The Idealism of Contemporary Film Theory Panel

Transformations, 2024

For the film theorists of the 1970s, phenomenology was pejoratively classified as a form of “idealism” which failed to recognise that “natural perception” is codified and structurally determined by ideological forces. This article proposes that, for this very reason, in returning phenomenology to film theoretical discourse, Vivian Sobchack presented Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s existential phenomenology as commensurate with materialism. Exploring both Sobchack and Merleau-Ponty’s respective conceptualizations of cinematic meaning or sense, I point to a subtle discrepancy between Sobchack’s theory of embodied film spectatorship and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on film and the arts, the latter of which do not identity the body as the source of artistic meaning. Through a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “sensible ideas” and a sequence from Kira Muratova’s Long Farewells (1971), I argue that there is an ideal component to Merleau-Ponty’s writings on cinema and the arts that locates the genesis of meaning, not in the body, but in an incorporeal elsewhere. This reconceptualization of the relation between sense and the sensible allows for a renewed appreciation of the place of idealism in film theory.

Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media (eds: Tim Markham, Scott Rodgers)

This chapter discusses the cinematic mediation of subjectivity through objects and materiality in documentary film. Chateau (2011) considers the mediation of subjectivity through film as a transposition of a character’s subjectivity into behaviour within, and interaction with, his/her environment, and this exteriorisation applies to the knowledge and affect to objects we observe or to which we react. Although applied to fiction film, Chateau’s phenomenological perspective is also applicable to non-fiction film, especially in light of the interdisciplinary “material-culture turn” (Hicks, 2010) in the humanities, where the focus for mapping subjectivity and socio-cultural identity falls onto human practices in relation to their physical space and objects. Consequently, my documentary practice focuses on objects (including space) as the embodied subjectivity of screen characters. Baudrillard (1968) argues that an object ceases to be a mere utensil when it is “abstracted from its function and thus brought into relationship with the subject”. By doing this, the subject invests emotions and feelings into that object, and only such objects together make up the system through which the subject constructs a world, a private totality. However, Miller (2010) points out that objects in general are peripheral and “blindingly” obvious, and the more invisible these objects appear to the human subject, the more powerful and determinant they are as manifestations of our subjectivity. Thus, as a filmmaker, the task of identifying these objects involves a certain estrangement towards the space of my characters. This can be elicited through Husserl’s epoché, which Gallagher (2008) summarises as the suspension and neutralisation of a certain dogmatic attitude towards reality, focussing on how it makes its appearance to a human being in experience. Miller (2010) makes two crucial interventions that are particularly conducive for achieving this epoché in documentary practice. Firstly, by dismissing the semiotic duality of subject/object and interior/exterior, Miller claims that objects make us, as part of the same process by which we make them. He calls this dialectical process “objectification”. My films explore this “objectification” by representing objects and spaces as embodiments of the characters and vice-versa, treating objects as subjects and subjects as objects. Secondly, Miller believes that objects are not intrinsically good or bad, but contradictory. Everything we produce has a tendency to autonomous interest and the potential to oppress, rather than serve. Therefore, my films represent objects and spaces as contradictory and multi-layered entities, resembling the character of a human being. Nevertheless, the question of how the subjectivity of the pro-filmic event is mediated through film language still remains. Chateau (2011) emphasises the objective textuality of the film form and its interplay with the spectator, concluding that the mediation of subjectivity requires its objectivation through a concrete set of decodable film signs – a film literacy. Several film scholars and practitioners have propagated the significance of audience reception theories in relation to the audio-visual literacy of film rhetoric (Breitrose 2002, Eitzen 1995, Gallese and Guerra 2012, Persson 2003). This paper proposes a cognitive-phenomenological approach to the conceptualisation of this rhetoric in practice. This cross-disciplinary method has two particular benefits with regards to my own practice: Firstly, since the research and development of my films is informed by a phenomenological premise (subjectivity through embodied space), an additional cognitive perspective can potentially achieve Chateau’s objectivation of that subjectivity and place subjective experience into a rhetorical framework. As Marbach (1993) proposes, phenomenological descriptions should be subsequently linked to formalized and intersubjectively shareable meanings. Secondly, a cognitive-phenomenological approach can potentially bypass semiotic notions of iconicity and indexicality that are frequently attributed to the documentary image or documentary genre (Plantinga 1997, Sobchack 1991), allowing access to a plethora of literature from fiction film studies, where phenomenology and cognitivism have had a more fertile breeding ground. In conclusion, this paper is using my documentary practice as a case study to encourage a cross-disciplinary discourse between theory and practice, and between phenomenological and cognitive theory. This endeavor goes beyond a mere dialectical exercise since its main objective is to explore the conditions of mediation in non-fiction film, and how the resulting insights can be utilized by scholars, as well as practitioners.

Gramma. Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2012

The present text investigates the dialectics of reality and materiality in cinema theory and practice. It attempts an epistemological and meta-semiotic approach. Based on Louis Hjelmslev's model of sign-function, it reformulates both the haunting of cinema by reality and the avant-gardes' focus on materiality as problematising the relation of cinematic semiosis to the exo-semiotic realm. It starts by laying down the philosophical background of the issues investigated. It then explores the epistemological and ethico-political parameters of the debate over aesthetic realism. Finally, it discusses avant-garde cinema's techniques of drawing attention to the expression-plane, attempting their provisional systematisation. It suggests that avant-garde interest in materiality constitutes a stance against the ideology of realism, proposing an alternative relation to reality.

Transformations, 2024

The tendency of film-philosophy to dissolve the boundary between subject and object, materiality and ideality of the sensible and the intelligible, repeats the moment in German Idealism when these boundaries were collapsed in thinking of the Absolute as the real of thinking itself -- an incomprehension posited within it -- invoking "transcendental materialism, as, in large part, an account of the emergence of self-determining, auto-reflexive transcendental subjectivity out of asubjective substance" (Johnston 18). The real of this incomprehension was initially proposed by J. G. Fichte in his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre as an alien element lodged within the closed loop of self-identity (I = I), which, in his 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, becomes the generative principle of oneness mediated by pure light, the incomprehension of which is resolved in principle while remaining in fact as unresolved openness of an I-We realizing itself in communal life. By acknowledging the source of generative difference in the self-constitution of the I-We as Grundreflex – an originary reflex action – we open the apperceiving eye in its potential for creative freedom in engagement with films, which, when taking into account the memorizing of organic machines through which light must pass, becomes mechanical creativity. In practical terms, the genetic principle of pure light must be accounted for from within the cinematic system operating through technical memory materializing the ideations of films in non-cinematic life as the moral imperative of a “should” (Soll). Employing Bernard Stiegler’s ciné- mnemotechnical thinking of organic machines, I apply Fichtean insights to one film: Antonioni’s L’Eclisse grasped in real thinking as a matrix of superpositional relations spreading through the cinematic system in which the film’s memory structure is enmeshed, generating entwinements of local and non-local interactions unfolding in the gap between ideation and materialization through quantum doubling. My aim in invoking the German Idealist moment is to demonstrate that philosophical problems underlying many of the issues facing scholarship in current film-philosophy find their roots within its complex structure. Through careful explication, Idealist concepts and analytical strategies can be applied in contemporary contexts to gain a stronger grasp of the idealist imperative underlying any attempt to undertake a materialist philosophy of film.

With this paper, I want to share with you my thinking on what I have considered the basis of this conference: the real of reality and what is disclosed about it through inquiry into the nature of film, a technically conditioned, audiovisual being of the reproduction of reality. What exactly is this real of reality in technical reproduction? Throughout, I will argue that insight on the nature of filmic reproduction is to be sought in the area of the 'being' of reality, which seems to be reproducible by film. What comes up in this specific reflection on the ontological nature of the photographic image in movement, or, better, the being of the object it depicts, is the following: to be reproducible is a quality of the being of objects that exist in reality. It is this being, which becomes reproducible in film, a pure being, out of time and space that transports the real of reality. The connection between the photograph and the depicted object is thereby based on André Bazin's approach, describing the photographic image as a " transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction. " 1 In this talk I propose to inquire into the being of the reproduced objects in film and in the world and, furthermore, building on Heidegger and his complex conception of the " presence of what is present, " to finally delineate the term " real of reality. "