mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
8 (2005), Nr.3/September
Rezension
Ludwig Nagl/Eva
Waniek/Brigitte Mayr
(eds.), film denken/thinking film. Film
& Philosophy,
Wien: Synema 2004 (www.synema.at), 259 pages, € 25,-. – Peter Kubelka, Film als
Ereignis, Film als Sprache, Denken als Film. Ein
Vortrag mit Beispielen, gehalten im
Österreichischen Filmmuseum am 10. November 2002
im Rahmen des Symposiums Film/Denken, Wien: Zone
2003 (zone.co.at),
PAL, colour, 4:3,
mono, 173', DVD 9, German), € 28,-. With thanks to Dr. Barbara-Amina Gereben-Krenn. Revised on April 23, 2019. 38989
characters.
I
This is a fascinating and rewarding
book for people with interest and patience.
Interest is presupposed in the philosophy of film
or philosophical aesthetics as a philosophy of the
arts including film, that is, to find a general
level on which is possible a theoretically
satisfying occupation with film theory and film
studies as well as a resumption of the
interconnections to intraphilosophical
disciplines like epistemology or ethics. Patience
is required because, according to
philosophical/theoretical traditions, there is a variety of different if not
divergent approaches that only partially
show up in a distinct way clearly positioned. And
this book is recommended to be read with the
documentary movie of Peter Kubelka’s
lecture at the symposium of which the book itself
is a document.
Ludwig Nagl
has been the driving force behind the symposium.
(The symposium had the title “Film/Denken - der Beitrag
der Philosophie zu aktuellen
Debatten in den film
studies”
and was produced by the Department of Philosophy
at the University of Vienna, the Institute for
Science and Art/Vienna and Synema
- Gesellschaft für Film und Medien. It took place on
In his contribution to the book in
review Nagl (“‘Film
and self-knowledge’: Philosophische
Reflexionen im Anschluss
an Stanley Cavell and
Stephen Mulhall”,
pp.31-46) seeks to prevent the philosophy of film
from being dissolved into or even abused from what
is called post-theory and from an instrumentalization of
philosophy by journals like Screen or the Cahiers
de cinéma. He rather
calls on philosophical traditions of the knowledge
of the self as analyzed by Kant, Lyotard and Wittgenstein.
Especially Wittgenstein’s private language
argument, says Nagl,
had explained that „we“ is
the content (Gehalt)
of the reference of „I“. This is, as Nagl points out, important
already for Cavell’s
first book on aesthetics Must We Mean What We
Say?.
There, Cavell
included the observation that modernism fades with
an increasing distance to popular needs leaving
the artistic function of rescue irrelevant.
Moreover, cinema, as Nagl
says with Cavell’s
books on cinema, shows to entertain a strong
continuity with a wide audience as well as to a
multiplicity of serious or non-serious genres.
Most importantly, cinema delivers hopes not in
risk. But the reflective
break with this by means of a post-traditional
„time image“, as Nagl
elucidates with Deleuze
(Cinema 2, first chapter, last pages),
offers the chance of cinematic self questioning.
With the new facts that the post-world-war-II
camera may be not in, but (shown!) outside the
world and that the screen suggests for the
spectator’s I in a coherent world comes a
narcissist theatricalization
of pictures rather than a way of enabling the
viewer to self recognition. How to incite and
preserve the latter? This is the main concern of Nagl with Cavell: an acknowledgement
of the self as an „Existenzial“
in cinema, a knowledge of the self in everyday
life relative to actions with respect to the modes
of reflections packed in emotions. This self
recognition at last is for instance about an
individual bodily integrity that includes and
allows bodily penetration and sexual reproduction,
as Nagl tells with
Stephen Mulhall’s
reading of the Alien series.
This book, when in my hands the first
time, would, I presumed, enclose a more detailed
analysis of Deleuze’s
approach as outlined in Nagl’s
Any reader of this book will further
notice that Deleuze
remains implicit in several ways with other
contributors. Birgit Recki
insists on the cinematic significance of
Nietzsche’s Apollonian to a degree that it is hard
to imagine that this insistance has not been at
least a bit informed by what Deleuze
wrote in section 2 of chapter 9 in Cinema 2 about
the „visual image“ (!) as of Apollonian origin and
mediated by drama whereas the ‘immediate’ musical
Dionysian image is nearer to will than movement
and yet unable to occupy the center
of total work - Deleuze
opts for music as a grain of dust in the eye and,
with Eisler, against
Eisenstein’s common movement of the visual and the
acoustic (Adorno/Eisler,
Komposition
für den
Film). Compare Recki’s
interest in the Frankfurt School in: “Am
Anfang ist das Licht. Elemente einer Ästhetik des
Kinos”,
in: Ludwig Nagl
(Hg.), Filmästhetik, = Wiener Reihe. Themen der Philosophie 10, Wien/Berlin: Oldenbourg/Akademie-Verlag,
35-60). David Rodowick’s
reflections so easily seem to manage without
reference to his book of 1997 (Gilles Deleuze’s Time
Machine) that we may suspect that a closer
interpretative reading of his contribution - which
I am unable to give here - yields interesting
underpinnings hidden here, except the allusion by
means of the Dionysian (see below). And although
Raymond Bellour (“Wie man mit Daniel Stern das Kino besser fühlen/denken kann”,
pp.213-235) does not admit, he impossibly can have
been independent of Deleuze
in working out his stance on the hypnotic in the
way he suggests (Cinema 2, end of fourth chapter)
- despite the fact that he explicitly has got to
do next to nothing with philosophy.
Deleuze is the big absent figure. Like Cavell, Deleuze with his two
volumes on cinema was a passionate cinéphile, one of those
admirable persons who saw a lot of movies, had a
comprehensive memory of them and the ability to
draw profit theoretically. I imagine Deleuze watching the
discussion of film theory for some time that had,
in the 1960es, arisen with film semiologist Christian Metz
and early on relied on an application of
psychoanalysis which was a theory Deleuze and Anti-Ödipus
co-author/psychiatrist Félix Guattari had difficulties
with. (See: Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel
(ed.), Wege des Anti-Ödipus. Mit einem Nachwort von Caroline Neubaur, = Ullstein Buch
3401, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/Wien: Ullstein
1978). Secondly,
when it comes to dream theoretician Freud and sémiologie Deleuze in his two volumes
preferred contemporaries Bergson
and Peirce who,
together with Nietzsche, are by far the most often
cited philosophers in his work. Given that Deleuze’s philosophy is
aesthetic empiricism we may see his work spanning
from Difference and Repetition and The
Logic of Sense to A Thousand Plateaus
in the context of doing phenomenology post-structurally without
phenomenology the stream of thought of which
was so dominant in the formative years of Deleuze (* 1925). Deleuze’s development as
seen from today and in terms of Cinema 1
and Cinema 2 represents a splitting up of
phenomenology into vitalist
(Nietzsche!) Bergson
and semiological (Saussurean) Peirce which seems to have
been inevitable (see Frédéric Worms (ed.), Bergson,
Deleuze, la phénoménologie, = Annales Bergsoniennes II, 2004) in order to elaborate a théorie-en-film that
corresponds to the philosophical basis Deleuze had finally
reached by 1980. The connections of movements to
movements by film’s own
stream of consciousness being like pictures
responding/reacting to pictures and thereby
construeing centers
of consciousness in movement-images and causing
reality effects; the invasion of time into these
movement-images effacing „virtual“ reality and
giving free flow to illusions without origin -
what else should it be than advanced
phenomenology, a phenomenological ontology that in
its Bazinian/Heideggerian/Greenbergian/Fried/Merleau-Pontyan way
inspired and encouraged Cavell
to do his decisive steps out of the realm of
analytic philosophy?
Gertrud Koch (“Motion
picture - Bausteine zu einer
Ästhetik des Films”,
pp.51-65) insists on the independence of the film
world from observation by way an
of artistically autonomous construction
of the world, a construction usually taken not
aesthetical and not as a work of art. It is only
with a specific performances of the invisible
object film that lets us fall into illusion.
According to Koch, this illusion felt as aesthetic
- including subversion by aesthetic wit - may be
reached with an artistic work on details as well
as with effects and experiments. Here Koch holds
up a tradition to be found in art theory from Diderot until late 19th
century. Strictly speaking, it is the
projectionists who play with modes of film proper
as will have done in consequence experimental film
makers like those of expanded cinema. Koch reminds
us of the projection of an early movie showing a
wall destroyed and then „re-erected“ with film running
backwards. She extends her theory of film - the
ontology of reality projected by means of
photographic world performances (Cavell) and film as a sign
- to the capacity of physical affordance. She does
so with an analysis of scenes in Chaplin’s „Gold
Rush“ and Hitchcock’s „Marnie“. The cooked
shoe-laces and -sole as pasta and meat when being
caught in a cold hut without
food during winter time on the way to
Birgit Recki
(“Überwältigung
und Reflexion - der Film als
Mythos und als Kunst”,
pp.71-91), following her “Am
Anfang ist das Licht. Elemente einer Ästhetik
des Kinos”
(in: Nagl
(Hg.), Filmästhetik, op.cit., 35-60), delineates a
hermeneutic aesthetics of film as a theory of
aesthetic experience. She wants to unify semiotic,
logical and analytic approaches and above all to
apply to film Cassirer’s
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-29).
With Cassirer of whom
Recki edits Gesammelte Werke at Meiner Verlag (1998ff.) she
identifies the pictoriality
of pictures as schemes. Schemes, already with Kant
not linguistic, are nonetheless rational. Or,
seeing is a theoretical sense also belonging to
aesthetic theory. Pictures may be Apollonian
dream-like, yet they are akin to language, says Recki with reference to Cassirer’s epistemology.
For pictures are a sensualization of
sense by means of symbolization. Or, sense is
embodied/expressed in a sensual medium by means of
a symbol or symbolic form. Depending on the degree
of concrete sensuality or abstract
spiritualization there are different ways of
symbolization or formation of reality. Like
linguistic expressions, pictures have a surplus of
meaning. They are „meaningful“
(“bedeutsam”)
as Recki underlines.
That converts them into aesthetic
ornaments. They are not just artificial but
artistic from the outset. In mental terms,
pictures/images as perceptual experiences are
sense/meaning (Sinn) in itself confirmed by an
activity like seeing-as. Recki
considers film in continuity with other kinds of
arts, so that cinema appears to offer pregnant
„sentences“ within
works of film. Like other symbolic forms, film
needs to be situated between myth and art, between
expression and representation, pure seductive
pictorial power and reflection. Pictures are
objects and thus have purely immanent meaning,
freedom, autonomy, and at the same time pure
expression of artistic spirit. That they are
obsessive is due to mythical consciousness (fn.
25, p.90, Goodman: pictures decipher cognitively
although not sufficiently). Hence what is called
dream factory is also producing laughter and
weeping. Art reflects images produced
spontaneously, authentically discovered and so
intensifies reality together with controlling the
gaze. Myth serves a desire of seeing that may
border to being overwhelmed by ecstasy, or
absent-mindedness or contemplation. (p.85, half) It is Cavell to whom Recki finally resorts.
Film for both, like Cassirer’s
correlation of the I
and language, is a form of self-consciousness
achieving a bridge for obsession and reflection by
means of intuition. Recki
makes another step though. In film, humans become
the support of expression and object of
representation at once - with the face (Balázs) when body-soul
interprets itself.
Gloria Withalm
in her contribution replying to Recki (“Film
als
Semiose - der Beitrag
semiotischer Theorien zu den film studies”,
pp.93-97) recalls the necessity of the discipline
to transgress the paradigm of film semiotics. In
order to synthesize philosophy, semiotics and
socio-cultural processes we need, with particular
attention to Ferrucio
Rossi-Landi, to focus
theoretically on analytical practice and
pragmatics. The former imposes a re-reading of Peirce and Cassirer in terms of a semiophilosophy. The
latter should allow to invoke
again concrete work of signs, the homology of
language and production and the dichotomy of film
and ideology.
Wolfgang Pircher
(“Hollywoods
Gespenster - Martin
Arnolds filmische Dekonstruktionsarbeit”,
pp.149-157) explains provocatively some more
recent attempts with found footage to cope with
ghosts, for instance fading of areas in the
pictures of film, the making disappear or
silencing of actors on found footage etc. He does
so with situating that practice in the tradition
of
Cynthia Freeland (“Empricism
and the philosophy of film”,
pp.187-202) thinks to step beyond film semiotics,
a discipline that seems to be a strong paradigm in
US film studies. Her confession is a combination
of ontology, hermeneutics and theory of value. At
stake is an understanding and assessing of
emotions, like Recki,
from a quasi-Kantian point of view: empirical
knowledge in conscious experience is rational (W. Sellars). At the same
time and in order to draw sense from experience,
empirical research of psychology or perceptual
aspects as examined by cognitive science should be
mediated to film theory, for instance a theory of
cinematic metaphors. Freeland contributes to this
kind of exchange. She makes a case with Peckinpah’s western „The
Wild Bunch“. The first example is a
verbal-and-visual metaphor as is the killing of
scorpions by ants whereby, neurologically
understood, the metaphorical meaning may be
grasped more rapidly than the literal/literary
one. The second example is one of the bunch being
shot at in slow motion which may have an
experiential basis in neurology as Freeland tells
with reference to Peckinpah’s
and her own experiences of being violently
attacked: that photographically normal images may
neurophenomenologically
differ from manifest conscious ones. Again,
Goodman’s conventional scheme of representation is
considered by Freeland in its need for completion
by implications of direct experience. The final
example refers to masterfully non-determined
facial expression by the lead actor that allows
for ambiguous interpretation with making the
audience’s relate to what
happened before and what may happen as the movie’s
finale - without comparably long cognitive
processes or additional knowledge on the side of
spectators.
The volume reviewed here concerns the
relations of philosophy to film and film theory,
not film studies as announced in the program! The
exception is Cynthia Freeland. Encouraged by Sellars’s
attack on a dogmatic self-understanding of logical
positivism in his „Empricism
and the philosophy of mind“
Freeland mentions in passing that a
vertical, hierarchical relationship of philosophy
(of film) to empirical research (on film) should
be replaced by organizing a free exchange between
philosophy and the sciences. The aim is „to
combine a rejection
of positivism and foundationalism
with an endorsement
of naturalism and empiricism.“
(187) Surprisingly,
she does not take over Sellars’s
programmatic emphasis on the philosophy of mind
although her explanations are exclusively directed
at developing a philosophy of film in mental terms
of psychology and neurology. But I concede that it
is another matter to additionally bridge the gap
to cultural film studies where there may be only
very little research or few publications so far.
That carries me to a question. What
are the mental conditions for having such an extraordinary memory of
movies as Cavell and
Deleuze do? Shouldn’t
we put effort in working out detailed commentaries
on the books of Cavell
and Deleuze? It
certainly would help to give short descriptions of
the phenomena in question that are used to build
an argument. I can well understand: for Cavell and Deleuze there may not have
been the time during the actual writing process to
take care for giving more detailed references.
Also, with giving a detailed reference to (the
scene of) the movie there may be the danger that the power of movie
(memory) might take possession of an author who
tries to
correspond with his or her philosophical aims. In
most cases I suppose that the lack of such a
memory explains the philosophers’ reluctance or
even incapability to cope with film on the same
philosophical level as given by the authors just
mentioned and by books already of a certain age -
The World Viewed was published in 1971, Cinema
1 and Cinema 2 in 1983 and 1985
respectively. In other words, the magnificent
knowledge of a huge amount of important movies and
with it of a lot of singular visual
particularities that the reader often doesn’t know
either intimidates or causes further specializing
where more integrative thinking is wanted. One
thing is for sure: Giving no illustrations as done
here is good philosophical tradition worth to be
preserved.
Mike Sandbothe
(“Filmphilosophie
als Medienphilosophie - pragmatische Überlegungen zu 'The Matrix' and
'Minority Report', pp.101-113) reviews a book
documenting the current state of German philosophy
of the media in the first half of his contribution
and gives an application of Nagl’s
“Ansätze zu einer
(noch ausstehenden) Philosophie des Films:
Benjamin, Cavell, Deleuze”
to a reading of two recent block-busters.
According to Nagl,
Sandbothe considers the two movies with Deleuze’s stance of the
cinematic as a Vorschein
of divinity and Cavell’s
stance of the cinema as a medium of moral
perfectionism. In Sandbothe’s
view, both stances purportedly are, in the
tradition of Aristotle, part of the theoretical
philosophy and the practical philosophy
respectively. However, as Herbert Hrachovec says in his
comment on Sandbothe
correctly (“Das ‘gute Leben’
und die Medienphilosophie”,
pp.115-118), a philosophy of media loses its
sharpness when it does not take account of the
differences of an “artificial
photo-mechanical product, radio technology mass
media or a data network organized according to
TCP/IP protocols”
(“ein
photo-mechanisches Kunstprodukt, ein funktechnisches
Massenmedium oder ein
nach TCP/IP-Protokollen eingerichtetes Daten-Netzwerk”,
p.116). Moreover, says Hrachovec
who confesses to have become an apostate of film
theory - why? - (compare his book Drehorte. Arbeiten zu Filmen, Wien: Synema 1997) with respect
to the internet one needs to remain skeptical concerning the
aesthetics of web sites. Indeed it is much more
interesting to focus on the internet’s
possibilities of communicative resistance with for
instance free software than to read movies just as
narratives about (imagined) effects of digitality on ficitious contents without
paying attention to digital aspects of the medium
itself - film - , as Sandbothe
does.
Of all the contributors, David Rodowick is the only one
in the book to directly address the digitization
of film (“The
Virtual life of film”,
pp.119-129). Rodowick
recognizes the replacement of celluloid correctly
as a challenge for the photographic process which
rests on the unaltered intaglio and that we
have become capable of replacing by a numeric
manipulation of the luminous „given“. The analogy
of this substance and indexicality
is negated. In consequence, computational notation
is rigorous whereas notation of celluloid (moving)
pictures was not. The concept of the picture
remains the same though, for Rodowick.
But aesthetic innovation of the digital entails a
reset of photographic realism throughout. Film is
no more media specific as it used to be for 20th
century film and (one might add philosophically) its film theory. Rodowick says that film
used to be a challenge for philosophical
aesthetics as conceived since Lessing up to more recent
times and for an ontological/an-aesthetic
philosophy of film as Goodman would have conceived
it if only he had had the guts to do it. Rodowick has them. For his
purposes, he sets out to reproduce the
autographic/allographic
distinction. Because of lack of tactile substance,
temporal film is allographic
and has a Dionysian craze like music - here Deleuze’s Nietzscheanism is even
surpassed - that strictly depends on performance
and works, like photography, like a print
disposing of signature but not notationality. This leads
Rodowick to a
definition of celluloid film along the lines of Goodman's „Languages of
Art“ (LA 114). But what now? What is the
ontology and aestheticity
of film today? Today, film is autographic, open,
not a final product and can, most importantly, be
translated into more than one medium - into screen
pictures, but also into sound or language how
„irrational“ the result may be. What follows is a
discussion of mostly Metzean
film theory. For semiological
reasons
In terms of digital virtuality Rodowick comes as close to
contemporary film and film theory as possible.
Recent developments escape him because the topic
is film with the burden of a material medium
specific as we can learn from his contribution.
What lacks first in a general theory of film is
taking appropriately account of the arts of the
„digital“ screen - the
difference of projected pictures and pictures on
monitors (both of them increasingly sizeless) has become less
essential. Screen art replaces film in an
additional form than TV does since decades
(monitors from mobile phone to big stadium
screens, projected movies from blue tooth
technology to big size wall projections). I also
wonder what kind of impact the visual arts might
have had on expanding and changing the concept of
film and movie since the 1960es, thinking of
closed-circuit-installations, video art, video
clips, digital painting like Bill Viola's, video
and movie installations rising in the 1990es, the
additional exhibition value of film in film
exhibitions as well as the increasingly important
film festivals, finally the whole fields of
computer games and website „moving pictures“
reaching from automatically high-lighted words
when moving the mouse on them, over those little
thumb nail size activate gifs to website banners.
I further suspect that digitality
causes an accelerated life of film/movie culture
(ever more rapid cuts etc.) that does not leave
untouched traditional genres like documentary,
experimental, narrative and advertisement film. I
can agree with the attitude that in terms of great
philosophers of art we need to keep in mind
great narrative cinema tradition. But a general
culture of movies has emerged by now. This is one
more challenge for a geisteswissenschaftlich
philosophy of art that does not give in to mere
empirical cultural studies.
II
Kubelka started his lecture - after
precisely arranging necessary demonstration
objects and the filling of the movie
theatre - at minute 31 and finished 125 minutes
later with giving another 18 minutes recording the
emptying of seats and projection room. This
includes plenty of time to show the blackness of
the Invisible Cinema, the so called projection
room of the Österreichisches
Filmmuseum at
After the screening of his „Arnulf Rainer“ - sequences
of black frames and white frames with rush or
silence respectively - Kubelka
set in to elucidate the relationship of film to
language - spoken, written or thought. We live, he
says, with language as a native tongue. We think
with it and other languages. Kubelka
says he loves language, but does not like to be
commanded by it. Who else would not agree? Kubelka says he is fed up
with believing in notions like „now“, „I go, I
live, I love, I do
<now>“. For nobody ever
has encountered the „now“. Those mythical
notions give way to an archaic life. To quit this
life, all forms of avant-garde from the aborigines
to our times stand up. So we only hear cutting
wood after it happened. A trace of the cut
inscribes into the air and then we hear sound.
Concerning the senses we live in the past. Hence
we only master traces. Film therefore is a work
with traces, something
already at work at the historical origins of
language. This allows to
leave myths and reflect ourselves anew.
Film is anthropomorphic, a picture of the
possibilities of man, as is a spoon a picture of
the forearm with the hand. Since a long time we
use it with virtuosity. Today computers exteriorate parts of the
brain, for instance memory, and they will do so as
long as man cannot live without them. A little
pumpkin, Kubelka
shows one, looks like a forearm with a hand, so we
need not apply the form to it besides cutting it
into halves.
„Cinema is absolutely
anthropomorphic“. We „sit“ in
the head - Kubelka
points at the movie theatre around - , look
through the eyes and listen through the ears of
the film maker, he says. (However, as there is no
contemporaneity there
is only time with time passing: the time of pace.
With walking, in this moment Kubelka
goes up and down in front of the audience, or the
pace of the heart or breath
we begin to encounter time as a stream.) Until its replacement with the
digital medium, film should be understood
historically like the arts of painting,
sculpture and cooking which originated 40.000,
100.000, 3 million years ago. Like those
arts, film was on the way from the 16th through
the 18th centuries and completed at the end of
19th century (!) even though it may be practiced
today, like painting, with bodily contact and
performed. Such a body
intelligence is not preserved with the digital, Kubelka complains. It is a
problem because the medium - film - is the real
teacher for practitioners. This kind of filmic
thinking has become universal and does not anymore
belong to a few experts. However with thought
including touch, taste and other body functions we
should speak of a bundle of various forms of
thinking embodied in an organism, bundles of sense
impressions (Mach !).
It is like language trying to tell me „I am“: that
is not true (Kubelka
with his typical mixture of standard German and
Viennese dialect inimitably: „Und jetzt kommt die Sprache und sagt ‘ich
bin’ - aber, des is ned woa!“). Because of the
vicinity of the eye and the ear, says Kubelka with pointing at
the eyes and ears of a bust of Greta Garbo, we believe in
reality or certainty. Yet in order to synchronize
the now and here, movies can go with the „ear“ elsewhere than to what
the eye looks at. The same goes with the
microphone and the camera (at another occasion Kubelka complained we
cannot switch off sound anymore on digicams). These devices
yield an artificial head technologically sourced
out. Also, there are different distances, the most
remote being the visual, followed by the auditory,
olfactory and gustatory senses. What is between
the event/object and the senses does not concern
us. Film is capable of constructing an artificial
life of the synchronous, as Kubelka
puts it. Yet this is a reality on its own, sitting
in the artificial head. This has, however, got
nothing to do with new media, it is valid for all
media in terms of „I am in medias res“ which means „I am
between what my senses give me.“ In an ambiguous
move Kubelka says
that in the case of Greta Garbo
it is not us who are in medias res - and yet we are in
the midst of things: interest, inter sumus. The between or the
in-medias-res reveals
to be the microphone-head-camera. (At this point Kubelka utters a harsh
critique of conventional movie pictures. They only
offer imitations of 19th and earlier centuries.
Sound is used here to explain what is shown.
Contrary to this abuse of sound the two Klappenhengste demonstrate
the packing of image and sound within the single
frame. Example: When Kubelka
assembles, in his film „Afrikareise“,
the sound of the gun shot at the zebra followed by
the home movie spectator’s „So?“
one knows how that montage is meant.)
Kubelka switches from talking about filmic
language to spoken language immediately written, a
different kind of visual language. He writes the
old Greek 'lambda' on the flip-chart meaning man.
Crossed with a vertical mark on the upper section
the sign means „free“ and
with marks „sky“. It seems that film, in the
opposite, produces a machinic,
objective picture of reality, not a sign as does
spoken and written language. Kubelka
thinks this filmic illusion enabled us to step out
of spoken and written language. It is this immense
quality of the appearance of film that promises a
completely new beginning.
After the projection of Kubelka’s film „Schwechater“, this very copy of film
is given to the audience. The celluloid wanders
through the hands and theatre tiers in order to
prove that there are only static pictures screened
one after another. Film itself is a sculpture band
(Rodowick’s intaglio!)
that we can branch off: 27,5
meters, 1 minute, 1440 pictures, 24 pictures
(„days“) a yard. Like a tailor or a shoemaker we
may have an appropriate bodily feeling of the
object. Put ironically by Kubelka, we can read the
movie more easily than a Beethoven score. For such
an experience the Invisible Cinema was a concept
radicalized in
Here Kubelka
reaches his topic „thinking as film“. The
artificiality of sound and the synchronous visual
event prompt us to interpret and have a specific
„inter est“ in taking the event as
fact. For Kubelka
this phenomenon is the basis of film language. The
multiple relation of image to sound - what I see
now and now, what I see now and I hear now, what I
hear now and now - , presented with the produced
comparison of sense impressions is deliberately
played out by film being a „spoon“ for the hand of
the audience. We need to study the media - that
which has grown out of us. We need to take media
as models for understanding our own structure.
With film „Adebar“ shown at the end of the
lecture, like „Schwechater“
another short movie of a bar, Kubelka
emphasizes that film does not begin with movement,
but with a situation. Also, the eye is supported
by thinking to some degree it would see nothing
without thinking. Just looking
into the Narrenkastl
- the fools’ box, the Austrian expression for TV -
is impossible. Compared to language the eye is the
noun, the ear the verb (in German: Zeitwort, Tätigkeitswort) - as Kubelka says, the ear
is open for movement and so as near to thinking as
is the eye which only examines the event
afterwards. In any case „Adebar“ deals with dance as a
precursor of synchronous experience and in
consequence a precursor of film language. Early
on, dancers felt that every movement should
produce its own sound.
Kubelka who has preserved from himself
the outlook and character of a baby a little bit, despite his seventy
years of age, shakes a dried husk like humans two
million years ago producing sound by shaking a rattle:
„Nobody of us grew up without Scheppern (German word for 'to rattle'.“
III
Despite Kubelka's positioning of film
against and beyond myth, he certainly himself plays with myth
thereby affirming it. He is too much an artist
than not do so, as he used to be professor at the
Art University of Frankfurt am Main lecturing on
cooking, playing the flute, and analysing film.
His distrust to the written word and even to
microphones for lecturing went hand in hand with a
long time rejection of transforming his activities
into other media. He always has been an
avant-garde hard liner, including strong
reservations against modernist Nouvelle Vague as
expressed in 2003 at the Österreichisches Filmmuseum on the occasion
of a discussion that followed his public
recollections of his friend Stan Brakhage who had died just
a short time ago.
Ontology. It is true and Rodowick
is right, Goodman’s ontology requires a natural
medium that is not given as a specific medium
anymore in the digital era of virtuality - we can
understand Kubelka
very well that he wants to save celluloid film as
a bodily medium. We can even understand his
attitude agaist any
post-Socratic philosophy (as advocated in a
lecture for instance at the
Philosophy of mind. It comes as a surprise to me that
mind figures prominently in many contributions.
Cynthia Freeland’s title has it suggesting a broad
examination of the implications of the
equivocation of film and mind in the phrase
“empiricism and the philosophy of film”. Raymond Bellour so heavily
discusses hypnosis that a philosophical reflection
would seem appropriate of
conceptual framework for an application to film.
As with Deleuze’s
dependence of Bergson
already the title of another contribution says it
all: “The film thinks” which again replaces
Freud’s famous claim “The dream thinks”, a
sentence that already prompted some philosophical
interpretation and may be further applied to the
philosophy of film with profit. Very obvious is
the leitmotif of emotions, discussed at
length in the contributions of Koch, Recki and Freeland including metaphor
as an important feature. And it is the
psychological concept of affordance (Gibson/Gombrich) that is given a
new turn by Koch with showing a prevalent quality
of firstness in
objects as aesthetic illusion - not unlike found
footage ghosts emerging visibly from the picture
plane (Pircher) - , a quality that adds to
a more formal ontology as erected when seeing
film/movies/cinema from the outside. The core
message of a philosophy of mind is that the
spectator’s experience is indispensable and may
even be taken as point of departure for
approaching the objective machinery which film has
become as an industry. Finally, what has been
developed as the culture of the self with
reference to Cavell (Nagl, Sandbothe) may be rooted
in a philosophy of society of culture but will not
do without fundamental reflection in the
philosophy of mind. I
leave it to future considerations whether a re-existentialising of the I not only as beholder
but agent becomes necessary (Nagl),
keeping film producing processes as secondary to audience perception
processes.
Aesthetics. Necessarily, the emphasis on
experience brings forward again or for the first
time an enhanced awareness of the aesthetic
in film perception. Koch and Recki
explicitly discussed classics of philosophical aesthetics: Diderot’s theory of
painting, Nietzsche’s treatise on tragedy. They
encourage us to put film again into the continuity
of arts in a general theory of the (aesthetic)
art. And, maybe, even the aesthetic of an ontology
of the languages/symbols of art can be reactualized - and need
not be opposed as for instance semiotics to Cassirer (Withalm) - and thereby
contribute to a philosophy of film that connects
to the multiple traditions of aesthetics and the
philosophy of art and prevents from dissolution of
film theory into the post-theory of film studies (Nagl).
Peter Mahr © 2005
back to: Addenda