nature of emotions, we are now, at last, ready to consider some of the key roles they play in the experience of motion pictures. We will begin by asking how we recognize the emotions of characters on the screen. Many motion pictures deal with emotionally charged life events, and we cannot make full sense of their narratives without attributing emotions to the characters they portray. There are debates about how this is done, and these can be illuminated by the foregoing considerations about the nature of emotions. To determine how viewers recognize emotions in film, one might turn to psychological research on emotion recognition. There the dominant views emphasize universal, evolved recognition capacities. The psychologist, Paul

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Ekman (1972), has been particularly influential. In his pioneering research, he claimed that members of two remote New Guinea societies isolated from Western culture understand expressions more or less as we do. Members of the Fore and Dani were shown photographs of six expressions, and were asked to match these short descriptions of evocative events involving danger, loss, contamination, and other themes. Drawing on this data, Ekman concludes that there are at least six universally recognizable emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. Several authors have suggested that these universal recognition abilities contribute to our ability to recognize emotions in motion pictures (Tan 2005; Bordwell 2007; Grodal 2009; Smith 2017). This may seem like an obvious and secure inference, but it goes against some entrenched assumptions within film studies. The universalist approach contrasts with strong firms of social constructionist. Many researchers in humanities are sympathetic to constructionism and regard universalizing claims as implausibly reductive. From this perspective it is a mistake to think we can comprehend cinematic emotions without considerable cultural knowledge. Who is right? It would be implausible to deny that biology contributes to emotion recognition. A blood-curdling scream in a horror film would probably be recognized the world over as an indication of extreme distress. Tears, laughs, smiles, and frenzied acts of violence are likely to be universally recognized as expressions of emotion, and research on innate emotional dispositions may shed light on how they are interpreted. Without biological contributions, it would be difficult to explain how we can make sense of cinema from other cultures. Whether in Thai, Turkish, Tagalog, or Tamil, movies are remarkably intelligible even when not intended for global audiences. Emotion recognition undoubtedly contributes to this intelligibility. To take one example, in the Ghanaian classic, Love Brewed in the African Pot (1980), a mother cries upon hearing that her daughter plans to marry a carpenter. We know immediately that she disapproves. Still, we should not infer from this universal intelligibility that emotions are entirely a matter of biology. All those who apply Ekman’s work to cinema have acknowledged cultural variation as well. Even Ekman recognizes variation, but he tends to limit this to “display rules”—cultural norms about when to suppress innate expressions (Ekman 1972). This may underestimate the impact of culture and overestimate the intelligibility of emotion in foreign motion pictures. In the Ghanaian example, we interpret tears as a sign of disapproval, but are we safe in assuming the mother is supposed to be represented as sad? In a literature review of cross-cultural research on emotion recognition, Russell (1994) reports considerable variables across the globe. In a table summarizing studies using Ekman’s six “basic” emotions, he reports that many have recognition rates far below Western samples. The lowest of all corresponds to a study reporting recognition rates in Africa for expressions that we see as sadness (32.2%). Similarly, Beauprè and Hess (2005) found a.24 hit rate for sub-­ Saharan African immigrants in Canada, recognizing “sad” expressions in

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African faces—less than half the rate for Caucasians responding to the same picture set. How sure, then, can we be about the exact emotion the mother is expressing? Here we must use narrative context to formulate a hypothesis. The emotion is surely negative, but the exact meaning is somewhat elusive, and its interpretation depends on many factors not available to casual Western audiences: what are local norms governing parents’ roles in nuptial decisions? What emotions are women allowed to express and how intensely? If the mother is experiencing sadness, is it over her daughter’s future prospects, the family’s material ambitions, the family name, or some form of spiritual injury? This latter possibility is raised by a sequence late in the movie in which the daughter’s unhappiness is treated by a faith healer. It cannot be ruled out that there is some local meaning to expressions. In addition, there are culturally specific variants of expressions. For example, in the Ethiopian movie, Lamb (2015), a father brings his child to stay with relatives after the boy’s mother dies in a drought; when the relatives hear the news they engage in a bout of melodic, ritualized crying, which comes to an abrupt stop, when one relative says, “It’s enough. They’ve come a long way.” Is this a genuine outpouring of emotion or a conventionalized expression of sympathy? Foreign viewers cannot be sure. Such examples align with much empirical work on expression and culture. Russell (1991) criticizes Ekman’s research on universals, pointing out that face recognition studies often reveal subtle differences. Variation is borne out by more recent studies: Jack et al. (2009) show that Caucasian and Chinese individuals look at different parts of the face when viewing expressions; Gendron et al. (2014) find that members of the Himba in Namibia sort photos of expressions quite differently than members of a Western sample; Crivelli et al. (2016) find similar discrepancies among small-scale societies in Papua New Guinea and Mozambique. In addition, there are culturally specific expressions including Japanese bowing variations, the head wobble in India, the French raspberry (a farting sound made with the lips, which functions like a shoulder shrug), and many hand gestures. Examples of each can be found in films. There are also significant differences in emotion vocabulary across cultures (Russell 1991). Even seemingly similar terms can have culturally specific meanings. The Russian concept of nostalghia, which is the title of a (1983) Tarkovsky film, is somewhat more morose than our own, relating perhaps to the untranslatable word, toska, which refers to a melancholic state. Both apply to the mood of Tarkovsky’s film. In Japanese, there is a word giri, which refers to a kind of indebtedness. This is a key theme in the movie Yakuza (1974) and much traditional Japanese drama, such as the Kabuki, Double-Suicide (1971). Giri can lead to oime (the aversive feeling of having an unreturned favor). We can see this play out in cinema, but the precise meaning is bound up with a cultural value system that may not be universal. Movies do not only present culturally specific aspects of emotions; they may also play a role in sustaining them. This can be seen, for example, in the case of gender norms. American Westerns present emotional ideals of masculinity

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(Smith 2017). In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), James Stewart’s character is portrayed as feminine in comparison to the more stoic John Wayne. In one scene, Stewart dons an apron, and Wayne coolly defends him from a gang of thugs. Viewers are, thus, encouraged to see Stewart’s more expressive emotional behavior as less admirable for a man (see also Bartsch 2008, on “meta-emotions”). Films can also reflect and reinforce norms about emotional intensity. Federico Fellini’s characters seem histrionic in comparison to Yasujiro Ozu’s. In Tokyo Story (1952), a husband, played by Chishu Ryu, registers the loss of his wife by slightly tipping his head down. A similar gesture can mark the difference between sadness and joy in a Noh theater actor wearing what Westerners might regard as a neutral mask. In other Japanese movies, such as Sansho the Bailiff (1952), expressions can seem exaggerated or opaque to Western viewers: when the lead character Zushio tells a group of slaves that they are free, he shouts in a breathy, nasal tone: is he expressing shame, torment, or righteous anger? In a way, such variations should be surprising. Filmmaking is a business. It uses shared technologies, follows familiar conventions, and sells to a global market. Hollywood has had an enormous influence on movies around the world, and many directors come to the United States for training and actively seek American distribution. In spite of this, one can find much evidence for both culturally shared and culturally specific aspects of emotional expression. The variations may be subtle, but they suggest that we should never be overly confident in ascribing precise emotional meaning to emotional displays in foreign cinema. Empathy and Alternatives The nature-nurture debate raises questions about how we actually arrive at ascriptions when viewing films. One possibility, that has gained momentum in cognitive film studies, is that we make use of empathy (Coplan 2004, 2006). Empathy can be roughly characterized as our capacity to understand other people’s mental states by imaginatively putting ourselves in their shoes. This can be done cognitively by reflecting on what it is like to be them or in their situation or “affectively” though a kind of embodied mirroring process. Both forms of empathy may play a role in some cinematic experiences. Affective empathy is especially likely when viewing strong emotional displays, such as Brigitte Bardot’s tearful testimony in La Vérité (1960)—one feels compassion for her even as she confesses to murder, because her torment is both palpable and contagious. Some actors are especially effective at inducing vicarious responses: consider Sydney Poitier in Raison in the Sun (1961) and Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma (1962). In other cases, empathy requires more cognition. Consider the scene in Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), in which Cléo watches a silent comedy while awaiting a cancer diagnosis; in the comedy, a character

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dies, and we are left to imagine what it must be like for Cléo to see that silly display of mortality while believing that she herself is terminally ill. Still, empathy cannot explain all our responses to cinematic emotion. For example, in The Piano (1993), there is a harrowing scene in which a lead character has a finger chopped off by her abusive husband; he expresses frenzied fury, while she looks void in her state of shock. Still, we are immune to catching his emotions, and we feel anguish for her. That anguish is not empathy. She is in a state of shock. As viewers, we feel horror and outrage. There are films where we feel some kind of engagement with evil characters, but this, as Smith (1999) suggests, is better described as alignment than as empathy, and it can even include antipathy. Further worries about empathy are raised by Carroll (2011). As he notes, we often do not share emotions with characters on screen. For example, we may know more than they do (as when they have not yet realized they are in peril) and we may feel more than they do (as when they are so focused on a harrowing escape that they block out their feelings). We make sense of emotions even when there is no contagion. Cognitive empathy could play a role in some cases, but there are times when we are reluctant to imagine being in someone else’s shoes, as in the case of some villains. Cultural differences of the kind already discussed may also make both affective and cognitive empathy difficult. How do we do it? One method is by learning to recognize emotional expressions, both those we share and those that are culturally foreign. An American viewer can learn the meaning of a bow and might even discern by observation that deeper bows show greater respect. But this strategy has limitations, even in Western films, where one might expect expressions to be familiar. In one study, Ekman-style facial expressions are used to express emotions only between 0% and 31% of the time (Carroll and Russell 1997). There are even paradoxical expressions, as when Katherine Hepburn’s character smiles near the end of The Lion in Winter (1968) and says “It’s the way I register despair.” A more reliable method of emotion attribution uses “scripts”—not theatrical scripts, but emotion scripts, which were discussed in section “Emotions and Other Affective States”. Social constructionists present scripts as an account of the nature of emotions. Whether or not this theory is true, they can also play an important role in emotion recognition (Eickers 2018). Even when expressions are not detected, one can determine emotions by following event sequences. This may be a common strategy for moviegoers, since film scripts exploit such cultural knowledge and usually provide comprehendible plotlines. (Compare Plantinga 2009, on “paradigm scenarios.”) Plot can also contribute to attribution by providing information that indicates characters’ attitudes. This information is sometimes provided visually, even without the use of emotional expressions, as in the case of the “Kuleshov effect,” which asserts that an expressionless face can be assigned emotional meaning when paired with an image of an object that has emotional significance, such as a casket. There has been empirical work on the Kuleshov effect, with varied results, but some studies find that the method works in some cases

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(Barratt et al. 2016; Calbi et al. 2017). There are also convincing cases in cinema. For example, there is a moment in Brokeback Mountain (2005) when a neighbor spots the two male leads rolling around toplessly while looking through binoculars. The camera cuts from the two men to their nosey neighbor, who slowly lowers his binoculars to reveal an ambiguous and understated expression. Since the film deals with cultural taboos against homosexuality, this expression comes across as one of disapproval (I will leave aside the hard question of whether it is seen that way or merely so interpreted). We do not need to empathize with the homophobe or come from his culture. The visual juxtaposition together with cultural information delivered by the plot provides emotional meaning. Notice it is not just the pairing of images, as Kuleshov proposed, but also narrative information that helps us here and in just about any conventional film. Narratives can imbue neutral expressions with affective significance. Indeed, Carroll and Russell (1996) have shown that context can even alter the interpretation of highly expressive faces; the same expression can look like fear or anger when imbedded in a narrative context. This is not a complete account of recognition, of course. The point is merely that evolutionary theories of recognition cannot offer a complete account. We discern emotions using emotion scripts, visual context, and plot. With all this information we can interpret emotions whose expressions are culturally unfamiliar. Indeed, even movie monsters and aliens, from Frankenstein to Godzilla, come to have discernable emotional states when placed in intelligible story sequences. Nature, culture, and narrative each contribute to emotion recognition.

Arousal Do Movies Arouse Real Emotions? Let’s turn now from emotion recognition to arousal. The issue of arousal has been most actively debated in the context of the paradox of fiction. The paradox begins with the premise that emotions carry existential commitments; we can only mourn for losses and fear threats when we take them to be real—a fictional threat or loss is not really a threat or a loss. Yet, the paradox continues, we seem to experience emotions when we experience fictions. The status of these alleged emotions is regarded as being paradoxical because they do not meet the existential commitments said to be required for genuine emotions (Radford 1975). Walton (1978) applied this paradox to movies when he made the provocative suggestion that the fear we allegedly experience at monster movies is merely make-believe. In addition to not believing that movie monsters are real, we don’t perform many actions associated with real fear, like running from the theater or calling the police. We just act as if we were afraid. Walton’s skeptical view has been attacked on many fronts. People claim to have emotions in response to movies (e.g., Wang and Cheong 2006), and they show physical symptoms (Carvalho et  al. 2012) and action tendencies (Tan

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2013). Indeed, much emotion research in psychology uses films and fictions to induce what psychologists take to be real emotions (e.g., Kreibig et al. 2007). Others have objected that Walton’s construct of make-believe erroneously implies that responses to movies are simply a matter of choice: we can have strong responses to movies even when we don’t want to (Hartz 1999), and we can fail to respond, as in the case of corny, dated horror films, even if we really want to (Carroll 1990). Such observations leave the paradox unanswered, however, since they don’t say how emotions could be induced by films, nor do they account for the ways in which cinematic experiences differ from ordinary emotions. Here, again, proposals are manifold, and most take the psychology of emotions into consideration. Some authors have suggested that we cannot focus on the existential commitments of our emotions while engrossed in a narrative (Stock 2006). Others have simply denied that emotions make existential commitments (Tullmann and Buckwalter 2014). On some cognitive theories of emotions, elicitation merely requires that we think about an arousing situation, not that we necessarily take such situations to obtain (e.g., Lamarque 1981). Indeed, work in cognitive neuroscience suggests that we must be able to elicit emotions through hypothetical reasoning in order to anticipate costs and benefits (e.g., Bechara et al. 1999). For the theory of emotions outlined in section “Emotions and Other Affective States”, another response is also available. As James (1884) observed, emotions can be elicited by perceptual means, without any need for intervention. Blood and guts on the screen can get our hearts racing by visual association. So can sudden sounds and screams. The capacity to elicit real affective states perceptually is even more obvious when we consider moods and drives. Stressful music can induce anxiety, and jubilant music can induce delight. With moods, the existential assumption doesn’t even get off the ground. Or consider drives such as hunger or sexual arousal. An enticing meal can whet the appetite, and sexually explicit imagery can bring viewers to extreme states of arousal. No one would say that pornographically induced emotions are just faking it. Likewise, it would be silly to deny that comedies really amuse, that mysteries can surprise us, or that violent special effects can cause disgust. These replies go some way toward defusing the paradox but don’t explain the apparent differences between ordinary emotions and those induced by fictions. Some differences are easy to explain: we don’t flee the theater because we know the cause of our fear isn’t real. Neither would we flee while watching a news story about a real threat that is removed from us in time or space. But there are subtler differences as well. In section “Emotions and Other Affective States”, I defined emotions as culturally scripted, valenced, embodied appraisals. Each of these dimensions may differ between real-world emotions and those that we experience in the theater. First, there are cultural scripts regarding movie response: we can laugh at pain (as in slapstick), scream out load, and weep openly. Indeed, it is probably more common to shed tears in the theater than watching the news. Likewise, monster movies may be more intensely

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experienced than real-world horrors (cf. Coplan 2006: 29). Still, the phenomenology seems different. When watching a disaster movie, for example, we might feel nervous exhilaration, but a live broadcast of similar events would leave us feeling gutted, nauseous, and deeply disturbed. We might describe both as vicarious fear, but one feels more cardiovascular and the other more intestinal. As we will note later, there may even be cases where real-world emotional valence is switched or overridden. For example, Vincent Canby described Towering Inferno (1974) as a “fun” movie that guarantees “thrills,” adding that it is a “vivid, completely safe nightmare.” In the movie theater, nightmares can be fun. Of course, not every disaster film is a joyride. For example, Janet Maslin described Titanic (1997) as a “terrifying,” “indelibly wrenching” movie that “lures viewers into… heartbreak.” The difference in tone may reflect the fact that Titanic is based on real-world events. But, even here, there is enough fiction in the script to insulate us from the kinds of emotions we might experience watching a documentary about the ill-fated ship. In general, real-world emotions haunt us in a different way than their cinematic counterparts. When a movie character dies, like Jack Dawson in Titanic, we may experience sadness, but we don’t mourn the death or become depressed because of it. One might express this by saying that movie theater emotions are genuine and intensely felt but somehow superficial. This is borne out by neuroimaging studies that have confirmed that the very same film causes overlapping but different neural activations. One difference is that real-world cases show activation in brain structures that implicate self-­ awareness (Abraham et al. 2008). When things happen in the real world, they don’t just arouse our passions; they matter to us. There is research on the “just-­ world hypothesis,” which suggests that people tend to think the world is just (Lerner 1980). Bad events challenge that presupposition, creating dissonance that lingers if not remedied. Movies sometimes present injustice, but this is less likely to cause dissonance for two reasons: cinematic evil is often confined to fictional worlds, and bad behavior tends to get punished. Therefore, misfortune on the screen doesn’t leave audiences feeling that the world is out of moral balance. The emotions we experience while viewing can be compartmentalized; they may linger for a while or make us reflect, but they do not necessarily leave us feeling that something in the world must be redressed. For these reasons, I think we can conclude that the emotions experienced in the cinema may qualify as different from their real-world counterparts. They can differ in cultural norms, embodiment, and even valence, resulting in states that are recognizable but also phenomenally distinctive. Cinematic emotions have a different impact. They may give us nightmares, but, when based on fictional characters or events, they don’t leave us feeling like the world is in need of repair. These differences are not just quantitative. Cinematic emotions may constitute qualitatively different subtypes of the like-named categories. They are not make-believe, but they are directed toward make-believe worlds, and their impact is correspondingly different.

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How Do Movies Arouse? Alongside debates about whether movies arouse emotions, there are questions about how they do so. Many compatible proposals have been offered. Among the most interesting are those that implicate distinctively cinematic strategies for emotion induction. After a brief review we can ask what implications these have for theories of emotions and motion pictures. Some of the most obvious methods of emotion induction include the display of emotional expressions (Lundqvist and Dimberg 1995; Fitzgerald et al. 2006) or emotionally charged imagery (Lang et  al. 2005). A more subtle method, elucidated by Carroll (2011), is called “criterial prefocusing”: motion pictures emphasize features that are criterial for an emotion. One example might be The Wages of Fear (1953), which is about a group of people driving a truckload of incendiary chemicals across a treacherous, rocky terrain. Every excruciating minute of the drive reminds viewers of the danger, in an effort to sustain the titular emotion, fear. Another method is to use familiar schemas, which rely on viewers’ memories and expectations. In cinema, such schemas include chase scenes, love scenes, lurking killer scenes, and stock plotlines involving love triangles, revenge, and triumphant underdogs. In a clever experiment using animated polygons, Oatley and Yuill (1985) found that they could evoke different interpretations by using titles that tapped into different cinematic tropes: a robbery, a protective mother, and a jealous lover. With each construal, we make new assumptions about motives, guilt, and innocence, forming new sympathies that alter the impact of the on-screen events. In a similar manner, genre expectations can alter impact (Smith 2003). The unsettling imagery in Eraserhead (1977) takes on new levity when we realize it is a comedy. Moving beyond genre, emotion can be impacted by narrative structure. For example, many narratives involve conflict and resolution. Changes in a character’s progression toward a difficult goal can impact emotions and physiological arousal (Suckfüll 2010). Movies can also impact affective states in ways that go beyond the content of what is presented. Music, for example, is a powerful emotion elicitor (Zentner et al. 2008; Robinson 2010; Seidel and Prinz 2013) and is used to great effect in film (Ellis and Simons 2005). Sometimes music reinforces visual content (Thayer and Levenson 1983), sometimes it determines impact of neutral scenes (Bullerjahn and Guldenring 1994), and sometimes it creates dissonance by contrasting with visual content. For a classic example of the latter, consider Kubrick’s use of Rossini’s La Gazza Ladra in A Clockwork Orange (1971); the cheerfully mischievous overture is coupled with images of Alex attacking members of his gang, implying that he is jubilant during these acts of violence—that, in turn, makes the episode more sinister and disturbing. Moviemakers can also influence affective states in other ways. Color and lighting make a difference (Wilms and Oberfeld 2017), as do many editing and camera techniques. Jump cuts can add energy, short cuts can fuel excitement, slow motion can amplify the impact of on-screen events, close-ups can add emotional intensity, and hand-cams can create immersive vitality. When cameras

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move in ways that deviate from possible human movements, the effect can be disorienting (Fingerhut and Heimann 2017). One can also create evocative disorientation by simulating various perceptual anomalies. For example, in Dev D (2009), drug intoxication is implied using heightened saturation, blurring, rapid perspective shifts, distorting focal lengths, trailing, double exposures, and a body-mounted camera. Some of the foregoing methods fit nicely with standard theories of real-­ world emotion induction. Criterial prefocusing, for example, exploits cognitive processes of the kind emphasized by appraisal theorists. Others, such as music, color effects, and editing techniques, presumably require non-cognitive induction and provide further support for the kind of theory present in section “Emotions and Other Affective States”. Some of these methods, such as color and music, might be characterized as “formal” insofar as they depend more on sensory features than content. This underscores questions raised in the previous subsection about whether cinematic emotions are different from real-­ world emotions. One possibility is that formally induced affective states are really moods rather than emotions. Moods do not presuppose particular objects and can therefore be divorced from content. Filmmakers may exploit moods to potentiate emotions and attain what might be called affective scene-setting. Gloomy, anxious, and exhilarating settings can facilitate the narrative and affective ends of a movie. Normally we think of moods as states of people. We do talk about the ambiance of restaurants or the tension in a room, but mood attribution is most frequently to individual persons. Cinematic moods are in contrast more naturally ascribed to settings. Still these are not purely external. Instead, they seem to depend on the experience of viewers. The mood of a setting can be defined as a response-dependent property. A gloomy setting is one that induces gloom. These may get conventionalized to some degree so that one can recognize gloomy settings without feeling gloomy, but the conventions depend on general tendencies to bring about affective states. As for bona fide emotions that arise in movies, such as the fear directed at movie monsters, induction techniques may shed light on why cinematic emotions often seem superficial. Techniques used to induce such emotions often dictate how we should feel in ways that lack nuance. Even with anti-heroes, we are encouraged to have more unequivocal sympathy than we would have for such individuals were we to meet them in real life. A filmmaker might try to induce more conflicted attitudes but at some peril; without sympathetic leads, audiences are more likely to disengage. Thus, filmmakers have an incentive to manipulate emotions in somewhat predictable ways. This predictability varies, of course, with genre. Many genres can be distinguished by their dominant emotions and moods. Induced emotions and affective scene-setting work in concert to create horror, suspense, tragedy, action, comedy, and pornography. The upshot is that genre films arouse emotions in ways that tend to be stereotyped. This, again, is an important, though contingent, difference between cinematic and real-world affective states.

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Motivation The Paradox of Negative Emotions We can turn now to our final topic, which is the role of emotions in our motivation to see motion pictures. If films often induce real affective states, it is natural to wonder whether these play a role in enticing viewers. In the case of comedy and pornography, the answer may be obvious. But many films evoke negative emotions. In general, we try to avoid such states. Why do we willingly spend time and money on films that make us feel bad? This has been called the paradox of painful art (Smuts 2007). The depth of the challenge can be underscored by recalling the analysis of valence given in section “Emotions and Other Affective States”. Negative emotions carry an internal signal that tells us to cease and desist. They have an inner voice that shouts “less of this”—yet we actively seek out what appear to be negatively valenced films. The most widely discussed example is tragedy, which has occupied philosophers since Aristotle’s time. Here the most relevant emotion is sadness, though Aristotle also places emphasis on pity. The topic of negative emotions has gained new momentum since the advent of motion pictures. Film explores some of the same emotional terrain as classic tragedy, with melodramas, and tearjerkers, but also includes other genres that induce negative affective states. Horror has received the most attention of these (Carroll 1990). Here the dominant emotion is fear, dread (Freeland 2004), and perhaps disgust (Korsmeyer 2011). Tragedy and horror are by no means the only kinds of movies that induce negative affect. There seems to be an almost inexhaustible range of harrowing subgenres: domestic abuse (The Castle of Purity, 1973), incest (The Wheel, 1923), dysfunctional families (Fists in the Pocket, 1965), alcoholism (Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf, 1966), drug addiction (In Vanda’s Room, 2000), existential dread (Shame, 1968), the drudgery of life (Jeanne Dielman, 1975), mental illness (A Page of Madness, 1926), suicide (Taste of Cherry, 1997), aging (The Last Laugh, 1924), prison violence (Scum, 1979), racism (Shadows, 1959), transphobia (In a Year of 13 Moons, 1978), downward spirals (Diary of a Lost Girl, 1929), religious intolerance (Day of Wrath, 1943), sex trafficking (Lilya 4-Ever, 2002), slavery (Sankofa, 1993), human cruelty (Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966), gang violence (Boyz n the Hood, 1991), delinquency (Los Olvidados, 1950), school shootings (Elephant, 2003), poverty (Ratcatcher, 1999), political oppression (The Official Story, 1985), colonialism (The Battle of Algiers, 1966), horrors of war (The Human Condition, 1959–1961), and genocide (Sometimes in April, 2005). It is important to keep this variety in mind because we must decide whether the paradox of painful art can be addressed with a unified solution or whether it requires a piecemeal approach. Aristotle focuses on tragedy, but his approach does not hinge on anything about sadness as such. Though mired in scholarly controversy, Aristotle’s answer can be interpreted as follows. Most commentators draw attention to two key terms: catharsis and mimesis. In antiquity, catharsis was discussed in

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both religious and medical contexts, referring to purification and purgation. Drawing on this, Lucas (1968) argues that Aristotle was inspired by religious festivals that were designed to increase emotional stability by exciting enthusiasm (this method of arriving at one state by inducing its opposite is a central plant of ancient homeopathic medicine). Intense emotion induction through drama, on this analogy, could increase spectators’ composure. This is not enough to explain why we might enjoy tragedy, however. Here mimesis comes in. For House (1956) we delight in an author’s skill at presenting negative emotions in a way that allows catharsis. For Schaper (1968), mimesis transforms such emotions into aesthetic states, allowing us to take pleasure in them. Aristotle’s catharsis theory rests on an outmoded psychology. While there is good evidence that humorous movies improve mood (Szabo 2003), this is unlikely for negatively valenced films. We know, for example, that exposure to violent media can have long-term effects on aggression (Bushman and Huesmann 2006). Likewise, enjoyment of violent media correlates with masculinity, sensation seeking, and aggressiveness (Hoffner and Levine 2007). It would be quite surprising if such individuals chose such fills to mollify these traits. There is also evidence that individuals with depression seek out sad films, and the result seems to maintain low moods, not cure them (Millgram et al. 2015). It is equally unlikely that painful art is primarily prized for mimesis. This mistakenly locates cinematic pleasure in admiration for directors, when in fact audiences often have no idea who has created the films they adore. Another historically entrenched response to the paradox of tragedy owes to David Hume. He advances what has been called a conversion account (Paton 1973). According to Hume, when two emotions of opposite valence co-occur, the subordinate one can be “converted” into the predominant; when the predominant one is pleasurable, the overall impression can be a pleasure even greater than one would have had without the native emotion. To establish the generality of this principle, Hume describes numerous cases where a negative emotion magnifies a positive one. For example: parents’ love for a child is intensified when the child is sickly; affection for a friend intensifies when that friend dies; and with lovers, absence makes the heart grow fonder. Scholars disagree about whether Hume thinks that the subordinate emotions disappear when this happens (Merivale 2011). I don’t think they do. In cashing out the idea of “conversion,” Hume says the subordinate emotion is “softened” and “gives force” to the predominant emotion. This implies that the subordinate transforms from being a purely abject state into one that has value insofar as it fortifies the predominant. Consider again Hume’s case of parental love toward a sick child. Here concern over the illness draws attention to the value of child. The concern is real and does not disappear, but it is edifying insofar as it helps the parents more fully appreciate the preciousness of their child’s life. Likewise, in the case of tragedy, real pity draws attention to the talent of the author. As with Aristotle’s idea of mimesis, Hume’s account is very meta. It locates tragic pleasure in admiration for the achievements of the artist. This seems implausible. Many of the disturbing movies that people like are not works of

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high art. Trashy horror films and maudlin melodramas garner huge audiences. Hume’s account is also implausibly hedonistic. Like many in the tradition, he assumes that we are ultimately motivated by pleasure, so the paradox of tragedy must find some source of joy in negatively valenced works. It seems perverse, however, to suggest that audiences walk away smiling from films about human misery, abuse, and genocide. Hedonistic approaches also leave us with the question of why we bother with negatively valenced movies at all—a well-­ wrought comedy would have all of the good and none of the bad. A different approach can be found in some contemporary responses to the paradox of horror—one of the most widely discussed variants of the paradox of painful art in recent film studies. Carroll (1990) offers a seminar discussion in which he proposes that the primary payoff of horror is cognitive. We find the monsters and killers in horror films to be fascinating, and we enjoy learning about them because they are aberrant. Other largely cognitive views have been advanced by Freeland (2000), who says that horror films allow us to contemplate good and evil, and Korsmeyer, who proposes that they let us reflect on human mortality and vulnerability. Cognitive views imply that horror films are largely didactic; they invite philosophical meditation, not just a good scream. This may be plausible for some subgenres, such as films about slavery or addiction, but it seems unpromising in the case of horror. One could more easily scratch the epistemic itch by reading essays than by watching slasher films, but that wouldn’t make for an exciting date. People seem to be drawn to horror for the emotional impact, not the learning experience. There is evidence that horror enthusiasts rate films more positively when they are scarier (Andrade and Cohen 2007). The storylines also tend to be trite, so not particularly edifying. Carroll would reply that formulaic plots can give viewers a firm foothold when investigating fascinating characters. Still, his account predicts that our primary motive is curiosity. One might therefore predict that individuals with a high “need for cognition” will be attracted to horror, since most measures of curiosity correlate with that scale (Olson and Camp 1984). That prediction is not borne out. There is no correlation between need for cognition and enthusiasm for horror (Kallias 2012: 87, 159). Even more strikingly, there is no correlation between enthusiasm for horror and a scale that measures individual differences in information seeking (ibid.: 142). The best predictor is sensation seeking (Edwards 1991). This suggests that horror fans like horror movies for the terror they instill. A more promising approach is offered by Bantinaki (2012). She recognizes the challenge of valence in facing paradoxes of painful art. If horror produces fear, and fear is negatively valenced, then we should avoid horror, not pursue it. Her solution is simple and elegant: for horror enthusiasts, fear takes on a positive valence. Bantinaki backs up this proposal by noting that the negatively associated with fear is linked to the fact that scary things are usually threatening. In fictional contexts, the threat is eliminated. But what makes fear positive? Bantinaki notes several benefits of safe fear: it can help teach us how to cope, it

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can be invigorating, it can instill a more sound sense of risk, and it can reveal things that we repress in ordinary life. I have concerns about Bantinaki’s proposal, though the idea of valence switching has undeniable appeal. With the exception of invigoration, the benefits that she enumerates don’t seem to be things we would actively seek out. They seem more like bitter medicine: it’s good for us to learn to cope, to improve our understanding of risks, and to confront what we ordinarily repress, but these are all activities that take hard work and might meet with considerable resistance. To suppose that these benefits contribute to positive motivation would seem to presume that we recognize them, grit our teeth, and swallow the bitter pill. This seems at odds with the phenomenology of horror enthusiasm. The analysis also seems quite local in that these benefits are less applicable to other domains, such as tragedy, war films, and dysfunctional family dramas. It would be more satisfying to find a motivation that is both recognized by moviegoers and general enough to handle other cases. For this, we might look to another approach, which emphasizes control. Eaton (1982), who was a pioneer of this approach, finds inspiration in Burke’s theory of the sublime: dangerous things can take on aesthetic appeal when viewed from a safe distance. In the case of disturbing fictions, Eaton proposes that the safety enjoyed by the fictional contexts gives us a sense of control that allows us to bypass negativity and enjoy artistic merits. Morreall (1985) advances a variant of the control approach. He begins by drawing attention to the fact that some people take pleasure in risky activities such as mountain climbing and skydiving. To enjoy these pursuits, it is important to feel a sense of control. Those who lack that, Morreall contends, will find such activities aversive. For Morreall, it is not artistic merits that motivate us to consume frightening works but exhilaration. With tragic works, the appeal lies in our capacity to withdraw into ourselves as savor bittersweet thoughts. Morreall’s account has the attractive feature that it makes the emotions themselves potential sources of our motivation rather than obstacles to it. There is some empirical work that adds support to the control theory. For example, horror fans tend to prefer movies that end with victory over evil, as compared to “teaser” endings, which indicate that evil may return (King and Hourani 2007). There is also evidence that sensation seekers often have a desire for control (Zuckerman 1979). Still, I have some misgivings about control. A horror film that gave viewers full control over the script would be less exciting than one full of surprises. This intuition may seem inconsistent with the King and Hourani finding that in horror-like endings evil is destroyed, but, curiously, that study also found that such endings are actually regarded as scarier and less predictable, indicating that there may still be an overall preference for movies that are less amenable to control. This is all the more obvious when it comes to tragedies. In that genre, the plot usually revolves around some heartbreaking situation that cannot be avoided. Viewers can escape the vicarious misery by leaving the theater, but fans of the genre remain riveted.

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Another concern is that control theories leave half the paradox unanswered. The sense of control is postulated as a mechanism for removing the sting from negative emotions, but it does not, in itself, explain why we seek out movies with dark themes. Here Eaton appeals to aesthetic properties and Morreall gives us a disunified account, appealing to both exhilaration and bittersweet reflection. The former falsely implies that horror fans should, ceteris paribus, prefer action films, and the latter begs the question by assuming that bitterness can be sweet. Moreover, it is important to recall that there is a huge range of unsettling subgenres. A piecemeal approach sacrifices explanatory strength. It would be better to find a principled reason for such diversity. One possibility is offered by Smuts (2007). He suggests that the diversity of painful art is, in fact, part of the explanation of its appeal. Rejecting hedonism, he argues that pleasure is not the only human motivation; we also seek rich experiences. Negative emotions add to that richness. A life of constant delight would be uninteresting. Cinema is able to expand the range of emotions that we can safely experience, and that expansion is, itself, a good thing. In this way, Smuts is able to say that we are drawn to painful art because of painful emotions, that these emotions vary from genre to genre, but that there is nevertheless a unified reason for their appeal. His approach also aligns with a recent empirical finding, which suggests that emotional diversity, not just happiness, contributes to well-being (Quoidbach et al. 2014). The rich experience account is alluring but ultimately unpersuasive for two reasons. First, it doesn’t explain how we overcome the negativity of negative emotions. People like varied diets and varied romantic experiences, but they do not seek out stale food or unsightly lovers. Second, Smuts doesn’t adequately grapple with individual differences. Not everyone loves tragedy and horror, and those who like one do not necessarily like the other. Many people have a favorite genre, and others that they tend to avoid. Thus, it is not diversity as such that matters but something more specific in these cinematic preferences. Emotion and Identity In this concluding subsection, I want to consider another approach to the paradox of painful art, which takes individual differences in preferences as a starting place. Perhaps we are drawn to motion pictures that say something about who we are. This would make our preferences both self-confirmatory and expressive. They underscore our identity to both self and others (cf. Fingerhut et al. in prep). Some facts that have already been adduced support this picture. There is a link between thrill seeking, masculinity, and horror, for example, as well as a correlation between horror enthusiasm and psychoticism (Weaver 1991). In contrast, sad movies are sought out by depressive people. There is also evidence that sad men like dark comedies (Greenwood 2010). More generally, movie preferences correlate with personality and gender (Oliver and Sanders 2004). We can communicate much about our social identities by professing a love for

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Westerns, romances, and comedies. Likewise, there are traits we manifest by consuming painful art. Horror can show off gothic sensibilities, aggression, and resilience to fear. Tragedy can show off empathy and moral fiber. As Feagin (1983) points out, tragedies allow us to take comfort in the fact that we can resonate with the suffering of others (see also Morreall 1985: 98). This fits with the observation in section “Emotions and Other Affective States” that emotions are not just universal innate instincts but come to have social meanings. There are, of course, movies that violate genre conventions or include emotional content that is nuanced or ambiguous. More often than not, these are “art films” and liking such films can also be understood as reflecting aspects about one’s self. Art film enthusiasts might even say, “I’m not the kind of person who likes to be emotionally manipulated by movies.” Thus, even here, the emotional profile of a film is a ground for preference, and that preference reflects identity. One might wonder whether the motivation to advertise identity can overcome negative valence. That is a question for future research. One possibility is that valence is switched when we use movies to confirm identity. Another possibility is that the identity functions are sufficiently motivating to outweigh negative valence or compensates for them. The identity approach suggests a slightly different possibility: perhaps it is the ultimate show of identity that we are willing to endure negative feelings. On this suggestion, negative feelings are not just counterbalanced by some independent payoff but rather contribute directly to that payoff. Notice, too, that the payoffs are not mere theoretical posits; they are known to moviegoers. Most of us are aware of what kinds of movies we like and happy to share that information with others. People boast about being horror enthusiasts, and others advertise when they are moved by social interest narratives. This is not simply a matter of subgroup pandering or virtue signaling. It is likely that we come to find our favorite kinds of films deeply gratifying. We do not necessarily enjoy them, but they fulfill our self-conceptions. Sometimes this fulfillment is directly linked to content: a political drama or addition story may reflect our values or relate to our biographies. Negatively valenced movies come in many varieties, because negative experiences are pervasive in life and play a role in shaping identities. When asked if someone likes a disturbing film, natural answers include “It rings true,” “It’s delivering an important message,” or simply, “I relate to it.” Such answers indicate a link between cinema and the self. The sense of personal connectedness may be deepened by the fact that this link is experienced through embodied emotions.

Conclusions This discussion began with a review of emotion research and advanced the view that emotions are culturally scripted, valenced, embodied appraisals. Other affective states are close relatives; moods, for example, can be regarded as emotions that lack particular objects. Three broad topics were then taken up with

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respect to the relationship between affective states and motion pictures: attribution, arousal, and motivation. On the question of attribution, both biological and cultural factors were implicated, and it was suggested that we often identify emotions in films using narrative cues rather than facial expressions. On the question of arousal, it was suggested that movies can elicit genuine emotions, but these are usually more superficial than emotions in real life and aroused in somewhat different ways, including editing, lens effects, and genre conventions. In addressing motivation, the discussion focused on the paradox of painful art. After reviewing several theories, it was suggested that identity plays a role in motivating people to seek out films that arouse negative emotions. By way of conclusion, I want to briefly weave these strands together. The idea of social scripting that figured in the theory of emotions that was defended in section “Emotions and Other Affective States” is also crucial for attribution in cinematic contexts. Cultural knowledge dictates roles that emotions play in organizing behavior, and these roles get recapitulated in motion pictures, in a way that allows for reinforcement and facilitates attribution. Social norms also play a role in telling us how we should feel about various situations, and motion pictures provide opportunities to learn and act out those norms. In this light, the arousal of emotions in cinema is part of a socialization process and an exercise of cultural knowledge. Such emotions may be stereotyped and superficial, in part, because they are enactments of cultural norms. This, in turn, may relate to the role that cinematic emotions play in the expression of identity. By dividing motion pictures in genres and furnishing them with discernable emotion norms, moviemakers provide audiences with opportunities to express preferences that convey information about social identity: to like a movie is to be a person who values having certain kinds of feelings, and this confirms one’s self-conceptions and advertises one’s character to others.

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Zajonc, R.B. 2000. Feeling and Thinking: Closing the Debate over the Independence of Affect. In Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition, ed. J.P. Forgas, 31–58. New York: Cambridge University Press. Zentner, M., D. Grandjean, and K. Scherer. 2008. Emotions Evoked by the Sound of Music: Characterization, Classification, and Measurement. Emotion 8: 494–521. Zuckerman, M. 1979. Sensation Seeking: Beyond the Optimal Level of Arousal. Hillsdale: Eribaum.

CHAPTER 39

Psychoanalysis and the Philosophy of Film Nickolas Pappas

In the 1930s and 1940s, a type of psychoanalyst became a stock character in American films: male, foreign-accented, and able to reveal surprising truths about other characters. • “The love impulse in men very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict,” Fritz Lehman/Fritz Feld says in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks 1938), detecting David Huxley/Cary Grant’s attraction to Susan Vance/ Katharine Hepburn when Huxley hasn’t yet seen it himself. • In Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock 1945), John Ballantyne/Gregory Peck tells Dr. Brulov/Michael Chekhov that Freud is “a lot of hooey,” but Brulov isn’t offended and reads a dream of Ballantyne’s to open up one region of his repressed memory. It seems natural that film embraced psychoanalysis, for the two had grown up together. Significantly, both Lumière brothers were born during the decade after Freud’s birth. And yet from the other side, the embrace has had something awkward about it. The psychoanalytical study of film is uncertain, and partly because of that unsureness, worried that the uncertainty bespeaks an absence of rigor, English-speaking philosophy did not address the psychoanalysis of film until recent decades. Anglophone or analytic philosophy came late to the psychoanalysis of film for other reasons too. To begin with, neither film nor psychoanalysis individually had enjoyed much of a welcome in English-speaking philosophy, a philosophical tradition that said almost nothing about film, and very little (very little that was nice) about psychoanalysis, until the 1980s. The positivistic side of

N. Pappas (*) The Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_39

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analytic philosophy complained that psychoanalysis did not belong among the natural sciences. Such central Freudian doctrines as the unconscious and repression were deemed unverifiable, while the paths to those doctrines involved epistemically dubious methods like dream interpretation. Second, when the psychoanalytical treatment of film did begin to attract attention, it did so in a form that made it even more unpalatable to Anglophone philosophy. What has been called “film theory” since the 1970s includes psychoanalysis as that was reimagined by Jacques Lacan, together with elements of structuralism and Louis Althusser’s version of Marx—all products of the philosophical tradition that is native to the European continent. Philosophers do not resist either film or psychoanalysis as they once did, but the psychoanalytically informed study of film continues not to be generally accepted. In such a climate, a survey of the subject can only try to be broadly comprehensible, as opposed to being widely persuasive. Agreeing with some of the statements in this survey will be easier if you belong to one philosophical tradition rather than the other. Understanding the statements should be easy enough for everyone.

Questions About Applying Psychoanalysis Skeptical reactions to the psychoanalytic treatment of film can take the form of different challenges: 1. Why psychoanalysis? 2. Given psychoanalysis, why apply it to films, when there is no comparable tradition of psychoanalytic theories for other human products or activities (driving, soup, concrete)? 3. Given psychoanalysis applied to film, who or what is the object of analysis (analysand)? 4. Given an analysand, who or what functions as the executor of analysis (analyst)? The first question overrides the others. If psychoanalysis fails as an account of human thinking and behavior, we have no reason to appeal to it when seeking to understand a film. In agreement with the challenger who presses question (1), I grant that if this Freud stuff is a lot of hooey then its value in speaking about films is decided and done for. We don’t need the astrology of film because astrology is false. But it will have to be other people on some other occasion who settle the questions whether psychoanalysis rests on true doctrines, which doctrines in it are the true ones, and how the truth of those doctrines leads to effective treatment. It will be hard enough to say what psychoanalysis can do with film even on the assumption that it is indeed based on true principles and successful methods.

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So which form of psychoanalysis do we assume for argument’s sake? Psychoanalysis has changed considerably since Freud’s death. Even during his life—and at his instigation—the subject took significant turns. Do we equate psychoanalysis with some period of Freud’s thought, or do we follow the later Freudian Lacan, or do we move past both of them to the often very different practices that dominate the profession today? In the worst case, the discrepancy between psychoanalysis in clinical practice and psychoanalysis as used for talking about the arts could leave us with theorists applying a brand of the subject that analysts consider outmoded. Imagine a lay diagnostician who relied on the four humors to understand physical ailments. But then theories supersede the earlier versions of themselves in more than one way, certainly not always in revolutionary disruption. We should not assume that a change in psychoanalysis would leave Freud in Galen’s position, as someone at whom we lob a patronizing compliment now and then: “He knew about the compulsion to repeat!” If Freud were a Newton to today’s psychoanalysts, then Freudian principles might still work well enough for discussions of film. It helps the film-theoretic appropriator of psychoanalysis that theorists take up only some terms and tenets from what is a large, elaborate system with considerable technical vocabulary. For many aspects of film interpretation, critics with a Freudian orientation rely on castration and the attendant concept of fetishism; scopophilia is part of the story too; dream theory accounts for much of the critic’s methodology. Besides those elements, the return of the repressed and the Oedipal drama probably have to appear in any treatment called psychoanalytical. It would be fatal if psychoanalytically inclined film critics were still talking about repression when clinical practice had abandoned the term. But minor adjustments to clinical psychoanalysis should not be held against film theorists. To be sure, it remains a problem that we sometimes have trouble judging which discrepancies are major and minor. We go further afield with film theory that takes its foundations from Lacan, especially in the US where Lacan is more marginal to analytical practice than he is in some European countries. But again, only parts of Lacanian analysis find their way into the combination of principles that comprise film theory. Those parts may still lie outside the analytic mainstream, but they are few, not unduly obscure, and even plausible.

Plato on Poetry One way to bring forward the follow-up questions (2)–(4) is by turning away from psychoanalysis, and from film, and looking into the situation that Plato faced when (as especially in the Republic) he interrogated poetry as a whole, and that remarkable species of poetry that was Attic tragedy.

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In the ancient as in the modern case, a theory of the human soul is developed to account for conflicted behavior; then the theory is brought to bear on a complex product of human activity. Some parallel peculiarities of the application arise in the two instances, possibly implying trouble for the theories’ capacity to account for the dramatic practice. The essential text is Book 10 of the Republic, which begins with Socrates’ turning the conversation back to poetry that is “mimetic” (poetry that represents or emulates human beings). Socrates and his interlocutors have looked into this subject already in Book 3. But between that section of the Republic and this one, their argument has expanded to discover the parts of the human soul and the varieties of souls there are; Socrates now proposes to bring that psychological knowledge to illuminate poetic mimêsis. The Republic’s psychology differs from Freud’s in complexity, specificity, and explanatory power. Platonic psychology is an armchair theory. But just because it is simpler, and comes to us from a long time ago, it does not arouse the suspicions that psychoanalysis does. We can watch Plato’s effort to apply a psychological theory to a dramatic art temporarily not distracted by objections to the theory itself. Sometimes theorists bring Plato into film studies with references to the Republic’s allegory of the cave.1 It is an uncanny anticipation of cinema. Rows of spectators in a large dark room see light and shadow flickering on the wall before them and treat the projected shapes as if they were real. But the allegory of the cave communicates such a strictly hierarchical epistemology, and it deduces such patently authoritarian political implications from that epistemology, that it has questionable value for theorists of film who would want their politics and their epistemology not to fall into such moralizing patterns. To my mind, other Platonic turns of argument echo more precisely: ( 1) the perceived need for further explanation regarding poetry; (2) the refusal of pleasure among tragedy’s theorists; (3) the uncertainty over where the theory fits the dramatic object to be explained; and (4) ambiguity between the unconscious that is cognitively unknown and the disavowed unconscious.

Why Apply Psychoanalysis? Psychoanalysis already owes something to Plato when it identifies products of fine art, and not other cultural products, as calling for psychoanalytic inquiry. Literature and sculpture, along with religious beliefs and practices, have been treated as fair game for the analyst since Freud. But psychoanalysis in Freud’s 1  See, for example, Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974–1975): 45.

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day passed mutely over automobile tires and surgery, and as far as I know psychoanalysis passes over such things today. But then, Socrates at his trial distinguishes between the poets he talks to and the practitioners of a technê—wheelwrights, doctors, and so on. Those professionals know their occupations, only going wrong when their professional ­confidence leads them to imagine that they are experts about political matters as well. Poets do not even attain that limited degree of knowledge, since although the words they write are wise and beautiful, the poets themselves are hapless at explaining what they wrote. The poem is something of a reverse riddle stumping only the one who comes up with it.2 The essential idea is the pre-Freudian observation that artists don’t know everything there is to know about their own art. Socrates proposes divine possession to explain the peculiar talent a poet has. He invokes possession or inspiration again in Plato’s Phaedrus, grouping together erotic love, inspired verse, and charismatic religious behavior as divinely inspired.3 Freud would acknowledge the motive behind giving the credit to divinities, just as he recognizes why many cultures take dreams to have come from gods.4 Appealing to a divine or natural source tells you why poets make poetry that says more than their rational minds can grasp. Cobblers may have an excellent day at the last, but they rarely make a shoe beyond their comprehension, and they don’t imagine such a day of shoemaking as the goal of their efforts. Plato turns to the gods to account for what exceeds the reasonable or rational, as the appeal of a poem or play does, or as its evocative power does. Today, psychoanalysis offers itself as specifically the study of what exceeds the reasonable or rational. Poetry Without Pleasure Plato anticipates Freud in a more direct way when the Republic pits its theoretical understanding of poetry against the pleasure that poetry brings. No question that people enjoy tragedies, but Socrates begins his argument by setting aside his love for Homer, and he concludes by comparing a desire for poetry to the condition of being in love. Knowledge of the psychodynamic operations in tragedy will work as a “counter-charm” to those effects.5 The idea of psychoanalytic inquiry as a damper on pleasure goes back as far as Freud’s insistence on payment for analysts. Money will motivate the analysts lest something else motivate them. Analysts get paid to prove they don’t enjoy what they do.6 The abstemiousness in analysis has become a cliché: Finnegans  Plato Apology 22a–d.  Plato Phaedrus 244a–245a. 4  See, for example, Chapter 1 of On the Interpretation of Dreams. 5  Plato Republic: people enjoy tragedies, 604d, 607d; Socrates sets his own love of Homer aside, 595d; comparison to being in love, 607e; “counter-charm” to poetry’s effects, 608a. 6  On payment for treatment see, for example, Sigmund Freud, “On Beginning the Treatment” (1913), in Sigmund Freud et  al., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1966) 12:121–144. See Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1991), 61. 2 3

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Wake speaks of psychoanalysts’ “unsmiling bit” practiced on young women “when they were yung and easily freudened.”7 But the denial of pleasure also raises the specter of the popular complaint that an analytical reading takes the fun out of a film. Someone is viewing it who does not derive the usual pleasure there is to get. The popular complaint is related to Freud’s conception of an analyst’s pleasure. A contemporary analyst who writes about film worries that “many contemporary theorists, … in the anhedonic rigor of their enterprise … seem to view pleasure at the movies as a seduction away from clarity about the apparatus’ more doubtful operations.”8 Insofar as psychoanalytic interpreters of film identify themselves, as they sit in the audience, with analysts as traditionally portrayed, those interpreters are enjoined to deny themselves the pleasure and cathexis or emotional investment that other audience members experience. The specter of unwanted anhedonia forces us to ask how the analytic relationship translates to the relationship between audience members and films. Who plays the part of the analyst? And is there a way to identify the analysand? Ambiguity of Application The clearest moral of the story for psychoanalysis and film comes from a crucial ambiguity, in Republic Book 10, regarding how to apply theory about individual souls to a theatrical institution. If mimetic poetry does mean disease and debilitation,9 and people’s souls are at risk, which souls are they? There are the spectators of tragedy in the first place, whom tragedy renders less rational. But the imbalance in their souls follows from a prior imbalance in the playwright’s soul, together with his penchant for depicting maleficent spectacles. The playwright meanwhile harms his fellow citizens in the way he does because of what happens in the tragedies he writes. Given that mimetic poetry essentially represents human beings, and in light of the fact that dramatic characters attract attention in proportion to their own irrationality, the poets obligingly turn out gangs of sick people to strut and fret their hour upon the stage.10 Even assuming completeness within Plato’s theory, that is, assuming that the theory accounts for all character types and every kind of motive, the act of applying the theory to tragedy shows that such applications are underdetermined. A theory designed to explain a single human being is not likely to apply in a unique way to cooperative social actions. You can see Plato thinking that his theory explains the extreme personality types found in a tragedy, in the grip of strong emotions; or that it accounts for the quirky personality of a play-

 James Joyce Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin Books, 1939), 115.  H. R. Greenberg, Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 14. 9  Plato Republic 399e, 595b, 608a. 10  Plato Republic: tragedy’s spectators made less rational, 605b–c, 606a–c; playwright already irrational, 603a, 603b, 605a–b; mimetic poetry represents humans, 393b–c, 395c–396d, 605a; dramatic characters attract attention, 605a, 605c–d. 7 8

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wright; not to mention the deleterious effect that tragedy has on spectators. But tragedy as performance and practice includes all these personages at once. The parallel problem for psychoanalysis comes out of its paradigmatic application in the relationship between analyst and analysand. Either of the two can be in the position of knowing, and what is to be known is the analysand. The knowledge emerges from the relationship between them, as the two of them reflect on that relationship. So, studying film psychoanalytically first requires identifying the analysand whom psychoanalysis will seek to know. It may be too much to expect the inquiry to therapize the analysand that it helps to make known, though I wouldn’t want to rule that possibility out. As the business of refusing pleasure already implied, describing a model of psychoanalytic interpretation for film also entails finding someone who occupies the place of the analyst. This step complicates the Platonic analogy inasmuch as philosophers (as Plato conceives them) can take any phenomenon as their object of inquiry, while analysts investigate and come to know within a specifically defined relationship. Two Kinds of Unconscious One last argumentative turn from Plato will come up again when assessing film theory. That is, the ambiguity in a complex psychology concerning that which differs from the rational mind. In Republic Book 10, the ambiguity surfaces when Socrates is justifying his comparison between painting and poetry. Both are representational art forms and therefore ignorant. But to show how much worse poetry is than ignorant, Socrates argues that mimêsis means—in both art forms—an appeal to the worst part of the soul. A painting misleads perception in the way that perception is misled when a stick appears bent in the water. The part of the soul being deceived can’t be reason, so a painting appeals to something other than reason. Meanwhile, a tragedy displays hyper-impassioned displays of grief that stimulate that irrational element in the soul that good men normally restrain.11 This is a prima facie difficulty in the passage. No doubt being fooled by an optical illusion betrays some mental operation not identical to reason, and joining in an outsize emotional outburst also betrays a non-rational operation. But the two things that are not reason are not each other. Plato’s argument seems to elide perceptual processes with emotional judgments.

Pathography Of the four points common to Plato’s situation and the film-going analyst’s, the most telling must be the uncertainty about the object of inquiry. Somewhere in the interpretive process lies a subject who exhibits the drives and conflicts, and the special history, of the psychoanalytic patient. Somewhere stands the 11  Plato Republic: mimetic poetry like mimetic painting, 602c–605b; misled perception, 602c–603a; corrupted passions, 606a.

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analyst, equipped to identify the analysand’s blind spots and to see what they mean. Over the course of the time that psychoanalysis has been brought to the study of art works, it has reenacted the ambiguity in the Republic’s argument. The oldest psychoanalyzing of art, which looks like the most obvious (but maybe only because it has been around the longest), goes by the name “pathography.” Freud often reads artworks this way, as symptoms of the artist’s impulses.12 The novel, painting, sculpture, or film supplies material in need of interpreting, as a dream recounted during analysis does, or a parapraxis remembered or enacted during the analytic session. We transfer the relationship between analysand and analyst to the film or other artwork and its audience member. Familiar objections await the pathographic method. The analyst may know nothing about the maker of a work, in which case the work has to stand in for all other symptoms. That already makes for an unorthodox analytic setting, as does the problem that the presenting data in an analysis are supposed to be unworked: parapraxes, dreams, a spontaneous facial expression. By contrast, films and poems and other artworks are controlled products of human activity. In the case of a film, we also face the objection that many people collaborated to produce the object of inquiry. Do we analyze the director, the screenwriter, or someone else? The analogy to canonical analysis might not survive these objections, although it is not as vulnerable as it is sometimes taken to be. Regarding the putatively worked quality of the presenting symptom, it is worth pointing out that even controlled actions can betray a blind spot; also that artworks are very often not controlled. Paintings and movies derive much of their appeal from the way they contain elements that don’t add up, as it were the traces of a flurry of activity not entirely subject to the artist’s oversight (or, as you might say, susceptible to an oversight on the artist’s part). Finally, there is the objection that the analytical relationship implies roles for artist and critic that we may not want to assume: on the artist’s side an old Platonic stereotype about creativity and mental illness, on the analyst’s the problem of pleasure. Exemplary audience members are the ones who come to the theater seeking pleasure, whether the film that day provides the pleasure or fails to. But the model of the analyst that pathography presents us with is not allowed that familiar enjoyment. Despite the obvious appeal of pathography, it rests on a tenuous likeness between the clinical and the critical.

 Examples include Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming” (1908) Standard Edition 9:141–159; “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood,” Standard Edition 11:59–137. Also see Ronald Hayman, “Kafka and the Mice,” Partisan Review 48 (1981): 355–365. 12

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Character, Work From treating the artist or author as analysand we can move, sometimes imperceptibly, to putting individual characters in that place, or (more amorphously) making the work the analysand. This shift can be subtle when talking about the work or the character functions as shorthand for talking about the work’s author. Saying a plot turns out one way rather than another, or dwelling on a particular image or color, amounts to describing the artist’s obsessions or blindness. When Freud spoke of Oedipus, in Oedipus Tyrannus, he seems to have wanted to say something different from that. Oedipus killed his father and married his mother in ignorance and then draws the truth into the light, not because Sophocles fails to understand actual human drives, but as an image of the unconscious characteristics those drives have. Oedipus, not Sophocles, is the Oedipal character in that play.13 Ernest Jones followed Freud with an Oedipal reading of Hamlet according to which Hamlet is an Oedipus without the symbolism.14 Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father and married Hamlet’s mother—what Hamlet Oedipally wanted to do—and because Hamlet now sees himself in his uncle, he can’t avenge his father’s death without effectively killing himself. The repressed desire belongs to Hamlet.15 More recently, when the authors Krin Gabbard and Glen O. Gabbard turn from cinematic portrayals of analyst-figures to the analytic study of cinema, they explicitly choose the study of characters as the approach superior to a study of the filmmaker: “we attempt to analyze the fictional protagonists in these films as though they were real people.”16 Other psychoanalytically informed readings of films that do not come from the tradition of film theory connect analysis with film characters in the same way.17 And even independent of psychoanalysis, one may apply psychiatric categories to film categories, finding folie à deux in Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson 1994); mania in Adrian Cronauer/Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam (Barry Levinson 1987); 13  See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter 5 “The Material and Sources of Dreams,” Part D, “Typical Dreams.” Ernest Jones’s approach to Hamlet is also partly anticipated in the same section. 14  Ernest Jones, “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive,” The American Journal of Psychology 21, no. 1 (1910): 72–113. 15  Jones’s reading of Hamlet collapses at times into a reading of Shakespeare, as when Jones remarks that “this conflict is an echo of a similar one in Shakspere [sic] himself,” in “The OedipusComplex,” 102. 16  Krin Gabbard and Glen O.  Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 187. 17  For examples of such readings see Glen O. Gabbard, ed., Psychoanalysis and Film (London, New York: Karnac Books, 2001), a compilation of film reviews originally written for a psychoanalytic journal. Analysis of fictional characters seems to be the approach assumed by Barbara Creed, “Film and Psychoanalysis,” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 77–90.

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dissociative fugue state in Travis Henderson/Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders 1984).18 Alternatively, readings may use the structure of the films to show something about the structure and progress of psychoanalytic thoughts in life, reading a film as if it were a dream (without a dreamer).19 Because the souls under review now belong to fictional characters, understanding them psychoanalytically might strike some philosophers as a contradiction in terms. The problem is not, as a simplistic objection might put it, that anxieties and neuroses are traits of existing beings, therefore inapplicable to fictional characters. Such “logical” objections go too far. (Those who order pizza exist, so it would have to follow that fictional characters don’t order pizza.) But something serious lies behind one’s discomfort at calling a character neurotically blocked, or a repressed homosexual; that is, that one cannot observe a character as one observes a human being. Not the bare or logical fact of a character’s fictional status, but something that follows from the fact, drives this objection. One feature of fictional characters is that only very limited information about them is available. Very ordinary questions about human beings make no sense when asked about the fictional kind—the question, for example, whether they play the piano. In Time Out of Mind (Oren Moverman 2014), it turns out that George/Richard Gere does and Dixon/Ben Vereen probably does not, although it remains a question about Dixon whether he has lost his ability to play or was lying about his musical past all along. In most films, for most of the characters in them, there are no grounds for either affirming or denying that they play the piano, nor grounds for asking. The absence of information about the character’s playing renders the so-called fact not a secret but an externality. This specific quality of fictional people limits the analytical readings one can make of such people. When a film presents its character with cherry-picked symptoms, a good observer will notice the repressed love or shamed sadism. Nevertheless, the objection’s impatience speaks to a significant difference between real and fictional humans and what we can know of either one. Not having a literal analysand to study is closer to a fatal obstacle when interpreters speak of the work: the film as a whole, in this case. “Ruby wanted to find the right career for her” means something even when Ruby is fictional, as it means something to say “Ruby ran into trouble with her boss.” But “Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nuñez 1993) wanted to find the right career” and “Ruby

18  These examples can all be found in David J. Robinson, Reel Psychiatry: Movie Portrayals of Psychiatric Conditions (Port Huron, Michigan: Rapid Psychler Press, 2003): folie à deux, 49; mania, 77; dissociative fugue state, 159. 19  For a reading that takes a film as the recapitulation of dream-formation, see Stanley R. Palombo, “Hitchcock’s Vertigo: The Dream Function in Film,” in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 44–63. On the same subject, see Sue Thornham, Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory (London: Arnold, 1997), 40.

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in Paradise ran into trouble with her boss” are not even in the running for statements about the film. Films don’t dream any more than they get fired. Whichever puzzles arise about psychoanalyzing the souls of the non-­existent, it makes at least one significant improvement over pathography. Although some readings of characters seem to be roundabout ways of reading the filmmakers, and character analysis then collapses into pathography, films can be conscious enough of their characters’ depths to make the film something we learn from rather than learn about. There is precedent for this attitude. When psychoanalysts praise creative writers for anticipating psychoanalytic ideas, they seem to treat the characters as potential analysands. Dostoevsky makes Raskolnikov alternate between grandiosity and self-abasing enervation because he saw that these superficially opposite states of mind could appear together in a narcissistic personality. Diagnosing Raskolnikov as a narcissist does not surreptitiously make Dostoevsky one too. On the contrary, it puts him in the position of a keen observer—or, if you want to use this language, the position of an analyst. We can learn psychoanalytically from a film like The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke 2001), whose character Erika Kohut/Isabelle Huppert first becomes known to the audience as the center of a masochistic fantasy she controls. Watching the system of her fantasy come undone, just when she thinks she will be enacting it with Walter Klemmer/Benoît Magimel, forces the viewer to ask what can lead a fantasy of control to collapse. Does Erika’s imagined loss of control (a loss of control that she controls by fantasizing it) fall apart on its own terms, seeking as it does to set the terms by which someone else will be able to set the terms of her experience? In that case, the film proposes a model for desire as the desire for what cannot be possessed. On the other hand, that student Walter who recoils at the details of Erika’s fantasy might not be the healthy innocent who stumbled into a strange woman’s personal mythology. From his first appearance in the film, Walter makes a display of his own desire for her. If he can turn his desire on and off, then he has already staged the failure of her masochism, regardless of the machinations with which she tries to manipulate his desire. Knowing how to understand Walter, and how far to implicate him in Erika’s incapacity to seek her own desire, takes some reflecting on this film. And I would say that we reflect with the thought that the film has presented these characters judiciously, knowingly, the film functioning more as an expert than as a fellow sufferer. We can probably all name films that we experience as knowledgeable about their characters. In Pretty Poison (Noel Black 1968), Dennis Pitt/Anthony Perkins comes to realize that Sue Ann Stepanek/Tuesday Weld has antisocial capacities exceeding his own. Did his tale of being a secret agent neutralize her inhibitions and let her act like a criminal, or did he simply fail to see what she had always been prepared to let herself do? As Piano Teacher does, Pretty Poison holds out the promise of enlightenment about its characters. Accordingly, we put these films’ makers in the role of mentors or supervising analysts rather than analysands. Granting the author or artist the role of psychoanalytic authority signals a move beyond Plato. Until this point, a psychoanalytic study of film could

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resemble a philosopher’s look at tragedy. But making the tragic poet one’s teacher does more than change the Republic’s argument, for it is the state of affairs that the Republic’s argument is an argument against. Whatever else Plato wanted to do with his theory of poetic representation, he could not have seen the mimetic poet as a tutor to philosophers. And psychoanalysis seems to have learned, faster than philosophy did, how to cede authority to the descendants of mimetic poets.

The Special Case of Analysts in Films A film with an analyst among its characters has the opportunity to play up its role as tutor and as repository of understanding about its own characters. Sometimes resembling Dostoevsky’s character Porfiry Petrovich, the analyst-­ characters in films personify the films’ capacity to know another character’s suffering, but also to personify the limits to that capacity. In some instances, films depict famous real-life analysts: John Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) and A Dangerous Method (David Cronenberg 2011), which covers episodes from the life of Carl Jung. These films take seriously their responsibility for showing psychoanalysts as they come to know their patients. Maybe because the films also tell conventional biographies, the analyst-figures—depicted as they are in the process of developing their theories—don’t function only as instructors in psychoanalytic understanding. With A Dangerous Method especially the presence of several psychoanalytical thinkers at once leaves the question hanging: which one knows the woman? Carl Jung/Michael Fassbender and Sigmund Freud/Viggo Mortensen are joined in the act of theory-development by Jung’s patient Sabina Spielrein/ Keira Knightley, whose paper on “Destruction” comes to influence Freud, though evidently not Jung. “Destruction as the Cause of Coming into Being” argues for a bivalence in the reproductive drive, making the reproductive drive a basis for both creation and self-destruction, hence accounting for how careers progress or fail to. Meanwhile, in the film, Freud advances his analytical ambitions as a clinical theorist while Jung veers toward the paranormal. Against the elementary thought that one of those two is right about the other, the film asks whether Spielrein views both men with the greatest accuracy. This is serious thinking, though possibly more as propaedeutic to analysis than as its practice. Hollywood has populated its films with a variety of psychiatrists or psychoanalysts, beginning with versions who border on the quack, then embracing psychotherapy in films that make treatment the solution to their plots, then (especially in the 1970s) casting therapists as agents of repression. In the 1980s, Gabbard and Gabbard’s Psychiatry and the Cinema, already mentioned, sketched a history of filmic portrayals of mental-health professionals.20 There  As they observe starting off their study, a “psychiatrist” is often equated with other figures. “American films have never completely succeeded in distinguishing psychiatrists from psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, and other therapists”: Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema, xvii. 20

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are exceptions to their grand narrative, and judgments to which one may take exception, but the book gives a good idea of the range of functions that analytical observers can have from within a film’s story.21 One might specifically take exception to Gabbard and Gabbard’s tendency to find the earliest depictions of psychiatrists negative, including those in Bringing Up Baby and Spellbound.22 Cary Grant’s character really does exhibit his love for Susan Vance “in terms of conflict.” Fittingly, he declares his love as the dinosaur skeleton he has assembled crashes down in front of them. If Dr. Brulov in Spellbound does not solve the mystery of John Ballantyne, he does bring Ballantyne to remember his name and elicits the dream from him that another analyst will finally decipher. The Gabbards are right, on the other hand, to play up a feature of movie-­ psychiatry that both falsifies the analytical method and would stand in the way of applying that method to film. The breakthrough insight solves a problem suddenly in Spellbound, as it does in Huston’s Freud. In Freud’s early Studies on Hysteria (1895), patients achieved the curative effect by recovering repressed memories, but that is a highly misleading depiction (at best) of how analysis works.23 But another analyst figure in the earlier Hollywood appears as both authoritative and effective, without the pizzazz of sudden interpretive insight: Dr. Jaquith/Claude Rains, who treats Charlotte Vale/Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper 1942), and guides her actions through to the end of that film. Stanley Cavell has noted the film’s self-conscious reference to Freud, as for instance in the inverted manner in which Jaquith’s initial relationship with Charlotte evokes Freud’s recommendations for beginning treatment. And even Jaquith’s effectiveness, as Cavell reads it, delivers a lesson to the audience’s would-be analysts. Charlotte comes to the conclusion, which more or less emerges with her declaration, that she is unknown. This is the name for the therapeutic effect when it reminds analysts of their limits while letting analysands claim their integrity or privacy.24 In Charlotte’s condition of remaining unknown (as in the general sense that Now, Voyager communicates, that Jaquith succeeds by means of love not merely expertise), the film proposes that psychoanalytic readings will distort the value in psychoanalysis if they aim at a complete reckoning of characters.

21   Also see Laurel Samuels, “Female Psychotherapists as Portrayed in Film, Fiction and Nonfiction,” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 13 (1985): 367–378. Samuels finds mostly negative portrayals of women therapists, until nearly the time of her writing of the article. 22  Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema: ineffectual quack in Bringing Up Baby, 58; unrealistic cathartic cure in Spellbound, together with (another) psychiatrist as villain, 63. 23  Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema: onscreen breakthrough insights, 37; in Spellbound, 63; in Freud, 109. 24  Stanley Cavell, “The Image of the Psychoanalyst in Film” [2000], in William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 295–304.

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The thought of psychoanalysis leaving someone unknown also indirectly comments on one sub-genre of the film with the analyst in it, namely the sub-­ genre in which the analyst is a detective. In both older and recent films, analysts have either functioned as detectives or been actual detectives with psychoanalytic insight. Thus, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock 1960) closed with Dr. Fred Richman/Simon Oakland explaining the unresolved Oedipal relations that brought Norman Bates to absorb his mother’s personality into his own.25 Some criminals need to be understood before they can be apprehended, and so the analyst-detective becomes the source for psychoanalytic insight within a movie plot. But it takes a duller sensibility for the analyst to advance a plot about crime detection. A mystery story needs a guilty party, not someone who feels guilty— taking the difference between the two as Nietzsche does when he calls sinfulness “not a Thatbestand but rather the interpretation of a Thatbestand” (facts of the case, corpus delicti). The flatfoot as headshrinker keeps everyone’s attention on the facts of the case even when we want an acknowledgment of the suffering patient, and when psychoanalytical practice would work best by acknowledging the limits beyond which the suffering patient can be known.

Film Theory What is most often called the psychoanalytic treatment of film today goes beyond the options sketched so far. It returns us to general questions about which kind of psychoanalysis is at work in the study of film, whom the theory applies to (filmmaker, spectator, etc.), and what mechanisms it seeks to unearth; but new questions about method and doctrine are also at stake now. Attention shifts to the spectator in psychoanalytic film theory since the 1970s. Because elements of structuralism and Marxism also enter into theory to a degree that this survey cannot do justice to, I will remain focused on what is distinctly psychoanalytic—which means, what is derived from Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis. Because Lacanian psychoanalysis is itself much disputed, as the film theory based on it also can be, I have covered general issues before coming to this species of film-psychoanalysis. Among the Lacanian concepts not found (or not found under those names) in Freud are the imaginary, as that is said to arise in the mirror stage, and the symbolic, which one experiences upon entering into language. The threat of castration and the fetishism resulting from that threat persist from Freud to Lacan, albeit in modified form, and they figure especially in some versions of Lacanian theory. The first uses of Lacan for discussing film began with a very early part of his theory, which would end up playing a minor role in his overall conception of 25  Another example, from early in film history, is Blind Alley (Charles Vidor, 1939), with Ralph Bellamy as the detecting psychiatrist: Gabbard and Gabbard, Psychiatry and the Cinema, 17. More recently, see Final Analysis (Phil Joanou, 1992), Side Effects (Steven Soderbergh, 2013).

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psychoanalysis. The mirror stage, the stage of an infant’s first comprehending look into the mirror, captures the genesis of the Lacanian imaginary. Your reflection looks more coherent than you feel yourself to be, so your foundational conception of yourself already entails an act of imagination. The similarities to watching a film let theorists enlarge Lacan’s mirror stage into an account of spectators in the theater. As the baby sees a perfected version of itself in the mirror, the spectator looks at the mirror-like movie screen and sees movie people like perfected versions of himself. He identifies with the eyes of the camera so that the film-viewing experience constitutes him as a subject, as his emergent self-consciousness had constituted him as a subject back during infancy. Jean-Louis Baudry spells out a version of the argument in “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” For Baudry, cinema constructs an ego ideal of the human being as viewing subject. “Just as the mirror assembles the fragmented body in a sort of imaginary integration of the self, the transcendental self [i.e., of the observing subject] unites the discontinuous fragments of phenomena … into unifying meaning.” By the “apparatus” Baudry means everything that goes into producing an illusion on the screen of coherent objects and continuous movements. The photographs contained in a film, taken individually, are still photos. “The projection operation (projector and screen) restore continuity of movement and the temporal dimension to the sequence of static images.”26 Baudry appeals to psychoanalytic explanation at this point. Because discontinuity characterizes the unconscious, our perception of continuity in film represents unconscious cognitive process made conscious: “the mechanical apparatus both selects the minimal difference [between two frames] and represses it in projection, so that meaning can be constituted: it is at once direction, continuity, movement.”27 The young child enters the stage of the imaginary by identifying with the coherent body in the mirror, forgetting the experience of multiplicity that preceded that self-discovery or discovery of selfhood. The metaphorical child at the movies analogously identifies with the coherent viewing experience that methods of continuity make possible on the screen. If the first mirroring let you have a body, this one lets you become a transcendental subject. Films as such effect this fantasy, in the way that mirrors as such effected the literal ­imaginary. “Ultimately, the forms of narrative adopted, the ‘contents’ of the image, are of little importance so long as an identification remains possible.”28 The mirror stage can’t do the work of a complete psychoanalytic theory. Daniel Dayan and Christian Metz made theory more fully Lacanian at the same time that they tried to make it more specific to film. Writing when Baudry did, Dayan elucidated the “suture,” a method of point-of-view editing in which one 26  Baudry, “Ideological Effects”: “Just as the mirror assembles,” 45–46; “the projection operation,” 42. 27  Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 43. 28  Baudry, “Ideological Effects,” 46.

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shot depicts the person’s looking and the next shows what that person’s looking at. The first shot creates the possibility of doubt or mistrust regarding what the camera sees, as it were a recognition that sights are available to the camera and not to the film viewer. (In Baudry’s terms, this mistrust might imply doubt about whether the viewer is after all a transcendental subject.) The second shot resolves the anxiety, making the unseen object available to the spectator. Thus, the system of suturing in general “is built so as to mask the ideological origin and nature of cinematographic statements.”29 Metz’s Imaginary Signifier takes the theory deeper into psychoanalytic waters. In a general sense he is guided by Lacan’s reinterpretation of gratification, now no longer the attainment of what is lacking or lost but, as it were, a pleasure in desiring what is not attained. To the mirror stage and associated process of identification Metz adds the Lacanian treatment of scopophilia and exhibitionism, along with the complex of castration and the subsequent evolution of fetish. The small boy discovers the fact of castration and compensates for this frightening enlightenment by fixating on the fetish object—underwear, for instance—that hides the fact of the castration while also teasingly keeping the fact in view; so too cinematic representation mostly or teasingly protects the viewer from the fact that the objects depicted are not there in the room with him.30 You watch the reckless car chase in The Seven-Ups (Philip D’Antoni 1973), and it’s terrifying to see people rush out of the street just in time to save their lives. There is no car chase in the movie theater, though, any more than there is a penis on a woman. To be sure, that exact analogy might not have occurred to you. No one reassures children at the movies saying “That monster is nothing to worry about: it’s like a woman’s penis.” Regardless, to the spectator who identifies himself with the viewing of the film, himself therefore a coherent viewer of real objects, the sense of self evanesces with the reality of the represented object. You are a viewer of the fictional screen who possesses integrity as one who sees and knows on the assumption that what you see exists.31 Conscious of its non-existence, you disavow the absence and attach your desire to what is there: film, projection. By bringing what is nearly a car chase into the theater, the film distracts you from the fact of its absence; yet the fact that you don’t have to run for the exit serves as that fetish object’s reminder that in fact an absence underlies what can seem to be present.32

 Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1974): 22.  Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1977): scopophilia, castration, fetish, 69; cinematic representation teasingly protects the viewer, 69–72. 31  I take Metz on castration and the fetish in these terms following Barbara Creed, “Film and Psychoanalysis.” I hate to endorse my gloss completely. Although this reading makes Metz’s view truer, it also threatens to return it to a mirror-stage analysis of the viewer, in which what always can only be at stake is the imaginary ego ideal. 32  This paragraph has been informed and aided by Ben Singer, “Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz,” Cinema Journal 27, no. 4 (1988): 4–22; and by Jacqueline Rose, 29 30

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Audience as Analysand The film theory that grows out of such observations has at least two advantages for anyone who cares about film and psychoanalysis. First, these theorists at their best attend to technical details about filmmaking and film experience: continuity, editing, camera angles. They do not lump movies, stories, and songs together into a single illustration of psychoanalytic processes. Second, film theory of this kind aligns the analytic session with film interpretation by resolving Plato’s ambiguity in favor of the audience. The analysand is no longer the filmmaker; no longer the non-human film character or the non-­ person film; the analysand is there in the theater, concrete and available to be studied. Identifying the analysand does not solve the problem of the analyst’s identity, and this matters more than because filling in analogies brings satisfaction. As problematic as it was to treat a film as a symptom, at least we saw who was doing that. But now the observant audience member seems to have turned into the one being analyzed. So who analyzes? Although Lacan’s own approach to literary works makes the most sense as a treatment of work as analysand,33 there is also a strain in his writing that puts the work in the role of analyst.34 Coming from a different engagement with psychoanalysis and with different aims, Cavell has explicitly proposed treating the film as the analyst.35 That might sound anthropomorphic, but it makes psychodynamic sense. As audience member you form a cathexis to the film; then you find yourself treating it according to your own narrative needs; but the film resists your attempts, as analysts resist the analysand’s effort to make them a cold father, a forgiving mother, and so on. When the film does not do what your fantasies would have it do, you are thrown back on your fantasies with a chance to ask why you wished for, or expected, this development or image or act rather than another. That scenario of spectatorial transference is not Lacanian or even necessarily Freudian. It only suggests one way in which film as analyst could make sense in “The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theory,” in Stephen Heath and Teresa de Lauretis, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 172–186. 33  Thus, see his reading of Poe, which bypasses the author in favor of discussing the characters and narrative structures: Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” [1966], trans. Jeffrey Mehlman Yale French Studies 48 (1973): 39–72. 34  Shoshana Felman puts the point explicitly, writing that for Lacan, “The status of the poet is no longer that of the (sick) patient but, if anything, that of the analyst”: “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Approaches,” in John P. Muller and William J.  Richardson, eds., The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988), 152. I should caution that Lacan’s own reading method has been characterized in incompatible ways by his adherents; E. Ann Kaplan, for instance, writes that he “takes the character rather than the author as a kind of case history”: “From Plato’s Cave to Freud’s Screen,” in Kaplan, ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 4. But the character exists as case history for the analyst (Lacan, for instance). 35  See below for more comments on Cavell and the psychoanalytical treatment of film.

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everyday film viewing. Without film as analyst, the analyst returns to the audience, as if to sit down next to the analysand. This makes better literal sense, in that two human beings are now functioning as members of the analytic session. But it implies (as Plato’s cave does) that some people in the audience remain gulled by the apparatus while others see through its illusion and explain the big lie to the benighted. The threat also arises that no one in the audience manages to escape the film’s effects. It is sometimes said that the apparatus blinds spectators as such to the ideological effect of the film spectacle.36 But then theory’s own existence becomes something of a wonder. The other option, that analysts and analysands sit together in the theater, leads into other questions about the spectator that I will return to in connection with feminist critics of theory. For now, the theoretical approach faces at least one challenge as a study of film, and another challenge as psychoanalysis. As a study of film, theory risks losing sight of films’ individual qualities. When Baudry declares the “contents” of the image to be “of little importance,” he means that films work as they do thanks to the photographic and social arrangements that issue in a screening. The camera, the cutting, and the sense of movement all render you a watching subject almost regardless of what is on the screen. Similarly, Dayan’s reading of the “suture” treats that shot sequence so generally that its relevant effects could come from just about any film.37 Something has gone wrong with an interpretive approach when it loses the power to tell one film from another. More recent Lacanian criticism has responded to this challenge, registering and seeking to explain specific features of the films being studied. But to achieve this acknowledgment of differences between films, interpreters have had to mute the totalizing account of spectatorial experience that analysis of the apparatus originally implied. One Lacanian commentator on film, Todd McGowan, responds to the differences among films by uncovering the strategies by which films, some films, use cinematic fantasy to show how objects of desire remain unattainable. Thus, 36  See Baudry, “Ideological Effects”; also Dayan, “Tutor-Code.” Dayan does write, by way of offering a way out of the cave: “When I occupy the place of the subject, the codes which led me to occupy this place become invisible to me. The signifiers of the presence of the subject disappear from my consciousness because they are the signifiers of my presence... If I want to understand the painting and not just be instrumental in it as a catalyst to its ideological operation, I must avoid the empirical relationship it imposes on me” (27). Still I find it telling that this strategy is defined in entirely negative terms: “avoid the empirical relationship … refuse that identification.” We understand what not to do but not what will bring that liberation. 37  On this point and for other telling arguments against Dayan, see William Rothman, “Against ‘The System of the Suture,’” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (1975): 45–50. More broadly, for critical assessments of several strands of psychoanalytic apparatus theory, see Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and on the uses of psychoanalysis in horror films particularly, “Psychoanalysis and the Horror Film,” in Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 145–157.

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in his reading of Paris, Texas, McGowan shows how an analysis of a character’s desire leads back to the desire of the spectator. Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick 1999) leads the spectator into fantasy of wealth to show the “obscene enjoyment” that wealth pays for.38 But it should be noted that McGowan preserves the differences among these films by returning to an older variety of criticism in which the fictional characters are the analysands, being scrutinized by filmmaker and viewer together. Then, considered as psychoanalysis, a reading like Baudry’s or Metz’s runs into a theoretical problem I observed in the Republic. In his effort to make painting an analogue to dramatic poetry, Plato equated the irrationality of a morally neutral cognitive process, perceiving a stick in water as bent, with the irrationality of a morally significant affective process. This ambiguity returns when Baudry speaks of continuous motion unconsciously constituted out of discrete still images, or when Metz equates disavowing the non-existence of the careening car with disavowing the non-existence of the mother’s penis. The arguments in Baudry and Metz conflate any cognitive process one does not observe (even happens not to) with a thought one does not let oneself observe. Baudry even says the differences between still images are “repressed” to create an illusion of smooth motion. That word is unfortunate. We have no reason to repress the constituents of cinematic technology as taboo or unacceptable. We simply don’t perceive them. Likewise, the speeding car’s unreality does not horrify me in anything like the way that the threat of castration does. Even if my coherence as perceiving subject requires the object of my perception to be real, as I suggested earlier, that coherence is a matter of my capacity for cognition. To equate a threat to my cognitive capacities with the threat posed by my mother’s castrated nature begs the question by making cognitive error already tantamount to what is irrationally horrifying. It may well be that I unconsciously respond to the reckless car with the flinches I would use in real life. Call that a “friendly unconscious” state in which my mental processes operate. I couldn’t say how I experience continuous motion, or how I cross the street in time when a car is coming, or call one color a shade of red when a very similar color looks like a shade of blue. These are unconscious, but I am not invested in disavowing them. And what goes unnoticed because it is automatic or done unthinkingly rarely matches up with what is unknown because it has been disavowed. If we distinguish the two kinds of unconscious thought that the theorists’ arguments run together, it becomes harder to call the resulting account of film spectatorship psychoanalytic. The tricks of editing may still be “lying” to moviegoers, but we are no longer in the situation of discovering people lying to themselves.

38  Todd McGowan, The Real Gaze: Film Theory after Lacan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007): excesses of fantasy in film, 25; Paris, Texas, 198–199; Eyes Wide Shut, 46.

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Feminist Theory As dismaying as one must find the prospect of all films’ looking alike, erasing differences among spectators is what really leaves the theory open to attack. One of its advantages had been just that it turned from the fool’s errand of “explaining the work” to consider the spectator. It forsakes that advantage if it requires the conclusion that all subjects being constituted are alike. Worse, the analysis makes this all-purpose spectator a man. When summarizing Baudry and Metz’s theories, I sometimes shifted from gender-neutral language to masculine words about the spectator (“film-viewing experience constitutes him as a subject,” etc.). This was to reflect the criticism, made from within psychoanalytic theory, that the masculine subject is in fact all the theory ended up accounting for. “What we are faced with is another theory of Man, another essentializing gesture.”39 Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”40 participates in the feminist dissatisfaction with psychoanalytic film theory, while still arguing from within that theory’s general parameters. Mulvey joins Baudry and Metz in seeking to understand the looking that takes place both in a film (by its characters) and at it (by the audience). But she takes them to have repeated the ideology of the narrative film when they meant to be interrogating it. They naturally imagine the spectator as male, given the way films have separated masculine and feminine roles within their story lines and consequently in their audiences. Film narratives put men in the position of doing, women in roles to have them looked at; and the men and women who watch a film that presupposes this gender differentiation divide up their spectatorial roles accordingly. The active male gaze is canonical inasmuch as the film’s women have been assigned to their passive position as objects of the gaze, and also inasmuch as the film instigates male activity. Thus, according to Mulvey, fantasies of active looking do not follow immediately from the moviemaking world that creates the film experience as such, but rather indicate how thoroughly patriarchy controls the world in which movies are made. To my mind, Mulvey reads as more plausibly psychoanalytic than the theorists she criticizes. She retains their focus on the person of the spectator as analysand; but rather than look for unconscious processes implicit in a film’s formal properties alone, she finds them in deeply ingrained ideas of male and female—which is to say, ideas we have good reason not to want to examine. Returning to the fetishistic response to cinema, Mulvey refuses to let that response stand as the reaction experienced by “the viewing subject.” It is about 39  Mary Ann Doane, “Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Constructions in Film Theory,” in Kaplan, ed., Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 55. On this failing of masculinist psychoanalytic theory, see Joan Copjec, “The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine,” October 23 (1982): 43–59; David N. Rodowick, “The Difficulty of Difference,” Wide Angle 5, no. 1 (1982): 4–15; Thornham, Passionate Detachments, 39–40. 40  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18.

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men viewing women. As a result, the disavowal at work is not a mere analogy about film viewing but a sexually significant description of the male regard of women, and disregard for them. Especially in the first years after publishing “Visual Pleasure,” Mulvey faced the criticism that her account too would reduce most films to a single reading. She wrote a later “Afterthoughts” partly in response to that criticism and indicated the opportunities still available to her for differentiating among films.41 Thus her intent at least, and the intent of other theorists, has been to find ways of talking psychoanalytically about films and their viewers while still differentiating among the objects of their analyses.

Stanley Cavell Stanley Cavell’s influence on the study of film by Anglophone philosophers draws on more than psychoanalysis; and it comes in for separate discussion in this collection. But it is worth a mention here because Cavell was an early exception both to analytic philosophers’ silence about film and to their resistance to psychoanalysis. He was also early within the tradition to combine the subjects and speak psychoanalytically about film. Although psychoanalysis figures in Cavell’s Pursuits of Happiness, on the Hollywood comedy of remarriage, his later exploration of the companion genre “melodrama of the unknown woman” includes more psychoanalytical discussions as well as reflections on how psychoanalysis applies to movies.42 Cavell responds to the work of Lacan and seems sympathetic to film theory’s way of mapping the analytical relationship onto film spectatorship, with analysands in the audience.43 Yet his work bears little resemblance to the writings of Baudry, Metz, and others. Aside from stylistic considerations, one reason for the difference is that Cavell does not expect readings of films to follow from their technical or formal features. An account of the apparatus will not carry psychoanalytic meaning. The meanings will come from developments that occur in individual films and groups or genres of films. Thus, Cavell retains the concerns that motivated pathography and the analysis of characters, despite declining to return to those well-worn paths. The historical contemporaneity of film and psychoanalysis gains additional significance, for Cavell, from the interest that both those pursuits take in the woman,44 or as he also understands that point, in what is feminine about 41  Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946),” Framework 15–16–17 (1981): 12–25. 42  Stanley Cavell: Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 43  See Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman,” in Smith and Kerrigan, eds., Images in Our Souls, 11–43. 44  Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema,” 29.

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humanity.45 The combined attention to women’s action and passion by film and psychoanalysis can be taken as rendering women the objects of our scrutiny, were it not that film, as much as psychoanalysis, addresses itself to “the knowing of women.” By that phrase Cavell leaves himself open to meaning the project of understanding what a woman is but also to the knowing that is hers, her knowingness. In his effort to stay away from both simplistic pathography and the fantasy-­ analysis of fictional characters, Cavell does share values with practitioners of Lacanian film theory. Besides his other differences from them, he is first of all more immersed in the psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical writings of Freud than they are, and secondly more concerned to remain in communication with the tradition of modern philosophy. Film study of the variety that he practices, that includes speaking about film psychoanalytically, is supposed to be part of the larger enterprise of determining what philosophers can and should do with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis posed a challenge to modern philosophy that philosophy has not yet fully met; film study offers a location in which the two might join in a productive conversation. For these last reasons on top of the others mentioned, philosophers who want to study film might find Cavell a more congenial guide than other psychoanalytic theorists.

Bibliography Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1974–1975. Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus. Trans. Alan Williams. Film Quarterly 28: 39–47. Carroll, Noël. 1988. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2013. Psychoanalysis and the Horror Film. In Minerva’s Night Out: Philosophy, Pop Culture, and Moving Pictures, 145–157. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1984. On Makavejev on Bergman. In Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes, 106–140. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1987. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. In Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 11–43. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1997. Contesting Tears: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2005. The Image of the Psychoanalyst in Film [2000]. In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 295–304. Albany: SUNY Press. Copjec, Joan. 1982. The Anxiety of the Influencing Machine. October 23: 43–59. Creed, Barbara. 1998. Film and Psychoanalysis. In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, 77–90. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 45  See Cavell, “On Makavejev on Bergman,” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 106–140; especially 137–138. On this point also see Timothy Gould, “Stanley Cavell and the Plight of the Ordinary,” in Smith and Kerrigan, Images in Our Souls, 109–136.

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Dayan, Daniel. 1974. The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema. Film Quarterly 28: 22–31. Felman, Shoshana. 1988. On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Approaches. In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P.  Muller and William J.  Richardson, 133–156. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Freud, Sigmund, James Strachey, Anna Freud, and Angela Richards. 1966. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press. Gabbard, Glen O., ed. 2001. Psychoanalysis and Film. London/New York: Karnac Books. Gabbard, Krin, and Glen O.  Gabbard. 1987. Psychiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gould, Timothy. 1987. Stanley Cavell and the Plight of the Ordinary. In Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 109–136. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Greenberg, H.R. 1993. Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch. New York: Columbia University Press. Hayman, Ronald. 1981. Kafka and the Mice. Partisan Review 48: 355–365. Jones, Ernest. 1910. The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive. The American Journal of Psychology 21: 72–113. Kaplan, E.  Ann. 1990. From Plato’s Cave to Freud’s Screen. In Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 1–23. New York/London: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 1973. Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ [1966]. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Yale French Studies 48: 39–72. McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan. Albany: SUNY Press. Metz, Christian. 1977. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16: 6–18. ———. 1981. Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946). Framework 15–16–17: 12–25. Palombo, Stanley R. 1987. Hitchcock’s Vertigo: The Dream Function in Film. In Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis, and Cinema, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, 44–63. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robinson, David J. 2003. Reel Psychiatry: Movie Portrayals of Psychiatric Conditions. Port Huron: Rapid Psychler Press. Rodowick, David N. 1982. The Difficulty of Difference. Wide Angle 5: 4–15. Rose, Jacqueline. 1980. The Cinematic Apparatus: Problems in Current Theory. In The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Stephen Heath and Teresa de Lauretis, 172–186. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rothman, William. 1975. Against ‘The System of the Suture’. Film Quarterly 29: 45–50. Samuels, Laurel. 1985. Female Psychotherapists as Portrayed in Film, Fiction and Nonfiction. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 13: 367–378. Singer, Ben. 1988. Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz. Cinema Journal 27: 4–22. Thornham, Sue. 1997. Passionate Detachments: An Introduction to Feminist Film Theory. London: Arnold. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.

PART X

Alternative Media

CHAPTER 40

The Television Medium Ted Nannicelli

What is television? This is perhaps the most obvious philosophical question one might ask about television today—not because definitional questions are of intrinsic interest but because what we call “television” is rapidly and undeniably changing in a number of ways. Television used to be something in your living room to which you could point. What you watched was deeply connected to how and where you watched it. True, one encountered on television old movies that once screened in cinemas. But the only context in which one could watch original television content was on the television. Moreover, until videotape recording technology was widely available to consumers, if you missed something on television—whether the first ten minutes of an episode, all of last week’s episode, or whatever—it was gone (unless you were fortunate enough to catch a rerun). Needless to say, the contemporary television landscape looks very different. The dimensions of the box that we referred to as the television now more closely resemble that of a cinema screen than a cube. On that device, we can now also enjoy YouTube videos, home movies, live video feeds, and video games. Moreover, there has been a proliferation of “devices” (laptops, tablets, phones) on which we can access all these kinds of audiovisual content and more still—including what we still refer to as “television.” Much of my own television watching these days happens on my laptop, on which I can, with an internet connection, access just about any piece of television content I want whenever I want it (“on demand,” as the marketing gurus would have it). We are in the midst of what media studies scholars

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have called “the post-network era,” “the post-broadcast era,” and even “the post-television era.”1 With these technological changes in mind, a number of scholars have noted the difficulty of defining television. For example, Glen Creeber writes, “where ‘television’ starts and ends is increasingly difficult to determine in a world where we now watch TV on a number of different media platforms, meaning that any aesthetic characteristics of ‘TV’ (if we can now even call it that) seem to be as transitory and ephemeral as the ever-changing technology on which it is broadcast.”2 Nevertheless, it would seem that we require at least a foothold on the definitional question if we are to make progress with questions about television’s potential aesthetic and/or artistic character. One potential response to this situation would be to abandon the idea that there is anything specific about television that sharply distinguishes it from other moving image media. “Can we continue to think about the specificity of a medium that seems so dispersed and unstable as an object of study?” Jason Jacobs asks.3 Those wary of medium essentialism would answer “no.” Noël Carroll has mounted a number of incisive attacks on the claims of medium essentialism in the literature on cinema, but his account of the broad category of “the moving image” has implications for television as well. I quote him at length here because he offers the most sophisticated criticism of medium essentialism in the literature. Of course, the features of TV that are often cited as its essential features, especially in contrast to film, have some basis in fact…Observing these features, where they obtain, is informative, especially for critical purposes. It is just not informative in the way that many theorists often suppose. That is, they are not necessary or fully comprehensive features of all TV, but only contingent features of groups of historically specific TV productions. It is useful to note such contingent regularities. The problem only arises when the theorist tries to extrapolate these local regularities into the essence of TV… This is not to deny that some TV differs from some films in the way the theorist says… But these differences, though often critically significant, do not add up to a categorical distinction between TV and film. In truth, my own suspicion is that as time and technology advance, TV and film will continue to converge. Perhaps they will become amalgamated and combined with digital computers to the point that we no longer talk of TV or film, but more generically of moving images. From that point in the future, we will look back to 1  The literature here is quickly becoming voluminous. For a start, see Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, ed., Television After TV (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Amanda D. Lotz, The Television Will Be Revolutionized (New York: New  York University Press, 2007); Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay, ed., Television Studies After TV (New York: Routledge, 2009); and James Bennett and Nicki Strange, ed., Television as Digital Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 2  Glen Creeber, Small Screen Aesthetics: From Television to the Internet (London: BFI, 2013), 3. 3  Jason Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?” in Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and Nicki Strange (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 257.

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the history of film and the history of TV and think of them as parts or phases in the history of the moving image, a trans-media form of expression and communication…that has sometimes been implemented by film, sometimes by TV, sometimes by digital computers, sometimes by some combination of all of these, and sometimes by that we cannot yet imagine.4

There is much to appreciate in Carroll’s account. In particular, he acknowledges that some historically contingent differences between film and television are relevant to appreciative criticism, and he presciently suggests that television and film technologies—what we might call the physical media or vehicular media of television and film—will continue to converge. So, one possible response to the difficulty of defining television today is to say that the problem is simply dissolved by subsuming television under the broader category of the moving image. On this view, there is no puzzle about watching “TV” on one’s laptop or phone. Neither is there any trouble in explaining problem cases like Louis C.K.’s Horace and Pete—a web series that is treated like television for critical purposes but which was never broadcast on a television channel. In these cases, the term “television” is a kind of historical hangover. We use it out of habit in talking about these sorts of cases, but, on Carroll’s view, it would be more precise to describe these cases as instances of “the moving image.” Upon further analysis, however, it is not so clear that we have compelling reasons to deny that television is a distinct medium. Suppose, for the sake of argument, Carroll is right that there is no ontological difference between television and film. That is one sort of categorical difference. But from this it does not follow that television and film are not different media unless one is wedded to a strong form of medium essentialism. That is, if we reject strong medium essentialism, according to which media are individuated by their essential, timeless natures, it is nevertheless plausible to hold that television and film are different media in the absence of further argumentation to the contrary. The debate about whether they are of a single medium or not then depends on an account of how media are identified and individuated. Carroll evidently thinks that media are individuated by their physical properties, which lends support to his hypothesis regarding the convergence of film and television, as well as his own definition of the moving image. However, there are reasons to wonder if such a conception of media is adequate. For example, one might argue that an artwork’s being constituted of particular materials or in a certain vehicular medium is insufficient for it having certain sorts of artistically relevant properties—say, representational, expressive, or semantic properties. A piece of canvass covered in drops and splotches of paint from a fallen palette does not represent, express, or mean anything. An audiovisual recording of Carroll O’Connor is not, by itself, sufficient for being a representation of Archie Bunker. For something to be an artwork, properly so-called, and have representational, expressive, or semantic properties, 4  Noël Carroll, “TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective,” in Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 278–279.

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s­ omething more is needed. How is it that vehicular media are able to transmit content, broadly conceived? We need a conception of a medium that, as David Davies puts it, “mediates between what the artist does, naively construed, and what the work ‘says,’ in a broad sense, in virtue of what the artist does.”5 For this reason, we need a more robust concept of “medium” that has an inescapable element of intentional agency built into it. A serviceable, albeit not fully developed, conception of a medium that incorporates these considerations is this: A medium is something like a cluster of relatively stable, coherent practices of making things in a particular vehicular medium. If one is prepared to accept something along the lines of this rough-­ and-­ready characterization of a medium, it is possible to defend and explain a distinction between the television medium and other moving image media like film. Historically, the distinction has been understood as being constituted by materials. So, at one point what seemed unique to the television medium was the technology that permitted live transmission or a relatively impoverished, square image and so forth. And what seemed to distinguish television from film was the fact that the latter medium lacked those materials and was constituted by materials that television lacked. However, it is now evident that materials alone are insufficient for distinguishing the two media (although in truth materials alone were never sufficient for this purpose). Increasingly, the materials of the two mediums are indistinct: Many television series and feature films are shot on HD video, after which they are subject to the same CGI manipulations. Then, works in both mediums are digitally encoded so that they may be electronically transmitted and screened (whether at home or in a cinema) or purchased on DVD or Blu-Ray. In terms of materials or vehicular medium, it could easily turn out to be the case that something like Legion and X-Men: Apocalypse do not differ in any substantive way. And this is precisely Carroll’s point. But although Carroll is right to deny that materials alone are sufficient to distinguish the specificity of television, it does not follow that there is no television medium at all. It is plausible that the medium is constituted not by those materials alone, but also by a cluster of shared practices making things with those materials. This is why, even in the era of convergence, it is possible to distinguish between the medium of television and the medium of film, which may be partly constituted by the same vehicular medium and some of the same practices of working in it but are also partly constituted by distinct practices.6 What, then, distinguishes television as a medium? Elsewhere I have argued that it is, at least in part, a matter of television having distinct practices for ­individuating its works temporally, establishing the temporal duration of those  David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 59.  One caveat here: Given the protean nature of our creative practices, media have an ineluctable temporal dimension on my account. So, I admit that, in principle, the practices that partly constitute the media of film and television, respectively, could shift so as to end up being identical. Film and television’s convergence into a single medium is, therefore, an open possibility on my view; I just don’t think it has happened. For further discussion, see Ted Nannicelli and Malcolm Turvey, “Against ‘Post-Cinema,’” Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies Journal 26/27 (Spring/Fall 2016): 33–44. 5 6

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works, and affording viewers temporal access to those works. More specifically, the television medium is partly characterized by (1) the understanding of “the work” as being temporally subdivided in various ways: series, season, episode, format, and so forth, and as thus potentially having different sets of temporal boundaries, some of which are malleable in a way the temporal boundaries of films are not, and (2) a diverse and complex set of practices for making these temporally diverse and malleable kinds of works. In the context of television, works are regularly created with no sense of when or how they might end, and are temporally prolonged, bit by bit, for years on end. In such cases, the temporal boundaries of works change after they have come into existence and, somewhat oddly, this happens through the creation of shorter distinct works that together constitute the longer ones. Relatedly, viewers’ access to works in the television medium, whether narrative dramas, sitcoms, news magazines, or documentary miniseries, is at once typically a one-off affair and piecemeal and processional. Correspondingly, rather different sets of practices are interwoven with the understanding of the temporality of works in the television medium as more diverse, more variable, more diffuse than of those in the film medium. Here, we might think of writing for narrative television in terms of A plots, B plots, C plots, D plots, and E plots, of shaping narrative structure around commercial breaks, of using the extended passage of real time in between access to constituent parts of the work to construct the passage of diegetic time, of casting different actors to portray a single character, of writing for a documentary series in more depth and detail than would be possible in a feature-length documentary film, and many more. Because these various ways in which television’s temporal boundaries may be diffuse and expansive collectively constitute a single differential feature of the television medium, I refer to them collectively as “temporal prolongation,” which, from its use in music theory, carries with it connotations of a temporally unfolding, yet organically unified structure.7 Note that in the above discussion of television’s distinct handling of temporality, we have not made reference to a unique essence of television. Indeed, some of the individual techniques to which I referred—for example, the casting of different actors to play a single character—are often employed in film as well as television. However, this does not threaten my claim, according to which television’s distinctive practices of handling constitute a differential feature of the medium—a historically contingent feature of the medium that is sufficient to mark it off from other media rather than a timeless essence that putatively specifies what is unique about television.8 Still, it is plausible that even ­conceived as a differential feature of the medium, temporal prolongation is relevant to our appreciation of television as an art, as I argue later. 7  Ted Nannicelli, Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2017). 8  The term “differential feature” is Berys Gaut’s. See his A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 224; 291.

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An Art of Television? Is television an art? The question needs to be handled carefully. It is common, in contemporary popular discourse, to hear claims that we are in a new golden age of television. For some critics, television has recently become an art.9 Implicit in these sorts of claims is an assumption that art status is a matter of achieving some degree of aesthetic value. Crudely put, the idea behind such claims is that with the advent of “prestige” cable dramas like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and The Wire, television was finally good enough, aesthetically speaking, to be art. This is a dubious claim for several reasons, not least of which is that it takes a narrow, reductive view of television history.10 It is not hard to think of television programs pre-2000 that have prima facie claims to art status whether or not one accepts an aesthetic conception of art. Roots, The Civil War, Marty, M∗A∗S∗H, The Avengers, and I Love Lucy all come to mind. So, what does it mean, then, to say that television is (now) art? Television in general? Surely not, for we would not want to say that things like advertisements and live feeds of legislative proceedings are instances of television art. The claim is too broad. We need a distinction between television as a medium and television as an art form. Just as there are artistic and non-artistic uses of the medium of film and the medium of language, there are artistic and non-artistic uses of the television medium. Incidentally, this is another reason to resist collapsing television, film, and other audiovisual media under Carroll’s broader category of “the moving image.” Carroll enjoins us to “forget the medium” and focus on the art of the moving image, but it is plausible we need the medium–art form distinction to account for non-artistic uses of television, film, and so forth. It is also worth observing that the popular claim that television has recently become an art depends upon a rather tendentious aesthetic characterization of art. There are good reasons to think that there can be artworks that are aesthetically bad and perhaps even devoid of aesthetic interest altogether. Does John Cage’s 4’ 33” have aesthetic value? Does Marcel Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm? What about the aesthetic disvalue of Thomas Kinkade’s paintings? It would seem hard to deny that representational paintings are artworks, no matter how aesthetically lacking they are. An interlocutor may reply that this is simply begging the question; moreover, perhaps the bar for aesthetic value is being set too high here. It might be more plausible to assume that an artwork at least has the capacity or intended function to elicit some sort of aesthetic interest or attention. Suppose we grant this claim for the sake of argument. The problem is that those who claim television has recently become an 9  For example, Emily Nussbaum, “When TV Became Art,” New York Magazine (December 4, 2009), http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/. Also see Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2014). 10  Some critics are more careful about this than others. For example, the title of David Bianculli’s The Platinum Age of Television (New York: Doubleday, 2016) belies his sustained, if not completely balanced, consideration of American programming from the 1950s.

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art do not have in mind this sort of moderate or minimal aesthetic conception of art. On the contrary, their view seems to be that, with the advent of certain prestige programming, television has become an aesthetically mature or rich art. But this is a slippery slope. Just how much aesthetic value, on this view, is necessary for television to be art? Trying to quantify it would appear fruitless, but no other options immediately present themselves. To be clear, this is not to cast doubt upon the value of exploring television’s aesthetic character—a matter to which we shall return in the next section. It is, however, to say that the question of whether television is art ought to be pursued separately. As an opening move, we should first deny that establishing there is an art of television depends on assuming the truth of a single, particular definition of art. Needless to say, there is no consensus about what art is. But this poses no problem when we speak of painting as art, of music as art, as literature as art, and so forth. Neither do we doubt that some paintings, musical works, or novels are artworks because the people who appreciate them cannot define art, nor do we doubt appreciators’ ability to correctly use the term “art” even if they can’t define it. (This is true of many terms we use on an ordinary basis.) As Noël Carroll has argued, we are often able to identify art in the absence of having a definition of art, and, indeed, identifying art is much more important to our standard appreciative activities.11 If one does insist upon a particular definition of art, the ongoing definitional debate notwithstanding, advocates for an art of television can point out that at least some television will plausibly count as art on any definition one prefers. Although I indicated reservations about aesthetic definitions of art, there are unquestionably some instances of television that would qualify as art on this view. Think, for example, of Planet Earth or Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey—or, if one thinks that the aesthetic value of those programs derives from what they depict rather than the programs themselves, consider Hannibal, Les Revenants, or Top of the Lake. Likewise, it is plausible that television will count as art according to institutional definitions. Recall, from above, the discussions of television as an art in the popular press. Consider, too, the number of high-­ profile film auteurs, including David Lynch, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, and Paolo Sorrentino, who have directed television episodes. Or the fact that New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted premieres of The Sopranos. Finally, the sort of intention-historical definition of art I prefer, which emphasizes the intentions of artists within a particular art historical context, is clearly amenable to television.12 From this point of view, television art is a kind of descendent of the arts of radio, film, and theater. To the extent that television practitioners 11  Noël Carroll, “Identifying Art,” in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 75–100. 12  See, especially, Noël Carroll, “Art, Practice, and Narrative,” in Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–75; Noël Carroll, “Art, Creativity, and Tradition,” in Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 53–73; Jerrold Levinson, “Defining Art Historically,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3–25; and Jerrold Levinson, “Refining Art Historically,” in Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 37–59.

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draw upon those earlier art traditions and invite appreciation in ways that are relevantly similar to those earlier art traditions, they are plausibly creating artworks in the television medium. This way of phrasing things—“creating artworks in the television medium”— points to a more substantive question about television’s art status. Leaving aside the broad question about the definition of art in general, we still might wonder whether, in addition to a television medium, there is a distinct art form of television. I claimed that we need the medium–art form distinction to account for non-artistic uses of a medium. Yet this leaves open the question of what kind of art is instantiated by the television medium. Is there any reason to think there is a distinct art of television? Another way of asking the question is this: What kinds of uses of the television medium qualify as properly artistic in a way that is distinctive to television? To answer such questions, we can draw upon a plausible thesis proposed by Berys Gaut in his study of the philosophy of film. What Gaut calls “MSF”—for “Medium Specificity of Forms”—claims, “For a medium to constitute an art form it must instantiate artistic properties that are distinct from those that are instantiated by other media.”13 What counts as an artistic property? Gaut elaborates, “What I mean by ‘artistic properties’ in this context is artistic evaluative properties, and properties, such as narrative structure, that can figure in the grounds of artistic evaluations. So (MSF) is true if either there are distinctive artistic values or distinctive devices (or effects) in cinema.”14 Substitute “television” for “cinema” in this formulation, and we arrive at the following claim: Television is an art form (distinct from related moving image art forms like film) because it achieves distinct artistic effects in virtue of the television medium’s differential features. I will outline just a few ways in which the medium-­ specific feature of temporal prolongation achieves distinct artistic effects.15 First, it is plausible that, in television dramas, temporal prolongation can help foster a particular, intense kind of engagement with characters. (This is not to say it necessarily has this function.) More specifically, the combination of temporal prolongation and serial television’s affordance of “familiarity” with fictional characters allows episodes to arrive “pre-packaged” with the tools to quickly foster intense levels of emotional weight.16 To continue the metaphor,  Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 287.  Berys Gaut, “Replies to Ponech, Curran, and Allen,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52, no. 2 (April 2012): 206. 15  Here I focus on character engagement and narrative suspense. For a broader discussion, including running gags in comedy, see my Appreciating the Art of Television. 16  Robert Blanchet and Margrethe Bruun Vaage, “Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television Series,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 18–41. Blanchet and Vaage focus on positive feelings toward characters, but there might a negative thesis compatible with what they propose. That is, it may also be the case that increased familiarity with characters can also foster stronger negative reactions to them. See Malcolm Turvey, “‘Familiarity Breeds Contempt’: Why Repeat Exposure Does Not Necessarily Turn TV Characters Into Friends,” in Screening Characters, eds. Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor (forthcoming). Likewise, Jason Jacobs has pointed out to me in personal communication that our familiarity with characters may also simply result in boredom, say, if the characters are flat or stereotypes. 13 14

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feature films, by contrast, need to start from scratch in building a structure of interrelated characters and situations before they can secure emotional engagement at the same pitch as television episodes. In an article full of insights on this topic, Robert Blanchet and Margrethe Bruun Vaage discuss the ways in which what I call temporal prolongation fosters strong emotional engagement with the protagonists of Mad Men, in particular Don Draper and Peggy Olson. But it is an episode of Mad Men broadcast after the publication of their article—“The Strategy” from the program’s seventh and final season—that perhaps best supports their key claims. After Don makes an uncharacteristic admission of vulnerability to Peggy—that he worries “That I never did anything. That I don’t have anyone”—the episode closes with them dancing to Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” Critics described this scene as “beautiful,” “sweet and sad,” “touching,” and even “heartbreaking.”17 Were “The Strategy” the first Mad Men episode you watched, the scene might strike you as well crafted if, perhaps, a bit sentimental. The scene’s emotional weight, its poignancy, depends upon feelings for Don and Peggy that have been fostered by temporal prolongation over many years. And although we can certainly think of emotionally powerful feature films and even short films, it seems plausible that the phenomenology or felt quality of our affective responses to television characters is distinctive in large part because of the time we have “spent” with them. In relationship to the way temporal prolongation can foster quick and powerful affective responses to characters, it has a particular capacity for eliciting and sustaining suspense. In the context of television drama, we can think of suspense in media psychologist Dolf Zillman’s terms as an “affective reaction that characteristically derives from the [viewer’s] acute, fearful apprehension being mediated by high but not complete subjective certainty about the occurrence of the anticipated deplorable events.”18 Of course, feature films and other art forms traffic in suspense as well. However, there are reasons to think that temporal prolongation affords particularly intense suspense, sustained over longer periods of time. The link between temporal prolongation, character engagement, and suspense can be elucidated by considering an episode from the sixth season of The Sopranos, “Remember When.” Arguably, long-time viewers of the show are able to derive extra pleasure from their ability to infer the mental states of Tony Soprano and Paulie Walunts from a combination of their facial expressions and our knowledge of their personalities and shared history. In a nice example of what Blanchet and Vaage call as “instant intensity,” 17  See the collation of episode recaps in Anna Silman, “The Best of This Week’s Mad Men Recaps: ‘The Strategy,’” Vulture.com (May 20, 2014), available at http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/ best-mad-men-recaps-the-strategy.html (accessed February 28, 2017). 18   Dolf Zillmann, “The Psychology of Suspense in Dramatic Exposition,” in Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, eds. Peter Vorderer, Hans J. Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), 208. Zillman describes this affective reaction as “noxious,” which is more contentious because suspense evidently elicits pleasure in many fictional contexts such as those described here or, say, in Hitchcock movies. I’m grateful to Jason Jacobs for this reminder.

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informed viewers are, from nearly the start of the episode, able to draw on this knowledge to read off Tony’s face years of suspicion and irritation with Paulie and, off Paulie’s face, years of envy and fear of Tony. Or, to put another way, it is plausible that viewers who don’t have the background narrative knowledge of Tony and Paulie’s relationship aren’t able to fully appreciate the dramatic tension orchestrated by the episode. This intensity reaches a climax when, after only about 45 minutes of screen time, Tony suggests to Paulie that they go on a deep-sea fishing trip. This invitation is imbued with suspense by years of shared history between the two characters (and viewers)—including, most importantly, their collaboration in murdering Big Pussy on Tony’s fishing boat in the second season. Viewers who haven’t spent enough time with Tony and Paulie to understand how impulsive Tony is or how much of a liability Paulie is to him simply can’t appreciate how much danger Paulie is in. The weight of this knowledge infuses the scene with a degree of narrative suspense that cannot be perceived simply by attending to the formal means (camera angle and movement, performance, sound) by which we are cued to wonder if Paulie might be in trouble. Shortly after, when Paulie and Tony are on the boat, we get a flashback, from Paulie’s perspective, of Big Pussy’s murder. Importantly, this affords new viewers the knowledge necessary to make sense of the scene, but the flashback alone cannot provide new viewers with the same degree of suspense more generally. Such effects are partly the result of our long-term engagement with the characters. Furthermore, temporal prolongation has a capacity for sustaining suspense in a way that is unavailable to one-off dramatic works. Henry John Pratt has argued that serial narratives have a special capacity to sustain suspense over greater durations than one-off narratives. One-off narratives—including feature films and single episodes of strictly episodic television series like The Simpsons (Fox 1989–present)—can, of course, create suspense within the work. But that suspense ends when the feature film or television episode ends. In contrast, the gaps in between installments of a serial interrupt rather than conclude all the salient narrative threads, thus allowing the serial to sustain suspense more or less indefinitely until the concluding installment.19 Although Pratt’s point applies to serial narratives tout court, it seems plausible that television’s temporal prolongation abets the sustainment of suspense in a particular fashion. Among the ways in which television’s sustainment of suspense differs from that of other serial art forms, including film serials, we should immediately note the relatively short passage of real time between episodes (usually a week).20  For a broader reflection on “interruption” in television, see Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted.”  The claims in this paragraph do not account for the possibility of “binge-watching” episodes on DVD or streaming services. As I have emphasized already, the features of television I describe here can be thought of as characteristic or differential features rather than unique or essential features; so, the possibility of binge-watching does not threaten my claims. There is also a difficult question about whether the binge-watcher has a proper experiential engagement with the program given that she does not experience them in the way the creators intended—unless all episodes are 19 20

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The relatively brief temporal gap in between episodes makes it less likely that viewers’ suspense will dissipate as it might in between installments of a literary or cinematic serial, which tend to be spread out over greater durations. Idiomatically speaking, it is harder to think of literary or cinematic “cliff-­ hangers” than it is to think of television cliff-hangers. Consider, for example, an episode from the final season of Breaking Bad, “To’hajiilee,” which ends during what would be the climactic moment in most movies or popular novels—a shoot-out. After five seasons of evading the authorities, Walter White, a chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, is handcuffed in the back of an SUV, caught in the crossfire between a group of neo-Nazis and two drug enforcement agents, one of whom is Walt’s brother-in-law, Hank. As the rattle of automatic weapon fire and shattering of glass ring out, Walter closes his eyes, clenches his teeth, and lowers his body in the car. The screen cuts to black. Uncertain as to whether Walt will live and, if so, whether he will be arrested by Hank or saved by the neo-Nazis, we are left in a state of suspense extraordinary even for serial television and nearly unthinkable for other serial narrative arts like comics, literature, or film. It is, however, not just the relatively short duration in between episodes that allows television programs to sustain suspense at a greater intensity than other serial narratives. Another important factor is television’s ability to follow a narrative thread over several years’ worth of (roughly) weekly episodes. The regularity of television episodes seems not only to sustain suspense from week to week but to sustain it and build it from season to season. In the case of Breaking Bad, the stakes of the narrative question around which suspense is built—“Will Hank discover that Walt is a drug dealer?”—increase as the series goes on, as does our felt suspense. This is also, in part, an effect of the phenomenon described by Blanchet and Vaage: The passage of real time—more specifically, the amount of real time we spend in the fictional world—tends to foster greater feeling for the characters of that world (albeit perhaps negative as well as positive). It is in this way that the intensity of the suspense we feel seems to increase proportionally with the amount of real time it is sustained.

Television Aesthetics Regardless of whether one accepts the claim that there is a distinct art of television, we might still ask if television has an aesthetic character. This is because, as I argued earlier, the realm of the aesthetic extends beyond art and, further, it seems implausible that art-hood is essentially a matter of possessing aesthetic value. Of course, there are also many cases in which aesthetic value or, more neutrally, aesthetic properties contributes to our experience of an artwork aesthetically and/or to the overall value of the artwork as artwork. And, given the ways in which I have described the artistic effects achieved by programs such as released simultaneously on a streaming service. In the interest of space, I leave these complications aside for now.

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Mad Men, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad, it seems plausible that at least some instances of television do indeed have an aesthetic character that constitutes an important aspect of our overall experience of them. Moreover, a number of television historians have argued that particular kinds of television embedded in specific sociocultural-historical contexts have distinctive aesthetic characters.21 However, charges of “aesthetic bankruptcy”—to use Fredric Jameson’s term—have dogged television throughout its history.22 Even as television was only starting to emerge as a mass medium in the post–World War II United States, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno denounced it in the Frankfurt School’s seminal work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Writing in the mid-­ 1940s, Horkheimer and Adorno claimed, “Television aims at a synthesis of radio and film [that] promises to intensify the impoverishment of the aesthetic material…radically.”23 In the mid-1950s, after television had become a fixture of middle-class American homes, Adorno offered a more sustained rebuke, concluding: “The effort here required [to study television and its putative effects] is of a moral nature itself: knowingly to face psychological mechanisms operating on various levels in order not to become blind and passive victims.”24 Adorno’s use of the term “moral” is interesting here because it suggests a common ground between political-aesthetic critiques of television in the tradition of the Frankfurt School and moral-aesthetic critiques of television lodged by thinkers of very different political persuasions.25 Consider, for example, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s more recent critique of television. Scruton claims television “has rendered many people inarticulate, and deprived them of the simple ways of making direct conversational contact with their fellows.” According to him, “Those energies and interests that would otherwise be focused on others—are consumed on the screen, in vicarious lives that involve no engagement of the viewer’s own moral equipment. And that equipment therefore atrophies.”26 Scruton himself acknowledges the affinities between his claims and those of Frankfurt School theorists, although perhaps needless to say he rejects their Marxist commitments. Rebutting the strong moralist perspective endorsed by both thinkers in both political camps—according to which television’s very nature necessarily engenders the decay of its viewers’ moral faculties—is beyond the scope of this 21  See, for example, John Thorton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); and Jason Jacobs, The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22  Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 137. 23  Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 97. 24  T.W. Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8, no. 3 (Spring 1954): 235. 25  See, for example, the views critically discussed in Alexander Nehamas, “Plato and the Mass Media,” The Monist 71, no. 2 (April 1988): 214–234. 26  Roger Scruton, “Hiding Behind the Screen,” The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society 28 (Summer 2010): 55.

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article.27 Instead, I want to focus on the matter of television’s aesthetic character. Two increasingly visible and influential research programs would seem to vindicate claims for television’s aesthetic value: One, in television studies, is devoted to “television aesthetics”; the other, in philosophical aesthetics, addresses “the aesthetics of the everyday.” However, “aesthetic” is a slippery term that, as we shall see, theorists do not always use to mean the same thing. Therefore, the extent to which these two research programs address traditional and newer challenges to television’s aesthetic character remains to be seen. In the “television aesthetics” literature, “television aesthetics” usually refers to one of two things. First, one often finds the term used in the way I have used it above—to pick out a research program that might be described as “the philosophy of television art.” That is, “aesthetics” is, in this context, used analogously to how it is sometimes used to describe the philosophy of the arts as a field of research. As Sarah Cardwell, one of the pioneers of the television aesthetics research program, puts it, television aesthetics in this sense is “a way of studying television that draws upon a generalised understanding of the key foci of philosophical aesthetics: the criticism and evaluation of art, and the raising and tackling of questions that arise from our engagement with works of art.”28 In other words, the term “television aesthetics” is sometimes used to refer to a research program that studies television programs as artworks.29 This use of the term “aesthetic” in relation to television has older roots, which Cardwell acknowledges, but did not really take hold in the field until the early 2000s when scholars like Cardwell and Jason Jacobs began to advance claims for understanding television as “a medium for artistic expression.”30 However, as we saw earlier, there are good reasons to avoid conflating questions about television’s aesthetic character and art status. Second, and in connection, the term “television aesthetics” is sometimes used more or less synonymously with “television style.” It is in this sense that Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock primarily use the term in their introduction to the recent edited collection, Television Aesthetics and Style. This is, of course, a common usage of the term “aesthetics” and there is nothing wrong with it, but when it is used in conjunction with “style” more needs to be said about 27  For an initial, forceful response, see Noël Carroll, “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” in Art in Three Dimensions, 201–234. 28  Sarah Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics,” Critical Studies in Television 1, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 73. 29  See, for rare, older examples, Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1974); and David Thorburn, “Television as an Aesthetic Medium,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4, no. 2 (June 1987): 161–173. Thorburn writes, “Let us first understand the term aesthetic in its descriptive, its cultural, or anthropological dimension. The term suggests not a valuing of aesthetic objects but a designation of their chief defining feature— their membership in a class of cultural experiences understood to be fictional or imaginary, understood to occur in a symbolic, culturally agreed upon imaginative space” (162). By my lights, this is a call to study television as an art. 30  Jason Jacobs, “Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (December 2001): 427.

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how aesthetics is to be distinguished from style. As Cardwell asks in her contribution to the book, “What else might (and should) ‘television aesthetics’ include, beyond the interpretive activity of close textual/stylistic analysis?”31 for Jacobs and Peacock, if anything distinguishes “television aesthetics” from stylistic criticism, it seems to be the involvement of evaluation or judgment.32 Yet the question remains: What, in this context, makes an aesthetic judgment an aesthetic judgment? Elsewhere, Cardwell and Jacobs, respectively, hint at key characteristics that have roots in Kant’s account of the judgment of free beauty and that demand more sustained investigation: subjective universality and a special kind of attention.33 At this point, we start to see more clearly mainstream television studies’ resistance to television aesthetics as a research project and to the idea of television having an aesthetic character. First, the orthodox view in the field holds that aesthetic judgments claiming universality are politically and/or ideologically pernicious.34 Second, much work in the field has focused on television as an ordinary or everyday object—one that putatively involves modes of attention of a quite different nature from that which neo-Kantians take to be involved in aesthetic appreciation.35 Television’s ineluctable ordinariness or everydayness, in particular, has been the subject of much theoretical discussion. Stanley Cavell, one of the first philosophers to seriously consider the possibility of television having an aesthetic character, wrote, “The familiar repetitions of the shows of talk—centrally including here situation comedies—are accordingly company because of their embodiment of the uneventful, the ordinary.”36 Likewise, as Roger Silverstone pithily summarizes in his seminal work on the subject, “Television is part of the grain of everyday life.”37 If such claims have some plausibility, as I think they do, the question is then whether television characteristically elicits particular kinds of engagement and whether they might be characterized as aesthetic. 31  Sarah Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond,” in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 28. 32  Also see, in this vein, Jacobs, “Issues of Judgment and Value”; and Christine Geraghty, “Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2003): 25–45. 33  See Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond”; and Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted.” 34  For a recent example in television studies, see Michael Z.  Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television (New York: Routledge, 2012). For rebuttals to this position in television studies, specifically, see Jason Jacobs, “Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 3, no. 1 (2006): 19–33; Ted Nannicelli, “In Defence of the Objectivity of Evaluative Television Criticism,” Screen 57, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 124–143; and Cardwell, “Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond.” 35  What I am describing as “neo-Kantian” views of aesthetic attention or “the aesthetic attitude” include Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” British Journal of Psychology 5, no. 2 (June 1912): 87–118; Clive Bell, Art (New York: Frederick A.  Stokes, 1914); and Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism: A Critical Introduction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960). 36  Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus 111, no. 4 (Fall 1982): 89. 37  Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1994), 22.

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This is because, contrary to what some television theorists have claimed, very little mainstream aesthetic theory—in the Kantian or neo-Kantian traditions or beyond—claims that the aesthetic character of an object is simply a matter of its possessing certain intrinsic properties.38 On the contrary, “the aesthetic” is commonly thought of in relational terms—as involving an object’s capacity to afford a special kind of attention, attitude, experience, pleasure, valuation, and so forth. And this is not withstanding significant professional disagreement about the details of such an account. This is why a focus on form and style will only get us so far in exploring the matter of television’s aesthetic character; there is a further question of what responses are elicited or invited by particular forms and styles. Now, given the above discussion of the television medium, we should remain skeptical of claims about a unique or essential mode of viewing fostered by all sorts of television. For example, it is highly doubtful that television, in general, fosters a kind of spectatorship characterized by “the glance”—a term coined by John Ellis, which “implies that no extraordinary effort is being invested in the activity of looking.”39 Ellis’s claim is simply too broad. It implausibly assumes a complete uniformity in television viewing that is unlikely to occur among diverse audiences in heterogeneous viewing conditions even when the content is exactly the same. This is the key point of the reception studies research program that has played a pivotal role in shaping television studies as a field. At the same time, the assumption that motivates the concept of the glance in the first place—namely, that television content is homogeneous and, moreover, stylistically impoverished—is also deeply implausible, as we have already seen.40 So, it is not clear the ordinariness of television tout court elicits a particular kind of attenuated or distracted attention that is at odds with aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, recent work on everyday aesthetics might seem to help build a case for television having an aesthetic dimension that is part and parcel of its ordinariness. However, on some accounts of everyday aesthetics, inclusivity is achieved at the expense of informativeness. The philosopher of music Theodore Gracyk asserts that this recent conception of the aesthetic “directs us to look for aesthetic rewards in any directed awareness of a situation.” That is, he claims, “We should expect to find aesthetic value in any appreciative perceptual experience.”41 Perhaps needless to say, this is an extraordinarily bold claim. And yet it is not an idiosyncratic view in the current literature. Sherri Irvin, for example, offers an interesting list of personal experiences that, she claims, “have an aesthetic character”: 38  For an example of this confusion, see Matt Hills, “Television Aesthetics: A Pre-Structuralist Danger?” Journal of British Cinema and Television 8, no. 1 (2011): 99–117. 39  John Ellis, Visible Fictions, Revised Edition (London: Routledge, 1992), 137. 40  According to Ellis, “The TV image tends to be simple and straightforward, stripped of detail and excess of meanings” (129). For criticisms of “glance theory,” see Caldwell; and Carroll, “TV and Film.” 41  Theodore Gracyk, Listening to Popular Music, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 38.

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“I run my tongue back and forth on the insides of my closed teeth, feeling the smoothness of their central surfaces and the roughness of the separations between them. In the middle of typing a sentence, when I am not sure what to say next, I turn to look out the window next to my desk, and I rest my right cheek on my cool knuckles while I watch the ducks that are swimming around in the small patch of lake that has already thawed near the shore…I drink tea out of a large mug that is roughly egg-shaped, and I clasp it with both hands to warm my palms…I scratch my head with a mechanical pencil that allows me to part my hair and reach exactly the right spot on my scalp. I move my wedding ring back and forth over the knuckle that offers it slight resistance, and I jiggle it around in my right palm to enjoy its weight before sliding it back on.”42 And Roger Scruton himself considers setting a table, dressing for a party or dance, arranging objects on a desk, and tidying a room examples of “the aesthetics of everyday life.”43 Unfortunately, such lists of examples of everyday aesthetics are rarely accompanied by sustained accounts of what makes something count as aesthetic. Everyday aesthetics advocates have provided a valuable service by identifying the ways in which neo-Kantian accounts of the aesthetic tend to be too narrow and restrictive. But those accounts did have the merit of clearly indicating what they took the aesthetic to be. What, according to an everyday aesthetics approach, would it be about television that made it aesthetic? At best, there are hints to suggest something is to be regarded as aesthetic if, in regarding it in the right sort of way—that is, with focused attention—it affords sensory pleasure.44 One problem with this proposal is that if one holds there is an aesthetic character in “any appreciative perceptual experience,” to use Gracyk’s words, then possessing an aesthetic character is not as special as one might, prima facie, think, and arguments to the effect that x has an aesthetic character become relatively uninformative and hardly worth the candle. One might use this sort of everyday aesthetics claim to establish that television has an aesthetic character, but then it must be admitted that this is not a very interesting or special feature of television. Of course, one might also wonder whether expanding the aesthetic in this way is cogent. Is properly focused attention on the water sliding down one’s throat when thirsty to count as aesthetic? What about focused attention on the experience of relief as one empties one’s bladder? Or the attention to one’s muscles expanding and contracting while lifting weights? How about closely attending to one’s heightened sense of tactile perception while under the influence of drugs or during a sexual experience? In short, the

42  Sherri Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics 48, no. 1 (January 2008): 30–31. 43  Roger Scruton, “In Search of the Aesthetic,” British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 3 (July 2007): 240. 44  See, for example, Irvin, “The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic.”

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concern here is that the attempt to expand the category of the aesthetic in this way risks “trivializing the notion of the aesthetic.”45 Furthermore, given that the proponents of everyday aesthetics lack a sustained alternative account of the aesthetic/non-aesthetic distinction, they may be charged with begging the question against traditionalists. Several commentators have observed that what everyday aesthetics advocates propose to include in an expanded conception of the aesthetic bears similarities to Kant’s conception of “the agreeable.”46 According to Kant, “As regards the agreeable everyone concedes that his judgment, which he grounds on a private feeling, and through which he says of an object that it pleases him, is also limited merely to his own person. Thus he is quite satisfied if, when he says that canary-wine is agreeable, another corrects the expression and reminds him that he ought to say: It is agreeable to me…To quarrel over such matters [as wine or color] with the intention of reproaching another’s judgment as incorrect when it differs from our own, as if two judgments were logically opposed, would he folly.”47 As Paul Guyer, the foremost expert on Kant’s aesthetics explains, “The correct expression or what we ‘ought to say’ with regard to the term ‘agreeable’ allows indexing the term to particular users, or allows for expecting purely private validity.”48 As he notes, such cases permit us, in Stanley Cavell’s terms, to “retreat to personal taste.”49 Thus, the agreeable includes purely subjective perceptual pleasures that would seem to be included under the umbrella of “any appreciative perceptual experience.” Ironically, this sounds very much like what some television studies theorists like Matt Hills call “popular aesthetics,” which is unwittingly proposed as an alternative to Kantian aesthetics.50 Of course, as is well known within the philosophy of art, Kant regards judgments of agreeableness as a type of aesthetic judgment, along with judgments of beauty (or judgments of taste) and judgments of the sublime. That said, the contemporary conception of aesthetic judgments in terms of Kant’s judgments of beauty, in particular, is not baseless. For it tracks an important difference between judgments that have merely subjective or private validity and those that have intersubjective validity. The difficulty for both television scholars who champion “popular aesthetics” and everyday aesthetics proposals that would secure television’s aesthetic character by expanding the category of the aesthetic is this: Expanding the 45  Christopher Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 3 (July 2010): 228. 46  Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” 228–230; Tom Leddy, “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 3–22. 47  Quoted in Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 120. 48  Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 120. 49  Ibid., 387n57. 50  See Hills, “Television Aesthetics.”

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contemporary notion of the aesthetic as involving Kantian judgments of taste to also include Kantian judgments of agreeableness would elide a prima facie important normative aspect of the aesthetic. Although I have phrased this in terms of Kantian categories, we need not think of things in this way. The crucial point remains the same. Neither popular aesthetics nor everyday aesthetics would seem to be able to account for the normative force that is part and parcel of aesthetic judgment as we conceive of it today. My judgment that Legion is a bold, dynamic, and arresting television drama claims intersubjective validity in a way that my assertion that I find the taste of hops pleasing does not. It is, in large part, the normative force—the claim to intersubjective validity of such judgments that make them of interest to others (beyond our close circles of friends and families who have an interest in us as individuals). And it is what makes evaluative criticism, as we standardly practice it, possible. Think, here, of the sorts of examples proffered by those championing popular aesthetics in television studies and everyday aesthetics in philosophy of art. Alan McKee’s book, Beautiful Things in Popular Culture, comprises a series of essays, each of which draws upon the criteria by which fans evaluate particular sorts of cultural artifacts in order to argue for what the best of a given kind is. So, for example, there are essays entitled “The Best Batman Story: The Dark Knight Returns,” “The Best Serial Killer Novel: Red Dragon,” and “The Best Disco Record: Sharon Redd, ‘Never Give You Up.’” There is much to recommend to these essays as pieces of ethnography. But, like the study of “popular aesthetics” within fan cultures more broadly, the evaluative judgments rendered here lack the claim to subjective universality that is characteristic of aesthetic judgment. Likewise, it is unclear to me how Irvin’s experience of smelling “trapped sunshine or roasted nuts” in her cat’s fur can reasonably be called aesthetic when I know my experience of smelling her cat (or any other cat) would be characterized by the unpleasant odor of animal body, cat food, and dust. It seems to me there is no reasonable or principled disagreement here as there would be if we each claimed intersubjective validity of our experiences. Rather, Irvin simply finds the smell of cats pleasing and I do not. This is quite unlike aesthetic judgments regarding the beauty of, say, a sunset, a waterfall, or a coral reef, in which one, in Kantian terms, “‘imputes’ the pleasure to others, although on the basis of its occurrence in oneself.”51 The aesthetic is of course a contested concept. As Malcolm Budd has put it, “there are different conceptions of its scope, no one of which has a proper claim to be the right one.”52 My claim is neither that the concept cannot, logically speaking, be expanded in the sense proposed by advocates of popular aesthetics and everyday aesthetics, much less that it need involve something like a Kantian distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful. Rather, the point is that the distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful tracks  Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 121.  Malcolm Budd, “Aesthetic Essence,” in Aesthetic Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 33. 51 52

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a distinction I think is worth retaining—namely, between judgments with and without claims to intersubjective validity. My concerns with these revisionary conceptions of the aesthetic are informed and neatly summarized by Christopher Dowling, who writes, “If we allow, as a more pluralistic view of the aesthetic might require, that ‘aesthetic’ talk in this domain include the mere evincing of subjective responses, many of the simple and fleeting pleasure responses, with no indication that the speaker expects anything significant of her audience beyond mere recognition, we are in danger of losing the sharp and significant focus on those responses that legitimately engage critical attention and interest.”53 However, it is worth noting, as a final point, that the everyday aesthetics advocates are wise to retain an emphasis on a special kind of focused attention as a necessary condition on aesthetic experience. Such a conception of aesthetic attention has fallen on hard times, now typically regarded in both television studies and philosophy of art as irrevocably archaic and stuffy. And perhaps it is implausible that aesthetic attention can be characterized in terms of disinterestedness and/or contemplativeness, as critics have charged (although I suspect much depends on how those terms are themselves defined). But aesthetic attention might be conceived in more modest terms. Pre-theoretically, at least, the requirement that aesthetic attention be focused seems right given that aesthetic appreciation seems to involve, prima facie, a kind of second-order appreciation—that is, a conscious awareness of one’s aesthetic appreciation of something. Here, I think, is the kernel of truth in the worries about “distraction” that philosophers like Scruton and television theorists like John Caughie have voiced. Attending to an object in a distracted state would seem to be at odds with aesthetic appreciation. Caughie, for example, expresses “the intuition that ‘good’ television asks of us a kind of intellectuality, a degree of intelligent detachment from the shocks and discontinuities of ‘flow’ which the apparatus throws at us.”54 Now, it seems to me that there is an inflationary sense in which Caughie’s “intelligent detachment” can be understood, according to which it is fairly close to the “aesthetic attitude” that George Dickie famously debunked (or putatively debunked) as a “myth.”55 But there may also be a deflationary sense in which all that is implied here is focused attention and a degree of self-­ consciousness about it. This latter, deflationary conception sets out what are, in my view, plausible necessary conditions on aesthetic attention (though they may not be sufficient). The mistake, I think, is to insist, as Caughie does, that the “apparatus”—that is, the television medium— tends, by its very nature, to stymie such attention. Indeed, it’s not entirely clear to me how Caughie imag Dowling, “The Aesthetics of Daily Life,” 229.  John Caughie, “Telephilia and Distraction: Terms of Engagement,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 3, no. 1 (2008): 15. 55  George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1964): 56–65. 53 54

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ines that his examples of “good television” avoid this putative tendency of the medium. It is an open question whether our television viewing practices might evolve in such a way that was at odds with the deflationary sense of aesthetic attention I have in mind here. The phenomenon of second-screen viewing—flitting one’s attention from the television screen to the computer screen, for example—seems prima facie incompatible with aesthetic attention.56 Again, however, I would emphasize that in such cases we would want to say not that the (new) television medium lacks an aesthetic character but rather that we weren’t attending in the right sort of way. That is, if such situations were not aesthetic, properly so-called, this would be a matter of the absence of aesthetic attention in the first place rather than the absence of aesthetic properties or, indeed, aesthetic value—concepts that would be parasitic upon aesthetic attention if we could rehabilitate a deflationary account of that concept. And this, I think, is what we can learn from the advocates of everyday aesthetics.57

Bibliography Adorno, T.W. Spring 1954. How to Look at Television. The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8 (3): 213–235. Bell, Clive. 1914. Art. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Bennett, James, and Nicki Strange, eds. 2011. Television as Digital Media. Durham: Duke University Press. Bianculli, David. 2016. The Platinum Age of Television. New York: Doubleday. Blanchet, Robert, and Margrethe Bruun Vaage. Winter 2012. Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television Series. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6 (2): 18–41. Budd, Malcolm. 2008. Aesthetic Essence. In Aesthetic Essays, 31–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bullough, Edward. 1912. ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle. British Journal of Psychology 5 (2): 87–118. Cardwell, Sarah. Spring 2006. Television Aesthetics. Critical Studies in Television 1 (1): 72–80. ———. 2013. Television Aesthetics: Stylistic Analysis and Beyond. In Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock, 23–44. London: Bloomsbury. Carroll, Noël. 2001a. Art, Practice, Narrative. In Beyond Aesthetics, 63–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2001b. Identifying Art. In Beyond Aesthetics, 75–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

56  See, for example, Dan Hassoun, “Tracing Attentions: Toward an Analysis of Simultaneous Media Use,” Television & New Media 15, no. 4 (2014): 271–288. 57  I am grateful to Jason Jacobs for valuable comments on an earlier version of this chapter and to Routledge for allowing me to reproduce several sentences from my book Appreciating the Art of Television.

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———. 2003. TV and Film: A Philosophical Perspective. In Engaging the Moving Image, 265–280. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2010a. Art, Creativity, and Tradition. In Art in Three Dimensions, 53–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010b. The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge. In Art in Three Dimensions, 201–234. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caughie, John. 2008. Telephilia and Distraction: Terms of Engagement. Journal of British Cinema and Television 3 (1): 5–18. Cavell, Stanley. Fall 1982. The Fact of Television. Daedalus 111: 75–96. Creeber, Glen. 2013. Small Screen Aesthetics: From Television to the Internet. London: British Film Institute. Davies, David. 2004. Art as Performance. Malden: Blackwell. Dickie, George. 1964. The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude. American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1): 56–65. Dowling, Christopher. 2010. The Aesthetics of Daily Life. British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (3): 225–242. Ellis, John. 1992. Visible Fictions, Revised ed. London: Routledge. Gaut, Berys. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. Replies to Ponech, Curran, and Allen. British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (2): 201–208. Geraghty, Christine. 2003. Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama. International Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (1): 25–45. Gracyk, Theodore. 2007. Listening to Popular Music, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Guyer, Paul. 1997. Kant and the Claims of Taste. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hassoun, Dan. 2014. Tracing Attentions: Toward an Analysis of Simultaneous Media Use. Television & New Media 15 (4): 271–288. Hills, Matt. 2011. Television Aesthetics: A Pre-Structuralist Danger? Journal of British Cinema and Television 8 (1): 99–117. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W.  Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Irvin, Sherri. 2008. The Pervasiveness of the Aesthetic in Ordinary Experience. British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (1): 29–44. Jacobs, Jason. 2001. Issues of Judgement and Value in Television Studies. International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (4): 427–447. ———. 2006. Television Aesthetics: An Infantile Disorder. Journal of British Cinema and Television 3 (1): 19–33. ———. 2011. Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic? In Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and Nicki Strange, 255–280. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, Fredric. Winter 1979. Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture. Social Text 1: 130–148. Leddy, Tom. 2005. The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics. In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M.  Smith, 3–22. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Levinson, Jerrold. 1990a. Defining Art Historically. In Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 3–25. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1990b. Refining Art Historically. In Music, Art, and Metaphysics, 37–59. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lotz, Amanda D. 2007. The Revolution Will Be Televised. New  York: New  York University Press. Martin, Brett. 2014. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution. New York: Penguin. Nannicelli, Ted. Summer 2016. In Defence of the Objectivity of Evaluative Television Criticism. Screen 57 (2): 124–143. ———. 2017. Appreciating the Art of Television: A Philosophical Perspective. New York: Routledge. Nannicelli, Ted, and Malcolm Turvey. 2016. Against ‘Post-Cinema’. Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies Journal 26 (27. (Spring/Fall): 33–44. Nehamas, Alexander. 1988. Plato and the Mass Media. The Monist 71 (2): 214–234. Newcomb, Horace. 1974. TV: The Liveliest Art. Garden City: Anchor Books/ Doubleday. Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. 2012. Legitimating Television. New  York: Routledge. Nussbaum, Emily. 2009. When TV Became Art. New York Magazine. December 4. http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62513/ Scruton, Roger. 2007. In Search of the Aesthetic. British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (3): 232–250. ———. Summer 2010. Hiding Behind the Screen. The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society 28: 48–60. Silman, Anna. 2014. The Best of This Week’s Mad Men Recaps: ‘The Strategy.’ Vulture. com. May 20. Available at http://www.vulture.com/2014/05/best-mad-menrecaps-the-strategy.html. Accessed 28 Feb 2017. Silverstone, Roger. 1994. Television and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge. Spigel, Lynn, and Jan Olsen, eds. 2004. Television After TV. Durham: Duke University Press. Stolnitz, Jerome. 1960. Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism: A Critical Introduction. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Thorburn, David. 1987. Television as an Aesthetic Medium. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (2): 161–173. Turner, Graeme, and Jinna Tay, eds. 2009. Television Studies After TV. New  York: Routledge. Turvey, Malcolm. ‘Familiarity Breeds Contempt’: Why Fascination, Rather Than Repeat Exposure, Explains the Appeal of Antiheros on Television. In Screening Characters, ed. Johannes Riis and Aaron Taylor. Forthcoming. Zillman, Dolf. 1996. The Psychology of Suspense in Dramatic Exposition. In Suspense: Conceptualizations, Theoretical Analyses, and Empirical Explorations, ed. Peter Vorderer, Hans J.  Wulff, and Mike Friedrichsen, 199–232. Mahweh: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

CHAPTER 41

Videogames and Film Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin

Introduction It is relatively commonplace for comparisons to be drawn between videogames and film. For example, videogame critics frequently praise games as being “cinematic” or presenting the player with “an interactive movie.”1 And there are a range of similarities—in terms of, for example, technical mechanics and narrative structure—between typical instances of films and of videogames. On the other hand, there also some clear points of disanalogy. For example, features such as interactivity are standard (in the Waltonian sense) for videogames but contra-standard for films.2 In this chapter we explore a number of important analogies and disanalogies between videogames and films as well as between the philosophy of film and the philosophy of videogames. Unsurprisingly, philosophical work on videogames is a relatively recent phenomenon. After all, videogames themselves are a recent innovation. The first videogames weren’t developed until the 1940s at the earliest, and they weren’t

1  For some examples, see http://uk.ign.com/articles/2013/10/03/most-cinematic-momentsin-games 2  “A feature of a work of art is standard with respect to a…category just in case it is among those in virtue of which works in that category belong to that category – that is, just in case the lack of that feature would disqualify, or tend to disqualify, a work from that category….a contra-standard feature with respect to a category is the absence of a standard feature with respect to that category – that is, a feature whose presence tends to disqualify works as members of the category.” (Kendall Walton, “Categories of Art,” The Philosophical Review 79 no. 3 (1970): 339).

J. Robson (*) University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK A. Meskin Department of Philosophy, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_41

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a widespread feature of people’s lives until decades later.3 Further, many early games were, while technologically innovative, rather limited in terms of their aesthetic ambitions. For example, the earliest videogames—such as Computer Space and Pong—typically had rather minimal and generic graphical interfaces and very limited (if any) narrative content. Recent videogames have, however, developed along a number of dimensions. Many videogames now feature lengthy narratives with dozens of characters (sometimes voiced by A-list actors), and these narratives are increasingly designed to exploit the interactive nature of videogames themselves.4 Similarly, technological advances allow videogame developers much greater freedom in how they render virtual worlds graphically as well as in the range and complexity of ludic options open to them. In line with these developments in videogames themselves there has been an explosion of philosophical interest in videogames. Recent work on videogames has dealt with issues as diverse as the nature of interactivity, the ontology of the virtual, sexism in videogames and the educational value of videogames.5,6 We will not, however, try to cover all of these myriad topics here. Rather, we will focus in depth on a few key issues and, in particular, those which allow us to explore some important areas of connection, and contrast, between videogames and film. In “Videogames, Definition, and Film” we consider how best to define videogames, with a particular focus on whether videogames should be considered a subcategory of film (or the moving image). In “The Art Status of Films and Videogames” we consider some debates over the art status of videogames and compare these to parallel debates concerning the art status of film. In “Videogames and Interactivity” we discuss a central aspect of videogames, interactivity, and ask what (if anything) differentiates videogames from interactive films. In “The Ethics of Films and Videogames” we explore various ethical issues relating to videogames and, again, compare these to some related issues which arise with respect to film.

3  There is no uncontroversial date for the first videogame. 1958’s Tennis for Two certainly seems to qualify but there are a number of possible predecessors. 4  As discussed in Grant Tavinor, “Bioshock and the Art of Rapture,” Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (2009): 91–106. 5  See Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin, “Video Games as Self-involving Interactive Fictions,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 no. 2 (2016): 165–177; Shelby Moser, “Videogame Ontology, Constitutive Rules, and Algorithms,” in The Aesthetics of Videogames, eds. Jon Robson and Grant Tavinor. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 42–59; Stephanie Patridge, “Videogames and Gendered Invisibility,” in The Aesthetics of Videogames, eds. Jon Robson and Grant Tavinor. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 161–80; Karen Schrier, “EPIC: A Framework for Using Video Games in Ethics Education,” Journal of Moral Education 44 no. 4 (2015): 393–424. 6  We will focus in this chapter on philosophical discussions of videogames themselves rather than on attempts to use videogames to do philosophy or illustrate standard philosophical themes and arguments (though see Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Philosophy through Video Games (New York: Routledge, 2009) for discussions of these other approaches).

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Videogames, Definition and Film One central issue in the philosophy of videogames concerns the nature of videogames themselves. Within analytic philosophy, this has tended to revolve around attempts to construct a successful definition of videogames. As with most definitional projects within the philosophy of art this search is not inspired by any widespread difficulty in identifying typical instances of videogames—it is easy to see, for example, that Sonic the Hedgehog is a videogame while Citizen Kane is not. Rather, the goal is to arrive at a “real definition” of videogames, that is, a definition which provides us with individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for something being a videogame. Defining Videogames As with other art forms, a range of definitions of the videogame have been proposed. For example, Nicolas Esposito defines a videogame as “a game which we play thanks to an audiovisual apparatus and which can be based on a story.”7 However, again paralleling debates concerning other art forms, each proposed definition soon encounters challenges. For example, one worry concerning Esposito’s definition is that it seems to fail to distinguish between videogames and the larger category of electronic games. This latter category includes hybrids such as Monopoly: Electronic Banking, which replace cash with credit cards and an electronic banking unit, as well as electronic pattern-matching games such as Simon. Probably the most influential philosophical definition of videogames is Grant Tavinor’s, according to which X is a videogame if and only if it is an artifact in a visual digital medium, is intended as an object of entertainment, and is intended to provide such entertainment through the employment of either rule and objective gameplay or interactive fiction.8

What should we make of Tavinor’s proposal? It certainly does a good job of covering many standard examples of videogames, but there are a number of objections to it which could be, and have been, raised. First, while there is clearly an etymological connection between “videogames” and “video,” some have expressed skepticism about whether it is really necessary for videogames to make use of a visual medium.9 (There are, e.g., audio games, such as Shades of Doom, which are designed for non-sighted 7  Nicolas Esposito, “A Short and Simple Definition of what a Videogame is,” Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play (2005): 2 (italics in the original). 8  Grant Tavinor, The Art of Videogames (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 33. A variant of this definition is presented in Grant Tavinor, “Definition of videogames.” Contemporary Aesthetics 6, no. 1 (2008). 9  See, e.g., Veli-Matti Karhulahti, “Defining the Videogame,” Game Studies 15 no. 2(2015).

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users.10) Second, one might worry about the intended entertainment condition. Perhaps there could be videogames which are neither entertaining nor intended to be so (think of an avant-garde videogame designed to constantly frustrate and annoy the user). A different class of objection goes rather deeper, claiming that the real problem is not with Tavinor’s proposed definition (or any particular candidate definition) but with the general project of offering such definitions. The project of attempting to find definitions within the philosophy of art— and within philosophy more broadly—has frequently been met with resistance. Probably the most prominent reason for such doubts is the kind of Wittgensteinian skepticism about real definitions most famously expressed in the context of philosophical aesthetics by Morris Weitz.11 And some—such as Jonne  Arjoranta—have expressed similar Wittgensteinian worries concerning definitions of videogames.12 Indeed, we might think that such skepticism will be especially attractive when applied to videogames since “game” is Wittgenstein’s go-to example of a term which resists characterization in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.13 Given this we might expect videogames, as a subcategory of games, to be similarly resistant. Yet, there are some prominent worries concerning this line of reasoning. First, there are reasons to deny that videogames really are a subcategory of games. There are, for example, a number of items commonly characterized as videogames which we might be resistant to counting as games. These include simulations such as the Flight Simulator series as well as “visual novels” such as To Heart.14 Second, the indefinability of a category does not imply the indefinability of its sub-categories. One could, for example, consistently agree with Weitz that art is indefinable while allowing that various sub-categories of art— films, comics, poetry, and so on—are not. Indeed, Weitz himself claims that while art itself cannot be defined, since it is an “open concept,” there “are legitimate and serviceable closed concepts in the arts” such as “(extant) Greek tragedy.”15 Finally, the claim that “game” itself cannot be defined has famously 10  Jordan Erica Webber, “Video Games that let Blind People Play,” Guardian, October 13, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/13/video-games-that-let-blindpeople-play 11  “Art, as the logic of the concept shows, has no set of necessary and sufficient properties, hence a theory of it is logically impossible and not merely factually difficult” (Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 no. 1 (1956): 27–35). 12  Jonne Arjoranta, “Game Definitions: A Wittgensteinian Approach,” Game Studies 14 no 1 (2014). 13  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1953 / 2001), 33. 14  Other reasons for this resistance have been offered in the ongoing debate between ludology and narratology (by, e.g., Gonzalo Frasca, “Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate that Never Took Place,” Proc. Level Up: Digit. Games Res. Conf (2003)). However, these often seem to presuppose, mistakenly in our view, that there is some incompatibility (or at least tension) between classifying videogames as games and classifying them as narrative works. 15  Weitz, “Role of Theory,” 32.

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been questioned within the philosophy of videogames. In particular, many ­philosophers working on videogames have expressed sympathy for something like Bernard Suits’s definition according to which playing a game involves “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”16 Regardless of the view we ultimately take regarding the definitional project, though, there are other important questions which could be asked about the nature of videogames. We might, for example, ask about the ontology of videogames or about the relationship between videogames and other (artistic) categories. In the remainder of this section we will address this second issue in depth and, in particular, ask whether videogames are a sub-category of film (or the moving image). Videogames as Films We have spoken above as if videogames and films are different art forms but there are several reasons to doubt this claim. First someone may deny (as we discuss in section “The Art Status of Films and Videogames”) that either film, videogames, or both are art. Second, it might be proposed that videogames are merely a sub-category of film. There are, as mentioned above, a number of prima facie similarities between videogames and films, and there are also more theoretically robust reasons for taking the two to be intimately connected. In particular, the vast majority of videogames seem, at least prima facie, to meet all of the conditions in Noël Carroll’s influential account of the moving image. Carroll proposes the following list of necessary, and perhaps sufficient, conditions for something to belong to the category of the moving image: (1) it is a detached display or a series thereof; (2) it belongs to the class of things from which the production of the impression of movement is technically possible; (3) performance tokens of it are generated by templates which are tokens; (4) performance tokens are not artworks in their own right; and (5) it is a two-­ dimensional array.17

We argued in a previous work that there is good reason to think that typical videogames will meet many (perhaps all) of these criteria.18 With regard to the second condition, things are fairly straightforward since it is clear that videogames are able to create the impression of movement in players (given that they frequently do so). Similarly, videogames also meet the fifth condition of being a two-dimensional array. As with film there are a number of videogames which present themselves as being 3-D, but this is merely a matter of their displays 16  Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia (Plymouth: Broadview Press, 1978 / 2005). Suits offers an earlier definition in a similar spirt in his “What is a Game?” Philosophy of Science 34 no. 2 (1967): 148–156. 17  Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 78. 18  Aaron Meskin and Jon Robson, “Videogames and the Moving Image,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 254 no. 4 (2011): 547–564.

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creating the illusion of three dimensionality rather than their actually being three dimensional. Importantly, even the recent swathe of virtual reality games such as Eagle Flight and Obduction are still two-dimensional displays in Carroll’s sense since, while such games may produce a highly convincing illusion of a three-dimensional world, the display image which we view in our VR helmets still lacks any genuine depth. When it comes to Carroll’s other conditions, though, things are rather more complicated. The majority of videogames are clearly examples of detached displays in Carroll’s sense. That is, they do not (by themselves) allow us to orient ourselves with respect to the objects they depict.19 We can no more come to know how far away London is, or in what direction, on the basis of playing a typical videogame based in London than we can by viewing a film based in the same location. Of course, we can do this in both cases by virtue of some additional information (e.g., if the work in question tells us the distance from London to Leeds and we know that we are located in Leeds), but the point remains that the works in themselves do not allow us to orient ourselves in this way. While this applies to many videogames, though, it may not apply to all of them.20 Consider, for example, so-called “augmented reality” games such as Pokémon Go. Here the player’s mobile device acts as the display, presenting what is, in many respects, an accurate image of the world in front of the player. That is, it displays the kind of image which a player would normally see when using the “video” function on their phone. There are, however, some notable additions such as the titular Pokémon (various fantastical animal-like creatures) which are rendered using computer graphics.21 These images cannot, of course, allow us to orient ourselves with respect to Pikachu, Charmander and their ilk, since these have no real-world location. Is this enough to establish that these games are detached displays after all? Not entirely. After all, such games will— in contrast to standard films and videogames—allow us to orient ourselves with respect to the various quotidian objects in our surroundings—trees, tables and the like—in much the same way as ordinary visual perception would. In other words, they seem to be, at best, only semi-detached. It might be objected, though, that when Carroll introduces the notion of detached displays he considers a case which has some similarities to the Pokémon Go case—where a live video monitor shows what is happening on the other side of a wall. In this case, although we are able to orient ourselves to the events depicted on the screen, he argues that it is still a detached display because our 19  We focus here on cases of films and videogames which are representations. As Carroll himself concedes (Noël Carroll. Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 1996): “many films and videos are abstract, or nonrepresentational” and the same, arguably, applies to various videogames (such as Tetris). We thank an anonymous reviewer for pushing us to clarify this point. 20  We previously claimed (in Meskin and Robson, “Moving Image,” 551–2) that this condition did apply to all videogames but subsequent technological advances, such as those we discuss below, have provided counterexamples to this general claim. 21  For more details of the Pokémon Go case, see https://www.pokemongo.com/

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capacity depends on “our knowledge of the placement of the camera in addition to the information available in the image.”22 So, it might be argued that our capacity to orient ourselves to the objects on the mobile device depends on knowledge of the position of that mobile device in addition to the information in the image. If this is right, then even Pokémon Go may involve a fully detached display. There do, however, seem to be some important differences between these two cases. In particular, moving the Pokémon Go display often changes the image it shows, but moving a photograph or film screen around does not change the photographic or cinematographic image. It follows that Pokémon Go displays do, but photographs, films and other traditional detached displays do not, provide information about their spatial relation to many of the objects they represent.23 That is, the Pokémon Go display carries information about the location, with respect to that very display, of some of the objects it depicts. But this is not the case with respect to standard photographic and cinematographic images. Is this enough to say that the Pokémon Go display may allow one to literally see the ordinary objects in our surroundings; that is, is it enough to count the display as a visual prosthetic?24 According to Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, ordinary photographs, films and paintings do not allow for such seeing because they do not provide egocentric information about the spatial relationship between the viewer and depicted objects.25 Note that this seems to be true about Pokémon Go displays as well: if the player moves while the display does not, the display will not change. So, while the display carries egocentric spatial information about what it depicts (i.e., it carries information about its spatial relationship to the objects it depicts), the visual system of the user does not seem to carry such information. In short, it is clear that videogames in general count as detached displays but the case of augmented reality videogames in particular is rather more complicated. While the displays in these cases seem to be detached in some respects, they also have features which suggest that they are importantly distinct from those found within traditional examples of the moving image. The third condition also seems to straightforwardly hold with respect to many videogames. Standard videogame playings were (until recently) generated by physical templates such as cartridges, CDs and arcade cabinets which are themselves tokens. However, more recent developments have somewhat  Carroll, Theorizing, 63.   See Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “An Objective Counterfactual Theory of Information,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 no. 3 (2006): 333–352. 24  See David Lewis, “Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 no. 3 (1980): 239–249. 25  Jonathan Cohen and Aaron Meskin, “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 no. 2 (2004): 197–210; Aaron Meskin and Jonathan Cohen, “Photographs as Evidence,” in Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, ed. Scott Walden (New York: Blackwell, 2008), 70–90. 22 23

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complicated this picture. When it comes to Massively Multiplayer Online Role-­ Playing Games (MMORPGs), for example, there seems to be a sense in which multiple “performances” are generated by individual tokens and a sense in which this is not the case. In some respects MMORPGs function very like traditional videogames; players of such games still typically own physical, or digital, tokens of the game in question, they can each independently engage in various quests to kill different tokens of the same “boss” character, and so forth. In other respects, though, they differ significantly. In particular, many MMORPGs feature shared worlds which persist over time. Of course, there is a sense in which ordinary videogame worlds persist and are “shared.” For example, multiple players of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can all explore various areas of the benighted kingdom of Hyrule. However, in typically non-MMORPG cases players are merely engaging with individual (unshared) tokens of the same fictional world type. In MMORPGs, on the other hand, players can interact with the very same token fictional world. One consequence of this is that large-scale changes within these MMORPG worlds, for example, with respect to the economy or the balance of power between various factions, are not straightforwardly generated by individual players interacting with individual tokens of the game.26 Rather, these changes often arise as the result of an overall pattern of actions by different players, such as the overall demand for a particular resource or the success of various competing armies or guilds. For example, a player looking to buy a Chromatic Sword in World of Warcraft will likely have to hand over a huge amount of gold at one of the game’s auction houses. The value of this item is, however, not determined by a particular token of the game but rather by facts about the game world as a whole—that the item in question is extremely rare (since the game is no longer generating new instances of the item) and in high demand (owing to its unique rainbow glow). The fourth condition is by far the most difficult to assess. When discussing this condition Carroll makes two importantly different claims:27 first, that performance tokens of films aren’t artworks in their own right, and second, that they aren’t susceptible to aesthetic evaluation in their own right. There is certainly some disanalogy between films and videogames when it comes to the second of these conditions. Carroll is correct that we do not typical evaluate individual showings of films aesthetically, but this does not appear to be the case when it comes to videogames.28 Consider, for example, that it is commonplace to describe a player’s performance in a fighting game such as Virtua Fighter 5, in a sports game such as FIFA 17 or a racing game such as Need for Speed, not merely in terms of their success in achieving the game’s aims but also  Indeed, it may be that having this kind of persistent world is a necessary (or at least standard) feature of MMORPGs. We will not, however, take any stance on this issue here. 27  Carroll, Theorising, 67. 28  We say that we “typically” don’t evaluate films in this way since it may well be that—as highlighted in, e.g., Robert Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noel Carroll,” Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 135–140—there are some exceptions to this claim. 26

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in apparently aesthetic terms. One player’s performance is “fluid and elegant,” another’s is “clunky and drab.” And these are far from being the only important respects in which we might aesthetically evaluate the playing of a videogame.29 While it is clear that we evaluate videogame performances aesthetically, it is rather more difficult to assess their claim to be artworks in their own right. Certainly, we don’t typically treat playings of videogames as if they were artworks. They aren’t typically reviewed in videogame publications or treated as something valuable in need of preservation. Similarly, the production of particular videogame performances doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we would expect to receive funding from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). However, it is not clear that this attitude is really justified, and many of the arguments we will consider below in favor of regarding videogames as artworks could equally well be applied to particular token playings of videogames.

The Medium of the Videogame and the Art Form of the Videogame As discussed above, it is not a straightforward matter to determine whether videogames meet Carroll’s conditions for being instances of the moving image, particularly when we take into account various recent developments with videogaming. Even assuming that they do meet these conditions, though, there are a number of reasons why we might still deny that they belong to the medium of the moving image. First, Carroll himself avoids committing himself to the claim that his conditions are jointly sufficient as well as individually necessary.30 Second, Carroll’s conditions are themselves controversial.31 As such, someone might allow that videogames meet all of the relevant conditions but argue that they are still not instances of the moving image since Carroll’s list is either incomplete or inaccurate. Further, even if we accept that videogames belong to the medium of the moving image, this leaves open the further question of whether they belong to the art form of the moving image. Meskin and Robson argue that we have good reason to deny that videogames are a part of the art form of the moving image.32 At least, that is, if we construe art forms here as being what Dominic Lopes refers to as “appreciative art

29  See, e.g., Meskin and Robson, “Moving Image,” 557–9; Jon Robson, “The Beautiful Gamer? On the Aesthetics of Videogame Performances,” in The Aesthetics of Videogames, eds. Jon Robson and Grant Tavinor (New York: Routledge, 2018), 78–94. 30  Carroll claims that if these conditions were presented as jointly sufficient they would be “overly inclusive” since they would allow, e.g., certain kinds of flip book to qualify as instances of the moving image (Carroll Theorizing, 71). Carroll later appears more sympathetic to the joint sufficiency claim (Carroll, Motion Pictures, 55 and 78). 31  Yanal, “Defining,” 135–40. 32  Meskin and Robson, “Moving Image,” 559–63.

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kinds.”33 According to Lopes something is an appreciative art kind “just in case we normally appreciate a work in this kind by comparison with arbitrarily any other works in that kind.”34 However, it doesn’t seem as if there is an established practice of this kind when it comes to videogames and film. That is not, of course, to claim that no such comparisons take place or even that they are never appropriate. It makes sense, for example, to say that the film version of E.T. is significantly better than the videogame but that the reverse holds for Goldeneye. The point remains, though, that many such comparisons clearly seem problematic. Consider, for example, the oddity of comparing Candy Crush and The Godfather or Flight Simulator and La La Land. We have seen, then, that despite the appeal of the claim there is reason doubt whether videogames belong to the medium of the moving image and, still more so, whether they belong to the art form of the moving image. Importantly, though, even if we accept the claim that we shouldn’t regard videogames as instances of the moving image this would not entail that there are no important connections between these two categories. It is to those connections which we now turn.

The Art Status of Films and Videogames One central concern for theorists of film has been the relationship between film and art.35 Although few contemporary theorists would deny that films can be works of art, there is a long history of skepticism about film’s artistic status. In philosophy, this skepticism is perhaps most famously expressed by Roger Scruton, who has argued that cinema is not an “independent” art form, that is, that works of cinema are art only in virtue of their non-cinematic elements.36 Scruton’s concern relates to the alleged inability of photography (and cinematography) to engage in “representation” by which, of course, he means much more than ordinary representation. In brief, Scruton’s idea is that artistic representation essentially involves thought and intentional (i.e., not merely causal) relations and that the photograph (or at least the “ideal photograph”) stands in a “causal and not intentional relation” to its subject.37 As already suggested, though, arguments of this kind—and other arguments against the art status of film—are, for various reasons, almost universally rejected by contemporary philosophers of film.38  Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art (Oxon: Routledge, 2010), 17.  Ibid. There is a problem with this account of “appreciative art kinds” (i.e., any kind which is a subset of an appreciative art kind will count as an appreciative art kind in its own right). The problem is irrelevant in this context. 35  See, e.g., Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957); Jesse Prinz, “When is Film Art?” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 254 no. 4 (2011): 473–86. 36   Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7 no. 3 (1981): 577–603. 37  Ibid., 579. 38  See, e.g., Catharine Abell, “Cinema as a Representational Art,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 50, no. 3 (2010): 273–286; Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 33 34

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Skepticism About Videogames as Art As with films, videogames have faced significant skepticism with regard to their artistic status. However, the sources of skepticism about the status of videogames don’t generally relate to their representational capacities. After all, videogames typically do not stand in a merely causal relationship with what they represent. In some cases, the worry about videogames seems to have to do with the fact that they do not appear to be the product of an individual artistic vision. So, for example, Jonathan Jones’s self-proclaimed “pretty good argument for why immersive digital games are not art” is that art involves an “inner response by a human creator” and this is lacking in videogames.39 Skeptics also appeal to the ludic nature of videogames and suggest that this is in essential tension with art status. Roger Ebert, for example, claims that “one obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game,” and Brock Rough argues at length for the incompatibility of games and artworks.40 We also suspect that much resistance to the artistic status of videogames is driven by the sorts of concerns that drove a great deal of early skepticism about film as art. Just as “film seemed to have a vulgarity that made it an unsuitable companion to theater, painting, opera, and the other fine arts,”41 many of the best-known videogames (Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, etc.) are often taken to exemplify the vulgarity of contemporary popular culture. Of course, it is obvious that vulgarity is not an essential feature of videogames. So a weak form of skepticism might hold that although no videogames are, at present, works of art, it is possible that there will be some in the future (cf. Ebert). It must be said, though, that this view is not so far off from that of some of the defenders of the artistic status of videogames. For example, while Aaron Smuts maintains that some videogames are art he also compares the state of contemporary videogames to that of film in the late nineteenth century, decades away “from the fully-realized promise of the artform.”42 Videogames as Art So, are videogames art? Let us do a bit to clarify the question before exploring some relevant arguments. First, the question seems to assume that there is a 39  Jonathan Jones, “Sorry MoMA, Video Games are not Art,” Guardian, November 30, 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/nov/30/moma-videogames-art. We do not mean to endorse the various concerns we report here. For example, we both doubt the adequacy of the “individual artistic vision” criterion as a necessary condition for arthood and agree with an anonymous referee who suggests that various games such as Civilization and Undertale plausibly meet this criterion. 40  Roger Ebert, “Video Games can Never be Art,” Roger Ebert.com, April 16, 2010, http:// www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art; Brock Rough, “The Incompatibility of Games and Artworks,” Journal of the Philosophy of Games 1 no. 1. 41  Thomas Wartenberg, “Philosophy of Film,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2015. 42  Aaron Smuts, “Are Video Games Art?” Contemporary Aesthetics 3 (2005).

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general answer to the question of the artistic status of videogames. But it is pretty clear that this is not how it works with film—some films are art and others, such as typical home movies and instructional videos, are not. (The same is, of course, true with many other categories such photography, painting and drawing.) A better question might be whether some videogames are art or, instead, whether no videogames are artworks. But this is still not the most perspicuous question since videogames might count as art in virtue of belonging to (or including) some other artistic category. So, for example, showing that there is a videogame which is art in virtue of being a sort of readymade (or in virtue of containing a film) would not answer the most interesting question about videogames and art. We want to know, instead, whether some videogames are works of art in virtue of being videogames or whether there is an art form of videogames. So, is there such an art form? Smuts argues that there is “good reason” to think that many videogames are art and that they comprise an art form.43 His central argument for this claim is that “most major theories of art” imply that at least some videogames are art. More specifically, he claims that “historical, aesthetic, institutional, representational and expressive theories of art” all agree in counting many videogames as works of art. One problem with this sort of approach is that anyone skeptical of the art status of videogames will find the fact that the aforementioned theories endorse their art status to be a good reason to doubt the theories themselves. Another worry is that some of the central considerations that Smuts offers may not quite establish what he takes them to establish. For example, Smuts argues that “A strong case can also be made for video games on institutional grounds, since there is a developing art world for video games.” Yet, the case for that developing art world that Smuts presents is not entirely persuasive. For example, the fact that The American Museum of the Moving Image (now the Museum of the Moving Image) has had numerous videogame exhibits does very little to establish that there is a videogame art world. After all, the museum’s mission statement mentions art in relation to only one aspect of what it does: “Museum of the Moving Image advances the understanding, enjoyment, and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media.”44 Problems also face Tavinor’s arguments in favor of the art status of (some) videogames.45 Tavinor appeals to the cluster theory of art which eschews definition in terms of individually necessary and sufficient conditions and, instead, holds that art status is underwritten by a cluster of merely criterial features which “count toward” that status.46 Tavinor argues that since certain  Ibid.  http://www.movingimage.us/about/, accessed August 31, 2018. 45  Tavinor, Videogames, 172–95. 46  Berys Gaut, “The Cluster Account of Art Defended.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 3 (2005): 273–288; Denis Dutton, “But They Don’t Have Our Concept of Art,” in Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 217–238. 43 44

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v­ ideogames possess many of the criterial features for art (e.g., aesthetic qualities, representation, skill, creativity, an extant practice of criticism, affording emotional experience, and being intellectual challenging), they should be understood as art.47 More specifically, some videogames (e.g., Grand Theft Auto IV) will count as art in virtue in possessing a wide range of relevant criteria, but older games such as Pac-Man may fail to make the cut.48 While this line of thought might initially seem attractive, it is important to remember that the cluster theory itself has been vigorously criticized by a number of philosophers.49 Further, it is not obvious that even those who endorse a cluster theory must accept that the cluster of features that Tavinor appeals to are really sufficient for art status. (So, e.g., some political speeches seem to possess all of the features which Tavinor highlights, but it is not at all clear that they are art.) As suggested earlier, a final concern is that establishing the art status of even a large number of ordinary videogames might not quite answer the question we want answered. Lopes has suggested that “parallels between video games and traditional arts…don’t in the end help the case for an art of video games.”50 The worry is that many videogames may count as art in virtue of belonging to some distinct art form (e.g., graphic art). If we want to determine whether there is an art form of videogames, we need to know whether videogames are art in virtue of what makes them videogames. Lopes suggest that videogames might well be an art form of their own because they can exhibit positive aesthetic features in virtue of interactive gameplay.51 Perhaps this is right, but the question of whether some practice is  a distinctive art form is a difficult one to settle. It is important to stress that in raising such skeptical concerns we don’t mean to deny that some videogames are art, nor even that some are art in virtue of what makes them videogames. Indeed, our own view is that many videogames meet both of these conditions. Rather, we are merely suggesting that, as with the case of film, it is rather more challenging to provide an argument for this art status which will satisfy skeptics than it may initially seem.

Videogames and Interactivity We suggested above that a key difference between videogames and film concerns interactivity. Although there have been interactive films—such as Kinoautomat, I’m Your Man and the critically panned “interfilm” Mr. Payback: An Interactive Movie—in which audience members vote on what will happen  Tavinor, Videogames, 180–90.  Ibid., 191. 49  Such as Thomas Adajian, “On the Cluster Account of Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 4 (2003): 379–385; Aaron Meskin, “The Cluster Account of Art Reconsidered.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 4 (2007): 388–400; Simon Fokt, “The Cluster Account of Art: A Historical Dilemma.” Contemporary Aesthetics 12, no. 1 (2014): 12. 50  Lopes, Computer Art, 114. 51  Ibid., 116. 47

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at key points, this feature is clearly contra-standard with respect to the category of films.52 By contrast, interactivity is standard, perhaps even necessary, for a videogame work. But what, precisely, is meant by “interactivity” here? It is, after all, something of a commonplace that all (or virtually all) artworks are interactive in some sense. We interact with a sculpture in a gallery by moving around it and viewing it from different angles, with a standard film by viewing it, by listening to it, by experiencing a range of affective responses directed toward its characters and so forth. We might characterize this as trivial interactivity which is dependent on the perceptual, cognitive and (often) physical engagement that is required for any artistic appreciation. There have, however, been various attempts to give more robust accounts of interactivity which would, among other things, allow us to distinguish between standard examples of film and standard examples of videogames. Below, we discuss influential accounts of interactivity offered by Smuts, Lopes and Berys Gaut. We then turn from considering robust interactivity in general to considering the particular kind(s) of interactivity involved in videogames and, in particular, to our own previous suggestion that the kind of interactivity involved in videogames is of a special self-involving sort. Smuts on Interactivity Smuts models his account of interactivity on a successful conversation.53 He contrasts successful conversation with two problematic cases—the first in which one interlocutor responds randomly to another, the second in which one responds perfectly predictably (e.g., by repeating everything that is said or by translating it into another language). Smuts’s suggestion is that in neither of these latter cases do we have interaction. The lesson Smuts takes from these cases is that “a certain kind of responsiveness absent of control and predictability is necessary for there to be interaction.”54 We do not find these cases persuasive. While both cases might not count as successful or cooperative interactions, there is certainly a sense in which an interaction takes place. Both are frustrating and arguably unsuccessful interactions, but the second interlocutor in each case responds to the first interlocutor and contributes to the overall conversation. (In fact, Smuts also sometimes talks about failures of “successful interaction” rather than interaction per se.) 52  Reviewing Mr. Payback, Roger Ebert wrote: “I went to see ‘Mr. Payback’ with an open mind. I knew it would not be a ‘movie’ as I understand the word, because movies act on you and absorb you in their stories. An ‘interfilm,’ as they call this new medium, is like a cross between a video game and a CD-ROM game.” (Roger Ebert, “Mr. Payback,” Roger Ebert.com, February 17, 1995, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mr-payback-1995. http://www.rogerebert.com/ reviews/mr-payback-1995). 53  Aaron Smuts “What is Interactivity?” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43 no. 4 (2009): 53–73. 54  Ibid., 63.

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But if this is the case, then absence of control and predictability may be necessary conditions for successful interactivity rather than necessary conditions for interaction simpliciter. For this reason, we think Smuts’s definition of interactivity—“Something is interactive if and only if it (1) is responsive, (2) does not completely control, (3) is not completely controlled, and (4) does not respond in a completely random fashion”—is unsuccessful.55 Lopes and Gaut on Weak and Strong Interactivity Lopes begins his investigation of interactivity by describing what he characterizes as “the standard computer science definition” of interactivity which holds that a medium is interactive just in case it “allows users to control the sequence in which they access content.”56 (The model here is hypertext.) Lopes terms interactivity of this kind weak interactivity, and he argues that it is found in a wide range of traditional media in virtue of the use of  tables of contents and indices.57 Weak interactivity is certainly found in many videogames, but is also a feature of many of the formats through which we now access more traditional examples of the moving image. The DVD box set of The Wire allows users to control the sequence in which they access the show’s episodes. And the chapter menu in an individual disk allows viewers to control the sequence in which they access parts of that episode. Similarly, streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime also allow for viewer control over the order in which they watch episodes of their favorite shows. In order to distinguish videogames from such examples, we need a richer notion of interactivity. In his early writing on interactivity, Lopes argued that strongly interactive works are artifacts “whose structural properties are partly determined by the interactor’s actions.”58 The difference is that rather than simply accessing one and the same structure in a different sequence as in the case of weakly interactive works, audiences for strongly interactive artworks shape the aesthetically relevant properties of those works through their choices. So, for example, Lopes describes the online musical work Tranformator which generates various sounds based on the path that a user takes through a virtual abandoned factory. In such a case, he argues, there is no set structure to the work but, rather, a plethora of different structures that are user generated.59 Although this account does a little better in characterizing the sort of interactivity which is involved in the typical videogame, it does not suffice for characterizing a suitably robust version of interactivity. In the first place, since Lopes’s notion of structure is defined aesthetically, we will need some way of  Ibid., 65.  Dominic McIver Lopes, “The Ontology of Interactive Art.” Journal of Aesthetic Education (2001): 67. 57  Ibid., 68. 58  Ibid. 59  Ibid., 69. 55 56

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extending the account to cover artifacts which are not artworks.60 In the second place, there needs to be some way of excluding non-interactive artifacts whose structural properties have been modified by an interactor (e.g., a painting which has had fresh paint splashed on it by a disgruntled gallery visitor or a sculpture which has been purposefully damaged). In light of these and other concerns, Lopes came to modify his account. The newer view holds that works of art are interactive just in case they “prescribe that the actions of [their] users help generate [their] displays.”61 Moreover, he allows that interactivity comes in degrees and, hence, that “a work of art is interactive to the degree that the actions of its users help generate its display (in prescribed ways).”62 We see built into these definitions the notion of prescribed responses—it is not any old determination of display by user interaction that makes something interactive but, rather, the fact that the work prescribes that we act so as to alter the display, that is, that it directs us to do so. With this in place, the potential counterexamples mentioned above are dealt with. What about the worry concerning extending the account to non-artworks? Lopes argues that interactivity in the case of art is the same as interactivity elsewhere and that his notion of “display” is wide enough to capture this.63 So what is a display? An artistic display, according to Lopes, is the “structured entity that results from the artist’s creativity and that we tune into when we appreciate the work.”64 But, of course, the notion of a display here is adapted from the notion of a computer display and, hence, we need not assume that (all) videogames are art to adapt the account to apply to them. We might, for example, merely say that a videogame display is the structured entity that we attend to when we play the game. However, Gaut has objected that the appeal to “users” in Lopes’s account entails that it is too broad. Since performers of musical and theatrical works are users of those works, and their actions affect the structure of the performances of those works (and, moreover, the works prescribe this), it would seem to follow that all works for performance are interactive.65 The simple solution Gaut suggests is to talk about the actions of audiences rather than those of users. On his modified account “a work is interactive just in case it authorizes that its audience’s actions partly determine its instances and their features.”66 Of course, as Gaut recognizes, not all interactive works are multiples.67 So although his proposed definition does not explicitly deal with one-off interactive works (perhaps because it is meant to apply to interactivity when it is found in the moving image), it is clear from his discussion of Lopes that a  Smuts, “Interactivity”.  Lopes, Computer Art, 36. 62  Ibid., 37. 63  Ibid., 36. 64  Ibid., 4. 65  Gaut, Cinematic Art, 142. 66  Ibid., 143. 67  Ibid., 142. 60 61

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fuller definition would allow that an interactive work might authorize that its audience’s actions partly determine “states of the work” rather than its instances.68 What about the Lopes/Gaut suggestion that interactive works are ones that “prescribe” or “authorize” actions? These notions are introduced to deal with cases in which users or audiences interact with works in an inappropriate manner (e.g., vandalism, skipping tracks in  a DVD). One concern is that this account focuses too much on how an artifact was intended to function rather than on how it actually functions. If authorization or prescription is meant to depend on creator intentions, then the Lopes/Gaut condition on interactivity may inappropriately exclude works which function, but were not intended to function, interactively. For example, it is plausible that screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show are interactive in virtue of how they function (e.g., audience members shout out and throw various things at key times during screening) rather than how they were intended or designed to function.69 In any case, it is clear that typical videogames do, but ordinary films do not, exhibit strong interactivity as it is characterized by Lopes and Gaut. However, this might not be all that there is to the interactivity of standard videogames. Self-Involvement and Interactivity Jon  Robson and Meskin argue that videogames exhibit a distinctive kind of interactivity.70 Standard videogames are, they claim, self-involving interactive fictions; that is, in virtue of their interactivity, they are about their users. Interactivity of this kind allows players to make various things fictionally true about themselves in the world of the videogame by making various choices within the game.71 If, for example, a player of Undertale chooses to have her avatar kill no monsters then she makes it the case that it is fictionally true in the playing of that game that she—the player—has killed no monsters. (It is crucial to note that this is only fictionally true in that token playing of the game— nothing about any actual person is true in the Undertale fiction considered as a type.) This, they claim, is a standard feature of videogame fictions. But it is not a standard feature of all interactive artworks or artifacts. Many of the interactive works of computer art that Lopes discusses do not exhibit this kind of  Ibid.  For an introduction to the phenomenon, see Brian Moylan, “The fan rituals that made Rocky Horror Picture Show a cult classic,” Guardian, October 19, 2016, https://www.theguardian. com/culture/2016/oct/19/rocky-horror-picture-show-fan-rituals-fox-remake 70  Robson and Meskin, “Self-involving,” 165–77; Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin, “Still Selfinvolved: A Reply to Patridge,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 no. 2 (2017): 184–7. 71  Robson and Meskin intend this claim to apply not only with respect to “game worlds” in Walton’s sense but also to Waltonian “work worlds”. For a discussion of the distinction, see Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 58–61. 68 69

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self-involving interactivity.72 So, for example, the interactive musical work mentioned above, Transformator, is not in any way about its users. Nor is self-­ involving interactivity a feature of all interactive computer fictions. It is not exhibited, for example, by Damian Lopes’s Project X which tells the story of Vasco da Gama’s famous voyage to Asia. Similarly, the interactive films mentioned above, Kinoautomat, I’m Your Man and Mr. Payback, may exhibit strong interactivity but they are not self-involving interactive fictions; that is, they direct their viewers to act so as to alter what is displayed, but those displays are not, in virtue of this, about those viewers. Why should we think that self-involving interactivity is a feature of ordinary videogame fictions? Robson and Meskin argue that this is the best explanation for certain aspects of ordinary thought and talk about videogames. Videogame players and observers find it natural to describe gameplay in terms of what the player did in the relevant fiction: for example, “You didn’t kill any monsters!” “No, I did kill a few before you came in. That’s why I won’t get to the Pacifist ending.” The view that games such as Undertale are self-involving interactive fictions provides the best explanation for this otherwise puzzling phenomenon. Intriguingly, though, this phenomenon does not appear to be confined to videogames. Robson and Meskin mention table-top and “live action” role-playing games as well as certain interactive theatrical works which may also exhibit self-­ involving interactivity.73

The Ethics of Films and Videogames A further area of debate concerns the ethical character of videogames. Many of the ethical issues concerning videogames will be familiar to those already acquainted with parallel debates regarding film and other art forms. As with other art forms, much of the ethical criticism of videogames in the popular media has focused on claims regarding the problematic consequences of videogame playing, for example, that playing videogames makes children less intelligent or distracts them from more wholesome and healthy activities.74 However, the most common criticism of videogame play is that it causes videogame players to be more disposed toward various acts of violence. And, as with other art forms, there seems to be some truth to these claims. For example, studies have found that exposure to violent videogames can lead to an increase  Lopes, Computer Art; Lopes “Interactive Art”, 65–81.  For some sympathetic criticisms of Robson and Meskin, see Stephanie Patridge, “Video Games and Imaginative Identification,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 no. 2 (2017): 179–84. For a response to some of these criticisms, see Robson and Meskin, “Still Self-involved,” 184–7. 74  See, e.g., Jonathan Wells and Francis Blagburn, “Is video gaming bad for you? The science for and against,” The Telegraph, August 8, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/ is-video-gaming-bad-for-you-the-science-for-and-against/ and Laura St. John, “8 Ways Violent Games Are Bad for Your Kids,” HuffPost 9/7/2013 updated December 6, 2017, http://www. huffingtonpost.com/laura-st-john/8-ways-violent-games_b_3875846.html 72 73

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in aggressive attitudes and behavior.75 For the most part, though, these claims are straightforwardly empirical ones and there is very little of interest which the philosopher of videogames (qua philosopher) can tell us about them. There are, however, a number of issues concerning the ethics of videogames which appear to have rather more philosophical depth to them. Videogames, Art and Ethics One question we might ask about both videogames and films is whether the ethical status of a work can affect its aesthetic or artistic value. Of particular interest is whether a work being morally problematic (in some respect) can make it aesthetically better or aesthetically worse. Indeed, this issue has been the primary focus for discussions of the ethics of various art forms. These debates are subtle and complex but a brief taxonomy of some competing views will suffice for our purposes. First, there are autonomists who hold that the ethical character of a work has no effect on its aesthetic value either because they deny that we can evaluate artworks on ethical grounds or, more commonly, because they take ethical evaluation of such works to be entirely independent from aesthetic evaluation.76 Others disagree and claim that ethical flaws (of a certain kind) can make a work aesthetically worse. Ethicists such as Gaut, for example, claim that “if a work manifests ethically reprehensible attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically defective, and if a work manifests ethically commendable attitudes, it is to that extent ethically meritorious.”77 Finally, there are immoralists who maintain that ethical flaws in an artwork can sometimes make the work aesthetically better.78 For example, Anne  Eaton argues that certain artworks are morally flawed in that they “endorse a morally abhorrent character” but that in some cases this flaw “is at the same time an aesthetic achievement in that it sets up and then skillfully solves an ambitious artistic problem” concerning how to make such a character both sympathetic and clearly morally reprehensible.79 75  Craig Anderson, “An Update on the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games,” Journal of Adolescence 27 no. 1 (2004): 113–122. This parallels similar results in research concerning the effects of exposure to violent films (see Craig Anderson, “Effects of Violent Movies and Trait Hostility on Hostile Feelings and Aggressive Thoughts,” Aggressive Behavior 23 no. 3 (1997): 161–178). 76  James Anderson and Jeffrey Dean, “Moderate Autonomism,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 no. 2 (1998): 150–167. 77  Berys Gaut “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182–203. Noël Carroll defends a distinct, though related, position which he terms “moderate moralism” in his “Moderate Moralism,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 no. 3 (1996): 223–239. 78  See, e.g., Matthew Kieran, “Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism,” in Art and Morality, eds. José Luis Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner (London: Routledge, 2003), 56–73. 79  Anne W. Eaton, “Robust Immoralism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 no. 3 (2012): 290.

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Once we have these general positions in hand, they can easily be applied to considering ethical issues relating to both films and videogames. It is not as immediately obvious, though, whether there are any interesting ethical issues which arise with respect to videogames or film in particular (rather than artworks in general). It seems, for example, that ethical debates which are explicitly conducted with reference to films or videogames are often equally applicable to other art forms. Consider, for example, Morgan Luck’s “Gamer’s dilemma” which asks about the defensibility of the common attitude of many gamers, according to which virtual murder is morally unproblematic whereas virtual pedophilia is morally reprehensible.80 While this dilemma is framed in terms of the attitudes of videogame players it could, as Luck himself notes, “be adapted to other types of virtual worlds, such as films, paintings and books.”81 This is the case, Luck argues, because there appears to be a tension across all such art forms when it comes to our attitudes toward the acceptability of explicit simulated murder and explicit simulated pedophilia.82 Still, it does seem that there are some ways in which debates concerning the ethics of videogames depart from more general debates relating to art and ethics. In particular, the interactive nature of videogames creates some interesting ethical issues which don’t (standardly) occur in most other domains such as film. The Ethics of Interactivity Strong interactivity in general certainly raises some new issues when it comes to consumers of various art forms. The viewer of a standard (non-interactive) film will typically have a choice about whether to watch the film in the first place, and they may well be morally culpable for some of their reactions to the film (if, e.g., they take perverse pleasure in watching displays of graphic suffering). However, they cannot be held responsible for any morally problematic elements of the film’s narrative since these remain entirely out of their control. By contrast, those who engage with interactive fictions—whether interactive films, videogames or interactive fictions of a different kind—will often bear some (though by no means all) of the moral responsibility for how that particular narrative turns out. The most morally interesting aspect of videogames, though, lies not merely in their being strongly interactive but in the particular kind of strong interactivity they afford. As discussed above, there seems to be a significant difference between videogames and, say, film (even interactive film) in that there is often 80  Morgan Luck, “The Gamer’s Dilemma: An Analysis of the Arguments for the Moral Distinction between Virtual Murder and Virtual Pedophilia,” Ethics and Information Technology 11 no. 1 (2009): 31–36. 81  Ibid., 35. 82  For arguments that he is not right here see, e.g., Christopher Bartel, “Resolving the Gamer’s Dilemma,” Ethics and Information Technology 14 no. 1 (2012): 11–16; Stephanie Patridge, “Pornography, Ethics, and Video Games,” Ethics and Information Technology 15 no. 1 (2013): 25–34; Rami Ali, “A New Solution to the Gamer’s Dilemma,” Ethics and Information Technology 17, no. 4 (2015): 267–274.

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an important sense in which we carry out certain actions within the fictional world of videogames. Consider, for example, a player of Grand Theft Auto V who engages in the game’s notorious “By the Book” mission where Trevor, one of the player’s avatars, is tasked with torturing a suspected terrorist. If Robson and Meskin are right about the self-involving nature of many videogame fictions, it is not merely the case that the player causes their character to torture the individual in question but it is also fictionally the case that the player performs this action themselves. By contrast, while many traditional art forms (such as film) sometimes endorse morally problematic attitudes toward torture, sexual violence and so forth, the audiences of these fictions aren’t themselves fictionally engaged in such activities.83 And something similar holds with respect to standard examples of strongly interactive film. Even if audience members vote to make it the case that a character in such a work performs some immoral action it will not standardly be fictional of any audience member that they perform this action. This contrast seems to point to a significant ethically relevant feature of videogames and other self-involved interactive fictions. Indeed, Robson and Meskin suggest that this might provide a partial explanation for the “moral panic” often engendered by violent videogames claiming that it is plausibly not just the representation of violence in a game such as the “murder simulator” Manhunt that worries critics but the fact that it allows players themselves to fictionally engage in brutal murders. Similarly, it is not merely the representation of prostitution and sexual violence that upsets critics of Grand Theft Auto V but, rather, the fact that players can themselves fictionally use the services of prostitutes and then assault them in order to take back the money that was paid to them.84

Clearly, though, this explanation—even if correct—is only a partial one. In particular, while it may account for the blanket moral condemnation aimed at violent videogames by some critics, it doesn’t offer any explanation for the more nuanced moral reactions felt by players themselves. For example, it is comparatively rare for players to feel the kind of moral unease which they experience when playing Manhunt or completing the infamous “No Russian” mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.85 Yet, the phenomenon Robson and Meskin describe, that of the player fictionally committing various violent acts, is widespread throughout a large range of mainstream videogames where most players never feel even a hint of moral queasiness concerning their actions. As such, whatever merits it may have in explaining a general “moral panic” ­reaction toward videogames it will be unable to, and indeed was never intended to, provide an explanation of the moral reactions of typical videogame players. 83  Though they may, as shown in Robson and Meskin’s Man Bites Dog example (“Self-involving,” 171), be fictionally complicit with such actions in virtue of their attitudes toward the fictional events depicted. 84  Ibid., 170. 85  Patridge, “Imaginative Identification,” 184.

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Summary In this chapter we have considered a range of philosophically significant comparisons between film and videogames. In particular, we focused in depth on some key debates concerning definitions, artistic status, interactivity and ethics. Of course, the list of topics we discussed above is far from exhaustive and there are a wide range of other issues where the two can usefully be compared.86 Still, we hope that the examples we have highlighted are enough to demonstrate that philosophers of film and philosophers of videogames have much to learn from one another.

Bibliography Abell, Catharine. 2010. Cinema as a Representational Art. The British Journal of Aesthetics 50 (3): 273–228. Adajian, Thomas. 2003. On the Cluster Account of Art. The British Journal of Aesthetics 43 (4): 379–3856. Ali, Rami. 2015. A New Solution to the Gamer’s Dilemma. Ethics and Information Technology 17 (4): 267–274. Anderson, Craig. 1997. Effects of Violent Movies and Trait Hostility on Hostile Feelings and Aggressive Thoughts. Aggressive Behavior 23 (3): 161–178. ———. 2004. An Update on the Effects of Playing Violent Video Games. Journal of Adolescence 27 (1): 113–122. Anderson, James, and Jeffrey Dean. 1998. Moderate Autonomism. The British Journal of Aesthetics 38 (2): 150–167. Arjoranta, Jonne. 2014. Game Definitions: A Wittgensteinian Approach. Game Studies 14 (1). http://gamestudies.org/1401/articles/arjoranta Arnheim, Rudolf. 1957. Film as Art. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bartel, Christopher. 2012. Resolving the Gamer’s Dilemma. Ethics and Information Technology 14 (1): 11–16. Carroll, Noël. 1996a. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1996b. Moderate Moralism. The British Journal of Aesthetics 36 (3): 223–239. ———. 2000. Art and Ethical Criticism: An Overview of Recent Directions of Research. Ethics 110 (2): 350–387. ———. 2008. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden: Blackwell. Cogburn, Jon, and Mark Silcox. 2009. Philosophy through Video Games. New  York: Routledge. Cohen, Jonathan, and Aaron Meskin. 2004. On the Epistemic Value of Photographs. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62 (2): 197–210. ———. 2006. An Objective Counterfactual Theory of Information. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (3): 333–352. 86  For discussion, see the essays in Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska eds. ScreenPlay: Cinema / Videogames / Interfaces (London: Wallflower Press, 2002); Aaron Smuts, “Film Theory Meets Video Games: An Analysis of the Issues and Methodologies in ScreenPlay,” Film-Philosophy 7 no. 7 (2003); Jonathan Frome and Aaron Smuts, “Helpless Spectators: Generating Suspense in Videogames and Film,” TEXT technology 13: 13–34.

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Dutton, Denis. 2000. But they Don’t Have our Concept of Art. In Theories of Art Today, ed. Noël Carroll, 217–238. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Eaton, Anne W. 2012. Robust Immoralism. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (3): 281–292. Ebert, Roger. 1995. Mr. Payback. Roger Ebert.com, February 17, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mr-payback-1995 ———. 2010. Video Games Can Never Be Art. Roger Ebert.com, April 16, http:// www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art Esposito, Nicolas. 2005. A Short and Simple Definition of what a Videogame Is. Proceedings of DiGRA 2005 Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play. Fokt, Simon. 2014. The Cluster Account of Art: A Historical Dilemma. Contemporary Aesthetics 12 (1). Frasca, Gonzalo. 2003. Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes from a Debate that Never Took Place. In Proc. Level Up: Digit. Games Res. Conf. Frome, Jonathan, and Aaron Smuts. 2004. Helpless Spectators: Generating Suspense in Videogames and Film. TEXT Technology 13: 13–34. Gaut, Berys. 1998. The Ethical Criticism of Art. In Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Jerrold Levinson, 182–203. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. The Cluster Account of Art Defended. The British Journal of Aesthetics 45 (3): 273–288. ———. 2010. A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Jonathan. 2012. Sorry MoMA, Video Games Are Not Art. Guardian, November 30. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/nov/ 30/moma-video-games-art Karhulahti, Veli-Matti. 2015. Defining the Videogame. Game Studies 15 (2). Kieran, Matthew. 2003. Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism. In Art and Morality, ed. José Bermudez and Sebastian Gardner, 56–73. London: Routledge. King, Geoff, and Tanya Krzywinska eds. 2002. ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/ Interfaces. London: Wallflower Press. Lewis, David. 1980. Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (3): 239–249. Lopes, Dominic McIver. 2010. A Philosophy of Computer Art. Oxon: Routledge. Luck, Morgan. 2009. The Gamer’s Dilemma: An Analysis of the Arguments for the Moral Distinction between Virtual Murder and Virtual Pedophilia. Ethics and Information Technology 11 (1): 31–36. Meskin, Aaron. 2007. The Cluster Account of Art Reconsidered. The British Journal of Aesthetics 47 (4): 388–400. Meskin, Aaron, and Jonathan Cohen. 2008. Photographs as Evidence. In Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature, ed. Scott Walden, 70–90. New York: Blackwell. Meskin, Aaron, and Jon Robson. 2011. Videogames and the Moving Image. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 254 (4): 547–564. Moser, Shelby. 2018. Videogame Ontology, Constitutive Rules, and Algorithms. In The Aesthetics of Videogames, ed. J. Robson and G. Tavinor, 42–59. Oxford: Routledge. Moylan, Brian. 2016. The Fan Rituals That Made Rocky Horror Picture Show a Cult Classic. Guardian, October 19. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/ oct/19/rocky-horror-picture-show-fan-rituals-fox-remake Patridge, Stephanie. 2013. Pornography, Ethics, and Video Games. Ethics and Information Technology 15 (1): 25–34.

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———. 2017. Video Games and Imaginative Identification. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 179–184. ———. 2018. Videogames and Gendered Invisibility. In The Aesthetics of Videogames, ed. J. Robson and G. Tavinor, 161–180. Oxford: Routledge. Prinz, Jesse. 2011. When is Film Art? Revue Internationale de Philosophie 254 (4): 473–486. Robson, Jon. 2018. The Beautiful Gamer? On the Aesthetics of Videogame Performances. In The Aesthetics of Videogames, ed. Jon Robson and Grant Tavinor, 78–94. Oxford: Routledge. Robson, Jon, and Aaron Meskin. 2016. Video Games as Self-Involving Interactive Fictions. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2): 165–177. ———. 2017. Still Self-Involved: A Reply to Patridge. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 184–187. Rough, Brock. 2018. The Incompatibility of Games and Artworks. Journal of the Philosophy of Games 1 (1). https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/JPG/article/ view/2736/5699 Schrier, Karen. 2015. EPIC: A Framework for Using Video Games in Ethics Education. Journal of Moral Education 44 (4): 393–424. Scruton, Roger. 1981. Photography and Representation. Critical Inquiry 7 (3): 577–603. Smuts, Aaron. 2003. Film Theory Meets Video Games: An Analysis of the Issues and Methodologies in ScreenPlay. Film-Philosophy 7 (7). ———. 2005. Are Video Games Art? Contemporary Aesthetics 3. ———. 2009. What Is Interactivity? The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43 (4): 53–73. St. John, Laura. 2013. 8 Ways Violent Games Are Bad for Your Kids. HuffPost, September 7, Updated December 6, 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurast-john/8-ways-violent-games_b_3875846.html Suits, Bernard. 1967. What Is a Game? Philosophy of Science 34 (2): 148–156. ———. 1978/2005. The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. Plymouth: Broadview Press. Tavinor, Grant. 2009a. Bioshock and the Art of Rapture. Philosophy and Literature 33 (1): 91–106. ———. 2009b. The Art of Videogames. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Walton, Kendall. 1970. Categories of Art. The Philosophical Review 79 (3): 334–367. ———. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas. 2015. Philosophy of Film. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Webber, Jordan Erica. 2014. Video Games That Let Blind People Play. Guardian, October 13. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/13/videogames-that-let-blind-people-play Weitz, Moris. 1956. The Role of Theory in Aesthetics. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15 (1): 27–35. Wells, Jonathan and Francis Blagburn. 2017. Is Video Gaming Bad for You? The Science for and Against. The Telegraph, August 8. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ men/thinking-man/is-video-gaming-bad-for-you-the-science-for-and-against/ Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953/2001. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Yanal, Robert. 2008. Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noel Carroll. Film and Philosophy 12: 135–140.

CHAPTER 42

Virtual Reality as an Emerging Art Medium and Its Immersive Affordances Gal Raz

History has rarely witnessed the emergence of a novel art medium with a distinctive set of stylistic conventions and technological affordances and constraints. Apparently, virtual reality (VR) is currently maturing as such an art medium. The VR field, which was established in several technological waves starting from the 1960s, is attracting a growing interest among artists who look for new forms of expression and storytelling. The current phase in VR history is a critical historical stage in which its set of idiosyncratic artistic devices is being developed and refined. The following account of the affordances of VR as an emerging art offers a neuroscientific perspective on the unique properties of this medium. It begins with a short technological and historical review of the field, which is followed by a theoretical discussion on the notions of presence and empathy in VR.  Finally, I argue that the unique immersive potential of VR relies on its embodiment capabilities, which are assumingly mediated by its effect on peripersonal neurons that encode the space surrounding one’s body. These modifications potentially facilitate perceptual and conceptual transformations, unprecedented in other media.

Technological Variety of Virtual Reality Virtual reality refers to “a scientific and technical domain that uses computer science and behavioural interfaces to simulate in a virtual world the behaviour of 3D entities, which interact in real time with each other and with one or more

G. Raz (*) Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, Tel Aviv, Israel © The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1_42

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users in pseudo-natural immersion via sensorimotor channels.”1 It usually immerses the user in the virtual world by blocking out her perception of the natural environment and replacing it with digital panoramic images and sounds. In most VR systems, the digital display is adapted in real time to the user’s head position to enhance the lively panoramic 3D illusion. In terms of VR hardware, the market currently offers a variety of image generation, display, and motion-tracking technologies, which facilitates a range of experiential affordances. The two main categories of image-generation technologies are 360° video cameras and computer-generated imagery (CGI). Live or staged events can be captured by commercial low- and high-end omnidirectional 360° video cameras similarly to the way they are shot in cinema (although with different technical constraints, such as the visibility of the film crew on the set, and several essential artistic differences; see the following sections). The resulting 360° video is rendered into a panoramic monoscopic or stereoscopic movie using specific software. Alternatively, CGI content can be designed using popular game engines such as Unity3D2 and Unreal.3 These software packages offer access to a large database of digital “assets” including models of objects, avatars, animations, and sounds, which could be readily rendered functional in the designer’s virtual world. Importantly, unlike 360° video technologies, CGI-based VR allows for the modeling of user’s body and its representation in the virtual environment. Moreover, in spherical 360° VR the user is limited to panning around the virtual scene. By moving her head, she can choose which part’s panoramic video will be displayed, but she cannot displace herself and move around within the scene. Volumetric CGI VR, on the other hand, is based on computer modeling of the virtual environment so that the viewing distance and angles can be updated in real time with the movement of the user. Integrated 360° video and CGI tools are currently being developed with the aim of combining the best of both technologies (the project #100humans,4 which was presented at Sundance Festival in 2016, makes use of such integrated technology). The most widespread VR display technology is the wearable headset, which covers the user’s eyes with screens. Some of the contemporary head-mounted display (HMD) systems also enable a representation of the user’s movement in the virtual world based on motion-tracking technologies. VR headsets have already gained some commercial success. The worldwide VR headset unit sales of the leading brands (Google Cardboards, Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, Sony PlayStation VR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift) were 11.2 million in

1  Lisa Rebenitsch and Charles Owen, “Review on Cybersickness in Applications and Visual Displays,” Virtual Reality 20, no. 2 (April 2016): 101–25; Philippe Fuchs, Pascal Guitton, and Guillaume Moreau, Virtual Reality : Concepts and Technologies (London: CRC Press, 2011), 8. 2  https://unity3d.com 3  https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/vr 4  I8, #100humans (US and New Zealand, 2016).

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2016 and 13.65 million in 2017 (forecast5). These vendors offer compatible gaming and movie VR content at their online stores. An alternative display technology for immersive VR is multi-projector spherical or cubic room systems, such as the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE6). CAVE is an interactive four-walled video theater. The images that are projected on its walls, floor, and ceiling are updating in real time depending on the user’s position, which is monitored by a motion-tracking system. CAVE systems may incorporate treadmills to overcome walking-space limitations. Stereoscopic display in the CAVE is enabled by binocular glasses. Importantly, in head-mounted display VR the user’s body disappears or is digitally reconstructed, whereas in CAVE experiences it is visible in its real shape. Such visual feedback given to the user from her real body may be important for medical applications of multi-projection VR systems in the field of motor rehabilitation.7 VR systems also differ in their built-in and add-on motion-tracking technologies, which enable varying degrees of precision. Some systems—such as Oculus Rift and HTC Vive—contain gyroscopes, accelerometers, and magnetometers or laser sensors, which allow for real-time tracking of the user’s motion direction and velocity and the updating of the virtual stereoscopic image according to the user’s perspective. The extent to which this potential is realized depends on the VR content. While in spherical 360° VR video the user can control her viewing direction by head rotations, CGI-based VR utilizes the headset motion sensors to fully map physical motion onto movement in the virtual world. Whereas these built-in sensors are used for the estimation of the general location of the user’s body, a finer tracking of specific organs including legs, hands, and fingers can be obtained using additional integrated technologies such as multi-camera systems and motion-capture suits and gloves. It is this embodiment potential which endows VR with unprecedented artistic affordances that are discussed later.

A Brief History of Virtual Reality as an Art Medium Precursors of head-mounted display and interactive multisensory cueing systems were patented as early as in 1945 and 1962 by Thelma Mccollum and Morton L.  Heilig, respectively.8 Heilig, an American filmmaker and writer, ­presented his one-man theater apparatus Sensorama in 1957. This device simu “Global VR Headset Sales by Brand 2016–2017 | Statistic,” accessed July 5, 2018, https:// www.statista.com/statistics/752110/global-vr-headset-sales-by-brand/ 6  H.  Creagh, “Cave Automatic Virtual Environment,” in Proceedings: Electrical Insulation Conference and Electrical Manufacturing and Coil Winding Technology Conference (Cat. No.03CH37480) (IEEE), 499–504. 7  J.  Fung et  al., “Locomotor Rehabilitation in a Complex Virtual Environment,” in The 26th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, vol. 4 (IEEE). 8  Simon Davis, Keith Nesbitt, and Eugene Nalivaiko, “Comparing the Onset of Cybersickness Using the Oculus Rift and Two Virtual Roller Coasters,” in Proceedings of the 11th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment (IE 2015), vol. 27, 2015, 30. 5

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lated a motorcycle riding through Brooklyn, incorporating sounds, artificial wind blows, vibrations, and even smells. The first functional VR HMD prototype was introduced in 1968 by the computer scientist Ivan Sutherland.9 This device (called “Sword of Damocles”) was designed as a helmet incorporating two miniature monitors to allow stereoscopic presentation of elementary computer-­generated graphics and video. More than four decades before the recent surge in virtual reality, Sutherland’s prototype already incorporated the key features of contemporary headsets including position tracking, eye tracking, and computer-generated images, which were updated in real time according to the user’s location and gaze. During the next 40  years, VR interfaces were improved by integrating various technological advances in display hardware, computer graphics, motion tracking,10 and feedback systems.11 Notable projects in the early years of this medium include Frederick P. Brooks’s GROPE (which began in 1967), which is a haptic-visual simulator, allowing the user to feel force fields acting on biomolecules; Myron Krueger’s Videoplace (invented in 1975), which was an interactive environment in which users in separate rooms could see two-­dimensional representations of each other’s movement based on image-­processing techniques; and Thomas Furness’s Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulator (VCASS; developed in 1982), which was a pioneering HMD-based flight simulator.12 On the other hand, this period also saw failed attempts to commercialize VR gaming platforms including the halting of the development of Sega VR at the prototype stage, possibly due to motion sickness problems.13 However, VR technologies have been increasingly adopted and applied in various fields including medicine, aerospace, engineering, architecture, education, gaming, marketing, tourism, and military training.14 The potential of VR as an art medium was acknowledged early on by Jaron Lanier—one of the pioneers in the field who also coined its name. In an interview he gave in 1989, Lanier said: “Virtual Reality is […] like having shared hallucinations, except that you can compose them like works of art; you can compose the external world in any way at all as an act of communication […] When Virtual Reality sponges up good energy from the physical plane, then 9   Steve Dixon, “A History of Virtual Reality in Performance,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 2, no. 1 (2006): 23. 10  Dixon. 11  Frederick P. Brooks et al., “Project GROPEHaptic Displays for Scientific Visualization,” in Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH ‘90 (New York, NY, USA: ACM, 1990), 177–185. 12  T Mazuryk and M Gervautz, “Virtual Reality-History, Applications, Technology and Future,” Technical Report TR-186-2- 96-06 (1996). 13  Jeff Hecht, “Optical Dreams, Virtual Reality,” Optics and Photonics News 27, no. 6 (2016): 24–31. 14  Dixon, “A History of Virtual Reality in Performance,” 2006; Daniel A. Guttentag, “Virtual Reality: Applications and Implications for Tourism,” Tourism Management 31, no. 5 (October 1, 2010): 637–51; Mazuryk and Gervautz, “Virtual Reality-History, Applications, Technology and Future,” Technical Report TR-186-2- 96-06 (1996).

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what you get in Virtual Reality is beautiful art, beautiful creativity, beautiful dreams to share, beautiful adventures.”15 Interestingly, although VR offered compelling possibilities to performance artists and storytellers, a relatively limited corpus of around 100 artworks was created during the first 40 years of the medium’s history.16 These works were mostly experimental in nature, targeting narrow Fringe theatre, galleries, and museum audience. The collection of works created as part of the Canadian Bannf Center’s Art and Virtual Environments Project comprises a landmark in this era of exploration of the artistic potentials of VR. Nine works were funded by this project, which took place in 1992–1994.17 Among the nine was Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland’s Placeholder.18 This work allowed users to practice pseudo-­ metamorphosis and switch between different perspectives on social interactions as they were embodied and re-embodied in animated snake, crow, spider, and fish. Osmose,19 which was created in this project by Char Davies, aimed to challenge the boundaries between the subjective and objective and mind and body.20 It immersed the user in a journey throughout a virtual landscape of forests and lakes and allowed them to fly up to the treetops and dive into the water by changing the pace of their breath. Other notable early VR artworks include Maurice Benayoun’s art installation Tunnel under the Atlantic21 and Blast Theory’s Desert Rain.22 Benayoun’s work, which was simultaneously presented in the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, invited the audience to dig a virtual tunnel and reveal cross-­cultural iconographic terrains23; Desert Rain, which received an honorary mention at the Transmediale Awards in 2001, was a political hybrid of Fringe theater show, video game, and VR simulation criticizing the gamification of the first Gulf War.24 Why did only a surprisingly small number of artists enhance the young medium? This phenomenon may be partially explained by the significant ­limitations on the artist’s access to expensive VR equipment and the growing disappointment in light of the gap between the high expectations fostered by the media and the actual quality of the existing VR devices. These conditions have been dramatically changed in the recent VR wave. Both the technical 15  Kevin Kelly, Adam Heilbrun, and Barbara Stacks, “Virtual Reality: An Interview with Jaron Lanier,” Whole Earth Review 64, no. 108–120 (1989): 2. 16  Jacquelyn Ford Morie, “Female Artists and the VR Crucible: Expanding the Aesthetic Vocabulary,” vol. 8289, 2012. 17  Mary Anne Moser, Douglas MacLeod, and Banff Centre for the Arts, Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual Environments (London: MIT Press, 1996). 18  Rachel Strickland, Placeholder (USA, 1994). 19  Char Davis, Osmose (Canada, 1995). 20  Steve Dixon, “A History of Virtual Reality in Performance,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 2, no. 1 (n.d.): 23. 21  Maurice Benayoun, Tunnel under the Atlantic (France-Canada, 1995). 22  Blast Theory, Desert Rain (UK, 1999). 23  Lars Qvortrup, Virtual Space: Spatiality in Virtual Inhabited 3D Worlds (Springer Science & Business Media, 2002). 24  Dixon, “A History of Virtual Reality in Performance.”

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quality and the availability of VR devices were considerably improved in the past decade with the exponentially growing investment in the development and commercialization of these technologies by prominent companies. Nearly $4 billion were invested in virtual and augmented reality (AR) startups in 2010–2015,25 and $1.1 billion were invested in these fields in the first two months of 2016.26 The company began shipping Oculus Rift Development Kit 1 (DK1) in 2013, about three years before Valve Corporation started shipping its competing HMD, HTC Vive. Google Cardboard and Samsung’s Gear VR are additional low-cost platforms which facilitate stereoscopic VR based on smartphone display. They were released in 2014 and 2015, respectively. The improvement of these new VR devices relative to the early platforms is significant in terms of price, convenience, and quality. While commercial HMDs manufactured during the 1990s cost $6000–11,000 per unit, weighed 1–2.4 kgs, and offered maximal display resolution of 479×234 pixels, the new high-­ end HTC Vive Pro costs around 1000, weighs less than 0.6 kgs, and has a resolution of 2880×1600.27 Importantly, the current VR boost encompasses not only the technological aspects, but also the content domain. In terms of investments, large content companies including Walt Disney,28 HBO, Discovery Communications,29 and Sony Pictures are already involved in the development and production of VR content.30 Several studios specializing in VR content and storytelling were recently opened, for instance, by Samsung,31 Intel,32 and the British National Theatre.33 Prominent filmmakers such as Werner Herzog,34 Ridley Scott,35 and

25  Jonathan Vanian, “Report Says Nearly $4 Billion Invested in Virtual Reality since 2010.,” Fortune, December 1, 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/11/30/investment-hot-virtual-reality/ 26  John Gaudiosi, “Magic Leap Leads $1.1 Billion Wave of VR and AR Investment,” Fortune, July 2016. 27  Davis, Nesbitt, and Nalivaiko, “Comparing the Onset of Cybersickness Using the Oculus Rift and Two Virtual Roller Coasters”; Tom Warren, “A Closer Look at HTC’s New Higher-Resolution Vive Pro,” The Verge, January 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16866240/ htc-vive-pro-vr-headset-hands-on-ces-2018 28  Aaron Tilley, “Disney Invests $65 Million Into Virtual Reality Startup Jaunt,” Forbes, September 2015. 29  Ananya Bhattacharya, “HBO and Discovery Are Partnering with a Startup to Develop Holograms,” The Verge, April 2016. 30  Brent Lang, “Sony Pictures, Reality One Team on Virtual Reality Slate,” Variety, September 2016. 31  Kwame Opam, “Samsung Is Opening a VR Film Studio in New York City,” The Verge, January 2016. 32  Tracey Lien, “Intel Ventures into Virtual Reality with Headset and Los Angeles Studio,” Los Angeles Times, August 2016. 33  Mark Brown, “National Theatre Creates Virtual Reality Studio for New Projects,” The Guardian, February 2016. 34  Patrick House, “Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality,” The New Yorker, January 2016. 35  Bryan Bishop, “Alien: Covenant Is Getting Its Own Virtual Reality Experience,” The Verge, January 2017.

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Alejandro Iñárritu36 have experimented with VR projects. A quantitative estimation of the late VR blooming was provided in 2014 by the Oculus founder, Palmer Luckey, who claimed that the extent of VR content production in the previous year exceeded the combined yield of the past 20 years.37 The integration of VR artworks in international film festivals provides further evidence for its growing profile as a legitimate art and entertainment medium. Since 2012, VR artworks have been showcased in Sundance, the largest American independent film festival, and in the prominent Tribeca Film Festival.38 Thus, for instance, in 2018, 33 VR projects were competing in the Virtual Arcade at the Tribeca Film Festival.39 VR artworks were also presented in the Cannes Film Festival.40 In addition, specialized international VR and AR festivals were launched in the recent years (e.g., VR FEST41 in Las Vegas, YVRFF in Vancouver,42 FIVARS43 in Toronto, AVRFF44 in Queensland, and Steamer Salon in Tel-Aviv45). The growing quantity of VR works shows a considerable formal diversity, as this young medium already offers content fitting into various major film genres including drama,46 horror,47 documentary,48 action,49 science fiction,50 nature films,51 thrillers,52 comedy,53 and porn.54

36  Roxborough Scott, “Alejandro G.  Iñárritu Embraces Virtual Reality (But Don’t Call It Cinema),” Hollywood Reporter, May 2017. 37  Davis, Nesbitt, and Nalivaiko, “Comparing the Onset of Cybersickness Using the Oculus Rift and Two Virtual Roller Coasters,” Proceedings of the 11th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment. 38  Paul Casciato, “Travel Picks: World’s Top 10 Film Festivals,” January 2012; Brown, “National Theatre Creates Virtual Reality Studio for New Projects”; Jose Antunes, “Tribeca Film Festival: A Stage for Virtual Reality by Jose Antunes,” ProVideo Coalition, April 2018. 39  Antunes, “Tribeca Film Festival: A Stage for Virtual Reality by Jose Antunes.” 40  Mindy Weisberger, “VR at Cannes: How Will Virtual Reality Change Film?,” Live Science, May 2016. 41  “VR FEST - Virtual Reality Festival, VR Arcade,” accessed July 5, 2018, https://virtualrealityfestival.com/ 42  “YVRFF – Vancouver Virtual Reality Film Festival,” accessed July 5, 2018, http://yvrff.com/ 43  Jesse Damiani, “FIVARS Is the Most Cutting-Edge Storytelling Festival in the World, and It Kicks Off This Weekend | Huffington Post,” The Huffington Post, September 2016. 44  “AVRFF – Australian Virtual Reality Film Festival,” accessed July 5, 2018, http://avrff.com/ 45  Tom Grater, “Virtual Reality Lands at Jerusalem Fest,” Screen Daily, July 2016. 46  Eugene Chung and Jimmy Maidens, Allumette (USA, 2016); Janicza Bravo, Hard World for Small Things (USA, 2016). 47  John Hegerman et  al., Holidays: Christmas VR (USA, 2016); Anthony C.  Ferrante, Killer Deal (USA, 2016). 48  Gabo Arora and Chris Milk, Waves of Grace (USA, 2015); Wallworth Lynette, Collisions (Australia, USA, 2015). 49  Spherica, Immersive Combat (USA, 2016). 50  Randal Kleiser, Defrost (USA, 2015). 51  Sandy Smolan, The Click Effect (USA, 2016). 52  J. T. Petty, Gone: VR 360, N/A (USA, 2016). 53  Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel, Interrogation (USA, 2016). 54  See Zara Stone, “How Virtual Reality Porn Turned Silicon Valley Into Sex Valley... And Forgot About Women,” Forbes, September 2016.

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VR and Cinema: A Stylistic Continuity or Rupture? Considering this creative boost, the convergence of art and VR currently appears to be more than anecdotal. Given the substantial creative and financial investment, it is likely that VR will remain a vivid domain of art and entertainment at least in the near future and that artistic VR forms will mature and consolidate into canonical formats. There is a growing agreement among filmmakers and critics that the future of this process critically depends on the extent to which VR artists will formulate effective stylistic strategies that exploit the unique potentials of their medium and avoid its pitfalls. When asked about the similarity and difference between VR and cinema, filmmaker Werner Herzog replies: “The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. […] So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.”55 According to Herzog, VR cannot be considered as an extension of cinema or video games. “It is something new, different, and not experienced yet,” he argues. Alejandro Iñárritu, who recently gained the Special Award Oscar for cinematic innovation for his VR project Carne y Arena,56 similarly emphasizes the gap between these two media: “Cinema is frame, cinema is length of the lens, cinema is editing, the position of images that create time and space. Virtual reality, even when it’s visual, is exactly all what cinema is not.”57 Steven Spielberg emphasizes the difference between cinema and VR in terms of storytelling: “I think we’re moving into a dangerous medium with virtual reality […] because it gives the viewers a lot of latitude not to take direction from the storytellers but make their own choices of where to look […] I just hope it doesn’t forget the story when it starts enveloping us in a world that we can see all around us and make our own choices to look at.”58 On the one hand, both classical cinema and VR usually present unfolding audiovisual sequences, which depict continuous actions. Both media can combine spatially and temporally separated shots, and both allow the author to control shooting distance, shooting angles, and (virtual or physical) camera movements. Other stylistic elements, such as mise-en-scène, lighting, and sound, are generally continuous across media. Thus, for example, due to the potential proximity between the user and the character in VR, acting parameters such as minute facial expressions may be visible similarly to cinema and unlike the classical theater. On the other hand, as Spielberg noticed, VR interactivity is gained at the expense of the author’s control over the storytelling. In specific, it complicates  House, “Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality | The New Yorker.”  Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Carne y Arena (USA, 2017). 57  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/alejandro-g-inarritu-embraces-virtual-realitybut-dont-call-cinema-1006881 58  Ben Child, “Steven Spielberg Warns VR Technology Could Be ‘dangerous’ for Film-Making,” The Guardian, May 2016. 55 56

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cinematic framing techniques, which are fundamental for attention-directing functions on which the cinematic storytelling is based.59 The VR user’s sense of agency and autonomous exploration of the diegetic environment might be violated by abrupt forced cuts and perspective shifts. Thus, a tight shot/reverse shot pattern, which is common in cinema, is at odds with interactivity, an elementary experiential component of VR.  Other common cinematic framing techniques such as camera motion, zoom, and focus manipulations are challenged in VR for the same reason. While non-narrative VR forms, which highlight the sensory aspects of the artistic experience, are apparently less affected by these constraints, VR storytelling may depend on the development of alternative attention-grabbing devices. Apart from these constraints, VR also has unique affordances in terms of presence and embodiment. These affordances are readily and intuitively harnessed by artists to enhance the user’s engagement with the virtual characters. A prominent proponent of the notion that the future of VR as an art medium depends on the extent to which it exploits its unique potential in eliciting immersive empathic experiences is the American artist Chris Milk. In collaboration with several partners from the media and the United Nations, he created a series of short 360° documentary VR projects including Clouds over Sidra,60 which tells the story of a Syrian 12-year-old girl in a refugee camp in the Jordanian desert; My Mother’s Wing,61 which focuses on a Palestinian mother in Gaza who lost two sons in the 2014 Israel-Gaza clashes; and Waves of Grace,62 which accompanies Ebola survivor in the capital of Liberia. “What I was trying to do was to build the ultimate empathy machine,” said Milk in his TED talk. “When you are inside the headset […] you are sitting there with her [the Syrian refugee’s] room, watching her […] And that’s where I think we just start to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality.” [Italics added]63. Although compelling and inspiring, Milk’s notion of VR as an “empathy machine” needs to be refined in light of the theoretical research of engagement in motion pictures. Neither VR embodiment affordances nor viewer’s/user’s engagement with virtual characters are homogenous phenomena. The heterogeneity of these factors should be taken into account as their complex interactions may yield counter-intuitive outcomes. In a series of seminal critical analytical works,64 Noël Carroll rejects the assumption that the viewer’s engagement with cinematic characters is domi Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus 114 (1985): 79–103.  Gabo Arora and Barry Pousman, Clouds Over Sidra (USA, 2015). 61  Gabo Arora and Ari Palitz, My Mother’s Wing (USA, 2016). 62  Gabo Arora and Chris Milk, Waves of Grace (USA, 2015). 63  Chris Milk, “The Birth of Virtual Reality as an Art Form,” 2016, accessed July 5, 2018, https://gosouth.co.za/birth-virtual-reality-art-form/ 64  For example, Noël. Carroll, “On Some Affective Relations between Audiences and the Characters in Popular Fictions,” in Empathy : Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 162–84; Noël Carroll, “On the Ties That Bind: Characters, the Emotions, and Popular Fictions,” Philosophy and the 59 60

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nated by “central imagining” in which “the audience member is in the same type-identical emotional state in which the fictionally character is.”65 Carroll points to a prevailing asymmetry between the viewer and the cinematic characters in terms of the appraised objects of their emotions (I may feel for a grieving fictional mother, while the object of her grief is different—her lost son66), the reality status of these objects (for me the characters are fictional, but the characters usually treat each other as if they are real), and the context of action (the characters can affect the diegetic events, while I cannot). Due to this asymmetry (as well as other parameters that are beyond the scope of the current chapter), cinematic engagement usually does not apply to definitions of identification, projection, or empathy, which imply that one not only shares the same emotion with another individual, but also feels it because she images herself as being in the individual’s shoes (or imagining that individual in her shoes67). This asymmetry is significantly mitigated when considering the relations between the user and her virtual incarnation in VR, which facilitates first-­ person presence, agency, and embodiment. The user’s and the avatar’s appraisals of the virtual world can be tightly matched as they interact symbiotically with this world. The reduced distance and enhanced agency may elicit quantitatively different engagement processes relative to cinema. While these insights also apply to first-person gaming experiences, the unique embodiment affordances of VR imply a further qualitative difference. This difference may become clearer in light of Murray Smith’s account of the notion of cinematic sympathy as an alternative to central imagining-based empathy. Smith highlights the process of spectator-character alignment. According to Smith, alignment ­ involves two sub-processes, which do not necessarily implicate full-fledged empathy: spatiotemporal attachment with characters and subjective access to their mental world.68 When entertaining first-person agency in both video games and VR, the subjective access may vary. On the one hand, the user may interact with a “void witness” whose presence can be assumed, but not directly seen. This embedded agent seems to have no independent subjectivity. It only reflects and resonates (and thus possibly copies) the user’s motives that drive the interested viewing. Such impersonal agency can be found in 360° video works, like Waves of Grace and Clouds over Sidra. On the other end of the spectrum, controllable avatars may have distinctive personality traits, long-term ambitions, desires,

Interpretation of Pop Culture, 2007, 89–116,; Noël. Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror (Routledge, 1990). 65  Carroll, “On Some Affective Relations between Audiences and the Characters in Popular Fictions,” 166. 66  Carroll, 168. 67  Carroll, 166. 68  Murray (Murray Stuart) Smith, Engaging Characters  : Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 143.

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and traumas, as in the story games Heavy Rain69 and Life is Strange.70 In terms of spatiotemporal attachment, both VR and video games can maximize this parameter by allowing the user to continuously control the view. This option warrants that the spatiotemporal attachment, which has an important impact in cinematic engagement71 and probably also in VR, becomes permanent as is rarely the case in films. While video games and VR resemble in these aspects of user-avatar alignment, they potentially vary in a third related domain, namely the sensory alignment. Depending on hardware and content, VR enables the user to allegedly share with the avatar not only auditory and visual inputs, but also vestibular, proprioceptive, and tactile sensations. Thus, VR embodiment affordances facilitate user-avatar relations, which move beyond the cinematic and gaming engagement. By applying a multisensory stimulation in VR, the user and the avatar can be brought into an unprecedented perceptual proximity. This potential brings VR closer to the notion of central imagining as it can induce an experimental level, which is qualitatively different from cinematic sympathy. Before moving on to review physiological evidence that sheds light on the uniqueness of VR, a word of caution about its empathic affordances has to be given. In her discussion on the ethical aspects of VR empathy, Kate Nash warns that a strong alignment between the user and her virtual incarnation might come at the expense of the engagement with other virtual characters and with the story of the real people who are featured in the 360° documentary: There is an inherent tension between attention to the other and the experience of transportation. […] There is a risk of improper distance insofar as the users prioritize their own experience of transportation and exploration (spatial presence) over engagement with the testimony of the other. Similarly, insofar as the user focuses on their experience of transportation as indicative of ‘what it is like’ to be in the space of suffering it is possible to speak of improper distance.72

Echoing Ed Tan’s notion of the importance of the witness position in cinematic emotions,73 Nash specifically mentions a disengaging uncanny experience of witnessing a crying woman in a physical proximity in the 360° video Waves of Grace in the absence of an ability to act.74

 David Cage, Heavy Rain (France, 2010).  Raoul Barbet and Michel Koch, Life Is Strange (France, 2015). 71  For a discussion on the importance of the intimate perspective alignment between the spectator and the character for empathy, see Nitzan S. Ben-Shaul, Cinema of Choice : Optional Thinking and Narrative Movies (Berghahn Books, 2012), 36–38. 72  Kate Nash, “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence,” Studies in Documentary Film, July 3, 2017, 10. 73  Ed S.-H. Tan, “Film-Induced Affect as a Witness Emotion,” Poetics 23, no. 1–2 (January 1, 1995): 7–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-422X(94)00024-Z 74  Nash, “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence,” 10. 69 70

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Thus, in line with Nash’s reservations and with empirical evidence on counter-­actions of empathy-related processes during a cinematic experience,75 Milk’s assertion that VR is an empathy booster needs to be modified with sensitivity to questions such as the following: Which empathy/sympathy processes? What are their objects? In what time frame (immediate or long-term engagement)? Which VR devices are employed? In her recent account of VR technologies,76 Mandy Rose offers an insightful distinction, which relates to the latter question. On the one hand, in 360° video works such as Waves of Grace and Collisions, the user’s body is not represented and her agency is limited to the act of viewing. In these works, “the disembodied eye is the locus of knowledge, while the body is redundant.” On the other hand, in works such as Hunger in LA,77 In the Eyes of the Animal,78 and Notes on Blindness,79 which combine motion-tracking technologies with haptic elements to simulate an emergency event, animal perception, and gradual blindness, respectively, the VR experience is based on bodily sensations. In the remainder of this chapter, I focus on the latter type of VR affordances, which Rose denotes “technologies of corporeality.”

Body Ownership Illusions and the Unique Potential of VR To shed light on the unique embodiment affordances of VR, I now turn to a brief overview of the empirical and theoretical work on body ownership perception. Only a few key findings and concepts are introduced later. Comprehensive reviews of the topic are offered by Blanke, Slater, and Serino80 and Maister, Slater, Sanchez-Vives, and Tsakiris.81 The first key finding, which is highlighted in this literature, is that body ownership perception is surprisingly flexible. A series of studies of multisensory body-­ related illusions supports this notion. In the case of the Pinocchio

 Gal Raz and Talma Hendler, “Forking Cinematic Paths to the Self: Neurocinematically Informed Model of Empathy in Motion Pictures,” Projections 8, no. 2 (January 1, 2014); Gal Raz et al., “Cry for Her or Cry with Her: Context-Dependent Dissociation of Two Modes of Cinematic Empathy Reflected in Network Cohesion Dynamics,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 9, no. 1 (January 1, 2014): 30–38. 76  M. Rose and M. Rose, “Technologies of Seeing and Technologies of Corporeality: Currents in Nonfiction Virtual Reality,” World Records 1 (2018): 1–11, http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/35355/ 77  Nonny de la Peña, Hunger in LA (USA, 2012). 78  Robin McNicholas and Barnaby Steel, In the Eyes of the Animal (UK, 2016). 79  Peter Middleton and James Spinney, Notes on Blindness (UK, 2014). 80  Olaf Blanke, Mel Slater, and Andrea Serino, “Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily Self-Consciousness,” Neuron 88, no. 1 (2015): 145–66. 81  Lara Maister et al., “Changing Bodies Changes Minds: Owning Another Body Affects Social Cognition,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 6–12. 75

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illusion,82 a blindfolded participant receives vibrations on her biceps while touching the tip of her nose with her fingers. The stimulation produces an illusion that the hand is extended, and the result of the combination of the tactile input from the fingers and the proprioceptive input from the muscles and tendons is a feeling of an elongated nose. The phantom nose illusion83 is similar, but instead of using vibrators, the proprioceptive information about the extended hand originates from the user’s actual hand being extended and the tactile feeling of the nose is a result of touching someone else’s nose. An out of body illusion can be experimentally induced when a participant sees a video of her back as if she were located behind it and the experimenter simultaneously touches her back with a stick while she watches the video. This manipulation results in an illusory drift in her self-location toward the seen body. Finally, the rubber hand illusion,84 which was discovered 20  years ago, is apparently the best-studied illusion among the four. To induce it, the experimenter hides the participant’s real hand. Instead, she introduces a visible rubber hand in a natural orientation in relation to the participant’s body. The experimenter then uses an object such as a paintbrush to simultaneously stroke the fake and the real hand. This manipulation results in a sense of ownership over the fake hand, which was validated and replicated using various ­measurements: self-reports,85 a drift in a blind estimation of the spatial location of the real hand toward the fake hand,86 a decreased temperature sensitivity of the real hand,87 and a reaction of the autonomous nervous system to physical risks to the fake hand.88 Importantly, an illusion of ownership was also elicited

82  Anna Burrack and Peter Brugger, “Individual Differences in Susceptibility to Experimentally Induced Phantom Sensations,” Body Image 2, no. 3 (September 1, 2005): 307–13. 83  V.S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, “Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4, no. 5–6 (1997): 429–57. 84  Mel Slater et al., “Towards a Digital Body: The Virtual Arm Illusion,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2 (2008): 6; H Henrik Ehrsson, Nicholas P Holmes, and Richard E Passingham, “Touching a Rubber Hand: Feeling of Body Ownership Is Associated with Activity in Multisensory Brain Areas.,” The Journal of Neuroscience : The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience 25, no. 45 (November 9, 2005): 10564–73. 85  For example, Ehrsson, Holmes, and Passingham, “Touching a Rubber Hand: Feeling of Body Ownership Is Associated with Activity in Multisensory Brain Areas.” 86  For example, Andrew Wold et  al., “Proprioceptive Drift in the Rubber Hand Illusion Is Intensified Following 1 Hz TMS of the Left EBA,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (June 4, 2014): 390. 87  For example, Joan Llobera, M. V. Sanchez-Vives, and Mel Slater, “The Relationship between Virtual Body Ownership and Temperature Sensitivity,” Journal of The Royal Society Interface 10, no. 85 (August 2013): 20130300. 88  For example, K Carrie Armel and V S Ramachandran, “Projecting Sensations to External Objects: Evidence from Skin Conductance Response.,” Proceedings. Biological Sciences 270, no. 1523 (July 22, 2003): 1499–1506.

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toward virtual hands89 as well as toward other body parts including legs, back, and face.90 This series of evidence regarding the malleability of our body ownership perception, which can be extended to some extent even to office tables91 and cardboard boxes,92 has gained considerable attention in experimental psychology. However, a self-confident film scholar may argue that this lesson should come as no surprise to those familiar with phenomenological film theory. This theoretical line starts with Merleau-Ponty’s account of cinema as an ultimate domain for synesthesia, intersubjective embodiment, and the intermingling of body sensations, mind, and worldly objects.93 It continues with the revival of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas starting from the 1990s by scholars such as Vivian Sobchack94 who sees the cinematic experience as a multisensory interaction between the spectator and a “film body,” which has its own intentionality and modes of perception and expression. In this spirit Steven Shaviro95 subscribes to the notion of affective and philosophical continuity between the spectator and the “cinematic body” (which has far-reaching political implications, see96), and Vitorio Gellese and Michele Guerra97 speculate about the role of the mirror neuron system (which has been studied by Gallese as a neuroscientist) in such a mode of cinematic-embodied simulation. If cinema offers an embodied interaction with the film’s skin, musculature, and viscera, as Jennifer Barker recently suggested,98 and if we touch the cinematic images with our eyes, is there really anything new or special about the bodily transformations facilitated by virtual reality? As film phenomenology suggests that the viewer’s body is 89  For example, Ye Yuan and Anthony Steed, “Is the Rubber Hand Illusion Induced by Immersive Virtual Reality?,” in 2010 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference (VR) (IEEE, 2010), 95–102; Wijnand A IJsselsteijn, Yvonne A. W de Kort, and Antal Haans, “Is This My Hand I See Before Me? The Rubber Hand Illusion in Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 15, no. 4 (August 8, 2006): 455–64. 90  For example, Giuseppina Porciello et  al., “The ‘Enfacement’ Illusion: A Window on the Plasticity of the Self,” Cortex 104 (July 1, 2018): 261–75; Roy Salomon et al., “Full Body Illusion Is Associated with Widespread Skin Temperature Reduction,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7 (July 25, 2013): 65. 91  Armel and Ramachandran, “Projecting Sensations to External Objects: Evidence from Skin Conductance Response.” 92  Jakob Hohwy and Bryan Paton, “Explaining Away the Body: Experiences of Supernaturally Caused Touch and Touch on Non-Hand Objects within the Rubber Hand Illusion,” ed. Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells, PLoS ONE 5, no. 2 (February 24, 2010): e9416, https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0009416 93  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 48–59. 94  For example, Vivian Carol. Sobchack, The Address of the Eye  : A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Vivian Carol. Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts : Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (London: University of California Press, 2004). 95  Steven. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 96  Steven. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Washington: 0 [zero] Books, 2010). 97  Guerra. Michele Gallese, Vittorio, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 3 (2012): 183–210. 98  Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye : Touch and the Cinematic Experience (California: University of California Press, 2009).

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extended toward the audiovisual artifact and significantly intermingles with it, does VR hold a unique promise of immersion? My positive answer to these questions relies on the empirical scrutiny of body ownership illusions. This literature suggests that such illusion depends on an actual synchronous multisensory stimulation, including tactile and/or proprioceptive cuing, rather than on the simulated synesthetic gestalt, which is highlighted by film phenomenologists. The type of body ownership illusion that has been studied in this line of research is induced by aligning the visual presentation of a fake/virtual body part being positioned, moved, or touched with the corresponding tactile and proprioceptive cues experienced by the individual on her own body. A critical factor here is the spatial proximity between the physical bodily correlate of the visually apparent body part (e.g., the real hand) and the source of tactile or proprioceptive information. Technically, these conditions can be fulfilled in VR but not in classical cinema. Blanke, Slater, and Serino99 review a series of studies, which provide substantial evidence for the notion that within some tolerance range temporal and spatial matching between these multisensory inputs are determining factors for body ownership illusion. One of the most striking evidence was obtained in a study of rhesus monkeys by Liangtang and colleagues.100 Monkeys of this species usually consistently fail in mirror self-recognition tasks and are therefore believed to lack the ability to recognize themselves in the mirror. The researchers report that rhesus monkeys developed a variety of behaviors that indicate that they acquired the ability to recognize their reflection in the mirror following a simultaneous visual-tactile stimulation. The stimulation was administered for 2–5 weeks during which the monkeys were trained to touch an irritating laser light spot on their faces, which were reflected in the mirror. After training, the monkeys were able to pass several mirror self-recognition tests including the examination of the ability to touch a colored area marked by a non-irritant light spot seen in the mirror or a video image. They also showed spontaneous mirror-induced self-directed behaviors. Importantly, four control monkeys that had gone through mirror habituation but had not experienced simultaneous tactile and visual stimulation failed in the mirror self-recognition tests and did not exhibit behaviors that indicate that they recognize themselves in the mirror.

VR Uniqueness in Neuroscientific Terms The discussion of Blanke, Slater, and Serino in the physiological mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness further clarifies the difference between the multisensory processing of external audiovisual stimuli, which takes place during the cinematic experience, and the multisensory integration of proprioceptive and 99  Blanke, Slater, and Serino, “Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily Self-Consciousness.” 100  Liangtang Chang et al., “Mirror-Induced Self-Directed Behaviors in Rhesus Monkeys after Visual-Somatosensory Training,” Current Biology 25, no. 2 (January 19, 2015): 212–17.

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tactile information, which occurs in VR. According to their explanation, the former involves separate reference frames, whereas the latter implicates a shared reference in relation to which the signals are continuously processed: In the case of integration of exteroceptive inputs, such as audio-visual integration (e.g., the noise and the flashing of a fire alarm on the wall), multisensory integration is based on the spatial relationship between the source of the visual and the auditory cue, determined by the position of the visual stimulus on the retina, the location of the sound in the auditory space, and signals related to eye and head position. Thus, additional sensory signals (eye-head proprioception) only minimally concur with the integration process of exteroceptive stimuli under static conditions. Instead, in the case of bodily inputs (e.g., visuo-tactile or audio-tactile stimuli), the common reference frame of multisensory perception is the subject’s body, and the transformation—or remapping process—involves processing and integration of additional proprioceptive and vestibular inputs signaling the location of a tactile cue on the body in space […] and visual inputs related to the configuration of the body in space.101

These authors postulate a more specific neuroscientific hypothesis about the role of fronto-parietal and temporo-parietal peripersonal neurons in bodily self-­ consciousness. The term “peripersonal neurons” was first suggested by Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues in 1981102 to describe neurons which react to bimodal (tactile and visual) stimuli, but only when they are presented in a space immediately around the monkey’s body. An extensive research of the peripersonal space (PPS) over recent decades has provided the following insights (summarized by Vignemont and Iannetti103): (1) the PPS is anchored to specific body parts such as hand, trunk, and face, surrounding them like “invisible bubbles”; (2) it is encoded by multimodal neurons, which may react to proximal auditory, visual, and somatosensory cues; (3) its boundaries are flexible; and (4) it is modulated by operational and emotional parameters. Peripersonal neurons, which responded to the presence of various objects in proximity to the face, did not react to an approaching realistic plastic apple and over-reacted when the monkey faced a plastic snake (assumingly reflecting a defensive response pattern104). In addition, PPS can be expanded or contracted when using tools.105

101  Blanke, Slater, and Serino, “Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Principles of Bodily SelfConsciousness,” 148. 102  Giacomo Rizzolatti et  al., “Afferent Properties of Periarcuate Neurons in Macaque Monkeys. II. Visual Responses,” Behavioural Brain Research 2, no. 2 (March 1, 1981): 147–63, https://doi.org/10.1016/0166-4328(81)90053-X. 103  F. de Vignemont and G.D. Iannetti, “How Many Peripersonal Spaces?,” Neuropsychologia 70 (April 1, 2015): 327–34, https://doi.org/10.1016/J.NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA.2014.11.018 104  Michael S.  A. Graziano, The Spaces between Us  : A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution, and Human Nature (NY: Oxford University Press,) 63–65. 105  See de Vignemont and Iannetti, “How Many Peripersonal Spaces?”

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Importantly, empirical studies suggest that body illusion induced using the rubber hand manipulation or VR affects the PPS.  Thus, Gaziano and colleuges106 showed how a multimodal neuron in the parietal cortex of the monkey brain developed an activity pattern which reflects sensitivity to the fake hands following a synchronous visual-tactile stimulation (and lost it following an asynchronous stimulation). Noel et al.107 induced a full body ownership illusion using an HMD, which presented a real-time video of the participant’s back being touched while synchronously touching her back. In line with previous works, they operationalized the PPS as the space in which bimodal stimulation (auditory and tactile) decreased the time it took to react to a unimodal (tactile) cue. The study reported that a synchronous stimulation in VR resulted in forward shifting of the PPS toward the avatar (an extension and constriction of the frontal and the rear PPS, respectively). Taken together, the accumulating evidence suggests that the “central nervous system represents differently and separately sensory stimuli happening on the body, in the space immediately surrounding the body and in the space beyond reach.”108 In light of this literature, it becomes clear that the special embodiment affordances of VR provide this art medium with unique ways to act within the peripersonal space. By administering an actual synchronized multimodal stimulation of the peripersonal neuron system (rather than recruiting it via synesthesia as alluded by film phenomenologists), VR may unprecedentedly induce a remapping of the user’s body into a virtual agent. The psychological significance of this artistic potential is revealed by a series of empirical studies, which supports the notion that VR embodiment may induce a holistic Proteus effect (named after the early sea god in the Greek mythology who used to change shapes), in which an individual adopts perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral tendencies of a virtual body in which she is embodied. VR may induce multi-level unconscious psychological transformations, which may sustain after the experience is over. In terms of perceptual transformation, it was shown that the embodiment of the user in a virtual child’s body resulted in an over-estimation of the size of virtual objects in comparison to a condition in which the participant was embodied in an adult avatar of the same size.109 Another study reported on an improved drumming performance when the users were embodied in a casually 106  M S Graziano, D F Cooke, and C S Taylor, “Coding the Location of the Arm by Sight.,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 290, no. 5497 (December 1, 2000): 1782–86. 107  Jean-Paul Noel et al., “Peripersonal Space as the Space of the Bodily Self,” Cognition 144 (November 2015): 49–57. 108  de Vignemont and Iannetti, “How Many Peripersonal Spaces?” 327. 109  Domna Banakou, Raphaela Groten, and Mel Slater, “Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Child Body Causes Overestimation of Object Sizes and Implicit Attitude Changes.,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 110, no. 31 (July 30, 2013): 12846–51; Ana Tajadura-Jiménez et  al., “Embodiment in a Child-Like Talking Virtual Body Influences Object Size Perception, Self-Identification, and Subsequent Real Speaking,” Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (December 29, 2017): 9637.

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dressed dark-skinned avatar in comparison to those who were virtually dressed with formal suits and had a light-skinned body.110 The user’s avatar’s skin color was also reported to influence the tendency to automatically mimic the gestures and posture of a companion avatar. Independently of the shades of their non-virtual skin, users tended to mimic more frequently avatars whose skin color matched with their avatar’s skin color.111 A particularly intriguing evidence in the course of this investigation is a lasting effect of VR embodiment on racial bias, as measured using the implicit association test (IAT).112 After finding that the embodiment of light-skinned women in dark-skinned avatars results in a short-term reduction of their implicit racial bias (as measured by the IAT113), Mel Slater and his colleagues tested for longer-term effects of such VR manipulation. They introduced the participants to a virtual Tai-Chi training in which the trainee was embodied in a black- or white-skin avatar. An IAT, which was conducted one week after the training, pointed to an attenuation of the racial bias among those who were embodied in the dark-skin avatar. A short-term attenuation of an implicit bias was also reported in the case of age114 following an embodiment in a virtual body of a child. Finally, this research group recently reported that participants who are embodied in an avatar which resembles Albert Einstein perform better than participants who were embodied in an unrecognized avatar in a verbal test, which is commonly used to estimate intelligence.115 What may be the underlying mechanism of this series of remarkable effects? In a recent review of this young field,116 the authors offer an explanation, which combines the established notion of associative learning with the currently prominent framework of predictive coding.117 According to their explanation, 110  K. Kilteni, I. Bergstrom, and M. Slater, “Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 19, no. 4 (April 2013): 597–605. 111  Béatrice S. Hasler, Bernhard Spanlang, and Mel Slater, “Virtual Race Transformation Reverses Racial In-Group Bias,” PLOS ONE 12, no. 4 (April 24, 2017): e0174965. 112  Anthony G.  Greenwald, Debbie E.  McGhee, and Jordan L.  K. Schwartz, “Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test.,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 6 (1998): 1464–80. 113  Tabitha C. Peck et al., “Putting Yourself in the Skin of a Black Avatar Reduces Implicit Racial Bias,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 779–87. 114  Tajadura-Jiménez et  al., “Embodiment in a Child-Like Talking Virtual Body Influences Object Size Perception, Self-Identification, and Subsequent Real Speaking”; Domna Banakou, Sameer Kishore, and Mel Slater, “Virtually Being Einstein Results in an Improvement in Cognitive Task Performance and a Decrease in Age Bias.,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018): 917; Banakou, Groten, and Slater, “Illusory Ownership of a Virtual Child Body Causes Overestimation of Object Sizes and Implicit Attitude Changes.” 115  Banakou, Kishore, and Slater, “Virtually Being Einstein Results in an Improvement in Cognitive Task Performance and a Decrease in Age Bias.” 116  Tajadura-Jiménez et  al., “Embodiment in a Child-Like Talking Virtual Body Influences Object Size Perception, Self-Identification, and Subsequent Real Speaking.” 117  Andy Clark, Surfing Uncertainty : Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind (NY: Oxford University Press, 2015).

42  VIRTUAL REALITY AS AN EMERGING ART MEDIUM AND ITS IMMERSIVE… 

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a conflict (or error) arises when perceiving low-level features of one’s own virtual body as representing the outgroup. The updating of attitudes and high-­ level beliefs about oneself is an efficient way to resolve this error. The authors add: We propose that, because of a newly established physical similarity between self and outgroup, the conceptual representations of self and outgroup also become linked. Via a process of evaluative generalization, the positive evaluations associated with the self concept now extend to the embodied outgroup. This results in the outgroup not only being associated with the self concept […] but also with positive concepts more generally […]. This mechanism can be thought of as maintaining consistency between the multifaceted aspects of self (personality, attitudes, and behaviours) and the body representation following the updates of the sense of body ownership.118

It should be noted that “Proteus effects” were reported not only in the context of VR. The appearance of avatars in video games and web-based virtual environments was reported to influence the user’s self-confidence,119 assertiveness,120 motivation to perform physical exercise,121 and racial stereotypes.122 Thus, the extent to which certain aspects of the Proteus effect are unique to body ownership illusions in VR remains to be further explored. However, assuming the validity of the hypothesis outlined earlier, VR is optimal for such effects. On the one hand, it facilitates efficient low-level manipulations of proprioceptive neurons, and on the other hand, it offers a flexible and powerful culturally loaded imagery. Thus, Kate Nash’s ethical concerns about the problem of improper distance and its adverse effect on the ability to empathize with others should be weighed against the notion that under certain conditions (which are yet to be discovered) VR’s quality of enhanced immersion may have a profound and lasting psychological and even political impact. In terms of artistic affordances, by employing the palette of multisensory devices, VR may lead the users into powerful identity-breaking journeys of body transformations across race, age, gender, and other identities.123 However, these devices are rarely exploited in current VR applications. Multisensory 118  Maister et  al., “Changing Bodies Changes Minds: Owning Another Body Affects Social Cognition,” 10. 119  Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson, “The Proteus Effect: The Effect of Transformed SelfRepresentation on Behavior,” Human Communication Research 33, no. 3 (July 1, 2007): 271–90. 120  Yee, N., Bailenson, J. N., & Ducheneaut, N. (2009). “The Proteus Effect: Implications of Transformed Digital Self-Representation on Online and Offline Behavior,” Communication Research, 36(2), 285–312. 121  Benjamin J. Li, May O. Lwin, and Younbo Jung, “Wii, Myself, and Size: The Influence of Proteus Effect and Stereotype Threat on Overweight Children’s Exercise Motivation and Behavior in Exergames,” Games for Health Journal 3, no. 1 (February 18, 2014): 40–48. 122  E.  Ash, “Priming or Proteus Effect? Examining the Effects of Avatar Race on In-Game Behavior and Post-Play Aggressive Cognition and Affect in Video Games,” Games and Culture 11, no. 4 (June 1, 2016): 422–40. 123  For examples of cross-gender and cross-race VR works, see The Machine to be Another project (http://www.themachinetobeanother.org)

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stimulation including proprioceptive and tactile cuing is not the default in VR production and distribution practices. It is an open question whether VR’s unique affordances could be integrated in the wave of emerging content and to what extent and in which formats it could be distributed and commercialized. Time will tell if the current VR wave is just another (well-funded) hype in a history of disappointments or rather the beginning of an artistic revolution. Whether these new experiential horizons will open or not, by keeping a close watch on the development of virtual reality and by intervening with it, the research of motion pictures could gain much insight into its key notions of spectatorship, interactivity, empathy, and immersion.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #100humans, 41 #MeToo movement, 654, 673 8½, 545 23, 62n46, 179n21, 238n3, 266n26, 273n57, 357n1, 382n7, 385n15, 394n48, 411n11, 436n128, 553, 621n48, 724n6, 729n20, 752n101, 840, 868, 942n39 7 Up, 250 8mm, 77 16mm, 77 25th Hour, 125 35mm, 77 51 Birch Street, 630 360° video camera, 996 400 Blows, 253 500 Days of Summer, 249 1080 Bruxelles, 868 2001: A Space Odyssey, 803 A Abell, Catherine, 72, 73, 75, 84 Abraham, A., 906 Abrams, M.H., 551, 553

Absence, 7–9, 80, 166, 167, 190, 192, 194–199, 262, 289, 337, 371, 373, 472n30, 484, 521, 582, 588, 594, 634, 655, 657, 666, 682, 683, 727, 728, 748, 770, 785, 856, 910, 923, 932, 938, 951, 955, 968, 971n2, 985, 1005 Absurd Imaginings, 110–114 Academy Award, 88 Action movie, 335 Action-oriented, 123, 524 Action time, 369 Active male gaze, 942 Activist, 77, 643, 695, 706, 712, 717 The Act of Killing, 493, 504–507, 506n14, 634, 635n18 ACT UP, 705, 717 Actor, 22, 73, 79, 86, 92, 112, 193, 210, 242, 244, 298, 311, 348, 523, 616, 680, 690, 851, 852, 860 Actualist, 807 Adair, Peter, 715 Adam’s Rib, 349, 350 Adaptation, 554–556, 823–841, 829n5, 829n6 Addison, Joseph, 412

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 N. Carroll et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19601-1

1015

1016 

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor W., 316–327, 330, 332, 354, 441, 767, 768, 805, 960 The Adventure of Prince Achmed, 170 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 112 Aesthetic attitude, 298, 817, 818, 962, 967 Aesthetic bankruptcy, 960 Aesthetic criticism, 410, 415–417, 420, 422, 425, 428, 429, 431, 433, 434, 436 Aesthetic description, 419 Aesthetic experience, 737 Aesthetic qualities, 223, 413, 416, 424, 457, 528, 529, 576n12, 678, 691, 696, 827, 983 Aesthetics, 72n4, 339, 357n1, 410, 687–688, 735, 959–968 Aesthetics of Race, 687–688 Aesthetic thinking, 537 Aesthetic value, 75, 327, 360, 410, 416, 416n32, 424, 425, 430, 576, 598, 954, 955, 959, 961, 963, 968, 989 Affect, 387n24, 395, 401–402, 413n21, 893–915 Affective contagion, 860 Affective empathy, 902 Affective matching, 399 Affective response, 854–858 Affective states, 894–899 Africa myths, 692 African Americans, 718 African-centered cinema, 687 African popular music, 687 Agamben, Giorgio, 276–278 Aggression, 151, 724, 750, 910, 914 Aguirre: The Wrath of God, 250 AIDS, 705–708, 717, 761 Ailes, Roger, 771 Aizura, Aren Z., 712 Akerman, Chantal, 631n15, 637, 868 Albritton, Rogers, 339 Alekan, Henri, 71, 80 Algeria, 449 Ali, Muhammad, 695 Alien, 364n35, 474, 531–533, 546 Alien Resurrection, 532 Alignment, 398 All About Eve, 72 Allegiance, 398

Allegory, 491, 685, 687, 691, 692 Allegory of the cave, 926 Allen, Woody, 362, 373, 498, 546 Almond, Brenda, 260, 274, 275 Alperson, Philip, 120 Also Sprach Zarathustra, 803 Althusser, Louis, 240, 278, 441, 442, 446, 447, 453, 455, 643, 711n23, 924 Althusserian, 365, 383, 384, 443, 452 Altman, Robert, 77, 239, 546, 814 The Amazing Spiderman, 130 Amazon Prime, 985 American avant-garde, 561, 565–567, 569, 639, 640 American film, 544, 546, 569, 695, 720, 923, 997 The American Friend, 330 The American Museum of the Moving Image (Museum of the Moving Image), 982 American Society of Cinematographers, 89 American Werewolf in London, 104 Amores perros, 868 Amour, 508–510 Analogue, 171, 174, 182–186, 363, 568, 595–597, 826, 830, 897, 941 Analysand, 631, 924, 928–933, 935, 939–943 Analyst, 423, 446, 585, 631, 925–931, 933–936, 939–940 Analytic, 100, 237–280, 261n9, 262n11, 273n58, 276n75, 279n85, 357–377 Analytical judgments, 341 Analytic-cognitivist, 454, 456 Analytic Philosophy, 12n18, 237–258, 260n3, 263n14, 266n25, 360n17, 361n22, 367n42, 367n47, 371–376 Analytic-synthetic distinction, 338 Anderson, Barbara, 386 Anderson, Hans Christian, 788 Anderson, Joseph D., 271, 386, 392, 395 Andrade, E., 911 Andre, Carl, 597 Andrews, David, 725 Anémic Cinéma, 574, 716 Anger, Kenneth, 565, 707

 INDEX 

Anglo-American, 261, 261n9, 262, 269, 274, 354 Anglophone, 261, 262, 264, 270, 441, 444, 446, 515, 520, 923, 924, 943 Animated cinema, 165, 166, 168, 169, 171–178, 180–182, 185 Animated film, 180, 371 Animation, 73, 165–186 Annie Hall, 847 Anomalisa, 170, 182, 182n31, 499–504 Anscombe, G.E.M., 263 Anthology Film Archives, 702 Anthropomorphism, 528 Anti-cognitivist, 472, 473, 486 Anti-empiricist, 179 Anti-humanism, 449 Anti-philosophy, 517 Anti-segregationist, 771 Antithese, 326 Antoinette, Marie, 613, 614 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 82, 253, 324, 364, 370, 522, 543, 545, 546, 560, 610, 849 Any-instant-whatever, 461 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 703 Apartheid, 678, 679 Aperture, 76, 82–84, 244, 245 Apocalypse Now, 88, 190, 804, 836 Appearance property, 60, 61, 67 Appraisal, 32, 33, 37, 401, 424, 662, 663, 859, 895, 897, 898, 905, 908, 914, 1004 A priori, 100 Apted, Michael, 250 Apuleius, 693 Arabic, 695 Arcade cabinet, 977 The Archers, 788–795, 797, 798 Architectural plans, 223–225 Arc lamps, 83, 84 Arendt, Hannah, 506–507 Argumentative discourse, 520, 667 Aristotle, 110, 247, 249, 294, 548, 552, 579, 808n32, 829n5, 837, 909, 910 Arjoranta, Jonne, 974 Arnheim, Rudolph, xxv, 29–31, 36–38, 174, 180, 192, 193, 238, 241, 248, 258, 359, 432, 544, 546, 605n4, 795, 809

1017

Aronofsky, Darren, 814–815 Arousal, 904–908 Arrival, 123, 813 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 761 Art, 43, 44, 44n6, 71–91, 174n12, 180, 199, 318, 319, 347, 357–377, 357n1, 433n110, 553, 574, 605n4, 721–755, 734n35, 783–799, 801–819, 914, 954–959, 979–983, 995–1014 Artaud, Antonin, 523–525, 528, 564 Art cinema, 253, 254, 392, 561, 566, 886 Art films, 4, 247, 258, 543, 754, 882, 914, 974 Artform, 516, 801, 808, 811, 818, 981 Art-house, 366 Arthur, Paul, 631 Artifact emotions, 402 Artifacts, 49, 64, 66, 102, 217, 331, 402, 586, 587, 721, 722, 726, 727, 733, 736, 739, 743, 746, 776, 849, 966, 985–987, 1009 Artistic evaluation, 24, 36, 956 Artistic medium, 31, 43, 173, 371, 377, 520, 754, 796–798 Artistic properties, 36, 37, 89, 956 Artistic value, 174, 190, 193, 194, 233, 722, 729, 754, 956, 989 Arts of sound, 813–815, 818 Artworld, 25n36, 243 Arzner, Dorothy, 703 Ashley, Kaitlyn, 728 Ashton, Fredrick, 788, 789 Asian, 366, 695 Asian Americans, 695 Aspect ratio, 374 Aspectual identification, 869 The Asphalt Jungle, 229 Assertion Argument, 105 Assertoric intention, 619, 620, 624, 637, 644, 645 Assertoric objective intention, 620 Associationism, 268 Astaire, Fred, 239 Astruc, Alexander, 640 Asymmetrical relationships, 400, 877 Atencia-Linares, Paloma, 203n53 Attias, Dan, 547 Attic tragedy, 925

1018 

INDEX

Attunement, 305 Audience-oriented, 535, 579 Audiovisual, 133, 221, 382, 395–398, 402, 429, 443, 445n17, 456, 463, 493, 507, 516, 518, 520, 575, 684, 811, 949, 951, 954, 973, 1002 Audition (sound), 122, 209, 794, 801, 808n32, 809, 812 Augmented reality (AR), 976, 977, 1000, 1001 Augustinian, 645 Au Hasard Balthazar, 909 Aura, 319, 320, 322, 325, 565, 609, 883 Auratic dimension, 613 Auratic quality, 319 Austen, Jane, 478 Austin, J.L., 338, 354, 750, 751, 778 Australia, 679, 761, 765 Auteur Theory, 543–546 Authorial intent, 726 Autobiographical act, 628, 638–648 Autobiographical documentary, 627–648 Autobiographical film, 604 Automata, 783–799 Automatic imitation, 871 Automatism, 783–799 Automediality, 628 Autonomist, 989 Autonomous processes, 878 Autonomy, 256, 317, 318, 324, 328, 371, 448, 454 Avant-garde, 40, 573–576 Avatar, 987, 991, 996, 1004, 1005, 1011–1013 The Avengers, 73, 954 Averill, J. R., 897 The Awful Truth, 349–351, 354n45 B Baby’s Lunch, 761 Bachelard, Gaston, 271, 272 Badiou, Alain, 5n3, 274, 276, 278, 279n85 Baker, Annie, 797–798 Baker, Sean, 670, 673 Balázs, Béla, 29, 193, 515, 528 Baldwin, James, 703–704, 711n33

Ball, Alan, 218 Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 803 The Ballad of Fisher’s Boarding House, 554 Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, 788 Ballets Russes, 788, 789, 789n16 Bambi, 174 Bancroft, Dustin, 851 Bandwagon, 430, 764, 765 Bannf Center, 999 Bantinaki, K., 911, 912 Baracco, Alberto, 268 Barber, Lesley, 804 Barbie, 751 Barker, Clive, 681 Barker, Jennifer, 268n31, 1008 Baroque, 587 Barratt, D., 904 Barrett, L. F., 896, 898 Bartel, Christopher, 745 Bartenieff, Irmgard, 150, 156 Barthes, Roland, 240, 278, 376, 427, 441, 442, 444, 446, 451, 452, 457, 643 Barthesian semiotics, 383 Bartsch, A., 902 Bass, Saul, 549 Bates, Norman, 290, 936 The Battle of Algiers, 46, 909 Battleship Potemkin, 370, 703n11 Batty, Craig, 216 Baudrillard, Jean, 441, 443, 443n8, 444, 451 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 867, 937, 938, 940–943 Baum, L. Frank, 718, 719 Baxandall, Michael, 179 Baynes, Pauline, 488 Bazin, André, xxv, 10, 11, 29, 35, 37, 83, 174, 238n3, 241, 242, 258, 267, 297, 303, 308, 324, 354, 359, 433, 521, 785, 786, 788, 790, 794, 795 Beardsley, Monroe, 111n19, 416, 423, 424, 733 Beatty, Warren, 88 Beaupré, M. G., 900 Bechara, A., 905 Beecham, Sir Thomas, 789

 INDEX 

Behavioral, 846, 856–858, 897, 898, 1011 Behind the Green Door, 728 Being and Time, 271n49, 300, 301 Being John Malkovich, 503, 829n6 Being-in-the-world, 277, 301–303, 305, 306 Belief, 389n32 Belief-like imagining, 847 Bell, Chris, 707 Bell, Michael, 418, 426 Bellamy, Ralph, 352 The Belle of Amherst, 112 Bellour, Raymond, 453 Benayoun, Maurice, 999 Benjamin, Walter, 273, 316, 319–323, 325, 326, 328, 330, 332, 441 Bensmaïa, Réda, 444, 445 Beowulf (poem), 18 Berger, John, 273, 769 Bergman, David, 703 Bergman, Ingmar, 257n67, 362, 583 Bergman, Ingrid, 115, 353, 612 Bergson, Henri, 271, 272, 459–461, 528, 591 Bergsonian, 458, 460–463, 594 Bergsonian/Deleuzian, 461 Berlant, Lauren, 709, 709n24 Berlin Alexanderplatz, 547, 548 Berliner, Alan, 644 Bernays, Edward, 770, 777 Bersani, Leo, 706 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 80, 88, 229, 491, 560, 566 The Best Years of Our Lives, 83, 376 Betty Boop, 41, 179 Beyoncé, 719 B-films, 364 Bi-epistemology, 720 The Big Sleep, 249, 823n1 Biomolecules, 998 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, 773 “The Birds,” 543, 803 Birth of a Nation, 679, 680, 758, 762, 770 Bisexual desire, 720 Bisexuality, 720 Bisexual representation, 720 Bisexual sexuality, 720

1019

Bitmap, 184 Black, Noel, 933 Black aesthetics, 687, 691 Black-and-white stock, 75 Blackburn, Simon, 276 Black communities, 679 Black diaspora, 690 Black feminist cinema, 682 Black male, 679, 680, 682 Black music, 687 Black Orpheus, 691 Black Panther, 692, 693 Black people, 679, 687, 689, 878 Black performer, 719 Black viewer, 689 Black women, 657, 660, 664, 680 Blade Runner, 301, 362, 363, 377, 488, 493, 823n1 The Blair Witch Project, 606 Blais, C., 561 Blake, William, 831 Blanchet, Robert, 956n16, 957, 959 Blanchot, Maurice, 525 Blanke, Olaf, 1006, 1009 Blaxploitation, 682, 689 Blazing Saddles, 11, 13, 16, 26 Block, Doug, 630, 631 Blockbusters, 7, 9, 34, 364, 692, 758 Blocking, 464, 681, 728, 730, 731, 996 The Blood of a Poet, 564 Blue, 51, 190, 197 Blue Velvet, 190, 425 Blues, 687 Boardman, Frank, 3 Bodily, 157, 267, 309, 383, 387, 395–397, 401, 477, 525, 532, 552, 714, 850, 854, 871–874, 881, 894–896, 898, 899, 1006, 1008–1010 Body/bodies, 830, 837, 1006–1009 Body ownership perception, 1006–1009, 1011, 1013 Bogart, Humphrey, 242, 348, 349, 607, 612 Bollywood, 683 Bolshevik Revolution, 762 Bolton, Lucy, 273 Bondage, 753 Bonnie and Clyde, 370, 371

1020 

INDEX

Booth, Wayne, 99, 421, 426 Bordowitz, Gregg, 707 Bordwell, David, 98n3, 99n5, 101, 123, 125, 133, 136, 145, 154, 168, 201, 206, 239, 247, 247n33, 248, 251–253, 257, 270, 273, 275, 293, 358, 365, 382, 384, 385, 388–392, 394, 403, 442, 443, 453, 455, 458, 763, 900 Bornstein, Kate, 714–715 Borsage, Frank, 544 Bouquet, Carol, 849 Bourgeois, 317, 320, 327, 328, 384, 442, 581, 716 The Bourne Identity, 6 The Bourne Ultimatum, 741 Bowie, David, 742 Boyce, Kristin, 783 Boyle, Danny, 254 Boys Don’t Cry, 714 The Boys in the Band, 710 Boyz in the Hood, 909 Bracketing, 87, 286, 292, 647 Bradley, Joy, 753 Brakhage, Stan, 51, 171, 239, 565, 567–569, 593, 640, 642 Brand, Bill, 7 Brando, Marlon, 79, 229, 230 Brandom, Robert, 263 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 803 Breaking Bad, 218, 390, 399, 959, 960 Breathless, 253 Bringing Up Baby, 345, 349, 414, 923, 935, 935n22 Brecht, Bertold, 174, 254, 326, 328, 453, 707, 716, 718 Brennan, Judge William, 747, 748 Bresson, Robert, 82 Breton, Andre, 564, 567 Brinckmann, Christine N., 872 Bringing Up Baby, 345, 349, 414, 923, 935 British Film Institute, 430, 605n7 British National Theatre, 1000 Britton, Andrew, 431 Broadcast video, 55 Brogan, T.V.F., 144 Brokeback Mountain, 699, 823n1, 904 Broken link, 526–527

Bronfen, Elisabeth, 354 Bronson, Charles, 307 Bronze, 245, 294 Brooks, Frederick P., 998 Brooks, Mel, 19 Broomfield, Nick, 642–644 Brown, Clarence, 120 Brown, Stuart, 261, 273 Brown, William, 279 Brown people, 690 Browning, Robert, 554 Brunette, Peter, 442 Brute causation, 611, 613 Bruun Vaage, Margrethe, 382, 399, 403, 877, 957 Buckwalter, W., 905 Budd, Malcolm, 966 Buddy movie, 355 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 217 Bullerjahn, C., 907 Bullough, Edward, 347, 348 Bunker, Archie, 951 Bunuel, Luis, 37, 238, 398, 559, 564, 565 Bürger, Peter, 328, 716–718 Burnett, Charles, 682 Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 683 Burtt, Ben, 814 Burwell, Carter, 801 Bush Mamma, 690 Bush, Jared, 87 Bushman, B. J., 910 C The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 323 Caché, 508, 854 Cacioppo, J. T., 860n43, 895 Cage, John, 954 Cahiers du Cinema, 286 Calbi, M., 904 Call of Duty, 981 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, 991 Cambodia, 771 Camcorder, 644 Camera, 82–88, 787n11 Camera angles, 58, 90, 109, 254, 310, 696, 789, 939, 958 Camera crew, 75, 90, 103

 INDEX 

Camera Lucida, 442, 787n11 Camera movement, 22, 37, 39, 82–88, 138, 225, 310, 311, 361, 418, 459, 568, 582, 792, 797, 798, 871, 1002 Camera-stylo, 640 Cameron, James, 531 Camille, 414 Camp, 701, 709 Camp, C. J., 911 Camus, Marcel, 691 Canada, 366, 696, 900 Canby, V., 906 Candida Royalle, 728 Candy Crush, 980 Candy Man, 681 Canguilhem, Georges, 271, 272 Cannes Film Festival, 1001 Cannon, W. B., 895 Canudo, Ricciotto, 515 Canvas, xxvi, 294, 337 Canyon, Christy, 728 Caouette, Jonathan, 630–631 Capitalism, 695 Capitalist society, 326 Caplan, Ben, 130 Capra, Frank, 238n3, 239, 349, 554, 763, 770 Capturing the Friedmans, 635 Caravaggio, 544 Carbone, Mauro, 267 Cardiff, Jack, 789 Card staking, 765 Carlomusto, Jean, 707 Carlyle, Thomas, 545 Carnap, Rudolf, 277 Caro, Anthony, 791 Carpenter, John, 804 Carroll, J. M., 904 Carroll, John W., 67 Carroll, N., 7n9, 22–25, 29–31, 43, 45n8, 51, 52, 53n11, 60, 61, 63, 87, 88, 97, 98n3, 103–111, 114, 127, 145, 153, 180, 192n8, 195–197, 239, 240, 245–247, 249–252, 253n48, 255, 257, 263, 268, 270, 275, 279, 293, 294, 357, 358, 361, 364–366, 376, 383–385, 390–394, 400, 402–403, 412, 424, 442, 443, 453–458, 472, 488, 489,

1021

495, 514, 528, 531, 575, 585–588, 590, 620n44, 628, 636, 637, 658, 662, 663, 668, 783–787, 796–798, 804–808, 810–812, 816, 818, 861n46, 879–882, 898, 903–905, 907, 909, 911, 950–952, 954, 955, 975, 976, 978, 979, 1003, 1004 Carson, L.M. Kit, 637 Cartesian, 301, 302, 308, 454, 456, 479, 488, 549, 632 Cartesian doubt, 341 Cartesianism, 287 Cartoons, 768 Cartridge, 977 Carvalho, S., 904 Casablanca, 248, 372, 607, 612 Casetti, Francesco, 515 Casey, John, 415 The Castle of Purity, 909 Categorical intention, 618, 619 Categories of art, 199, 974 Catharsis, 909–910 Cathexis, 928, 939 Caughie, John, 967–968 Caught from Behind, Part II, 749 Causality, 151, 157, 249, 565, 606 Cause-effect, 250 Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), 997 Cavell, Stanley, xxv, 165, 174–177, 182, 183, 186, 241–243, 245, 246, 256–258, 267, 268, 276, 286, 303, 308, 335–354, 364, 414, 513–515, 519–522, 525, 526, 528, 530, 531, 535, 791, 793, 798, 802, 935, 939, 943–944 CCTV, 49, 346 CD, 30 Celluloid, 4, 11, 23, 31, 51, 64, 169, 358, 361, 375, 431, 493, 494, 568, 589, 590, 797 Cel technique, 169, 170, 179 Cendrars, Blaise, 561 Censorship, 723 Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, 386 Central imagining, 556, 875, 876n38, 1004, 1005 Cephalus, 498

1022 

INDEX

Cezanne, Paul, 309 Chamarette, Jenny, 267 Chanter, Tina, 273 Chaplin, Charlie, 33–35, 46, 238n3, 545, 577, 578 Character engagement, 865n1 Characters, 157, 243, 368, 803 Charles, Josh, 129 Charlie Brown, 72 Chase, David, 547 Chatman, Seymour, 100–102, 110, 132, 391 Chazelle, Damien, 126, 190 Chekhov, Michael, 923 Cheong, L.-F., 904 Child, Abigail, 569 China, 683, 696 Chion, Michel, 200, 201, 204, 206, 207, 812 Choi, Jinhee, 574, 876 Chomsky, Noam, 771–773 Chomskyian, 446 “Choreographic Cognitions,” 150 Choreography, 222, 788, 792 Cinema history, 146, 229, 364 Cinema-space, 371, 373, 375 Cinema studies, 318, 329, 330, 333, 701, 702, 704, 867 Cinematic aesthetics, 714, 715 Cinematic animation, 165, 167, 168, 175, 185 Cinematic apparatus, 456, 518, 563, 709, 711 Cinematic fiction, 848, 893 Cinematic intelligence, 517 Cinematic narration, 98, 115 Cinematic narrator, 97–115 Cinematic seeing, 87 Cinematic shot, 366 Cinematic signs, 457, 559 Cinematic thinking, 458, 515–519, 527, 529, 537 Cinematic thought, 23, 499, 500, 515, 525, 535 Cinematic universe, 687, 689 Cinema-time, 368, 371, 373, 375 Cinematographer, 71, 78, 127 Cinematographic apparatus, 937 Cinematographic thought, 517

Cinematography, 71–91, 174, 591 Cinema vérité, 613, 637, 640, 641 Cinéphiles, 373, 453 Ciné-poems, 604 Cis-gender, 658 Citizen Kane, 32, 83, 232, 232n41, 369, 370, 376, 433, 547, 548, 973 Citizen Kane, 32, 83, 232, 369, 370, 376, 433, 547, 548, 973 Citizens’ United, 773 Civil rights, 715, 771, 778 The Civil War, 954 Clair, Rene, 558 Class, 688 Classen, Steven, 771 Classical film theorists, 174, 180 Classical theories of poetry, 557 Clay, Cassius, 695 Claymation, 170, 173 Clayton, Alex, 432 Cléo from 5 to 7, 902 Clerici, Marcello, 491 Clinton, Hilary, 773, 778 Clooney, George, 544 A Clockwork Orange, 907 Close up/close-ups, 30, 39, 80, 85–88, 127, 154, 227, 241–244, 249, 393, 398, 414, 548, 558, 562, 563, 589, 590, 592, 728, 742, 789n17, 802, 813, 814, 854, 871, 907 Closure, 40, 41, 129, 250, 537, 622, 633, 865 Clothier, William, 88 Cloverfield, 606 Cluster account, 806 Cluster theory of art, 734, 982 CNN, 772 Cocteau, Jean, 564, 565 Coen Brothers, 78, 823n1 Cognitive, 145, 177, 189, 195n20, 201–205, 212, 260n3, 381–404, 846–847, 893, 903, 911 Cognitive film theory, 271n46, 383n10 Cognitive media theory, 381, 382 Cognitive psychology, 252, 279, 384, 845, 870 Cognitive symmetry, 881 Cognitive theory, 382, 384, 390, 391, 404

 INDEX 

Cognitive theory of the imagination, 846–847 Cognitive unconscious, 387 Cognitivism, 247, 383n10, 386n19, 662–664, 895 Cohen, Annabel, 201, 202, 203n55 Cohen, J. B., 911 Cohen, Jonathan, 56, 977 Cohen, Maxi, 633 Coherence theories, 827 Cold Mountain, 803 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 555 Collage, 173 Collingwood, R. G., 359–360 Collodi, Carlo, 693 Colman, Felicity, 272 Color, 907 A Color Box, 361 Color grader, 78, 91 Color stock, 75 Color Timer, 78 Comedy, 41, 882 Comedy of Remarriage, 242, 339, 349–352, 364n34, 414n22, 943n42 Comics (newspaper), 72 Commemorative film, 604 Commodification, 321, 332, 695, 708, 712, 716 Communication, 17, 19, 101, 193, 265, 309, 310, 319, 327, 381, 389, 391, 394, 395, 402, 415, 431, 434, 553, 554, 561, 579, 582, 584, 590, 611, 621, 759, 764, 766, 774, 873, 944 Communicative intention, 19, 619, 637 Communicative practices, 448, 684 Communism, 317 Communist Party, 449, 695 Composer, 156, 222–224, 318, 685, 789, 790, 804 Compositing, 83 Computer-generated imaging (CGI), 34, 73, 74, 84, 241n13, 243, 245, 246, 255, 637, 732, 952, 996, 997 Computer Space, 972 Comstock Act, 746 Conceptual Act Theory, 896–898 Conceptual processing, 870 The Conformist, 491 Congo, Anwar, 504–507

1023

Conquest, 693, 725 Conscious expression, 524 Consciousness, 294–298, 308, 448 Consciousness-raising, 672 Constellations, 326 Contemporary cinema, 154, 653, 667, 694, 809 Contemporary European cinema, 679 Context of living, 328 Continental, 237–280, 239n4, 247n33, 262n11, 276n75, 279n83, 279n85, 354, 453, 454, 514, 522 Continental Philosophy, 259, 261, 264n15, 273n58 Contingent universals, 389 Continuity editing, 149, 246, 254, 939 Continuity mistakes, 611 Continuity script, 221 Control theories, 912, 913 Cooper, David, 263–264, 274 Copeland, Misty, 14 Coplan, A., 339, 671, 871, 902, 906 Copland, Aaron, 804, 860n42 Coppola, Francis Ford, 79, 88, 190, 546, 791n22, 804 Corleone, Michael, 9 Corliss, Richard, 219 Cornell, Joseph, 566–567 Cornell University, 173n11, 359n15, 363n31, 376n80, 391n41, 394 Corporeal, 703n11 Correspondence theories, 827 Corrigan, Timothy, 640 Cosmos, 613, 955 Costello, Diarmud, 54 Costume, 16, 22, 431 Costume design, 73, 90 Costuming, 664 Cotten, Joseph, 126 Counterfactual state, 858 Counterpropaganda, 774 The Coup, 693 Courbet, Gustave, 742, 743 Covert film music, 816 Cowie, Elizabeth, 636, 708 Cowley, Christopher, 638 Cox, Brian, 126 Coyote, Wile E., 243 Crash, 398

1024 

INDEX

Crawford, Joan, 703, 719 The Crazy Ray, 558 Creative imagination, 360, 845 Creeber, Glen, 950 Creel, George, 758 Crimes and Misdemeanors, 498–499 Crimp, Douglas, 706, 717 Criterial prefocusing, 251, 252, 907, 908 Critic clusters, 430 Critical analysis, 211, 362, 454, 456, 551, 559 Critical communication, 415 Critical theory, 28n12, 315–333, 383, 384, 409, 441, 444, 453, 456, 717, 744, 768 Criticism, 409–436, 410n5, 413n16, 413n18, 416n28, 427n85 Crivelli, C., 901 Cronenberg, David, 934 Crumb, 72 Crusoe, Robinson, 683 Cruz, Ariane, 753 The Crying Game, 256, 714 Cuarón, Alfonso, 135, 136, 202 Cuba, 688 Cubistic, 562 Cukor, George, 349, 414, 544 Culinary art, 743 Cultural-historical/culturally-historically, 449, 457, 521, 526, 527, 578 Culturally determined, 874 Cultural studies, 189, 544 Culture industry/culture-industry, 316, 320–322, 328, 329, 331, 354, 700, 701, 705, 708, 718, 768, 769 Cundey, Dean, 87 Cunliffe, Zoe, 653 Curran, Angela, 97, 114n21, 274 Currid, Brian, 719 Currie, G., 13, 14, 22, 51, 59n22, 59n23, 61, 63–66, 74, 83, 97, 99n5, 101, 102, 107, 107n15, 108, 112, 114, 114n22, 137, 139, 178, 195, 196, 201–205, 207, 245n27, 247, 248, 250–252, 267, 271, 279n85, 358, 361, 366, 373–376, 609n14, 614n28, 636, 809–811, 845n2, 847n4, 849n9, 852–854, 852n15, 853n17, 859n28

Curthoys, Ned, 506 Cusack, John, 125, 803 Cutting, James, 145, 382, 394 Cut-outs, 170, 173 Czech, 695 Czechoslovakian, 688 D Da Gama, Vasco, 988 Dadaist, 716 Dadlez, Eva, 469 Daffy Duck, 768 Dali, Salvador, 37, 238n3, 567 Dallas, Stella, 347, 353 d’Allonnes, Fabrice Revault, 82 D’Aloia, Adriano, 872 Damasio, A. R., 854n18 Damasio, H., 895 Damiano, Gerard, 728 Damned Interfering Video Activists (DIVA-TV), 707 Dance, 787n12 Dances with Wolves, 253 Dandy Dust, 713, 714 Danes, Claire, 548 A Dangerous Method, 934 Daniell, Henry, 414 Daniels, William, 80, 89 Dante, 695 Danto, Arthur, 6, 9, 15, 16, 20, 22, 23, 25, 52, 243–246, 587, 590 D’Antoni, Philip, 938 Darabont, Frank, 132 Darkness, 127, 155, 424, 546, 677 The Dark Knight, 659 Darwin, C., 837 Darwinian, 829, 838n7, 840 Dasein, 300–308 Dash, Julie, 682, 690 Daughters of the Dust, 690 David Holzman’s Diary, 637 Davidson, Jaye, 715 Davies, David, 5, 6, 165, 472, 488, 489, 503, 576, 952 Davies, Stephen, 223, 578, 817, 818 Davis, Bette, 72, 703, 719, 935 Dayan, Daniel, 937, 940 Day of Wrath, 909

 INDEX 

De Lauretis, Terese, 240, 701, 702, 702n10, 709, 712 De Niro, Robert, 792 De Palma, Brian, 791n22 De Saussure, Ferdinand, 445, 446n20, 447, 450 De Sousa, Ronald, 662 Deadwood, 954 Deakins, Roger, 78, 84, 91 Dean, Tacita, 493 Dear White People, 680 Death Proof, 741 Decentered, 274, 860 Deconstruction, 701 Deen, James, 728 Deep focus, 83, 84, 549 Deep Throat, 726, 728 Depiction, 53n13, 56–59, 57n25 Degrading, 689, 724, 731 Delerue, Georges, 549 Deleuze, Gilles, 20–23, 159, 257, 257n68, 263, 264, 272, 274, 276, 278, 354, 441–445, 449–451, 454, 456–464, 513–515, 517–519, 522–530, 535, 546, 711 Delluc, Louis, 558, 563 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 681 Demeaning, 724, 753, 758 Demille, Cecil, 109 Demme, Jonathan, 296, 403 Denino, Paul, 646 Dennett, Daniel, 474 Dennis, C. J., 554 Deontologist, 470, 475, 480–482, 484, 487 Depiction, 20–22, 50, 53, 54, 56–59, 73, 74, 83, 85, 120, 178, 245n27, 288, 291, 293, 295, 297–299, 306, 326, 370, 478, 613, 620, 653, 654, 656, 657, 659, 667, 669, 671, 673, 674, 682, 688, 724, 725, 727, 740, 744, 826, 834, 848, 852, 852n14, 854, 935 Depth of field, 32, 33, 83, 361 Depth of focus, 849 Deren, Maya, 241n7, 551, 556–561, 564–569

1025

Derrida, Jacques, 260, 261, 263, 264, 271, 274, 441–445, 450–454, 530, 700, 711, 711n33, 719n49 Derridean, 709, 719 Descartes, Rene, 340, 353, 474, 479, 496, 532, 593, 594, 596 Deserto Russo, 545 Desdemona, 343, 474 Desire, 389n32 Desnos, Robert, 555, 564 Detached display, 24, 195, 196, 211n43, 246, 975–977 Detective, 125, 247, 290, 335, 690, 936 Detroit, 416n28, 432n106, 693–696 Dev D, 908 Dialectic, 191, 272, 320, 325, 332, 352, 385, 449, 450, 524, 533, 657, 694, 696, 760 Dialectical critique, 689 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 316, 317, 321, 321n8, 324, 327, 329, 768, 960 Dialogue, 192 Diana Ross, 719 Diary of a Lost Girl, 909 Dickerson, Ernest, 77 Dickie, George, 25, 359, 967 Dickinson, Emily, 112, 567 Diegetic music, 803, 804n11 Diegetic narrator, 362 Digital cinema, 87, 91, 182, 183, 185, 280n88, 529 Digital image, 183–185, 529, 758 Digital photography, 184 Digital processing, 171, 185 Digital technology, 166, 168, 171, 173, 182, 184, 185, 511 Dilman, Ilham, 260 Dimberg, U., 860n41, 907 Dinello, Daniel, 481 Direct cinema, 613, 640 “Direct cinema” movement, 639 Direct emotions, 401 Director, 719 Direct perception, 835 Direct realist, 63, 65 Disaster, 482, 679, 854, 906 Disclosedness, 305

1026 

INDEX

Disclosures, 120–122, 124, 126, 132, 135, 287, 288, 292, 300, 303n81, 305–309, 520, 631 Discourse, 9, 175, 217, 264, 290, 305, 307, 308, 318, 391, 392, 395, 421, 426, 430, 451, 452, 454, 515, 520, 526, 535, 536, 560, 583, 594, 642, 643, 657, 660, 663, 667, 669, 700, 702, 706, 710–713, 721–723, 746–748, 750, 751, 754, 755, 759, 760, 771, 775, 954 Discovery Communications, 1000 Discrimination, 419, 620, 689, 722, 724, 746, 751, 752 Discursive contexts, 457 Disjunctive account, 807 Disney, Walt, 176, 181, 183, 370, 670, 693, 1000 Disney World, 670 Di Summa, Laura T., 627 Doane, Mary Ann, 657 Doctorow, E. L., 217 Doctor Watson, 99 Docudrama, 612, 625 Documentary, 603–625, 605n7, 635–638 Documentary miniseries, 953 Dogme, 185 Dolly shot, 87 Dominance, 266n23, 321, 450, 654, 658, 724, 750 Donald Duck, 176 Donelan, Carol, 274 Donna Summer, 719 Donne, John, 425 Donnelly, K. J., 803, 813 Doob, Leonard, 763, 764 Doorly, Patrick, 422 Dore, Gustave, 555 Dorothy, 107, 703, 719 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 933, 934 Doty, Alexander, 660, 702 Double consciousness, 690 Double Indemnity, 72, 73 Double-Suicide, 901 Dowling, Christopher, 967 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 98 Dracula, 682 Drag Queen, 704

Drama, 110 Dramatic imagination, 472, 475, 486 Dramatic time, 368, 369 Draper, Kai, 481 Drawing, 243, 254, 256, 322, 323, 447, 450, 452n29, 523, 813, 900, 910 Dream/dreams, 16–18 Dream images, 560 Dream theory, 17, 18, 925 Dreier, Katherine S., 716 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 238n3, 462, 545 Driencourt, Jacques, 765–766 Drive/drives, 105, 804, 899 Dromm, Keith, 636 Dr. Strangelove, 396 Dryburgh, Stuart, 77 Du Bois, W.E.B., 684, 688 Du Boisian, 689 DuBowski, Sandi, 642 Duchamp, Marcel, 43, 573, 574, 577, 716, 718, 743, 954 Duclos, S. E., 894 Dulac, Germaine, 515, 528, 564, 703 Dummet, Michael, 264–267, 270 Dunham, Lena, 218 Dunkirk, 98, 108 Dunne, Irene, 350 Dünne, Jörg, 628 Dunye, Cheryl, 710 Duration, 150 Duration of shots, 153, 849 Durée, 461 Dutch angle, 14 Dutch colonialism, 688 Duvall, Shelley, 859 Dworkin, Andrea, 724–725, 750, 752 Dyck, John, 801 Dyer, Richard, 703, 704 Dylan, Bob, 807 Dynamic environments, 871 Dziemidok, Bohdan, 417 E Eagle Flight, 976 Early cinema, 761 East Asians, 682, 695 East of Borneo, 566 Easy Rider, 371

 INDEX 

Eaton, Anne W., 885n65, 989 Eaton, M., 912, 913 Ebert, Roger, 981 Écriture, 700 Edelman, Lee, 701, 709 Edison, Thomas Alva, 4, 198, 794–795 Editing, 143–161, 369 Edwards, E. D., 911 Egan, David, 471, 473, 475, 476, 479 Egocentric space, 56, 847, 977 Eichenbaum, Boris, 554 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 506 Eickers, G., 897, 903 Eidetic reduction, 293 Einfühlung, 869 Einstein, Albert, 604, 1012 Eisenhower, President Dwight, 554 Eisenstein, Sergei, 31n1, 144, 146, 150, 155, 191, 192n7, 238, 239, 319, 320, 325, 370, 523, 524, 528, 557, 558, 575, 586, 587, 703, 762, 763, 777 Eisler, Hanns, 805 Eitzen, Dirk, 404, 606n10, 636 Ekman, P., 855n22, 899–901, 903 Eldridge, Richard, 237 Electrical, 75, 75n10, 79, 90 Elephant, 909 Eliot, T.S., 735 Ellis, John M., 417–418, 963 Ellis, R. J., 907 Ellsworth, P. C., 895, 897 Ellul, Jacques, 765–767 Elsaesser, Thomas, 515, 710 el-Shabazz, el-Hajj Malik, 695 Emancipated cinema, 326 Embodied, 308–311 Embodied character, 873 Embodied consciousness, 309–311, 516 Embodied metaphors, 395–397 Embodied simulation, 146, 397, 400, 872, 1008 Embodied state, 311, 812 Embodiment, 394–397, 703n11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 339, 344 Emersonian perfectionism, 338n11, 339, 340, 343, 344 Emmanuelle, 728

1027

Emotion, 401–402, 894–897, 900, 913–914 Emotional asymmetry, 868 Emotional contagion, 871, 874 Emotional intelligence, 524 Emotion elicitation, 854, 907 Empathizing, 846, 876 Empathy, 398–400, 671, 865–886, 902–904 Empathy machine, 1003 Empire, 250, 288, 346, 368, 848 The Empire Strikes Back, 130, 204 Empiricism, 179 Empiricist, 179, 268 Empson, William, 418 Enactment, 126, 565, 575, 576, 915 Engel, Pascal, 268, 270, 279 Engraving on film, 173 Enslavement, 681, 690, 693, 694 Ephron, Nora, 132 The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, 372 Episode, 132 Episodic enrichment, 130 Episodic structure, 495 Epistemic Merit Model (EMM), 775, 776 Epistemic resistance, 607 Epistemological, xxv, 135, 165, 175, 183, 184, 257n48, 272, 289, 326, 518, 520, 521, 609, 610, 617, 620, 624, 637, 643, 670, 672, 673, 683 Epoche, 292, 301 Epshteyn, Boris, 772 Epstein, Alex, 215 Epstein, Jean, 515–518, 523, 551, 558, 561–568, 576, 591–594, 702, 703 Equality, 90, 327, 774 Equisapiens, 694–696 Eraserhead, 907 Erotetic, 495, 510 Erotetic narration, 127, 290, 393, 496 Erotic, 565, 656, 659, 701, 725, 737, 739, 741–743, 768, 927 Erotic economy, 714 Erotica, 725, 741 Eroticization, 724, 750 Escape from New York, 804 Esposito, Nicholas, 973 Essay film, 639, 640

1028 

INDEX

Essence, 14, 29, 51–53, 121, 192, 194, 195, 261, 266, 267, 273, 287, 288, 290, 292, 293, 301, 303, 311, 374, 448, 516, 525, 553, 554, 588, 589, 594, 640, 726, 731, 734, 759, 786, 838, 841, 953 E.T., 980 Eternal questions, 535 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 227, 256 Ethical criticism, 228, 229n29, 232, 988 Ethical imperatives, 430, 833 Ethical importance, 866 Ethicist, 475, 989 Ethico-political, 527 Ethnographic, 681 Eurocentric, 331, 448, 450 Euromodern, 683, 692 European cinema, 370, 458, 464, 679 Euthanasia, 509 Evaluative, 724, 725, 732, 754, 769, 774, 845, 860, 861, 884, 956 Evaluative aesthetics, 410 Evaluative criticism, 409, 966 Evaluative definition, 747 Evaluative facts, 855 Everyday aesthetics, 964 Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, 372 Evidentiary status, 629, 643 Existence, 670, 731–733, 736, 743, 859, 940, 953 Existential-aesthetic, 527 Existential/existentials, 304–308 Existential phenomenology, 301, 444 Exiting a Factory, 761 Experiential access, 870 Experiential imagining, 107, 847, 848 Experimental, 642 Experimental filmmaking, 567, 639, 707 Experimentalist, 10n7, 669 Explicitness, 275, 534 Explicit sex, 723, 726–728, 730, 732 Exploit, 57, 192, 194, 250, 714, 764, 845, 903, 908, 972, 1002 Exploitation, 256, 689, 693, 724, 726 Expository Documentary, 608, 611n22, 620 Extensional, 807, 810, 811

Extension criteria, 3–26 Eye, 397, 803 Eyelight, 79, 80 Eye-sources, 567 Eyes Wide Shut, 808, 941, 941n38 Eye tracking, 395, 397, 998 F Faber, Michael, 478 Fabula, 120, 123, 248, 249, 368, 392 Facebook, 771, 774, 778 Face-to-Face Imagined Seeing, 108 The Factory, 718 Fairbanks, Douglas, 562 Fairness Doctrine, 772, 773 Falconetti, Maria, 462 False consciousness, 331, 664, 725, 767, 775 False movement, 461 Familiarity effect, 884 Family resemblance, 261, 621n46, 622, 721, 728, 870 Fan-fiction, 216 Fanon, Franz, 681, 688 Fantasia, 246 Fantasy, 708 Fantômas, 882 Fargo, 801 Farmer, Brett, 709, 710 Fascist, 317, 320, 329, 491, 523 Fassbender, Michael, 934 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 329, 330, 546, 547 Fatal Attraction, 663 Feagin, S., 858n36, 914 Fear, 856, 899 Feedback system, 998 Fehr, B., 896 Feige, Daniel Martin, 257 Fellini, Federico, 370, 543, 545, 551, 902 Female, 425, 450, 451, 633, 654–657, 659–661, 663, 665–668, 671–673, 680–683, 690, 692, 709, 724, 728–731, 750–752, 768, 769, 942 Female sexuality, 752 Feminist film theory, 656, 659, 660, 707, 708, 713, 713n29, 769 Feminist ideology critique, 664–666

 INDEX 

Feminist imagination, 666, 672–673 Feminist Marxism, 710 Feminist philosophy of film, 653–674 Feminist psychoanalysis, 709 Feminist theory, 942–943 Femme Pictures, 728 Ferrera, Lorraine Senne, 547 Festen, 185 Fetish, 938, 938n31 Fetishism, 321 Feverson, Anglobilly The Rise and Fall of the Legendary, 173 F for Fake, 606 Fiction, 97, 98, 486, 605n7, 635–638 Fictional film, 55, 101, 473, 474, 534, 620, 625, 845, 848, 854, 855 Fictional intention, 620 Fictionally true, 847, 987 Fictional narratives, 180 Fictional narrator, 100–104, 106, 109, 110 Fictional representations, 849, 853, 856, 857 Fictional Showing, 133 Fictional truth, 111, 130, 847–851 Fictional world, 84, 100, 103, 104, 107, 111, 113, 114, 120, 125, 130, 131, 133, 138, 176, 181, 337, 360, 361, 369, 371, 373, 375, 402, 480, 483, 485, 488, 593, 612, 803, 848, 849, 851, 852, 854, 857, 906, 959, 978, 991 Fiction-directed emotions, 855, 856 Fiction/nonfiction divide, 641 Fictive intent, 104 Fidelity, 206 Field, Syd, 215 Fieldwork, 642 FIFA 17, 978 Fight Club, 765, 823n1 Film acting, 242, 801 Film adaptation, 14, 788, 823n1, 829, 836–838, 841 Film as art, 191–194, 241, 242, 357–360, 377, 548, 743, 787, 981 Film as film, 29, 33, 363, 622, 623 Film as language, 18–20, 307, 456 Film as philosophy, 256, 267n27, 363n26, 492n2, 513–537

1029

Film-being, 267, 528, 529, 616 Film critic, 83, 358, 544, 563, 658, 659, 662, 667, 925 Film criticism, 88, 257n67, 257n68, 285, 300, 354, 390, 410n5, 411, 419, 430, 433, 454, 664, 866, 886 Film festivals, 700, 1001 Film fiction, 97, 102, 868, 869, 886 Film-form, 527–529 Film genre, 242, 252, 253n51, 363–364, 606, 610, 741, 754, 1001 Filmind, 527–529 Film interpretation, 16, 90, 360, 391, 454–455, 534, 579, 925, 939 Film in the condition of philosophy, 533 Film language, 560, 700 Film lighting, 79 Film/mind, 529 Film music, 803–807, 816–818 Film narrative, 132, 136, 139, 250, 360–363, 371, 375, 848, 904, 942 Film of presumptive assertion, 620 Filmosophy, 513–537 Film phenomenologist, 1009, 1011 Film-philosophy, 257, 363, 457–464, 514–520, 522, 527, 528, 530–537 Film-Philosophy (journal), 354 Film production, 242, 326 Film score, 804, 808 Filmscript, 830–832, 838 Film space, 367, 368, 370–372, 377 Film stock, 32, 37, 46, 72, 75–79, 82, 89, 90, 244, 358, 360, 361, 375, 493, 762 Film studies, 247n33, 260n3, 365n39, 397n58, 431, 431n105, 451–453 Film text, 392, 659, 661 Film theory, 10, 32, 146, 174, 175, 189, 200, 212, 237–258, 267, 276, 278, 280n88, 336, 354, 358, 359, 365, 375, 383, 387, 390, 395, 442, 443, 445, 452n29, 453–460, 462–464, 513–515, 530, 531, 546, 556, 604, 617, 654, 656, 659–705, 707, 708, 710, 713, 715, 716, 719, 720, 727, 745, 768, 769, 775, 784–788, 796, 893, 924, 925, 929, 931, 936–939, 942 Film time, 367–370, 372, 377

1030 

INDEX

Film world, 252, 258, 268, 304, 370–372, 528, 529, 728 Fincher, David, 77 Fingerhut, J., 908, 913 Finnegans Wake, 927–928, 928n7 First Amendment, 747, 749 Fischer, Lucy, 667 Fists in the Pocket, 909 Fitzgerald, D. A., 907 Fixed spectator, 660 Flaherty, Robert J., 545 Flashback, 241, 248, 253, 254, 325, 370, 560, 832, 958 Flash Gordon, 41, 109–111 Flashing, 77 Fleming, Victor, 105, 719 Flesh and the Devil, 120, 122, 138 Flight Simulator, 974, 980 Flinn, Carol, 804, 805 The Flintstones, 180 Flip-books, 167, 168 The Florida Project, 670, 671, 673 Flory, Dan, 399, 403, 878, 883n60 Flow, 145 Fluxus, 43, 327 Focalization, 248, 258 Focal length, 82, 84–86, 168, 370, 587, 588, 908 Focus, 82, 251, 252 Fokt, Simon, 726, 726n14, 733n32, 735 Foley, James, 204 Foley artist, 204 Folman, Ari, 642 Fonda, Henry, 240, 350 Fonda, Peter, 371 Foot, Phillippa, 481, 482 Forbes, Michelle, 469 Forceville, Charles, 395 Ford, Harrison, 244, 245 Ford, John, 88, 238, 239 Form, 979–980 Formalism, 11, 392n44, 553 Formalist, 554, 557, 558 Foster, Jodie, 296, 299 Foucault, Michel, 271, 376, 441, 442, 444, 447, 450–452, 454, 455, 643, 710n27, 711 Fountain, 43, 573, 716, 743 Fourth Wall, 694 Fox News, 771

Frame, 14, 49, 86, 87, 120–122, 152, 154, 246, 368, 370 Framing, 21, 44, 85, 87, 121, 127, 134, 138, 249, 323, 325, 330, 361, 393, 461, 560, 608, 621n46, 687, 728, 730, 745, 746, 771, 884, 1003 Frampton, Daniel, 266, 279, 515, 519, 527–530 Frampton, Hollis, 596, 597 France, 173, 238n3, 262, 274, 278, 359n13, 359n14, 444, 445, 515, 543, 639n28 Francophone, 682, 690 Frankenstein, 103, 794, 795, 834, 904 Frankfurt School, 315–320, 316n1, 326, 327, 329–332, 441, 767–769, 960 Frears, Stephen, 125 Free indirect discourse, 560 Free indirect point of view, 560 Freeland, C. A., 909, 911 Freeland, Cynthia, 247, 274, 278, 364, 403, 658, 664–665 Freeman, Harold, 749 Freeman, Morgan, 132, 210 Frege, Gottlob, 261n9, 262–267 Fregean, 265, 266, 277 Frege-Husserl divergence, 269 Frege-Russell-Carnap school, 263 Fregoli Delusion, 502 French, 71, 83, 90n47, 268, 272, 276, 324, 354, 441, 444–446, 445n17, 448, 449, 451–453, 515, 523, 528, 544, 555, 558, 561, 563, 564, 591, 639, 682, 711, 711n33, 767, 773, 901 French epistemology of science, 262 French filmmaker, 515, 558, 561 French Foreign Legion, 682 French postwar theory, 711 French spiritualism, 262 Freud, Sigmund, 237, 254, 322, 449, 451, 452, 561, 656, 658, 706, 710, 713, 714, 923–928, 930, 931, 934–936, 944 Freudian, 16, 242, 317, 387, 416n28, 444, 556, 656, 713, 867, 885, 924, 925, 939 Freudian theories, 444, 867 Freud: The Secret Passion, 934 Fricker, Miranda, 668

 INDEX 

Frida, 86 Friday the 13th, 298, 726 Fried, Michael, 791 Friedkin, William, 710 Friedman, Anthony, 216 Friedman, Peter, 633 Fromm, Erich, 317 F-stop, 82, 83 Fuller, David, 418 Fuller, Graham, 416 Functionalist, 119, 122, 123, 125, 126, 132, 137, 446 Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRIs), 387, 397 Functional sounds, 813 Funny Games, 508 Furness, Thomas, 998 Fusion of personalities, 872 Fuss, Diana, 704 Futurist, 553 G Gabbard, Glen O., 931, 934, 935 Gabbard, Krin, 931, 934, 935 Gabriel, Peter, 803, 807 Galen, 925 Gallese, Vittorio, 146, 147, 397, 1008 Gallic, 711 Gameplay, 983, 988 Gamer’s dilemma, 990 Games, 13, 39, 129, 131, 245, 255, 386, 404, 425, 768, 846, 865n1, 868n9, 949, 971–974, 976, 978, 981–983, 988, 1002, 1004, 1005, 1013 Gangster film, 504, 543 Ganja & Hess, 690, 692 Garbo, Greta, 80, 120, 414 Garcia Bernal, Gael, 202 Garland, Judy, 703, 719 Gaut, Berys, 30, 35–40, 42, 44, 46, 54, 65, 65n54, 84, 89, 90, 97, 98n4, 99, 100n6, 101, 101n8, 107n15, 108–111, 136–137, 181, 184, 185, 195, 210, 219, 220, 226, 227, 255, 358, 360–367, 375, 376, 404, 806, 808, 811, 812, 845n1, 858n2, 859n37, 869, 876, 956, 984–987, 989

1031

Gay, 327, 633, 701, 702, 704–706, 708, 709, 712, 715, 719 Gay spectator, 709 Gehr, Ernie, 569, 575, 587, 589, 590 Geiser, Janet, 569 Gender, 240, 256, 273, 274, 315, 331, 332, 364, 454, 646, 654, 661, 663–665, 670, 679, 682, 683, 693, 696, 702, 705, 707, 709, 712, 715, 719, 729, 744, 750, 753, 897, 901, 913, 942 Gender identities, 702, 705, 715 Gender stereotype, 753 Gendler, Jason, 130 Gendron, M., 898, 901 Genealogical critique, 455 Generality, 36n3, 418, 510, 534, 730, 765, 826, 910 ‘General Linguistics,’ 445 Genetic fallacy, 273 Genette, Gérard, 391 Genitalia, 714, 728 Genre, 9, 23, 113, 199, 216, 243, 248, 251–254, 339, 349, 350, 361, 364, 366, 394, 431, 531, 532, 546, 557, 558, 604, 606, 610–612, 621n46, 623, 629n9, 635, 636, 638–640, 655n4, 667, 678, 690, 692, 693, 715, 722, 723, 725, 726, 728, 730, 734, 745, 754, 761, 825, 849, 850, 859, 907, 908, 912–915, 943 Gere, Richard, 932 Gerima, Haile, 682, 690 German aesthetics, 735 German critical theory, 441 The German Ideology, 317, 331 Germany, 104, 147, 262, 315, 317, 320, 329, 359n12, 546, 615, 616, 758 Gerstner, David, 699 Gerwig, Greta, 667–668 Gestalt, 145, 272n53, 371 Gesture, 156, 182, 193, 307, 343, 396, 412, 418, 470, 716, 719, 720, 871, 901, 902, 942, 1012 Get Out, 693 Gettier, Edmund, 340, 341 Gever, Martha, 704 Geyrhalter, Nicholas, 569 Ghostbusters, 665, 847

1032 

INDEX

Gibbs, John, 432, 433, 435 Gibson, J. J., 386, 392 Gifs, 758 Gilbert, John, 120 Gilbert-Lecomte, Roger, 528 Gilligan, Vince, 218, 230 Gilmore, Jonathan, 845 Giotto, 544 Girls, 218, 752, 753n104 Girls Gone Wild, 751 The glance, 963 Gledhill, Christine, 659 Glendinning, Simon, 261–263 Glengarry Glen Ross, 226, 227, 231 Glittering generalities, 765 God and Country, 575, 586 Godard, Jean-Luc, 174, 194, 253, 326, 332, 522, 543–545, 560, 569, 640 The Godfather, 7, 9, 79, 252, 546, 547, 823n1, 980 Gold, Joel, 633 The Golden Ass, 693, 694 Goldeneye, 980 Goldie, Peter, 857, 857n31, 860, 860n44 Goldman, Alan, 416, 417, 858n34 Gollum, 171 Gombrich, E.H., 421–422 Gomez, Nick, 547 Gondry, Michel, 218, 227, 228 Gone with the Wind, 105 Goodman, Nelson, 338 Good Morning, Vietnam, 931 The Good Wife, 128, 129, 131, 132 Goodwin, Ginnifer, 87 Good Time, 804 Gopnik, Adam, 818 Gorbman, Claudia, 201, 202, 805 Gordon, Jane Anna, 679 Gordon, Lewis, 689n19 Gordy, Barry, 696 Gorgias, 759 Gould, Timothy, 354 Gracyk, Theodore, 963, 964 The Graduate, 851 Grain, 76, 79, 90, 109 Grain structure, 77 Grammar, 272 Grand imagier, 529 Grand Theft Auto, 981

Grand Theft Auto IV, 983 Grand Theft Auto V, 991 Gran Fury, 717 Grand theory, 711 Grant, Cary, 107, 240, 349, 350, 923, 935 Graphic, 229, 246, 368, 557, 724 Grease, 665 Great Britain, 366 The Great Train Robbery, 761 Greek dramatists, 552 Greene, Graham, 126, 693, 695 Greengrass, Paul, 741 The Green Ray, 493 Greenwood, D., 913 Gregory XV, Pope, 759 Greimas, A. J., 446, 447 Grene, Marjorie, 268 Greyson, John, 704, 707 Grice, H.P., 19 Grice, Paul, 777 Grief, 856 Grierson, John, 628, 635, 762, 763 Griffith, D.W., 544, 554, 555, 679, 762 Griffith, Robin, 707, 708 Grint, Rupert, 135 Grip crew, 75, 75n10, 79, 90 Grodal, Torben Kragh, 147, 150, 271, 382, 396, 396n56, 400 GROPE, 998 Gross, Daniel, 143 Guerra, Michele, 146, 147, 1008 Guess Who’s Coming for Dinner, 680 Guggenheim Museum, 224 Guillermin, John, 690 Guldenring, M., 907 Gulf War, 999 Gulkin, Harry, 634 Gumby, 170 Gunn, Bill, 690 Gunning, Tom, 551, 554, 555, 787n11 Guo, Christine G., 871 Guyer, Paul, 335, 965 Guzzetti, Alfred, 16–17 H H.D. (aka Hilda Doolittle), 564 Habermas, Jurgen, 316, 327–328, 760 Hagberg, Gerry, 823

 INDEX 

Halberstam, Jack, 713 Halberstam, Judith, 713 Hall, Stuart, 659 Hallucinating, 846 Hallucination, 858, 998 Hamilton, Andy, 813–816 Hamlet, 823n1, 825, 931, 931n13 Hamlyn, D.W., 275 Hammer, Barbara, 707 Hammer, Espen, 315, 354 Hand, David, 73 Haneke, Michael, 276, 277, 311, 508, 509, 854, 933 Hannibal, 955 Hannibal Lecter, 882 Han Solo, 245 Hanson, Ellis, 704 Haptic, 713, 1006 Haptic-visual, 714, 998 Hard-core, 470, 727–731, 751, 753 Harlem Renaissance, 695 Harmon-Jones, E., 894 Harrington, Curtis, 565 Harry Potter, 105, 107, 111, 128 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 105 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 135, 138 Hartz, G.A., 905 Haskell, Molly, 654, 655, 662 Hasson, Uri, 382, 397 The Hateful Eight, 222 Hatoum, Mona, 628 Hawks, Howard, 238, 239, 240n7, 349, 414, 544, 923 Hayak, Salma, 87 Hayakawa, Sessue, 562 Haynes, Todd, 708 Hazareesingh, Sudhir, 711, 711n33 HBO, 546–548, 772n61, 1000 HD video, 952 Head-mounted display, 996, 997 Headset, 997, 998 Hearing, 209, 812 Heath, Stephen, 239n4, 240, 385 Heavenly Creatures, 931 Heckroth, Hein, 789 Hedonism, 544, 913 Hedwig and the Angry Inch, 714

1033

Heftberger, Adelheid, 146 Hegel, G.W.F., 237, 242n16, 257, 263, 273, 276, 324, 449–451, 699, 832, 837 Hegelian, 67, 242, 253n51, 266n23, 273, 449, 549, 716 Hegelianism, 444, 449, 450 Hegelian-Marxism, 444 Hegemonic cinema, 679, 684 Heidegger, Martin, 263, 271, 276, 277, 286, 300–309, 311, 354, 418, 444, 445n17, 449, 451, 521, 525, 530, 536, 802 Heilig, Morton L., 997 Heimann, Katrin S., 145, 147 Hein, Hilde, 670 Heisenberg, Werner, 604 Helpmann, Robert, 789, 792 Henriques, Julian, 144, 159 Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, 398 Hepburn, Audrey, 303 Hepburn, Katherine, 242, 349, 350, 903, 923 Heracleitus, 352 Herman, Edward, 771–773 Hermeneutical, 672 Hermeneutical resources, 672–673 Hermeneutics, 618, 684 Herzog, Werner, 250, 329, 330, 546, 1000, 1002 Hess, Amanda, 665 Hess, U., 900 Heterogeneous, 760, 774–779 Heterosexual, 658, 668, 692, 706, 720, 725 Hidden figures, 90, 90n46, 90n47 Hierarchy, 450, 552, 719, 724, 750 High art, 180, 251, 320, 911 Higher-level empathy, 875 High Fidelity, 125 High Noon, 253 Hilary: The Movie, 773 Hills, Matt, 965 Hindemith, Paul, 806 Hip-hop, 687, 693 His Girl Friday, 349 Histoire(s) du Cinéma, 332 Historical re-enactments, 616, 620, 625

1034 

INDEX

History and Class Consciousness, 321, 321n7 History of philosophy, 261, 273, 474, 519, 699 Hitchcock, Alfred, 4, 35, 37, 41, 44, 86, 103, 218, 239, 240n7, 249, 290, 304, 463, 529, 549, 709, 803, 872, 923, 936 Hitler, Adolf, 317, 323 HIV, 633, 706, 707, 761 Hobart, Rose, 566, 567 Hochschild, A., 896 Hockney, David, 335 Hoerl, Christoph, 62–65 Hoffman, Dustin, 851 Hoffman, E.T.A., 788 Hoffman, Karen D., 635 Hoffner, C. A., 910 Hogwarts, 107 Hollywood, 16, 49, 71, 74, 75, 78, 80n22, 82, 89, 126, 138, 174, 176, 177, 216, 217, 221, 221n22, 228, 229n38, 237, 238n3, 239, 240n7, 254, 304, 316, 321–324, 330, 340, 341, 345–349, 352, 359, 364, 366, 370, 372, 384, 388n26, 425, 493, 504, 506, 523, 543, 544, 559, 605, 612, 653–657, 665, 666, 674, 690n21, 696, 703, 707–710, 749, 757, 758, 763, 768, 769, 810, 830, 831, 839n7, 902, 934, 935, 943 Hollywood Reporter, 229, 229n38 Hollywood Video Production Company, 749 Homeland, 547, 548 Homer, 552, 927, 927n5 Home video, 49, 729 Homicide, 226 Homogeneous, 302, 383, 454, 460, 604, 622, 770, 963 Homographesis, 709 Homophobic, 705, 706 hooks, bell, 657, 660 Hoolboom, Mike, 7, 23 Hopkins, Anthony, 296 Hopkins, Robert, 53–55, 74, 107n14, 115 Horace and Pete, 951

Horkheimer, Max, 315–318, 321, 329, 767, 768, 960 Horoscopes, 768 Horror, 664, 725, 909, 914 Horror Film, 403n79, 664 Hourani, N., 912 House, H., 910 House of Games, 226 Howard, Byron, 87 Howard, John, 350 Howard, Trevor, 126 Howett, Peter, 125 Hubbard, Jim, 715 Huesmann, L. R., 910 Hughes, Langston, 694, 695 Hugnet, Georges, 564 Hugo, 30, 144, 191, 238, 359, 359n11, 383, 528, 792 The Hulk, 73, 74 The Human Condition, 909 Human Nature, 227, 228 Human condition, 271, 336, 341, 349, 732, 755, 909 Human freedom, 340, 350, 488 Humanistic ideology, 448 Humanities, 339, 441, 453 Human Rights Campaign (HRC), 705 Hume, David, 263–264, 268, 274, 426, 474–477, 910, 911 Hummel, William, 760, 761 Humor, 228, 299, 633, 720, 732, 745, 754, 879 Huntress, Keith, 760–761 Huppert, Isabelle, 508, 933 Hurd, Earl, 169 Hurley, Susan, 857, 857n30 Husserl, Edmund, 262, 264–267, 269, 271, 286, 287, 289–301, 306, 308, 309, 311, 449, 451, 595 Huston, John, 741, 934, 935 Hutchins, Edwin, 145 Hyman, Mark, 772 Hyperreality, 443 Hyper-visuality, 728 Hypothetical imagination, 472, 475, 486 Hypothetical narrative, 534 Hyrule, 978

 INDEX 

I Iago, 343, 506, 507 Ice Poseidon, 646 Iconography, 252, 253, 394, 690, 728 Idea, 57, 58, 60, 61 Ideal documentary, 612, 636 Identification, 362, 603–625, 701, 858–861, 866–869 Identification-as-identity, 867, 869 Identity, 701, 913–914 Identity group, 664 Ideological, 318, 937 Ideology, 315–333, 664–666 Ideology Critique, 330–333 Illocutionary act, 750, 778 Illumination, 76, 78, 81–83, 305, 435, 685, 686 Illusion, 13–15, 201–205 Illusionism, 14, 15, 59, 65, 67, 294, 325, 574 Illusionist, 15, 22, 59, 60, 62–66 Illusionistic, 201, 461 I Love Lucy, 954 Image, 267, 271, 271n47, 279n85, 294–298, 359, 798 Image consciousness, 289, 294–298, 300 Image generation technologies, 996 Imagination, 15–16, 104–106, 115, 298, 374, 845–861 Imagination Account of Fiction, 104–106, 115 Imaginative activity, 845, 875 Imaginative attitude, 847 Imaginative identification, 859, 860 Imaginative resistance, 399n64 Imaginative simulation, 870, 875, 876 Imagined representation, 854 Imagined seeing, 83n31, 98, 106–110, 133 Imaginings, 846, 849 Imitation, 29, 31, 145, 148, 152, 190, 193, 199, 211, 215, 286–288, 337, 426, 459, 517, 528, 552, 568, 642, 658, 659, 690, 700, 710, 715, 785, 870, 871, 903, 997, 999 Immersive empathic experience, 1003 Immoralist, 989 Imperialism, 683 Implicit association test (IAT), 1012

1035

Implied author, 99, 119, 133, 136, 137, 139 Implied spectator, 663, 664 Imposition, 450, 523 Imposition objection, 503, 534, 535 Impression of movement, 53n11, 62, 63, 166, 169, 170, 461, 811n43, 975 Im-signs, 559 I’m Your Man, 983, 988 Iñárritu, Alejandro Gonzalez, 1001 In a Year of 13 Moons, 909 Inception, 848 Incident light meter, 82 An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, 770 Indeterminacy of translation, 825, 827, 839 Indexicality, 183 Indexical relation, 183, 185, 186 India, 543, 603, 606, 617, 683, 901 Indigenous, 679, 681–684 Indirect point of view, 560 Indistinctionalist, 607 Indonesian genocide, 504, 506 Industrial Light and Magic, 171 Inequality, 724, 746, 750, 771 Inferences, 10, 123, 384, 387, 391, 392, 397, 483, 485, 590, 662, 848–850, 853, 859, 900 Inferential reasoning, 858 Inferno, 695 Inferred author, 139 Informative intention, 619 Inhuman, 518, 523, 526 Instability, 495, 563, 643–645, 647, 670 Instagram, 628, 646, 771, 774 Institute for Social Research, 315 Intel, 1000 Intellectual robot, 517 Intended entertainment, 974 Intention, 25, 727 Intentional agenda, 617 Intentional consciousness, 300, 308, 310 Intentionalist, 807 Intentionality, 289, 290 Intentional object, 473, 855 Interactive, 593, 844, 971, 972, 983–988, 990, 991, 997, 998 Interactive fiction, 987, 988, 990, 991

1036 

INDEX

Interactive films, 972, 983, 988, 990, 991 Interactive gameplay, 983 Interactive multisensory cueing, 997 Interactive narration, 139 Interactivity, 983–988 Interview, 567 Interfilm, 983 Internal monologue, 524 International Colloquium of Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man, 444 Intertextuality, 243 Intuition pump, 470, 471, 473–477, 479–482, 485, 489 In Vanda’s Room, 909 Invariantism, 131 Investigative narrative, 631, 647 Ion, 759 Irigaray, Luce, 441, 451 Irony, 720 Irrealist, 855–857 Irvin, Sherri, 6, 963, 966 Islam, 695 Italian Futurist, 166 Italian neorealism, 359, 370 It Follows, 804 It Happened One Night, 256, 349 Iven, Joris, 567 J Jack, R. E., 901 Jackson, Peter, 931 Jacobs, Jason, 950, 961–962 Jaeckin, Just, 728 Jakobson, Roman, 446, 553–554, 558, 568 James Bond, 41, 388 James, William, 338, 678, 894 Jameson, Jenna, 728 Jane, Jesse, 728 Janet, Pierre, 561 Japan, 543, 683, 696 Japanese, 178, 682, 901, 902 Jarecki, Andrew, 635 Jarman, Derek, 51 Jarvie, Ian, 358, 372, 373, 376 Jason Leigh, Jennifer, 501, 502

Jason Vorhees, 298 Jay, Martin, 316 Jazz, 320 Jeanne Dielman, 868, 909 Jenkins, Henry, 131 Jeremy, Ron, 728, 731 Jesus, 690, 833 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre, 532 Jewish, 104, 498, 679, 682 Jews, 507, 679, 682 JFK, 77, 606 Jim Crow, 771 Joan of Arc, 250 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 551, 565 Joe and Maxi, 633 Johns Hopkins University, 389n31, 390n39, 399n62, 444, 829n5, 932n19 Johnson, Duke, 500 Johnson, Mark, 396 Joint authorship, 220, 232n41 Jones, Duane, 690 Jones, Ernest, 931 Jones, Jonathan, 981 Jonze, Spike, 218, 503, 829 Jordan, Lawrence, 555 Joslin, Tom, 633 Jouissance, 711 Jowett, Garth, 774 Juhasz, Alexandra, 707 Jules and Jim, 186 Julie & Julia, 132 Jung, Carl, 934 Jungle Fever, 256 Jurassic Park, 87, 171 K Kael, Pauline, 547 Kagel, Mauricio, 326 Kallias, A., 911 Kane, Daniel, 568 Kania, Andrew, 14, 59–62, 64, 100, 100n6, 101n8, 102n9, 103, 210 Kant, Immanuel, 262, 262n10, 263, 263n14, 276, 331, 340, 343, 344, 410, 411, 474, 578, 760, 962, 965 Kantian, 262n10, 266n23, 277, 336, 346, 517, 736, 963, 965, 966

 INDEX 

Kantianism, 287, 343, 343n23 Kantian tradition, 738 Kaufman, Charlie, 218, 227, 228, 500, 501, 503, 829–841 Kawin, Bruce, 528 Keane, Marian, 354 Keating, Patrick, 71, 119 Keaton, Buster, 546, 549 Kelly, Jill, 728 Kermode, Frank, 788 Kerry, John, 777 Khondji, Darius, 77 Kidman, Nicole, 84 Kiernan, Matthew, 735 Kieslowski, Krzysztof, 546 Kill Bill, 741 Kinaesthetic, 870–874 Kinaesthetic empathy, 871 Kinaesthetic imagination, 147 Kinesthetic mimesis, 870–874 Kinetic, 24, 145, 159, 456, 463, 515, 718 Kinetophone, 198n31 King Kong, 171, 251, 288, 848 King Lear, 298, 339, 342 King, C. M., 912 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 694 Kingsley,, Charles, 554, 555 Kinoautomat, 983, 988 Kipling, Rudyard, 554 Kirchheimer, Otto, 317 Kirtland, Katie, 561 Kitsch, 325 Kivy, Peter, 805 Klahr, Lewis, 569 Kléber, Alfred, 702 Kleinschmidt, Shieva, 67 Kleiser, Randal, 707 Kleptocrat, 696 Klevan, Andrew, 409 Kluge, Alexander, 316, 324, 327–330 Knausgård, Karl Ove, 627 Knight, Deborah, 357 Knightley, Keira, 934 Kobelia, Dorota, 172 Koch, Gertrud, 316 Kodachrome, 90, 90n46 Koons, Jeff, 740 Korea, 683, 696

1037

Korean Americans, 695 Korsmeyer, C., 909, 911 Kozzlof, Sarah, 878 Kracauer, Siegfried, 29, 35, 316, 318, 320, 323–326, 330, 332 Kragel, P. A., 894 Krakauer, Siegfried, 193 Krasker, Robert, 127 Kreibig, S.D., 894, 905 Krisha, 815 Kristeva, Julia, 441, 443, 444, 451 Krueger, Myron, 998 Kubelka, Peter, 569 Ku Klux Klan, 679 Kubrick, Stanley, 266, 396, 543, 694, 907, 941 Kuleshov, Lev, 146, 157, 319, 762, 904 Kuleshov Effect, 903 Kurosawa, Akira, 239, 370, 543 Kushner, Jared, 772 L Labor movement, 316 La Bruce, Bruce, 710 Lacan, Jacques, 239, 263, 278, 441, 442, 444, 446, 447, 453, 643, 658, 711, 924, 925, 936, 943 Lacanian psychoanalysis, 365, 383, 454, 936 Lacanian theory, 708, 867, 936 Lackey, Douglas, 543 Lady Bird, 667–669, 672 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 728, 740 The Lady Eve, 349, 350 Lady Gaga, 742 L’Age d’or, 564, 565 La Jetée, 52, 197 Lakoff, George, 396 La La Land, 126, 222, 980 Lamarque, Peter, 97, 111n19, 849n9, 905 Lamb, 901 Landau, Martin, 498 Landis, John, 104 Lang, Fritz, 238, 249 Lang, P. J., 907 Lange, C. G., 894 Langer, Susan, 788

1038 

INDEX

Langton, Rae, 750, 751 Language, 18–20, 33, 238n3, 266–269, 307, 810 La Notte, 324 La Perle, 564 LaPlanche, Jean, 708 La Règle du Jeu, 372 L’argent, 82 Lasswell, Harold, 763, 764 Last Dragon, 696 The Last Emperor, 80, 88 The Last Laugh, 909 Last Year at Marienbad, 249, 253 Las Vegas, 1001 Latinas, 718 Latinos, 718 Laura, 255, 267, 280n89, 655, 709, 709n26, 730n26, 867 La Vérité, 902 L’avventura, 82, 253, 373, 849 The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, 978 L’Eclisse, 253 Le Petit Soldat, 761 Le Prince, Louis, 4 Le Tempestaire, 592–594 L’Etoile du mer, 555–557, 564 Leavis, F.R., 418, 418n41 Lebensphilosophie, 262 Lee, Alfred, 760, 761 Lee, Bruce, 682 Lee, Chang-dong, 425 Lee, Lance, 215 Lee, Spike, 77 Leeds, 976 Lefebvre, Henri, 144n1 Legion, 952, 966 Leibniz, G.W., 523 Leibowitz, Flo, 247, 663 Lens/lenses, 22, 82–86, 168, 244, 245, 286, 323, 370, 527, 587, 641, 654, 703, 719, 785, 915, 1002 Leone, Sergio, 307 Lerner, M.J., 906 Lesbian, 701–705, 712 Les Revenants, 955 Les Triplettes de Belleville, 72 Le Tempestaire, 592–594 Leung, Helen Hok-Sze, 713

Levaco, Ronald, 146, 157 Levenson, R. W., 907 Leviathan, 569 Levin, Daniel, 389 Levine, K. J., 910 Levinson, Jerrold, 100, 102–106, 110, 114, 120, 247, 737–744, 803, 805, 806, 853n16 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 441, 446, 447, 450 Levitt, Helen, 567 Lewis, Damien, 548 Lewis, David, 850 Leyda, Jay, 567 LGBTQ, 701, 705, 712, 715, 720 Liangtang, Chang, 1009 Liberty Valance, 250 Liget, György, 808 Lighting, 79–82 Lighting crew, 75 Lighting designer, 75, 79 Lilya 4-Ever, 909 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 488 The Lion in Winter, 903 Lindgren, Ernest, 434 Lindsay, Vachel, 556 Linguistic signs, 552, 559 Link, Caroline, 104 Linklater, Richard, 172, 181, 182, 495, 497 Lin-signs, 559 Lippmann, Walter, 770, 771 Lip-synching, 719 Lisa, 279n83, 354, 501, 502 Litch, Mary, 278, 362 Literal seeing, 852 Literary art, 180 Literary criticism, 551, 560 Literary fiction, 98, 99, 104, 105, 473 Literary memoir, 628 Literary theory, 98, 133, 238, 247, 441, 452, 561, 562 Little, Cleavon, 11–13, 16, 19 Little Big Man, 253 Live action, 13, 169, 171–173, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 494, 495, 988 Live-action cinema, 166, 168, 174–178, 181 Live Aid, 770

 INDEX 

Live streaming, 646 Live video feeds, 949 Livingston, Paisley, 98n2, 99, 219, 220, 226, 232n41, 247, 263, 266, 271, 279, 376, 471, 472, 517, 576–579, 582–5867 Locke, Brian, 695 Locke, John, 331, 760 Locutionary act, 778 Logical, 287, 289, 295, 296 Logical atomism, 265, 268, 269 Logical positivism, 825 Loht, Shawn, 285 London, 49n1, 53n13, 75n8, 76n13, 167n3, 168n4, 168n5, 173n10, 179n21, 181n29, 182n32, 215n1, 259n1, 260n2, 262n11, 265n20, 268n32, 271n48, 271n50, 275n67, 276n75, 278n81, 279n83, 316n1, 321n7, 321n8, 321n9, 323n13, 325n20, 327n22, 331n26, 358n4, 359n11, 363n27, 364n32, 364n35, 366n40, 382n4, 382n6, 382n7, 383n8, 383n10, 386, 387n24, 390n39, 391n42, 392n44, 396n52, 403n78, 403n80, 409n3, 412n13, 413n16, 413n17, 413n18, 413n20, 414n22, 415n24, 415n27, 418n41, 418n42, 418n45, 420n50, 421n53, 423n63, 424n66, 426n74, 426n76, 427n81, 427n84, 431n105, 432n107, 432n109, 433n112, 433n113, 434n119, 605n7, 678, 682, 703, 731n28, 732n30, 769n44, 829n5, 839n7, 848, 927n6, 931n17, 932n19, 939n34, 944n45, 976 Longinus, 552 Long shot, 393, 504 Long takes, 83, 330, 361, 872 Long-time Companion, 707 Lopes, Damian, 988 Lopes, Dominic McIver, 30, 35, 38, 42–44, 73, 979, 980, 983–987 Lopes, Garcia, 567 Lord of the Rings, 171 Los Olvidados, 909 Louis, C.K., 230, 951 Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 716

1039

Love Brewed in the African Pot, 900 Loving Vincent, 172, 172n9 Low-contrast, 76 Löwenthal, Leo, 317, 318 Low-level, 76, 860, 870, 1013 Lubitsch, Ernst, 80 Lucas, Christopher, 91 Lucas, D.W., 910 Lucas, George, 171 Luck, Morgan, 990 Luckey, Palmer, 1001 Luhrmann, Baz, 84 Lukács, Georg, 321 Lukacs, György, xxv, 515 Lumet, Sidney, 719 Lumière, 604, 761, 923 Lumière actualités, 604 Lund, Ilsa, 115 Lundqvist, L. O., 907 Lye, Len, 361 Lynch, David, 190, 425, 565, 955 Lyrical documentary, 567, 569 Lyrical film, 557, 558 Lyrosophic, 562 Lyrosophie, 561 M Macarthur, David, 354 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 759 Machine aesthetic, 516 Mack, Jodie, 569 Mackendrick, Alexander, 218 Mackie, J.L., 249 MacKinnon, Catharine, 724, 725, 750–753 Mad Max: Fury Road, 661, 668, 669 Mad Men, 130, 547, 957, 960 Madonna, 742 Maes, Hand, 722, 734, 737, 740, 741 Magazine, 627, 745, 758, 953 Magimel, Benoît, 933 Magnolia, 803 Mainstream film, 39, 89, 123, 126, 137, 219, 384, 593, 653–658, 660, 661, 664, 666–668, 670, 671, 673, 674, 707, 714, 730, 877 Maister, Lara, 1006 Make-believe, 97n1, 101n7, 245, 372, 634, 850, 851, 853, 856, 904–906

1040 

INDEX

Malcolm X, 77, 77n18, 695 Male, 350, 450, 451, 655–659, 663, 665–668, 679–683, 692, 709n26, 729, 730, 742, 768, 769, 904, 923, 942, 943 Male Dominance, 654, 724, 750 Male gaze, 654–659, 657n29, 768, 769, 942 Male supremacy, 724, 750 Mallarme, Stephan, 555 Maltese Falcon, 348, 741, 823n1 Mamet, David, 226, 227, 231 Manchester by the Sea, 666, 804 Mandt, A.J., 264 Manhattan, 7, 567 Manhunt, 991 Mankiewicz, Herman J., 232, 547 Manlove, Clifford T., 658 Mann, Aimee, 803 Manne, Kate, 665 Manovich, Lev, 183, 184 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, v, vi, 902 Man with a Movie Camera, 575, 583, 589, 590 Maras, Steven, 221, 222 Marathon Man, 847 Marble, 245, 337, 784 Marcus, Laura, 631 Marcuse, Herbert, 317, 318 Margolis, Joseph, 273 Margulies, Juliana, 129 Marie-Antoinette conduite à l’échafaud, 613 Marker, Chris, 52, 197 Marks, Laura U., 714 Marlin, Randall, 763, 764 Marnie, 543 Martin, M.G.F., 210, 211, 812 Martinique, 683 Marty, 41, 954 Marvel Cinematic Universe, 128 Marx, Karl, 35, 317, 321, 331, 332, 449, 451, 581, 710, 924 Marxism, 293, 330, 365, 383, 443, 449, 586, 587, 694, 710, 936 Marxist, 278, 315, 317, 320, 330, 416n28, 450, 452, 575, 577, 580, 581, 583, 584, 586, 589, 664, 710, 762, 775, 960

Masculine subject, 942 Masculinity, 668, 669, 752, 901, 910, 913 M∗A∗S∗H, 954 Maslin, J., 906 Masochism, 933 Masochistic pleasure, 322 Mason, Rebecca, 673 Mass, Willard, 556 Mass art, 180, 357, 364, 367 Mass culture, 315, 318–320, 332, 758, 759, 766 Mass Entertainment, 357, 360, 454, 523 Massine, Léonide, 789 Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), 978, 978n26 Mateik, Tara, 715, 718–720 Material inscription, 446 Materialism, 268, 272n52 Materiality, 194, 308, 448, 568, 569, 705, 718 Matravers, Derek, 102, 104, 105 The Matrix, 131, 131n34, 256, 443, 479, 488, 593, 594, 596 Mauss, M., 898 Maximization of profit, 695 Mayer, Carl, 225 Mayne, Judith, 703 Maysles Brothers, 640 Mazello, Joseph, 87 McAlpine, Donald, 84 McBride, Jim, 637 McCabe, Susan, 564 McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 77 McCain-Feingold, 773 McCarthy, Cormac, 217 Mccollum, Thelma, 997 McDermott, Marc, 121 McDormand, Frances, 801 McDowell, John, 263 McElwee, Ross, 633 McGinn, Colin, 17 McGonigal, Andrew, 130 McGowan, Mary Kate, 750 McGowan, Todd, 940 McGregor, Ewan, 84 McKee, Alan, 837, 966 McLaren, Norman, 361, 370, 371 McOmber, Brian, 815

 INDEX 

Meaning, film, 17, 609n14 Meaning-fulfillment, 290, 291 Meaning-intention, 290 Medea, 111 Media studies, 365, 381, 382, 382n2, 384, 385, 403, 701, 867, 949 Mediated imagined seeing, 108–110, 113 Medina, José, 669–671 Meditations, 594 Meditations on First Philosophy, 496 Medium, 31, 192–193, 431, 796, 949–968, 979–980, 995–1014 Medium essentialism, 454, 950, 951 Medium, film, 255, 258, 294, 360, 361, 367, 383, 431, 454, 494, 574, 577, 589, 953 Medium of art, 238, 243n18, 245, 257, 335 Medium shot, 548 Medium specificity, 29–46, 192–193, 956 Meese, Attorney General Edwin, 748 Meitu, 646 Mekas, Jonas, 640, 642 Melodrama, 247, 251, 336, 337, 340, 352–353, 364, 663, 909, 911, 943 Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, 242, 339, 352–353, 364n34, 943n42 Melodramatic, 544 Memento, 362, 377, 488, 492n2 Memoir/memoirs, 627, 630 Memory, 294 Memphis, 694 Mendelssohn, Moses, 337 Mendes, Sam, 254 Mental simulation, 374 Mental state, 125, 178, 370, 374, 393, 398, 617, 618, 846, 858, 859, 876, 879, 881, 902, 957 Merivale, A., 910 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 145, 267, 271, 285, 286, 288, 308–311, 513, 1008 Meskin, Aaron, 56, 209n77, 979, 987, 987n71, 988, 991, 991n83 Messaris, Paul, 388 Metacinema, 604 Meta-critique, 691 Meta-emotions, 401 Metaphors of vision, 569 Metaphysics of presence, 454, 455

1041

Metcalf, Thomas, 476–478 Meter, 82, 553, 569 Met Opera, 26 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 76 Metropolitan Opera, 25, 26 Metz, Christian, 16, 17, 239n4, 240, 267, 286, 453, 458, 546, 559, 636, 867, 937, 938, 938n31, 941–943 Metzger, Radley, 728 Mexican standoff, 462 MGM, 719 Micheaux, Oscar, 682, 682n9 Michelson, Annette, 556, 566, 574, 575, 584, 595, 596 Mickey Mouse, 176, 186 Middle-level research, 366 Mid-focal-length lenses, 86 Milk, Chris, 1003, 1006 Miller, Arthur, 556 Miller v. California, 747 Miller, George, 668 Millet, Kate, 654 Millgram, Y., 910 Milner, Victor, 71, 80 Mimesis, 870–874 Mimetic, 97n1, 120, 121, 137, 138, 191–192, 320, 456, 690, 691, 834, 837, 841, 926, 928, 934 Mimicry, 255, 396, 690, 691, 860, 870, 881 Mind-reading adaptations, 389 Minimalist, 7, 38, 569 Minimal narrating agency, 107–109, 114 Minneapolis Civil Rights, 724 Mirror neurons, 146 Mirror self-recognition, 1009 Mirror stage, 271, 936–938, 938n31 Mise-en-scène, 221, 225, 323, 330, 394, 708, 709, 826, 1002 Misogynist, 556 Mississippi Masala, 256 Mitchell, Artie, 728 Mitchell, Jim, 728 Mitchell, William J., 183–185, 549, 714 Mitry, Jean, 144, 147, 152, 157, 239, 258, 286, 359 Mixed techniques, 173 Moby Dick, 18, 823n1 Mockumentary, 606

1042 

INDEX

Modality of Narrative, 124–128 Modell, Arnold, 146, 147 Moderate, 229n39, 534–537 Modernism, 192, 327, 328, 330, 339, 450, 526, 533, 791n19, 878 Modernist, 555 Modernist poet, 555, 561 Modern Times, 256, 577, 581, 596 Modifying Function, 804, 818 Modulation, 80, 81, 89, 153, 159, 255, 463 Molina, Angela, 849 Monetary value, 321 Money shot, 723, 728 Monism, 808 Monogamy, 720 Monolithic, 240, 454, 806, 878 Monopoly: Electronic Banking, 973 Monosexual, 720 Monster, 678 Montage, 238n3 Montage editing, 149, 238, 253, 254, 763 Montague, Richard, 277 Mood, 401–402 Mood-congruent, 855 Moore, G.E., 268 Moore, Margaret, 806, 807 Moore, Rich, 87 Moral, 469, 506n15, 882, 884 Moral assumptions, 535 Moral-emotional appeal, 881 Morality, 279n83, 735 Moral psychology, 382, 399, 403, 884–886 Moral register, 344 Moral valence, 882 Moran, Richard, 472, 475, 486 Moritz, Karl Phillipp, 553 Morreall, J., 912–914 Morris, Errol, 634 Mortensen, Chris, 67 Mortensen, Viggo, 934 Moscow, 317 Moscow Film School, 762 Moser, Christian, 628 A Most Violent Year, 222 Mother!, 174, 807, 814 Mothlight, 51, 171

Motion tracking technologies, 996, 997, 1006 Motor mimicry, 860 Motor readiness, 857 Motown Records, 696 Moulin Rouge!, 84 Moura, Vitor, 629n8 Movement, 23, 59–67, 82–88, 149–151, 285–311, 460, 461 Movement-image, 20, 21, 23, 458–464, 523, 524, 527 Moverman, Oren, 932 Movie (journal), 433 Moving image, 12n18, 22–24, 24n35, 49–68, 119–139, 381–404, 757–779, 982 Moving Pictures, 9, 9n12, 22–24, 52n8, 271n46, 587 Mr. Payback: An Interactive Movie, 983 Mulatto, 680 Mulhall, Stephen, 308, 354, 531–533, 535, 536, 839n7 Mullarkey, John, see Ó Maoilearca, John Müller-Lyre example, 204 Müller-Lyre lines, 204 Multimodal, 583, 809, 812, 871, 1010, 1011 Multimodal art, 802, 811 Multiple authorship, 22, 89, 219, 220, 226–228, 232 Multiracial, 678, 692n22, 704 Mulvey, Laura, 768, 768n43, 769, 942, 942n40, 943, 943n41 Murder My Sweet, 100 Murdoch, Rupert, 771 Murnau, F.W., 37, 225, 238n3, 545, 682 Murphy, Jeffrie, 481 Museum of Contemporary Art, 999 Music, 196, 202, 803–813, 815–818, 907 Musical, 805, 807n28, 816 Musique concrete, 813, 815 Müstergerg, Hugo, xxv, 30, 144, 191, 359, 383, 528, 794n31 Muzak, 816, 817 My Beautiful Broken Brain, 627, 629, 646 Mycenaean, 8 My Puberty, 642

 INDEX 

Mystery of the chateau of Dice, 564 Myth, 686, 783–799 Mythological, 271, 337, 442 Mythopoetics, 691 N NAACP, 771 Name-calling, 759, 765 Nannicelli, Ted, 30, 35, 40–42, 40n5 Nanook of the North, 246, 607, 762 Narration, 98–102, 114–115 Narrative, 104, 119–139, 151, 250, 368, 391–394, 605n7, 630–635, 655, 754, 768n43, 942, 942n40, 943n41 Narrative dynamics, 120–124, 136 Narrative fiction, 71, 74, 75, 103, 372, 377, 493, 494, 560, 865, 865n1 Narrative film, 371 Narratively incoherent, 868 Narrative poem, 555, 556 Narrative structure, 248, 251, 252, 290, 394, 485, 495, 496, 611, 629–631, 664, 713, 728, 873, 907, 939n33, 953, 956, 971 Narrator, 98, 100–102 Nash, Kate, 1005, 1006, 1013 National cinema, 216, 364, 431 National Film Board of Canada, 762 National Socialism, 329 Native Americans, 681 Natural attitude, 292 Naturalism, 386–391 Naturalistic, 82, 190n2, 192, 271, 272, 293, 381, 386, 388, 390, 812, 849, 853, 873 Nazi, 104, 316, 757, 763 Nazimova, 562 NEA, 979 Need for Speed, 978 Negative Dialectics, 325 Negative Emotions, 909–913 Negative Propaganda, 763–765 Negotiation, 660 Negt, Oskar, 327, 328 Neo-avant-garde, 716–718 Neo-Brechtian aesthetics, 383 Neo-classical, 552, 557 Neo-formalist, 145

1043

Neo-Kantian, 962–964 Neo-Thomism, 262 Neumann, Franz, 317 Neuroaesthetic, 517 Neurocinematics, 382n7, 397n57 Neurology, 395 Neuroscience, 382n7, 397n58 Neuroscientific, 873 Neurotransmitters, 396 Neutralization, 191, 192 Neutral Propaganda, 760–763 New Cognitivism, 247, 247n33, 248, 254, 257 New Critics, 420n52, 421, 425 New Deal, 317 New German Cinema, 328–330 Newhart, Bob, 548 Newman, Barnett, 51 Newman, Michael Z., 128, 129 New-media, 715, 719 News magazine, 953 Newspaper, 7, 72, 184, 488, 555, 768, 789 Newsreels, 757 The Newsroom, 218 Newton, Isaac, 925 New York, 26, 52n8, 74n7, 83n31, 84n32, 87n35, 89n43, 90n45, 122n6, 131n34, 167n2, 168n5, 173n10, 179n22, 182n32, 191n3, 215n3, 217n11, 218n12, 219n15, 228n37, 231n40, 240n5, 261n6, 264n16, 265n22, 268n32, 271n49, 272n53, 276n76, 279n84, 306, 315, 317, 319, 320, 321n8, 331n26, 332n27, 336n3, 336n4, 341n19, 354n44, 361n21, 362n25, 363n26, 365n37, 365n38, 376n80, 377n83, 382n4, 382n6, 382n7, 383n8, 383n10, 383n11, 384n13, 385n15, 386, 387n24, 391n42, 392n44, 396n52, 396n54, 399n63, 403n78, 403n80, 404n82, 411n11, 412n13, 413n18, 414n23, 418n42, 418n45, 423n63, 424n66, 427n81, 427n84, 428n86, 430n102, 432n107, 433n110, 433n112, 434n119, 435n125, 546, 556, 566, 604n2, 605n7, 639n28, 678, 702,

1044 

INDEX

New York (cont.) 711, 723n2, 724n6, 731n29, 748n83, 751n94, 752n97, 752n98, 757n1, 757n2, 759n6, 759n8, 761n9, 761n10, 761n11, 762n13, 763n19, 764n22, 764n25, 766n34, 768n40, 770n46, 770n47, 771n52, 847, 848, 928n7, 928n8, 931n17, 939n32, 939n34, 940n37, 955 New York City, 26, 306, 556, 847, 848 New Yorker, 818, 831, 834 New York Times, 335n1, 665, 707 Nichols, Bill, 608, 608n13, 616, 621, 628, 641–643, 643n35, 850n10 Nicholson, Jack, 808 Nicomachean Ethics, 579 Nicotra, A., 896 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 263, 444, 449, 451, 455, 526, 530, 586, 770, 818, 936 Nigeria, 148, 683 Nigerian, 688 Night of the Living Dead, 690 Night scenes, 37, 566 Nihilism, 519, 522, 525–527 Ninotchka, 80–82, 89 Noble Lie, 759 Noema, 265 Nolan, Christopher, 108, 123, 364, 659, 848 No Lies, 606 Nollywood, 683, 687 Non-cinematic image, 166 Non-cognitive theory, 897 Non-diegetic music, 803, 804 Non-digital movie camera, 166 Non-digital screening, 171 Non-dominant, 657, 673 Nonevents, 678 Nonfiction, 605n6, 605n7, 635–638 Nonfictional mode, 606 Nonfiction Film, 605n6, 605n7 Non-hierarchical, 451 Non-interactive artifacts, 986 Non-linguistic, 266, 456, 460, 463, 554, 582, 583 Non-mainstream, 551 Non-narrative, 149, 365, 368, 371, 557, 569, 730, 1003

Non-philosophical, 262, 264, 537 Non-representationalist, 526 Non-technicist, 527 Nontransgender, 711 Noonan, Tom, 501, 502 Normandy, 615, 616 North by Northwest, 709 Norton, Edward, 126 Nosferatu, 682 Nostalgia, 546 Noth, Chris, 129 Novel, 16, 62, 99, 106, 111, 119, 121, 124, 129, 130, 137, 217, 242, 256, 275, 318, 337, 373, 419, 449, 458, 471, 473, 475, 476, 478, 485, 486, 489, 553, 554, 565, 577, 585, 586, 598, 622n48, 682, 683, 815, 823, 847, 850, 856, 859, 865n1, 868n9, 930, 955, 959, 974, 995 Noverre, Jean-Georges, 787n12 Now, Voyager, 935 Nowhere in Africa, 104 Nozick, Robert, 760 Nudity, 727 Nuñez, Victor, 932 O Oakland, Simon, 936 Oatley, K., 907 Obama, Barack, 773, 778, 779 Obduction, 976 Oberfeld, D., 907 Oberhausen Manifesto, 329 Objectification, 722, 726 O Brother Where Art Thou?, 78 Obscene, 681, 724, 746, 747, 941 Observational documentary, 608, 609, 611n22, 614, 616, 620 Observation sentences, 825, 826 O’Callaghan, Casey, 802 Occlusion size, 85, 86 Ocean’s 8, 665 O’Connor, Carroll, 951 October, 78n20, 247n33, 382n2, 444, 575, 586, 942n39 O’Donnell, Victoria, 774 Oedipus, 33, 829n5, 931 Oedipus Tyrannus, 931

 INDEX 

Offenbach, Jacque, 788, 789 The Official Story, 909 Offline, 858, 875 Of Grammatology, 444, 719n49 O’Hara, Scarlett, 105 Oil, 172, 245, 545 Oldham, Gabriella, 160 Oldman, Gary, 135 Oliver, John, 772 Oliver, M. B., 913 Olsen, Bree, 728 Olsen, S. H., 97, 411 Olson, Charles, 567 Olson, K. R., 911 Olympia, 757 Ó Maoilearca, John, 279, 280n88 Once Upon a Time in the West, 307 Oneohtrix Point Never, 804 One Second in Montreal, 197 One Sixth of the World, 557 Only Angels Have Wings, 769 On the Genealogy of Morals, 586 On the Sublime, 552 Ontological, 98, 102–106, 113, 114 Ontological demarcation, 603, 620 Ontological Gap, 98, 102–106, 113, 114 Ontology, 3–26, 221–225, 337, 359 Ontology of film, 3–5, 8–11, 15, 16, 20, 22, 24, 26, 221, 310, 311, 336, 337, 345, 348–350, 521 The Opening of Misty Beethoven, 728 Opera, 25, 112, 129, 192, 193, 336, 788, 804n12, 818, 981 Operation Rescue, 705 Ophuls, Max, 249, 544 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 504–506, 634 Oppositional gaze, 660, 663, 664n30, 669 Oppression, 330, 658, 670, 682, 767, 774, 909 Optical printer, 74, 83, 84 The Ordinary Man of the Cinema, 523 Ordinary Stream, 678 The Origin of the World, 742 Orlean, Susan, 829–832, 829n6, 834–839 Orpen, Valerie, 146, 147 Osborne, Harold, 411

1045

Othello, 112, 113, 342–344, 348, 354n45 The Other, 448, 450, 451 The Outer Limits, 469 Out of body illusion, 1007 Outsider Art, 180 Owens, Joseph, 268, 269 Oz, 107 Ozawa, Shigehiro, 682 Ozu, Yasujiro, 522 P Pacing, 151–156 Pacino, Al, 9 Pac-Man, 983 A Page of Madness, 909 Pain, 87, 112, 270, 401, 485, 487, 502, 508, 509, 633, 711, 724, 871, 905 Painting, 80n22, 786 Paint on glass, 173 Palcey, Euzhan, 682 Panning, 44, 45, 87, 246, 419, 996 Panofsky, Erwin, 238, 241, 242, 258, 521, 797 Paper, 130, 173, 180, 245, 338n11, 347, 348, 367, 444, 469, 476, 476n13, 496, 587, 590, 613, 618n40, 623, 798, 858n25, 876n28, 934 Papineau, David, 272 Papini, Giovanni, 515 Paradigm shift, 266n25, 455, 702n10 Paradox, 909–913 Parametric narrative, 458 Paranormal Activity, 606 Paraphrase, 583 Parfit, Derek, 274 Paris, 41, 80, 82n24, 229n38, 278, 319, 330, 445n17, 508, 544, 561, 564, 604n3, 678, 703n11, 766n31, 788, 941, 999 Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slayton, 747, 748 Paris, Texas, 932, 941 Parks, Gordon, 690 Parmar, Pratibha, 704 Parmenides, 352 Parodies, 277, 730 Participation theorists, 853

1046 

INDEX

Participatory documentary, 642 Participatory imagining, 854 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 556–568 The Passion of Joan of Arc, 462 Passive position, 942 A Patch of Blue, 680 Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, 807 Pathography, 929–930 Páthos, 869 Paton, M., 910 Patriarchal, 654–657, 660–672, 674, 769 Patriarchal Ideology, 660, 661, 663, 667, 668 Patriarchy, 665, 666, 768, 769, 942 Patterson, John, 547 Peacock, Steven, 961, 962 Peanuts, 72 Pearlman, Karen, 146, 148, 160 Peckinpah, Sam, 807 PECMA flow, 400 Peeping Tom, 398 Peele, Jordan, 693 Peirce, C.S., 269, 458, 459, 462, 678, 714 Peircean, 458, 460, 462 Penn, Arthur, 371 Penn, Matthew, 547 Pennebaker, D.A., 637, 640 People of color, 682 People v. Freeman, 749 Percepts, 522, 523 Perceptual-affective, 523, 524 Perceptual imagining, 107, 114, 114n22 Perceptual monism, 808, 809 Perceptual phantasy, 298–300 Perez, Gilberto, 390, 391 Pérez, Héctor J., 871 Perfectionism, 338–345, 351 Performance, 8, 24, 25, 33, 39, 43, 44, 44n6, 72, 150, 151, 153, 156, 166, 195, 196, 197n27, 221–223, 225, 227, 244, 246, 298, 299, 413, 417, 425, 428, 432, 481, 529, 616, 665, 685, 691, 692, 696, 709, 718, 718n48, 719, 726, 749, 752, 786, 789, 790, 808n28, 811n43, 816, 898, 929, 958, 975, 978, 979, 986, 999, 1011

Performance token, 195, 197n27, 811n43, 975, 978 Performative documentary, 608, 616 Peripersonal neurons, 1010 Peripersonal space (PPS), 1010, 1011 Periscope, 774 Perkins, Victor, xxv, 32, 123, 124, 134, 219, 363, 421, 425, 434, 436, 783–787, 793 Perlocutionary act, 778, 779 Persepolis, 642 Persona, 103, 545, 583 Personal identity, 264, 274, 302, 303, 362 Personal narrative, 631 Perspective taking, 399, 486, 671, 875 Pessimism, 767 Phaedrus, 927, 927n3 Phallus, 675 Phantasy, 294, 298–300 The Phantom Menace, 7 Phantom nose illusion, 1007 Phenomenological, 285–311 Phenomenological attitude, 292, 293 Phenomenological contact, 610 Phenomenology, 266n25, 286–294, 300–301 Phenomenology of film, 288, 291, 300, 346, 359, 812 Philadelphia, 349, 350, 403, 417n36, 716 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 716 The Philadelphia Story, 344, 349, 351, 354n45 Philippot, P., 894 Phillips, Dawn, 33, 54 Philosophical argumentation, 256 Philosophical filmmaking, 491–511 Philosophical film theory, 513–515, 531 Philosophical Investigations, 338, 425n73, 575n9, 577, 583 Philosophical thought experiments, 473 Philosophy of Art, 424n66 Philosophy of mind, 270, 662, 870 Philosophy of television art, 961 The Philosophy of the Cinematograph, 516 Phonemes, 446

 INDEX 

Phonetic, 446 Photocopies, 173 Photogénie, 563, 703n11 Photographic images, 615 Photographic lens, 323 Photographic trace, 173, 185, 609, 609n14, 612–615, 621, 622, 624, 625 Photography, 73, 174n13, 521, 761, 786 Physical media, 29, 951 The Piano, 77, 903 The Piano Teacher, 933 Picasso, Pablo, 207, 833 Pickford, Mary, 558 The Pickwick Papers, 130 Picnic, 764 Pictorial Representation, 13, 178 Picture-maker, 71, 82, 84 Piecemeal theorizing, 365, 385, 403, 796 Pierrot le Fou, 544 Pinocchio, 693, 694 Pinocchio illusion, 1006–1007 Piotrovskij, Adrian, 556–564, 566 Pirates, 728 Pisters, Patricia, 263, 272 Pitt, Brad, 240 Pity, 856 Pixel, 78, 184, 1000 Pixilation, 170, 173 Pizzolato, Nick, 218 Plain folks, 765 Planet Earth, 955 Planned Parenthood, 705 Plantinga, C., 254, 255, 271, 376, 395, 399, 403, 590, 612n22, 619n41, 628, 636, 637, 873, 878, 880, 881, 884 Plaster, 245 Plato, 344, 472, 474, 491, 498, 499, 552, 685, 759, 787, 867, 925–929, 927n5, 933, 939–941 Platonism, 265, 267 Playboy, 742 Plays, 10, 13–16, 19, 20, 23–26, 30, 31, 111–113, 115, 123, 127, 129, 146, 147, 160, 167, 174, 175, 182–184, 196, 199, 200, 202, 203, 221–223, 226, 242–244, 246, 248, 249, 251, 255, 270, 277, 289, 292, 298, 299,

1047

318, 325, 326, 328, 338, 346, 348, 350, 370, 372, 374, 388, 394, 398, 400, 402, 414, 434, 441, 442, 444, 461, 469, 472, 486, 497–499, 502, 505, 506, 521, 527, 545, 558, 567, 585, 606, 621n46, 632, 645, 656, 660, 672, 673, 685, 687, 693, 696, 700, 710n28, 710n31, 711, 719n49, 728, 729, 742, 755, 796, 803, 805, 808, 809, 815, 818, 823–825, 828, 830, 835–837, 845, 847, 849, 851, 852, 854, 856, 858, 880, 884, 893, 899, 901–903, 909, 914, 915, 927, 928, 931, 932, 934, 935, 953, 973, 986, 988 Playwright, 556, 685, 797, 928 Pleasure, 693 Plot, 903 Plutocrat, 696 Poet, 38, 111, 113, 553, 555, 556, 559, 561, 564–565, 567, 685, 694, 695, 735, 759, 927, 928, 934, 939n34 Poetic, 553, 564 Poetic Cinema, 551 Poetic documentary, 934 Poetic function, 553, 554, 558, 568 Poetic mimêsis, 926 Poetic production, 564 Poetics, 110, 147, 247, 556, 829n5 Poetic speech, 553 Poetry, 552–554, 556–564, 568, 788, 927–928 Pointillist painting, 63 Point-of-view (POV), 16 Point-of-view shot, 113, 248, 560, 859, 859n38 Poitier, Sidney, 680, 902 Pokémon Go, 976, 977 Police, 202, 510, 547, 668, 689, 690, 904 Political aesthetics of race, 691–696 Political art, 693 Political correctness, 384n12, 455 Political economy, 316, 641 Political modernism, 526 Political philosophy, 274, 760 Politique des auteurs, 639 Polley, Sarah, 634, 634n17, 635, 642 Pollock, Friedrich, 317

1048 

INDEX

Polyphonic, 669 Pompidou Center, 999 Ponech, Trevor, 51, 52, 598, 619n41, 628 Pong, 972 Pontalis, J.B., 708 Poor People’s Campaign, 694 Pop art, 327 Populist, 661 Pornographic film, 729, 754, 755 Pornography, 721–755 Portraiture, 193, 642 Post-broadcast era, 950 Post-Freudian, 497 Post-Kantian, 242n16, 262 Post-Marxist, 315 Postmetaphysical, 530 Postmodern, 636, 647 Postmodernist art, 717 Post-network era, 950 Postproduction, 501, 814 Poststructuralism, 441–464 Poststructuralist, 315, 442–445, 442n4, 447–460, 462–464, 636, 641, 643 Post-television era, 950 Potentiated double consciousness, 689 Pouissin, Nicolas, 337 Pound, Ezrac, 567 POV, 876, 877 Powell, Michael, 784, 788, 789, 791n22, 792, 798 Powell and Pressburger (aka The Archers), 789, 792, 798 Power, 9, 40, 71, 81, 88, 89, 91, 120, 144, 159, 174, 190, 193, 201, 202, 227, 229, 249, 274, 280n88, 287, 295, 303, 305, 308, 311, 324, 338, 392, 393, 404, 416, 442, 449–452, 452n31453, 454, 455, 459, 463, 506, 516, 523, 524, 526, 527, 531, 533, 556, 564, 565, 610, 613, 625, 632, 634, 636, 642, 669, 686, 692, 710n27, 717, 724, 751, 758, 762, 764, 767, 771, 772, 779, 785, 789–791, 793–795, 797, 799, 835, 839, 852, 885n67, 926, 927, 940, 978, 1003 Practical Philosophy, 340, 343 Practical Wisdom, 256, 304

Pragmatist, 338, 340, 446, 678, 775 Prague linguistic circle, 446 Pramaggiore, Maria, 201 Pratt, Henry John, 958 Predictive coding, 1012 Preminger, Otto, 709 Presence, 16n24, 61, 98, 109, 110, 113, 114, 121, 138, 156, 185, 196, 199, 202, 254, 258, 262, 288, 289, 297, 301–305, 307, 330, 332, 338, 341, 347, 413, 419, 420, 423, 442n4, 445, 450, 452, 452n31, 454, 455, 488, 495, 501, 506, 508, 521, 553, 555, 616, 629, 634, 635, 637, 638, 640, 644, 647, 648, 657, 677, 679, 683, 684, 691, 726–728, 731, 732, 742, 744, 745, 766, 784, 785, 805, 846, 853, 855, 856, 934, 940n36, 971n2, 995, 1003–1005, 1010 Presentness to the world, 521 President McKinley at Home, 761 Pressburger, Emeric, 784, 789, 792, 798 The Prestige, 123 Pretty Poison, 933 Pretty Woman, 256 Pre-verbal intelligible content, 459 Price, Steven, 222 Price, T.F., 894 Priest, Graham, 67 Prieto, Rodrigo, 86 Prime-time serial, 128, 129 Prince, Gerald, 124 Prince, Stephen, 404 Princess Leia, 659, 661 Prinz, J.J., 895–898, 907 Pro-attitude, 879 Problem of evil, 362 Production code, 546 Pro-filmic, 166, 167, 171–173, 175–177, 183–186, 204, 612n22 Pro-filmic event, 167, 171, 175–177, 183–185, 605, 608, 610, 612 Project X, 988 Projector, 564 Proletariat, 320, 328 Propaganda, 691, 757–779, 774n66 Propagandist, 622, 760, 764, 767, 774 Propositional imagining, 847 Propositionally true, 848

 INDEX 

Propositional node, 609 Proprioceptive, 1005, 1007, 1009, 1010, 1013, 1014 Prose narrative, 559, 561 Prospection, 119, 122, 123, 125, 132 Protagonist, 41, 80, 86, 90, 122, 125, 126, 136, 138, 247, 251, 253, 304, 305, 345, 351, 353, 373, 382, 391, 399, 400, 403, 470, 565, 593, 627, 629, 633, 638, 641–643, 647, 656, 657n9, 659, 661, 665, 666, 667n41, 690, 693, 695, 728, 768, 848, 849, 856, 868, 869, 881, 883, 931, 957 Proteus effect, 1011, 1013 Proto-thinking, 530 Prototype theory, 199 Psycho, 290, 543, 936 Psychoanalysis, 701, 923–944 Psychoanalytic, 20, 252, 315, 317, 358, 443, 452–454, 456, 458, 459, 464, 631, 656, 657, 659, 661, 663, 664, 667, 709, 713, 769, 805, 816, 924, 926–929, 932–939, 941–944 Psychological convergence, 881 Psychological prompts, 880 Psychologism, 289 Psycho-semiotic/poststructuralist, 383–385, 383n11, 384n12, 443, 463 Psycho-semiotic theory, 383–385, 383n11, 384n12 Psychotechnology, 144 Psychotherapy, 630, 631, 934 The Public Enemy, 228 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 29, 35, 150, 319, 393 Punctum, 457 Puppets, 173 Pure semiology, 459 Pure Sounds, 810, 816, 817 Purves, Duncan, 480 Pye, Douglas, 134–136, 135n47, 435 Q Quadrilogy, 531 Quai du commerce, 868 Quasi-subject, 524

1049

Queensland, 1001 Queer, 699–720, 703n11 Queer avant-garde, 716, 718, 720 Queer bisexual, 720 Queer cinema, 700, 707, 708, 715, 720 Queer cinematic, 709, 716, 718, 720 Queer critical discourse, 710 Queer culture, 708, 719 Queer filmmaker, 707 Queer-film philosophy, 699–720 Queer-film theory, 700–705, 708, 710, 713, 715, 719 Queer images, 706–708 Queer intellectual movement, 711 Queer politics, 712, 719 Queers, 315, 660, 670, 699–720 Queer theoretical, 719 Queer theory, 699–701, 711 Quesnoy, Pierre, 528 Quine, W.V.O., xxv, 265, 270, 338, 825–828, 832, 833, 835, 836, 838–841 Quinlivan, Davina, 273 Quinn, Warren, 481 Quoidbach, J., 913 R The Rabbit of Seville, 246 Race, 399n64, 677–697, 715 Race stories, 679 Race theory, 705 Rachels, James, 480, 481 Racialized subjects, 678 Racism, 43, 330, 399, 403, 677, 688, 691, 878, 909 Racist, 680 Racist anthropology, 680 Radcliffe, Daniel, 135 Radford, C., 14n20, 904 Raging Bull, 792, 793 Ragtime, 217 Rain, 567 Rains, Claude, 935 Raising Arizona, 810 Raison in the Sun, 902 Rancière, Jacques, 276, 278 Rango, 91 Rape, 229n38

1050 

INDEX

Rapper, Irving, 935 Ratcatcher, 909 Rate of change, 153, 154 Rate of cutting, 153, 154 Rationalism, 451, 562 Rawls, John, xxv, 343, 727, 760 Ray, Charles, 562 Ray, Man, 555, 557, 564 Ray, Nicholas, 249 Ray, Satyajit, 542 Rea, Michael, 726 Rea, Stephen, 714 Ready-mades, 43, 44n6, 288, 308, 743 Reagan, Ronald, 748, 773 The “Real,” 552 Realism, 10–13, 200–211, 238n3 Realist, 610–617 Realistic Heuristic, 97, 110–113 Realist Theory of Documentary, 608, 609 Reams, Harry, 729 Rear Window, 4 Recognition, 58, 114, 119, 122, 123, 125, 127, 132, 133 Recognition Prompt, 114 Recollection, 632, 641, 644 Reconstruction, 679, 758 Recyclomation, 173 Red Desert, 560 Redemption of physical reality, 325 Reds, 88 The Red Shoes, 783–799, 791n22 Reed, Carol, 126, 363, 373, 535, 579 Re-enactments, 634 Reisz, 153 Reflective light meter, 82 Reflexive, 276, 279, 575, 596, 608, 642, 848 Reflexive documentary, 642 Reframe, 42, 87, 520 Reggae, 687 Regulation, 271, 725, 748, 749, 773 Reininger, Lotte, 170 Reisz, 153 Reitz, Edgar, 324, 329, 330 Relational Theory of Documentary, 609, 610 Relationships of intensity, 152 Relativism, 130, 362, 661, 663, 684 Reliabilism, 340

Rembrandt, 73 René, Norman Renoir, Jean, 44, 45, 238, 238n3, 239, 370, 372, 522 Renov, Michael, 636, 643–645 Repertory, 366 Representation, 174n13, 701 Representation of women, 661, 708 Representationalist, 65, 458 Representation-by-origin, 612n24, 620 Representation-by-use, 612, 612n24, 620, 624 Repression, 272, 924, 925, 934 Reproducibility, 319 Republic, 491, 498, 552, 685, 787, 925–930, 927n5, 934, 941 Republican, 272, 924, 925, 934 Reservoir Dogs, 462 Resistance to theory, 537 Resistant Imagination, 666, 669–672 Resnais, Alain, 249, 253, 522 Response-dependent, 60–63, 65, 908 Retrospection, 119, 122, 123, 125 Return of the Jedi, 206, 659 Revaluation, 430n100 Rhetorical address, 127 Rhetorically, 504, 534, 583 Rhu, Lawrence, 354 Rhythm, 143–161 Rhythm and blues, 687 Rhythm in film editing, 160 Rich, B. Ruby, 700 Richards, Ariana, 87 Riggs, Marlon T., 633, 642, 707 Riley, Boots, 693 Riley, Raymond Lawrence, 693 The Rime of Ancient Mariner, 555 Rio Lobo, 544 Riva, Emmanuelle, 508 Rizzolatti, Giacomo, 870, 871, 1010 Road movie, 335 Robbins, Tim, 125 Rockford Files, 547 Rocky Horror Picture Show, 372, 987 Rocky III, 803 Rodowick, David, 247n33, 252n48, 257n68, 354, 382n2, 658, 699 Rogers, Ginger, 239 Rolston, Adam, 717

 INDEX 

Roma (Gypsies), 679 Romance, 349, 688, 735, 808, 823, 914 Romantic, 552, 593 Romantic comedy, 250, 364 Romero, Oscar, 791n22, 792 Roosevelt, Franklin, 317 Roots, 954 Rope, 304, 305 Rorty, Richard, 263, 269, 275 Rosar, William H., 804 Rose, Mandy, 1006 Rosen, Marjorie, 654, 655, 662 Rosenthal, Judah, 498, 499 Rossellini, Roberto, 370, 522 Rosto, 173 Roth v. United States, 746 Rothman, William, 336, 354 Rotoscoping, 171 Rouch, Jean, 640 Roudinesco, Élisabeth, 710n31 Rough, Brock, 981 Rough heroes, 882 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 759 Rowling, J.K., 136 The Royal Tenenbaums, 100 Rubber hand illusion, 1007 Ruby in Paradise, 932 Rudo y Cursi, 202 Rules of the Game, 398, 546 RuPaul’s Drag Race, 715 Russell, Bertrand, 67, 760, 761 Russell, Bruce, 594–595 Russell, J. A., 904 Russia, 580, 696, 762 Russian Formalist, 248, 446, 553, 557 Rutherford, Ann, 714 Ruttman, Walther, 567 Rux, Carl Hancock, 8 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 124–126, 131 Ryle, Gilbert, 263, 357n1 S Sabiston, Bob, 172, 181, 182 Saccadic, 528 Sagan, Carl, 613 St. Augustine, 693 Salt, B., 76, 154 Samba, 687

1051

The Same, 448–451 Samsung, 996, 1000 Samurai, 741 San Filippo, Maria, 720 Sanders, M., 913 The Sands of Dee, 554, 555 San Francisco: Aftermath of an Earthquake, 761 Sankofa, 690, 909 Sansho the Bailiff, 902 Sarbin, T.R., 897 Sarcasm, 720 Sarris, Andrew, 544, 545, 639n28 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 274, 497, 513 Satrapi, Marjane, 642 Saturday Night Live, 765 Saussurean linguistics, 383 Saw, 803, 813 Say Anything, 803, 807 A Scanner Darkly, 7, 181 Scenes of empathy, 873 Scepticism, 182n32, 520 Schachter, S., 896 Schadenfreude, 868 Schaper, E., 910 Schatz, Thomas, 252, 253, 255 Schefer, Jean-Louis, 523 Scheirl, Hans, 713, 714 Scherer, K. R., 895 Scherer, Thomas, 147 Schiller, Friedrich, 324 Schlöndorff, Volker, 324, 329, 330 Schmerheim, Philipp, 182, 182n32, 183 Schmidt, Paul, 154 Schoonmaker, Thelma, 792, 793 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 500, 503, 504 Schrader, Paul, 544, 791n22 Schulman, Sarah, 715 Science, 270–272 Science fiction, 109, 243, 364, 469, 483, 486, 493, 682, 684, 1001 Sciences of the brain, 458 Scientism, 270–272 Scopophilia, 656, 925, 938, 938n30 Scorsese, Martin, 239, 546, 791–793, 791n22, 797–799, 955 Scott, Ridley, 301, 364, 474, 493, 531, 1000 Screen, 272n53, 442, 942n40

1052 

INDEX

Screening, 65, 110, 170, 171, 183, 246, 345, 506, 529, 534, 562, 567, 598, 637, 757, 940, 987 Screenplay, 9, 15, 16, 20, 23, 24, 26, 126, 215–217, 220–223, 221n21, 225–228, 231, 232, 383, 502, 503, 547, 829, 829n5, 841 Screen time, 19, 127, 369, 729, 730, 958 Script-fic, 216 Scripts, emotion, 903, 904 Scriptwriting, 829 Scruton, Roger, 74, 174, 419, 960, 964, 967, 980 Sculpture, 11, 24, 196, 198, 224, 245, 363, 419, 734, 791, 837, 926, 930, 984, 986 Scum, 909 Searle, John, 474 Seashell and the Clergyman, 564 Season, 132 Second-screen viewing, 968 “Second-wave” feminist, 705 Secret Sunshine, 425 Seeing, 81, 107–108, 115, 121, 371, 487 Seeing-in, 852 Seeing/Showing argument, 107–108 Seel, Martin, 258 Seidel, A., 907 Seitz, John F., 72 Self, 868n9 Self-defeating quality, 612 Selfie, 628 Self-other differentiation, 399 Sellars, Wilfrid, 271n47, 798 Semiological systems, 446, 448 Semiology, 446, 447, 458, 459, 462 Semiotic linguistics, 443 Semiotic/semiotics, 20, 267, 293, 307, 383, 384, 443, 452–454, 456, 458–460, 462–464, 546, 559, 709 Sensorimotor, 159, 996 Sensory alignment, 1005 Sensory Ethnography Lab, 569 Sensory imagining, 847 Sensory media, 677 Sensory-motor, 146, 458, 463, 522, 524, 525 Sensuality, 254 Sensuous media, 395

A Sentimental Bloke, 554 Sequencing, 136, 237, 249, 762 Serene Velocity, 575, 587, 588, 588n44, 590, 595, 619n43 Serial fictions, 130, 131 Serial narratives, 128–132, 958, 959 Series, 543–549 Serino, Andrea, 1006, 1009 Serres, Michel, 447 Sesonske, Alexander, 165, 175–178, 182, 183, 185, 186, 357, 359, 366–377 Set design, 32, 90, 126 Se7en, 77, 803n8 Seventh Seal, 544 The Seven-Ups, 938 Sex, 731, 740, 754, 755 Sex act, 728, 732, 737, 739, 740, 746, 749, 753 Sexism, 330, 660, 688, 753, 972 Sexual, 255, 414, 656, 659, 678, 692n22, 696, 702, 704, 705, 709–712, 714n41, 715, 720, 724–727, 730–733, 737–740, 742–744, 746–753, 755, 895, 898, 905, 964, 991 Sexual activity, 725, 748 Sexual content, 726, 732, 742 Sexual desire, 659, 702, 705, 711, 720, 726, 733, 743 Sexual difference, 656, 705 Sexual ethic, 725 Sexual expression, 725 Sexuality, 454, 642, 657, 683, 701–703, 702n10, 712, 720, 721, 723–725, 730, 731, 733, 735, 736, 744–746, 750, 752–755 Sexual material, 726 Sexual organs, 725 Sexual representation, 725, 753 Shades of Doom, 973 Shadows, 909 Shaft, 690 Shaft in Africa, 690 Shakespeare, William, 34, 113, 298, 339, 354, 931n15 Shallow-focus, 83, 84 Shame, 909 Shargel, D., 897 Sharits, Paul, 51

 INDEX 

Sharpness, 696 Shaver, P., 897 Shaviro, Steven, 1008 Shaw, Dan, 278, 813n50, 873, 873n26 Shaw, George Bernard, 786, 790 The Shawshank Redemption, 132 She Must Be Seeing Things, 702 Shearer, Moira, 788, 795 Sheller, Charles, 569 Shelley, James, 53, 54, 66 Sherlock Holmes, 41, 98, 99, 130 Sherman, Cindy, 628 Sherman’s March, 632, 644 Sherman tank, 615, 616 Shin’ichi Chiba, 682 The Shining, 808, 859 Shirky, Clay, 644 Shklovsky, Viktor, 553, 554, 558 Shock, 127, 158, 319, 414, 449, 516, 523–526, 529, 827, 838, 903, 967 Shock-experiences, 319, 526 Shooting angles, 1002 Shooting distance, 1002 Short stories, 131, 231, 553, 788 Shots, 6, 11, 14, 16, 74, 83, 85–87, 89, 103, 109, 113, 146, 149, 152–158, 166, 170, 172, 176, 237, 241, 248, 249, 307, 311, 325, 370, 389, 398, 412, 459, 494, 495, 500, 529, 548, 554, 560, 562, 566, 581–583, 586, 588–590, 596, 615, 723, 728, 730, 731, 745, 762, 789, 790, 798, 801, 849, 859, 876, 877, 1002 Showrunner, 218 Shrage, Laurie, 656 Shrek, 72 Shub, Esfir, 144, 150 Shutter speed, 82, 244, 245 Shyamalan, M. Night, 123 Sibley, Frank, 424 Sight and Sound, 430 Signification, 413n21, 444–448, 451–452, 456, 459, 460, 462, 463, 592, 693 Signified, 384, 446, 448 Signifier, 16, 17, 21, 384, 446, 448, 679, 681, 702n9, 940n36

1053

Signs, 90, 384, 388, 443, 446–447, 449, 452, 457, 459, 462, 463, 552, 553, 559, 561, 568, 619, 679, 696, 725, 778 The Silence of the Lambs, 296, 299, 823n1 Silent films, 29, 31, 31n1, 34–35, 191–193, 196–198, 238, 323, 359, 566, 654, 810, 811 Silverlake Life: The View From Here, 633 Silverman, Kaja, 240, 453, 702n9, 708, 709 Silverstone, Roger, 962 Simmons, W. K., 753n107 Simon, David, 218 Simon, Neil, 14 Simondon, Gilbert, 272, 445n17 Simons, R. F., 907 The Simpsons, 180, 533, 958 Simulation, 858–861 Sinatra, Frank, 957 Sinclair Broadcasting, 772 Singer, J.E., 896 Singer, Peter, 476–478 Sinigaglia, Corrado, 870, 871, 871n14 Sinn, 265 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 257, 257n68, 263, 276, 294, 308, 354, 363, 403, 472, 578, 634, 878 Sitcom, 41, 953 Sitney, P. Adams, 556, 559, 561, 566, 567 Six Feet Under, 218 A Sixth Part of the World, 575, 576, 580–583, 585, 591, 597 The Sixth Sense, 123 Sixties art cinema, 253, 561 Skepticism, 338–345, 981 Skype, 4, 5, 49, 210, 302 SLAB, 240n5, 240n7, 278, 442 SLAB theory, 239, 240, 240n7, 442 Slapstick, 33, 732, 905 Slater, Mel, 1006, 1007, 1009 Slavery, 681, 690, 693, 757, 909, 911 Sliding Doors, 125 Slocombe, Douglas, 71, 80 Smith, Adam, 337 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 410, 431

1054 

INDEX

Smith, G.M., 248n34, 402, 907 Smith, Jack, 707, 714n14 Smith, Jeff, 196n26, 804n13, 806, 807n28 Smith, M., 247, 248, 255, 260, 271, 275, 277, 398, 399, 471–473, 475, 479, 486, 573, 672, 866, 876, 876n38, 886n68, 900, 902, 903, 1004 Smith, Tim, 145, 382 Smith, Zadie, 501–503 Smuts, A., 472, 575, 586–588, 909, 913, 981, 982, 984, 985 Snow, Michael, 51, 197, 569, 595–597 Snow White, 73 Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, 73 Soap opera/soap-opera, 129, 250 Sobchack, Vivian, 145, 267, 268, 308–311, 529, 714, 1008 Social cognition, 255 Social construction, 724, 750 Social constructionism, 896–898, 900, 903 Social criticism, 256, 742 Social identity, 670, 673, 897, 913, 915 Social institution, 446–448, 733 Social issues, 534, 646 Socialist, 581, 688 Social media, 629 Social pleasure, 254 Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, 386 Sociology, 29, 260, 350, 414n21, 441, 562, 653, 654, 767 Socio-political, 391, 403, 455 Socrates, 498, 759, 926, 927, 927n5, 929 Sodderland, Lotjie, 627 Soderbergh, Steven, 239, 254 Soft-core, 727 Soft-focus, 325 So Is This, 51 Solomon, Deborah, 335n1 Solomon, R., 497, 896 Soloway, Jill, 218 Sometimes in April, 909 Sonic the Hedgehog, 973 Sonic traces, 608 Sonny Chiba, 682

Sontag, Susan, 39, 413, 413n21 Sony Pictures, 1000 The Sopranos, 17, 18, 128, 399, 546–548, 954, 955, 957, 960 Sorkin, Aaron, 218 Sorrentino, Paulo, 955 Sorry to Bother You, 693, 694, 696 Soul, 279n83 Sound, 189–212, 801, 808–810, 814, 815, 855 Sound art, 813–815 Sound design, 135, 189, 813–815, 813n53, 814n57 Sound effects, 190–192, 192n7, 196, 198, 204, 205, 208, 346, 686, 803, 814, 814n56, 815, 872 Sound image, 210 Sound mixing, 815 Sous rature, 719, 719n49 South Africa, 688 South Korea, 425, 696 South Park, 180 Soviet Union, 29, 30, 31n1, 80, 238n3, 393, 557, 569, 580, 581, 583, 584, 591, 688, 762 Space, 460 Sparshott, F.E., 357, 357n1, 359, 366–377 Spatial clarity, 86 Spatial obscurity, 86 Spectacle, 201, 255, 702n9, 706, 709, 716, 723, 729, 731–733, 742, 745, 746, 754, 928, 940 Spectator, 395 Spectatorship, 655–659 Speculative, 227, 443, 515, 517, 518, 603, 628 Speech act, 750, 751, 777, 778 Speech act theory, 619n41, 750, 777, 778 Spellbound, 923, 935, 935n22, 935n23 Spielberg, Steven, 41, 87, 546, 791n22, 1002 Spinoza, Baruch, 443n9, 523, 878n44 Spiritual automaton, 523, 524 Spiro, Ellen, 707 Spy movie, 335 Stadler, Jane, 404, 872, 872n23, 878 Stage acting, 242

 INDEX 

Stagecoach, 253 Staiger, Janet, 221, 221n22, 222, 384 Stam, Robert, 442n4 Stangneth, Bettina, 507 Stanley, Jason, 775, 776 Stanton, Harry Dean, 932 Stanwyck, Barbara, 72–74, 349, 353 Star, 345–349, 631 Star Wars, 41, 130, 204, 546, 659, 661 Star Wars IV: A New Hope, 130 Static film, 197, 243 Stecker, R., 107, 115, 133 Stein, Gertrude, 567 Steinbock, Eliza, 713, 714 Steinem, Gloria, 725, 725n9 Steiner, George, 418 Steiner, Peter, 553, 554 Steiner, Ralph, 567 Stereoscopic display, 997 Stereotypes, 278, 325, 654, 655, 660, 667–669, 679, 682, 688, 696, 712, 753, 956n16, 1013 Sternberg, Meir, 120–123, 125, 137, 139 Stevens, Kate, 150 Stevens, Kirdy, 728 Stewart, Jimmy, 304, 350 Still Photograph, 16, 21, 55, 56, 165, 373, 500, 597 Stimulation, 411, 725, 1005, 1007, 1009, 1011, 1014 Stock, K., 6, 104–105, 905 Stoker, Bram, 682 Stonewall era, 712 Stop-motion animation, 170, 171, 176, 182, 183, 500 Storaro, Vittorio, 80, 88, 89 Stories We Tell, 634, 635n18, 642 Storyteller, 71, 82, 102, 139, 635, 638, 685, 999, 1002 Strand, Paul, 569 Strangers on a Train, 249 The Street Fighter, 682 Strickland, Rachel, 999 Stroboscopic, 51 Strong interactivity, 990 Structural film, 587, 589, 595, 596 Structuralism/structuralist, 278, 445–451

1055

Structuralist/Althusserian Marxism, 443 Structuralist critique, 445, 447, 451, 687 Structure of engagement, 880 Structure of sympathy, 866, 880, 881, 885n67, 886 Stryker, Susan, 711–713 Studio set, 851 Style, film, 362, 457, 812 Suárez, Juan, 704 Subdoxastic mimicry, 860 Subjectivity, 242, 253, 286, 287, 291, 292, 300, 301, 308, 309, 324, 400, 420, 427, 441, 445n17, 446–449, 451, 452, 452n31, 456, 459, 523, 528, 545, 560, 561, 632, 637, 641, 645, 647, 668, 683, 700, 709, 713, 735, 873, 880, 1004 Subjectless, 526 Subject positioning, 384 Sublation, 716–718 Subliminal advertising, 765 Submission, 694, 724, 750 Subordination, 449, 450, 454, 724, 748, 750 Subroutine, 881 Subversion, 667–669, 672 Suckfüll, M., 907 Sugar Cain Alley, 682 Suits, Bernard, 975 Sundance, 996, 1001 Sundance Film Festival, 996, 1001 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, 225 Super-8, 634 Superhero, 34, 177, 243, 684, 692, 692n22 Superimposition, 325, 568, 703n12 The Superstars, 718 Supporting propaganda, 775 Suppositional imagination, 619 Surrealism/Surrealist, 238n3, 555, 564–566 Suspense, 121, 122 Suspension of belief, 203 Suspension of disbelief, 14, 201–203, 202n48, 372 Sutherland, Ivan, 998 Sutton, John, 160 Suture, 713n39, 937, 940, 940n37 Swinging the Lambeth Walk, 361

1056 

INDEX

Swiss Army Man, 803 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 329 Symbolic, 42, 57, 215, 317, 447, 448, 565, 568, 604, 848, 936, 961n29 Symbols, 18, 19, 32, 58, 150, 254, 307, 384, 546, 733, 750, 770, 778, 846 Sympathetic emotions, 401 Sympathy, 398–400, 865–886 Sympathy-cum-antipathy, 880 Synchronicity, 208 Synesthetic affect, 396 Syntax, 19, 307, 326, 561 Synthetic critical approach, 444 Systems of signification, 446 Syuzhet, 120, 248, 249, 368, 370, 392 Szabo, A., 546, 910 Szabo, István, 546, 910 T Taberham, Paul, 381 Taboo, 728 Tabu, 545 Tactile, 872, 964, 1005, 1007, 1009–1011, 1014 Talbot, Henry Fox, 168 Tales of Hoffmann, 783–799, 791n22 Talkie, 193, 515, 801n1, 808 Tan, Ed, 1005 Tangerine, 673 Tappolet, C., 895 Tarantino, Quentin, 462, 741 Tarkovski, Andrei, 194 Tarnation, 630, 631 Tarzan, 41, 683 Taste of Cherry, 909 Tati, Jacques, 194 Tavinor, Grant, 973, 974, 982, 983 Taxi Driver, 792 Taylor, Alan, 547 Taylor, Paul, 687 Taymor, Julie, 86 Tchérina, Ludmilla, 788, 789 Technologically-mediated, 319, 516 Tel-Aviv, 1001 Teleological definition, 739 Telephoto, lens, 84–86 Television (TV), 34, 38–41, 49, 129, 139, 505, 546–548, 603, 606, 610, 616, 623, 715, 790, 886, 949

Television aesthetics, 959–968 Television series, 41, 131, 399, 548, 680, 715, 882, 952, 958 Tempera, 245 The Ten Commandments, 45, 109 Tenniel, Sir John, 488 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 554 Tension and release, 157, 159 Tentpole films, 364 Testimonial, 765 Testimony/testimonies, 611 Texts, 189, 194, 208n73, 264, 294, 298, 339, 376, 409, 441, 442, 446, 451, 455–457, 470, 488, 492, 515, 531, 574, 575, 654, 661, 703, 705, 717–719, 841 Textualist, 456, 457, 463 That Obscure Object of Desire, 849 Thayer, J. F., 907 Theater, 33, 38, 328 Theatrical lighting, 79 Theodicy of cinema, 689 Theoretical philosophy, 340, 343 Theoretical subsumption, 537 Theory, 240n5, 278, 315–333, 339, 371, 381–404, 392n45, 413n21, 442, 443, 453–457, 543–549, 604n2, 686, 699, 700, 846–847, 894, 896, 897, 999 Theory of mind, 374, 389, 875 Therapy, 269, 470, 631, 753 There’s No Place, 718–720 Thewlis, David, 501 The Thin Blue Line, 634 Third Critique, 578, 736 The Third Man, 126, 128, 138, 256, 363, 373, 375, 535, 579 Third wave feminist, 705 Thom, Randy, 189 Thomas, Deborah, 135 Thomas, Dylan, 556 Thomas, Wynn, 77, 90 Thompson, Kristin, 143, 145, 168, 384, 394 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 476 Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 87, 90, 134, 136, 377, 392, 808, 810 Thoreau, Henry David, 339, 344 Thought experiment, 469–489 Threat of castration, 936, 941

 INDEX 

3D, 500, 975, 996 3D computer animation, 173 3D models, 500 Three Stooges, 41, 732 Tilting, 87 Time, 149–151, 194, 367n43, 461, 591, 1014 Time-image, 21 Time Out of Mind, 932 Timing, 151–156 Tinkcom, Matthew, 699, 701, 710, 715 Tinting, 566 Titanic, 401, 906 To Have and Have Not, 769 To Heart, 974 Toilet Training: Law and Order in the Bathroom, 715 Token, 24, 190, 195, 196, 197n27, 243, 246, 622, 723, 754, 811n43, 975, 977–979, 987 Tokyo Story, 902 Toland, Gregg, 32, 83, 84, 376, 549 Tomboychick, 642 Tomito, Isao, 804 Tomkins, S., 896 Tonal scale, 76 Tongues Untied, 633, 642, 707 Tooley, Michael, 481 Too Many Ways to Be No. 1, 125 Top-Down Propaganda, 770–773 Top of the Lake, 955 Tories, 705 Toronto, 357n1, 764n24, 1001 To Sir, With Love, 680 Total Cinema, 783–799 Totalitarian, 317, 562, 767 Total speech act, 778 Toto, 107 A Touch of Evil, 180, 547 Towering Inferno, 906 Trace-dependency, 618, 621, 622 Trace-making process, 168, 183, 184 Tracking shot, 241, 370 Tracy, Spencer, 350, 351 Tragedy, 244, 909, 914 Traheir, Lisa, 354 Trajectories, 155 Trajectory phrasing, 155 Transcendence, 287, 319, 325, 520, 690

1057

Transcendental ego, 291 Trans cinema, 713–715 Trans-cinematic aesthetics, 714 Trance film, 565, 567 Transfiguration, 6, 520 Transformation, 6, 171, 191, 256, 257n68, 327, 414, 415, 445, 452, 464, 516, 523, 524, 526, 527, 561, 562, 565, 566, 693–695, 710n28, 716, 743, 790, 878n64, 880, 995, 1008, 1010, 1011, 1013 Transformator, 988 Transgression, 681, 709, 885 Transgressiveness, 885 Transgressive sexualities, 746 Trans∗ individuals, 753 Translation, 823–841 Trans-mediated experience, 715 Transparency, 54–56, 208–211 Transparency thesis, 11, 54–56, 66, 245n27 Transparent, 218, 715 Transportation, 202, 203, 1005 Transsexual, 711, 712 Trans-television theory, 715 Trans women, 664, 673 Tribal artefacts, 180 The Tribe, 810, 811 Tribeca Film Festival, 1001 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 491, 508 A Trip to the Moon, 761 Triumph of the Will, 757 Trivial interactivity, 984 Tromp l’oeil, 852 True Blood, 218 True Detective, 218 Truffaut, François, 186, 253, 543–545, 549 Trump, Donald, 482–485, 696, 705, 772 Truth, 685, 847–851 Truth-apt states, 846 Truth-tracking, 846 Tullmann, K., 905 Turvey, Malcolm, 257n68, 518 TV, 218n12 TV series, 41, 548, 865n1, 886 Twain, Mark, 113 The Twilight Zone, 41, 469

1058 

INDEX

Twin Peaks, 548 Twitter, 771, 774 2D computer animation, 173 Twofoldedness, 852, 852n14 Tyler, Parker, 528, 556, 565, 702 Type, 8, 10, 17, 24, 33, 44, 56, 62–65, 88, 105, 112, 144, 149, 150, 182, 196, 202, 219, 243, 252, 261, 274, 292, 293, 295, 297, 317, 333, 349, 365, 369, 382, 389, 393, 413, 415, 416, 436, 459, 462, 464, 470, 475, 477, 480, 483, 491, 493, 494, 554, 606, 617, 656, 673, 728, 732–734, 744, 748, 751, 761, 775, 788, 846, 870, 877, 886, 899, 923, 928, 965, 987, 990, 1006, 1009 Typography, 562 U Ubiquity Thesis, 100, 103 Ugetsu, 370 Uidhir, Christy Mag, 737–740, 743, 744 Ukrainian Sign Language, 810 Ultraviolet, 516 Ulzana’s Raid, 546 The unconscious, 387, 444, 447, 451, 454, 463, 564, 768, 769, 924, 926, 931, 937 Unconscious state, 941 Underground Cinema, 704 Undermining Propaganda, 775 Undertale, 987, 988 Une Chien andalu, 559 United Kingdom, 266n23, 704, 765, 773 United States, 148, 198, 266n23, 366, 386, 646, 696, 705, 708, 746, 757, 765, 771, 778, 902, 960 United vs. FEC, 773 Unity3D, 996 Universal Studio, 103 Unreal, 996 Unreliable narration, 99n5, 139, 139n60 Up in the Air, 544 U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), 758 Utilitarian, 470, 475, 486, 487

V Vaage, Margrethe Bruun, 382, 399, 403, 877, 884, 956n16, 957, 959 Van Gogh, Vincent, 172 Van Leeuwen, Theo, 160 Van Patten, Tim, 547 Van Sant, Gus, 708 Vancouver, 1001 Variable framing, 87 Vasilaki, Mimi, 743, 744 Vehicular media, 951, 952 Vendler, Helen, 417 Ventriloquist effect, 205 Venturi, James, 544 Verbal philosophy, 586 Verbinski, Gore, 91 Vereen, Ben, 932 Vertical approach, 557, 564, 566, 568 Vertical poetry, 565 Vertical structure, 557 Vertigo, 86, 413, 769 Vertov, Dziga, 144, 150, 238n3, 241n7, 319, 557, 569, 575–577, 580, 581, 583–585, 589–591, 597 Vestibular, 1005, 1010 VGIK, 762 Vicary, James, 764, 765, 775 Videogames, 971–992 Videography, 494 Vienna, 51, 126, 261n9, 263 Vietnam, 640, 771, 777, 931 Viewer response, 726 Viewing affordance, 614 Viewing time, 368 Villain, 123, 131, 298, 305, 507, 680, 682, 692, 882, 883, 903, 935n22 Villeneuve, Denis, 123, 301 Villiers de ’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 794 Vimeo, 644 Violence, 33, 136, 151, 298, 404, 505, 509, 544, 655, 666, 681, 689, 707, 725, 732, 741, 745, 748–750, 882, 900, 907, 909, 988, 991 Virgil, 695 Virtua Fighter 5, 978 Virtual reality, 995, 1002 Virtual worlds, 521, 972, 990, 995–997, 1004

 INDEX 

Visconti, Luchino, 543 Visual bloopers, 611 Visual coding, 252 Visual consumption, 322 Visual Imagining, 853, 854 Visuality, 714 Visually Coupled Airborne Systems Simulato (VCASS), 998 Visual novel, 974 Visual pleasure, 655, 768n43, 942, 942n40, 943, 943n41 Visual representation, 107, 664, 677, 818, 851 Visual signs, 559, 725 Visual traces, 617 Visuocentrism, 802 Vocal Acting, 815 Vococentric, 815 Voice, of characters, 815 Voiceover narrator, 501, 877 Voiceover/voice over narration, 501, 502, 830, 833, 837, 877 Void witness, 1004 Volumetric CGI VR, 996 Von Praunheim, Rosa, 707 Von Sternberg, Josef, 249 Von Trier, Lars, 32, 549 Von Trotta, Margarethe, 329 VR, 976, 995–1014 VR helmet, 976 Vuillermoz, Emile, 528 W Wachowski, Brothers, 596 The Wages of Fear, 907 Wagner, Richard, 804 Wai, Ka-Fai, 125 Wajda, Andrzej, 239, 543 Walbrooke, Anton, 789 Waldeback, Zara, 216 Walk Away Renee, 630–631 Waking Life, 181, 494–498, 500 Walker, Mandy, 90 Walkman, 818 Wallace and Gromit, 170 Wall-E, 814 Walley, Jonathan, 52

1059

Wallis, Tom, 201 Wall-Romana, Christophe, 555, 561–565 Walsh, Raoul, 371 Walt Disney, 693, 1000 Walters, Lee, 131 Walton, K., 11, 54, 55, 81, 97, 97n1, 100, 101n7, 109, 111, 112, 199, 244, 245, 245n27, 372, 421, 849n9, 850, 851, 853, 854, 856n26, 904, 905, 987n71 Waltz with Bashir, 642 Wang, H.L., 904 War, 266n23, 491, 612, 615, 757, 763, 777, 803 War and Peace, 243, 824 Ward, Jesmyn, 99 War film, 364, 912 Warhol, Andy, 250, 346, 368, 370, 371, 707, 718 Warholian, 718 Warranted assertibility, 340 Warshow, Robert, 544 Wartenberg, Thomas, 255, 256, 263, 267, 270, 275, 279, 363, 472, 479, 488, 489, 531, 534–536, 577–586, 593, 594, 596, 597 Washington, Denzel, 77 Water color, 245 Water for Maya, 51 Waterloo, 616 Waters, John, 710 Watson, Emma, 99 Wavelength, 595–598 Wayne, Bruce, 659 Weak interactivity, 985 Weaver, J. B., 913 Webb, Marc, 249 Weber, Samuel, 715 Weekend, 545 Weimar Republic, 317, 323 Weitz, Morris, 974 Weld, Tuesday, 933 Welk, Andy, 547 Welles, Orson, 32, 83, 126, 180, 232, 238, 238n3, 239, 249, 364, 373, 375, 433, 522, 545, 549, 555 Wenders, Wim, 329, 330, 932

1060 

INDEX

Western, 77, 178, 224, 239, 253, 262, 266, 359, 364, 441, 441n1, 448, 450–452, 454, 526, 573, 581, 603, 653, 688, 741, 802, 897, 900–903 Western ethnocentrism, 450 Westfall, Joseph, 259 The West Wing, 218 Wheatley, Catherine, 263, 276, 279, 280n89 Whedon, Joss, 73 The Wheel, 909 Whiplash, 190 White, 73, 338n10, 390, 488, 704, 959 White-affirming, 678 White commodification, 695 White House, 705, 758 White Male, 680, 692 White, Morton, 338 White Museum, 7 White, Patricia, 238n1, 247n33 White normativity, 677, 678, 682 White perspectives, 689 White supremacist, 695 Whitewash, 690 Whitmanesque, 557 Whitney, John, 370 Whittle, Stephen, 712 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 7 Who Killed the Electric Car?, 770 The Whole, 461–464, 523, 524 Why We Fight, 763, 770 Wide-angle lens, 84–86 Wide Awake, 644 Wiggershaus, Rolf, 316 Wiggins, Wiley, 495 Wikileaks, 773 Wilde, Oscar, 429, 700 Wildean, 718 Wilder, Billy, 72 Wilder, Gene, 16, 807 Will, 123, 127–129, 131, 132, 158, 500, 959 Will.i.am, 778 Williams, Bernard, 726 Williams, Linda, 657, 725, 729 Williams, Raymond, 273 Williams, Robin, 931

Williams, Tami, 703 Willis, David, 442 Willis, Gordon, 79 Wilms, L., 907 Wilson, George, 98, 105, 106, 108, 249, 529, 853 Wilson, Woodrow, 679, 758 Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., 898 Winston, Brian, 621, 636, 637, 643, 644 Winterburg, Thomas, 185 The Wire, 218, 547, 954, 985 Wiredu, Kwasi, 684, 685 Wise, Robert, 146, 218 Wiseman, Fredrick, 640 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 242, 242n16, 257n68, 265, 269, 277, 338, 341, 342, 354, 418, 425, 431, 518, 532, 536, 575n9, 577, 583, 829n5, 835, 836, 839, 974 Wittgensteinian, 518, 532, 533, 826, 838n7, 841, 974 The Wiz, 719 The Wizard of Oz, 100, 719 Wojnarowicz, David, 707 Wollheim, Peter, see Wollheim, Richard Wollheim, Richard, 38, 133, 245n27, 337, 423, 852 Women, 274n61, 666, 751, 769 Wonder, Stevie, 807 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 718 Wonder Ring, 567, 568 Wonder Woman, 661, 753n108 Wood, 567 Wood, Ed, Jr., 546 Wood, Robin, 416, 416n28 Woollard, Fiona, 481 Word is Out, 715 Word Movie (Flux Film #29), 51 Work contextualism, 130 World cinema, 370 World Health Organization, 706 World of the film, 97, 99, 108n17, 186, 206, 347, 361, 369, 371, 373, 803, 830, 839n7 World of Warcraft, 978 World-picture, 521 World-projection, 267, 521

 INDEX 

The World Viewed, 174n15, 175, 175n16, 176, 176n17, 241, 241n8, 267, 267n29, 269n41, 336, 336n3, 338n9, 339, 345–350, 354, 798, 802 World War I (WWI), 554, 757 World War II (WWII), 350, 449, 516, 682, 960 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 224 X Xenophobia, 679 X-Men: Apocalypse, 952 Y Yacavone, Daniel, 258, 268 Yacobi, Tamar, 137 Yakuza, 901 Yeats, William Butler, 733 Yhcam, 528

Yogi Bear, 180 YouTube, 644, 646, 758, 774, 949 Yugoslavian, 688 Yuill, N., 907 Z Zabriskie Point, 370 Zajonc, R.B., 895 Zelig, 606 Zentner, M., 907 Zero Patience, 707 Zillman, Dolf, 957, 957n18 Žižek, Slavoj, 278 Zoetrope, 39, 168 Zoom, 85, 246, 288, 587, 595, 596, 1003 Zootopia, 87 Zsigmond, Vilmos, 77 Zuckerman, M., 912 Zunshine, Lisa, 389 Zweig, Stefan, 613

1061