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On Film

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Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us

Abstract

This is the new Gesamtkunst and the most powerful shaper of disposition. It contests Aristotle’s contention that spectacle is the most dispensable aspect of drama. As the concluding art form, it invites comparison with the media of the other arts. This chapter explores the possibilities of presentation afforded by the peculiar characteristics of the medium. It presents a brief history of film. The chapter ends with an analysis of Babette’s Feast

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In 1911 the poet Riciotto Canude introduced the term. Jean Mitry , The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema . C. King trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) 1 (henceforth APC). Mitry has been called “the Aristotle of film.” As my footnotes will reveal, I owe much to this wide-ranging, magnificently well-informed book . See the comprehensive sketch of his work by Brian Lewis in Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, P. Livingston and C. Plantinga, eds. (London: Routledge, Kovács 2009), 397–407 (henceforth RCPF).

  2. 2.

    The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 14 (henceforth WV). It was the study of Cavell’s book that touched off these reflections by affording many suggestive lines of exploration.

  3. 3.

    Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures,” (henceforth SM), Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, George Dickie and Richard Sclafani, eds. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1977), 352 (henceforth ACA).

  4. 4.

    Cavell, WV, 8. Panofsky, SM (363) made the comparison earlier (1934).

  5. 5.

    See Paul Weiss , Cinematics, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975, for a treatment of each of these contributions.

  6. 6.

    See Cavell, WV, 165.

  7. 7.

    Alexander Sesonske, “Aesthetics of Film, or a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Movies” (henceforth AF), in ACA, 586.

  8. 8.

    Aristotle, Metaphysics , IX, 7, 1049a–1049b. For a comprehensive treatment of the overall conceptual system and the place of aesthetics in it for each of the major thinkers treated here, see my Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999).

  9. 9.

    Aristotle, Poetics, J. Barnes ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1450a, 12; 1450b, 28.

  10. 10.

    Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Green Bay, WI: Aquinas Institute, 2012), I–II, 57, 3, ad 3. In spite of his novel assimilation of an Aristotelian view of the essentially embodied human subject, he still found the plastic arts lower than the verbal arts because of their greater implication in the body.

  11. 11.

    See Noel Carroll , “Towards an Ontology of the Moving Image ,” Philosophy and Film, ed. C. Freeland and T. Wartenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995), 71. The concocters of virtual reality are working to remedy that by linking the visual with the tactual.

  12. 12.

    Dewey , Art as Experience (New York: Capricorn, 1934), 162ff, 106–19, 139. This is a central theme in Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. E. Casey et al. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 15, 24 ff, and in Heidegger .

  13. 13.

    APC, 284a.

  14. 14.

    APC, 285–6.

  15. 15.

    APC, 175b.

  16. 16.

    APC, 326b.

  17. 17.

    APC, 67b.

  18. 18.

    APC, 311b.

  19. 19.

    Sergei Eisenstein was not only the most accomplished of film directors , he was one of the best theoreticians of the film. See a collection of his works in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, Jay Leyda trans. (New York: Hartcourt 1949).

  20. 20.

    APC, 297b.

  21. 21.

    APC, 329b.

  22. 22.

    It was cut from an astonishing 10 h to a still whopping 4!

  23. 23.

    APC, 362b.

  24. 24.

    APC, 251b. See below.

  25. 25.

    See Heidegger , OWA, PLT, 48–9.

  26. 26.

    Cf. Paul Weiss , Nine Basic Arts, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961, 67–84. See also my “Architecture: The Confluence of Technology, Art, Politics, and Nature,” Philosophy of Technology, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1996. It is reprinted in the volume you are reading.

  27. 27.

    Cavell, WV, 23.

  28. 28.

    APC, 100a. Maurice Merleau-Ponty reported the same kind of exercise. “The Film and the New Psychology,” Sense and Non-Sense, H. and P. Dreyfus trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 54.

  29. 29.

    See above.

  30. 30.

    See Suzanne Langer , Feeling and Form, (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 69–103.

  31. 31.

    There are apparently no films showing the pictures that Mussorgsky describes musically in his Pictures at an Exhibition.

  32. 32.

    Cavell, WV, 25; Sesonske, AF, 588.

  33. 33.

    Sergei Eisenstein , “The Cinema as an Outgrowth of Theater: Through Theater to Cinema,” in ACA, 345–50.

  34. 34.

    Alexander Sesonske, “The World Viewed” in The Georgia Review, 1974, 564 (henceforth TWV).

  35. 35.

    Sesonske, AF, 588.

  36. 36.

    Panovsky, SM, 354.

  37. 37.

    APC, 39aff.

  38. 38.

    APC, 169ff.

  39. 39.

    APC, 161b.

  40. 40.

    APC, 170b.

  41. 41.

    On the notion of retention, see Edmund Husserl , Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, J. Churchill trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 50–97.

  42. 42.

    Panovsky, SM, 365.

  43. 43.

    APC, 208a–10b.

  44. 44.

    Of course this only refers to visual representation. What we are producing in this text is not amenable to visual representation.

  45. 45.

    Roman Ingarden , The Literary Work of Art, G. Grabowicz trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 246–87, 331–56 (henceforth LWA).

  46. 46.

    APC, 80b.

  47. 47.

    APC, 86b. As an epigram to “In vino veritas,” in Stages on Life’s Way, Søren Kierkegaard cites Lichtenberg: “Such works are mirrors. When an ape gawks in, no Apostle gazes out.” W. Lowrie trans. (New York: Schocken Books,1967), 26.

  48. 48.

    Panovsky, SM, 360.

  49. 49.

    Carroll, 76.

  50. 50.

    Like Aristotle, Sesonske claims that a play can be “fully experienced and understood” merely by reading (AF, 586). Such a claim turns upon what “experienced” and “understood” mean. It obviously fails with regard to experience . And there is an “understanding” involved in completed presence that is not there in the absence involved in reading. Of course, film also is a mode of presence in absence since the viewer and the actors are absent from one another.

  51. 51.

    Sesonske, AF, 586.

  52. 52.

    Sesonske, TWV 567. It was somewhat of a surprise that a contemporary silent film, The Artist (2011), took five Academy Awards, including one for Jean Dujardin as best actor.

  53. 53.

    Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time. K. Blair trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 42, 81. (henceforth SIT).

  54. 54.

    SIT, 96.

  55. 55.

    SIT, 18, 20–1, 118.

  56. 56.

    SIT, 228.

  57. 57.

    Tarkovsky, the direct opposite of Eisenstein whose aim was visceral stimulation of support for the Revolution, worked out of the Russian religious tradition. One of his major works dealt with the painter-monk Adrey Rublio. SIT, 23. For a comprehensive look at Tarkovsky’s work, see András Bálint Kovács, “Andrei Tarkovsky,” ACPF, 581–90.

  58. 58.

    See Cavell, WV, 40. Cavell compares the viewer with Plato’s Gyges in the Republic, II, 358.

  59. 59.

    Sesonske, AF, 587.

  60. 60.

    Except maybe plastic which has accumulated in the area the size of Texas around Midway Island….

  61. 61.

    Sesonske, TWV, 568.

  62. 62.

    Sesonske, TWV, 567–69.

  63. 63.

    APC, 26a.

  64. 64.

    Aristotle, Politics, VIII, 5, 1340a, 1ff.

  65. 65.

    For an in-depth treatment of music and the film, see APC, 230–74.

  66. 66.

    Tarkovsky, 113.

  67. 67.

    Tarkovsky, 121.

  68. 68.

    Roman Ingarden , Ontology of the Work of Art, R. Meyer and J. Goldthwait trans. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989), 332–9. Tarkovsky, on the other hand, sees music and film as conflicting. T, 159.

  69. 69.

    APC, 105a ff.

  70. 70.

    APC, 263b–264b.

  71. 71.

    APC, 205–6.

  72. 72.

    APC, 379b.

  73. 73.

    Babette’s Feast (New York: Vintage, 1988). Isak Dineson was the penname of Karen Blixen, The novel was originally published in The Ladies’ Home Journal.

  74. 74.

    The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 163 (henceforth HS). This remarkable book had its original presentation through the invitation extended to Professor Kass by the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas as a week-long McDermott lecturer. We were skeptical when Kass responded to the invitation that he would address the philosophy of eating. Neither Paul Weiss who wrote on virtually everything nor John Dewey who paid particular attention to the lives of ordinary citizens had produced anything that approaches the wisdom about eating found in this surprising book.

  75. 75.

    HS, 183–9.

  76. 76.

    HS, 184. Quotations are from Isak Dineson’s text as cited in Kass’s book .

  77. 77.

    HS, 187.

  78. 78.

    HS, 189.

  79. 79.

    HS, 191.

  80. 80.

    There is a problem here. The cost at the Parisian café included the salaries of the chef, the waiters, and the waitresses, as well as profit for the owners. Babette as chef and a young man as waiter received no salary, nor was there an owner who extracted his profit. So the Jutland feast probably cost something like half the Café Anglais price.

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    Robert E. Wood

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Wood, R.E. (2017). On Film. In: Nature, Artforms, and the World Around Us. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57090-7_9

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