Episode 59 - Film
Transcript
David: 0:06
Hi, I'm David Peña- Guzmán
Ellie: 0:08
and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink.
David: 0:12
A podcast where two friends
Ellie: 0:13
who are also professors
David: 0:15
philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.
Ellie: 0:18
Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. Just imagine you are a French person living in Paris in 1895. It's a cool December night. And you've entered into the basement of the Le Salon Indien du Grand Café. It's a cafe
David: 0:46
It's a Grand Café, Ellie.
Ellie: 0:48
Grand Café. Yeah. You've been invited to the first screening of the Lumière brothers film, which depicts a train rolling into the station. It's a silent film, of course, this is 1895. And as you behold, for the very first time in your entire life, an actual moving image and it's of a train coming towards you, speeding, hurtling in your direction, you become terrified. You fail to recognize that the train is just an image because you've never seen a moving image before and you run screaming out of the room.
David: 1:21
This is the story of cinema's origin. When cinema was first introduced to Parisian audiences in the late 19th century, the feeling from spectators was one of confusion, shock, and excitement because people couldn't quite tell the difference between what was real and what was imaginary between what was reality itself and what was merely a projection of it on their screen.
Ellie: 1:47
This story that we've just told you, you might have come across if you've studied film theory before. Hell, I even use it in my classes, but it turns out that we actually have no accounts of audience's reception of this film from the time period, the idea that people ran screaming from the room, which I've definitely heard and then passed onto my students, turns out to be just speculation from thinkers in more recent decades about how they probably reacted in panic, because they'd never seen anything like this before. And so the myth of the famous Lumière brothers trained, pulling into the station at La Ciotat is a myth.
David: 2:23
So, yes, it is a myth in the sense that we don't know if people literally got up from their seats and started running as a lot of accounts of the origins of film indicate. But as a myth, I think this story makes perfect sense in its context and also of its context, because the authors of the article that explains why this story is actually mythic to scholars of cinematic history by the name of Martin Loiperdinger and Bernd Elzer. They point out that the late 19th century was obsessed with all sorts of phenomena of which cinema became only one that had to do with the coming to life of the inanimate. So, for example, people all over Europe and North America at the time were absolutely obsessed with things like wax museums, ghost stories, apparitions, what the authors call The Arts of Illusion. So like magic shows and things like that. And there's a sense in which film taps into this preexisting belief, that's already floating in the air about the porosity of the barrier between life and matter where some combinations of matter can suddenly come to life, which is essentially what some people say about cinema. So film taps into this preexisting belief about the porosity, the inherent porosity of the boundary between life and matter, where if you just achieve the right organization of matter, it will produce a whole that will magically come into life.
Ellie: 3:57
I think that's really interesting. And there's no doubt that the invention of film is one of the most transformative inventions of the modern age and that the proliferation of moving images that followed is something that's both extremely recent and also suddenly ubiquitous. And it really transforms our way of perceiving. But at the same time, I feel like if this is a story that we retroactively place upon the past with no empirical evidence, right? The story of the audience running away from the train that didn't happen apparently, or that we don't know happened because we don't have evidence. I think maybe we should probably stop using it, right? Because it trades on assumptions and speculations with no basis.
David: 4:37
I don't know. I mean, I don't wanna come in the defense of assumptions and speculations that are ungrounded, but maybe I will a little bit in so far as, so the, the article is really funny because the authors make the argument that it probably didn't happen that people panicked and that there was a stampede, but the way they go about it is by pointing out things like, oh, well, nobody reported it to the police. Or at the time a cafe would've fit a max of 50 people. So you would've expected to have some injuries. And yet there were none in the medical record. So, you know, like it's also not the case that the claim that it didn't happen is itself based on a direct des, description of the event. And I do think it's likely, and this is a personal sense that some people were,
Ellie: 5:21
David
David: 5:22
were surprised that the, no, I, I don't think this is
Ellie: 5:25
Oh, oh, were surprised. Sure. I thought you were gonna say that people ran out of the room.
David: 5:28
No, no, no, no, no. But that maybe people like took a step back or were like, oh my gosh. I mean, I do that nowadays in the 21st century when something scary happens in a movie. So I can only imagine in the late 19th century, people would not have been in that position to judge that boundary between the cinematic and the real in the same way with that. We do
Ellie: 5:49
Yeah, but it's di, it's one thing to say that people ran screaming out of the room. And another to say that they were just surprised, right? Like, I, I would agree with speculating that they were surprised, but I literally heard, you know, like an esteemed colleague of mine gave a talk and they're a film professor, not, not somebody at my current institution,
David: 6:05
Name names.
Ellie: 6:07
but it started with a really amazing description way better than the one that I gave about this scene. And that's where I first learned of it. And it turns out that that is just speculation. So I think maybe they shouldn't have started the talk with that story.
David: 6:19
Fair enough, then again, I mean, this is a broader point, but I do think it's impossible to remove all mythical elements out of history because history is itself, a mythologizing discourse in order for us to tell stories about the past, that, that last, and that create an impact. We often produce folkloric narratives. You know, for instance, many people have said that the story of, uh, Isaac Newton and the apple, the apple falling on his head never actually happened. Or even the story also drawn from the history of science that Galileo was sentenced by the church that hated science. That also didn't quite happen in that way. So, I don't mind the use of certain myths that tell us something about our interpretation of the past.
Ellie: 7:04
Yeah, but there's a difference between presenting something as a revealing piece of folklore or myth, which is hopefully what we're doing right now. Um, because we are starting the episode with it, right. And presenting something as historical fact when we don't have evidence that it provided, I think we definitely need to hold those two things apart, but I will say thanks to our, our student assistant Sunny Jeong-Eimer for discovering that this was in fact a myth for us. So was very helpful because they were gonna be using this as an opening for thinking about the nature of film. And as with many of our episode titles, this topic is just extraordinarily broad. I think one might even say it's an extreme act of hubris to have an episode that's just called Film. Like a film, a film theorist right now is like typical philosophers, but we are gonna be speaking despite the broad nature of the topic and title specifically about a key area of the philosophy of film, which is the ontology of film. Ontology is a study of being, so today we're thinking about the nature of film. What is film? And what does it mean to watch one?
David: 8:10
Today we are talking about film.
Ellie: 8:13
Are film objects selective depictions of reality as it is, or do they constitute a separate world unto themselves?
David: 8:20
How does film differ from the other arts, such as photography and theater?
Ellie: 8:25
And what kind of spectator do we become when we watch a film?
David: 8:29
Ellie, I think it's fascinating that an entirely new art form has been invented in such recent human history. I mean, think about other arts, like painting or dance or sculpture or theater, they have existed for thousands of years, but photography and film were only invented in the late 1800s.
Ellie: 8:54
Well, and they weren't even necessarily considered arts at first, right? Much of early film theory in particular is about making arguments for why films should count as an art form, rather than just a technique or an offshoot of one of the other arts, like a filmed version of theater, for instance.
David: 9:10
Mm. So the recency of film and its initially questionable status as an art form, have a lot to do with the fact that photography and film require for their development scientific and technological developments in fields like optics, light theory. Which is why it's no surprise that they emerge only in the late 1800s, which is when, for example, electricity and light becomes central objects of scientific inquiry. So it really is not until this period, that photography and film can exist as stable and controllable artistic media.
Ellie: 9:50
Yeah. And I think one thing that happens around that time and anytime, something that might count as an art form emerges. Is that theorists start to make cases for why something should count as an art form, as well as what distinguishes this art form from other existing ones. And so this is where aesthetics and ontology overlap, because aesthetics has to do with outlining different art forms and ontology has to do with what makes something, what it is.
David: 10:16
Yeah, and you and I both teach aesthetics, but I honestly leave out film most of the time because I, I know it's terrible, but it's because I'm so weak on the philosophy of film and you teach the philosophy of film. So you're of the two of us, you're the in-house expert on this subject. So let me ask you the following question. What are some of the main candidates that philosophers point to as markers of what makes cinema different from the other arts?
Ellie: 10:46
Yeah, so one way to define film is to describe it as the medium that transforms discontinuity, that is, snapshots on a film strip, so you have all of these individual snapshots that are static images into a continuity by stitching those together and putting them in a linear format of successive time. So film is the art form that transforms discontinuous images into a continuity.
David: 11:18
And if that's the case, it would follow that film is essentially just photography plus temporality, but temporality is arguably not unique to film, right? There are other art forms that hinge on temporality like dance, the dance movements unfold in time. Theater also is a fundamentally temporal art form. So, doesn't something like theater do essentially the same thing as film?
Ellie: 11:47
No, because theater is just continuity. So people are dynamically in the theater moving across a stage in real time. Whereas in the film you have separate snapshots that are being placed one after the other so quickly that they appear to be a continuity. And before I taught this class last time, I checked with a filmmaker friend to make sure that this is still the case with digital images now, because right we don't use actual film strips anymore. Um, but they said that this is also true today in the digital age, right? There are individual snapshots that give rise to a continuity. And in addition to that level of discontinuity to continuity, there's also the fact that films are most often shot in separate scenes on different days, sometimes in different weeks or months altogether. So film is stitched together out of heterogeneous contents in a way that other arts are not. Whereas no matter how many times you rehearse a play and even practice its scenes out of order or in a different place than the stage, the final product is a continuous performance.
David: 12:47
Okay. Yeah, point well taken there because I thought I was on board with the idea that film is different from photography, because it adds this element of temporal succession. But if it's the case that a film is just a bunch of successive, still images that are, as you just said, stitched together. Then my concern is that it, it seems like all we have is not temporality, but an illusion of temporal progression. Um, and so I'm, I'm losing here. The difference between now film and photography, because wouldn't film, just be a form of composite photography, like seeing, uh, a bunch of photographs very quickly.
Ellie: 13:30
And this would especially have been the case with early films, which of course were silent. And that's what early film theorists of course are focusing on. So in many ways, of course, photography and film are extraordinarily close. And so I just wanna follow your point for a moment, David, and, and show what's right about it before then saying how film theorists might respond and say that film actually is different from composite photography. So, both film and photography show reality and the philosopher Stanley Cavell notes that a photograph is a manufactured image of the world that shows the world as it is. So, sure, you can add a paint smudge to a photograph. You can make a collage out of it, et cetera, but those things are added to a photograph and aren't part of the photograph as a photograph. So a photograph itself is of the world. And Cavell uses the example of a photograph of a building here. And he says that you can look at this photograph and ask, I wonder, what's behind this building, or what's beyond the frame of this picture, but these questions don't make sense if you ask them of a painting. So even when a painting is of a real building, the painting has been created from a completely blank canvas, thanks to the imagination of the artist. There's not something behind the building, in a painting.
David: 14:51
Yeah, nobody's asking like what's behind the mountain in a famous building or is there a back entrance to the house, uh, painted on the prairie? Uh, because we have this understanding that it's not a real object in the real world. Sure. And so now let me see if I follow your line of reasoning here, Ellie. I hope this episode is not just Ellie and I constantly trying to hope that we understand one another, because this is complicated, uh, material.
Ellie: 15:16
Hey, that's a very Socratic method for doing ontology.
David: 15:20
Yeah. Which one of us is Socrates and which one of us is the interlocuter?
Ellie: 15:24
I'm the interlocutor in this one, for sure. No, we, we do, cause you're asking the questions right now. Go ahead.
David: 15:30
Okay. If film and photography depict a slice of the real world through these still images. And then film just puts these images in such close temporal succession that it produces the illusion of movement in the viewer. Then the paradox, or maybe the challenge seems to be that the uniqueness of film lies not in film itself, in the images that it uses, but rather in the cognitive illusion, that those images in their movement produce in a subject with a certain kind of perceptual apparatus. And so is the claim that the uniqueness of film is just its capacity to bring about this illusion in us?
Ellie: 16:16
It's funny you should say that because this is precisely what the early film theorist Jean Epstein says. So, he says that it's not the cinematograph, but rather the viewer that transforms discontinuity into continuity. So as we know, the continuity produced by static images viewed in succession is an illusion. He calls it a ghost, amazingly. There's a lot of ghostly reflections in philosophy of film. You've got the by Derrida, "Cinema's Ghost" as well, but Epstein says that it is the limits of human sight that create continuity. For instance, when humans see a row of dots that are really close together, we automatically create a line out of it. And the same happens with a film strip because the images are so close together, we create a continuity out of discontinuity when we're viewing it because our brain can't handle seeing image, image, image, image, image, image, image. It has to succession out of image.
David: 17:12
I mean, no, and that, that sounds right to me that the human nervous system performs this unifying function that creates unity out of disunity. But now I'm wondering whether that illusion of unity or of mental unification is really unique to cinema or whether it applies to all arts in general. And here, let me just focus on photography. So, obviously a photograph is not like film, even though photographs appear in early film as its building blocks. But the reason why people were fascinated by photography early on is because a photograph basically froze a moment of time for all eternity. So it allowed you to appreciate that moment in all its detail attending to every aspect of the scene. But the reason that we experienced the photograph as enriching, as opposed to like a, like a quick glance at the world with the human eye is precisely because of the limits of human sight, because our eyes don't scan the world that fast. And because they don't give us enough detail. Right? So one of the, one of the things that also fascinated people at the, at the time of photography's emergence was that you could zoom in on something and reveal detail that was inaccessible to the human eye. And so, when you look at a photograph, there is this moment of seeing beyond sight or like having access beyond the access that we normally have. And granted here, I'm talking about detail and resolution rather than continuity, but it's an illusion all the same, right, that is produced by the mind.
Ellie: 18:54
But I do think that that's different from what Epstein is talking about, because it could be very well that what he's talking about is not the only limit of the senses. It's just that he's focusing on the particular one that creates continuity out of discontinuity. So, if you think about the photograph, even if you're focusing on particular elements of it, You're scanning the same image, right? It's a single image, but when you're watching a film, you're getting bombarded with image after image. And the changes in images are giving rise to the illusion of movement, of continuity over time. And this illusion of movement actually also tracks movement in real time, at least in most films where the final product of like Clint Eastwood walking is the same pace that Clint Eastwood walked when they were filming.
David: 19:39
So, now I'm thinking about turning the argument around and rather than saying, oh, well, photography is just like film in that they are these illusions that are different from normal perception. Now I'm thinking well, in this regard of creating this illusion of continuity out of discontinuity, maybe film is not like photography. Maybe it is like, normal perception because of course, when we are awake and attending to the world, we also get discontinuous, uh, visual stimulation. So think about blinking, right? We blink all the time and yet we never notice it. So it could be that film actually resembles normal human sight, more so than not.
Ellie: 20:21
Yes. And actually that's somewhat similar to some points that Epstein makes and he relates it to Xeno's paradox of time too, which we don't have space to get into here but if you're interested in that, go back to our paradox episode from summer 2021, I think? No, fall, fall 2021.
David: 20:37
I'm so surprised that you remember when that was. That was like 20 episodes ago.
Ellie: 20:42
Well, I remember it vividly because I remember listening to the final cut of that when I was in Hawaii for a conference which was in September, 2021. Um, yeah. Anyway, whatever. So do revisit that episode if you're interested in how this might connect to Xeno's paradox of time. But I think there's another way that film resembles perception. And I'm thinking here less about perception, the way we usually think about it, which is as perception of the world around us. And more in terms of what we might call inner perception or the stream of consciousness, which actually, maybe that takes us beyond perception. Let me say where I'm going with this and whatever, I'm not gonna worry too much about whether we wanna categorize this as perception. So many films, juxtapose different shots, right? There will be different angles or even totally different images within the same scene. And this mimics the stream of consciousness because in everyday life, our attention moves in random directions, right? We have different perceptions, different thoughts, different memories and images that succeed one another. And so the early psychologist in film theorist, Hugo Munster, this episode is filled with amazing names of theorists. Um, Hugo Münsterberg points out that film can track the inner world, which is very different from other arts, such as theater, for example, where you can't jump back and forth between different perspectives or scenes.
David: 22:01
Mm. Yeah, I mean, I wonder to what extent you can jump back and forth from different perspectives in real life. So I, I do have questions about the extent to which film really resembles the stream of consciousness since that hinges on your interpretation of the stream of conscious experience and its nature. But, but, I can definitely see how the arbitrariness of montage, for example, could capture something about the fact that everyday experience kind of jumps around between different objects and the experience is only unified after the fact or through an act of the mind.
Ellie: 22:35
Yeah, like in the simple fact that in recording here, I had an image of me being in Hawaii, listening to the paradox episode, right? Like you can capture that in film in a way that you can't as instantaneously do in theater.
David: 22:45
Yes, correct. I mean, you can do that. It's called that's the nature of the flashback, right? It is the cinematic representation of the act of recall or remembrance. I mean, now I'm thinking about other cinematographic techniques that might map onto other cognitive operations. Like the close up as cinema's version of focused attention, you know, when you're just like focused on something so much that the details start amplifying. Or even slow motion, uh, which could capture those moments maybe of boredom when like time slows down or, you know, depending on the context they could display a lot of things. I'm now thinking about the movie Inception which is about dreams, but in the movie, um, what's his name?
Ellie: 23:30
Leonardo DiCaprio?
David: 23:31
No, the director I'm forgetting his name.
Ellie: 23:34
Oh, Christopher Nolan.
David: 23:35
Christopher Nolan. Thank you. So in that film, in Inception, Christopher Nolan uses slow motion to capture mental operations that happen in dreams to capture the dream itself. So, there are these scenes where the characters are moving at normal speed, but then it's the world itself that starts moving in slow motion. So, something up around them starts falling very slowly. And the idea is that through this cinematic intervention, you capture something about the mental operations of the dreaming subject, namely that in dreams like the loss of physics don't really apply.
Ellie: 24:12
And I think that helps show why so many film theorists think that film has unique capabilities that other arts don't have because you can't get that slow motion effect in other arts. One thing you hear a lot in art history is that the invention of photography threatened painting, because it had been painting's goal to achieve an exact reproduction of the world. And once photography came along and could do that perfectly better than any Trompe-l'œil painting of the Dutch golden age, we don't need painting anymore.
David: 25:03
Yeah. I mean, hence the rise of impressionism, expressionism, and various forms of modern art that reject representation itself as we discussed in our recent episode on, on kitsch. Um, you know, we're just like plugging in all more and more episodes as, as we produce more, more content of Overthink.
Ellie: 25:23
It, it just happens naturally. It's like, I realize like, oh yeah, if you wanna hear more about this, check out the other episode. I have been noticing we're doing it more and I, but it's like, it just is happening naturally. Listeners, there was not some like conscious effort to plug our episodes, anyway.
David: 25:36
In five years, it will only be an episode that just only references. Yes.
Ellie: 25:44
Okay. So, this idea that photography achieves painting's goal of realistic representation, this common story that we get in art history film, arguably takes this even a step further because it also includes that element of time that we discussed earlier. But one of the most influential philosophers of film resists this narrative that once photography came along and achieved, the dream of painting, painting had to create new dreams for itself, namely non-representational dreams or abstract ones. And this is the philosopher Stanley Cavell that I mentioned briefly earlier. He argues that photography and film were never actually competitors with painting. For him, the relation between subject and object are totally different in these media. So he argues that painting maintains the presentness of the viewer and lets the world recede. Whereas film on the other hand makes the viewer recede and makes the world present. So painting accepts the recession of the world, right? You're not seeing the actual building, you're seeing a representation of it and that is making you feel present to it and all the more so the case with modern art that's non-representational, but photography maintains its presentness by accepting our absence from the world. And so he says that movies arise out of magic by permitting us to view the world unseen. There's a deep, psychological desire Cavell thinks to not need power, to allow ourselves to be passive in the face of the world, to relinquish control. And movies allow us to do this and they end up actually seeming more natural than reality because they relieve us from our private fantasy, our sense of responsibility, right. In having that externalization of a stream of consciousness, our stream of consciousness rests for a moment.
David: 27:34
Hmm. I'm not sure how I feel about this idea that in film and partially in photography, we recede from the world and we let the world unfold unimpeded. It seems to me a little bit of the aesthetic version of the scientific notion of pure objectivity, where there is a looking without all the limits and the flaws and the finitude of a looker. So you just have the presentation of a world to nobody. And there is an essay by the American cultural critic, Susan Sontag, about film in which she makes the argument that this view of the invisible spectator in film makes sense only if you think about the spectator quite literally as a consumer. So yes, we consume film. We don't actually make it. We're not the directors, we're not the actors, we're not the editors. We don't really have much control over film. And so obviously the spectator is passive in that regard, but she says this theory of the invisible spectator that withdraws is not true if you think about the spectator as a subject of aesthetic experience, because in film, it is a logic of identification between the viewer and the scene that they're viewing, right. We identify not so much with the characters in, in a film, but with the camera itself, which is of course moving in all directions, it's giving us visual information. And so in film, from a phenomenological perspective, we actually become hyperactive. We assert ourselves by identifying with the active mobile force of film itself, which is the camera. And, and I think her argument is that in film, it's not that we see through the camera. It's that we see as the camera, we become the camera and the camera is the active agent.
Ellie: 29:32
Yeah. And there's a lot of psychoanalysis of film that addresses the way that the spectator does or does not identify with the camera, with the main characters, et cetera, et cetera. But I wanna focus on this point that you're drawing from Sontag about viewing the spectator as consumer versus as subject of experience, because what I'm hearing in that is possibly the idea that it's only when we think about the film as an object of consumption, that we start to see ourselves as passive with respect to it. And Cavell would take issue with that because his response would be that this dynamic is not at all specific to the capitalist mode of consumption that dominates contemporary film viewership, or it's that we're thinking about the viewer as a consumer, that we get this idea of the viewer as passive. For him, it's a lot more fundamentally about the nature of film itself because film and photography are mediated through the camera. And the camera can offer a snapshot of reality as it is. He argues for instance, that photography overcomes subjectivity in a way that painting never could do. Photography has an element of automatism, right? The human agent is removed from the task of reproducing reality. All they choose is what to shoot, but the contents themselves lie outside of the cinematographer's control, which is super different from painting for instance, and the viewer of the photograph or film is put in the position of seeing through the film to reality rather than seeing the photograph or film object itself. So, sure, you know, we can identify with the camera, but for him, the camera is not an active or mobile force the way it is for Sontag. Cavell argues that the camera is essentially the capturing of what is outside of it. And so we might even say that it's the ultimate passivity, right. And he thinks that this is really psychologically appealing because we like to feel like baby. And in fact, there's a film theorist, Jean-Louis Baudry, who says that the dark movie theater is the perfect space reviewing film, because we get to feel like we're back in the womb.
David: 31:35
Oh, my god, really? Okay. The, this is really interesting because Sontag also talks about the darkness of the theater itself, not in connection to the womb, but in terms of its connection to producing an ambience of the uncertain, of potentially a dangerous situation, which for her it's essential to understanding what film is. So, she has another essay entitled "The Decay of Cinema." And in this piece, which is shorter, she, she writes about the darkness of the theater and she says that in order to understand film, we need to understand of course, cinematographic techniques, which we've been talking a lot about the flashback, montage, the closeup, et cetera. But we also have to think about film's conditions of watchability. So the material conditions under which movies are watched. And historically in the first, whatever, eight decades, six, seven decades of the 20th century, that was movie theaters. And she focuses on the perverse appeal of the movie theater as a space because in a traditional movie theater, you're not only in the presence of a gigantic projected image that overpowers you and engulfs you, kind of like a womb, but you are also in the dark, right? And the dark has a lot of psychoanalytic connotations, but Sontag adds and on top of that, you are surrounded by strangers that you cannot see. And so she says that this setting of darkness, plus strangers, plus this monstrous gigantic image that is essentially consuming you just by virtue of its size, brings with it the appeal psychologically of the possibility of being kidnapped. She says only in the theater are people kidnapped. And I think what she means ultimately is that deep down, we get off on divesting ourselves of our sense of agency and security. And again, she doesn't talk about this in, in terms of regression to a state of infancy or a fetal development. She, she, actually talks about it in terms of ritual. She says that going to the theater in the first half of the 20th century, before the rise of TV, which she then says kills theater.
Ellie: 33:56
Oh god.
David: 33:57
Yeah. Going to the theater is a ritual that is in, in her words ruminative because it generates a lot of thought, but also erotic because of the darkness and the strangers and the, the being overpowered by a force bigger than you.
Ellie: 34:14
Yeah. I mean, I think some of that I think is more complexly and to my mind, sufficiently articulated by Baudry and other psychoanalytic film theorists, because I don't agree with Sontag that film gives us the sense of danger or potentially of being kidnapped. I think the whole point of film, similarly to aesthetics of the sublime is that you get to see something happening outside of you without feeling threatened by it, in your own person. Like you get to recede, right? I, I take Cavell's point there.
David: 34:47
That's not, it's not film that does it. It's the movie theater. It's film's material condition of possibility. It's the big space in dark.
Ellie: 34:55
I, I think it's both.
David: 34:56
Well, for her it's the theater.
Ellie: 34:58
Well. Yeah, but when we're talking about the theater, I also disagree that the theater is intrinsically a space where you feel in danger of being kidnapped. I think the whole point of a movie theater is to produce a sense of security and recession of the subject that allows you to view the world unseen as Cavell says.
David: 35:16
I mean, I still do think that we need to think with Sontag about the material conditions under which films are watched precisely for that reason, because how has our experience of watching films shifted now that for example, most of us watch films at home, maybe in our living room where you cannot achieve the same absolute darkness that you get in movie theaters. And in fact, Sontag says that because we now watch movies in domestic spaces rather than in the movie theater itself, with its architectural layout and all its features, we have domesticated film itself. And this domestication she says is disrespectful to cinematic ritual because you lose the ritual dimension of, of going into the dark, letting yourself be consumed by this image that is larger than life. And according to her, that is why film doesn't inspire devotion anymore. Uh, at one point she says there are no cinephiles anymore in the world and.
Ellie: 36:20
That's just just wrong. I live in LA and I'm surrounded by cinephiles
David: 36:24
Well, I don't know that. Well, she says there are a lot of movie consumers and movie watchers who often demand yet another blockbuster movie. Um, and this has a lot to do with the changes in the industry of filmmaking for her. But for instance, even the possibility that now films are released directly onto Netflix from the very beginning for her is an indicator of the loss of the character of the cinephile. Because people, even though they love movies, contemporary movie watchers are forward looking. They just want the next special effect, the next movie development, instead of being backwards, looking and respecting the originality of historical films. But of course she's being, she's being provocative with that claim. But I do think she's tracking a real change in our relationship to film as a culture.
Ellie: 37:13
Yeah. Although I, I don't think that that is true on the whole. I definitely think that there are profound transformations in the way that we perceive film that are brought about by watching films mostly at home, rather than on the big screen. But for instance, I have the Criterion app, the TCM app. And when I turn on my television, I have an entire history of film in front of me, at my disposal. And back in the day, when you could only see things on the big screen. Yeah, sure, a lot of times movie theaters would play old films, but you wouldn't be able to have a comprehensive knowledge of film the way that you can, if you have access to these apps or to watching, you know, even back in the day of like DVDs or something.
David: 37:58
Yeah, but I mean, your experience is not representative. I mean, you're literally a philosopher who teaches philosophy of film. So yes, you like a cinephile.
Ellie: 38:05
I don't, I don't know if I would say that, but I am going to accuse my students of not being cinephiles and being consumers. Next time they complain about a two and a half hour Antonioni film that I assign.
David: 38:15
No, but that's, but that's, exactly right. I mean, nowadays, a lot of people complain about long movies. A lot of people say they refuse to watch black and white films. A lot of people will not touch a silent film. And so there is this shift toward a kind of relationship to film that focuses on innovation rather than the tradition of film as a whole. And I think that's her point.
Ellie: 38:37
Yeah. I just wonder though, whether that starts from the assumption that film was always this like very high brow art that people treated in the way that the cinephiles, say in the French new wave, treated them. Film started as entertainment for the lower classes. And I don't think that Sontag would extend her argument about cinephiles to those original movie goers.
David: 39:00
Well, she does say that the difference between cinema and theater, according to some people, is that cinema is a fundamentally democratic art form whereas theater is the bourgeoisie art form because going to the theater in the 20th century became the exclusive kind of art form that marked off the higher classes from the lower classes. So, it's not that she rejects that. It's just that she rejects the notion that nowadays, given material conditions of production, of film, you get the same kind of devotion, ritual devotion to film as an art form than before. But again, you know, I'm, I'm sure we can find a lot of counter exceptions.
Ellie: 39:43
I'll leave that aside. But I will say, I think at the very least, it's a good idea to maybe start watching films in my house with no lights on and definitely leaving my phone to the side, which I can be pretty bad about.
59 - intro:outro:middle stem: 40:02
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David: 40:21
We've talked a lot about how film allows us to juxtapose different shots, one after the other, and that this can mimic the psychological structure of the stream of consciousness in a way that maybe theater, painting and photography cannot. And I really wanna highlight here that this really is a huge innovation of film. Film fundamentally is montage.
Ellie: 40:48
I'm happy you're bringing this up because this is very close to my heart. My partner is a film and television editor. Um, hi, Trevor.
David: 40:56
Hi, Trevor.
Ellie: 40:57
He listens to all of our episodes. Um, and it's through spending time with editors like him, that I've come to appreciate how fundamental the process of stitching a film together is to the creation of film itself. I think in the common imaginary, we often think about film as being about directors and actors, maybe writers, but all of those roles are also roles that you find in other art forms, such as theater. Of course, being a screenwriter is different from being a playwright, but in any case writer and writer in both of those media. And it's only in film that an editor is needed. And when we're talking about editors here, just in case, some are not familiar with the way that a film actually works. It's the editor who is stitching together the different shots, right? So we're not talking about like a copy editor. Obviously a playwright might have an editor who's like helping them with their prose, but we're actually talking about a very distinct kind of role that we only find in film. And that is the film editor.
David: 41:53
Yeah, the cut.
Ellie: 41:54
In fact, none other than Orson Wells, the very famous director and actor said that the editor is the only person who has control over a film.
David: 42:04
Yeah, that sounds right to me. And, uh, to be honest, I never really understood the power of editing until you and I embarked on this project of Overthink and we had to become editors of our own sound. And it's actually at the level of editing, of cutting things out, putting things in reorganizing that you really see the, the expression of that will to, to art in some ways, and even more so with a medium like podcast, which is purely sound, it has one level of editing. But when I have tried to do editing for something that has sound and visual components, it's an exponentially more difficult and artistically demanding task because you have to ensure the unity of the sound in relation to the, and of the image in relation to the sound. And again, that is the artistic moment.
Ellie: 42:55
Yeah, my editing of my YouTube videos is straight up bad, but I don't have time to make it better. We, we have full time jobs as philosophy professors, which, you know, makes us appreciate those who do have expertise all the more. And there's so much amazing work in film theory on the role of editing and on montage in particular, including some really interesting anecdotes from early film about how people were not used to seeing cuts, because they'd never seen moving images before and how that led to some very confusing experiences. So this is different from the La Ciotat anecdote that we started with about the train where people may or may not have been struck by the train coming towards them.
David: 43:37
Well, they were not gonna be struck. They may or may not have stampeded out.
Ellie: 43:41
I meant psychologically struck. You meant physically struck. Yes. Luckily they were not, uh, physically struck, psychologically struck probably, but we don't know
David: 43:48
Definitely, definitely.
Ellie: 43:51
But that film is just a single shot. I'm thinking here of examples of people seeing montages for the first time. And there's this great anecdote that my students always love from Béla Balázs, an early film theorist who tells a story that he heard from a friend in Moscow. His friend's cousin visited Moscow from a small farm in Siberia and saw a film for the first time while she was in Moscow. And she was totally horrified by what she saw, because she thought that the shots of different body parts say like the closeup that you mentioned earlier, David, actually showing a dismembered body because she didn't recognize that the close up of a head was not just a severed head.
David: 44:31
Yes, yes.
Ellie: 44:32
So she, yeah, she, she just couldn't register the montage as montage.
David: 44:36
Yeah. I mean, it, it is a severed head. That's why it's called a cut, right? Like, sit, like at the level of what is presented to your sensory organs. It is a portion.
Ellie: 44:45
Yeah. Again, metaphor and myth. Not the same as reality, David.
David: 44:51
Um, and, but I mean, if anything, this shows also how strongly I disagree with the realist interpretation of film that it just presents reality as it is. Uh, in fact, I think there's a lot of cutting and a lot of curating, a lot of staging.
Ellie: 45:05
You're not down with Cavell.
David: 45:07
I, I really am not. I think there's a lot more continuity between film and other art forms when it comes to staging and, uh, creation, but that's neither here nor there. I mean, I do really love this story because it captures something that is so alien to us, which is precisely the alienness of film itself. And the father of media studies, uh, Marshall McLuhan makes a similar point in his book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, which is about the rise of the printed word. And later the rise of visual media in the 20th century and how those two events fundamentally alter human perception and human experience. And he tells the story of experiments that were conducted in the 1960s by John Wilson, who was a social anthropologist from England. And what this guy, John Wilson, did is he showed a film to pre or non alphabetic tribes in Africa to see how they experienced film itself. And so he showed them a film of people doing some random behaviors, like taking out the trash. And then they asked the people who were watching the film to talk about what they just experienced. And they realized that people who didn't have the cultural background of alphabetic culture, literally having an alphabet and a writing system would actually relate to film in a fundamentally different way. And he says, "What we noticed in particular is that they talked a lot about there being animals in the film. And we didn't think that was true. We, there, there were no animals. And so it was not until the, the researchers themselves went back through the film that they themselves created, that they realized, oh, actually there were some chickens in the background that they never noticed. And so the argument is that a non alphabetic subject tends to focus on things isolated unities that make sense relative to their lived experience like chicken or tree or animal. They never, they never understood that they were supposed to unify the progression of images that they were being bombarded with as a progression or as a narrative. And more importantly, they didn't even think to consider an individual frame as a whole unity either rather they just scanned what they were seeing for details that made sense to them.
Ellie: 47:36
Whoa. That is so fascinating.
David: 47:38
Yeah. And, you know, you could already imagine how this could go in a really dark, uh, like racial anthropology direction.
Ellie: 47:45
I'm glad you said non alphabetic at some point. Cause I was like pre alphabetic. Yeesh.
David: 47:50
Yeah. Yeah. So non-alphabetic is the correct term. And the point that, uh, Marshall McLuhan makes based on this story is that what this research shows is that any picture he says is a convention. It is something that you need to learn to interpret. So something like photography and also film is a language that we get habituated into. And it is not something that is given to us as a unit or as a structure of meaning from the get go. It is not a given. And so we need to learn to read it.
Ellie: 48:25
And that also makes me think about some of the stuff that we talked about earlier in the episode on the creation of continuity from discontinuity, because it seems like some of what we're talking about as essential to film may actually be the result of a certain kind of way of seeing time as progression and of seeing maybe it has to do with the subject predicate form of a lot of languages. Maybe it has to do, like you said, with that alphabetic linking of one letter to another letter, to another letter, and then that giving rise to a word, which is a unit of meaning, which strung together with other words creates longer units of meaning. Maybe it even has to do with the sort of figure ground structure that we're used to, where there is something first in the foreground and then something in the background. Like we're not paying attention to the chickens because they don't strike us as what is most important about the scene. But as you're saying, that's a sort of culturally contingent feature that we're not used to recognizing.
David: 49:20
And one of the ways in which McLuhan makes the point is he says the non alphabetic subject looks at a picture in the same way that an alphabetic subject reads a text by literally scanning details, almost like word for word, and looking for isolated units of meaning in the structure of the whole presentation in the whole visual image. Whereas what we do, those of us who are already trained in photographic and cinematographic images is we actually have to step back from the whole image in order to unify it as a whole. So we have to take a, a kind of distancing effect, which a non alphabetic subject who is not used to these kinds of aesthetic objects wouldn't even think to do. Who thinks to step back from the world? Only those who've been taught to do it.
Ellie: 50:09
And on top of that, that the inauguration of this new form of perception through film itself is dependent on particular modes of perception, language, meaning making that were themselves already dominant in the cultures that originated film say France, for instance, and this is something that Béla Balázs focuses on in this same piece, where he writes about the Siberian girl, where he says, and is a quote "We ourselves no longer know by what intricate evolution of our consciousness we have learned our visual association of ideas," but he says, "we have learned to integrate these single disjointed pictures into a coherent scene."
David: 50:47
Yeah. And so with the rise of new technologies or new forms of art or new media, you learn new forms of unifying experience according to conventions, but we can take that step even further because McLuhan's central insight in the Gutenberg galaxy, is that things like the printed word with, uh, the printing press or the rise of electronic visual media, like television in the 20th century, these new forms actually deregulate normal human perception by over emphasizing one sensory modality over others. And so it sort of throws our subjective experience, which is supposed to be synesthetic and unified in relation to nature out of whack by essentially making us hyper visual objects. Uh, and so he has this critique of ocularity, which for him is, is the downfall, phenomenologically speaking, it's the downfall of modern humans that vision takes over and, uh, basically overpowers the other senses.
Ellie: 51:54
This is a little bit different from the really fascinating idea that the visual has come to be the focus of our perception in a way that's perhaps I don't know, unhealthy. Would we say that?
David: 52:05
Problematic. Yeah.
Ellie: 52:06
Prob, yeah, but one thing that I have noticed is even though we are definitely accustomed to perceiving film, like when I say we, I mean, those of us who've grown up watching films from an early age, watching TV, et cetera. I've never had that experience of the Siberian girl thinking that a body was dismembered. But I have been really struck recently, nonetheless, by how much quicker montages are becoming. And this is an objectively true fact, like there are now way, way, way more cuts in scenes than there used to be. This is something that Trevor has told me about, but I felt this viscerally in my most recent experience of seeing a movie, which okay, so it, the movie was Everything Everywhere, All at Once, which everybody's obsessed with. It's like everyone's favorite movie of 2022.
David: 52:53
Yes. I loved it.
Ellie: 52:54
I, okay. So
David: 52:56
Say nothing negative.
Ellie: 52:57
You and everybody else except me. No, no, I, I did not like this movie. Like I
David: 53:03
Really?
Ellie: 53:04
had a very, very strong reaction against it. There, there was a lot that I liked,
David: 53:09
You're like, nothing, nowhere, ever.
Ellie: 53:11
I dunno nothing, no, nothing, nowhere, at no time. Um, oh my god, the rock scene, come on. So,
David: 53:17
So cute.
Ellie: 53:18
Uh, okay. I like, yeah, no, well,
David: 53:23
Why did you hate it? Why did you hate it?
Ellie: 53:25
Okay. So there are .Many reasons I will say. I like the acting. There's a lot that I like about it, but what I hated about it was that I felt like the montages were so rapid that a couple of things happened. One was that I actually got nauseous so there were so many quick cuts in rapid succession that my perception was not trained to see them and I had to close my eyes at one point because I was literally feeling sick to my stomach because my senses were out of whack, seeing so many cuts all at once. So if you haven't seen the film, it takes place over the course of different time periods in a multiverse. And so there are a lot of shots back and forth often of the same character, including closeups of the same character, where she's wearing different clothes and she's in different backgrounds. And when those images are juxtaposed one against the other over and over and over again throughout the film, it produced a sense for me that this film was a series of unearned climaxes rather than something that was building emotionally over time. And so I felt like the film by virtue of its really rapid montage style of editing, as well as a total overuse of music, I thought produced this sense that you need to be emotionally heightened at all moments. And the ironic effect was that I ended up totally detaching from it and being really bored.
David: 54:46
Well, then you should be happy because you love Cavell and you think that the spectator should withdraw and recede.
Ellie: 54:51
Oh, no. I was so aware of my boredom the entire time, David. I was like fidgeting. I also fell asleep a couple times.
David: 54:58
What. I mean it's one thing to say that you didn't like, um, the speed of the cuts. It's a whole other thing to say that you fell asleep in a movie in which everybody was laugh crying the whole time. I mean, I, I did that. I laughed and I cried and I thought it was fantastic.
Ellie: 55:13
Yes, but I, I think that the re- those, those two things aren't for me separate, like my falling asleep and my boredom was related to the fact that I did not think that the style of editing was successful for me. Okay. But anyway, tell enough about my views on this. Tell me why you loved it so much.
David: 55:28
I mean, that, that takes a while. I thought it was a really interesting take with, uh, satire and with moments of gravity and levity at the same time built in from a human standpoint. And I wasn't bothered by the montage or even by the music. And I am extremely sensitive to soundtrack in films. The moment that I get the sense that I, that I'm being told by the director to be sad or to be happy, I immediately pout, and I get taken out of the film by the sound track.
Ellie: 56:00
How did you like this film? And it is so heavy handed.
David: 56:03
Because, yeah, because it's bombastic. So there is no pretense otherwise. So there was a kind of winning frankness to me about what the film was trying to do. Either way, I mean, for you, it seems like the speed of the cuts were a problem because they made you dizzy. But I think that is one of the scientifically proven side effects of time travel that the film was trying to tap into.
Ellie: 56:27
Oh, no, no. Don't tell me, it's performative. See my view, my view of those cuts is that so the, the director started off as music video directors, they're phenomenal music video directors. And I think that that's a genre that really pioneers quick cuts, but I also think that younger generations are way more used to quick cuts than we are, and often really jarring cuts. If you look at the style that is prevalent on TikTok, for instance, it's rapid succession of cuts that are very noticeable.
David: 56:52
Yeah. And so, I mean, maybe you are concerned about the TikTokification of, of cinema with these cuts, but again, the, the fact that an object like cinema can produce that dizziness or that nausea, that was the term that you used in a viewing subjects, just by virtue of the kind of visual presentation that it produces brings me back to my absolute utter disbelief in realist philosophies of film. Like the world doesn't do that to me.
Ellie: 57:23
Yeah.
David: 57:23
I don't think it's ever done that to me.
Ellie: 57:25
Yeah. Well, and arguably, what the film was doing to me could be, could be considered a distancing effect, which is that pioneering technique used by Bertolt Brecht, the playwright who thinks that a distancing effect ultimately leads to a disengagement of the subject from accepting the status quo. So maybe there is political revolutionary potential in my dislike
David: 57:46
Yeah.
Ellie: 57:46
this editing style.
David: 57:49
it's a neo Brechtian neoMarxist film that leads to audience engagement with their material reality, in your case of being upset and storming out of the movie theater, just like arguably, some people may have done, we don't really know in the mid 1890s with the showing of the Lumière film.
Ellie: 58:08
For better or for worse, I stuck it out.
David: 58:15
We hope you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Ellie: 58:23
You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice. You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod..
David: 58:34
We wanna thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, as well as our production assistant Sunny Jeong-Eimer.
Ellie: 58:40
Samuel PK Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.