Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image

300 Pages·2009·4.854 MB·English

by  John Mullarkey (auth.)

Refractions of Reality
Refractions of Reality
Philosophy and the
Moving Image
John Mullarkey
University of Dundee
© John Mullarkey 2009
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-00247-0
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First published 2009 by
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mullarkey, John.
Refractions of reality : philosophy and the moving image / John
Mullarkey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Motion pictures – Philosophy. I. Title.
PN1995.M73 2009
791.4301—dc22 2008035183
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
Preface: The Film-envy of Philosophy ix
Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? ix
Philosophical cinema or cinematic philosophy? xi
Convergence on the film process: theélan cinématique xiv
Philosophy’s perpetual identity crisis xvi
Introduction: Nobody Knows Anything! 1
Oh, they both make such good arguments! 1
The circular logic of paradigms and examples 3
Between theory and post-theory 6
Continental or analytic? Once more unto the breach 8
Rapprochement or impasse? Film as relational process 10
Towards a non-philosophical cinema 11
Nobody knows everything: knowing, being and process 13
1 Illustrating Manuscripts 15
Themeta-en-scène 15
The advent of high-concept cinema: ‘once upon a premise ...’ 18
Extreme pretexts 20
Philosophies through films 22
Gone to the movies 24
Conclusion 26
2 Bordwell and Other Cogitators 29
Introduction: going back to the future 29
Classical and art-house: hurray for Hollywood 33
Messages are for Western Union 35
Science, empiricism, culture 40
Closely observed frames 42
From reflection to refraction 46
Play time 48
Moving the continuum 52
The representationalist axiom of analytic film-philosophy 55
3 Žižek and the Cinema of Perversion 58
Good theorist, bad theorist: Bordwell contra Žižek 58
Freudianism for beginners 61
The return of the Real 64
v
vi Contents
The film gaze 67
Representationalism again: Žižek and the pre-cogs 68
Traversing the fantasy or transcending the Real? 70
The return of the Real to reality 71
Films, time and time again 74
Conclusion 75
4 Deleuze’s Kinematic Philosophy 78
Deleuze’s ambivalence:philosophiasivecinema? 78
Cinema’s concepts 80
A non-reductive materialism 84
From movement to time: images and signs 87
Time regained 92
Is cinema Bergsonian? 97
Movement-image and time-image:when is a cut irrational? 100
Films and their makers: from the automatic art to the
autonomy of art 104
Amongst the Deleuzians: a thousand tiny examples 107
5 Cavell, Badiou and Other Ontologists 110
Cavell and the ontology of ordinary film 110
The philosophical ordinary 111
Reflections on the ontology of film 114
Automatism of the medium 117
Contra Deleuze? 118
Modernism 120
Reflexivity: film’s other minds 121
Other Cavellians 123
More ontologies: Frampton’s affective thinking 126
Badiou’s inessential cinema 129
6 Extended Cognitions and the Speeds of Cinema 133
Anderson’s elusive reality 133
Branigan’s radial camera 136
When is a film? The cinematic event 140
Nothing happening: events in the blink of an eye 145
Bringing us up and down to speed 150
7 Fabulation, Process and Event 156
Jacques Rancière’sFilm Fables 156
Thoughts taken out of context 163
Making movies and art with time 169
Fabulating the film event 173
Paradoxical feelings: moved by movements 180
Contents vii
8 Refractions of Reality, or, What is Thinking Anyway? 188
Outline of an outline 188
Affective embodiment 191
New mediations 193
Differential spectatorship 197
Sound and false fidelity 198
Acting realism 199
Animal cinema 201
A non-philosophy of cinema 204
What is thinking (again)? 208
Conclusion: Code Unknown – A Bastard Theory for
a Bastard Art 214
In praise of being unphilosophical 214
Filmology: from unknowing to pluriknowing 215
Beyond coprology 217
Notes 219
Bibliography 261
Index 273
Acknowledgements
This book is the fruition of two lives that have coexisted over the last seven
years, one actual and philosophical, the other virtual and cinematic. Its
philosophical gestation owes a vote of thanks to many, but especially to
my colleagues at the University of Dundee (Beth Lord in particular). Its cin-
ematic life was born when I had the privilege to be taught by my colleagues
in film theory at the University of Sunderland, either when taking their
classes or teaching alongside them: they include Susan Smith, Trish Winter,
Sue Thornham, Deborah Thomas and Steve Cannon. I also want to acknowl-
edge the film philosophers and theorists who have helped this book see
the light of day: Andrew Benjamin, Paul Douglass, Daniel Frampton, Mark
Bould, Mark Richardson, Nicole Hewitt, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Stephen
Zepke, Miriam Baldwin, Suzanne Guerlac, Will Large, Anna Powell, David
Deamer, David Martin-Jones as well as everyone at film-philosophy.com.
Without the advice of Elie During and Barbara Muriel Kennedy, this would
have been far lesser work. It is especially Edward Branigan’s sage counsel
that has had the largest impact, however, and as such I am truly grateful to
him. In addition, I would like to thank those at Palgrave Macmillan who
have helped this project along – Dan Bunyard and Priyanka Pathak, in par-
ticular, deserve my appreciation. The copy-editing and proofreading skills
of Keith Povey and Nick Fox have improved the book greatly. Finally, any
sophistication this text has when discussing anything contemporary in the
arts is due to long conversations with Laura Cull, to whom I am always
indebted, both for her tolerance and scholarship.
Earlier versions of some of the material from the Introduction, Chapter
4 and Chapter 7 appeared, respectively, in Mullarkey 2008a, 2008b, 2007a.
I gratefully acknowledge permission to use this material. This project was
supported by a research leave grant from the Arts and Humanities Research
Council.
viii
Preface: The Film-envy of
Philosophy
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.1
Who wants to be a philosopher anyway?
In the introduction to his own work on film and philosophy, Reel Arguments,
Andrew Light makes an interesting confession: there have been times in his
career when he wished he was a film-maker rather than a philosopher.2 Let
me also come out of this same closet with an even stronger declaration – I
have always believed that it would be much more rewarding to make films
than practise philosophy. Indeed, I have written philosophy books mostly
in order to compensate for the fact that nobody would let me make films
(I won’t bore you with the details). Yet, my retreat to philosophy was not on
account of some vague likeness with cinematic storytelling, but because both
film and philosophy share a relation with something far grander: reality
itself. On the one hand, film, like philosophy, has its double in reality: both
can (though don’t always) give us powerful depictions of reality, the one
primarily through the use of words, the other principally through the vis-
ual medium. On the other hand, writing philosophy, especially philosophy
with leanings towards metaphysics, is a bit like being a film director. Before
the blank screen of the word processor, one has the power to create a reality
of one’s own, designating what goes where, which piece of information is
relevant and which irrelevant, what will count as truth and what as mere
appearance. Both practices involve god-like constructions, ones where a
reality is constructed through artistic means; others where a world, though
perhaps no less fictional, is constructed through thought. The obvious diffe-
rence between these two activities, of course, is that, these days at least, few
people are interested in the realities that philosophers create, whilst seem-
ingly everyone is interested in those displayed through film.
It is a commonplace to say that each century has had its distinguishing
art form, that it was poetry in the eighteenth century, the novel in the nine-
teenth and cinema in the twentieth. This poses the question as to which
art form will be the one for our twenty-first century, and whether or not it
will remain cinema, or at least some form of cinema. Before exploring this
question, it is worth noting that the French philosopher Alain Badiou has
typified both the art and philosophy of the twentieth century as propound-
ing a ‘passion for the Real’.3 Certainly, what Allan Kaprow has described
ix
x Preface
as twentieth-century art’s ‘fevered search for essences’ (modernism’s ‘pure’
forms of literature, sculpture and painting) evinced a passion that stands
out as peculiarly philosophical for its era. Surely, however, it has always been
philosophy’s passion to have the power to capture reality in its thought: with
a few (disingenuous) exceptions, its pleasure principle has constantly been
reality and nothing less – even if only to say, from on-high, that we can-
not know reality at all.4 And in this ongoing obsession, philosophy found a
strange rival in the one art form that, from the twentieth century onwards,
struck it as singularly capable of such a power – film.
From such early theorists as André Bazin, who argued in the 1940s that
cinema is the art of reality that captures ‘the object itself ... freed from the
conditions of time and space that govern it’, through to Siegfried Kracauer
in the 1960s, who thought that film could redeem our impoverished per-
ception of physical reality, or Gene Youngblood in 1970, who saw in cin-
ema the possibility of an ‘expanded consciousness’ that would save our
beleaguered world, right up to contemporary philosophers like Stanley
Cavell, Jean-Luc Nancy and Colin McGinn, who recognize in the movies
an ‘indisputable’ power over our understanding of reality, a ‘ubiquitous’
power to ‘take in everything’ – there have always been thinkers whose
overtures to film have been avowedly metaphysical.5 And now, moreover,
this passion is being regenerated in the plethora of books and courses cur-
rently appearing on film and philosophy (many of which use cinema as a
new means of teaching the oldest discipline). In the last hundred years or
so, evidently, philosophy’s perennial passion for the real has transformed
into a film-envy in many quarters.
And yet this envy, as is often the case with such emotions, is not unam-
bivalent. If we ‘armchair’ philosophers are compelled to consume films
from the cinema seat rather than create them from the director’s chair, then
we can at least cast aspersions on the mode in which film captures reality.
When Colin McGinn, for instance, investigates film’s ability to create worlds
that engage our mind ‘so naturally, so smoothly, and overwhelmingly’ – a
power he dubs the ‘mind–movie problem’ by analogy with the ‘mind–body
problem’ in philosophy – he still believes that it remains philosophy’s pre-
serve to articulate this problem:6
Movies have never been, with rare exceptions, a highbrow medium. They
rejoice in the visceral, the gaudy, and the vulgar ... There is nothing better
after a hard day of philosophical thinking and writing than a ‘mind-
less’ movie; I can almost feel my brain shifting its chemical balance, the
neurons rearranging themselves.7
Films, for McGinn, cannot comprehend their own profound power, for they
are primarily a medium for ‘sensation and feeling’ rather than ‘abstract
thought’.8 What the philosopher giveth with one hand ...