Abstract
‘An increasingly popular claim amongst film-philosophers is that film is no mere handmaiden to philosophy, that it does more than simply illustrate philosophical texts: rather, film itself can also think. Film can philosophise. According to the Deleuzian version of this thesis, film has a form of mindedness all its own on account of its relationship with the world being non-representational: film-content does not reflect objects to us the viewer, rather film-content is an object for itself. Deleuze gets this idea from Bergson, who argued that cinema has the same refractive or material form (rather than reflective or representational form) as has consciousness. In this sense, film has a mind of its own. Following a short exposition of this thesis, this essay tests it out by applying it to that most philosopher-friendly of film-makers, Jean-Luc Godard. I choose this most obvious example, not only because Godard himself also tried to show that film had a refractive rather than reflective form, but also because it turns out that taking the view that his films are themselves forms of thought is far harder to establish than first appearances might lead us to believe. In fact, I will argue that we will only succeed in establishing this thesis through a radical, and perhaps vacuous, re-definition of what thought is as such.’
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Notes
- 1.
David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (University of California Press, 2006), 119: ‘What has changed, in both the most conservative registers and the most adventurous ones, is not the stylistic system of classical filmmaking but rather certain technical devices functioning within that system. The new devices very often serve the traditional purposes. And the change hasn’t been radical.’
- 2.
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1987), 228.
- 3.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, pp. 80, 39, 151.
- 4.
This analysis was written in collaboration with Kristin Thompson in Film Art: An Introduction, fourth international edition (McGraw-Hill, 1993), 437.
- 5.
Bordwell and Thompson, p. 438.
- 6.
Bordwell and Thompson, p. 439.
- 7.
Bordwell and Thompson, p. 441.
- 8.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 332.
- 9.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 54.
- 10.
Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 104.
- 11.
Frampton, p. 108: ‘Following Bordwell we might just get analyses of stylistically innovative films as simply deformed or abnormal’.
- 12.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, pp. 206, 212.
- 13.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 219. He is referring to La guerre est fini here.
- 14.
Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 129.
- 15.
See Paul Douglass, “Bergson and Cinema: Friends or Foes?,” in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 209–227: p. 216: ‘The “key-hole effect” of the very tight shot maximises awareness of this limitation, which does not disappear as the shot widens – rather, it becomes simply less occlusive, leaving us less consciously aware of our dependence upon the camera’s movement to disclose what lies out of frame. As [William] Wees says, the peculiar thing is how desensitised audiences are to film’s distortions: “The situation has become so thoroughly institutionalised that the dominant cinema, its audiences, and most critics who write about it happily accept perspectivist norms”.’ Conversely, it is now said that Imax is not good for narrative (faces are too large, cuts must be limited, there cannot be too much movement, close-ups are too grainy, and the overall effect is nauseating). But the same was said of Cinemascope at first – no doubt we’ll get over it.
- 16.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 82.
- 17.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 164. My emphasis.
- 18.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, pp. 157, 158: ‘Spatial configurations are motivated by realism (a newspaper office must contain desks, typewriters, phones) and, chiefly, by compositional necessity).’
- 19.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 328.
- 20.
Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, p. 207.
- 21.
Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 13.
- 22.
Cited in Richard Maltby, ‘“A Brief Romantic Interlude”: Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds of the Classical Hollywood Cinema’, in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 434–459: p. 434.
- 23.
Christian Metz, “Trucage and the Film,” Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): 657–675: p. 665.
- 24.
William Merrin, “Did You Ever Eat Tasty Wheat?: Baudrillard and The Matrix,” Scope: Online Journal of Film Studies, June 2003, http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/articles/did-you-ever-eat.htm
- 25.
Despite claims (see Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 65, 266) for a restricted scope for his theory, he applies it most often to ‘film’ as such.
- 26.
For further discussion of this other image, see my Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009).
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Mullarkey, J. (2012). From Reflection to Refraction: On Bordwell’s Cinema and the Viewing Event. In: Halsall, F., Jansen, J., Murphy, S. (eds) Critical Communities and Aesthetic Practices. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 64. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1509-7_6
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