Hamish Ford. Handbook of Film Studies. Editor: James Donald & Michael Renov. Sage Publications. 2008.
This chapter looks at three central case-studies in the sometimes vexed relationship between European philosophy and the quintessentially, if ambivalent, modern institution of cinema. The aim is not only to address what European philosophy has had to say about cinema and film, but also to suggest some of the questions that cinema has posed to such philosophy and to show how, in doing so, cinema has impacted upon philosophy.
The case-studies considered are: the relationship between film writing and Frankfurt School philosophy; Merleau-ponty’s phenomenology as a broadly influential strand of philosophy-related film scholarship; and, finally, an assessment of the most substantial study of the cinema by a major European philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, most notably his notion of the ‘time-image’.
One other key intersection between European philosophy and Film Studies is missing from this list. That is the take-up by the discipline, as newly institutionalized in the 1970s, of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Barthesian semiotics. That story is told elsewhere in this Handbook, particularly in Chapter 3 and Chapter 15.
Radical Investment and Critique: The Frankfurt School’s Vision of Cinema
The nexus between philosophy and film was substantially developed, even inaugurated to a large extent, by writers associated more or less officially with the Frankfurt School, in particular Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. Very much thinkers of their time, their Weimar period writing in the mid- to late 1920s presciently warned about the susceptibility of Germany’s emerging consumer culture to its exploitation by fascist politics. Within this context, and as part of a wider revival of interest in the problematic of ‘modernity’, it is their theoretical yet politically engaged responses to cinema understood as a key feature of modern urban life that led to a critical re-evaluation of Kracauer and Benjamin in the 1990s. (See Chapter 22 for an account of the Frankfurt School that places their thinking about film in the context of cinema, modernity and modernism.)
The work of scholars such as Heide Schlupmann (1987), Gertrud Koch (1991; and particularly Miriam Hansen (1992; 1993; 1995; 1997) has helped to reclaim Kracauer from a reputation as a naive realist, so that now he is acknowledged as a significant forerunner to later, more famous Frankfurt School analysts of consumer culture such as Theodor Adorno. As Kracauer, along with Benjamin, is sometimes treated as a celebratory commentator on early popular culture at its now often romanticized 1920s apogee, it is important to remember the darker elements of his early writing. Rather than heralding the beginning of a new age, the Weimar essays often feature language describing a historical process of ‘decay’. Metaphysical ‘lack’ and ‘crisis’ are exposed as the root of modern reality for the early Kracauer, in an extension of the sociologist Max Weber’s influential early twentieth- century descriptions of modernity’s ‘iron cage’ (1958: 181) and its prevailing ‘disenchantment’ (1946: 155). In his best known essay from this period, 1927’s ‘The Mass Ornament’, Kracauer argues that it is the ‘metaphysical suffering’ caused by people’s ‘exile from the religious sphere’ that makes them ‘companions in misfortune’ (1995: 129). Nonetheless, the Weimar era writing at least maintains some heavily qualified investment in modernity’s consumer culture as one possible means of bringing about historical disruption and change, including a cautiously hopeful vision of cinema’s role in this process.
At the centre of Kracauer’s investment in cinema is his advocacy of a complex understanding of realism. This realism is radically different either from that of ‘classical Hollywood’ or the ‘classic realist text’, or from mainstream documentary realism.
Kracauer’s ‘radical’ cinematic realism has the potential to prompt perception that transcends teleological movement, whether the narrative of ‘official’ history or the coercion of institutional modernization. As he later argued in Theory of Film, first published in 1960, the camera’s ability to record the minutiae of the physical world captures and displays multiple material fragments of contemporary life that escape the constraints of narrative. In doing so, a complex physical reality is ‘redeemed’. This ‘redemption’ undermines not only the narrative and political closure of classical realism, Hollywood or otherwise, but also the idea of psychological motivation—and, by extension, the possibility of ‘centred’ subjectivity. Kracauer saw film as seizing ‘the human being with skin and hair’, which is why ‘[t]he “ego” of the human being assigned to film is subject to permanent dissolution, is incessantly exploded by material phenomena’ (quoted in Hansen, 1993: 458). The key to this displacement of the human ego is the rendering of the modern world in the form of objects that clutter it. While the Hollywood tradition is defined by the centrality and importance of people (characters) and their dramas, Kracauer emphasizes ‘the tremendous importance of objects’. For him, ‘the actor too is no more than a detail, a fragment of the matter of the world’ who makes up ‘real- life complexes which the conventional figure- ground patterns usually conceal from view’ (1997: 252, 255). This refusal of distinctions between form and content, subject and object, figure and ground, exposes ‘openings’ that provide new, paradoxical focal points for the viewer, fissures of possibility (rather than lack) typically concealed in narrative-based filmmaking.
Bearing witness to, and ‘democratically’ rendering, all of modernity’s physical elements—including its discarded objects and human beings—film challenges the viewer to engage with modernity’s confronting materiality as liberated from rationalizing structures and regimes. Contemporary history can then be charted as indeterminacy and experience, rather than closure. This meant that Kracauer was able to differentiate what he saw as film’s potential for liberatory distraction from reactionary distraction, or ‘alienation’. His view was that not only teleological narratives but also the ritualistic spaces of cinema-going encouraged this reactionary distraction, seduced the proletariat into the rituals and mythologies of the social real that oppressed them, rather than allowing them a critical distance from it (Kracauer, 1987). At the same time, however, Kracauer also describes a radical distraction in response to film’s democratic rendering of modernity’s material surface, which allows the viewer a chance to recognize his or her alienation. Herein lies cinema’s potential to generate an ethical response to mass culture via the rendering of its surface phenomena—an aesthetics in which the moving image, filled with the rich heterogeneity of material history, can be claimed for a potentially rethought and negotiated experiential sense of collective life. Kracauer’s politics, aesthetics and philosophical investments come together in this idea of the liberated fragment-spaces of the image in engagement with the self- liberating viewer in concert with others.
The grounding of Kracauer’s Weimar-era analysis of cinema in modernity’s historical forms prefigures the emphasis on historical specificity, contingency, and difference in today’s culturally engaged Film Studies—hence its appeal. The key to his philosophy is the impact of surface material reality as presented in the film image, not as a superficial skin to be penetrated in order to discover the ‘truth’ beneath it, but rather as the very stuff of modernity’s real, embodying the marks of all its potentially enabling radical energy and its regressive re-mythologization—a reality intimately connected to the crisis-engendering energy of modern capitalism. For him, this ambivalent modernity, potentially radical but easily regressive, can be seen nowhere more clearly than in and through film.
Walter Benjamin also discerned radical transformative potential in film, in particular through the violence this technological art inflicted on pre-modern tradition and belief. His most famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, first published in 1935, assesses how photography, film and sound recording destroy the metaphysical originality and ‘aura’ of the work of art: ‘for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual’ (1992: 669). This loss of aura, the effective eviction of religion or the sacred from art, is another symptom of Weber’s disenchanted modern world and yet also offers the possibility of emancipation. However, Benjamin notes how replacement mythologies and metaphysical investments re-emerge, the most obvious being through the iconic power of close-up images of movie stars. Art’s auratic element is re-energized with ‘modern’ forms and mythology to match. Technology thus forces, and enables, the aura to take new, more popular forms that appear more ‘democratic’ at best, and offer frightening propagandistic potential at worst.
For Benjamin, the potentially regressive aspect of ‘aura’ lay in its seductive powers of reification and consumption. The alternative he hoped for was a new, ‘radical’ aura gleaned from the very heart of social reality, activating the contradictions or ‘gaps’ for creative and transformative potential and so creating an energized contemporary subjective experience. The commodity, says Benjamin, is always ‘bathed in a profane glow’ (1973: 105)—one easily pressed into the service of consumer desire but one which also has the potential to be harnessed for more revolutionary purposes. But a kind of double bind emerges when it comes to any possible ‘content’ for any such non- regressive aura. Although he welcomed its disappearance as a marker of privileged class access to art, Benjamin (1972) also lamented the destruction of a new aura’s potential, such as the socialist possibilities of photography, by commercialization’s ‘use value’. Here Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism reveals itself, combining an intermittently materialist- historical approach with a ‘Messianic’ metaphysics, sometimes in the form of Jewish theology, concerning revolutionary (but non- prescriptive) change. Benjamin’s work is less philosophically ‘consistent’ than that of his contemporaries, and its lack of system stretched the limits of Frankfurt School interdisciplinarity. Yet his sometimes romantic celebration of fragmentary textual practice and thinking is one of the things that has attracted film scholars to Benjamin’s work. An emphasis on experience in all its unpredictable and unknowable specificity is the key to a general commitment to subjectivity as a means of personal resistance and creative ‘escape’ from an oppressive social reality and the dictatorial elements of consumer culture.
Benjamin’s emphasis on subjectivity, play and fragmentary experience meant that he was from the outset more sympathetic to the avant- garde than Kracauer. He aligned himself with the dadaists, expressionists and surrealists in searching for an aesthetic means of rendering and prompting the transformation of everyday experience as a mechanism of revolutionary change. Despite that difference, Benjamin did also share Kracauer’s interest in cinema’s ability to liberate and activate the ‘rubbish’ of history, and he believed that the best means to this end was montage. This became his ultimate textual principle irrespective of form, a method that allowed an articulation of the modern world in all its rupture and incoherence (Bronner, 1998). In effect, montage became both form and content: material and spiritual rupture, artistic and sociopolitical possibility. His unfinished Arcades Project (1999), the fragmented textual form of which suggests a mythic ‘ur-history’ of cultural modernism, is the quintessence of this in literary form (Bronner, 1998; for extended discussion, see Buck-Morss, 1991). This is where Benjamin’s modernist utopianism resides: it is an always-in-process creative act with an unattainable material condition or end-point—an experience, conception and expression of lived history ripped from linearity and prescribed progress. The role of cinematic experience is then to draw out subversive socio-political powers that frequently lie dormant or suppressed in film’s conventional formal presentation. Film’s ‘social significance’, Benjamin writes, ‘is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage’ (1992: 668).
Benjamin’s advocacy of the cinematic experience rests ultimately on a hopeful, non- regressive metaphysics enabled by the sheer immediacy of film’s affective impact, but that has the potential to bring about real-world changes. Central to this conceptualization of the medium is a capacity for perception uniquely engendered by the photographic arts—first, still photography (1972), and then cinema. As Benjamin puts it: ‘The camera introduces us to unconscious optics’ (1992: 677). This unconscious optics ties together Benjamin’s conception of montage as generative fragmentation and the idea of reality’s unfettered rendering on screen in all its gaps and unconsidered elements, and in doing so it opens up thus far unrealized potential not only for perception, but also for understanding and action. Much of the scholarship on the optical unconscious has treated it as the evocative genesis for a politically engaged avant-garde theory of cinematic—and ‘modern’—experience that is agonistic vis-a-vis more ‘official’ narratives of modernism (see especially Krauss, 1994). This approach is framed in quasi-utopian terms. It implies that subjective effect can lead to socio-political outcomes by means of a virtual experience or event. In doing so, this understanding of ‘unconscious optics’ seems to assume that the individual subject’s way of experiencing the world is shared by others, by means of both trans-individual psychic perception and social agreement as to desirable change.
The much-discussed core of this modern experience is ‘shock’, a term that encapsulates Benjamin’s version of Bertolt Brecht’s principle of the ‘interruption’ or ‘alienation’ effect (1964). Benjamin suggests that cinema can potentially bring about a shock of recognition on the part of an audience affected similarly, one made up of subjects able to recognize the conditions revealed to them on the screen. In Benjamin’s idiosyncratic model, this occurs less through rational reflection than through unconscious or ‘absent-minded’ processes:
Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film . The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. (1992: 679)
This beguiling idea of shock, with its ambiguous yet potentially radical impact upon a mass of viewers on the unconscious level, perhaps shows most clearly Benjamin’s hybrid of Marxist philosophy and mystical Messianic thought. Itis at the heart of Benjamin’s attempt to shape an aesthetics by which socio-political ‘liberation’ can be energized as well as a prefiguring of how such movement might subsequently come about.
The implications for film theory of Benjamin’s thinking about the process of experiential montage and shock have only been worked through since his death. Because they presuppose an extraordinarily close relationship between the viewer and the very apparatus of cinema, they offer a distinct perspective on spectatorship and ideological complicity. In Benjamin’s view, the audience really identifies less with the actor than with the camera (1992: 672). Rather than empathizing, temporarily, with one or other of the characters in a film, the idea of shock and reflexive alienation relies upon any such subjective alignment being short-circuited. This not only has the potential to ‘liberate’ the viewer in terms of subjectivity, their social real, and the possibility of political engagement; it also radically opens up long sustained assumptions about what constitutes films, filmmaking and cinema per se.
Kracauer and Benjamin remain foundational figures in the traffic between philosophy and film, offering both critique and potentially radical visions of twentieth- century modernity’s quintessential medium, and they are widely held in high regard within present-day Film Studies. By contrast, their Frankfurt School colleague Theodor Adorno has often been scorned, especially from a populist cultural studies perspective, for his ‘elitist’ view of the ‘culture industry’. This critique was articulated most polemically with Max Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1979), first published in 1944. Here the Frankfurt School’s ‘new Marxism’ found its most influential (and controversial) account of the oppressive and homogenizing structures of mass consumer culture. Capitalist modernity, Adorno and Horkheimer argued, was reneging upon Enlightenment promises about individual freedom. It was re-enslaving workers through the mechanized industrial processes of Taylorism and Fordism, while offering the bourgeoisie a pseudo-individuality through consumption. The glamorous zenith of this delusory individuation was the movie star, they suggested, whose hairstyle was supposed to express her uniqueness. But Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of cinema went further than the conformist process of subjectification evident in Hollywood iconography. They also made something of a pre-emptive strike against auteurism in its original 1950s incarnation. When the new culture industry cognoscenti read the ‘personal signature’ of a film director as a marker of creative freedom, argued Adorno and Horkheimer, as often as not they were falling into the trap of misrecognizing a standardized, assembly-line product as a work of individual artistic expression (Andrae, 1979: 34).
Unlike Kracauer and Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer appeared to deny cinema any possible radical aesthetics, impact or outcome, let alone the ‘vernacular modernism’ later perceived by Hansen (1999). This is why they are frequently considered not to have ‘understood’ film at all, especially given the contrast between the sophistication of their analysis of other art forms and a passage like this:
The sound film, far surpassing the theater illusion, leaves no room for imagination or action on the part of the audience, who is to respond within the structure of the film yet deviate from its precise detail, without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality … Sustained thought is out of the question, if the spectator is not to miss the relentless rush of the facts. (1979: 126-7)
Film becomes an irredeemable mechanism of the enslaving culture industry in which ‘the regression of enlightenment to ideology . finds its typical expression in cinema and radio’, fuelled by mass desire for a model of heavily delimited ‘individuality’ as prescribed by the ideological dictates of what they call ‘the administered life’ (1979: xvi).
In its defence, it should be remembered that Dialectic of Enlightenment was written at a time when Hollywood and European fascism’s domination of the moving image needed very much to be addressed, and when there seemed little hope for a more radical modernist vision of cinema. Benjamin’s writing on film was itself equally coloured by its context: in particular, the often avant Soviet, German and French cinema of the 1920s. Although Benjamin did not survive to reconsider his thoughts on film during and after the war, Kracauer did, and his post-war work is highly pessimistic about the future development of cinema.
In 1966, Adorno published a late essay on film that appears to reflect both the influence of his friend, the filmmaker Alexander Kluge, and also the impact of recent modernist feature films like Antonioni’s La Notte (Italy/France, 1961). With its more nuanced attitude towards cinema—and perhaps towards the culture industry as a whole (Hansen, 1981-82)—‘Transparencies on Film’ (1991) provides Film Studies scholars with a useful point of entry into Adorno’s monumental final work, Aesthetic Theory (1983), published in 1970 after his death. Such late writing has been the main focus of film scholarship’s thus far limited and sporadic interest in his work, often in the context of assessing the philosophical importance of post-war European film modernism. A new look at Adorno’s relevance to Film Studies also allows a deeper recognition of his work’s relationship to Benjamin and Kracauer, as Hansen’s meticulous re-evaluation of Frankfurt School scholarship has shown. Furthermore, it provides a clearer back-history to the arguments influencing many early critical theorists of postmodernism, such as Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson.
Adorno’s late work addresses artistic praxis and aesthetic experience as commentaries upon an alienated social real that, potentially, may move from commenting on that real to subverting it. Art, for Adorno, should not be an escapist discourse—or at least genuine, radical modern art. This means art that critically reflects alienation back upon its social conditions. Reflexivity is the key. Appropriating techniques and materials from a reality defined by the culture industry, radical works of art must draw attention to the marks or fractures resulting from the appropriation process, preserving traces of those elements that resist integration (Adorno, 1983: 10). Although this can enable means to transformative ends, the tone of such artworks is anything but affirmational. For Adorno, ‘black is the ideal’ as the means to both trenchant critique and possible newness (1983: 58). Modern art can provide sites through which radical, appropriation- resistant ‘negativity’ can partially be enacted. This is potentially achieved by the material work itself and by engaging the subject in confrontation with this challenging force (see his Negative Dialectics [1973], first published in 1966, for Adorno’s ultimate philosophical exposition of negation.) The work of art’s critical rendering of horrific social reality through its formally reflexive appropriation of materials provokes an affective ‘tremor’ in the subject (Adorno, 1983: 346). For this most pessimistic Frankfurt School thinker, only the reflexive and fragmentary rendering of a reified modernity can deliver art’s promise of epistemological assault and ethical impact: ‘art may be the only remaining medium of truth in an age of incomprehensible terror and suffering’ (Adorno, 1983: 27). What it offers is the potential for an engaged capacity for creative fantasy, a potential space in which the un-free subject might experience and think anew.
Once the excesses of the culture industry thesis are contextually faced then put aside, Adorno’s late aesthetic perspective suggests a challenging Frankfurt School account of cinema very different from those of Kracauer and Benjamin. It offers two valuable strains. On the one hand, it provides a way of engaging critically with all the psychic and philosophical dimensions of cinema’s starring—or ‘mirroring’—role within a sometimes ethically regressive socio-political reality. On the other hand, Adorno’s philosophy suggests a framework within which it might be possible to explain film’s more properly challenging incarnations, and to assess the extent of its potential for radical critique and disruption.
Embodied Cinema: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Sense
The return to favour of some Frankfurt School contributions to Film Studies, along with Andre Bazin’s concurrent resurgence, has often been achieved by re-framing earlier debates around realism, history and ontology—ideas out of fashion in some schools of film theory during the 1970s and 1980s (see Chapter 24). At the same time, and in relation to these revived debates, a different strand in European philosophy has also been taken up in contemporary Film Studies: the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and its legacy.
In her book Address of the Eye (1992), Vivian Sobchack demonstrates the potential usefulness of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology by highlighting some of the blind spots in the theoretical underpinning of dominant film theory since the 1970s. Psychoanalysis and Marxism, she argues, have ‘converged in a mutual recognition of the originary nature and productive function of language and discourse in constituting the libidinal “economy” of the “self” and the political “unconscious” of the social formation’ (1992: xiii). The key impulse in Sobchack’s book—one increasingly evident across diverse Film Studies discourses, including some that don’t engage with phenomenological language as well as those that do—is to address the affective experience of embodied subjectivity, conceived through non-psychoanalytic means. Adapting Merleau-Ponty’s language, Sobchack describes this liberation of embodied experience from its repressed position beneath structuralist theory as the ‘ “fleshing out” of film’ (1992: xviii).
A broadly phenomenological perspective has been a recurrent feature in European thinking about film. Both Kracauer and Bazin maintained a phenomenological emphasis on spatiality and the relationship between subjects and objects as rendered on screen, while also demonstrating a keen interest in the precise formal means of that rendering. Writing in the first half of the 1950s, Bazin proposed that the invention of sound and deep- focus lenses had allowed the viewer freedom to select focus from a hermeneutically open image (1967: 35). If cinema and physical reality are as intrinsically related as Italian neorealism famously persuaded Bazin they are, then the subject must also share in this technological-organic relationship. This broad principle makes for the opposite of a semiotically-informed vision of cinema, as pointed out by Peter Wollen in Bazin’s emphasis on the organic nature-world the camera records (1976: 22). Yet the kind of material world Bazin describes, and the result of its being filmed, make for a loosely phenomenological film writing that can be read today as ultimately reinforcing neither the subject’s nor the world’s ontological status.
While phenomenological principles have, in largely non-explicit form, coloured much important film writing over the decades, in recent times there has been a more concerted theoretical attempt to harness a phenomenological approach. This is evident, most notably, in the reassessment of film spectatorship under the rubric of ‘affect’ theory. Here, however, the focus will be specifically on the usefulness of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology for Film Studies.
Although Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is governed by existentialist principles, his existentialism model of the subject that emphasizes an embodied ‘being-in-the-world’ at the heart of all perception (1964c; 1989). Merleau-Ponty thus offers film theory philosophical tools to assess on-screen space, mise en scene and bodies, as well as the viewer’s visual perception. In doing so, his philosophy offers an alternative to structuralist semiotics (or indeed Derridean textual theory) and psychoanalysis. Although perhaps ‘universalizing’ subjective experience along his own existentialist lines in the process, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is productive in seeking to encompass object and subject as part of the same spatio-temporal reality—embodied relationships shared among subject-‘perceivers’ and objects such as a film, without reducing these interrelations to the status of textual play or exemplary models of the psyche.
On the basis of common perceptual and material grounds of existence, the subject is constantly transforming itself through the fluid, always in-process mode of being-in-the- world. This idea can at first seem somewhat mystical, and it is true that the first page of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical treatise The Phenomenology of Perception, first published in 1945, describes phenomenology as a ‘transcendental’ philosophy that ‘puts essences back into existence’ (1989: vii). Nevertheless, it is then immediately emphasized that individual and socio-political transformations are linked via an inescapable starting point for all perceiving relations: the world, which is ‘ “already there” before reflection begins—as an inalienable presence’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1989: vii). Such a seemingly self-evident yet epistemologically destabilizing axiom effectively sidelines both presumptions about the centrality of the subject and the idea of pure objectivity. The world can be ‘known’ by no other means than (inter)subjective experience. This axiom is illuminating for Film Studies as a way of addressing the experience of an on-screen ‘reality’ that is resolutely there at least for the duration of the film—and longer in remembered, even more virtual form.
Also relevant to Film Studies in a more applied sense are Merleau-Ponty’s writings on aesthetics, particularly his essays ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, first published in 1948, and the masterly ‘Eye and Mind’ from 1961 (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b; 1964a). Although the subject of the latter is Paul Cezanne’s painting, the writing resonates with the perceptual and conceptual vertigo of film experience. ‘Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a: 169). But his philosophical project at large is inherently concerned with aesthetic experience. Marjorie Grene aptly describes this aspect of Merleau- Ponty’s work when she observes that it ‘shows how in our very distance from things we are near them, … [illuminating] our attachment through detachment, the very core of our way of being-in-a-world’ (1994: 232). Merleau-Ponty’s refusal to maintain a Hegelian subject/object dialectic means that he can describe the capacity for ‘objectively observable behaviour’ as a site for meaning or feeling to an extent no less than within the realm of subjective experience—provided, of course, that ‘objectivity is not confused with what is measurable’ (1964c: 24). When it comes to the leap of faith the film viewer enters into, so as to empathize with the figures on screen as subjects rather than merely as flattened shadows of human forms or spectral after-images of people that were presumably once in front of the camera, Merleau-Ponty reminds us of the object-status of on-screen bodies. But a different kind of subject is also thrust into play where we might not usually envisage it, allowing the traditionally sacred (even spiritual) prize of subjectivity to be spread across the aesthetic field—to the extent of characterizing the actual ‘text’ itself. Object/subject and work/human distinctions thus break down in a move most relevant for present-day conceptions of human relations to technology and virtual experience.
In this way, films, the characters within them, and engaged viewer-perceivers can all be seen as making up and sharing a slippery ‘ground’ of relationships between embodied entities. This understanding can provide for a deceptively precise description of both the relationship on-screen bodies appear to have with their physical world (if it is a vaguely recognizable ‘realistic’ one) and the relationship the viewer has to that reality. The language in ‘Eye and Mind’ is both startlingly ‘cinematic’ and useful for conceptualizing the spectator’s relationship to the individual image and the film frame, scrambling control and origin of the visual field in the process: ‘In principle all my changes of place figure in a corner of my landscape; they are recorded on the map of the visible. Everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, and is marked upon the map of the “I can”’ (1964a: 162). This suggests an understanding of the spectator’s relationship to the image and vision per se, bereft of its Enlightenment powers of epistemological access and gain, and instead as the central machinery that enables an extraordinary virtual yet ‘grounded’, embodied experience.
When considering Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the ‘irrational’ nature of experience, one needs to keep in mind his work’s context within the atheist-existentialist response to Nietzsche’s rejection of both religious and rationalist epistemologies. Merleau-Ponty’s vision of subject and world dictates that at the centre of consciousness lies an ‘emptiness’ that is ‘observable only at the moment when it is filled by experience. We do not ever see it, so to speak, except marginally. It is perceptible only on the ground of the world’ (1964c: 41). He offers a very paradoxical possibility here in suggesting that somehow this ‘emptiness’ can be momentarily perceived by the seeking viewer within spatial reality as viewed, energized both by desire and the co-dependent relations of subjects, objects and world. The generative, creative nature of this process in the context of cinema is such that the viewer-subject can feel they have perceived glimpses of a character’s (‘empty’) interior consciousness, less perhaps through the classical form of close-ups and performed expressivity than through juxtapositions of bodies with places and things: a spatial configuration brought about intentionally, yet reaching beyond intentionality.
Motivated by the desire for meaning, generating such resonance and spectrality, the perceiving subject’s act of vision fails to bring about mastery and knowledge as such yet at the same time produces much more than a ‘simple’ view of the world. In two much quoted passages from ‘Eye and Mind’, we read:
[T]he real problem is to understand how it happens that our fleshly eyes are already much more than receptors for light rays colours and lines …. They are computers of the world, which give the gift of the visible as it was once said that the inspired man had the gift of the tongues …. Now perhaps we have a better sense of what is meant by that little verb ‘to see’. (1964a: 165, 186)
For the film viewer, ‘to see’ encompasses communicative potential defined by radically open subjectivity—desires, beliefs and psychological position as being-in-the-world, but in a process that undermines epistemological regimes. This leads to a paradoxical realization. Although the viewer’s subjectivity energizes the image, in the process that very subjectivity becomes displaced, not fully present to itself, so that in the process of film spectatorship we are partially ‘absent’ from ourselves as subjects. And through our ‘absence’ during engagement, we cannot ever affirm knowledge, mastery or proof of our experience.
For a theoretical account of cinematic spectatorship, Merleau-Ponty effectively contradicts the notion that film is made up of different textual/image layers to be deciphered by a subject at one remove from their embodied experience of that film/world. In ‘The Film and the New Psychology’, we read:
[T]he movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of mind and body, mind and world, and the expression of one in the other … the mingling of consciousness with the world, its involvement in a body, and its coexistence with others; and because this is movie material par excellence. (1964b: 58-9)
What emerges both from Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical account of being-in-the-world and from the more concentrated writing on artistic experience is a distinctive aesthetics of perception. Wilful, fully conscious subjects may try to engage their rational powers to explain what they see, but their embedded, visual-sensual relation with the world remains beyond reason.
A phenomenological approach to cinema involves a correspondence between conscious thought, embodied affect and the technology of film, including the specific formal incarnation of the particular film in question. Together, all these factors enable a perceptual reality to be felt or engaged through the senses. Sobchack’s work has been important in demonstrating how effectively phenomenological methods can be employed to address embodied film experience, the ramifications of which undermine established philosophical assumptions about cinema. She rejects theoretical accounts that see film as an object of vision, and the spectator either as allied with the ideological regime in play or as a victim trapped by foreclosed understandings of subjectivity and the cinematic apparatus. Such explanations ignore the material and cultural-historical situations of both the spectator and the film and, as a result, they universalize both power relations and ideological-linguistic regimes. A very different aesthetics and politics of the gaze result from a critical-theoretical project engaged with phenomenological philosophy. In fact, the rethink is quietly radical. Cinematic experience, in light of Merleau-Ponty’s work, comes to be seen as encapsulating two viewing positions: the spectator and the film itself, each existing as both subject and object of vision. Film experience can thereby provide insight into the perceptual and signifying nature of embodied vision in a way that transcends individual subjectivity: a process that occurs in exaggerated form in the cinema. In Sobchack’s explicitly phenomenological film theory—and her later work on affect and ‘cinesthesia’ follows this dimension through more specifically—cinema becomes a ‘sensuous’ phenomenon indeed (2000). As engaged by the viewer’s human perception, the experience of film is activated as a truly sensory and ‘sense’- making event/object/subject.
‘Sense’ comes across in Sobchack’s account as a corporeal conduit of affect and communication, comparable to Merleau- Ponty’s ‘ground of the world’ (1964c: 41). ‘Sense’ is thus presented as being ontologically more authentic or more real than any semiotic codes or textual-theoretical interpretations. Sobchack argues that a film offers ‘wild meaning’ before it is ‘fragmented and dissected in critical and theoretical analyses’, and that in the first instance a film’s ‘existence emerges embodied and finitely situated’ (1992: 12). In the experience of cinema, in other words, film ‘makes sense’ to the viewer only for it to be destroyed or sullied by analysis. Such a statement seems to resonate with those elements in Merleau-Ponty’s writing on aesthetics that invoke quasi-primordial, ahistorical ‘being’. This affirms a ‘truth’ in the special encounter between film and subject, but one that can only be addressed through attempts to evoke in language the a priori—but already past—experience of embodied being-in-the- cinema/world.
Philosophy Meets Cinema: Deleuze and the Time-Image
In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, originally published in 1983, Gilles Deleuze makes some critical remarks about phenomenology for insufficiently addressing immanence and difference, and for offering an ‘ancient’ account of experience as framed by the existential privileging of subjectivity (Deleuze, 1986: 57-8, 60-1). Even so, there are some notable points of intersection in the way that Film Studies has appropriated and applied Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. Perhaps most crucially, both philosophers strongly oppose epistemological systems that deny or overlook corporeality in the search for signifying networks and subjective models, and both are instead largely concerned with the perceptual and aesthetic dimensions of embodied experience.
If ‘big-T theory’ has been in retreat for some time in Film Studies, Deleuze’s cinema books stand out as offering a serious engagement with cinema from a genuinely philosophical position, while retaining a close relationship to the object of study via the discussion of particular films and filmmakers. Deleuze’s historiography and his philosophical coverage of film history are both eccentric yet rich in bringing together, and making substantial contributions to, theoretical and critical ideas that have played out in various ways for many decades. One such connection, made at the start of Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989), originally published in 1985, is with Bazin. For Bazin, the enhanced ‘perceptual realism’ that comes into play with deep- focus and quality sound reproduction has two consequences. Not only does it give the viewer much greater opportunity to work hermeneutically with a more ambiguous image, it also has the effect of ‘bringing together real time, in which things exist, along with the duration of the action’ (1967: 39). Radically expanding this idea, Deleuze charts both the historical and aesthetic extent of the process in coming to concentrate on films that take such a temporalized image to its apogee (particularly the post-1950s European modernism Bazin did not live to write about) and its philosophical significance.
The framing process for Deleuze’s study is quite simple. Cinema 1 philosophically demarcates pre-World War Two cinema by suggesting that classical Hollywood, French Impressionism and Soviet montage are all governed by images and on-screen subjectivities guided by perceptually and ethically confident action and movement. Towards the end of the book, and leading into Cinema 2, Deleuze records how the movement-image becomes disabled in some advanced Hollywood films that push the system to its limits, and is then superseded more wholly by temporality in the postwar European cinema. He thus highlights the epistemological, moral and subjective challenges that emerge as soon as movement (which in its pre- and inter-war incarnation keeps time beneath the surface) itself becomes subverted or engulfed by time. This process he sees, like Bazin in his demarcation of the ‘new’ cinema, first in the 1940s work of Orson Welles and into the 1950s with Alfred Hitchcock, and then more importantly in Italian neorealism. Most of Cinema 2 is then taken up with discussion of the time- image’s most radical incarnation (according to Deleuze) in the films of directors such as Ozu Yasujiro, Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky.
The change from hegemonic movement to foregrounded time in the cinematic image may represent an aesthetic, ethical and philosophical ‘advance’ for Deleuze, but it is also a process of violence. The disablement of productive movement brings negativity and doubt into play. In a formulation indebted to Nietzsche, Deleuze explains this subversion of movement’s epistemological and moral content and motivation by arguing that the time-image is generated by (and reproduces) what he calls ‘powers of the false’ (1989: 126-55). These forces not only override movement, they also forge a new kind of parodic inversion of movement by conjuring up ‘false’ or ‘aberrant’ movements (1989: 39-41). In a key passage, Deleuze summarizes the aesthetic and epistemological ramifications of such temporally enforced falsity and suggests how it eats out movement from within:
A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something intolerable and unbearable .. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-motor capacities. (1989: 18)
That ‘something’ is the power of immense temporality, what Deleuze ambiguously calls ‘the full, that is, the unalterable form filled by change’ (1989: 17). It is this that disables the ability of characters, narrative logic, fictional world and film to engender morally confident action and direction in classical movement- image cinema—irrespective of its ideological content, be it D.W. Griffith in the USA or Sergei Eisenstein in the USSR. The time- image treats these mainstays of film content entropically:
If normal movement subordinates the time of which it gives us an indirect representation, aberrant movement speaks up for an anteriority of time that it presents to us directly, on the basis of the disproportion of scales, the dissipation of centres and the false continuity of images themselves. (1989: 37)
The emphasis on a vertiginous foregrounding of time makes for a decentred, unreliable world that cannot be assumed beyond its rendering in the image. Deleuze describes reality in the time-image as being made up of spaces that are ‘reduced to their own descriptions’, through ‘direct presentations of an oppressive, useless and unsummonable time which haunts the characters’ (1989: 136).
In a quintessential Italian neorealist film such as The Bicycle Thief (Vittorio de Sica, Italy, 1948) Deleuze sees the process of the new time-image ‘taking over’, as the initially teleological narrative generated by the search for the stolen bicycle entropically opens out into an enlarged wandering and passive gazing upon the world brought about by temporal expansion. He describes this as forcing substantial change upon and within the subject:
[T]he character has become a kind of viewer. He shifts, runs and becomes animated in vain, the situation he is in outstrips his motor capacities on all sides, and makes him see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or an action. He records rather than reacts. (Deleuze, 1989: 3)
This process in neorealism can still come across as classically humanist in its holistic asserting of subject, image and world (as Bazin often powerfully argued in relation to such films). European cinema would go on to increase more radically the prominence of falsity and ‘unbelief’.
The common element Deleuze sees in epistemologically, perceptually and morally vertiginous time-image films is encapsulated in the concept of ‘the crystal’: that is, the dissolution of classical sensory- motor abilities and their accompanying epistemological description and understanding of the world in the face of achronological time. Dispersing spatial coordinates and melting away distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object, the crystal becomes:
the most fundamental operation of time: since the past is constituted not after the present that it was but at the same time, time has split itself in two at each moment as present and past … We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, non- chronological time, Chronos and not Chronos. This is the powerful, non-organic Life which grips the world. (1989: 81)
This ‘Life’, which requires that we acknowledge the virtual and (only perhaps seemingly) ‘non-organic’ aspects of temporal experience, disrupts any conventional understanding of time’s operation. D.N. Rodowick describes the dizzying implications of the dangerously excessive time produced by intermingling ‘Chronos’ with ‘not Chronos’ as ‘an emptiness, a pure virtuality rendered by the incommensurability of perception … This is the highest power of the false that cinema can express’ (1997: 190).
For many scholars of Deleuze and the cinema books, the vertiginous impact of this difficult time-thought relation both enables and is partly mitigated by the philosophical notion of ‘becoming’, defined via Deleuze’s particular take on Nietzsche’s vision of autocreating subjectivity and the idea of the ‘eternal return’. It is notable that Rodowick, for example, asserts any identity or notion of being as possibly ‘affirmed in the principle of becoming’ by means of ‘the eternal return of difference’ and the willed power of the false—all brought about by time ‘forcing us to think’(1997:133).The time-image creates the possibility of a certain kind of thought: that is, difficult thought. Played out simultaneously on screen and spectatorially, this process is marked by a dialectic of creativity and devastating ontological impotence. This is why Deleuze states:
What cinema advances is not the power of thought but its ‘impower’, and thought has never had any other problem. It is precisely this which is much more important than the dream: this difficulty of being, this powerlessness at the heart of thought. (1989: 166)
In its creative potential, the virtual time- thought ‘machine’ is often the key to framing the time-image in a quasi-utopian light (Schwab, 2000: 162). In seeming contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and although Deleuze remains strongly antiCartesian, in Cinema 1 and 2 the body seems to represent the price paid for the modern world’s nihilism, its revolutions and its potential. The body takes on the form of a burdensome repository sluggishly holding subject and future world back. Using starkly oppositional language in describing Antonioni’s cinema, Deleuze demarcates:
the two aspects of the effect of the time-image: a cinema of the body, which pulls all the weight of the past into the body, all the tiredness of the world and modern neurosis; but also a cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world, its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains. (l989: 205)
This is a sensitive response to what are still sometimes derided as purely depressing and hermetic films. And yet, in stressing the potential for new thinking forged from the ashes of ontological destruction, Deleuze’s account of post-war European modernists such as Antonioni can tend towards a rather ‘positive’ or idealist reading. The risk here, then, is a conceptual blunting of time-image cinema’s impact both in terms of affective experience and philosophical importance.
Theoretical accounts of the time-image can suggest a very different kind of cinema from that which is actually experienced when watching the post-war European films Deleuze discusses in Cinema 2. His analysis of time in these films does convey some sense of the destructive force that motivates the particular modern impulses and potential so important to his philosophy of the cinema.
But their more disturbing and destabilizing impact can be elided or underplayed. In this way, the radical critique and challenging confrontations brought about by ‘difficult thought’ in Deleuze’s account seem largely to commit violence against regressive elements of the Enlightenment subject and notions of ‘being’ without in turn potentially also undermining re-conceived, and favoured, understandings of subjectivity emphasized as ‘becoming’.
For good or ill, Deleuze’s cinema books and the scholarship around them appear to constitute the most notable discourse based on European philosophy in Film Studies over the last decade or so. Given the sceptical trend in the discipline away from such styles of thinking, this scholarship has been persistent and devoted rather than voluminous. It would be problematic, of course, if Deleuze’s methodology and a priori assumptions were to become a new theoretical orthodoxy internalized by a generation of film scholars. If it did, then it would require breaking down for the same reasons as the paradigms of the 1970s. Although critique has so far been sporadic, the cinema books have been around long enough to provoke attacks on their methodology and on Deleuze’s particular philosophical framing of time as read in the film image.
Sean Cubitt, for example, has argued that—like Hollywood, in fact—the post-war European cinema Deleuze celebrates ultimately lays claim to a sublime image outside of history, and that he therefore essentializes film as time with a problematic end point of pure stasis (2004: 338-9). This objection that time-image films have as their aim a pure stasis, because their settings and formal presentation feature temporal and spatial dislocation, may itself presuppose that cinema can only offer socio-historical resonance and critique when rendering recognizable milieux using a realist aesthetic. Although it is of course desirable that Deleuze’s historiographical agenda and methodology should be scrutinized and questioned, Cinema 2 at its best—both as philosophy and as genuine film scholarship—discusses films in a way that actually subverts any idea of stasis and rest for the subject facing a cinema/world of such achronological duree, and whose engagement and thought are so central to the event of the time-image. It is, rather, pre- and inter-war cinema that is treated in Deleuze’s analysis as typically allowing the subject and their social morality to assert confidence and ahistorical stability through the unproblematic forging and engagement of movement. When it comes to time-image cinema, subjectivity and the world are reconfigured away from all such sureties—even if for Deleuze utopianist possibility is also enabled by such breakdown.
Explaining why he sees Deleuze’s contribution to Film Studies as so productive and fresh, Gregory Flaxman addresses the waning of highly theoretical writing in favour of cultural studies, reception theory and other empirical discourses. He describes the result as ‘a peculiar, and particularly fashionable, absence of debate—about what film is, about its difference from other arts, about its effect on thought, about the way its images can be distinguished—in which a set of traditional assumptions quietly cement themselves’ (2000: 7). Whether or not we concur with the details of such a thesis, this chapter has defended the tradition of continental European philosophizing about film: addressing cinema as a philosophically significant, potentially radical form; exploring the challenging implications of its bodies and worlds as rendered on screen for those in spectatorial engagement and critically assessing its role as the originary moving image form in a consumer culture. What emerges from the nexus between film and philosophy provided by this tradition is a striking exploration and analysis of cinema’s destabilizing, elusive yet forever affective impact at the heart of contemporary experience.