Thoughts on Images : A Philosophical Evaluation 9786068266237, 9786068266220

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THOUGHTS ON IMAGES

Jarmo Valkola

THOUGHTS ON IMAGES

A philosophical evaluation

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¤ Zeta Books, Bucharest

www.zetabooks.com © 2012 Zeta Books for the present edition Language and text editor: Juulia Valkola Dedicated to my mother, family, and friends. This is a referee publication. Special thanks to professors Beáta Thomka, Paul Majkut and Kristian Feigelson. ISBN: 978–606–8266–22–0 (paperback) ISBN: 978–606–8266–23–7 (ebook)

CONTENTS Introduction by Paul Majkut . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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1 Epistemic metaphors . . . Meaning and Essence . . . Simulations . . . . . . . . Perspectives . . . . . . . . Gestalt . . . . . . . . . . Perception . . . . . . . . . Divided Attentions . . . . Hypotheses . . . . . . . . Models . . . . . . . . . . Schemes . . . . . . . . . . Variations of Process. . . . Thoughts . . . . . . . . . Metaphors of Imagination. Representation . . . . . . Intentions . . . . . . . . . Connections. . . . . . . . Levels of Knowledge. . . . Active Processes . . . . . .

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2 Pictorial Formations. . . Attending Problems . . . Mental . . . . . . . . . Pictorial Glances . . . . Mediated Transmissions . Imagination . . . . . . . Metamorphoses . . . . . Composing . . . . . . . Shapes and Patterns . . . Approaches . . . . . . .

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128 128 136 140 148 155 158 162 167 173

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6 Channels . . . . . Interpretation . . . Images of Creation Stages . . . . . . . Symbols . . . . . . Observation . . . . Compositions . . . Flow. . . . . . . .

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3 Existential Affections . . Ambiguous Architecture. Processes . . . . . . . . Digital. . . . . . . . . . Motion . . . . . . . . . Experience. . . . . . . . Fusion of Horizons . . .

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4 Cinematic Metaphysics . . . . Deduced Viewpoints . . . . . Cutting . . . . . . . . . . . . Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . Contemplation . . . . . . . . Impressions and Memories . . Image and Enunciation . . . . Dialectics . . . . . . . . . . . Visual Spectacle . . . . . . . . Construction . . . . . . . . . Visual Fragmentations. . . . . Phenomenological Meditation Orchestrations. . . . . . . . .

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5 Concluding Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 354 Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 363

INTRODUCTION by Paul Majkut

The ideas discussed in Prof. Valkola’s comprehensive survey of contemporary image theory, his intricately serried arguments, and a concluding puzzlement that yields analytic understanding to surprise leave us with more questions than answers, and this squarely is the importance of his efforts: He passes his own curiosity on to his reader. The intellectual density of Thoughts on Images: A Cognitive and Phenomenological Perspective and its penetrating investigation into the quiddity of the image approached from a phenomenological point-of-view that, in practice if not theory, inevitably equate the experience of an image with the image per se, at times lending weight to subjectivity and calling attention away from the objective image. Prof. Valkola begins with the intuition—which I consider an assumption—that “Phenomenology offers a means to examine the distinct materials of different media in terms of how each affects the viewer’s experience of it, and its impact on the lived body of the viewer.” Surely, Prof. Valkola is not alone among contemporary phenomenologists in his tendency to subjectivize experience, but the intensity with which he pursues his investigation, the phenomenological rigor that he applies to his analyses of the experience of the eidetic image—which, in the end, is not an image at all1—suggests to us that he would be more comfortable talking about sight itself, which serves as the physiological sine qua non of the perceptional experience of the images he discusses. 1

As Spinoza commented, “The concept of the dog doesn’t bark.”

PAUL MAJKUT

8 Prof. Valkola rightly accepts that:

Human phenomenology is neither completely subjective nor entirely objective, because we do not arbitrarily, as pure subjects, inject meaning into the life-world we experience. Neither does reality impose any particular meaning on the act of consciousness or the subject.

If the relationship of seer and seen (sight as such) is the ground of imagistic experience, then we are confronted with fundamental neurological question about visuality that must answered: Is seeing a continuous or discrete physiological act? Upon the answer to this question will rest our understanding of the image. In this, Valkola surveys and employs Gestalt theory judiciously, most notably in his treatment for cinematic foreground and background, depth and shallowness of focus. In this, Arnheim’s psychologism also plays a role in the story Valkola tells. Undue attention on noetic aspects of an image (perception, visuality), that is, image as experience, leaves the noematic image, image as object, sadly unattended. This is a crucial consideration when the image under consideration is a moving image, when critical observation requires us to question the nature of vision, to question whether we see a moving object—any moving object of sight, including images—as in continuous motion or whether we see it as a compilation of discrete images, whether we are able to perceive it as discrete or not. In the perceptual relationship with a moving object, the entity is present in continuous, unbroken stream of consciousness of inner experience (erlebnis), but perception is here is of human necessity myopic, as Rufin VanRullen and Christof Koch astutely point out: How does conscious perception evolve following stimulus presentation? The idea that perception relies on discrete processing epochs has been often considered, but never widely accepted. The alternative, a continuous translation of the external world into explicit perception, although more intuitive and subjec-

Introduction

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tively appealing, cannot satisfactorily account for a large body of psychophysical data. Cortical and thalamocortical oscillations in different frequency bands could provide a neuronal basis for such discrete processes, but are rarely analyzed in this context.2

Clearly, the question of sight and seeing a moving image is complicated in the case of analogue film that is composed of discrete, still frames that, when projected, are rhythmically tempo-experienced within time—how fast (allegro) or slow (andante) time is subjectively experienced and how the visual speed is changed—and perceived as continuous because projection speed surpasses the limitations of human perception.3 Here, a phenomenology of visual rhythm is called for in further studies. It is simply not enough, when discussing the nature of the image, still or moving, to ignore its noematic status, especially when there is such a striking parallel between the structure of the image as discrete and the structure of vision as discrete. As Prof. Valkola says: Meaning of an image may change over time, and, in this sense, cinema provides an alternative approach to history and memory. Traces of the past are shared image-memories, and through phenomenology we can think that our vision is the most noble of senses. A vision can work as a metadiscourse of historical representation. With regard to the context of experimental video or film, 2

Rufin VanRullen and Christof Koch, “Is perception discrete or continuous?” Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.7 No.5 May 2003, 207. VanRullen and Koch state their concern clearly: “Do we experience the world as a continuous signal or as a discrete sequence of events, like the snapshots of a Multimedia Component camera? Although the subjectively seamless nature of our experience would suggest that the relevant underlying neuronal representations evolve continuously, this is not the only possibility. Conscious perception might well be constant within a snapshot of variable duration.” 3 which is not to say that digital film is not also discrete, but that is a separate discussion because each medium demands its own technological distortions

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it is apparent that some of the most prominent current technological developments in digital media re-driven by a desire to produce a time-based auditory and visual capacity which is more or less continuous with the forms and language developed from the history of cinema. Another point is that there is a growing theoretical debate on the ways in which non-linearity, programmability and interactivity relate to the assumptions of both narrative and experimental cinema. (LeGrice, 282-283). Time, temporal rhythm, and history are themselves problematic, to state the obvious. In the current study, we are confronted with the possibility that time itself is a visual arrangement of images in proximity or, more generally, an arrangement of objects next to each other, and the conscious juxtaposition of these objects an aesthetic act that does not require the notion of causality. In this case, we are disciples of Hume. Further overshadowing Prof. Valkola’s discussion of the image and the experience of the image is the discontinuity of nature that is accounted for by quantum mechanics. Electrons find themselves in Paris at a specific time, then in the next instance, they are in Tokyo or the dark side of the moon, having jumped from one quantum state to another without troubling themselves with all the intermediate steps required of continuous passage.4 Zeno’s arrow paradox is here informative: If a person looks at an arrow as it is in motion, at a precise moment in time, it seems to be motionless. How, in that case, is motion seen? Afterimages are a case in point, static images that persist to the extent of becoming a physiological disorder, as in negative Palinopsia, when sensation overpowers the perceptual illusion of image continuity. Without an explanation of afterimages, the discussion of images is incomplete. Prof. Valkola leads us to the threshold of an area of research in need of attention, that is, vision as a compilation of discrete 4 “If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless.” Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b5

Introduction

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“snapshot” images. More can be expected along these lines as phenomenology continues to find common ground with cognitive science. Unfortunately, as important as this collaboration may prove to be, I follow another line of phenomenology, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s absence is conspicuous in Thoughts on Images: A Cognitive and Phenomenological Perspective, and except for a passing reference to transcendental phenomenology5 its insights are neglected; and, still, although there is perfunctory reference to transcendental phenomenology, it is not employed throughout this book. This should not come as surprise. Eidetic and existential phenomenology have since Husserl’s own time come to dominate discussion within the “phenomenological movement,” so, as a consequence, Prof. Valkola follows the line of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, as distasteful as the latter may be.6 I suspect that Prof. Valkola is saving his energy for another book that employs transcendental insights to the image. In the meantime, I am left with my own scattered observations, one of which is the primacy of empathy as a mode of cognition that runs parallel to perception. While for realist and existential phenomenologists empathy is subsumed by perception, for transcendentalists the two are distinct, though parallel noetic modes of cognition. The categorical subsumption of empathy under perception explains its inadequate treatment by eidetic and existential phenomenology, which, in Husserl’s terms, deals with the physical and psychological residuum of the natural attitude. 5 With phenomenology we can analyse and describe our consciousness. In this sense, phenomenology is the study of essences, but also a speculation of transcendental subjectivity, a philosophy that accounts for space, time and the world, just as we experience and live them. It is an attempt to give direct description of our experiences, which are mediated through intellectual and constructive elements. 6 Carnap warned us about the fabricator of “pretend sentences”; Adorno alerted us to the danger that arises when “The sublime becomes the cover for something low.”

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Nor should empathy be relegated to a purely ethical status— unless ethics is itself understood as a mode of cognition and not solely an act of judgment. Scheler, in his discussion of love (that is, empathy) as a mode of cognition that is “knowledge uncontrolled,” and modes of quantified knowledge as “knowledge controlled,”7 provides an approach to images not found and not 7

Majkut, Paul. “Empathy’s Imposter: Intersubjectivity versus Interactivity,” Glimpse. San Diego: Proceedings, Society for Phenomenology and Media, Winter, 2000; and, revised: Phenomenology and Media. “Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity vs. Intersubjectivity.” Zeta Books. Bucharest, Romania, April, 2011: “All human knowledge, in so far as man is a ‘member’ of a society in general, is not empirical but ‘a priori’ knowledge . . . There is no ‘I’ without a ‘we’. The ‘we’ is filled with contents prior to the ‘I’ (Scheler, Max. Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. by Manfred S. Frings. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. 67), and in his phenomenological treatment of the sociology of knowledge discloses that “love and control. . . are the foundation for two attitudes towards cognition. . .” (Scheler 118). Despite the truism (“There is no ‘I’ without a ‘we’”), Scheler’s comment is ambiguous. For example, is “we” possible without “I”? What are these contents that fill the “we” except the “I” and “the other”? Scheler’s explanation posits an “a priori” “we” but, in that it is “filled,” it comes to us phenomenologically neither as a plurality (“we”) or a singularity (“I”), but appears grammatically neutral. A safer term is “human,” but even what is human is a posteriori. Human knowledge may be rooted in a prepredicative a priori, but this rootedness does not entail either singularity or group identity; nor does it mean that this prepredicative a priori is “human” or “exists.” Scheler seems to use a priori to mean “to come before” in time, then employ it interchangeably with logical a priori, mixing terms of temporality with those of eternality. Putting these objections aside, Scheler’s description of the parallel, if not antithetical epistemologies of love and control is nonetheless profoundly useful for our discussion of the process and structure of knowing that takes place in cyberspace though digital technology. It is apparent, for example, that the digitized “knowledge” (that is, “data”) of internet communication is knowledge controlled rigidly by quantification. This brittle knowledge of the other is knowledge controlled by the tyranny of on-line digital rigidity. Empathetic knowledge of the other is knowledge uncontrolled (knowledge “out of control” or Scheler’s “love”). Knowledge controlled is, in the instance of digital media, control exerted by the object. It is the subject that is controlled by this form of knowledge. In love, as Stein says of empathy, the subject is a cogito that loses control and allows itself to be “entirely absorbed” into but not by the object, for, Stein reasons,

Introduction

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possible in eidetic phenomenology alone. Images as discrete are of necessity objects of quantified knowledge controlled, but images as continuous, beyond quantification, are quite uncontrolled objects of consciousness. Specific application of the transcendental method can be found in Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, but this omission in Prof. Valkola’s reflections in no way hinders the thrust of Thoughts on Images: A Cognitive and Phenomenological Perspective, which, after all, is not a transcendental study. Again, he chooses to follow Merleau-Ponty: “Merleau-Ponty thinks that perception is the original text of conscious experience, and thus of phenomenology itself.” While this may be true of existential phenomenology, it is excessive to claim that it is true of all phenomenology, of “phenomenology itself,” unless, of course, we dismiss Husserl and transcendental phenomenology as phenomenology. Roman Ingarden and Wolfgang Iser, phenomenological pillars of “reader-response theory,” elaborate a theory of reading that is easily extended to film studies. In this, Prof. Valkola relies on Metz’ extrapolations of Ingarden and Iser. Of course, treating a film as a text, as a language act with a visual “grammar and vocabulary,” offers its own challenges. Many argue against the analogy of objects of vision treated as language acts (in the linguistic sense of language), but Prof. Valkola’s explanations extend ideas originally found in Ingarden and Iser. Feeling in its pure essence is not something complete in itself. As it were, it is loaded with an energy which must be unloaded. . . . By nature it must always. . . be ‘expressed’ (Stein, Edith. On the Problem of Empathy. Trans. by Waltraut Stein. Washington, D. C.: ICS Publications, 1989. 51-52). It is this uncontrolled knowledge and expression that allows Stein’s subject to be entirely absorbed into the object of its knowledge, but not reconstructed by that object. It is the surrender of the subject rather than conquest by the object. Here a digression may prove helpful, although it will not remove existential objections to the problematic of the “transcendental turn” to which this line of thought is leading.

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One such extension of the visual-textual analogy is found in Prof. Valkola’s use of rhetorical tropes to analyze images, above all metaphor. On this, Prof. Valkola carefully informs us that: The figurative and metaphorical aspects of language make it reasonable to assume that, from an evolutionary point of view, abstract thinking has developed on the basis of the concrete scripts of acts and scenes which have gone through a process of extraction of essential features that could be used as models for other mental processes. Nevertheless, the way in which a person is able to imagine that she is ‘rotating’ or ‘scanning’ a given complex of mental images, this implies that the mental processing of images takes place as a simulation of perceptual processes with external objects.

Metaphor is a powerful descriptive tool. In the wrong hands, it is a destructive one. I have written extensively on the use of bad metaphors during transition periods in media history. Though I grant that bad metaphors are necessary initial understandings of any new medium, continued discussion tests these metaphors by extending them—extended metaphors are the test of the original metaphor’s validity. For example, the metaphor of a “window” for a computer screen was explanatory at first, suggesting that the computer screen allowed one to see through it into the objects of the Internet. Now, we see that this metaphor is inadequate because, for one, I can’t open that window and jump outside, despite Bill Gates and The Matrix. In discussing epistemic metaphor, Prof. Valkola observes that: Some may say that we can never really go beyond these kinds of metaphors or conceptual ideas, but on this account, sense-data may be selected according to need or attention. This is certainly a striking image, since for vision to occur, the brain (or mind) has little to do except select and pick up features of the ambient array of light.

This remark fits nicely into the discussion of continuous versus discrete considerations of vision that I brought up earlier,

Introduction

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though I would not characterize the selecting and picking up of features of the ambient array of light as “little to do.” The phenomenological concept of intertext originated with Ingarden and developed by Iser poses many fascinating considerations when applied to the image, first of which is the question of just how extended an intertext may be. Fully extended, there can be but one intertext, and that unity informs all images with potential meaning only in a referential world, where meaning is deferred from one instance of meaning to another within a discourse, as Derrida teaches, but impairs the images relationship to the transcendent world of things (not objects). Intertext, when granted, also requires us to know what it is that makes an individual image autonomous—not part of the intertext, but a distinct ontological entity. These are questions that must be asked elsewhere. In the future, we may expect a continuation of the value of using rhetorical tropes to describe images. I look forward to Prof. Valkola’s continued work and hope that he will deal with visual metonymy, visual synecdoche, and visual simile. In the end, an image is an imitation, an artifice. — Stuttgart and Freiburg, November, 2011

INTRODUCTION

How do images affect us? How do they relate to our understanding of us and the world? Where do images come from and how do they influence our feeling and emotions? These are some of the questions posed by Thoughts on Images—a philosophical evaluation on the role of the image in our contemporary media culture. Our world is greatly pictorial, deeply immersed in changing cultural and technological forms. Images are everywhere around us and their significance is greater than ever. Therefore, it is important to consider the extent to which new media and communication techniques actually determine the culture within they exist. To do this, images have to be studied in a variety of ways, using a wide range of methods and approaches. In front of an image, we make choices between the surface of the image and the virtual world it refers to. Perceiving images is not merely processing objective information, but is also a deeply subjective experience, and is thus not directly comparative with the information contained in the physical image. The 21st century has witnessed many widely significant changes in the role of images on technological, aesthetic, political and social levels. Digital production, proliferation of television formats, YouTube, and other dimensions of web-based footage have caused rethinking inside culture and image circle. Different notions of viewing and spectatorship are present both within and between all the various audiovisual disciplines. The value of a digital image, for example, is derived in part by its role as information, and its capacity to be easily accessed,

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manipulated and stored in a computer or on a website. Thus, the digital image gains its value from its accessibility, malleability and information status. Yet the increased versatility of digital and virtual images raises many questions concerning the cultural concept of photographic truth. As digital media makes everything apparent, fidelity lies in the mind of the beholder as much as it lies in the relationship between a camera and that which is in front of it. It cannot be guaranteed that what we see in a digital image is exactly what we would have seen if we had stood in the camera’s place. One of the unique qualities of virtual reality systems is that they unleash the spectator from their bodily position in space, allowing for a more free-floating experience of perception. In audiovisual media culture, reality is being reformed all the time. This prompts the emerging of new forms of subjectivity, different texts leading to other texts, and undoubtedly images and thoughts without a clear end. From this point of view, digital culture and the new forms of cultural being are essential in media relations. The basic difference between digital and other media is that digital media is multi-semantic by nature. The computer is a semantic and symbolic medium in which it is possible to simulate both formal and informal symbolic languages as well as non-symbolic processes. In cinematic narration, the influence of digital culture gives rise to new ways through which the filmmaker can broaden up the principles of perceptual realism. After all, the manipulation of photographic images is as old as the history of the devices connected with the recording of reality. Regarding the context of experimental video or film, it is apparent that some of the most prominent current technological developments in digital media are re-driven by a desire to produce a time-based auditory and visual capacity, which is more or less continuous with the forms and language developed from the history of cinema. There is also a growing theoretical debate on the ways in which non-linearity, programmability and interactivity

Introduction

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relate to the assumptions of both narrative and experimental cinema. Features of hyper-culture are evidently found in today’s world of images. The mixing of cultures in contemporary reality shows that hyper-cultural images and sounds may function as an amalgam of the real and the representational—as a certain kind of bricolage between different modes of signification and representation. To grasp this new role, we need to bring together the idea of images—especially mechanically produced ones—and the idea of the imagined community, and the French idea of the imaginary, as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations. Our goal is not only to gauge the gulf between different cultures, but also to trace the subtle ties that bind the present to the past. At stake is a relationship between the globalization of different cultures, the new forms of modernity, and the mass migrations and diasporas that mark the present moment as being distinct from the past. There is a need to create interdisciplinary space and imaginative theoretical combinations for the study of images through historical and cultural contexts. This prompts the question: What is the speciality of the image in our digital and hyper-cultural age? The phenomenon is very wide, and possibly difficult to determine. We can talk about the role of images and their relationship towards society, human development and situations inside communities. We can try to introduce the fundamentals of modern image-thinking and to explain the relevant problems in this field. Consequently, we can describe important developments and functions of modern imagery, and we can try to provide new directions for future research in this field by introducing important models and paradigms that significantly differ from those used in the past Images are points of mediation and communication and they combine all media forms. Thinking about the image and its perception, while considering different theories and approaches, both interpretative and scientific, will help us open new horizons in this

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field. Phenomenological and perceptual relations and points of view are essential. Through phenomenological explanation we can approach and describe our target points from outer and inner perspectives. Through means of perception we can dialogically relate our points of view with modern traditions of thought and scientifically relevant themes. In a broader compass, our existential experience deals with senses and bodily perceptions, spiritual and physical ideas and combinations. In this sense, our material and spiritual being is undivided. Our sensory relationship with the world is determined by this unity of conscious and sub-conscious ideas (Feuerbach). Life is first and foremost a phenomenological concept; not an objective or biological fact, but rather a mesh of wordless, visual constructions, image-like atmospheres and spheres of prelogical thinking. While looking at images, we communicate with them, searching for various meanings. We relate ourselves to the world and create our perspectives towards reality. Our phenomenological perception is forged through these means, and we find ourselves in a situation where there is a possibility to create even larger perspectives on our lives—through thinking and imagination. Phenomenology provides tools to describe the emotional and existential side of experiencing images, but we have to remember that the act of consciousness is already infused with language, meaning and the presence of other influences. Thus, images function in our consciousness as structured relations between the present and the past. Image-consciousness (Husserl) is a connecting force behind interpretation and understanding. The concept of the image can be widened into a family of images including perceptual, mental and verbal images. The issue of ‘pictorial turn’ opens new perspectives and interpretations to the interdisciplinary study of the image. Consequently, images are also relations between consciousness and the object. Phenomenology will account for the affective side of experiencing images at this point. Generally thinking, perception involves interpretation and constructed ideas

Introduction

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through which the spectator reacts to sensory and symbolical qualities as well as the semantic information contained in the image. Watching an image is an existential and social experience, which happens through active reception and the framing of the subjective and mediated world. Perceptions can be dynamic and relational; they can possess directed tensions (Arnheim). Perception of an image through a phenomenological perspective should acknowledge the creative possibilities of visual composition, framing, extending, freezing of fragmentizing, and expanding the role of the image into a philosophical argumentation. As a consequence of this, modern media images have to be re-constructed in order to be re-constituted. We are living in an era in which visual images and the overall visualization of our culture has accelerated so dramatically that the global circulation of images has become an end in itself, especially through the internet and other digital communication. We need new points of view, and at the same time we are in a situation where new interpretations will certainly arise. In representing fresh ideas, Thoughts on Images creates an approach, a dialogical and constructive enterprise between various points of thought, and offers one answer to this challenge. Finally, it is the images themselves that spark independent thought, and the aim here will be fulfilled if the reader becomes as excited as the writer about the problems concerned. This book features an outline of some possible solutions to further stimulate this kind of thinking. Thoughts on Images is a philosophical, and, to some extent, psychological point of view to the idea and concept of the image. Those familiar with the related literature will be aware of its influence on this approach.

1. EPISTEMIC METAPHORS

Meaning and Essence To determine the properties of the image as image I must turn to a new act of consciousness: I must reflect. Jean-Paul Sartre The emphasis upon mental pictures, or mental images as important for memory may have reinforced the notion that mental images (especially visual images) are the stuff of Mind, and causally important for producing behaviour. Richard L. Gregory The daily practice of engaging with images in the late twentieth century means that a certain kind of knowledge is built up and maintained, and this is a very practical as well as theoretical knowledge. Ron Burnett Reality has always been interpreted through the reports given by images; and philosophers since Plato have tried to loosen our dependence on images by evoking the standard of an image-free way of apprehending the real. Susan Sontag Hypermedia, as is to be expected, has its own set of conventional distortions. Paul Majkut

The goal of science is the description and explanation of both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. In this sense, we are specifically involved in a theoretical interpretation of what is perceived or recorded. Our perception of the world is

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coloured by perceptual, linguistic, and cultural differences, which we can describe. In this spirit, science is not the piecemeal accumulation of facts; rather, it is a struggle between competing theories. And it is not true that science arrives at one answer, although elementary science may give this kind of impression. As the work on the philosophy of science has shown, it is a profound mistake to think of science as beginning from a theoryneutral observation. (Kuhn, 1977, 270–277). Rather, science is saturated with theory, so that the most realistic way to see the transition from one view of, say, gravity to another is as the replacement of one battery of theoretical concepts by another. It is the question of paradigm shifts. (Kuhn, 1969, 177–191). Broadly speaking, what distinguishes the work of different scientists is not what they have done, but merely the theories they have brought to bear through their experiments, especially when the theories and observations are concept-mediated. Debates about realism and anti-realism have been intense in the philosophy of science. Scientific methodology explores the methods by which science arrives at its posited truths concerning the world. In this way, it is closely related to the theory of knowledge. Typical issues are the sense in which theories are accepted in science, and the nature of relations between evidence and hypothesis. We might say that hypotheses of science serve as chunks for conveying large amounts of information economically, and that object perception is the chunking of bits of sensory information so that we see objects. (Gregory, 1981, 161). Epistemological questions are related to this, especially questions like how to identify the essential, defining components of knowledge. Epistemologists also debate and argue about the limits and scope of knowledge. For example, it is very important to note that gaining knowledge does not depend on consciousness, although it may often be associated with it. (Ibidem, 451). For us, a sign is any entity carrying information, and something that stands for something in some respect or capacity. A symbol,

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or conventional sign, is typical in natural language forms. A meaning is the common, conventional, or standard sense of an expression, construction, or sentence in a given language, or of a non-linguistic signal or symbol. One of the oldest theories of meaning is the image theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of words in public language derives from the ideas and/ or mental images that words are used to express. We can also speak of thoughts, beliefs and intentions, and think that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning. With phenomenology we can analyse and describe our consciousness. In this sense, phenomenology is the study of essences, but also a speculation of transcendental subjectivity, a philosophy that accounts for space, time and the world, just as we experience and live them. It is an attempt to give direct description of our experiences, which are mediated through intellectual and constructive elements. How we see things around us has been considered by philosophers and artists for millennia, and studied intensively by experimental science for over a century. One of the central questions is the extent to which vision reflects the nature of things; and as the physical sciences advance, the object world is described as knowledge of the world. This intelligence of eye and brain is unconscious, and we hardly realize that it is constantly at work. Artists often reverse this process, and present us with just the necessary information for images to evoke surrogate worlds, which may look real, even though we know they are not. To understand what is going on, we have to appreciate the physiology of the brain, and how it uses knowledge to create visual reality from images in the eyes. In this way, the brain is connected with the production of images. (Bergson). Perception is guessing what is out there, and sometimes the guess is wrong. Then we have an illusion which can be an evocative experience, and may point in the direction of how perception works. While the artist uses illusions as tools for creating objects beyond normal experience, the visual

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scientist uses them for discovering truths about us. The important mediator between all this is consciousness. What would be the point of art, and life, without conscious experience? The old idea of meaning proposed that the meaning of words in general language derived from the ideas or mental images that words were used to express. Contemporary philosophical approach speaks more of thoughts, beliefs and intentions than of ideas and images. Cognitive meaning captures what has been central in the theory of meaning beyond ethics. The fields of art and culture are strongly present in today’s image world. The meaning of culture is strong: culture in a way that we can understand it as being a way of life, a scene for ideas and knowledge, a metaphysical structure of society, and a creator of standards in relation to the way society values the products created by culture. The meaning of art has gone through a process of continuing change. Since the 1960s new theories and methods have widened the cultural dimension, and since the 1970s interest into matters like emotions, gender, body, time and space has clearly increased. (Boone, 1986; Blier, 1987). Viewpoints concerning the form and style of narration have been essential, when talking about the relationships between art forms and their meanings. Contemporary artists with a wide range of cultural backgrounds have increased their engagement with documentary and developed their own forms of it. The relationship between form and ideas is essential. Forms convey meanings, as they raise experiences of the past or function symbolically on the level of the mind and bring in emotions. The role of the image has gone through changes: the 21st century has witnessed many significant and wide changes in the role of images on technological, aesthetic, political and social levels. Digital production, proliferation of television formats, YouTube, and other dimensions of web-based footage have caused rethinking inside culture and image circles.

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Simulations Undoubtedly what is fluttering this way deep inside me must be the image, the visual memory which is attached to this taste and is trying to follow it to me. Marcel Proust

Different notions of viewing and spectatorship are present both within and between all the various audiovisual disciplines. The value of a digital image, for example, is derived in part by its role as information, and its capacity to be easily accessed, manipulated and stored in a computer or on a website. Yet the increased versatility of digital and virtual images raises many questions concerning the cultural concept of photographic truth. (Burnett, 2005; Valkola, 2003). As digital media makes everything apparent, fidelity lies in the mind of the beholder as much as it lies in the relationship between a camera and that which is in front of it. It cannot be guaranteed that what we see in a digital image is exactly what we would have seen if we had stood in the camera’s place. Today, visual culture is everywhere around us. A renewed interest in aesthetics has arguably risen in fields such as art and media education, which brings forth many ideas related to visual culture. One of the most striking features of the new kind of visual culture is a growing tendency to visualize things that are not in themselves visual. Allied to this intellectual aspect is the growing technological capacity to make all kinds of things visible. One of the first thinkers to call attention to these developments was Martin Heidegger, who called it the rise of the ‘world as a picture’. (Heidegger, 1930). We can state that the ability to absorb and interpret visual information is the basis of modern society and is becoming increasingly important in the information age. It is a relatively new and learned skill. In other words, visual culture does not depend on images themselves but on the modern tendency to visualize existence.

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For some scholars, visual culture is simply the history of images. One can think that visual culture has a determining role in the wider cultural field. In this sense, such a history of visual culture would highlight those moments where the visual is contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of social interaction and definition in terms of class, race, gender, sexual and other identities. Through active selection it is possible for individuals to select information, and modify it depending on their previous experiences. It needs repeated observation to make sense of all the patterns around us, and this is where perception interacts with cognition through the process of recognition, organization, and discrimination. Furthermore, visual interpretation deals with both eyes and brain. What we know or have experienced in the past and how we have made sense of these experiences and tracked them in our memory moderate what is understood. According to this view, the memory can produce images of the past, and films can produce flashbacks. Perception can unite the apparently disparate. The mind develops memory ideas and imaginative ideas. Consequently, the mind is filled with emotions. The perception of movement is not something that has its independent character in an outer world process, because the mind has built it up from single pictures rapidly following one another. Broadly speaking, the mind is an integrated system that includes synaptic networks devoted to cognitive, emotional, and motivational functions. (Le Doux, 258). We can isolate visual and linguistic elements in a single work, but our thinking can move easily back and forth between them. Each one of the modes has something to contribute to our understanding. All in all, visual culture is a fluid structure, focused on understanding the response to visual media of both individuals and groups. Its definition comes from the questions it asks and issues it seeks to raise. Most recently the visualizing of computer environments has generated a new sense of excitement around the possibilities of the visual. Only recently has the art

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world, along with university arts departments, begun to recognize the power and possibilities offered by new technologies. Media education faces challenges especially in this field. We can think that one of the principal tasks of visual culture is to understand how modern complex images come together. First of all, nowadays images function as an amalgam of the real and the representational, as a bricolage between different modes of signification. Secondly, visual culture directs our attention away from structured, formal viewing settings (like the cinema and art gallery) to the centrality of visual experience in everyday life. Presently, different notions of viewing and spectatorship are current both within and between all the various visual disciplines. This means that the value, for example, of a digital image is derived in part by its role as information, and its capacity to be easily accessed, manipulated, and stored in a computer or on a web site. On the other hand, the increased versatility of digital and virtual images raises many questions concerning the cultural concept of photographic truth. As digital media make all too apparent, fidelity lies in the mind of the beholder as much as it lies in the relationship between a camera and what is in front of it. Whether what we see is exactly what we would have seen had we seen alongside the camera cannot be guaranteed. (Nichols, xii.). In today’s world, digital technologies have made it possible to build on the ability to artificially construct realism. For example, digital images can be produced without a camera, but they can still look like photographs. This means that the photographic image is produced without a referent in the real. Obviously, certain technologies and styles encourage us to believe in a tight correspondence between images and reality, but with the effects of lenses, focus, colour and depth of field, high-resolution media seem to guarantee the authenticity of what we see. They can be used to give an impression of authenticity, and because images are selected and arranged into sequences, scenes, and so on, the

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interpretation and meaning of the images will depend on many kinds of factors. In this spirit, then, digital images and virtual simulations are not indexical by nature, since they cannot be said to have been in the presence of the real world they depict. For example, an image that inserts people digitally into a landscape where they have never been does not refer to an actual moment in time. And a different set of questions is raised when we consider the impact of digital imaging on news and historical documents. This means that in the contemporary world of visual culture and visual images, different forms of image manipulation are creating a broad array of images that defy traditional notions of time and space. (Sturken &Cartwright, 140–141). Still, our bodily perspective is important in relegating our perceptive positions. Of course, there is a possible for transcendental emotions, especially through music and abstract thinking. Higher understanding of ideas includes pre-logical understanding. We are moving around in the world, but this moving is not only physical. It is more phenomenological since it happens in a perspective situation towards the world. The body is the subject, and consciousness works as one of its properties. We are depending on the presence of the world and we have a reciprocal relationship to it. We have a cultural relationship to images, and this relationship has developed through dialogue. So, between life and images there is a parallel relationship, a desire for dialogue. Life is how we express it, and images are one of the forms of this expression. One of the unique qualities of virtual reality systems is that they release the spectator from her bodily position in space, allowing for a more free-floating experience of perception. (Ibidem, 146.) In audiovisual media culture, reality is being reformed all the time. This prompts the emerging of new forms of subjectivity; different texts leading to other texts, and without a doubt, images and thoughts without a clear end. From this point

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of view, digital culture and the new forms of cultural being are essential in media relations. The basic difference between digital and other media is that digital media is multi-semantic by nature. In a similar manner, the computer is a multi-semantic symbol medium in which it is possible to simulate both formal and informal symbolic languages as well as non-symbolic processes (Finnemann, 22–28). In cinematic narration the influence of digital culture relates to those new ways through which the filmmaker can broaden up the principles of perceptual realism. Furthermore, the manipulation of images is as old as the history of the devices connected with recording of realities. With regard to the context of experimental video or film, it is apparent that some of the most prominent current technological developments in digital media are re-driven by a desire to produce a time-based auditory and visual capacity which is more or less continuous with the forms and language developed from the history of cinema. Also, there is a growing theoretical debate on the ways in which non-linearity, programmability and interactivity relate to the assumptions of both narrative and experimental cinema. (LeGrice, 228–229). What is the speciality of the image in our digital age? The phenomenon is wide, and difficult to determine. We can talk about the role of the images and their relationships towards the society, or towards human development, and towards situations inside human communities. Through this context we can observe images and analyze them from the point-of-view of (1) semantic density (meaning), (2) aesthetic impressiveness, and (3) historical significance. For this reason, we can understand that there is no single theoretical approach towards the image to cover all this. Since the idea, concept and the role of images is an encompassing and diverse category, it includes images of very many different types that are incorporated in contexts in different ways. In some cases the semantic aspects of the role and narrative of images may be

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central relevance to the way it functions. In other cases, the expressive or aesthetic properties of images may be central. While some images encode meanings in almost language-like ways, in other cases meaning operates on a more general level. In most cases, the same artworks in context can be approached from a variety of different perspectives, all of which are relevant to understanding some aspect of their form or significance. (Valkola, 2004). Understanding is a continuation of historical tradition, and a form of dialogical openness. It is important to recognize the multidimensionality of images where the semantic, aesthetic, affective and purposive dimensions all apply to the same object at hand. The analysis of the images must involve an understanding of how the parts contribute to the whole image and what makes the image as it is in contemporary context. This can only be determined by analysis across media and across contexts. The art of understanding consists in knowing which interpretive techniques are there to be given prominence to at a given time. (Schleiermacher). The study of images encourages researchers and theoreticians to deal with the temporality of cultural processes, to connect the experiential dimension of culture, the immediacy of performance with longer term and general processes. Images have different durations. Some may be over in a matter of seconds, even if the impact of a single work can endure for a lifetime. Others may be present and last for many hours. Others may be part of a permanent structure as an iconic presence. (Peirce). The different durations of presence will affect how such works and their images are seen, how people relate to them over time, how they can be used in knowledge transmission, how they can be perceived, and so on. The analysis of their form and content must take these factors into account—the image is not simply the object itself but the whole context in which it is produced, seen and used. (Valkola, 2002). There is an added complication. The experience of a single image is not necessarily confined to a single event or context. Different dimensions of it may come into play over time as a

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result of multiple exposure or evocations of the memory of form. A more general point is that there must be a central proposition of the meaning of image in the contemporary world: understanding the significance of images requires placing it in the widest possible context. It is not sufficient—or perhaps possible—to understand its immediate effect or significance without first understanding the historical, social, and cultural backgrounds of its production. One of the advantages of studying responses of images is that they provide a means to access the processual dimension of culture. They connect events with processes and they connect experiences separated in time. Studying viewer responses recognises the direct relationship to actuality. (Vaughan, 1999; Ward, 2005). The relationship between fiction and non-fiction is a blurred boundary (Nichols, 1994), so, the spectator’s activity of interpreting the material becomes central. The modalities of performance in images foreground the hybrid and uncertain nature of the contemporary situation in this kind of output. The future of the study of images must re-engage with these kinds of methods and problems. It must engage with the study of form and content at the micro level, noticing in the production of images a form of agency that arises from bodies of knowledge. At the macro level it must engage in the study of form and content for the purpose of comparative and historical analysis. Attention to form and content and the relative autonomy of form forces attention away from any single interpretative framework and encourages the researcher to look for the widest possible range of explanations for the existence of images themselves and the contribution they make to the history of images. The study of form in images opens up a full range of avenues to explore the psychological impact of images, their cognitive significance, the creative processes that underlie in them and their contribution to the systems of knowledge and meaning. (Ellis, 1982: Valkola, 2002). Defining an image has never been a simple task. Ultimately in the case of cinema, television, and increasingly, the internet,

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individual viewers will have their own preconceptions and expectations of image material, and often these may not accord with more established definitions. There is also a sense that new technologies of production and delivery, heightened competitiveness, industrial centralization, fragmenting audiences and internationalizing markets have all dramatically impacted on the role of the images. (Cottle, 2004). Significant changes are occurring online. Cheaper digital technology has widened access to the means of production for a multitude of artists, filmmakers, operators and activists around the world. YouTube, like the internet more generally, works to free the flow of information, reinvigorating free speech, but this occurs in a special environment that disallows the unification of the vast material. The internet’s international reach has made it an outlet with the potential to find audiences outside of traditional channels of distribution and exhibition. Thus, the range of reproduced and multiple images in contemporary visual culture mean that the concepts of authenticity, originality and space gain new meanings. The art of the past has been transformed in this new image world. Even more importantly, the context of the images is now wide and open for new forms of interpretation. Sure, nowadays images are more prone to circulation, changed contexts and remaking. These are the central aspects of contemporary media culture. In today’s world, the extraordinary proliferation of images cannot cohere into one single picture for the contemplation of the academics. In this sense, visual culture is the crisis of information and visual overload in everyday life. This all prompts a need for new ways to deal with this virtual reality where seeing is not believing, but interpreting. The concept of criticism is widely used. Criticism is noticing, the recognition of aesthetically relevant features of art works. (Scrutton, 28). If criticism is a certain kind of noticing then it does not follow that there are general rules applicable across categories of works of art, or that there are any otherwise specifiable foundations upon which critical judgement is based. In approaching a work of art we can notice features of aesthetic value,

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and we can learn to do so because we may have an appropriate background for it. More specifically, to take criticism as a kind of noticing is to reject a view of criticism as somehow approaching works of art with no preconceptions, or with no peripheral knowledge and experience of the critic. According to this view, it is a question of idea of criticism as a perceptual process. We can think that the aim of criticism is to understand or to grasp the meaning of the work of art. (Wollheim, 1982, 549– 559). Arguably, then, criticism is, in an interesting sense, a perceptual process. By this we mean that criticism should not be modelled as an approach to works of art armed with rules or sets of criteria for aesthetic excellence that are then applied. In contrast, criticism should be modelled as a survey of both large- and small-scale features of the object in question. Or, to put it another way, criticism is also a matter of scrutiny. This kind of thinking amounts to the idea that criticism consists in scrutiny of the work of art. And furthermore, this kind of view conceives of scrutiny as an essentially perceptual process. (Wollheim, 1980, 192–193). In a similar manner, art criticism can lend support to different kinds of efforts to go beyond the artistically straight and narrow by providing evidence that creativity is a dynamic and forward-moving process. Generally, criticism can help lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of the importance of art in human life. (Wolff, 88–89). Following these lines of thought we can think that the viewer brings in general truths about the work of art and knowledge of some of the prevailing conventions of art. Then, again the critic brings with her a great deal of information external to the particular work under scrutiny. Intriguingly, these levels might be general truths about society, the art world, prevailing conventions of art, and so on. Obviously, the internal truths of a single work of art must be gained from looking at the work. Within this framework this kind of contrast between the internal and external is central to the scrutiny view of criticism. In order to

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achieve all this we can think that the internal truths passing into critic’s cognitive and phenomenological stock must go through perception. All in all, the critic may understand things, and the internal truths of the work, but she must acquire that understanding by looking at the work, and in no other way. Natural attitude (Husserl) is a kind of a pre-reflective commitment concerning the ontological status of the world and the things we discover within it. From this, certain presuppositions have found their way into our thinking like that our mind can range over the entire objective world and study certain aspects of it, while leaving the world’s objective character unchanged. Critical attitude can contain phenomenological destruction, in the sense that we are approaching earlier theories with a critical attitude, and seeing them through an overlapping discourse. We will always need an outsider’s position to scrutinize things critically. This is specifically true with psychological matters, in which we are more subjectively involved. That is why the need for internal processing is strong if we are to describe the subjective aspects of a narrative flow, including feelings, emotions and aesthetic effects. Aptly, these kinds of perceptions happen in the invisible body/mind interior, and belong to the subjectivity of the spectator. This is something, which the viewer has to construct by a series of cognitive acts. (Bordwell, 1985, 27–62). In a similar manner, to whatever extent cognition, broadly construed, turns out to be relevant to the explanation of social behaviour, emotion, psychopathology, or physical skills, the cognitive scientist will be interested. (Flanagan, 179). In view of all this, judging reality depends on the modularity of the mind, on the potential for parallel processing by separate function centres in the brain. We can think that mental representations of a fictional or real object have the same local reality in the mind, but the global module that judge reality-status prevents us from mistaking the fictional for the real and also allows us to experience emotions evoked by the local simulations.

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(Grodal). In this sense, the spectator’s role is perceptual. From a scholarly point of view, understanding works of art is centrally a perceptual process rather than an inferential one. Consequently, there is no significant step between how we perceive the work and how we understand it. In particular, understanding is rooted in scrutiny of the aesthetic surface of the work. Furthermore, perception supplies premises for an inference of the meaning of the work of art. However, we can think that a certain cognitive stock allows the construction of critically relevant evaluations, from which the judgement of meaning can de deduced. This means that meaning and coherence are constructed not only in different ways, but also on different levels within the reception. Thus, written and image-based discourses are exceptionally rich sources of information from which a spectator can extract meaningful and coherent experiences on a wide variety of levels. (Persson, 24).

Perspectives At every instant, there is more than the eye can see, more than the ear can hear, a setting or a view waiting to be explored. Kevin Lynch

The idea of this thought experiment is that cognitive science is committed to the reasonable view that the mind is a representational system, i.e. an intentional system that transforms, processes, stores, and retrieves information about the world. Of course, this representational system is a rich one, consisting of a priori structures, processors, and categories, which we use to create an orderly picture of the world. Now the significance of this is that as the picture is enriched and revised throughout our lives we become continually better at anticipating reality. But, as we can clearly recognize, the debate does not end here. The starting point of all inference is the observation that comes through our senses. We can form generic concepts, and they enable us to form concepts of entities that are not based on experiences. Obviously, cognitive

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scientists perform their transcendental inferences by generating hypotheses about mental processes, gathering relevant data from human subjects, and thereby refining or rejecting the initial conjectures. (Flanagan, 259). It is a challenging endeavour to reveal the cognitive system’s actual operations, since while cognitive activities transpire within us they frequently do so in such a smooth and rapid fashion that we are mostly unaware of them, although some cognitive functions seem to be transparent to consciousness. In most cases cognitive psychologists cannot rely on conscious awareness of cognitive processes, but must proceed to devise experiments that reveal the underlying processes operative in cognition. As an idea of this study, we can point out that the arts are cognitive emblems and also a matter of active thinking. The symbol system approach to cognition identifies the different arts as each being a different symbol system, and thinking in the arts as processing, or conducting operations on, the symbols of one of these systems. This is a further notion that establishes the arts as cognitive. Furthermore, it also establishes them as unique because each art medium is a different symbol system, and therefore thinking within each symbol system is a unique kind of thinking. Over the past decades, cognitive science has revolutionized our understanding of mental processes. Mental processes are formal manipulations of symbols, or programs, consisting of sequences of elementary processes made available by the information-processing capabilities of neural tissue. (Pinker, 387). Philosophical theorizing about the mind has provided a starting point for modelling and empirical investigations of cognitive science. For example, mental processing of images questions the physical basis of the mind, simply just how the brain carries or represents perceptions. Following this, we can think that mental processes are operations by which the individual mind infuses meaningfulness and coherence into a fragmented and non-meaningful objective world, generating holistic chunks of phenomenal entities (e.g., objects, events, intentions, and causes). (Persson, 7). Usually we can think that, for example,

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understanding is the general term for these processes, and features an ongoing interaction between an organism and its environment. To put this in a larger perspective, understanding other people is one of the fundamental human abilities. In a way, understanding refers to the practical mode of all human existence and its situation in a world that projects various possibilities. Intriguingly, we know much less about our ability to understand other minds than about our ability to understand the physical world around us. There are contexts where it is perfectly acceptable to describe things in this way. Thus, one currently prevalent theory of the evolution of cognition suggests that the capacity to understand, and so manipulate, our con-specifics was the driving force behind the development of distinctively human intelligence. (Byrne & Whiten). One rather obvious assumption is that understanding is the way the world presents itself to us, and this is the result of the massive complex of culture, language, history and bodily mechanisms that blend our world into what it is. (Johnson, 104). This argument may seem to prove too much, but then again, individual claims on what our representations are about are frequently made in the cognitive science literature. Yet, one can claim that we don’t know enough to theorize about the semantics of our mental representation system, in the sense that linguistics provides us with the formal semantics of natural language. Arguably, we can still infer that the semantics of our mental representation system must have certain characteristics. However, we can talk about human cognitive capacities, which are intentional, and can be pragmatically evaluated. We can think that they are also productive. The potential concern of cognitive science is that it’s not only interested in the content of mental representations, but also in the ideas of where this content comes from. Furthermore, this means that for a mental entity or state to be a representation, it must not only have content, but also it must be significant somehow. Then, again, we can construe that a significant representation can produce an interpretant state or process in the subject, and

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this state or process is related to both the representation and the subject in such a way that, by means of the interpretant, what the representation represents can make a difference to the internal states and behaviour of the subject. (Strelny). Without a doubt, we can point out that the interpretant of a mental representation for a given subject consists in all the possible computational consequences, including both the processes and the results of these processes. We can think that visual imagery is a distinctive cognitive system and process, and closely related to visual perception. They are both based on same brain functions. The moral of this thought experiment is that the brain learns and stores many things in networks that can function outside of conscious awareness. (Le Doux, 9–10). This can be put in another way with the so-called “picture theory”, which has a very long history, going back to Plato or even Democritus, and until quite recently it was almost universally accepted. (White). The first point to note about this intriguing argument is the interesting obscurity of the idea that having visual imagery involves having entities, in the head or in the mind, which are similar or functionally equivalent to inner pictures. Looking at this argument through our eyes, some premises are present. First of all, these pictures are thought of being composed of copies or remnants of earlier sense impressions, and complexes of visual sensations. Secondly, picture theory came under severe philosophical attack in the middle years of the last century for being committed to an implausible, Cartesian view of the mind. In any case, however, this computational version of the picture theory can be both coherent and empirically credible. (Kosslyn, 341–370). Furthermore, we ought to consider a thought experiment according to which picture theory is coherent, given the assumption that computational data structures of some type are proper model for conscious and intentionalistic mental contents. (Tye). Perhaps, then, cognitive science’s attempt to explain intentionality by

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positing mental representations creates a problem, because mental representations are in many cases taken to be symbols. For one thing, a symbol in the traditional semantic sense involves conventions, both with respect to its meaning and respect to its syntactic type. What matters is that conventions themselves also involve intentionality, and that’s why it is not so simple to explain intentionality by positing mental representations or mental symbols. (Horst). Commenting on a larger perspective, we can point out that most discussions of cognitive theory conflate the notion of a mental (intentional) content with that of a computational representation, failing to distinguish the computational mental dogma from the view that brain function may best be understood and simulated computationally. Following these lines of thought we can state that the computational theory of mind has led to rapid progress because it has given a precise mechanistic sense to formally vague terms such as ‘memory,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘goal,’ ‘perception,’ and the like, which are indispensable to explaining intelligence. To put these visions in terms of our time we can consider cognitive science to be based on a non-behaviouristic, psychological framework of research. That is, statements about the understanding of visual phenomena, behaviour, or language, concern the understanding of mechanisms and structures by which these activities are processed by the human mind and brain. Furthermore, aspects of cognitive research and thinking have their roots in Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. We conclude, then, that cognitive science has several philosophical implications. As an example of this, people often lack knowledge of underlying mental processes; and this means that we are not adept enough at identifying causes of our behaviour and mental states. According to our view here, the human mind is, in a cognitive sense, a system of many different special purpose processors, most of which have no idea of what the others are doing. The mind possesses a capacity for storing and manipulating symbols,

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and the whole cognitive system consists in vast numbers of neurons connected with each other. Previous and current research in cognitive science indicates that people are prone to a wide variety of characteristic reasoning and judgment errors. Intriguingly, it is interesting to notice that to whatever extent a person is capable of achieving self-knowledge, rationality, and an accurate picture of the nature of the mind as a whole, it will require much more than peering inward with our mind’s eye and applying natural knowledge and reasoning abilities. In this sense, the co-operative working of the different systems of the brain supplies humans with information processing, and provides active and plastic adaptation to the environment. This means that it is a complex of functional systems, organized according to plans and programmes created by the social history. (Gregory, 1987, 489–490).

Gestalt The starting point for perception is the layout and arrangements of objects in space. Nicholas Wade

There is no need to deny the efforts of cognitive schools, which have tried to describe the way in which perception and meaning are structured by human mental structures and mechanisms. In gestalt-thinking, for example, grouping means that the ‘whole’ is more than the sum of its parts. In this sense, the whole is a description of the result of the interaction of the parts. It means that we establish a phenomenon, a concept, or a schema, for which the associated features and aspects are its determiners. That is, we can give conscious salience to these determiners, by asking what is understood by a given concept or by trying to reveal the underlying network of associations. We can concede that psychologists have investigated the activation of network of associations by investigating associative priming, the way in which one phenomenon activates an associative network and by

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that facilitates mental operations on the items in the activated network. (Anderson, 166). The essentiality of mental processes is typical for cognitive approach. In particular, mental structures are involved in the process of perception itself, and this idea can be found in many cognitive theories, which see the testing of mental structures as central to the perceptual process. It is perhaps more puzzling that top-down and bottom-up processes are used by many constructive theories. Consequently, Gestalt psychology is interested in perceptual organization, meaning the ways in which we unite things and elements into patterns or objects. For this reason, Gestalt psychology wants to determine the concepts through which we organize parts into a whole, and make conclusions along the lines of a shape being more elementary and easier to remember than a background. When a shape is seen in front of a background, one surely sees the shape like a formless material, which in its turn seems to emphasize the background. Furthermore, the contours that seemingly differentiate the shape from the background appear to belong to the shape. Arguably, all gestalt-solutions are not generally accepted but many of the problems proposed by Gestalt psychology have still current value. Let us look again at perception as an active and constructive process. We have to be careful in describing how perception does not come straight from sensory information, but is more likely a combination of the interaction between sensory information, internal hypotheses, expectations and knowledge. So, in the bigger picture, the sensory information forms a basis for larger processes. Historically, there is a long-standing tradition in philosophy that perception (especially touch and vision) gives undeniably true knowledge. This all depends on some defining features by philosophers who have generally sought certainty and have often claimed it; whereas other scientists are more used to modifying their theories by new data, and have been, in this sense, more

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flexible. Still, a further point deals with the fact that many scientific instruments have been developed because of the limitations of the senses and the unreliability of perception. The senses are a primary source of evidence. Our beliefs, and ultimately the evidence for our beliefs, trace back to sensory experience. Other sources of evidence include memory and the testimony of others. Of course, both of these sources rely on senses in one way or another. This characterization might lend itself to larger metaphorical levels. Here is a particular vivid one: Is it worth asking why we have both perceptions and conceptions of the world? And further on, why is perception separate and in many ways different from our conceptual understanding? Suppose we can overcome this worry and think of it being because perception works very quickly, whereas conceptual thinking is much slower, possibly taking years to form adequate concepts. The first general hypothesis we might note is that knowledge and ideas are in a way timeless, and through this kind of thinking it does not seem possible for perception to use all of our previous knowledge, because it works so fast. Another related problem is that perceptual and other processes take their time, and the passage of time is something that will take its time. In this sense, images are dependent on the explicitly visual experiences of perception, space, time, and human signification. Following this logic, images and their representations are epistemologically related to the viewer’s language, aesthetic sensibilities, ideological beliefs, and unconscious thought processes. However, there is a special intelligence in perception. Furthermore, it can be argued that the development of distance perception freed organisms from the tyranny of reflexes, and was the necessary precursor of all intelligence. As a conclusion, the special intelligence of perception has been widely discussed and debated. We can point out an earlier account, which portrayed sensory perception differently as a passive un-distorting view, through which the mind accepts sensations, which were considered to be

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sense-data of perception. Some may say that we can never really go beyond these kinds of metaphors or conceptual ideas, but on this account, sense-data may be selected according to need or attention. This is certainly a striking image, since for vision to occur, the brain (or mind) has little to do except select and pick up features of the ambient array of light. Perhaps perception is not determined only through sensory information. Our reasoning has led us to the acceptable conclusion that perception is a multi-dynamic process, which includes, first of all, a search for interpretation based on sensory information, and secondly, the usable knowledge concerning the properties of objects in question. This enables us to deduce that this knowledge is maintained by earlier experiences, which are born through sight and through the information gained by senses. Objects have past and future, because an object transcends experience and becomes an embodiment of knowledge and expectation. (Gregory, 1966, 9–11). No doubt, it is very difficult to give an answer to how we perceive reality. A slightly sophisticated idea is that we must learn to differentiate between different reactions, born and learned. In this sense, the behaviourist model is too restrictive to study perception, because perception is experience based on worldly objects. (Ibidem, 218–219). What we are after is an indication that the senses cannot produce direct perception of the world, but instead they offer proof for testing hypotheses of what lies in front of us. At any one time a perceived object is a hypothesis, suggested and tested by sensory data. (Ibidem, 12).

Perception Operations of imagining are, of course, exercises of mental powers. Gilbert Ryle

Perceiving objects is a problem solution of sorts. Sometimes the eye and brain can make false conclusions, and then we see a hallucination or an illusion. From a scholarly point of view, human

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perception and thinking are not totally different processes, because especially many-sided figures and images prove that perception includes delicate processes even on a basic level. (Gregory, 1971, 15). It has long been known that in perception there is a likelihood principle, and in perception there are also unconscious inferences. Within this framework perception includes unconscious conclusions, and the whole perceptual processing includes many complicated mental processes, which we are not aware of. (Goldstein, 195). Perception includes unconscious conclusions as well, and through that it is possible to explain, for example, illusions. (Hochberg, 57). When one watches a view, one gains information through fixations and eye movement. Consequently, eye movement is necessary for details, because we can clearly see only those details that are very near to the point we are looking at. Eye movement is also important, because the impression of depth comes through certain features that function as local depth cues. More importantly, eye movement is not arbitrary, but instead every eye movement seems to be decided in advance. Our reasoning has led us to believe that eye movement is guided by expectations, and those expectations will arise on the basis of what we have learned to expect in certain situations, and also what we have learned about the regularities of forms and shapes. Movement of the eyes is guided by received information, and that we are not totally aware of the order of eye movement and fixations. (Neisser, 41). We construct, in other words, the idea of the perceptual whole through the number of its parts. According to this view, one gathers visual information through eye movement, which one then fits into a schematic map to produce a unified perception. A schematic map is the program of possible samplings of an extended scene, and of contingent expectancies of what will be seen as a result of those samplings. (Hochberg, 309–311). From a scholarly point of view, a schematic map is a matrix of the mind’s time and space expectations, which integrates different glances into one perceptual structure. Intriguingly, when we are watching a view,

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most of it is not in the retina, but in the mind’s eye. More specifically, the view has been stored in encoded form, and not as a mental mirror image. All in all, a sudden glance can be a sensation, a schematic map can be an image, and perceptual structure can function as perception. (Ibidem). There is something very fascinating with this approach, since it means that a schematic map is not just a visual storage or a passive afterimage, but an active director of the whole perceptual process. This leads us to the following conjecture that not just reading, but also listening and watching are skilled functions that happen through time. This is an extraordinary advance in our thinking, and further on we can think that they are all dependent of earlier structures, which we can call schemes. They are internal parts belonging to a perceiver’s perceptual cycle. Following this line of reasoning, those parts can be changed by experience connected with the perceptual material. Obviously, schemes direct our perception, and at the same time they can be changed during the perceptual process. (Neisser, 55–57). Another consequence of this is that because we see what we are looking at, the schemes together with the valid information control the perceptual process. What matters is that through this cycle perception becomes a building process, where the perceiver actively explores the surroundings by moving the eyes, head, and body, so, that one can gain all the possible information. During each of these moments the perceiver forms and tests the upcoming expectations. By analogy, new information can change the original scheme, and a new scheme can guide future perceptions. By definition, the past is not still going on, since it has happened before the present, but following our idea here, we can think that schemes are expectations or anticipations through which the past influences the future. Because of this kind of hypothesis, the whole perceptual process is a perceptual cycle. (Ibidem). Arguably, perception is not just recognition of previous assumptions, but it produces new knowledge for the human organism, and although a perceiver might have some expectations

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when she gains information, these expectations can be fixed and modified during the perceptual process. The difference between a skilled and unskilled perceiver is not that the skilled perceiver would add something into the stimulus, but rather gain more information about the object. The question is a pertinent one and debatable, for, according to this view, a skilled perceiver can realize features and higher structures that are not noticed by others. That may help to explain how it is possible to realize that the schemes of a skilled perceiver can be more developed, so that they can receive broader information and handle more complicated information. At this point we can think that learning through perception can affect a developed schematic map, so, a perceptual learning can affect what we are looking at, and how we remember what we see. A cognitive map means a space and orienting schema where perception is a process where there are many different perceptions working at the same time. Intriguingly, these perceptions change original schemes and every person has his or her own schemes due to a personal life. The same is true to the testing of hypotheses, but these hypotheses are strictly bordered, very general and not very specific by nature. (Ibidem). Consider another example. Two different criteria are often used to attribute map-like organization of spatial knowledge to people. One is when spatial inferences about the direction and distances among locations can be made without direct experience. The other is when it is possible to mentally take a different perspective on an entire spatial layout. This can be done by imagining oneself in a different position with respect to a layout. (Hintzmann, O’Dell, Arndt, 149–206). To put it in more general terms, it is possible to think of cognitive maps as data bases, and the term ‘cognitive map’ is being used increasingly metaphorically. In semantic theory of metaphor we can relate to more sensory aspects of the image. (Ricoeur). Metaphorical meaning relates to the density of images and to the phenomenology of imagination.

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Divided Attentions Vision is the process of discovering from images what is present in the world, and what it is. David Marr

According to a hypothesis, when we view a scene, the world seems to be filled with objects that have particular shapes, colours, and material properties. Very possibly, the primary source of information that we use to acquire information about our world is visual, which relies on the light reflected off of object surfaces to a point of observation. In other words, our knowledge of object structure, and aspects of our visual world, is determined by the structure of the surfaces of objects, since it is there that light interacts with objects. Perception is usually dependent of concepts. When we perceive something, we also perceive it as some kind of entity. All in all, we can think that human perception relies on knowledge of the world around us. Another point is that the majority of traditional psychological theories investigate perception as recognition of something, and there are methods through which we can observe the different phases of perception. But there are other puzzles to be discovered. Nowadays there is also talk about direct perception. For example, there are three different ways of perception: direct perception, recognition and interpersonal perception. (Neisser, 225–249). It is not our present concern to examine the correctness of the reasoning behind all this. It is possible to think that we perceive objects through different phases. So, instead of thinking of perception as being defined by unified conceptions, we could define it in terms of phases: perception is an on-going universe, a collection of events that are related to each other and might interact. It should be emphasized that in the first pre-attentive stage of processing, stimulus will be divided into primitives. Later on, in the second focused attention stage of processing these primitives are united into a whole. (Goldstein, 198).

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Consider another example. Related to perception, there is an idea that the differentiation of textures depends on local features—primitives that he called textons. Consequently, these textons form textures, and they don’t have to be totally identical to form groups. (Julesz, 34–43). These distinct states have distinct effects: the different parts of perception are differentiated through different textures. In the pre-attentive stage of processing the textons are united into textures quickly and automatically. After this, there’s recognition of patterns and objects. The key aspect here is this: the process happens in the bottom-up style during the first phase, and later on also from top-down. In the pre-attentive stage of processing, perceptual organization and differentiation of the textures takes place. Further on, different perceptual laws organize visual views into homogenous areas and elements. This phase is an initial one, of which we are not aware of. (Treisman, 5–35). Perhaps a more promising approach is that a perceptual organization will happen in the early stages of visual processing, and it is needed for the development of more complex representations. (Tarr, 503–512). We can assume that perceptual organizing has two ways of processing: the grouping of and separation of features. For this reason, however, the different perceptual laws will describe more thoroughly this organization, and they function although all the possible information concerning the view in question is not available. The essential grouping of features will happen during the slower, focused attention stage of processing. (Treisman). In particular, this stage selects and integrates features into certain positions. Consider another plausible suggestion. The focused attention stage of processing is needed to form a temporary object representation or object file from a certain object, and it will be fulfilled constantly, for example, when the object changes through movement. This line of reasoning continues: if the attention is divided, then a temporary representation includes those features that

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characterize the whole structure of different elements as a group. Initially, there might be two ways of looking: one for the perception of local forms, and the other for larger perception. This is an intriguing statement. Furthermore, selective attention is the factor that leads to the perception of details, and one can consider the larger, global perception as a very general process, which includes even then perception of all those things that are beyond our attention. (Julesz, 42–43). Objectively speaking, the recognition of objects will happen then, when temporary representation will be measured with the patterns in the memory or with the descriptions that have taken place with the previous objects in mind. In fact, sometimes during active perception the representation that is all the time fulfilling itself will change into something else. Clearly, then the recognisable object might change into another that is more appropriate. (Treisman, 31– 32). Consider finally the sufficient reason argument that the perception and recognition of objects takes normally more than just the right selection and listing of features. In other words, normal perception takes place between earlier knowledge, and sensory information gained through perception. The most significant consequence that deals with the grouping of features and parts is that there will be emergent features, which are directly perceived. We can perceive directly the parts or groups formed by them, and these are the emergent features. (Pomerantz, 141–180). Also other tests have proven that a target may be recognized based on very little information. They show that a spectator in front of an image with a previously unseen view can through one fixation extract enough information to understand it. (Biederman, 213–253). At first sight, this seems to be very essential for the viewing of art, and its objects. We can think that in the first phase of perception the objects are divided into basic elements that are then unified, and the gathered wholes are then recognized by comparing them with the representations in memory. Three-dimensional objects are

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recognized through volumetric elements, called geons. (Ibidem, 115–147). These geons are basic materials of perception, and by combining them it is possible to build up thousands of objects. The argument requires the idea that geons can be perceived at least from five easily recognisable properties of object line: collinearity, curvilinearity, symmetry, parallelism, and cotermination of segments. Whatever this all means is helped by the following suggestion: our visual system differentiates those properties from the two-dimensional retina image, and they are strong proof of the three-dimensional world having the same properties. A further point was made through the idea of perceptual laws (like the Prägnanz law) having a significant role in the formation of geons. A consequence of this was that if the basic elements can be perceived, and the perception of objects is based on basic elements, then the object can be recognized. As a whole, the recognition can happen very easily when there is enough information to recognize the geons of the object. When geons are found, their order is compared with the representation in memory. The crucial thing here is that all the geons are perceivable, because they can be recognized quickly through some of them. Of course, the whole object will offer a more optimal possibility to recognize geons, and the object. This is important because if object recognition would happen with a large amount of information, the process would become slow and liable to mistakes. So far through our investigation and through practical experience we can assume that object recognition is a very quick and precise process. We can also assume that the recognition of very complex objects lasts longer than the recognition of simple ones, but because the recognition of objects happens through simple basic elements, the complex objects will be as quickly recognized. (Ibidem). A lesson to learn is this: because object recognition is based on geons from different perspectives, the whole object is quickly recognized regardless of what the perspective would be.

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There is also point of view, according to which object recognition is bound with the perspective. The recognition of an object through a new perspective is easier because a storage of representations with different points of view already exists in the mind. We can assume that when we have seen an object through many perspectives, the recognition of it is not bound to a certain perspective. (Lawson & Humphreys, 2). In one computational theory the process of seeing includes different phases through which the retinal image (the electrochemical and neural activity initiated in the retina) will change into three-dimensional representation. (Marr, 34–37). David Marr’s theory of visual perception was crucial, since it brought gestalt (shape or form) ideas into computational perceptual psychology. In the theory, the first phase leads into a primal sketch where the main function of a visual system is to recognize the properties of two-dimensional image. The recognition includes the changes of light sources and highlights, and the primary analysis of local, geometric structures. At the same time, a group of basic elements is identified, and many perceptual laws are being adapted. The second phase in this theory leads into a 2 ½ D sketch, where the visual system processes information, which was included in the primal sketch. The goal is to reach a representation concerning the depth and direction of surfaces. The 2 ½ D sketch is an internal representation of the physical world, and it is reached through top-down process. After this the 2 ½ D sketch information will be changed into a 3–D model representation, which is a three-dimensional vision of the world. The recognition of objects will happen when the 3–D model representation is compared with a list in memory of 3–D model descriptions. When an appropriate model is picked up from the list, it is possible to make a better analysis concerning the representation. (Ibidem). How will all this fit into our goals of investigation? Intriguingly, this argument seems to continue from the premises of the previous ones, and then turn into logic of its

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own. But notice that these series of thought are somehow infinite. However, this is an appropriate response to earlier views, and the importance of the theory lies in the assumption that perception is born out of analysing the information of the retinal image.

Hypotheses The idea that visual awareness of detail is a kind of virtual awareness is consequential. Alva Noë

Let us consider the idea that knowledge can work downwards to parcel signals and data into objects. There is also a point related to this: as knowledge changes, the parcelling into objects may change, both for science and perception. These things may have an unrivalled capacity to generate paradoxes. For example, the criteria for recognizing and naming the various features of a machine as separate depend very much on our knowledge of functions. More specifically, it is a question of the importance of upward and downward processing in perception and science, the complex interplay of signals, data, and hypotheses. Unravelling this is essential for understanding the strategies and procedures of perception and science. It is hardly surprising, in the light of this, that a profound difference between perceptual and conceptual objects is that perceptual objects are always concrete ones, while conceptual objects of science may be abstract ones. Much of our conception of the world is bound up with its apparent spatial and temporal features. And without a doubt, perceived objects have spatial extension and may change in time; and while conceptual objects cannot be sensed, they may be unchanging and, in this sense, spaceless. Yet, they have the status of objects in that they are public. Although, concrete objects may have features that are abstract, as we believe especially from scientific knowledge.

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(Gregory, 1981, 403). Of course, there are differences between perceptual and scientific hypotheses. Firstly, perceptions are from one vantage point, and run in real time, but science is not based on a particular viewpoint. That is why perception differs from conceptions by being related to events in real time from a local region of space, while conceptions have no locale and are essentially timeless. A further point is that perception is far more limited in range and application than conception. Broadly speaking, the basis of empiricism is that all conception depends upon perception, but conception can break away from perception, and create a new world. Secondly, perceptions are of instances, and science is of generalizations. This means that we perceive individual objects, but we can conceive generalizations and abstractions. Thirdly, perceptions are limited to concrete objects, while science also has abstract objects. Following this, the contribution of inferences and assumptions to sensing even simple things makes the distinction between concrete and abstract objects difficult and perhaps impossible. Fourthly, perceptions are not explanations, but concepts can be explanatory. Consequently, scientific hypotheses are closely linked to explanation. Perceptions have far less explanatory power, but might have some. Fifthly, perception includes awareness, and the physical sciences exclude it. In the light of this, we can think that this is an embrace of the consequence of things, an argument that tries to explain how through these visionary statements we can have knowledge that is more synthetic. Within this framework there is striking difference between hypotheses of science and perception. The consequences of this are that sensations are involved in perception, but awareness or consciousness has no place in the hypotheses of physics. There is a considerable variety of features here, and much of human behaviour controlled by perception can occur without awareness: consciousness is seldom if ever necessary. There are marked similarities and important identities between hypotheses of science

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and perceptions, however, the differences are extremely interesting. Furthermore, it may be that developments in artificial intelligence might provide new conceptions. One of the lessons of our inquiry is that perception as a whole is based on many different systems, which are partly independent modular ones. As mentioned before, perception includes three basic forms and systems: direct perception, interpersonal perception, and representation. Many other modular systems also exist, like the memory system, motoric control system, and the system of writing, which are in collaboration with each other, and are therefore hard to separate. We perceive objects as being a certain distance from other objects. We also identify temporal changes and spatial relations between them. For example, direct perception is only one form or system of perception, and it is innately prepared, and concerned with parietal pathway. (Neisser, 225–237). So, perhaps the best strategy to think about all this is to state that in direct perception the spectator is active, and can get the kinetic depth effect. More generally, in visual experience, depth effects are created by the nervous system and the mind. (Arnheim, 1974, 279). We seem to be able to conceive these ideas, and what we need are proper methods of judging the legitimacy of these conceptions. The difficulty is to explain all the possible variations and references in this field of observation. We may be able to distinguish between matters of the physical world, between science and perception, between abstract and concrete happenings, and collections of states of affairs. Combining all this, we can have a clearer picture ahead of us. Discussion of these things may provide alternative views for the future. As an enlargement of this: many cognitive functions are dependable on mental representations. We can think that while investigating the nature of the world, we are actually investigating the content of our own minds. We are densely connected with space, time, and causal ideas. When we recognize things,

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we have to identify targets through the information stored in our memory. This kind of recognition might change from very simple cases into very complex ones. In the art world, an example of a complex one would be the recognition of a painting by Rembrandt. More specifically, recognition is always determined by the past: to recognize something we have to notice the similarities between the actual information, and the information of certain moments from before. That is, the recognition of single objects depends usually on the perception of certain characteristics and textures. We conclude, then, that in everyday experience, all of these three forms and systems of perception function smoothly together.

Models The account of pictorial seeing applies as easily to pictures of mythical or fictional kinds as to pictures of actual kinds. Malcolm Budd

It is tempting to realize how different theories and scientific approaches to perception have opened up horizons in this field. A broader view of perception can see these different approaches as complements of each other, and help us with a better understanding of the whole process. The perceptual laws and other gestalt-psychological principles can help and guide us on how to organize perceptions into unified patterns and objects. It is adequate to understand how the perceptual laws describe the effects of certain innate and very early learned schemes into the organization of perception. Gestalt psychologists thought that these organizing principles have a physiological basis, and would thus be innate ways of organizing perception. Even more importantly, if we think that there are innate and learned schemes, we can see the unification of many perceptions, although our experiences and interpretations of them might be very different. Yet in the background there is common information, which has been picked from the same targets.

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From this point of view the innate, gestalt-psychological schemes seem to be sometimes flexible. In the studies concerning many sided and complex image interpretations, there is a perspective according to which the primary organization of perception might happen in several ways. By varying the rates of these changes, the innate schemes are not always stiff but can produce different shapes on the same material basis. To take an illustration of the point, we can say that different perceptions are consequences of different schemes that will change during one’s lifetime, and in the perception of art this suggests that the same work of art looks different when seen during different periods of one’s life. Admittedly, different visual models, descriptions, and representations are partly learned, because they are based on earlier experiences. Consider that all learned schemes are not models or representations, because they can deal with the ways and principles of perception. Furthermore, we can think that the different visual models, descriptions, and representations are linked with the basic system of perception: recognition. In the light of this, very brief glances are relatively immune to the effect of learning, but learning can affect the previously mentioned schematic map, which we found as a learned model or representation of an object. There are hypotheses, according to which a learned perceiver of art can sometimes develop better schemes, models, and representations compared to an unskilled perceiver, and can also take in more information and find out more complex connections between elements and things. Whether this is true or not is debatable. In human perception, learned schemes can be models and representations of objects, and they can be endlessly formed. All in all, learned and innate schemes might have different roles in different situations, and they function in different phases of perception by completing each other. The innate schemes do not lead straight into the recognition of an object. They work more as organizers of perception. The

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learned schemes have a role in recognition. They are models, descriptions, and representations. The learned schemes can be guiding models of action. It is possible that the differentiation between learned and innate schemes is purely theoretical, and actually it is a question of combining the two. The perceptual laws itself do not bring in the desired effect: it is produced by learned models, descriptions, and representations. Because of the learned representations, certain shapes can gain more meanings than others, and based on previous knowledge of the world, it is possible to form expectations that will guide to a proper interpretation. After dealing with some difficulties and paradoxes, we can point out how different models and representations are hypotheses of sorts, and not often very accurate representations of the views in front of us. Sure, the hypotheses of representation have formed through experience, which brings in new expectations guiding our perceptions. How, for example, is it clear that while observing complex images the existence of learned representations is significant? This is related to the idea according to which a spectator who stands in front of them has the possibility to develop different interpretations and meanings. While recognizing targets inside the images we have to deal with more interpretational processes than in perceiving the reality. Especially, through associations we can link unseen features into familiar objects. (Gregory 1971, 85–87). Consider another example. In face recognition we can quickly perceive the essential and structural features of a face. And without a doubt, the recognition of a familiar face occurs due to the distinctiveness of a face. (Lewis & Johnston, 437–459). Aptly, face recognition requires holistic recognition, which has its advantages also in object recognition. Instead, the recognition of letters is more like part-based recognition, useful in object recognition but not in any other. There is also a perspective, according to which it is not possible to recognize objects without the

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cultural context surrounding them. Equally undecidedly, we can think that the influence of the past on the cognitive processes of human beings is much more complicated, than just a hint to certain processes which store information. Needless to say, we learn to perceive things through human communication, and the produced knowledge will move on to new situations as models, ways, and principles of action. Perception in itself is a phenomenological process, since to see is to perform operations on visual materials. Part of what makes this approach especially interesting is the conviction that the operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception, but the essential ingredients of perception itself. As an apparent reference of this idea means that it is a question of active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison and problem solving. All of this has huge dimensions, since these are the ways that the human mind treats cognitive and phenomenological material at different levels. Human minds allegedly possess many innate, special-purpose, domain-specific psychological mechanisms. Their development requires minimal input and their operations are context-sensitive, mostly automatic and independent of another and of general intelligence. We might even go further and say that each of these operations is a component of intelligence and of perception. Consider, for example, the fundamental operation of selection. If we are to select some aspects of a visual situation for attention, and for further processing, then we must select particular shapes, colours, patches, or lines. The same is true for all such operations, which are thereby shown to be indisputably both cognitive and conducted from the very beginning in visual terms. Within this framework the concept of visual thinking means that a difference between passive reception and active perceiving is contained already in elementary visual experience, and furthermore we can think that although a retinal projection is given,

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it is not the essence of perception. Consequently, that given world is only the scene on which most characteristic aspect of perception takes place. The perception takes place through glances, directed by attention, and focusing the narrow range of sharpest vision on different aspects. In a larger perspective, all these aspects are concerned with how the mind works. Furthermore, perception also consists in the formation of perceptual concepts. To summarize the preceding ideas, we can state that the human vision deals with the raw material of experience by creating a corresponding pattern of general forms, which are applicable not only to the individual case at hand but to an indeterminate number of similar cases. This shows exactly how important the issue at hand really is. Consequently, there are striking similarities between the elementary activities of the senses and the higher ones of thinking and reasoning. The same mechanisms operate on both the perceptual and the intellectual level so that we need terms like concept, judgment, logic, abstraction, conclusion, computation, to describe the work of the senses. (Arnheim, 1974, 46). A further application of this theory deals with the question of what perceiving accomplishes at a sensory level, that which in the realm of reasoning is known as understanding. Perception cannot be deductive thinking, because perceiving things is not only a human operation. That is why it is more inductive thinking, and for this reason we can, for example, experience perceptual paradoxes. (Gregory 1971, 161–161). This is certainly not a paradox, since thinking can be inductive, and it can presuppose selection and choosing. According to the idea here the visual concept of the object derived from perceptual experiences has several properties. It conceives in itself the image, where the object can be seen as three-dimensional, of constant shape, and not limited to any particular projective aspect. An implication of this follows with the idea why a person’s visual concept of the object is based on the totality of observations

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from any number of angles. Admittedly, it is still a visual concept, and not a verbal definition obtained by intellectual abstraction. One point to note about this intriguing and inductive argument is that sometimes intellectual knowledge helps to form a visual concept. How is this possible? We can think that an object’s certain and essential features will appear best from different angles. Looking at this argument, premises will follow: visual concepts must be distinguished from so-called eidetic memory images, which make it possible for some people to project upon an empty surface an exact replica of a scene they have perceived before. And further on, we can compare them with afterimages, although they can be scanned by eye movement, and this is not possible with afterimages. Eidetic images are substitute perceptions and as such mere raw material for active vision. As a follow up of this, it is clear that the problem of surface perception is difficult because the visual system is confronted with the problem of untangling the different physical causes of the images on our retinas, and filling in missing information when only portions of a surface are visible. Nevertheless, much progress has been made in understanding how the visual system infers surface structure in some simplified images, but still much remains to be done before we have a full understanding of how our visual system works.

Schemes The surface of any picture can contain elements that though, individually visible, make no contribution to what the picture represents. Richard Wollheim

The visual concept of anything that has volume can be represented only in three-dimensional medium, such as sculpture and architecture. (Bruno). Intriguingly, if we want to make pictures on a plane surface, all we can hope to do is to produce a translation,

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to present some structural essentials of the visual concept by two-dimensional means. An image can be translation or transformation, but this transformation has to be reversed to obtain the required information. Thus, in talking about visual concept and perception, it is not only a question of image perception but of perception in general. A visual concept is not just a reflection of some aspect. What philosophical conclusions can we draw from this? A visual representation or scheme of the mind is a three-dimensional model composed through experience, and not a scheme related to the organization of perceptions and of principles concerning with the perception. Another point to make is that by investigating the drawings of children, we can find out why and how they perceive things. The early drawings of children show neither the predicted conformity to realistic appearance nor the expected spatial projections. (Arnheim, 1974, 163). This leads to a conclusion of children actually drawing visual concepts. This view was against the earlier belief in which it was suggested that children are technically unable to reproduce what they perceive. The drawings of children do show incomplete motor control. Yet the outlines are accurate enough to indicate what the drawing is supposed to be like. On the other hand, other theorists had maintained that children aim at making straight lines, circles, and ovals because these simple shapes are relatively easy to draw. Whether this is true or not remains an open question. We can assume that this might be true, but it does not indicate what mental process induces children to identify complex objects with geometric patterns. In the light of this, we cannot interpret them as simplified projective images. As a consequence of this, we can claim that the mental life of children is intimately bound with their sensory experience. If the child’s mind contains any non-perceptual concepts of roundness, straightness, or symmetry, how would they be translated into visual shape? An interesting question is whether they are

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derived from visual experiences, and whether we should believe that the primarily raw material is processed into non-visual ‘abstraction,’ to be translated back into visual shape for the purpose of image making. This seems to be a complicated issue, and since visual perception is based on optical projection, the sense of sight was deemed incapable of conveying a truthful image of what three-dimensional things really look like. Nevertheless, another point deals with the idea that to apprehend a shape of an object by touch is in no way simpler or more direct than apprehension by vision. One influential way of addressing this question is to consider the ways in which, in order to experience space kinaesthetically, the brain must create that experience from sensory messages that are not spatial, and kinaesthesia involves the same kind of task as vision. Let us try to enlarge our perspective. Suppose we say that a grown up person selects visual interpretations concerning different objects on the basis of visual information at hand. Of course, other senses, like touch, will affect our perceptions, but they do not determine the perception. (Gregory, 1971, 41–42) Another approach claims that perception does not consist of a photographically true recording of something, but rather reaches out for the structural features of that particular thing. What really matters is that in perceiving an image one perceives actively the structural features of the image. In other words, the human mind can be forced to produce replicas of things, but it is not naturally geared to it. We could concede that since perception is concerned with the grasping of significant form, the mind finds it hard to produce images devoid of that formal virtue. There is no need to deny that, for example, an artist may start her work based on an idea, which is then worked out through some vague scheme, and then gradually fixed with new ideas. One could perhaps ask, that if an artist tries to reach out something which corresponds to real perception, then what kind of scheme or mental representation is there to be fixed? Through a much more

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plausible approach we can think that the concept of a scheme might be different when applied to perception of reality than to representation of it. Another feature of this version is that perception consists in forming visual concepts, and mental representations, and making an image is like producing representational concepts on the basis of visual concepts. Thus, these concepts and representations are structures consisting of essential and special features. This means that although a mental representation or a visual concept contains more information about an object than what we can perceive from one perspective, it still is a simplification of the object. This certainly makes these ideas more understandable, and phenomena of this kind find their explanation in what Gestalt psychology describes as the basic law of visual perception: Any stimulus pattern tends to be seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as the given conditions permit. Simplicity can be defined by means of information theory: The smaller the amount of information needed to define a given organization as compared to other alternatives, the more likely the figure will be so perceived. This follows the matter, according to which both a psychologist and an artist must come to realize that the perceptual experience of looking at a figure cannot be described as the sum of the perceived components. (Arnheim, 1974, 58). A further enlargement of this is that objective and subjective simplicity do not always run parallel. But in what sense is this somehow special? We can elaborate that a perceiver may find a sculpture simple because they are unaware of its intricacy; or they may find it confusingly complex, because they have little acquaintance with even moderately elaborate structures. Consider another idea. It appears that we have a tendency to see things as wholes. We have to be careful here, however. What is seen in a particular area of the visual field depends strongly on its place and function in the total context. Of course, the structure of the whole may be modified by local changes. This interplay between

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whole and part is not automatic and universal. So, in these situations, a part may or may not be influenced by a change in the total structure. It seems, then, that this illustrates just that any visual field behaves as a gestalt. And this, after all, is precisely what we have expected. Furthermore, if attention is focused, we can see details, but when attention is split, we perceive more about the whole than its parts. Now, according to this version, the quality of attention reflects the nature of perception. This may help to explain how we think of it. Even though well-organized figures cling to their integrity and complete themselves when distorted, we should not assume that such figures are always perceived as undivided, compact masses. (Ibidem, 69–70). In visual perception, shape is not the only factor determining the splitting of visual field. Similarities and differences in brightness and colour can be even more decisive. Now, given this view, the appearance of any part depends, to some extent, on the structure of the whole, and the whole is influenced by the nature of its parts. This piece of reasoning does not require any more abstract ideas for its truth. In this sense, no portion of a work of art is ever quite self-sufficient. Consider a practical example. Picasso, after experimenting with sketches of rather complex hands and figures for his mural Guernica, made them much simpler in the final work. Following a general idea, every painting, sculpture or film carries meanings. Whether they are representational or abstract, they are still about something. Arguably, then, an image can present a visual statement, and the simplicity of art objects involves not only their visual appearance in and by itself, but also the relation between the image seen and the statement it is intended to convey. This kind of double messaging can be a genuine possibility. Our reasoning here has led us to the conclusion that simplicity requires a correspondence in structure between meaning and tangible pattern. This is something that Gestalt psychologists have called isomorphism, a requirement for design in the applied arts as well. Within this framework a visual

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concept is something that comes through visual and not verbal thinking. This is partly due to the general idea according to which, for example, models, descriptions, and representations stored in memory are usually visual.

Variations of Process A basic truth about what it means to be human is that there is no consciousness without a body. Rhonda Blair

Phenomenological activities transpire within us, and this happens frequently so that we are not even aware of it. Some phenomenological and cognitive functions might be transparent to consciousness. It is tempting to think that there are two kinds of perceptual thinking, which can be called intuitive and intellectual cognition. But is this really adequate? According to this reasoning, intuitive cognition takes place in a perceptual field of freely interacting forces, through which the perception of an image is born. This interaction is actually a very complex field process, of which very little reaches consciousness. This makes it difficult to describe. An example of this would be how one apprehends a work of art like a painting. During this process, an observer perceives the various components of an image, including, for example, the shapes and colours and relations between them. The final outcome of this processing becomes conscious in the mind of the perceiver as the perception of a painting. What really matters is that a great deal of thinking and problemsolving goes on in intuitive cognition. This takes us to the second argument, according to which, through intellectual cognition, an observer isolates items and relations among items from the perceptual field in order to establish the particular nature of each. This means that intellectual processes follow each other in linear succession. These processes take place in time, and by gradually solidifying the perceptual concepts gained from direct

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experience, the mind acquires the stable shapes. This is all very interesting, and we can immediately figure out some interconnections between these two cognitive models. Much of our thinking is bound up with intuitive and intellectual reasoning. There is no real need to deny the existence of these processes, although definite answers concerning their explicit interaction might be hard to get. The threads of thinking are drawn together, and they might raise further and more significant questions. The recognition of images can be compared with previously un-experienced targets or views with insufficient information, which both require more specific perception than a familiar view. Needless to say, the perception of images requires some kind of thinking, comparison, knowledge, experience, and attention. So far, we may think that through experience an observer works toward solution that is highly appropriate, and this process leads into interpretation. At most it shows that the process is partly unconscious, and that is why an observer sees through image perception the target, and does not consciously think all of one’s choices. (Gregory, 1971, 30–32). Representing this as a valid argument, we have something like the following: if we think of image perception as visual thinking, we can realize that there is a lot of information in the image, which we don’t use. Another thing is that we can identify different targets based on quite little information. Consequently, perception is not just recognition, but more or less it is perception and understanding of spatial structures, and understanding of different objects and parts and their relations in the visual field through visual thinking. When observing an image, one single and special feature can already activate representations of the mind, and lead to the recognition of objects. So, the testing of different hypotheses is not necessary every time. On the other hand, the perception of images is also connected with the understanding of spatial structures and relations, and this kind of understanding requires visual thinking. When an image is very complicated, and offers a lot of information,

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one might need more conscious deductive processes to fulfil the task of understanding, and sometimes when there is not enough information to select the right object, the mind cannot decide how to see the object. And without a doubt, complex images test the idea that the interpretations include experimental reflection. (Gombrich, 1987, 218–219). A more satisfactory expression of the idea is this: complex stimulus impulses inside an image create a situation where the schemes as mental representation of memory are gradually more and more focused toward the final solution. The paradox here, however, is that perception is not only the gathering of information or activating the mind and its representations, but it also forebodes future perceptions, because visual experience is, in this sense, dynamic, and deals with psychological forces. We can imagine that in a psychological framework, image-based discourse functions on many cognitive-emotional levels and the spectator can use a wide set of dispositions to make sense of the various levels of image-based discourse. Another point to make is this: perceptual inductions differ from logical inferences, because inferences are thought operations that add something to the given visual facts by interpreting them. Instead, perceptual inductions might be based on previously acquired knowledge of the world. So, in this sense, perception is an experience that is born out of the information and the forebodings connected with it. More importantly, forebodings are crucial for survival, and are in this sense very natural ways of behaving and thinking. We can offer an explanation, according to which, it is possible that forebodings are connected with image perception and interpretation. Intriguingly, an image always leaves holes, which are there for the observer to be fulfilled. As indicated before, what we see depends on the previous knowledge of what we know. Following this, forebodings create illusions, and an observer can fulfil the holes, if there is no doubt how to do it. Then, through our experiences it is possible to do the fulfilling, to reflect life and ideas into the image.

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At this point we ought to ask how it is that the human mind operates, regarding these earlier ideas. We cannot answer this question simply by explaining some individual workings or states of the mind. It is more a question of the kind of reflection where the human mind works as interplay of tension-heightening and tension-reducing strivings. For we can imagine another way, according to which, the same kind of twofold dynamics will be reflected in every work of visual design. In a work of art, there might be a structural theme involved, and suggested by the subject matter, but constituted first of all by a configuration of perceived forces. We can think that the theme is given a simplest form compatible with the character of the statement. Visual perception consists in the experiencing of visual forces. (Arnheim, 1974, 412). Painting a larger view, perhaps it is possible to find that various aspects of the image combine in presenting the narrative as a pattern of visual forces, of eloquent shapes and meanings. Every aspect of the work participates in unison to facilitate a deeper apprehension of the artwork’s theme. An artwork’s form is constructive in the sense that it is not an external shape of things but a process of building up the work. This is a valid argument, and demands sufficient reasoning. We have to ask, however, whether natural objects possess strong visual dynamics because their shapes are the traces of the physical forces that created the objects. Another point to make is that works of art are seldom produced physically by the forces we perceive in their shapes. Alternatively, we can define that all the dynamic qualities in the works of art are not created by physical forces, and even if all visual dynamics were due to the direct manifestation of physical forces, this would not account for the perceptual effect of the final product on the mind of the observer. But it is perhaps more appropriate to think that this effect is not due to the observer’s knowledge of its cause. We can offer an explanation to look for the visual properties of the individual perception, since those might be responsible for the phenomenon. This is precise and adequate thinking.

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Thoughts Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—a painting mixes up all our categories in laying out its oneiric universe of carnal essences, of effective likenesses, of mute meanings. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We are surrounded by phenomenological traces of thinking through which an intelligent organism operates in a kind of perception-action cycle, taking in sensory information from the environment, performing internal computations on it, and using the results of the computation to guide the selection and execution of goal-directed actions. After all, the initial sensory input is provided by separate sensory systems, including smell, taste, haptic perception, and audition. In its more complex forms, for example, learning is intimately connected to thinking and reasoning. Humans are not only able to think, but also to think about their own cognitive processes, resulting in metacognition. The very idea of this can also be expanded for higherlevel representations. Now imagine all these processes connected with cinematic thinking. In cinematic narration editing is possible because the mind can achieve quite complex co-ordinations in, literally, split seconds, and this also touches on the nexus of relationships between form and experience, knowledge and perception, and established and in-coming information. The very idea invites more thinking. One aspect in film culture has aspired to a rigorous logic, within which all the phenomena will become one tightly coherent structure; akin to a logical system conceived by linguistics-based structuralism. Unfortunately, its paradigms have maximised the difficulties in understanding the nature of mental operations on which film form depends. That surely is not a coherent description, but insofar as thought is co-ordination, it must seek out, and yet tolerate both external and internal discrepancies.

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While some discrepancies are repressed, like conflict-inducing wishes in a Freudian theory, or ‘cognitive dissonance’ in a more general way, many discrepancies are recognised and endured, or used and indeed enjoyed. And this goes on not just as riddles, paradoxes, jokes, surprises, and so on, but also in ordinary thought. It has been truly said that contradiction is more the cause than the product of consciousness. It may be, however, that discrepancy is more basic than contradiction, since the mind is geared to integrating systems, which, without necessarily contradicting one another, are disparate. Most obviously this has to do with the sensory systems, sight, sound, touch, and our awareness of the different positions of the different parts of our body in relation to space and gravity, momentum and counterpressures. The origination of bodily actions, for example, deals with more or less basic mental activities but these relations are not always easy to find out. But actually this also deals with mental sub-systems, like networks of associations. It seems that the human mind monitors these various factors simultaneously, and computer scientists have underlined the importance of parallel processing, in effect, the simultaneous processing of independent variables, whether heterogeneous or homogenous. It is this constant comparison of discrepancies, which enables us to differentiate between images and scenes, or to compare mutually exclusive paradigms or models for the same phenomenon. In a way, perception is pattern-recognition, not in the sense of recognising a simple template, like the visual equivalent of a paradigm, but the ability to compare and contract similarities and differences, and co-ordinate them as variations. Consider a good example like the constancy of vision mechanism, which enables us to reflect a table as rectangular even though, from all normal eye levels, perspective presents it as an irregular trapezoid, which, as we move around it, is a constantly changing series of forms. This has something to do with cinematic thinking.

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Such a co-ordination of things is not conscious, in the sense that we can work it out in our minds, nor even in the looser sense, that it is under voluntary control, or that we can easily become conscious of it. But neither is it unconscious, in the sense that it is somehow repressed. Rather, it belongs to what Freud called the preconscious area, reflecting a zone of mental operations, which are sometimes difficult but often impossible to render conscious. Of course, these processes have many different reasons, as many as the mind has levels and subsystems. So, probabilistic explanation might say that some are low-level reflexes or sequences of motoric instructions. Sure, others are perceptible, but normally interest us so little that we find it hard not to be distracted by almost any other thought even when we try to concentrate on them. Moreover, much of our complex, higher-level thinking is preconscious too. We rarely can spell out every stage in an associative chain, if indeed the mind goes back along thought chains in a linear way. Given an ordered state at a particular time, most reconstructions of associative chains are done by retrospective hypothesis. This means that they never explain the omission of equally available alternatives, and they can hardly cover more than one aspect of such search procedures. Let us try to define more precisely the workings of the human mind. Here is another approach. More probably is the case that the mind sets out from several aspects of a task-in-situation simultaneously, and what it offers as a solution to these multiple requirements is the product of convergence from every feature of content, context, function, and goal, including desire, wish-fulfilment and fear. In connection with this, simultaneous processing might be a better phrase than parallel processing, because parallels do not integrate too well. Since we are concerned with the philosophy of the mind, at any rate, the model of multiple, simultaneous operations allow us to understand the brain’s remarkably efficient compromise between speed and heterogeneity. However, there are some remaining difficulties. Rather than following old association chains, the brain must have far more

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efficient systems for cross-indexing and excluding information. For most of these operations consciousness is unnecessary, and indeed, full articulation in consciousness would be impossibly slow. A probabilistic explanation would be that much of our conscious thinking takes the form of vague awareness, where the vagueness stands for a preconscious knowledge, which can often be so quickly retrieved that we think of it as having been conscious all along. Another way of putting the matter is that we often sense—and with great confidence—that an argument contains a discrepancy, before we define what it is. Admittedly, in normal speech, we somehow know what to say, and roughly what it is but without knowing exactly, or what words we will use. And after the moment we have said it, it would be hard for us to repeat the words exactly. The same is true of thinking. Often the conscious part of our thinking is restricted to a co-ordination of selected items of data, the setting of a goal, and a volitional decision to perform the task. Obviously, the actual performance is no more conscious than instructing each foot alternately to take a step. Consciousness does not think. Within this framework of ideas, perhaps it is more the result of the higher mental sub-systems registering discrepancies from one another. In a similar manner, consistency is not the basis of constructive thinking; it is what thinking constructs out of the disparate and the discrepant ideas in time. Hence, it is true that we feel quite comfortable with all the irrationalities of cinematic form, and, in this sense, we find ourselves in the middle of incompatible contradictions like the edited flow of shots presenting incompatible spaces within one screen space, and so on. The key idea here is that to make sense of a film, the human mind draws on our general understanding of the cinematic situation of which its forms are part. And another thing is that it draws also on our general knowledge of the world, of which our knowledge of cinematic situation is a part. The ability of children to make

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sense of images and sounds on a screen depends less on receiving verbal disquisitions or deconstructions of the medium, but rather on the everyday experience of it. Through this way cinematic images and their multiple viewpoints analogise with perspective, which of course exists in the material world quite independently. Even in real-life vision we can draw on basic mechanisms of form and perception, thus we can understand that audiovisual narration is a matter of moving viewpoints. The heavily shadowed side of a man’s face forms part of the same object as the visually very different sunlit side of that face, and that the shape of a head depicts a solid object, not a flat or convex surface. We think intuitively, and apart from visual knowledge we need a probabilistic knowledge of the world. For example, when we see a gun go off in a western film, we expect to see another man falling in the subsequent shot. These simple items are not coded, and films can and do surprise us. The paradox here, however, is that it is sometimes difficult to separate knowledge of the world, knowledge of semiotic form, and knowledge of meanings from each other, since far from being separate levels, zones or disciplines, each of them implies the other. Consequently, knowledge of semiotic form is part of our wider knowledge, which can only be a knot of all these things. A slightly more respectable reason would be to replace paradigms, like separate levels, by models like interacting sub-systems. Clearly, through this interaction disputatious pairs like coherence and correspondence are revealed as near synonyms for the same coordination. This definition has to be modified, and it is surprising how often probabilistic inferences can repair deficiencies in knowledge. Historically, there are assertions that the structures of verbal language dominate perception of cinematic form. Significantly, they are under the grave disadvantage that no evidence exists to prove it, and only piecemeal shred of evidence to even suggest it. The moral of this thought experiment is that many effects attributed to verbal forms are better explained in terms of

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deficient or variant knowledge of the world. Through experience we can think that cross-cultural, cross-sub-cultural and ideological differences radically affect our experiences. They also affect our perception and understanding of cinematic form. This means that by rendering other thought forms visible, the variety of consistent and possible consequences of our thinking can have wider references.

Metaphors of Imagination Our thought, then, has objective validity because it is not fundamentally different from objective reality but is specially suited for imitating it. Kenneth Craik

Current research in cognitive neuroscience provides new insights into how the structures and processes of the brain are related to consciousness, and definitions of personhood, reason, and emotion are being rethought in the light of new information about brain structure and neurochemical processes, and how these manifest in consciousness and behaviour. The increasing ability to manipulate consciousness and our sense of ourselves at the point at which mind arises out of the body raises a cluster of questions about what the self is. (Blair, 3). The concrete and detailed control and implementation of muscle innervations, for example, take place on a non-conscious level. We have no consciousness of the numerous muscle innervations, which enable us, for instance, to skate. But we have a conscious high-level operational control of our behaviour via a much more general program. This program could look like a script, that is, a narrative or a summary of a sequence of acts. Important aspects of storytelling can be seen as developing out of the procedures we use when planning. Another essential feature of human consciousness is the ability of the embodied brain to make a model of it. (Johnson-Laird, 15). Because this model

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has to be contained in the human brain itself, it follows that it must necessarily be much simpler than the brain. The function of this model is linked to its ability to improve the quality of the acts of which humans are capable, whether these are physical or mental. This is an important note and relates back to our earlier discussion. But one would also have to include the idea that mental models of consciousness are primarily phenomenological, representing exterior space, with the inclusion of agents and objects in this space. Evidently, the raw material for these mental models consists of perceptions, and mental models describe the way in which we act in the world by importing features of it, and using aspects of it as tools. We can think that models are not just representations: they are tools, concepts that owe a great deal to the computer age that has diminished the clear-cut opposition between mind and matter. Furthermore, an essential aspect of the mental models is the construction of the model of the person itself. The model acquires its elements partly from the exterior world, partly from the inner world. The conception of the person as an acting figure in space is acquired from the exterior world by imitation. (Johnson). So, the person uses his or her visual perceptions of other persons as model schemata. Specifically, these schemata are organised chronologically and in accordance with various laws of association, and they are mediated by various things. (Wilson, 171–172). The schemata in itself is always a product of imagination. (Kant). It should be emphasized that the conceptions of abilities to perceive, to feel, and to think are acquired from the interior world, but the content of the thought processes is mainly represented in forms from exterior space. Aptly, these intellectual problems are neatly put side by side in the following idea: similarly, the imagination used in more abstract thinking will employ model images of phenomena in and acts performed in an exterior, objective space, which is marked linguistically by the use of figurative language. (Lakoff & Johnson). The figurative and metaphorical aspects of language make it

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reasonable to assume that, from an evolutionary point of view, abstract thinking has developed on the basis of the concrete scripts of acts and scenes which have gone through a process of extraction of essential features that could be used as models for other mental processes. Nevertheless, the way in which a person is able to imagine that she is ‘rotating’ or ‘scanning’ a given complex of mental images, this implies that the mental processing of images takes place as a simulation of perceptual processes with external objects. (Kosslyn). This means that besides scripts of actions, we also have scripts of perceptions, which enable us to carry out acts of hypothetical perception, that is, imagination. It should be emphasized that the ultimate theme of the image, the idea of creation, is conveyed by what strikes the eye first and continues to organize the composition. It is not enough to say that the forces that characterize the meaning of the story come alive in the observer’s mind, and produce participation that distinguishes artistic experience from the detached acceptance of information. One mechanism working is that the image is determined by the totality of visual experiences we have had with the perceived object during our lifetime. In visual thinking, the interaction between the shape of this object and that of things seen in the past is not automatic and not ubiquitous, but depends on whether a relation is perceived between them. Historically, the principles in art have taught us how things can be seen not only as such, but as they are represented. Broadly speaking, this kind of interaction means that also verbal descriptions might stir up visual memory traces, and can affect internally into the interpretation of images. What gets stored and retrieved in processes like this is at least partly determined by attention. The same can be said about thinking in other media. To put it another way, kinaesthetic thinking requires the selection for attention of particular bodily movements, and verbal thinking requires the selection of particular words and sentence structures. Thinking is the performance of these kinds of operations

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on the elements of a particular medium. So, if thinking is conducted in the terms of a particular medium, then to put it into the terms of a different medium is to change it. In this sense, visual thinking cannot be put exactly into words, because all translations are distortions of the original thought. That is why thought can remain true to itself only if it remains faithful to its medium, and this is the reason for insisting that we keep different kinds of thinking separate. The media correspond to our sensory channels. Obviously, in the case of sight, the medium is visual and in the case of hearing, the medium is sound. These are the two sensory channels thought as the most important for thinking. In thinking about language, the situation is different, because there is no single sensory channel corresponding to it. Needless to say, language can be spoken in which case it is heard or written in which case it is seen. So, language is not so much a medium of perception but of representation, and a medium in which we often speak of the visual arts as different media like painting, drawing, and sculpting. Whether or not language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual, it is also a self-contained, creative symbolic organization. And this organization not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness, and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience. (Sapir, 74). Later on, this idea was developed into the Whorfian hypothesis that language moulds thinking. Of course, it might be necessary to point out that thinking is generally affected by language, which itself adapts to thought and action. The use of language also calls attention to the different aspects of environment and culture. And without a doubt, there are differences between existing cultures and languages. For example, the importance of writing for societies and for individual

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thinking can hardly become overestimated and its importance was clear to the earliest civilizations in which it was developed. This early writing consisted of picture symbols, which became connected in conventional ways to express ideas. Later on, they became associated with sounds of spoken language as the sound of the name of an object denoted by the symbol became the name of the symbol. Related to this is the notion according to which cultural behaviour is the process of symbolizing the surrounding world as well as the own behaviour. (Dutton & Krausz). Perhaps the most effective way to describe it as a process is that it works in two directions: it implies the transformation of data, the transformation of nature, and it contributes to the identity of a person or group that is the agent of this symbolizing activity. In this sense, culture is not a linear activity of discovering the world, because there are many cultural approaches at the same time. Furthermore, the most characteristic feature of culture is its pluralistic character. In art as well as in sciences, in the continuous self-reinterpretation of various religions as well as in the meandering flow of economic order, reality shows always new aspects and structures. In particular, the existing map of human life is not filled up, but rewritten in the new structures and symbols. The science does not take away the human aspect, since it provides tools to engage things more closely. All in all, culture and reality are interrelated to such a degree that the restructuring history of cultures belongs to reality itself. A further point to make is that in order to interpret the functioning of the senses properly, one needs to keep in mind that they did not come about as instruments of cognition for cognition’s sake, but evolved as biological aids for survival. This is a promising explanation, and it means that the perceptual process is purposive and selective. Thinking about art media as a media of representation, we can conclude that just as perception is not a passive reception of sensory impressions, so is representation not imitating, because perception is an active search for visual

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structures and representation is an active search for equivalent structures in a medium of representation. Even more importantly, this search requires active and constructive experimentation within the medium of representation. As a whole, representation is as thoroughly cognitive as is perception.

Representation In other words, this is imagery involved in language itself; it is part of the game of language itself. Paul Ricoeur

According to our idea here, art is the imprint of life upon our consciousness, and a facet of truth projected within a particular framework of understanding. Without a doubt, we will point out that relation of representation to art is and old and enduring process. Already such Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle considered imitation and resemblance to be the main factors in art. This lasted well into the late nineteenth century, when philosophers became increasingly aware of art as less concerned with imitation or resemblance and more concerned with other positions. Works of art by Picasso and Duchamp are still about something. (Carroll, 32). Ready-made and found objects such as Fountain and In Advance of a Broken Arm possess aboutness. Whatever that means, it means that they have semantic content, and the artist intended them to mean something. The same is true of avant-garde works of art. Even these kinds of experiments that defy interpretation may have a subject, and can mandate interpretation. On the other hand, pure orchestral music and non-representational architecture seem to resist a definition of art in terms of aboutness. There is much art that is about anything. Pure decoration is another example. Such artworks can be simply beautiful, ‘beneath interpretation,’ and ‘solely in virtue of the perceptual impact they make on us’. (Ibidem). Representation-type theories of art are inadequate to address all possible

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cases, seeing as much of art is indeed representational, and visual art is especially likely to be representational. Against this line of reasoning comes another point. Thinking about an expression-theoretic account of art we come into terms of different emotions like sadness, joy, or fear. They became especially pronounced at the end of the eighteenth century, perhaps as a result of Romanticism and the rise of absolute music, and they resulted in a notable subjective turn in artistic practice throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. (Ibidem, 104–105). According to Carroll, x is a work of art if and only if X is (1) an intended (2) transmission to an audience (3) of the self-same (type-identical) (4) individualized (5) feeling state (emotion) (6) that the artist experienced (himself/herself ) (7) and clarified (8) by means of lines, shapes, colours, sounds, actions and/ or words. (Ibidem, 65). This all sounds a bit complicated, and maybe this definition needs modifying for reasons we shall encounter later. So, whichever position we might choose probably runs into problems. When philosophers of art talk about what, for example, poems express, they are not thinking broadly about the communication of ideas. For them, what are expressed are certain human qualities (also known as anthropomorphic properties), notably emotional tones, moods, emotively coloured attitudes, and the like. It is the concept of expression that concerns philosophers of art is the one in evidence in sentences like: ‘This artwork expresses joy’. (Ibidem, 80). One might see this as too narrow a conception of expression. Many philosophers, like Kant, wrote about the expression of aesthetic ideas, which are not mere feelings. They are more like concepts, and have wider references, which can also be completely arbitrary. Expression is, of course, a contingent feature of art. Much of art is expressive, but it is not the case that all art is expressive of emotion. It has turned out that a great deal of twentieth-century art is preoccupied with ideas, rather than emotions. (Ibidem, 105). Expressive

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properties of an artwork constitute concentrated and intensified forms inherent in all perceptual phenomena. Works in the field of art have always been influenced by philosophical theories of language and meaning, and theories of knowledge and perception, and furthermore, by psychological and cultural theories. There has been a lot of critique towards the role of images in contemporary society, for example, and the ways in which images, sounds, and narratives shape our understanding of human attitudes and experiences. More specifically, the idea of art media as symbol systems, which differ from natural languages in that they are non-discursive and are capable of being replete with significance. Furthermore, the use of these systems to create meanings is governed by rules, which are mostly intuitive and natural, but are also partly conventional. In this view, artistic thinking is the processing of the terms of a symbol system, creating significance and following the appropriate rules. (Goodman, 40). In the light of this, thinking in art is the goal of aesthetic education. While aesthetics as a concept is surrounded by some ambiguity, much of it emanates from the very nature of aesthetics itself. Generally, aesthetics deals with how viewers interpret the nature of art and why they respond to art as they do. The ambiguous and problematic issues related to aesthetics emanate from variable character of individuals and human cultures generally, and the subsequent variable interpretations and meanings given to artistic phenomena. In this sense, aesthetic study deals with the phenomenological and cultural dimension of artistic experience. Theories of art can be complex, including definitions of art, recommendations concerning our approaches to art, analyses and interpretations of the nature of the aesthetic, and recommendations concerning aesthetics evaluations. We can also think that aesthetics deals with the variable nature of art, and involves contested concepts. Evidently, no single theory sufficiently explains art for all times and all places. All in all, artistic meanings,

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functions, and forms are adjustable to changing individual and social contingencies. Maybe we should think of art as an open concept, one whose boundaries can never be finally drawn and whose future cannot be predicted. We can think of works of art as things that have one or more of a number of qualities, chief among which are those identified by the major historical theories of art we can consider. A work of art may have some of the qualities identified as important by the representational, expressionist or formalist theories, no one of them being essential, any one of them being sufficient. Within this framework, aesthetic study can proceed from the premise that the aesthetic instructional enterprise is problematic and embedded in social implications and significance. This conjunction of argument tells that there are two slightly different ways of talking about aesthetic qualities and the experiences around them. Firstly, we can think of their character as totally perceptual, like perceiving colours. So, it is possible to speak of the quality of aesthetic experience, and the pleasure of things. Secondly, we can think of aesthetic qualities related to meanings, and try to interpret their significance in order to understand them. It is a question of the depth of art and the insights it brings. Historically, our tradition of art has been in a state of continuous change. It has consisted of a succession of movements and styles, accompanied by a value system that promotes change and results in the deliberate search for the new and the discontinuous. We might go even further and point out that, for example, formalism in art arose as a reaction to representational theories of art. In this sense, modern artists eschewed pictorial illustration, composing paintings out of often non-representational shapes and masses of colour. This was pictorialism in another sense since their aim was not to capture the perceptual appearances of the world, but often to make images noteworthy for their visual organization, form, and arresting design. John Cage’s music or Robert Morris’s sculptures are formless but nevertheless

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art. To put it into more general level, it is not always clear what a significant form in art should be since problems seem to be erupting with respect to the requirement that the exhibition of significant form be designed or intentional. (Carroll, 117). This meant that formalism was not content with providing a descriptive account. It was an attempt to influence artistic practices by identifying what is important about art. It offered a definition of art that was more evaluative than descriptive. By identifying what it saw as important about art, it wanted to influence the way we decide what may be works of art rather than simply to describe it. Actually it did not clearly distinguish the descriptive and the evaluative approaches, but seemed to assume that they amounted to the same goal. Briefly, making a work of art is an intentional activity. Making art cannot be viewed as something that involves only an artist and an art object; artists seek to convey meaning to others. In order to do this, they must consider the perceptual and cognitive capacities of their audiences. Following this line of thought, they must believe that others possess capacities and tendencies to see, think, and reason just as they do. Another thing is that they must also assume a common body of knowledge and belief, and they must assume a similarity of interests between them and their audience. It is by exploiting all of these things that artists are able to manipulate the physical materials of their chosen medium and produce configurations that are comprehensible and interesting to others. We can appreciate art, and by doing so we can also appreciate design. In this sense, art appreciation is in large measure design appreciation. We want to know how the single work works, and we want to see how its parts are intended to function toward the realization of the points or purposes of the work. Intriguingly, a natural object of artistic appreciation is artistic form, especially when artistic form is understood functionally. The perceptible form or design of an artefact is related within the appearance of a single object especially in visual art. What

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we appreciate in an artwork is how the forms function as means to bring about the ideas of the artwork. This argument may seem to prove too much but it has its consequences. Thus, having an idea of the magnitude of artistic expressions requires us to be able to complete our journey into the world of art with satisfactory purposes. It is an infinite question, for example, of how suitable an artwork is designed to acquit its purpose. We can form this idea, and it can be a remarkable source of the pleasure we can find in an artwork. To deal with these notions brings in a contemplative way of finding out how art design functions altogether, and to secure the point of frequent gratification in reflecting upon artworks. All this might sound abstract, but what is real in the process of creating an artwork? Commonly, it involves electing the forms that the artist believes will function optimally toward realizing the point or purpose of the work. Now suppose that forms are selected because they are intended or designed to perform certain functions. (Carroll, 145). This seems a plausible explanation but it does not cover everything. To deal with this objection, we can think that in order to analyse the form of an artwork functionally, we might say that is necessary to have some conception of the point of the work. Unfortunately, it may be easy to isolate but it can also be elusive. That is why a formal analysis can go side by side with other interpretations of the work. Evidently, through a thorough interpretation it is possible to pick up the themes of the work, and use them as guides to relevant formal choices. We construct, in other words, the whole magnitude of art through the number of its parts. A further enlargement is that philosophical problems can also arise from the activities of art critics and historians. In fact, when people talk about art their assumptions may become more noticeable and their inconsistencies more obvious. For that reason, much of aesthetics is reflection on what people say about art, rather than on artworks themselves. This is an important notion, and it is

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clear that ‘aesthetic’ can also be used as an adjective to describe states of mind of the observer. Consider this: Our state of mind is aesthetic whenever we look at things for the qualities and significance of their appearances. Aesthetics also encompasses the philosophy of art, and how artworks are to be interpreted, appreciated, and understood. Are there really objective criteria or standards for this kind of evaluation? What is real is the process of art, and the methods of aesthetics cannot be reduced to rule but can be described as considering examples and counter-examples, making connections with earlier knowledge, looking at language carefully, and considering the history of ideas.

Intentions Otherwise our empirical imagination would never find opportunity for exercise appropriate to its powers, and so would remain concealed within the mind as a dead and to us unknown faculty. Immanuel Kant

From our perspective, everything here depends on what we mean by art and its implications. The historical, philosophical approach to aesthetics deals with what aestheticians have said, styles in aesthetic dialogues, and schools of aesthetic thought. Indisputably, it offers a structured approach, sometimes closely resembling the content structure and teaching methodologies found in general education. This kind of educational and philosophical perspective is compatible with academic rationalism, because it is an intellectualised approach to aesthetics. Our idea here is that aesthetics is a unique form of perception and experience, and the proponents of this approach usually believe that art can provide intense experiences that entail perception of visual and tactile qualities integral to the object being viewed. Of course, there are real differences in aesthetics concerning the works of art. Some of them are or may sound better than others,

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and this means something different than that a given person simply likes some works of art better than others. At the same time, we may want to work toward a theory of establishing questions around aesthetics that are open and flexible. There must be room for reasoned argument concerning the relative aesthetic merit of various works of art. This is partly due to the idea that aesthetic experience occurs within the viewer and not literally in the object itself. There are difficulties in relating all these ideas. A central difficulty in establishing, for example, a theory of aesthetic judgement is that aesthetic value seems always to come back to experience, and experience is by its nature subjective. Admittedly, the primacy of aesthetic experience in establishing aesthetic value must be maintained. Historically, great works of art are considered great ultimately because of the quality of the experience they are able to provide. This is a problematic issue, and not easy to answer. We can think that the work as a whole must incite an aesthetic experience of a certain quality, so that it would be considered a great work of art. This happens regardless of any formal qualities that could be pointed out in a work of art, e.g. intricate line, complex harmonies, fully-developed character, etc. These lines of thought can sometimes be very interactive, and in many cases this mixing of ideas will actually happen. Works of art have in common that they have been crafted, composed, designed, and possibly presented by individuals, whose intent is that the work will be used as an object of aesthetic interest in some way. This may explain what we think of aesthetic entities. Aesthetic study entails developing skills that will enhance our ability to respond aesthetically in a variety of contexts. For purposes developing aesthetic skills, we can call it aesthetic scanning. By aesthetic scanning, it is possible to mean examination of the sensory, formal, expressive, and technical aspects of the art object in question. It is possible to use aesthetic scanning as a tool leading to heightened responses to works of art and translating into an

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aesthetic sensitivity to all of the visual surroundings. Of course, it is possible to analyse our experiences, and take a closer look on what aestheticians have said, and study different cultural definitions of art to develop aesthetic and perceptual acuity, experiences, and so on. This is how aesthetic scanning closely relates to perception. According to this point of view, aesthetic perception is worthy of singular attention, and it is also evident that his approach accommodates art educational activities and assumptions like transfer of knowledge and skills occur from art making. This is certainly an interesting point of view. And without a doubt, aesthetic perception is more properly construed as an active search for meaning. We can find similar considerations in scrutinizing a work of art: a viewer might assume that an artist has made something meaningful and will try to make sense of it. Viewers will be concerned with what an artist intended to do in making that work. They will also go beyond all this in trying to decipher intended meanings in order to organize their perceptions in other ways. Furthermore, viewers will relate these newly discovered understandings to their lives and seek personal insights from works of art. This is how strongly all these elements interact. Looking at works of art is challenging because they can be understood in different ways and, for this reason, present puzzles and problems for viewers. A commonplace observation is that a work of art is never understood completely. Sure, many people find viewing art to be an intrinsically rewarding experience. And many believe that viewing art contributes to self-understanding and personal development. In looking at works of art, we confront the ideas, beliefs, and feelings of others, all of which reveal our own limitations. This is a striking idea, and helps to accommodate different perspectives by reorganizing our phenomenological and cognitive framework to assimilate new points of view. Following another line of thought, we can think that while many artistic goals are personal, others are shared. When artists

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make art, they join an ongoing enterprise in which certain aims or goals are already established. They can choose to reject some but cannot reject them all. Otherwise, what they create would not be recognized as a work of art. Artists working in the same art form, for example cinema, painting, sculpture or architecture will have a cluster of related goals. Some but not all will overlap those of artists who work in another art form. A painter or a sculptor, for example, will often attempt to represent objects or things, but this is rarely the aim of an architect. Yet painters and sculptors, as well as architects, attempt to create unified aesthetic objects. The aesthetic object appears to us as a whole, since it is an object unified by its form. (Dufrenne, 91). Understood in this way, the form is not only the unity of the sensory field, because it is also a unity of meaning. Artists working in different artistic genres will share certain goals. Painters of landscapes, for example, will typically have different (if overlapping) sets of goals from those who paint still-life views or make films. The former might be concerned with the changing patterns of sunlight and the rendition of atmospheric effects, and the latter might exhibit a greater interest in rendering textural effects. Of course, overlaps between all this can sometimes be tremendous. Another line of reasoning might explain how different artistic goals are also inherent in an artist’s style. Consider, for example, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, which all reject Impressionism. Each, however, does so in pursuit of a characteristically different set of artistic aims. For example, Expressionist artists typically are interested in the depiction of personal emotions and feelings, subjective concerns that are often occupied with a protest against what is felt to be a hostile social milieu. Cubist artists, on the other hand, reject what is felt to be an Impressionist occupation with the mere rendering of evanescent effects of light and atmosphere. They strive to create pictorial alternatives to an optical conception of reality through abstracting the shapes of objects and arranging them on a flat plane.

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Surrealist artists, unlike Impressionists, are concerned with the unconscious aspects of the psyche. They seek to liberate the creative unconscious through the use of non-logical automatic procedures, startling juxtapositions of unrelated objects, dream imagery, and private symbolism. This all sounds familiar and has its consequences persisting through time. Many features of art are or can be closely related, and many of the goals that an artist has in making a work of art are related teleologically. There is a means-end relationship between and among them. Applying paint to canvas, for example, is a step Picasso took in order to realize the goal of producing a representation of the bombing of Guernica. Having an end in view, however, does not mean that an artist must be constantly thinking about goals in the process of making a work of art. Nor does it imply that an artist’s goals cannot be modified in the process of creating a work of art. Artists often do change their goals as they receive feedback from the work and as their ideas and feelings evolve. Nevertheless, an artist produces a work of art to convey meaning. Viewers who approach a work of art, therefore, do it on the assumption that it is meaningful. The will try to understand what has been produced. The first question to be asked concerns what the artist is doing or attempting to do in making the work. In asking such a question, the viewer is inquiring into the artist’s goals. These constitute mostly of one’s intentions in making the work. Consider that many goals are readily recognized. Because these are recognized immediately, there is a tendency to overlook the role of our cognitive background in making such understandings possible. Arguably, then, artist’s intentions were shaped by the historical context in which they were adopted. This may help to explain how we think that intentions are complex and shaped by culture. At least a part of an artist’s intention is formed in light of the history of art itself. The artist intends to produce a work of a certain kind understood in light of the art of the time, and because of that it is often difficult

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to distinguish discussions of individual artists from discussions of the art world they participated in. Therefore, we can say that when talking about an artwork’s meaning, it is often useful to have knowledge both of the artist’s individual life and of the art world around it. (Parsons & Blocker, 122). Whether this is relevant or not depends a lot on the topic in question. Consequently, the ability to understand what Picasso was doing or attempting to do in painting Guernica quite literally depends upon the knowledge, beliefs, and understandings that a person brings to bear in scrutinizing his work. However, viewers are able to understand much of what an artist intended through scrutiny alone because artists have traditionally considered the perceptual and intellectual capacities of their audiences. In traditional view, someone who truly intended to represent a cat, for example, would not produce a configuration that would likely be read as an image of something else. In avant-garde or experimental setting this would easily be vice versa. Artistic intentions, then, are in some sense public matters, but understanding the special intentions of an artist requires background information and knowledge. Following this line of argument, an intention is rarely the unambiguous and easily formulated purpose of the artist we may have supposed. At any time a person has a variety of desires, some of which are relatively transient wishes, others might be long sustained motives, and many lie between these extremes. These desires may be in conflict with each other and they certainly will not all be carefully thought through and articulated carefully. We can think that some of them may never have been formulated at all, and an artist may be totally unaware of them, and yet they may be the most important elements in the context of an artist’s universe. If most works of art are comprehensible to some degree, circumstances often conspire to create estrangement between artist and viewer. Whether this is a satisfactory expression remains unclear, but in early and less complicated societies artists made

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work for a restricted audience that shared many of the same interests and beliefs. As a consequence, almost everyone was able to understand the work an artist produced. But as cultures expanded and grew more diverse, artists have tended to work for specific social groups whose ideas and values differed from others within the same community. Evidently, the range of art objects available to the viewer is also greater now than ever. In earlier times someone’s exposure to art would generally be limited to the relatively few works that were near at hand. Of course, travel was difficult, museums were largely nonexistent, and books and reproductions were scarce and inadequate. Now, art from the past as well as from the present, from other cultures as well as our own, is readily more available. Perhaps, however, the talk of movements and changes in the context of art world is somehow metaphorical since we have different states of consciousness at different times. Consider another problem. There is yet another reason why average people, so to speak, find it difficult to understand works of art. As the making of art evolved from simple beginnings, it also grew more complex and reflexive. Clearly, these processes took their time. Metaphorical ideas are also temporal processes, and through the passage of time artists were no longer content to serve the interests of other members of the society; they increasingly began to focus upon their own specialized interests. Later on, some artists of the twentieth century have often made it a point to stand apart from general society, and individual aesthetic and personal concerns have been brought to the front. We can distinguish how fine arts throughout much of their history reflected the values and concerns of the communities artists served. Now the situation is, of course, much more varied and complex since art tends to reflect the interests and concerns of a much smaller segment of society. This is somehow paradoxical statement, which has its shortcomings, but even with these assumptions some positions are left to be again discovered.

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Another application of the criteria here suggests that works of art are inherently problematic. Even though artists’ intentions are available through observation, full understanding is not automatically recoverable through scrutiny alone. In describing a work of art, background knowledge is sometimes necessary. In some respects, artistic intentions can also be ascertained through interviews with the artist or through public statements in which the artist reveals her goals, either directly or through inference. The psychic activities that lead us to infer that in front of us, at a certain place, there is a certain object of a certain character, are generally not conscious activities, but unconscious ones. Finally, they are equivalent to conclusions, to the extent that the observed action on our senses enables us to form an idea as to the possible cause of this action. To put it another way, there are similarities between the result of unconscious inferences and those of conscious conclusions. Of course, familiarity with the milieu in which an artist works can also assist viewers in understanding an artist’s intentions. Part of this milieu is the physical setting in which an artist works. Knowledge of personal events in the life of an artist can also help viewers determine intent. This may help to explain what we think of these ideas. Another argument is that the social and cultural milieu in which artists work also shapes their goals and aspirations. As a whole, knowledge of the artistic tradition that an artist inherits often allows viewers to infer artistic goals. Taken in isolation, maybe creativity is an outcome of trial and error. Because Picasso made a painting instead of a sculpture of Guernica, viewers are entitled to infer that, like other painters, he intended to produce an arrangement of shapes and colors on a flat surface, not a three-dimensional object to be viewed from multiple vantage points. Because he was painting a public mural instead of an intimate easel painting, viewers can infer that, like other muralists, he did not desire to produce an object that should be scrutinized for its subtle textural and painterly effects.

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Because he used elements of Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, viewers can infer a cluster of artistic goals Picasso shared with other artists who worked in these same stylistic idioms. And because he combined these stylistic idioms, viewers can infer that his artistic intentions differed from those other artists. These are soluble ideas and creative processes, and maybe it is so that these kind of outstanding creative achievements have a habit of breaking, not always in such predictable ways, with the tradition out of which they emerged. At the general level, a creative artist inherits a tradition but in many ways also transcends it. There are complicated relationships between creativity, knowledge of understanding artworks, and the role of aesthetics as intellectual disciplines. How can we adapt the methods and contents of these ideas into changing situations? Following another line of thought we can concede that a central conception of, for example, cognitive art education is transfer, which means an ability to apply one’s learning in new situations. This kind of applying is necessary in many situations, and these distinctions need to be examined carefully since making decisions concerning any critical idea or claim presupposes that we have a clear understanding of the concepts employed. For example, theoretical problems that develop form assumptions of transfer have been discussed widely. Whether methods and exercises specific to developing aesthetic perception can maintain integrity in art educational programs may influence whether the goal of heightened aesthetic experience is achieved. When discussing the theoretical bases for assumption of cognitive transfer one needs to consider both the cognitive characteristics and processes that are considered integral to the study of art, and those that are initiated by art experiences and then later transferred to and utilized in non-art contexts. Both making and exploring art involve a form of thinking that opens the ways to multiple systems of knowing and experiencing. (Räsänen, 3). A principal virtue of this approach, in this sense, is its ability to

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explain and sustain a number of ways in which people actually think and talk about art related to aesthetics. (Graham, 49). Aside from methods of inquiry, cognitive approach as a discipline offers a body of content that can be used for better understanding and appreciation of art and its contents. We do not have to agree with all of these conclusions. Works of art do vary enormously. It seems hard to specify all of these elements in a proper way since there are various kinds of intellectual and artistic goals, attitudes and methods involved in this. Intriguingly, if the power and meaning in an aesthetic experience are to be used as a measure of the quality of an artwork, the experience must be as genuine as aesthetic experience as that has been defined. Another thing is that sentimental and trance experiences can also be powerful and carry meaning. Good examples along these lines are the films of Maya Deren. Consequently, in order to have weight for the evaluation of an art work, the power and meaning in the experience must be directly caused by the work itself, and not, for instance, the result of some chain of association for which the work was only the first link. According to our view here, when attempting to evaluate a work of art based on our experience of that work, we must be reflective, interrogating our thoughts and feelings to be sure of their source. Another point to work out is that without substantial selfknowledge, it is difficult, if not impossible; to know whether what we are experiencing has its origins in the artwork or in our own psychological makeup. In this sense, this concept of transfer is connected to higher-order thinking, which can be defined as a broad term including problem-solving, critical thinking, creative thinking, and decision-making. We can go further and think that focusing upon artistic intentions as a way of coming to understand a work of art stands in sharp contrast to formalist conceptions of art criticism. Arguably, formalist critics believe that it is a mistake to appeal to an artist’s intentions, a mistake they have labeled as the intentionalist

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fallacy. (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 468–488). Whatever this means, is related to the idea that for the formalist, artistic intentions are private thoughts, and in many cases mental events that occur just before or during the process of artistic creation. They argue that attempts to ascertain what these are send critics off on a fruitless quest for biographical and contextual knowledge and away from the work of art itself, which is the proper locus of critical concern. As a consequence of this, for formalist critics such external evidence can only be an unreliable indicator of meaning. They reason that such knowledge is often unavailable, either because artists are no longer living or because they may not remember what their thoughts were. Then again, artists sometimes exaggerate when describing their intentions. This means that critics are faced with a dilemma, and according to a formalist perspective, it might be better than to seek an understanding of a work of art through careful examination of its internal evidence. This might all be true in some connections but we need to understand it more clearly. A number of misconceptions underlie with these ideas. Some may say we can never go beyond the nature of artistic intentions themselves. First of all, possibly contrary to what formalists believe, critics who seek to understand artistic intentions are not concerned with transitory thoughts that occur in minds of artists but rather with the goals that artists seek to attain in creating works of art with states of mind rather than with mental events. Secondly, the state of mind of the artist is not only private but has a public character. This is due to the fact that since making a work of art involves an attempt to convey meaning, many of these goals will be available to viewers directly. Furthermore, as history of art has shown to us, such goals shaped by beliefs can be inferred through investigation into the societies and cultures in which the artists have lived. Critics are not forced to rely solely upon what artists are willing to reveal. Thirdly, it might be true that formalist critics

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draw an arbitrary distinction between internal and external evidence. In some sense, no viewer approaches a work of art with an innocent eye, but in many cases with certain kinds of background or other knowledge that may affect how the internal evidence of a work is perceived. Viewers who know more about an artist and the content in which works of art are created are able to see and understand more than viewers who lack such knowledge. Whether this is a plausible argument remains open to debate. Perhaps, however, works of art should have the capacity to afford aesthetic experience for which content oriented and affect oriented accounts can be given. According to this view, aesthetic properties are in any case dependent on responses, and they are neither merely detected nor merely projected. Most of the atmospheric ideas here concern that common conceptual frameworks obtained through social conditioning might explain the convergence of aesthetic predication. It may be worth to consider that our approach and especially value of works of art depends somehow on the opportunities they afford us to exercise our sensible qualities on, to recognize and to distinguish different elements and qualities in the appearance of things. In this sense, it is a question of the aesthetic properties of works of art. These aesthetic universes alert us to the qualitative dimensions of the world at large and improve our mental capacities for discovering them. Broadly speaking, it is also a question of the dimensions of our aesthetic properties to enlarge our experiences. An aesthetic and phenomenological approach towards art may claim that some works of art can supply us with a deeper understanding of human nature and the human condition by imaginatively illuminating our experiences. Similarly, the greatest scientific achievements are those that have made fundamental contributions to human understanding. Let us consider another approach. Suppose viewers customarily seek to understand works of art in terms of artistic intentions,

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yet there is also another assumption underlying their interaction with works of art. Evidently, part of our contemporary concept of a work of art is that it is an artefact to be intellectually and imaginatively apprehended by viewers and thus function as a source of insight, enlightenment, and enjoyment. Historically, this assumption might possibly be the result of social and cultural developments that have led over the past few centuries to contemporary ideas concerning the aesthetic realm. Following André Malraux, we can remark that a “Romanesque crucifix was not regarded by its contemporaries as a work of sculpture; nor Cimabue’s Madonna as a picture. Even Pheidias’ Pallas Athene was not, primarily, a statue.” (Malraux, 13). This means that many of these kinds of ideas, concepts and beliefs are rooted in their time and culture. There is, of course, more than one way to see all this. These processes may have causal connections, and we can resist in describing these cases as implications of reflecting their times more broadly. Of course, these artefacts are now understood in a different way than they were in the cultures of their origin. This may help us to think how we can present modern concerns. To avoid difficulties, we can think that whether or not this is peculiarly modem concern, it is nonetheless a genuine assumption that contemporary viewers bring to bear in their approach to works of art. A follow up of this idea is that with this assumption has come the idea that meaning lies partly outside the intentions of an artist. What are the plausible causes of this remark? Admittedly, there may be more or less connotations and references in a work of art than its artist intended, and, in this sense, spectators have a legitimate role in uncovering what we might call aesthetic understanding of a work of art. This is a huge problem with many dimensions, and this concern arises for a number of reasons. One is that information about an artist or the culture in which the artist lived may be inadequate or unavailable. Historically, we know something about the culture

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that produced the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, but even less about individual artists themselves. These processes have distinct parts. Let us suppose that these claims or proposals are true. This means that there a large gaps in our knowledge about the cultures and artists of the past. This definition will, as it turns out, have to be modified. Time is something that is connected with us: we can live the past through the works of art since we can order our experiences temporally. Of course, the debate does not end here, but when a viewer encounters a work of art produced in such circumstances, the best that can be done is to speculate about an artist’s intentions, and through this way recognize that there may be no decisive solution to these very specific questions. To understand these current notions and interests more fully, it may be helpful to turn into other areas, as well. Other chances in thinking have helped us to realize how, for example, artistic developments have historically affected the way viewers have come to understand works of art. Works of art are not only influenced by the tradition from which they emanate, but they also modify that tradition. (Eliot, 3–11). What Eliot meant is that later works of art create new and different possibilities for understanding earlier works. This is a two-way situation where earlier and later outcomes have their interactive possibilities. It also shows us how it is possible that the chain of causes and the chain of thinking is a moving presence of cyclical time ideas that go back and forth. What we can remember has its effects in what will happen. Inevitably, all of these situations, then, underscore a particular attitude with which viewers approach works of art. There is a connection between ideas that point out this: if viewers assume that works of art are outcomes of intentional activity, they often assume that they are aesthetic objects as well. As such, they are looked upon as sources of the kind of intellectual enjoyment that comes about through the imaginative use of our human perceptual and cognitive faculties.

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Along these lines of thought, we can realize that the intentional and aesthetic understandings suggest that viewers have an active role in responding to works of art. Needless to say, such an assumption is confirmed by the findings of psychologists and others concerned with visual perception. It is now common to observe that perception and conception of ideas are not isolated but rather conjoined in a viewer’s response to a work of art. From a scholarly point of view, perception of a work of art is best understood as an active effort aimed at obtaining understanding, and as such, it parallels other kinds of efforts that people make in integrating experience into coherent wholes. Philosophers, for example, have noted that aesthetic response possesses a structure similar to efforts aimed at establishing meaning in such disparate disciplines as science and the law. All of these are species of “from-to” knowing. (Polanyi, 46–65). Whether this is a plausible idea or not, at least it tells us that we are dealing with easy ideas and beliefs. Following Polanyi, aesthetic perception, like other modes of productive thinking, involves an imaginative synthesis of initially chaotic elements. We may sum up that in perceiving a work of art, we call up our past experience, background theory and knowledge of the world, as well as our bodily awareness, and present concerns, to fill up the quest for a meaningful and resourceful interpretation. And without a doubt, from these tacit elements we project an understanding based upon the clues presented in a work of art. Apart from these ideas, more generally, the imaginative element in aesthetic perception, as well as in scientific discovery, has aroused the attention of philosophers in time to time. All these processes are depictions of the productive ideas, which the patterns of different phenomena into being. We need conceptions to figure out perceptions. We can dwell in the realm of possible experiences, and ascend from it with the help of our imaginative powers. Historically, much has been made of line drawings of ambiguous figures to illustrate what occurs when viewers perceive a work of art.

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All these expressions may not be entirely articulated but let us think that aesthetic properties give humanly accessible shape to things, and they evoke curiousness. Perhaps, and maybe in many ways, aesthetic experience involves the constructive powers of the human mind, so, according to this view, aesthetic experience is of overwhelming importance to art. Aesthetic experience is comprised of design appreciation and the detection of aesthetic properties. (Carroll, 203). At first sight, this seems a useful idea, and a matter of attention and contemplation of aesthetic qualities and artistic forms. It also informs us that aesthetic experience does not represent the only kind of legitimate response to art. Aesthetic attitude or frame of mind can happen for approaching art so that we might both appreciate its intrinsic perceptual qualities, and as a result of this have an aesthetic experience. For example, we can contemplate an object purely as a sensation for its own sake, in a way unaffected by any cognition or knowledge about it. Still, maybe there are no purely sensory experiences divorced from any cognitive content. Considering this, cognitive and moral experiences may be equally appropriate related to aesthetic understanding.

Connections Whatever is impressed upon us the wax we remember and know so long as the image … remains in the wax, whatever is obliterated or cannot be impressed, we forget and do not know. Paul Ricoeur

To think is to make connections. A wider approach promises that the connections of interest to the symbol systems are the internal connections between the elements of self-sufficient media or symbol systems. It legitimises only thought that stays within the terms of a symbol system. Another point is that nowadays, for example, integrated learning calls for connections across as well as within symbol systems, whatever the result may

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be. Especially it is a question of connections between visual and linguistic elements. As indicated before, the reason is that much of the meaning of works of art lies in their relations with the world we live in, including personal and collective purposes, and the culture around us. We have learned from history that traditionally culture is accessible mostly through language, but the cultural network of meanings has much more dimensional qualities, and is mainly mediated through language and behaviour. This means that categories embodied in language and behaviour form part of the constitution of meaning. This is a general approach that has its causal determinants among others. We can recognize these views and connect them with modern and future aspects. Let us make another point. In some recent studies it has been found that the capabilities of youth to discuss art have been greatly underestimated. Also, with proper motivation and good strategies or through the interjection of conflicting ideas, groups of individuals without a formal educational background can deal with sophisticated aesthetic issues. (Congdon, 67–76). This is a striking idea connected with earlier thinking. There is evidence that the visual thinking of children begins as part of what has been called a plural-media activity. (Kindler, 99–106). According to this view, when children begin to draw, they actually represent meanings visually, but they do not make marks on paper that are intended for visual contemplation only. More importantly, they engage in an activity that includes gesture, imitative noise and language, and their visual products are meaningful only in the context of the total activity. Following these lines of thought, the origins of drawing are not confined to one medium. And without a doubt, this is the fact that is relevant to more general philosophical point concerning the role of language in a wider perspective, which is essential in connecting works of art and culture. There are some investigative meanings in this. In a productive way, this is because our culture is irrelevant to the deepest significance of art, so that the different kinds of

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thinking should be carefully kept apart. Otherwise we might fail to grasp that significance. Whether this is true or not, it is definitely understandable that the meaning of a visual work should be grasped in visual terms, although there might be, and often is, a linguistically based interpretation on culture, but this has been formulated in different media. There is no further need to point out that the thinking that deals with visual medium, grasps its essential meanings. Still, a crucial thing is that there are also two different media for thought, and they can and should be constantly connected. We might pause to note here that we can, of course, isolate visual and linguistic elements in a single work, but our thinking can move easily back and forth between them. The idea is that each one of the modes has something to contribute to our understanding. The second argument is that thinking, while moving back and forth from one mode to another, can make distinctions and connections that might otherwise be impossible. Initially, there are two tracks, but maybe only one destination. What, according to convention, is a grasp of the meaning of the work of art? There have been attempts to think that works of art are constituted as meaningful objects by both visual and linguistic materials of thought in interaction. The fact is that both approaches are valid and necessary ones, especially since they are part of what creates the whole system. We may now give space for a final argument. What is being measured here is just one way to take seriously the assertion that works of art must be interpreted, because before interpretation it exists only as a material object and not as the work of art. So, interpretation has its important effects. We need interpretation since through that we can bring in larger, aesthetic ways to understand the justification of art and go beyond central problems of contemporary aesthetics. By placing emphasis on the ways in which meaning is made and experienced by viewers interpretation analysis deals with the reception of the work of art and its variables, which is in some tension with conventional ideas of

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influence and effects. Actually, analysis is the process of breaking up a concept, work of art, or fact into its simple or ultimate constituents. Interpretation brings into focus a range of issues concerning the process of mental imagery and mediation. This argumentation has its complexity, but one thing is certain: we need critical assumptions and efforts to stimulate independent thought, and deal with comprehensive and dimensional reasoning of art and its consequences. In approaching the structure of art, we can notice that structure is a concept including both content and form so far as they are organized for aesthetic purposes. It is tempting to think that the work of art is then considered as a whole system of signs, or structures of signs, serving a specific aesthetic purpose. The supreme value of art is mediation between man and his own impuissance, his feelings of disharmony with and within the universe. (Mitry, 19). Artistic impulse ultimately expresses man’s inexhaustible and unsatisfied feelings for the absolute. Needing to explain, to preserve, and to control the mysterious, fleeting, and ungraspable present, man developed tools (science, art, religion), in such a way as to possess a simulacrum. (Ibidem, 15). These are quite general arguments measuring things and ideas from a universal viewpoint. They cover a range of subjects, and depict a matter of convention, which has its references in a spectrum of continuous logic. Let us look at our time more closely. In contemporary works, which are related to our own cultural tradition, the footnotes are in our head due to our sharing a common culture and experience. It is possible to think that whereas high culture’s prevalent aesthetic theories earlier assumed that in an art situation, the artist is active and the spectator passive, in fact, it is more like the artist and the spectator are both active. And if their activities do not exactly overlap, they are bound to collide somewhere in the middle of the work of art. (Durgnat, 18). For example, in cinematic narration, the spectator shares the emotions of many of

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the persons on the screen, and simulates these so that all the resulting sensations give the colour of living experience to the emotional reflection in our mind. For example, motion picture fictions are sense-bearing vehicles that mandate viewers to imagine the state of affairs and events that they depict audiovisually. (Carroll, 154). Another point to make related to this is that, while watching a film, there are unconscious conclusions derived from sensations, which are equivalent in their consequences to the so-called conclusions from analogy. This is a point of view, free of conscious thinking, and these unconscious conclusions are irresistible and present, and the effect of them cannot be overcome by a better understanding of the real relations. In short, the artwork does not simply offer a reflection of reality, but first and foremost it offers a type of engagement towards it. The spectator is somehow engaged in this communicative situation. The idea of how this is to be identified deals with the assumption that it projects a state of being with the world in which the ineffable finds itself controlled. For example, Jean Mitry holds in common with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existentialist aestheticians a view of the artwork as an invitation among individuals to share a certain valued life experience. In recognizing and reflecting this, the art work shows itself as a communication and at the same time as a revelation of being, in some full aspect of its particularity. (Lewis, 51). This is a point of view filled with idealism, and we can think that traditionally gaining such insights may be one of the major reasons why people look at works of art. The personal concerns are connected with more universal issues. Illuminatingly, the mind is insatiable for meaning, drawn from, projected into, the world of appearances, for unearthing hidden analogies which connect the unknown with the familiar, and show the familiar in an unexpected light. It weaves the raw material of experience into patterns, and connects them with other patterns; the fact that something reminds me of something else can itself become a potent source of emotion. (Koestler, 390).

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This is a valid statement, and clearly indicates the interactive power of the human mind. As indicated before, aesthetic inquiry consists of an examination of the nature of art and why individuals respond to art as they do based on the meanings they give to art. All in all, aesthetics as an area of study entails an examination of aesthetic meanings. To take a minor view, art criticism is based on the possibility of analyses and evaluations of art to be tested against information on a specific work of art and from perceptual evidence. More specifically, in aesthetic inquiry, statements on art are examined as to their logical and rational truth and their persuasive power. As a whole, works of art are related to a variety of contexts, including the world they represent, the artist who made them, the audience, and the art world and various aspects of the culture in which they were produced. We must look not only at the relationship of elements within the work, but also beyond the object to its historical, rhetorical and philosophical contexts in order to comprehend its meanings. In doing so our interpretation constitutes the work of art. Works of art can be thought of as an externalisation of the artist’s consciousness because we cannot overlook the fact that works of art derive their identities and structure from historical and causal matrices. In this sense, their meanings and associations are bound to the cultural framework of the time and assume causal connections with an artist’s environment. In this context, a causal line was a temporal series of events so related, that given some of them, something could be inferred about the others whatever might be happening elsewhere. The strength of this argumentation is twofold: First of all, works of art embody ideas that express an age and the attitudes and beliefs that define a world by those living in that period. Secondly, it is through the attributes of style and expression that the observer discovers these ideas. Further on, artists do not merely assert these facts or ideas in their works, because they suggest them in ways intended to transform the way the ob-

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server receives them. The artist’s use of rhetoric and metaphor is an attempt to get the observer to take toward the work an attitude, which involves more than recognition of a truth or an idea. Works of art can cause viewers to heighten and confirm convictions or transform their ways of thinking about their convictions. Interpretation might be puzzling to a person with insufficient knowledge. At one point in the history of art, there was complicity between artist and spectator, in which the latter was to disregard the paint and gape at the Transfiguration, to stand dumb in front of it. According to this and our view here, this is not true anymore, since works of art have meanings that can be distinguished from those held by other cultural objects, and this opens up possibilities for talking about them. This way of thinking suggested that aesthetic understanding is far closer to intellectual, cognitive action than to a mode of sensory stimulation, and calls for an aesthetic stance as something that has to be constructed. A theory of art can present a foundation for interpretation that is predicated on our understanding of art being culturally, philosophically and historically developed. That is why we must shift our conceptions of interpretation to a broader, more global approach. In this way, we might have a better theory for interpreting works of art and a better foundation for teaching students to understand their meanings. Consequently, theories of art as a foundation for interpretation provide insights and entail more work on the part of teacher and student alike. In educational context, we can figure out that teachers must present works of art in a more studied context, knowing something about the history of art, the art world, and art theories, which will better enable them to explain the artist’s intentions, technique and style. Furthermore, this means that students must also develop grounding in art history, theory and knowledge about the different contexts of the work. Finally, the increasingly detailed background research will be a guiding force toward a more plausible and complete understanding of the different aspects of contemporary art.

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Historically, it is understandable that human beings are highly visual, and it was not until the first crude graphic display screens were introduced in the late 1960s that computers began to change our relationship to information and forge a new kind of thinking towards time and space. Generally thinking, computers are largely based on the structure of the way the human brain processes information. Computer models and simulations are unique in ways of complexity, dynamism, controllability and visual presentation. These are useful properties and tools for modelling, and also relevant to philosophical thinking. It is one thing to understand that human memory is organized in lists, and lists of lists cross-referenced by associations between them, and it is another thing to see that system on a screen modelled not on pencils and printing presses but on how a human mind processes information. Within this world, which is partly real and partly unreal, the spectator can freely rearrange that information and impose new structures. This idea emphasizes the activity of the spectator who is constantly testing various hypotheses in one’s mind, drawing inferences, creating schemes, and arriving at conclusions. This construction is also subject to constant revision. A further point of this is that seeing ideas as visual objects changes your view of the world because when everything is visible, the display becomes the reality, and a possibility to widen our vision. Following this, we can say that in visual perception we are immediately aware of the world around us. (Crane, 130–131). Admittedly, and as indicated earlier, this means that visual perception is not passive recording of the stimulus material, but an active concern of the mind. Consequently, reading a picture is a sequence of mental processes exactly like reading some other piece of reality. Every element of a work of art is indispensable for the one purpose of pointing out the theme, which embodies the nature of existence for the artist. In this sense, symbolism can be found even in works that, at first sight, seem to be little

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more than arrangements of fairly neutral objects. The argumentation emphasizes that the meaning of a perceived event changes the pattern of possibilities for future action, and meaning is the selective function on the range of the recipient’s states of conditional readiness for goal directed activity; so the meaning of a message to you is its selective function on the range of your states of conditional readiness. (MacKay, 24). Defined this way, meaning is clearly a relationship between the message and the recipient rather than a unique property of the message alone. And related to this, states of readiness are for organism’s large numbers of conditional probabilities. Asking a question is a means of changing the conditional probabilities of the questioner’s states of readiness. (Ibidem). An important feature of this was that the Gestalt psychologists were the first to establish the significance of phantom forms in visual systems. Evidently, phantom formalisations can transform scattered, atomistic sense data into configurations, forms, objects, and scenes. A further consequence was that resemblance itself is a phantomisation when, for example, the perceiving mind groups a particular patch of grey tones into a shadow-moulded face. Phantomisations are not merely subjective but shared and social facts, which are rooted in coordination with the material aspects of the world. One might even speak of vision having its own syntax and grammar, woven from the brain’s structures and experiences, and handling language as one kind of structure amongst others. More importantly, phantom forms can transform concrete graphic features into pictorial representation. This is a good notion, since they are particularly important in editing. In cinematic narration, and especially through editing and montage, these features are in key position in determining what will be a strong or weak feature, what will catch the attention and what will be overlooked. Within this context, we can state that traditional aesthetics saw that the essence of cinema was in movement and cutting,

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but if cinema is a mongrel medium, then we must relate movement and cutting to all its affinities. Consequently, we have to take a new look at the cinema, to look at screen editing in a new way. Cinema is a performance art like theatre, but cinema is also a pictorial art, and pictorial signs are iconic in one respect and arbitrary in every other. Traditionally there has been very little talk about cinema’s theatrical affinities, because of the heavy burden on montage and cutting. But a visually minded theatre director can also guide the spectator’s eye by controlling the whole stage and using cinematic effects, manipulating the space between actors; thus theatre-space can also be very fluid and pictorially interesting. Study of screen space has generally been linked with the formal properties of film, and this has helped to establish the significance of screen space, but has also relegated it to being of secondary importance, as subordinate to narrative causality. The symbiotic relationship of screen storytelling and screen space includes also time, and their contribution to the range of meanings in film alongside other determinants of narrative. The cinematic relationship of space and time is dynamic and a close examination of this process helps to identify their shared properties, and the subjectivity of audience identification with characters in place. Screen space and time may be visible on the screen but it is brought into being by the conventionalized ways of seeing, and through various, also often conventionalized expectations of viewers, depending on their knowledge of the world, and knowledge of cinema-going experience, their expectations of the genre, and their gender, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The screen’s relationship of space and time has evolved through a series of rules or codes of production that begin with perspective and develop because of the special quality of the medium. (Tuan). From the perspective of earlier film history, we can observe that during the silent period the miming in cinema was very effective; there was no use for picture or words, although often a

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silent film treats words as if they were pictures, and it uses typography and calligraphy in a kind of expressive way, which for example literature does not do, because literature actually does not understand the shapes of the letters. For example in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) the letters illustrate the drowning of a woman. This is an example of how letters can be half word and half picture, how a sign, which is not pictorial turns into a pictorial sign. The basic element of theatre is not the setting—it is the presence of the actor. And cinema uses actors because the film’s story depends upon the actor’s personality, his ability to use gestures, postures, atmosphere and physiognomy. In this way, cinema is a way of showing things, an act of showing, and an art of mise-en-scène. Cinema is an art of visuals in motion. The director, with a strong and sophisticated visual sense, can make most of what we call pictoriality, the ability to cast and read sophisticated messages in a visual form. In other words, it is a question of creating the elements of cinema. Achieving the truth of a film image—these are mere words, the name of a dream, a statement of intent, which, however, each time it is realised becomes a demonstration of what is specific in the director’s choice, of what is unique in his position. To seek one’s own truth (and there can be no other, no ‘common’ truth) is to search for one’s own language, the system of expression destined to give form to one’s own ideas. Andrei Tarkovsky

Cinema has its poetic meanings; although the methods might change, the only objectivity is the subjectivity of the author. (Agel). Already the description of a perception entails phenomenological method. Human phenomenology is neither completely subjective nor entirely objective, because we do not arbitrarily, as pure subjects, inject meaning into the life-world we experience. Neither does reality impose any particular meaning on the act of consciousness or the subject.

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Levels of Knowledge The term image covers both pictures and abstractions. Noël Carroll

“The term ‘image’ (originally based on ‘imitation’) means in its first sense the visual likeness of a real object or person, and in the very act of specifying resemblance it distinguishes and establishes the entire category of visual experience which is not a real object or person. In this specifically negative sense—in the sense that the photograph of a horse is not the horse itself—a photograph is an image.” Maya Deren But, as Maya Deren adds, the term ‘image’ also has positive implications, because it presumes a mental activity in its most passive form like the mental images of perception and memory, or as in the arts, the creative action of the imagination realized by the art instrument. Reality is filtered by the selectivity of the individual, and modified by prejudicial perception to become experience. One of the most important functions of a visual system is the recognition of patterns, the ability to identify objects. Images are constructions and basic visual units. Already static images are endowed with “significance”, because they are in the flux of changing fields and amidst the stimuli which race perpetually behind and beyond these fields. (Andrew, 34–35). The photographic image is always the consequence of a certain interpretation. When a person watches a view, they gain information through fixations and movement of the eyes. Eye movement is necessary for details, because we can clearly see only those details that are very near to the point we are looking at. It is also important because the impression of depth comes through certain features that function as local depth cues. Eye movement is not arbitrary, but instead seems to be decided beforehand. It is guided by expectations, and those expectations rise on the basis of what we have learned to expect in certain situations, and what we have learned about the regularities of forms and shapes. Eye

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movement is guided by received information, on a level we are usually unaware of. (Neisser, 41). In order to increase our understanding of the many processes surrounding images, we must begin with our relationship towards our environment. One gathers visual information through eye movement, which one then fits into a schematic map to produce a unified perception. A schematic map is the program of possible samplings of an extended scene, and of contingent expectancies of what will be seen as a result of those samplings. (Hochberg, 309–331). It is a matrix of the mind’s time and space expectations, which integrates different glances into one perceptual structure. When we are watching a view or an image, most of it is not in the retina, but in the mind’s eye. The view has been stored in encoded form, and not as a mental mirror image. A sudden glance can be a sensation, a schematic map can be an image, and perceptual structure can function as perception. (Ibidem.) A schematic map is not just a visual storage or passive afterimage, but an active director of the whole perceptual process. Eyes are directed to what may be needed next, and to checking current perceptions. The science of perception is concerned with how events are observed and interpreted. An event may be the occurrence of an object at some distance from an observer. There are distinguishable stages in the extraction and use of sensory information corresponding to our perception of objects, and to the perception of facts about these objects. Seeing an object does not require that the object is to be identified in any particular way. It is more like coming to know it in a visual way. The physical world influences our mind through its influence on our brain. Perception of the physical world involves causal transactions from the physical to the mental. The brain develops functional models of external situations. These brain traces can be like images, or rather abstract representations of objects and situations coming from many individual experiences. In this sense, the brain models the

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world with analogue representations. Perceptions are about seeing but also about interpreting. These ideas and dichotomies arise from the fundamental question of what the study of the image should be all about. We can say that the perception of images is a building process, where the perceiver actively explores the surroundings by moving the eyes, head, and body, in order to gain all the possible information. Not just reading, but also listening and watching are skilled functions that happen through time. They are all dependent of earlier structures, which are called schemes. They are internal parts belonging to a perceiver’s perceptual cycle. Those parts can be changed by experience connected with the perceptual material. Schemes direct perception, and at the same time they can be changed during the perceptual process. (Neisser, 55–57). Because we see what we are looking at, the schemes together with the valid information control the perceptual process. In every moment the perceiver forms an expectation, and tests it. New information can change the original scheme, and a new scheme can guide future perceptions. Schemes are expectations or anticipations through which the past influences the future. This whole process is a perceptual cycle. The phenomenological perspective becomes important here. Schemas (or schemes) are complex types of cognitive structures representing generic social experiences and cultural knowledge. They contain the common and characteristic features of similar phenomena, for example similar objects, events, situations or discourse, and they exist in the minds of individual subjects as psychic structure, but they are linked to socio-cultural and historical realities. Schemas are developed from daily life experiences, which in their turn reflect socio-cultural circumstances at a certain point of history. (Höijer, 583–603). We are dealing with an interdisciplinary study of the mind. It results from the efforts of researchers working in different fields. We can refer to the intersection or converging work of, for example, linguistics,

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psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and robotics. It is a collaborative effort for the study of the mind, and its applicability varies according to what kinds of questions are put forward and how their relevance is assessed. One might point out that images are mediations between the world and human beings. (Flusser, 9). But images have come between the world and human beings. They were supposed to be maps but they have turned into screens … human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world ‘out there’ which meanwhile itself becomes like an image—a context of scenes, of states of things. (Ibidem). Images are not outside of perceptual processes, but rather integral to, and at the foundation visual, linguistic, and perceptual processes. (Burnett, 32). The term image can refer to the complex set of interactions that constitute everyday life within image-worlds. Images are points of mediation that allow access to a variety of different experiences. So images are the interfaces that structure interaction, people, and the environments they share. (Ibidem). Images can combine all media forms and are a synthesis of language, discourse, and viewing. They are not isolated expressions among many and are certainly not just objects or signs. They are more like an interaction between different elements. So, images may become tools for the creation and expression as well as visualization of stories. (Ibidem, 2–4). Images represent a technological intelligence that shifts the ways humans see themselves, from individuals to hybrid personae, where identity no longer resides in one particular place, object, or person. (Wall). Spectators are continuously probing the boundaries of reality and image, and the real challenge is to find connections and personal experiences. The experience of viewing is about a struggle between proximity and distance. Viewing is the desire to enter into the screen and become a part of the images and to experience stories from within the settings made possible by the technology. (Burnett, 7). The technology aspect depends on the

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availability of it, since this determines what kind of cognitive networks, for example, can be constructed. But the image in the cause of economics and politics is different from the image in the cause of art … all images, all stories, all creations made by people have designs, in all senses of the term. (Kolker, 21). In studying the importance of the image in our world we might point out that there is a need for a meta-theoretical perspective that would integrate and possibly co-ordinate the various approaches in this field. The idea is that there is a perceptual and cognitive basis for understanding the processes connected with the image experience. Through this we can allow intellectual and cultural abstractions to be interconnected into our understanding. The image is obviously dependent on the agents producing it. (Mitry, 29). This approach will help us to gain a comprehensive and understandable view of the processes behind the structures of the image. Images are sites of communication, miscommunication, mediation, and intelligence. Ron Burnett

It is not an easy task to study the multifaceted effects of the images since already a single image addresses us and involves us on several levels of perception and consciousness. We can claim that the image is objectified perception, related to whatever caused it and with which it identifies. (Mitry, 31). The image of an object is identical to the object, to the extent that it establishes the existence of that object, and thereby the image signifies what the object has the power to signify. Knowledge can work downwards to parcel signals and data into objects. As knowledge changes, the parcelling into objects may change, both for science and perception. For example, the criteria for recognizing and naming the various features of a machine as separate depend very much on our knowledge of functions. It is a question of the importance of upward and downward processing in perception

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and science, the complex interplay of signals, data, and hypotheses. Unravelling this is essential for understanding the strategies and procedures of perception and science. Consequently, a profound difference between perceptual and conceptual objects is that perceptual objects are always concrete ones, while conceptual objects of science may be abstract ones. The perceived objects have spatial extension, and they may change in time, while conceptual objects cannot be sensed, may be unchanging and space-less, and yet have the status of objects in that they are public. Although concrete objects may have features that are abstract, as we believe especially from scientific knowledge. (Gregory 1981, 403). According to Gregory, there are differences between perceptual and scientific hypotheses. Firstly, perceptions are from one vantage point, and run in real time, but science is not based on a particular viewpoint. That is why perception differs from conceptions by being related to events in real time from a local region of space, while conceptions have no locale and are essentially timeless. Perception is far more limited in range and application than conception. The basis of empiricism is that all conception depends upon perception, but conception can break away from perception, and create a new world. Secondly, perceptions are of instances, and science is of generalizations. We perceive individual objects, but we can conceive generalizations and abstractions. Thirdly, perceptions are limited to concrete objects, while science also has abstract objects. The contribution of inferences and assumptions to sensing even simple objects makes the distinction between concrete and abstract objects difficult and perhaps impossible. Fourthly, perceptions are not explanations, but concepts can be explanatory. Scientific hypotheses are closely linked to explanation. Perceptions have far less explanatory power, but might have some. Fifthly, perception includes awareness, and the physical sciences exclude it. There are striking differences between hypotheses of science and perception. Sensations are involved in perception but

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awareness, or consciousness has no place in the hypotheses of physics. Much of human behaviour controlled by perception can occur without awareness: consciousness is seldom if ever necessary. There are marked similarities and important identities between hypotheses of science and perceptions, however, the differences are extremely interesting. It may be that developments in artificial intelligence might provide new conceptions. In a way, perceptions are like hypotheses, conclusions of unconscious, and inductive inferences, so, the concept of the normal meaning of frequently repeated perceptions can come about with immutable certainty, lightning speed and without any meditation. By frequent repetition of similar experiences one can attain continually recurring connections between very different perceptions. What is needed altogether is a thorough exploration of the meanings and other dimensions of the image to see how various perspectives can contribute to an overall understanding of the nature of the image. Meanings concerning the image can be built up inductively, from many different sources, as with language and perceptions. In this process, our ideas of the physical form of objects happen inductively, by combining visual experiences from different viewpoints. It is important to notice that at any given moment we see the world from one viewpoint, and from one angle. In that sense, each shot on the cinema screen corresponds to a glance, but the succession of shots is very unlike a succession of glances. We can say that a human eye operates on very different mental principles than a camera, and our glances shift to focuses of attention within a vaster field of peripheral vision, and this field constantly inter-relates the glances within it at the same time as our short-term memory co-ordinates the series of glances in a serial and on-going way. Perception is also referred to the performance of some composite phenomenal activity; an operation that affects mental contents, a process in which information processing is used to transfer information from the world into the brain and mind

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where it is further processed and related to other information. The perception as a whole is based on many different systems, which are partly independent modular systems. Perception includes three basic forms and systems: direct perception, interpersonal perception, and representation. Perceptual and motor systems deal with the inputs and outputs of cognitive activities. There exist also many other modular systems like the memory system, motoric control system, and the system of writing, which are in collaboration with each other, and are thus quite hard to separate. In direct perception the spectator is active, and can get the kinetic depth effect. Mind is an information processor, which represents and transforms information. The mind must incorporate some form of mental representation and processes that act on and manipulate that information. (Friedenberg & Silverman, 3). Many phenomenal functions are dependable on mental representations: we have to identify targets through the information stored in our memory. Recognition of this kind might change from very simple cases into very complex ones. In art, a simple case could be the recognition of a painting by Mondrian; a complex one a recognition of Escher’s lithographs. Recognition is always determined by past: to recognize something we have to notice the similarities between the actual information, and the information of some earlier moments. The effect of the past in cognitive processes is a very complicated issue, which can’t be explained just through information storage. In learning, there is an interaction between experience and earlier understanding. The recognition of single objects depends on the perception of certain characteristics, and textures. In everyday experience, all these three forms and systems of perception function smoothly together. All this calls for thinking about image and its perception, all the different theories and scientific approaches, and what kind of possibilities they open up in creating future horizons in this

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field. A broader view of perception can see these different approaches as complements of each other, and help us with a better understanding of the whole process. There is a certain multiplicity of questions to be answered. For example, Gestalt psychology suggests that perception goes out immediately towards comprehensively abstract patterns, the so-called gestalt. In this kind of thinking, concrete thing perception comes before the awareness of generalized abstract Gestalt. (Ehrenzweig, 18). The perceptual laws and other Gestalt psychological principles can help and guide us how to organize perceptions into unified patterns and objects. The perceptual laws describe the effects of certain innate and very early-learned schemes into the organization of perception. Gestalt psychologist thought that these organizing principles have a physiological basis, and so they would be innate ways of organizing perception. If we think that there are innate and learned schemes, we can see the unification of many perceptions, although our experiences and interpretations of them might be very different, but still in the background there is common information, which has been picked from the same targets. We have different perceptual hypotheses and conceptual hypotheses of the world, which might work on different timescales. The innate psychological schemes seem to be sometimes flexible. In the studies concerning many-sided and complex image interpretations, there is a perspective according to which the primary organization of perception might happen in several ways. So, the innate schemes are not always stiff but can produce different shapes on the same material basis. Different perceptions are consequences of different schemes that will change during a lifetime, and in the perception of art this seems that the same work of art looks different when seen during different periods of one’s life. Perception functions remarkably fast, because unexpected events do happen. Thus, the reality is made by private hypotheses of perception, and shared hypotheses of conception. Visual models, descriptions,

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and representations are partly learned, because they are based on earlier experiences. All learned schemes are not models or representations, because they can deal with the ways and principles of perception. The different visual models, descriptions, and representations are linked with the basic system of perception, recognition. Very brief glances are relatively immune to the effect of learning, but learning can affect the schematic map, which is a learned model or representation of an object. Image perception is related to conception by perceptually guided activities requiring understanding. A learned perceiver of images has developed better schemes, models, and representations, and can take in more information, and can find out more complex connections between elements and things like an unskilled perceiver. Because learned schemes can be models and representations of objects, they can be endlessly formed. Learned and innate schemes might have different roles in different situations, and they function in different phases of perception by completing each other. All in all, the innate schemes do not lead straight into the recognition of an object. They work more as organizers of perception. The learned schemes have a role in recognition. They are models, descriptions, and representations. The learned schemes can be guiding models of action. It is possible that the differentiation between learned and innate schemes is purely theoretical, and actually it is a question of combining the two. The perceptual laws itself do not bring in the desired effect, because it is produced through learned models, descriptions, and representations. Because of the learned representations, certain shapes can gain more meanings than others, and can be based on previous knowledge of the world, thus it is possible to form expectations that will guide to a deeper interpretation. Consequently, through mental associations we can link unseen features into familiar objects. (Gregory, 85–87). In this way, the different models and representations are hypotheses of a kind, and not often very accurate representations of the views

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in front. According to this study, the hypotheses of representation have formed through experience, which brings in new expectations guiding our perceptions. While observing complex images the existence of learned representations can be clearer, because in front of them it is possible to gain different interpretations and meanings. While recognizing targets inside the images one has to deal with more interpretational processes than when perceiving reality. For example, in face recognition one can quickly perceive the essential and structural features of a face. The recognition of a familiar face happens through the distinctiveness of a face. (Lewis & Johnston, 435–479). Face recognition requires holistic recognition, which has its advantages also in object recognition. Instead, the recognition of letters is more like part-based recognition, useful in object recognition but not in face recognition. There is also a perspective according to which it is not possible to recognize objects without the cultural context surrounding them. One can think that the influence of the past into the cognitive processes of human beings is a much more complicated process than just a hint of some processes, which store information. We learn to perceive things through human communication, and the produced knowledge will move on to new situations as models, ways, and principles of action. For example, images are not just products, representations, or copies of reality, or by-products of cultural activity. They are the ways in which humans visualize themselves and how they communicate the results. (Burnett, 9). Similarly, the perception of images is, in a sense, pattern recognition but not in the sense of recognising a simple template, like the visual equivalent of a paradigm. It is more like the ability to compare and contrast similarities and differences, and coordinate them as variations. Such a co-ordination is not conscious in the sense that one spells it out in one’s mind, nor even in the looser sense that it is under voluntary control, or that one

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can easily become conscious of it. Rather it is in the pre-conscious area, a zone of mental operations, which are sometimes easy, sometimes difficult, and often impossible to render conscious. The mind has many levels and sub-systems of which some are low-level reflexes, or sequences of motoric instructions. Others are perceptible but normally they interest us very little. Much of our complex, higher-level thinking is preconscious too. One rarely can spell out every stage in an associative chain. Nevertheless, most reconstructions of associative chains are done by retrospective hypothesis, and they never explain the omission of equally available alternatives, and they can hardly cover more than one aspect of such search procedures. Concerning this perspective, the mind sets out from several aspects of a task in situation simultaneously, and what it offers as a solution to these multiple requirements is the product of convergence from every feature of context, content, function, and goal. The model of multiple, simultaneous operations allows one to understand the brain’s remarkably efficient compromise between speed and heterogeneity. Rather than following old association chains, the brain must have far more efficient systems for crossindexing and excluding information. For most of these operations, consciousness is unnecessary, and full articulation in consciousness would consist of impossible slowness. From this point of view, most of the conscious thinking takes the form of vague awareness, where the vagueness stands for a pre-conscious knowledge, which can often be so quickly retrieved, that one thinks of it as having been conscious all the time. Visual images are the products of intentional human activity. Noël Carroll

Above all, images (like all mediation in general) have a tendency to block the path to the objects they mediate. (Flusser, 111). The application of the photographic process to reality results in an image, which is unique in many respects. A photograph testifies the

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existence of a certain reality, and if realism is a term for a graphic image, which precisely simulates some real object, then a photograph must be differentiated from it as a form of reality itself. Images are not to be thought of as entities like pictures, they are purely relational, a relation between consciousness and the object.

Active Processes An image is nothing else than a relationship, an orientation towards the object. Jean-Paul Sartre

As we shall see, a difference between passive reception and active perceiving of images is contained in elementary visual experience. We are not conscious of an image of an object, but have an imaginative consciousness of the object. The perception of an image is a cognitive process, which means that to see is to perform operations on visual materials. The cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. It is a question of active exploration, selection, grasping of essentials, simplification, abstraction, analysis and synthesis, completion, correction, comparison and problem solving. These are the ways that the mind treats cognitive material at different levels. (Arnheim). Each of these operations is a component of intelligence and of perception. Vision deals with the raw material of experience by creating a corresponding pattern of general forms, which are applicable not only to the individual case at hand but to an indeterminate number of similar cases. Consequently, we can experience also non-presented objective conditions, including the mind’s categories, which are meanings in an ordinary sense and concepts in a philosophical sense. On a sensory level, perceiving accomplishes that which in the realm of reasoning is known as understanding. Much of human

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inference depends not on deduction, but on inductive probabilistic reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. Everyday inductive reasoning and decision-making is often based on simple judgment heuristics related to ease of memory retrieval and degree of similarity. (Kahneman & Tversky). The visual concept of the object derived from perceptual experiences has certain properties. It conceives in itself the image, where the object can be seen as three-dimensional, of constant shape, and not limited to any particular projective aspect. It is apparent that visual theory has developed into a point, where it is possible both to assess the conditions requisite to the effect, and to appreciate its theoretical importance. A person’s visual concept of the object is based on the totality of observations from any number of angles. It is still a visual concept, and not a verbal definition obtained by intellectual abstraction. Sometimes intellectual knowledge helps to form a visual concept. An object’s certain and essential feature will appear best from different angles. Present study also makes clear that visual concepts must be distinguished from so-called eidetic memory images, which make it possible for some people to project upon an empty surface an exact replica of a scene they have perceived before. We can compare them with afterimages, although they can be scanned with eye movement, and this is not possible with afterimages. For example, the problem of surface perception is difficult because the visual system is confronted with the problem of untangling the different physical causes of the images on our retinas, and filling in missing information when only portions of a surface are visible. However, much progress has been made in understanding how the visual system infers surface structure in some simplified images, but still much remains to be done before we have a full understanding of how our visual system works. (Nakayama & Shimojo). There is some conceptual integration that extensive research has made it obvious that not only is the veridical perception

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under certain conditions a feat of the visual system, but also that the manner in which that feat is accomplished represents an outstanding example of the cognitive problem-solving nature of the visual system. Nevertheless, to appreciate the difficulty posed for the visual system, it is necessary to reflect upon the precise nature of the input received by the system under certain conditions. The various parts, for example, of a passing figure are received at slightly different times. This is not a major difficulty, since several lines of evidence suggest that our experience of briefly presented stimuli persists beyond the presentation itself in the form of iconic images. It is not surprising that a percept of the stimulus pattern is sometimes not achieved. Thinking of this kind of perspective, we can say that these kind of failures are instructive both with respect to the phenomenological nature of success, when it occurs, and with respect to the operations of the visual system which underlie success.

2. PICTORIAL FORMATIONS

Attending Problems Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. Walter Benjamin

According to a further perspective of this study, we can think that an image is a collection of graphic elements that convey meaning for the spectator. When we view a scene, the world seems to be filled with objects that have particular shapes, colours, and material properties. The primary source of information that we use to acquire information about our world is visual, which relies on the light reflected off of object surfaces to a point of observation. Our knowledge of object structure, and aspects of our visual world, is determined by the structure of the surfaces of objects, since it is there that light interacts with objects. Consequently, compositional features like centres of interest may be graphic rather than scenic, in a sense like abstract paintings can have them. The spectator’s attention is easily pre-empted by focal points, like a configuration of strongly contrasted colours, or a nexus where many line converge at sharp angles. Yet, colour and composition can compete, and graphic structures are always vulnerable to nonpictorial priorities, such as literary content. It is clear that the form and composition of the images can concentrate the spectator’s attention in a particular way Movement is a primary graphic feature, because it is so conspicuously concrete. It is somehow assumed to be more realistic

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than the static spaces within which it occurs. The movement in an image is real, but only in the sense that everything else in the image is real. As a representation of another movement, it is not often realistic, and when it happens to be realistic, no special consequences flow. As a whole, the human mind is biologically pre-programmed to accord a high priority to movement. Pictorial organisation can intensify effects palpable in real-life vision. Although movement in itself is completely abstract, different factors can give movement a kind of character, which interacts with other elements. Movement resembles all the elements of concrete form in suggesting a range of dynamics, and it is highly responsive to dramatic or semantic elements. This opens up questions that are highly relevant to all forms of scholarly and academic activity. According to our perspective here, perceiving relies on knowledge of the world around us. It is said that perception is usually dependent of concepts. When we perceive an image, we also perceive it as some kind of entity. It might be difficult to separate knowledge of the world, knowledge of semiotic form, and knowledge of meanings, because far from being separate levels, zones, or disciplines, each implies the others. That is, knowledge of semiotic form of the images is part of our wider knowledge. However, if one replaces paradigms like separate levels by models like interacting subsystems, then coherence and correspondence will stand revealed as synonyms for the same co-ordination. We can say that certain knowledge is not always necessary, and it is surprising how well probabilistic inference can repair deficiencies in knowledge. All in all, images are representational. Signs within the images are presented in various ways, many times depending on the style of the person making these images. The majority of traditional psychological theories investigate perception as recognition of something, and there are also methods through which we can observe the different phases of perception. Nowadays there is also talk about direct perception. We observe other

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things more than others, and what is in the centre of the focus, is usually seen clearer. This relates to the function of the eyes. It is relevant that the different parts of perception will be differentiated through different textures. In the pre-attentive stage of processing the textons will be united into textures quickly and automatically. After this there will be a recognition of patterns and objects. The process will happen in the bottom-up style during the first phase, and later on also from top-down. Attention plays a special role in pattern recognition. It is a question related to visual search. This process is fast, automatic and effortless. In other words, it does not require attention and happens before attentional processes can even be brought to bear. Consequently, different perceptual laws organize visual views into homogenic areas and elements. This phase is an initial one, of which we are not aware. This opens up relevant ideas for further research, and these perspectives have been widely accepted in the community of perceptual researchers. There have been numerous replications and extensions of these basic findings. This also creates a theoretical idea of how and where in the visual system features get bound together. (Friedenberg & Silverman, 111). According to this point of view our visual system breaks up an image into separate streams that correspond to object identity and location. Consequently, distinct parts of the brain process distinct aspects of a stimulus, such as its colour, form, and motion. In this perspective focused attention is the force that binds different features together. The question remains, how does the brain do it? A solution is offered in the way that neurons that represent separate features may synchronize their firing rates. This synchronization has the possibility to serve to link the features. All in all, focused attention could be the driving force behind this process. This problem characterizes also more generally the problem at hand. Arguably, attention can be intentional, even prefigured. If some things draw our attention, this can be unintentional. We can think that attention is an aspect of consciousness, but is not

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synonymous with it. If attention is divided, then a temporary representation includes those features that characterize the whole structure of different elements as a group. There might be two ways of looking: one for the perception of local forms, and the other for larger perception. Selective attention is the factor that leads to the perception of details, and one can consider the larger, global perception as a very general process, which includes even then perception of all those things that are beyond our attention. In this sense, we have two visual processes. The first, the pre-attentive process, can inspect a complex texture all over the visual field in parallel, and can detect changes in the kind and density of textons. Only if such changes occur in certain regions does it summon up the attentive, serial process to scrutinize one of these regions by focal pin-pointing. The preattentive process acts as an early warning system, for itself it cannot evaluate positional shifts in textons, although it can look for texton changes throughout the entire visual field during very brief glimpses. It is shown that prior to form recognition, an important, early visual system exists that can effortlessly locate some conspicuous local feature differences, and in turn can direct the searchlight of attention to these locations. This is how the ground state is segmented into the figure one, and this includes a fundamental problem of perception. The recognition of objects will happen then, when temporary representation will be measured with the patterns in the memory or with the descriptions that have taken place with the previous objects in mind. There are several ways of discerning relevant explanatory domains for the study of images. Human memory allows us to store our past experiences and to draw on them. Through this it is possible to deal with new situations that might bear some similarity to the older ones. Memory is essentially non-representational, so the levels of complexity of human-cultural interaction are many sided. Sometimes during active perception the representation that is all the time fulfilling itself will change into

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something else. Then the recognisable object might change into another that is more appropriate. (Treisman, 31–32). The perception and recognition of objects takes normally more than just the right selection and listing of features. The second visual process is to inspect regions where the density of textons is different. It can perform the prodigious feats of human from recognition. Cognitive research has found out the existence of functionally distinct memory systems, and models of memory specify how these different systems interact. This scheme might be considered to have certain controversial further implications. According to this study, the perception of images takes place between earlier knowledge and sensory information gained through perception. However, the most significant consequence that deals with the grouping of features and parts is that there will be emergent features, which are directly perceived. One can perceive directly the parts or groups formed by them, and these are the emergent features. (Pomerantz). Further academic tests have proven that a target may be recognized based on very little information. They show that a spectator in front of an image with a previously unseen view can through one fixation extract enough information to understand it. (Biederman, 213–253). This is very essential for the viewing of art, and its objects. The rich diversity of image-worlds means that visualization can take many forms, and that it is simultaneously a part of the perceptual realm and the thinking mind. (Burnett, 203). Equally important is that visual perception does not offer me a ‘space’ but an ‘image of space,’ a particular ‘situation’. (Mitry, 30). There is also an idea according to which object recognition is bound with the perspective. This means that the recognition of an object through a perspective is easier, because a storage of representations with different points of view already exists in the mind. When we have seen an object through many perspectives, the recognition of it is not bound to a certain perspective. The ability to see, seeing as a whole, means to enter into a meta-experiential and

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meta-theoretical relationship with the process of sight. This is fundamental to any critical analysis of culture. (Burnett, 10). From our point of view, a visual image is a mental representation of an object or scene that preserves metric spatial information. (Freidenberg & Silverman, 139). The visual image refers to the perception of surface orientation, textures, locations and motions. (Wade, 230). An individual’s concept of spatial relationships is not the exact replica of what one sees. Physical transduction in the eye and neural transformation of impulses connected with retinal receptors shape sensory signals in genetically pre-programmed ways. Perceptual processes are involved in building up a concept of spatial relationships. This means that the visual space is a product of an individual’s sensory processes. According to this study there are diverse operations involved in the image processing. There has also been debate around the issue whether or not visual images even exist. People who believe in visual images are pictorialists. (Block). They believe that we form quasi-pictorial representations that represent in the same way as images do. Further on, pictorialists advocate the common notion of mental analogue representations. The other side of the coin features descriptionalists, who believe that images are not pictorial. This relates to the idea that the subjective experience can make one believe that there are images somewhere, although in reality it is all just digital symbol processing. Analogue and digital representations lead to different outcomes. Images are processed spatially, and they are subject to transformative processes like scanning, zooming and rotation. Digital symbols are processed according to syntactical rules. The existence of mental images would imply that some human operations differ fundamentally from computer operations. This is in line with the current emphasis which points out that analogue and digital, as well as pictorial and descriptive processing does happen. Items can be represented by both verbal and visual codes. (Paivio). The mental image can function as a prerequisite for natural perception, since this image .

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coincides and conditions with our perceiving and framing of a present event. It would be difficult to talk about an image without also talking about the pictorial. (Burnett, 68). The pictorial is an essential quality of the image, and not a simple sense of visual. The visible in an image is, in this sense, a fragment of what is signified since images do not simply reconstruct the real. They may hint towards it, resembling more of a reflection. The image presents a relationship among a number of various levels of meaning. Furthermore, it is a question of interaction between different elements of the image. Arguably, as a result, images do not depict a real that is absent from the photograph and then brought to life by interpretation or viewing. The process is neither mechanical nor linear. There are no prior moments outside of the image, no history that doesn’t at one and the same time declare itself as image and as discourse and as event. (Burnett, 69). Another insight may also serve as justification in here. Considering the ordering process of images, scholars have proposed various modes to explain one of these problems. None of these models assume linguistic knowledge is required to understand images. The template model hypothesizes that the human visual system synthesizes perceptual data into a composite and matches it to stored memory. Problems with this model include the large number of images that must be stored to find matches for all visual experiences. The prototype model conceptualizes visual images as being compared to an “average” of the class. This comparison occurs in part through schemata, which are “rules” that describe the essential characteristics of a prototype of a class. (Spoehr & Lehmkuhle, 41–47). All these views imply various connections. Connected with this are the questions of how the schemata are stored, how or if new ones are developed, and what happens when differences are so extensive that no schema can reconcile the information. The feature model assumes that, rather than visual matching occurring, features

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in a list are coordinated. In applications of cognitive psychology to media, most scholars have used the concepts of schemata, prototypes, templates, and scripts (general narrative outlines) to describe the mental activity of spectators. (Staiger, 71). The felt immediacy of experience has something to do with the aesthetic quality of the image. Cognitive experience is a process that arises from and is conditioned by earlier basic experiences. Cognitive experience proceeds through the stage of conceptual elaboration of possible resolutions and later it develops into a final reconstruction of the experience, wherein the initial fragmented situation is transformed into a unified whole. The mediating process in here is part of the cognitive inquiry from experience to experience, and our knowledge of the world is what makes possible the final and more integrated experience. Human retinas consist of a mosaic of rods and cones with each receptor having its separate nerve. The assemblage of rod nerves encodes the night-time images, and the cone nerves encode the day-time images. Rod and cone messages coexist all the time, and are combined in varying degrees to form one image whose composition depends upon the level of adaptation. The brighter the light, the more detailed the image. Thus, the dependence of perception upon the level of illumination and the way that contrast is preserved over such an enormous luminance range is chiefly achieved by the processing of these nerve signals. The retinal image is encoded in terms of contrast, which has the advantage of being independent of that constantly changing overall brightness level in nature. This intelligible and purposeful adaptation is very different from the way that eyes seem to be temporarily blinded by exposure to a very bright light. Visual adaptation deals with the special features of the eye. This process gives new significance to the phenomena.

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Mental What is often forgotten is the meaning and enigma of visibility itself. John Berger

Related to perceptual thinking, we can claim that eidetic images are not constructs of the formative mind like visual concepts. In this sense, the visual concept of anything that has volume can be represented only in three-dimensional medium, such as sculpture and architecture. If we want to make pictures on a plane surface, all we can hope to do is to produce a translation, to present some structural essentials of the visual concept by two-dimensional means. Consequently, an image can be translation or transformation but this transformation has to be reversed to obtain the required information. Thus in talking about visual concept and perception, it is not only a question of image perception but of perception in general. We can think that representations and descriptions of the mind are objectcentred. This leads to the idea that a visual concept is not just a reflection of some aspect. As a reality, the photographic image confronts us with the innocent arrogance of an objective fact, one which exists as an independent presence, indifferent to our response. Maya Deren

Christian Metz argues that the codes spectators use to perceive referents are related to the codes used to read visual images. (Metz, 78–80). The spectator reads moving images the same way as he or she perceives the physical world. The cinema does not have a language because it has no double articulation, and it has no signs as such. Each image is more than a sign; it is a sentence. (Ibidem). Connected with phenomenology he asserts that filmgoers know what cinematic images mean because of prior experiences with understanding the occurrences in the real world. In Metz’s system, people interpret films as they do because they already have learned

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cultural codes to understand what is presented to them. Image perception does not consist of a photographically true recording of something, but is more like reaching out for the structural features of something. All in all, in perceiving an image one perceives actively the structural features of an image. Through phenomenal framework we can think that the concept of a scheme might be different when applied to perception of reality than to representation of it. It is clear that a grown up person selects visual interpretations concerning different objects on the basis of visual information at hand. Other senses, like touch, will affect our perceptions, but they do not determine the perception. It may be defined that the human mind can be forced to produce replicas of things, but it is not naturally geared to it. The result of this is that since perception is concerned with the grasping of significant form, the mind finds it hard to produce images devoid of that formal virtue. For example, an artist may start his or her work based on an idea, which is then worked out through some vague scheme, and then gradually fixed with new ideas. If an artist tries to reach out something, which corresponds to real perception, then what kind of scheme or mental representation is there to be fixed? One important point here is that the mind functions a great deal beneath or beyond our conscious awareness. It is elementary for our mental architecture to allow us to detach ourselves from many continuous procedures and release our imagination and use our experiences and memories for creative purposes. Perception creates interconnections in human mind and brain. In drawing, the artist uses a reduction to contours similar to that found in vision. A physiological basis of pattern perception in the visual system is the signalling of outlines signifying the contoured forms of the object seen. In view of all this, we can think that the draughtsman usually first sketches these linear outlines and later fills them in with hatching or wash to give the illusion of light, shade, and plastic form.

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In vision, the eye receives the projections of bright and dark areas on the retina, and the neuronal systems code them for relative brightness or darkness respectively, and enhance their linear borders. During the transfer of visual information from the eye to the brain, the contoured borders are accentuated progressively in the retina, the lateral geniculate, and the visual cortex. By means of this border contrast enhancement, the neurones of the visual cortex can signal complex patterns with linear contours. Arguably, the brain generates a vast number of interactions between neurons: within this mix of events, memories and connections, thought emerges. In sketching, the artist acts in accordance with the same visual law, but proceeds in a direction opposite to the abstractive process of vision. An artist begins with the linear outlines and ends with a picture showing also the values of light and space. It is relevant to notice that since the eye is constantly in motion, we cannot really fix our gaze in any prolonged manner or produce an arrested image, as it is possible through technological imaging. Due to this, our brain must make up an image out of constantly changing, and often scanty, clues like lines and signs. Artists employ a wide range of visual styles in which different subjects are chosen, and in which different visual attributes are emphasized. Artists are like visual neuroscientists, when they try to understand the way in which we know the visual world. Artists have independently discovered the modules of the visual brain. In cognitive science, modules are functionally independent mental units that receive inputs from other modules, perform a specific processing task, and pass the results of their computation onto some additional modules. (Friedenberg & Silverman, 17). The visual in all of its complexity can be broken down for the purposes of analysis and criticism, but essential components of vision will remain enigmatic. (Burnett, 11). According to this study, image perception depends on active, psychologically based processes. It is accepted that stored knowledge and as-

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sumptions actively affect all kind of perception. Consequently, perception consists of forming visual concepts, and mental representations, and making an image is like producing representational concepts on the basis of visual concepts. These concepts and representations are structures consisting of essential and special features. This means that although a mental representation of a mind or a visual concept contains more information about an object than what we can perceive from one perspective, it still is a simplification of the object. (Rock). Phenomena of this kind find their explanation in what Gestalt psychology describes as the basic law of visual perception: Any stimulus pattern tends to be seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as the given conditions permit. (Arnheim, 53). Simplicity can be defined by means of information theory: The smaller the amount of information needed to define a given organization as compared to other alternatives, the more likely the figure will be so perceived. Both a psychologist and an artist must come to realize that the perceptual experience of looking at a figure cannot be described as the sum of the perceived components. This means that objective and subjective simplicity do not always run parallel. Furthermore, a perceiver may find a sculpture simple because they are unaware of its intricacy, or find it confusingly complex, because they have little acquaintance with even moderately elaborate structures. (Ibidem, 55). It is understandable that the quality of attention reflects the nature of perception. There are notions according to which it appears that we have a tendency to see things as wholes. What is seen in a particular area of the visual field depends strongly on its place and function in the total context. Of course, the structure of the whole may be modified by local changes. This interplay between whole and part is not automatic and universal. A part may or may not be influenced by a change in the total structure. This illustrates just that any visual field behaves as a gestalt. (Ibidem, 67). Yet, if attention is focused, we can see details, but

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when attention is split, we perceive more about the whole than its parts. Even though well-organized figures cling to their integrity and complete themselves when distorted, we should not assume that such figures are always perceived as undivided, compact masses. We can think that the models, descriptions, and representations stored in memory are usually visual. It is possible for visual elements to produce visual discourse, since every painting, sculpture or film carries meanings. Meanings can be used constructively in the sense of building up interpretations. Whether meanings are representational or abstract, they are about something. For example, shape is not the only factor determining the splitting of the visual field. Similarities and differences in brightness and colour can be even more decisive. The appearance of any part depends to some extent on the structure of the whole, and the whole is influenced by the nature of its parts. No portion of a work of art is ever quite self-sufficient. (Ibidem, 78). Our capacity to appreciate various modes of representation is an extension of our flexible visual and cognitive abilities. An image can present a visual statement, and the simplicity of art objects involves not only their visual appearance in and by itself, but also the relation between the image seen and the statement it is intended to convey. Phenomenological understanding tells us that the visual field (how things are subjectively presented to us in visual experience) can be richly detailed through our impressions.

Pictorial Glances The act of photography is that of phenomenological doubt, to the extent that it attempts to approach phenomena from any number of viewpoints. Vilém Flusser

Perceptual thinking deals with many interactive processes, which cognitive research has come up with to explore and also

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to settle oppositions between different approaches. In the spirit of Rudolf Arnheim, we can say that there are two kinds of perceptual thinking, which are distinguished as intuitive and intellectual cognition. Note that this account is challenging. We can conceive how elementary it is that intuitive cognition takes place in a perceptual field of freely interacting forces, through which the perception of an image is born. Furthermore, this interaction is a very complex field process, of which very little reaches consciousness. An example would be how one approaches paintings. The observer perceives the various components of an image, the shapes and colours and relations between them. The final outcome becomes conscious as the perception of a painting. A great deal of thinking and problem solving goes on in intuitive cognition. Through intellectual cognition an observer isolates items and relations among items from the perceptual field in order to establish the particular nature of each. Intellectual processes follow each other in linear succession. Some of the inferences related to perception might be unconscious but they all belong to the constructive cycle of different happenings during this process. Consequently, by gradually solidifying the perceptual concepts gained from direct experience, the mind acquires the stable shapes. This is the way how meaningful perception occurs, involving a whole network of associations. But this is not always self-evident. According to this study, our perceptual movements, whether obviously physical, like eyemovements and re-focussing, or more elusively mental, like movements of attention, are physiological by nature. As co-ordinations of mental and physical operations they involve physical tensions, which scientific psychology has well described, and which mainstream aesthetic theory has treated in terms of tension, balance, rhythm, and all the other elements of pictorial composition with its abstract and concrete significations. Images seem to provoke these factors in which real life viewing does not, partly through the image’s tight unity, partly through the relative

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restriction of eye movement, or partly through contradictions between the pattern and its implied scene. Looking at images uncouples perceptual processes from most ‘being-there’ reflexes, leaving them available instead for sensitised significance. All in all, the pictorial reading of images can become rich through associations in the manner of building up compositional meanings. This explains how different perceptual modes offer an interesting vantage point for further research. We can think that through experience an observer works toward a solution that is highly appropriate, and this process leads into interpretation. The recognition of images can be compared with previously un-experienced targets or views with insufficient information, which both require more specific perception than a familiar view. Recognition takes place in various perceptual situations. It is believable that the perception of images requires some kind of thinking, comparison, knowledge, experience, and attention. Partly the process is unconscious, and that is why an observer sees the target through image perception, and does not consciously think all of one’s choices. The use of modelling and comparison with experimental data is a specific characteristic of cognitive psychology and is also used in the artificial intelligence and some network approaches. The single image can provide us with all the necessary information we need for understanding how the objects in the image are related to each other. With respect to this, if we think of image perception as visual thinking, we can realize that there is a lot of information in the image that we don’t use. Another thing is that we can identify different targets based on quite little information. As if these constraints were not enough, a further point lies in that perception is not just recognition, but more or less it is perception and understanding of spatial structures, and understanding of different objects and parts and their relations in visual field through visual thinking. As mentioned before, one way to split arguments about how we know the world is the distinction between descriptive and

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pictorial beliefs. The former idea believes that knowing is the result of proposition-based, non-visual representation. The latter claims that images have a fundamental function within cognition and are not necessarily translated into discourse. Viewing an image is a perceptual and cognitive process. The outcome of this debate matters greatly to film and visual media research, since the linguistic model falls into a descriptive category, whereas some film scholars dispute such a linguistic premise to knowledge of the perceptual world. (Staiger, 71). As recently as just few years ago, the judgment was still out as to whether mental images are ‘pictorial, or linguistic, or both’. (Reeves, 275–279). Most generally, the normal function of the rules and conventions of pictorial composition is to encourage maximally efficient internal relationships as related to context, content, and assumed purpose. Thus, the current emphasis is not so much on whether images and image processing exist, but on which types of tasks call on them and under what circumstances. (Friedenberg & Silverman, 149). We will not have a full solution of this problem, but we can point out that much of interesting discourse involves some shift of alteration to conventions, and special purposes may require that normal procedures be bent, twisted, reversed, or broken. For example, a filmmaker may think that it is important to draw the spectator’s attention to facts and features of the frame, not only as a condition of pictorial representation, but as a contradiction of the represented items. This guidance of pictorial glances might then reverse normal procedures. One reads the shot as an especially integrated whole, but incompletely integrated with competition for the attention between sub-configurations. At the same time, this competition constitutes a form of structure resulting in tension, balance, and dynamics. The interpretative attention bestows special significance on some features of pure graphic form, while overriding others in its pursuit of significance. In cinematic narration, it is significant how an image is framed. Even the most realistic

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image does not reflect totally the experience perceived from reality. In the light of this approach, we can say that there is a need of an active output of the artist in producing the images. In some cases, an image can be relatively closely structured, yet internally unstable. Its configurations recombine as the spectator’s eye patrols over the image. It is important to notice how the film shot presents a logical oddity in being both a composition, and a mere surround for a set of clues to something in itself as invisible as most associations, meanings, and references are. The shots of a film have a pictorial relationship with one another. For example, the juxtaposition of two strong compositions can create a shock, a collision, a sensation of optical clash or contradiction, or a kinetic dynamic. The spectator’s eye can de-prioritise the change of shot, and concentrate instead upon elements that link different shots together. Thus one can recognise a second shape as the same thing from another angle, and prioritise the continuity. The point of view here is that the juxtaposition of shots is only a prelude to the semantic interaction between shots. Especially, editing practice is dominated by this dialectic of contrast and continuity, difference and similarity. Further on, the spectator’s mind must handle all this very fast with relating different shots, and overlooking the cuts. We can think that when observing an image, one single and special feature can already activate representations of the mind, and lead to the recognition of objects. Thus, the testing of different hypotheses is not every time necessary. On the other hand, the perception of images is also connected with the understanding of spatial structures and relations, and this kind of understanding requires visual thinking. When an image is very complicated, and offers a lot of information, one might need more conscious deductive processes to fulfil the task of understanding, and sometimes when there is not enough information to select the right object, the mind cannot decide how to see the object. Complex images test the idea that the interpretations include

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experimental reflection. (Gombrich, 218–219). As a result, complex stimulus impulses inside an image create a situation where the schemes as mental representation of memory are gradually more and more focused toward the final solution. Another thing is that the image of an experience is not always distinguished from the perception of a physical encounter. This is a reasoning that deals with the identity of the image. The traditional image is not readily manipulated, nor does it withstand the detailed scrutiny that a physical object can. The role of imagery, for example in mental life, has entranced philosophers for decades. Surely, one reason for this has to do with the way people acquire knowledge of the external world. Through empiricism we know that the visual system forms brief images like snapshots, which the linguistic system encodes and deposits in memory. Furthermore, imagery can be driven by information coming from internal information sources like memory. In this way the image serves as a first stage in chain of information acquisition, and images are thought to sustain orientation and mobility in space. Another significant matter is also how mental images serve as personal symbols. It is useful to state that individual symbols within an image have no precise alphabetic relationship, but when used in combination, meaning is found for an image through a traditional, discursive method. This all has meaningful dimensions since it happens inside the mind of the spectator. Generally speaking, the perception of an image is not only the gathering of information or activating the mind and its representations, but it is also a way of foreshadowing future perceptions, because visual experience is dynamic, and deals with psychological and imaginative forces. Thus in a psychological framework, imagebased discourse functions on many cognitive-emotional levels and the spectator uses a wide set of dispositions to make sense of the various levels of image-based discourse. (Persson, 43). In a wider perspective, perceptual inductions differ from logical inferences,

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because inferences are thought operations that add something to the given visual facts by interpreting them. Instead, perceptual inductions might be based on previously acquired knowledge of the world. In this sense, image perception is an experience that is born out of the information and the forebodings connected with it. This would imply that forebodings are important for survival, and in this meaning also very natural ways of behaving and thinking. It is also possible that forebodings are somehow connected with image perception and interpretation. According to this study, seeing an image always leaves holes, which are there for the observer to be fulfilled. What we see depends largely on our previous knowledge. We can think that forebodings create illusions, and an observer can fulfil the holes, if there is no doubt how to do it. Through our experiences it is possible to do the fulfilling, and by this to reflect life and ideas into the image. Useful to know is that the image can contain different forebodings than related to physical reality. The representational objects usually exist in some kind of relation to physical objects. Consequently, through this it is possible to transfer a great deal of forebodings related to physical objects into representational objects. Thus, it is a question of adapting a mental alert into different mediums. In a way it is possible for an image-maker to perceive their surroundings through this mental alert. All in all, through this cognitive translation we can have practical and aesthetical attitudes towards recording the environment. More specifically, there are many perceptual functions, properties and contexts, which emerge from our bodily involvement with the physical world. A significant part of cognitive psychology is one of its presumptions about the perceiving human. It is often noted that this kind of theory starts with the premise that humans are goal- or task-oriented. Furthermore, humans have objectives, and this human feature structures any encounter with our environment. There are cautions against an analogy of

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the human brain with the computer since humans are not neutral or passive to ‘bits’ of incoming information. Instead, humans select some parts for attention at the expense of others, recoding and reformulating them in complex ways. In this way, a human processing occurs in steps, an immediate one being fast categorization, with further refinement occurring in later stages. This means that there is remarkable flexibility in the recognition of features and structures of our visual field. According to our idea here, we can think there is a lack of significant and meaningful knowledge concerning the nature and function of images in our mind. The human mind works as the interplay between tension-heightening and tension-reducing strivings. We can state that the same twofold dynamics are reflected in every work of visual design. (Arnheim, 1974, 411–412). To some extent, a work of art might have a structural theme, suggested by the subject matter, but constituted first of all by a configuration of perceived forces. In this way, the theme is given the simplest form compatible with the character of the statement. One crucial point is that in art circles the notion of a rich inner life, and we can expand this by saying that a vivid sense of this kind of thinking must surely characterize anyone whose work requires problem-solving, invention, and organization of things. Furthermore, nowadays visual computer programs help to show how the perceptual system copes with ambiguity in the input, and how it is able to recognize certain inputs as images of impossible objects. It is useful to know that these achievements rest on the active interpretation of the image-parts by reference to an implicit schema or representation, where the parts are largely identified by way of the over-all schema. As it has been pointed out the interplay between the viewer and the image viewed sheds light on the objective structures of both parties. A further consequence is that computers are responsible for the explosion of images in today’s world probably more than any other technological innovation, and in future we might suggest

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that the fusion of computer and television technologies will increase the interactive possibilities of the users. Altogether, this development will also increase the modes of communication, and the ongoing symbolical structures of images and words. Related to this is the idea that visual perception consists in the experiencing of visual forces. (Ibidem, 412). On this level it is understandable that natural objects possess strong visual dynamics because their shapes are the phenomenological traces of the physical forces that created the objects. Another thing is that works of art are seldom produced physically by the forces, which we can perceive in their shapes. As an expansion to this, all the dynamic qualities of the image are not created by physical forces, and even if all visual dynamics were due to the direct manifestation of physical forces, this would not account for the perceptual effect of the final product on the mind of the observer. (Ibidem, 419). We can think that this effect is not due to the observer’s knowledge of its cause. Instead, we must try to find out why certain things are the way they are, and look for the visual properties of the percept that are responsible in creating this phenomenon.

Mediated Transmissions Picture is a model of reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein

According to this study, an intelligent organism operates in a perception-action cycle, taking in sensory information from the environment, performing internal computations on it, and using the results of the computation to guide the selection and execution of goal-directed actions. This is clearly intended since the initial sensory input is provided by separate sensory systems, including smell, taste, haptic perception, and audition. We can say that in its more complex forms, learning, for example, is intimately connected to thinking and reasoning. It is understandable

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that humans are not only able to think, but also to think about their own cognitive processes, resulting in meta-cognition. Similarly, they can also form higher-level representations. This notion can be elaborated and in sensory cognition one appropriates the sensible forms of objects and their observable characteristics. Presuming that while some discrepancies are repressed like conflict-inducing wishes in a Freudian theory, or cognitive dissonance in a more general way, it can be said that many discrepancies are recognised and endured, or used and indeed enjoyed. This kind of thinking goes on not just as riddles, paradoxes, jokes, surprises, and so on, but also in ordinary thought. It has been truly said that contradiction is more the cause than the product of consciousness. It may be, however, that discrepancy is more basic than contradiction, since the mind is geared to integrating systems, which, without necessarily contradicting one another, are disparate. Most obviously this concerns the sensory systems, sight, sound, touch, and our awareness of the different positions of the different parts of our body in relation to space and gravity, momentum and counter-pressures. Visually thinking, this means that the human body, for example, is already very expressive by nature, with gestures and facial expressions. Through cognitive research we know how important these things are. Visual perception deals with facial expressions and through images human physiology can become apparent. Consequently, we can point out that this also deals with mental sub-systems, like networks of associations. According to our idea it seems that the mind monitors these various factors simultaneously, and computer scientists have underlined the importance of “parallel processing”, in effect, the simultaneous processing of independent variables, whether they are heterogeneous or homogenous. It is this constant comparison of discrepancies, which enables one to differentiate between images and scenes, or to compare mutually exclusive paradigms or models for the same phenomenon. (Carroll, 489–499). In a sense, perception is pattern-recognition, not

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in the sense of recognising a simple template, like the visual equivalent of a paradigm, but the ability to compare and contract similarities and differences, and co-ordinate them as variations. A good example is the ‘constancy of vision’ mechanism, which enables us to see a table as rectangular even though, from all normal eye levels, perspective presents it as an irregular trapezoid, which, as we move around it, is a constantly changing series of forms. Nevertheless, it is more probably the case that the mind sets out from several aspects of a task-in-situation simultaneously, and what it offers as a solution to these multiple requirements is the product of convergence from every feature of content, context, function, and goal including desire, wish-fulfilment and fear. ‘Simultaneous processing’ might be a better phrase than ‘parallel processing’ because parallels do not integrate so well. Related to our task here, we can say that at any rate, the model of multiple, simultaneous operations allow one to understand the brain’s remarkably efficient compromise between speed and heterogeneity. We may further speculate that images, memories, and ideas arise internally and must be considered from moment to moment. Memories do not exist without a foundational image of the body. Unconscious and conscious images of our bodies are the basis for how we negotiate the world. (Blair, 77). Psychic images grow out of our body images or schemas, which are fundamental components of our sense of self. It is true that a human being is consciously aware of only a limited amount of information at any moment. A person selects information through attention. Attention works through the mind and thought. The fundamental property of attention is to make the content of consciousness appear more clearly. Consciousness begins to arise when the flow of sensory images—the preconscious movie-inthe-brain about the states of the body—is accompanied by images of the self. (Damasio, 215). The brain’s ability to absorb information is limited. To accept an input is equivalent to pay-

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ing attention to the source of information. The brain’s selection mechanisms filter the information. (Broadbent). Through research we know that our perceptual and cognitive apparatus has developed through evolution and later through the ontogenetic development, and determines to a significant degree which features are likely to be represented now and later. As mentioned before, the perception of images and more generally of visual attention concerns eye movement. This means that it depends on the nature of stimulus, how the conflict between attention and perception is induced. There are certainly many concepts, details and factors around the issue of perception. Understanding of its physiological basis has grown throughout the years. Another thing is that communication theories and computer technologies have advanced this research remarkably. We can think that our ability to listen selectively to one message and ignore another or to look at an image in colour in the presence of other colours has to do with vigilance. The interference between internal images and incoming stimuli has been under scrutiny. An observer can block or weaken the strength of incoming messages to the brain. In vision it can be done by closing the eyes or averting one’s gaze. All information, which impinges on the receptors of the sense organs, reaches the pattern-analysing mechanisms of the brain. It is useful to bear in mind that often the observer is conscious only of one message although a second message is also producing reactions simultaneously. Points concerning visual attention are important here. Significantly, Jacques Aumont has made the following distinction between central and peripheral attention. According to his point of view, central attention deals with the focalisation of important aspects of the visual field. And further on, peripheral attention concerns the attention given to new phenomena on the periphery of the visual field. (Aumont, 38). For Aumont this is a vague concept. There is something general in the process of recognition through perception, the primary function of which

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is to allow for recognition to take place in different perceptual situations. At the same time one ought to remember that gazing is not the same as looking. To gaze is to scan, while to look means that an effort has to be made to focus on some features of the environment being observed. (Burnett, 204). Another thing is that the occurrence of dreams and hallucinations unrelated to ongoing external stimuli attests to the fact that conscious perceptual experience depends upon brain processes that may operate independently of those sub-serving the reception of information from outside world. Conversely, in skilled behaviour in situations involving divided attention, and in many of the body’s involuntary regulatory responses to changes in external stimulation information may be received, processed, and initiate responses without conscious registration. Following these observations we may suggest that consciousness and information transmission depend upon different systems, which may under certain circumstances operate independently. The central awareness of perceptual experiences relies upon sufficient contribution from the ascending fibres of the reticular activating systems. It is significant that these form a dense network of cells, which arises in the brain stern and then spreads upwards and outwards to infiltrate the cortex. We can point out that some of the basic skills needed to understand visual images are identical with the abilities necessary for natural visual perception. These are fundamental human ideas and experiences. Much of current research has been directed to understanding the internal mechanisms of attention in the brain. There is a need for a good understanding in this respect. For example, the so-called attention theory has advanced to a point where it can give real insights into the solution of practical problems and solve different propositions. In this sense, attention is not anymore a single process concerned with expanding the clarity of perception. We can approach attention as a complex phenomenon, which includes selection of one mes-

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sage from several interpretations of information, and selection of one action from several plans of action. (Underwood). According to this study, attention models our interactions with the world, and provides us with strategies and control of our tactics of information sampling, and finally, optimises our information processing in the face of our limited processing capacities. Words are too obviously not things themselves; words are made-up sounds, developed throughout the life of a culture … but seeing a thing seems to bring us something very close to the thing itself. Robert Kolker

We can suggest that rather than following old association chains, the brain must have far more efficient systems for cross-indexing and excluding information. For most of these operations consciousness is unnecessary, and indeed, full articulation in consciousness would be impossibly slow. Following our point of view, we can clarify that most of our conscious thinking takes the form of vague awareness, where the vagueness stands for a preconscious knowledge, which can often be so quickly retrieved that we think of it as having been conscious all along. For example, we often sense and with great confidence, that an argument contains a discrepancy before we actually define it. Another thing is that in normal speech we somehow know that we know what to say, and roughly what it is, but without knowing exactly what it is, or what words shall we use. Consequently and in fact an image, whether photographed, painted, or digitised, is not the thing itself, because it is a representation of a mediated transmission. In many cases the image is composed, lit, pushed through the camera lens, or a computer, and transferred onto film or through binary code onto the computer screen, appearing to be the thing itself, though, in reality it is only its image. We might also find it useful to talk about consciousness and thinking in this respect. From the inside, consciousness seems to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon, a kind of inner light. It is

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often the case that the conscious part of our thinking is restricted to a co-ordination of selected items of data, the setting of a goal, and a volitional decision to perform the task. We can say that the actual performance is no more conscious than breathing. In this sense, consciousness does not think. Perhaps it is the result of the higher mental sub-systems registering discrepancies from one another. Apparently our visual system is finely tuned to recognize patterns and interpret them as the visual features of objects. Related to this it is useful to point out that from inside, our consciousness seems to be obvious and pervasive. We have knowledge of many things happening around us and even inside our bodies of which we are unaware or unconscious. But nothing could be more intimately known to us than those things of which we are individually conscious. One can also argue that there is a perspective from which consciousness seems to be a feature that sunders the universe. According to this study consistency is not the basis of constructive thinking; it is what thinking constructs out of the disparate and the discrepant. Hence, we can feel quite at home with all the irrationalities of the form of the image, and especially with the cinematic forms. In cinematic narration ‘this picture here’ can also mean ‘this place elsewhere,’ and another thing elates to the edited flow of images presenting incompatible spaces within one screen space, and so on. Similarly, even in real-life vision we sometimes draw on basic mechanisms of form and perception when we still understand that in audiovisual narration it is more a question of moving viewpoints. Or, that in a certain scene the heavily shadowed side of a woman’s face forms part of the same object as the visually very different sunlit side of that face, and that the shape of a head depicts a solid object, not a flat or convex surface. It is important to bear in mind that to make sense of a film, the mind draws on our general understanding of the cinematic situation, of which its forms are part, and of our general knowledge of the

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wider world, of which our knowledge of cinema is a part. The ability of children to make sense of images and sounds on a screen depends less on receiving verbal disquisitions or deconstructions of the medium, but rather on the everyday experience of it. Parents treat it as ‘illusions,’ saying that the dog on the screen will never bite us, and that its images and their multiple viewpoints analogise with perspective, which of course exists in the material world quite independently of its various approximations on paper.

Imagination Images freeze movement, demonstrating choice. Susan Ossman

It is meaningful to notice that the perceptual apparatus is able to guide our concentration in a given situation to the most presumably relevant sensory data. This means that image representation, within general cultural and certain specifically conventions, relates to our visual perception of the world in a way that language can achieve only extremely marginally. Assertions that the structures of verbal language dominate perception, or film form, for example, labour under the grave disadvantage that no evidence exists to prove it, and only piecemeal shred of evidence to even suggest it. Furthermore, many effects attributed to verbal forms are better explained in terms of deficient or variant knowledge of the world. In view of our present concern, it is possible to notice that cross-cultural, cross-sub-cultural and ideological differences radically affect experience and perception. This is after all the commonest justification of art. It also means that by rendering other forms of thought visible, it enables us to try them on for size, or for communicative or diagnostic purposes. There are conventions, codes, and rules governing the elements in an image and its overall organization. Apart from visual knowledge we need probabilistic knowledge of the world. This

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means that the information needed for appreciating the image, for recognizing objects and understanding spatial relationships, takes place on a fairly abstract level based on mental operations and visual subsystems, which produce inputs to our general visual system. Looking at an image produces a perceptual response which has its basis in our common neural structures. There are several features that are characteristic of the human consciousness. (Johnson-Laird, 356). One is that it functions as a superior operational system. The concrete and detailed control and implementation of muscle innervations, for example, take place on a non-conscious level. We have no consciousness of the numerous muscle innervations that enable us to dance, for example. But we have a conscious high-level operational control of our behaviour via a much more general program. This program could look like a script in the sense in which the term is described in Schank and Abelson (1977), that is, a narrative or a summary of a sequence of acts. Important aspects of storytelling can be seen as developing out of the procedures we use when planning. According to Johnson-Laird, another essential feature of human consciousness is the ability of the embodied brain to make a model of it. Because this model has to be contained in the human brain itself, it follows that it must necessarily be much simpler than the brain. The function of this model as linked to its ability to improve the quality of the acts of which humans are capable whether these are physical or mental. It is possible to state that the conceptions of abilities such as perceiving, feeling and thinking are acquired from the interior world, but the content of the thought processes is mainly represented in forms from exterior space. Consequently, the mental models of the consciousness are primarily phenomenological, representing exterior space, with the inclusion of agents and objects in this space. The raw material for these mental models consists of perceptions, and mental models describe the way in which we act in the world by importing features of it, using aspects of it as

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tools. We can think that models are not just representations; they are tools, concepts that owe a great deal to the computer revolution that has diminished the clear-cut opposition between mind and matter. Furthermore, models are tools for the understanding of phenomena. They are made by those who seek understanding and they may be improve upon and replaced by better models. (Flusser, 75). In other words, an essential aspect of the mental models is the construction of the model of the person itself. The model acquires its elements partly from the exterior world, partly from the inner world. This kind of mental modelling is a central requirement for all social interaction. The conception of the person as an acting figure in space is acquired from the exterior world by imitation. In his way, the person uses his or her visual perceptions of other persons as model schemata. (Johnson). Psychological, social and cultural connections can also serve as models or inputs behind the figural aspects of characterisation. From another point of view, the imagination used in more abstract thinking will employ model images of phenomena in and acts performed in an exterior, objective space, which is marked linguistically by the use of figurative language. The figurative and metaphorical aspects of language make it reasonable to assume that, from an evolutionary point of view, abstract thinking has developed on the basis of the concrete scripts of acts and scenes, which have gone through a process of extraction of essential features that could be used as models for other mental processes. Similarly, the meaning of an image does not lie entirely within the image itself, but also in how that image is processed by an interpretive device. When Kosslyn (1980) describes the way in which a person is able to imagine that he is ‘rotating’ or ‘scanning’ a given complex of mental images, this implies that the mental processing of images takes place as a simulation of perceptual processes with external objects. Besides scripts of actions, we also have scripts of

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perceptions, which enable us to carry out acts of hypothetical perception, that is, imagination. According to Flusser, the significance of the images is on the surface. (Flusser, 8). And one can wander over the surface of the image through ‘scanning’. The significance of the image is revealed in this process, and it represents a synthesis of two intentions: one manifested in the image and the other belonging to the observer. Anton Ehrenzweig has spoken of two kinds of attention: “In a work of art any element however paltry has to be firmly connected to the total structure in a complex web of cross ties radiating across the entire picture plane. There is no decisive division between the Gestalt of the figure and mere background elements. The complexity of any work of art however simple far outstrips the powers of conscious attention, which, with its pinpoint focus, can attend to only one thing at a time.” (Ehrenzweig, 21). As mentioned before in some connections conscious and unconscious thinking will go together. It is a complex issue, and we might need the extreme un-differentiation of unconscious vision to can these complexities. The superior efficiency of this unconscious vision in scanning the total visual field has been confirmed by research. Unconscious vision is proved to be capable of scanning serial structures and gathering more information than a conscious scrutiny lasting a hundred times longer. (Ibidem, 33). For example, subliminal images are invisible, and often enter subsequent dreams, traits of condensation, displacement, fragmentation, duplication and other techniques of the primary process.

Metamorphoses Images depend upon a shared agreement among viewers and a fairly structured set of conventions. Umberto Eco

The symbolic aspects of the image are related to a kind of mental construction of the diegetic world, which happens while

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watching images. Our knowledge of the world goes together with the perceptual data appearing at that moment. The observer can focus on the surface of the image, and through this they can see the objects in the image more than the physical properties of the image. Unconscious neural patterns are united with cognitive ideas and operations happening simultaneously. Similarly, the ultimate theme of the image, the idea of creation, is conveyed by what strikes the eye first and continues to organize the composition. Codes are algorithms of the unconscious, precise and logical rules of the procedure. (Nichols, 1981, 28). Codes are symbolic systems and this means that they are composed of elements that represent something. (Flusser, 9). In this way, the forces that characterize the meaning of the story come alive in the observer’s mind, and produce participation that distinguishes artistic experience from the detached acceptance of information. (Ibidem, 460). Following Flusser, our point of view here is that the image is determined by the totality of visual experiences we have had with the object during our lifetime. This process means that the interaction between the shape of the object and that of things seen in the past is not automatic and not ubiquitous, but depends on whether a relation is perceived between them. (Ibidem, 48). It is a two-way movement since viewers, in a metaphorical sense, move into images and outside of them, so, viewers are separate from the images and yet deeply concerned with experiencing them. (Burnett, 48). More broadly, the principles in art teach us how things can be seen not only as such, but as they are represented. It is true that also verbal descriptions might stir up visual memory traces, and can affect internally into the interpretation of images. The code of the nervous system is provided basically by the fact that each nerve fibre carries only one sort of information. In such a system learning must consist in a change in the connection pattern of the pathways from input to output. The initial basis of the nervous memory is thus provided by heredity, through genetic memory,

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which establishes the nervous pathways. According to this study, memory depends upon selection from the multiplicity of possible actions of those that represent useful responses to the environment. With each memory, we are in fact remembering a variation on a neural pattern within a new organic context. (Blair, 73). More precisely, in terms of a phenomenological description we can say that the media correspond to our sensory channels. In the case of sight, the medium is visual and in the case of hearing, the medium relates to sounds. These are the two sensory channels that are the most important for thinking. In thinking about language, the situation is different, because there is no single sensory channel corresponding to it. Language can be spoken, in which case it is heard, or it can be written, in which case it is seen. Due to this, language is not so much a medium of perception but of representation, a medium in which we often speak of the visual arts as different media like painting, drawing, sculpting, etc. Language is not merely a more or less systematic inventory of the various items of experience which seem relevant to the individual. It is also a self-contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help, but actually defines experience for us due to its formal completeness and our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience. Later on this kind of thinking was developed into the Whorfian hypothesis, of language moulding thinking. In terms of a cognitive description, the construction, use, and distribution of images are fundamental to every culture, and the ability to use and create images comes from an innate disposition that humans have. Thinking is generally affected by language, which itself adapts to thought and action. The use of language also calls attention to the different aspects of environment and culture. Our perceptual capabilities include depth of vision, which enables us to have an experience of a unified world despite apparently receiving stimuli through various organs of

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perception. The system is a metamorphosis, and there are differences between existing cultures and languages. For society and for individual thinking, the importance of writing can hardly be overestimated, and its importance was clear to the earliest civilizations in which it developed. In line with Flusser’s thinking, writing itself is mediation—just like images—and is subject to the same internal dialectic. The first forms of writing consisted of picture symbols, which became connected in conventional ways to express ideas. They can become associated with sounds of spoken language as the sound of the name of an object denoted by the symbol became the name of the symbol. More broadly, cultural behaviour is the process of symbolizing the surrounding world as well as the own behaviour. This kind of process can work in two directions: it implies the transformation of data, the transformation of nature, and it contributes to the identity of a person or group that is the agent of this symbolizing activity. Our view here defines that culture is not a linear activity of discovering the world, because there are many cultural approaches at the same time. The most characteristic feature of culture is its pluralistic character. In art as well as in science, at times it happens that in the continuous self-reinterpretation of various religions as well as in the meandering flow of economic order, reality shows new aspects and structure. The existing map of life and culture is not filled up, but rewritten in the new structures and symbols. We can bear in mind that culture and reality are in many ways interrelated and to such a degree that the restructuring history of cultures belongs to reality itself.

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History, in the precise meaning of the word, is a progressive transcoding of images into concepts, a progressive elucidation of ideas, a progressive disenchantment (taking the magic out of things), progressive process of comprehension. Vilém Flusser

Composing Art doesn’t really make the artist immortal, but it makes the audience feel immortal. Raymond Durgnat

In line with this research, we can state that aesthetic study of the images can proceed from the premise that the aesthetic instructional enterprise is problematic and embedded in social implications and significance. We can think of artworks as things that have a number of qualities, chief among which are those identified by the major historical theories of art we have considered. A work may have some of the qualities identified as important by the representational, expressionist or formalist theories, no one of them being essential, any one of them being sufficient. There are two slightly different ways of talking about aesthetic qualities of images and the experiences around them. Firstly, we can think of their character as totally perceptual like perceiving colours. So, it is possible to speak of the quality of aesthetic experience, and the pleasure of things. Secondly, we can think of aesthetic qualities related to meanings, and try to interpret their significance in order to understand them. It is a question of the depth of art and aesthetics, and the insight it brings. Our tradition of art has for over a century been in a state of continuous change. It has consisted of a succession of movements and styles, accompanied by a value system that promotes change and results in the deliberate search for the new and the discontinuous. When philosophers of aesthetics talk about what poems express, for example, they are not thinking broadly about the

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communication of ideas. For them, what are expressed are certain human qualities (also known as anthropomorphic properties), notably emotional tones, moods, emotively coloured attitudes, and the like. That is, the concept of expression that concerns philosophers of art is the one in evidence in sentences like: ‘This artwork expresses joy’. (Flusser, 80). But this seems to be too narrow a conception of expression, although many philosophers, like Kant, write about the expression of aesthetic ideas, and these are not mere feelings. Consequently, much of art is expressive, but it is not the case that all art is expressive of emotion. A great deal of twentiethcentury art is preoccupied with ideas, rather than emotions. (Ibidem, 105). Visual perception has a relation to the world, and the relation of representation to art is an old and enduring process. Our point of view here is that art is the imprint of life upon our consciousness, and a facet of truth projected within a particular framework of understanding. Already with early philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, imitation and resemblance were considered to be the main factors in art. This lasted well into the late nineteenth century, when philosophers became increasingly aware of art and aesthetics as less concerned with imitation or resemblance and more concerned with something else. According to our view, works of art have semantic content, and the artist intended them to mean something. Similarly, even avant-garde works of art that defy interpretation have a subject, and mandate interpretation. On the other hand, pure orchestral music and non-representational architecture seem to resist a definition of art in these terms. There is much of art that is about anything. Pure decoration is another example. Such artworks can be simply beautiful, ‘beneath interpretation,’ and ‘solely in virtue of the perceptual impact they make on us’. (Carroll, 32). According to Carroll, representation-type theories of art are inadequate to address all possible cases, though much of art is indeed representational, and visual art is especially likely to be representational. (Ibidem, 33).

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This dimension might apply to aesthetic thinking, which is the perception of that significance in the arrangement of those terms. This gives us access to the visual world. It is true that visual images have great emotional power to entertain, educate, and persuade viewers. Every image that is put on public consumption entails a great responsibility in that sense. Following that line we can say that thinking in art is the goal of aesthetic understanding. While aesthetics as a concept is surrounded by some ambiguity, much of it emanates from the very nature of aesthetics itself. It is important to notice that aesthetics deals with how viewers interpret the nature of art and why they respond to art as they do. The ambiguous and problematic issues related to aesthetics emanate from a variable sense. According to this study, aesthetic study of images deals with the phenomenological and cultural dimension of artistic experience. (Nietzsche). We can point out that making an creative image or painting is an intentional activity. In the present context, phenomenology provides an inspiring set of thoughts and can increase our sensitive understanding of the affective side of art and images. By large, art appreciation is in measure design appreciation, which means that it is important to know how the work works, and to see how its parts are intended to function toward the realization of the points or purposes of the work. Let us think that knowing in this sense is a constructive conceptual activity, which anticipates and guides our adjustments to future experiential interactions with our environment. (Osborne). We live in a phenomenological world as it has emerged and constantly emerges from our bodily and cultural engagement with physical and cultural reality. With this in mind, our appreciation of phenomenological tools and ideas may provide us an approach that aims at the complex expression and attraction of images. It is useful to bear in mind that a natural object of artistic appreciation is artistic form, where artistic form is understood functionally. In a similarly partial way, making art or focusing on something is a constantly renewed act, and cannot

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be viewed as something that involves only an artist and an art object, since artists seek to convey meaning to others. In order to do this, they must consider the perceptual and cognitive capacities to their audiences. It is a constructive process. For example, formalism in art arose as a reaction to representational theories of art. To put this into a bigger picture, modern artists eschewed pictorial illustration, composing paintings out of often non-representational shapes and masses of colour. Arguably, their aim was not to capture the perceptual appearances of the world, but often to make images noteworthy of their visual organization, form, and arresting design. In this sense, it is not always clear what a significant form in art should be. Problems seem to be erupting with respect to the requirement that the exhibition of significant form is designed or intentional. (Carroll, 117). Furthermore, formalism was not content with providing a descriptive account. It was an attempt to influence artistic practices by identifying what is important about art. Similarly, it offered a definition of art that was more evaluative than descriptive. By identifying what it saw as important about art, it wanted to influence the way we decide what things are artworks rather than simply to describe it. It is also evident that actually it did not clearly distinguish the descriptive and the evaluative approaches, but seemed to assume that they amounted to the same goal. Another approach to contextualize matters is that human psychological mechanisms enable a continuous awareness of how suitable an artwork is designed to acquit its purpose. This is a remarkable source of the pleasure one can find in an artwork. Here, reflection grows important. Contemplating the way in which their design functions to secure the point frequently gratifies the reflection upon artworks. In the larger frame, one must believe that others possess capacities and tendencies to see, think, and reason just as they do. One must also assume a common body of knowledge and belief, and a similarity of interests

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between them and their audience. It is a selective process, and by exploiting all of these things that artists are able to manipulate the physical materials of their chosen medium and produce configurations that are comprehensible and interesting to others. Often, what we appreciate in an artwork is how the forms function as means to bring about the ends of the artwork. Following this, the methods of aesthetics cannot be reduced to rule but can be described as considering examples and counterexamples, making connections with earlier knowledge, and looking at language carefully, and considering the history of ideas. Consequently, our state of mind is aesthetic whenever we look at things for the qualities and significance of their appearances. It is meaningful to address that creating an artwork involves electing the forms that the artist believes will function optimally toward realizing the point or purpose of the work. Forms are selected because they are intended or designed to perform certain functions. (Ibidem, 149). According to an idea here, in order to analyse the form of an image functionally, it is necessary to have some conception of the point of the image, which may be easy to isolate but it can also be enigmatic. That is why a formal analysis can go side by side with other interpretations of the image. Through a thorough interpretation it is possible to pick up the themes of the image, and use them as guides to relevant formal choices. We have in our mind certain knowledge of the world, and philosophical problems can arise from the activities of art critics and historians. In fact, when people talk about art their assumptions may become more noticeable and their inconsistencies more obvious. For that reason, much of aesthetics is reflection on what people say about an image, rather than on images themselves. Furthermore, ‘aesthetic’ can also be used as an adjective to describe an observer’s state of mind.

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Shapes and Patterns Images entrance us because they provide a powerful illusion of owning reality. Robert Kolker

Our perception of the world is continuous. Through perception it is possible to discover structures. This includes philosophical approaches, since perception can be understood as a form of insight. In a broader compass, while seeing structures, our understanding of the world also increases. The world has countless number of patterns, and a work of art has the possibility to create a form that is significant to the spectator, because one can see a certain pattern. The theoretical implications concerning the historical, philosophical approach to aesthetic deals with what aestheticians have said, with styles in aesthetic dialogues, and schools of aesthetic thought. This has all value to the exploration of the images, as well. It offers a structured approach, closely resembling the content structure and teaching methodologies found in education. This kind of educational and philosophical perspective is compatible with academic rationalism, because it is an intellectualised approach to aesthetics and to images generally. Arguably, there are real differences in aesthetics concerning the works of art. Some of them are better than others, and this means something different than that a given person simply likes some works of art better than others. At the same time, we would like to work toward a theory of establishing questions around aesthetics that are open and flexible. There must be room for reasoned argument concerning the relative aesthetic merit of various works of art, including different images. We can think that aesthetic experience occurs within the viewer and not literally in the object itself. In this way, aesthetics is a unique form of perception and experience. The proponents of this approach usually believe that art can provide intense experiences that entail perception of visual and tactile

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qualities integral to the object, and images being viewed. According to our thinking here, the philosophy of perception is concerned with how mental processes and symbols depend on the world internal and external to the perceiver. It is evident that in looking at images and other works of art, we confront ideas, beliefs, and feelings, all of which reveal our own limitations. We accommodate different perspectives by reorganizing our cognitive framework to assimilate new points of view. Looking at works of art is challenging because they can be understood in different ways and, for this reason, present puzzles and problems for viewers. A commonplace observation is that a work of art is never understood completely. Many people find viewing art to be an intrinsically rewarding experience, contributing to self-understanding and personal development. Art heightens the idea of life, and features extremely sophisticated instances towards a satisfactory fulfilment of rewarding experiences. The primacy of aesthetic experience in establishing aesthetic value must be maintained. Our capacity to orientate is enormous, and great works of art are considered great, ultimately, because of the quality of the experience they are able to provide. A central difficulty in establishing a theory of aesthetic judgement is that aesthetic value seems to always return to experience, and experience is by its nature subjective. Regardless of any formal qualities that could be pointed out in a work of art, e.g. intricate line, complex harmonies, fully-developed character, etc., if the work as a whole did not incite an aesthetic experience of a certain quality, it would not be considered a great work of art. For example, images have in common that they have been crafted, composed, designed and possibly presented by individuals, whose intent is that the work will be used as an object of aesthetic interest in some way. Cued by the images, our mind makes many assumptions spontaneously. Aesthetic study of images entails developing skills that will enhance one’s ability to respond aesthetically in a variety of

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contexts. One can call this aesthetic scanning. By aesthetic scanning, it is possible to mean examination of the sensory, formal, expressive, and technical aspects of the art object in question. It is possible to use aesthetic scanning as a tool leading to heightened responses to images and translating into an aesthetic sensitivity to all of the visual surroundings. Of course, it is possible to analyse one’s experiences, and take a closer look on what aestheticians have said, and to study different cultural definitions of art to develop aesthetic and perceptual acuity, experiences, and so on. We can think that aesthetic perception of images is worthy of singular attention. It is also evident that his approach accommodates art educational activities and assumptions, like transfer of knowledge and skills. Similarly, aesthetic perception is more properly construed as an active search for meaning. In scrutinizing a work of art, a viewer will assume that an artist has made something meaningful and will try to make sense of it. Viewers will be concerned with what an artist intended to do in making that work. They will also go beyond trying to decipher intended meaning in order to organize their perceptions in other ways. A meaningful consideration of this is that viewers will relate these newly discovered understandings to their lives and seek personal insights from works of art. All in all, this deals with shared experiences. Artists working in art forms like cinema, painting, sculpture, and architecture, will have a cluster of related goals in their hands. While many artistic goals are personal, others are shared. When artists make art, they join an ongoing enterprise in which certain aims or goals are already established. This means that they can choose to reject some but cannot reject them all. Otherwise, what they would create would not be recognized as a work of art. A painter or a sculptor, for example, will often attempt to represent objects or things, but this is rarely the aim of an architect. Yet, painters and sculptors, as well as architects, attempt to create unified aesthetic objects. Artists working in different artistic genres will also

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share certain goals. Painters of landscapes, for example, will typically have different (if overlapping) sets of goals from those who paint still lives or make films. The former might be concerned with the changing patterns of sunlight and the rendition of atmospheric effects, and the latter might exhibit a greater interest in rendering textural effects. Evidently, parts and wholes are united, and through the image we can approach, understand, and play with the material of the external world in different ways, for example, to humanize it, and make it our own. (Kolker, 14). In talking about images in the light of this approach, we can say that now digital technologies allow for an eruption of the imaginary into nearly everything. (Burnett, 205). We can stress that different artistic goals are also inherent in an artist’s style. Consider, for example, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism, which all reject Impressionism. Each, however, does so in pursuit of a characteristically different set of artistic aims. Consequently, expressionist artists typically are interested in the depiction of personal emotions and feelings, subjective concerns that are often occupied with a protest against what is felt to be a hostile social milieu. Cubist artists, on the other hand, reject what is felt to be an Impressionist occupation with the mere rendering of evanescent effects of light and atmosphere. Following these ideas, they strive to create pictorial alternatives to an optical conception of reality through abstracting the shapes of objects and arranging them on a flat plane. From art history we know that Surrealist artists, unlike Impressionists, are concerned with the unconscious aspects of the psyche. Surrealist painters and poets of the early twentieth century dreamed about the fluidity of information concerned with human perception, about the latent, almost inherent instability to destroy reference and recreate the world using different mediums. By this, they seek to liberate the creative unconscious through the use of a-logical automatic procedures, startling juxtapositions of unrelated objects, dream imagery, and private symbolism.

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According to an idea, many of the goals that an artist has in making a work of art are related teleologically. There is a meansend relationship between and among them. Having an end in view, however, does not mean that an artist must be constantly thinking about goals in the process of making a work of art. Nor does it imply that an artist’s goals cannot be modified in the process of creating a work of art. It is evident that artists often do change their goals as they receive feedback from the work and as their ideas and feelings evolve. However, an intention is rarely the unambiguous and easily formulated purpose of the artist one may have supposed. At any time a person has a variety of desires, some of which are relatively transient wishes, others are long-sustained motives, and many lie between these extremes. We have to bear in mind that these desires may be in conflict with each other and they certainly will not all be carefully thought through and articulated. Thus, some of them may never have been formulated at all, and the artist may be totally unaware of them, and yet they may be most important. In a broader context, we can think that if images and other works of art are comprehensible to some degree, circumstances often conspire to create estrangement between artist and viewer. In early and less complicated societies artists made work for a restricted audience that shared many of the same interests and beliefs. As a consequence, almost everyone was able to understand the work an artist produced. But as cultures expanded and grew more diverse, artists have tended to work for specific social groups whose ideas and values differed from others within the same community. With this in mind, the range of images available to the viewer is greater now than ever. In earlier times someone’s exposure to art would generally be limited to the relatively few works that were near at hand. Travel was difficult, museums were largely nonexistent, and books and reproductions were scarce and inadequate. Nowadays the situation has changed, images from

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the past as well as from the present, and from other cultures as well as from our own, are readily available to anyone. It appears that an artist produces an image to convey meaning. Viewers who approach this image, therefore, do it on the assumption that it is meaningful. Along this line of thought, they will try to understand what has been produced. The first question to be asked concerns what the artist is doing or attempting to do in making the image. In asking such a question, the viewer is inquiring into the artist’s goals. These constitute his or her intentions in making the image. Arguably, many goals are readily recognized. Because these are recognized immediately, there is a tendency to overlook the role of one’s cognitive background in making such understandings possible. We can point out that artist’s intentions were shaped by the historical context in which they were adopted. Furthermore, intentions are complex and shaped by culture. At least a part of an artist’s intention is formed in light of the history of art itself. The artist intends to produce a work of a certain kind understood in light of the art of the time, and because of that it is often difficult to distinguish discussions of individual artists from discussions of the art world they participated in. Both matters are more or less intertwined. In talking about the meaning of the work, it is often useful to have knowledge both of the artist’s individual life and of the art world around it. (Parsons & Blocker, 122) We invest images with emotion and meaning, but we may forget that they are images, and in that sense mediations. (Kolker, 14). It is useful to assume, at least partially that the meditative power of the image is important in the era of visual age. Through the message and form of the image it is possible to create a meaningful dialogue between the image and its viewer, forcing the viewer to become active in interpreting the significance of what is being shown. In this way, viewers are able to understand much of what an artist intended through scrutiny alone because artists have traditionally considered the perceptual and intellectual capacities of

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their audiences. Someone who truly intended to represent a cat, for example, would not produce a configuration that would likely be read as an image of something else. This brings in a reflective consciousness, and we can think that artistic intentions, then, are in some sense public matters, but understanding the intentions of an artist requires background information and knowledge. There might yet be another reason why average people find it difficult to understand works of art. As the making of art evolved from simple beginnings, it also grew more complex and reflexive. Artists were no longer content to serve the interests of other members of the society; they increasingly began to focus upon their own specialized interests. Artists of the twentieth century have often made it a point to stand apart from general society, and individual aesthetic and personal concerns have come to the fore. Consequently, fine arts throughout much of their history reflected the values and concerns of the communities artists served, but nowadays art tends to reflect the interests and concerns of a much smaller segment of society.

Approaches L’Image est un creation pure de l’esprit. Pierre Reverdy (The image is a creation of pure spirit).

Following an idea here, we can point out that aesthetic properties give humanly accessible shape to things, and they evoke curiousness. Aesthetic experience involves the constructive powers of the mind, and aesthetic experience is of overwhelming importance to art. According to Carroll, aesthetic experience comprises design appreciation and the detection of aesthetic properties. (Carroll, 203). This is a matter of attention to and contemplation of aesthetic qualities and artistic forms. Aesthetic experience does not represent the only kind of legitimate response to art. We can

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easily think that phenomenological, cognitive and moral experiences may be equally appropriate. According to this study, images are inherently problematic. There are similarities between the result of unconscious inferences and those of conscious conclusions. Even though what artists intend to do is available through observation, full understanding is not automatically recoverable through scrutiny alone. It is useful to think that background knowledge is also necessary. Artistic intentions can also be ascertained through interviews with the artist or through public statements in which the artist reveals their goals, either directly or through inference. In a broader compass, the psychic activities that lead us to infer that there in front of us at a certain place there is a certain object of a certain character are generally not conscious activities, but unconscious ones. Finally, they are equivalent to conclusions, to the extent that the observed action on our senses enables us to form an idea as to the possible cause of this action. Casually considered, familiarity with the milieu in which an artist works can also assist viewers in understanding an artist’s intentions. Part of this milieu is the physical setting in which an artist works. Knowledge of personal events in the life of an artist can also help viewers determine intent. Thus social and cultural milieu in which artists work also shapes their goals and aspirations. Knowledge of the artistic tradition that an artist inherits often allows viewers to infer artistic goals. Along with its objective existence for us as its observers, an image possesses its own being. That is why the space of an image can act as a situation of an existence. An image presents both direct and reflexive experiences. If the power and/or meaning of an aesthetic experience are to be used as a measure of the quality of an image, the experience must be a genuine aesthetic experience as that has been defined. Sentimental experiences and trance experiences can also be powerful and carry meaning. In order to have weight on the evaluation of an image, the power and meaning in the experience must be directly caused by the

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work itself, and not, for instance, the result of some chain of association for which the work was only the first link. We can point out that a principal virtue of cognitive approach is its ability to explain and sustain a number of ways in which people actually think and talk about art related to aesthetics. (Graham, 49). When discussing the theoretical bases for assumption of transfer, one needs to consider both the phenomenological characteristics and processes that are considered integral to the study of art, and those that are initiated by art experiences and then later transferred to and utilized in non-art contexts. Both making and exploring art involve a form of thinking that opens the ways to multiple systems of knowing and experiencing. Thinking there is an interaction among modes of thought means that the benefits of art study go beyond their own artistic outcomes. Artistic cognition consists of constructed, visual forms that are analogous, though not isomorphic, to experience, and in this way, the study of art is a mind-builder different from any other subject area, since art calls for interpretation. Phenomenological artistic benefits consist of abilities of translation and transfer, opening up the possibilities of multiple meanings. For example, an image can be a world where the experience of the real is, in actuality, constantly and imperceptibly shifting. Our involvement and emotional immersion do change as we reflect and scrutinize the phenomenological world of the image. An image can reflect upon the complexities of representation. It is, therefore, a visual activity coming into being in significant relations to the objects, the world, and the others it intentionally takes up and expresses in the image. When attempting to evaluate an image based on one’s experience of this kind of work, we must be reflective, interrogating one’s thoughts and feelings to be sure of their source. It is meaningful to bear in mind that without substantial self-knowledge, it is difficult, if not impossible, to know whether what one is experiencing has its origins in the image or in one’s own psychological makeup.

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In other words, focusing upon artistic intentions as a way of coming to understand a work of art stands in sharp contrast to formalist conceptions of art criticism. Formalist critics believe it is a mistake to appeal to an artist’s intentions, a mistake they label the intentionalist fallacy. The form of the image can be reflective. For the formalist, artistic intentions are private thoughts, mental events that occur just before or during the process of artistic creation. Consequently, they argue that attempts to ascertain what these are send critics off on a fruitless quest for biographical and contextual knowledge and away from the work of art itself, the proper locus of critical concern. For formalist critics such ‘external evidence” can only be an unreliable indicator of meaning. They reason that such knowledge is often unavailable, either because artists are no longer living or because they may not remember what their thoughts were. Then again, artists sometimes exaggerate when describing their intentions. Critics are thus faced with a dilemma, and, as formalists argue, are better off seeking an understanding of a work of art through careful examination of its internal evidence. A number of misconceptions underlie the anti-intentional thesis. One concerns the nature of artistic intentions themselves. First, contrary to what formalists believe, critics who seek to understand artistic intentions are not concerned with transitory thoughts that occur in minds of artists, but rather with the goals that artists seek to attain in creating works of art, with states of mind rather than with mental events. Second, the state of mind of the artist is not only private but has a public character. Because making a work of art involves an attempt to convey meaning, many of these goals will be available to viewers directly. Furthermore, such goals, shaped by beliefs can be inferred through investigation into the societies and cultures in which the artists live. Nevertheless, critics are not forced to rely solely upon what artists are willing to reveal. Third, formalist critics draw an arbitrary distinction between internal and external evidence. No

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viewer approaches a work of art with an innocent eye, but always with certain kinds of background knowledge that affects how the internal evidence of a work is perceived. Thus, viewers who know more about an artist and the content in which works of art are created are able to see and understand differently than viewers who lack such knowledge. In the light of this, images and other works of art should have the capacity to afford aesthetic experience for which content-oriented and affect-oriented accounts can be given. Aesthetic properties are in any case response-dependent, and they are neither merely detected nor merely projected. Common conceptual frameworks obtained through social conditioning might explain the convergence of aesthetic predication. We value artworks because they afford the opportunity for us to exercise our sensibilities, to recognize and to distinguish different qualities in the appearance of things. The aesthetic properties of images alert us to the qualitative dimensions of the world at large and improve our capacities for discovering them. That is why aesthetic properties enliven our experiences. Attention can be in the object which we are looking at but it is not necessary pointed out into the experience. Aesthetic cognitivism claims that some works of art can supply us with a deeper understanding of human nature and the human condition by imaginatively illuminating our experiences, and also the greatest scientific achievements are those that have made fundamental contributions to human understanding. (Graham, 62). Beliefs and other mental states exhibit intentionality, but so, in a derived way, do images and other representations. Images extend our intentionality far beyond our immediate reach. Although viewers customarily seek to understand images in terms of artistic intentions, there is also another assumption underlying their interaction with works of art. Part of our contemporary concept of a work of art is that it is an artefact to be intellectually and imaginatively apprehended by viewers and thus

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function as a source of insight and enjoyment. This assumption might possibly be the result of social and cultural developments that have led over the past few centuries to contemporary ideas of the aesthetic. Whether or not this is peculiarly modern concern, it is nonetheless a genuine assumption that contemporary viewers bring to bear in their approach to images. This assumption gives rise to the idea that meaning lies partly outside the intentions of an artist. There may be more (or less) in an image than its artist intended, and spectators have a legitimate role in uncovering what one might call aesthetic understanding of a work of art. This concern arises for a number of reasons. One is that information about an artist or the culture in which the artist lived may be inadequate or unavailable. There a large gaps in our knowledge about the cultures and artists of the past. When a viewer encounters an image or another work of art produced in such circumstances, the best that can be done is to speculate about what an artist intended, recognizing that there may be no decisive solution to specific questions. This is related to the general idea of this study, as well. If viewers assume that images are outcomes of intentional activity, they often assume that they are aesthetic objects as well. As such, they are looked upon as sources of the kind of intellectual enjoyment that comes about through the imaginative use of one’s perceptual and cognitive faculties. In line with this, we can state that one becomes oneself through one’s simultaneous interaction with the surrounding physical and biological world on one hand, and the social and cultural environment on the other. Furthermore, artistic developments have also affected the way viewers have come to understand images. Images are not only influenced by the tradition from which they emanate, but they also modify that tradition. Later images create new and different possibilities for understanding earlier ones. All of these situations, then, underscore a particular attitude with which

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viewers approach images. A new visual osmosis can occur when image’s space and time chunks flow into one another. In the kinetic and physical quality of the graphic experience of an image, there may well be physiological feedback from another source, the kinetics of sensory-motor experience.

Channels The picture is an object of desire, the desire for the signification that is known to be absent. Douglas Crimp

The intentional and aesthetic understandings suggest that viewers have an active role in responding to images and other works of art. Such an assumption is confirmed by the findings of psychologists and others concerned with visual perception. It is now common to observe that perception and conception are not isolated but rather conjoined in a viewer’s response to an image. Thus, the perception of an image is best understood as an active effort aimed at obtaining understanding. As such, it parallels other kinds of efforts that people make in integrating experience into coherent wholes. (Neisser, 94–95). Philosophers, for example, have noted that aesthetic response possesses a structure similar to efforts aimed at establishing meaning in such disparate disciplines as science and the law. Aesthetic perception, like other modes of productive thinking, involves an imaginative synthesis of initially chaotic elements. Following an idea here, in perceiving an image, we call up our past experience, background theory and knowledge, bodily awareness, and present concerns. From these tacit elements we project an understanding based upon the clues presented in an image. The imaginative element in aesthetic perception, as well as in scientific discovery, has aroused the attention of philosophers in recent years. Much has been made of line drawings of ambiguous

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figures to illustrate what occurs when viewers perceive a work of art. In observing a figure such as the famous duck-rabbit, for example, viewers first see the figure in one way and then in another. This means evidently that to think is to make connections. The connections of interest to the symbol systems are the internal connections between the elements of self-sufficient media or symbol systems. Thus, it legitimises only thought that stays within the terms of a symbol system. Integrated learning calls for connections across as well within symbol systems, whatever the result may be. It is especially a question of connections between visual and linguistic elements. The reason is that much of the meaning of the works of art lies in their relations with the world we live in, including personal and collective purposes, and the culture around us. We can think that culture is accessible mostly through language, but the cultural network of meanings is mediated through language and behaviour. Consequently, the categories embodied in language and behaviour form part of the constitution of meaning. As an expansion of this, one would expect a cognitive approach in psychology to be a natural link with discipline-based art education, but it has some problems in that direction. It fits well with those who think of making art as a principal activity of art education and of the various media of art making as the disciplines of art. For it allows them to say that to learn to draw is to learn to think visually and to use the symbol system of drawing. But it is less useful for those who count art history, aesthetics and criticism as disciplines of art. These disciplines use words and cannot claim to be either a medium or a symbol system. Still both the discipline-based art education and the symbol system approach share the view that art is cognitive and that its cognitions are unique. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligence relates to this. Gardner thinks that intelligence is a way of thinking determined by some combinations of Arnheim’s perceptual channels and

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Goodman’s symbolic domains, overlain with the stipulation that they are useful in socially developed practices. (Gardner). We can say that this is because culture is irrelevant to the deepest significance of art, that the different kinds of thinking should be carefully kept apart. Otherwise we might fail to grasp that significance. The meaning of a visual work should be grasped in visual terms, although there might be linguistically based interpretation on culture, but this has been formulated in different media. The thinking that deals with a visual medium grasps its essential meaning. Still, a crucial thing is that although there are two different media for thought, they can and should be constantly connected. It is important to notice that we can isolate visual and linguistic elements in a single work, but our thinking can move easily back and forth between them. Each one of the modes has something to contribute to our understanding. Thinking, while moving back and forth from one mode to another, can make distinctions and connections that might otherwise be impossible. Evidently there are two tracks, but one destination, which is a grasp of the meaning of the work of art. Works of art are constituted as meaningful objects by both visual and linguistic materials of thought in interaction. Both approaches are valid and necessary ones, because they are part of what creates the work of art. This is just one way to take seriously the assertion that works of art must be interpreted, because before interpretation they exists only as a material objects and not as works of art. By placing emphasis on the ways in which meaning is made and experienced by viewers, interpretation analysis deals with the reception of the work of art and its variables, which is in some tension with conventional ideas of influence and effects. Following the ideas of this study, interpretation brings into focus a range of issues concerning the process of mental imagery and mediation.

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Interpretation The image is an impression of truth, a glimpse of the truth permitted to us in our blindness. Andrei Tarkovsky

We share common cultural experiences in contemporary works that relate to our own cultural tradition. It is possible to think that whereas high culture’s currently prevalent aesthetic theories assume that the artist is active and the spectator passive, in fact the artist is active and the spectator is active too. And if their activities don’t exactly overlap, they’re bound to collide somewhere in the middle of the work of art. In film, the spectator shares the emotions of many of the persons on the screen and simulates these so that all the resulting sensations give the colour of living experience to the emotional reflection in our mind. There are unconscious conclusions derived from sensations, which are equivalent in their consequences to the so-called conclusions from analogy. Following another line, whenever the parts of retina in the outer corner of the eye are stimulated, it is due to external light coming from the direction of the bridge of the nose. The inference we make is that it is so in every new case whenever this part of the retina is stimulated. This means that it is free of conscious thinking, and these unconscious conclusions are irresistible, and the effect of them cannot be overcome by a better understanding of the real relations. In short, the artwork does not simply offer a ‘reflection of reality,’ but first and foremost it offers a type of engagement: it projects a state of being with the world in which the ineffable is controlled. For example, Jean Mitry holds in common with other existentialist aestheticians a view of the artwork as an invitation among individuals to share a certain valued life experience. For them, the art work is a communication and simultaneously a revelation of being, in some full aspect of its particularity.

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According to this study, seeing is an activity of creative engagement with processes of thinking and feeling, and images are one of the crucial ways in which the world becomes real. Images speak to people because to see is to be within and outside of the body. Consequently, our mind is insatiable for meaning, drawn from and projected into the world of appearances, to unearth hidden analogies which connect the unknown with the familiar, and show the familiar in an unexpected light. In other words, images are both mental and physical, within the body and mind, and outside the body and mind. Thus, to see images is to also see with images. Consequently, the visual field is as psychological as it is real and external to the viewer. From a cognitive point of view, it is just not possible to separate what has been seen from what has been thought. We can think that body and consciousness, or body, mind and feelings, comprises a singular thing; everything that comprises consciousness derives from our physical being. In the light of this, it is necessary to notice that aesthetics as an area of study entails an investigation of aesthetic meanings. Our point of view is that aesthetic inquiry consists of an examination of the nature of images. Another thing worthy of study is why individuals respond to images as they do based on the meanings they give to images. For example, art criticism is based on the ability of analyses and evaluations of art to be tested against information on a specific work of art and from perceptual evidence. In aesthetic inquiry, statements on art are examined as to their logical and rational truth and their persuasive power. This means that works of art are related to a variety of contexts, including the worldview they represent, the artist who made them, the audience, and the art world and various aspects of the culture in which they were produced. Following our thought, we can think that the spectator must attend to the non-exhibited qualities of an image. Evidently, we must look not only at the relationship of elements within the image, but also beyond the object to its historical, rhetorical and

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philosophical contexts in order to comprehend its meanings. This means that in doing so our interpretation constitutes the image. According to this study, images are about something. They are created to present a view of the world and to affect our attitudes and visions of the world. For example, images can be thought of as an externalisation of the artist’s consciousness, because we cannot overlook the fact that images also derive their identities and structure from historical and causal matrices. Thus, their meanings and associations are bound to the cultural framework of their time and assume causal connections with an artist environment. A causal line is, in this sense, a temporal series of events so related, that given some of them, something can be inferred about the others whatever may be happening elsewhere. Related to contemporary thinking, we can state that images embody ideas that express an age, the attitudes and beliefs that define a world by those living in that period. Furthermore, it is through the attributes of style and expression that an observer discovers these ideas. This means that an artist does not merely assert these facts or ideas in one’s work, because they suggest the ways how the spectator receives them. Another point is that the artist’s use of rhetoric and metaphor is an attempt to get the spectator to adapt an attitude towards the image, which involves more than recognition of a truth or an idea. The expression of the otherwise inexpressible is not the only communicative function that, for example, metaphors serve. They also achieve a certain communicative compactness, since all the applicable predicates belonging to the metaphorical vehicle are implied succinctly through the vehicle itself. Nevertheless, images can cause viewers to heighten and confirm convictions or transform their ways of thinking about their convictions. Nowadays images have meanings that can be distinguished from those held by other cultural objects, and this opens up new possibilities for talking about them. Our point of view is that the aesthetic understanding of an image can be closer to intellectual, cognitive action than to a

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mode of sensory stimulation, although they do overlap. As mentioned before, images are culturally, philosophically and historically developed. That is why we must shift our conceptions of interpretation to a broader, more global approach. This way we might have a better theory for interpreting images and a better foundation for teaching students to understand their meanings. In line with this is the notion that theories of images as a foundation for interpretation provide insight, and they entail more work on the part of teacher and student alike. For educational reasons, it might be useful for teachers to present images in a more studied context. Knowing something about the history of images, the image world, and theories will enable them to explain the artist’s intentions better. Also important is the knowledge of theories of art, which the work rejects or internalises, and knowledge related to techniques and style. Furthermore, students will also have to develop grounding in art history, theory and knowledge about the different cultural and historical contexts of images. Through this, the detailed background research will be a guiding force toward a more plausible and complete understanding of the different aspects of our contemporary image world.

Images of Creation The soul of things is in the close-up. Béla Balázs

It is evident that images can represent things. One cognitive theory claims that the brain produces electrical fields of the same shape as observed objects. Brain fields also adapt to certain prefixed forms. Thus, the brain develops functional models of external situations. These models may have different shapes from what they represent but they may be analogues of objects. One can think that brain traces are abstract representations of objects and situations, which are built from many individual experiences. People can imagine many things connected with their lives. They can daydream, entering somewhat hallucinated states espe-

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cially when preceding sleep. In their mind, people can also hear voices connected with their lives, or they can walk across the room with their eyes closed, and navigate intervening spaces accurately. In all of these many conditions, people can be said to be imaging. This all leads to the nature of the mental image, especially to its role in mind and behaviour, and to the ways in which we can account for imagery in a theoretically satisfactory way. These are all questions of great interest. Often we think of mental images as ‘pictures in the mind’. Understood this way, they are rich pictorial evocations of scenes not present to one’s view. Usually, all of these events are listed as images. The visual qualities of mental images might be felt subjectively in the sense that they require a pair of functioning eyes, and the mind behind all this. Without this system of elements there is no picture, and yet images seem to have an objectivity of their own. Because images of art are objective facts, can there be any critical dialogue about their nature? It is evident that an observer has a mental structure of their own. Through different responses it is possible to show that looking at an image is a result of the encounter between two mental structures, namely the perceptual image received and the personal views and attitudes of the beholder. Across many cultural periods, people have reacted to works of a particular style in drastically different ways, for example to Art Nouveau architecture, paintings of Salvador Dali, or the mental meanings of buildings in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste—all these senses can be involved in the production of imagery, although some kind of images may be evoked more readily than others. Nevertheless, we can state that people filter the world in their preferred way of encoding, but often these allegedly constitutional differences can be matters of preference, or appropriateness to the situation. Furthermore, the way the images function in mental life, and even in nature as an object of mind, are interesting things to ponder. Mental images, especially spatial ones, are endowed

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with the properties they are alleged to represent in mind, although the content of the mind might not be a suitable descriptor. One can also assert that mental experiences can be captured with the structured prepositional representation of logic. Still, one can think that imagery is best thought of as a kind of private system of symbols that people use for different purposes to orient themselves in the world, and especially in space. People recall events as mental scratch-pads of sorts to solve problems in their lives. According to our view, an image is a physical entity composed of different elements. In this sense, the image has a limited, objective realm, and this reflects to another realm consisting of the viewer’s imagination. It is our intention to discover to what extent it is possible for the mind to absorb all these elementary features of the image. This ability of the mind to absorb external sensations, images (and sounds), while giving them emotional value, causes them to become an integral part of the consciousness. According to our study, one can lay special emphasis on the way in which imagination can assimilate a totality of impressions existing in the timeless state of the consciousness. Also extremely important is the way in which imagination attaches emotional values to these images. This brings in the totality of the experienced images that relate to one another, and further on carries an emotional association that exists mainly in the imagination. The two are the main characters of the image experience, and finally they absorb each other. Consequently we can say that they form the totality of the image experience in our minds with strong emotional connotations. We can explore the extent to which an image will live on in the observer’s consciousness as an emotionally charged shadow. An image might be shown only just long enough to give the observer a conscious or unconscious impression. Our point of view is that the image lives in the observer’s mind long enough to create an impression, and through this the observer is involved in projecting the

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image. Projecting an image is an act of consciousness. This way, the observer produces an image of one’s own since it involves the unique nature of the emotions and values that one associates with them. The human mind has the ability to allow an image to live inside the mind as a kind of shadow-image. The mind absorbs the original image and creates a shadow-image, which reflects to the original one. In this way, the image exists in the spectator’s imagination. The human mind has a complex variation of relationships towards the realm of the images. As the images live on in the observer’s mind, these relationships grow richer and more complex. In film, which consists of individual and serial images, the spectator’s imagination also allows impressions of individual images to create an impression of the larger whole. Sergei Eisenstein spoke of neutralized image, which means that film shots should be neutralized so that they could become basic formal elements. These elements could be combined according to various formal principles. Each image, or shot, functions to deliver a special psychological stimulus combined with other shots. This process creates juxtapositions, visual dialectics of a kind, in which the spectator’s senses join images through similarity or contrast, creating further significances. A shot in a film is a series of images, a series of frames, but it is also a serial image, a new kind of pictorial entity, and even if there are no camera movements in a shot, on the level of the image there are many kinds of movements, which allow the shot to be covered. A movement (objective or camera movement) does not undermine the image, but develops it. It is possible to think that what the graphic qualities lose in the sense of economy, they will regain through tempo, rhythmic, choreography and orchestration. In the classical account of perception, our sensory receptors analyse the energy provided by the physical world into independent but unnoticeable sensations, and the world teaches us to perceive those objects and events. Furthermore, the physical

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world, known to us through the totality of our perceptual experiences, and the inferences suggested by these experiences, is governed by laws we cannot ignore with impunity. We can point out that many perceptual phenomena seem to defy analysis in terms of independent sensations. According to this idea, when an object moves in the field of view, its apparent shape and size remain unchanged because of perceptual constancy, even though the image that it is projecting stimulates a changing set of visual receptors. Thus, for a shape to be perceived or recognized, it must be a figure. Gestalt-theory gathers around the laws of organization, which seem to determine whether any shape that is presented by artist, or computer for that matter, will in fact be perceived. They seem potentially of the greatest theoretical importance, because they are taken to show that we perceive events and objects not by learning to interpret our sensations, but because evolution has provided nervous systems that yield three-dimensional perceptual organizations under appropriate conditions. Aside from the speculations about brain fields, the whole of any perceptual organization determines the appearance of its parts. Another point to notice is that the classical theory through which we approach perception and ideas around it, most probably produces the stimulation we receive, and that psychological structure therefore generally reflects physical structure, accounting best for the perceptual illusions and their constancies. (Hochberg). It is not surprising that there is symbolism even in works that, at first sight, seem to be little more than arrangements of fairly neutral objects. Every element of a work of art is indispensable for the one purpose of pointing out the theme, which embodies the nature of existence for the artist. In this sense, the meaning of a perceived event changes the pattern of possibilities for future action, and meaning is the selective function on the range of the recipient’s states of conditional readiness for goal directed activity. Defined in this way, meaning is clearly a relationship between the message and the recipient rather than a unique property of the

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message alone. We can bear in mind that states of readiness are large numbers of conditional probabilities for an organism. Asking a question is a means of changing the conditional probabilities of the questioner’s states of readiness. The significance of phantom forms in visual systems is evident. This means that phantom formalisations can transform scattered, atomistic sense data into configurations, forms, objects, and scenes. Resemblance itself is a phantomisation when, for example, the perceiving mind groups a particular patch of grey tones into a shadow-moulded face. Phantomisations are not merely subjective but shared and social facts, which are rooted in coordination with the material aspects of the world. In this case, one might even speak of vision having its own syntax and grammar, woven from the brain’s structures and experiences, and handling language as one kind of structure amongst others. According to this sort of thinking, phantom forms can transform concrete graphic features into pictorial representation. They are particularly important in editing a film, in determining what will be a strong or weak feature, what will catch attention and what will be overlooked. Every experience is a relation between a part and whole, between figure and ground. The mind has the ability to resolve this relation and organize its perceptual field. Perception of movement, or the impression of it, is not a result of seeing successive stages of the image, but includes a higher mental act. The spectator invests the impressions into them. One ascribes the sensation of viewing movement to the displacement of a figure on its ground. Through willed attention, we can reverse that relation, altering our perception of the movement. It all depends on how our attention structures the perception. The vectors of movement, and anticipated trajectories commonly override the static features of a composition, creating a new, more choreographic impression. According to an idea here, mind or mentalist theories risk occluding a raison d’etre of film form, which means that the mind,

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instead of relying on its own resources, is presented instead with a real representation to offer stabilised forms, interesting detail, and stimulating information. The perception of a representative image is always a perception of something, and recognition of it. The mind is hierarchic, comprising several levels with the higher levels depending on the operation of the lower. Each level resolves the chaos of undistinguished stimuli by a veritable act virtually creating the world of objects, events, and emotions that each of us lives in. At its primary level, the mind animates the sensory world with motion. The mind at its most primitive level confers motion on stimuli. This means that the spectator interacts on an individual basis with it, because the meanings are created through attention. This phenomenon can be described by recounting some famous experiments in perception. For example, the phi phenomenon shows that the mind has its own laws at its most basic level, and constructs our world when exercising them. It shows as well that the technology of film implicitly recognizes these laws and affects the mind itself. This way one can achieve aesthetic effects from the experience. Basic mental capability is enough to conceive the entire cinematic process as a mental process. Furthermore, the view of film form as a mind’s eye view coheres well with an emphasis on film as diagram, as discourse, as a sequence of ideas in visual form, or like in formalism, a sequence of forms re-presenting visual ideas. Moreover film, like the other visual arts, represents visual thinking and visible thought. In a word, forms in art, media, and discourse exist in hybrids of forms.

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Stages Yet to speak of metamorphosis, here. is to miss the dysmorphic condition of this pulse, which, committed to the constant dissolution of the image, is at work against the interests of what we could identify as form. Rosalind Krauss

Parallel editing in film differs from standard procedures, and is made possible by the mind’s capacity to split its attention or to distribute its interest over number of events at roughly the same time. It seems obvious to describe all cinematic properties as mental. Besides the basic quality of motion, also close-ups and camera angles exist because of the mind’s very way of working. Not only does the mind live in a moving world, it organizes that world by means of this property of attention. In the same way, the cinematic image is not a mere record of motion, but an organized record of the way the mind creates a meaningful reality. Attention operates on the world of sensation and motion, just as angle, composition, and focal length are properties a step above sheer recording of intermittent photographs. On an even higher level, the mental operations of memory and imagination are confronting, and this goes beyond simple attention to give the world a sense, as an impact, and as personal direction. The filmic is what, in the film, cannot be described. (Barthes). The filmic properties which respond to these mental operations are the various kinds of editing, all of which confer on both motion and significant camera work. According to this, emotions, which are complete mental events, are at the highest mental level. The material analogues in cinema relate to each stage of mentality. The primitive illusion of movement given to us by the mind’s operation on intermittent photographs is supplemented by select attention attained via angle, composition, image size, and lighting. Corresponding to memory and imagination are the natural resources of editing, which compress or expand time,

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create rhythms, and render flashbacks or dream scenes. Since the materials of cinema are the resources of the mind, the form of cinema must mirror mental events, i.e. emotions. This means that film is the medium not of the world, but of the mind. Furthermore, its basis lies not in technology but in mental life. The mention of the mind’s free play and separation from the practical has traces of Kantian thought. Film is connected with the realm of freedom that has both psychological and metaphysical dimensions. Film can be linked with existing conceptions of art in order to defend it against its detractors, and the conceptions of art Kant invokes do not tie the object in any essential way with the imitation of the outer world. Psychology is part of a scientific mode of thought. It tries to explain aspects of what Kant called the phenomenal realm, the realm of sense experience where things are linked in time, space, and causality. There is another claim, according to which a disjunction between outer forms of space, time, causality and mental processes is essential to this theory. According to an idea, this is speaking of functions, which means that the analogies might not be called phenomenological but functional. In this way, functional analogies might be developed between mind and film. Furthermore, the sciences of the phenomenal world can never get outside that world to the basis of life and consciousness. They are locked within a world of causality. This also deals with ethical principles there which serve to justify our normal moral sense, giving us the ability to judge one action as better than another, and more importantly, allowing us to go beyond ourselves in such judging. Just as we demand that everyone accepts the logical principles by which we make sense of the material world, so we demand that everyone recognizes the transcendence of certain moral principles without which we couldn’t properly speak of right and wrong actions. An isolated art object must appeal to the disinterested perceiver in all its uniqueness, first stirring the mind and then putting it to rest. Another point of view related to contemporary thinking is that

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in some respects the plasticity of digital images brings images closer to what can be done with language, poetry, and speech. This points out to that the film must follow a purely mental world, replacing the relations of appearances in the world with mental relations. Nevertheless, the film differs from the dream mainly in completeness. Whereas the dream may arouse certain fantasies and emotions, leaving us bewildered or trembling on awakening, the aesthetic film will dispel all the energies it calls into play. It will take appearances from nature, and re-order them in light of the mind, and by doing so stir our emotions. It might then neatly tie up those appearances, giving them a final order, which at once asserts the priority of mental laws over chaotic appearances and at the same time completes the spectator’s experience. The idea of the spectator’s relation to the cinema is an interesting point of view concerning the role of the spectator. In documentary, images function in a metonymic mode representing parts of a larger whole authenticating historical actuality. This means that individual styles in producing meanings will, of course, differ. David Bordwell has made differentiations between four kinds of meanings: referential, explicit, implicit and repressed or symptomatic. (Bordwell, 1989, 8–9). In searching for referential meanings the perceiver may construct a concrete ‘world’. In constructing the film’s worlds, the spectator draws not only on knowledge of filmic and extra-filmic conventions but also on conceptions of causality, space, and time, and on concrete items of information. In explicit meanings the perceiver may move up to a level of abstraction and assign a conceptual meaning or ‘point’ to the fabula and diegesis she constructs. In implicit meanings the perceiver may also construct covert, symbolic or implicit meanings, units of which are commonly called ‘themes,’ or problems, issues, questions and so on. The perceiver may also construct repressed or symptomatic meanings, which are like disguises; they may be treated as the consequence of the artist’s obsessions. An image is

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related to the multiplicity of meanings that it can create. Meanings are built into the use of images whatever the visual medium around them is. Cultural and personal context of the images will change, as well as the historical and other contexts in this process of evolution. The meanings that images produce through communication are by and large mediated since an image is an entity between meaning and signification, and also a fundamental element of construction and comprehension.

Symbols The picturesque is an art of composing scenes and a system for the analysis of the character of place emerging from the materiality and the cultural matrix of objects. Renzo Dubbini

Commonly speaking, humans are as much within images as they are creators of images. They coexist with what is pictured and build hypotheses about the future and past through visualization. In other words, the moving picturesque scene, composed to provoke emotional reaction, has travelled to film’s own scenic design, and is inextricably linked to a landscape of emotions. Furthermore, the form of each and every object is adjusted by its viewpoint, and by their relationship with one another, so that depending on the point of view, each perspective of a shape is different, and this is one of the basic differences between visual perception and language because, for example, the shape of a verb does not change, but the shape of a table changes depending on the viewpoint. For example, a basic rule, not only of pictorial but also of visual perception is that if two objects seem to overlap, then the completed one is in front of the other. Another point, Raymond Durgnat has suggested that the term syntax coming from linguistics which deals only with distinct and pre-specified forms normally implies the bringing together of distinct units, but pictorial form evolves extension and continuity and from this angle pictures are nothing

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but syntax, the only pure syntax there is. (Durgnat, 1984). For example, a line is not really one distinct unit after another—it is a unit by being an extension of the same thing. In this sense, a line is not a syntax of points. Syntax was also one of the first domains to attract wide attention in cognitive science. Upon this premise rests another one: images can serve as pictures or as symbols; they can also be used as mere signs. (Arnheim, 1974, 135). The three terms (picture, symbol, sign) do not stand for a kind of image. Rather, they describe three functions of images. This means that a certain image may be used for each of these functions, and will often serve more than one at a time. Another point is that an image serves merely as a sign to the extent in which it stands for a particular content without reflecting its characteristics visually. As far as images are signs, they can serve only as indirect media, for they operate as mere references to the things for which they stand, not analogically, and therefore not for thought in their own right. However, numerals and verbal languages are true signs. Furthermore, images are pictures to the extent to which they portray things located at a lower level of abstractness than they are themselves. This means that they do their work by grasping and rendering some relevant qualities (shape, colour, movement) of the objects or activities they depict. According to this study, an image is concrete in itself, but it is abstract from what it is a picture of. In the visual arts people often take ‘abstract’ to mean non-representational of anything that one can recognize, but even representation is abstract in the sense that it only picks up some aspects of the thing it refers to it. Consequently, a photograph is semi-abstract in the sense that it leaves the object. It can reproduce some aspects of the object, but not others; shading, but not depth; and in a photograph one often looses the contour of things. In the visual arts a painting or a piece of sculpture is not a stand-in for physical objects, to be subjected to physical handling. More likely, a work of art is a statement about such objects, and other facts of experience. In

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the light of this, being perceptual statements, the images produced by art objects are final in their properties. Even when structured by the pure forms of space and time, sensible images do not yield knowledge until they are grasped in context. Otherwise, we are left with impressions since images without content might feel quite empty. In addition, abstractness is a means by which the picture interprets what it portrays. A picture is a statement about visual qualities, and such a statement can be complete at any level of abstractness. Only when the picture is incomplete (ambiguous or inaccurate) with regard to the abstract qualities, the observer is called upon to make one’s own decisions about the features of what one sees. Another thing is that an image acts as a symbol to the extent to which it portrays things, which are at higher level of abstractness than is the symbol itself. Thus, a symbol gives a particular shape to types of things or constellations of forces. And further on, as symbols, fairly realistic images have the advantage of giving flesh and blood to the structural skeletons of ideas. It is important to notice that symbols allow events to represent other events, possibilities and abstractions, which do not exist as objects of sense exist, though some may be hidden in deep structures of reality. For the symbol to be successful the vehicle must be rich in figurative connotations. Our perceptual capacities allow us to categorize the world into separate objects in perception, and we can describe the world as being made up of separate objects by the words in language. It is an interesting question how far perceptual and verbal classifications into objects are the same. They are certainly similar, but there seem to be hardly enough names for the objects into which the world is divided perceptually. During perceptual learning—such as when learning to see biological cells with a microscope—new objects appear from initially random or meaningless patterns. When given names, such as ‘nucleus’ and ‘mitochondrion,’ the student sees these patterns as objects. This means that what is seen and

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accepted as objects also depends upon whether they are regarded as functional units. It is common knowledge that a hand, or an arm, or the pages of a book are functional units, though they are complex structures. Furthermore, in microscopy the criteria for what is a functional unit may be highly theory-laden, and so may change as theoretical descriptions change. The most striking and a unique feature of the mind is the acceptance and use of things as symbols standing for other things. (Gregory, 1981, 416). From the perspective of historical understanding, our psychological orientation towards the social and cultural world relates to our perception of it. This deals with both realistic and imaginary representations. Images influence our private fantasizing producing mental representations, and simultaneously images are a significant part of our social life. Our symbolic spheres come into play with this and influence the development of our evolution. Roots of consciousness are deep in the presymbolic language of the mind. Furthermore, images are part of our mental process, and they operate within realms of thought and perception, within conscious and unconscious desires. As pointed out, body language and facial expressions form an integral part of our behaviour. Communication across cultural boundaries is possible. Our body continuously manifests our being in various circumstances, and symbolic connections through cognition are possible through inter-connective brain activities. Language and symbols are needed in many cases, especially when dealing with our inner lives. The mimetic realm deals with gestures and facial expressions. Furthermore, memory retains or exaggerates significant things, and easily forgets the rest. We generally do take in the mask before we notice the face. The mask here stands for the crude distinctions, the deviations from the norm that mark a person off from others. Any such deviation, which attracts our attention, may serve us as a tab of recognition and promises to save the effort of further scrutiny. For it is not really the perception of likeness for which we are originally programmed, but the

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noticing on unlikeness, the departure from the norm which stands out and sticks in the mind. (Gombrich, 13). To some extent, understanding oneself deals with an interpretation of oneself. For example, images can model our experiences of being in the world. In that sense, the cognitive system brings in more flexibility. Possible views of human action are explored through our mind’s functional and imaginative capacities. Symbolism on the level of images and on the level of mind functions through our cognitive capabilities of enlarging our life situation. For example, people recognize caricatures—pictures that capture the essence of some represented object—faster than photographs. A caricature is surprisingly faithful to how the mind remembers things, and various objects with which we are familiar have canonical forms (i.e., shapes that are close to the ways in which those objects are encoded in our mind’s eye). (Hochberg, 77). Also, in addition to the visual features of the represented object, there are non-visual features that might be encoded; thus the caricature might in fact not only be as informative as the accurate drawing: it might even be more directly informative for the task that the subject is to perform. Our mental model of the world is an evolving capacity and echoes the sensory, affective, and imaginary dimensions of our being. Images function on both conscious and unconscious levels effectively constructing our experiences. In its broadest compass, symbolic interpretations that make one concrete object stand for another equally concrete one are almost always arbitrary. We cannot really tell whether a certain association was or is in the conscious or unconscious mind of the artist or beholder unless we obtain direct information, which needs analysis. The work of art itself does not offer the information, except in the case of symbols standardized by convention, or in those few individual instances in which the overt content of the work appears strange and unjustified, unless it is considered as a representation of different objects of similar appearance.

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Observation The image itself is the system of the relationships between its elements, that is a set of relationships of time from which the variable present only flows. Gilles Deleuze

Arguably, we can measure the world through our glances and make interpretations of it. Related to our conscious and cognitive understanding, it is useful to bear in mind that as we look at the world, we can see a very large visual field within which there is rather small area of special attention, and within that there is a surprisingly small area of sharp focus. It is surprising that no clear or definite boundary separates these zones. If the turn of our head establishes the larger field, the smaller areas depend on our glances. This relates to the idea that changes in the scene may stop one’s eye movement, for example, when a montage of images is produced for the spectator. Our bodily, perceptual involvement in reading the images is connected with the autonomy of our various cognitive capabilities, which impose various guiding schemata over our mind’s work and give possibilities to mix our own experiences with knowledge gained from different sources. It is possible that our glances do not register everything we notice, and our attention often shifts within the visual fields independently of them. According to our study, the act of seeing necessarily involves associated and mediated thoughts, which may briefly replace our visual attention. The eyes make many exploratory movements, saccadic glances, which are prompted largely by expectations associated with the preceding glances, or by attraction from conspicuous feature within larger zones. It is the case that even in peripheral areas of vision movements swiftly pre-empt attention for obvious bio-functional reasons. In contrast, the image consists of one large visual field, which ends very abruptly and arbitrarily at each edge. Its overall texture as a world of one image, with its consistent type of semi-abstraction, renders conspicuous a relationship of parts, which becomes

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a graphic unity, and a pictorial composition. Evidently, this has no real equivalent in the visuality of the normal world, yet it seems to act as a powerful source of significance. Around this image, the head, eyes, and thoughts move, not necessarily following the compositional structure, but constantly encountering its conspicuous features. Thus, the image becomes a succession or sequence of visual fixations, albeit retaining a continuous overall presence. We look at images through successive fixations. During this circle of moments, the succession constitutes an internal editing or montage, though this is distinguished from editing or montage in our special sense, where succession replaces continuity of presence. Let us say, that in many cases the artist’s goal is to convey a message about the world around us. This approach should also be contrasted with another view through which we can think that we can also find in art a message about the workings of the brain. Taking into account that pictorial art attempts to capture the three-dimensional structure of a scene, artists choose to view particular objects, people or a landscape. Many look to art for examples of pictorial depth cues, perspective, texture gradients, and so on. In this sense, pictorial art can tell us a great deal about vision and the brain if we pay attention to the ways in which paintings differ from the scenes they depict. We might learn that artists get away with a great deal of impossible colours, inconsistent shading and shadows, inaccurate perspective, and the use of lines to stand for sharp discontinuities in depth or brightness. Nevertheless, these representational modifications do not prevent human observers from perceiving robust three-dimensional forms. We can state that art that captures the three-dimensional structure of the world, without merely recreating or copying it, offers a revealing glimpse of the short cuts and economies of the inner codes of vision. Furthermore, the non-veridicality of representation in art is so common that we seldom question the reality why it works. Perception is not a matter of sensory information giving perception and guiding behaviour

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directly. Rather, the perceptual system is a ‘look up’ system; in which sensory information is used to build gradually, and to select from, an internal repertoire of ‘perceptual hypotheses’. (Gregory, 1970, 171). These hypotheses guide our perceptual categories and help them to function to our benefit, and further on provide orientation in the world of images. Being in the world of images relates to our social and cultural sphere. The image is an artefact with historical, aesthetic and other connotations. Looking at images is as perceptual as a cognitive process related to our conscious and unconscious understanding of the world around us. When looking at images, the size of a retinal projection varies with the distance of the physical stimulus object from the observer. Thus, the distance dimension distorts the perception. When one looks at an image, one may see an object change its size during the movement of one’s eyes, even though the object actually maintains its size all along. In the world of images there are various and complex perceptual modifications, which affect and vary depending on the object’s location relative to the observer. Furthermore, when the image of an object changes, the observer must know whether the change is due to the object itself or to the context or to both; otherwise one understands neither the object nor its surroundings. The observational object must then be abstracted from its context, and this can be done differently: one thing is perhaps the way of performing an abstraction because the observer may want to peel off the context in order to see the object as it is in complete isolation. The other way is to observe all the changes it undergoes and induces because of its place and function in its setting. The perceptual apparatus enables our understanding of reality through many connections, not simply just relating to reality but also, in a sense, providing symbolic representations of it. It seems natural to assume that there is a need for an imagemaker to create actively certain kind of views, so that for example the patterns inside the image would appear as three-dimensional as possible. This kind of overlapping is particularly useful

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in creating a sequence of visual objects in the depth dimension, when the spatial construction of the picture does not rely on other means of perspective. Representations of different paradigms are likely to give different answers: for example, the spacebuilding role of superposition in Chinese landscape painting is well known. Through these processes the pictorial, picture plane images are influenced by traditional and other cultural notions with an amount of intentionality. Phenomenological and cultural explanations are related to our bodily perception of the world and its images. Another point is that also transparency can bring super-positional effects into the image. For example, physical transparency is obtained when a covering surface lets enough light through to keep the pattern underneath visible. It is by no means a guarantee of perceptual transparency, which can be obtained without physically transparent materials, since this means that superposition of shapes forms a prerequisite of transparency, and a necessary but not always sufficient perceptual condition. (Arnheim, 1974, 253). Following this, the rule of simplicity predicts the functioning of transparency. Transparency is perceived also in painting and sculpture, purely based on shape relations. In regard to art history, we can point out that the notion of two things appearing in the same plane is sophisticated and found only at refined stages of art like in Renaissance and Modernism. The perceptual world offers us continuous dimensions of phenomenological extensions beyond our immediate situations. The study of images in the light of their phenomenological and other connections brings in meanings and significances beyond our immediate understanding. Descriptive ideas are connected with objects that can take part in the third dimensions of the image by tilting away from the frontal plane and by acquiring volume or roundness. This kind of differentiation of spatial conception can be observed in all the visual arts, in architecture, sculpture, stage design, and choreography, and it represents a

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particularly important factor in the pictorial medium. As the exploration continues, there is still much experimentation needed before we can establish the comparative weight of different factors, and not without a greater knowledge of the physiology of vision. When visual perception must make a choice between a simpler shape and a spatial orientation, it usually chooses the former. (Ibidem, 261). Due to our human perceptual qualities, for a stationary eye and a stationary observer, the image of an object at any point in space is simply projected to some point on the retina and then to the cortex. Given the position of the point in the retinal image, it is not difficult to understand how we manage to perceive the object’s direction in space. Our bodily connection with the world means that the viewer’s body is in almost constant motion, one’s head is in motion with respect to one’s torso, and one’s eyes are in motion in one’s head. Moving observers need two kinds of eye movement to look at moving (or stationary) objects in a three-dimensional world: Compensatory movements, smoothly and precisely executed, permit the eye to remain fixed on some point while the body moves. In addition, we have skilled pursuit movements that swing the eyes smoothly to keep them fixed on moving objects, and the adaptive mechanisms of accommodation and convergence that bring any object in one’s attention into clear focus and to a central location on the retina. In addition to this, saccadic eye movement brings the central part of the retina, the fovea, from one point in the visual field to another, in rapid jumps that take only about 1/20 of a second to execute. (Hochberg, 40). This is a significant notion and relates strongly to our orientation towards the phenomenological world. This is why normal vision would be impossible without the cooperation of these muscular actions, and according to Hochberg the viewer’s perceptual system must in some fashion ‘make allowances,’ for the eye movement it produces,before it can assign spatial meaning to any stimulation of the retina. According

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to this, the perception of movement depends upon certain physical condition. It means that the movement must attain a certain velocity before it is perceived as movement. Another point is that the contrast between a moving object and stationary background makes the movement clearer and more obvious. Primarily the movements of the images of objects do not produce perception of movement across the retina, because the eyes are also moving to and fro in the head, and thus images of stationary objects are constantly moving across the retina. One needs this kind of eye movement to keep everything in balance. It has been hypothesized that sensations to the brain from the muscles, which rotate the eyeballs, change continuously as the eyes move, and that these changing sensations offset and compensate for the changing retinal impressions. Another explanation is that the changing retinal impressions are compensated for in some way by an awareness of the motor impulses proceeding from the brain to the eye muscles, which cause them to move the eyeballs. Whatever the explanation, it seems that we are able to differentiate between movements of the retinal images caused by movements of the eyes, and movements within the retinal image caused by movements of objects in relation to their surroundings, which appear stationary. It seems likely that with all its limits, our storage capacities allow us to reconstruct earlier segments in the light of later information. There is a need to extend present perceptual psychology, which is still largely confined to the study of the individual event, into the sequence of perceptual consequences. Considering this, it might be helpful in the programming of interactive, and virtual media, and in cases where the narrative itself is of a special visual event. In this sense, images are flexible. Especially as we move from media to hypermedia, and from text to hypertext, images may become more and more layered. This means that there are no simple models concerning referentiality, or attributions of cause and effect. (Burnett, 137). In cinematic narration, normally the internal relationships of the shot pre-occupy us, since most of the information lies there in

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front of us. This means that one does not only overlook the edges of the shot, but one also hears the sound as being in the scene, even when a single loudspeaker is placed well to one side of it. Another point is that if the source of the sound is so ill-placed, for example behind the projector as to threaten the illusion, one usually contrives to get used to it, to make a sustained mental-constructivist effort to re-co-ordinate the cues, and mentally return the sound into the image. But even in such cases, these perceptual and cognitive capacities do play an important mission in guiding our orientation towards the situation at hand. According to our point of view here, we as observers do not reconstruct a light source in order to recover the depth from shading and shadow. We do not act as optical geometers in the way that computer graphics programs do. We do not notice inconsistencies across different portions of a painting but recover depth cues locally. In the real world, the information is rich and redundant, so we do not have to analyse the image much beyond a local region to resolve any ambiguities. Furthermore, when faced with the cues of pictorial art, the local cues are more meaningful, albeit inconsistent with cues in other areas of the painting. According to a perceptual analogy like this and like with many aspects of art, discrepancy between art and the scene it depicts informs us about the brain within us as much as about the world around us.

Compositions Images represent a technological intelligence that shifts the ways humans see themselves. Jeff Wall

Significantly, expanding the painterly image into a moving (sometimes static) cinematic image, we can point out that there is a complicated inter-relationship between the perception of the movement of the surroundings and the movement of the body, which is displayed in what is known as ‘parallactic movement’.

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For example, as we move forwards in a car along the road, the retinal image of the landscape in front of us expands, flows on both of our sides, and then contracts and becomes sucked in behind us. (Gibson). We have to bear in mind that this effect is not usually very noticeable in ordinary daylight, when the whole visual surroundings are perceived as rigid and stable while we move. But it may be apparent in driving at night, when the surroundings are not clearly perceived. Another point related to our perceptual orientation is that if we look at objects on either side of us, we may see them moving rapidly in the direction opposite to that in which we are moving; but the farther away they are, the slower the movement, and the horizon remains stationary. In fact, in this situation the retinal image of the landscape is continuously distorted or deformed as we move, but we are not consciously aware of this deformation; instead we perceive it in terms of our own movement across the landscape. According to this study, this is something that, for example, cinematic narration can pick up in relation to perspective and visual thinking. Thus a rough generalization may be made, that the total amount, which can be attended to at any one moment, is constant. If attention is concentrated on a small part of the field, little will be perceived in other parts; if attention is diffused over a larger area, no one part will be very clearly and accurately perceived. (Vernon, 159). Concerning our perceptual capacities, often the conscious part of our thinking is restricted to a co-ordination of selected items of data, the setting of a goal, and a volitional decision to perform the task. This means that the actual performance is no more conscious than blinking. As humans we are constantly involved with complex cognitive operations. For example, one can feel oneself quite home with all the irrationalities of image formations. According to this study, to make sense of a single image, the mind draws on our general understanding of the image situation, of which its forms are part, and on our general knowledge of the wider world, of

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which our knowledge of images is part. The inclination of our understanding of images lies in our adaptability towards changing situations and conditions, and in our adaptive behaviour towards the world in front of us. Similarly, the ability of children to make sense of different television programmes depends less on receiving verbal disquisitions or deconstructions of the medium, but rather through common and, in this sense, adaptive experience of it. As a general notion, we can think that art is a communicative and cognitive activity since individual minds are linked with cognitive networks, and an image can have meta- communicative aspects dealing with its significance. In cinematic image, movement draws in the eye, and its vectors and trajectories usually override the static (visible) elements of the composition. Significantly, the contradiction between the pictorial scene and the frame is relegated to a very low-priority awareness, and instead one concentrates on the scene, where the interesting and fruitful information lies. Although the composition of the image guides our eye, few of the eye’s movements reproduce the image’s compositional lines. Nonetheless, the composition looms large in our apprehension, as one keeps encountering its structure. The roving, or browsing eye apprehends not only the whole pattern, but more like successive sub-configurations, some of which constitute objects or actions, some of which are purely pictorial, graphic structures. In this sense, the singular static or moving image is a complex entity with various elements at once co-existing and competing for our attention. Furthermore, one can never see every possible configuration, or every detail, because our perceptual apparatus is always selective, and though sometimes one can stay content with the obvious, and pre-coded form, one is also guided by important inputs from non-visual content and context. This means that mental models and realistic worldviews are interconnected affecting each other in the sphere of the mind with a natural tendency. According to this study, the composition of moving pictures shares many elements with still composition. Yet, movement

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counterpoints this to the point of overriding and disrupting it. This means that it creates a third dimension of a kind by implying a space for the objects to move through as they shift. In this way, movement has the ability to loosen space, and therefore also the composition of the image. Simultaneously trajectories override relationships: movement and speech can give images of faces more autonomy, or rivet the attention towards them. It is understandable that usually the nexus movement, or change in rhythm and duration counterpoints, or dismantles the unitary composition of the still image. Consequently, space ceases merely to imply movement and time. By this, it enters into concrete relationships with them.

Flow Still image is a realm both important in its own right and instructive for its utilization of codes also found in films. Bill Nichols

The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame. The actual passage of time is also made clear in the character’s behaviour, the visual treatment and the sound—but these are all accompanying features, the absence of which, theoretically, would in no way affect the existence of the film. One cannot conceive of a cinematic work with no sense of time passing through the shot, but one can easily imagine a film with no actors, music, décor or even editing. (Tarkovsky, 113). Mirror (Zerkalo, 1975) was a film that featured many time levels, not just in the historical, linear sense, but also in the ways that past and present interact with each other through the prism of human consciousness and conscience. It was in the narrow sense of the running time of a film, however, that Tarkovsky’s ideas about time reached their radical formation. For Tarkovsky, time was the essential building block of cinema. Tarkovsky’s

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images are phenomenological experiences of a particular state, where material reality changes into a dreamscape. The cognitive understanding of our mental faculties has enriched our involvement with the mind’s capacities to process complex interactions and associations related to ideas at hand. This does not explain everything, since in art the creative element forms the basis of unique achievements in perceiving reality. The image and its constructions give possibility to a special dialectic between the image and its perception. Equally importantly, cinematic narration has a skill of redoubling the effect of motion of light, because film images are actually moving, and a single image in a film never stands still, just as light never does, and just as the eye never does. As a result, the moving eye is the other half of the moving light. As regarding contemporary understanding, Anne Hollander suggests: “Modes of art using human experience for their subject that both engage the scanning eye and suggest its analogy to the inner life can rely on a raw emotional pull. In movies the camera itself is the seeking gaze, demanding enlightenment, and its choices can demonstrate its superior insight: good cinematography and editing give the effect of satisfying the eye’s immediate prior longings at every instant. Ideally, the camera unerringly finds what the bodily eye and the mind’s eye are both unconsciously lusting for or perhaps dreading.” (Hollander, 20–21).This notion has appropriate and partly philosophical underlining concerning the issue at hand. The act of recognition can define relevant data for the understanding of images. It is good to remember that after being shown a rapid sequence of unrelated skills, viewers can recollect information about some of the individual images, (or shots of a film), and they show some signs of having visual expectations about what will come next. Another thing related to this is that there is also evidence of a visual buffer that stores some small number of views. Through cognitive perspective it is natural to

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notice that we need mental structures to place the individual images and shots. According to our point of view here, when spectators gaze, look, and think, inner and outer realms cease to be divided, and boundaries dissolve, and new boundaries are created in the mind. It is common knowledge that our visual system has been built up so that local space is heavily controlled by subjective perspective. This was true even before the development of pictorial perspective, which includes a reference to the fact that the development of pictorial perspective is a rational, objective thing, and does not involve subjectivism. Despite that, there is also a question of a point of view, which marked visual perception even before it appeared in images. According to this study, pictorial perspective is already a construction on which real-life vision intricately and radically depends. Furthermore, the differences between real-life vision and pictorial structures explain why pictorial perspectives are very flexible. This line of reasoning might be attractive, but in the visual arts, graphic qualities of an image usually refer to the image itself. Graphic configurations of an image might express something important in connection with other features of the image. Especially, plasticity of the image is the difference between the graphic (formal) qualities and the original, pre-pictorial qualities. This happened especially with Impressionism. For example, Claude Monet’s paintings of haystacks and cathedrals are about how light and perceptive qualities of the image work on these objects, which are chosen for their plastic convenience. In each painting, for example, the colour of the haystack is different because the light shining on the haystack is different. The colour of the haystack is determined by the colours the haystack absorbs. The colour we see is simply the colorized light that is not absorbed and that is reflected into our eyes. With the Cathedral paintings Monet went even further, since his aim was not to represent a tangible model, as with the haystacks, but to create impressionistic paintings under different luminance and climatic conditions.

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In the Cathedral series, the authentic protagonist was not the architectonic model, since Monet used a point of view of such form that the architecture, due to the almost complete absence of perspective, lost its grandeur. This meant that the building was more than a background, and the power of the painting was to represent the dynamic quality of the light and the atmosphere. In this sense, the plastic quality of an image is pre-pictorial, insofar as it is possible to study the volume, hues and other feature of the object, but in the final image the plastic and graphic qualities are not separate levels and structures, since they are in constant interaction with the other. When graphic qualities are separated from the representation of anything visible, the image becomes abstract. Of course, there are many compromises between abstraction and representation, and not only in degree. For example, an image may be exact as to colour but abstract as to volume. An image can be conceived of as a range of possibilities, and we can speak of abstract photographs when the patterns of light seem to have the same significance as abstract paintings. The reading of the image is a sequence of mental events exactly like reading of some other reality. That may help us to explain how, for example, abstract art can take graphic qualities as a metaphor for mental events, and we can think that it can do so because perceptual processes are also mental activities. We can express this by thinking that long before abstraction the graphic was known to be expressive. Abstract patterns may signal energy and character, or suggest convergence or disintegration. It is certainly striking that in calligraphy those associations seem to arise because the writing leaves clues related to the writer’s style, and through this way it can be an indexical sign. Without excluding this factor, abstraction depends rather on a projection process. For example, Burnett thinks of projection as a process that performs the visual, disrupts linearity, and undermines the presumed equilibrium between signification and representation.

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Now we have a definition of projection, and we can begin to explore the consequences of it. Let us say that our sensory-motor mechanisms feed us with kinetic projections and affect our experience of real objects, movements and space. Or, to put the matter somewhat differently, it is possible to assert that vision, space, and muscular tensions combine as closely as they do since they involve interaction with other bodies, and our bodies in visual and physical space. We will assume, then, that mental structures are related to external physical objects through mechanism of the brain. Consequently, the projection and production of meaning occurs in the mind, which is the place and locus of all signs. According to this hypothesis, the form of an image is dependent on mental operations in the mind of the beholder. This conception was related to the breakthrough of cognitive and perceptual theories, and connected with the development of ideas of seeing in visual culture. Before that, essentially rationalist ideas of structure were dominant, in the sense of how, for example, compositional lines of the image control the spectator’s eye. These harmonious measures of the human scale including Le Corbusier’s Modulor and some Fibonacci theories were advanced and often useful, and aware of the role of tension, but they lacked the subsequent sense of an all-pervasive dynamic, in which perceptual mechanisms function by extending and putting into use the various perceptual and cognitive faculties that have evolved through human biological and cultural development. This leads us to the following conjecture: perceptual mechanisms integrate biologically wired-in systems with extrapolations from experience, which are not purely visual, and rely much on various non-visual assumptions. Significantly, in processing a visual flow of an image, perceptual, emotional and cognitive aspects are functionally related and represent interacting neural processes in the brain-mind totality. This means that most of the neural processes are not conscious, since much of the constructive work in image-formation, and much of the implementation or simulation of motor programmes,

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takes place at a non-conscious level. As an extension of this, many processes will be felt as intensities and saturations. According to our visual intelligence, it is possible to notice that we see relationally when we observe something that really exists in the material world, and relate to it with our personal view, giving it meaning. We also see in a phenomenal sense when we see visions, mirages or other imagined things, and also when we construct what we see. The phenomenal world related to images can also work as an abstract surface in the metaphorical sense. According to our point of view, perception, like the structure of consciousness, is never empty but always the perception of something. Given its existential nature, its link with the body that is finite and always has a particularly directed and biased access to the world, perception of something is invariably the marking of a choice and the setting of boundaries that constitute a field or context and its primary significance. Furthermore, perception is a structured expression of intentionality in existence. Human visual perception is a lived experience and it also brings latent and operative thought into existence. Thus, we can speak of perception as thought itself, because perception not only engages consciousness with the world in a gestalt-structure, but also expresses, through that gestalt, the structure and structuring activity of consciousness in existence. This is a complex dialectic relationship. In cognitive thinking, a term like ‘gestalt’ is closely related to cognitive terms like ‘pattern’ and more loosely related to cognitive terms like ‘schema’. For example, George Lakoff’s cognitive semantics represents a systematic research into the mental models that structure the human phenomenological world, and, although the precision of his theories and analytical examples of images and metaphors as mental models is modern, his way of thinking is very similar to that of phenomenological analysis of aesthetic phenomenon carried out earlier in cognitive studies. According to our view, mental and visual processes are essential in exploring visual and stylistic meanings of images, and the

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semantic processes according to which the concept of visuality is crucial to audiovisual research. In a larger context, the concept of semantics refers in its origins to philology, where it means the research of meanings with words, and from where it has gradually slid into the meanings themselves and into the research connected with them. There is a willingness to connect semantics with natural verbal language, as linguistics call it, and then it can be either a special area inside linguistics or a wider feature of it. Furthermore, the general semantics is not to be restricted only to words, but also to syntactic meanings and wider references. Arguably, extensions of this kind can change into exceptions or break totally and gain independence through that, and then we can refer with semantics to all kinds of meanings. In this sense, we can also talk about visual semantics and we can think, not only of signs and symbols, but also of the structures of the meaning inside the mind itself. And what is at last equally important, the cognitive operations called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself. Through this kind of thinking, many realms are inter-connected and re-negotiated in an enlightening way. An image can have narrative dimensions that can go beyond our canonical ideas related to culture, rituals and beliefs. The hermeneutic idea of our conscious being relates to a constant evaluation of the reality we live in. Our emotional and cognitive faculties re-formulate the images and narratives around us. For a larger perspective, it is useful to acknowledge that for prime reasons, high culture normally tries to maximise an artwork’s semantic yield, but sometimes it might be useful to reinforce certain uncertainties in aesthetic theories. There are uncertainties as to when two ideas mesh in a way as to constitute a structure or theme, when their affinity remains merely incidental, when it makes an echo but generates no further ideas of much substance or consequence, and when the similarities in a metaphor stop.

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Furthermore, there are uncertainties as to how far unity proposes a structural intentionality of some sort. In cinematic narration, for example, Eisentein’s theory of montage might seem to strengthen the opposite view, that the fact of juxtaposition within an artwork is sufficient to turn any two spots, local events, into a structure provided even the slightest, vaguest or most general affinity between the exists. If montage exists between shots, as Eisenstein assumed, it must also exist between sequences or, indeed, between ideas. The role of imagination can give us new ground to believe in this kind of dialectic concerning human reality and its image-like creations. Furthermore, these features can be observed through intellectual and emotional strategies. In this way, exploring the content of an image can help us to form more and more accurate depictions and cognitive and phenomenological accounts of the image world around us.

3. Existential Affections

Ambiguous Architecture The universe of texts can be seen as a landscape. Vilém Flusser

Perceptual and motor systems provide the inputs and outputs of cognitive systems. As indicated earlier, an important aspect of perception is the recognition of something as a particular kind of object or event. One of the central issues concerning perception questions the extent to which perceptual processes are influenced by higher-level cognitive information or purely by incoming sensory information. A related idea concerns the claim that visual imagery is a distinct cognitive process and is closely related to visual perception, and possibly relying on the same brain processes. The dominant cognitive architecture of ideas has assumed that the mind possesses a capacity for storing and manipulating symbols. These symbols can be composed into larger structures according to syntactic rules. According to this study, images are generally about ambiguous forms of presence and absence. They are also metaphors for how the spectators deal with their proximity and distance. This means that, for example, virtual images need to be approached as one of the many levels of experience of modern reality. The realms of fantasy and fiction are in many ways mixed. It is important to notice that the human mind deals with these issues very spontaneously related to our perceptual and cognitive thinking. Our nervous system is constantly in a state of some kind of activity, in a human mode of existence. Through this,

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the experiences are connected, and they have a continuum with perceptual and psychological undercurrents. Consequently, humans coexist with images, and build hypotheses around them. In this sense, images are an expression of various levels of thinking and intelligence. Their context is wide and open. According to our understanding, images are expressions of physical and mental sensations, which are felt immediately. Another slightly larger point is that images are major means of captivating and recording history. We can think that there is an ontological dimension in the work of the image, since images reflect the work and nature of memory, the construction of history, and they create phenomenological reflections. Merleau-Ponty thinks that perception is the original text of conscious experience, and thus of phenomenology itself. (Merleau-Ponty, 21). Consequently, a man’s body is not an object but a condition for objectivity, a point of contact between consciousness and the world. Thus, meanings are contributed by consciousness, and perception is more than a mosaic of discrete sensations and more than their sum. To build up a more hypothetical situation, one could say that perception is a primordial structure of encounter and engagement of the lived-body with and in the world. It is the mode of access, the opening upon the world that allows consciousness its objects through the agency of the body. Thus, perception becomes the existential paradigm of intentionality, the ’original text’ or expression of the structure of consciousness which carries its meaning within itself, as it shows itself. (Ibidem). Before perception can be preedicated (that is, intended as an object of consciousness), it must itself provide the horizon and grounds that make predication possible. Perception is just that act which creates at a stroke along with the cluster of data the meaning which they have, but moreover sees to it that they have meaning. (Ibidem, 38). Related to this is the notion that consciousness is attention-tending towards its object. This involves that a phenomenological reflection insists upon consciousness

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intentionality, that consciousness is never pure but always of something. (Heywood & Sandiwell, 14). For our research ideas, this means that to examine visual media through phenomenology, one can focus on the specific capacities of each medium that distinguish its properties on our experience of the images produced in each. This relates to the endless cycle of our cognitive and perceptual qualities. In some sense, images may suffocate their observers, but for a person, the question how to be with the images in a contemporary world is a crucial one. Images can be regarded as windows that open views onto and into different worlds. This is a metaphor that has been around for a long time. We can say that seeing is an experience, which means that a retinal reaction is only a physical state—a photochemical excitation. Physiologists have not always appreciated the difference between experiences and physical states. It is a question of people who see, and not just about their eyes. In this sense, cameras and eyeballs are blind. Attempts to locate within the organs of sight (or within the neurological reticulum behind the eyes) something nameable called ’seeing’ may be dismissed. That Kepler and Tycho do, or do not, see the same thing cannot be supported by reference to the physical states of their retinas, optic nerves or visual cortices: there is more to seeing than meets the eyeball. (Hanson, 7–8). Observably, the changes of perception are, or are due to, changes of interpretation, committing us to say that there are two processes, perceiving and interpreting. It is doubtful whether in real life we do experience a scene as a whole, as a succession of details to which, for example, close-ups are a close approximation. Consequently, according to visual thinking, when one focuses one’s eyes on a point, one remains conscious of the scene as a whole. Camera close-ups are far more emphatic, and will cut up the visual whole quite drastically. We can constructively think that images provide people with plasticity. With images, the eye has less freedom when the succession and duration of an image is controlled, and presumably eye

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movement ceases or diminishes at least if, for example, the emergence of the images is fast enough. This means that on a cognitive level the mind has more freedom, since the on-going configuration never presents itself as a fixed whole. The whole human process is a deduction from the multiplicity of images and held together only in the memory, which is a reconstruction of facts and experiences on the basis of the way they were stored, not as they actually occurred. (Le Doux, 96). In a film shot, the form of the image disappears as fast as it appears. The structure of this phenomenon is space in time, but like the single image, it combines looseness in some respects with integration in others. This kind of integration means that images have a pictorial relationship with one another. For example, the juxtaposition of two strong image compositions can create a shock, a collision, and a sensation of optical clash, or contradiction, and a kind of kinetic dynamism. This might mean looseness in that sense, that the eye can prioritise the change of an image, and concentrate instead upon elements that link two images. Thus one can recognize a second shape as the same thing from another angle, and prioritise the continuity. According to this study, the juxtaposition of images is only a prelude to the semantic interaction between them. For example in cinematic narration, the editing practice is dominated by the dialectics of contrast and continuity, and difference and similarity. Furthermore, the spectator’s mind must handle all this very fast, usually relating different images and shots and overlooking the cut. Frequently, the spectator does to the cut what she does to the edge of the frame: she overlooks it, since it is more important to focus on the information within each shot and each image. Still, there are cases when the clash, the ‘interval’ between the shots and images, becomes conspicuous. The spatial frameworks of an image have significant meaning concerning the perception of visual objects and their interaction. In the physical reality our field of retina and the co-ordinates of the visual surroundings build up the frameworks of spatial orientation through kinaesthetic factors. In ordinary life, these factors

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work usually in harmony with the visual surfaces of our surroundings. This indicates that visually receptive people will pick up the clues from the outside world, and are in that sense more outer-directed, and dependable upon the standards of the environment. Kinaesthetically receptive people listen to the messages of their body, and seem to be more inter-directed, trusting on their own evaluation. An image can be a schematic meeting point for mental, physical and real ideas. Images are mirrors of the world around us. According to this study, the context of the images today is wide, and also open for new interpretations. Burnett thinks that the links between the computer and the television screen are very suggestive of an aesthetic that is struggling to redefine flatness and three-dimensionality. (Burnett, 1995, 190). Our knowledge of the world connects and enlarges our understanding of modern day images where the role of time, memory, and history plays a crucial significance. The spaces between image and word can gain new dimensions. Images move in space and in time, and, in this sense, are under a continuous process of rewritten history. This also changes the role of truth related to images because of the memory aspect. Time is transcendental towards the image since it has the capacity to change our immediate presence, which is marked by our subjectivity. In the light of this, our consciousness is phenomenal by structure. This phenomenal organization deals with all the various kinds of order and structure found within the domain of experience, i.e., within the domain of the world as it appears to us. There are obviously important links between the phenomenal and the qualitative aspects of consciousness but the phenomenal structure of experience is richly intentional and involves not only sensory ideas and qualities but complex representations of time, space, cause, body, self, world and the organized structure of lived reality in all its conceptual and other forms. Since many non-conscious states also have intentional and representational

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aspects, it may be best to consider phenomenal structure as involving a special kind of intentional and representational organization and content, the kind distinctively associated with consciousness. The eye that sees draws inspiration from images. It features a magical bond between the perceptive visual outcome and the mental ideas that follow. This means that if the image are static, like in the case of a photographic image, the seeing activity is not, since the seeing activity includes the mental and thinking processes connected with the image. This changes the nature of the image into a reference point of various underlying social and cultural signifiers. An image can create historical references around it and work through memory processes to enlarge its capacities as a model of communication. Photographic images are in a sense nostalgic and by this transitional. They evoke the past but must cope with the present. For example, Impressionist painters in France in the late 19th century were considered radical in their time because they broke many of the rules of picture-making set by earlier generations. They found many of their subjects in life around them rather than in history, which was then the accepted source of subject matter. Instead of painting an ideal image of beauty that earlier artists had defined, the impressionists tried to depict what they saw at a given moment, capturing a fresh, original vision that was hard for some people to accept as beautiful. They often painted outdoors, rather than in a studio, so that they could observe nature more directly and set down its most fleeting aspects—especially the changing light of the sun. The importance of their artistic work was imprinted in their canvases. In Camille Pisarro’s Sunset with Haystacks (1879), shadows and haystacks are given equal pictorial weight. An impressionist makes no representational distinctions between shadows and material reality, nor even between reality and its reflection—the apparent and the real. (Melot, 206). The style of impressionist painting had several characteristic features. To achieve the appearance of spontaneity, impressionist painters used broken

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brushstrokes of bright, often unmixed colours. This practice produced loose or densely textured surfaces rather than the carefully blended colours and smooth surfaces favoured by most artists of the time. The colours in impressionist paintings have an overall luminosity because the painters avoided blacks and earthy colours. The impressionists also simplified their compositions, omitting detail to achieve a striking overall effect. Pisarro revealed a new way of drawing and painting, and a new concept of reality. Following this, the term impression signified both a generalized and an immediate impact of raw reality on the viewer’s retina. (Ibidem, 207). The connections between intentions and artistic control were significant. The digital age has contributed into a rethinking of earlier practices concerning the role of images in a modern world. We have to focus more sharply on what we mean by images and what we can say and think about them. This all brings forth ideas concerning the various aspects and connotations related to images. The phenomenological and perceptual aspects of images constitute a major importance. This concerns the understanding of these processes, connecting the mental to the pictorial. Understanding the diversity of the mental world and its associative states is crucial if we are to avoid the temptation of viewing mentality as constituting some kind of homogenous mental state. The scientific study of mental states, at least the neurobiological approach, is premised upon the practice of correlating specific brain states and activity with specific cognitive activities. Due to this, sensitivity to the typology of mental states could help prevent the temptation of homogenizing the biochemical expressions of mental states to a narrow type, and give space for the diversity of the phenomenon, for the mixture of feelings, thoughts, abstractions and sensations. In poetry, for example, words combine to produce imagery, though clearly this idea of an image must be translated into prose in order to make sense. This means a kind of dissolve of the boundaries of the image with the linking of meaning and

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language. We are in the realm of consciousness and its complexity. We all know that our visual apparatus consists of the eye (or eyeball) and certain nerve cells in the hinder part of the large brain and nerve fibres connecting the eye with these cells. The significant problem for visual science has been to explain how the brain bridges the gap between what is given to the visual system and what is actually experienced by the perceiver. The basic elements of vision and mind constitute abstract reasoning and sensations that are constantly in motion. We are aware of these perceptions although not always very clearly. The flexibility of the mind means a re-organization of the information and knowledge that it receives. The images are concrete in themselves but abstract in many other connections, since our thought processes are abstract by nature. This is another connection between the pictorial and the mental realms of the image. Admittedly, this is another proof of the richness and diversity of cognitive and perceptual apparatuses. Phenomenological schemes are flexible because they are constantly adjusted by various processes. Following this, we can learn to see things in new light because of having recognized something familiar in a phenomenon or a representation that might at first have looked quite strange. For example, figurative art imitates the world and through this affects our views of it. A good example is the tension between an image and what it represents. By looking at the image it is possible to gain new aspects in the physical and spiritual quality of the image and its depiction. The way of thinking about how, for example, subjectivity affects the conceptualization of the images, is certainly an important one. Subjectivity and its relation to the phenomenal world has been a major influence among painting in the past. Maybe there is a virtual flow of being between inside and outside appearances, a mirror-like effect or blending and mixing various influences between immediate perception of an image and its representation of something. Seeing and thinking are closely connected.

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In this sense, vision, perception, understanding and thinking form a continuous process of interrelated systems. Consider the image’s power of depiction and the function of memory. For example, cinematic narration is montage between images but the cinematic image is a compilation of different elements. Thus, as in painting, there are also visions inside one single image. And the complexity of cinematic narration is not so much based on the fact that cutting between images would replace the montage inside an image than on the fact that that we are dealing with both things at once. Keeping this in mind, we are controlling the movements of the spectator’s eye, and what is more important, we are controlling the movements of the spectator’s thoughts inside one image, and then we put them against the following image. But because the cinematic image deals also with movement, there cannot be just a question of montage inside or between images, but also of the ways in which movement relates to the lines of the look, and how it transforms and guides them.

Processes Phenomenological psychology’s comprehensive task is the systematic examination of the types and forms of intentional experience, and the reduction of their structures to the prime intentions, learning this what is the nature of the psychical, and comprehending the being of the soul. Edmund Husserl

The spectator’s thoughts tend to follow the line of the image’s look, especially a strong one. More specifically, if there is an element of surprise, then the thoughts of the spectator tend to move with the look. Thus, for example, cutting in cinema does not happen only between the pictorial points of interest, but also according to the action lines and directions in a film. All in all, there are many things happening similarly, and no simple rules to explain it all.

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We can think that memory is a much more complex phenomenon, and it is easier to make sense of what one perceives if it is familiar, or if that kind of thing is familiar, but what is involved in finding that thing familiar may be quite different. A further point is that one may find something familiar without any explicit recollection of when one experienced it or something like it before. A theory that connects memory essentially with information storage is of a part with a memory theory based on the idea of memory traces. That is to say that it presupposes the setting up and maintenance of some state of the system which has its effects upon other states of the system. (Hamlyn, 99). In some sense, memories are similar to perceptions, as we experience the present with the senses. Perceptions are hypotheses of the present and immediate future. Like perception, memory depends upon gap-filling, and guessing from inadequate (stored) data. It seems appropriate to suggest that memories are hypotheses of the past. They are thus closely related and linked to perceptions. (Gregory, 273). Memories are bits of the past, and on this account, they are not links with reality, but rather samples of a past reality, which thus in some sense still exists. In general the different components of memory lead to one another and we pursue elusive memories by exploring the associations which we do recall. And further on, memories are marvellously cross-indexed. (Rattray Taylor, 244). Sometimes meeting an old acquaintance after many years will bring memories flooding back, and sometimes a smell will do it; or, as in the instance made famous by Proust, a tiny incident such as dipping a cake in tea. But usually these hypermnesic records seemed to be formed during or just before an emotional stress. Details of which one was not even aware of perceiving at the time may come back. It is well known that we can only remember a small number of unrelated items in immediate memory (something between five and seven), and in order to remember a larger number of items, they must be committed to more permanent storage in an

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encoded form (i.e., in an abstracted, symbolic or reduced form). Julian Hochberg thinks that because the succession of our eye movement is often quite rapid (about 4 per second), an observer will normally make more fixations during the inspection of a single scene than he can hold in his immediate memory. (Hochberg, 65). That is why some parts of his or her perception of the scene must draw on encoded recollections of his earlier glimpses. Since our eyes register fine detail only within a very small foveal region of the visual field, we must learn about the visual world by a succession of glances in different directions. Such glances are made by saccadic eye movement, whose endpoints are decided before the movement is initiated (i.e., saccades are ballistic movements). This means that where one looks is actually decided in advance. Therefore, the content of each glance is always, in a sense, an answer to a question about what will be seen if some specific part of the peripherally viewed scene is brought to the fovea. In viewing a normal world, the subject has two sources of expectations: (i) he has learned something about what shapes he should expect to meet within the world, and about their regularities; and (ii) the wide periphery of the retina, which is low in acuity and therefore in the detail that it can pick up, nevertheless provides an intimation of what will meet his glance when the observer moves his eyes to some region of the visual field. Looking at static pictures is a temporal process, which has always been evident to students of composition, who discuss ‘leading the eye’ in some obligatory sequence over the layout of the picture. (Ibidem). Images may have a controlling force over the way we see the world. But this is just another side of the phenomenon and the way how images operate. As the new technologies behind images have advanced, also the ideas of how they affect have been enriched. In cinematic narration, when thinking about interest or tension points of images, we can think that the spectator does not see the composition as an abstract

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graphic structure, because the composition is regrouped around one’s interest points, and a typical interest point is usually an interesting face or something rapidly changing inside the image. Often the interest point is ahead of the action because the spectator is looking to see what is going to happen. In watching a scene, the spectator’s look covers many interest points, so we can, without moving an eye, shift tension from one thing to another. Thus we can speak about tension points within the look. For example, when an actor is looking at the camera it is often difficult to tell whether they are doing it or not. And talking about eye-lines, it is often difficult to trace the definitive direction of the look. Ever since Berkeley, most philosophers, physiologists and psychologists started with the assumption that we cannot account for our perceptions of space in terms of information in visual stimulation, and went on from there to try to discover how we made up for this inadequacy. The first real challenge to this tradition came from James J. Gibson, who started with the inescapable fact that people can perceive space by means of vision alone, and concluded, therefore, that some kind of information must be present in visual stimulation. The gradient of texture-density is a particularly promising high-order variable for this purpose. This means that if you look straight ahead at a homogenously textured surface, the density of the texture does not change from one part of the optic array to the next. (Hochberg, 124). It is tempting to think that every time an observer moves toward any rigid surface, the elements in their visual field undergo a process of expansion; and this gradient of expansion forms a pattern that will be different for each orientation of the surface, for each direction and speed of the observer’s motion, and for each distance of the observer from that surface. Following this, the cone of the look related to the world gets quite wide, and apparently the area of the sharp focus in the eye is tiny, and one of the artificial elements of the cinematic narration is that the frame restricts the cone of the look to the rectangle of the screen. This means that when we are looking to an eye,

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we cannot tell whether it is looking into that zone or whether it is looking somewhere else. Because the area of the eye’s sharp focus is so tiny, it gives us one reason why people—when looking at moving images—look around within the screen. It also explains why we can shift focus in a film shot because, if the spectator is looking at a face in the background, it is possible to throw the foreground out of focus, and the spectator does not notice that it is blurred because of the sharp focusing on the part of the screen. Everything is actually all in the same focus to the spectator, all in the same focal plane, but because the spectator is looking at a different section of the screen, they do not see it. In making a film analysis and looking at everything very closely, we can see those parts, which have clearly gone out of focus. The realization of our perceptions of the world in the form of space and time is the only aim of our pictorial and plastic art Naum Gabo

In visual experience, we have intuitive faculties to sense qualities of formal and spatial relations, or maybe tensions, and through this way learn to discover the plastic and psychological qualities of the image. Expression gives the artist the materials to give shape and form to one’s creative impulses, which can then be visualized. An artist must not only interpret one’s experiences creatively, but also be able to translate one’s feelings into a creative interpretation of the medium one is using. Consider an image. It can have plasticity if its pictorial message is integrated with the picture plane and embodied into the nature and qualities of the expressive medium. The integration of many sensory systems constitutes visual perception, and, for example, images are obviously of great importance to us, since they are one of the means with which we acquire information about the world. Humans have always depicted the visual space around them. In ancient societies, pictorial images were resemblances of experiences that could be communicated

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further on. The general characterization of image consciousness relies on the narrative contextualization of images, and the memories around them. This works as an existential referent to the world through the spectator’s cumulative comprehension of the representation. The problems of image and time cannot be separated from the context of existential phenomenology. As noted, phenomenology will account for the affective side of experiencing images. Emotions are agents of this affection, and the various states typically classified as emotions appear to be linked only by overlapping family resemblances rather than by a set of sufficient conditions. In various passions the emotional effects may include involuntary physiological changes due to arousal of the autonomic nervous system, and characteristic facial expressions. From phenomenological perspective, these effects seem to be an integral part of our perception in various situations. Generally speaking, images had to be recognized, so they were transferred into shapes and objects in space. In an artistic mind, this process was a transformation or comparison between the actual experience and the pictorial form of it; an access towards the visual image, which is a kind of representational process of the pictorial idea. The visual image deals with our immediate and concrete understanding of our perceptual experience, and the interpretation of it. The concept of the image strengthens our argument here, because it brings forth the creative relationship between visual experience, discourse and knowledge. The desire to eliminate some of the ambiguities around the idea of the image suggests that the idea of the image can be an accessory to the processes of depiction. After all, an image defines spatial relationships by imitating them, and these relationships form its syntax. Schematically speaking, an image has a direct correspondence with the idea behind it, and this is the way that a photograph can be obtained, for example. Inside the image, the form of each and every object is adjusted by its viewpoint, and by their relationships with one another. Visual image deals with the

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processes the brain uses to maintain visual information. Admittedly, the images or scenes we see are usually stable enough to be apprehended as simultaneous and permit further scanning by eye movement or mental attention. The essence of visual order makes possible the way how this scanning of the eye movement mixes response and form with decisions which are independent of the form. The mind can treat visual images as visible transparencies to the ideas. Pictorial signification is analogue insofar as it presents feature similar to those in reality. The matching of this form is sometimes called iconicity, which deals with still images standing for abstract concepts of meaning and thought. In this sense, the meaning is elusive. Furthermore, it limits images to something like linguistic ideas of denotation. By this it minimizes graphic and plastic qualities of the image, obliterating them under iconography. Our cognitive system is complex and universal, and it shares stimulus features. We all know that the coding of stimuli and responses is crucial for human behaviour. The psychophysics and neuroscience communities have been looking at correlations of noisy stimulus inputs with behavioural decisions and neural responses in order to infer the stimulus features that mediate sensory and perceptual processes. (Friedenberg & Silverman, 201–205). Cognitive science has been developing related techniques to identify stimulus features extracted by human observers and testing the rules by which these features are combined to produce categorical decisions. In analogue signs, the form of the signifier conveys information about the form of the signified. But the form of the arbitrary sign signifies nothing about the signified, since the sign has meaning only by virtue of a denotation which can be absent from the signifier. For example, seeing, perceiving and knowing about things need mental coordination, interaction and construction in a visual sense. Images are instances of viewing, and their perception creates meanings that are connected with this

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process. We can rely on introspection of perceptual processes, and reason that interpreting is an intellectual process while seeing is not supposed to be one, and that we are aware of interpreting but not aware of processes of seeing. (Hanson, 19). For Richard L. Gregory this seems an important mistake: ‘Hanson’s view is here a hangover from stimulus-response accounts of behaviour. The crucial point is that animals, as well as adult humans and scientists, predict from limited sensed data to situations, which can be related only by kinds of inference. In fact we have every reason to believe that perceptions have their richness and integrity as well as their predictive power through inference. This is almost self-evident to the psychologist working on perceptual processes (though with exceptions), but it is anathema to philosophers seeking unadulterated, theory-free and assumption-free sensory data.’ (Gregory 1981, 188). Within this framework, the processes of seeing involve many processes which could be described as interpreting, though we are not aware of these or any processes of perception. We can think that a difference between passive reception and active perceiving is contained even in elementary visual experience. Our sensory apparatus affords many kinds of stimuli. Consequently, the visual frameworks and kinaesthetic factors set up the limits and lines for our perception, and the expectations aroused by visual concepts and schemes will affect our perceptions. In this light, we can point out that any given world is only the scene on which the most characteristic aspect of perception and perception of images takes place. The glance roams around that world, directed by attention, focusing the narrow range of sharpest vision on various spots—following the flight of a distant sea gull, scanning a tree to explore its shape. This eminently active performance is what is truly meant by visual perception. (Arnheim, 1970, 13). As a whole, it is a question of treating cognitive material on any given level and every process that may be included in thinking takes place at least in principle, in perception.

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On a broader scale, one can also say that thinking is internal perception; it comes from one memory trace within the mind encountering other memory traces. According to this study, thinking is actually the mind perceiving itself. (Valkola, 1993, 20). Nowadays more and more forms of image production have arrived into the lives of the people, and on the cultural scene. Furthermore, images are not only the vehicles for the communication of meanings but especially in a digital age also for the creation of virtual and other environments. The problems to understand this kind of development have grown, and the critical means for a reasonable discourse are not always easy to discover.

Digital The image is not simply a particular kind of sign but a fundamental principle of what Michel Foucault would call ‘the order of things’. W.J.T. Mitchell

As a consequence of this, images have moved from their conventional locations into far more technologically advanced and more complex environments. The contexts of today’s imageworlds are different from the previous ones. There are many transformations taking place in this context. The communication of and through images has gone through many changes during the last decades. These changes also relate to the question of producing meanings inside digital media. One of the principal tasks of modern media culture is to understand how modern complex images come together. As noticed earlier, in our hyper-cultural presence, images can function as an amalgam of the real and the representational, as a kind of bricolage between different modes of signification. We can formulate that at present, different notions of viewing and spectatorship are current both within and between all the various visual disciplines. Generally speaking, digital technologies have made it possible to build on the ability to artificially create realism. For example,

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digital images can be produced without a camera, but they can still look like photographs. This means that the photographic image is produced without a referent in the real. Certain technologies and style encourage us to believe in a tight correspondence between images and reality, but the effects of lenses, focus, colour, depth of field and high-resolution media seem to guarantee the authenticity of what we see. They can be used to give an impression of authenticity, and because images are selected and arranged into sequences, scenes, and so on, the interpretation and meaning of the images will depend on many kinds of factors. Digital images and virtual simulations are not indexical by nature, since they cannot be said to have been in the presence of the real world that they depict. An image that inserts people digitally into a landscape where they have never been does not refer to an actual moment in time. And a different set of questions is raised when we consider the impact of digital imaging on news and historical documents, so, in the contemporary world of visual culture and visual images, different forms of image manipulation are creating a broad array of images that defy traditional notions of time and space. Modern media images have to be deconstructed in order to be reconstituted. (Burnett, 2005, 47). One of the unique qualities of virtual reality systems is that they unleash the spectator from his or her bodily position in space, allowing for a more free-floating experience of perception. (Sturken & Cartwright, 146). In media culture the reality is under reshaping all the time. New forms of subjectivity emerge, and different texts leading to other texts with images and thoughts without a clear end. Modern computers are active physical realizations of formal languages of arithmetic and logic. They can employ sophisticated messages and they have vast reasoning powers. Many important evolutionary phenomena can be studied by using simulation along with observation and experiment. We can think that the interaction of collaboration and competition at all stages of evolution is a relevant subject to further inquiry, since many epistemological and metaphysical concepts go along with these

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ideas. In cinematic narration, the influence of digital media relates to those new ways through which the filmmaker can broaden up the principles of perceptual realism. The manipulation of photographic images is as old as the history of the devices connected with recording of realities. The recurrent manipulation of photographic images exemplifies the complex relationship between history and the status of the image as a witness and trace of the past. The simple act of looking at an image brings in phenomenological traces of memory and imagination. Meaning of an image may change over time, and, in this sense, cinema provides an alternative approach to history and memory. Traces of the past are shared image-memories, and through phenomenology we can think that our vision is the most noble of senses. A vision can work as a metadiscourse of historical representation. The research of images has recently had an important impact on film studies generally, and especially on studies of social change and processes of globalization. The impact has been in two major areas: in the study processes of style and aesthetics of images, and in the discourse on the processes of ethics, and the conceptualization of cultural boundaries. The two issues are closely related since the conceptual ideas of images have always been an area that creates an over-rigid and prescriptive model of the image world as a bounded entity. It is now understood that the creation processes of images in which objects partake are not restricted to the place and time of their production, but inherent in all of the interactions in which they are involved. The nature of the creation processes will depend on the role that images have in the producing society, and in particular historical circumstances. What can the study of art and aesthetics contribute to the role of images? They both are an integral part of all human societies, and by failing to study them an image researcher denies itself access to significant body of information. An aesthetic approach to images opens the way to understanding the processes of creativity and creative action. It can provide insight into human

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cognitive systems, for example to how people conceptualize the components of their everyday life and how they construct representations of their world. Images are often employed in the creation of contexts, and the analysis of image forms and contents opens routes to understanding the effect of narration on the minds and bodies of the audience (Ellis & McLane, 2006). More generally, the failure to acknowledge and investigate the place of the aesthetic in human life has resulted in the neglect of data that can enrich studies of embodiment, of dispositions, and of factors that are nowadays acknowledged to play a crucial role in socio-cultural processes and identity formation. The growing importance of television and digital culture has brought in many new visions and at the same time increased the interpretative possibilities of images. In the future, we need to draw together original contributions from scholars and practitioners of the image. We need to employ a variety of critical approaches from film, media, and cultural studies to encompass both national and trans-national perspectives to investigate the manifold practices and objects that might be grouped under the expansive and contested concept of the image at the present moment. We need to look backwards and forwards to inquire into past understandings and future proceedings of images. According to this study, the range of reproduced and multiple images in contemporary visual culture mean that the concepts of authenticity, originality, and space gain new meanings. The art of the past has now been transformed in this new image world. As a consequence of this, the context of the images is now wide and open for new forms of interpretation. Nowadays images are more prone to circulation, changed contexts, and remaking. These are the central aspects of contemporary media culture. In today’s world, the extraordinary proliferation of images cannot cohere into one single picture for the contemplation of the academic scholars. What this means is that the conversion of images into information makes them far more adaptable, flexible, and changeable. (Burnett).

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Motion Images are holding places in visual life. Dudley Andrew

In art, the painter first stages his subject through the mind, or through sketches and models. In photography, the photographer has to stage what they will photograph, and the theatre director might think in terms of stage pictures. In film, one can think of choosing the elements through montage or through a pictorial angle. What cinema does, or what an image does, is just as much reality as all the other things in the world (because one is looking at it, so it must be reality), but it rearranges that reality through the cinematic form. So, instead of the saying “the glance roams through that world directed by attention”, in cinema one’s glance works in the order dictated by the film director. It is guided by the director’s attention and by the form of the film. And instead of one’s focusing at will, one shows a close up, or a long shot, and the camera can follow, for example, the flight of a distant sea gull, or it can prevent one from doing it. Film form is a different order of perception on a world, which in some ways is the same as ours, but in other ways different. While one is sitting in a film theatre, watching images, one can also see the theatre and the other people, and one can see that the image is only an image. In still photography, the term shot refers to a single exposed image. But in cinema it means a series of frames. This means that the cinematic frame is the picture. From a larger perspective, Clive Bell thought that painting is art if and only if it possesses a significant form. Though the importance of form was made especially apparent by the tendency of modern art toward abstraction, significant form was a property said to be possessed by all artworks, past, present, and future. We can think that significant form is compromised of arrangements of lines, colours, shapes, volumes, vectors, and space. Genuine art, in this view, addresses the imagination like the figures of Gestalt

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psychology, prompting the viewer to fill the artwork in such a way that we apprehend it as an organized configuration of lines, colours, shapes, vectors and spaces. Carroll thinks that theorists like Bell did not argue simply that formalism was the best theory for newly emerging and newly acknowledged forms of art. (Carroll, 110). They maintained that formalism revealed the secret of all art for all times. This means that from the formalist perspective art could be representational, but unlike the representational theorist, the formalist regarded representation as an incidental rather than as an essential property of artworks. (Ibidem). When considering a frame in a film, we can say that it has four overlapping, and highly confusable senses: the single image, its edges, the shot, and its field of view. From a cognitive perspective, we know that if static frames are shown at sufficient speed, the human eye has difficulty in isolating them from one another, and a succession of broadly similar static pictures can fuse into ‘one picture with movement’. In this sense, the single frame is not exactly invisible, but in ‘the moving picture’ it is indistinguishable. Furthermore, it is invisible as a unit, but a single frame is briefly visible, and indeed legible. Between virtual invisibility and legibility many intermediate gradations are possible, depending on varied features of content and context, and their conjunction. The frame may be in some sense subliminal, and if some theories of subliminal suggestion are correct, the individual frame might even be invisible but legible. Considering this we can state that graphic feature might be a useful term for all those pictorial features, which are non-representational. As a whole, the usual definition of the shot as an uninterrupted series of exposures runs into complications. It assumes that the frames were exposed and displayed at the same speed. But if the film is run through the camera more slowly than it is then displayed, the result will be what is called fast-motion. For example, in a scientific film, a camera might be set to shoot at the rate of three frames a day in four weeks, so as to show a plant

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grow seemingly in seconds. Far from being a mere novelty, the device has serious use as a discovery procedure for scientific purposes. We can think that fast motion entails interruption, in the sense that the next exposure is delayed. However, the same shot may be uninterrupted in the sense that it is taken in the usual way, or that the successive exposes are triggered and stopped by an automatic timing device. Further on, the need for even motion favours automatic timing devices, without the need for interruption by humans. Given certain subjects, however, slow motion may be achieved by human interruption. Following this, the spectator may have no way of knowing which process was used, and whether they are watching a shot or multiple shots. We can still speak of a ‘fastmotion shot,’ because it looks like one movement through one shot. The form of display does not reveal the form of production. In slow motion, the exposures are neither interrupted nor delayed, though their display is. As an enlargement of this, scientific films can reveal, for example, exactly how a bubble is broken up as the bullet from a rifle speeds through it. Related to this, motion in the real world is very often too fast for us to see clearly, and slow motion does not strike us as an illusion, but rather as wonderfully meticulous detailing. This satisfies our sense of reality. Paradoxically, animation is closer to fast than slow motion. The usual definition of animation requires that the object must be moved by hand, or at least, individually controlled by irregular human intervention between frames. This definition does involve some grey areas. For example, puppets pushed by the finger require animation techniques, whereas puppets on strings can be filmed normally, whence the rival definition that in animation films the objects depicted as moving do not move by themselves. Many weird hybrids abound between animation and ‘live action,’ such as pixilation. One might photograph a real live person in real live space but in fast-motion so arranged as to suddenly

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displace him from A to B to C ... Z. The identical effect could be achieved by shooting the scene normally and then editing selected frames. Or one could first create the pixilation and then edit it. As so often is in these cases, the effect of the final form depends on the spectator’s perceptual and cognitive processes, and the constructivist effect of the form must be contrived to fit all the restructuring combinations of physiological structures, and acquired experiences. Whether used to counterfeit live-action, to outrage reality, or to intensify realism, all these effects take their meaning from the spectator’s knowledge of the world, meaning normal events, speeds, scales, photographic processes, production techniques, and so on. In a sense they are illusions, and certainly, where the represented movement is concerned, they are simultaneously re-contextualized by knowledge, and downgraded to impressions or diagrams.

Experience Inasmuch as the other art forms are not constituted of reality itself, they create metaphors for reality. But photography, being itself the reality or the equivalent thereof, can use its own reality as a metaphor for ideas and abstractions. In painting, the image is an abstraction of the aspect; in photography, the abstraction of an idea produces the archetypal image. Maya Deren

Considering photographic and cinematic images, we can think that whereas the photographic image is a single picture, the film image or shot cannot be defined as such, since it features movement. And movement in itself means a continuous alteration of things, especially when an object leaves or enters the frame, or when the camera moves generating an ever-changing scenic segment. Consequently, if the shot nonetheless has a felt unity, rather like our sense of an image, it is done by constituting one continuous space-time chunk with its continuous movement and change. In one central respect, the photographic image and

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the film image are diametrically opposed. Following Jonathan Cray: “Photography is an element of a new and homogenous terrain of consumption and circulation in which an observer becomes lodged.” (Cray,13). Furthermore, this means that the photographic image stops movement, and renders eternal all the depicted facts and relationships of one brief space-related moment. As an enlargement of this idea, the depicted eternal moment conquers over time. In other words, in a photographic image stillness conquers change, and space transfixes movement. In contrast, the movie image or by enlargement the shot thrives on the transformation of the moment of space by time, duration, movement and change. This means that it is not renouncing the option of stillness. The cinematic image may depict a scene without movement, or use a freeze-frame approach. This may still feature some movement as the still camera does, although the displayed time of the shot represents a controlled duration which the single photographic image does not seek. In cinematic narration, the control of duration is an editing decision. Another terminological oddity related to images is the concept called freeze-frame. In effect it consists of one exposed frame, reprinted on a whole series of frames. Related to photographic process, this means that it is a single framer, and as a cinematic display it consists of multiple frames. Furthermore, interestingly subtle surprises are possible as between freeze-frames and moving pictures of immobile scenes. Often, the idea of a freeze-frame refers to the sudden freezing of a moving shot. This can be in some respects compromising of two shots: first comes the movement, then fixity of the image, after that a normal change, and finally the impossible trans-fixation of the image. Broadly thinking, whenever film theory starts from photographic ideas it risks all the confusions that arise from the use of the word ‘shot’ to describe structurally opposed entities. In this connection, it is tempting to propose an alternative term for the moving shot. One possibility is the word ‘take,’ derived from the taking of a photograph. This would be appropriate. Alas, the

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term is already bespoke as in ‘Scene one, take one’. For it is common for a shot to require several attempts, and then movie cameramen call the shot a ‘scene’ and each try a ‘take’. In fact, of course, each ‘take’ is a scene and a shot in itself. With the result that ‘scene’ applies to (a) the camera’s shot, (b) the scene in front of the camera during that shot, and (c) the general setting implied by the series of shots of which that particular shot is part. However baffling to those who expect linguistic forms to possess some structural logic, these riotous terminological shifts originate in the practicalities of production process, such that no particular need is felt for consistent terminology as distinct from specialized, provisional and local purposes. These purposes are to establish relationships between disparate entities such as the scene to be a shot, or the shot in the camera, the shot as edited, and the overall scene to be suggested. Consequently, we can think that since editing is by definition a relating process, it is all the more useful to avoid the traps set by language, which is too easily satisfied by its own forms of coherence, and occludes the demands of correct correspondence. As related to visual perception and thinking, one can refer to smaller parts of the visual world, or to its whole framework. Nevertheless, it is a changing, developing and evolving process, while all the aspects are subject to continued confirmation, reappraisal, change, completion, correction, and deepening of understanding. (Arnheim, 1974, 15). Continuing with cinematic perception, one can speak of cinematic semantics, with which we can understand the exploration of cinematic meanings, concentrating on specific cinematic things like exploring the meanings of moving images, succession, montage-combinations and camera-effects. Throughout this study and in this connection our interest is in focus with visual and stylistic meanings of the images. Concerning the reality, the single image can only catch the visual surface of the physical world from one particular viewpoint, which is really restricted to the surface of local happenings, because every image has to happen within a closed area. Furthermore, we can point out that

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the perception of, for example, photographic images allow us to extend effortlessly our knowledge of the visual world across spatial, temporal and social boundaries. Another point is that many the processes within that area of visual perception are not complete. Thus, if one makes a film about weather, one cannot do it within a scope of a photographic images, because all the events that make the weather are so scattered around the world that all one can really do is to put different photographs together and then let the spectator infer a connection between them. If one makes a film about the weather by combining 40 different images, that is really outside photography since the connections which are demonstrated exist through editing, not within the photographs themselves. Consequently, as soon as we combine two photographs we have exceeded the limits of photography, and we are making abstract or general connections. As a conclusion, one can say that cinematic narration is a great deal more abstract than it looks because it depends on the connections between single photographs, not on what happens in the picture. This means that what happens on a screen is like a clue to a whole association of ideas that come with it. By enlargement of this, photography as a process is a conspicuously fragmentary affair, depicting not objects and events, but more or less aspects of appearances. To put it another way, mainstream aesthetics has assumed that any objectivity was thoroughly compromised, or redeemed by the selectivity of the process, technique, and authorial decisions. All in all, a photographic image features the traces of reality, but it is not even a synecdoche of reality. We can think in this light that it is really and only one way of constructing abstract graphics, which by visual analogy, resemblance, and association are interpreted as images. Consequently, the photographic image is less an illusion than an allusion. For some filmmakers, good editing poses first a visual question and then a possible, visual answer. In experimental studies

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of film or video cutting, both the visual question posed and the larger story structures within which the shots are presented significantly affect how the edited shots are comprehended. (Kraft, 291–307). We can think that the mental structures fitted to our successive glimpses at the screen and at the world cannot have the characteristics of the world itself. As an extension, movements as we remember or anticipate them do not continue to run off in time, nor do remembered or anticipated layouts continue to exist in space. Further on, when following a narrative film, a spectator internalizes the whole structure of interests depicted in the drama, and this structure includes alternative outcomes to various lines of action which the spectator must keep track of in some sense before one alternative is actualized in order for the film to be received as, for example, intelligible. It is common knowledge that film theorizing progresses by criticizing already existing theory, and in criticizing one theoretical solution to a problem, one may also see one’s way to a better solution. This is a question of dialectical criticism, and in this sense a mode of rational inquiry. This was also the point of cognitive aesthetics because of the emphasis that it placed on the efficacy of models, which exploit the role of cognitive processes (as opposed to unconscious processes) in the explanation of visual communication and understanding. Following this, its proponents share certain convictions. For example, cognitive models may provide better answers to many of the theoretical questions concerning visual communication and narration through images. The cognitive approach challenges many narrative paradigms, because it focuses on the evaluation of visual communication through our best abilities of experience and reasoning. As an expansion of this we can think that thought is not solely a matter of intellect. More or less, the question is of the perception of phenomena and thinking, in which there lays a human being’s chance of gaining valuable information about reality with the help of experience and thinking. Following Gordon Rattray Taylor:

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“However, the genius of a Goethe or a Shakespeare, a Sophocles or a Tolstoy, a Milton or a Racine, seems to be of a somewhat different kind. Here it is the imaginative projection, which counts, the power to identify with the emotions of the others and to express them in words and simulated deeds. There is a constant interplay between the coolly reasoning cortex and the impulsive, excitable mid-brain. And this is true not only of the works of geniuses but of the thinking of everyday life.” (Rattray Taylor, 258). As spectators, when viewing an image we will perceive it at a certain conceptual level as directed by viewer and/or addresser, programming, for example, by means of narrative schemata and other indexical procedures indicating formats of attention. (Carroll, 1999, 199). At the same time, the whole viewing process will activate networks of associations below the threshold of consciousness, and activate superior, ‘propositional/abstract’ frames and themes. Images are comprehended universally and intuitively, because it is clear that the spectators can understand images from different cultures and from different circumstances. Maybe this links with the idea, that there is something common and shared in the universal understanding of images, which is based on human perceptual qualities, human nature and understanding of different phenomena. We can think that an image is a part of the whole medium of re-experience, discovery and creation. This means that an image is a visual phenomenon in which meaning as a never fully predetermined idea, arises more as a function of perceptual, emotional, and cognitive activity. According to this study, this process goes forwards and backwards, which means that the image and the reality from which it forms a selection, is grasped again as dynamic cognitive presence. Most visual images will simulate reality somehow because emotions aroused by them can be symbolically gratified by fictitious acts. Consequently, a spectator seeing attractive phenomena in visual images is promised possible future

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mediations with its objects by identifying with some selective features of it. To participate at this level of meaning of the image, the spectator must identify with some special features of it, and create capabilities for subjectivity and identification within the fictive and concrete world of the image. As Noël Carroll has suggested, identification is probably the oldest account in the Western tradition of our emotional relationship to characters. (Carroll, 2008, 161). Furthermore, identification is the secret of the bond that we forge with the protagonists. In cinematic narration a cut juxtaposes not only two scenes, but also two graphic configurations, or structures of images. This juxtaposition is a visual event, which means that the structure of each image can strike against its predecessor, generating a clash, or a collision, which is physically palpable in its energy. Following this idea, a kinetic kick may be generated by the juxtaposition of strong and bold compositional lines inside various images. In the light of this approach, a single cut may be smoother if the centre of interest in the first shot’s last frame roughly coincides with the centre of interest in the second shot’s last frame. In such cases, the spectator’s eye can move swiftly from one centre of interest to another. As a general statement, we can think that any work of art is a self-contained little universe, a microcosm complete in itself. (Mast, 25). This means that an interest in universes like that is based on the fact that they offer us something what is different compared to natural universes. Mast thinks further on that the universe of a work of art is finite and orderly, and its order is perceptible and comprehensible, because it functions under certain laws, it has logic of its own. (Ibidem). A point related to this is that we can understand, for example the universe of an image as a kind of microcosm, a world with its own order and logic but also a world with associations and connotations related to its perceptual and viewing processes. Consequently, when a spectator puts their soul into that world, they see that it is an image of

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that world. We can feel ourselves inside of that image, but in a second we can move outside of that image and observe the whole perceptual process. (Lotman). A cognitive experience of an image is based on a two-way tension of that kind. Thus, as we look at images we are under many simultaneously appearing stimuli. According to this study, the image is a multifaceted and ephemeral concept. Our experiential reality is flooded with perceived, remembered and imagined images because we are living in an image culture. For example, cinematic narration is composed of visual images (whether coloured or black and white ones), spoken or written words, music, actors, sets and so on. These comprise the many ways of telling its emotions and ideas to the public. The simplest way to define the film image would be to identify it with a single frame extracted from the filmstrip. But such a definition would possess serious deficiencies. Psychologically, when watching a film, we experience action, movement, and sound— not static images. In the light of this, we need to accept as images, for example, the gesture of a hand, or the ringing of a telephone. In order to conform them to ordinary discourse and common experience, a looser definition of a film image is necessary. This suggests that the film image should be thought of as any simple object or event, normally perceived and regularly identified as a single entity that is presented on either the screen or the sound track. (Whittock, 20–21). Mentally speaking, sounds can also provoke images in our minds. Furthermore, this deals also with our capacity to mentally construct characters, or psychologically relate ourselves to others. In cinematic narration, systems of communication are based on the artist’s choices from elements of construction. Following Juri Lotman, every image on the screen is a sign: it has meaning, and it carries information. (Lotman, 41). As a consequence of this, there are two kinds of meanings: first of all, images on the screen reproduce some sort of objects of the real world, and then a semantic relationship is established between these objects and

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the screen images (objects become the meanings of the images reproduced on the screen); on the other hand, the images on the screen may be augmented by some additional, often totally unexpected meanings. These we can call additional meanings, which can be symbolic, metaphorical, metonymical, and so on. Films can use symbols of many sorts to arrive at an extra layer of experience. Furthermore, this does not have to be a generalisation, an allegory, or a moral but just an extra awareness of the characters’ feelings, of forces and factors operating inside the story. Cinematic narration has been called a chain of visual impressions running and interlocking in an uninterruptible succession of graphic bombardments. (Sharff, 9). That is to say, that visual thinking and cinematic language can be understood as a certain kind of intellectual activity, because in a creative cinema a most simple kind of scene involves a massive series of directorial decisions that go far beyond the realistic situation behind the scene. (Durgnat, 1983, 8). The cinematic experience is a system of communication based on our bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression. It entails the visible, audible, kinetic aspects of sensible experience to make sense visibly, audibly, and haptically. (Sobchack, 41). As a communicative system, the film experience uniquely opens up and exposes the inhabited space of direct experience as a condition of singular embodiment and makes it accessible and visible to more than the single consciousness who experiences it.

Fusion of Horizons To suggest that the image of reality represents forms less than their substance and their extension in space is another way of saying that the image of reality is not reality but its image. Jean Mitry

Concerning the interpretation of the images, we can point out that the synthetic and analytic methods of perceiving are two ways

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of interpretation. (Vernon, 222). As the names indicate, the observer who adopts the synthetic method tends to see the perceptual field as an integrated whole, whereas the observer who adopts the analytic method breaks up the field into its constituent parts or details, studying each one separately and perhaps overlooking the effect of the whole. (Wilding, 80–81). In the synthetic method, visual illusions related to images appear more compulsively. For example, apparent causality between the depicted objects is readily seen, and size, shape, and possible colour constancy are high. The analytic method is more appropriate when small details must be attended to and certain qualities isolated from the whole, for instance in judging the brightness or colour of a surface of the image independently of its other qualities, or those of the remainder of the field. Furthermore, it must be utilized in making judgements of perspective size of the image. (Ibidem, 79–91). But, on the other hand, it might be worth stressing that perspective is not the product of direct perception. This argument may seem to prove that we calculate perspective from the experience of shapes, which things have tended to be. Sometimes we can, of course, be fooled by optical and other illusions, which are good in exploiting the constructivist extrapolations of the mind. Appreciation of detail can give us enough encouragement to read the pictorial elements of the image, and configure them in a new way. It is tempting to think that when reading an image our visual attention moves across it relating its relationships and configurations to each other. Our mind treats the image as a real object and as a depiction of something very simultaneously. Hochberg thinks that the explanation to why inconsistencies of pictured space can go unnoticed may in part be that the inconsistent regions of the image are not normally compared to each other directly, and any object is usually examined by a succession of multiple glimpses, and the various regions that are looked at each fall in turn on the same place in the eye. (Hochberg, 60). Following this we can state that this is why the separate parts of the figure all

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have to be brought at different times to the central part of the retina, the fovea, if they are to be seen in full clarity of detail. According to the psychological view of perception of the image, the meaning of the stimulus is to function as an interface between two kinds of elements, one being the object or the image itself and the second being the spectator’s mind. The mind alone contains the meaning, which it associates with the image’s otherwise empty signifiers. Evidently, the image is merely a form of ideas signifying nothing, but awaiting the perceptual and cognitive mind to contribute the connection between signifiers and signifieds. (Durgnat, 1983, 6–7). According to this study, the meaning in visual perception is constructed in the mind, since the emphasis on the active and constructive operations of the mind will in Gestalt psychological thinking go far beyond the notion of the production of meaning by a text. Following our idea here, we can say that in spite of retinal variations and environmental influences, the mind’s image of the object is constant, because mind’s ability to conception transforms perceptual forms. Furthermore, it is a question of constancy of vision, as J. M. Wilding puts it: “The maintenance of a stable world despite changes in the view due to our movements is called position constancy.” (Wilding, 49). This is a constructive process related to our perceptual and cognitive capacities. We can think that if visual perception only seems to have a truly astronomical spelling and vocabulary, it is because it has neither. It remembers not so much specific forms, than processes of construction. We can say that in real visual perception, we have taught ourselves to see that a table is rectangular even though, as we walk around it, its images on our retina can only be a constantly changing series of quadrilaterals. (Durgnat, 1984, 94). Consequently, this is why it is obvious, for example, why elasticity is the essence of visual perception and cognitive structure of things, even at the expense of some possible confusion. Visual elasticity in visual perception resembles analogy in that it may be very precise or very rough by nature. Fur-

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ther on, this means that it can only work in an intimate alliance with other principles. According to an idea here, we can think that if a single image is rich in its various complications, then the multiplicities according to it are based on the points for our attention through perception. Following this, as our gaze—and our thoughts independently of it—move over an image, they discover a variety of centre points. In the light of this, the image and its associations may tempt, tease and lure or provoke us although the artist might have anticipated the manoeuvres of our attention. Pictorial reading of an image or pictorial appreciation of an image gives us further encouragement to look for the graphics. As a consequence of this, it is possible to develop a new way of looking through the configuration of pictorial elements in an image, because the eye rarely fixes on a certain point for very long. As an outcome, the essence of this process is more likely some kind of patrolling over an image. (Durgnat, 1984, 6). There are elements in a single image that call attention to themselves more strongly than others, but at the same time the spectator is also aware of the compositional whole because looking at images is fundamentally a mental process. Noël Burch related to our contention that all the elements in any given image are perceived as equal in importance, which counters a fondly cherished notion of nineteenth-century that art critics later embraced by a number of twentieth-century photographers: the belief that the eye explores a framed image according to a fixed itinerary, focusing first on a supposed ‘centre of compositional focus’ (generally determined by the time-honoured ‘golden rectangle’), then travelling through the composition along a path supposedly determined by the disposition of its dominant lines. (Burch, 34). Following this idea means that this kind of conception is outdated because the modern eye sees things differently. The conceptual meaning of this lies in the idea that, for example, an artist cannot direct our attention as closely as certain traditional analyses, based

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on compositional level, firmly believe in, since powerful structures in images can exist without a one-way, linear order. According to this study, our visual attention moves across an image as if we were redirecting a more or less real scene, at least to the extent that an image can be a real object and a depiction of something. Cognitively and perceptually speaking, we often see things as a whole and after that we can dip into details, which become centre points, but at the same time we are looking at the relations, which also become points of interest. For example, when we look at a map, which covers a distance between two places, we don’t look at a point, but instead at a distance between two points. This means that the same time when we are talking about centre points, we are also talking about zones, lines, distances and fuzzy circles. Another point is that when we look at a triangle, we can see it as a shape, or as an outline, and we can look at the three lines or we can look at the three angles. This means that perceptually it is a question of the extreme flexibility of the centration points in our mind, and these points will constantly overlap each other. Furthermore, when looking at a triangle, we can centre on the top apex, and then on another apex and another apex; next we can centre on the space between the lines, and we can think of the three lines as one shape; then we can think of each line on its own, and each angle on its own. This shows how our perceptual world comprises multiple and constantly changing variations and possibilities. Consequently, according to this example of seeing, we have actually found over ten centration points without moving our because they are really tension points, some of which are as big as the whole triangle, some of which are as small as a given angle. According to this study, while our visual attention moves across an image, its major configurations and relationships will keep recurring and reorganizing. And since films exist specifically in time, they expand our perceptual shaping possibilities available to painting and sculpture. Generally, this means that when talking

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about the varieties of visual coherence in perception we can state that representational art always re-creates the world around us as a new form of visual organization. (Braudy, 23). From a scholarly point of view we might have an intuitive conception of time’s role in cinema, but when it comes to defining it, we might face certain difficulties. If we simply substitute time for space in this definition to give us a characterization of time, we end up with something that might feel trivial. It seems that to overcome the difficulty, we need to distinguish between the time of the narration and the time of the characters in the narrative. Characters have a more personal time in cinema, where this is understood as the set of changes going on in the time of the characters, and in their immediate vicinity. The time of the narration is more external, registered by the changes in the narrative. Despite this, external and personal times can go together, or follow different directions and dimensions, for the changes that constitute personal time can also take place in external time. Another point to follow is that since the methods related to looking at images are in part subliminal, images can constitute a generally available method of creating visual coherence. This perceptual and cognitive coherence forms an effect and a reflection of visual thinking that is present every day in paintings, photographs, comic strips, sculptures, life-style, and other possible ways of dealing with contemporary visual culture. Related to visual and perceptual thinking, we can say that the main structural similarity between the eye and the camera is that both have lenses, and that is not very significant, since everything else in their perspective and perceptual systems is entirely different. For example, the camera captures a superficial and momentary impression of an image or a scene on a photograph or on a film, with an all-over evenness which is as un-analytical as it is impartial, and with a fixity which renders it incapable of interrogation, correction and re-vision. In comparison with this we can think that human vision, or rather human attention,

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entails the operations of the mind’s eye. This means that it works like a rough-and-ready but versatile and self-correcting computer, which can summate and integrate a variety of glances, and for which ‘I see’ means ‘I understand’ since it functions by feedback between seeing and knowing, between seeing-as, and interrogation. (Durgnat, 1983, 8). This is an important notion related to our visual understanding as a whole. According to this study, when we are moving through visual spaces, the exact definitions are usually less important than some kind of rough perception and spatial location. As mentioned before, the visual world around us is rarely at rest: and if it is then we are not, because our eyes move so that the perceptual image on the retina is constantly unstable. An image can be elusive and enigmatic. And more closely, when objects do pass us, they change their form constantly. This means that even the most static objects are in a visual movement when we approach them or move our heads. In visual and pictorial perception there’s a powerful element of analogue approximation, which means that when an object looks roughly like one, it probably is one. For perceptual and cognitive reasons, analogy between objects and inside the images is elastic just as similarity is a matter of degree, analogy understood in this way is also selective since it operates even when limited to certain aspects. It is reasonable to think that the differences between cinematic realism and human vision, for example, are powerful since in other respects these two modes are less unlike than others, and that certain phenomenal similarities create effects of immediacy and vividness. Certain types of images can share stimulus features with their subjects. According to our point of view, our expectations will affect our interpretations. Following this, an image can be a simulacrum, which relates to the discourse on real and original (Baudrillard). In the digital age, the concept of originality of an image has changed, and in this kind of thinking of the origin of an image can be a mental reflection in the image-maker’s mind.

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Following this logic, the images have tied themselves into the series of images on the level of the mind. The meaning of an image, in this light, can also be determined by the media context in which an image is presented and viewed. An image can have various effects on the way observers think since the whole process around this is a complex meeting place for social and cultural interactions. Meaning relies in the interaction of all possible elements in this situation. Perceptually speaking, we can think that different cultures and different styles establish this mental set, and create a kind of expectation of horizon that will register all the deviations and changes. It creates a mental alert with all the attitudes and expectations that will affect to our perceptions. Related to this, also different mediums create different mental sets. Perceptually, we can read an image when we recognize its reflections on the reality in a given medium. According to this, we have to identify the mental set of a certain image to be able understand the image as representation. Furthermore, the context of the image will often bring in expectations, and the interpretation of the image is then possible based on various clues. To reflect different meanings into the analysis of the images means that there are different factors mixed with each other. Finally, what we read from the images depends on our ability to recognize things that have reflections into our storage of images in our minds.

4. Cinematic Metaphysics

Deduced Viewpoints The phenomenological description will comprise two parts, description of the “noetic” (noesis) or “experiencing” and description of the “noematic” (noema) of the “experienced.” Edmund Husserl

In visual perception, the transitions of elements inside narrative may even be more abrupt than habits of language might suggest. Phrases like ‘cutting between shots’ risk suggesting that spectators experience first a shot, then a cut, and then another shot in that order, as if experienced form reduplicated the material order of the strip of film. But the cut was never on display. The spectator never sees a cut as such, and moreover, the cut on the strip of film, is identical with the frame-line between any two frames of the continuing shot. The new shot is offered at the same speed as the next frame in the old shot. The spectator sees the sudden new form, from which one deduces, that the viewpoint or scene has changed. The second shot intervenes directly with the first. The spectator does not experience a cut, but the second shot, and the differences between the shots. What one sees is the new graphic form of scenic information. Any new viewpoint is a deduced difference, a difference of signified content, and not of signifying form. The invisibility of the cut and the deduced nature of the change of viewpoint explain how cuts, although so total, can yet be subliminal. Given successive shots of, say, a car speeding by a castle, the spectator primarily sees ‘car-and-castle’. Acting as a

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unity, this scene overrides the fact of different shots. The different views are a secondary difference, and correspond to seeing the same scene “afresh”, looking at things from another angle, or in a different light, or slightly adjusting one’s mental set. Normally, each shot would show something slightly different. One shot might emphasize the driver’s experience, another the car’s relationship to the castle, and so on. But neither of these emphasizes ‘ruptures’ or contradicts the other. On the contrary: each complements the other. It develops the same general situation in an on-going way. The shot is felt, not to interrupt its predecessor but to continue it, by proceeding to another point. The cut is a continuation and thus easily a connection, the condition of an association in which the relationship overrides the discontinuity. In cinematic narration, strongly felt continuities are derivable, not only from spatial deletions, but from swiftness in describing a situation and its development, or the trajectories of a story, or transitions from one topic to another. Very often, therefore, abruptness is also smoothness. If a connection is not immediately apparent, then often the spectator will nonetheless be patient, at least if the discourse so far seems to be coherent. For one understands that, in discourse as in discovering the world, information comes to us ‘in bits and bytes,’ that is successively, and not simultaneously. Cinematic narration is indeed linear in the sense that exposition is as ‘timebound’ as narration or description is. Exposition, description, and narration are three major classes of discourse. Narration applies to stories, that is, chronological states involving alternative possibilities. Description covers states and systems (such as cycles) where chronology is non-alternative, secondary, or nonexistent. Exposition applies to slightly more complex configurations of considerations. Even when the subject matter is clearly structured, the structure of the discourse may be designed to gear into the present structure of ideas in the target audience. Discourse usually incorporates aspects of the structure of subject.

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But, particularly when the subject has no particular structure, or several structures, the discourse devises its own. Cinematic narration is not linear in the absolute, atomistic, sense, which would suggest that all of the information is broken down into separate bits which can only follow one another, as on a digital computer. Indeed, the shot, like any other picture, is largely a simultaneous display, even when movement, change, pictorial composition and priority of interest render the reading of the shot sequential or successive. Similarly, words are both successive and simultaneous. “The cat sat on the mat” is a linear sequence, but ‘cat’ is already an assemblage of data in no particular order. For example, it specifies the following: feline, furry, four paws, mammal, purring, scratching, and so on, combining all of one’s general knowledge of cats in its various contexts and connections. According to our view here, all exposition involves transitions and deletions, and the cut from one shot or scene to another is as swiftly sublime as any other arrangement in discourse. Hence, there is the insistence that a shot is less an illusion of real space than an idea of a visual-physical space. Just, as a discourse is a flow of ideas, so can continuity in narration be a flow of visual ideas, abstracted space-time chunks and their contents, and the association of those contents. Everything depends upon how easy the association to the next idea is in context of the ideas so far. Similarly, film images with their continuous experience of change denote the present tense of involvement and identification. In cinematic narration as in verbal language, the thread of continuity may be initially abrupt, or mystifying. A great fascination lies in the difficulty of specifying where continuities end and in-coherences begin. This emphasis on the connectionist role of coherent meaning risks implying that only the spectator’s trust in some ulterior coherent meaning linking the shots saves him from experiencing fast cuts as disorientating, violent, even painful ‘bombardment of im-

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ages,’ although avant-garde films might offer very scantily connected images at machine-gun speed. This very speed distances the spectator from each image. At this rate it might seem that it is almost impossible to jolt the spectator. Far from cutting being condemned to be violent, it is condemned to be smooth, but this would dispose of theories from Eisenstein’s dynamic collision to the Hollywood’s concern to maintain smoothness. Continuity annoyances are rarely a matter of ’ ‘pure form,’ nor even of interactions between it and human physiology. They are invariably semantic, involving the frustration of expectations and information processing. The study of film could prove as central to the study of human perception as Renaissance paintings were for the development of rationalism. (Hochberg, 16). The reading of cuts furnishes vivid demonstrations of just how swiftly the mind can process new perceptual data, and construct a hypothesis of their relationship with different data. This swiftness in reading and relating a new image is a function of ‘simultaneous parallel processing’. The mind seems to concentrate on relationships rather than differences. The brain may be remarkably efficient, but is neither magical nor omnipotent. In film form, which is tightly time-bound, information must be worked out. The reader of a written text may read fast or slow and re-read a passage ten times, but most films use the average constant speed of understanding. This does not relegate cinematic narration to some category of coarser discourse than the performing arts, music and oral literature. Nor should one assume that films impose upon their target audience some lowest common denominator of response, which would coarsen its delicate individualities. On the contrary: it reminds us that each individual spectator adjusts their responses to each film, and in an ongoing manner. Certain sequences in Eisenstein’s films delighted those intellectual spectators whose responses could combine pictorial sophistication with philosophical associations, or those who, after studying his theories, knew how he ex-

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pected them to react. But the same sequences baffled, and therefore annoyed other spectators, whose response to films maximises that visual-physical ‘being-there’ (dasein) amidst the action described (the diegesis). When the spectator sees a new shot, they are, or course, quite free to note that fact, and meditate over it. But this would impede their attention to the ongoing flow of new information, and normally they have no reason to do so. The normative spectator is readily interested in this new development, and in its relationship, and the entire context so far. The shot boundaries may be the least interesting thing about them, even when they help to structure an eloquent composition. The shot as an exact and integral thing is a ‘pawn,’ readily sacrificed to the overall flow. And the illusion, which it generates, is readily sacrificed to the overall illusion, consisting of different pictures. It does not matter that these images contradict one another, thus breaking the illusions at this level. This formulation contrasts with the usual assumption, according to which film is ‘illusionist’ because its visual-physical form is somehow photographic, and connected with movements. Film can achieve an especially intense excitement by transcending this form through cutting. A new osmosis of visual-physical experience occurs. The intensity, which the former gives to the latter, allows the latter to override the former. Thus the created space-time chunks are ‘liquidized,’ they flow into one another, and at the same time they are somewhat abstracted. (Durgnat, 1972). Stefan Sharff has spoken of deletions in cutting. Deletions as a term are free from irrelevant implications. Deletions refer to apparent space, because the deleted spaces may never have existed. In the beginning of Joseph Losey’s The Go-Between (1968), two boys set out to explore a country house. The theme of exploration and the shots of impressively grand staircases and long corridors would seem to render continuity so conspicuous as to forbid deletions. But the film concentrates on particular chunks within the overall activity, thus telescoping a probably all-morning exploration

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into a succession of split-minute shots. It nonetheless contains a sensed continuity, because the spectator sees the tempo of the action in each image, and extrapolates it into the gaps. In this way the implications of actions override concrete form and the diegesis is no longer than the actual film. The basic principles of this kind of continuity highlight individual moments as to imply longer duration, and single actions to imply the whole flow of actions. Also every space implies necessarily to a larger space, because cuts as changes of viewpoint can loosen space and time, and also spectator’s attention in individual shots. And montage, as a collision of ideas, is in a sense also the omission of ideas. According to this study, the cut is a visual relationship between successive images but it is not itself an image, because before the second shot can appear, the first must have vanished. It must become only a memory, a kind of ‘phantom form’. Nonetheless, a visual relationship arises from the juxtaposition; generating that paradox of a pictorial relationship which is not a picture. When Eisenstein theorized cuts as graphic collisions between the shots, he was only describing what every spectator, who sees his earlier films, unforgettably experiences. As shots replace one another in the same screen space, their graphic forms can collide, and visual features in one shot seem to strike against visual features in another shot. This collision generates a shock, which belongs in neither of the shots, but accrues to the second shot before fading. This succession-as-collision depends not on persistence of vision, whereby the human retina retains an image like some short-lived photographic process, but on the mechanisms of visual perception. These structures are not passive, transparent, or ethereally acquiescent to outside stimuli, but instead they are hardworking physical structures. They generate physiological sensations akin to a noise, and craftsmen naturally co-opt the sensations for their purposes, thus turning this ‘noise’ back into message. In the kinetic-physical quality of graphic experience, there may well be physiological feedback from another

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source, the kinetics of sensory-motor experience, but if so, the balance of noise and feedback is difficult to determine. The images, which relate directly across the cut, are not simple, single entities. Each image is already multi-factorial, a structured combination of many features. A cut may be very smooth in conspicuous respects, or very abrupt, with every opportunity for varying degrees in different combinations. In other words, the cut, as a general form, has no general meaning, which corresponds to all cases related to cuts. It is not really a semantic category even if it is a formal one. It accommodates very different relationships and meanings. The cut means whatever the juxtaposition of shots implies. It is this variety of relationships between intricately related forms, which make the art of editing a semantic craft, that is to say, a craft that is always an art. Film has the reputation of being a selfevident art, as obvious as perspective, but the self-evident is often made so by painstaking craft, by the art, which conceals art, and by adjusting intricacies and implications. We may further speculate how chaos and confusion constantly await, whence procedural rules like the continuity rules try to sort out situations. New ways of looking were a primary focus of the French avant-garde in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. What ‘looking’ means was thus a central concern of the modern art at a time of rapid social change. For example, the painters who worked in Cubism were interested in depicting objects from several points of view simultaneously. It was a style resistant to the dominant model of perspective, because it proclaimed that the human eye is never at rest upon a single point, but is always in motion. The Cubists painted objects as if they were being viewed from several different angles simultaneously, and focused on the visual relationship between objects. Cubism changed the nature of the relationship between the painted image and reality, and by so doing iexpressed a new relationship between man and reality. (Berger, 1971). Many other styles (for example, Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism) have also

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been responses to the dominance of perspective in Western art, and declared more subjective and complex visions.

Cutting In fact, much of the power of images, we might conjecture, comes precisely from their ability to resist being entirely subsumed under the protocols of specific cultures. Martin Jay

In cinematic narration, some cuts can be so smooth that the very category of cutting is thrown into question. In Rope (1949), Alfred Hitchcock constructed shots lasting ten minutes each (the maximum allowed by his equipment) and, on top of that, disguised the cuts by closely matching the first and last frames of adjacent shots. The cuts are detectable only because such matching is surprisingly difficult technically. When the cuts involve no change of viewpoint, they are, in intention and in principle, undetectable, or rather they are moments within one sustained shot, one pause amongst others in the camera’s continuous movements. Moreover, cuts are clear only to connoisseurs who find them interesting despite Hitchcock’s avowed intent of achieving as cut-less film. Hitchcock’s particular choice of editing structures comes to signify the meaning of specific narrative situations. His use of editing and camera movement, for example, is particularly convenient in identifying the relationship between the specialized use of the long take in Rope, and the way that extended camera movements are used in conjunction with the classical editing of shot-reverse-shot discipline, and montage sequences in all of his films. At the other extreme, cuts can occur in startling fashion, and some are indeed called ‘shock-cuts’. Even incompetent, truly muddled cutting is experienced in a less local way than one might expect. In amateurish “home videos”, we experience not so much a succession of immediate rude jolts, but a diffuser incoherence, a sense of rooms and walls floating uncertainly around one another, of space as wavering yet constrictive.

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Hitchcock’s highly personal use of classical editing, particularly in the shot-reverse-shot mode used to establish meaning within the dialogue sequences of Notorious (1946), creates a system of meaning in which formal structures and narrative material articulate. Hitchcock’s editing rhythm works through the alternation of the shot-reverse-shot, and the relatively impersonal two-shot as analogues for conversational intimacy. Also important is his use of formal dialogue and symmetrical systems as visual counterparts for emotional confusion—the oppositions of psychological and social order, and the related issue of sincerity and deception. This last issue is especially useful in considering the nature of a character’s intensely subjective relationship to the events of a particular narrative, which is often a surrogate for the relationship of the viewer to the films. Robin Wood’s point of view deals with the extended treatment of recurrent themes in the films of the American period, particularly what he calls the ‘therapeutic’ theme as Hitchcock’s counterpoint of pathology and psychological health. Wood also attempts to establish the rudiments of Hitchcock’s location in a literary tradition and his discussion of Hitchcock and Shakespeare is in this context important. (Wood, 1969). It is useful to approach the films in general, as well as the specific insight into Hitchcock’s methods, and particularly the aspects of the ontological connections between the film narrative and its subjects. (Cavell, 1971). In considering the continuity of the Hitchcock canon, there is particular critical value in the discussion of the continuity of genres in general, and the persistence of the traditional or folk forms of narrative in film, in which characters are mythical types. These observations on the evolution of a narrative tradition lead to the consideration which follows of Hitchcock’s recurrent use of formal symmetry, the mythical type of the scapegoat and the archetypal resonance of narrative situations and the configuration of characters in Hitchcock’s films. One might imagine that camera movements, being gradual, consistent and like real-life vision, would be immune to whatever

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possibilities of distraction might burden cuts. On the contrary, a cut from a long shot of a scene to a close up can feel entirely natural, for it resembles real-life vision and the way our attention moves from a general orientation to a ‘closer look’ at whatever attracts our eye. The cut swiftly fulfils our interest or clearly re-directs it. It is a good gestalt, a neater diagram than real-life vision offers. But if the camera moves from long shot to close-up, it takes longer, and redirects our interests less swiftly. There may be an intermediate period when we are not sure what we are being redirected to look at. For such lesser clarity of extraction there may be excellent reason, and indeed the track-in to close-up can have very different effects, depending upon each specific configuration. It may be short, swift and inconspicuous; or slow and creepy. Nothing is more direct, logical and natural than the cut, and nothing is as swift in asserting a new topic and providing information about itself. Nor does abstention from cuts respect the integrity of some unity of space, which would characterize real-life vision. In real-life vision, our attention consigns the overall consistency of the space around us to subliminal status, while our attention picks out, ‘segregates’ but also inter-relates successive centres of interest. Our eyes may move like a camera but our attention jumps like editing. The image on the retina never even reaches consciousness. The camera has no brain, only a retina, and filmmakers quickly learn not to take expressions like ‘camera-eye’ too literally. Without exploring all the differences between film and real-life vision, the overriding fact is clear, that the human-eye and the camera-eye have nothing in common except a lens. Human vision is edited in the camera by the brain. The eye is thought-driven, and the film negative is a retina with no thoughts, no responses, and no senses. The cameraman’s eye must direct the camera’s choices. The problem is not the sophistication of mechanical reproduction as compared to the naivety of the mind but the reverse since the machine is so primitive that the mind hardly knows how to gear

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down to it. According to Gilles Deleuze, the film image offers a perceptual process beyond the notion of natural perception, since the cinematographic apparatus continuously produces an illusionary movement through its interaction of different instantaneous images. (Deleuze 1991, 1–3). In this way, the film image creates an infinite series of past and future. In film, facial and bodily performances can be more effective than actual speech in relaying psychological and behavioural characteristics. In this way, bodily expression acts as a vehicle of the mind where mental processes are rendered through the action of performance. In this flow of transformation the spectator’s mind can also deal with irrational situations. The image can be incompatible with the visual field around it, and with the spectator’s physical reality. The camera moves, but gravity tells the spectator that their body is still seated, and their visual systems cannot come fully into play. What lays special duties on film continuity is not the clumsiness of the spectator’s brain, but its accuracy in up-fronting the genuinely irrational nature of being. The elaborate fetishization of Madeleine (Kim Novak) by ‘Scottie’ Ferguson (James Stewart) in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is a similar impulse in a psychologically deranged character to restore the illusion of superficial continuity to a situation that is emotionally disjoined. In a way, Vertigo has similarities in its basic idea with Rear Window (1954). The spectator follows this mystical Madeleine like Ferguson does, sharing the wandering, and later the guilty feelings related to her death. (von Bagh, 56). The guilty feeling stays, although the spectator gets to know the basic things behind the happenings earlier than Ferguson. Despite of this, the spectator starts to participate in all this, and is also involved with complex moral issues, cause-and-effect questions of responsibility, and so on. (Ibidem). Moral pressures are cleared out and intensified through the structure of suspense, which continues all the time. In Vertigo, Scottie tries to recreate Madeleine in the figure of Judy (Novak). All these moral pres-

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sures and issues are intensified in the film through the construction of suspense, which is cleverly built up on themes of vertigo and falling. As so often with Hitchcock, the creation of suspense deals with moral, psychological and erotic motifs. The suspense creates not only spectator’s interest towards the future, but at the same time brings in an evaluation of the past. The essential thing is to decode the setting, which in Vertigo means a therapeutic treatment for the protagonist, and also for the spectator. This is due to the carefully structure identification process that Hitchcock uses in this film. (Ibidem). Vertigo has unique continuity of development, which contains a brief prologue and three main movements. In the prologue, we see the incident that precipitates Ferguson’s vertigo. The first movement deals with his consent to follow Madeleine, and the gradual deepening of his involvement. The second movement shows her attempted suicide, their meeting, and the development of their relationship until her death and his breakdown. The third movement begins with his meeting with Judy, and passes through the development of their relationship, his attempted re-creation of Madeleine, to Judy’s death and the curing of Ferguson’s vertigo. This is not to argue, as montage enthusiasts did, that cameramovement should be proscribed. On the contrary the director can compensate this by moving the camera in a slow, smooth, and careful way, so that an unnoticeable unnaturalness is as rich a semantic intensifier as the opposite unnaturalness of the cut. A cut is the shortest distance between two points. It is the fastest and smoothest way to travel from one point to another, and by going straight to the new point it establishes a connection. A cut is both an analysis and a new association. Its segmentation preludes recombination. Generally, the discontinuity corresponds to the discontinuity between any two ideas, or indeed any two sentences. A series of short sharp sentences can be read more smoothly than one continuous, but convoluted one. We have followed a common habit

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of language (parole), whereby editing is the juxtaposition of shots. But it is an unusual type of juxtaposition, for the spectator cannot see both shots at once. The juxtaposition is really a succession. In the more usual sense of juxtaposition, images are laid out side by side, as on a page, and the eye can move back and forth from one to the other both configurations being continuously present. Films can occasionally use ‘split-screen’ effects, dynamically combining succession with juxtaposition. But for the moment our concern is in the more basic and pervasive form, suggesting montage as succession. A redefinition of a cut as a connection is paralleled in etymology. As a production term cut begins from craft process: the editor shortens shots by cutting a strip of film across the frame lines. But since one usually goes on to join the separate shots one cuts together and between the shots, so that cutting also means its own opposite, which is the linking and assembling cuts together. The term ‘editing’ may carry slightly stronger connotations of recombination and assemblage, than ‘cutting’. But the two terms are commonly synonymous, and the strongest distinction between them is that cutting associates with a manual craft, whereas editing up-fronts executive status. In French, montage is the standard term for cutting and editing. The Russians adopted it as a standard term, to which the theories of Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian avant-garde artists gave a special sense. This was helped by the French avant-garde interest in dazzling cutting, and the two influences established montage in English as meaning conspicuous, creative cutting. The term montage sequence means a short sequence of conspicuous editing, often using optical effects of many kinds. To say that editing depends on knowledge is to say that it depends on implication. To a great extent, the art of editing is the art of anticipating the spectator’s expectations and questions, and at a pace to which one can readily adapt. In cinematic narration, shots contribute to what Jean Mitry called ‘logic of im-

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plication’. Logic often implies causality, or some otherwise necessary relationship with determining prescriptions and inexorable consequences, as distinct from looser relationships, influences and tendencies. Usefully it stresses the positivism of the process, the idea that mental constructions are very forceful and strong enough to form a structure on which film form (including editing) can rely. Cinema is labelled by selectivity—viewpoints, which are developed through choices. Even the shortest documentary contains a lot of organizing, a point of view of fiction. So the essential cinematic strategy contains the idea by which one can hide things in a film, in order to gradually reveal them. Through this kind of mechanism a series of cinematic shots shape into a series of emphasises, throughout the selective and manipulative role of the camera. That is why film is not a reproduction of reality, because once a scene has been cut into shots, one is not working with the reproduction of reality anymore; instead, one works with the statements referring to that reality. In a sense, film seems real, because it reproduces the way we see things in the world; it hasn’t got as much to do with the fact that it reproduces the world exactly, but it reproduces the way in which we look at it. Cutting into shots sometimes corresponds to selection and manipulation, like when in a film one hides themes in order to reveal them, which sometimes corresponds to the way in which one normally uncovers reality (one sees a thing in a long shot, then walks up to it, and it is in close-up; then one walks around it, and it is like a cut or camera movement). In many films this may reproduce normal perception, which in one sense is manipulation and in another it is not. Selection can rely on natural processes, natural perception, and it can rely on manipulation as a trick made by the filmmaker. Most of our thinking goes on in the intervening areas between reality and fiction, which can be called speculation or hypothesizing, and that is an area of uncertainty.

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Forms But if cinema and photography seemed to reincarnate the camera obscura, it was only as a mirage of a transparent set of relations that modernity had already overthrown. Jonathan Crary

Eisenstein among other Russian theorists was the first to see the full possibilities of the early fragmentations of space and time in cinema. The emphasis was on cutting, which depended on showing. That is how Eisenstein brought to film an eye as ‘painterly’ as that of the German expressionists, and Eisenstein-type of editing became part of film language generally and featured particularly in the work of film theoreticians and documentarists, who were often the same people. Eisenstein’s discussion of film form in his essay Film Form: New Problems (1935), its organity, and its function as a paradigm of reality, described the formal thrust of film. Form allows the unique moment at which the synthesis of material and non-material reality occurs. Elaborately analogical formal design allows related aspects of reality to be represented in a series of cross-referential, elliptical texts. All that is visible is organized to imply the considerably larger scale of all that would not be capable of inclusion, except by the didactic intrusion of a narrator whose voice would necessarily falsify the paradigm by having no analogue in reality. Eisenstein treated film form as a non-didactic level of narration which, while objective, can also provide a subjective commentary that is not necessarily that of an external narrative authority. The objective or neutral level of form presents a single means of access to reality, but also shares its multiplicity of details and information with those that are simultaneously being organized within an alternating progression of other views. This synthesizes the objective and subjective, both direct vision and the flux of consciousness. It is the automatism of the camera’s vision moving within the world, reframing, and re-emphasizing through composition. This is a sign of a paradigm of the reality as it is created

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in the temporal progression or evolution of a consciousness that continuously strives to reconcile the antinomies of objectivity and subjectivity. Russian theorists devised the useful distinction between analytic and synthetic editing. In analytic editing, a clearly single, continuous space is dissected into several shots. In synthetic editing several spaces are assembled into one. Synthetic editing disguises an initial separateness to create an apparent continuity. The practices are less symmetrical than the terms. Analytic editing may or may not disguise the original space. Synthetic editing does that always. The opposite of analytic editing is intercutting. Synthetic editing is the first hint that the distinction between one space and several spaces can be far from clear. How does the spectator then decide whether successive shots have remained within the same scene? One must decide whether the space, direction, action, objects, and general character of the shots look roughly compatible. One must reckon not only with actual positions but also with general trajectories of movement, and with spatial extrapolations like the probable continuation beyond the frame, the directions of people’s looks, and so on. Thus, on-screen space always suggests off-screen space, without defining it. The spectator works through probability or improbability of continuation. Since off-screen space remains undefined, space here can only mean a kind of zone or general area. That’s why it is a feature of general description. Let’s take a classic example. In Luis Buñuel’s & Salvador Dali’s Un chien andalou (1928) a girl looks out of a window, and sees a fallen cyclist in the street below. She rushes out of the door, down some stairs, emerges from the street door, and embraces the cyclist. In one sense there is a sequence of several scenes consisting of a room, a staircase, and a street. But in terms of physical and visual continuity it looks like one scene, because the girl can see from the room into the street. Although the stairwell is visually sepa-

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rated, her physical movements are also in one uninterrupted line. This film is full of spatial tricks, and these kinds of equivalents are complete routine in many films. The principle here extends through chains of sequences. It prompts the question of how far apart two persons may be, so that the same space (the line of pursuit) feels like two separate shots. For example, chases in films are so ambiguous that they can be handled either as a sequence or as a scene. If we intercut between two cars shown separately, it suggests a sequence, because they will pass through the same spaces but at separate times. A high distant viewpoint might show both cars in the same shot, in which case it is a scene. If the director combines intercutting together with such long shots, the combination would be called either a scene or a sequence, though the general sense of a movement might favour ‘sequence’ over the more static connotations of a ‘scene’. This would suggest that the scene-sequence distinction involves not merely the relationship between different objects but their relationship with the camera. In this case, the scene and sequence are not categories of the diegesis, but a function of exposition, and often a decision of style in most cases. Theorists have assumed that since film is so realistic and visual, spatial relationships must be self-evident, so that it is immediately obvious whether a shot belongs in the same space as its predecessor, or somewhere else. Anyway, there are many cases where a shot carries no indication of whether it is another part of this scene or the first part of another scene. Cinema is certainly a visual-physical medium in which space-time continuity is always conspicuous but not self-evident. Hence the conveyance of rough relative positions is so crucial and pervasive that it extends beyond the realm of cutting, and routinely makes calls upon the internal content and form of the shot. In phenomenological practice, Eisenstein’s contribution stands out vividly. It constitutes classical film theory’s major ideas on film. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle, he asked certain central

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questions about the nature of cinema. Eisenstein thought that it is a form of an audiovisual spectacle (Debord) drawing on representational processes akin to those in many other arts like literature, music, theatre, and the graphic and plastic arts. He also wondered about the whole filmmaking process and about the relation between parts and whole. Eisenstein disclosed many suggestive relations of part to part and part to whole: not only various types of editing but also ‘montage within the shot,’ dominant/overtone interactions, vertical sound/image relations, a polyphonic weave of ‘voices,’ and, at the largest scale, motivic ‘representations’ that contributed to the emergence of an emotion-laden image. (Bordwell, 1993, 279). In a broader compass, Eisenstein also thought about the characteristic means and ends of the art. For him, the formal devices and systems that he disclosed aim at the maximal excitation of the spectator-perceptual stimulation, emotional transport, and intellectual awareness; at the limit, ecstasy. (Ibidem). The real value of this thinking lies in its idea to formalize concrete qualities of texture and pattern. The Aristotelian distinction between form and material was central to Eisenstein’s avant-garde contemporaries, and he enriched it in several ways. He analysed film form as both a geometrical structure (as in the canon of five-act tragedy ruling The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and a dynamic, time-bound process (as in overtonal and vertical montage). (Ibidem). For Eisenstein’s purposes was crucial to think about the development of film form as a system of technical choices. This system had a distinct purpose under some dominant or artistic image. He tried to disclose how the physical qualities of the performer governed the possibilities of kinetic expression. He questioned parameters of the visual image-composition, line, tonality, and movement, and then sought to reduce them to principles that would explain the effects of films and give directors more deliberate control. His pedagogy offered at once practical advice on planning a production and analytic

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concepts for bringing to light the particularities of method informing a work’s structure. (Ibidem). In line with Bordwell, the final outcome was a poetics of film style unprecedented in its comprehensiveness and detail. Eisenstein was very broad in his approach since he understood larger forces behind cinematic development, discovering findings of art history, literary and musical theory to bring out common formal problems across media. He was able to show the relevance of Piranesi, El Greco, Poe, and other artists to the problems of cinematic creation. At the same time, his intimate knowledge of filmmaking practice allowed him to start not with abstract doctrines, but with cinematic qualities that required exposure and explanation. Furthermore, whereas Aristotle offers what we might call heavily theoretical ideas, Eisenstein works chiefly in the domain of descriptive thinking, delineating the functions of particular devices within the cinematic system. More faithful transmitters of the Aristotelian impulse in his milieu were the Russian Formalists, who articulated a systematic, inductive, and open-ended inquiry into literary art. Nevertheless, in Eisenstein’s attempt to show what formal principles yield the most effective artworks he brought the tradition of Aristotelian thinking into the study of cinema. These ideas also bring out an important contribution by Eisenstein. Aristotle concentrates on the playwright’s making of plots; in his system, spectacle (opsis) is a secondary factor. Eisenstein almost exactly reverses the proportions. The ‘attraction’ as explained in Eisenstein’s 1923 essay is anti-Aristotelian in its refusal to be subordinated to plot structure. Consequently, when the attraction becomes a unit of spectacle to be integrated into the overall effect, Eisenstein remains less interested in plot, character, and theme than in spectacle. His ‘dramaturgy of film form’ is really a dramaturgy of film style, of lighting, composition, framing, and editing. Furthermore, Eisenstein also attempts to explain how a performance is built for the audience. The writings on audiovisual

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montage also highlight principles of movement common to music and visual spectacle. In lectures of film direction, and apart from his theories of editing, Eisenstein later offered an analytical description of staging and performance that suggestively supplements the conception of mimetic art. Later on, André Bazin emphasized deep focus in seeing the image as a graphic structure. Although Bazin thought that Orson Welles and William Wyler did not direct the spectator’s gaze. Durgnat thought that it was a first step on the same slippery slope down which the Bolsheviks had rushed in the 1920s, when they, too, restricted manipulation to montage, removed it from mise-en-scène, and reduced the shot to an unarticulated, inarticulate unit—merely ‘raw material’ with which film-editing could have its will. (Durgnat, 1983, 2–3). Lev Kuleshov and in certain moments also Bazin were overlooking the complex structure of an image. Later on critics went to contrast the metteur-en-scène with the auteur and stressed camera movements. They also overlooked the richness of the pro-filmic operations of the mise-enscène, which the shot exists to show, often from the angle which showing requires. Let us underline that a shot in a film is a series of images, a series of frames, but it is also a serial image, a new kind of pictorial entity, and even if there are no camera movements in a shot, on the level of the image there are many kinds of movements, which allow the shot to be covered. A movement (objectional or camera movement) does not undermine the image, but develops it. What the graphic qualities lose in the sense of economy, they will regain through tempo, rhythmic, choreography and orchestration. (Ibidem). A knowledge and understanding of film is vital to improving its aesthetic quality. In cinematic narration, the close-up of the human face makes possible the silent soliloquy, in which the face speaks, whether the character is alone or with others, mute or in conversation. It is certainly an artistic creation. The close-up can

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lift a character out of the heart of the greatest crowd and show how solitary it is in reality and what it feels in this crowded solitude. Cinema, especially sound film, can separate the words of a character talking to others from the mute play of features by means of which, in the middle of such a conversation, we are made to overhear a mute soliloquy and realize the difference between this soliloquy and the audible conversation. Film, through the close-up, can make possible the polyphonic play of features ... the appearance of contradictory expressions on the same face ,so that a variety of feelings, passions and thoughts are synthesized in the play of the features as an adequate expression of the multiplicity of the human soul. (Balázs, 64). This reveals to the audience ‘a strange new dimension,’ ‘a new world,’ the world of microphysiognomy which could not otherwise be seen with the naked eye or in everyday life. The art of film is also characterised by its capacity to change set-up and camera angle. It is through its capacity to change set-ups and angles that film can express different moods. Changing angles and set-ups is crucial to ‘the most specific effect of film art’—identification. Cinematic montage is the association of ideas rendered visual; it gives the single shots their ultimate meaning because the spectator presupposes that in the sequence of pictures that pass before his eyes there is an intentional predetermination and interpretation. This phenomenological consciousness, this confidence that we are seeing the work of a creative intention and purpose, not a number of pictures thrown and stuck together by chance, is a psychological precondition of seeing a film and we always expect, presuppose and search for meaning in every film we see. This is a basic, irresistible intellectual requirement of the spectator and it operates even if by some reason or other the film seen is really merely a chance collection of pictures stuck together without rhyme or reason. Seeking meaning is a fundamental function of human consciousness and nothing is more difficult than to accept meaningless, purely accidental phenomena with complete

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passivity. Our mechanism of idea association and our imagination will always tend to put some meaning into such a meaningless conglomeration, even though perhaps only in play. (Ibidem, 119). Montage, or editing, can be used to produce a number of important effects. For example, to convey the sense that time has elapsed between two scenes, it can interpolate another scene in another place. In this kind of interpolation, a most interesting link is between time effect and space effect. The farther away the site of the inserted scene is from the site of the scenes between which it is inserted, the more time we will feel to have elapsed. The interpolated scene technique is difficult to avoid and renders it necessary to make several threads of action run parallel to one another. As well as conveying a sense of time and interweaving several strands of image and narrative, montage also creates associations of ideas, either by suggesting indirectly the inner sequence of the spectator’s ideas and associations or by actually showing the pictures which follow each other in the mind and lead from one thought to the next. The flashback is an example of the latter approach. This may be used in a relatively simple way, in which the transition from fictional present to fictional past is strongly marked, but in which the representation of the past itself takes a straightforward narrative form. On the other hand, it may aim to reproduce the psychological process of remembering the past. As well as working in this way, montage can also work poetically, to produce a non-rational correlation of shapes and images. For this to be successful, however, the images that work poetically and metaphorically must be organic parts of the film story that are raised to symbolic significance; otherwise they will merely be allegories that appear to be thrust into the film to make a point. Similarly, intellectual montage may use the sequences in a film as a hieroglyphic writing of sorts, a ‘rebus’ or picture puzzle, in a way that empties the pictures themselves of meaning and sensuous content, rather than letting the intellectual meanings grow out of pictures that are meaningful and sensuously powerful.

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Contemplation Hence the fact that classical painting spoke—and spoke constantly –while constituting itself entirely itself outside the language; hence the fact that it rested silently in a discursive space, hence the fact that it provided, beneath itself a kind of common ground, where it could restore the bonds of signs and the image. Michel Foucault

Matters of architecture and visual design have shaped the history of cinema. In cinematic narration, things are framed for viewing, and assembled as a part of the spectacle. This has to do with cinematic architecture, moving between interior and exterior spaces. The items on display are ordered, arranged as sequences through spatial structures, and finally assembled as parts of the narrative chain. The history of cinema shows how stories were developed in shaping various views through the processes of montage for imaginative spectatorship. The spectators activated the connection between images and architecture. There was a creation of more or less phantasmagoric relationship between the displayed images and their viewing audience. The spectator is free to develop one’s own mental geography in connection with the displayed views. The montage crested by the spectator’s browsing was designed through the assemblage of the images, and their gradual dissolution from one to the next. This all reflected the history and memory aspect of the cinematic narration, which became a pictorial voyage, and an emotional spectacle. Cinematic narration reflects the work and nature of memory, the construction of history, and through this can create phenomenological reflections on the medium itself. This prompts a larger question on the role of media in contemporary society: In an age where style often overrides content, is it possible that these two can coexist in a creative way? A filmmaker seeks to collect the vanishing fragments of the past, tries to see the unseen, to de- and reconstruct the human past through ephemeral style. Cinematic narration can enact a mimetic desire and evoke

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an aura of authenticity. This enaction can be a dialectical negation arising from within the province of the cinematic form, accepting its central presuppositions, yet displacing its context. They bring the private and the marginal into the field of cinema, discarding the centralized perspective of the narrator in favour of multi-layered fragments, and rely on affective expression rather than analytical interpretation. As immanent negation, this can enlarge the framework and scope of the cinema, producing an effect of counter-history. In many films, there are privileged moments in unfolding which juxtaposes different moments of temporal reference. There can be a connection between present and past, and through this connection one has memory and history. And when one studies films and media works in this way, one is not only studying the development of the form, but also a way of seeing how cinematic and media forms engage concepts, and re-present ideas. In a way, many films and media works are research trips into the past, and the media presentation of memory in these works can be compared with the knowledge proposed by various disciplines that research and speculate on memory processes. If films and media works give us images of memory, the personal archives of the past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past. In fact, films and other media works often merge the two levels of remembering the past, giving large-scale social and political history, and the subjective mode of a single individual’s remembered experience. So, this kind of storytelling is a flashback in its innovative use of various kind of footage. These kinds of works are re-edited traces of a past framed by a narrative which transmits the concepts of history and memory. The past is not regained but reframed through montage and fragmentation. Cinematic language, architecture, and travel culture are lived and constructed structures of life with an ongoing negotiation of emotions, and historical dimensions. They all share a lot of ur-

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ban ties, and work in relation between events and places inside the media discourse. In cinematic narration, moving images work like fictional dynamics of lived and perceived space. In this sense, visual arts express a common notion of knowledge. Media discourses are descriptive in the sense of their narrative impulses, which create psychological, phenomenological, and geographical routes and paths. The observational space of cinematic language, architecture, and travel culture is related to the emotional feelings of memories and sentiments. This emotional terrain reflects interior and exterior landscapes, representations of the states of mind. The subject of media narration is a representation of textual narrative with haptic dimension. Space is the place of emotional and phenomenological interplay, and a discourse of affects. In media geography, one moves through history, and this movement forms a passage of intertextual references, and narrative detours. One approaches an unknown landscape with a cling to its historical and other representations. One may get lost during this wandering, yet the pleasure of incorporation is the measurement of this assimilation. In media discourse, different temporalities are spatially organized, and narratives are configured reproducing the ordering principals of description and emotional and physical transformations. The temporal quality and nature of cinema; its ability to transform still-life representations, images into continuous movement on the screen, and cinema’s complex way to reproduce meanings are aspects that increase film’s possibilities for philosophical reflection. (Deleuze). A filmmaker is a producer of visual space, and experiences. Time and movement are cinema’s prime elements. This reflects traveling, and actually many films are physical and emotional journeys through various landscapes. A filmmaker is a modern landscape painter, a natural historian of sensibility, attentive to the duration of changing experiences of existentiality. The spectator brings in one’s mental space, and cognitively maps the narrative

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chain of events, and orders them in one’s mind to a logical outcome. When talking of film, montage, editing and cutting are close to being synonyms. All refer to the process of cutting the strip of film, and selecting and re-arranging the images on it. Editing is often defined as the selection and arrangement of shots. But, more than this, editing dismantles the shot itself, when it works with the separate images (frames) of which the shots themselves are composed. Each frame is static in itself, and only their swift succession generates the shot’s impression of movement. The removal of frames determines the length of each shot and the selection of which frames to remove changes its content. The anatomy between cinematic language, architecture, and travel culture deals with the very surface of these structures and spectatorship. This involves constructions and readings of physiognomic language of these various media discourses. There is a spectatorial curiousness embedded in all these forms because they are corporeal processes. It is a relation between body and space. Constructed this way, for example, media design is a corporeal process dealing with spatial architectonics. One is acquainted with lived experiences, bodies as objects of media iconography with spatial dimensions. As media forms, cinematic language, architecture and travel culture include narrations in motion. There is a relation to subjectivity in these matters. Since the spectator of these media forms of discourse occupies a special place inside the narration, and leaves phenomenological traces of one’s history onto the media screens. The spectator is embodied with spatiality concerning perceived and lived space. In itself, the image on the screen is a reality like any other; an area within the visual field perceived like all the rest of it. It’s recognised as an image by its visible characteristics as an image, whether paint, or the particular characteristics of photographs—signifiers as such. Simultaneously, one recognises the resemblances to and the differences from other scenes or objects. Hence, most types of depiction cannot reveal their subject without simultaneously, or

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previously, revealing their status as depictions. There is no moment of illusion, which is then checked, or criticised, or deconstructed, by the reality sense. More likely, there might be a moment of recognition and a rush of associations. To this general rule, a few exceptions exist, notably carefully sited trompe-l’oeil paintings. but with most images and effigies, the discrepancies between the representation and the represented are so primary, so radical, so all-pervasive, that we don’t need reminding that the map is not the territory, the picture not the scene. Even the moving photographs in the cinema are blatantly only photographs by texture, and by the arbitrary limitation of their frame. They are incompatible with the cinema, and the flow of information from our body. They are strangely non-responsive to preconscious perceptual adjustments, and any remaining confusion is pulverised by social habituation, and conditioning they scarcely need. But they receive devaluation over again by montage itself, and this means the succession of incompatible scenes all in one space. Normally, the preliminary condition of access to display requires that the represented jibes with the representation. The display must end, if only to accommodate the spectator. And accommodate in this sense is a weasel word, because the spectator’s body only is not accommodated, but merely one’s convenience, interests, and desire for pleasant stimulation without unpleasant confusion. Illusionism may be briefly interesting, as virtuosity, and therefore as a self-reflexive display of the spectacle itself. But it soon palls, and thereafter the spectator requires new information, which means development, change, and succession. The need for on-going information favours mobile, semi-abstract, devalued forms. This means that illusion becomes allusion. Where cinema is concerned, only the message of the message relieves the tedium of the medium. Another insight may also serve as justification in here. The experiential dimension of media discourse is a spectatorial practice of

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spatial relationships, and deals with embodied transformations. Media discourse works with the interconnections between public and private spheres, between interior and exterior realms. There is a constant need for exploration connected with these views. The emotional fixation in this media traveling relates to fantasies of narration through one’s embodiment with the perceived space. The cinematic continuity consists of images and sounds binding together footage from different moments in time in a way that stresses the mutability of their significance. These images and sounds are stitched together into a series of sequences of varying length and tempo that establish intricate rhythms, visual harmonies and counterpoints within the film, and create gradual and sometimes abrupt changes in mood, subject-matter and location. Characteristically, a film or media maker can utilize the whole expanse of the screen, and edit the flow of the images and sounds with an eye to formal symmetry and contrast. Film’s space-time chunks can be liquidized, they can flow into one another, and similarly they can be somehow abstracted. As shots replace one another in the same screen space, their graphic forms can collide, and visual features in one seem to strike against visual features in another. This kind of succession as collision depends not so much on persistence of vision whereby the human retina retains an image, but on the mechanisms of visual perception. The dialectic of montage is not only within a shot, or between different shots, but between any details, and their overall context. Through montage one can think that cutting is, in a way, inseparable from selecting the shots, and arranging the images, and often it is also a question of staging the elements inside and between the shots. On a phenomenological level, the problem of representing history through film and media is bound up with finding a way to write history, a way that acknowledges, rather than occludes, the processes of constructing history as a form of history that finds a place for history’s indeterminacies—

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in terms of both the limits of representation, and the problems that beset our understanding of the temporal. The pictorial composition of images deals with the spectator’s experience through time as a process of constant anticipation and gradual proceeding and accretion of expressive forces understood relationally. This can mean a gestalt approach to understanding all of the elements of pictorial composition. Audiovisual experience deals with temporal continuity and with perceptual and mental phenomenon of attention and certain intentional grasps on reality are not isolated, but can take their place in a gestalt of a temporal character. (Carr, 31). In editing, this is underscored with a reasonable complexity and with multiple features between seeing and audiovisual art. The interaction is there, and we just have to find it. A scene may be real, or feigned, or merely suggested—or, as in many cartoons, a drawing without plausibility, let alone realism. The crucial point is that a film may need no editing if it consists of one shot which is ideal and selfexplanatory as it stands. Many early films were virtually just two shots comprising of a shot of a scene, and a shot of the words spelling the title. Films without editing, or with only trivial editing, are not too rare to prevent the agreement that editing is the essence or ‘pre-condition’ of cinematic art and discourse. In talking about the modes of narration, the phenomenological approach has the possibility to create continuity between physiological and affective responses, creating interplay between various elements. Cinema creates an exploration of the terms and conditions of perception. Cinema has its own reality, its own nature of consciousness, and its own way of thinking where, for example, editing is almost an invariable condition of philosophy of film as a finalized media discourse.

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Impressions and Memories The eye of ego consciousness, the eye of the reader of the book, arises within a cultural-historical moment in which the ego as disembodied spectator is invited to keep his or her eye, singular, fixed, and distant, upon the world. Robert D. Romanyshyn

Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1982) is a film about cinema as a conduit for memory and history, and it critically explores the relationship between different forms of representation. Marker is constantly reflecting upon the complexities of the question of representation and preservation of history in its various manifestations. He is fascinated by the way in which technological media such as audiotape, videotape, photography and film have the ability to trap and trigger impressions and memories, yet, in recording moments from the past, detach those events from their context or source of origination. This theme acquires added dimensions in respect of the impact of new technologies of image making. This issue of the fragility of memory saturates the images and commentary throughout the film. The landscape of Sans soleil is an image world where cultural memory is scarred by an overriding sense of the impermanence of things. The pathway taken in Sans soleil is not straightforward, but a journey through the labyrinth of time, place and memory. The history, which Marker relays is a collective history of events, sites and places, but pervading this is a history made up of personal memories. In the course of the film, the camera-man reflects on his recollections of the political struggles of the past and on the different aims and strategies of representation that have informed his filmmaking, frequently invoking and re-examining, the sounds, themes and images of his previous films and those films, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), that have left their mark on his work. Sans soleil is constructed from letters, impressions, quotations, images and film footage from around the globe. The film mixes diverse materials: Marker’s own footage, both old and new, but also clips from other films, interweaving these fragments into a complex and fragile whole.

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In Sans soleil, Marker uses an epistolary and phenomenological mode of narration, which is a special convention that he has utilized in his films from the 1950s on. Yet, the relatively straightforward use of this mode in his previous works is, in Sans soleil, overlaid with more varied and complex dimensions. Whilst in Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia, 1957) Marker had constructed the commentary in the first person, opening the film with the words “I write to you”, Sans soleil opens in the third person, with a female enunciator stating “He wrote me”. The film consists of a spoken monologue by this unnamed enunciator, who reads and occasionally comments upon fragments of letters sent to her by a similarly unnamed correspondent whom we know from the beginning to be a freelance cameraman, but who remains unnamed until the end. The letters range from specific impressions and reflections upon images, places and events he encounters on his travels, to phenomenological observations about his planned or aborted film projects, or his recollections of the past and speculations about the future. Although this anonymity creates a degree of impersonality, the effect is, in certain respects, arguably more intimate than if the correspondent and enunciator were named. Names here could only be obstructive. This refusal of appellation means that the thoughts conveyed by the enunciator imply a sense of confidentiality, and we are thereby drawn into a close and probing relationship to the correspondence. Bereft of any knowledge about the relationship between the correspondents, the viewer is induced to listen all the more attentively to what is said, and to reconstruct the protagonists out of the fragments we are given. This has the effect of concentrating attention onto the grain of the voice, its subtle inflections and the thoughts they convey, as opposed to who and in what context these words are specifically addressed. Although laconic, the reflections of the cameraman are composed out of a wide array of forms of address, from candid confessions and concrete observations to more musings. The

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emotional register is similarly consciously varied, moving rapidly between witty asides and ironical perceptions to more sardonic and even embittered reflections. However, an intimate and questioning tone prevails, frequently drawn towards melancholy and disenchantment, as the cameraman reflects on the course of history, and vainly tries to separate the mutable appearances of history from its realities. This mutability and ambivalence constitute the intellectual and emotional core of the film, and appear to extend to the film’s characters. As the film progresses, the relationship between the cameraman and his correspondent becomes subtly intertwined. Indeed, at times, it is impossible to decide whether certain observations belong to the cameraman or to the correspondent. Marker creates an effect of indeterminacy in the structure of enunciation, embedding observations between the two; in doing so, he creates a fluid interchange between direct and indirect speech, and between the spoken and written word. This ambiguous status that Marker establishes between the cameraman and the enunciator extends to all the major characters named within the film. We can never be entirely confident about ascribing to any of these characters an unequivocal identity. Those familiar with Marker’s films will inevitably identify him with the character of the cameraman, and may well recognize that some of the fragments of footage ascribed to this character are taken from Marker’s previous films. The cameraman’s trips to Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Iceland, the United States, France and Japan mirror the travels of Marker himself, and again, like Marker, he is a maker of political films, who has an affinity for cats and owls, whose emblematic images are dispersed throughout the film. Yet, as if to unsettle the viewer’s confidence in such identifications, in the credits the letters of the cameraman are ascribed to ‘Sandor Krasna’. Sans soleil sets itself the task of fulfilling Sandor Krasna’s desire to set the image free, to script it its pre-text and seal it. From this process, a new system of signification might

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emerge. (Marchessault, 1986, 4). Though the existence of Sandor Krasna is highly improbable, his mysterious absence, his relationship to the narrator and to the film as well as Chris Marker’s own position in all this, serves to carve a productive uncertainty into the flow of predominantly documentary images. (Ibidem). Similarly, the film’s electronic sounds are attributed to ‘Michel Krasna’. This again has its ironies and associations. The surname Krasna may be interpreted as shorthand for Krasnapolski, one of Marker’s fictional family names. In addition, another “unseen” character in the course of the film enticingly evokes characteristics associated with Marker. Hayao Yamaneko uses computer technology to alter, edit and transform images graphically from an historical archive of film footage. In the film, the cameraman ruminates on several occasions on his friend’s digitalized representations of the past, and, at certain points, images from the film itself recur, reworked through Yamaneko’s technology. Once again, those familiar with Marker’s recent experiments with video and computer technology will recognize the signature of Marker himself on Yamaneko’s images, and may recognize footage used in his previous film, Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977). In the light of this, it is tempting to see each of the characters that emerge within the film as alter egos for Marker, augmenting and separating out different, even conflicting aspects of his own personality. Taken as such, these characters afford Marker the opportunity for both self-assertion and self-effacement, the latter a quality he admires in Japanese culture. Yet, one should resist the temptation to see these characters as simply aggregates of Marker. Just as the use of the female voice to enunciate the cameraman’s reflections always holds us at one remove from the identity of the cameraman, so do these characters act as ‘mediating points of reference’ that perpetually hold open the gap between Marker’s own identity and that of the reflections of the characters. The complicated interpolation of voices, like disembodied echoes, fades into one impossible

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narrator, at once sender and receiver, and a circle. Marker’s reticence about the narrator in Sans soleil indicates both a self-conscious examination of the rhetorical modes of construction of autobiography, and an unwillingness to speak of his past as if it were simply present to consciousness. To speak of the self that one once was is to risk ignoring the role of forgetfulness in memory, to erase all that which eludes the present moment from which one speaks. It is, in short, to abstract that ‘other’ self from the midst of the material world of the past in which it was embodied. Logically there are two films, the one that Krasna is describing in his letters, and Sans soleil as a kind of homage to this film. Without falling prey to hermeneutic nihilism, Marker, at each turn, questions our access to the past posing a series of questions about the complex nature of preferentiality. Hence, in examining the anteriority of the past, Marker is led to interrogate the nature of self-representation. These characters therefore provide Marker with the opportunity to disperse observations, and thereby to enlarge and complicate the perspective of the film. In the light of this, it may also be salutary to remember that ‘Marker’ is itself a pseudonym, and that Marker has described Sans soleil as an interweaving of materials that forges a collective fictional memory. Consistent with this, the scenes included in the film freely interweave fragments of the work of other filmmakers not only in the form of quotation, but also as part of the raw material out of which the film is composed. We see scenes from Sana na N’hada’s Carnival in Bissau, Mario Marret and Eugenio Bentivoglio’s Guerrilla in Bissau, Jean-Michel Humeau’s Ranks Ceremony, Daniele Tessier’s Death of a Giraffe and Haroun Tazieffs Iceland 1970, which are interspersed with Marker’s own footage with little or no attention being drawn to the suturing between original and borrowed materials. Similarly, an array of fragments of video film and televisual materials are scattered like a phenomenological mosaic throughout Sans soleil. Through such juxtapositions and ambiguous

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characterizations, Marker undermines any notion of a ‘self-contained subject,’ implying that memory and the subjectivity from which memory itself is born are likewise perpetually reconstructed out of diverse materials. (Kear, 1999, 6). Beyond complicating common notions of the subject, the contingent forms of Sans soleil establish an intricate and finely balanced contrapuntal structure. The film’s montage of images creates a universal breadth, intermixing footage that has no single unifying characteristic. The montage of images moves outside the realm of logical linearity, and in this way denies the possibility of their own truth. (Marchessault, 4). An initial disorientation occurs, as we rapidly cut across different cultures, times and places. The consistency that is achieved by having one enunciator read the reflections of the absent cameraman reasserts a provisional phenomenal continuity and unity to the film that counterbalances the effect of the radical montage technique. A rhythmic counterpoint is therefore set up between the sonorous cadences of the voice, which become familiar as the film progresses, and the more frenetic waves of images and sounds. Yet, this continuity is itself complicated by the way in which a counterpoint is established between the enunciation, whose references to the letters are framed within the past tense (“He wrote me”), and the images which often induce a sense of present between the filmmaker’s observations and what is shown on screen. (Kear, 6). The formal and stylistic norms of cinema constitute an indispensable frame of reference in Sans soleil. Marker’s selections, strategies, choices and filmic tactics do provide an account of structural constraints in the film. Thus, Marker’s modes of presentation within the film represent a critical engagement with the question of representation itself. A more flexible approach to the characterizations within Sans soleil would therefore be to see these characters as positions within they are used to a variety of structural, as well as autobiographical ends. From the options available to him, he selects his materials and forms to create the

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degrees of his filming. Yamaneko’s modes of imaging provide a counterpoint to Krasna’s camerawork. They represent alternate approaches to representation, alternate aesthetics and alternate strategies to the question of the representation of memory which are deployed in the course of the film, and which at various moments Marker himself has deployed. Sans soleil is therefore neither entirely fictional nor entirely autobiographical, but exists at the interface of these categories. Marker’s eye for irony and juxtaposition allows him to obtain the maximum amount of diversity and fluidity without losing sense of structure. Images of pain and even death intermingle with images of tenderness and joy; images of the sacred are interwoven with the erotic and profane; the exotic with the mundane; forlorn hopelessness with images of struggle and resistance. These juxtapositions and the themes that emerge out of them begin to forge correspondences that transcend time and place, blurring distinctions between moments and places. In many passages Marker links up three continents simultaneously. In the course of the film, we slip from a shoreline in California to a shoreline in Iceland, from images of demonstrations at Narita in Japan in the 1960s and 1980s to anticolonial demonstrations in Portugal, and from the battleground of the island of Okinawa to the battlegrounds of the war of liberation in Guinea-Bissau.

Image and Enunciation The ‘hidden meaning’ emerges simply by the way the story looks at human beings; thus the audience is invited to look at the characters in the same way without being made aware that indoctrination is present. Theodor Adorno

Generally speaking, Sans soleil’s method is to search for the discreet connections between seemingly disparate times and places, and also to allow juxtapositions of images to resonate suggestively without necessarily having a clearly prefixed meaning. Yet,

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this search for correspondences is counterbalanced by logic of dissociation. Although, in Sans soleil, image and enunciation often provide explicit commentary on each other, they do not always correspond. Rather than hierarchically subordinating images to words, Marker sets up an intricate dialogue between them. Thus, the opening sequence that precedes the titles is exemplary of the complexities of the relationship Marker establishes between the commentary, the images and other components of the film. The film opens with a black leader over which the enunciator states: ‘the first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in 1965’. For a few seconds we then see this serene silent footage of three blonde children walking in a scenic Icelandic landscape, filmed in bright sunlight, which has the artless simplicity and intimacy of a homemovie, after which the black leader returns and the enunciator continues: “He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked”. (Ibidem., 12). As the enunciator speaks, the black leader is interrupted for a few seconds by acquired footage of a United States war-plane descending into the bowels of an aircraft carrier, an image that receives no commentary and is succeeded again by black leader and the comment, “He wrote me: ‘One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film...If they [viewers] don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black”’. After which the opening tides, including the title of the film, appear. This dialectical juxtaposition immediately shifts the emotional register from serenity to disquiet, and might even be read as contradicting the commentary’s earlier remark about the cameraman’s intentions to place this footage all alone at the beginning of a film. As the film progresses, Marker augments the meanings of this allusive sequence in later sequences that echo and repeat the initial pairing of childhood with the war. In the first, we move from an image of a child in Japan to a child in Africa, via footage

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of a Polaris missile. In the second, we return to the opening footage of the children in Iceland in its entirety, although its return, as if by memory, is subtly changed. Now there is a slightly blurred ending, and the shaky frame, which had been tidied up in the first presentation of the footage in order to make the sequence more accomplished, is now allowed to stand, testifying to the strong wind and the filmmaker’s complete absorption in the subject he was filming. (Ibidem., 13). In the meantime, a volcano on the island has irrupted and as the scenes succeeding this reappearance of the footage reveal, the village where the footage was taken has partially disappeared under the lava and ashes. In the third recurrence of this imagery of the children in Iceland, we see the footage transformed through Yamaneko’s ‘zone’. The transference of the original footage to the zone marks a passage from one order of the representation to another, the transformation of the indexical image to that of the zone’s abstractions”. In each of these sequences, and in their phenomenologically saturated images, a certain melancholy prevails. In the first two recurrences, this occurs via the juxtaposition with forces of nuclear and natural destruction. In the latter, melancholy arises on account of the toss of the phenomenal presence of the image as it is transmuted by Yamaneko’s technology. In retrospect, the black leader following the opening shots, far from being simply an empty space, acquires the status of being a sign which comes to stand for the collective experiences of loss and destruction, all the allusions to finality and death that the film evokes and which ultimately threaten the collective memory of civilisation. (Ibidem., 14). Characteristically, Marker’s juxtapositions seek to suggest connections and to open discussion. In one of the most intricate sequences, he uses channel-hopping on late night Japanese television both to establish a reverse of his own montage editing technique, and to create a poignant montage of images. During this sequence, the cameraman turns from one channel featuring a program on the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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to another, which features images of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The latter is accompanied on the soundtrack by Kurtz’s monologue from Apocalypse Now (1979). In Sans soleil, Marker presents a special kind of history that parallels memory in its need to make sense out of the senseless. This is a film not only about the meaning of memory and history, but about their very possibility in an age where media have become our way of dealing not just with reality, but with those vanished moments we call the past. (Rosenstone, 1995, 155–156). As this sequence continues, the film suggests how a certain accumulation of recurrent images on late-night Japanese television, mainly of Japanese popular Sumari and horror films, taken together may be read as a text that allegorizes certain patterns of social and sexual stratification, desire and power. Marker invokes the memories of the history of the past and the subjugations of the phenomenal present that are encoded in these images. A further level of interpretation includes the deeper unconscious significance that images of horror play within Japanese society, and, related to this, the aesthetics of horror in Japanese culture. Following this commentary, stills from Japanese horror movies are rapidly intercut with other stills from erotic and pornographic movies, and with the kind of advertising images featuring women seen earlier in the sequence. (Kear, 14). The juxtapositions of these stills suggestively draw out the persistence of certain ideological notions and cultural divisions within and across gender categories. Beyond the specific significance these images have in relation to the Asian continent, in the course of the film these images of horror, desire and power become connected to the actual horrors of the footage of the victims of the wars, the meditation on subjugation of women across different continents, and other questions about representation which Marker evokes throughout the of the film. Sans soleil comprises a series of images of simultaneous verbal and visual reflections. This can be a new form of history for a visual age: a history which does not consist of assembling data into

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some kind of logical argument, but in ruminating over the possibilities of memory and history, personal experience and public events, and the relationships among them. (Rosentone, 156). Through the form of Sans soleil, Marker creates a critical dialogue between the film and its viewers, forcing the viewer to become active in interpreting the significance of what is being shown, and to ponder on the film’s juxtapositions, rather than passively relying upon the commentary to communicate their significance. And it is the fragment that forms the core of this approach. Marker follows the Husserlian sense of experience in Sans soleil. Every intentional experience has a noetic (real) phase and a noematic (non-real) phase. This can be felt in the immediacy of experiencing Marker’s images. More broadly, every noetic phase of consciousness corresponds to a noematic phase of consciousness. Noesis is a process of reasoning, which assigns meaning to intentional objects and in Marker’s hands to images and sounds. Noesis and noema may both be a means to explain objective meaning of expression. With Marker, they have become richly detailed representations of the audiovisual scene. We have the impression how the noetic meaning of transcendent objects is discoverable by reason, while the noematic meaning of immanent objects is discoverable by pure intuition. Marker’s audiovisual compositions are phenomenologically felt, subjectively presented to us in experience. Their noetic meaning is transcendent, while their noematic meaning is more immanent and naturally part of this existing metaphysics within and throughout the mind and the world. Thus, noesis and noema correspond respectively to experience and essence of Marker’s audiovisual world. Historically, this concern with instigating a reflective consciousness, rather than simply conveying a message, is also vividly apparent in the general form of the observations of the commentary. The fragments of the cameraman’s letters are mostly anecdotal and epigrammatic—indeed, even aphoristic on occasion stimulating reflection, rather than closing down meaning. (Kear, 15).

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This is not to say, however, that, Marker’s editing lacks a common purpose. What ultimately structures the various parts of the film is the concern to find a form of presentation that approximates the associative faculties of memory. The various patterns of the edits interweave image and sound in a way that is analogous to the structure of reflective consciousness. The varying length of shot and dissolve often seems to respond to the demand of memory: the lingering of a memory, for instance, or its sudden termination and replacement by other images and thoughts that are evoked by way of reflective association and even dissociation. This extends to the viewer’s experience of Marker’s montage technique, which appeals to the flow of undirected or reflective thought, to thought that is not narrowly formed but is associational, the very thought patterns which we identify with memory. The only way to remember is to rely on the visual media, whose trickiness and ambiguity can never be forgotten, least of by one who manipulates them so well. In Sans soleil the filmmaker uses the media to remember and by the same time he is highly sceptical of media images. (Rosenstone, 157). Moreover, the dynamic structure of signification may also be read as reflecting the workings of memory. The recurring of images and sequences in different series not only enriches their significance, but also transforms them through their perpetual re-context. In this way, the succession of images seems to mirror the ebb and flow of a consciousness that is continually pervaded by the memories of the past; memories which will never remain stable, but exist in a state of becoming, on account of the fact that their reappearance always recurs within the ever-changing context of the present. More broadly, Sans soleil dispenses with many of the conventions that traditionally structure films. The work has little in the way of plot or chronological development, and similarly—although occasional sequences of arbitrarily positioned narrative filter into the film—there is ultimately nothing that could be classified as a story-tine in any conventional sense. Instead, images, anecdotes, fragment of letters

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and sketches for projects emerge, trail off and re-emerge in unexpected ways. The classical unities of time and place are constantly interrupted as the film traverses different places and different times, bringing them into a dialectical relationship with each other. At times, the kaleidoscopic nature of the film may convey a sense of randomness and even disorientation for the spectator, who searches in vain for the familiar footholds of the conventions of traditional narrative cinema. This is the way how Marker insists that his audience dispense with these structures and adapt to a different way of reading. The viewer has to respond to shifting modes of signification, and read the film according to both diachronic and synchronic modes of reading, constantly referring to what has gone before and reappraising its significance. Hence, to come to terms with the film requires one to follow the film’s complex pathways, to attend closely to the style of Marker’s presentation, which is inextricable from its phenomenological content. In a broad picture, an essential feature of the originality and challenging nature of Sans soleil is the form in which it unfolds its themes. Themes do not emerge sequentially but cyclically, discreetly arising out of subtle correspondences and repetitions that the edits establish in the course of the film. Marker consciously and consistently undermines any clear hierarchical structure of the film’s elements, replacing this with a more democratic form of ‘shifting dominants,’ in which each moment of the film acquires a relative equality. This pertains even to the presentation of key imagery within the film. Although, as the film progresses, certain recurring images become of particular importance in the elaboration of the film’s themes—for example, the imagery of destruction and death (images of fire, natural disasters and the disasters of war), and most especially the imagery of the sea (a metaphor which carries many connotations in the film: memory, flux, death and infinitude)—there is no attempt immediately to impose the larger significance of this imagery within the film upon the viewer’s consciousness. Many of the most poignant images appear and disappear

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from the screen in a matter of seconds, whilst other less plangent moments may prevail for a longer duration. Only through an acute attentiveness to the associations that arise out of the juxtapositions of commentary and images and the reoccurrences of certain structural units of the film does the viewer begin to decipher the significance of particular passages and their bearing on the film as a whole. The momentum of the film thus focuses on the free-flowing juxtapositions of images and the suggestive relationships of continuity and discontinuity, which these establish with the soundtrack. Consequently, the film’s continuity is constantly interrupted by Marker’s interconnecting of fragments of images, binding together footage from his travels across the globe and footage from different moments in time in a way that stresses the mutability of their significance. The images snatched from these moments and places, displaced from their original context, are stitched together into a series of sequences of varying length and tempo that establish intricate rhythms, visual harmonies and counterpoints within the film, and create gradual and sometimes abrupt changes in mood, subject-matter and location. It is clear that Marker’s editing does not follow a uniform pattern. Some edits proceed by theme, and some by association in bricolage fashion or by structural opposition, whilst others proceed according to format requirements, which correspond to such criteria as the position of the images within the frame, screen direction and camera angle. Often what seem to be random shots of the mundane are carefully contrived to achieve a particular aesthetic effect. Characteristically, Marker utilises the whole expanse of the screen, editing the flow of images with an eye to formal symmetry and contrast. In the spectacular scenes of the neighbourhood celebrations in Tokyo, for instance, Marker tracks the dancing and parading figures across the entire length of the screen, having figures that exit from one side of the screen be replaced by others entering from the other side, and vice versa. Alternatively, in a passage that follows the journey of a train in Tokyo, he edits

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together groups of shots from different perspectives, which, like a Cubist painting, present the object of attention simultaneously from an array of alternative points of view.

Dialectics The afferent nerves are images, the brain is an image, the disturbance travelling through the sensory nerves and propagated in the brain is an image too. Henri Bergson

In Sans soleil, Marker undermines his mastery of the range of technical possibilities of montage. Like any modernist filmmaker, Marker assumes that at the level of editing, a film consists of sequence of shots, and that each sequence’s internal organization conforms to the needs of careful planning. Through his editing, he develops variable logics, which may be at work within even a single edit. This creates a high degree of semantic instability, with the result that single images and sequences become polyphonic acquiring multiple significance and resonances on different planes of meaning as the film progresses. Many of these edits are structured around the interplay of motion and stillness, the basic rhythms of cinema. In one passage, synthesized images of a kamikaze plane are replaced by footage of the wing of a contemporary jet flying high above Africa. Dogs trailing across the waterline of a sandy beach, in turn, follow this, and a striking overhead shot of desert dunes whose surface resembles the rotting patterns of waves of the previous shot. In the final moment of this sequence, another overhead shot, an African woman gazes from the deck of a boat out over the waves of the sea. The freezeframing of her face both recalls and links up to other sequences in which Marker focuses on the reciprocal interchange of gazes between subject (cameraman) and object (those whom he films), and brings the interplay of sequences of images of stillness and motion to a temporary halt. The camera is often a visible pres-

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ence of the inspecting gaze that one might imagine. The camera does not need to be turned on or even in place for the inspecting gaze to exist; merely its potential to exist might have this effect. (Sturken & Cartwright, 2001, 99). In another sequence that again focuses on the interplay of moments of animation with moments of stillness, the statue of a camel in Africa is succeeded by a mannequin of a policeman, replete with white gloves, strategically positioned on the bend of a road near Japan’s Shiba coast in order to discourage speeding. This, in turn, is followed by a cut to a close-up on the white gloves of a Japanese bus driver. Through the windows of the mobile bus, we see shots of a scarecrow which satirically echoes the mannequin of the policeman, a pile of abandoned cars, and an airplane parked in a carnival, images whose suspension of animation contrasts with the mobility of the bus, and which return us to the stillness of the statues that opened the sequence. Whilst this pattern of editing establishes a certain containment of these elements within a coherent structure, the imagery in this sequence also extends beyond its initial context to echo and link up with other images of travel, policing, statues, débris and wastelands that appear earlier and later in the film. In another passage, footage of an African heron prompts, by way of a free association on the part of the commentary, a cut to an emu in the Ile-de-France. The camera then focuses in on the eye of the emu, then cuts first to the gaze of an African woman and then to the eye of the recurring motif of the votive Japanese figurine of a cat. These images of the eye link up through the course of the film with a host of other images of the eye, and become linked in the commentaries to themes of power, surveillance, voyeurism, representation and the magical function of the eye (both the actual eye and the ‘camera eye’) in non-Western cultures. The film’s fascination with the eye is openly announced by the voice-over, recurring in everything from the credit sequence of Vertigo to the documentation of a Japanese ritual.

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(Walsh, 1989, 32). Marker’s employment of a montage technique, whilst bearing its own very distinctive traits, astutely draws on the innovations of Soviet monteurs such as Vertov, Kulesov, Eisenstein and Medvedkin. The dialectical use of montage editing in early Soviet cinema to carry and consolidate a cinematographic message across a progression of images is used by Marker in a number of sequences in suggestive ways. For instance, in one passage which explores the relationship of the sacred and the profane, we are lead from pornographic images on late-night Japanese television, via a succession of advertising posters for an exhibition of the Vatican’s treasures in Tokyo, to a Hokkaido departmental store which, as the commentary remarks, combines the functions of sex shop, chapel and museum. These posters feature the outstretched arms of Pope John Paul 11, and it is the recurrence of these posters, which take us from the exterior streets of the city to the interior of the Vatican exhibition. These images accompany the commentary’s contrast of the alternate attitudes to sexuality within Western and Eastern religions, and a provocative commentary that links censorship on the “adult” channels on Japanese television with Christian dogma. In the beginning of the film Marker echoes the strategy of Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. (Ibidem., 33). All this underscores Marker’s ability to insert the most apparently occasional footage into editing patterns of density and profundity. (Ibidem). Whilst these examples demonstrate Marker’s use of editing to control tightly the unfolding of a sequence, his editing often veers in an opposite direction. Fragments of footage are often purposefully displaced, Marker sharply intercutting images in a way that defers their meaning. For instance, although the footage of an Apollo space rocket seen near the beginning of the film is not entirely devoid of significance in the initial context in which it appears, it does not fully connect to the film’s imagery until close to the film’s conclusion. Only then is it mentioned that the Apollo astronauts trained at a site in Iceland devastated by a vol-

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canic soil, the site we recognise as where the film’s initial footage of children is set. This connection is then augmented by the use of this site as the setting of a sketch for a science-fiction story. Equally, the images of the broken figurine of a votive cat upon which Marker fixes his gaze acquire significance only in respect of the later images of ruins and dismembered bodies. Moreover, not all the edits are intended to advance analysis. Some set up subtle and even whimsical conceits characteristic of Marker’s cinema. In one sequence, the commentary remarks on the fact that, in the Bijago, it is the women who chose their husbands. We then cut from the profile of a young Bijago woman staring intently leftwards, to a row of the aforementioned Japanese votive cat figurines, all of which have one arm raised as if vying for contention for her affections. Similarly, there are moments when Marker’s camera lingers on something for the sheer pleasure that its appearance provides. In the carnival scenes in Tokyo, he scrutinizes the intense concentration upon the face of one of the dancers. Throughout the film, there is a constant interplay of different levels of representation, and this again motivates Marker’s editing. For instance, actual film footage of trains is intercut with animated footage of trains from the popular Japanese Manga-cartoon; the sequence of the slaughter of the giraffe by hunters ‘begins with a television segment in which a figure fires a pistol; and footage of, among other things, political demonstrations de-materialises and re-materialises in turn as it is filtered through the digitalized technology of the “zone”. By constantly shifting between different levels of representation, Marker is able, through his editing, to create a dialogue between them, to examine their different modes of signification and how they connect to each other. Marker uses a montage technique to create echoes and counterpoints between images, which alternately reinforce, contradict or intensify each other. Any one sequence or series of images may establish an array of phenomenological relationships as the film progresses.

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In memory, in history, and in images lie our humanity, our connection to the world. The experience of memory as constantly reconfigured by consciousness is integral to the film’s evocation of melancholy. For the experience of the past, as a shifting field of relations, invokes a sense of abjection. Not only are the reflections and images of the cameraman presented as fragments that can never be wholly defined or reconstituted, but also the often rapid succession of images induces a sense of fragility. From this point of view, the uncertainty of address is part of the deep texturing of the cinematic world, which verbal and visual narrative levels are extremely complex. Marker recreates the vertigo of time. In each moment there is struggle: we try to preserve the experiences we have had, storing them in the fragile warehouse of our memory. However, the recordings we have fade too fast, losing their poignancy under the corrosion of time. But here exactly ties the triumphant paradox of Marker’s haunting film. The mind might be powerless in the unequal struggle with time, but not in revealing, forcefully, the story of this dramatic loss. The figure of the spiral, which, as we will see, becomes an essential motif in Sans soleil, ultimately shapes the form of the film’s unfolding. The spiral is a graphic motive, in Madeleine’s hair, and in one man’s insane memory. (Marchessault, 6). As the work draws to a close, we begin to see that the progression of the film takes the form of an ever-diminishing spiral, where sequences and images recur in ever-changed form and with evergreater rapidity. Perhaps the key to Marker’s approach in composing Sans soleil lies in a reference made early on in the film to the work of Sei Shönagon, the female Japanese writer and diarist of the Heian period. Sei Shõnagon’s famous Makura no söshi (The Pillow Book, c.886–1000) is a vast and miscellaneous collection of zuhitsu, personal notes and occasional writings mostly compiled during her time as lady-in-waiting to Empress Sadako during the last decade of the 10th century. The Pillow Book is widely held to be not only a consummately crafted work of

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prose, but also one of the most important historical documents of the mid-Heian period. Today it survives only in fragmentary form, a montage of impressions, character sketches, anecdotes and acute observations on nature, objects and the everyday life of the court. It is the 164 lists that Sei Shõnagon composed within The Pillow Book that are of most interest to Marker; lists such as ‘Things that arouse a fond memory of the past,’ ‘Elegant things,’ ‘Rare things,’ ‘Distressing things’ or ‘Things that quicken the heart’. Such lists and the latter in particular, to which, at one point, the commentary refers, over a tracking shot of the ascent of a Polaris missile—might be seen as analogous to Marker’s own project in Sans soleil. Indeed, there are numerous explicit and implicit references to Sei Shönagon’s lists. The reference at the beginning of the film to the list of “things that quicken the heart” in retrospect can be seen to refer to the use of an amplified heartbeat in the soundtrack during the sequence on the Hokkaido ferry, or to resonate in the light of the grotesque and distressing footage of the slaughter that we see in the film. We might therefore regard Sei Shõnagon’s book as providing a literary counterpart to Marker’s film, and regard Marker as reaching back into the distant memory of Japanese culture to discover the model for his own visual exploration of the everyday life of contemporary Japanese culture. The Pillow Book serves Marker as an example of an alternative mode of representing history and a model for organizing his filmic impressions. Not only does it provide a method—the commentary refers to Sei Shönagon’s lists as providing a useful phenomenological criterion of selection when filming—but also we sense the commentary’s reflections about the disenfranchisement from political influence that gave rise to such writings, as Sei Shönagon’s echoes the sensibility of the filmmaker, weary of the “intransigence” of history to the cause of social and political justice. Hence, the commentary’s description of the prose stylists of the Heian period might be, in certain respects, applicable to Marker’s own

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contemplation of the signs of everyday existence. Any discussion of composition and mode of address in Sans soleil needs to take into account not only the relation between the commentary and the images, but also the relation of the soundtrack to these elements. There is an important analogy to be drawn between the polyphonic form of Marker’s montage and certain forms of musical structure. As with musical structure, the film has to be grasped intuitively as a whole, rather than sequentially part-by-part or note-by-note. Furthermore, Marker stated his aim of weaving the various filmic elements of Sans soleil into ‘the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints and mirror like fugues’. Marker develops his film-fugue contrapuntally, by way of a four-part invention of speech and image, sound and silence. The contribution of the latter two to the film’s total effect should not be underestimated. Like the voids in Japanese prints and Chinese scrolls, or the pauses in musical progression, the silences in Sans soleil are often as telling and weighted as the commentary. As with the use of ironic juxtapositions of images, music plays an important role in provoking thought and establishing the tenor of Sans soleil. In a manner comparable to Godard’s experiments with soundtrack, music is employed not simply to augment the images (for example, imitating the rhythms of travel or crowds) or to set the mood, but as an important element of the film in its own right. Indeed, Marker creates a many-faceted phenomenologically interesting relationship between image, sound and commentary, using music to create a vivid set of allusions. The music used in Sans soleil is very varied, bringing together, and even intermingling, heterogeneous musical forms. These include traditional, classical and folk music from different periods and different regions, including Asia, Africa and Europe, and many other musical forms. This diverse array of music, some of which belongs to the realm of traditional and sacred rituals, and some to the world of leisure, col-

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lides and jars with each other, like a schemata of conflicting languages. In turn, these musical forms periodically mingle with industrial noise, the hubbub of video games, advertising jingles, and the sounds and rhythms generated in everyday city life. Hence, although the use of music frequently serves to locate places through the invocation of musical forms indigenous to them, music is as often employed to create overlaps between the often abrupt transitions from one place and time to another. The music in Sans soleil also serves to evoke moments from the past that constantly filter into the present, breaking up the continuity in time. To take some instances: in one sequence, images of Guinea Bissau are accompanied by music from the Cape Verde islands while the enunciator comments on the filmmaker’s request for this juxtaposition as a symbolic tribute to the goal of Amilcar Cabral of uniting the two countries. In another sequence in a bar in Tokyo, the soundtrack plays a musical refrain from La Jetée (1962), invoking the way in which sound can be the conduit of memory, and can establish discreet intertextual references to other films. Similarly, at certain points in time, music used in one sequence recurs in another in, order to announce the return of particular themes. For example, the music accompanying the ceremonies of mourning the death of a panda recurs just prior to, and then during, the scene of the violent slaughter of a giraffe. Crosscutting between a giraffe being shot in Africa and the death of a bear in Japan is not done for the sake of comparison but in order to gain insight into the idea of death. Gradually, in the course of the film, one becomes aware of how these various sounds, like the film’s images, are filtered through a synthesizer, which distorts their original sound. Like the zone which translates memories into pure images, so the synthesizer music transforms the array of different musical forms into ‘pure sound,’ flattening the distinctions between them. The role of music within the soundtrack is interwoven into the thematic of the film. The film derives its title from a six-part melancholic song-

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cycle by Mussorgsky, and Marker’s technique uses counterpoint and repetition to announce themes in a way that parallels Mussorgsky’s music. Although only a brief fragment of Mussorgsky’s cycle of songs (a passage from ‘Sur le fleuve,’ the last of the songs in the cycle, which concerns itself with death) is heard in the course of the film, Marker uses the song cycle as a vehicle to establish his phenomenological leitmotif of the fragility of memory. Beyond such explicit references, Marker creates a series of discreet dialogues between the film and the song cycle, thereby establishing a hyper-textual relationship between the two. On a formal level, both works display an amazing richness in compositional conventions and expressive possibilities, but use extremely economic means to achieve these aims. However, Sans soleil shares more than simply formal compositional affinities with Mussorgsky’s song cycle. They share an extensive common range of imagery and a common mood of melancholy. Any list of these would include the following: imaginative re-creations of the events of long ago; introspective, even bitter and regretful musings on the past and the present, which, as in Sans soleil, are also addressed to an unnamed female correspondent; the imagery of crowds; an accentuation on the impression and the fleeting moment; the experience of frustration and ennui; a selfconsciousness of the passing of time; distant happiness, hidden hopes and mournful, regretful thoughts; the interweaving of images of wakefulness and sleep; a shifting between figures of nature with those of the city; the imagery of deep waters and intimations of death. This imagery constitutes an extensive common topography between Marker’s film and Mussorgsky’s composition. Marker’s editing in the Tokyo-cityscape sequence, in its creation of abrupt and constantly shifting viewpoints from street level to rooftop, conveys a sense of simultaneity, the camerawork re-creating an effect of fleeting glances scanning the city for its characteristic signs. These signs shuttle back and forth in rapid succession, some immediately decipherable, some less so, with

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little in the way of guidance for the viewer. This is how Marker captures both the sense of exhilaration and seductive allure that the encounter with the city provides, and the strange sense of fragmentation, illegibility and disarticulation. Tracking images of crowds descending the stairs of the subway, the commentary suggests that the city should be deciphered like a complex ‘musical score,’ one in which “one could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of detail”. The city’s form is always therefore on the brink of formlessness and change. Marker draws out this sense of disarticulation by way of revealing juxtapositions. Moving from one part of the city to next, he catalogues the clash of historical references and quotation of the architecture and public works adorning the streets. In one of the most revealing of these juxtapositions, one, which creates an extraordinary sense of historical density, Marker films the statue of a Buddha in a cemetery overlooking the network of train lines that form the city’s nerve centre.

Visual Spectacle It is necessary to beware of assuming that in order to sense, the mind needs to perceive certain images transmitted by the objects of the brain, as our philosophers commonly suppose; or, at least, the nature of these images must be conceived quite otherwise than as they do. René Descartes

In Sans soleil, Tokyo is represented as a delirious and fraught reality of different appearances, a dystopian 20th century equivalent of the floating world of the Edo period. This is a metaphor which finds its concrete embodiment in the shots of the many advertising placards of beautiful young Japanese models suspended in mid-air over the city, hanging from invisible wires and cables above the streets and railway lines which run through the city. This intoxicating realm of advertising and the mass media invades public space and private thought alike. Here the omnipresent video and television screens that adorn the department store walls,

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the computer-generated images, and the huge, Western-style advertising billboards and murals taken from the comic strip books hail to and prevail upon the passer-by, dwarfing them with their monumental scale. There is more than a suggestion in such imagery of the way in which the modern city acquires the character of a space of surveillance. The huge images adorning the city’s billboards, featuring figures looking out of the posters, cast their gaze across the city, voyeurizing the voyeurs. Equally, the erotically-charged images of young women and comic-strip heroines, on a scale inflated out of all proportion, seem starkly to counterpoint the impersonality, constraint and conformity that reign over the street-life below, as though they were the projections of repressed desires. In one of the most telling images, the reflections of a mass of figures in the subway are absorbed within the giant billboard image of a fashion model. In this post-modern megalopolis, reality and dreams are inextricable from each other, as representation becomes determining of reality. Following the sequence where the cameraman scans Japanese late-night television with its plethora of images of desire, horror and violence, the scene shifts to the subterranean tunnels that lead from the department store malls to the train stations. In this sequence, Marker invokes the long-standing trope of the train, both as metaphor for the cinematic apparatus and as symbol of industrial progress. Yet, Marker’s invocation of this metaphor reinvents its meanings. Whilst, for the Soviet monteurs, the metaphor of the train was initially bound up with the image of the progression of history, for Marker, in the context of Tokyo’s postmodernity, it becomes a metaphor for a society given over to forms of visual spectacle. Visual culture in this sense is a provisional and constantly shifting view, not defined by medium so much as by the interaction between viewers and viewed. (Mirzoeff, 1999, 13). There is a metro-sequence, in which the images accompanying the commentary show people buying tickets for the subway,

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boarding train compartments, and, once seated, drifting into sleep, a segment which recalls and brings full circle the journey into the city in the film’s opening passages. As this sequence progresses, images of the passengers’ sleeping faces are allusively intercut with images of the late-night television sequences replayed from the night before, suggesting the way in which these images of desire and violence become imprinted onto their subconscious thoughts and dreams. The subway sequence is an evocative treatment of sleeping, dreaming, and waking as they relate to the experience of the spectator. The passage offers us not only an example of the film’s intricate use of montage to slip nimbly between the realms of desire and the everyday, dream and wakefulness, subjective and collective memory, but also an image of a world whose experience of the real is, in actuality, constantly and imperceptibly shifting between these categories. Marker’s quest for the true image is an ongoing task, since such images are not often found, and when they are they often come by surprise. Marker’s hand-held camera seems to respond directly to the diegetic world. Yet, if at times Marker presents a picture of the city as overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman, he qualifies this by drawing attention to other subtler sides of the city. He reflects the beauty of the the light in January, or the particularity of the faces and the lives of the inhabitants of the city, as different and precise as groups of instruments; or the ways in which the patterns of everyday existence restructure and reclaim the megalopolis. There is a remark that saying that after dark the impersonality of the city by day gives way to the transformation of the city into a series of villages. Marker is reflecting also the marginal aspects of the citylife. In the beginning of the film, a homeless alcoholic in a rundown quarter of the Tokyo suburbs assumes the authority of the role of a policeman directing the traffic from the middle of a busy junction. In another sequence, the poorest of the Tokyo poor people sit in front of television screens in the chic department stores to watch the Sumo-contests. These images show

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how tightly coded and hierarchically ordered Japanese society is. The spectator is in the middle of a multiplicity of techniques that interrupt and disconnect time, and give space and causality an unstable existence. In his own way, Marker attacks our present understanding of images. Furthermore, the meditation upon the metropolis of Tokyo becomes interwoven with a series of commentaries on the economic position of Japan, its political landscape, and its complex relations to other continents. The film asks whether history is now primarily driven by the competition to colonise the global market for technology. One of the reasons why Marker returns to Japan is that it has arguably become the leading manufacturer of the new technologies that are transforming our experience of the world. Yet, aside from this, the fascination of Japan for us today is the manner in which the impact of new technologies and Westernisation has not simply eclipsed previous long-standing cultural customs, but coexist with pre-existent cultural patterns, creating a peculiar relationship between modernisation and tradition. Modernity, wherever it appears, does not occur without a shattering of belief, without a discovery of the lack of reality—a discovery linked to other realities. Marker continually returns throughout the film to various sacred observances and rituals that preserve the practices of the past. Hence, whilst pointing to the rapid changes that have taken place in recent Japanese history he probes the new cultural forms of modern Japan for symptoms of the deeply encoded patterns of the past. Postmodernism marks the era in which visual images and the visualizing of things that are not necessarily visual has accelerated so dramatically that the global circulation of images has become an end itself, especially through internet. Marker’s description in Lettre de Sibérie (1957) of Siberia as a land of contrasts situated between Middle Age and 21st century might provide a fitting epigraph for the analysis of his portrayal of Japan in Sans soleil. These observations about Japan lead on to, in phenomenological sense, probing examination of the question of the relation-

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ship between the developing Third World and the West. In Marker’s hands Japanese visual culture is a fractal network, permeated with patterns from all over the globe. This kind of network has key points of interface and interaction that are of more than ordinary complexity and importance. According to our perspective here, Marker clearly understands that the transcultural experience of the visual in everyday life is the territory of visual culture. This is a key site of the interaction between the everyday and the modern. The spectator is shuttled back and forth between the pre-industrial landscape of Africa and the post-industrial economy of Japan. She becomes aware not only of the disparities between the two, but also of the persistence of forms of thinking and cultural expression that link these places together insofar as they distinguish themselves from the West. These forms of thinking are ultimately used in the film as a way of critique to Western ideologies, in particular the metaphysics of presence in Western thought, and it’s privileging of what is spoken to and what is left unsaid. In reflecting upon classical Japanese prose, which has comparatively few adverbs and adjectives, the cameraman makes remarks upon the lack of anthropomorphism in the Japanese language. Here connotation discreetly inhabits the act of denoting without disrupting the concrete nature of language, Marker creates an audiovisual and phenomenological experience, which results from the intersection of the everyday and the modern that takes place across the lines marked by consumers traversing the grids of modernism. With Marker we can think like Husserl who argued that a careful method of interpretation could disclose both the meanings of actions and words (and with Marker sounds and images) that are intended to be meaningful, and the way the world had to be in order for those meanings to be possible. In contemporary life, there is a consistent tension between the local and the global, the one influencing the other, and vice versa. If the journey through the everyday life of Japan and Af-

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rica is on one level, a very material and specific exploration of the contemporary landscape, the journey of Sans soleil also becomes a passage through to the past. It forms an interior journey. The letters picture a world where we are constantly drawn back to reflections from the past, and most saliently to the violent political clashes and revolutionary struggles of the 1960s, looking back to this era both to assess its failure to bring about the political changes sought, and to redefine the present political climate. Footage from the political struggles of the 1960s, including images of guerrilla warfare, public protests, social conflicts and struggles for independence, are constantly intercut with images from the present. In one respect, Marker’s aim here is to map out the phenomenological discontinuities between the political landscape of the 1960s and that which prevails today. Marker seems to think that we need a new role for the imagination in everyday life. To grasp this new role, we need to bring together the idea of hyper-cultural images, especially mechanically produced images, and the idea of the imagined community, and the French idea of the imaginary, as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations. Marker’s goal is not only to gauge the gulf between various political cultures, but also to trace the subtle ties that bind the present to the past, to show how the burden of the politics of the 1960s continues to determine the present. At stake is a relationship between the globalization of different cultures, the new forms of hyper-culture and modernity and the mass migrations and diasporas that mark the present moment as being distinct from the past. Marker is bracketing the world—not doubting it but rather suspending judgments about it, excluding more logical inferences and getting pure appearances with universal connections. In Sans soleil, the everyday is everywhere inhabited by the phenomenological traces of the past. In the opening sequences, we are immediately made aware of the way in which the banal and the incidental can trigger associations of previous times, or

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even imaginings of future times. On board the ferry from Hokkaido, we are shown images of commuters from the island, reading the papers, absorbed in reflection, or simply snatching moments of sleep as they are delivered across the shore. These humdrum images are the spur for the filmmaker’s recollections of the wars he experienced during the 1960s. The pensive moments of reflection and irritation amongst the commuters and, above all, the sleeping bodies slumped across the ferry’s chairs are framed by the camera, soundtrack and commentary in such a way as to resemble the captives or victims of ‘a past or future war’. Figures swathed in blankets appear as if they were corpses; fragments of limbs seen from close range took like human remains of a battle; and the ferry itself comes to resemble fallout shelter. The tableaux in sum present an evocation of the way how the small fragments of war become ‘enshrined in everyday life’ encoded all the more resonantly in that the discreet contents of banal offer an almost blank canvas for memory to imprint itself upon. With Marker, the ability to visualize a culture or society almost becomes synonymous with understanding it. The film points to the coexistence of very different experiences of modernity within the global economy. Intercutting images of the highly advanced and affluent society of contemporary Japan with images of the rural poor of Africa, a contrast is drawn between the processes of modernisation in Japan and a way of life that involves a daily struggle for survival. These contrasts not only are registered in economic divisions, but also imply a different experience of the temporal and nature. Marker here is keen to undercut any sentimentalising of the rural existence of the ‘Third World,’ a vision which is obliquely referenced in the course of the film by way of a succession of images of monuments to Rousseau, his chateau and its grounds. Instead, he shows its hardships and local struggles as a form of existence almost forgotten by the West. Marker is concerned, however, to show not

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only the separation of the ‘first’ and ‘third worlds,’ but also the ties that bind such disparate places together. For, in the postmodern world, few borders remain intact. This theme unfolds in the course of the film, initially through images of displacement. Images of exoticism, indicative of a prior wave of colonialism, are transferred to Europe (i.e. the narrator comments on two occasions about the emus that live in the Ile-de-France, and footage of them recurs on a number of occasions). In Sans soleil, the phenomenological work of the imagination is not entirely disciplined but is a space of contestation in which individuals and groups seek to annex the global into their own practices of the modern. Marker shows how one can create new patterns of imagination in highly unpredictable fashion. The filmmaker’s long-standing ambivalence about the politic culture of the 1960s and its aftermath forms a mode and a leitmotif of the film, a constant reference point in his reflections on the present, past, and future. On one hand, the letters express certain exasperation with the naivety of the ideals of this era for achieving social vision of the future, pointing to the ideological fault lines in its thinking—in particular, its utopian uniting, in a common cause, of the dispossessed and those rebelling against their own privilege. On the other hand, there is genuine admiration for the sense of outrage and collective ideals that impelled a generation to revolt, and nostalgia for the sentiments. Moreover, as Marker eloquently observes, if the ideals that had driven the protesters onto the streets had concretely failed, nevertheless all they had won in their understanding of the world could have been won only through the struggle. The film is pervaded by a mode of melancholy reflection on the failure of the radicalism of the 1960s to achieve its common aims, the persistence of the same old struggles that seemed once to be drawing to a close. Marker explains how a director can build his or her scenes out of many shots of isolated details and rely on objects, eye-lines, and reaction shots. The important thing is to

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establish and sustain certain style through building up extended scenes and creating memorable traces out of overt narrative ideas. Marker draws out the divisions between ‘revolutionary romanticism’ and the pragmatic issues of post-revolutionary struggle; to work, to produce, to distribute, to overcome post-war exhaustion, temptations of power and privilege. Included within the former is the very notion of ‘guerrilla filmmaking,’ which too often, Marker suggests, treated as an adventure. Marker is bracketing the world—not doubting it but rather suspending judgments about it, excluding more logical inferences and getting pure appearances with universal connections. Marker needs intuition to go through all of these activities where the essence of things is under investigation. Marker tries to find out what makes it essentially itself, by searching for the most general features of which the specific characteristics we see are the objects of investigation. Marker varies freely and imaginatively the components of the phenomena being studied in this audiovisual display in order to determine their essential, and conditional features. Artworks are, at least partially, intentional objects, and we can examine an artist’s work for trials and explorations, attempts to define his or her difference. The focal point of Marker’s treatment of this issue is the bitter ironies of the aftermath of the revolutionary struggle of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde islands to free them from Portuguese colonialism. It also becomes an occasion for Marker to display his filmmaking skills, to expose the hyper-cultural quality of his style, and to experiment briefly with the sorts of spatial construction that he will later exploit more thoroughly. Marker frequently returns to this event as a watershed moment, for it was a war that temporarily inspired the hope. In the course of the film, we retrace the steps by which the revolution ultimately ended in a military coup. This unfolds in the form of a revisit to the key sites of the war’s history. According to the idea, the cameraman returns to the Fogo bay where the events began that led to the insurgence in 1959. He also returns to the river that borders the Bijago in Guinea-

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Bissau, a revisit whose footage is poignancy intercut with archive film of Amilcar Cabral, the soon-to-be-assassinated revolutionary leader of the Partido Africano da Independencia da Guin e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), waving a parting gesture to the shore that he will never see again. This footage is, in turn, intercut with that of Louis Cabral, his half-brother, who was to become president of the newly formed independent nation of Guinea, making the same gesture along the same river. Marker then cuts from images, taken during the war, of the soldiers embracing in an act of comradeship and solidarity, to footage in 1980 of a military award ceremony that shows Louis Cabral decorating and embracing Major Nino. Surprisingly, the camera captures the distraught figure of Nino, who seems overcome by the event. (Kear, 29). The increased number of unclaimed shots and patterned framings suggests an increasingly overt narration. These passages dealing with the war of independence in Guinea stand for much more than the particular events they describe. For, at the heart of Marker’s reflection upon the events of the 1960s is the retracing of the splintering and loss of direction of radical left-wing thought during this period, a capitulation that provokes a melancholic fatalist vision of the advancement of history. There is a sense of fatalism, which saturates the general tone of the film. This is most memorably incarnated at the conclusion of the discussion of the failure of the independence movement in Guinea. (Ibidem). At its boldest, this narration invites us to participate in those games with expectation which characterize the Marker-film.

Construction Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Jean Baudrillard

As a narrative, Sans soleil attempts to create a trajectory of understanding by beginning with images and sounds that make

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claims upon us. These claims are typically produced through acts of disclosure that create a sense of obligation in the viewer toward the viewed. Since the 1950s, self-reflexivity has been a defining characteristic of Marker’s cinema. However, Sans soleil is one of the most self-conscious and intricately composed of Marker’s films, constantly referring to its own processes of construction, and examining the nature of different forms of representation. This self-reflexivity is an indispensable aspect of the structure of the film and the advancement of its main themes. Marker represents a mode of counter-cinema, and those aspirations have focused on the deployment of techniques that interrogate the conventions of cinema. Following in the tradition of Brecht, Marker has fostered conventions of estrangement, intransitivity, non-closure, and the foregrounding of representational conventions in order that the viewer should constantly be aware of the constructing operations that are at play within film, and adopt a critically reflective attitude towards both what is represented and the way in which it is represented. (Kear). The repertoire of shooting and editing techniques in Sans soleil are employed to gain the viewer’s complicity, by disarming and penetrating the subject from every possible angle. In documentary, various kinds of direct and indirect address have been added to the expository techniques. For Marker, it is an ethical imperative of representation that it declares its means, rather than present film as a transitive instrument of reality. In this respect, Marker’s critical use of self-reflexivity as a technique of raising self- consciousness should be differentiated from the more conservative and modish uses of self-reflexivity in much contemporary postmodernism. Devices for keeping the framing operations of the cinematic medium at the forefront of our consciousness comprise, on one hand, strategies of interruption which draw the viewer’s attention to the processes of construction, such as altering the speed of the film, freezing an image, substituting photographs for moving footage, or ‘tampering’ with the image—for instance, arbitrarily altering the colour

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tones of images and sequences. This self-reflexivity extends even to discussing openly the processes of composition. Throughout the film, there is a constant stream of questions being posed about how to film, how to edit, how to convey the feelings associated with a particular moment or image. These reflexive observations are intricately intertwined with metacommentaries on film as a medium and reflections upon the nature of representation. These forms of self-consciousness take a number of forms, but share a consistent complication of the perspective through which we view the film. In the most straightforward of these, Marker at several points invokes the longstanding metaphor of the passage of a train as a symbol for the processes of the cinematic medium itself. (Ibidem). In the first of these examples, a metropolitan train, with its long succession of carriages, is tracked by a static, centrally-placed camera as it travels the entire length from one side of the screen to the other, alluding thereby to the succession of filmic frames passing before an immobile spectators This metaphor is further augmented later on, as we are shown the inside of a train carriage, by the implied parallel between the immobility, anticipation and dreamlike state of the passengers in the train and the subject position of the cinematic spectator. Recognition of the interactions of different cultural style must be seen in relation to the larger purposes of filmic representation. In Sans soleil other sequences provide a more convoluted form of reflexivity that changes the very identity and status of the film itself. Sans soleil opens, for instance, with the enunciator referring to a future project of the cameraman, a project in which he would gather together images that had a special personal significance for him. As the enunciator speaks, some of the images of this ‘future’ project begin to appear on the screen and the title, “Sans soleil/ Sans soleil”, appears. Towards the end of the film, this project is rearticulated. Dwelling on the nature of memory, the cameraman hesitantly invents a sketch for a science-fiction film.

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The film might in the process of being composed, rather than completed, thus complicating the temporal dimension of the film and refusing the notion of closure. There is a feeling that Marker seems to intimate that Sans soleil’s existence is itself contingent, that the film could be reconstituted in different forms and that the finished project represents only one manifestation in time of the original project. Alternatively, it may be taken as a device to place the film under erasure. In each respect, it is the indeterminacy of the film’s ontological status that matters. (Kear, 33). An idea follows that there is no simple equivalence between the photographic images that record an event and events themselves, undermining any notion of immanent relation between the two. The photographic image as a phenomenological trace of an event acquires a materiality that substitutes itself for the contingency of the passing moment it depicts. The photographic image renders a precise moment in time. Complicating this still further, any attempt to preserve a simple opposition between events and the images used to depict them has to take into account the presence of technologies such as film or photography at those events. This presence represents an intervention, one that inflects and shapes the experiences and events it seeks to record. In this sense, by embracing cultural simultaneity in an ultimate eclecticism of images across time and space, Marker responds to the major social and cultural changes brought about by technology. In Sans soleil, Marker seems to think that new technologies of imaging have changed the perception of the past to the point where reality is overlaid by representation. Consequently, this general argumentation does not deny the existence of realities that exceed the means of representation by which we depict the events, but rather points to the image as a site not of plenitude, but of loss. It is precisely to this issue of the ‘semantic gaps’ between the experiences of events and the representations by which we recall them. In one sequence, for instance, dwelling on the

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way in which certain material experiences remain impermeable to memory and inexpressible in representation, the film comes to an abrupt halt, frozen on an image of an African woman being transported across the sea in a rowing boat. This means that Marker frequently draws our attention to what does not appear in the image, but what was there in the experience of filming an event, and, contrariwise, what appears in the footage but had gone unnoticed in the filming of the event. There are passages, such as the Tokyo subway-sequence that critically examine the intricacies of the relationship of representational media to material reality, questioning the way in which our perception of the world is saturated by different forms of representational media. Sans soleil constantly shifts between different levels of representation and different levels of reality, analyzing the mediating role of representational media in our collective histories and personal memories. With Marker, seeing is not to believe, but to interpret, and visual images succeed or fail according to the extent that we can interpret them successfully. In the course of the film, we are exposed to various forms of film footage, digitalized imagery, televisual images, animated cartoons, video games, prints, sculpture, photographs, advertising billboards and taped sound: it is out of this that the filmmaker’s memories are in part reconstituted. The referential status of these memories, however, is persistently questioned. In his own way, Marker uses some of the idioms and conventions of Japanese language and myth as a way of critiquing fundamental concepts inherent in Western thought. These reflections become critically engaged with the question of imaging, most explicitly in the aforementioned sequence that juxtaposes an analysis of Japanese television with Yamaneko’s video images. In a way, the centre of the film is Hayao’s zone. (Rosentone, 165). After scanning late-night television, the commentary turns our attention to Yamaneko’s machine, the ‘zone,’ an overt reference to Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), in which images of—among

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other things—student-protest clashes from the 1960s, extracts of Kurosawa Akira’s Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) and documentary footage of the Kamikaze sorties off the coast of Okinawa during the Second World War are transformed by synthesizer-technology. Faced by the exasperating endurance of forms of political oppression and the disparity between the appearance of change and the persistence of the same old struggles recurring time and again throughout history, the zone suggests a new kind of objectivity, a new way of understanding representations and of constructing them as a challenge to one ossified fables of history. From a cellar in Tokyo, Yamaneko responds to the dilemmas of cultural memory and the contingencies of history by attacking, with the zeal of a fanatic, images stored in the computer’s memory, taking them apart in his machine. Fed into the ‘zone,’ fragments of images of the past are ‘de-realised,’ translated into images proper that no longer have entirely legible form. Yamaneko uses the machine to create an archive of personally composed images stripped of their context. Out of this space a parallel world of images emerges, a world transmuted by thought, one that represents the indexical image in terms of a pageant of flowing plural energies and fragmentary intensities of colour and shape. As we see, the procession of these synthesized images, the commentary draws a distinction between the characteristic ‘realist’ forms of presenting contemporary and historical events on television, and the ‘zone’s’ transfigurations, commenting that these images lie less than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality. The memory box of the television, with its crush of alienated images, characteristically occludes the signs of its manufacture, reasserting the fit between representation and the world, and all the while imparting ideological messages below the threshold of consciousness. The ‘zone,’ by contrast, takes cultural memory as

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its subject matter, but only to transform those representations into an ever-mutable and opaque surface. (Kear, 34). It is in the ideological contestation of systems of imaging that the ‘zone’ has meaning. The ‘zone’ is not therefore an ultimate response to the dilemma of representation and history, but one contingent procedure that is deployed to induce a critical consciousness of that dilemma. Although Marker uses the palette of the ‘zone’s’ prism, this is not at the expense of other forms of imaging, but rather within the interplay of alternative languages of imaging. If ‘the zone’ eschews representation or, more particularly, the immanent relation of the image to the events it records, it does not relinquish the role of signification. It becomes the vehicle both for expressing the limits of representation, and for alluding to a reality that exceeds visible appearances. Like La Jetée, Sans soleil allusively opens with an image of childhood and planes that is replaced with those of death and apocalypse. The visit in Sans soleil to the Japanese ‘sex chapel,’ which displays in glass cases specimens of preserved animals posed in acts of copulation recalls the visit made to the natural history museum in La Jetée, a scene that in the latter stands for the preservation of time. The Tokyo subway sequence also evokes the subterranean tunnels that provide the setting of La Jetée. As this suggests, inter-textual references within the film evoke memories and augment lines of thought in the film. The most important and complex of these inter-texts refers to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in a sequence that provides a re-creation and reading of this intricate detective story. In Vertigo, Hitchcock’s detective Scottie is hired to follow and report on Madeleine, the wife of an old friend, who believes she is possessed by the spirit of Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide after a tragic love affair many years before Madeleine’s birth. As the plot gradually unfolds, Scottie’s ability to unravel the tangled web of illusions and events becomes more and more tenuous, and appearances are not what they seem to be. Eventually, by a

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strange twist of fate, he will find himself unwittingly complicit in ‘Madeleine’s death’ on two occasions. The film’s re-enactment of Scottie’s trail is not only a cinematographic, but also a psychological, journey that both parallels the structural path of Sans soleil and retranslates Hitchcock’s film into Marker’s own idiom. Marker uses photographic stills from Vertigo intercut with his own film footage, to retrace Scottie and Madeleine’s footsteps. This amounts to a tour of the routes and sites of Vertigo, but Marker also reconstructs, with subtle differences, some of the scenes, which are edited as if to approximate the semblance of memory. Marker uses the narrative of Vertigo not only to illustrate the workings of memory, but also to have his representation of Vertigo as a demonstration of the complex interlinking of past and present. This is evident in the way in which he transforms Vertigo by conflating it with the memory of his own films. Those familiar with Marker’s previous work will already know how Vertigo provided the structure for the plots of Le Mystere Koumiko (1965) and La Jetée, the latter of which is told, with the exception of one brief moment, exclusively through the juxtaposition of photo-stills. (Kear, 37–38). In Sans soleil, the scene in La Jetée which reworks the moment in Vertigo—when Madeleine implausibly points out to Scottie a place within the concentric circles of the sequoia tree from where she has come and to where she belongs—is obliquely inserted into the retracing of Vertigo’s narrative. Moreover, this re-creation of Vertigo is achieved by translating Hitchcock’s film into the idiom of La Jetée’s photo-stills. Perception, memory, and imagination are key concerns of phenomenological approaches to cultural analyses. In using phenomenology to examine visual media, one can focus on the specific capacities of each medium that distinguish its properties, and the effect of these properties on our experience of the images produced in each. (Sobchack). Phenomenology offers a means to examine the distinct materials of different media in terms of how each affects

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the viewer’s experience of it, and its impact on the lived body of the viewer. In Marker’s hands these are phenomenal images, but for Deleuze, for example, Madeleine’s profile shot is a ´crystal image´ in which various temporal levels overlap and intertwine like the different planes in a crystal. Marker in memorably uses the Vertigo -sequence Sans soleil to recapitulate and develop further issues about power and freedom, and time and history. For Marker, Vertigo is more than an obsessive love story; rather, it offers a meditation on the nature of history. It is the only film, so the commentary states, to have adequately presented ‘impossible memory, insane memory,’ and a film that has acquired a particular obsession for the filmmaker who, it is stated, has seen it nineteen times. In examining the intricacies of Vertigo’s plot, a complex mise-en-abime is elaborated, in which, like a play of mirrors within mirrors, Vertigo acts as a commentary on Sans soleil and vice versa. Marker provides in this sequence both a reenactment of the narrative of Vertigo and, at the same time, an allegorical reading of the film, characterizing Scottie as ‘Time’s Fool of Love’. In phenomenological sense, the Vertigo -sequence is further interlinked with a segment towards the end of the film, where the commentary dwells on the aforementioned abortive sketch for a film to be entitled Sans soleil. At this point, the commentary returns full circle to the opening image of children in Iceland. The narrator then elaborates further on the nature of the intended project. Like La Jetée, this was to be a science-fiction film, but, set on the wasted landscape of another planet or, alternatively, on our own planet. The protagonist in this story is a man who has forgotten how to forget. He is an alien who comes from the future from the year 4001. In this future, the human brain has been perfected, and people have total recall. From where he comes, there is no alienated image; to call forth an image or a memory is to be aware of the origins of the ‘long and painful pre-history’ from which it has arisen, and yet something

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vital still eludes. The visitor has been drawn to this terrain by his wish to understand Mussorgsky’s song cycle ‘Sans soleil,’ still sung in the 40th century, and it is through his attempt to come to terms with this piece of music that he dimly ‘perceived the presence of that thing he didn’t understand,’ the relationship between unhappiness and memory. Paradoxically, the experience of forgetting, the gaps in our recollection of the past, is seen not to be the antithesis of memory, but commensurate with memory and the advancement of history. The passage reconstructing Vertigo is, as the above quotation indicates, dominated by the motif of the spiral, “the spiral of time”, which, in the original film, recurs as a leitmotif at various intervals: in the opening credits; in the spirals of the concentric circles of the sequoia tree; in the coiffure of the portrait of the dead Carlotta; and in the coiffure of Madeleine herself, and which, in Sans soleil, adorns the hair of the mobile of the muse in the ‘zone’. The underlying theme of the revisit of the past in the retracing of Scottie’s footsteps recalls various earlier and later sequences in which the cameraman returns to places that are deeply engrained in his memory. At the beginning, we retrace the cameraman’s return to Tokyo and his revisiting of once-familiar sites. We also follow him on his return to the Cape Verde islands, where he surveys the aftermath of the postwar landscape for the signs of the continued struggle for independence, and, later still, to a village where he once stayed in Iceland. In each instance, we are taken on a tour of the familiar landmarks which once provided the orienting points of his journeys, but, as with the reconstruction of the sites of Vertigo, these journeys are marked by loss and rupture, for, although the majority of the sites have remained, some have vanished, and those that have persisted no longer exist in the same form. With Marker we are always aware that history, like memory is, to paraphrase the historian Michel de Certeau, a treatment of absence. This absence remains at the centre of history, for what represented of the past is merely a

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series of fragments. Detached in the midst of its material environment, these fragments can never be wholly reconstituted. Correspondingly, the representation of history is neither commensurate with the events it represents, nor equivalent to the experience of those who have participated in those events. The lack of common measure that inevitably exists between the views historical events as “official versions of collective memory” and scale of personal experience detaches history from its source is material perception and consciousness. For the individual experiencing historical events, history remains recalcitrant invisible, for it is the event, not the causality that is experienced. Rejecting the idea of history as simply a mirror of events, Marker implies instead that the writing of history does not simply record or reproduce events as they were, but gives a phenomenological form to them. Our understanding of the past is therefore only the sum total of representations that can be made of it at any one moment in time. Yet, the problem is deeper than a self-conscious recognition of the limits of historical recuperation. For the problem of historical interpretation is also bound up with the experience of temporality. History is caught in a double bind; if what the present understands about the past is never simply the past as it was, it is equally true that our understanding of the present is always refracted through our imperfect recollection of the past. This implies that past and present are ultimately inseparable, for the present continually inhabits our perception of the past, and the past our perception of the present. We are ultimately unable to disentangle what we project back onto the past from the past itself, for we are incapable of detaching ourselves fully from the present. Our inability to stand outside of history means that we are ill-equipped to judge whether there is an underlying order to the apparent randomness and chaos of historical events, because the order of history must exist beyond the limits of our perception, and thus beyond the reach of our understanding. The problems of history thus

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become enmeshed in a series of problems of perspective. The fact that the observation of history is made from a vantage point within history is related to the knowledge it seeks to provide of the world, and thus undermines its claims to objective neutrality or secure foundations. Marker investigates entities and states of affairs through transcending human experience. Philosophical views and matters arise.In the course of Sans soleil, Marker draws our attention to these problems of the writing of history, adopting a radical sense about the limits of historical representation, the attendant blindness and misrecognition that accompany our attempts to stand apart from and grasp the unfolding of historical process. At one point, questioning the forces, which are determining the power relations of the modern global economy, the commentary states: “Do we ever know where history is really made? More poignantly, the frequent exposition of moments of interpretive blindness counters the persistent imagery of the omniscient eye that runs throughout the film. Indeed, as we have recognized at times in Sans soleil, there is a personification of a mythical history. This melancholy of fatalism in Sans soleil implies that man does not make history, but endures it, or, put another way, that the unfolding of historical events always outstrips the interpretive frameworks which we bring to bear upon them. The destructive forces of time in their various cultural and natural manifestations are ever present within the film, and even prevail upon the images of Sans soleil itself. Towards the conclusion of the film- the sequences of images that we have already seen in the course of the film are repeated, but how directed through the distorted prism of the zone. The possession of recurring images filtered through Yamaneko’s machine begins to take on a ritual destruction of the fragments of memory that the film has evoked. Indeed, at one point, an analogy is explicitly drawn between the effects of the filtering images on Yamaneko’s machine and letters which one burns, and which are consumed at the edge of the

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fire. These ideas are accompanied by images of sacrifice, the burning of dolls, and the footage of Kamikaze planes in flames— all processed through Yamaneko’s machine. Yet, if Sans soleil uses the language of myth to form a critique of the rational and humanist vision of history, this pessimism about the scope of history is not intended to negate history as a form of knowledge. Sans soleil is interpreting history, and deciphering ideas that lie beneath the appearances of history. Marker draws our attention to what may otherwise be forgotten. In the sequence of the visit to Okinawa, he laments the passing of the Ryoko, the native inhabitants of the island, whose population was devastated during the American invasion in 1945. Sans soleil therefore, in Marker’s own words, attempts to ‘repair the web of time’ where it has been broken. The problem of representing history for Marker is bound up with finding another way to write history, one that acknowledges, rather than occludes, the processes of constructing history. This is a phenomenological form of history that finds a place for history’s indeterminacies, in terms of both the limits of representation and the problems that mark our understanding of the temporal. That other way for Marker involves an attempt to convey something of history’s dialectical polyphony of voices and structures. The mutability of signification connected with the refusal of closure will represent images as a living presence. We might say that Sans soleil is a demonstration of such a mode of history. What memory chooses to remember and how we can achieve phenomenological experiences are central thematic ideas in Sans soleil. Memory is the bridge between space and time. There are many moments in Marker’s film, which are described, as being among those memories whose only function is to leave behind nothing but memories. Marker thinks through his images and sounds that the different concepts of time are the great questions of the century, a belief endorsed by Paul Virilio. According to this belief we live in a world of intensely tiny units of time. The real world and our image of

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the world no longer coincide. Part of the intention of Sans soleil is to illustrate Virilio’s theory and to show how it can also be applied retrospectively. Marker’s modes of presentation within the film represent a critical engagement with the question of representation itself. A more flexible approach to the characterizations within Sans soleil would therefore be to see these characters as models within the film, which are modified to a variety of structural, as well as autobiographical ends. Hence, Yamaneko’s modes of imaging provide a counterpoint to Krasna’s camerawork. They represent alternate approaches to representation, alternate aesthetics and alternate strategies to the question of the representation of memory which are deployed in the course of the film, and which at various moments Marker himself has deployed. Sans soleil is therefore neither entirely fictional nor entirely autobiographical, but exists at the phenomenological interface of these categories. Marker’s montage technique is mosaic and associational, and it produces a very dynamic structure of signification. The recurring of images and sequences in different series enriches and transforms their significance. There is an important analogy to be drawn between the dialectic form of Marker’s montage and certain forms of musical structure. Marker’s images are audiovisual compositions, with recurrent themes, counterpoints and mirror like fugues. All in all, Marker creates a many-faceted relationship between images, sounds and argumentations.

Visual Fragmentations Philosophical texts offer images through which subjectivity can be structured and given a marking which is that of the corporate body. Michèle Le Doeuff

We can assume that an analysis of a filmmaker’s style reflects the meanings of even most obvious techniques. The images used in a film may seem merely functional, but when examined carefully

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they reveal significant choices. An image is an unedited strip of film which varies in duration from fractions of a second to larger lengths. Images can be categorized better by space than time, although both affect the content of the single image. With space we are dealing with the distance and proximity of the camera on the subject being photographed: the further the camera is, the greater the amount of space and subject matter is in the frame. Stefan Sharff has suggested that ‘the cinematic chain is a rigorous movement, merciless in its push and pull ... it is the function of orchestration to keep this movement under control, tying together a film’s various elements and distributing them properly’. (Sharff, 1982, 167). It is intended to achieve some kind of organic harmony and continuity, which is to emerge from the inner sources of the medium itself. ‘Orchestration is the guardian of the overall harmonies in a cinematic continuum.’ (Ibidem). In Béla Tarr’s films, movements are orchestrated, and this kind of acting is a unique feature of his style, and features another example of his stylized subordination of performers to the image’s overall spatial and temporal outlining. Tarr’s pictoriality reflects his larger ideas on how to control the narrative. The individual image works as building force of the whole system where space and designed locals work as a starting point, and through actor’s movements, camera positions and general compositional lines it is possible to create cinema, which is highlighted by symmetrical lines, elements of tonality and balance. The naturalness of acting can affect as ceremonial, since in Tarr’s world acting is subordinated to wider aesthetics of the narrative. The cinematic image works in pictorial design and plane of the action producing a cinema that is rich in tableaux-like compositions and overall connotations. When dealing with closer views of characters and objects Tarr uses selective perspectives. The elemental space is often portrayed as a clear composition with everything in focus. They have a special pictorial quality, which is related to the spectator’s perceiving of them. Tarr understands clearly how cinema

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is a performance art like theatre, but also a pictorial art and pictorial signs are iconic in one respect and arbitrary in every other. Traditionally there has been very little talk about cinema’s theatrical affinities, because of the heavy burden on montage and cutting. But a visually minded director can also guide the spectator’s eye by controlling the whole stage set and using cinematic effects, manipulating the space between actors. Thus the space of the action can be very fluid and pictorially interesting. Director’s work is to take care of the context and narrative functions of the whole operative filmmaking process, and especially transitions between scenes. The more distinctive these transitions are the better the quality of the film is. All the visual devices in Tarr’s system of narrative display have their functions and modifications connected to a film style that has its functions and norms played out in a coherent inner and outer logic. Norms can be ‘mediations,’ lying at the core of a special set intertwining circles of film culture. Tarr concentrates on the visual design at the level of the images in a way that that make characters’ positions, eyes, faces, and bodies coincide. The matching of characters inside the narrative is part the whole arrangement, which is motivated by the scene’s action and general dramatic ideas. In general, Tarr’s establishing shots, transitional devices and overall visual design have their own norms, which form and create the basis of the spectator’s schemes and expectation throughout the narrative. The stylistic variation is there, as well as the idea of simplification. Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmoniak, 2000) is a mesmerizing and phenomenologically interesting mediation on popular demagogy and mental human manipulation. Tarr is a highly acquired and original filmmaker, and has yet to acquire the broad critical following of fellow Hungarian Miklós Jancsó and Greece’s Theo Angelopoulos who are often referred as his closest filmmaking relatives. Werckmeister Harmonies may start to change things and prompt rediscovery of his earlier

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works, including especially Damnation (Kárhozat, 1987). Tarr is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers in our time. Adapted from Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), Werckmeister Harmonies also reunites the technical team behind Sátántangó (1994), photographer Gábor Medvigy and composer Mihaly Vigó for an opus that’s recognizably a Tarr film but in comparison with Sátántangó also different. Events move forward at a relatively rapid pace related to Tarr’s earlier films, to a final half-hour that brings in a greater emotional dramatic. The setting of the film is usual to Tarr: a small and bleak Hungarian village, in a freezing winter temperature but without snow. As the camera pulls away from an image of a stove and embarks on the opening ten-minute take, the audience is plunged into a rural bar at closing time with the drunken people gradually falling under the spell of a young man, local postman and a kind of holy fool Valushka (Lars Rudolph), who leads them into a performance imitating the solar system. An outsider becomes the catalyst for an attempt to change. The world described in the narration is clearly standing on some kind of brink: jobless people hang around in the streets, families are disappearing, and some kind of revolution is in the air. The time is right for people’s imaginations to be seduced. A mysterious circus run by unseen foreigners has come to town, and villagers have flocked from all over, drawn by a promised appearance by a mysterious figure called “The Prince.” At the moment, however, all that’s on show is a life-size stuffed whale inside a large truck, and the people have to pay 100 forints to gaze upon it. As the locals talk about revolution and leadership, tension grows among those who have braved the cold to see the circus. After the manager announces that the Prince can’t appear, the passive mob finally rebels and—in a chilling sequence that in some mysterious way recalls the silent, rebellious work force of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)—marches on the local hospital and starts trashing the

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place. It is here that Tarr develops the film’s most memorable moves: In a moment of transcendent cinema, (powered by Vig’s magical music), the mob is halted in its steps by an unexpected sight and disperses of its own accord. The military then ruthlessly hunts down and crushes the resistance. Werckmeister Harmonies has the sense of some impending crisis that’s not quite happening in a place where people have been thrown back on their basic living resources. Later scenes mark the elements still more strongly. Tarr takes from Krasznahorkai’s, novel the key moments: there’s the visit to the town of ‘the largest whale in the world’ organized by the ‘Prince,’ a shadowy, unseen figure. Tarr films the slow progression of the whale by lorry through the night-time streets as a creaking ritual of impending doom. Then at the start of the film there’s the inspired speech about the nature of the cosmos in the local bar at closing time by Valushka, which Tarr orchestrates into a single take. All these larger variations are more or less noticeable, mainly because they occur at moments when causality is slackened and the rules of additive form can come to the foreground. There is a sense of Dostoyevski and Kafka in the air, similar atmospheric notions in this fable of a foreboding disaster, which might seem a bit obscure, but works as a powerful adjunct to the emotional impact of the film. Krasznahorkai puts this uncanny quality into words, which Tarr then transforms into an extraordinary composite of cinematic storytelling, language, music, sounds and images. Once you start looking at the images you’re trapped into a world of involuntary attention. This brings in a sense of pure aesthetic experience when the ‘nightmares conform to reality’. Werckmeister Harmonies is a classic demonstration of his symphonic approach to filmmaking. Tarr’s images and sounds work subliminally on the spectator’s emotions over large expanses of time even when the spectator is dimly aware of what’s going on. Through Gábor Medvigy’s hypnotic camerawork the perceiver is not a passive subject but an active one, contributing substan-

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tially to the final effect of the work. There are many processes involved with this, physiological, preconscious, conscious, and unconscious. Some perceptions are automatic responses beyond control; for example, film’s medium depends upon these automatic abilities of senses and human brain. A lot of the object recognition is preconscious, and these kind of mental processes differ from physiological activities because they are available to the conscious mind. Much of reaction to film’s stylistic devices might be preconscious because one learns different cinematic techniques, for example, from classical films. Tarr’s stressing of the image’s depth and his desire to discriminate objects through lighting allow him to give each transitional shot various distinct visual components. The narration can use these components to take us on a detour whose topography shifts between the perceptual clarity of visual landmarks and conceptual links between shots. It is of course the narration that brings various parallels to our attention. In such ways, Tarr’s transitions may work to break down the very distinction between a scene and a transition. More subtle is the way how, for example, photography depends on freezing the movement of that moment, so photography falsifies the world by freezing it, and by falsifying it; it gives the world expressive strength. Film works exactly the opposite way: it starts with a movement, and it unfreezes the world; even when the world is static, one can, by moving the camera, give movement to the static world. From this perspective, film is not a photographic art so much as it is a performance art because still-photo thinking is a reverse of moving image thinking. So, one essential filmic operation can be considered sequential linking of spatial images. The motion picture in itself is an event because it looks different every moment, whereas there is no such temporal progress in painting or in sculpture. It is here that the effects of Tarr’s rule-governed compositional play become significant. Furthermore, motion being one of its outstanding properties, the film is required by aesthetic law to use

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and interpret motion. Consequently, for a spectator many kinds of shifts in viewpoints (through varied camerawork) may be completely invisible, because he or she looks through the images, not at them, and therefore has little or no idea where one shot ends and another one begins. Performances are disciplined, and essentially marionettes in Tarr’s hands. Though never explained in the film, the title of the film refers to the 17th-century German organist-composer Andreas Werckmeister, esteemed for his influential tones on harmony and musical construction. It is a fitting parallel for a filmmaker whose films work on the emotions in as unfathomable a way as the compositions of great symphonies. In an age when an average film contains approximately 1000 shots per 100 minutes, Tarr’s two-and-a-halfhour Werckmeister Harmonies has an improbable 39 shots in 145 minutes. Viewing its intense contemplation of an atavistic world of strange catastrophe and grim survival is both an unnerving and fascinating experience. The material of expression most characteristic of the cinema is the multiple, mechanically moving image and its placement in sequences. One of the specific codes of cinema is camera movement. This code involves the totality of the film field of vision as it relates to the stasis of mobility that can occur within the cinematic shot. Obviously, at any moment the camera either may rest static or may follow some path of movement (vertical, horizontal, circular), or some combination of those paths. In Tarr’s approach to narrative and style, every shot is constantly making its choices explicit by having eliminated all the figures of potential movement or stasis that are not present. This code is specific to film because it requires the utilization of materials of cinematic technology. Unusually clear examples of the utilization of camera movement as codes specific to the cinema occur in the films of Miklós Jancsó. For closer views of people and objects, Jancsó frequently employed film’s equivalent of atmospheric perspective, selective focus. Stylistically speaking one can see Tarr’s style, for example, in Sátántangó, as a continuation of the Miklós Jancsó-style in some

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earlier Jancsó-films, especially Agnus Dei (1969) and Red Psalm (1971). These films flamboyantly flaunted the mastery of camera movement. Jancsó’s near-schematic technique relied heavily on camera set-ups and long, wandering, and elaborates compositional scenes that compellingly use the integration of figures with the landscape. From the Soviet montage tradition emerged the idea of a group protagonist, which Jancsó turned into dedramatizing ends. Jancsó’s dramaturgy emphasized large-scale forces and momentarily fluctuations. The scenes were played out in very long takes with constantly moving figures and ceaselessly panning and tracking cameras. In Red Psalm, the groups have become pure emblems of social forces, playing out symbolic rituals in abstract space. Any attempt to make sense of Béla Tarr’s films in strict narrative terms is as doomed as an analysis of Jancsó’s abstract political parables. Tarr’s films may lack some of the choreographic grace and visual allure of his fellow countryman’s classic works of the 1960’s and 1970’s, since their black and white photography foregrounds elements more related to Expressionism in art. Uniting both directors is a distrust of power structures and a resolutely Hungarian interest in mass resistance. Tarr’s construction of a scene’s space may be thought of as reinforcing certain overall patterns of his narrational process. His emphasis on the visual is controlled by a unified system of intrinsic norms of composition, acting, staging and cutting. We can follow and accept these narratives because they respond and reflect the general schemata of his stylization. In Tarr’s narrative system, the movement of the camera is always suspenseful. At the opening of Damnation we see in long shot huge moving buckets suspended on wires like cable cars, hear them shunting in the distance back and forth from some unseen quarry. The camera slowly retreats until we’re behind an apartment window that becomes a frame within a frame. What had seemed an exterior shot quickly becomes an interior one; what had seemed omniscience is in fact the point of view of a man staring out of the

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window at the cables. Tarr’s camera moves back behind the man’s head without showing his face until the head itself blocks the image of the moving buckets. Without a cut we are then made to realize that what we’ve been looking at is what he sees, but now his very presence obliterates the image that was once ours and is now his, as it had been all along. As if to prove he can move in the other direction, Tarr films an interior two-way conversation in long shot framed by billowing curtains. The camera tracks sideways along the curtains, until the speakers are out of frame and then pulls back through the open window before lowering itself to ground level where we read a ‘Police’ sign on the front of the building. Only as we’re leaving do we find out where we’ve been. But this is not merely a demonstration of auteur virtuosity: reversal is a crucial element in the repetitive circular structure on which the film is based.

Phenomenological Meditation Matter and form and their distinction have a deeper origin. Martin Heidegger

The marked stylistic events will enter into larger scale patterns. The opening long shot of Sátántangó makes a different point. By means of its organizational unity and stylistic control, the film achieves great didactic rigour. In a grey landscape under grey skies we watch a herd pass—some attempting to mount others—slowly into a soggy field. Sluggish bovine movement may well be an involuntary parody of the demonic tango to come. Yet unexpectedly the camera tracks behind farmhouse buildings to match the movement of the herd until it vanishes out of sight. As the camera’s gaze glides across the surface of the distressed wall, at once the weight of the time passing turns into foreboding. This world seems the sport of malign deities. Later in the film, a young girl in a desolate barn overlooking a rainswept plain punishes in real time the cat she loves. And further

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on Tarr presents a tableau-like scene, straight like from a Brueghel-painting, when the girl watches trough a bar window as the locals dance accompanied by accordion music. In Sátántangó, Tarr approaches Nietzschean nihilism. Tarr’s images offer the most powerful and complex vision of the historical situation in the Eastern Europe region over the last decades. Through his images, he speaks for ordinary people in his universal cinematic language, people, who might feel cheated and disappointed in their lives because of the financial and other crises. It is of course the narration that brings such parallels to our attention, often through such obvious devices as the lateral camera movements that link different places. But the film does show a definite commitment to depth compositions, especially in opaque establishing shots. The prevalence of depth makes Tarr’s image self-conscious. They are so intricately composed that much of this result lies on purely pictorial level of the arrangement. There is a lack of trust in the air that comes through Tarr’s images but also religious and other allegories in Sátántangó, multiple references to the apocalypse. The didactic unity of the film is supported by its narrative organization. The cause-effect linkage is quite episodic, and the plot pattern encourages a condensed accumulation of events characteristic of an epic story. By cutting off the ground on which people stand and relying on considerable depth, the framing makes objects and figures hover in various zones of foreground and background. The visual motives are there inside the images. The motif of rain comes forward, as well as the metaphor of the bells. It rains almost incessantly, and this relates to Krasznahorkai’s fixation with sorrow. There is a bit of Robert Bresson in Tarr’s image tableaux but the influence of Carl Th. Dreyer’s severe imagery is also present. Sometimes Tarr´s images are stage-like and geometric in their compositional dimensions. The static tableau-images bring in fixed world of oblique constructions. The extreme close-ups recall Theo Angelopoulos’s images in The Travelling Players (1975)

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with their long monologues of facial expressions. The present of people and their faces is important. It is also very crucial how Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies are devoted to people walking. This becomes a metaphor, a meditative phenomenological sense of narrative, which is full of meta-communication. Although the space can be mapped, it requires close attention. The long shots are cunningly designed to exclude crucial regions and to prompt the spectator to rely on gross landmarks. Like any original filmmaker, Tarr follows the psychological processes of narrative. Put in this context, Tarr is revealed as once more refusing a great many options, picking some of them that can be explored in specific detail, and organizing them according to his cinematic thinking. Many shots have their virtue of frontal positioning of figures and objects, the arrangement of perspective, and a uniformity of tonalities in the figure and background. As a whole, Tarr creates a space of vast, canvas-like perspectives where figures act in a continuous and hieratic way relying on strong compositional lines as to achieve greater expressivity. The special camera treatment and picture composition is the key to Tarr’s images. What fails from the story has to be shown visually through images. The images show where Tarr’s world is coming from. Continuous movement is needed for metaphysical and phenomenological reasons and an abstract choreography to portray the human relationships. Tarr needs phenomenological dimensions to appear in his images. He wants to depict a cyclical process returning to itself, and at the same time to create the illusion of moving forward. This is what the choreography of the camera-movement expresses. It is a question of how pictorial artifices are used in this process that confines itself to certain and very precise visual dynamics. Pictorial depth may be present in various ways and degrees. It usually deals with figure and ground relations, perspectives, lighting effects, and placement of different elements inside the image. Even flat images contain depth cues. Tarr creates densely packed

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compositions, which can still contain free space-areas with significant elements in foreground or in background. Small shifts in figure positions will appear to be creating arresting compositional lines. The performers, his actors are subordinated to this overall planning of various factors of composition. Performers are rarely in close-up, more common is the use of long-, full-, and medium-shots. When the camera tracks or follows someone, depicted movements are in balance of the whole composition. He also arranges his figure so that their placement, posture, and orientation are controlled through the general composition. Figure-movements are precisely measured, and they can be important motifs throughout the narrative. Tarr approaches editing as he approached the planning of the image-compositions. Conventions of continuity editing are recombined and re-structured. Tarr’s editing alternatives are connected with the architecture of his images. Pictorial planning of single images, shots, and sequences has achieved a greater organizational level in his films. Now, Tarr has the possibility to develop a cinematic language of his own through compositional unification of different elements of narrative. His editing choices are illustrative and profound. Editing procedures are functionally stable, processed, and systematic in all manner of details. The classic separation of images, decoupage, is organized according to the architectural form of the images where the structural lines of composition will guide the overall harmony of the legible choices. Tarr’s accomplishment consists of taking an original set of cinematic materials and transforming them by means of a unique formal system. There are themes of sexual betrayal, surveillance and criminal actions in Damnation and Sátántangó, but in Werckmeister Harmonies all this spreads up into more collective levels of existence. The riot and mayhem at the end of the film are based squarely on the book, but Tarr’s idea comes from an incident that was of passing interest in the novel: the sacking of a hospital once the riot is well under way. Tarr places it later in his narrative and

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with restrained suspense withholds the violence until a key moment. As it merges into a headstrong crowd, the camera tracks back in front of the throng in a near-endless take that shows its members running angrily on a road to nowhere. Still Tarr lingers, and then a sudden cut alters the meaning. A reverse-angle shot, unusual in this film, reveals the target of their hatred: a decrepit hospital building which they enter and ransack in a sequence-shot that follows the destroyers into a series of rooms peopled by ailing inmates unable to protect themselves. It is a sustained image of the helplessness of victims and the pointlessness of destruction, an apocalypse that stresses the banality of evil in an era of European history. The spectator’s cognitive map is much sharper at a shot-to-shot level, since most of the film’s cues for contiguous regions rely on eye-lines and frame entrances, and these do permit us to measure out a total space. Tarr lets the spectator build a space consisting of clear dramatic nodes within a solid overall area. Tarr offers an experience of imagery of a flow of experience as it is given to us in phenomenologically immanent perception or in some other reduced intuition. The phenomenologically particular images are captivating in the whole wealth of their concreteness and with their precise determinacy to let things appear, now in this aspect, now in that, and with just that fluctuating clearness and intermittent elegancy. In all, this tactic allows Béla Tarr to keep the image alive, to quicken our visual interest while also linking or developing his characteristic compositions. Moreover, since we cannot see what is off-screen, camera movement offers a chance to arouse and foil expectations. Springing such surprises is a fairly traditional use of camera movement. More distinctive is the way in which Tarr’s camera movements participate in a larger dynamic of opening and filling space at a tempo which allows us to form anticipations about how the blocking will develop. Thanks to the long take and silent intervals, Tarr prolongs the very process of staging, leaving us plenty of time to recognize that we are forming

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expectations about where the character or camera will go next. Time is required to give the spectator a broad range of knowledge More precisely, Tarr’s extremely slow camera movements often move away from or past the characters creating up a mood and sensation related to formal suspense. This makes it possible for Tarr the use of different perspectives during the same shot. For example, in Sátántangó and in The Turin Horse (2010) he changes perspectives from people to the landscape, and so on. In The Turin Horse, a narrator introduces the event that precedes the story of the film. In 1889 while in Turin, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnesses a situation where the driver of a hansom-cab starts whipping his stubborn horse. While trying to intervene, Nietzsche throws himself in between the driver and the horse and collapses. After the incident, Nietzsche becomes ill and stops publishing. This verbal introduction ends with a remark that summarizes the nature of this film: we do not know what happened to the horse. In The Turin Horse, Tarr follows the fate of the horse and his owners, an elderly man and his daughter living in a little cottage, over the course of six days. After the introduction, Nietzsche disappears from the film apart from a later philosophical cameo-appearance. But clearly, the incident with the horse and Nietzsche is very essential. Everything that happens in the story of The Turin Horse is secondary to the Turin incident. In the audiovisual reality of the film, there is no before, but only an afterlife of the early happenings. In The Turin Horse, Tarr relies on minimalist means and gestaltmodes of storytelling to convey his ideas. Philosophical views and matters arise. The Turin Horse seems extreme in its dramatic and aesthetic asceticism. The narrative is carried by a single composition covering the entire soundtrack, and by the same scenes reoccurring day after day. The Turin Horse has a meditative nature with much tension arising between the images and sounds. The film is a philosophical and phenomenological investigation of the nature, constitution, and structure of a certain reality. In a broader scope,

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it addresses questions and investigates answers, which it presupposes. The metaphysical naturalism of the film has its descriptive and phenomenal features. The nature of space and time is crucial for Tarr. Tarr renders a world out of totality of entities, a system of relations between individual things. He makes vivid our understanding of temporal and spatial relations in a cinematic world. The various states of emotions appear to be linked together by the film’s image-architecture with philosophical and psychological undertones. The film is an imaginative projection into a special situation to capture the relevant spectrum of appearances for aesthetic contemplation. The meaning of this world relates to its being. Whatever presents itself in this bodily reality is simply accepted as it gives itself out to be, though only within the limits in which it then presents itself. (Husserl). In The Turin Horse, as in most of his films, Tarr creates an alternative to classical Hollywood-narrative and develops stylistic features to an unprecedented level of aesthetic observation and nuance. He is reflecting relevant aspects of the dynamics of human experience. He creates his unfashionable tendency to visualize social existence in ordered, balanced and concentrated forms. His filmmaking is symmetrical forming completely regularized arrangements of shots and sequences. His visual balance and order introduce a set of associations to the formal description of narrative, a psychological equilibrium that signals a bias towards historically contingent style. He specifies how by balance we can understand that all parts of cinematic composition undermine the importance of the whole. By implementing his exceptional audiovisual sense, Tarr is correlating his vision to the ideas of the phenomenological reduction (meaning pure experiences) with the infusion of the eidetic reduction (meaning essential essences), and reconstructing a world of appearances. Tarr’s account includes an interpretation of how human thinking is connected with the universe, and how special audiovisual statements about this can be made. Tarr’s phenomenological descriptions are carefully ob-

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served with direct intuitions, and then confirmed through their use of relating a whole range of different phenomena (both real and imaginative) to particular instances of our experience. The various techniques are exploited as elements of perceptual design, serving a narrative end to create surprise or suspense but organized to a degree that stresses the symmetries of pattern. The overall symmetry of these transitions, along with its minor nuances and surprises, should require only a little commentary. In Tarr’s usage, balance and order mean something more akin to cinematic coherence and unity. In The Turin Horse, the work’s formal properties serve an identifiable purpose and function to express specifiable themes and meanings. This explains the thematic and formal unity of Tarr’s style that utilizes sonic and other formal strategies to increase the interpretative activity of the spectator. Tarr does not imply that the meaning and importance of his film must be readily transparent. As a consequence, Tarr places a high currency on the various types of phenomenological realms that a film may elicit, and, in exploring this, requires the spectator to actively arise their hermeneutic resources in order to comprehend the film’s sophisticated messages. Pointing out a larger compass, Tarr thinks that through the work of his formal system, certain referents and commonplaces become deepened and enriched. These references are only accessible through understanding the compositional dynamics at play in his narrative. For Tarr, the composition and audiovisual form of his narrative designate the totality of his approach. Painting a special view on Tarr, perhaps it is possible to find that various aspects of the image combine in presenting the narrative as a pattern of audiovisual forces, of eloquent shapes, forms and meanings. In this sense, every aspect of his film participates in unison to facilitate a deeper apprehension of the work’s theme. Tarr’s filmic compositions act as catalysts for soliciting interpretation on the level of experience. Expressive properties of a film can constitute concentrated and intensified forms inherent in all

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perceptual phenomena. The expressive properties have their kinship in certain mental states. As Tarr’s film show, the perceptual stimuli coming from images and sounds create mental processes involved in the experience. Tarr manifests an emotive property as well. These emotive reflections indicate particular mental states and associations. The existential relationship between expression and the structure of a film is developed. In film, expression operates through psychophysical parallelism with its structural relation between perception and the following mental states. The Turin Horse comprises structural totality where perceptual configurations are carriers of expressive modernism to produce particular effects. Minimal information is provided between main figures. Tarr’s shapes and lines of composition reveal expressive dynamics, which we can witness. By using form carefully, Tarr orchestrates our attention towards the figures in a landscape. Tarr is an experimental filmmaker, testing the results of his formal decisions and challenging new demands for the viewer. In The Turin Horse, a careful reworking of subjects and themes will emerge offering structural patterns, which emphasize meaning in a labyrinth of form and style probing the deepest possibilities of the medium. The reality of the film-image is always partial, since the audiovisual perception arises from the interaction of the mind’s active, organizing capacities, and the stimuli found in the sensory environment. Tarr uses spectator’s natural human propensities to allow his creative effects their full disposal, gapping our knowledge and encouraging our relationship with the film. Our phenomenological and cognitive properties are scanning the images and sounds relationally apprehending their meanings. The spectator of a Béla Tarr -film is, in a way, forced to see these changes, share the immobility of happenings, waiting and the expectations of the characters, while the shot proceeds. David Thomas Lynch thinks that this the way that, for example, Sátántangó combines distance with empathy, aided by a compli-

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cated chronological rearrangement of the story and careful attention to the particularities of the characters. The character is not only a piece of mis-en-scene, but much more like supplement of the narrative continuity. The character can make the words and actions real, offering the audience not only visual pleasure but also emotional and psychological deepness. Characters have their own identity and history and childhood, which might reflect the problems of society on social levels. So, the character is very much vivid and his or her choices, backgrounds, emotions, and functions are not accidental. The notion of character also offers some purchase on outlying or ancillary promotional functions in the film like the star system in essence. It involves the creation and popularization of characters. In some cases, we can seek guidance from role models, and their practices. Being guided by role models requires some recognition of just who should be a role model. One may act out of a character, since dispositions do not automatically produce particular actions in specific cases. One may also have a conflicted character, like in many Béla Tarr’s films, if the virtues one’s character comprises contain internal tensions. The sympathy, empathy or antipathy gives different values, measures and opens the needs of a character. In the films of Béla Tarr, the needs of characters are very clearly presented, consisting of simple and basic things like security or love, and a need for independence. Although to have these basic things, like the everlasting emotions of loneliness, misanthropy and dystopia, they are so much related to the characters that it is hard to find a way out of this circle. The anxious feelings for the audience reactions, and the conclusion of how the audience perceives the character is more than important. For example Andrei Tarkovsky melded time according to the dictates of the film’s memory, producing a film that seems to turn inward, to take the spectator inside the mind’s eye of the narrator. To the extent that the force of cinematic images systemically deconstructs codes for narra-

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tive continuity, the position of the narrating mind’s eye constantly shifts between various planes of film space-time, eluding a stable hold on the events of the narration. The movement of the narrative point of view dislocates the position of the spectator’s eye in turn. The spectator no sooner finds a footing in the events of the fiction than the editing breaks the terms of scopic identification and opens up yet another space-time and yet another locus in which the spectator must insert herself. The indication of narrating and spectating subjectivities never quite achieves a coherent unity in the present and presence of the film image, but follows a movement without origin, present, or presence, a movement that perpetually postpones the closure of eye to an unlocatable future-past. For Tarkovsky, rhythm in the images is not the metrical sequence of pieces, but the time-thrust within the frames. Montage brings together time, imprinted in the segments of film. Pointing to Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait of a woman (shown in The Mirror, 1975), Tarkovsky claims that the famous painting is powerful precisely because in it one cannot find anything that one might particularly prefer, one cannot single out any detail from the whole ... and so there opens up before us the possibility of interaction with infinity. He adheres to the same principle while showing a human face on the screen: rejecting facial expression as a way of conveying ideas, Tarkovsky attempts to reach into our innermost feelings, to remind us of some obscure memories and experiences of our own, overwhelming us, stirring our souls like a revelation that is impossible to interpret in any particular way. According to Vlada Petric this attitude relates to the concept of la photogénie defined by Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein in the 1920s as the most unique feature of the film medium. Tarr’s images and especially camera movements are related to the general scene, subordinating to it any calligraphic side effect. As compared with cuts, the slowly moving camera’s gradual angle changes allow a more solid, sustained sense of scene. Long takes stay with a stretch of world. Tarr’s reflective

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moments flatten those sharp peaked rhythms of action, decision, or suspense that might disrupt or supersede our sense of time. Working together these features of form elongate our sense of duration. The takes seem even longer than they are, approaching a vision of sequence shots. In one respect Tarr’s cutting nudges closer to montage editing than Hollywood norms. In Tarr’s oeuvre the hard-edged landscapes are important, and people being distant make small pictorial movements; encourage cuts on strong, almost static universe. Tarr’s approach to audiovisual display refers to the hermeneutical circle of ideas with the tension between Tarr as interpreter of his unyielding worldview where the static and balanced compositions create energy and tension to inevitably and immediately felt experiences. This is how the audiovisual world can speak to us, refine the horizon with greater nuance, and finally move toward a fusion of horizons.

Orchestrations Contemporary iconoclasm, like early modern versions, rests on the puritanical myth of an authentic or innocent epistemological origin. Barbara Maria Stafford

Tarr’s physical landscape is marked by the long shots, images, where the different elements function as parts of the natural setting, but they too are part of a sub-textual language that calls up both private and universal associations from one film to the next. Tarr orchestrates the various elements in his own way: the action consists of what the characters and the camera do in relation to one another, so, there is the possibility of moveable and shifting relationships between the elements. Tarr’s visual approach concerns the character’s hidden agendas and duplicitous motives, adding to the overall paranoid and conspiratorial atmosphere. Tarr’s image strategy creates various kinds of movements within stasis, and freedom within confinement. Tarr’s commitment to long takes, distant views and temps morts plac-

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es an enormous weight upon the unfolding shot. Camera movement is the most obvious accessory here. In Tarr’s films the camera movements seem locally motivated. This tactic allows Tarr to keep his shots and images alive, and shift our visual interest. This is the way that Tarr’s camera movements participate in a larger cinematic dynamic, filling the spaces in a slow tempo; they offer a chance to arouse and foil expectations. The strategy with the long take is to take it to a moment of heightened expressivity. Its source is in a modernist aesthetic, the absence of drama can command our attention and emotional investment along different lines. The strategy of building a long take to a moment of heightened expressivity, in the absence of phenomenological drama, which can command our attention and emotional investment along mainstream lines, has its source mainly in modernist aesthetics. The movement of the body itself further complicates temporality in landscape experience, a phenomenon we call kinaesthesia. When moving across landscape space there is not only a dynamic flow of perceptions derived from external sources, but there is also the muscular and nervous movement of the body itself through space and time. This is something that is related to cinematic thinking. There is a complicated interrelationship between, for example, the perception of the movement of surroundings and the movement of the body, which is displayed in what is known as ‘parallactic movement’. Tarr strengthens his universes by a feeling for a man-in-environment -theme. This is possible by an unhurried choreography of camera and characters, and by heavy emphases on people’s silent or cryptic thinking. It seems that Tarr rejects montage (or uses montage-withinshot) as too manipulative a technique for capturing the reality or essence of a given moment in a given place. Walter Benjamin has recognized that the meaning derived from landscape and architectural space is received ‘by a collectivity in a state of distraction,’ slowly appreciating its symbolic environment through ‘ha-

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bitual appropriation,’ or through everyday use and activity. Béla Tarr creates new relationships between the camera and the scene. It is a question of montage within the camera and montage within the shot, which seems to become a more ’normal’ way of expressing than the usual montage thinking. In a Tarr film reality and imagination mix and reflect each other. This all has a specific quality, which creates stimulating differences. Tarr extends many de-dramatizing tactics. His special interest is in the landscape and stretches of dead time. Tarr’s camera examines the scenes with its own curiosity, enumerating the contents of the shot before it with only small movements, and after that, panning in the appropriate direction. Béla Tarr is a modernist in creating a recognizable, self-conscious style, which he carries throughout his works. In his films the long takes and camera movements create dialectic among different elements in the shot. Tarr blends European cinematic traditions with a new kind of cinematic awareness. Tarr has openly expressed his admiration for Jean-Luc Godard and Abbas Kiarostami, but in terms of style their work is at some distance from his. His use of the sequence-shot (a single shot that takes in a significant amount of action and information) to orchestrate complex movement and edit it within the frame without cutting links him, of course, to Miklós Jancs, as well as to early Sergei Paradjanov, and to Tarkovsky, Angelopoulos and Sokhurov: all figures who have been in major roles in the cinema of Central and Eastern Europe. Tarr’s vision, though, is distinctively his own. His films have a feeling of present, a being-there that marks them off from the historical preoccupations of Jancs, and fixity of place and time that separates them from the perpetual odysseys of Angelopoulos. Nor, as a nonbeliever, does Tarr share in Tarkovsky’s sacred vision of the four elements of the material world, transmuted from Russian Orthodoxy. The sheer weight of his images seems to make them immune to the temptations of a lustrous transcendence. Tarr’s thematic and stylistic concerns have their expressive motifs in showing the

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subjective logic, a kind of movement of thoughts. The subtlety of the lighting effects is not simply a source of legitimate aesthetic pleasure in its own right, but part of the thematic and psychological structure of the film. The stylistics of Béla Tarr is a world apart not only from Hollywood but also from the fractured forms and shock techniques of western modernism. Tarr has developed a new cinematic art from the long take, multi-planar composition and the complex orchestration of characters, sounds and objects in and out of the frame. It is a meeting place for themes and styles, a kind cinema of adversity: a fascination with the interface of nature and culture that co-exists with a sense of the terror lurking in the material world. This has been called “magical realism,” but it is not supernatural by nature. Instead this kind of cinema exists in the face of adversity, both human and natural. In Tarr, the very presence of different elements percolates the texture of the image, with its intimations of infernal wind, rain and cold and the flood of biblical proportions that threatens at the end of Damnation. Most overtly, Tarr uses style to call our attention to the patterning of his scenes, highlighting the motifs and symmetries we have been considering. Tarr’s films are fine examples of artistic originality, because Tarr can create direct perceptual and imaginative engagement with the films themselves, and can give rise to a distinctive aesthetic mode surrounding the films. Tarr is a European filmmaker who can mould sensuous or imaginatively intended material into original symbolic form. Tarr brings the rational, sensible and historical aspects of phenomenological experience into an internal relation. All the different elements of his films are, in a way, inseparable, coherent, and mentally and physically embodied. Béla Tarr’s cinematic syntax makes possible increasingly complex combination of shots, which can generate an even greater variety of messages and meanings. Such combinations touch on the mystique of cinema: a peculiar and original cinematic reality. Tarr’s film phrases, constructed through fragmentation, also tamper with reality by showing the total geogra-

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phy of a setting and spatial relationships between the shots. Tarr shows that the intensity of viewer involvement depends on the energies, which radiate from the screen according to the filmmaker’s arrangement of dramatic sequences. Phenomenology therefore means for Tarr the attempt to let the images and sounds speak for itself, since our own human existence too, in its most immediate, and internal nuances, will reveal itself. Tarr searches for pre-reflective, pre-ontological, lived understanding of the world, and seeks the essence of the ontological ground of the phenomena. In phenomenological sense, Tarr’s films are ontological events, creating an interaction between the spectator and cinematic visions, which are part of the experienced history of what is actually understood.

5. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

What are images? Are they real, or do they exist only in our minds? What are the features of a single image? How do we perceive images? How can we relate ourselves to the images that we see? Here are some of the questions we have tried to answer in the preceding pages, and we have done so through the study of the problems and paradoxes at hand. No definite and final answers can be drawn from a topic as diverse and continuous as this one, but hopefully some interesting points of view have arisen at least. One of the lessons of our inquiry is that images are in many ways unique objects, which can be seen as itself, and as some other object or thing. They may have a certain size but they can still refer to things of other sizes. As an extension of this, images are, in a certain sense, impossible. They point to things that are elsewhere, and they enable reactions to situations that are not present at any given moment. There is a considerable variety of features we ordinarily ascribe to images, and it is possible to hold that some of the features are more or less unreal than the other ones. Consequently, images can produce perceptions that are not possible for the physical objects of the world. In the light of this, images are one step away from the immediate reality. Another significant point is that in front of images we have to make choices between the surface of the image, and the virtual world it refers to. The imagined reality of the image is not a physical reality although it might have references towards it. Furthermore, an image is a

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representation of things, consisting not only of lines and colours. It needs one to look at it, and interpret it. Assuming that images are not only our projections onto the world, we can ask: What are they? Our point of view defines that the perception of an image consists of at least two simultaneous processes of understanding: the direct perception of the surface of an image, and the indirect consciousness of a virtual surface of an image, which is related to knowing and imagining of things. The first place to look will be then among objects of our direct experience. To be able to read and interpret images, we have to know how to compare them, how to proceed with significant solutions to problems, and all this is only partially similar to the reading of physical objects contained in reality. We perceive an image as being at a certain distance from other objects. The perception of an image requires knowledge, comparison, and deduction. The perception of a representative image is always a perception of something, recognition of it. The comparison related to this is an outcome of it, so that we can perceive the existence of a representative reality. In any case, the perception of an image as a representation requires more cognitive processes than the perception of physical objects. One creates expectations as soon as one sees an image. One of the lessons of our inquiry is that perceiving images is not merely processing objective information, but is also a deeply subjective experience, and is thus not directly comparative with the information contained in the physical image. We can think that an image is many-sided according to its inner nature. Photographs were already absurd in their own way, when one thinks of the unreality of a frozen moment. Of course, we are now used to this, and we can understand and classify them. We have adapted to the speciality of a still image, and we can accept its power of truth. It is useful to bear in mind that the information contained in an image is often imperfect, and this allows many different interpretations. Also, the sources of information inside

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the image can be contradictory or misleading, regarding pictorial representations. Sometimes it is useful to classify images by some conspicuous graphic feature, which may be dominant. One can name verticality, horizontality, diagonality and triangulations in various directions and at many different angles. If all these features exist in one image then it is more a question of dramatic and semantic components of the image, which might control it. According to this study, perception is the formulation of visual concepts or representations of the mind, and making an image is producing representational concepts based on visual concepts. These concepts and representations are structures, which consist of essential and particular features. This means that although a representation of the mind or a visual concept contains more information about an object than we can perceive from one angle, it is also a simplification of an object, because it does not show all the details of the object. Through film images, a filmmaker can extend the viewer’s experience of a montage technique, which appeals to the flow of undirected or reflective thought, to thought that is not narrowly formed but is associational, the very thought patterns which we identify with memory. Another point is how some filmmakers have developed new cinematic art from the images of long take, which creates a multi-planar composition with the complex orchestration of characters, sounds and objects in and out of the frame. Through a phenomenological approach, we can appreciate more the emotional and existential side of experiencing and reflecting on images. Following this we can think that images function in our consciousness as structured relations between the present and the past. More broadly, modern media images have to be deconstructed in order to be reconstituted. A contemporary interpretation thinks that an image is a record of things, which can be stored, and especially in the digital age it can be changed into another image. Consequently, images have

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moved from their conventional locations into far more technologically advanced and more complex environments. As a follow up, the contexts of today’s image-worlds are different from the previous ones. There are many transformations taking place in this context. The communication of and through images has gone through many changes during the last decades. These changes also relate to the question of producing meanings inside digital media. Digital and virtual images gain their value from their accessibility, malleability, and information status. There is a considerable variety of features we ordinarily ascribe to images, and the increased versatility of digital and virtual images raises many questions concerning the cultural concept of photographic truth. A different set of questions is raised when we consider the impact of digital imaging on news and historical documents, so, in the contemporary world of visual culture and visual images, different forms of image manipulation are creating a broad array of images that defy traditional notions of time and space. Still, assuming that images are not merely our projections onto the world, what are they? First of all, we are living in an era in which visual images and the visualizing of things that are not necessarily visual has accelerated so dramatically that the global circulation of images has become an end itself, especially through the internet. Related to this, the context of the images is now wide and open for new forms of interpretation. Nowadays images are more prone to circulation, changed contexts, and remaking. Images can be multi-factorial, structured combinations of many features. An image can be defined as one thing which looks just similar enough to another to suggest it or to remind the spectator of it in context. We seem to think that pictorial reading of images can become a rich array of associations. To that extent, graphic and pictorial elements constitute different visual entities, albeit rooted in the same pictorial features, and neither quite separated from the other. According to this study, the analysis of the meaning of the image has important theoretical aspects. Although it is not pos-

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sible to bring in all the possible details concerning the topic, the more or less rough outlines suggest that we are dealing with material which earlier theories on image has yet hardly touched. We have outlined some of the independent research into the meaning of the image, covering much of the same ground that Jacques Aumont and others explored in their analysis of the history of the image. In this way, this far-reaching dialogue with earlier theories on images has made us all the more hesitant in putting forward the deeper levels of the meaning of the image. It became more and more apparent that the earlier theories of the meaning of the image promised to be tools that once were important steps in approaching the topic at hand. The reason for this is very easy to see. It is possible to investigate all kinds of creative fantasies related to images but one can not make assumptions about the origin and the character of the images with not resisting all attempts at fuller understanding. What seems to emerge without reasonable doubt is the fact that many meanings of the image arise from the various connections between conscious and unconscious or subliminal levels of the mind. Furthermore, we can think that the meanings of the image with their various degrees of de-differentiation testify to the deep quality of de-differentiation in general. Structural approach seems to play an eminently important role in creative work related to images. The link between creative de-differentiation and imagination concerning the role of the images in our culture no longer allows us to assume that we are merely dealing with superficial perspectives toward images. Hence the eminent theoretical significance of the meanings inside the images is revealed, and their close link with various mind processes. All in all, the key outcome of our evaluation is that part of the meaning of the image results from deeply subliminal processes. Creativity is somehow capable of tapping these levels by a variation of the top and bottom levels of the creative imagination. It can through this make use of subliminal fantasies for

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solving immanently practical tasks inside the mind, doing highly abstract procedures or painting a good picture that possesses a lively pictorial space. After this journey into the possibilities of the image framework we might not hesitate to seek the origin of this kind of pictorial space in profoundly subliminal fantasies of the human mind. We have earlier seen how these images draw the viewer inside, obliterating the distance between her and the image. The observer is put to work to articulate the oscillating surfaces of the image, so that she can extricate herself from its close embraces. It is important to realize the very direct linkage between the structural analysis of the image and the aesthetic analysis of its substructures. Consequently, the analysis of the meaning of the image poses another problem. Theoretical writing today takes it for granted that visual material is very important for analysis. It tends to neglect other sources as being superimposed on the earlier, supposedly more fundamental material. This survey shows a situation which is quite the opposite, a conclusion which flows directly from our attention to the subliminal states of the mind. Visual material is structurally more differentiated than other material and for this reason alone it is more accessible to conscious understanding. Undifferentiated images, whatever their content may be, are withdrawn from unconsciousness. In a way, structural differentiation is the mind’s instrument for repressing mental material, since any increase in the mind’s structural handling of the material must increase both the material’s inaccessibility and the depth of its unconscious quality. It seems that in the mind’s cyclical re-composition and re-articulation of the image, its meanings are often revised and re-controlled. Altogether, the structural analysis of the meaning of the image promises to be a research tool of astonishing dimensions. We can say that the function of the creative mind is the collaboration between several mental levels. The creative observer of the image links previously disconnected realms. These realms func-

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tion according to their different codes. The creative feature is to link the earlier modes of functioning with current ones. Furthermore, the characteristics of these realms are the substitution of the meaning of the image for precise words, symbolization, and the merging of other images. In the mind we are also dealing with the primary processes that might function irrationally. The realm of art brings in another dimension. The mind uses unconscious scanning of the images, and this requires an active differentiation of modes of thinking. This means the creation of an entirely new perspective towards images. The constructive role of the unconscious scanning of the image might be difficult to accept. We can think that unconscious fantasy is innate in the human mind from its inception and develops constantly later on. According to an idea here, conscious thought and unconscious fantasy develop together. The human mind works with both realms side by side with the help of creative injection through which it is possible to modify new links and shape new, more comprehensive images. So, what is the significance of these issues? We have tackled many questions in our approach. With our investigation, we have been concerned with many problems related to images. Although all the possible features connected with our approach are deeply interesting, they are not always easy to define. The idea of the image is often represented in metaphorical terms, and these metaphors control our thought. What we need are methods of judging the legitimacy of our conceptions related to images. One of the crucial ideas in Thoughts on Images lies in the fact that images are connected to changing metaphors that have different and sometimes incompatible properties. Perhaps the best way to imagine all this is to think of images as components and objects in the audiovisual culture level, where the levels of expectations form a mental set of sorts, a reflection of the interpretation of an image. Evidently, the form and composition of images can concentrate the spectator’s attention in a particular way. It is remarkable

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that features, which real-life vision scarcely relates, can be sharply brought together, and placed into juxtaposition, which does not exist in real-life vision. In analysing images, the pictorial form of the image can direct the spectator’s attention in certain ways, creating centres and movements of attention, which can criss-cross and compete with each other. An image can slip nimbly between the realms of desire and the everyday, dream and wakefulness, subjective and collective memory, but also an image can be a world in which experience of the real is, in actuality, constantly and imperceptibly shifting between these categories. The philosophy of the image has an impact on our self-conception. According to this study, the quest for the true image is an ongoing task, since such images are not often found, and when they are, they often come by surprise.

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