Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience 1498519032, 9781498519038

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Phenomenology of Film

Phenomenology of Film A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience

Shawn Loht

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-1902-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-1903-8 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

vii

Acknowledgments ix 1 Précis to a Heideggerian Phenomenology of Film

1

2 Heidegger’s Being and Time: Film Experience as Being-in-the-World 37 3 Film and Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art

75

4 Phenomenology and the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy

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5 Terrence Malick

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6 Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown and The White Ribbon

171

7 David Gordon Green’s Joe, and an Afterword

191

Bibliography 199 Index 207 About the Author

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v

Preface

This book attempts to provide a phenomenological account of film using the philosophy of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Heidegger never formulated a philosophy of film, and on top of that, the comments and reflections one can find in his oeuvre regarding film and photography are sparse and critical. With this in mind, the work to follow takes some other cues from Heidegger. I attempt to formulate an account of film in the spirit of Heidegger’s writings, rather than formulating a strict, rigorous view of what Heidegger himself would say about film. I draw significantly on core texts in Heidegger in order to develop positions on the phenomenology of film to which Heidegger’s thought lends itself. The first four chapters each try different approaches toward providing this phenomenology. The first chapter takes up the starting issue of film’s ontology and its phenomenological implications. Chapter 2 examines Heidegger’s early masterwork Being and Time so far as its analytic of “Dasein” stands to contribute to understanding the existential, human side of the film-viewing experience. Chapter 3 takes up film in the context of Heidegger’s philosophy of art and his critique of technology. Chapter 4 engages Heidegger’s thought on the question of whether and how films can be said to perform philosophy. Chapters 5–7 apply the theoretical findings of the first four chapters to a selection of films that are particularly fruitful for a range of Heideggerian readings. I focus primarily on narrative, fiction films, although much of the territory I take up should apply to the majority of moving image media. As I proceed, I do not wish to make any deep commitment to a particular concept of “film.” This is principally because my interest lay on the human side of the filmviewing experience—the phenomenology of the human agent who views films. Because Heidegger’s phenomenology is at the heart an existential phenomenology—and because I want to be true to the spirit of his work—the vii

viii Preface

outlook on film I present in this book is one motivated by altogether humanistic concerns rather than by concerns about the metaphysical makeup of an art medium. However, I envision this work to be as much a contribution to the philosophy of film as a contribution to Heidegger studies. On this score, I attempt to bring the application of Heidegger to some key issues in contemporary philosophy of film. The following abbreviations are employed for citations of frequently used primary source texts. BT Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Revised Edition. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Revised with a foreword by Dennis Schmidt. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010. (Citations to this text give section number (§) followed by English page number and page number in the German original, respectively.) OWA Martin Heidegger. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track. Translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Other references to Heidegger’s texts appear in the endnotes.

Acknowledgments

This book’s genesis traces a long and winding road. There are many individuals I would like to thank for their insight and conversation along the way. The first thank you goes to Marc Jolley, publisher at Mercer University Press, for putting the idea into my head to write a book on the philosophy of film, innocent as the suggestion was. A second thank you goes to my friends Shane Lief and Sarah Shelton, without whose conversation and partnership in reading Heidegger I do not believe this work would ever have seen the light of day. Others who have encouraged my work along the way and pressed me to think about Heidegger and the philosophy of film more carefully include Jack Sammons, Mark Jones, Patrick Jolley, Ashley Royal, Matthew Opple, Bryan Whitfield, Adam Tate, Laura Teresa Di Summa-Knoop, Phil Getz, Julia Ireland, Tracy Strong, David Davies, Jonathan Simon, Keith Silverman, and Richard Velkley. Special thanks go to Dan Shaw, editor of the journal Film and Philosophy, for his patience and encouragement steering me through my early, awkward attempts to write publishable work on the philosophy of film. The students of my philosophy and film courses at Tulane University also deserve credit for helping me learn about this subject. The anonymous reviewer who read my manuscript for Lexington Books was instrumental in making this work better than it would have been. Tonya Jordan Loht, who became my wife in 2016, also deserves my deep gratitude for allowing me the freedom to purse this task to its end, which included my spending of many off-days and weekends reading and writing. Not to mention her willingness and enthusiasm to join in my movie-watching interests wherever they lead. I must also acknowledge the gains of my lifelong friendship with Michael Cramer, whose movie tastes gave me significant and memorable exposure at an early age to some of the outer limits of cinema. Finally, I would also like to give special thanks to Jana Hodges-Kluck, editor at Lexington Books, for her ix

x Acknowledgments

initial interest in this project and for her patience and flexibility in stewarding the work of a first-time author. Portions of chapter 4 previously appeared in other publications. I thank the publishers of these journals for permission to reuse these articles. Sections 2–3 and 5–7 of chapter 4 appeared in an earlier version in: Shawn Loht, “The Relevance of Heidegger’s Conception of Philosophy to the Film-as-Philosophy Debate.” Film and Philosophy, Volume 19 (2015): 34–53. Reprinted by permission of the Society for the Philosophic Study of the Contemporary Visual Arts. Sections 4 and 8 of chapter 4 previously appeared in: Shawn Loht, “Phenomenological Pre-Conditions of the Concept of Filmas-Philosophy.” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Volume 2 (2) (2015): 173–85. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http:// www.tandfonline.com

Chapter 1

Précis to a Heideggerian Phenomenology of Film

I begin this text with a brief memoir. I realize it is not customary for philosophers to begin texts with autobiographical material. In the present instance I hope the reader can forgive my excursion. I feel as if my personal story is essential to where the inquiry originates. This book takes its inspiration from a personal experience that I also consider to be a seminal moment in my philosophical development. It was also my first conscious philosophical insight into the power of movies and their way of engaging us. I was in my graduate school years, about the age of 24 or 25. I had the occasion of viewing Metropolis on a DVD rental. As most will know, this film is the futuristic science fiction classic directed by German filmmaker Fritz Lang. Admittedly, at that moment in time I had very little knowledge of silent films, and only minimal exposure to many prewar films. I definitely had never considered myself a movie buff, and I did not regard film as much more than a popular entertainment medium. Metropolis opened up for me a whole new way of seeing things. It was not the story, creativity, or special effects of Fritz Lang’s work that captivated me. What I found so powerful about Metropolis was simply how immediately I was taken in by the very experience of the world it created, how moving I found the plight of its characters and their own yearning for authenticity and freedom. I also resisted this power Metropolis had on me; in fact, I found the first half of it so overwhelming that it took me some days to finish watching the rest of the film. I needed time to digest the experience I was having; or at least, I felt as if the initial power of that first encounter with it obviated any need to watch the film to its end. Today, I equate the experience much more with experiencing the profundity of a bona fide artwork. I see the power of the episode as an expression of coming to grips with art in general as a nondiscursive source of meaning and truth. However, what stayed with me was the philosophical challenge of 1

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wanting to understand the experience of films from the group up, particularly in the way of their existential power of giving meaning to us, of presenting new images to us, and providing us with new pathways of thinking. I wanted to understand what makes films seem so real, despite the reasons we have for classifying them as make-believe, as “representations” of actually existing things. The study to follow is motivated by this challenge. HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF FILM In this book I will attempt to develop a holistic philosophical account of the film experience using the thought of Martin Heidegger. The way I propose to make this account is to sketch a phenomenology of film, employing core elements of Heidegger’s work and thought. In this introductory chapter I wish to outline some of my motivation for invoking Heidegger’s philosophy in the service of the philosophy of film; to provide a little background on Heidegger’s relationship to film as a popular art medium and a manifestation of twentieth-century technology; and to indicate some of the ways a Heideggerian phenomenology may have a specific application to thinking about film and cinematic media. As an outline of topics for the upcoming chapters and the motivation for taking these topics up, this first chapter will necessarily be quite formal in some places. Heidegger typically is not characterized as a philosopher who espouses a specific “philosophy” or “system.” It is also unclear whether he espouses a singular “phenomenology” and if so, what this would be. As with other seminal European philosophers to whose heritage Heidegger belongs, his thought exhibits multiple shapes throughout his career, such that there is no wide agreement regarding whether Heidegger’s philosophy contains a central kernel or theme, or whether there are views to which he remained committed for in his entire career.1 I will not engage with any of these issues in great depth. Rather, my interest in Heidegger is motivated more by a wish to use key items in Heidegger’s work as foundational material for opening up new ways of thinking about the film experience. The question for me is not: what would Heidegger say about film? Instead, it is: What can Heidegger’s thought contribute to the philosophy of film? I concede, it may be the case that I end up pushing the boundaries of Heidegger’s philosophy a bit farther than Heidegger would sanction. Maybe there are overwhelming reasons to opt against adapting Heidegger’s thought to a subject Heidegger never considered very seriously.2 Nonetheless, I want to take a chance on this score, with the hope that this work opens up some new avenues for applying Heidegger to a contemporary subject and for making this subject better understood in its own right. An upshot is that in taking this more adventurous road, we break the



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study of Heidegger out of the rigid, esoteric talk of being, Ereignis (or the “event”), and the like within which Heidegger scholarship is so frequently confined.3 Much of my turn to Heidegger will in fact be framed as a response to what strike me as overly restrictive metaphysical commitments in contemporary philosophy of film—commitments that invite an out-and-out phenomenological clarification or which otherwise suffer from the errors of metaphysical Cartesianism, to which Heidegger’s work serves as an antidote. While I will not enlist Heidegger as a philosopher of film per se, I will attempt to show how key tenets of his thought can lend insight into difficulties in current philosophy of film. In addition, some of my responses to these metaphysicalCartesian issues are even motivated by Heidegger’s own criticisms of film and photography conceived as manifestations of Western culture’s subjectivized, technological, Cartesian way of looking at the world. In other words, I will try to reconcile some of Heidegger’s critique of film—motivated by these metaphysical-Cartesian grounds—by bringing in other considerations from Heidegger’s thought. It is widely known that Heidegger was not an admirer of twentieth-century popular media. On the flipside, what I hope to do is illustrate the narrowness of Heidegger’s conception of these, and consequently, use Heidegger’s conception of these media’s limits as a way to generate a view of how not to understand film philosophically. But why Heidegger? Other contributors to phenomenological philosophy such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty also work within a similar paradigm, and scholarship has borne out their relevance for the philosophy of film.4 Outside of a few bits and pieces that have appeared over the years, philosophers of film have not looked to Heidegger for guidance on understanding the film medium as such.5 One feature unique to Heidegger’s way of doing phenomenology is his emphasis on uprooting sedimented, sclerotic, historically pervasive categories that plague Western thought in the present. Not only that, his work also provides foundations for considering various conditions for the possibility of experience—in particular, the conditions that underlie the experience of the meaningful intelligibility of things. As is well known about Heidegger’s groundbreaking book Being and Time, this work sets about addressing “the question of the meaning of being.” In the course of this examination, however, Being and Time ends up generating hermeneutical and transcendental accounts of human experience; questioning the meaning of being entails unraveling the experience or understanding of this very meaning. The task also entails interrogating whom it is that has this experience, this understanding. According to the framework Heidegger develops, human being contains a more holistic connection to the world at large than the traditional metaphysical model we tend to inherit from philosophers such as Descartes or Kant. Philosophers of their ilk—in the modern paradigm—tend

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to construe the human makeup such that the mind is problematically severed from its world of perceptions. The solution to the problem of the human mind’s connection to the world, as readers of Descartes and Kant know, is to hypostasize knowledge as solely contained in the mind. In this view, the human mind possesses its own demonstrably reliable principles of logic and organization. The human mind can be its own judge of what is certain and what is fallible. Whether and how human knowledge actually grafts onto the “actual” world is less important, because the nature of this actual world is deemed unknowable anyway. What remains most important is that one’s knowledge is practically efficacious. Different in Heidegger’s understanding of human mind and world is his phenomenological description of the very connectedness of these two entities in everyday experience. Human beings do not come into the world as blank slates who must establish a connection to things through self-empowering means. Rather, humanness is derivative from Dasein, one’s being-there. To be a Dasein means already to be in a world. Epistemology need not be viewed as a philosophical problematic, because Dasein’s existentiality undergirds its transcendence. Human beings come onto the scene in a world that is readymade, existentially and transcendentally speaking. The self-discovery each of us goes through in our infancy, childhood, and adulthood is a function of the world-context that bears us. In sum, there is no separate “world” apart from the human being because the human being existentially is this same world; one is existentially inseparable from one’s world. Thus, the achievement of knowledge does not require bridging the gulf from mind to world because one is already there and always was. It is in this sense that Heidegger’s account of human being places existence before essence. We learn about our humanness on the basis of our existential nature, not the other way around. In other words, for each of us, our humanness is derivative from our existence as Dasein. This underlying model of Dasein’s relationship to its world (what Heidegger calls “being-in-the-world”) is also informed by the various “existentials” or categories that comprise Dasein’s existence and the particular ways in which things matter for it. Dasein exists understandingly; that is, Dasein possesses coping skills for negotiating and interpreting its surroundings, without needing prior instruction. Dasein naturally possesses know-how. On this same note, Dasein’s being-in-the-world is characterized by attunement to the world, or what Heidegger calls “moods.” This is to say, my experiences and perceptions are shaped by my moods, or what is the same, by the disposition or guise in which things occur for me. On a happy day everything I come across can be just as pleasant as pie. But on a bleak day my state of being can be such that “nothing is going right.” Heidegger also describes the existentiality of being with others: to be a Dasein is not to be an isolated solipsistic



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mind, but instead to belong to a shared world where my pursuits are derivative of those of others. The world of Dasein is also existentially discursive. Dasein’s existence is characterized by the ability to communicate in language and also by a facility for comprehending the discourse that is already present in one’s surroundings. My existence as a speaker and hearer takes place in the world. I comprehend the meaning of fellow speakers immediately and they respond to me in kind. The point to emphasize at this juncture is that the holism of human existence in the world occurs in such a way that things and experiences are meaningful, intelligible, and significant only with reference to and because of Dasein’s being-in-the-world, its existentiality. In other words, nothing possesses meaning in its own right; there “is” no ultimate truth of reality outside of human experience. In sum, there is no meaning outside of the understanding of Dasein in which this meaning resides (BT §43, 203/212). Meaning, intelligibility, understanding, truth, and so forth are phenomena that occur in and for human existence, where this existence is inextricably fostered by one’s shared, inherited world. Looking at the broader task I have set for myself here—engaging Heidegger in the service of a philosophical account of film—among the consequences for thinking philosophically about film is that we ought to render film—as a medium, object, and experience—as fundamentally rooted in a Daseinbased model of being-in-the-world, in keeping with what Heidegger lays out in Being and Time. That is, we ought not regard film or the experience of particular films as foreign, problematic cases of metaphysics, epistemology, or aesthetics, precisely because these are all issues that can be circumvented through the phenomenological terms of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. From this perspective, films are not unique objects to which Dasein must find a way to relate. Films are things to which Dasein already does relate, loci in which Dasein naturally finds meaning. We can regard films as unique instances of disclosure over and above their mere existence as, say, serially moving pictures. For, as Heidegger describes in Being and Time, Dasein itself has the feature of disclosedness or unveiling, of discovering meaning and having things come to light. Dasein is not simply the being to which being is disclosed; it equally is what some have labeled “the discloser” or “the revealer.”6 In brief, to be a Dasein entails not being in the dark, not experiencing things in ways that they are obstinate and impenetrable. Dasein brings with itself the feature of having things be illuminated, of things presenting themselves in auspices of intelligibility and revelation of meaning. Heidegger’s philosophy of art is particularly fruitful for bearing out this last set of claims. Artworks for Heidegger comprise paradigm cases of works made by the human hand whose effect is to reveal truth, where truth is understood according to the Greek locution of aletheia, or un-covering.

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Unlike other paradigmatic philosophical accounts of art that problematize the truth-bearing character of the work (e.g., Kant) or else discount it altogether (e.g., Plato), for Heidegger, it is a defining trait of artworks to reveal truth. This happens in a way that they poetically foster insight into the nature of the world. Artworks disclose truth through their own power; truth is “set” into the work, while the work itself preserves this truth for a time. Yet this truth cannot emerge, it cannot be appreciated without a human viewer who is there, participating in the artwork’s disclosure. This phenomenon is a dynamic twoway process in which the artwork’s disclosure occurs to and for the human viewer; this observation parallels Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that there is only meaning as long as there is Dasein. Hence Heidegger’s observation in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that artworks, even the greatest ones, are conditioned to contexts of culture and time. For all their uniqueness and shining power, the greatest works of art are still world-oriented; their disclosures of truth occur in ways contingent on the world they inhabit. It is in this sense that I find helpful the English language locution sometimes rendered for Dasein in this regard: “being-here.”7 Human existence, and the sorts of disclosures one experiences at a given historical or cultural moment, is characterized by a kind of “here-ness” of being, of having being present itself in culturally determined, place-specific ways. I believe the features of Heidegger’s phenomenology I have described so far to be especially apposite as an entry point for a phenomenological account of film and the film experience. Films can be understood in terms of Heidegger’s notion of art; and we engage with films in a manner by and large continuous with our being-in-the-world. Indeed, as I will describe in chapter 2, we can characterize film-viewing as an instance of being-in-theworld. Film-viewing can be understood as a mode of being-there, of Dasein’s essential projection beyond itself. Yet film-viewing is also clearly constituted by a two-way disclosure; films perform their disclosure temporally, to and for the human viewer. Yet a human viewer is also required who has the character of openness. That is, in order for filmic disclosure to occur the human viewer must be able to participate in this disclosure. TERMINOLOGY AND FRAMEWORK At this point it is fitting to set out some of the vocabulary, as a means for establishing the framework I will employ in what follows. In particular, I shall highlight how I understand phenomenology and its relevance for the present work. The reader might still be wondering how I understand the notion of phenomenology and in what guises I will entertain the idea of a phenomenology of film. Also in order is some further explication of Heidegger’s



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conception of phenomenology. Phenomenology has in its century-plus history taken on many different shapes, subject matters, and methods. There have been different schools: transcendental phenomenology, existential phenomenology, hermeneutic phenomenology, semiotic phenomenology. And one is likely to get different descriptions of phenomenology depending on what proponent of it one has in mind. Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, et al. each demonstrates what are usually considered to be somewhat different brands of this methodology. However, as a philosophical methodology and not a system of doctrines, concepts, or principles, phenomenology typically does not entail its own commitments per se outside of its longstanding dedication “to the things themselves” (hazy though this locution is). Still, there are a few items typically taken to characterize phenomenology or a phenomenological approach to doing philosophy that I will highlight as especially germane to my approach. First and foremost, phenomenology is a philosophical method that places emphasis on phenomena as they occur in lived experience. In other words, phenomenology entails accounting for things specifically according to their ways of manifesting themselves or revealing themselves experientially to the human agent. This entails giving attention to the spatiotemporal contexts and situations in which these phenomena occur, rather than isolating ideas from the occurrences that generate them. Thus, a working goal I will aim at in the course of things is to avoid doing conceptual analysis that removes the subject matter from its broader context. For doing a phenomenology of film, a central feature of my approach, therefore, is to avoid construing film in its status as a mere object. In other words, I wish to pay special attention to the overall context in which film has its being, which includes its viewing and the viewer’s relationship to it as viewed. A second item crucial to the phenomenological outlook I am adopting is the consideration of human consciousness, and the various conscious states involved in film-viewing, in terms of what is often called intentionality. “Intentionality” refers to the notion that consciousness entails consciousness of, namely that any state of consciousness always has an object; being conscious means always being conscious of some thing or other. A key distinction at work is that this sort of consciousness goes beyond the objects in front of one. The notion of intentionality circumscribes the fact that the mind’s object is typically not simply an object. Rather, intentional states target meaning or sense.8 An intentional state entails engaged comportment, founded on multiple levels of intelligibility. As such, intentionality is a less static, more dynamic way of appreciating conscious states and the way these contribute to the accrual of knowledge. Alternative perspectives that intentionality trumps on this score include the notion that conscious states are explicitly propositional, and the empiricist notion that knowledge originates in sense

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impressions and the human capacity for extracting or associating ideas from these. In brief, as John Haugeland describes it, intentionality highlights the fact that there are other cognitive attitudes besides knowing that are involved in both everyday and theoretical knowledge.9 My interest in intentionality vis-à-vis the film experience centers in the character of film-viewing that involves this more nuanced state of mental directedness—that the sort of consciousness involved with film-viewing is more existential, more predicated on understanding of meaning and sense than these alternative treatments can account for. In speaking of intentionality’s relevance for film-viewing and perception, Allan Casebier observes: The perceptual situation is conceived as one in which perceivers grasp the objects of their experience, an object that transcends their cognitive acts. The experience of film involves such a transcendence wherein the mind cognitively grasps objects that neither are nor can be parts or properties of mental acts. Moreover, in transcendence, the objects reached out to (in their existence) are indifferent to mental acts involved in their apprehension; accordingly, they exist, in an important way, in themselves.10

Film-viewing is in fact an excellent example of how intentionality operates at the core of human experience. For engagement with a film transcends the formulation of propositions and the mental processing of sense-data; film-viewing involves a multitude of intentional states, both forward- and backward-looking, by which the viewer builds and maintains an understanding of the narrative, the dialogue, and the interplay of images and themes. Film-viewing is a literally live, intentional process which, while directed at a singular locus, nonetheless fosters multiple layers of meaning often founded upon one another, hence many items requiring intentional directedness. A caveat I must acknowledge before I run any further with this invocation of intentionality: Heidegger is most certainly not a phenomenological philosopher who subscribes to an intentional model of consciousness.11 Although this concept does figure at the forefront of Heidegger’s own philosophical influences (Husserl, Brentano, and farther back, Duns Scotus), Heidegger decries intentionality as too narrowly characterizing human being-in-theworld. This is because the very model intentionality supposes betrays a Cartesian vein of mind’s relation to world, such that the products of cognition (i.e., meaning) are rendered into representational figments. And even if this charge is too strong, Heidegger also worries that the intentional model still construes the intentional object as a thing present-to-hand, just like any ordinary object. However, Heidegger’s philosophical interest circa Being and Time hovers around the wish to understand the very being of intentionality (or whatever we want to call it).12 Heidegger aims to describe the conditions



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of intentionality, intentional objects, and ultimately, meaning or intelligibility as all grounded in Dasein’s existential character. For this reason, the concept scholars uniformly employ in describing Heidegger’s broader alternative to the notion of intentionality is “comportment.” Comportment expresses the fact that much of our everyday activity is not cognitive at all, such that what is cognitive is still very often predicated on softer, less distinct modes of practical engagement with our surroundings. These are modes that do not require “conscious” thought and which oftentimes can be disrupted by overthinking them. As Dreyfus observes on this score, for Heidegger “Dasein must be understood to be more basic than mental states and their intentionality.”13 More than this, comportment also ties back into Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as being-in-the-world. Comportment, or more precisely comportment-toward, expresses the idea that Dasein’s engagement with things is always a function of its comportment toward the world. In other words, our everyday awareness, our cognitive states, are loci of meaning derivative from our world-directed existentiality. For instance, the world of the teacher is what shapes her familiarity with chalk, blackboards, and erasers. These objects, along with textbooks, grading, and the like, have their meaning from out of her comportment-toward, her being-toward the world of teaching. The teacher never entered into this world through an additive piecemeal familiarity with each of these objects; only the world in which these live can infuse them with meaning. The result of these observations vis-à-vis the intentional model of consciousness is this. We do not relate to things by transcending the metaphysical distance between mind and object, as if there is a divide that must be crossed; rather, objects meaningfully appear for us just insofar as we already are world-comported.14 In brief, as Heidegger says, Dasein simply is transcendence; this is what it means to be a being whose essence is to exist.15 I will talk about these issues further in what follows, but in the interim, their significance for presenting a phenomenological account of film, I will suggest, is that film-viewing ought to be understood in similar existential, transcendental terms. In short, we need to recast the film-viewer relationship in a way that overcomes the more typical notion of construing these as two distinct entities that come together as merely occurrent objects. We need to understand film-viewing in a more holistic model of comportment, such that film-viewing is not merely a cognitive or intentional state, but instead a state of being. The notion of disclosure or disclosedness is also crucial to the appreciation of phenomenology I wish to develop in this work. In phenomenological schools of thought, disclosure refers to the fact that knowledge eventuates out of a unity of knower and known, but particularly in a way that occurs both in givenness to and revealing by the human agent. Heidegger tends to use the term “disclosedness” [Erschlossenheit] when describing this phenomenon.

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He characterizes it in the double-sense I am describing here: on the one hand, the human agent or Dasein has the existential capacity for intentionality, comportment, and revealing. On the other hand, this capacity of Dasein couples with a givenness or disclosure occurring on the part of the various things with which Dasein engages. Heidegger often uses metaphors of illumination, that is, having things come to light, being “cleared” for the knower, as a means of characterizing the givenness of things in disclosure alongside Dasein’s capacity for uncovering, bringing things to light. Most importantly, disclosedness is always both of these; Dasein discloses (both things and itself), and things are disclosed for Dasein.16 Limiting the cognitive paradigm to just the first results in solipsistic representationalism; limiting this to the latter supposes some kind of Aristotelian empiricism. The twofold dimension of Heideggeian disclosedness is decisive for the phenomenological structures of film-viewership I aim to describe in the next chapters. It is also decisive for distinguishing a Heideggerian approach to film from that of a philosopher such as Gilles Deleuze, whose system of cinematic taxonomy construes viewer agency as almost completely passive, eschewing a model in which the viewer exhibits any capacity for the illumination of what is viewed. For the present moment, the point to emphasize is that experiences such as film-viewing, or reading, or taking in a work of visual art operate at both levels, of the human mind that is receptive to and intentionally minded toward the work, and of the disclosure opened up by the work itself. For a simple example in the case of a narrative, fiction film, consider the viewer’s disclosedness and the disclosures fostered in the process of viewing Citizen Kane. Among the other intentional states—states of disclosedness—the viewer of this film may experience, one of them likely to occur is the disclosedness of the significance of “Rosebud.” This word is the last thing Kane says before he dies, at the start of the film. The meaning of “Rosebud” emerges as a question, whose answer can only be vaguely articulated by the viewer, until this initial, unfulfilled intentional state can be fulfilled at the film’s end. So the viewing of this film involves a disclosedness, that is, the viewer disclosing the meaning of “Rosebud,” unlocking or uncovering it as it were. Yet the viewer does not learn the meaning of “Rosebud” solely through her own investigation. Rather, there is a visual and discursive disclosure for the viewer that plays out over the course of the film and particularly at its end when an image finally reveals, i.e. fosters the disclosure, that “Rosebud” was Kane’s beloved snow sled. This discovery, this disclosedness experienced on the part of the viewer plays out precisely because of the disclosure the film grants. In his later work, however, particularly in the writings on art and poetry, Heidegger does plainly understand artworks to foster their own brands of disclosure, what he often terms aletheia. He shifts toward a view in which being’s disclosure or aletheia occurs independently of human involvement.



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Scholars usually have this distinction in mind when they characterize the early, circa-Being and Time Heidegger as primarily occupied with Dasein, and the later Heidegger as interested in the disclosure of being. In the present work I see these differences in Heidegger’s philosophical interest not as two competing ways of thinking but instead as complementary and equally essential to the project that Being and Time initiates: inquiry into the question of the meaning of being. Another key distinction I will make here is less terminological and more methodological. Phenomenological approaches to doing philosophy oftentimes place emphasis on the role of language and particularly of description in one’s account. An underlying assumption at the heart of phenomenological approaches to philosophy is that language has the unique ability to let things be seen, to bring them into view by virtue of articulating their relationships with other things. The rationale for this assumption is the following: if I can talk about something, this means I can make it present for myself and others, and this in an extent to which the subject was not previously present or known. Communication in language entails a degree of intentional comportment, of disclosure of whatever it is that I have to say. For whatever I am able to describe in words, there is also a basic disclosure of the thing that affords my very description. My intentional state often bears an essential connection with the disclosure from which my discourse originates. In general, this account is the meaning of phenomenology’s emphasis on describing “the things themselves,” as they are manifested in experience. On the other hand, a limitation also typically acknowledged in this very feature of language is that our descriptions can only ever gesture at the things we are attempting to describe. We can bring phenomena into view through our use of language, but our language has the limitation of forever hovering around what we wish to describe. This is the sense of Heidegger’s notion of “formal indication,” especially prominent in his early work through the period of Being and Time.17 Language itself cannot capture the essence of things, insofar as language is limited to approaching these essences from the periphery as it were. Language is limited to describing appearances,18 though in this way it nonetheless works for the phenomenologist as an accessory to bringing the essences of things into view. Another concession the phenomenological approach often makes on this score is that whatever subjects the philosopher takes into view always have a hidden aspect.19 To cite a classic example, suppose you are standing in front of a three-dimensional cube, you are able to see the front of the cube and some of the sides and perhaps the top if you are tall enough. But you can never see all sides of the cube at once. You can only see those that are given to you from your spatial position—though you can certainly be intentionally directed toward this unseen aspect of the cube.20 Moreover, only through the

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seen sides of the cube can you have any sort of intentionality toward the hidden sides. You require the seeing of what is visible in order to know about the parts that are unseen.21 We can make a generalization from this example to the effect that all subjects the philosopher can take up have a similar dimension of hiddenness or inaccessibility, despite whatever ways they are positively accessible. Philosophical accounts are necessarily incomplete since they always come from a certain view or aspect. There can be no singular, exhaustive philosophical account of the world, much less of any given thing in it. Nor can philosophy discover an eternal, static essence within things, as such an essence is not discoverable. In Heidegger’s view, what such an erroneous supposition commits to, in fact, is removing things from their essential mode of appearing from out of hiddenness, not to mention eradicating their world-borne character. For Heidegger this limitation of philosophy is complicated by another layer in fact. In Heidegger’s thought, the natures of all beings, including human beings, are also historically conditioned, such that their way of manifesting themselves is a function of the ontological paradigms of their historical epoch. For instance, the Greeks had their paradigmatic concepts of eidos, telos, and energeia; in the medieval world beings were seen as products of creation, having their ultimate origin and being in God; in the modern age beings are conceived according to the model of Cartesian representation. According to this reasoning, to talk of any item of reality having an eternal, static essence misses the fact that the very guises in which things manifest themselves are historically momentary and determined by the hermeneutic logos of their age—or what is the same for Heidegger, the historical guises in which being has manifested itself and been knowable to the human being. Film and the media of popular culture are examples as strong as any such cases we might apply to Heidegger, in fact. As I will discuss further later in this chapter and again in chapter 3, film for Heidegger is an instance of the twentieth-century West’s fundamental way of seeing the world through the lens of subjective representation. Film’s dominance not just as a consumer product but also as an all-pervasive way of “seeing” the world and bridging all distances between things is a reflection of the modern tendency to regard all orientations in the world as “views” or “pictures.” To bring this back to the terms of the present discussion of language and philosophical discourse, the broader point to note from these cues in Heidegger is that this historical material is what a philosophical account of something like film stands to miss altogether, unless we can also make an account of this historical grounding—the historical phenomenology and hermeneutics—of our subject matter. Moreover, even setting aside this Heideggerian concession, the ties between phenomenology and language stipulate that any account we might make of film in the account that follows is inherently



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descriptive and provisional. We cannot make claims to essentialism because we are only describing things as they appear in lived experience. And after all, like many other art objects, films certainly present themselves as singular experiences, opening up their own discourses, disclosures, and worlds. From the standpoint of phenomenology, however, this is an acceptable concession as phenomenology has always been foremost concerned with description. HEIDEGGER AND PHENOMENOLOGY Much of my motivation for running through the terminology here is to foreground its relevance for thinking about the film medium phenomenologically. A core assumption that the work to follow proceeds upon is that film is itself fundamentally and uniquely phenomenological. I want to advance the view that any philosophical reckoning with film conceived as an object for philosophical study must take this dimension into account. Surely the reader will ask: What do I mean when I say “phenomenological” in this context? In one aspect I intend my meaning to be wholly colloquial: film and the moving image arts are fundamentally showing, disclosive media. What does film do? It shows. A film’s enactment and its viewing are ultimately predicated on the disclosure afforded to the viewer taking it in. In addition, the disclosures of film and related media are primarily, though not exclusively, visual. Certainly the disclosures fostered in given films take on other discursive and aesthetic forms, as in music, dialog, editing, and the like. But in descriptive (and ultimately ontological) terms a foundation in visual disclosure seems undeniable, such that these other items are (by and large) ancillary to the visual dimension of film’s way of showing. And certainly among these ancillary features consists the dimension according to which film can leave things fundamentally un-shown. That is, as I will suggest at various points, film’s purview consists not merely in pictorial and imagistic showing, but also in revealing the unseen aspects of the camera’s vision. For phenomenology has always been concerned with this dimension too, to articulate the meaning of what is unseen but nonetheless present. More deeply, I wish to characterize film as a distinctively phenomenological medium in the sense that any phenomenological account of a given sphere of reality must also reckon with the human side of the experienced phenomenon. That is, crucial to my project is to describe film from the side of the human agent who experiences filmic disclosure. Simply stated, the phenomenology that the film medium exhibits is equally a phenomenology (or hermeneutics) of the film-viewer. To say that film is fundamentally phenomenological thus entails a corresponding component in which we provide a hermeneutic interpretation of the human aspect of the phenomenon, its

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disclosures, and its intentionalities. Putting it bluntly, perhaps the film experience reveals something phenomenologically apposite about us, such that examining the specifically disclosive, phenomenological character of film media can help to bring these human facts out. For a commonplace example, think about the universality of the human reaction to and experience of pictures and cinematic images. Sometimes this human capacity is labeled as “pictorial recognition.”22 A phenomenology of film therefore ought to lay a foundation for exploring this side of film’s phenomenological nature—the fact that film involves a display to a human agent, a display rendered to the human agent in definite describable ways, and which the human view naturally understands without need for further instructions. Part of why I find Heidegger’s philosophy and his way of doing phenomenology attractive on this score is that across his various works he provides detailed accounts of the phenomenology of human experience, of the disclosures afforded to and for Dasein precisely as they are experienced. Heidegger’s work helps to describe not only the phenomena of the world but also the agent who experiences these phenomena, emphasizing that this agent is to be considered a phenomenon in her own right. The present work has the goal of providing a Heideggerian account of the film experience. So, in a more qualified and technical sense it is incumbent upon me to address what phenomenology means more specifically for Heidegger. Much of my account of phenomenology so far has been rather general. My point of reference for a specific conception of Heidegger’s brand of phenomenology is his account of it in the opening sections of Being and Time, especially Section 7. In this section Heidegger spells out both what phenomenology means for him and how the concept of “phenomenon” is to be understood. Being and Time’s guiding question is that of the meaning of being, or, as it becomes more precisely formulated over the duration of the text: What are the underlying conditions that afford meaning and intelligibility to beings? This initial question of the meaning of being is one whose asking has been neglected, covered over, and forgotten in the history of philosophy. Heidegger suggests in Section 7 that phenomenology is a crucial method for reinvigorating investigation into the guiding question because it is especially suited for explicating things that are hidden and which do not typically show themselves. Yet, one could raise a question as to why this peculiar formulation of the guiding question is a suitable subject to bring to phenomenology. In what way is the question of the meaning of being constitutive of a phenomenon of the sort phenomenology investigates? It is easy to fall into a formal, rather vague characterization here, of characterizing any given thing as a “phenomenon” containing dimensions of hiddenness. Colloquially speaking, surely not just any kind of phenomenon is of philosophical interest. So what are the phenomena of phenomenology? As already stated,



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Heidegger’s interest lay in unraveling the phenomena that for the most part do not show themselves but which at the same time function as the meaning and ground of those that are more familiar (BT §7, 33/35). Moreover, Heidegger also understands “phenomena” as original, fundamental instances of self-showing [sich-zeigen]. Or, if this connotes too much of a sense of agency, we can also consider the phenomenon simply as what appears, and precisely as it appears. He takes a cue from the Greek roots phaino and phainesthai, which respectively mean “to show” or “appear.” The connotation embedded in these terms is that of things which show themselves; they do not need a show-er but instead self-show. Now, the guiding question of the meaning of being fits the bill here if we think about its dimensions of both familiarity and confusion for the average philosophical mind. While the meaning of being— perhaps better understood as simply the notion of “meaning,” that is, sense, intelligibility23—is indeed a phenomenon, a self-showing, this is a showing that is not immediately intuitive or obvious. In colloquial terms we can, after all, agree with the statements: “Being has a meaning” or “There is a meaning of being.” Likewise, while the meaning of being is not at all clear, being is a subject with which the human subject has a natural familiarity. To ask after the meaning of being entails also residing within some understanding of being’s meaning, though this understanding clearly can be obscure. Thus, the question of the meaning of being is suitable to bring to phenomenological inquiry precisely because the meaning of being can be regarded as a fundamental instance of self-showing that is at the same time hidden away, only partially in view. What does Heidegger mean by the notion of “meaning” of being? The concept of “meaning” has a specialized sense for Heidegger in regard to the guiding question. In Being and Time’s first division, Heidegger explicitly defines meaning as the ground that underlies human understanding; meaning “is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself” (BT §32, 146/151). As Magda King has described, meaning for Heidegger is “that from which something is understandable as what it is.”24 Alternately described, meaning refers to intelligibility or sense. For instance, Dreyfus observes that accounting for the meaning of being is about making sense of our ability to make sense.25 The meaning of being thus refers to the fact that things of everyday experience are readily understandable and accessible. Thus, as Thomas Sheehan has described it, when Heidegger highlights the question of the meaning of being, he aims to convey that “the ‘being’ of things is exclusively their meaningful presence (Anwesen) to human beings in correlation with their understanding of that meaningfulness.”26 Sheehan has recently brought attention to the fact that Heidegger’s talk of the meaning of being has caused so much unnecessary confusion in the reading of Heidegger, since Heidegger’s project circa Being and Time in fact focuses on being qua intelligibility or

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meaningful presence more than anything else.27 So Being and Time’s guiding question is not a cerebral, quasi-mystical inquiry into being as such; rather, it is a roundabout way of beginning an inquiry into the conditions of the intelligibility of things, ourselves, and the world. Heidegger does not limit his explication of the concept of phenomenon (in the robust phenomenological sense) to the purview of the guiding question, however. Much of the remainder of Being and Time in fact takes up other phenomena to which this fundamental notion of phenomenon in the guiding question is ancillary. Examples are world, space, attunement, care, and truth.28 Phenomenology in this broader Heideggerian sense is thus a methodology for identifying the conditions under which these phenomena have sense and significance in human experience.29 And it is not simply the case that all past philosophers have totally missed the distinction of genuine “phenomena.” Other philosophers have stopped short of identifying phenomena as such, although they may have been close to making this discovery. Heidegger cites Kant’s account of phenomena (referred to by Kant as “appearances”) as a case in point, claiming that Kant’s notion of phenomena is limited to a vulgar, insufficiently critical conception, though acknowledging that Kant grazes the robust conception. Kant recognized that all appearances occur in space and time; moreover, he recognized the a priori nature of this relationship. Space and time are identified as the inner conditions to which all intuitions are subject. Yet, Kant failed to see that space is a proper phenomenon in its own right. This is because Kant held that space itself is not an object of experience; space never “appears” though its conceptuality is certainly evident. In Kant’s mind, in order to talk about space as a self-subsistent phenomenon would require hypostasizing it as something fundamentally unknowable that exists “behind” appearances, as it were. In this light, space would become a noumenon, not a phenomenon. In Heidegger’s view however, space, and also time, must in fact comprise instances of genuine self-showing in order for their a priori necessity even to obtain (BT §7, 31–32). Though, this is not to say that their brand of self-showing is immediately obvious either. When Heidegger goes on to treat space phenomenologically later in Being and Time, his goal lay in identifying the conditions that make space itself intelligible. To conceive space as a phenomenon of phenomenology means to think about space as itself an appearance, a self-showing, whose showing is nonetheless hidden and only partially seen. (As Nicholson observes, although phenomena self-show, one also must look for them.)30 In other words, the question Heidegger brings vis-à-vis space in terms of its phenomenological aspect concerns the conditions of the very experience of space—space’s meaning and ground. What makes space possible as a concept we can decipher (as Kant observed) at the root of all presentations? As Heidegger makes clearer later in Being and Time, space is a phenomenon whose meaning lay in Dasein’s



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capacity for de-distancing [ent-fernung], that is, bringing things ontologically closer to it. The ontology of space receives its phenomenological explication through the way in which space comes to be an appearance, that is, the way in which space is revealed in experience. HEIDEGGERIAN PHENOMENOLOGY AND FILM The present study, however, is not concerned with the meaning of being but purports to provide a phenomenological account of film. How do these two things go together—Heidegger’s phenomenological inquiry into the meaning of being, and the philosophical examination of film? Some other features of Section 7 of Being and Time indicate how we might apply Heidegger’s brand of phenomenology more broadly and to more concrete subjects. On the basis of what has been described so far, the question of the meaning of being can be understood to represent the subject matter of phenomenology par excellence.31 What is more obvious yet also more hidden to philosophical inquiry than the meaning of being?32 And insofar as the meaning of being represents the subject matter of phenomenology par excellence (because being comprises the thing most familiar yet also the least known), phenomenology can also be understood as ontology. Ontology is comprised by the study of being as being, or as Heidegger often puts it, the being of beings. Heidegger’s argumentation at this juncture is that phenomenology is the only way to achieve the goals of ontology. Thus Heidegger writes, Phenomenology is the way of access to, and the demonstrative manner of determination of, that which is to become the theme of ontology. Ontology is possible only as phenomenology. The phenomenological concept of phenomenon, as self-showing, means the being of beings—its meaning, modifications, and derivatives (BT §7, 33/35).

Historically, ontology’s purview has been not simply being as such but also exemplar instances of being (e.g., God, the soul, logical entities, space and time) and the conditions that underlie their possibility and intelligibility. In this light, Heidegger equates phenomenology with ontology, and he makes clear that philosophy thus is to be understood as phenomenological ontology, where this refers to letting the being of beings appear for what they are. Consequently, insofar as I am aiming to cast the present work as one of phenomenology, I equally purport for it to be an ontology of film. This is to say, I wish to perform a phenomenological analysis of film insofar as it has its own manner of being, that is, a meaning, sense, or intelligibility, that can be uncovered and described. And this last notion is not at all foreign to philosophical study

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of film. It is uncontroversial among scholars in contemporary philosophy of film that film has an ontology, which is to say, a metaphysical status, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, and so forth.33 This topic has been at the forefront of film theory going back to the work of its pioneers, such as Eisenstein and Bazin. What I am hoping to do is make some strides toward generating a ­phenomenological ontology of film. In the spirit of Heidegger’s vocabulary of phenomenology, I wish to let the self-showing bound up with film be seen precisely in its manner of self-showing. How can we make this more concrete in the context of talking about film? In preliminary terms we can observe that film constitutes a phenomenon of phenomenology in the robust Heideggerian sense, by virtue of the fact that there is indubitably an underlying (and self-showing) structure of meaning that grounds the being of films, particularly in terms of the viewing experience. In other words, film is a type of object whose ontology plainly has underlying conditions that transcend its mere metaphysical status as an object. What is the (meaning of) film’s being? Answering this question phenomenologically entails uncovering the ontological conditions that underlie film’s possibility for intelligibility and its manner of self-showing. As a preliminary, I propose that the (meaning of) the being of films (as beings) ostensibly has a phenomenological structure, one that underlies the more phenomenal, everyday familiarity one has with instances of films in their ordinary guise of moving images. The phenomenology of film will involve making this underlying ontology explicit. We can also justify the motivation for a phenomenological approach to the philosophy of film by considering everyday encounters with the film medium in its own right. I have already highlighted in a number of cases the way in which film is a fundamentally viewed medium. We must acknowledge that film is not a mere object when we consider that its enactment or realization only occurs in viewing; its being simply is experiential and temporal. Accordingly, to try to understand film in static terms misses something. Analogically, this fact is not unlike the observation of the ancients in Zeno’s thought experiment that Achilles will catch the hare; Achilles will catch and pass the hare precisely because motion does not occur in a series of infinitesimal instants. Motion occurs in time, spanning a continuous duration. But to say that films have their ontological essence in their simply being viewed is also not quite right. We might consider the long-standing phenomenological observation of Merleau-Ponty that films comprise gestalts34, namely holistic, unified experiences with their own logic, which is manifested in features such as montage, reverse shots, narrative, and the like. We could employ several different metaphors here as a way to indicate the broader sweep of the phenomenological ontology of film. Films may be encountered; they are often lived with; they can pose conflict; they stay with us after their viewing; they



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can instantiate immersive worlds. These existential dimensions are fostered or constituted by the engaged viewer. And in the end, we can also think further about this dimension of engaged viewership. That is, what underlying conditions can we identify that help us to understand the draw and attraction posed by films for human viewers? Specifically, what are the human conditions that cause films to have these existential capacities? The takeaway here is that the existential nature of film-viewing demands that we heed a larger phenomenological context in which the medium has its being, a context that includes the viewer (prosaic though this observation may seem). As a communicative art form, film instantiates the long-standing label of a “medium” and the commitments this label brings with it. Films function as connecting links that bridge the viewer to the audio-visual world opened up through motion pictures. In these preliminary terms then, we might say that film conceived as a phenomenon of phenomenology rests in the ontology of various intentionalities involved with film-viewing, and in the sorts of disclosures that take place for the viewer. This is about describing the space between viewer and screen, if you will. I suggest that we can go step deeper in this analysis by considering the phenomenological quality of this last relationship. Films can function as the occasion for various intentionalities and disclosures for the human viewer; but what are the underlying conditions for this phenomenon? Is there also a phenomenon on the human side whose self-showing we can indicate? We do not want to treat the film experience as a mere event fostered by a relationship between a human mind and an art object, as if they are two merely occurrent things. This is where Heidegger’s account of Dasein again comes to the fore. For Heidegger, phenomenology is also a hermeneutical study of Dasein (BT §7, 36/38). This is because any investigation into the meaning of being must begin with that being which possesses an understanding of being, namely Dasein. And to inquire into the phenomena of Dasein thus requires heeding the phenomena that underlie Dasein itself. Therefore the phenomenology of film is, coextensively, a phenomenology of the film-viewer. This conclusion conveys the thrust of my initial claim that a phenomenology of film necessarily requires going beyond the issue of film conceived as an independent object with its own ontology. Film conceived as a fundamental instance of appearing or self-showing requires for its phenomenological analysis an account of the being to whom it appears, that is, the human agent who views it. METAPHYSICS IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF FILM A last item I need to take up before I move on regards how I understand “film” as such. That is, what conception of film am I proceeding with and

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proposing to subject to a phenomenological examination? In a certain fashion, I wish only to answer this question in preliminary form. I realize this may be frustrating for the reader, in view of my statement that this work aims to contribute to the philosophy of film. I have a couple of reasons for this approach. First of all, in a phenomenological spirit I wish to bracket the concept of film, and to keep this concept open as a question rather than stipulate a definition at the outset. More specifically, in the spirit of Heidegger’s notion of formal indication it is my hope to unravel film’s phenomenology by approaching the topic in layered, and above all, descriptive fashion. In other words, it is my hope to get to the crux of matters by examining the subject according to different aspects that hover over a common (though certainly loose) essence. And again, much of my rationale is motivated by the phenomenological dictum that the object of our examination can never have a full, complete account. We are bound to see the objects according to aspects, never in the ideal whole. In the case of current ways of understanding film and cinematic media this is especially true. Philosophers of film by and large eschew “essentialist” accounts of film on the ground that film does not have a rigidly fixed set of properties. It has likewise been suggested that film’s essence is better conceived in a “family resemblance” model, a la Wittgenstein.35 I shall not attempt to radically alter this view. In addition, because I wish to discuss film from a phenomenological perspective, the scope of my inquiry does not hinge upon isolating the “essence” of film according to strict criteria. To begin my study by posing the question “what is X?” would run afield, possibly losing sight of the larger issues in play. Again, much of my motivation is to steer away from describing film in terms of an object with independent metaphysical status. I wish to steer toward the more holistic dimensions of the film-viewer connection and in particular, the experiential side of film-viewing. In what follows, a central position I will defend is that, although film and cinematic media are currently in a state of flux, eschewing a fixed essence that all can agree on, there is nonetheless a unified phenomenological model we can point to on the side of viewership.36 I will suggest that this phenomenological model holds across the diverse sorts of media comprising the current incarnations of film and moving images. I will first present the contemporary view in the philosophy of film, in order to use it as a foil for developing the alternative phenomenological position. What is the contemporary view? There has been a trend in the philosophy of film during the last few decades to strip down extraneous and grandiose conceptions of film, for the sake of re-orienting philosophical understanding of film in a more analytic, rigorous, and above all clear terminology.37 Much of this work has been done by philosophers who adopt an Anglo-American, analytic style of philosophizing. Those of this school often avoid using the term “film,” now favoring terms



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such as “moving image” or “cinematic art.”38 There has also been some interest in the ontology of the core units or smallest parts of cinematic images now that the digital basis has become the standard form of delivery.39 And admittedly, there is an extensive historical context that persuasively justifies a stripped-down approach to philosophizing about film and identifying just what sort of thing film is. In the past, major film theorists and philosophers such as Eisenstein, Bazin, and even Cavell perhaps became too caught up in defining film according to one or more of its powerful features, for example, the montage, the reproduction of reality, a disembodied voyeuristic eye, and so forth. In viewing film this way, it might be said that these figures committed a fallacy of composition, making a claim about all films based on traits merely observed in some.40 And as Carroll and others have observed, there has also been a pervading, historical confusion between film’s essence and its aesthetic possibilities, an “essentialism” wrongly applied to the medium; theorists have tended to define film in terms of what it does well or particularly effectively, rather than considering its purely metaphysical features as an object bearing a set of properties.41 So, in the present state of this dialogue things have swung back in the opposite direction, away from “grand” theories. The question now has become “what sort of thing is a film?” This follows in the guise of the age-old metaphysical approach to philosophical topics where philosophers pose the question “What is X?” The consensus approach for defining film in this contemporary work has been to circumscribe film’s essence in some guise of i) an image or series thereof, ii) where these are understood to move or else have some feature enabling the appearance of motion or change. For instance, Gregory Currie characterizes film and cinematic media according to the concept of pictorial representation that is delivered onto a surface so as to produce an apparently moving image.42 Others who advance a similar view include Rafe McGregor, who defines film as “a series of pictures in motion.”43 Berys Gaut places film under the umbrella of “cinematic art,” writing that “cinema is the medium of the moving image,” while also maintaining that interactive moving images such as video games belong in this taxonomy.44 Moreover, because film and cinematic art today is primarily digital, Gaut observes that digital cinema is properly defined as the medium of moving images generated by bitmaps, where bitmaps are understood as mathematical models or representations of digital images.45 Another attempt at definition on this more abstract side is that of Trevor Ponech, who defines cinema’s underlying essence as a “stroboscopic-luminescent field or visual display.”46 By this concept, Ponech seems to mean any kind of projection of light that functions specifically as a display; cinematic media are projections of light that produce communicative images and other discernible visual flora. Though, Ponech stipulates that such visual objects need not be images per se. Other accounts of film’s ontology

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place additional focus on the genesis or production of films, or their status as artifacts, though I believe these issues to be less crucial for my concerns at the moment.47 There is somewhat less consensus regarding whether film is limited to two-dimensional images, and whether projection upon a surface comprises a necessary condition.48 I shall have some things to say about these latter issues in what follows. The leading conception of film’s ontology in contemporary philosophy of film comes from Noël Carroll. Although the other philosophers I have mentioned do not agree with Carroll on every detail, Carroll’s approach more or less represents the agreed-upon orthodox approach characterizing to film’s ontology. Recasting what traditionally has been called “film” as “moving images,” Carroll identifies five jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for the ontology of these.49 For the present context I will retain his label of the “moving image.” First according to Carroll, the moving image is a “detached display” or series of these. In other words, central to moving images is the spatial separation of the displayed image from that which it displays. For instance, when I see an actor on the film screen, his presence on the screen (in and of itself) gives me no sure indication for where he is. Secondly, the moving image has a nature such that it possesses the technical possibility for the impression of movement. In other words, it is not required that movement actually appears (as in the case of still shots and freeze frames). What is required is simply that the image can convey movement in some fashion, where this is an option the filmmaker can choose or not; this feature distinguishes moving images from static photography and other two-dimensional pictorial representations. For instance, the screened images of Andy Warhol’s Empire, while not conveying movement per se, do not preclude the possibility that, say, the Empire State Building sways in a strong wind or is struck by lightning. Thirdly, performance instances of moving images, or “tokens,” have no distinction from their types. This condition contrasts with literary works, whose token instances may differ in nature from their types. The type of Homer’s Iliad is an entity in its own right, the work that Homer composed. Whereas, the token instances of Homer’s Iliad such as the Robert Fitzgerald translation I assign to students in my literature course is not the same entity as the original type; it is derived from it. In the case of moving images every given instance of one is the same. For instance, we do not make a distinction between the film Gone with the Wind contained on the original film reels stored in the Hollywood archives versus the rental copy we get from the video store. Fourthly, performance tokens of moving images are not artworks in their own right. This fourth condition is an observation regarding the nature of moving images as performed, namely that each performance or screening of a film is the same. This difference is evident in comparison with a medium such as



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theater or live poetry, where performances themselves are different and can demonstrate different artistic merits. And fifthly, the moving image is a twodimensional array. This last is predicated on the notion that we are talking about moving images, which is to say, photographic, pictorial, or other sorts of visual displays seen on a flat surface. Whereas, to hold that moving images can also be three-dimensional complicates matters by bringing in various sorts of moving sculptures and light shows. On the other hand, an oddity of this last item is that Carroll classifies non-cinematic media such as children’s flip books and zoëtropes as still falling under this fifth condition. The reason to include them is plain as day considering the advent and genesis of moving image media: the first “films” were little more than photographs rapidly displayed in flip-book fashion, allowing the impression of motion.50 What in general is persuasive in Carroll’s five-point account? The first, second, and fifth conditions characterize properties of moving images conceived as independent objects viewed by a human agent. In general, these three items are a successful classification under the assumption that we conceive moving images as objects sustaining basic metaphysical properties. The third and fourth conditions specify differential criteria of the moving image, laying out what distinguishes moving images from other media such as literature and theatre. I do not aim to take issue with conditions three and four. The first, second, and fifth conditions, I think, require more analysis. The first condition in Carroll’s list classifies the moving image as a detached display; moving images are displays whose content is spatiotemporally removed from their source. The question I wish to pose is this. Why not reverse the direction, so that the orientation is that of the viewer toward the image? Should we not also call out the nature of the viewer-image relationship, such that the viewer has a certain comportment toward the moving image that fosters a meaningful disclosure? Can we describe in any more depth the phenomenological side of the hermeneutical expectation of the viewer who takes in the moving image? This first feature of Carroll’s ontology of the moving image prioritizes the moving image conceived as a mere display, at the expense of overlooking the viewer’s viewing. Now, as even the most casual reader of Heidegger will know, the German philosopher delights in etymological analysis and dissection of words into their principal parts. If Heidegger were here, he might idiosyncratically ask: Is there not some hermeneutical significance in the concept of a dis-play, namely the “play” of images, distantially removed, to a viewing subject? I shall dwell more on this criticism shortly. In Carroll’s defense, the concept of the moving image is geared toward being more inclusive than historical conceptions of film. The label of moving “image” allows us to include items over and above traditional, photography-based film, in view of the digital, computer-generated basis that makes up most of today’s movies and cinematic media. Likewise,

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moving “image” is more inclusive than moving “pictures” since many images that can be displayed cinematically are not pictures at all. They need not be representational images, nor need they depict something that was once in front of a camera. Nonetheless, we ought to make a phenomenological distinction regarding film or moving images conceived as detached displays, in their detachment from the viewer as well as their detachment from what they display. The question can still be posed: In what way am I detached from the display that a moving image occasions for me? Is it only a spatiotemporal detachment? In the case of representative images, something that functions as a display can only do so if I am comported toward it precisely insofar as my intentional state takes this as a display, as a representative showing to which I passively submit my attention. The intelligibility of the display is predicated on my mindedness toward that display.51 The detached display concept is also problematic for other reasons, as Robert Yanal has observed. For one, Carroll’s stipulation is only coherent in the case of representative depictions, and not if we are dealing with abstract moving images. A “flicker” film does not display any object that is detached from its actual surrogate. What is displayed is simply what I see and find meaningful on the projection surface; there is nothing “detached” to speak of.52 The second item in Carroll’s list of jointly necessary and sufficient conditions observes that the moving image has the technical possibility to give the impression of motion. The motion itself need not be actual. And the image need not contain or depict motion at all. It simply needs to be able to convey the impression of motion. Again, this observation on Carroll’s part is limited to a metaphysical condition of the moving image itself.53 The phenomenological status of the images conceived as subject to the impression of motion is less clear. For instance, we might also ask about the temporal character of the moving image in the viewing thereof. Is there not an underlying phenomenon at work here, in which the moving image is constituted by an ecstatic temporality or projection on the viewer’s part?54 It is a question of the fact that moving images are dependent on the viewer’s temporal comportment, her expectation of change or at least readiness to perceive change. Recall that in classical metaphysics, motion is conceived as falling under the more general concept of change. Would it not be appropriate to highlight viewer expectation of temporal change as the genuine phenomenon of interest here, and not motion?55 One might note in passing, that this issue is one in which the work of Deleuze has some relevance. In Deleuze’s film-philosophy as outlined in Cinema 1, the movement-images of cinema are not composed of static frames; instead, they are organic wholes of movement and time in their own right. There is no further unit of measure.56 The Deleuzian conception gives us reasons to regard movement-images as organic, hermeneutically significant wholes that are existentially bound up with the meaning they convey.



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So on this score, the revision to Carroll’s second condition I would propose is that moving images are founded in the viewer’s ecstatic readiness to perceive temporal change in a meaningful, holistic fashion. The fifth item in Carroll’s list poses some similar puzzles. In this fifth condition, the moving image is defined as a two-dimensional array. Accordingly, this condition does not logically exclude quasi-cinematic media such as children’s flip-books or zoëtropes, as these likewise comprise moving images and meet all four of the other conditions. This fifth condition also includes three-dimensional film insofar as 3D is technically produced via two-dimensional arrays; although, Carroll frames his argumentation such that an actual three-dimensional hologram or similar cinematic projection would violate this condition. Carroll does not speak further to how virtual reality and holographic images fit into this scheme, but Gaut does, grouping these under his classification of “cinematic art.”57 In any event, I find Carroll’s observation regarding flip-books and zoëtropes provocative because it seems to suggest that certain items falling outside of traditionally conceived cinematic media (flip-books and zoëtropes) are members of this class, while other, perhaps more overtly cinematic items (such as holographic and virtual reality images) do not fall within this class.58 Because in this fifth condition Carroll’s conception of moving images ends up significantly overlapping with media whose natures are clearly cinematic in some regards, involving pictures or images in motion, to my mind what ultimately is at issue are the bilateral, disclosive dimensions of the object’s manifestation to the viewer. In other words, as I have hinted already, I believe the phenomenological structure of viewer engagement must be a decisive factor in distinguishing what sort of thing we are dealing with in the concept of moving images. Indeed, I am advocating less emphasis on the thinghood in question, and more emphasis on the experiential, phenomenological structure that is involved. In this regard, an observation by Robert Sinnerbrink is especially helpful: To make a familiar phenomenological point, theoretical questions concerning the ontological status of movement in the moving image can only arise once we (consciously or deliberately) interrupt the immersive experience of watching a movie and reflect on the mechanisms—technological, psychological, physiological—that causally generate the movement that we perceive….we need only distinguish what we might call the primacy of our cinematic perception—what we experience, phenomenologically, when we watch movies—from the theoretical or explanatory accounts from the various causal mechanisms that generate this phenomenological experience of movement in time.59

Following on this quotation, on a deeper phenomenological level I believe it is not inappropriate to highlight the aspect of viewer comportment that is

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in play across the viewing of these different sorts of media, considering the diversity between the examples of Hollywood cinema, abstract and structural moving images, children’s flip books, and zoëtropes. Phenomenologically speaking, viewer comportment here seems by and large the same across the examples. I suggest that there is a unifying component embedded in the phenomenology of viewership of these media, and that such a component lay at the heart of their ontology. Putting it simply, I suggest that it may be the case that the different sorts of moving image media highlighted thus far are very similar phenomenologically, and that the only material difference is the technology or apparatus that fosters their displays. Let us set aside for a moment the issue of what metaphysical features constitute the ontology of the moving image conceived as an independent object. After all, while the photographic film medium has only existed for less than two centuries, human interest in moving images goes back much farther, as documented in distant sources such as Plato’s cave allegory and the suggestion from the Timaeus that time is the moving image of eternity.60 In terms of the viewing experience, to view a traditional “film” seems not unlike witnessing the display of the flip-book or the zoëtrope. Each of these involves the viewer in an act of passivity, of taking in a series of automated images generated independently of the viewer’s input. The images in turn appear on or in an object (i.e., screening surface or screen medium) that is distinct from one’s own person. The viewer’s passivity occurs in the course of showing on the image’s part, and engaged viewing, on the viewer’s part. The viewership here inevitably also includes a notion of interpreting the image in question, of seeing the display as a display, automated from without, in which further meaning can be discerned.61 I believe this reasoning also extends to the issue of moving images being limited in Carroll’s stipulation to two dimensions. There seems to be no prima facie reason for why viewer comportment differs across two- and three-dimensional media, just as we likely would say that viewer comportment does not differ with a traditional film versus a flip-book. In sum, I suggest that the shortcoming of treating the “moving image” as the base, granular unit driving the film-viewing experience limits moving image ontology to a mere taxonomic classification. It is not unlike the paradox embedded in the Aristotelian notion that underneath all of the objects we engage with in our everyday lives there is an imperceptible “substance” or “substrate.” By limiting the “What is X?” question to the mere thinghood of moving images, what is overlooked is the phenomenological disclosure of the image’s displaying capacity, as well as the viewer’s intentional comportment. More importantly, something I think has been overlooked in the scholarship I have cited thus far is the type of viewer engagement a moving image involves. We must identify on the viewer’s part a degree of projection toward the image and its depiction. I do not want to characterize film images as if



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they were like slides or snapshots (contra Deleuze), sending their intelligible content across space to the viewer’s eye, which then reports to the mind the content of the image. Rather, viewer projection is an essential feature of the most basic capacity of the viewer to experience the intelligibility or meaning of moving images. By “projection” I simply mean an intentional directedness toward the images, such that one is able to meaningfully appropriate or make present what is depicted in the image. In chapter 2 I will describe this projection in terms of Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world. Alternately, I also mean to suggest an existential dimension of transcendence or being “there” on the viewer’s part, exemplified in the sometimes immersive quality of film images and the worlds they depict. As I will describe in the chapters coming up, Heidegger’s conceptions of space and de-distancing help to bring out this “there”-character of the viewer’s transcendence. (EXISTENTIAL) PHENOMENOLOGY AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO METAPHYSICS In the following I would like to finish up the chapter by outlining the alternate ways of positively and “formally” indicating the phenomenology bound up with the viewing of moving images—or what I understand in the same terms—the phenomenology of film-viewership. First, I would like to emphasize the spatiotemporal disconnect between viewer, screen, and depicted content. The experience of film-viewing has its locus in the viewer’s manner of directing her line of vision toward the image. In other words, I need to look at the image though I need not be close enough to touch it. Yet, this visual directedness alone does not foster the act of viewing. I can look at a cinematic image and think about something else altogether, just as say, while driving on the highway I may only have a proximal awareness of what is going on front of me. Plainly, engaging with a film image differs from a mere blank looking at something. We might say, following a locution of Heidegger’s, that viewer engagement with film images is predicated on a kind of beingthere, or projection, where we are existentially present with what the image depicts. This is especially apposite in the instance of fiction film, where we might say that film-viewership is predicated on projecting oneself into the world depicted onscreen. Similarly, the viewing experience of film is patently one of anticipation or expectation regarding changes in the displayed content that will occur over time. In a manner of speaking, the viewer’s sense of time is suspended or bracketed insofar as she submits to the film’s automated, hermeneutic timespace. There is a manner of ecstatic absorption, of the viewer’s being at the mercy of what is depicted. This feature is distinct from other more static

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media such as sculpture or serially ordered pictures (e.g., graphic novels; artist-specific gallery exhibits), which plainly allow the viewer more command of their own sequential and interpretive experience. Generally speaking, in the viewing of a moving image-cum-film there is a tacit degree of passivity on the viewer’s part. Unlike other cinematic media such as video games or animated computer software, moving images-cumfilm are characterized by a basic lack of interactivity. Although there is no necessary condition that it remain this way in the future—interactivity in particular seems as if it will become more and more embedded in moving image media—passivity seems to be a longstanding defining feature of the traditionally conceived “film” and of the cinema that we still have at present. We go to the movie theater and find a comfortable seat to settle down and “watch” the picture. This is not unlike the older locution of “taking in” a play or Broadway show. And even the home-viewing of cinematic media in today’s world, despite the advent of “on-demand” services and their unlimited content, nonetheless exhibits this dimension of passivity. The film-viewer is shown depictive content, while the viewer’s “seeing” is paramount.62 With my talk of “comportment” here I mean an existential manner of making the image present. This is a factor at work over and above the spatiotemporal dimensions of viewer orientation toward the image; hence I mean it more broadly than intentionality as well. Understood this way, this existential comportment is one in which the viewer is able not simply to “witness” or “view” what is seen on screen, but also to be there, with what is depicted, to make it present and meaningful—to exist with what is depicted in the image, as it were. I address this aspect of viewership further in chapter 2. For the meanwhile, at issue is the viewer’s transcending a mere seeing or looking at the image shown onscreen, toward existentially presencing or disclosing what is depicted. Putting it simply, I am describing the viewer’s seemingly inherent capacity to remove the distance between herself and screen, such that the content depicted onscreen becomes hermeneutically accessible and present. There is nothing grand in this claim, outside of the phenomenology clueing us into the ontology. However, one different strain in my approach is the explicitly existential dimension I am highlighting in the phenomenology. As I have hinted up to this point, the conception of film-viewership I am employing has a significant locus in Heidegger’s conception of Dasein and the existential structures that shape Dasein’s way of relating to things. By “Dasein,” Heidegger means you or me; each one of us is a Dasein (BT §5, 15/15). Dasein’s essential feature is existence, or the aspect of being-there [da] (BT §4, 12/13). To be a Dasein is to be in a world. To problematize Dasein’s knowledge of individual entities—to ask how Dasein has knowledge of things ontologically removed from it—ignores the fact that Dasein is always already in a world (BT §13, 62/62). Indeed, problematizing the issue



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of Dasein’s comportment toward or knowledge of things is predicated on this phenomenon already being given. If Dasein did not have the ontological feature of transcendence, then one would not able to ask how transcendence is possible (BT §12, 57/57). In keeping with the existential structure of Dasein I have described here, I suggest that this structure fundamentally determines Dasein’s way of relating to and viewing moving images, films, and the like. They are not objects from which Dasein is fundamentally severed, such that Dasein’s relationship toward them needs to be constructed from the ground up. Dasein’s transcendence enables their accessibility and their possibility for generating meaning. Mind you, this is not a feature rendered insignificant by the cognitive science view according to which human beings naturally recognize pictures as depictions. Rather, the existential dimension must come first; we must have transcendence in order for things, including films and moving image media, to have the possibility of intelligibility. Transcendence conditions the very possibility of things appearing as things. Another way of motivating this existential-phenomenological view is the following: Heidegger’s account of Dasein also entails that the theoretical attitude—the manner of looking at the objects of the world with an “objective,” scientific eye—occurs through a modification of the practical context inherent to Dasein’s everyday lived experience (BT §13, 61/61). To put it simply, we only become philosophers by abstracting from our lived world and the things in it, taking them out of their natural surroundings. According to Heidegger, this is the basic way in which theorization occurs; typically, we are motivated to think about a subject theoretically when we wish to solve a problem encountered in the everyday context of things. But here is the rub. The theoretical mind is always predicated on the prior existence of Dasein’s practical immersion. It is not the case that our practical life is layered on top of some “objective” reality that existed first.63 The consequence for film is that to define the base unit of this subject in terms of a rock-bottom, metaphysical object with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions risks abstracting from the lived context in which these are found and individuated. To construct the film experience from out of the metaphysical elements of the mere moving image overlooks the holism of film experience understood as an existential mode of comportment, and ultimately, as a way of being. For reasons I hope will become clearer as I proceed, there is something of an anthropological, humanistic bent in my position here, insofar as I will hold that the film-viewing experience is by and large a meaningful one because it is uniquely meaningful for Dasein. And this is because Dasein is the being that experiences meaning, meaning that is disclosed in distinct modes and phenomena.

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HEIDEGGER’S VIEW OF FILM As I finish this opening chapter I have a couple of loose ends to resolve. Up to this point I have not discussed much of Heidegger’s conception of film or what he has to say about it in his own work. I do not intend to address it fully until chapter 3. One reason I have waited to introduce this issue is that Heidegger’s own reckoning with film is something of a nonstarter. As his later writings on art and technology make clear, he does not regard film, photography, or cinema as art forms. In essays such as “The Age of the WorldPicture” he in fact seems to characterize film and popular media at large as antithetical to the appreciation of genuine art. Some of this has to do with his broader critiques of Western, twentieth-century culture. Some of his attitude also stems from his epochal understanding of the dominance of technology and the rapid expanse of the tools technology affords modern life. And most apposite for the present topic, of film’s underlying ontology, Heidegger holds filmic media in low esteem because of this media’s locus in modern pictorial representation. Pictorial representation is problematic in Heidegger’s view on two principal counts. First, the very possibility of widely disseminated, easily produced photographic representations risks giving a false impression to the mass of humanity that being is simply whatever can be captured on film. And the reverse also holds for Heidegger mutatis mutandi: film has a tendency to suggest that whatever it pictorially captures is true to reality. In other words, the modern appropriation of film has been one that regards the photographic image as coextensive with beings, such that photographic “seeing” is regarded as a sure way to knowledge. (Walker Percy asks rhetorically on this score: “Why visit the Grand Canyon when you can see it in a photograph?”)64 However, Heidegger himself understands the relationship between art, truth, and being as fundamentally beyond the purview of filmic and popular media. Heidegger understands being as fundamentally rooted in a degree of hiddenness or concealment, and to a far-enough degree that media such as film and photography do not ordinarily penetrate. The widespread proliferation of photographic pictures into every moment of life only obscures this fact further. On this note, the second principal reason Heidegger finds pictorial representation problematic is that it has too strong an overlap with modernity’s placement of truth in subjectivity. Described differently, the pictorial representation afforded by filmic media is predicated for Heidegger upon the modern, Cartesian notion that truth and the nature of reality more broadly have their locus in the judgment of the subject. Accordingly, film epitomizes for Heidegger the notion that all of reality can be captured in subjectivized “views” or pictures held by the subject; this event is expressive of the even wider phenomenon that the world itself has become a “worldview.” Although



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Heidegger does have sophisticated historiographical reasons for positing this idea, in colloquial terms his criticism is more broadly of a piece with the twentieth-century diminishment of truth as objectivity that transcends the human perspective. The pervasiveness of subjectivity as the tribunal for truth mirrors the death of God as well as the Western belief that truth is itself an anachronism. This brief consideration of Heidegger’s view of film is an issue I intend to expand upon in chapter 3 and again in chapter 4. Meanwhile, the following goals convey I how intend to leverage a rejoinder to Heidegger’s critique of film while at the same time offering an alternative perspective on film’s phenomenologic-ontological dimensions. One of my goals in the chapters to follow is to push back against Heidegger’s various critiques of filmic media, in order to open up consideration of some of film’s phenomenologic-ontological aspects that do particularly benefit from a “Heideggerian” treatment. Indeed, I do intend to argue that Heidegger’s dismissal of film’s merits and possibilities, while perhaps generally correct, is also too strong. I will defend this last view in the course of suggesting that Heidegger’s philosophy of art offers favorable ground for appreciating film as a bona fide art form. Before I take up this question, however, I intend to develop a more robust framework of the phenomenology of film that roughly follows the scheme of Heidegger’s account of Dasein in Being and Time. From Being and Time I will develop a basis for considering film experience as an existential mode of comportment founded in Heidegger’s notion of “being-in-the-world.” I aim to defend the view that the film experience transcends the mere image-based foundation of filmic media (and the epistemological commitments of this view) by virtue of existential features that have their seat in Heidegger’s conception of Dasein. In a similar spirit, I intend to present some further reasons for why conventional, analytic approaches to the philosophy of film suffer from their tacit separation of film and viewer. In particular, I aim to present reasons for why conventional understandings of film and the film experience suffer from the errors of Cartesianism. I hope to demonstrate how Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s being-in-the-world can be enlisted to counter the traditional screenviewer separation. NOTES 1. For a recent perspective see Iain Thomson, “The Failure of Philosophy: Why Didn’t Being and Time Answer the Question of Being?” in Division III of Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being, ed. Lee Braver, 288–89; Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham, Md., Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); Babette Babich, “The New Heidegger,” in Heidegger

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in the Twenty-First Century, ed. T. Georgakis, P.J. Ennis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), 167–87, esp. 168–69. 2. For a survey of some speculative reasons for Heidegger’s silence on the issue of film, see Brian Price, “Heidegger and Cinema,” in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuva Trifonova (New York: Routledge, 2009), 108–21. 3. For a fine assessment of this limitation in Heidegger studies, see Thomas Sheehan, “Phenomenology Redidiva,” Philosophy Today 60 (1) (Winter 2016): 224. 4. Seminal examples include Allen Casebier, Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). More recently, see Jenny Chamarette, Phenomenology and the Future of Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Mauro Carbone, The Flesh of Images: Between Painting and Cinema, trans. Marta Nijhuis (Albany: SUNY Press 2015); Hunter Vaughan, Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 5. The few exceptions are Brian Price, “Heidegger and Cinema”; the short collection of conference papers found in Tony Fry, RUA TV? Heidegger and the Televisual, ed. Tony Fry (Sydney: Power Publications, 1993); and Wilhelm S. Wurzer, Filming and Judgment: Between Heidegger and Adorno (New York: Prometheus Books, 1992). Wurzer’s book makes an excellent start on this subject but suffers from woeful obscurity and also only focuses on a few texts in the later Heidegger. 6. Graeme Nicholson, Illustrations of Being (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., Prometheus Books, 1998); John Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude: Heidegger’s Transcendental Existentialism,” in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, Vol. 1, ed. Mark A. Wrathall and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 47. 7. See Richardson’s commentary on Heidegger’s philosophy of art in this context, in William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 403ff. 8. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 113–17. 9. Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude,” 45. 10. Casebier, Film and Phenomenology, 39. 11. Cyril McDonnell, Heidegger’s Way Through Phenomenology to the Question of the Meaning of Being (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2015), 59–60. 12. Dermot Moran, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality,” Inquiry 43 (2000): 41–42. 13. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 13. 14. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992) §11, 165-66/210-11. 15. Ibid. 16. Haugeland, “Truth and Finitude,” 47.



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17. Graeme Nicholson, “Truth as a Phenomenon,” Review of Metaphysics 68 (4) (2015): 814. Also see Dennis McManus, “Ontological Pluralism and the Being and Time Project,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51(4) (2013): 669. 18. Nicholson, “Truth as a Phenomenon,” 813–14. Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications,” Review of Metaphysics 47 (4) (1994): 779, 785. See the Dahlstrom article for a more robust account of Heidegger’s notion of formal indication. 19. Andrew Mitchell, The Fourfold (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 40. 20. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, 115–16. 21. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 40. 22. Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 111. 23. Sheehan, “Phenomenology Redidiva,” 224. 24. Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. John Llewelyn (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 6. 25. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 11. 26. Thomas Sheehan, “Did Heidegger Ever Finish Being and Time?” in Division III of Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Unanswered Question of Being, ed. Lee Braver (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2015), 260. 27. Ibid., 262–63. 28. Graeme Nicholson, “Truth as a Phenomenon,” 810–11. 29. Sheehan, “Did Heidegger Ever Finish Being and Time?” 262. 30. Nicholson, “Truth as a Phenomenon,” 807. 31. Cf. King, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, 112. 32. Scholarship on the Heidegger of this period suggests that, for Heidegger, the meaning of being is just the sort of hidden, unapparent phenomenon for which phenomenology was conceived. See Cyril McDonnell, Heidegger’s Way Through Phenomenology to the Question of the Meaning of Being, 10. 33. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 53. 34. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 54–55. 35. Thomas E. Wartenburg, “Carroll on the Moving Image,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 1 (2010): 79–80. 36. Because I aim for my account to be phenomenological in scope, I wish to avoid the commitments of the label “spectatorship.” I use the more neutral “viewership” with this in mind. 37. Principally, I have in mind the legacy and influence of Bordwell and Carroll’s respective chapters: “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory” and “Prospects for Film-Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noel Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 3–36, 37–70. 38. Noël Carroll’s body of work is the most prominent example, but others include Berys Gaut and Gregory Currie (full references below). We might also observe a parallel divestiture in the artistic status accorded to film and photography going back

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to Scruton’s influential 1981 article on this subject. Roger Scruton, “Photography and Representation,” Critical Inquiry 7 (3) (1981): 577–603. More recently, see Robert Hopkins, “The Real Challenge to Photography (as Communicative Representative Art),” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2) (2015): 329–48. 39. Enrico Terrone, “The Digital Secret of the Moving Image,” Estetika LI (New Series VII) (1) (2014): 25–27, 35ff. 40. For a concise summary, see Trevor Ponech, “Definition of ‘Cinema’,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 54–55. 41. See for instance Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 25–36, 49ff. 42. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 4. 43. Rafe McGregor, “A New (Old) Ontology of Film,” Film-Philosophy 17 (1) (2013): 277. 44. Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12. 45. Ibid., 14–15. 46. Trevor Ponech, “Definition of ‘Cinema’,” 60–61. 47. Philosophers who have taken up the issues of genesis and production include Davies. See David Davies, “Ontology,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, 217–26. The issue of film conceived as an artifact is taken up by Currie and Ponech. See Currie, Image and Mind, 3–4; Ponech, “Definition of Cinema,” 60–61. 48. Wartenburg, “Carroll on the Moving Image,” 77–78. 49. Noël Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 78. 50. Ibid., 75. 51. For a similar line of criticism, see Robert Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image: A Response to Noël Carroll,” Film and Philosophy 12 (2008): 136. 52. Ibid. 53. Wartenburg, “Carroll on the Moving Image,” 73. 54. Cf. Currie, Image and Mind, 41–42. 55. For a critical assessment of this issue see Justin Remes, “Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis,” British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (3) (July 2012): 257–70. 56. Paola Marrati, Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, trans. Alisa Hartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 19. Felicity Colman, Deleuze & Cinema: The Film Concepts (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 34. 57. Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 49–50. 58. Also see McGregor’s criticism in McGregor, “A New (Old) Ontology of Film,” 276. 59. Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum: London, 2011), 38. To my mind, D.N. Rodowick’s position on these issues is also very informative. See D.N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 1. 60. Ibid., 277. 61. Wartenburg, “Carroll on the Moving Image,” 72.



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62. David Davies, “Ontology,” 225. 63. Ibid. Dagfinn Follesdal, “Husserl and Heidegger on Actions in the World,” in Essays in Honour of Jaako Hintikka, ed. Esa Saarinen, Risto Hilpinen, Ilkka Niiniluoto, and Merrill Provence Hintikka (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), 371. 64. Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Picador, 1975), 46ff.

Chapter 2

Heidegger’s Being and Time Film Experience as Being-in-the-World

Philosophers have long invoked the concept of world for describing the cinematic medium’s capacity to mimic or reproduce reality. This chapter engages Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world from Being and Time for the purpose of justifying a phenomenological framework for describing the film experience. To make my central position explicit, I want to describe how film-viewing is a specialized instance of being-in-the-world. I want to make this identification in literal terms rather than using it as a metaphor or explanatory device. Secondly, I aim to connect some key characteristics of Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world to certain aspects of the film experience that stand to be illuminated phenomenologically. In Heidegger’s account, Dasein’s being-in-the-world occurs concomitantly with definite modes of being-in, specific ways of being “there.” Dasein is always “in” the world in these dynamic, interrelated ways: understanding, attunement, and discourse. Each of these indicates the ways in which Dasein has its disclosedness. More simply, they express the ways in which things matter for Dasein. To repeat some of my remarks from chapter 1 on the motivation for this approach, Heidegger’s account of Dasein stands to offer a holistic framework for describing the film experience, particularly viewership. My interests encompass the existential dimensions of the disclosure that occurs between screen and viewer rather than concerns of epistemology or metaphysics. I want to invoke Heidegger’s assertion in Being and Time that traditionally conceived structures connecting subject and object, mind and world suppose an existential grounding, where the latter precedes epistemology and metaphysics. Simply put, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein provides a holistic conception of human experience, in which existential projection obviates the need for a transcendental epistemology. In particular, Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world provides the groundwork for comprehending why it is 37

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unnecessary to account for Dasein’s escape from subjectivity; it is unnecessary because Dasein always already is in a world, and always already with things. I think we overlook the holistic dimensions of our connection to films when we render films and the medium at large something distinct from the viewer, that is, as independent objects whose being is not constituted in a phenomenological disclosure. More particularly, on this same note my interest is to delineate what Heidegger calls Dasein’s “existentials,” the categories constitutive of Dasein’s existence, for the purpose of rendering a phenomenological model that can illuminate issues of cognition and emotional affect that have figured prominently in Anglo-American philosophy of film during the last couple of decades. However, certain aspects of the viewer side of the film experience get missed if we try to comprehend film under a philosophical lens, as a mere object that engenders certain effects on the human subject through some kind of action at a distance. In what follows my overall goal is to outline a phenomenological solution to these issues using Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world, in a manner that potentially avoids the pitfalls of a Cartesianized, subject-object model of film-viewership. Because I need to use a good amount of space to do justice to Heidegger, much of what I will have to say in terms of resolving problematics for the philosophy of film is of a preliminary character. I hope simply to point the way to some solutions and new perspectives made possible by a phenomenological approach. FILM AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD In chapter 1 I highlighted that being-in-the-world expresses for Heidegger Dasein’s fundamental mode of existing “in” a world. That is to say, one can never be a “worldless” human subject. Dasein is not removed from “the” world in such a way that experience is predicated upon bridging a metaphysical divide between mind and world. Nor again is the concept of world to be understood as a self-standing container or vessel that simply houses all things of the universe. For Heidegger, world and Dasein are not to be understood as distinct entities. To be a Dasein means to be in a world, to be world-ed. Therefore, the expression being-in-the-world indicates a unified phenomenon to which Dasein essentially belongs insofar as it exists at all (BT §12, 53/53). Heidegger counters the Cartesian-Kantian epistemological paradigm by describing Dasein’s world-habitation as a way of already being in and with this world: “In directing itself toward … in grasping something, Dasein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in the world already discovered” (BT §13, 62/62).

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Moreover, Dasein’s being-in a world refers to Dasein’s self-understanding, self-interpreting constitution (Ibid.), such that to be a Dasein means to have a world, a place, a situation, all of which factically define one (BT §12, 56–57/56–57). To be a Dasein entails belonging to a shared world of customs and practices, from which each Dasein’s own self-understanding is derivative. Dasein is always in a place or situation according to the objects and causes it takes up. Finally, in each of these above ways, as well as in a related third sense, Dasein’s being-in-the-world is coextensive with its manner of “being-there,” its da-sein. In Heidegger’s characterization, Dasein is the being whose essence is to exist; existence in turn is defined as that to which Dasein always relates in some way. A way of simplifying this terminology of existence is to observe that Dasein is projective, ecstatically extended beyond itself. For instance, as indicated above, Dasein has its being through its membership in a shared world; even to be a Dasein at all entails having a world. This projective character of Dasein also undergirds Heidegger’s resolution of the traditional problematic associated with epistemological transcendence. The question of the metaphysical basis of knowledge is a nonissue because Dasein is transcendence; Dasein’s existence entails that Dasein is its world. Heidegger suggests that we can bring the phenomenon of being-in-theworld to light by considering Dasein’s engagement with its every surroundings, and principally the objects Dasein employs in ordinary tasks, what Heidegger calls things “ready-to-hand” [Zuhanden], such as tools or equipment (BT §15, 66/67ff). The “worldly” character of world permeates the ontological makeup of the objects Dasein handles in its everyday dealings. The ready-to-hand things with which Dasein performs its everyday tasks do not consist of self-sustaining metaphysical properties, but instead receive their intelligibility relative to the tasks they perform and the referential context of significance in which they have use. The hammer has its intelligibility through the jobs for which it is useful, in concrete, particular places and situations such as hanging a picture on the wall or nailing plywood on a construction site. Tools such as hammers gain their intelligibility from the functions they fulfill, not from some objective list of properties that additively results in a hammer being present. Engaging with things ready-to-hand reveals the larger surrounding, worldly context in which Dasein finds itself (BT §16, 72/72ff). When I use the hammer to drive in a nail, my focus is on my in-order-to, the ultimate task I am fulfilling. My focus is not on the hammer; the hammer is invisible or inconspicuous, because what I do with it has reference to the larger context of the home, the workshop, or the construction site. And mutatis mutandi for the reverse: the things with which Dasein engages receive their meaning from the world in which they are useful. The hammer has its meaning in the tasks for

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which it is useful for me, which explains for instance why it is not impossible to invent a new use for hammers completely removed from driving nails. Dasein’s appropriation of items ready-to-hand in its everyday involvements demonstrates that Dasein’s being is predicated on taking up some activity for the sake of a desired outcome. Thus, Dasein’s everyday being is interpretive, in that its goings-about involve appropriating things and contexts for particular uses and purposes. Following upon the above discussion, we can observe again that these modes of Dasein’s being express its projection beyond itself, such that its being belongs to its shared world. For the present analysis, the takeaway is that Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world supplants a traditional account of world whereby “world” and the things “in” it are epistemologically removed from the human subject. For Heidegger, Dasein not only always has its world, but it also exists in a definite surrounding world, a context in which things are known and familiar as one takes them up. As Cristina Lafont writes, Heidegger’s conception of world is informed by the hermeneutic turn, that it, the philosophical discovery that human experience is fundamentally interpretive. For the concept of world, this means that “the world is no longer the totality of entities, but a totality of significance, a web of meanings that structures Dasein’s understanding of itself and of everything that can show up within the world.”1 This recasting of the concept of world is more localized, in a way that more closely characterizes world on the basis of the shared world, the web of significance or meanings in which one goes about everyday tasks. FILMS CONCEIVED AS THINGS READY-TO-HAND In what follows I want to delineate several different but overlapping applications of film to Heidegger’s model of being-in-the-world. I will start with a very basic one: the involvement everyday Dasein has with films, insofar as films and the film apparatus have their own tool-character. We can observe that Dasein’s engagement with the equipment of films is predicated on a similar phenomenological orientation as with standard sorts of tools such as hammers and nails. Consider the film medium in terms of the tool-character of the different components that make film-viewing possible. There is the media (e.g., film reel; cassette; disk); the playback device (projector; video player; computer CPU); the light source and the surface upon which the light is directed. The tool-character of this apparatus is by and large transparent in the course of film-viewing. One does not view a film by looking carefully at the physical screen upon which the image is projected, or by examining the television box housing the screen, or dismantling a projector. Rather, each

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of these objects has its function in remaining transparent for the sake of the broader task of playing a film. This much is a very simple application. How would the application look if we broaden our perspective to include the film as it played? The lived-experience aspect of what these pieces of equipment actually furnish—a film that we view—demonstrates that the film image itself has a definite essence stemming from its use, that is, from the viewing thereof. Film-viewing is most fully realized when the equipment is transparent or even functionally invisible, where the viewer is absorbed in the play of cinematic images. However, the viewing experience tends to be disrupted when the apparatus is faulty, or the images are of a bad quality, etc. Consider the distraction you experience when you notice a blemish on the movie theater screen, or the old-world frustration of trying to watch “rabbit-ears” television with snowy reception. The point I wish to emphasize at this relatively elementary level of phenomenological description is that the “use” of film images, that is, one’s viewing of them, is predicated on Dasein’s capacity to employ objects for the sake of purposes. Putting it simply, films are objects with which Dasein is familiar as part of its shared world (in the shared world of the twentieth-century West, anyhow). The images of which films consist in their viewing are similarly familiar, as “objects” for which ordinary Dasein possesses functional coping skills. Most importantly for the present turn in my account, film images foster an instance of Dasein’s projective existentiality, its capacity to transcend, to fundamentally be with that which it engages. FILM-VIEWING IS BEING-IN-THE-WORLD Much more remains to be said here; I have only sketched the above as an entry point into a deeper reading of being-in-the-world and its relevance for film. The positions I wish to develop further are the following. First, the most controversial point I want to take up is film’s character of fostering being-in-the-world. That is, I want to describe film-viewing as derivative from Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world. I want to describe viewer comportment insofar as it comprises a special instance of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. But rather than propose this view point-blank and present formal reasons for holding it, I also want to consider some other aspects of Heidegger’s conception of Dasein’s being-in-the-world that can help fill in the picture and which might provide a foil for potentially resolving some common dilemmas in the philosophy of film. In immediate terms, what I mean by the equation of film and being-inthe-world is this: philosophers have long recognized that photographic and cinematic images, not to mention, many paintings and drawings, are naturally

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accessible to ordinary perception. Going as far back as Plato, it has been known that human beings are able to see pictures as mimetic representation. One does not need to be taught that pictures depict; it is a naturally occurring human capacity. And in film and moving image media, the pictures shown onscreen are typically intelligible as depicting whatever they represent. The average viewer is accustomed to see “through” the photographic image, to comport herself intentionally toward what the image portrays. In this way, the viewer transcends the pictorial, framed character of the image insofar as her mindedness is directed toward the picture’s subject or the intelligibility articulable “in” the picture. Phenomenologically speaking, we can similarly observe that photographic images and their assemblage in film scenes and sequences are natural forms of world-disclosure. In other words, these media have a capacity for fostering world in the manner of a set of cinematic, immersive surroundings, or in Heidegger’s terms, a web of significance and shared meanings. I do not believe this phenomenon requires much explication; one need only think of the immersive-world character of the greatest films (To Kill a Mockingbird; Stagecoach; Man with a Movie Camera) and film series (The Godfather; Lord of the Rings; Pirates of the Caribbean) in addition to any number of lesser films that engender a strong sense of place or a culturally specific setting. Serialized television programs such as Mad Men or Game of Thrones, which employ strong senses of place and time, would also apply to this comparison. To be clear, what I am trying to adduce here does not, in any event, concern an aesthetic aspect of films or their viewing. I am not couching world as an aesthetic judgment to be made after the fact, as if at issue were only a phenomenal characteristic of the viewer experience. Rather, I am highlighting the existential dimension in which Dasein’s existence as being-in-the-world extends into the act of film-viewing. I am cueing upon statements of Heidegger’s to the effect that being-in-the-world always refers to Dasein’s ways of being-there. One example is this: “The being which is essentially constituted by being-in-the-world is itself always its ‘there’” (BT §28, 129/132). Stated simply, Dasein’s very way of being is to be coextensive and identical with its ‘there.’ To comprehend my meaning, consider this: Heidegger holds in Being and Time’s opening sections that being-in-the-world conditions our very ability to discover things as meaningful, to appropriate objects in ready-to-hand fashion, and so forth. Heidegger also asserts explicitly that being-in-the-world informs every other aspect of Dasein’s being (BT §26, 114/117). Dasein’s ways of relating to things, to discovering meaning, simply are all “world-ed.” It is the fact that Dasein is always already in its world, with already given tasks, meanings, and goals, that makes things relevant for Dasein. Without its prior being-in-the-world, Dasein would not experience things meaningfully; it would have to learn everything from the ground-up like an infant. The view I am describing

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for film-viewing’s fostering of being-in-the-world follows from this model. We would not have a cognitive means of seeing film-based worlds at all if we were not existentially constituted by being-in-the-world. In other words, if we were not being-in-the-world, there could be no world brought to life in films. In sum, I am trying to highlight here the world-fostering character of films, the fact that films have a unique (though not exclusive) capacity to manifest or disclose Dasein’s being-in-the-world, in a fashion that is existentially real, and thus, non-representative. To go back to where I began this analysis: the equipmental or tool-character of the film images is such that its way of being ready-to-hand is to bring the viewer into the world of what it depicts. To flesh out these preliminaries with an example, consider the opening sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho, which consists of several wide-angle shots of a city skyline. These shots move progressively from broad shots of the cityscape toward narrower subjects: the skyline, a roofscape, a building amid the roofscape, a window of this building, the room inside the window, and finally, two people in this room. At each change in shot, the subjects of the camera’s focus are seen and recognized. Similarly, the continuity of the edits ensures that the viewer sees each shot as depicting part of the same overall place. In general, film sequences (when produced effectively) have a natural way of conveying the world of what they depict. The viewer does not lose her way between shots or changes of scene, etc. Rather, the viewer remains oriented in this world, as it were, maintaining sufficient understanding to navigate even complex sequences such as the montage. In the existential terms of Dasein, to characterize film-viewing in the guise of being-in-the-world is tantamount to describing the film world as a place or space in which Dasein is “there,” an immersive environment that Dasein is “in.” The crux is that these spatial and directional metaphors are existential, constituted in Dasein’s comportment or intentional state. I do not mean to hypostasize some kind of metaphysics of world that film-viewership builds or constructs; this would re-invent the same wheel that Heidegger’s account of being-in-the-world obviates. I also wish to distinguish my sketch from Cavell’s notion of world, to which I am sympathetic, but which nonetheless poses certain problems vis-à-vis Heidegger’s observation that being-inthe-world is an existential constitutive of Dasein. Cavell seems content to describe the world as a singular, subsistent entity, and that viewing of the world is what fosters the film experience. For Cavell, films are the world “viewed.”2 Whereas it seems to me that this proposal falls flat without a grounding of this notion of world in Dasein’s existence. This is a dilemma that has been noticed by some in the scholarship but without being reconciled in a systematic way.3 Therefore, in talking of the experience of world engendered in films, I am referring to the manner in which film-viewing is predicated on the viewer’s own mode of ecstatic projection. In this latter fashion

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the issue I am highlighting regarding film and world also does not concern the “aesthetics” of the kinds of world or worlds films reveal, as exemplified in the recent work of Daniel Yacavone.4 In more colloquial terms, I am characterizing film’s capacity for opening up its own sort of space, its own surroundings and context, such that something akin to a familiar or meaningful world emerges for the viewer. Following Sinnerbrink’s Deleuzian locution, we might likewise characterize the experience of world through film as “virtual.”5 In the spirit of Heidegger’s initial sketch of world in terms of surroundings and shared practices, we can observe the phenomenology of what I am describing here by considering the kinds of acquaintance and familiarity Dasein gains during the course of its viewing a particular film. Scenes, characters, and props gain their meaning and significance from the film-world context in which they appear. They do not have meaning in their own right; Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud,” for instance, gains its meaning from the film world in which it resides. Similarly, the lead character of this film, Charles Foster Kane, gains his identity, his Dasein from the shared world into which he was born. Recall that for Heidegger, world is not a metaphysical container or sum of all the objects in reality; a world only originates in one’s various occupations and employments, in the various goals for which one acts. To hypostasize the film experience as one of looking at the world through a screen misses the fact that world is an existentialtranscendental feature of Dasein itself. Most importantly, in the existential terms of our viewership, the thrust here is that the people and objects depicted in film are afforded hermeneutic significance—we are able to appropriate them meaningfully—just insofar as our film-viewing is an extension of our being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is a condition of Dasein even having objects to engage with, of having things be noticeable or out of place, and of having other Daseins with which to be concerned, etc. The “Rosebuds,” the Kanes, and other things we encounter in such films have meaning for us because we are there. SPACE AND DASEIN’S DE-DISTANCING Several additional features of Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein help to bear out the claim I have proposed. One key item is Heidegger’s recasting of the concept of space. Space for Heidegger does not refer to the fluid, three-dimensional category of Newtonian physics in which all bodies move. Likewise, space comprises neither a metaphysical condition of substances (as conceived by Descartes), nor an epistemological condition of perception (as in Kant’s theory of knowledge). Rather, the experience of space is conditioned by what Heidegger calls Dasein’s existential mode of de-distancing [ent-fernung].

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De-distancing expresses Dasein’s capacity for presencing things, that is, making them present and available in degrees of nearness or farness. Consider the setting of the workshop. The tools the artisan uses for her work are near or far in terms of their readiness-to-hand. The table saw is ontologically distant for the artisan at work manufacturing, say, small wooden figurines for a dollhouse, even if the table saw happens to be “spatially” close. The fashioning of small wooden figurines will preclude a state of mindedness toward such an inappropriate device. De-distancing is a more accurate phenomenological description of conditions for Dasein’s spatiality because it more closely characterizes the way space is experienced. It provides an alternative to a framework in which space is “perceived,” measured, or reckoned theoretically. Phenomenologically speaking, the experience of what we often refer to as “space” is about the nearness or farness of things in terms of their lived proximity or the ease with which they can be made present. Whereas, the notion of space conceived as a fluid housing all physical objects is not something one usually encounters in everyday life. “Space” does not separate Dasein from the objects of its perception or use. In fact, what is commonly referred to as “space,” and Dasein’s experiencing of anything like it, is only made possible through Dasein’s capacity for de-distancing (BT §23, 102/105) A more important thrust of Heidegger’s recasting of space as an existential is that it renders the notion of distance, that is, nearness and farness, into terms of existential presence or being-there. If I am a person who is unable to walk, then the corner store down the street may be much more distant for me to reach than the friend living on the other side of the globe whom I can easily “be with” by telephone. Heidegger describes this distinction as one of “ontic” versus “ontological” nearness. What is ontically or “spatially” nearest is often what is ontologically most distant (Ibid.). The larger point for my interest here echoes what was said about tools in the workshop: things are present and available to Dasein insofar as they have relevance for the task at hand, which in turn entails that these things are ontologically present insofar as Dasein makes them so. Accordingly, space is not a self-sustaining category, and it does not represent any sort of objective “distance” between Dasein and things. My deeper interest at this juncture is to describe and consider how this sketch of Dasein grafts onto the interaction between screen and film-viewer. It seems to me that there is a basic line of fit between Heidegger’s projective conception of de-distancing, the film-viewer’s natural absorption in the cinematic image, and the image’s capacity to foster the experience of world. I say this because film-viewing essentially involves the viewer appropriating the cinematic image so as to bring it existentially near and make it meaningful. One way to make more sense of this is the following. We treat the subjects of film images as existentially present, insofar as we are ourselves there, in the

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film world. We do this despite the fact that in terms of sheer space or distance, the image’s subjects probably are quite far away (think, for example, of the screened image of a tiger roaming the Indian jungle). In what manner do we consider such subjects actually to be present in the course of viewing them? There has to be a degree of existential projection, in which we make the subjects of cinematic depiction accessible and available to ourselves, where we make them existentially, intelligibly present, though not spatially near. Something like this phenomenon is described by Sartre in his short book The Imaginary, where Sartre delineates the phenomenology of various sorts of images and the consciousness of them. What is different and in my view understated in that account is the manner in which the human agent must existentially project herself toward what is imagined. For Sartre, the rockbottom phenomenological feature of imagination or image-consciousness is making the absent present, by way of an intentional state. But vis-à-vis the Heideggerian account I am providing here, Sartre’s account gives too much credence to consciousness’s intentional imaginative state, and too little heed to the manner in which the human agent transcends herself, projecting herself into the world of the imagined.6 (Though, to be fair to Sartre, his account of imagination does not explicitly engage with cinematic images.) Moreover, at this point it should be clear why Dasein’s relation to the screened image should not be characterized as what Heidegger would label an “ontic” relationship between beings. Because the lived experience of film-viewing fundamentally involves Dasein’s being-there, we are talking about an existential projection of Dasein rather than two occurrent objects simply meeting one another. Not only that. The very experience of observant film-viewing negates the ontic account insofar as film-viewing involves intentional states, and disclosures of meaning occurring in guises of presence and absence that clearly transcend a physicalistic model of screen interacting with mind. As I finish up this section I would like to highlight the relevance of my reading of Heidegger’s concepts of being-in-the-world and de-distancing for some issues in the philosophy of film. First, my position stands to make some contribution for contemporary theses on the epistemology of film-viewing. George Wilson has produced a body of work that problematizes the epistemology of narrative comprehension in the viewing of fictional films. In one influential paper Wilson raises the issue of precisely how the film-viewer can comprehend the spectative, observer-centric aspect of film narrative. Wilson compares the issue to that of fictional novels and stories, which are often taken to represent the account of a person who witnessed the events in the story. Sometimes this narrator is identified (as in Moby Dick’s opening “Call me Ishmael”), but sometimes not, leaving the story to be rendered in an anonymous third-person perspective. Do narrative, fiction films reproduce

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the viewpoint of an omnipresent spectator of the events shown on screen? Do we witness on screen what we would see if we were that spectator? Or is the film merely the spectator’s truncated memory of those events? And how do we viewers negotiate the various paradoxes of this omnipresent spectator’s embodiment—for instance, the ability to hear a conversation between two people when they are in a crowd and shown only in deep focus? What mechanism allows us to comprehend such cinematic conventions in a meaningful way?7 I suggest that one way of deconstructing Wilson’s dilemma is to acknowledge the de-distancing, there-being character of Dasein. Rather than get stuck on the epistemological, spatiotemporal, and somatic disconnects between viewer and fictional comprehension, perhaps the dilemma can be lessened by acknowledging Dasein’s capacity to project itself into the film world, to make itself existentially present in the events revealed on screen. In this sense what I am describing is not much different from the sort of projection I perform in acts of imagination, for example, the memory of receiving my doctoral diploma or attending the funeral of a loved one. In these instances I do not merely recall the images of events in the guise of a mental slide show; I remember them insofar as I was there, and can re-place myself there, existentially participating in the activities again and recalling certain emotions. My presence and action at these events is the loci of the imagined memory of them.8 Another, more long-standing issue in the philosophy of film to which I believe Heidegger’s account of world and space stands to make a contribution is the issue of realism. Realism is the notion expressing film’s apparent feature genuinely to re-present its subjects for the viewer, such that when I see X on the screen, I am genuinely seeing X. Classical realists such as Cavell and Bazin suggest that the film image is a genuine re-representation of reality, holding that this is the film image’s single-most unique feature.9 Realists of a more contemporary persuasion such as Currie suggest founding a notion of realism in the fact that film images are actual records of the camera’s subject intersection with a light source, where the original motion of light is captured by the camera for reproduction later. That is, when a viewer beholds a film image, she is looking at a copy of this original source of moving light.10 Putting it simply, from a functional standpoint, beholding X in the film image is identical to actually seeing X in front of one. Another influential perspective on this issue comes from Kendall Walton, whose position is often labeled the “transparency thesis.” For Walton, film-viewing is transparent—the viewer sees through the image to the original subject itself. The film image is a mere screen or plate of glass or mirror, through which we see the original object. Walton argues for this position on the ground that looking at objects through closed-circuit camera systems, or through reflections in one or more mirrors (such as with periscopes), does not prima facie disrupt one’s visual

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connection to the actual object. To see something via one of these media, despite not necessarily knowing one’s spatiotemporal relation to the original subject, does not preclude still seeing the actual object. The security officer observing a person on a closed-circuit video security system, or the submarine captain viewing the ocean surface through a periscope, takes in the actual object.11 For Walton, these observations motivate the conclusion that film-viewing is similarly transparent. The film screen is a lens through which one sees the camera’s original subject.12 I do not have the space to summarize the criticisms to these realist positions in any great detail. It is not my interest here to give a decisive defense of traditional or contemporary realism views, or to rebut their critiques. I think it is fairly obvious why film images do not re-present reality or the “real.” For instance, one agreeable reason is that what we see in a film image need never have been in front of a camera; what one sees in a digital image, say, need never even have existed, because the image itself is composed of pixels generated by a computer program. And similarly, even in classical cinema various effects can be performed by or on the camera to alter the appearance of the image. For instance, a special lens can alter the coloration of the image, to enhance or mute certain colors; or a gauze can be put over the camera lens, resulting in the image looking foggy or hazy.13 These are simple examples. The broader, agreeable point to be gleaned from such criticisms of the realist view is that when film images appear to be “real,” they are better understood as mimetic representations; the film image does not really depict or re-present X, it is a mere imitation or two-dimensional copy of X. (And there is also the fact that film images need not represent at all; they can be abstract. But I will not discuss this further.) It seems to me that the phenomenological underpinning I have described here is essential for defending anything like a “realist” interpretation of filmviewing. This is because, as I have described it, film-viewing’s character of realism is originative in a Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world. The items we happen to see on screen can only have the appearance of realism insofar as the viewer can be disposed toward them in this way. This may sound like a platitude, but the deeper point to recall is that, according to Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s everyday engagement with things, it is Dasein’s being-in-the-world that allows things to be recognizable as things, to be appropriated for this or that purpose, to have a definite meaning. Dasein can only have anything like a “world” because its existence is already defined by de-distancing, being-in-the-world. And in a parallel fashion, Dasein can only have things be real, or presented as real, insofar as it existentially makes them present. What I am trying to describe here is the manner in which the purported realism of film-viewing is underwritten by the existential comportment of Dasein. For instance, to adapt a well-known trope from Cavell, Garbo

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or Bogart can be genuinely present to us because we are viewing Daseins, who de-distance ourselves projectively, toward these personalities.14 It is we who make Garbo and Bogart present; there is no inherent property of the film image that accomplishes this. I maintain that the altogether realistic aspect of film-viewing’s existential comportment gets overlooked when one poses too strong an epistemological separation between screen and viewer. In other words, I believe realism only becomes a problem in the philosophy of film when the depiction of the image is rendered a distinct object from the viewer, an object whose intelligibility needs to be constructed from the ground-up. I am attempting to describe realism as an existential mode of the disclosure that occurs in film-viewing. An upshot of my proposal is that it obviates the problem of accounting for how film images can be seen as “real” when their subjects clearly are not. At the same time, it preserves the aesthetic dimension according to which films can be powerful by virtue of their capacity to be lifelike or realistic (for reasons I will outline further in what follows). If we recall my claim that film-viewing comprises an instance of being-in-the-world, the logic behind the Bazinian-Cavellian notion that films can realistically re-present the actual world is grounded in the viewership of Dasein: film-viewing is being-in-theworld. We can circumvent the apparent contradiction in holding that films present the actual world by recognizing that world is constituted by Dasein. The burden of fostering world does not lay upon the image to carry. DASEIN AND BEING WITH OTHERS Another crucial feature of Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world is to highlight the presence of other Daseins as integral to being-in-the-world. Reading up to this point in Being and Time, one could get the mistaken impression that to be a Dasein is a solipsistic kind of existence, isolated and disconnected from the rest of the world. It may seem problematic to conceive how Heidegger can account for the existence of other subjectivities or minds, especially in a way that avoids the Cartesian problem of, say looking out one’s window and wondering whether the figures on the street are automatons dressed in human clothes. How does Dasein relate to others on a general level? How does it know there are other beings possessing the same essence as itself? How can it be sure of the existence of other Daseins? In keeping with my approach so far in this chapter, my interest in the present section is to engage Heidegger’s account of the existence of other Daseins and our way of relating to them as a way of illuminating our orientation toward human beings depicted in fiction films. Do we regard them as real people? Do we

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understand them as similar to ourselves? And what causes us to experience an emotive disposition toward them, or to be hopeful for their outcomes? Heidegger’s answer to the question of other Daseins is as follows. As with the exegesis of world, foremost is the importance of regarding Dasein in a way that does not separate Dasein’s existential characteristics from the lived world to which Dasein belongs. On the one hand, there is a way in which Dasein’s everyday comings and goings reveal the existence of other beings like it. The surrounding world is not simply one of occurrent objects and useful things; rather, our surroundings typically also reveal the presence of other beings who exercise care and who act with purpose. The examples Heidegger cites are again occupational: we see the field which is cared for and kept in good order, or we see the boat tied up on the riverside, secured there by someone other than ourselves (§BT 26, 115/117–18). Over and above these observations, we are also familiar with these other beings in their own right, particularly insofar as they comport themselves toward their world in the same way that we do. Presumably their paths even cross with ours or else have a chance to do so. These other beings exhibit a different kind of being than that of objective presence or handiness, by virtue being “in” the world, in a way parallel to our own way of being “in” it. Recall that in Heidegger’s initial account of being-in-the-world, the concept of in-ness connoted a sense of inhabiting or dwelling. In brief, one way of demonstrating the existence of others is this phenomenological sketch of our own individual, lived world as overlapping with the lived worlds of others, in a way that these are visibly shared. I exist “in” a world, but this world is also lived “in” by others whose in-ness parallels mine. But on the other hand, in view of the preceding considerations, the existence of other Daseins is not for Heidegger simply an inductive conclusion made by observation. It is not the case that we “discover” other Daseins by knowing ourselves first and only subsequently seeing others as reflections of ourselves. To limit the account of other Daseins to such argumentation would simply reassert the Cartesian, epistemic problem of how we know of other minds. Heidegger’s more definitive way of addressing this issue is to identify “being-with,” or Mitsein, as an existential feature of Dasein itself (§BT 26, 116/118). To be a Dasein is simply to have Mitsein, to be “with” others; it means for there “also” to be others. The “with” and “also” entailed by this talk of other Daseins is to be taken existentially rather than as a feature of Dasein that may obtain or not (§BT 26 115/118). Heidegger writes: “[The term Mitsein] does not intend to ascertain ontically that I am factically not objectively present alone, rather that others of my kind also are (§BT 26, 117/120).” Stated differently, the thrust of Heidegger’s account here is that were my world not one I fundamentally co-inhabit with other Daseins, then there would

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be no way I could come to experience it as a shared world. The existence of other Daseins cannot be something I arrive at optionally or cumulatively, as if it only were to occur by chance (BT §26, 122/126). And the definitive reason for this view is that, as we saw in the initial account of Dasein’s everyday being-in-the-world, it is existentially constitutive of Dasein already to belong to a shared world with its own customs and practices. Such a shared world in which things and situations are imbued with meaning and significance is fostered by the being of other Daseins. These other Daseins are encountered by us insofar as they also belong to this shared world (§BT 26, 116/119). Our being-with others makes it possible for us to be comported toward them and to engage with them meaningfully (Ibid.). In general, Heidegger’s account of being-with as the existential underlying Dasein’s relation toward other Daseins helps to illustrate the fact that to be a Dasein entails belonging to a shared world. The world in which one exists is not fundamentally solitary, where one is locked off from everyone else; instead, it is by and large already pre-inhabited by others. This is to say, the world in which I go about my everyday business is not simply mine, as if I give it all of its meaning and significance. Instead, in a manner of speaking this world is already prefabricated, or pre-tailored to the care of others who are also there and have afforded it to me to share. How does Dasein relate to the other Daseins in its world? Does it understand itself to possess an innate kinship with these other Daseins? Does it “care” about others? Heidegger only answers these questions elliptically, but for the present purpose we can take note of a few important conclusions. First, because it is the nature of Dasein to be taken in by the world, and to understand things in terms of their immediate presence, Dasein by and large understands itself through the lens of its interaction with others: “One’s own Dasein, . . . is encountered initially and for the most part in terms of the surrounding world taken care of that is shared” (BT §26, 122/125). Indeed, it seems a fact of life that we often measure ourselves by how others see us, or perhaps even more so, by the demands of the public, shared world, in which we stand to be evaluated according to the standards of this world. In this regard Heidegger writes: “being-with others belongs to the being of Dasein, with which it is concerned in its very being. As being-with, Dasein ‘is’ essentially for the sake of others” (§BT 26, 120/123). In brief, because my own being is something I am concerned about, I am also concerned about my shared, public existence as well, which involves other Daseins, for whom I must show solicitude. The world of other Daseins is my world. Secondly, Heidegger also notes that Dasein’s way of exercising care, or in this case, concern for other Daseins differs from our everyday way of treating mere things. For in our everyday dealings we do not handle other Daseins the way we handle inanimate, merely occurrent beings. But does Dasein possess

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a care for other Daseins in the same way that its own being poses an issue for it? While Heidegger goes on later to highlight care [Sorge] as the ultimate being of Dasein, Heidegger maintains that our way of exhibiting care for others is to be called “concern” [Fürsorge] (§BT 26, 118/121). Concern has two positive modes. On the one hand, we can care for others in the sense of taking care of everything, relieving them of every burden. For example, we can care for a terminally ill person by unburdening them of every need they have. Or, an overbearing parent can become so involved in caring for the child that the child exercises no self-care. In these cases, we take care of whatever everyday things-at-hand are bound up with that other Dasein’s self-care. In contrast, an alternate positive mode of concern is to allow the other Dasein the freedom to take up their own possibilities. In this case, we do not take care away from the other Dasein; instead, we give it back to them, so that they can authentically appropriate it (§BT 26, 119/122). This more removed, more passive mode of concern allows the other Dasein to freely own the possibilities they encounter, which is to say, it allows the other Dasein more of a chance for both self-discovery and self-realization. It is not unlike the feeling of a parent who wants their child “to have every opportunity” and who thus endeavors to present good choices to the child. This expression does not carry a literal meaning of wanting the child to have an “infinite” number of opportunities before them. Instead, it refers to the child’s existential ability exercise her own freedom, through making her own choices and owning the results of these. Why do we hope for this for the child? It is because we understand the essential significance of choice, responsibility, and ownership as essential for our own beings as Daseins. BEING WITH OTHERS IN THE FILM EXPERIENCE The potential gains of invoking being-with and concern in the service of the philosophy of film is that these stand to offer a fertile ground, first, for understanding the general relationship of film-viewer to film character, and secondly, the emotive disposition film characters often effect in us as viewers. I also suggest that Dasein’s features of Mitsein and concern help further to justify my claim that the film experience comprises a manner of being-inthe-world. Beginning with this last item: if we recognize that Heidegger’s existential description of Dasein renders it a holistic, singular phenomenon, then it is worth highlighting that Dasein’s being-in-the-world is also one of being-with. For to be a Dasein means to exist in a world with others, to belong to a shared world. Looking at film worlds as instances of being-in-the-world, I suggest that the same logic follows mutatis mutandi. The worlds opened up by fiction film are not simply spaces in which I exist solipsistically; they

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are also fundamentally human worlds, worlds constituted by the presence of other Daseins. We can also observe that this appears to obtain equally for the co-viewers of films—those watching along with me. To put it simply, the world opened up to me by the fiction film typically presents itself as a Daseinoriented world. Indeed, this is even so in the case of cartoons or digital films whose characters are fantasy creatures. Although the characters of Bambi or Toy Story are not necessarily human beings, they are Daseins, insofar as they are beings whose being is of concern for them.15 Such characters exhibit similar dimensions of care and concern within their surroundings as I do within mine; and their world is relevant and meaningful for them in a fashion continuous with how I disclose it. Film characters comport themselves to their surroundings in a fashion that is reflective of beings who are not simply occurrent or ready-to-hand. And I also do not treat them this way; I comport myself toward them as beings whose fates are also existentially significant for me. In summary, in the being-in-the-world of our film-viewing experience, we appreciate the existence of others such as ourselves because this film world is already worlded in a Dasein-centric way. This world presents itself as one already possessing meanings and contexts of significance in which Dasein has its abode. In this light, I believe it is not inappropriate to conclude that, in existential terms, the characters of fiction films are not fictional for us at all; they are existentially and hermeneutically real. That is, we comport ourselves toward them just as we would actually existing Daseins. This last conclusion is no doubt controversial, but the significance of these observations is perhaps made stronger in view of the problematic in the philosophy of film regarding the viewer’s emotional disposition toward film characters. What is it that interests us in the plights and backstories of film characters? Why are we oftentimes inclined to like or dislike certain characters, or to disapprove of what they do? Why are we hopeful for certain outcomes—and why do we take joy in the successes of the characters with whom we sympathize? In short, what causes us even to relate to fictional film characters in a manner that these emotional dispositions occur in us? In the spirit of what I have remarked already, I suggest that an underappreciated facet of resolving these questions is the existential manner in which we relate to these characters in the first place as they are of a piece with our being-in-the-world. These characters’ outcomes and fates are meaningful for me because I understand my being-in-the-world to be just like theirs. The forces these characters struggle to overcome have meaning for me because I see them as potentially representative of my own struggles. I want these characters to succeed because I want myself to succeed. Heidegger’s account of the positive modes of concern seems to strike the right note insofar as one of these positive modes involves allowing others their own freedom to succeed or fail. In view of characters with whom we sympathize or look on

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favorably, what else is our care toward them, other than understanding that their struggles are theirs to undergo? I realize in my capacity as a Dasein that for my fellow Daseins, taking ownership of one’s freedom is essential to being a Dasein. My concern for such characters is about affirming this very freedom, of a Dasein to realize its own essence. On the one hand, I must allow these characters their freedom because I am fundamentally removed from the situation; I am present to their plights although I cannot intervene. On the other hand, I also have a stake in the outcomes of their stories because their world is my world. If they succeed, then my prospects inevitably will appear more favorable as well. Or, if their struggle ends in a neutral or unsuccessful outcome, then perhaps their way of dealing with this failure can provide me with insight into my own potential failure. I will finish up this material by contrasting some features of my proposal with a leading complementary view, that of Noël Carroll. I do not wish to rebut Carroll’s claim here. I will simply highlight what my viewpoint stands to offer. For Carroll, an entry point into comprehending the causality behind a viewer’s sympathy or antipathy toward film characters stems in, on the one hand, whether a character’s moral position is consistent with the viewer’s own, and on the other hand, the film’s own way of framing its characters in positive or negative lights. In short, while certain characters can be naturally appealing to us, the film in which they appear also has a certain role. The film itself needs to portray characters in a fashion that causes them to be likeable.16 For instance, we might sympathize with Forrest Gump in the film of the same name, given that he is an innocent, overall pleasant and virtuous human being, someone upon whom we look with moral approbation. But at the same time, we must also recognize that it is the film Forrest Gump that portrays him in a positive light. In other words, the film shows his good side, but leaves open the question of whether he has a bad side precisely by omitting any scenes in which Forrest’s character might appear in a negative light. And this is in contrast to other characters who are explicitly portrayed as less favorable, for instance, the school principal who wants to keep him from enrolling due to his low IQ, or the New Year’s Eve party girls who make fun of his disability. In Carroll’s view this tends to be a structural feature of any film in which we look positively on some characters and negatively on others, including films where even the good characters are in fact bad, such as a film about an affable mafia boss, or a film-noir movie that stars a hard-boiled police detective.17 What I believe the material developed out of Being and Time’s concepts of being-with and concern contributes here is a better-defined articulation of the existential underpinning of sympathizing with characters or wanting them to succeed. For what is missing in an account such as Carroll’s is a deeper phenomenological analysis of precisely why we relate to film characters at

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all—why we want some to succeed and others to fail. At the end of the day there is a question conventional views on this subject still must answer, and this is the question of what it means for us to be affectively disposed toward film characters at all, and why we do not view them neutrally. I continue some of this discussion below, with reference to Heidegger’s concepts of mood and attunement. HEIDEGGER’S CONCEPT OF BEING-IN In Chapter 5 of Division 1 of Being and Time, which is entitled “Being-in as-Such,” Heidegger drills down on specific ways Dasein has its “there,” or alternately stated, what he labels its “disclosedness” (BT §28, 133/129). The goal is to analyze in depth the other “existentials,” or essential characteristics concomitant with Dasein’s having of a world. In other words, Heidegger describes in this portion of the text some of the specific modes that shape Dasein’s experience in the world. For, to be a Dasein does not mean to be a worldless subject or solipsistic mind free of emotion, prejudice, or knowledge. Rather, the notion to heed is that Dasein has its disclosures in specific ways, ways that stem from its singular manner of existing. Putting it simply, the notion is that, insofar as things matter at all for Dasein, they matter in particular aspects. The three existentials Heidegger highlights in this section are attunement, mood, and discourse. They are not features of Dasein that exist independently of one another. Instead, they overlap, equiprimordially constituting Dasein, such that they can only be distinguished in analysis.18 They cannot be added onto Dasein or taken away either. Let us examine each of these further in order to see how they overlap and what relevance they might have for viewing films. ATTUNEMENT AND MOOD To the first of these existentials Heidegger assigns the label of “attunement” [Befindlichkeit]. Heidegger clarifies the concept straightaway, suggesting that in colloquial terms attunement refers to being in a mood or having a mood [Stimmung]. But the structure he describes here requires some unpacking. A simple way to make sense of the phenomenon in question is to observe that everyday Dasein is always mooded in some way or the other; it is difficult to imagine being in “no” mood, outside of consciously willing oneself to be temporarily emotionless. The crux is that to be a Dasein means to always be in some mood or other, that this occurs in such a way that our moods

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also impact our state of understanding. This feature of Dasein’s moods can be observed with the disposition of a bad, rotten, or nasty mood. If I am in a bad mood, everything I encounter may appear to me as bothersome and inconvenient. I might take things the wrong way when others speak to me, or even “see” an innocent gesture as an affront. I might feel as if the day is one where everybody is pushing my buttons. And the same stands to happen in the opposite situation. On a day that I feel supremely happy every encounter I have may seem as pleasant as pie, as if there is not a care in the world that makes things less cheerful. I recall a day like this recently. While driving through town in my home city of New Orleans, I noticed that people in all of the cars that passed me in the opposite direction looked as if they were smiling. But I caught myself and realized: there is no reason why all of these passersby should be smiling, and maybe they in fact are not smiling or happy. But it was my mood, the state of my attunement that caused me to see my surroundings in this way. It is also notable that nothing on my part caused this mood to occur. I did not will myself into this state. I found myself in it. Such an occurrence represents for Heidegger the fact that moods often assail us unannounced, coming to us from without as it were (BT §29, 133/136–137). Those who are familiar with the experience of anxiety or depression know this fact well; these affected states very often occur unannounced and without welcome. One can wake up in the morning and have an impending feeling of a depression coming. Alternately, sometimes one does not know one is in this state until its symptoms become manifest. One realizes one was already anxious or depressed, unbeknownst to oneself. For Heidegger, mood is also often public and shared. That is, you, I, and others may all experience situations in specifically mooded ways, which in turn impact our understanding and comprehension of our surroundings. For instance, we can talk of the “romantic” mood of an age (such as that of Germany in the nineteenth century); or, following the events of September 11, 2001, Americans collectively shared in moods of mourning and vulnerability.19 In this fashion, Heidegger’s conception of mood avoids being limited to a subjective, Cartesian rendering, such that mood is always private. On the contrary, because moods are often public and shared, their consequences can be shared as well. Our collective cognitive and perceptual states can derive from our mood. But what does Heidegger mean by the notion of attunement, and how does it differ from mood? As Heidegger describes, attunement is the “ontological” underpinning of the more familiar “ontic” phenomenon we know as mood (BT §29, 130/134). Attunement comprises a way of being (ontological) by which Dasein is in the world such that things can engender (ontic) an emotional affect, that is, such that things can matter in a specifically moodcentric way. In other terms, this distinction of mood and attunement can be

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described as that of mere emotional affect, conceived as an ontic phenomenon (for which we can perhaps formulate some scientific explanation), versus the existential being-there (what Heidegger calls “attunement”) on the basis of which any emotive mechanism can occur for the human agent. The point is that the existential disposition of attunement conditions what is perhaps more familiar, the emotional state or, colloquially speaking, “mood.” It is important to see that attunement is not the same thing as emotional affect.20 Instead, it is existential condition that underlies the possibility for emotion. Attunement refers to the existential presence of Dasein in a given situation, such that one can be affected by that situation. Heidegger maintains that mooded attunement informs all manners in which things can matter for Dasein. Heidegger describes it as “existentially a disclosive submission to world” (BT §29, 134/138–39; original italics). So the concept of attunement refers to Dasein’s being-in-the-world, and its specific disclosures therein, always occurring in the background of some kind of affected mode. Dreyfus observes in this light, “moods provide the background for intentionality, that is, for the specific ways things and possibilities show up as mattering.”21 To the extent that attunement is constitutive of Dasein’s being-in or beingthere in the world, it also helps to make explicit the phenomenon of Dasein existing as worlded. Heidegger’s example of fear conceived as a mode of attunement is instructive of the fundamental existential structure rendering visible Dasein’s being-in-the-world (BT §29, 136–38/140–42). For one to fear something indicates not only that fear is for one’s own self, but also, that one is in the world in an underlying way such that this fearsome thing can be encountered precisely as fearsome for one. To say that one is fearful indicates the plain fact of one’s being-in-the-world in a way that is out of one’s control (“I am afraid of X” = “I would prefer that X not happen, but I can’t completely control whether X happens.”) In other words, the mood of fear is not merely predicated on cognitions about given objects deemed to be harmful. When one experiences fear, one is attuned to oneself and the world in a way that allows this fearsome thing to be disclosed as fearsome. The existential of attunement reveals one’s being-in-the-world insofar as one’s being-there comes to light, through the way one understands one’s relations to the world and the things in it. FILM MOOD AND VIEWER EMOTIONAL AFFECT In what ways does Heidegger’s concept of attunement relate to the experience of mood in films? And more broadly, in what way does this existential map onto the phenomenon of the film-viewer’s emotional reaction or affect?

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Traditional scholarship in the philosophy of film has long recognized the problematic nature of viewer emotion. The main question of the dialog concerns how and why a viewer can experience emotional affects that are occasioned by a fictional representation that is also detached from the viewer’s spatiotemporal world. The viewer experiences emotional affect originating in a world she does not inhabit, and moreover, based in an object that does not stand to impact her in any real way. Yet, viewer emotional affect does occur. How does this happen? The primary viewpoint I aim to defend here is that the phenomenon of viewer emotional affect occurs in film-viewing because the viewer is existentially “there.” In the act of film-viewing, the viewer is “there” qua Being-in-the-World, such that her emotional affect or disposition represents a definite way of being in the given film world. What is meant in the notion of film-viewing causing an emotional affect in the viewer? In phenomenal terms, on first glance it seems that, as a viewer, I am comported toward the events shown on screen in a way that I stand to be moved or find myself in a moved state. How does such a phenomenon happen? Plainly this occurrence is fostered by way of being with the individuals or situation shown on screen. I need to be there, and attuned, in such manner that being moved emotionally is a possibility that arises through my orientation to, or involvement with, what I witness. The film “world” involves or engages me in a fashion that my mood and emotional state change concomitantly with my being in that world. This line of reasoning is borne out wonderfully in an article by Julian Hanich, who describes how the feeling of dread in film-viewing is expressive of the viewer’s fear not simply of the dreadful event anticipated, but fear for herself.22 For instance, I do not fear seeing the character Jason Vorhees of the Friday the 13th series so much as I dread what I will be exposed to when Jason comes by surprise and commits some nefarious deed. Adapting Hanich’s analysis to my reading, I experience this dread because I am being-there, projected into the film world. My own being will be impacted by what I see, such that I cannot undo what I witness. From the everyday experience of film-viewing, we have the familiar phenomenon of some depiction shown onscreen occasioning an emotional affect in the viewer. For instance, I witness a death onscreen that occasions in me a feeling of sadness for the individuals of the story. Or in a different scenario, I might view a scene depicting an unlikely victory of an underdog over the heavy favorite. I may experience feelings of happiness for the victors, or broader appreciation for the fact that sometimes the most deserving do win the goods, etc. Perhaps in cases such as these, there is some loosely cognitive element at work here that is concomitant with my experience of this emotional reaction. In such cases, I have the cognition, I recognize that there is something to be sad or happy about, and so forth. For the moment, however, the item I want to highlight is the observation that I must be comported, or

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disposed, toward the situation depicted in a way that first allows for emotive reactivity on my part. This is to say, the situation needs to be sufficiently transparent and accessible to me, so as to foster my mooded response. It is in this sense that I need to be “there,” with or in the events depicted on the screen. If this were not the case, I would not be able to witness the events at all. Because attunement and understanding are equiprimordial, the experience of mood, and its existential source in attunement, is constitutive of my understanding the situation at all (BT §31, 138/142). Because emotional affects and dispositions are many and variable in filmviewing just as they are in any other context, I want to tread carefully in making blanket generalizations. To my mind, however, the larger preliminary point to observe is this: the fact that the viewer is spatiotemporally removed from the situation depicted onscreen, while also experiencing an emotional affect, or being mooded, seems to be the strongest evidence indicating that attunement in Heidegger’s sense informs the disclosure fostered in the film experience. The empirical fact that film scenes never before witnessed can nonetheless occasion distinct moods for their viewer is a strong piece of evidence. Consider a couple of opening scenes of films that convey a definite and palpable mood just by virtue of the world into which they bring the viewer. The opening scene of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West fosters a mood of boredom. This scene is an unusual opening scene for a conventional major studio picture in that it contains several minutes of shots, all of the same scene, without dialog or action. The scene depicts three men sitting at a train stop in the old American West. They do nothing else aside from appearing to wait. Because they are at a train stop we assume they are waiting for someone to arrive. The only notable sensory stimuli are the sounds of dripping water, a creaky windmill, and the buzzing of a pesky fly. Yet how would we say the scene occasions the mood of boredom? The viewer can be bored precisely because she is “there,” existentially present to this scene in which nothing is happening. The viewer’s being-in-the-world occurs in a fashion that this world refuses to be engaging or interesting. The world presences itself as moving painfully slow, in a way that one cannot make time move any faster. The Dasein of one present at this scene is left in the lurch. All one can do is wait. And the mood does shift rapidly, when an unnamed mystery man played by Charles Bronson appears out of nowhere, obliterating the three dopes in rapid gunfire. As viewers, we were first bored, now we are shocked and astonished. It would be amiss to account for the boredom of this initial scene by highlighting specific factors additively. Such a description would misconstrue mood as a function of objective particulars. This approach would render mood into a sum of properties of the human being conceived as a thing, overlooking the fact that mood must originate in an existential state of being,

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Dasein’s existential of attunement. Nor would it be sufficient to classify the mood of boredom as one cognized on the basis of these or other objective features of the scene. For in that case, there is no way to account for the boredom as existentially experienced, as a mode of one’s own being. In truth, it is the being-in-the-world one experiences in this scene that bores. Whereas, to read certain features off of the scene that inductively convey boredom only concerns the ontic and phenomenal aspect of viewing the scene. In keeping with my example from Once Upon a Time in the West, I would suggest that the same phenomenon is readily observable in other films with strongly mooded opening sequences (Tess; Blade Runner; The Tree of Life; The Godfather; Caché; Citizen Kane). For instance, the opening scene of Roman Polanski’s Tess fosters a mood of old-world decay. Or, consider the powerful opening shot of Michael Haneke’s Caché, in which a prolonged still shot taken from a stationary camera depicts a nondescript street scene. The initial mood that results is a combination of anxiety and confusion. As a viewer, I want to know what this is about, why nothing is happening, and when the scene will change. I am present to this scene, and cannot remove myself from the mood it engenders because I am at the mercy of my attunement, a mode of my being-in this film world. On the other hand, it would also be mistaken to assume that film moods conceived as a mode of attunement need to be perfectly evident and obvious in every instance. For Heidegger, even states of attunement seemingly lacking in mood indicate the presence of a mood, often one that is suppressed unknowingly (BT §29, 131/134–35). Again, this seems to function quite prominently in the film experience, insofar as muted, nondistinct moods of film scenes often act as a counterweight to other moods which are also in play. To maintain that given fiction film scenes contain no mood would seem quite questionable, especially insofar as scenes occur within the unfolding of larger narratives. Changes in scene can carry mood along with them, as, for instance, the shift from the first to the second scene of The Godfather. The first scene of The Godfather initially fosters a mood of helpless outrage, which is only countered by the Don Corleone’s capitulation to Bonasera’s request for justice provided that Bonasera pledge fealty to the Don. Though a state of anxiety also comes about, as we do not know what the Don will require of Bonasera when the time comes. The second scene of the film shifts gears entirely, conveying the jubilation of a large family wedding. Yet, the mood of this first scene remains in the background, informing the disclosures that follow. We cannot share in any unadulterated joy of the occasion because of this factical, mooded state of being into which the initial scene has thrown us. Plainly there is much more territory that one could explore in the subject of mood and attunement in the film experience. By no means do I purport to have given a complete account of the subject. What I have tried to do with

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this outline of mood and attunement is to highlight their existential significance for comprehending the broad palette of mood and emotion that so often occurs in film-viewing. In summary, what I have suggested amounts to the claim that as viewers, we are existentially present in the film world and as such, attuned to situations onscreen. And it is this attunement that allows us to experience moods, or affective responses. Now, because for Heidegger attunement belongs to a unified, threefold structure underlying Dasein’s being-in, some of what I have to say will be strengthened by my account of understanding and discourse, the other two parts of this structure. As I conclude this section I wish to highlight the thrust of my account so far by considering some other leading views on the subject of film and emotional affect. Currie advocates a “simulation” thesis for the experience of emotional affect in film-viewing. According to this thesis, one’s emotional affect is caused by the imaginative state into which the film places one. The imaginative basis on which film-viewing takes place allows for one’s emotional machinery to run “offline,” as Currie puts it. The viewer simulates being present to the events onscreen, allowing for her emotional disposition to cue upon whatever occurs in this situation.23 For instance, I am jolted out of my seat when a scare occurs in a horror film because I am imaginatively simulating that actual situation as I watch the film; I am imagining actually having the experience the scene depicts, which allows certain emotional capacities to trigger after the fashion that they would fire in real life. Currie’s position has a degree of merit, certainly, given that most people can willfully produce emotional feelings in themselves by imagining being present in an emotionally charged situation. I can conjure up the feeling of fear that I might experience trying to escape from a burning building, by imagining myself in that very situation. In a similar way, it is well known that trained actors can willfully cry on set by imaginatively conjuring a feeling that produces real tears. From one standpoint it may seem as if Currie’s position and mine are the same, or that they simply highlight the same phenomena only with different vocabulary. Where I beg to differ lay in Currie’s reliance on the notions of imagination and simulation. I am not sure we need to posit imagination as the seat of film-viewing emotional affect, if one grants that film-viewing involves a prior dimension of projected, attuned being-in-the-world. In other words, I do not see the need to say that we “imagine” ourselves in the situations of film worlds, given that film-viewing can be described as being-there, as de-distanced projection otherwise continuous with one’s everyday being-inthe-world. From a phenomenological standpoint I believe Currie’s reliance on imagination risks rendering the viewer a solipsistic, Cartesian subject who can only relate to the events of film situations by copying them in one’s private imaginary world. I suggest that Currie’s invocation of imagination is unnecessary, insofar as it cites a cognitive faculty in order to explain an

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affective stimulus. Whereas, from the Heideggerian position I have proposed, the film-viewer’s emotional state is part and parcel of her way of being. Phenomenologically speaking, it does not make sense to separate imagination from moodedness just insofar as moods and situations seem to occur for Dasein with these running together, in conjunction with one another, generating meaning to and for Dasein. We would not want to say that one’s Dasein is simply removed from such imagined states, or that one’s emotional responses are “running offline.” Other commentators on the subject of emotional affect and film-viewing have suggested similar approaches to unraveling this problematic, under the guise of similar structures of cognition and reaction. For instance, Carroll proposes that film viewers can experience genuine emotional affects on that ground that imagined states of film perception are so closely intertwined with belief states.24 In other words, imaginatively entertaining what one sees on screen is of a piece with believing that it is so. Carroll makes this claim based on evidence from evolution, that imagination’s tie with belief was originally a survival mechanism. In this view, primitive human beings were able to engender fear as an emotional response to potential sources of danger. The emotional affect in a film-viewer, Carroll suggests, is caused by a belief state, a belief in a proposition that causes one’s reaction. Carroll writes: In effect, a fictional motion picture instructs its audience to hold certain propositions before the mind unassertively … our emotions are susceptible to imaginings as well as beliefs. The cultural institution of fiction, including the precinct of fictional motion pictures, rests upon our innate capacity to be moved emotionally by representations of counterfactual states.25

Again, what I have to say in response to this proposal is that phenomenologically speaking, there must be an underlying existential mode that occurs prior to one’s “belief state” about a fictional situation depicted on film. Not only that, the concept of being-in-the-world obviates the need to account for knowledge or perception on the basis of belief states. I see no need to hold that the viewer of fiction films entertains logical propositions about X or Y being true in the film. Positing a belief state overlooks the fact that as viewers, we already can be there, in the fiction, because projection is an a priori feature of our existence as Daseins. To hold that an affected state needs to be preceded by a belief state overlooks the aspect of Dasein’s transcendence, the fact that Dasein’s states of knowledge (whether of belief, perception, cognition) are already ways of its being. In summary, the positions of both Carroll and Currie end up breaking up a phenomenon that already was unified from the start. The film-viewing Dasein can be understood as with the film,

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projectively existing in its world, making this world present. In the following sections, I will attempt to give further justification to this view. THE EXISTENTIAL OF UNDERSTANDING Understanding [verstehen] is a second existential category comprising Dasein’s modes of “being-in” the world. Heidegger identifies understanding as fundamentally continuous or equiprimordial with attunement. This is to say, understanding and attunement are different aspects of the same phenomenon and can only be distinguished in analysis. They both characterize modes in which things matter for Dasein. Every attunement has its understanding, and every understanding is attuned (BT §31, 138/142–43). As an existential, understanding characterizes the being of Dasein, not merely the “knowing” or cognition of Dasein, as the term and its history in philosophy might imply. Quite simply, for Dasein to be-in-the-world indicates Dasein existing as understanding. Heidegger does not regard understanding in epistemological terms, as one might gather on the basis of its use by classical philosophers such as Kant or Locke. In those contexts “understanding” refers to a specific faculty or power that underwrites human cognition, as, for instance, in Kant where understanding describes the human ability to bring the content of intuition to the appropriate concept. To regard understanding as a “faculty” or activity of Dasein risks characterizing understanding as an occurrent feature of a thing, a feature that could be present or not (BT §31, 138/143). Such a view would moreover beg the question as to what performs the understanding activity, and according to what principle, etc. This is one of Heidegger’s complaints against the Cartesianism of Kant and other philosophers of knowledge: that they did not question the being of the faculties they theorized. Understanding in Heidegger’s account is an ontological structure by which Dasein exists in the world in terms of significance and goal-orientation; it is the structure by which world is disclosed as a setting for meaningful interaction.26 Understanding “constitutes the being of the there in general” (BT §31, 138/143). Expressed in this way, Heidegger’s revision of the concept of understanding aims to re-orient the metaphysical model embedded in traditional theories of knowledge in favor of the existential projection or possibility that grounds this model. As Dasein’s “there in general,” understanding names the phenomenon of Dasein existing in the world such that she knows her way around. Heidegger describes it this way: “As this understanding, [Dasein] ‘knows’ what is going on, that is, what its potentiality of being is.” (BT §31, 139/143). Part of the reasoning here is that understanding is factical, which is to say, it occurs for Dasein on the basis of its own past experience and future planning. As such,

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Dasein’s understanding does not exist outside of time or temporal experience. This feature for its part entails that understanding always occurs on the basis of prior, contextual understanding, as well as futural direction. For instance, the artisan entering the workshop at the start of the workday exercises understanding by virtue of comprehending the surroundings of the shop, and comporting herself to this surroundings in continuity with her goals for the day, the projects left unfinished the previous day, and so forth. These latter notions convey that Dasein’s understanding is essentially a way Dasein has of self-relating, and being-there, relative to its own possibilities. In this light, a key item that distinguishes Heidegger’s concept of understanding is the notion of possibility or potential. He writes, “The mode of being of Dasein as potentiality of being lies existentially in understanding” (italics mine) (Ibid.). Understanding does not concern simply being able to do or comprehend something, but existentially entails a ‘thereness’ or presence on Dasein’s part. In a further distinction Heidegger says, “In understanding as an existential, the thing we are able to do is not a what, but being [Sein] as existing” (Ibid.). What Dasein is able to do via its understanding is be. And Dasein can in fact “be,” that is, exist, in an infinite number of ways. This would include knowledge states, but also other non-cognitive kinds of states such as the skilled coping of using a hammer, or appreciating a symphony. Understanding is the mode of being by which Dasein exists in terms of its possibilities. It is Dasein’s mode of projecting beyond itself, and in a way that gives significance to Dasein’s surroundings and making use of them. For Dasein to be-in-the-world means that Dasein exists understandingly. According to Heidegger’s introduction of this concept, understanding was actually entailed in the earlier accounts of tools and their manner of revealing the phenomenon of being-in-the-world. Recall Heidegger’s earlier deduction of the concept of being-in-the-world from the description of Dasein’s innate capacity for familiarity and goal-orientation in the use of tools. That passage served to demonstrate that the phenomenon of being-in-the-world emerges on the basis of Dasein’s everyday engagement with things ready-to-hand. Turning to the concept of understanding at the present juncture, the points Heidegger aims to develop further in the present context are that, first, Dasein’s ways of being there, that is, its ways or potentialities of having a world originate from out of its prior states of being-there. And secondly, that this phenomenon is in turn predicated on Dasein’s way of projecting itself, which is to say, being “there” in terms of those states of being one has had “here.” Heidegger puts it, “As factical, Dasein has always already transferred its potentiality of being into a possibility of understanding” (BT §31, 142/147). In other words, Dasein’s projections beyond itself are a function of the projects it currently has. Thus, understanding is the term Heidegger introduces to describe the projective power of Dasein, the existential feature by which

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Dasein’s world comes to light in conjunction with Dasein’s projection of itself. Understanding “penetrates” into possibilities, out of the various things that are present for it. It projects into definite directions (BT §31, 140/144). This notion of projection helps to articulate the way in which Dasein experiences definite disclosures in whatever it is doing. Space, surroundings, and significance all come to Dasein pre-laden with meaning. Projection conveys the idea that the spheres of disclosedness Dasein encounters are definite ways of having things revealed for it in a meaningful way. Accordingly, Dasein’s understanding is implicitly a self-understanding (BT §31, 140/144), a way of one’s being present to oneself. For instance, the experienced artisan possesses an understanding of her tools and tasks in a fashion that is an existential projection of her facticity. The hammer and nails are not objects of contemplation for her, but instead function as pragmatic thresholds through which the she realizes her projected visions of tasks to be completed. As Heidegger describes it, Dasein is operative as understanding “in such a way that this being discloses in itself what its very being is about” (BT §31, 140/144). Understanding refers to one’s own possibilities, and to one’s own ability to see oneself and the world in terms of these. Dasein’s being-in-the-world fundamentally is this projective self-understanding. Or more colloquially: Dasein is the being that understands itself in terms of its possibilities (recalling the book’s opening claim that Dasein is the being whose being is an issue for it). I shall say more about the relevance of this concept for film-viewing in what follows. To give a preview in the meanwhile, the place of this existential concept for film-viewing lay in its aspect of projective know-how. That is, understanding is operative in film-viewing just insofar as this activity is fundamentally predicated on negotiating surroundings, and of projecting oneself forward through these surroundings. For films are not simply finished canvasses whose meaning comes to us ready-made; instead, we project ourselves into their world, making it significant. We skillfully negotiate what is presented to us, on the basis of our factical understanding. In this same section of Being and Time, Heidegger goes on to introduce some metaphors that spell out the scope of understanding. One additional way he characterizes understanding is with the term “sight” [Sicht]. He does not mean sight in the colloquial sense of eyesight or vision. Rather, “sight” here names Dasein’s character of having things become intelligible or otherwise present by way of Dasein’s projective mode of understanding. As Heidegger introduces the concept, “Dasein is equiprimordially sight existentially existing together with the disclosedness of there” (BT §31, 142/146). The familiar experience of seeing, then, is conditioned by Dasein’s existential capacity for sight. We can consider this passage to be an account of the existential conditions that underlie the ontic phenomenon of sight in everyday experience.

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One way to think about the meaning of this passage is to recall the double aspect of how Dasein experiences its “there” via understanding. On the one hand, we have observed that understanding fosters Dasein’s projection. For instance, upon walking into the workshop, the being of the artisan, qua beingin-the-world, consists in projecting the various possibilities she factically brings to the shop and its contents. The concept of sight Heidegger introduces in the present passage, on the other hand, conveys how the workshop and the possibilities it affords come to light for the artisan by understanding’s character of sight or seeing. This is the sense behind Heidegger’s qualification in the passage that Dasein is sight existing together with the disclosedness of the there. The disclosedness of the there, that is, the surroundings of the workshop and the spheres of relevance offered up, comes to light by virtue of Dasein’s existential way of seeing, or making things seen as it were. Again, this concept of sight does not constitute for Heidegger anything like physical causal conditions for visual perception, so much as it describes the existential conditions that underlie what we colloquially refer to as vision. This point is conveyed in Heidegger’s qualification that sight is predicated existentially on understanding (BT §31, 142/147). This is to say that for Dasein to “see,” or even be able to see, it must first be “there,” and this latter in a fashion that what is there is “disclosed” for it. Heidegger says the following: [Sight] corresponds to the clearedness [Gelichtetheit] characterizing the dislosedness of the there. “Seeing” not only does not mean perceiving with the bodily eyes, neither does it mean the mere nonsensory perception of something objectively present in its objective presense. The only peculiarity of seeing which we claim for the existential meaning of sight is that it lets beings accessible to it be encountered. (BT §31, 142/147)

So in a manner of speaking, Dasein’s there-ness is coextensive with its sight. Or, going further back with the terminology, we can say that Dasein’s beingin-the-world is coextensive with its existential sight. Although Heidegger does not give it an extended treatment here (while it is much more prominent in the post-Being and Time work), the somewhat metaphorical notion of “clearing” also functions to highlight what is phenomenologically at stake in the connection of understanding and sight. “Clearing” in the context of understanding refers to Dasein’s character of being-in-the-world in a lighted or illuminated fashion, as the German root [Licht, light; Gelichtetkeit, clearedness, literally, a quality of being lighted or lit up] conveys. As the above-quoted passage indicates, the existentiality of sight corresponds to the cleared, that is, lit-up or illuminated nature of the disclosures Dasein experiences. In keeping with the metaphor, we can say Dasein does not live in darkness but instead habitates in a way that its world,

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its surroundings are brightened, not hidden away inaccessibly. The thrust is that Dasein is ontologically speaking this very process of clearing. More colloquially we might say “clearing” denotes Dasein’s existential dimension of always being situated or oriented, and thus, of enacting or activating a threshold of intelligibility upon which it can proceed. Heidegger in fact goes on to describe “meaning” as just this threshold upon which Dasein’s understanding moves (BT §31, 146/151). I shall address this further in what follows. INTERPRETATION The concept Heidegger labels “interpretation” [Auslegung] brings together many of the aforementioned phenomena, in a way that illustrates their dynamic character. In brief, interpretation refers to the development of understanding, understanding taken up in a particular direction (BT §32, 144/148). It does not represent a departure from understanding, so much as it is understanding exercising itself.27 The point here is the following: understanding does not express merely Dasein’s power of projection or of experiencing disclosedness. Rather, understanding’s projective power equally conveys Dasein’s ability to take up these possibilities, that is, to develop them and go further with them. Interpretation conveys Dasein’s taking ownership of what it understands, and this in a way that is consistent with the understanding Dasein already possesses. For instance, imagine that I am in the workshop and I find a foreign tool in the toolbox. It is something I never seen before, and I do not know what its use is. In Heidegger’s locution, I have “interpreted” this object or tool the moment I take it from the toolbox and consider what its use or purpose is. Rather automatically, I judge that this foreign item is a tool, belonging in the toolbox or some similar place, based on where I found it—the toolbox. The point to take away here is that I do not blankly stare at this foreign tool and consider its purpose by, for example, adding up a list of its properties. I appropriate and engage it in the context of where I found it. In broader terms, the ways in which I interpret the world originate from the prior understanding I already have. This fact echoes the point that to be a Dasein is different from being a Lockean empirical observer who learns about the world and the things in it through bare sense impressions. The crux of this example, beyond the “interpretation” with which I make sense of a foreign item in the toolbox, is that Dasein’s being-in-the-world is fundamentally interpretive, insofar as Dasein is always in process of reckoning with one understanding or another and building from it. So interpretation is not something I actively do, in the sense of performing an action on a direct object. Rather, Dasein’s very modes of being, indeed, its having its “there,” include interpretation.

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For the purposes of the present discussion, the important conclusions that follow here are thus. First, Dasein’s general engagement with the world, which has a foundational locus in understanding, is interpretive. We engage and realize our projections of ourselves on the basis of the “fore-conceptions” or “fore-understandings” of ourselves and our worlds with which we come at our tasks. Secondly and more importantly for my present purpose, insofar as Dasein is fundamentally an interpreting being, it is also evident that all of Dasein’s everyday engagement with things is predicated on seeing things in an interpretive way, or “seeing-as” (BT §32, 145/149). Heidegger summarizes it this way: “What is disclosed in understanding, what is understood, is always already accessible in such a way that in it its ‘as what’ can be expressly delineated. The ‘as’ constitutes the structure of the explicitness of what is understood; it constitutes the interpretation” (BT §32, 144/149). Interpretation in this existential model is more automatic and subliminal, insofar as the various interpretations one makes originate in one’s everyday, shared practices. For instance, getting into one’s car and driving somewhere does not constitute an active, deliberative way of seeing a four-wheeled object and determining its usefulness as a transportation vehicle. The point is that the very use I make of the car is in fact founded on this pre-predicative “seeingas,” that is, I see it as what I know already to be a car (BT §32, 145/150). Moreover, a broader implication of this last conclusion is that our perceptive engagement with things is rarely the result of a bare staring (or as Heidegger will likewise describe later, bare listening and hearing). That is, Dasein’s engagement with things, and its having of a world and a totality of relevance, does not eventuate from a blank staring or distanced, un-interpretive eye. As Heidegger puts it, “The simple seeing of things nearest to us…contains the structure of interpretation so primordially that a grasping of something which is, so to speak, free of the ‘as’ requires a kind of re-orientation” (Ibid.). To argue that everyday perception originates in a bare-seeing built in ground-up fashion from various sense impressions only constitutes a modification of the ordinary, existence-rooted sight described above. In sum, Heidegger’s spinning-off of interpretation from understanding has the result of recasting traditional philosophical locutions of sensation and perception into terms of existential comprehension. In short, when we see, and when we hear—these are activities that are already interpretive. It is my hope that at this point the reader will have some sense of where I aim to take this discussion of interpretation, meaning, clearing, and sight. I recognize the challenge in following this long list of concepts and their definitions. In order to marry these items up with an analysis of film and film-viewing, I will start at the end of this discussion and work backwards. First, I understand interpretation to be operative at the base level of looking at a film screen and comprehending the contents of the film image. That is, the

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basic experience of looking at a flat screen or a television is one of seeing it as the locus of the film image. To put it simply, looking at film images in the first place is an instance of transcending the objective properties of where or upon-what the image appears.28 Secondly, films and the sequences and scenes that comprise them likewise represent interpretive experiences for the viewing Dasein. For instance, to watch the movie Stagecoach and engage it as a movie involves several interpretive acts. It involves the multiple layers of interpreting the film as a cohesive whole; interpreting the events as comprising a narrative or story; taking the actors to be characters having fictional names and the like. It will also include the way we judge and assess movies, classifying them according to genres, as well as viewing this film as, for example, a western, a romance, a slasher, and so forth. Interpretation must also be at work in the more muted, altogether non-discursive ways in which films cue the viewer’s attention with visual items or other clues that are to be taken in one way or another. In short, any manner in which we appropriate the given film in terms of deriving meaning or developing an understanding is, in Heidegger’s terms, interpretation. Because interpretation is simply the development of understanding, interpretation characterizes our factual ability to negotiate our way through films. But one might still ask: how do we do this? As viewers, how do we explain our ability to navigate our way through films? Where does this capacity come from? Answering these questions requires recognizing the origin of interpretation in the existential of understanding. Understanding is Dasein’s power of projecting, in terms of both having projects and projecting oneself forward, such that these are also disclosed for one. So in the context of viewing a film, understanding represents my basic know-how, my ability to find my way about. To be clear, what this does not mean is that human beings have a natural film-comprehending capacity, in a manner akin to Deleuze’s claim (citing Bergson) that the universe is a meta-cinema, that is, that reality is inherently cinematic or a cinematic mind, where images simply command one of their own power.29 Because understanding is defined for Heidegger as an existential, that is, a way of being, it similarly is not a faculty for engaging objects of this or that kind, but instead underwrites the possibility for cognitive or perceptual faculties to exist. As such, understanding describes simply Dasein’s capacity to be “there,” projectively in the film world, such that interpretation can follow. The micro-concepts of sight and clearing for their part help to illustrate the fact that Dasein’s film-viewing is an activity fostered by Dasein’s disclosedness. In other words, the meaning Dasein experiences in films is a product of its act of revealing, its disclosedness, fostered through its projective understanding. This does not entail that films do not function as independent works

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of art with their own power of fostering truth, an issue I address further in the next chapter. But what it does mean is that a film’s ability to deliver meaning to the viewer, to be naturally accessible and intelligible, has an equally significant locus in Dasein’s existential power of understanding, its ability to develop this understanding in interpretation, and to render the film “seen” or “cleared,” that is, illuminated, lit up. To make sense of this last series of claims, one need only consider what expectations will inform one’s existential comportment on her next trip to the cinema. One’s understanding will engage automatically as the opening credits of the movie roll; one will interpretively “make sense of” the first scenes of the film; and presumably, one’s interpretation will gather enough steam such that the plot and key premises can be articulated and made meaningful for one. DISCOURSE With this last turn in my analysis I wish to make a very quick assessment of the last of the three existentials that Heidegger labels as equiprimordial with attunement and understanding. This third item Heidegger calls “discourse” [Rede] (BT §34, 155/161). Heidegger defines it as “the articulation of intelligibility” (Ibid.). Heidegger maintains that discourse was actually already presupposed along with the previous two existentials highlighted. This is because it refers to Dasein’s experience of meaning and its ability to appropriate this meaning interpretively. But what makes discourse an existential alongside understanding and attunement? To say that discourse is the articulation of intelligibility refers to Dasein’s most basic capacity to communicate the givenness of what it experiences. It has already been established that Dasein does in fact experience disclosedness, or meaning, in its understanding. “Meaning” refers to the foundation upon which any understanding maintains itself. Discourse as Heidegger describes it here simply refers to the basic, existential capacity Dasein possesses for articulating this meaning (BT §34, 155/161). Discourse is not the same thing as language but conditions the possibility of language. This notion reflects the fact of ordinary experience, that whatever one may be given to articulate in words must already be given, prior to language as it were. My interest in running through this last concept quickly is motivated by a wish to get straight to the most important point vis-à-vis the philosophy of film. I believe Heidegger’s existential of discourse helps to disambiguate the long-standing notion that films have their own way of communicating, or as some have proposed, their own language. I am referring to the long-standing views of philosophers and theorists according to which film images and their connection in films exhibit a grammar or semiotics. Looked at from the

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side of Dasein, to conceive discourse as an existential helps to explain why philosophers and film theorists even first had an interest in claiming that film images are naturally linguistic. Certainly, I do not purport to close the book once and for all on the long-standing observation that films do exhibit something akin to language or our experience of language. But I do want to suggest that the paradox of demonstrating anything like a “cinematic language” is contingent on seeing that Dasein’s existential capacity of discourse (and by extension, its interpretive understanding) functions as the primary ground of such a phenomenon. In other words, any language enacted by film images is really originative in and constituted by Dasein’s discourse. In this fashion, language is not something that exists independently of Dasein so much as Dasein, as existentially discursive, brings language to life wherever it finds meaning. This notion is captured well in Heidegger’s locution that discourse constitutes the “structuring” of the intelligibility Dasein discloses in its beingin-the-world. Finally, these features not only pertain to a given Dasein’s ability to articulate intelligibility, that is, to speak and communicate. They also pertain to Dasein’s ability to comprehend the speech of other Daseins who coexist in its shared world (BT §34, 157/162). Because Dasein existentially is discourse, existing amidst language, it is likewise capable of recognizing discourse from without. A last noteworthy feature in Heidegger’s account of discourse is that it penetrates silence as well as actual words. That is, discourse equally pertains to Dasein’s ability to discover meaning even in things that are not explicitly discursive. Discourse is just as much a capacity for hearkening or hearing, of recognizing what is given prior to language (BT §34, 158/163), as it is a capacity for exercising language. This existential fact is equiprimordial for discourse to occur in the first place—we might say that it is what led the first human beings to begin talking. Alternately stated, I find this notion to be extremely powerful for making sense of the phenomenology of the film experience given that so much of film-viewing does work at the level of silence, of having meaning be presented in terms that are not audible but which can also be described in words. That is, I am suggesting that Dasein’s existential of discourse is instrumental for any capacity of films to be discursive, in guises both audible and otherwise. Much of the motivation for the choice of films I will take up in later chapters stems from this observation, and it is a subject to which I will return. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS This chapter has attempted to highlight some ways in which the phenomenology of the film experience originates in what Heidegger calls Dasein’s

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being-in-the-world. Much of what I have said construes film-viewing as a Dasein-centric activity; I have characterized films as loci of meaning and intelligibility that receive these from out of Dasein’s projective understanding. I have attempted to adduce the view that many of the most basic aspects of the film experience have some explanation in Dasein, in human existentiality if you will. But I also wish to assess the phenomenology bound up with films themselves, conceived as quasi-independent objects exercising their own power to the viewing Dasein. I will propose that one way to consider films in this light is through the rubric of Heidegger’s philosophy of art. Dreyfus highlights that the account of tools and other ready-to-hand things in Being and Time does not preclude other types of beings with their own ontologies. Specifically, Dreyfus highlights the way in which artworks comprise another kind of beings that Dasein encounters.30 Being and Time does not reckon specifically with artworks, but as becomes clear in Heidegger’s later writings, artworks nonetheless comprise for Heidegger a unique stratum of beings with their own unique manner of disclosure. NOTES 1. Cristina Lafont, “Hermeneutics,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark K. Wrathall (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 270. 2. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 25, 73, 101. 3. Most prominently, Christopher Yates, “A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds,” Contemporary Aesthetics 4 (2006). (No page numbers.) 4. Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 15ff. 5. Cf. Robert Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2015) 17, 22. In Sinnerbrink’s locution, films have the power to “disclose,” “project” and “present” what he calls “virtual worlds.” 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2010). 7. George M. Wilson, “Le Grand Imagier Steps Out: The Primitive Basis of Film Narration,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 185–99. 8. Robert Sokolowski, “Picturing,” Review of Metaphysics XXXI (1) (September 1977): 18. 9. Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged ed., 17, 20; Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. 10. Currie, Image and Mind, Ch. 4. For a summary of this and similar views see Andrew Kania, “Realism,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 239–40.

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11. Also see Yanal, “Defining the Moving Image,” 136. 12. Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 246–77. 13. Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, Ch.3. 14. Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged ed., Ch.4. 15. A similar argument is leveraged by Mulhall in his reading of Blade Runner. See Stephen Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 19–30. 16. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 177–84. 17. Ibid., 182, 184. 18. Lauren Freeman, “Toward a Phenomenology of Mood,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 52 (4) (December 2014): 449. 19. J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Heidegger: An Introduction (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 65; Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 169. 20. Freeman, “Toward a Phenomenology of Mood,” 450. 21. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 174. 22. Julian Hanich, “What We Are Afraid of When We Are Scared at the Movies,” Projections 8 (2) (Winter 2014): 26–49. 23. Currie, Image and Mind, 144ff. 24. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 154–55. More recently see Jake Quilty-Dunn, “Believing Our Eyes: The Role of False Belief in the Experience of the Cinema,” British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (2015): 1–15. 25. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 155. 26. Mark A. Wrathall, “Heidegger on Human Understanding,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time, ed. Mark A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 179. 27. Ibid., 182. 28. For an exceptionally rich and lucid account of this phenomenon, see Lucas D. Introna and Fernando M. Ilharco, “Phenomenology, Screens, and the World: A Journey with Husserl and Heidegger into Phenomenology,” in Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems, ed. John Mingers and Leslie Willcocks (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 56–102. 29. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 59. 30. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 84–85.

Chapter 3

Film and Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art

This chapter explores the relevance of Heidegger’s philosophy of art to film. The goal is to consider the latter insofar as it stands to fall within the phenomenological conditions of what Heidegger labels the “artwork” or “work of art.” Heidegger’s philosophy of art, which he developed in the 1930s and 1940s, has arguably been as influential for the philosophy of art as his earlier groundbreaking work Being and Time has been for phenomenology and existential philosophy. Heidegger’s interest in this subject transcends the bare philosophical question of what art is, engaging more broadly art’s historical, linguistic, cultural, and existential conditions. Over and above evaluating how the film medium squares with Heidegger’s broader conceptions of art and art media, I suggest that Heidegger’s understanding of art is equally important for comprehending film’s ontological status, that is, for understanding what sort of thing a film is in terms of an essence or nature. This question is an issue front-and-center in contemporary philosophy of film, and it is a matter in which Heidegger’s philosophy of art stands to genuinely contribute to the paradigm. Indeed, Heidegger argues that artworks are not things at all, but instead that their character fundamentally exceeds that of thinghood. Artworks comprise unique manifestations of being that are complete and sufficient unto themselves. Accordingly, the present chapter seeks to unravel just how films might be said to exhibit the same features. An important related goal of this chapter is to consider how we might defend the film medium in the face of Heidegger’s well-known critiques of 20th-century technology and popular media. Defending the view that film is compatible with Heidegger’s philosophy of art requires grappling with the explicit and implicit complaints Heidegger himself lodges against film considered as a technological innovation. I argue that Heidegger’s negative assessment of film is not unequivocal, but allows some room for flexibility. 75

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I also wish to engage Heidegger’s thought on the artwork so far as it presents an alternative framework to conceptualizing film in metaphysical terms. For Heidegger, artworks drastically transcend the status of mere things, operating instead as loci of truth and poetic birthings of language. I hope to adduce a perspective in which films can be appreciated in these guises. FILM IN HEIDEGGER’S CRITIQUE OF TECHNOLOGY It is well-known that Heidegger’s later work contains extensive critiques of twentieth-century technology. And it is also widely acknowledged that Heidegger’s attitudes toward popular media, especially those enabled by modern technology, are uniformly negative, perhaps too strongly so.1 Heidegger considers film along with other twentieth-century innovations in telecommunication to be a product of modern technology’s totalizing conquest of life. Film for Heidegger comprises a static, ultimate form of “representation” fostered by being’s revealing itself in the guise of “en-framing” (or in a more recent translation, “positionality”) [Gestell].2 En-framing is Heidegger’s term for the totalizing, yet one-dimensional mode of being according to which the modern subject views the world as unlimited “standing-reserve” [Bestand] to be “set upon” or “challenged” [herausfordern] such that the earth and everything it houses become seen as mere “stock.”3 En-framing is not itself a structure or a perspectivism, so much as it is the way being reveals itself in the present epoch.4 All of the goods of the earth are seen as “available;” everything is positioned in a precisely calculated fashion, ready to be used. Indeed, of less concern for Heidegger is the concept of “stock.” More so, it is the utter, totalizing degree of en-framing, which universalizes all things in the rubric of orderability or requisitioning [Bestellens].5 En-framing sees no innovations as beyond human reach. This lack of limitation occurs because en-framing allows the modern subject sole power to define the criteria for what is possible and what is not. The en-framed world of the modern subject no longer encounters objects [Gegenstand] that stand opposed to human will.6 It has been decided in advance, as it were, that all things lay within the power of this will. For an historical signpost, this thought seems to be at the heart of Descartes’s claim in the Discourse on Method that certain methodological approaches in science will help us to become “masters and possessors of nature.” Although Heidegger does view this situation as posing a bona fide moral dilemma, insofar as it entails a loss of meaning and value for humankind, his critique of technology or specific media thereof is not a moral one. That is, there is no blame to be apportioned on any person. Instead, technology is the fully realized manifestation of being’s disclosure in the form of techne,



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or making. In the ancient world, techne was seen as continuous with nature rather than opposed to it, fostering the revealing of naturally occurring forms. In that view, the toolmaker does not fashion nature; instead, nature furnishes the forms the toolmaker brings forth in the finished product.7 However in the present, as we know, technology tends to be characterized as an entity unto itself. In Heidegger’s view, the difference between ancient techne and modern technology has its locus in the latter’s stance of mastery and dominance. In Heidegger’s view this shift was inevitable, a product of being’s manner of givenness to the human realm. In its ancient guise, being manifested itself in terms of constant presence, best encapsulated in Aristotle’s concept of ousia. For the ancients, techne and ousia were complementary. Yet in Plato, too, one can make a similar observation. The being of things in Plato’s world is given by their looks—their eidei or outward appearance. This ontology comprised the Western metaphysical paradigm up to the time of modernity. In contrast, for the modern subject, being has withdrawn from beings, and has become understood as subjective representation, reaching a climax in Nietzsche’s notion of will to power and the Ubermensch who can revalue all values. In brief, being is no longer regarded as a property inherent in things; the metaphysical “object” [Gegenstand] has disappeared altogether and no longer stands over against [gegen] the human mind.8 The last vestiges of being conceived as ousia are preserved in the representational thought of the human subject. Again, this move can be observed in significant modern philosophers such as Descartes, in whose Meditations substance or ousia is explicitly defined as a subjective idea, not a property inherent in things. But what does this all have to do with film and other popular media of our time? The place of film and photographic media within this historical assessment here is in fact very clear-cut. One source is Descartes’s discovery of the epistemic power of subjectivity, according to which all of reality can be rendered in terms of mental representations. For Descartes, perceived reality is less reliable than represented objectification, as the mind of the human subject is more able to secure the truth of its own ideas using clear and distinct judgment, than it is able to secure the truth of what lay outside of the mind. This insight of Descartes takes further shape in the philosophy of Kant and its subsequent legacy in German idealism. As Kant describes it, human experience just is the stream of representations, or Vorstellungen, of which consciousness consists. This means that visual experience, for instance, is just a series of pictures, while what these pictures are of (i.e., their origin) is fundamentally unknowable. On this score, one might note the deep historical significance of vision or sight for Western thought, as the medium of choice for verifiable knowledge. This is not strictly a modern insight, although the dominance of empiricism certain has some influence. As Phillip Rosemann has observed, Heidegger regards the primacy of the visual in human thought

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to stem as far back as Plato and Aristotle, particularly their emphasis on the forms or eidei of things, the “looks” in which things appear. According to this paradigm, a thing’s eidos comprises that which it is really is, its eternal or timeless nature. In Rosemann’s words, “what ‘really’ is must endure in our physical or mental gaze.”9 Filmic media—regardless of whether one means still photography or motion pictures—offer a tailor-made case of Heidegger’s conception of technological en-framing because of their capacity to set upon and capture life in static images. These are images that moreover are chosen by and for the viewing subject. And unlike painting and drawing, because film-photographic media typically purport to depict the real, they are in the unique position of re-determining what the real in fact is. The real is whatever is shown in the film-photographic image; whatever cannot be photographed tends to be of less interest. The vast phenomenon in the early 21st century of anyone with a smartphone photographing and sharing to social media every minutiae of their life is a case in point. Heidegger’s worry here is that film and photography have a totalizing ability to make us believe that whatever can be captured on film is the real. And likewise conversely: a worry is that the real is whatever appears in film-photographic images. (Think of the advent of “reality television.” Its name suggests the hermeneutic position that it depicts “real” life.)10 The film camera is conditioned to portray the world in terms of a predefined “picture,” subject to editing, cutting, and enhancement.11 There is a certain power to these phenomena that goes well beyond Heidegger. Philosophers and film theorists have long recognized that the images produced by the camera have a natural way of effecting the impression of reality. Cavell makes this point in The World Viewed regarding film’s phenomenological relationship with the modern subject: the photographic image relieves us from the burdens of perception by virtue of film’s seeming natural power to show us whatever there is to see.12 In sum, these phenomena encapsulate Heidegger’s coining of the present metaphysical situation of the West as “The Age of World-Picture” in the essay of the same name. The present age is the age of picturing, the age of seeing all the world in terms of (subjectively represented, yet purportedly objective) pictures. Moreover, as digital image creation has become the norm, the advance in technological capability has greatly enhanced our ability to create any images we please, and to make such images look as real as we please. Michael Eldred has called the phenomenon of vast digitization of all information, media, and commerce the “digital cast of being,” which is reflective of Heidegger’s suspicion that modern technology exhibits a totalizing tendency to completely recast our understanding of the makeup and essence of things.13 The digital cast of being is the manifestation of being as digital beings, binary number units. Even in the philosophy of film scholarship, it is a typical approach



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today to consider issues of the ontology of film and moving images according to the technology involved, namely digital pixilation and the like.14 For Heidegger, at issue is the larger paradigm, the existential condition according to which being has come to reveal itself in the present time. The rise of the moving image into a popular art form and as a regular, everyday means of mass communication can be understood simply as a hermeneutic, existential condition of a piece with twentieth-century subjectivity. Even the moniker “moving image” is telling in this way, as manufactured images are portable, transferable, and literally visible in all places of civilized Western life. This is opposed to cinematic “film” of the golden age of Hollywood, which had a more well-defined topological and cultural grounding; in comparison, “film” in this guise was a definite thing.15 Heidegger juxtaposes his critique of the totalizing technological conditions enabling film and photographic culture alongside a broader cultural critique not unlike the views of those in the school of critical theory, especially Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. In a writing from the esoteric work Mindfulness (written in the same period as “The Age of the World-Picture”), Heidegger echoes a sentiment made famous in Benjamin’s essay on the technological reproducibility of art works. Heidegger writes that photography and the cinematic arts represent a way that twentieth-century culture has relegated art appreciation to the level of consumer-driven “experiences.” That is to say, things like movies, popular music, museum exhibits, art “installations,” and so forth have all become choices available to the consumer who, in the capitalist West, is encouraged to pursue whatever entertainment vehicles they like. All these are seen as equally available and worthy choices. People take less seriously the notion of certain experiences, insights, or moments being privileged. Consequently, great works of art no longer hold the significant cultural value they once did, as the world is now filled with activities and experiences that at once flood and dull the senses.16 For a time-capsule that conveys Heidegger’s cynicism on film and the cinema, one might consider the way films were advertised to the public during the 1920s and 1930s. It was not infrequent for movie posters to encourage the potential ticket purchaser to see Citizen Kane or Gone With the Wind on the promise that “It’s Terrific!” or “The Most Magnificent Picture Ever!” Or, such an advertisement may have given the command that the movie “Must Be Seen!” These messages show a little of the zeitgeist that Heidegger surely has in mind, where the proliferation of consumer entertainments commands itself to be enjoyed, deemed essential for one’s life and cultural fluency. The one instance in his published books where Heidegger discusses a specific film by name, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, both exemplifies these critiques and suggests rich avenues for a more positive assessment of film that we might formulate on Heidegger’s behalf. Indeed, without this passage

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there would be a lot more work to do in comprehending how Heidegger’s thought might accommodate film at all. And this passage is especially interesting given that Heidegger offers not-faint praise for the film in question, praise which seems surprisingly consistent with Heidegger’s understanding of art and artworks, which I will take up in due course. One of the speakers in Heidegger’s late work “A Dialogue on Language” gives a favorable, though still quite brief assessment on Rashomon. The dialogue’s “Inquirer” character speaks of the film as creating an “enchantment that carries us away into the mysterious.” He elaborates as follows: “I recall a hand resting on another person, in which there is concentrated a contact that remains infinitely remote from any touch, something that may not even be called a gesture any longer…. For this hand is suffused and borne by a call calling from afar and calling still farther onward, because stillness has brought it.”17 The context surrounding this passage is a critique of film continuous with what Heidegger says elsewhere. But the statements quoted intimate that Heidegger finds this scene of Rashomon to convey a genuinely meaningful disclosure of being. The Inquirer’s emphasis on a hand “suffused and borne by a call calling from afar” suggests an appreciation for the film image’s potential for letting things be, in a way that allows things to reveal themselves in their natural occurring, alternating guises of hiddenness and showing, and silence and audibility. If one reads this quotation carefully, crucial in the Inquirer’s characterization of the film shot is what transcends mere depiction of the hand. That is, of importance is not simply what the image depicts, but instead, what strikes the Inquirer as coming from without the image: the call of being borne in the hand’s touch.18 Incidentally, this passage also echoes Heidegger’s account of discourse in Being and Time. Discourse is existentially constituted in listening and hearing just as much as in talking. To this end, even silence is something that can be “heard” insofar as it comprises a discursive mode of Dasein. This very brief passage from On the Way to Language yields the impression that film itself is not problematic for Heidegger as much as its lack of a tendency to depict the sorts of extra-photographic moments described in Rashomon.19 That is, Heidegger’s critique of film seems to hinge on film’s underused capacity to employ images such as that of the hand called from afar, images that refer beyond themselves in a fashion that transcends mere depiction or copying of reality. (If anything, this key possibility of film perhaps reveals where Heidegger’s comprehension of film is exceeded by other continental philosophers such as Deleuze, who regard the cinema as an open, infinite system of world-disclosure.)20 We can discern traces of this implicit attitude elsewhere in Heidegger. Other texts demonstrate that his contention with film, television and the like centers in their leveling down of meaning and in their removal of naturally occurring distances from human existence. In 1935’s Introduction to



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Metaphysics, Heidegger famously writes that the twentieth-century’s key innovations in telecommunication foreshadow this loss of meaning: When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; … there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?21

Rhetorically speaking, Heidegger’s implicit answer to these questions is that the what for, where to, and what then are simply nowhere and nothing. These innovations lead us nowhere, except toward their ever more totalizing power and our loss of time and history. In an equally decisive passage from the 1950 lecture entitled “The Thing,” Heidegger indicates that this cultural critique also encompasses film: All distances in time and space are shrinking. … The germination and growth of plants, which remained hidden throughout the seasons, is now exhibited publicly in a minute, on film. Distant sites of the most ancient cultures are shown on film as if they stood this very moment amidst today’s street traffic. Moreover, the film attests to what it shows by presenting also the camera and its operators at work.22

Heidegger is lodging criticism against contemporary media’s diminishing of the distances that are in fact essential to wholesome, authentic experiences. Film and other mass communication tools eliminate the natural, lived distinctions of near and far. They cause a conflation of the global and the local, rendering long-standing modes of otherness into the sameness of household names and water-cooler chitchat. And this is not to mention that film images remove things from their natural, lived contexts. The things depicted on film are forcibly extracted from the very places where they have their meaning. What is more, the availability of all the world to be seen through photographic images causes the viewer to forget the fact that many phenomena of life are not meant to be seen. This is not unlike Hannah Arendt’s claim in The Human Condition that the dawn of the Western polis is predicated on natural divisions of the public and private. As Arendt describes it, there are events naturally suitable to be seen and done publicly (e.g., political action; leadership; education) and others that are not (e.g., birth and death; intimacy).23 Heidegger’s critique here follows a similar line: film seizes upon and captures minute moments of life, rendering them readily available to one’s eye

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and removing them from their original lived contexts. Film has a nature to render everything available to be seen. As Andrew Mitchell has described it, the standing-reserve’s total availability fosters a kind of obscenity, a lack of reserve. As a result, at risk is an erasure of the very phenomenological character of human experience, in which some things naturally hide themselves from view and deserve respect for doing so.24 Heidegger’s statement quoted above from “The Thing” likewise highlights how film’s abolition of distance makes possible images of items that cannot even be perceived by the naked eye. Such a phenomenon literally makes things available to view that in former times were simply impossible to know the existence of, let alone possible to see. In this light it is especially crucial to recognize film’s power to foster a world view in which being is regarded according to subjective representation. For instance, does the microscopic vision of a high-powered camera “discover” microscopic things? Or do such things merely exist because we invented a camera that can capture the sort of images we already chose to see? Heidegger also condemns cinema and radio for constantly affirming the commonplace and the everyday.25 In contrast, Heidegger claims that genuine experience of being requires heeding being’s own denial [Zurückweisung] and defense [Abwehr].26 In other words, the problem posed by these media is that they have a natural tendency to overlook the fact that there are intrinsically hidden and unknowable aspects of being, that some things are fundamentally distant and cannot be brought close to the eye. In sum, these critiques are expressive of Heidegger’s larger claim that the film image reflects the modern subject’s myopic drive to secure an unshakable self-understanding.27 Filmic media have a way of subliminally reinforcing, in feedback-loop fashion, an impression that whatever what one can see is what is, that one is lord of all one surveys. Heidegger’s position on these issues is that not everything in life can and much less should be depicted, and moreover, that what film images do capture are subjectively determined picture-realities rather than genuine manifestations of being.28 On this note, Heidegger writes in “The Question Concerning Technology” that all insight into reality, through film or otherwise, is in fact limited by the manner in which being reveals itself.29 The problem for film-photographic media is that they have a basic disposition to disregard being’s self-disclosure.30 In what follows I turn to Heidegger’s writings on art in order to generate a foil and alternate viewpoint for appreciating how film squares with Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. As I see it, the challenge posed for film in the face of Heidegger’s criticism outlined so far is less about finding some way to contradict or disprove what Heidegger says, than it is about uncovering the grounds for regarding film’s potential to be what Heidegger calls art. Much of Heidegger’s philosophy of art can in fact be understood as an account of human making, or techne, that is distinct from the broad sweep of



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technology. I will suggest that if we can find a way to accommodate filmic media in Heidegger’s philosophy of art, then this provides a means for seeing that the film image is not just an instance of technologically rooted, subjective representation, and that in some instances film perhaps transcend this limitation altogether. TRADITIONAL THEORIES OF ART The essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” contains perhaps the most decisive account for squaring Heidegger’s thought with the question of film. This essay’s central argument holds that genuine art fosters a disclosure of truth. This view counters traditional philosophical aesthetics, which, in the course of describing the human experience of art, predicates this experience on an interminable divide between viewer and object. Definitions of art proceeding from this assumption overlook the artwork’s own independent power, mistaking mere features of artworks as constitutive of their art-status and thus overlooking the ready-made, already existent character of the artwork. As such, we might say art is fundamentally phenomenological, in the sense of essentially stemming from a specific emergence of being to and for the human agent.31 By the term “truth” as it occurs in art, Heidegger does not mean “correct judgment” or “correspondence” to reality. It occurs prior to human judgment, acting as a condition of judgment even to be possible. Truth means “disclosure”—what the Greeks called aletheia, or un-concealing of what was hidden (OWA, 47–49).32 In order to comprehend the logic of Heidegger’s line of inquiry leading to these conclusions, we need to survey the principal contours of the “Origin” essay. Heidegger’s way of describing art’s “origin” takes a roundabout path, in the course of which he works to dispel a number of historically seminal theses regarding artworks and what comprises them. He begins the essay by entertaining the commonplace assumption that artworks originate in the hand of artists (OWA, 1). Yet Heidegger complains that this usual view fails when one considers the notion that the artist also needs the work in order for this role to have meaning. Heidegger does not indicate a source for this competing thesis but it is reminiscent of Aristotle’s thesis that the artist or craftsman does not create work from out of nothing. In this ancient view, the artist or craftsman works from the idea of the product. The potter makes ceramics based on a formal conception of the completed product that she possesses in her mind; moreover, she shapes the clay into the form to which it naturally lends itself. In this light Heidegger observes, “The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other” (Ibid.). Thus Heidegger concludes in favor of the thesis that drives this essay as a whole. Neither artwork nor artist

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is responsible for their own being. Instead, there is a third factor that holds ultimate sway, namely the phenomenon of art itself (Ibid.). In this light, Heidegger observes, the question of the origin of the artwork becomes the question of art’s nature (OWA, 2). Asking where the artwork originates becomes a question of what art is. For a second approach Heidegger suggests spending more time examining the nature and characteristics of the artwork in its own right, particularly from the standpoint of artworks conceived as things (Ibid.). In other words, the question he puts to the topic is: What sort of thing is an artwork, qua thing? What is the artwork’s specific thinghood or substance? For artworks typically are encountered as things that are fashioned, made by a human hand out of materials such as wood, stone, or paint. Yet, the art-character of these works ostensibly does not stem from their materiality but rather only resides in it. The art-character, the aesthetic quality, is something “added on” to the material basis, as it were (OWA, 5–6). How is this added-on character to be understood more fully—how does it get into the thing? Heidegger suggests that this orientation, too, is deficient insofar as it renders the artwork’s thingly character as akin to the pairing of substance and accident in classical metaphysics. That is, it seems amiss to describe artworks as mere things whose status derives from having some particular quality or predicate attached to them. Heidegger reflects that the confusion here perhaps stems from the longstanding pervasion of language into the Western philosophical view, such that the things described in our discourse are taken to mirror the grammar of that discourse itself (OWA, 6–7). In the case of artworks, Heidegger’s meaning is that we have an inherited, default way of understanding these as thingscontaining-certain-properties precisely because our grammar causes us to think: “An artwork is such-and-such a thing with such-and-such qualities and traits.” The form-matter, substance-accident metaphysics we envision in the artwork in the course of describing it mirrors the subject-verb-predicate mode of definition into which we lapse when we describe such things. This observation leads Heidegger to question the legitimacy of this overall approach, of inquiring after artworks considered as things, because, after all, it minimizes artworks to mere things, stripping them of any power or majesty they may in fact exhibit (OWA, 7). This is all to say that we do not gain ground on understanding the nature of artworks by simply calling out wherein their thinghood lay, or discerning the manner in which they differ from non-things. In the end this approach merely begs the question of what artworks are, let alone the question of what “things” are. For similar reasons, Heidegger continues, the aesthetics-based approach to characterizing artworks also fails. The principal reason for its inadequacy is that it overemphasizes the priority of sense-perception in the experience of artworks (OWA, 8). Again, one thinks of Kant’s philosophy of art (and



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perhaps even farther back of Hume’s theory of taste), according to which aesthetic experience occurs when the senses are overwhelmed by intuitive content that judgment has no way of accounting for. For Kant, aesthetic judgment differs from everyday cognition in that the former involves sense-experiences that the human intellect cannot explain through ordinary means; the faculty of judgment cannot discern the rule or law that generates the artwork. Heidegger does suggest that this orientation gets one thing right, namely the immediacy of the experience in question, which overall is consistent with the phenomenology of the everyday human understanding. Sensations are experienced in their wholeness rather than through raw, sense “impressions” as the empiricists would have it.33 For example, Heidegger says, we recognize the distinct sound of a Mercedes engine; the storm whistling in the chimney; the door that slams. Whereas, hearing a bare sound requires steering our attention away from the things, toward some more abstract notion of pure sound (Ibid.). The reason the aesthetics-based approach fails, however, is that it causes the thinghood of the artwork, qua thing, to disappear. In other words, such an approach brings the work into too close of an immediacy, such that we end up only focusing on the subjective, aesthetic side of experience rather than the overall phenomenon occasioned by the artwork’s very appearance in a thing (Ibid.). This dialectical path leads Heidegger to suggest once again a dualistic perspective: the artwork is not simply a sensory manifold, but a combination of form and matter. One can correct the errors of the aestheticsoriented approach by recognizing that any object of sensory experience must be both material (in Greek, hule) and form (in Greek, morphe). Rendered this way, the sought definition of the artwork jives better with the commonsense philosophical judgment that the artwork cannot simply be viewed as entirely based in form. Rather, the form must inhere in some material substrate—the form has its being by residing in this material base (OWA, 8–9). However, this proposed way of understanding the artwork fails too, because once again it renders the artwork as a material thing that moreover can be equated with other human-fashioned objects. For instance, Heidegger highlights, artworks become no different from equipment or tools. The painting of a master artist becomes equal in status to a pair of shoes, he says. And this is problematic, since we know that true artworks have a self-sufficient character. For artworks have a character of “resting” in themselves, exhibiting their own completeness, whereby they resist use rather than lending themselves to any kind of usefulness. Whereas, equipmental objects have their being in their usefulness and reliability (OWA, 10). Clearly this argumentation arrives at a dead end. What is Heidegger attempting to convey? Two key points figure into Heidegger’s motivation in these passages. First, he wishes to convey that traditional theories of art and the aesthetic are all in some way or other parasitic on the long-standing

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metaphysical distinction of form and matter (OWA, 9). Obviously this is a generalized, broad-strokes claim, but his underlying reasoning stems from the observations that emerge out of commonplace attempts to describe the artwork’s thinghood. In attempting to pinpoint the thinghood of the artwork, as we have seen, the end result is that we make the same recourse, time and time again, to metaphysical distinctions that distract from the subject at hand: the nature or essence of the work of art, as art. The second, even stronger point motivating Heidegger in this context is the claim that Western thought in general is hampered by its constant tendency to extend this conceptual framework to all subjects it encounters (Ibid.). And the underlying motivation for this tendency, Heidegger suggests, is that it makes everything understandable in a uniform, unambiguous way. If we equate the rational with form and the irrational with matter, then we have at once secured for ourselves the realm of the logical and understandable. And this result in turn reinforces the traditional Cartesian division of subject and object. We regard the rational as whatever can be commanded by the mind of the human subject (Ibid.). In a word, the Western metaphysical paradigm is so pervasive that it constrains our ability to understand both ourselves and the things we engage with in our everyday lives. Our immediate inclination is to understand and describe all things, indeed, precisely as things—whether this be in terms of an object sustaining a set of properties, or atoms bundled together according to physical and biological schemes, or a piece of God’s creation. In the end, it is very difficult for us to comprehend the world in terms outside of this metaphysical paradigm of things (OWA, 12). Heidegger’s criticism here is not a moral assessment, so much as it is a way of addressing the situation we find ourselves in, as we explore ways of understanding art and the manner in which artworks possess their own unique status. And as is perhaps clear at this juncture, Heidegger does in fact aim to account for the origin of the work of art in wholly other terms. One critical remark of Heidegger’s whose relevance will become clearer in my forthcoming analysis is posed in the form of a question he raises rather elliptically. He asks whether the thinghood of things is even appropriate to ask about in the way we have tried (Ibid.) Is the question of art’s nature as simple as formulating the right definition that can universally apply to every case? Or is there rather a refusal, a push-back on the side of artworks that resists easy characterization? As it will become clearer, this refusal or resistance is in fact essential to Heidegger’s positive account of art, insofar as artworks have in their nature an aspect of concealment or withdrawal that at once calls itself out, making itself known. I plan to speak further of how Heidegger’s recasting of art has relevance for film in what follows. In the meanwhile, it suffices to draw up a few preliminary conclusions Heidegger’s critique of conventional theories of art lends on behalf of film. First and foremost, I believe one can leverage a



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strong argument that film and the film experience transcend both the form/ matter conception of artworks and the aesthetic conception Heidegger critiques in the “Origin” essay. I attempted to describe some of the limitations of the metaphysical, form/matter viewpoint in chapter 1. In the present context, what seems most in order is some consideration of the consequences of understanding films as mere things—in whatever terms we might render this equation—irrespective for the moment of whether films ought to be classified as artworks. The traditional form/matter, substance/accident model of classical metaphysics does not graft comfortably onto talking of films because, putting it quite simply, films lack a clean atemporal structure. In other words, it is difficult to conceive an eidos for films, insofar as they lack a cut and dried thingly form. On the one hand it certainly is easy to say that any given film—or making this more concise—any moving image has its thinghood in a detached, two-dimensional image that allows the appearance of motion. Or, engaging a different definition of film and moving image media, we can easily ascribe to film images an interplay of light whose origin is spatiotemporally distinct from us, etc. On the other hand, the question Heidegger’s critique of the object-based metaphysics of art poses for these conventional definitions of film images is this: Can we characterize the film image in terms of its thinghood and still hold on to this thing’s unique, experiential quality? Do we learn anything gainful about films or the film experience by comprehending the metaphysical underpinning of the “moving image”?34 As the experiential, phenomenological approach to these issues should make rather clear, it is open to debate whether a traditional object-based ontology of film genuinely yields any meaningful analysis of what film is. And this is because an irreducible quality of films is the experience of them, particularly considered from the side of the viewer’s intentionality or comportment. Any metaphysical nature of films is void of meaning outside of the existential being-there bound up in film viewership. To reduce film images or the film experience to the level of mere things seems to sever the relationship that comprises a film’s thinghood. In brief, accounting for the ontology of film requires heeding the phenomenological aspect that is ostensibly so essential to a genuine reckoning of the thing (supposing this label is even appropriate). The perspective Heidegger describes as the “aesthetic” stance on art lends itself somewhat better to a positive phenomenological account of film and the film experience. Heidegger presents the aesthetics-based approach to theorizing about art as more strongly favorable for describing the immersive, experiential component of engaging with artworks. However, this approach also comes up short for the present purposes just insofar as, historically speaking, this position is rooted in the paradox of the harmony of sense-perception with a lack of cognitive insight into the intelligibility of the artwork. Assuming

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Kant is Heidegger’s target here, Kant’s account of teleological judgment brings the artwork too close, as Heidegger says, by virtue of sketching the artwork’s power as just this aesthetically immersive, experiential component. Kant describes aesthetic judgment as occurring in instances of human perception in which the understanding lacks a rule for comprehending what is presented to intuition. In a word, Kant’s thesis on art is predicated on the notion that artworks present themselves in a guise that is fundamentally inexplicable, at least as far as human understanding is concerned. Whereas, Heidegger wants to emphasize that the experience of artworks is not all about this raw, speechless beholding of the work. Adapting this debate to the conversation regarding film, it seems that we can enfranchise at least two notable features of the film experience on behalf of Heidegger’s rejection of the aesthetics thesis. First, as I have emphasized already in chapter 2, the film experience is existentially rooted, on the basis of the viewer’s fundamental dimension of being-there. Film and viewer meet each other halfway, as it were. It would be amiss to describe this aspect of film experience as a flood of visual, sensory input upon a viewer who has no easy way to account for what is happening. A film viewer is readily oriented in the world exhibited on screen. The film medium seems ready-made, by and large, for immediate intelligibility by virtue of its re-presentation of reality. And secondly, the possibility of too much reliance upon the immersive, immediate-experience aspect of film-viewing is tempered by the phenomenological visibility of a film’s thinghood. In other words, it seems to me that the phenomenology of film-viewing is such that the very film experience, immersive as it may be, nonetheless contains within itself an acknowledgment of the film’s spatiotemporal removal from the viewer. Hermeneutically speaking, the connection of film and viewer seems predicated on this implicit distance. Having surveyed at this point both Heidegger’s critical assessment of technology and his deconstruction of traditional theories of art, I believe we can also respond further regarding attempts by philosophers to define film at the level of the picture or the moving image. Following Heidegger, one can observe that the inclination to isolate the ontology of film at the granular unit of the moving image is in keeping with Heidegger’s claims on the age of the world-picture, namely that the present time is the moment of the image, when all of the world is seen as translatable into images and accessible via images. For its part, the ubiquitous presence of the picture causes us to overlook the power of original, unfiltered experiences of life. And not only that. According to Heidegger, this phenomenon is consequent upon the withdrawal of being from beings; being is no longer understood in terms of objective presence. Instead, being has become reduced to perspective, one’s own picturing—the representation one can form of things without heed to the things themselves or their lived contexts. Hence, the prevalent tendency among philosophers of



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film to regard films as originative in images or similar granular concepts is a consequence of the present paradigm of being, alongside the already pervasive historical tendency to understand being in terms of thinghood or objective presence. These are not simply criticisms of traditional philosophical approaches to art and aesthetics, or even to the philosophy of film. They are also concerns to which a defense of film-cum-art must respond. The sections to follow take up these issues. ART AND EQUIPMENT Let us return to the “Origin” essay. In light of the theoretical problems encountered thus far in the essay, Heidegger tries an alternate approach. He proposes that the nature of “equipment” be considered as a more manageable alternative to the work of art, insofar as an item of equipment would seem to stand somewhere between a mere thing and a work of art. Perhaps examining what equipment is used for and how it is made can yield some clues regarding how artworks come to be (OWA, 13). However, he also adds the rejoinder that this renewed approach still needs to be free of the usual philosophical interpretations. We must proceed from direct description. Part of the rationale for this qualification is that equipment has an overlap with the artwork in traditional metaphysics, such that there is a convenience in the tendency to define a piece of equipment in representational terms (Ibid.). In its original Greek formulation, techne refers both to the art of the creative artist (e.g., painting, sculpture) and the handicraft of the craftsman (e.g., cobbling, carpentry, tanning). And like the artwork, equipment is also something fashioned by the human hand out of raw materials. In this classical paradigm both art and equipmental objects are viewed as things that come into being by fulfilling some form or model in the creator’s mind, where the finished product is that original form embodied in physical existence. Heidegger wants to explore the essence of equipment from this angle so that it might become clearer just in what fashion equipment and artworks diverge. Heidegger’s next move is deliberate, although it may not seem so at first glance. He suggests we choose for our example of equipment a pair of peasant shoes. Moreover, in order to simplify our picture, he suggests an example known to the art world and which likely will be familiar to a philosophical audience considering the question of the artwork’s origin. This example is Van Gogh’s well-known painting of peasant shoes (Ibid.). Heidegger asks: If we look at this painting, wherein does the equipmentality of the shoes consist? Obviously, equipmentality is not an item we can observe simply by looking at the painting. Nor do we capture the equipmentality of the shoes by making bald statements about the use we envision shoes typically having:

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walking, protection of the feet, dancing, and so forth. Heidegger asserts that the equipmentality of the shoes emerges when we take the time to envision the world in which these shoes of the painting reside, that is, the world where they have their life. He reads the painting as follows. The painting depicts peasant shoes, perhaps those of a woman in a farming community. For such a peasant woman, the shoes are perfectly unremarkable. They comprise a mostly inconspicuous, everyday node in the nexus of her life. Hence, in the peasant woman’s lived world the shoes themselves are inconspicuous by virtue of their very usefulness. Heidegger’s initial conclusion about the equipmentality of the shoes is this: their equipmentality lay in their very (inconspicuous) usefulness (OWA, 13–14). The reader who has followed me up to this point will recognize that Heidegger’s account of equipment in this Van Gogh painting mirrors his description of equipment in Being and Time, which I took up in the previous chapter. Interestingly, that text provides a similar account of the usefulness of equipment or tools as integral to their essence, where usefulness is primarily inconspicuous, unseen. What, then, is the significance of the present account of equipment here, in “The Origin of the Work of Art”? And again, how are we to make sense of the emphasis on equipment when the more looming question concerns art and artworks? Heidegger’s central point is that we learn most about the equipmentality of the shoes by allowing the world to open up in which the shoes of the painting reside. If we can allow the world in which these shoes have their abode to appear, so to speak, then we can genuinely witness the equipmental character of the shoes. In the following passage Heidegger describes this lived world of the shoes. From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker’s tread stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow trudge through the far-stretching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slide the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth … (OWA, 14).

And not only that. An equally crucial point is that Van Gogh’s painting allows the truth of the shoes’ equipmentality to emerge. Heidegger is asserting that we learn about the equipmentality of the shoes by putting ourselves before this painting and heeding what the painting itself opens up to us: “[T]he equipmental being of equipment was only discovered by bringing ourselves before the Van Gogh painting … The artwork let us know what the shoes, in truth, are” (OWA, 15). The conclusions Heidegger gleans here are several, and each one requires elaboration. The strongest takeaway of this example and of the roundabout path to it is this: the work of art allows a disclosure



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of being, such that the work’s role is to foster “a happening of truth.” As Heidegger writes in the last sentence of this quotation, the artwork lets us know the truth of the shoes; the painting allows us this insight. By truth, Heidegger means the Greek keyword aletheia, which can be translated as unconcealment, revealing, or disclosure. Etymologically, aletheia indicates uncovering (the alpha-privative a-) a thing from hiddenness, lethe. In the Van Gogh painting, then, Heidegger describes the following. The happening of truth refers to the work’s fostering of a disclosure, a revealing of meaning. For what is opened up through Van Gogh’s painting transcends simply the shoes. The painting reveals the lived world of the peasant who wears these shoes, in a way that an ostensible, historical meaning is discovered for the first time. Accordingly, “truth” in this context does not indicate that the painting is articulating a statement or proposition to which a state of affairs in the world factually corresponds. Nor does “truth” indicate opposition to falsehood. Heidegger employs some locutions that are helpful in spelling this difference out. A key aspect of the artwork’s accomplishment lay in “setting” truth into the work. The work brings the truth of the peasant shoes “to stand” (OWA, 16). The rhetoric here is heavily metaphorical but Heidegger’s broader meaning is this: the work of art has its sway in articulating and bringing to light historically significant moments, moments that are at once definitive not simply for the audience but also for the world from out which the given work eventuates. These historical moments are not merely brought out in the work in a fleeting fashion or dependent on the judgment of a discerning viewer. Rather, these historical loci are fixed or set “into” the work insofar as the work captures their historical significance, uncovering this significance and preserving it in the work. So the notion of truth at work here involves the broader meaning that the specific artwork establishes, over and above whatever the artwork actually depicts. In this last regard the deeper sense consists in which the Van Gogh painting is not merely representational. Heidegger confirms this notion when he says “The work, then, is not concerned with the reproduction of a particular being…. Rather, it is concerned to reproduce the general essence of things” (Ibid.). This general essence of things is what the painting “speaks.” Heidegger is attempting to describe how the painting effects truth in a way that transcends traditionally conceived representational art, where the work is seen as a copy or imitation of an actually existing thing. This is then to say: Van Gogh’s painting, while certainly depicting peasant shoes in terms of its bare image-content, fosters a disclosure that is much broader in scope. The truth of this work is not what it depicts, but instead the world it discloses, the world and historical moment to which the shoes belong. These aspects come forth in the painting in a kind of metaphorical language. So Heidegger’s account of the painting’s truth is still a representative account, though an account of this representation at a much deeper,

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unseen level. His concern vis-à-vis traditional representational theories of art lay in the criteria of historical and cultural truth that are set into the work, and which the work re-presents specifically through aletheia.35 Looking at Van Gogh’s painting, an unspoken premise in Heidegger’s reading of it is that the life of the peasant who wears the shoes is the life of Heidegger’s own cultural heritage. He himself grew up in a rural community of farmers and loggers in the Black Forest region of southwestern Germany. The world of the Van Gogh painting is the world of the German heritage (as Heidegger understands it). What Van Gogh’s painting accomplishes, then, is not just to bring this heritage and world to light, but to establish them, grounding a particular place and time as a loci of meaning for the Germanic peoples. In other words, this painting articulates German Dasein in its historicality. The scope of art’s difference with the world of everyday things is now clearer. The phenomenon of art is comprised by the occasioning of truth in particular works. Art is a way in which human works, that is, things made by the human hand, foster the occurrence of truth. In sum, Heidegger is challenging the notion that art can be understood in ground-up fashion, by, say, analyzing conceptual terms that comprise commonsense notions of art or by identifying metaphysical traits inherent in specific art works.36 The change Heidegger is proposing to bring to these long-standing paradigms is to render art—indeed, to recast the entire traditional vocabulary—in terms of being’s eventuation in the form of truth. Or, to put it more colloquially, Heidegger is attempting to characterize a specific, decidedly non-cognitive fashion in which knowledge occurs—namely, the truth-bearing character of works of art. Just as Being and Time establishes that knowledge occurs for Dasein in ways that transcend ordinary models of cognition and intentionality, “The Origin of the Work of Art” extends this new paradigm by highlighting a specific kind of phenomenon—namely, the work of art—in which this takes place. Artworks comprise a unique, irreducible phenomenon in which intelligibility or meaning come to bear for Dasein. It is in this sense that Heidegger uses the locution “the being of beings” when talking of what artworks bring to light. Artworks represent the intelligibility or meaning (i.e., the being…) that informs the lived world (…of beings). They comprise a specific, irreducible way that we “have” beings, just as Being and Time’s account of tools describes another such mode of having beings—the mode of usefulness or availability encountered with tools.37 Putting the main conclusions together regarding Heidegger’s new, recast definition of art, it should now be clearer why he finds it so problematic to reduce artworks to the level of mere things or form/matter composites. The problem with these latter viewpoints is not so much that artworks are not things—because they certainly are—but rather that their scope transcends any sort of thingly character. The phenomenology of art, according to



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Heidegger’s account described above, requires comprehending both the lived world out of which the artwork originates and the lived world that the work articulates. Thus, providing an ontology of the work of art—or following Heidegger’s title of the essay, explicating the “origin” of the work of art— actually amounts in phenomenological terms to unraveling the relationship such works have to their world. Or perhaps what is the same: the ontology of art ultimately involves recognizing the phenomenological ways in which artworks truthfully articulate their world to and for the viewer. These are features of art that we plainly miss out on if we attempt to formulate a definition of art or art works conceptually from the ground up. On this note, I believe it should go without saying that Heidegger’s account of artworks by and large sidesteps issues of what art is. It seems to me that we appreciate Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of art better on this score if we regard it as an account of phenomenological ontology, that is, a theory of being, and particularly, a theory of a specific way in which being reveals itself, namely poetic truth.38 I shall say more about the connection with poetry below. At this juncture it may seem as if we are pretty far removed from talking of films, film images, or the film experience. In addition, because Heidegger’s interest in the “Origin” essay lay only in great works of art (OWA, 19) it is not perfectly clear whether and how his philosophy of art is applicable to film across the board.39 For the purposes of this chapter, I do not wish to engage in a protracted analysis of whether film meets conditions of art per se, or how Heidegger’s reckoning of art squares with conventional accounts of this subject. Instead, what I hope to do is outline some of the ways that the themes of Heidegger’s “Origin” essay can speak to the ontology of film. I am less interested in whether film can be classified as art in every case, and more interested in what contribution we can leverage from Heidegger on behalf of film under the assumption that films can in some cases exhibit qualities akin to Heidegger’s conception of artworks. In a word, what can Heidegger’s philosophy of art reveal about film, assuming film can comprise a Heideggerian artwork? In what follows I will explore some of this territory, then I will return to it intermittently below as I complete my commentary on Heidegger’s essay. In what ways does film offer up anything like the features of Heidegger’s conception of the artwork? In view of Heidegger’s reading of the Van Gogh painting, I believe we can highlight two items as a start. First, many instances of popular cinema seem capable of fostering truth as aletheia, particularly in the cultural and historical undercurrents that are so crucial in Heidegger’s unpacking of the truth in Van Gogh’s depiction of peasant shoes. In the case of films there seems to be no prima facie reason for why they would be incapable of revealing the being of beings, and this in a fashion that ostensibly is not representational. Some seminal films fit quite well with Heidegger’s view

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of truth in the work comprising an historical locus. Landmark films often foster a sense of cultural identity precisely by highlighting important moments and struggles as of a piece with the world they enact. For instance, in the United States Citizen Kane can be said to express some of the undercurrents of freedom, capitalism, success and failure, and birth and death definitive for American identity. To be sure, these are themes that can be read out of the film although they may only receive elliptical, indirect treatment in the film’s script; but this appears to be just the way Heidegger suggests we understand an artwork’s truth. Indeed, Citizen Kane provides an expression of how things are, as it were, for the American citizen of the twentieth century, over and above portraying a fictional biography of one man. Truth in the guise of aletheia occurs in the manner of a happening or enacting; this truth occurs not in any specific shot, sequence or dialogue of the film, so much as through the film as a whole. To use a Heideggerian-style phrase, the film allows truth to emerge. A second feature decisive for squaring film with Heidegger’s conception of the artwork is the workly, thingly character of films. Part of Heidegger’s characterization of the work of art is its manifestation of truth through the work, where the work itself is of human fashioning (OWA, 10). Artworks are things that are made but which resist usefulness. Do films present themselves as works in a similar light? Do they show the presence of a human hand? In what does their material character consist? For a full response to these questions, I will wait until I have completed my commentary on Heidegger’s essay. In the meanwhile the following preliminary observations may suffice. First, one may observe that films have a discernible difference from equipment. That is, it seems uncontroversial to hold that films possess a character that transcends use, or at least that in many cases this is so. An instructional video at a corporate training course certainly has its seat in usefulness (I have no reason to watch it again after I absorb the lesson), but examples such as Citizen Kane clearly do not become “used up” after viewing; if anything they require repeated viewing in order for their staying power to perpetuate. In what way do films “resist” use, to employ Heidegger’s locution? The crux seems to be that films command mere viewing for the sake of viewing; viewing the film (and safeguarding its truthful disclosure) is an end in itself. None of this means I cannot convert a film into other uses, for instance in assigning students an out-of-class viewing of The Birth of a Nation in a college course on the history of race relations. The point of distinction is that the film also demands respect in own right. Its justification for existence is self-sufficient by virtue of the truthful disclosure it affords. But does this line of reasoning speak to the made, crafted character of films? The made, crafted, or explicitly “workly” character of films is a more complex issue for a number of reasons. Film-viewing in general is predicated on the craft of the film’s production being invisible or at least



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mostly inconspicuous. Moreover, today’s films are more and more sleek and polished than at the beginning of the motion picture era. The craft is mature and perfected, as it were. Films do not display a material nature for the most part; they do not show what they are made of, their thingly character, in the way that paintings, for instance, show their composition in pigment, brushstrokes, thick or thin application, and the physical canvas. And all of this is ostensibly more the case in the present digital age of film production, where films are no longer even housed on physical film reels; their digital basis permanently preserves them, circumventing the infirmities formerly imposed by time. It could even be said, digital films are less and less made of anything, insofar as the medium increasingly eschews photography of live subjects in favor of what can be produced digitally through the use of computers. In sum, film-viewing nowadays goes straight to the image, in a way that by and large transcends material factors. What about film’s earlier history? There was a time when film’s materiality demonstrated a much more significant presence. In the early days of photography and moving pictures, surely the material, work-character of film was quite visible. The medium’s decades-long use of celluloid film reels, prone to fragility and rapid decomposition, not to mention the presence of scratches or dust on the film stock, which could be seen in the projected images, revealed films as fragile things not made to last forever. And the craft of filmmaking in general was more primitive; features such as focus, editing, lighting, or camera placement could be awkward or clumsy, making themselves known to the eye. To be sure, it is not the case that these features have completely disappeared from filmmaking. But they certainly are much less present. For these reasons, the question of film’s materiality and thus of its workly character in the present time seems to be a mixed bag. In what follows I consider some other aspects of Heidegger’s thought on art and art works that we can perhaps rely on to resolve this ambiguity. STRUGGLE OF WORLD AND EARTH. MATERIALITY. MOTION AND REST. HAPPENING. Heidegger continues his account by highlighting several additional traits artworks bear. One such trait is the artwork’s finitude. An artwork’s historicality and truth-bearing capacity are conditioned by its finite character. This finite character takes some different shapes. An artwork manifests what Heidegger calls the “conflict” between “world and earth.” That is, the work has its character in a kind of struggle to wrest its truth into the world from out of the abyss of the earth’s concealing power. But this is still rather cryptic. What does Heidegger mean? In Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes,

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this juxtaposition of world and earth is visible in the very phenomenological quality of what the painting reveals. The painting brings the viewer into the lived world of the shoes and the person who wears them. This world is itself one that has its being in struggling and reckoning with the earth; the pastoral farming life of the German peasant as revealed by the painting gains its meaning from this context. The shoes for their part likewise have their existence thanks to a temporary victory of the human craft that has fashioned them out of leather into the form they will have for a time. This occurs while the shoes themselves still refer to the earth by virtue of their use for walking. An artwork’s lifespan is fleeting. Painting and drawing use wood, canvas, paper, and pigment, which break down or fade over time. Sculpture and architecture employ stone or other earthen materials for their work. Works of these media become absorbed back into the earth sooner or later; they only physically last for as long as their struggle for worldly persistence wins out. Surely these features are part of the charm of the greatest works of art, namely that we recognize them as the fragile, temporary miracles that they are. Heidegger’s interest here is to highlight the finitude of artworks that stems from their material origin, or alternately, from their otherwise temporally conditioned character.40 For any artwork is temporally conditioned by virtue of the historical and cultural conditions out of which it arises and for which it has meaning. We often talk of great works of art as conveying “universal” truths, but in fact, distant examples such as the Greek epics and tragedies indicate that artworks have lives limited to world- and time-specific conditions. There is no way such works can speak to us in the present as they did to their original audiences, supposing their authentic performance even to be possible today. As a result, Heidegger concludes that whatever such works uncover in their effecting of truth is, as a result, similarly finite in a way that it is subject to annihilation. As Dreyfus has commented on this score, art “dies.” So artworks are mortal or finite in all of these ways. Their truth can lose historical relevance and their material makeup inevitably decomposes (which ought to be a reminder that the great works restored and preserved in museums are, functionally speaking, embalmed corpses). In sum, art’s occasioning of truth is always impermanent, subject to decay.41 These interrelated aspects of the artwork’s temporal character have an apex in what Heidegger calls the struggle of world and earth (OWA, 32). Artworks comprise instances of truth emerging in the guise of things coming to light in juxtaposition with the abyssal character of the earth. Again, because artworks are things, fashioned out of earth-borne materials, artworks are able to persist in the world only as long as they are not swallowed back into the earth’s depths. And in turn, the struggle embodied in artworks also creates a unique space hermeneutically definitive for human life, where world and earth come together to originally manifest their mutual harmony and opposition. The



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facets of finitude highlighted here express the broader existential, phenomenological character of precisely how artworks effect their truth. A second, paradigmatic example in Heidegger’s account of these phenomena is the Greek temple of Athena located at Paestum. This particular work encapsulates the features of artworks highlighted thus far, but it also appears especially to embody the struggle of world and earth Heidegger sees as definitive for artworks. The temple in question was, for the Greeks who built it, a holy space, a place of worship which still stands today, although obviously it no longer performs its original function. As Heidegger describes, the temple’s manner of “struggle” shows a kind of motion, of the earth jutting forth in the form of rock. This rock has been collected, against the inertia of its own weight, and has been cut and built up into the structure of the finished building. In the finished building this motion comes to rest for a time; the temple is “set up,” put into place, as it were. The dichotomy of motion and rest effected by the temple is for its part equally reflective of the temple’s significance and meaning for its abode, the world in which it resides and struggles to exist. In this regard we can also appreciate the jarring, shining character of the temple’s appearance, especially as it must have been for the Greeks who built and used it. The temple is so remarkable just in its way of setting the human abode off from the cradle of the earth. The earth itself is not so much conquered by the builders who erect the temple, as it has been brought out into the light of the human world (OWA, 26–27). The temple thus articulates the explicit meaning embedded within these rather inexplicit strata.42 The meaning embedded in these quoted passages drives home much of Heidegger’s unique analysis of the temple and its broader relevance for art. The construction of the temple is coextensive with the emergence of the lived world in which the temple has its significance. In other words, there is a tacit ontological connection between the wresting of this temple’s stone from out of the earth and the purpose and plan with which the temple was erected. The world and the earth mutually articulate one another in this arrangement, and this moreover in a way that these two poles are not enemies—the conflict is not morally charged. The two phenomena instead need each other. The stone needs the temple in order to emerge and manifest itself as stone (OWA, 24), and the temple likewise needs the stone, without which it would be unable to express the earthly sojourn from which its purpose stems. Heidegger highlights his selection of this particular work because it is not an instance of representative art. That is, the temple does not re-present or re-produce another entity imitatively (because, after all, what would this be?). The temple is not a “true” representation or copy of something else. Heidegger says explicitly that this building, as a building, “portrays nothing” (OWA, 20). For Heidegger, the temple nonetheless has its essence in enacting truth. What truth is this, then, if it is not the truth of representation? What kind

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of truth can a building contain? Heidegger says that the truth of a work such as this one consists in its world-opening character. This echoes the notion of truth as aletheia, namely uncovering, revealing. The temple achieves its status as a work of art and an instantiation of truth by bringing world into the open in a unique, signal instance. The temple fosters the occasioning of truth through articulating what Mark Sinclair labels the “pre-thematic, hermeneutic horizon” underlying the world of the Greeks who built it. This is a horizon that cannot be portrayed representatively precisely because it exceeds any limitation to a concept.43 Heidegger says on this note: “Standing there, the temple first gives to things their look, and to men their outlook on themselves” (OWA, 21). Obviously much of Heidegger’s rhetoric here is high-flown, but the point is that the temple illustrates the artwork’s capacity to create and manifest its world, by virtue of its capacity for establishing and articulating the meaning of and for the world in which it resides. It is here that Heidegger’s notion of truth’s original guise of aletheia transcends a conception of facts or correspondence; truth in the case of art involves its meaningconferring relationship to the human world. Moreover, the temple example illustrates the way in which artworks serve to articulate meaning that goes far beyond simply the individual work regarded as an object, such that they have the power to foster the occurrence of meaning for their world for the first time or else in a wholly original way. As I finish up this lengthy excursus, it is useful to think outside the confines of Heidegger’s text a bit in order to consider some potential criticism. Certainly one weakness of his account as summarized thus far is that it relies on examples of plastic art. One might wonder how media such as poetry or music fit in, or likewise film and related arts such as photography and theater. At this juncture the key to circumventing this criticism is to see that for Heidegger, these classical instances of plastic art media (i.e., painting and architecture) have their function insofar as they exhibit continuity with the human abode. In other words, Heidegger’s emphasis on the material, temporal finitude of these art forms is reflective of the finitude and conditions of human life—of the abode that is established in the struggle between world and earth—for which they have meaning. I shall speak to these questions further when I take up Heidegger’s commentary on art as poetry below. As a preliminary, however, it seems that other traditionally conceived art media need not display literal materiality; the crux of this issue is that whatever artworks we take up must exhibit their own manner of finitude that is reflective of the finitude of their world. Our demonstration must show that the individual artwork is comprised by the emergence of truth in the work, and where this truth occurs by conferring meaning for and upon its world. As one might observe from my locution here, I suggest that we likewise focus on the artwork specifically as a work (following Heidegger’s characterization of artworks), rather than get



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too caught up worrying about the underlying media or the how of its achievement.44 The two examples Heidegger has cited thus far suggest that artworks comprise singular and unique instances of truth occurring in the work, where each such work has its own way of serving this function. Other great works will have their own unique ways of fulfilling this role. As Julian Young aptly observes on this note, great art not only brings the mystery of art to presence, but is itself essentially mysterious.45 Following up on his description of the Greek temple, Heidegger uses another spatial keyword, “clearing,” in order to emphasize the ultimate fashion in which the artwork’s power is to open up space and place, to allow things to come to light in their specific abode. “Clearing” is the English translation of the German Lichtung, literally “lighting” or “clearing,” in the sense of an open space in a forest where light is not blocked by trees or foliage. “Clearing” is also the same term employed by Heidegger in Being and Time’s exegesis of Dasein’s existential capacity for understanding-interpretive disclosure; in that context, Dasein is characterized as having the existential feature of clearing. Artworks foster a clearing, more metaphorically, by their capacity to coextensively bring themselves and their world to light. As Günter Figal has described on this score, artworks for this reason are genuine “phenomena” in the proper sense of phenomenology.46 To use Heidegger’s example, the Greek temple opens up a space, a surroundings or abode as it were. One does not see it simply as a building, but instead as a lit-up, definite place, from out of which the truth of this place and time is borne. And again, looking back to Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes, a similar phenomenology is evident. This painting’s way of clearing is a way of bringing its cultural and historical significance to light, of letting these be seen and established in their very significance. Heidegger is highlighting with “clearing” the interplay of revealing and concealing that characterizes the disclosure of being as well as the disclosure of human Dasein. Heidegger writes: “Only this clearing grants us human beings access to those beings that we ourselves are not and admittance to the being that we ourselves are” (OWA, 30). For Heidegger, artworks such as those described in this essay have their power in that they “allow unconcealment with regard to beings as a whole to happen” (OWA, 32). In other words, artworks reveal the event-character of aletheia and of the clearing underlying the appearance of all things, including us. But a twist is that, through these works, “self-concealing being becomes illuminated” (Ibid.). If we read this phrase regarding self-concealing alongside the last sentence of the quotation above, we see that the illumination characterizing an artwork’s emergence in the clearing is punctuated by a visible concealment. That is, the illuminated things of the clearing show their hidden side. They do this in a way that they show it as hidden. This seems to be the deeper meaning within Heidegger’s initial suggestions that artworks are made of materials

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borne of the earth. Earth represents the ultimate, abyssal ground of the concealed character of beings, and thus, of the hiddenness inherent within artworks.47 Heidegger intimates this meaning in the following: “To set forth the earth means: to bring it into the open as the self-secluding” (OWA, 25). How does one bring the self-secluding, the earth, into the open if it self-secludes? Heidegger’s answer is that “an inexhaustible richness of simple modes and shapes” into which earth’s self-seclusion “unfolds” manifests this self-concealing of the earth (Ibid.). These inexhaustible, simple modes and shapes are what Heidegger understands as artworks. Therefore, Heidegger’s meaning about the relevance of earth for artworks consists in artworks’ instantiation and reflection of earth’s ultimate self-concealing nature, particularly as this self-concealing nature is juxtaposed with the openness of world’s clearing. And as we have seen, this openness is fostered by the artwork itself. Reading this relationship from the opposite direction: the clearing in which artworks reveal their world at the same time expresses the fundamental hiddenness of world’s ur-ground, earth (OWA, 26). So in summary, Heidegger’s initial characterization of artworks as earthen in the sense of having a material nature is superseded by these deeper claims regarding earth’s expression in the self-concealment fostered within artworks. In other words, the origin of the work of art is not so much the literal earth, so much as it the self-concealing showing reflective of world’s intertwining with earth. This reasoning reaches an apex when Heidegger says: “Nowhere in a work is there any trace of work-material” (OWA, 25). But in a roundabout fashion this conclusion is consistent with Heidegger’s initial characterizations of the artwork. The artwork transports one to another place; the artwork transcends thinghood; it does not have an actual thingly character; it functions as an instance of truth as aletheia. There is still some work to do in addressing the application of these themes for film. The notion of clearing is perhaps one of the strongest direct applications of Heidegger’s philosophy of the artwork to the film medium. For the cinematic medium has its essence in, among other things, projecting a cleared space for the viewer. A projector is literally a light source that illuminates from out of nothing. Thus the projector brings film images to light. These are images that nonetheless require an overt pairing with darkness. Is this series of claims essentialist, in a way that could be challenged by contemporary philosophers of film? I believe the key to avoiding this objection is to recognize that at issue is the existential nature of these characteristics of film. Film’s clearing is existentially constitutive of the film experience rather than functioning as a metaphysical essence. To put it this way likewise conveys human Dasein—the human viewer—as a counterpart to film’s existential manner of clearing. A different way to appreciate this description is to consider that the film experience is brought about by images in light, not darkness. What we



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view on screen, and equally, what is revealed about and for our world, is a fundamentally illuminated phenomenon, not a darkened one. The prevalence of clearing can be highlighted in several guises in actual films. Most fundamentally, the film image as such is the product of projected light that illuminates the content of the frame. In addition, film shots are not only composed of series of projected images. Film shots themselves are composed of the interplay of light and darkness applied to their subjects. And film editing, though often inconspicuous, nonetheless is predicated on alternate stops and starts of darkness and light. One might even observe that editing is often especially effective when it is conspicuous (e.g., the jarring cuts from scene to scene in films of Michael Haneke such as The Castle and Code Unknown; Godard’s jump-cut technique in Breathless; the excitement of horse and stagecoach chases in the Western genres; and even commonplace techniques of fade out/in). Equally significant here is the duration of a film as a whole, which is a finite occurrence, a brief allowance of cleared space. Films as a whole can be regarded as lit-up spaces that are visible for a while then go out again, not unlike the rising and setting of the sun or a fire burning in the night. We can observe a similarity in the nascent medium of film’s origin, the photograph, which by nature captures and preserves a subject or scene in a momentary flash of light. Taking these observations a step further, we can also observe that film fundamentally consists in the interplay of revealing and concealing. The film shot, for instance, consists of a showing that is always at the same time concealing what lies outside of the shot. Sometimes this occurs more noticeably and sometimes less so. The transitions from shot to shot and scene to scene demonstrate a similar capacity; these transitions always conceal one subject in favor of another. The subjects of film shots also exhibit this through-andthrough phenomenological character; film’s employment of focus, miseen-scene, and depth of field for instance all proceed upon this foundation, showing specific things while holding others back. To be sure, many if not most films will bring attention to these features more or less inexplicitly, if at all, supposing they are even prominent enough to be noticed. How does Heidegger’s characterization of the struggle of world and earth figure into film? This aspect of films is trickier to take up just because, as already noted, in today’s world films by and large eschew revealing their materiality. It seems to me that the dynamic of film for using darkness and light, or concealing and revealing, comprises what should be called film’s harmonization of world and earth. For in the end, films do consist of a character of temporary victory of light over darkness, where their revealing wins out for a time, only to eventually become swallowed back into oblivion. Their by and large digital basis, in which they are housed on a computer drive rather than on film stock, preserves them for a potentially much longer time, but it

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is in no way permanent. Secondly, films can have their own ways of calling attention to the interplay of world and earth in the very subjects they depict. For instance, we might cite the Summer films of Ingmar Bergman or many of Terrence Malick’s films (Days of Heaven; The Thin Red Line), to see examples of world’s and earth’s conflict in thematic treatment. Alternately, one might consider the genre of Western films as an example, insofar as the premise of this genre includes American culture’s struggle to inhabit the raw frontier and conquer the challenges posed by the geography, not to mention the very lawlessness of an unsettled place. To my mind this feature parallels the manner in which both Van Gogh’s peasant shoes and the Greek temple articulate these; as Heidegger comments on these examples, they bring one to another place in which world and earth struggle against one another. And thirdly, we might also observe that films certainly can still exhibit their material fragility in a manner that reveals their earth-bound character. Admittedly this is a characteristic much more prominent in early cinema, because of its projection of images using celluloid film stock. But we can also think more imaginatively about how this earth-borne finitude nonetheless remains embedded in the medium. Extant and prominent features of film that demonstrate this capacity include the fade-in/out and the employment of light in general. Even features that call out the embodied, human situation (as vitiated in the camera eye) could be said to reflect this same capacity; consider the effect of a shaky shoulder-mounted camera, or the fact that films consistently rely on camera placement at the ground level, consistent with the location of the human eye. Finally, I also wish to repeat a remark from above, that what seems especially decisive for squaring film with Heidegger’s conception of the artwork, vis-à-vis the latter’s material, earth-borne, world-revealing character is the manner in which films in their finitude ostensibly mirror the finitude of the human abode, such that they also are able to articulate it truthfully qua aletheia. But what of this talk of “mirroring” the human abode? It is a very broad expression. In what specific ways does film accomplish this? From Being and Time we took the notion that film-viewing comprises a unique occurrence of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. In the present context of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, we can observe a complementary aspect: films, like Heidegger’s specific artwork examples, also articulate the phenomenon of world by bringing world to light, wresting it from the hiddenness it ordinarily resides in. That is, phenomenologically speaking, film comprises a way that world—and moreover Dasein—can come to light as such. Revealing world is a characteristic of Dasein itself. According to Being and Time, Dasein experiences disclosure in the manner of clearing, bringing world to light. Hence, while we can take seriously the notion that films ostensibly possess less of an explicitly material, earth-borne origin than other plastic art forms, a film’s performance



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and viewing nonetheless demonstrate its world-constituting power. However, in what way do films, qua the film-photographic medium, demonstrate a continuity with their human abode? In what manner do photographic pictures, for all of their automatism and digitization in the present world, remain of a piece with the lived world where they occur? Wherein lay their intimacy with their lived world, in a way that they might fit comfortably alongside Heidegger’s examples? The preceding analysis has been primarily limited to the rather vague terminology of darkness and light, concealing and revealing. What is needed here is a more direct account that grapples with the specifically pictorial, photographic nature of films and the images comprising them. One way I will propose to reconcile these issues with Heidegger’s philosophy of the artwork is in his account of art as poetry. LANGUAGE In the latter pages of “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger describes a further, equally crucial characteristic of art: it originates in poetry (OWA, 45). On the surface this claim might be uncontroversial, even trite. However, Heidegger’s meaning is ontological rather than simply metaphorical. Heidegger’s meaning is that, insofar as art has a truth-fostering character, this latter trait is equally a poetic one. He writes: “All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is, in essence, poetry” (OWA, 44). Heidegger is attempting to describe the poetic dimension of truth’s very occurrence through artworks in the first place; he sees the artwork’s occasioning of truth in an existentially creative guise. For insofar as the truth fostered by art stems from an abyssal source, this truth necessarily exhibits a creative aspect. The truth of art, it might be said, is poesis, which in the Greek etymology literally indicates “creation.” Hence the artwork is in essence poetry because the artwork simply is an instance of poetry, conceived as a kind of spontaneous creation that is fabricated by no specific agent. More than this, Heidegger also describes this poetic character as of a piece with the advent of the intelligibility of the world at large. In other words, while the work of art instantiates the occurrence of poetry, this poetry corresponds to the open, lit-up character of the world for which the artwork has meaning. On this score Heidegger says, “From out of the poeticizing essence of truth … an open place is thrown open, a place in which everything is other than it was” (OWA, 44–45). The intelligibility of the open world fostered by the artwork is poeticized. Heidegger bases his claim on his view regarding language’s fundamentally poetic role in the discovery of things. His rationale is that language’s occurrence constitutes a phenomenological event in which things first reveal themselves.48 But what does it mean for things to reveal themselves for the first time, particularly in

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the context of artworks? Heidegger is cueing upon the capacity of artworks to comprise unique, proto-linguistic expressions that have never been coined before. Engagement with such works on part of the viewer constitutes a poetic experience just insofar as the viewer discovers meaning not heretofore given or articulated. The artwork births a new meaning for which the viewer can at best struggle to find words that capture what is beheld. Similarly, we can appreciate that the creation of the work by the artist constitutes a similar discovery, one that the artwork will harness and manifest in its own right as opposed to providing a mere surrogate for words. One might consider it as a sort of gesture fostered by the artist’s insight into the being of things.49 Heidegger does not give examples to illustrate his meaning in these passages, but familiar historical examples illustrate the import well enough. For instance, Michaelangelo’s David is known for uniquely bringing to light the strength and majesty of the Florentine people. While such an historical characterization of a city-state like Florence could certainly be quite commonplace, the point to note is that Michaelangelo’s statue brings this meaning to light in its own unique fashion. This meaning is not one that simply could have been articulated in everyday talk. Only the statue, and only this statue in particular, could have brought this meaning to light. Heidegger’s emphasis on art as poetry highlights an existential feature of creation of, and engagement with, seminal artworks such as the David. Namely, appreciating this sculpture occurs at once with the ability to appropriate its expression and bring this expression to language. This process is not one of distinct activities that the viewer needs to perform by force of will; rather, it happens of its own accord. In brief, Michaelangelo’s David fosters an original disclosure of being, a specifically poetic disclosure that the work’s audience can appropriate in language. A tacit point in Heidegger’s account here is that this conception of language is not confined to the spoken or written word. For present purposes, the point is that the human experience of having language is coextensive with things disclosing themselves in a way that words are able to express this disclosure.50 A telling, well-known line from Heidegger’s philosophy of this period captures the sense well: “Language is the house of being.”51 And conversely, Heidegger remarks, an absence of language entails a lack of openness and disclosure; in such a scenario there is nothing, no thing, to be spoken (OWA, 46). The reasoning here is that, insofar as being’s manifestation to the human agent occurs through disclosure, this disclosure comprises a poetic givenness of things that human language is able to voice. Language comprises the very phenomenon in which this givenness for human articulation first occurs. Heidegger writes: “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance” (Ibid.). Hence, language does not function as the mere human verbalization of ideas and impressions;



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instead, language’s original and most primordial occurrences stem from the givenness of things in their original, most fundamental disclosures. This sprawling exegesis of art, language, and poetry has extensive relevance for a phenomenology of film. It could easily justify an entire chapter’s worth of treatment on its own. The main item I wish to focus on as I finish up is the connection between film images and Heidegger’s conception of language. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether all film images constitute works of art (for surely not all of them do), what does seem more certain is that film images often constitute moments of what we might call poetic expression. This is because the everyday experience of images, particularly photographic images, is naturally coextensive with the human facility for articulation. Mind you, this claim is not one I aim to leverage from an analytic formulation of images or language. Rather, the import here is the existential, phenomenological relationship of an image and the possibility for predication an image provides for the viewer. For images do not simply provide us with pictures of things; the very beholding of images also affords us the ability to say things about them. And vice versa: it is impossible to conceive the existence of words severed from the existence of images. For us, having the one entails having the other.52 Consider that in the experience of viewing an image, over and above looking at the mere subject of images, we can also describe points of interest in the images. We can observe and describe relationships between items in the image. And just the same, we can observe and articulate elements of presence and absence. We can take note of what is not shown, or what remains hidden in the image. And this phenomenon clearly extends more broadly, from the simplest film images to connections between film images, shots, scenes, and films as wholes. The film experience is one of viewing sequences of images that lends itself to language precisely because images naturally sustain for their viewer the activity of predication about what is in those images. Let us delve a little deeper into the phenomenological underpinning of these observations. In keeping with Heidegger’s connection of art and poetry, the crux is that film images must be said likewise to originate in a poetic manifestation of being, and that this poetic happening underpins the film image’s disposition for lending itself to language. But why is it necessary to assign a “poetic” manifestation of being to the origin of the film image? Maybe putting it this way is overindulgent. For an answer, I suggest one consider a filmmaker’s quest to get the “perfect shot.” Or, consider the memorable shots that are definitive for the greatest films. Do filmmakers happen upon the great, seminal shots by virtue of their own power, or do the shots reveal themselves? Although we obviously want to preserve the esteem of great film directors, at the same time we must heed the phenomenological underpinning that affords images to present themselves as meaningful and decisive—their

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ability to call themselves out, such that they naturally foster articulation for the viewer. It is here that I believe we want to observe the poetic aspect of being’s disclosure that in turn allows decisive film images to be captured at all. Just as with other familiar art forms, film images have the potential to capture and present new meaning. Film images originate in poetic manifestations of being, without which neither the images nor their articulation on part of the viewer would even be possible. Describing this differently, we might say that film images are constituted by being expressing itself in pictures, pictures which moreover foster the existential projection of world (as described in chapter 2). Recall Heidegger’s pronouncement on this score: where there is no language there is no being. But as we have likewise observed to the contrary, film images foster articulation. This articulation would not exist without the image. So film images therefore necessarily have just this origin, in a disclosure or manifestation of being. CONCLUSIONS: FILM AND TECHNOLOGY, AND FILM’S ONTOLOGICAL STATUS This chapter has taken up the question of how film squares with Heidegger’s philosophy of art. I have attempted to address how films can in various ways exemplify the features of art following Heidegger’s understanding of artworks. Notwithstanding Heidegger’s critique of technology and twentiethcentury entertainment media, there seems to be no prima facie reason to exclude film from the status of art as described in Heidegger’s “Origin” essay. Several questions remain however. The most obvious one might be this: Are all films instances of Heideggerian art? If not, how do we distinguish those that meet these criteria from those that do not? And what do we stand to learn about the film medium as such, if we concede that not all films meet the criteria of art as defined in Heidegger’s essay? It serves to recall that Heidegger does not explicitly hold that his account in the “Origin” essay applies to all artworks; instead, his spoken implication is the essay’s scope only concerns great art. Presumably outside of the example cases he uses, many if not most non-great artworks will fail to exhibit all of the features of genuine artworks Heidegger outlines in the essay. All in all, it seems more likely the case that he uses great artworks as his examples because these are instances of what art can do in its most fully realized possibilities.53 I believe that interpreting the film medium in the context of this Heideggerian framework ought to follow the same rubric. I suggest that this chapter has not made an account of what all films do, or what they are. Nor have I meant to suggest that all films are Heideggerian art. On the other hand, I do think the findings of this chapter stand to make some headway in terms of



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contributing to a phenomenological ontology of the film medium, by virtue of the fact that (following Heidegger’s philosophy of the artwork) we have highlighted several features of what film can do in its most fully realized instances: exhibit a workly character; foster the revealing of truth in the work; capture a struggle of world and earth; bring beings to language poetically; and so on. I am interested in appropriating Heidegger’s philosophy of great artworks on behalf of great films par excellence, but this is with the assumption that we can make many similar observations about films in general without getting too encumbered by the great art/great films question. What has the present chapter established about the phenomenological ontology of film, in view of the question of what films are? Starting from the end and working back to the beginning, I suggest we that we have learned that films represent possibilities for poetic revelations of truth. This possibility lay in films because of the poetic power of the images films often convey, in tandem with truth’s own way of occasioning itself in human works. It is also in this sense that I believe Heidegger’s criticism of film as a meaningless popular medium, fostered by our predilection for “picturing,” is overcome. Films need not be distracting, fast-moving “pictures” of life. If they can be appreciated as potential loci of truth, then this profoundly deepens their meaning beyond status as mere technological tools of entertainment. Films are ostensibly human works, yet the cultural power within film’s shining exemplars ostensibly exceeds the ability of any one person to create. Indeed, the medium as we know it at present is an historical bequest, one whose identity is built into our thrown facticity as Westerners and global citizens. Not only that. As we know from film history, many of the greatest films are the products of accident. And many of the most memorable shots in cinema were surely not foreseen at the same time they were captured by the camera, their greatness oftentimes only recognized in hindsight, long after the fact. (This is a fact that gets overlooked in reducing the medium to its merely technological status, let alone reducing it to the status of an ontological “thing.”) In this light, films equally have the power to become definitive for their culture in a fashion that is both forward- and backward-looking. If we survey some of the most well-known culturally definitive films for the West—for example America’s Citizen Kane, Germany’s Metropolis, France’s The Rules of the Game, Italy’s La Dolce Vita—these are instances of historical moments being captured on film that arguably express something just as historically rooted as prescient. Still, does Heidegger’s philosophy of art speak to the ontological aspect of films? I believe the most powerful contribution we can leverage from Heidegger’s “Origin” essay on behalf of the philosophy of film is this essay’s emphasis on art’s disclosure of truth specifically as a wresting of world from earth, and of the open from out of hiddenness into light. Stating this more

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colloquially, Heidegger’s writing on art seems to capture an essential phenomenological feature of film’s ontology, namely that film images fundamentally consist in the intelligibility fostered through disclosures of presence and absence, light and darkness, showing and hiding. The truth that eventuates here may not always be primordial or culturally seminal, yet we can nonetheless observe that film’s various methods for enacting presence and absence are the most fundamental source for its potential to convey truth as aletheia, which as we observed above is also oftentimes poetic in nature. We can make a similar conclusion about film’s ability to articulate the strife between world and earth. Films and film images and shots comprise momentary captures of world’s emergence from out of earth. But these moments are fleeting and predicated on their foundation in the darkness of earth’s concealing power. Looking at the beginning of this chapter’s inquiry and thinking back to Heidegger’s original question regarding the thingly character of the artwork—he asked after “what kind of thing is a work of art?”—we can observe that asking what kind of thing a film is leads in another direction entirely. This chapter has not discovered an answer to the question of what sort of thing films are—for Heidegger the equation of artwork and thing comprises a contradiction in terms—so much as it has made some headway in unraveling the phenomenological conditions that lay beneath the familiar, ontic objects we classify with the label “films.” Again, this achievement is meant to deliver on my claims from chapter 1 that to treat comprehensively the ontology of film behooves one to engage it phenomenologically. The present chapter has hopefully made some strides in accounting for film’s ontological status by unraveling these phenomenological conditions. Whereas chapter 2 took up the film-viewing experience from the side of the phenomenology of Dasein, chapter 3 has unraveled the phenomenology of the film, what appears to Dasein in a dative, disclosing fashion. We have observed that the film experience happens in both directions: in the viewer’s disclosedness of the film, and in the film’s disclosure to the viewer. The next chapters take up the question of how deep the general disclosure of film can go. Heidegger’s reflections on the poetics of art have indicated a way in which film images are co-instantiated with language and truth. Can films also reveal philosophical insight? Can they teach truth regarding the nature of reality? Chapter 4 examines this issue.

NOTES 1. For a thorough account of this issue, see Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger and Our Twenty-First Century Experience of Ge-Stell,” Research Resources, Paper 35 (2014),



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Fordham University. http://fordham.bepress.com/phil_research. Downloaded May 12, 2016. 2. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 49–51. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 19–20. 4. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 51, 57. 5. Ibid., 37, 44–45. 6. Ibid., 37. 7. Susanna Lindberg, “Lost in the World of Technology With and After Heidegger,” Epoché 20(1) (Fall 2015), 217. 8. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 29–32, 37. 9. Philipp W. Rosemann, “Heidegger’s Transcendental History,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 40(4) (2002): 510. 10. David J. Gunkel, Heidegger and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 167. 11. Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 86. 12. Cited in Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 65. 13. Michael Eldred, The Digital Cast of Being (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Books, 2009). 14. See, for instance, Enrico Terrone’s wonderfully telling locution in “The Digital Secret of the Moving Image,” 27. Terrone writes: “technology reveals the essence” of the moving image. 15. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 28ff. 16. Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), 23–24. 17. Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 16. 18. In other works, Heidegger draws attention to the significance of the human hand’s essential capacity for indicating or pointing to being. The human hand is not merely an instrument or tool but an essential part of human situatedness with regard to being. See Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), Section §6, Part c. 19. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 150. 20. Marrati, Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, 28. 21. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40. 22. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 163. 23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Ch. II, esp. Sections 4–5. 24. Cf. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 40. 25. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 55: Heraklit. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, (1976), 244. 26. Ibid.

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27. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 128–30. Cf. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 26. Also see Tony Fry, “Switchings.” RUA TV? Heidegger and the Televisual, ed. Tony Fry (Sydney: Power Publications, 1993), 26. 28. Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line” Film-Philosophy 10(1) (2006): 36. “Heidegger’s general complaint against cinema is that it remains irreducibly ‘metaphysical’ in the sense of only ever being able to present beings in their massive presence. It is beholden to a metaphysical realism intrinsic to the cinematic image as presenting beings to perception rather than revealing the luminous play between Being and being[s].” 29. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 26. 30. Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” 17. Cf. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 21. 31. Günter Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology: The Appearance of Things (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 66–67, 93–96. 32. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). All subsequent citations of this essay follow this edition. 33. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1985), 116. 34. Cf. Friday’s critique of Carroll on Bazin’s phenomenologic-psychological definition of film on this score. J. Friday, “Andre Bazin’s Ontology of Photographic and Film Imagery,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63(4) (Autumn 2005): 345–46. 35. Aili Bresnahan, “The Dynamic Phenomenon of Art in Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’,” American Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-journal 1(2) (Spring/Summer 2009): 2. K. Gover, “The Overlooked Work of Art in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’,” International Philosophical Quarterly 48(2) (June 2008): 146. 36. Dennis J. Schmidt, Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 69. 37. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 84–85. 38. Cf. Anthony Lack, Martin Heidegger on Technology, Ecology and the Arts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 35. Mark Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 139. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works, 81. 39. Heidegger’s notion of “great” artworks is complicated beyond what I can address here. For further commentary on the distinction and significance of “great” artworks in Heidegger’s essay, see Kockelmans, 138–41. James Magrini, “The Work of Art and Truth of Being as ‘Historical’,” Philosophy Today 54(4) (2010): 346–63; and especially Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 7–12. 40. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works, 110–11. 41. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark K. Wrathall (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2005), 414. 42. Lack, Martin Heidegger on Technology, Ecology, and the Arts, 42–45.



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43. Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art, 176. 44. For a similar defense see Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 48–50. 45. Ibid., 50. 46. Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology, 73. 47. Mitchell, The Fourfold, 75. 48. Ibid., 71. 49. Schmidt, Between Word and Image, 131ff. 50. Richardson, Heidegger, 2nd ed., 409–10. 51. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 254. 52. Robert Sokolowski, “Picturing,” 3–4. 53. Sinclair, Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Work of Art, 177.

Chapter 4

Phenomenology and the Concept of Film-as-Philosophy

Can I learn a new philosophical insight from a film? Can films be philosophically instructive in their own right? And alternately: Do films perform or present philosophy, particularly in ways that we can label “cinematic”? If so, how do these events occur? And prior to all of that, what even gives us occasion to consider the occurrences I am describing? Can we account for the impetus of philosophers and other intellectuals to propose interpreting the film medium along these lines in the first place? This chapter considers what Heidegger’s notion of philosophy stands to contribute to this conversation. As with the previous chapters, my interest is particularly with non-documentary, narrative films, although I do not believe anything I have to say is not also applicable to documentaries, structural films, and other non-fiction genres. The move to this topic may strike one as a left turn from the path of the previous chapters, which were tacitly concerned with more transcendental, existential conditions of the very experience of film-viewing. In what way is the present concern continuous with what the previous chapters accomplished? I see this topic as strongly continuous with the preceding investigations insofar as the film-as-philosophy debate is, to my mind, as strongly Heideggerian in spirit as any other application of Heidegger’s philosophy to filmic media. I say this because, in a number of ways, Heidegger’s career project is one of continually questioning what philosophy is, and what sorts of insights philosophy can afford us. Not only that, among seminal philosophers of the West, Heidegger has been as instrumental as anyone in helping to open up wider appreciation of the diverse ways philosophy may occur. Specifically, Heidegger has been crucially influential in demonstrating ways for philosophy to transcend its traditionally discursive model, in favor of heeding the various shapes and molds in which being is disclosed for Dasein. 113

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Indeed, much of Heidegger’s contribution in this light has been to specify the existential conditions that underlie philosophy’s practice in the first place. This chapter aims to illuminate contemporary philosophical dialogue on the question of film-as-philosophy by invoking some of the principal accounts of philosophy Heidegger formulated in his career. And insofar as Heidegger typically casts his notion of philosophy in phenomenological terms, part of my goal is to describe some of the ways film’s phenomenological underpinning is conducive to the occurrence of film-as-philosophy. In the end, I wish to further the view of the three preceding chapters that film is fundamentally phenomenological, and that key aspects of the film experience are best explained in a phenomenological model. SUMMARY OF THE DEBATE A long-standing view in contemporary philosophy of film is that if nondocumentary, narrative films can be said to philosophize, then this occurs in very limited ways. The issue can be summarized as follows: while it is certainly attractive to suggest commonsensically that films wax philosophical in diverse ways1, it is another thing entirely to argue soundly for how films philosophize “by cinematic means alone.”2 That is, it is difficult to describe in precise language what it even means for a film to philosophize in its own right—that a film can “think” or “reason” or “make conclusions,” and so forth. It is also quite unclear as to how a film can actually generate nontrivial philosophical insights, insights which moreover are not parasitic on the words and dialogue of the actors. Certainly, a different case can be made if one describes the philosophy at work as achieved on the part of the viewer, but then this neglects the issue of what the film accomplishes. These views stem from a seminal position advanced by Bruce Russell in an article published about 20 years ago, addressing film’s “philosophical limits.” Russell argues that films cannot philosophize in their own right on the basis of the following reasoning. Philosophy is best understood as the generation of conceptual knowledge, or else, as defense of a thesis regarding conceptual knowledge. And films cannot do either of these by purely cinematic means. Films can at best provide inductive evidence for vague, weak theses. While films can portray counterexamples to long-standing philosophical theses, they cannot firmly refute such theses or prove theses on their own. And for similar reasons, while films can raise questions of a philosophical bent, they cannot definitely answer these questions in a way that results in conceptual knowledge or justification for a theory. Much of the thrust in Russell’s argumentation comes from his observation that narrative, fiction films only represent test cases with a sample size of one; whatever conclusions one can glean



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from them will necessarily have a shaky inductive foundation. But not only that; the other half of the problem is that outside of a narrative film’s spoken words, there is no demonstrable way to discern what philosophical arguments, conclusions, or theses a film even presents. For instance, I certainly could propose that It’s a Wonderful Life presents one or more philosophical arguments, but these arguments are bound to be interpretive. I have no way to ensure that other viewers will discern the same philosophical arguments, or even if this happens, that these arguments are even assembled and presented in the same fashion as in my interpretation. Historically, leading views on this subject have largely followed in the spirit of Russell’s work, though many have made strides in countering Russell’s general position. One approach has been to restrict one’s conception of philosophy to narrow, orthodox molds, in order to demonstrate cases of films that do philosophize or otherwise present philosophy in a manner of speaking. Thomas Wartenburg, for instance, highlights that films are capable of performing thought experiments, a common method philosophers use to prove a point. Films can perform thought experiments by virtue of the capacity of some films to involve the viewer in a philosophical exercise by their inducement of a belief in the viewer and subsequently challenging that belief. Likewise, films for Wartenburg can illustrate philosophical theses, by virtue of their power to show things imagistically in a way that mere philosophical discourse cannot drive home as easily. This would be just like the practice of typical philosophers to illustrate ideas and concepts using examples. Nonetheless, a limit to approaches such as these is that it restricts the philosophical capacity of film to whatever ways of doing philosophy one can legitimate via recourse to long-standing practices. The orthodox side seems to suppose that film-as-philosophy is a salient concept only if one’s notion of philosophy is one that philosophers have long agreed upon. As a result, this orthodox side of the question eschews the possibility that films can philosophize in original, unpredictable ways, or that films realize the condition of philosophy in a way that is totally their own. In the last ten years, a number of philosophers of film have proposed ways of grappling with these challenges to the notion of film-as-philosophy. Principally, the tendency has been to describe film’s capacity for philosophizing in its own right in one way or another. This has come about in various locutions. For instance, Robert Sinnerbrink and Hunter Vaughan have pitched the notion of films enacting “cinematic thinking.” Daniel Frampton has argued for the notion of a film “mind,” namely that viewing a film is to witness a mind in action, a mind thinking in images. Stephen Mulhall, perhaps most controversially, has suggested that some films simply are works of philosophy par excellence. Mulhall argues that such films exemplify philosophy in action, by virtue of their ability to portray ideas and situations that, solely through this

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portrayal, challenge long-standing paradigms and ground new ones. And of course one must not forget Stanley Cavell, whose pioneering work in the philosophy of film is predicated in the notion that many of the greatest films comprise efforts to resolve the philosophical problem of skepticism. The goal of this chapter is to invoke some of Heidegger’s accounts of philosophy in the service of highlighting the specifically phenomenological conditions underlying the notion of film-as-philosophy. Many readers of Heidegger will be familiar with the fact that Heidegger’s engagement with the question of what philosophy is and what occasions philosophy’s work figure into the heart of his thinking. This issue is one he remains concerned with throughout his career. I certainly will not try to present a comprehensive study of Heidegger’s various statements on philosophy, which, given the size of his corpus, would be a gargantuan task. Rather, I propose to use some key Heidegger texts as a framework for better appreciating the notion that the nature of philosophy is such that it lends itself to a conception of film-as-philosophy. Finally, in the conclusion of the chapter, I will show how current work in the more progressive side of the film-as-philosophy literature complements my invocation of Heidegger. I will suggest that comprehending philosophy’s phenomenological guise helps to make better sense of some of the more challenging claims in this side of the debate. HEIDEGGER’S EQUATION OF PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY A wide-ranging account of philosophy that represents a microcosm of Heidegger’s career-long engagement with the subject can be found in the opening pages of Being and Time. The main contention from Being and Time that I want to explore is Heidegger’s equation of phenomenology and ontology, and the significance of this equation for his understanding of philosophy’s proper province. Because I have already discussed Heidegger’s take on philosophy as phenomenology at length in chapter 1, I will only highlight some cursory points here, though I do have some new things to say as well. Taking a cue from classical thought, which regarded ontology as first philosophy, Heidegger argues that because philosophy concerns both the being of beings and the manner in which beings show themselves, philosophy is best understood as doing both fundamental ontology and phenomenology. Accounting for the being of beings requires heeding the actual phenomena, “the things themselves” (BT §7, 26/27–28). As highlighted in chapter 1, phenomena are not the direct objects of sense-perception, isolated according to certain looks, representations, or aspects. Phenomena in Heidegger’s sense are the hidden grounds, the self-showings that underlie “appearances,” in



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fact rendering them intelligible. Phenomena in the genuine sense comprise “…what already shows itself in appearances, prior to and always accompanying what we commonly understand as phenomena (though unthematically), [which] can be brought thematically to self-showing” (BT §7, 32/34). The etymology of Heidegger’s term sichzeigen or “self-showing” is instructive. The German verb zeigen carries the sense of “indicating” or “pointing out,” while the sich- prefix makes the verb reflexive. Thus, “self-showing” involves something self-indicating or self-referring in its own right rather than simply being put on display. A further qualification Heidegger proposes for this robust notion of phenomena is a dimension of hiddenness or concealment. Phenomenology in the full sense articulates what is visibly unseen, yet nonetheless essential to the meaning and intelligibility of what is seen. The province of phenomenology is accounting for this unseen character. The point of this last distinction is not for the purpose of claiming that reality consists of impenetrable, “noumenal” entities. Nor is it that being or beings “hide” themselves as if they possess a kind of agency. The gist, rather, is that the immediate givenness of things in experience often distracts us from comprehending their fuller lived context, a surrounding context of meaning that includes visible, readily accessible elements as well as less apparent, intrinsically hidden ones. Thus, the meaning or ground of the stuff of everyday experience is often the least visible. On the question of precisely what it is that phenomenology allows to become visible or seen, Heidegger writes: Manifestly it is something that does not show itself initially and for the most part, something that is concealed in contrast to what initially and for the most part does show itself. But,…it is something that essentially belongs to what initially and for the most part shows itself, indeed in such a way that it constitutes its meaning and ground. (BT §7, 33/35)

A paradigmatic example that illustrates the cash value of Heidegger’s phenomenological method can be found in his study of the lived experience involved with tools. For instance, a hammer can correctly be said to possess material characteristics like having a wooden handle, and an attached steel head, being of substantial weight, etc. The catch is that such immediate, phenomenal “appearances” do not express the phenomenological underpinning of a hammer’s ontology, which only becomes apparent in the hammer’s usefulness. The hammer’s usefulness does not come from the thing itself, but only emerges in a surrounding context of purposes, such as when one gets a hammer from the toolbox in order to hang a picture on the wall. The point is that the hammer, when considered in isolated terms, has no surrounding context. But traditional metaphysical accounts ignore this lived context of the hammer’s use. A proper philosophical account of a hammer’s ontology

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accordingly requires articulating these underlying considerations, which, according to our definition, are phenomenological at the root. According to this initial set-up of Being and Time’s early chapters, philosophy just is phenomenological ontology. Heidegger writes: “Ontology and phenomenology are not two different disciplines…. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology…” (BT §7, 36/38). Accounting for things as they appear, in and from their unseen meaning and ground, is equally ontology and phenomenology. A crucial qualification Heidegger adds, however, concerns the one who is doing philosophy. Because philosophy is an activity proceeding from and for the agent who philosophizes, namely Dasein, philosophy represents a mode of self-interpretation of the one who engages in it. Philosophy thus equates to understanding things how and insofar as they are given to one, just as much as philosophy concerns accounting for those things that are given. The “one,” the Dasein to whom being discloses itself, necessarily becomes an object for study. With these qualifications in view, philosophy carries with it the hermeneutical limitation that its discoveries are always concerned with the human situation. Among the connotations “Dasein” brings with it terminologically is that it refers to the human phenomenon of being “there” [da], namely that the human subject is always located at a particular moment and place. There is no God’s-eye view that philosophy can attain outside of being’s disclosures to and for Dasein. The nature of philosophical inquiry is such that any discovery to be made ultimately refers back to Dasein’s range of experience. And it is the philosopher who has the burden of articulating these perspectival limits. One of the limitations to which the philosopher must pay special attention is the tendency of Dasein to take the immediate, phenomenally given as if it were the total phenomenon. As we observed in earlier chapters, Heidegger’s reasoning for this claim centers in the notion that the history of Western thought has been permeated by the metaphysics of presence, where beings are typically understood in terms of visual appearance. This naturally occurring prejudice impedes Dasein’s ability to philosophize about things in their hidden or unseen aspects. The philosopher’s province is to practice phenomenological ontology under the assumption that the hidden, less obvious aspects of things are the most difficult to uncover and grasp but also the most important for capturing phenomena in their full disclosure. FILM CONCEIVED AS PHENOMENOLOGICAL ONTOLOGY How does this account of philosophy qua phenomenological ontology square with the question of film-as-philosophy? As a start, I contend that the film medium is characterized by the capacity to present its depictions in a way that



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is also ontological, in two related senses. First, I simply mean that films have the basic hermeneutical capacity for positing their depictions as factually consistent with or affirmative of the known world. Plainly not all films do this; superhero and fantasy films, for instance, do not, insofar as their narratives convey an admixture of fantasy and reality. But many fiction films accomplish this with ease, insofar as they portray relatable, intelligible stories, people, and places consistent with those counterparts one knows in the world of one’s own experience. I can view a film such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and can easily graft the world opened up by this film as consistent with my own vision and understanding of early-twentieth-century Washington, politics, and so forth. Or more abstractly, through the viewing of Boyhood I can comprehend some of the factual narrative of an actual single mother raising two children and attempting to balance a career and personal life by virtue of witnessing the plight of the single-mother film character played by Patricia Arquette.3 Secondly and especially relevant for the question of film-as-philosophy, films have the capacity to convey meaning that can be understood in universal terms.4 That is, films have a capacity for portraying the nature of things over and above their affirmation of individual persons and narratives. I am thinking particularly of what we “take away” from viewing films, that is, their ability to convey messages, insights, truths, or discoveries in a fashion that transcends the mere storytelling component—the aspect of film in which its fiction can function as a generalized statement of fact. In this case, the crux again is not that all films make this accomplishment, but that this is a capacity not beyond films to realize. For example, the film It’s a Wonderful Life can be said to comprise a reflection on the nature of human relations and close-knit communities. The tragedy and later success of George Bailey, whose strong moral fiber ends up occasioning his own rescue by those who love him, can be regarded as an ontological affirmation of the reward inherent in a virtuous life. Or, as we might discern in a more challenging film example, one might regard The Tree of Life as a philosophical affirmation of the conflict of faith versus reason, what the film couches as the choice between the “way of grace” and the “way of nature.”5 Putting all of this together, let us consider an example that accomplishes all of these features. When one watches The Godfather, for example, one is certainly able to entertain the notion that actual postwar New York mafia life was similar to that depicted on screen. One can envision real-life people having motivations, desires, and conflicts similar to those of the film’s fictional characters. These aspects speak to my first sense of film as an ontological medium. Regarding the second sense, surely a film such as this provides genuine insight about real-life situations, choices, and fates analogous to those of the film’s characters Michael (Al Pacino), Sonny (James Caan), Tom Hagen (Robert Duval), Connie (Talia Shire), etc., even if one does not

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belong to a crime family. This is particularly the case with the insight this film affords into a rare and enigmatic character such as Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and his way of managing the role of the “Don.” This man is a character the likes of whom one may never encounter in real life. One can nonetheless adapt one’s world view in a way that accommodates this new type of character as actually existing. One might also gain from The Godfather an expanded sense of the moral commitments and dilemmas bound up with familial allegiance, friendship, and justice. The opening scene’s dialectical conversation regarding vengeance for the assault on the daughter of the funeral parlor operator, Bonasera, is a case in point. Murder, it is claimed, does not provide justice for a sexual assault, though both Don Corleone and Bonasera seem to agree that justice itself is in order. Another instance is the initial rise of Michael Corleone and his later corruption at the hands of conflicting forces, many of which are out of his control. Michael’s rise and fall affords the viewer insight into the matrix of moral, economic, familial, and political commitments faced by the leader of a crime family who aspires to make the family business legitimate. Finally, considering the series as a whole, one can see the Godfather saga as representative of a genuine moment in American cultural history. That is, one can take away a new or enhanced understanding of the Sicilian-American immigrant experience, or of the advent of organized crime in America, or even of the intersection of both of these with national and international politics. To be sure, most films lack such an ontological dimension. And it suffices to say that most films do not make tacit, nontrivial statements on the nature of things. But understood as a norm for films appropriate to the film-as-philosophy heading, these features seem difficult to deny as minimal conditions. It is difficult to conceive an instance of philosophy occurring through film that is not predicated on (or affirmative of) some ontology to which the viewer can relate. This point echoes Heidegger’s assertion regarding the fact of philosophy’s orientation in the human situation of the moment—we philosophize from and for our factical situation. Even in movies whose fictions are less immediately connected to the present world, for example, in fantasy or science-fiction films, there will still be ostensive narrative aspects that reflect known reality in some fashion. This last notion is seconded in Stephen Mulhall’s thesis regarding film-as-philosophy in the Alien series, the philosophical aspect of which is fundamentally predicated on everyday ontological knowledge about human beings and the nature of biological life.6 But what about conceiving films under the guise of “phenomenological” ontology? That is, in what way is film-as-philosophy, qua ontology, also phenomenological? Following Heidegger’s methodological terminology in Being and Time, the immediate connection I propose is this: to label a given film as



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phenomenological, it must present a genuine phenomenon in the robust sense. But in order for this to happen, it also seems that the film must make this status about itself known. As already noted, phenomenology concerns selfshowing, particularly in the manner of the self-showing, but typically unseen conditions underlying what actually appears. What does this stipulation mean for film? It is not enough to say that a film merely displays images or tells a story. Recall that, in Heidegger’s sense, appearances are not the same as phenomena. As a mere reproduction of appearances, any instance of film is unremarkable; one can say that it merely reproduces reality or renders reality into a flat image. This last is precisely Heidegger’s critique of film considered as a twentieth-century technological medium, as described in the previous chapter.7 Instead, for Heidegger phenomena are the rock-bottom groundwork, the source of intelligibility for appearances as such; phenomena comprise the ontologic-hermeneutic whole, the intentional apparatus of comportment within which appearances occur. As such, phenomena are not necessarily “seen” visually. A notion from Heidegger that may split the difference as a proposed criterion for identifying a film as “phenomenological” is that the film shows that it is showing. For phenomena are in Heidegger’s definition instances of the self-showing of beings. Heidegger’s early-career notion of formal indication conveys this notion nicely. As I described in chapter 1, formal indication characterizes the practice in Heidegger’s phenomenology of gesturing toward the various phenomena bound up in an account, such that they can be made known without being delineated precisely. Language often allows us to formally indicate this or that phenomenon, by way of helping us to describe what is at hand though we do not know the exact essence of the object. I propose that films are able to self-show, in the manner of showing that they show, in a guise akin what Heidegger calls formal indication. But this reasoning is very abstract. The more complex question is: How do films go about showing phenomena, in a way that this showing is itself made explicit, and in a way that also transcends the flat reproduction of images? I want to assert a theoretical claim about genuine phenomena in film, but I recognize that it is difficult to justify such claims persuasively beyond citing specific instances in films. Phenomenology is a method, not a prescription of appropriate objects or fields of research. To consider film under the guise of phenomenology accordingly entails looking more for the characteristic methods of the medium, and less for specific contents. As a middle ground, I will cite some common film tropes that illustrate what I have in mind. To begin with, one may consider films that actually depict the cinematic apparatus itself or the film crew’s involvement in the work. In such films as Persona, The Cameraman, and Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, the medium itself is called into question or otherwise made thematic. Many Woody Allen films (such as Mighty Aphrodite) employ

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this technique. More rarely, one could cite instances in which the filmmaker appears and provides some commentary on his role (Jean Cocteau’s appearance in the final film of the Orpheus trilogy; Alejandro Jodorowksy’s episodic commentary in The Dance of Reality). The filmmaking process itself is depicted in such progressive classics as Contempt, Mulholland Drive, and Adaptation. Self-reference is the quality that is common to these tropes. In these examples, self-reference calls attention to the ontological grounding of the film as a whole. In general, what I have in mind with these instances is how a film can direct the viewer’s attention to the film’s nature in a way that the work as a whole becomes questionable or otherwise is put into question. For example, consider Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a film which depicts the mental breakdown of a nurse who is originally charged with supervising a psychiatric patient’s recovery. A self-referential trope occurs explicitly in the film’s beginning and end; both display celluloid running through a projector, without verbal commentary. Persona thereby calls attention to itself as a visual recording, a recording of actors playing roles in front of a camera. The film makes a tacit ontological statement regarding its own nature and in a manner that the specific layers of its way of showing are formally indicated without being rigorously defined. This film’s way of self-showing is not explicit regarding its meaning or outcome. Though its formal indication highlights the conditions of its intelligibility, these conditions are not delineated with precision. They are pointed to, made known in a fashion more nuanced than if the film had simply announced the meaning of this directorial choice in words. Films also call attention to themselves as films through the use of unconventional cinematic techniques. The conventions of classical Hollywood exist to make us unaware that we are watching a film, and when they are violated it is jarring. Examples I have in mind include unanticipated pauses or moments of silence, deliberate use of black-and-white film stock, prolonged freeze-frames, and the use of prominent images, themes, and motifs that ostensibly cue the viewer to take notice, but which have little relevance to the narrative. An example that illustrates a number of these at once is the pink coloration applied to the image of an anonymous young girl in the otherwise black-and-white film stock of Schindler’s List.8 Or, consider the quirky, surprising image of a mechanical, robotic bird (it appears to be a robin) at the end of Blue Velvet. In cases like these, the film provides something to view precisely as something to view, calling the viewer to reflect upon the interpretive meaning—the conditions of intelligibility—the image allows. In metaphorical terms, these instances convey a message to the viewer that the filmmaker has chosen to call attention to the conditions underlying the work itself. In summary, what is crucial in each of the above instances is that the film refers to itself insofar as it is a film; it thematizes itself as providing



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something unique and specific for the viewer to note. In these cases the film shows itself as a phenomenon in its own right, a phenomenon which we might label (following Heidegger) a “self-showing” [Sichzeigen]. To pause a moment and survey the territory, surely with instances such as the above, a critic may pose the rejoinder that the only compelling philosophy at work concerns the medium itself: that these techniques only perform a (reflexive) philosophy of film and do not otherwise produce a phenomenological ontology. Some scholars have suggested that ­film-as-philosophy perhaps only genuinely occurs in this guise, namely that film-as-philosophy occurs when a given film provides a philosophical account of the filmic or photographic medium.9 Much of my aspiration in the present chapter is to describe why this notion of film-as-philosophy is too restrictive. There is a richer schema I would like to propose, which is instantiated in films that explicitly articulate the lived context of the experiences they depict, such that the object of the depiction is made known as a phenomenon. There is a big difference between a film that engages in self-reference in a way that any other artistic medium can do, and a film that is doing phenomenological ontology in a uniquely cinematic fashion. In what follows, I wish to develop a fuller account of this latter possibility. For the purposes of this exegesis I will briefly invoke the Terrence Malick film The Thin Red Line. This film is also one I take up in the next chapter at more length. For the present purpose I shall focus just on its value for our thinking about film-as-philosophy. Though ostensibly a war film, The Thin Red Line portrays the horrors of war juxtaposed alongside more sweeping musings on the ecstasies of natural life and human destiny. The main setting is a days-long battle that takes place on the island of Guadalcanal during World War II. Unique among other purported war films, The Thin Red Line avoids formulating any central position on the morality of war. The film places less emphasis on traditional plot structure in which persons attempt to accomplish a task (in this case, an American military unit seizing an airfield), and more emphasis on vignettes involving the inner lives of an ensemble cast of characters. The viewer is invited into the minds and thoughts of these characters through both spoken dialogue and Malick’s hallmark soliloquy-style voiceovers, the latter of which often transpire out of step with an individual character’s action on screen. One might describe this technique as a means of conveying the Dasein or “being-there” of the characters. The viewer learns about these characters not merely from witnessing their outward behaviors, but also from the phenomenological conditions that make their outward appearance intelligible. This refusal of the film to adopt a more conventional narrative form allows the contrasting world views of its characters to speak for themselves. At film’s end, there is no conclusive “argument” offered or

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closure reached. It presents something like a collage of perspectives, to be taken by the viewer for what it is worth. Nature functions as a frequent thematic and visual subject that offsets the human-centric aspect of The Thin Red Line’s narrative. Indeed, nature is brought to attention in iterative fashion as a backdrop to the human world and the events depicted on screen.10 The first image of the film is that of an alligator, lurking menacingly in the jungle swamp of an as-yet unidentified south pacific island. The opening voiceover soliloquy, spoken by the character Private Edward P. Train (John Dee Smith) sets the stage for this theme: “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?” Many of the subsequent stream-of-consciousness musings of the featured characters are framed in a similarly interrogative, open-ended fashion, questioning the interrelated courses of nature and human life. Throughout the film, Malick’s camera attends to natural objects, such as flowing grasses, trees, and animals. A similar frequent motif is the idyllic life of tribal peoples in and around the island of Guadalcanal, who seem to live a conflict-free existence. A shot that is repeated at numerous points is an upward-looking camera angle depicting the underside of treetops in the jungle, viewed from ground level. This helps to frame the subject of the narrative specifically as an event occurring within a primeval, yet thriving natural world—as a war in the heart of nature. This repeated shot also serves to thematize the destiny of the men fighting in the battle. They are in an island paradise at the end of the earth, yet they have come to fight their last figurative battle and rise to heaven. Moreover, the beginning and end of the film serve to encapsulate these contrasts, bookending the hideous violence of the island battle with indications of momentary tranquility. The opening sequences of The Thin Red Line depict American forces descending upon Guadalcanal by sea. This initial setting is very calm, though the invasion to follow is not. The film ends with a similar calm, depicting the departure of these same forces from Guadalcanal. A trailing camera shot focuses on the island as the transport boat glides away over the smooth sea. As should be clear from the language of my brief descriptions, these overlapping thematic contrasts of life and death, birth and decay, peace and strife are for their part framed poetically, as if this poetry too lay at the heart of the film’s ontological portrayal of war. Regarding the potentially phenomenological dimensions of The Thin Red Line, many of its notable cinematic features foster what I am calling film-as-philosophy. The film constantly draws attention to itself by virtue of the unique cinematographic and narrative quirks I have noted. In particular, offbeat uses of the camera, extensive internal monologues, and rich nature images of astounding beauty lend the film a very self-conscious, yet



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understated character. All of its highly unconventional elements contribute to the film performing a phenomenology of its main subject: the lived experience of war alongside the ontology of war itself. It calls attention to war as a phenomenon in the robust Heideggerian sense. There are several different ways in which it does so. First, the film presents war with emphasis upon its existential aspect. Though ostensibly belonging to the war film genre, The Thin Red Line is not as interested in depicting events, narratives, battles, and skirmishes, as it is in musing upon war thematically, especially with regard to the question of its origins. War is presented as a happening that confronts humanity, as something to which human beings must respond. War is not something that was simply created by man; it lives at the heart of nature. Or at least, it problematically appears to coexist alongside nature. On this note, one might also observe that the broader conditions of war’s ultimate intelligibility are foregrounded by the experiences of the characters, principally as conveyed through the characters’ voiceovers. We learn about many characters that the war experience occasions reflections on much wider subjects such as friendship, social conformity, and glory and recognition. War rendered as a phenomenon in this film thus concerns the broader conditions of intelligibility that make war a meaningful concept. In other words, war is an appearance that has its life amid numerous other unseen, yet equally meaningful human activities. Second, the film’s engagement of the voices and perspectives of multiple characters makes relatively explicit the perspectival nature of the human understanding of war, particularly the notion that war is an occurrence that presents itself to human subjectivity. War appears as a phenomenon ontologically constituted by different sides and aspects, such that war will confront each person differently. This perspectival essence is brought out by the film’s principal characters, some of whom are motivated by moral considerations of duty and the preservation of life, whereas others are motivated by personal gain or their sense of subjection to fate. This lived-experience aspect, achieved through extended representations of first-person points of view, contributes to its phenomenology of war. Through this first-person emphasis, the viewer is made witness to the private thoughts and spiritual musings of the characters, who are encountered as isolated, wandering subjectivities striving for their own connection to the world and constantly questioning its nature. Summing up, it is also appropriate to equate The Thin Red Line’s phenomenological achievement as coextensive with its ontological account of war. War is depicted as a phenomenon, in the sense of an individualized, lived experience; and the ontological accounting of the film is presented as phenomenological, which is to say that the meaning of war can only be understood through the multiplicity of isolated perspectives shown on screen, where these each present their own ontological outlook.

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ON THE PHILOSOPHICAL COMMITMENTS OF THE IDEA OF FILM-AS-PHILOSOPHY Now that I have outlined an interpretation of film conceived as phenomenological ontology, I want to develop the notion of philosophy at work. I want to make clearer sense of the notion that philosophy occurs through film. In particular I am thinking about ambiguities embedded in this subject regarding the hermeneutic distance between screen and viewer, and the question of the mediation between the one and the other. Do films “philosophize” by engaging in what some have labeled with terms such as “cinematic thinking,”11 or should we conclude that they merely provide material for philosophical reflections on part of the viewer?12 And regarding the former, what would give cause to philosophers for assuming that the notion of films philosophizing is even cogent? Philosophy in its traditional guise is considered a human activity. Yet much of the more progressive side of the conversation about film-as-philosophy often proceeds as if a nonhuman entity has its own rational agency.13 Making progress in this debate requires grappling with the undeniable fact of philosophy’s occasioning through a primarily nondiscursive object. If film is denied any sort of rational agency, then a problem arises concerning how to qualify the occurrence of philosophy through film as anything but accidental. (In this last instance, I assume that citing the talent or vision of the filmmaker would simply beg the same question.) Here are some prefatory remarks on resolving these questions. I believe, on the one hand, that speaking of a film as if it has a “mind” that “thinks” is a category mistake. On the other hand, these expressions are metaphorically powerful, and capture something important. Presumably part of the inclination to hold that a film “thinks” or that it “philosophizes” is based on the assumption that the viewer of said film does not philosophize on her own, independent of the film. Rather, the film occasions some philosophical insight in the viewer that would not have occurred to her in its absence. Or alternately stated, the film reveals to the viewer a new idea or thought-pattern in some specifically cinematic fashion. (This last notion is one that Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema articulates particularly well, in its emphasis on film’s capacity to produce combinations of images that exceed everyday human perception.)14 These observations lead me to conclude that the sense behind the notion that philosophy occurs through film is indicative of a fundamentally phenomenological structure. In this structure, film-as-philosophy is contingent on viewer comportment. Yet this is a comportment to what the film itself proffers. Borrowing a locution from Heidegger, philosophy can occur through film insofar as the viewer is “being there” (Da-sein); film-as-philosophy is afforded through the viewer’s disclosing projection into the film. In a manner of speaking, the viewer is taken out of herself, transported to another place,



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perhaps not unlike Heidegger’s description of this occurrence in the appreciation of the artwork. Yet again, the film’s hermeneutic must be revealed by the film. It would not make sense to claim that philosophy’s occurrence, or the discovery thereof, is something forced by the viewer. In this regard I differ with the Deleuzian model of film-as-philosophy. I say this because in Heidegger’s framework of understanding philosophy, Dasein or being-there is specifically predicated on a presencing, a projective placing of oneself into an existential space in which the being of things and oneself is at issue. Philosophy is not a one-sided event that happens without Dasein’s input, although there certainly are dimensions of the problematic of being that occur to the human agent from without. Therefore, I propose to describe the screen-viewer dynamic of film-as-philosophy as having an event-like character, where film and viewer come to appropriate or own one another. Still, is it salient to describe philosophy in this manner? At this point it is necessary to justify on philosophy’s behalf how it can be coherent to invoke the concept as I have. PHILOSOPHY AND THE BEING AND TIME PROJECT: THE SELF-QUESTIONING CHARACTER OF DASEIN The concept of philosophy, and what it means for philosophy to exist at all in fact figures into the heart of Being and Time’s question into the meaning of being. In what follows I will outline some of Heidegger account of philosophy’s place in this work. Then I will turn to the issue of how this talk clarifies some concerns of film-as-philosophy. Thus far I have outlined some key aspects of Heidegger’s conception of philosophy. First, that its ultimate and genuine form is comprised in phenomenological ontology, and second, that as a phenomenological ontology it also must be practiced in the manner of a hermeneutics of Dasein. This means it must provide an account of the being to whom the phenomena of phenomenology appear. Interesting about the initial problematic of being, however, is that as Heidegger lays it out, it essentially mirrors this structural reckoning of philosophy, phenomenological ontology, and Dasein. In other words, philosophy as a practice and a way of interrogation is derivative of Dasein itself. But Dasein only takes to philosophy because it has an intrinsic existential understanding of what is questionable and what is to be sought in the issue of the meaning of being. Heidegger’s sketch of this relationship reads this way: Every questioning is a seeking. Every seeking takes its lead beforehand from what is sought. Questioning is a knowing search for beings in their thatness and whatness. … As questioning about … questioning has what it asks about

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[Gefragtes]. All asking about … is in some way an inquiring of. … Besides what was asked, what is interrogated [Befragtes] also belongs to questioning. What is questioned is to be defined and conceptualized in the investigating, that is, the specifically theoretical, question. As what is really intended, what is to be ascertained lies in what is questioned: here questioning arrives at its goal (BT §2, 4/5).

As we know, the approach Heidegger pitches at Being and Time’s start is predicated on the fact that we, each of us instances of Dasein, already live within a certain understanding of being. From this understanding we are able to recognize our incomplete understanding. We thus possess an inherent capacity to enter into modes of questioning and seeking. And this is the state we are in if we follow Heidegger’s starting reasoning in this passage. To ask after something entails already having some sense of what we are seeking and what we hope to find. In the present case, asking after the meaning of being entails that we already possess some understanding of this meaning. But one might ask: What causes Dasein to enter into this dialectical inquiry in the first place? This is an inquiry that, as Heidegger acknowledges, is inherently and unavoidably circular (BT §2, 7/7). The basic answer consists in the fact that, as stated in Being and Time’s opening pages, Dasein is the being whose being is an issue for it; we are beings whose being is a concern for us (BT §4, 11/12). My existence has the specific character of “mineness” [Jemeinigkeit], and as such it is of concern for me. Dasein essentially possesses the possibility within itself to recognize the conditions of its understanding and to question after those conditions when these become problematic. This occurrence is not unlike Heidegger’s account of the breakdown of tools during his description of Dasein’s discovery of world. In that section of Being and Time, Heidegger suggests that Dasein’s theoretical mode eventuates when Dasein encounters a problem. For instance, the head of the hammer breaks off and I need to consider other objects that might be suitable for the task. I take to thinking conceptually and looking for objects that meet my picture of the concept. Much of this reasoning is grounded more comprehensively in what Heidegger calls “care” [Sorge]. In the latter sections of Division 1 of Being and Time, Heidegger writes that care expresses Dasein’s being; this is to say that care indicates the structural totality underlying Dasein’s existence (BT §41, 186/192). Heidegger makes explicit that by definition, care is also self-care (BT §41, 186/193); its interior, ontological unity is a matter of concern for each Dasein’s self. We can thus view care as encapsulating Dasein’s ontological inclination to question both itself and the meaning within which it resides. What about the relation of these features of Dasein to the film medium and the issue of film-as-philosophy? I believe that rendering this account



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of philosophy into a coherent application to film hinges on regarding the film experience as coextensive with Dasein’s existential manner of projection. According to Heidegger’s account of care, Dasein is its projections or possibilities. Its projections originate from out of its facticity, the “facts” about oneself that are already given by virtue of one possessing “mineness.” Heidegger summarizes it this way: “Dasein is always already ‘beyond itself,’… as being toward the potentiality-for-being which it itself is” (BT §41, 185/192). Accordingly, Dasein’s projective power is bound up with Dasein’s self-understanding; Dasein’s existence originates in facticity (BT §41, 186/192). We have also observed that the film experience can be conceived as a mode of being-in-the-world. Chapter 2 indicated that Dasein is existentially capable of being “there” in the film world, because Dasein is projective, interpretive understanding. The logic of how film-as-philosophy occurs in this Dasein-based model is quite simple from here: philosophy occurs for Dasein in the film-viewing experience whenever Dasein’s film-oriented projection leads it to a questionable state of meaning. But not just a questionable state of meaning, either; we also must say, this is a questionable state regarding Dasein’s own meaning, its self-understanding, and thus, its being-in-the-world. These structural features of Dasein in their relation to film illuminate how some films can even execute a kind of philosophic and political propaganda. The classic instance that comes to mind for many in this conversation is the Leni Riefenstahl docudrama film of Nazi Germany, Triumph of the Will, although numerous other culturally definitive historical fiction films fit the bill. One may cite Metropolis, Birth of a Nation, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Battleship Potemkin just to name a few obvious instances of films that have exhibited the ability to generate or otherwise solidify a new philosophic political view by queuing upon the questioning factical mode of their audiences. From a Heideggerian standpoint, one could say that what such films accomplish is to engage a meaning, a state of understanding in their audiences’ Dasein, and to uncover a new state of discourse, a new articulation of intelligibility from out of this original state. From chapter 3 we saw the role that films as purveyors of artistic truth, or aletheia, can fulfill; such truth is not universal or absolute so much as it expresses the historical meaning and moment of a people. A different but related way we can make sense of the dynamic I am describing is to recall one more time the account of tools. Heidegger suggests in this context that Dasein enters into the theoretical mode whenever a tool is completely unavailable for the task at hand. When it finds itself in this situation Dasein can exercise the capacity to think conceptually, to put itself into an “objective” mood. It thinks beyond the situation at hand, but in a fashion where this thinking is to be adapted back into that same original situation, to the original purpose for which the first sought tool is lacking. Now, as I have

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suggested in the paragraphs above, a similar outlook obtains when we consider Dasein’s recognition of a problem in its self-understanding (and what is the same, its understanding of the meaning of being, or the general intelligibility of things for it). That is, when Dasein’s self-understanding encounters an issue, it enters into a corresponding mode in which it can exercise the capacity to resolve this issue or otherwise deepen its level of understanding. Does it need to be labeled “philosophy” in the traditional senses of, for example, defending a thesis with argumentation; proposing a view then testing it in example cases; or generating concepts or conceptual knowledge? I believe Heidegger would say these conceptions of philosophy are derivative from the more fundamental mode of philosophy that motivates Being and Time’s fundamental question. In other words, to talk of “original” or “pure” ways of doing philosophy without bracketing these within a more existential framework, wherein they are seen to originate in a fundamental disposition of Dasein, overlooks that the orthodox ways of defining philosophy must have their origin in a more primordial, reflective and questioning source. So the possibility of film-as-philosophy in the light explored here stems from Dasein, and especially from Dasein’s projective, self-questioning auspice. This auspice ostensibly has the capacity to come to life in film-viewing, insofar as viewership brings with it a discursive element. It is uncontroversial that the viewer watches films in a naturally questioning mode; this seems to be a basic feature of narrative, fiction film, or at least, it is a feature that narrative film aims for in order to be engaging.15 And likewise, over and above posing questions from out of storyline and plot, narrative films (if not all films) possess the capacity to arouse questions in the viewer that are more thematic and abstract, occurring more strongly on the discursive side as it were. For the viewer, there is the possibility of reflection, meditation, or musing, based on situations and problems the film poses. To sum up, I suggest that this is able to occur because the viewer, as a projective Dasein, is able to appropriate the meaning of the film world by being there, engaging in the discourse the film fosters, and entering into a state of understanding the film enables. Still, what is the sense of claiming, as I have, that such meaning can become an issue for viewing Dasein? This meaning can become an issue for Dasein—it can become questionable—precisely because Dasein is the questioning being. And Dasein is itself involved in the meaning it appropriates, insofar as its states of understanding—its factically founded projections—are definitive of its self-understanding. What would all of this look like in the context of an actual film? Much of chapters 5–7 take the task of bearing this question out more extensively. For the sake of using an easy example that will hopefully serve for the moment, The Thin Red Line is actually one of the best I can think of.



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As I have already highlighted, The Thin Red Line offers a phenomenological ontology of war using film’s multivalent palette of cinematic presentation. Its philosophy involves a showing of war, by presenting to the viewer a multiplicity of complementary situations and perspectives from the war experience. Moreover, this film presents a collage of images and words that function as meditations on diverse themes, including life and death, nature, conflict, and human kinship. We can cite others as well: loyalty, honesty, conformity, and authenticity. The film’s characters are ostensibly portrayed in various questioning modes regarding these themes and others, primarily through voiceover soliloquies, while the cinematography of the film places significant stylistic emphasis on images of nature. These elements are juxtaposed alongside depiction of a massive military siege in which many will die on both sides. In this way, the questioning posed by the film is seen as of a piece with the premise and plot of the film. All of this material inevitably provides to the attuned viewer grounds for reflection, both regarding the film’s characters and one’s own self, to the extent that many of the aforenamed thematic issues figure into one’s own being-there and thus one’s self-understanding. Take, for instance, the film’s hero, Private Witt (Jim Caveziel). He is presented at the film’s start as a free spirit, someone who only follows rules when it suits him. But he also relishes opportunities for exercising virtue and realizing something akin to Heidegger’s conception of authenticity. We see this at the film’s start, when he is shown relishingly absorbed in his idyllic existence among the Pacific island natives, observing their customs and playing games with the children. His first words of dialogue, initially presented in a voiceover, and later married up with a live shot of Witt talking to a fellow soldier, indicate Witt’s fascination with the potential grace one can exhibit at the moment of death. He muses on his intuition that to face death and not shrink from it is one of the most ennobling experiences one can have in this life. I remember my mother when she was dying… I wondered how it'd be when l died. What it'd be like to know that this breath now was the last one you was ever gonna draw. I just hope I can meet it the same way she did. With the same… calm. Cos that's where it's hidden the immortality I hadn't seen.

We might observe that this speech of Witt’s functions as an echo of Being and Time’s problematic. Witt recognizes his own internal comprehension of the meaning of his being (namely, that it is grounded in finite mortality), and

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at the same time, he recognizes its limitations and desires to overcome them. And similarly, as the film progresses and Witt returns to Charlie Company, he takes initiative in multiple situations that require leadership. Witt’s striving for authenticity (and particularly, the true glory of bravery) comes to a climax near the film’s end when he discovers that his small reconnaissance band has walked into a trap. While on a brief scouting mission from which he and a few others are expected to gather information and report back to superiors, he discovers that Charlie Company is surrounded and will be caught by surprise by the enemy. He quickly determines that the best course of action to save the most lives will be to create a diversion. Witt does this knowing that he will be either captured or killed. And this is what ends up happening. An enemy platoon surrounds him in a clearing of the jungle. As his death at the hands of the enemy becomes immanent, we gain a sense that this was the fate toward which he has inclined from the start of the narrative. His final encounter with the enemy, where he is surrounded by dozens of enemy soldiers all pointing their guns, shows him calm and composed. His death is only depicted in passing; he falls from a gunshot as the scene quickly cuts to an extended still image of sunbeams shining through trees, as if the path of these sun rays reflects his ascension to heaven. The process of death in this case is quite sudden, but it is superseded by what film presents as the deeper meaning of this man’s noble death. The attuned viewer is bound to regard Witt’s character as a foil for meditations on life, death, mortality, and destiny in equal measure. Witt’s character poses to the viewer the question of what human life means at the moment of this historical event shown onscreen, and of whether any further meaning informs what these men accomplish in the film’s here-and-now. These concerns naturally arise for viewing Dasein insofar as Dasein projects itself into the discourse, the threshold of meaning that underlies Witt’s situation. To put it simply, we are able to articulate Witt’s situation philosophically insofar as we are able to be there, with him; we have the existential capacity to hear his discourse in its articulation of his being as well as of our being (insofar as we are Mitsein). In this way the film occasions in us the insight to think about the significance and meaning of our being, where meaning refers to the conditions making our existence intelligible. The tragic but fated aspect of Witt and others who face their mortality in this film equally becomes a tragic, fated, yet also philosophical experience for us, the viewers, insofar as we bear witness to the problematic of the general narrative. This problematic is one in which we contemplate the meaning of our being in view of the broken, obtrusive fate of the film’s premise—people just like us, dying in a battle on a remote corner of the earth, to win a war they perhaps did not choose but were nonetheless obligated to fight. In other words, like the broken hammer in Heidegger’s workshop, the tragic nature of The Thin Red Line’s premises



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and outcomes serves to inspire viewing Dasein to contemplate further, to theorize, to wax philosophical. I reiterate the point from above that this occurs because Dasein is the being that philosophizes from out of broken or incomplete states of understanding. Here I am particularly thinking about the observation made by philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche as well novelists such as Walker Percy and Cormac McCarthy that tragedy is a grand human event that tends to reveal the nature of things to us, enabling us to see what is most important for our lives, or to discover what we previously had overlooked.16 It can occasion for us new theoretical views by causing us to see things as if for the first time. The closing voiceover line of The Thin Red Line is apt here in its summation of the tragic nature of the events that have been shown: “All things shining.” To be clear, I aim to describe these hermeneutic ways of comprehending The Thin Red Line as generally constitutive of the existential phenomenology bound up with viewing such a film. In other words, I do not accept that films pose some kind of invisible hermeneutic barrier between themselves and the viewer, such that the viewer can only guess at what the philosophical import might be, or what messages the filmmaker intended to convey, etc. Rather, because what I am describing has its seat in Dasein’s being “there,” in and with the human narrative of the film, the resulting conception of film-asphilosophy expresses the existential self-understanding of the viewer. This in turn helps to justify why the discourse a film affords the viewer is often murky, ambiguous, or in need of precision. These are all features inherent within Dasein’s everyday state; although philosophy would seem to be an inherent possibility of Dasein, in everyday life Dasein lives in states of ambiguity, of unclear and uncomprehended meaning (BT, §37–38). Because the academic, rigorous understanding of philosophy and philosophical thinking occurs existentially posterior to this more primordial state, we must regard this potentially ambiguous, roughshod place of Dasein’s self-understanding as essential and primary in any talk of film’s philosophical potential. THE LATER HEIDEGGER ON PHILOSOPHY Though the later Heidegger does not reject the account of philosophy offered in Being and Time, he aims in these later writings to offer a more penetrating account of philosophy’s historical and ontological origins.17 Particularly in his work from the late 1920s and early 1930s, Heidegger characterizes philosophy as an extra-human occurrence that happens in a manner transcending human agency. One of the more controversial ways he argues for this view is to hold that philosophy’s occurrence is contingent upon being’s eventuation to the human subject, particularly in the guise of what he calls

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the “ontological difference.” This concept refers to the human insight into the distinction between being and beings, namely that alongside the familiar things of everyday experience there is also a givenness of the meaning or intelligibility underlying these things. The discovery of “being” proper occurs via this insight into this meaning or intelligibility. In Heidegger’s view, philosophy’s original inspiration stems from the wonder occasioned by insight into this distinction; philosophy’s original province is to articulate and preserve the ontological difference. The crux for my present goals hinges on Heidegger’s claim that this initial occurrence of philosophy—as well as philosophy’s continued practice in the present time—would have been impossible without being’s primordial givenness to the human realm. In other words, discovering the ontological difference was not something the first philosophers could have done through simple curiosity. In a word, the implication is that the human inspiration to do philosophy is not the result of mere happenstance. Rather, philosophy happens to the human realm; it is not taken up by choice.18 Nor can philosophy’s methods or discoveries be predicted or mapped out in advance. Instead, the human practice of philosophy is limited to the ways in which being reveals itself. In the 1936 lecture course Basic Questions of Philosophy Heidegger advances this view by arguing that philosophy does not permit a singular definition. He states, “Philosophy is completely different from ‘world-view’ and is fundamentally distinct from all ‘science.’ Philosophy cannot by itself replace either world view or science; nor can it ever be appreciated by them. Philosophy cannot at all be measured by anything else but only by its own shining, now hidden, essence.”19 The claim that philosophy “cannot at all be measured by anything else” is of special interest in this connection. This claim implies that philosophy cannot be defined in terms outside of itself. There is a sense in which any attempt at delimiting philosophy through frameworks of science, logic, theology, etc., necessarily misconstrues its essence. The question incumbent on Heidegger to answer in this light is the following. In what, then, does philosophy’s essence consist, if not in attaining scientific knowledge or formulating systematic world views? In what way is the consequent definition of philosophy to be anything but non-vacuous? The answer Heidegger proposes is the following: philosophy’s essence is fulfilled in seeking and questioning, rather than in any kind of conceptformation or formal argumentation. And it has as its goal attaining a nearness to the truth of being: Our goal is the very seeking itself. What else is the seeking but the most constant being-in-proximity to what conceals itself…. To posit the very seeking as a goal means to anchor the beginning and the end of all reflection in the question of the truth—not of this or that being or even of all being, but of being itself.20



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Much of Heidegger’s locution here follows the spirit of the “Origin of the Work of Art” essay, except that philosophy indicates concern with the truth of being itself rather than the historical, poetically mediated form of disclosure fostered by the artwork. Philosophy’s province is the thinking of that very truth. Heidegger’s understated but unique suggestion here is that philosophy consists in an ongoing quest that does not (and cannot) establish anything firmly, precisely because the truth of being itself cannot be established or held onto permanently. At most, philosophy can strive to continually uncover and preserve the ongoing becoming of truth’s essence, aletheia. This limitation is not unlike Diotima’s account of the relationship of wisdom and immortality in Plato’s Symposium. In that work, to commune with the immortal takes struggle and toil. To discourse with the immutable forms only comes with striving; one cannot possess the prey permanently. Part of Heidegger’s rationale for holding that philosophy must continually strive to uncover the truth of being is this: to maintain otherwise would set the stage for either nihilism (that there is no truth) or fascism (that the truth is known for all time henceforth).21 And at the same time, the philosopher must also concede to being’s own refusal of complete openness. In this light, Heidegger writes in “On the Essence of Truth” that “Philosophical thinking is gentle releasement that does not renounce the concealment of being as a whole. Philosophical thinking is especially the stern and resolute openness that does not disrupt the concealing but entreats its unbroken essence into the open region of understanding and thus into its own truth….”22 What Heidegger is challenging in traditional conceptions of philosophy is at once the notion that philosophy should go on the offensive, establishing facts, concepts, theses, and the like, and the mistaken belief that philosophy is capable of doing so. Philosophy’s power in fact can only extend as far as the disclosures being allows, and this often means heeding what cannot be revealed or spoken. In colloquial terms, we might equate this phenomenon to philosophy’s capacity for recognizing ambiguity, such as in moral and political topics. Classical philosophers also had this insight, that wisdom has the character of knowing its own limits. In Heidegger’s locution, the gist as we have observed already is that human insight into the truth of being is limited to being’s own self-revealing—what Heidegger characterizes in other writings as being’s giving of “the matter to be thought” [das Zu-denkende].23 The truth of being determines what is to be thought in and for the human realm. On the other hand, this last point brings out a principal aspect I wish to highlight in Heidegger’s conception of philosophy, namely the unpredictability of philosophical activity, as well as of the media in which philosophy may be realized. In Basic Questions of Philosophy Heidegger asserts that philosophy is capable of “leaping ahead” to new, unpredictable modes of human

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comportment. Question-worthy issues reveal themselves independently of human agency. Heidegger writes: Philosophy is…a knowledge that leaps ahead, opening up new domains of questioning and aspects of questioning about the essence of things, an essence that constantly conceals itself anew…. Philosophical reflection has an effect, if it does, always only mediately, by making available new aspects for all comportment and new principles for all decisions.24

For Heidegger there is an historical tension inherent to the occurrence of philosophy. His point here is that philosophies are seldom motivated by concerns that arise at the given moment in time; rather, such motivation is both backward- and forward-looking. In this “mediate” fashion, philosophy opens up new categories of human understanding that may as yet have no application or significance. Furthermore, insofar as the character of being’s self-revealing is also subject to historical transformation, philosophy both emerges and responds to being according to being’s transformative disclosures. This distinction is also a subtle, but decisive point of divergence from Deleuze’s position on film-as-philosophy. For Deleuze, the genuine province of philosophy, cinema, and art is to exceed the human condition.25 In Deleuze’s vision, the universe of cinematic images is virtually infinite. However for Heidegger, philosophy’s discourse is by and large historically conditioned. Key moments in the history of philosophy bear out Heidegger’s characterization. In Plato, being emerged in the guise of ideal forms, the eidei of justice and the good. Human philosophical activity was regarded as attempting to define these forms, which were seen as fundamentally severed from the human realm. Two millennia later, Descartes’s notion of being occurred in mathematical terms, with the result that he understood philosophical activity to have its virtue in logical analysis and proof akin to the work of geometers. And even in today’s world, one can observe a continuity of these lines of thought, when scientific theorists such as Stephen Hawking declare that philosophy is dead because it is taken as a truism that mathematical physics is the proper accessory for comprehending the nature of the universe. In each of these historical instances, one can observe the disconnect between the philosopher’s discovery and the moving target at which the discovery aims. In Plato, one can observe the rudiments of later Christian metaphysics, in which the philosophical understanding of the nature of reality was continuous with, but also superseded that of the Greeks. In medieval Christian philosophy, God is viewed as the ultimate eidos, the one uncreated being from which the act of creation stems. Similarly, the dawn of modern philosophy in Descartes contained the seeds of the twentieth century’s



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technological mastery of nature, where all beings (including human beings) have devolved into standing reserves, materials ready to be mined and consumed. Neither Plato nor Descartes was in a position to comprehend the direction in which their philosophical insights would lead, or where our conception of “doing philosophy” would go next. And for Heidegger’s part, in his later work he even evaluates his own thought according to philosophy’s process of historical transformation. In writings such as “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger contemplates what he calls the “other beginning,” the future moment at which he believes the first epoch of the Western mind will come to completion and restart. One cannot describe how the philosophical paradigms of the West will change as the result of this “other beginning.” But the point is that this unknowability is inherent to philosophy’s unpredictable ways of revealing itself. Heidegger understands the contribution of his own work as a kind of hint or preview of the inevitable epochal transformation to come.26 Looking back at the essay on the origin of the artwork, we can observe that Heidegger’s argumentation in that writing mirrors what he describes about philosophy. And this is not a coincidence. The reason for the overlap is that being has an historical nature. Sometimes Heidegger refers to the history of the West as the “history of being,” with the meaning that being reveals itself in epochal, transformative moments. In the present context the thrust of this connection is first, that philosophy and art are limited in their own insight into the power of their discovery, and second, that the way and the how of this discovery is similarly unpredictable. The media of philosophy (and as I suggested in chapter 3, of art) cannot be limited to the guise in which one knows philosophy at the present time. One literally has no power to stipulate that philosophy need occur via verbal discourse or scholarly writing, say. Not only is there not a prima facie reason to hold that a medium such as film cannot foster the occurrence of philosophy; again, as we have observed from Heidegger’s writing on art, the truth of being does not limit itself to showing up in traditional discursive forms, either. The truth of being (via art) has its essence in poetry. In summary, I have invoked this roundabout phenomenological description of philosophy and truth for the purpose of motivating a view that can appreciate the philosophical potential latent in a medium such as film. It is useful to reiterate that much of this analysis of film-as-philosophy actually does not concern film, so much as it concerns the nature of philosophy.27 Indeed, I want to advocate the view that philosophy itself is not antithetical to occurring in film or in other media that at first glance may seem surprising. The remaining chapters of my study have for one of their goals the illustration of this thesis through the reading of specific films.

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SINNERBRINK AND CAVELL I wish to conclude this chapter by citing some work in the literature that articulates more strongly the notion that film and philosophy are not antithetical but actually fit together quite nicely. Robert Sinnerbrink advocates an appreciation of film’s philosophical capacity that is very much in the spirit of what I have described in this chapter. In the book New Philosophies of Film, he advances a thesis on philosophy’s occurrence in film through the lens of “philosophical film criticism.” His goal is to counter skeptics of the film-asphilosophy debate by highlighting the underlying synthesis of philosophical and aesthetic elements in serious film interpretation. Sinnerbrink contends that “We can only ‘demonstrate’ whether a film makes a philosophical contribution by offering aesthetically receptive, hermeneutically defensible and philosophically original interpretations of the films in question.”28 Sinnerbrink’s meaning is that we can only defend our view that a given film makes a contribution to philosophy by giving a discursive account of how and why this is so. To make his case, Sinnerbrink provides in-depth readings of three films by “auteur,” postmodern filmmakers: David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, and Terrence Malick’s The New World. He suggests that these films are natural candidates for the film-as-philosophy designation because they genuinely seem to demand interpretation. Thoughtful, interrogative viewing seems essential to uncovering the meaning and message of these films, which lay beneath the surface impressions they immediately yield. These are films that press the boundaries of the medium to such an extent that their nonlinear, unconventional, and challenging aspects call for new ways of thinking and sense-making.29 What I want to extract from Sinnerbrink can be briefly summarized. First, film, as he describes it, is “a dynamic artform, open to technical, aesthetic and practical innovations.”30 Film resists essentialist accounts, and as such, it is difficult (if not self-defeating) to propose a strict tabulation of the medium’s inherent capacities or limits.31 Films are also inherently multivalent in their content and form, and we need to maintain an openness to their aesthetic power.32 Finally, and most significantly, films are philosophical, in an important sense, when they naturally lend themselves to philosophical reading, interpretation, or criticism.33 This last claim is easy to misunderstand, because it sounds as if Sinnerbrink is arguing that philosophy occurs through films whenever they inspire philosophical musings in their viewers. But the deeper point he is making involves film’s capacity to occasion new pathways of thinking, new perspectives and questions, precisely by virtue of the unfixed essence of the medium. While it is true that narrative, fiction film usually relies on oral discourse (which is of course not uniquely cinematic), film is a hybrid medium of this and many other elements, such as camera focus, length



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of shot, lighting, sound engineering, and editing. As Sinnerbrink describes it, “the philosophical contribution film can make is more akin to showing rather than saying.”34 Works done in the filmic medium have their own unique aesthetic effects, fostering human thinking in their own unique ways; for instance, we might recall the previous chapter’s account of the poetic potential of film images vis-à-vis Heidegger’s philosophy of art. Or, one can also cite the observation of philosophers of film such as Thomas Wartenburg who bring attention to the discursive power of visual examples in driving home philosophical ideas and problematics.35 Sinnerbrink’s more crucial point in my estimation is that we also need to give more credence to the specifically interpretive, critical dimension films can afford the viewer. This assertion emphasizes the essential connection between the film’s depiction and the viewer’s act of interpretation. Especially with more sophisticated, adventurous filmmaking such as that exemplified in Inland Empire, Antichrist, or The New World, Sinnerbrink’s point is that philosophical film criticism is part and parcel of successfully appreciating what a given film is and what it accomplishes. The criticism and the film-viewing are not two different things. To defend this view further, one might recall Heidegger’s account in Being and Time of Dasein’s capacity for interpretation. Interpretation in that work is defined simply as the activation or development of understanding. Dasein interprets whatever it understands; interpretation is not something extra that one can either do or not according to one’s choice. Instead, the crux is that human experience is fundamentally interpretive; it is always predicated on dimensions of “seeing-as,” or “fore-having.” This is to say that Dasein is interpretation, in the manner that experience, being-in-theworld, proceeds from a prior understanding and projection of oneself. One’s interpretation is thus bound up with one’s own facticity and history. In the case of film-viewing, what this means for Sinnerbrink’s account of thoughtful film interpretation and criticism is that these stem from the existentiality of the very film experience. Whereas, while one can be inclined to downplay notions such as this on the ground that it is just one’s “interpretation,” the thrust from the side of Dasein is that there are oftentimes existential reasons behind one’s interpretation. Putting it more explicitly, oftentimes the philosophical content of a film comes across a certain way because the viewing Dasein exists in a state (a hermeneutic or historical state for instance) that causes this. In response to the skeptical accounts of Livingston and others36, the decisive difference here for defending film-as-philosophy is expressed in a view also advocated by Cavell. Filmic media ought to be considered as offering new ways of thinking that need not be discounted just because they transcend (or otherwise only roughly translate into) ordinary philosophical discourse. As Cavell argues, rather than undermining a given film’s philosophical value,

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the awkwardness inherent in the philosophical interpretation of films is precisely the point. That is, if we concede that films can generate new experiences on the part of the viewer, then these new experiences will likewise command their own unique form of analysis and philosophical expression. Cavell writes, “This is an epitome of the nature of conversation about film generally, that those who are experiencing again, and expressing, moments of a film are at times apt to become incomprehensible…to those who are not experiencing them….”37 This is because “[a] reading of a film sets up a continuous appeal to the experience of the film….”38 Again, I believe Sinnerbrink’s observation regarding film’s “showing” is apt; what a given film presents can be philosophically provocative precisely because it shows something which is both genuinely novel and does not readily lend itself to verbal articulation—although such articulation certainly is not impossible.39 Recalling Heidegger’s account of the poetic experience fostered in the work of art, it is apposite to acknowledge the fashion in which this experience is fundamentally signal. The event of being’s disclosure via art or philosophy is, in a manner of speaking, pre-linguistic. Sinnerbrink’s comments on philosophical film interpretation substantiate my notion of philosophy occurring in unexpected forms, and in ways one cannot anticipate. Sinnerbrink expresses a sentiment akin to my Heideggerian interpretation of this topic when he writes that in order to validate the film-as-philosophy thesis (through studies of specific films), “we will have to engage with aesthetic, hermeneutic and other relevant criteria that fall outside the domain of philosophical argumentation, narrowly construed. In sum, we can only defend the film-as-philosophy thesis by interdisciplinary means….”40 Justifying the proposition that film can operate in the condition of philosophy requires envisioning philosophy within broader, more flexible boundaries, where new visions, questions, and hints are seen as legitimate philosophical accomplishments. What I propose to add to Sinnerbrink’s account is the following Heideggerian observation: to regard philosophy according to such wider boundaries means letting philosophy occur by virtue of its own power, without recourse to particular notions of what philosophy is or should be. In another writing, Sinnerbrink gives a Heideggerian reading of The Thin Red Line in order to describe how it exemplifies film-as-philosophy according to such unique aesthetic and hermeneutic criteria. I suggest that his account complements my reasons for labeling this film an instance of a phenomenological ontology: The Thin Red Line is an enactment of…cinematic poesis, revealing different ways in which we can relate to our own mortality, to the finitude of Being, the radiance of Nature, as well as depicting, from multiple character-perspectives,



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the experience of loss, of violence, of humanity, and of just letting things be. This showing is enacted not simply at the level of narrative content or visual style; it involves the very capacity of cinema to reawaken different kinds of attunement or mood through sound and image, revealing otherwise concealed aspects— visual, aural, affective, and temporal—of our finite being-in-the-world.41

Sinnerbrink’s reading reinforces a claim I highlighted already, namely that the viewer of The Thin Red Line gains a philosophical perspective on the phenomenological ontology of war—and particularly as it is relevant for one’s own being-in-the-world. This accomplishment of the film takes place in a manner over and above the level of mere discourse, in comportments such as questioning and wondering, where showing and revealing occur in ways not limited to the visual and audible.42 STEPHEN MULHALL Stephen Mulhall also regards philosophy in a more expansive light, namely one of self-questioning and reflecting upon its own conditions. His work in fact figures among the first attempts in post-Cavellian philosophy of film to popularize film’s own modes of cinematic, philosophical thinking. Mulhall sees film-as-philosophy in ostensive terms: if a given film presents itself in a reflective, self-questioning auspice, then this provides sufficient grounding to label it philosophy. This orientation is clearly somewhat Heideggerian, through its emphasis on philosophy as questioning and open-minded reflection, as opposed to philosophy understood as analytically rigorous argumentation and so forth. Like Sinnerbrink, Mulhall holds that the possibility of film-as-philosophy is best demonstrated in readings of particular films, and in the manner in which these films can be seen to reflect on their conditions.43 This last claim has also been the subject of critics’ strongest opposition to Mulhall, on the ground that Mulhall’s readings are just that—that his readings are only his interpretations.44 A paradigm case for Mulhall is the Alien series. This series is premised on a science-fiction scenario in which human beings encounter an alien species in a remote corner of the universe. The discovery of this species poses (as Mulhall argues) new ways for understanding human life and its relation to nonhuman life. Mulhall reads the series as exhibiting a fundamentally philosophical character by virtue of its sustained meditations on themes of life, sexuality, and embodiment, such that these do not merely drive the narrative but are also questioned and revealed in a new light. He characterizes these themes as “inter-related anxieties about human identity,” anxieties which occasion the following questions:

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What exactly is my place in nature? How far does the (natural) human ability to develop technology alienate us from the natural world? Am I (or am I in) my body? How sharply does my gender define me? How vulnerable does my body make me? Is sexual reproduction a threat to my integrity, and if so, does the reality and nature of that threat depend on whether I am a man or a woman?45

In Mulhall’s reading, the philosophical reflection initiated in the first film in the series, Aliens, challenges ordinary conventions regarding the status of the human being as the dominant life form of the universe. The human characters encounter an existential threat when they discover a seemingly superior species, a species that nonetheless needs human bodies in order to propagate. The alien species can only reproduce by way of impregnating a carrier vessel—in this case, a human body. The “male” alien implants its embryo by forcefully probing into the host’s mouth, throat, and stomach, where the embryo then gestates. To be human in this scenario thus poses the possibility of becoming a “female” carrier for another species’ continuation. Thus, Aliens suggests new paradigms for notions of body, gender, and biological purpose. Certainly, a safe bet in Mulhall’s approach is the working supposition that the Alien films sustain philosophical interpretation. More difficult to justify is Mulhall’s claim that these films actually perform original philosophical thinking in their own right. In one of his most striking series of claims, he writes: [T]he sophistication and self-awareness with which these films deploy and develop that issue [of human identity to embodiment],… suggest to me that they should be taken as making real contributions to these intellectual debates…. I see them rather as themselves reflecting on and evaluating such views and arguments, as thinking seriously and systematically about them in just the way philosophers do…. they are philosophical exercises, philosophy in action—film as philosophizing.46

How does Mulhall defend this series of claims? A key premise in his reasoning is that the appearance of multiple sequels in the Alien series, each by a different, influential director, renders the subsequent films a series of reflections on the first film’s premises.47 The series progresses philosophically by “reflecting upon the conditions of its own possibility,” a feature that lends these films “as good a characterization as could be desired of the way in which any truly rigorous philosophy must proceed….”48 To summarize, there are two central claims at work in Mulhall’s account. First, that the convention of film sequeldom represents a sort of self-questioning based upon logical starting conditions. And second, that because such self-questioning is characteristic of philosophy par excellence, the reflective, self-questioning style of these films emerges as a form of philosophy as well.



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On the notion of questioning, Mulhall’s meaning seems to be that the specific premises of the films lend them their questioning or, really, question-able character. With the first film of the Alien series, we get premises which are explored and opened up as the series continues. But again, why label it “philosophy”? A crucial qualification seems to be what Heidegger would label the factical and projective import of the questions these films pose. That is, the “questioning” posed by these films gains its philosophical character just insofar as it specifically engages and analyzes the facts of what it means to be human (in such fashion that these remain in question as the series proceeds).49 A line of argumentation develops in the films according to which new paradigms projectively arise for understanding what it could mean to be human, namely existentially threatened by another species, a carrier vessel for that species’ progeny, etc. So Mulhall’s central argument about film-asphilosophy in the Alien series has its cash value in the progress these films make toward establishing new truth-claims and paradigms for understanding humanness.50 More importantly, Mulhall’s account especially brings out the experiential phenomenology bound up in the very notion of film-as-philosophy. Mulhall is not making a claim about discursive messages that films convey in explicit verbal terms—pace Russell, not at issue is whether a given film’s philosophical message is perfectly clear, or whether its conclusions are precisely stated. In fact, there is not an external philosophical argument to be grafted onto this film if we adopt Mulhall’s reading; the only “meta-text” Mulhall’s reading supposes is the film itself and where the film’s starting premises take the viewer. Mulhall’s thesis, then, turns on the viewer’s acceptance of and participation in the logical premises the film offers. Insofar as the Alien series performs its philosophical reflection based upon specific starting premises about what it means to be human, the film’s human viewer is in a hermeneutical, factical position to appropriate this meaning. Therefore, what makes Mulhall’s argumentation successful in this regard is its predication upon the philosophy in which the human viewer engages by virtue of viewing the film at all; with the Alien films, this is philosophical activity which deepens the viewer’s own self-knowledge. Another way to make sense of Mulhall’s argumentation is simply to consider the instructive power of images in the human thought process. Philosophers have long recognized that thinking more often than not occurs with images or using images. Aristotle and Kant are a couple of seminal thinkers who hold that images are in fact indispensable for thinking. An image can often capture an idea in the way that words cannot; and alternately, many individuals are able to understand a concept more easily when seeing it represented pictorially.51 I suggest that at the heart of Mulhall’s position is an indication of this fact. Films such as the Alien series foster philosophy for

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the human viewer by making their philosophical ideas pictorially visible. This last claim is similar to Deleuze’s observation in Cinema 1 that a decisive realization in the history of film is the capacity for movement-images to exhibit mental relations to one another, namely that images can inform other images, in the manner of engendering a cinematic thought process. Mulhall does not draw upon Deleuze in his reading of the Alien series, but Deleuze’s conception of cinematic images enacting mental relations seems to encapsulate nicely what Mulhall has in mind.52 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS As I finish up, I would like to bring the phenomenological issues that I have highlighted into stronger focus. Film-as-philosophy presupposes a definite hermeneutical identity between screen and viewer. To speak intelligibly of film-as-philosophy, positively conceived, tacitly characterizes an occurrence that happens with and through the viewer.53 Film-as-philosophy cannot refer simply to a characteristic of a given film in its own right. In Mulhall’s defense, however, there is nonetheless a phenomenological precondition embedded in the very notion of film-as-philosophy that his thesis importantly brings out: namely, if a film strikes us as performing a unique philosophical exercise, then this is because it is in fact doing so in some way or other.54 This conclusion does not necessarily entail that merely any film instantiates film-as-philosophy. But it does place the burden more squarely on viewer experience insofar as it is occasioned by the given film. In this same spirit, I suggest that Heidegger’s account of philosophy opens up an alternative to orthodox conceptions of film-as-philosophy, where philosophy is only conceived according to certain standard practices. I have drawn on Heidegger as a counterpoint to traditional sensibilities on this topic in order to substantiate my claim that there can be no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the occurrence of philosophy in film. This approach has served to illustrate that certain films may engage in philosophy in Heidegger’s sense of the term, as phenomenological ontology. Likewise, we need to maintain a more open notion of what it means for philosophy to occur in the first place before we rush to judgment about its occurrence through film. According to the later Heideggerian view, the only necessary stipulation one needs make is that philosophy maintains its basic orientation of questioning and seeking. Anything more than this is tantamount to an arbitrarily chosen methodology, framework, or world view.55 The gist of my position is that if a film affords the viewer insight into the nature of things, that is, if a film’s selfshowing opens up new modes of understanding, then it is an instance of philosophy.56 Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, gave independent reasoning for the



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notion that discourse has its locus in Dasein, and that artworks—human-centric instances of truth as aletheia—can foster the origination of language. The present chapter has delivered on the premises of the previous two chapters by indicating some ways that film-as-philosophy exhibits a similar dynamic. It is neither wholly an activity of films, nor something viewing Dasein performs without input. Rather, it involves both of these, in the bi-lateral direction of viewer comportment to film, and of film’s disclosure to the viewer. The next chapters explore these issues in the context of selected films that might be said to exhibit vivid, yet challenging instances of film-as-philosophy. NOTES 1. Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), Conclusion. 2. Kevin Stoehr, “By Cinematic Means Alone: The Russell-Wartenburg-Carroll Debate,” Film and Philosophy 15 (2011), 114. 3. For a fuller parallel account of this film, see Laura T. Di Summa-Knoop, “‘It is Like It is Always Right Now’: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and the FictionNonfiction Divide,” Film and Philosophy 20 (2016): 55–57. 4. Herbert Granger’s reading of Le Feu follet is an example of film meaning thus understood. Herbert Granger, “Cinematic Philosophy in Le Feu follet: The Search for a Meaningful Life,” Film and Philosophy 8 (2004): 74–90, esp. 75–76. 5. Shawn Loht, “Ethical Philosophy in Film, and the Question of Film as Philosophy: A Reading of The Tree of Life,” Film and Philosophy 18 (2014): 164–83. 6. Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed, esp. Ch.1–4. For some parallel accounts that argue on a similar basis, consider Stoehr, “By Cinematic Means Alone,” 120–21; Loht, “Film as Ethical Philosophy,” 173–74, 179–80; Daniel Wack, “How Movies Do Philosophy,” Film and Philosophy 18 (2014): 99–101. 7. Heidegger, “The Thing,” 163. 8. Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 88–89. 9. Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, eds. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), 173–85. 10. Indeed, Sinnerbrink observes several layers to the micro-macro framework of this film: “In both cases, the experience of war and conflict is made vivid dramatically and cinematically; how the event of a battle is more than the sum of any particular sequence of individual decisions or violent actions; how a kind of collective will-to-violence sweeps up individuals and groups in its fiery wake; how a malevolent energy begins to envelop the wills and moral agency of particular individuals and begins to deed upon itself in a collective act of self-destruction, going well beyond any material, military or strategic objectives.” Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 186–87. 11. Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed. 4–5. Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 10.

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12. For instance Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image,” 182–83. Also, Russell, “The Philosophical Limits of Film,” 389–90, and his “Film’s Limits: The Sequel,” Film and Philosophy 12 (2008), 12–13. 13. Frampton’s account is most apposite in this regard, but also consider Mulhall. See Frampton, Filmosophy, 47. Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed., 5–6. 14. Marrati, Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, 38–41. 15. Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures, 134. 16. Dennis J. Schmidt, interview by Richard Marshall, 3AM Magazine, February 25, 2017, http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tragedy-and-philosophy/. Walker Percy, The Message in a Bottle, 3–6; Cormac McCarthy, interview by Ira Flatow, Science Friday, January 1, 2016, https://sciencefriday.com/segments/from-theorigin-of-art-to-the-end-of-humanity/. 17. It is true that Heidegger’s phenomenological methodology does re-orient itself in the post-Being and Time work, but for present purposes I do not wish to get mired in this topic. 18. This claim is not unlike a parallel view Heidegger expresses in his philosophy of art, namely that art works occur in the guise of a happening or event. An art work’s accomplishment is not fixed or permanent, and the relevance of its meaning can vanish. 19. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 4. 20. Ibid., 6–7. 21. Martin Heidegger, Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 8–9. 22. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1977), 135–36. 23. For one instance, see Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Philosophy –Thinking and Poetizing, trans. Philip Jacques Brownstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 2. Also refer to Georg Kovacs, “Philosophy as Primordial Science,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John Van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 103. 24. Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, 3–4. 25. Marrati, Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy, 38. 26. See Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 33–34. 27. Todd DuFresne, “On Film, Theory, & ‘Film as Philosophy’: Or, Philosophy Goes Pop,” Film and Philosophy 15 (2011): 150. 28. Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 134. 29. Ibid., 137–39. 30. Ibid., 22–23. 31. Ibid., 44. 32. Ibid., 129–31, 134, 141. 33. Ibid., 131ff. 34. Ibid., 132–33. 35. Thomas Wartenburg, Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), esp. Ch.3.



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36. Paisley Livingston, “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy,” in Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, eds. Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2006), 13. 37. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 11. 38. Ibid. 39. Sinnerbrink develops this viewpoint further with regard to ethical philosophy in his more recent book Cinematic Ethics. In this work, Sinnerbrink applies the logic I have discussed to film’s ability to engage viewer emotional affect and empathy as a means for motivating an ethical perspective. For an excellent discussion of this phenomenon, see Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, Ch. 4, esp. the sections on the film A Separation. 40. Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film, 134–35. 41. Robert Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema? On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” Film-Philosophy 10 (2006): 35–36. 42. On the topic of wonder in The Thin Red Line, see Robert Clewis, “Heideggerian Wonder in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” Film and Philosophy 7 (2003): 22–36. 43. Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed., 3–6. 44. DuFresne, “On Film, Theory, & ‘Film as Philosophy’,” 147. 45. Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed., 3. 46. Ibid., 3–4. 47. Ibid., 4. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. “This cosmic backdrop makes it all but impossible to avoid grasping the ­narrative and thematic structure of the films in metaphysical or existential terms – as if the alien universe could not but concern itself with the human condition as such…” Ibid., 7. 50. Cf. Loht, “Film as Ethical Philosophy,” 178–79. 51. Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 138ff. Robert Sokolowsi, “Visual Intelligence in Painting,” Review of Metaphysics 59(2) (2005): 333. 52. Deleuze, Cinema I, Ch. 12, Section 1. 53. Stoehr, “By Cinematic Means Alone,” 120–21. 54. I mean this as a general, but not absolute, catch-all claim. Cf. Mulhall, On Film, 3rd ed., 3–4. 55. Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 135–36. 56. In my view this is an understated but crucial observation in Mulhall’s account. of the philosophy of the Alien films.

Chapter 5

Terrence Malick

This chapter and the two following are intended to be illustrations of some of the theoretical account offered up to this point. I have chosen to focus on selected works of three filmmakers whose cinematic achievement stands to exemplify each of the phenomenologies I have described thus far in this study. I will take up some films that I believe give us a lot to explore in Heideggerian terms, although I do not mean to couch these examples as the only ones that are relevant. Nor do I want to suggest an essentialist view that any of these films contain the “essence” of film or any similar teleological aesthetic films ought to meet. Rather, in the spirit of scholars such as Cavell and Mulhall, my interest is to help these example cases speak for themselves in expressing possibilities for the film medium. In the end, this is just one set of possibilities, yet I equally hope that my reading of these films can successfully point to important traits of film at large, that is, articulate some outlines of film’s (phenomenological) ontology. TERRENCE MALICK’S RELATIONSHIP TO HEIDEGGER In the present chapter I take up two films of the American filmmaker Terrence Malick. I say this with some caveat. For one thing, the amount of scholarship that has proposed connections between Malick and Heidegger might suggest that there is little more to be said on this subject. Stanley Cavell brought attention to Heidegger’s “presence” in the films of Malick in the second edition of The World Viewed,1 and ever since then the Malick-Heidegger connection has been taken by scholars as something of a given.2 Invoking Heidegger has become a somewhat standard way to interpret Malick’s films philosophically.3 This connection of Malick and Heidegger is certainly apt; much if not all of 149

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this connection stems from what is known about Malick’s personal biography at the beginning of his career.4 Before becoming a filmmaker, Malick was an aspiring academic philosopher. In addition to dabbling in reading Heidegger with Stanly Cavell at Harvard in the 1960s, he taught as Hubert Dreyfus’s teaching assistant at MIT for a time. He also published an English translation of Heidegger’s post-Being and Time essay “On the Essence of Ground” that is still widely used by many Heidegger scholars as a go-to translation of that work. There is some assumption that Malick would have continued with his study of Heidegger if he had not been derailed by the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle. Malick spent time at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship after his undergraduate study and planned to write a Ph.D. dissertation on the concept of world in Heidegger and Wittgenstein. It is reported that Ryle, an analytic philosopher, wanted Malick to write on something less abstract.5 Many scholars have found Malick’s films to be quite amenable to reading in terms of Heidegger’s brand of existentialism, especially Heidegger’s account of Dasein.6 In particular, the facets of Dasein scholars have highlighted include being-in-the-world, being-toward-death, thrownness, and authenticity. To be sure, Dasein offers an attractive framework for reading Malick’s work philosophically, but this concept is in fact broad enough to apply to countless other examples of film characters, and their stories and conflicts, not to mention any number of films that thematize the existential dimensions of life. Other recent applications of Dasein to film and television media include an analysis of the “House” character in the television show of the same name; and the uncanny aspect of Dasein exemplified in works of the horror genre.7 As some have recognized, however, it is questionable to suppose that, because Malick was an aspiring Heideggerian philosopher at one time, his films are therefore representative of Heideggerian philosophy.8 This dilemma is complicated by the fact that Malick has never spoken publicly about the seeming philosophical import of his films. He does not give interviews, and DVDs of his films have never included director’s commentaries. In this light, it has been suggested that we need to treat the Malick-Heidegger connection as a question rather than a given.9 I agree with the skepticism, because I tend to think that the application of Heidegger is just a little bit too easy and simplistic in helping to reckon with Malick’s work. (And indeed, Malick’s more recent films To the Wonder and Knight of Cups seem less immediately amenable to Heideggerian analysis.) While it may be true that Malick’s major films lend themselves to a Heideggerian, Dasein-centric interpretation, this overlooks the question of the application of other philosophers and philosophical theories. Because films are by nature multivalent, capable of expressing multiple philosophical frameworks at once, and because the film medium itself is a hybrid of many artistic components, we can “read” nearly any theoretical framework into a given film.10 And not only that, Dasein itself



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is a broad concept, as it concerns the existentiality of life. As a philosophical concept, Dasein and its structures can surely be read into countless films that articulate meaning-of-life issues or where one can observe a film addressing “existential” ideas. As such, reading Heidegger into Malick may not accomplish much aside from parsing a theory and illustrating it through an example. With all of this admittedly being said, I shall not break the pattern of philosophers of film reading Malick’s films in terms of Heidegger’s philosophy! However, what I propose to do differently is to steer away from using Heidegger as a foil for interpreting the narratives and human stories of Malick’s films. In other words, the distinction in my approach is that I wish to use Heidegger’s philosophy as a means for describing the phenomenological aspects of Malick’s films, and this just insofar as they are films. I do not aim to downplay the productive work others have done in finding ways to interpret Malick’s film narratives according to Heideggerian terms of Dasein and so forth, but this approach is simply not where my interest lay. The emphasis I wish to place, in contrast, concerns the experiential phenomenology at work in viewing Malick’s films, as well as what can be gleaned from this phenomenological account on behalf of the film medium at large. This is to say, I am less interested in whether Malick’s films display the presence of Heidegger’s philosophy or not; I am more interested in using Heidegger’s philosophy as a means of highlighting the phenomenology of film. It is true that my proposal may come across as question-begging—I have suggested that Heidegger is not necessarily factually relevant for interpreting Malick’s films, when I have at the same time suggested that Malick’s work provides a foundation for a Heideggerian phenomenology of film. What I can say in response to this criticism at the outset is that I think Malick’s films are nonetheless convenient for pointing to a number of the phenomenological aspects of film I wish to highlight. But by no means do I think that Malick is the only filmmaker we could start with. In chapter 6 I attempt to describe the films of Michael Haneke as an alternate example. But I also think any study of Heideggerian films, narratives, or filmmaking techniques would do well to begin with Malick, at least insofar as it offers an entry point to a deeper conversation, regardless of whether the Malick-Heidegger connection is indeed factual or just a coincidence.11 DAYS OF HEAVEN Synopsis Days of Heaven portrays a fictional story of three migrant workers who briefly settle on a sprawling wheat farm in the Texas panhandle during the early twentieth century. From the looks of it, the film is historically set in or

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around the roaring twenties. The main characters introduced during the first minutes are Bill (Richard Gere), his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams), and his pre-adolescent sister Linda (Linda Manz). We learn early on through the voiceover of Linda, who speaks as a narrator, that these three do not have a permanent home, but instead travel about having “adventures.” The film itself begins in the style of classic Hollywood cinema, with a lengthy sequence of beginning titles. A montage of photographic stills appears, depicting various scenes of early twentieth-century Americana. This sequence is accompanied by a musical background of the “Aquarium” piece from Saint-Saens’s orchestral suite Carnival of the Animals. Those familiar with “Aquarium” will likely recall its instantly recognizable hypnotic, repetitive lead melody, which is played by a string arrangement. The hypnotic opening of this piece is followed by a more playful piano phrasing that suggests something akin to an infinite puzzle or vortex. Morrison and Schur observe that this piece: …reverberates between folksy classicism and classy kitch … as if it were simulating an archetype so pervasive in the collective imagination that it could not be traced back to its origin. In its dreamy solemnity, the score achieves the effect of having been heard before—even if one is hearing it for the first time; likewise the photographs seem meant to appear as if already seen, even if one is unaware of their referents. They inhabit the sphere of the mythic, insofar as they seem to exist outside time, out of place, yet to evoke relatively local moods, styles, periods.12

The total effect of this sequence on the viewer immediately suggests that the film to follow consists of some portrayal of Americana, but which will contain an air of mystery or unresolved questions. As the title sequence comes to a close, Days of Heaven’s initial narrative scene depicts an urban industrial setting. Several men are shown shoveling coal into coke ovens in what appears to be an iron works. Bill is one of these men, becoming the character of focus in the sequence as he finds himself in a disagreement with the shift foreman. The sequence comes to an end when Bill punches the foreman, the latter dropping to the ground in a heap. Bill flees, though we do not learn whether the victim of the punch died from the blow. Noteworthy about this sequence is that we also do not know the cause of the conflict between Bill and the foreman, or the preceding backstory that make Bill erupt into this show of violence. In any event, one can only assume that the foreman’s injury is severe enough for Bill to flee the city; one infers this from the next sequence where Bill, Abby, and Linda appear riding on a train for presumably some duration of days or weeks. Linda’s voiceover narration commences here, as a montage depicts the three on a train among other migrants, finally



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arriving at a vast farm in Texas where they hop off the train trying to get work. Linda’s voiceover during this sequence provides a rich palette of historical and cultural context to their travel narrative. She says: [It] just used to be me and my brother. We used to do things together. We used to have fun. We used to roam the streets. There was people sufferin’ in pain and hunger. Some people, their tongues were hangin’ out of their mouth…. In fact, all three of us been going places. Looking for things, searching for things. Going on adventures. They told everybody they were brother and sister. My brother didn’t want nobody to know. You know how people are. You tell them something, they start talkin.’

The most substantial portion of the film’s narrative focuses on the three characters’ time at this vast estate, owned by a wealthy but solitary farmer (Sam Shepard) whose actual name is never mentioned. Bill and Abby initially conceal their romantic status in order to avoid suspicion of scandal, claiming that they are siblings. Though it is conveyed at different points that other people working on the estate suspect they are either hiding something or too comfortable with one another for a sibling relationship. One of those suspicious of Abby and Bill is the farmer’s right-hand man, an older, weathered man who is outspoken to the farmer on this subject. However, the farmer takes an interest in Abby and initially demonstrates no lack of faith in her intentions or backstory. A turning point in the story occurs when the estate owner voices his feelings to Abby and persuades her to marry him. At first, Bill is put off by the audacity of his competitor, but during the course of this occurrence he has also learned that the farmer is terminally ill and will likely die within a year. Bill and Abby agree that she will go through with the marriage on the assumption that after the farmer dies they will inherit his wealth and secure a life of comfort. This is also where the central conflict of the film occurs. Rather than focusing on the drama and suspense of these two characters trying to finagle their way to easy money, the film portrays a more silent conflict that plays out with Abby, and to a lesser extent, Bill. Linda remains in focus as well, though her comprehension of the situation seems more innocent and apathetic, as conveyed in her spoken narration. Although Abby is at first reticent to return the advances of her new husband, she eventually develops feelings for him. At the same time, Linda conveys in a voiceover that “instead of getting sicker,” the farmer “stayed the same.” This unexpected event causes the relationship of Bill and Abby to become more uncertain. Bill leaves the estate altogether for some unknown destination (while Linda stays) as he recognizes his arrangement with Abby is not tenable, at least for the time being. He seems to recognize that his fate has drawn him away from the place. Linda

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says in a voiceover: “He seen how it all was. She loved the farmer.” Abby for her part comes across as somewhat passive, at a crossroads with how to deal with her new circumstances. Various scenes depicting her interaction with her husband indicate that she cares for him and wishes she could give herself fully, while at the same time she can be seen holding herself back, out of feelings of guilt and confusion due to her prior commitment to Bill. However, to be clear, much of this drama is unspoken, with principal scenes seemingly composed in order to render ambiguity instead of clarity. This portion of the film comes to a climax when Bill returns somewhat unexpectedly and without fanfare. He attempts to continue his romance with Abby, in one scene waking her up during the night to run out of the house for a few hours’ freedom, and as we see later, embracing her in a gazebo during the twilight hours of evening. Prior to this gazebo scene the husband had shown some suspicion of inappropriate relations between Abby and Bill, at one point asking Abby “Why you let him touch you like that?” Abby’s answer is that this simply is her way of being affectionate with her brother. But the ruse finally emerges during the scene in which the husband sees Abby and Bill embracing and kissing in the gazebo. This scene is noteworthy when considered alongside the film’s other scenes that suggest the occurrence of some decisive action without this action being portrayed explicitly. In the present instance, we do not see exactly what happens in the gazebo, because gauzy curtains block the camera’s view of what transpires inside. Instead we only see silhouettes of human figures inside; these silhouettes offer just a visual suggestion of what actually is happening. Similarly, we do not know the exact state of mind of the husband as he witnesses this suspicious occurrence. We can only imagine that he assumes the worst. His suspicion seems to have erupted when he ties Abby, arms, legs and all, to a post on the porch of the estate house, in order to prevent her from escaping with Bill. At a moment when it seems as if things could not get worse for this man, an equally disheartening turn of events happens when the farm is overrun by huge swarms of wheat-consuming weevils. A montage of shots depicts the weevils quickly clearing the wheat fields, destroying all of the vegetation. The farmer tries to rally his workers to smoke out the weevils and prevent further catastrophe. A further climax ensues as Bill appears, running into the farmer amid the chaos; Bill tries to run away, and during the chase the husband swings a lantern at Bill and his stroke misses, setting the dry grass on fire. The fields are engulfed in flames, killing off the invading insects, but at the expense of Bill escaping and the farm engulfed in a conflagration—heaven becoming hell. When the morning comes we see the farmer on a horse, riding around his estate to survey the damage. He encounters Bill by chance. As they approach one another at close range, the farmer attempts to shoot Bill with a revolver but it misfires. Bill quickly stabs him with a knife, leaving him to die alone.



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This action happens quickly and without dialogue, as Bill appears to extend his knife hand more out of a self-defense reflex than from a desire to harm the farmer. Bill, Abby, and Linda flee the estate, though because they are now known fugitives they are forced to live on the run. Bill is later apprehended by authorities and killed. Linda gets sent to a boarding school, but she is depicted running away from it not long after she arrives. We do not learn of Abby’s fate, other than witnessing her parting ways with Linda. One can infer that she does walk away with some material wealth. Her attire in her final scene is that of a well-to-do person, not that of the more raggedy migrant worker she was at first. Analysis Days of Heaven is grounded in archetypal characters whose histories and personalities are vague. The film places more emphasis on what happens when these archetypes intersect on the idyllic Texas wheat farm, rather than emphasis on the characters’ personal development. One of the unique ways Malick highlights the archetypal nature of the film’s characters is with prominent use of Linda’s voiceover. Linda is noteworthy in this role because she is a character on the periphery of the events rather than someone directly involved. Not only that, her lack of maturity inhibits her ability to comprehend the shifts that take place in the three main adult characters. Her narrative insight comes across as somewhat random and often out of step with key turns of the storyline. Moreover, because Linda’s narration functions as our principal source of interpretation for the story, the result is a displacement of the film’s narration from the story that plays out visually. The characters appear as generalized, rather opaque instances of human subjectivity. By the film’s end, we have not learned much more about these characters than we knew at the beginning. More significantly, because the film’s scenes seem deliberately to eschew clarity, favoring ambiguity instead, the film as a whole refuses a comprehensive intelligibility. The elliptical style in which the film conveys its story results in key events of the story transpiring, yet without needing to be shown or verbally articulated; indeed, we might say that this convention refuses one’s total rationalization of the depicted events.13 Or perhaps better described, that the events depicted in film images convey themselves without the need for additional discourse. It is as if the how is less important than the that of what actually happened. We must rely on Linda’s testimony to a large extent because it is all that is provided. Her testimony offers some clues, for example, that Abby indeed fell in love with the farmer, and that the farmer’s sickness went into remission. But her testimony also obfuscates in other ways. Perhaps the clearest example of this contrast occurs in her final voiceover where she expresses good wishes for a friend; this friend could

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be Abby, but the identity of the friend is not made explicit. She says: “This girl, she didn’t know where she was goin’ or what she was gonna do. She didn’t have no money on her. Maybe she’d meet up with a character. I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.” This last voiceover is prominent just insofar as Linda expresses no regret, shame, or sadness over the previous events, particularly the death of her brother. It seems as if she does not comprehend much gravity in the situation, despite having witnessed the brutal killing of her brother and being complicit in the deception that led to the murder of the farmer. There is a degree of existential silence, a silent discourse as it were, to Linda’s words, conveying that the remaining details in this story will remain unsaid.14 A couple of other thematic motifs of Days of Heaven also bear further analysis. First, the tacit historical context depicted in this film strongly intersects with the quirks of its narrative. This historical placement of the story is conveyed right at the beginning of the film, in its title sequence, and reemphasized at points throughout. Bill, Abby, and Linda are shown as belonging to the migrant worker population of early twentieth-century America. They travel among many other migrants on the train, and work alongside migrants during their time at the wheat farm. Many of these other migrants represent the mixing bowl of immigrants in America during the open-door years of this economic heyday. We see Asians, eastern Europeans, African Americans, and Germans among those whose ancestry is readily identifiable. These figures are typically shown in contexts of keeping to themselves, holding close the small minutae of their cultural heritage. One notable scene where this is made particularly prominent is the marriage ceremony of Abby and the farmer. The ceremony is conducted by an eastern Orthodox priest, which is noteworthy for the lack of a Texas protestant or perhaps Catholic procession. Though again, as viewers, we are not provided with further context or insight on this issue. A parallel historical context is delivered in the geographical setting of Days of Heaven. The main part of the story is set in the Texas panhandle, at a time of rapid growth in America, a time at which industrial and agricultural production struggled to keep pace with demand. This is made evident in a scene depicting the farmer with his accountant, tallying up the year’s profits. The accountant conveys that this is the farmer’s best year ever, possibly making him “the richest man in the panhandle.” Certainly this man’s largesse and good fortune are impressive, but for the viewer witnessing these happenings, this prosperity is countered by the sadder fact that the historical moment lived by the farmer was quite short. Farming came to be a generally less profitable occupation in America in the later twentieth century, with improved agricultural methods and slowing population growth causing the price of grain to become much lower. And the large farms that once were owned and managed



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by families and individuals no longer exist in the idyllic form shown in the film; most industrial-scale farms of today are either owned or underwritten by corporations, with the farmer acting more as an operator-sharecropper. The film’s title provides a hermeneutic suggestion to this very effect, namely that the story represents “days of heaven.” The human characters receive a blessing that lasts for a short time, to live in the serene setting of a bountiful earth, reaping its gifts. By film’s end, this gift has been redeemed. One could make the metaphorical observation that the earth responds with a fury, a cyclical conflagration, even a vengeance as the characters’ scheme unravels colossally. The film’s emphasis on natural setting and the organic minutae of this setting is the second thematic motif I would like to address as I conclude this portion of my analysis. Malick’s camera work in Days of Heaven gives a lot of attention to a variety of natural subjects, including the flowing wheat fields and the seed-head or grain of the wheat blades, as well as various animals, insects, and birds. Malick’s use of long still shots in this film helps to highlight these very particularized organic objects, illustrating that they are items found in this given (and rather opulent) setting of America’s heartland. In this way the film seems to make an ontological assertion about the flora and fauna of this place and time, poetically articulating a relationship between the lived human world of the narrative and the natural surroundings that cradles this human world. In the same spirit, the starkly natural and pastoral setting provides a foil that mirrors the rise and fall of the characters.15 On the one hand, the film’s photographic emphasis on the diverse human characters who live on this farm, in their daily routine of backbreaking yet noble work, suggests that this human abode is of a piece with the silent earth. The human and the natural realms are not at odds with one another but cooperate harmoniously.16 Yet Days of Heaven strikes one as a depiction of failed human striving to harmonize with nature—and just as much so, failed attempts at interpersonal harmonization and self-realization—where nature’s opulent bounty and tempestuous violence reflect the coupling of human promise and catastrophe.17 Phenomenology In the present section I want to address the material we can leverage from Heidegger in order to make further sense of the phenomenological aspects of Dasein’s viewership of this film. Though in doing this, I want to draw upon much of the territory outlined above. First, let us address the transcendental aspects bound up with viewing this film and appropriating the meaning it offers. That is, what underlying conditions can we highlight regarding the possibility of viewing this film at all? Recall that in Heidegger’s account of Dasein from Being and Time, Dasein has the existential character of

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transcendence. This is to say, Dasein’s knowledge of things in the world is not predicated on any sort of “escape” from the mind, where cognition involves retrieving or capturing intelligible content from the outside world and then processing it after the fact. Rather, to be a Dasein is already to have a world, and to have objects and tools within ready grasp according to their practical function. Dasein has the essential character of existence, which means among other things, projection and de-distancing, such that it has the capacity to make things and meanings present. And similarly, the ways in which things take on meaning, the aspects in which they matter, are contingent on Dasein’s modes of being-in-the-world, that is, understanding, attunement, and discourse. Dasein has the character of “clearing,” illuminating the intelligibility of what it presences. And these existentials that comprise Dasein are also informed by Dasein’s historical facticity; one’s viewership does not occur as if the viewer’s mind is a blank slate. Instead, the disclosures afforded to viewing Dasein (in the present case, the disclosures of the film Days of Heaven) occur against the background of Dasein’s historical being. Putting these elements together, Days of Heaven functions as an example case of a film affording Dasein the presencing of a seminal historic moment. Yet equally at work is the disclosedness effected by viewing Dasein, in terms of Dasein’s comportment toward the film. For instance, the spatial and temporal distance between the viewer’s time and the time period of the film are de-distanced. The viewing Dasein can thus enter into the film world of Days of Heaven, observe the plight of its characters, and participate in the particular understanding the film effects. As I emphasize in chapter 2, I believe that phenomenologically speaking, we do not want to couch film experience as some sort of distanced watching from afar, such that we are severed from the film and its world by virtue of our knowledge that, for example, the story is fictional; an unreal, two-dimensional representation; shot on a set with artificial lighting and props; and conveying a story whose outcome has no bearing upon one. Rather, the existential projection bound up with film-viewing, originating in Dasein, makes the film world hermeneutically and existentially present. The historic aspect of Days of Heaven is an entry point for unraveling these items further. As viewers of this film, we are not history-less. In viewing this film, we experience a disclosedness of our historical identity. How does this disclosedness occur? Because we are Dasein, we already project ourselves there, into the world of the film. As viewers, we disclose ourselves. And as Daseins, that is, as beings concerned about and familiar with their own being, we proceed from some self-knowledge. So the world of Days of Heaven is not a totally foreign world for most of us; it is continuous with our being-in-theworld. Some things may be unfamiliar, but ostensibly there will also be much that we recognize either from our own personal experience or from historic



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meaning that we have made ours through education, “tribal knowledge,” word of mouth, and the like. Accordingly, I suggest that it is the projective, de-distancing character of our Dasein that enables us to disclose the historical and cultural meaning the film affords. The three existentials that express Dasein’s way of being-in the world are also crucially operative in the disclosures afforded by this film. With the existential of understanding, we can highlight a number of interrelated aspects. First, because understanding (and its activation in what Heidegger calls “interpretation”) is always predicated on a fore-having, or a pre-understanding, it is worth recalling that viewing of this film—indeed of any film—is likewise always consequent upon prior film-viewing and the sorts of conventions other films have already conveyed to one.18 This will include items such as genre, editing, focus, narration, cross-cutting, and similar techniques of the medium. A second layer is the ability of understanding for projecting forward and backward. The existential of understanding is not simply about processing information, or applying intuition to concepts, say, in static fashion. Understanding involves an ecstatic dimension of being beyond oneself, stretching past what is simply in front of one, as a projection from one’s current state of being. Hence the very narrative, temporal aspect experience in Days of Heaven or any other film is underwritten by this projective ek-stasis of Dasein. That all being said, let us examine a third layer of understanding here, which surely is the richest to take up. The existential features of understanding laid out here foster a disclosure—an interpretation—that comprises film images juxtaposed with one another, in temporal sequence. Dasein projects meaning—which is to say, it discloses intelligibility—from this juxtaposition of images. Hence, existentially speaking, Dasein’s interpretive understanding, the meaning it finds in this film, is derivative from Dasein’s underlying aspect of being-there in the film world. Days of Heaven is also ostensibly a film with a definite mooded character, consisting of several particular moods. Recall that mood occurs for Dasein through attunement; only insofar as Dasein is attuned in its surroundings can it experience mood and have disclosures that occur in a mooded fashion. Mood for its part impacts one’s understanding. In the case of film-centric moods, as I suggested in chapter 2, the mood fostered by a film occurs in the background of the viewer’s being-there. This mood colors one’s understanding and consequently one’s interpretation of what transpires in the film world. So what are the moods of Days of Heaven? The prevailing mood which is established early in the film is one of uncertainty and ambiguity. One does not know how to make sense of the offering of the film’s title sequence and its strange music; nor does the first proper scene, depicting Bill’s punch-out, yield many positive answers to what the film or its characters are about. This uncertainty pervades the scenes that follow, such that the mood of uncertainty

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renders one’s understanding in the scenes to follow as mystery-laden. Again, the point is that attuned mood and understanding are of a piece. They are two equiprimordial, mutually influential aspects of the underlying phenomenon of Dasein’s being-in. The middle portion of the film, particularly, the parts focused on the work of the laborers who tend to the wheat fields, in contrast shows a more muted, positive mood, even an optimism at points. The landscape is shown in a guise that renders it nurturing and wholesome, and the color quality of the cinematography in these scenes seems chosen in order to make the farming activity seem especially beautiful. One noteworthy scene in which this is particularly evident depicts the farm workers finishing their day’s work, just as the sun has gone down and darkness moves in. The workers are shown leaving the field. As they approach the direction of the camera at about a three-quarters angle, they are shown in pure shadow. We see the human figures in the form of silhouettes; the disclosure seems one of total serenity. However, the tense, suspenseful backdrop of the story of Abby, Bill, and the farmer, which bookends these scenes of tremendous beauty, pervades the muted optimism. One slowly gains the feeling that these characters are threatened, that their enterprise is doomed by some inevitable failure to come. And this mooded attunement inevitably pervades what we see; the mood influences our understanding or perception, although it is not certain as to exactly when this shift in mood takes place. This echoes Heidegger’s observation that moods are unpredictable and can take hold of their own power. I intend to speak at length of the topics of discourse, poetry, and language in the forthcoming chapters and sections. As a preliminary, in the case of Days of Heaven I shall highlight a few items that might introduce the reader to how these Heideggerian concepts have filmic application. First, the fact that Days of Heaven uses a narrator, in the voice of Linda, illustrates the natural existential connection between language and images. Language is coextensive with Dasein’s being-in-the-world, insofar as Dasein’s being includes the existential of discourse. The capacity for articulating things in words reflects our existence with and among our surroundings. The same phenomenon underlies our capacity for hearing the discourse of another. Hence, the natural disposition the viewer will have for comprehending the meaning of Linda’s narration, elliptical and off-centered it may be. The spoken language of Linda’s narration fits the film’s images such that one’s mooded understanding cues upon Linda’s discourse. Indeed, we can observe the role of what Heidegger labels Dasein’s discourse in the fact that our viewership is discursive, in a way that is responsive to the images and overall procession of the film. The images of the film occur to us—to our mooded understanding—intelligibly, in a fashion that our discursive articulation can respond to in kind. We can articulate meaning that is a response to the



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understanding we disclose in the film-world. For example, Malick’s frequent use of nature images—insects, plants and animals, landscapes—shown in prolonged still shots, while themselves offering a discursive foundation, also provides us with a basis for other discursive disclosures we experience in the film. This exemplifies the threefold structure of attunement, understanding, and discourse Heidegger describes with regard to Dasein’s ways of being “in” the world and of having things matter. What I have described so far in Days of Heaven engages elements of Heidegger’s account of Dasein from Being and Time for the purpose of indicating the phenomenology of the viewing of this film. In what follows I shall speak briefly regarding the phenomenological aspects of this film corresponding to the investigation from Chapters Three and Four above, on this film as Heideggerian art, and its exemplification of film-as-philosophy. The Art of Days of Heaven What features of Days of Heaven might contribute to its character as an artwork in Heidegger’s sense? As a start, we can cite some of its visible finitude, and thus, its “made,” crafted character. The film’s title sequence as described above is suggestive that the film to follow comprises a moment in keeping with this selection of photographs. As the film rolls, the depiction presents itself as something of a selection, a fragment, or a moment of this broader time in American history. And indeed, as already observed above, Days of Heaven does present itself in an historically conscious guise, where individual people and situations are bracketed as shadows, snapshots of the historical trajectory at work. In this way, Days of Heaven captures and preserves the truth of an historical moment in the American cultural identity. The very vivid use of magic-hour natural light and its effect on the coloration of the landscape similarly conveys the crafted, artisanal character of this film. Other aspects of this film that convey its workly character include its emphasis on still shots of landscapes—flora and fauna of the wheat farm—as well as more particular, out-of-view subjects, such as insects climbing up the grass blades, and grains of wheat on the heads of their plant. This technique of including many long stills conveys to the viewer a sense of emphasizing the subjects of these images in and of themselves, as if their depiction in the camera’s gaze has ample power to convey meaning. One might say that through these prolonged stills Malick’s camera makes implicit reference to itself and its role, but because it happens without commentary or elaboration, its effect is to reassert the camera’s subject. A final element that also plays a crucial role in conveying this film’s character as an artwork is its extensive emphasis on the interplay of light and shadow. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in this film’s multiple shots indicating human figures and artifacts in silhouette

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form. This feature of Days of Heaven is especially apposite vis-à-vis the film’s narrative and its characters being subject to a shades-of-grey dynamic, where the human situations and problems resist a black-and-white interpretation. Malick’s employment of shadow presents itself in this film as a stylistic choice of a cinematic potency, allowing the film’s fundamentally cinematic character to reveal itself. For among the unique things a film can exhibit in its workly character, as a film, is the manner in which things occur in light. Film captures its subjects in specifically lit-up, shown-up fashion, corresponding to their way of happening. And not only that. Film can also capture things that are given to appear in shadow or in muted color, or alternately, as we see in this film, human situations fraught with ambiguity and confusion. In sum, this film reveals its crafted character by virtue of its very emphasis on the conditions comprising its thinghood. Among other things, these include (as we have seen) light and shadow; stark coloration; assertion of images; editing; spoken words (but also silence); clarity and ambiguity. Among its other notable artistic features, Days of Heaven comes across on first glance as tailor-made for Heidegger’s notion of artworks as originating in the strife of world and earth. Much of what I have just said about light and shadow have bearing for this related distinction regarding world and earth. Insofar as earth represents for Heidegger the primal darkness and the ultimate abyss underlying world’s capacity for openness, the film’s employment of light and shadow, amidst the earth-borne abode housing the film’s story, is strongly resonant with Heidegger’s vision of earth’s enclosing power. We can regard the film’s various shadowy characters and situations as manifestation of earth’s temporary allowance of light to the world. The human figures and their activities rise and flourish in conjunction with the earth’s changing seasons. In these respects the film fosters truth as aletheia, bringing all of these historical, poetic, human aspects to bear from out of their intrinsic hiddenness. I say “intrinsic” hiddenness because at the end of the day, most of us do not “know” the sort of life or place Days of Heaven depicts. More than half of the American population lives in cities. Most are not farm workers and never will be. What the film accomplishes is, in a manner of speaking, a wresting of this truth from out of oblivion, where it can be preserved in the social consciousness. On a similar note, the film’s setting also strongly thematizes the interplay between world and earth. Indeed, the backdrop of the human story in this film could be said to portray this very strife. The generous bounty of the Texas wheat farm is emblematic of the cradling, nurturing character of the earth in granting sustenance to all who live upon it. The middle portion of the film provides an ontological assessment of just this relationship between humanity and earth, namely that the earth is our ultimate abode, and that the stewardship of wheat-farming exhibits this primordial communion. Yet, as the film’s



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depiction of the seasonal cycles of farming indicate, the earth’s gifts only last for a time, and then retreat until the next year. And earth’s abundant giving can sometimes withdraw altogether, in favor of pestilence and conflagration, what we sometimes refer to as “natural disaster.” The bequest the earth grants us is sometimes countered by a more violent temperament that occasionally erupts and which we have little power to stop. This hermeneutic is reinforced in the human side of the story, as the romances between Abby and her two lovers comes to a disastrous end; their days of heaven flourish for a time then wane into oblivion, leaving Abby alone to start completely over. I will close this section with some reflections on Heidegger’s conceptions on art as poetry. Terrence Malick is often characterized as a poetic filmmaker. But what does this mean? Days of Heaven (and Terrence Malick’s films more generally) can be said to instantiate a “poetic” cinema by virtue of fostering a filmic communication that by and large operates through metaphors. Rather than the metaphors being verbal, as in traditional poetry, here the metaphors are primarily visual. What about the deeper vision of poetry in the sense Heidegger uses this term? Heidegger writes in the “Origin” essay that all art originates in poetry. What would it mean to say that, as a work of art, Days of Heaven originates in poetry? I have leveraged the immediate observation that this film presents its images as if one is seeing them for the first time.19 However, the deeper meaning Heidegger’s thought invites here is that Days of Heaven also functions as a vision of being’s poetic way of revealing itself to the human realm. In other words, I suggest that in its guise as a Heideggerian artwork, we also think of Days of Heaven as a phenomenological disclosure of being, in an especially poetic form where language is married up with image. I propose that we use this film as an exemplar for conceiving (artistic) films as poetic manifestations of being. This is tantamount to recasting our notion of the film medium’s ontology, in favor of regarding films as loci of meaningful disclosures to viewing Dasein. Does Days of Heaven Present a Philosophy? Before I finish this section I would like to address the question of what kind of philosophy Days of Heaven can be said to present—indeed, of whether and how the viewer’s experience of this film includes anything akin to philosophy as I sketched it in chapter 4. The first observation I wish to make on this score is that I think Days of Heaven does not offer much explicit or implicit philosophical material that one can extract from its viewing. Patently this film works at the level of historical re-presentation, portraying individual human characters as microcosmic instantiations of broader, poetic themes. To try too hard in ferreting out some philosophical conclusion or concept from this film risks pressing an outlook on this film that is imposed or arbitrary. This being

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said, I think there are two directions where we can take the question of this film’s philosophical contribution and get some mileage out of it. First, in my view Days of Heaven offers a fine example of material for what Robert Sinnerbrink calls defensible philosophical film criticism. I say this because, while Days of Heaven ostensibly does not offer a tacit philosophical discourse, line of questioning, examination or testing of a thesis, what it does do is lend itself to a sophisticated, philosophically justifiable reading on the part of the viewer. Indeed, each of the items I highlighted above in the context of Heidegger’s philosophy of art are easily read out of the film, even for one who has no knowledge of philosophy or Heidegger’s work. In this way, while the film does not generate any philosophical insight per se, in the way that philosophers are inclined to describe it, this does not preclude the film nonetheless offering up insight that can enhance one’s understanding of oneself and one’s world. Secondly, and more crucially, for making some headway in the dialogue on film-as-philosophy, I do think we ought to give credence to what is less discernible on the surface with this film, and thus, what we stand to leverage through a phenomenological analysis. And much of this material has already made its way into the accounts I have given of this film. To spell out the principal item of my interest, I would like to highlight as especially noteworthy the prominence in Days of Heaven of the unseen in human life, and the way in which this unseen dimension is an inevitable dimension of having a world in which things are seen. While this is not a topic the film voices in explicit terms—and hence not a philosophical issue the film articulates in traditional discourse—we can nonetheless leverage it as a philosophical insight the film enables in us. Through this film’s indicating of the multilayered, unseen dimensions of the characters’ motivations and choices, we get a glimpse of what is unseen within what we do see. In keeping with what I described in chapter 4, what I think we get through this aspect of Days of Heaven is something like a phenomenological ontology of human life, and particularly, of the ties that bind people in love triangles and cases of mistaken identity. So in response to critical views of those who argue that film-as-philosophy is only genuinely possible in very limited, tacitly discursive guises, I would give the rejoinder that what is at issue is not what the film presents, so much as it is the hermeneutic that the film effects in the viewer. Recall that the film-asphilosophy conversation turns on whether films can be said to philosophize in their own right, which is to say, in purely or else primarily cinematic terms, and this in a manner that is not totally at the mercy of the viewer to articulate. What I would reiterate again here is the notion that, in order to avoid making the mistake of claiming that film-as-philosophy is solely an accomplishment of the film, one needs to concede the two-stage, dative process of manifestation actually involved. In a word, film-as-philosophy is in fact predicated on



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the film occasioning in the viewer an insight she would not otherwise have had. If it is conceded that human beings think and philosophize in terms of images, then in the present light, it should be easy to hold that we also think and philosophize cinematically. But what reason do we have to label the (admittedly fuzzy) sketch I have proposed for the philosophy of Days of Heaven as actual philosophy? For this question I suggest invoking the discussion of philosophy as I leveraged it from the opening of Being and Time. That is, I suggest thinking about the philosophy occasioned by Days of Heaven as a function of the factical state of the viewer in conjunction with the viewer’s understanding projection of herself into the film’s world. For it is a given that the viewer needs to be hermeneutically projected into the meaning the film affords. The viewer’s philosophizing state can only follow from out of a state of understanding— seated in Dasein’s structure of care—that cognizes its barriers and seeks to resolve these. And as we have seen, Days of Heaven filmically sets up a barrier for understanding, in the form of human characters and situations that refuse easy articulation, while nonetheless drawing attention to these precisely in their very refusal of intelligibility. To reiterate, what I want to contribute to the dialogue on film-as-philosophy is a general appreciation of the phenomenological nature of, on the one hand, the film affording a certain disclosure to the viewer, and on the other hand the viewer’s questioning, factical projection that discloses the film’s meaning. CONCLUSIONS AND SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE THIN RED LINE I spoke at length of Terrence Malick’s 1999 film The Thin Red Line in chapter 4. I do not wish to lengthen that discussion here by any great measure. However, I would like to close this chapter by highlighting some overlap between this film and my observations from Days of Heaven. If I were to give an exhaustive Heideggerian reading of The Thin Red Line akin to what I have written above, I would make many similar comparisons. The Thin Red Line clearly functions as a filmic instance of Heidegger’s conception of art (if there ever was one). It replays an historically seminal moment, yet in a fashion that this moment’s truth or aletheia echoes with much deeper existential resonance; it poeticizes itself through the mixture of discourse and image; its cinematic quality is prominent, in its overt, often exaggerated use of the filmmaker’s tool-set (editing; voiceover; lighting); it articulates the struggle of human life in its conflict with itself as well as with the earth. It does not merely “exhaust” its cinematic images—it does not use cinema as a means to an end—but instead makes cinema apparent. In other words, its cinematic

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quality affords us insight into what films can and cannot do. Part of its cinematic achievement lay in its respecting of the essential hiddenness of the ultimate foundations of what it has to show. Nature and human life, and the war and harmony of people—these are left to remain mysterious. Though the film’s setting and context are quite clear, its assemblage gives the presentiment of an artwork crafted to speak for itself.20 One specific way The Thin Red Line demonstrates a unique poetry, a poetry whose discourse is left for the viewer to interpret, is through its overt dis-assembly of character, image, and interior monologue. This feature of the film has been dissected at length in a magisterial article by Robert Pippin, which I heartily recommend to the reader. In brief, Pippin observes that the overtly philosophical and articulate voiceovers of The Thin Red Line’s characters are presented sharply out of step with the intelligence and demeanor of the characters as they are depicted on screen. What they do, versus what they “say” in their soliloquies, does not fit together. The most explicit example can be seen in the film’s leading character Private Witt. Although Witt demonstrates bravery in the highest degree and shows deep care for his comrades, as a human character he is not presented as the sharpest tool in the box. He is simple and for the most part, not sharply articulate. Yet, in his voiceover soliloquies, his interior voice is intelligent, articulate, and quite philosophical. A similar dichotomy, perhaps even more striking in its contrast of inner versus exterior voice, is observable in the character of Private Train. Train’s voice is both the first one heard in the film and the last. His opening voiceover questions the war in the heart of nature, asking why nature vies with itself. His final lines as the film closes read this way: Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? The brother. The friend. Darkness, light. Strife and love. Are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face? Oh, my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining.

In exterior terms, Private Train is simple as well, as his spoken dialogue conveys little more than the clichés and panicked musings of a very young



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man entering battle for the first time. This dichotomy of the interior and exterior states of the characters is paralleled by the contrast of the film’s emphasis on the grisly images of war’s violence and its repeated employment of nature motifs. Indeed, the film depicts war in the heart of nature, but in such a way that nature’s power is rendered questionable, even self-consuming. Much of the film’s images consist of recurring close-up shots of towering trees, swaying grasses, and other wonders of Guadalcanal’s vibrant tropical ecosystem. A number of these shots have their own metaphorical power. A token shot repeated throughout the film is an upward-looking camera gaze of treetops as viewed from the ground level. The camera looks toward the heavens, or toward God, seemingly representing a grander scheme to which the film’s episode belongs.21 Another shot depicts a tall tree swallowed up by vines, indicating that nature is cruel. Pippin’s observation from all of this is that the film presents to the viewer a poetic assemblage of images, characters, voices, and themes whose conflict can only be reconciled by the viewer. In other words, he reads this film to present a paradox, one that the film itself cannot resolve. More than this, Pippin also suggests that the film’s inherent paradox is also its truth.22 The implication is The Thin Red Line harbors within itself Heidegger’s vision of aletheia, the revealing truth-character of art. The one thing I would add to Pippin’s reading is the contribution of the existentiality of the viewing Dasein in all of this. For as Daseins, we do not view this film in a bubble; rather, we come to it with facticity, with an historical consciousness of our own history. We similarly come readymade with some discursive knowledge of war, and of the place of death in the circle of life. Nonetheless, we are able to find new meaning in the film (in Heidegger’s sense of Dasein’s capacity for “meaning”) because we can project ourselves into its world. The film’s world is not a foreign world but our world; the film’s characters are not “others,” they are us, informing our shared world. The ultimate point I am driving at is that, in our capacity as Daseins, we are able to grapple with The Thin Red Line as a Heideggerian work of art because we can be in its world. We are able to project ourselves understandingly into its world; we can appropriate its discourse; and we attune to its mood because these are existential features of Dasein. This is Dasein’s way of being, to articulate and appropriate intelligibility, to reveal meaning. And as Pippin’s reading suggests, The Thin Red Line presents intelligibility in the manner of a truthful work of art. In summary what I have attempted to highlight in this very short diversion is the meeting of film-viewing Dasein’s existentiality, and the truth-fostering character of art.

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NOTES 1. Cavell, The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition, xiv–xv. 2. Most recently: Thomas Deane Tucker and Steward Kendall, “Introduction,” in Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. Thomas Deane Tucker and Steward Kendall (London: Continuum, 2011), 1–2; Steven Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012); Martin Woessner, “What is Heideggerian Cinema?” New German Critique 38(2) (2011): 129–57. 3. See, for instance, Rybin, Terrence Malick, xiv. 4. Robert Sinnerbrink, “Re-Enfranchising Film: Towards a Romantic Film-Philosophy,” in New Takes in Film-Philosophy, eds. Havi Carel and Greg Tuck (London: Continuum, 2011), 39. 5. For a fuller account of Malick’s philosophical education and scholarship, see Woessner, “What is Heideggerian Cinema?” esp. 129–41. 6. Prominent examples include Rybin, Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film, esp. 14–15, 26–30; Simon Critchley, “Calm: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line,” Film-Philosophy 6(1) (2002): 1–15; Marc Fursteneau and Leslie McEvoy, “Terrence Malick’s Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red Line,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, 2nd ed., ed. Hannah Patterson (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 189. Rybin’s monograph is particularly praiseworthy, however, in its broader incorporation of texts from across Heidegger’s corpus including The Essence of Reasons, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Although, his work is largely written from a cinema studies perspective and often engages Heidegger in only cursory fashion. 7. Dasein and its existential categories also figure into the much smaller literature that applies Heidegger’s philosophy to films and television outside of Malick. See, for instance, Curtis Bowman, “Heidegger, the Uncanny, and Jacques Tourneur’s Horror Films,” in Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror, eds. Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel Shaw (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 65–84; Leigh Rich and Jack Simmons, “Heidegger and House: The Twofold Task in Working Out the Question of American Medicine,” Film and Philosophy 15 (2011): 49–70; Erin Kealey, “Who Would You Be in a Zombie Apocalypse?” Film and Philosophy 16 (2012): 34–52. 8. This issue has received some attention in the scholarship. See, for instance, Iain Macdonald’s incisive observation: “it is not at all clear that Malick is (or why he should be) interested in remaining faithful to his original philosophical interest in Heidegger.” Iain Macdonald, “Nature and the Will to Power in Terrence Malick’s The New World,” in The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 88. Also see Stuart Kendall, “The Tragic Indiscernability of Days of Heaven,” Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, eds. Stuart Kendall and Thomas Deane Tucker (London: Continuum, 2011), 153, 164. 9. Critchley, “Calm,” 7. “Any philosophical reading of film has to be a reading of film, of what Heidegger would call der Sache selbst, the thing itself. A philosophical reading of film should not be concerned with ideas about the thing, but with the thing itself, the cinematic Sache.” Also see Sinnerbrink, “A Heideggerian Cinema?”



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29. More recently, see Sinnerbrink’s essay entitled “Song of the Earth: Cinematic Romanticism in Terrence Malick’s The New World,” in Robert Sinnerbrink, New Philosophies of Film (London: Continuum, 2011), 180–81. 10. David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 28. 11. For a fuller survey of many of these issues, see Shawn Loht, “Film as Heideggerian Art? A Re-Assessment of Heidegger, Film, and his Connection to Terrence Malick,” Film and Philosophy 17 (2013): 113–36. 12. James Morrison and Thomas Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick (Westport, Mass: Praeger Press, 2003), 46–47. 13. This wonderful observation of Morrison and Schur strikes me as especially fitting: “It is worth pausing here to ask whether, … Is to show a thing to describe it?... [W]e will likely conclude that words are always reaching out toward images, images forever striving to be put into words. Following this logic, to show something presumably means that there is no need to describe it, and conversely, writers would not need to describe, if only they could show…” Ibid., 48. 14. Ibid., 40. 15. Cf. Woessner, “What is Heideggerian Cinema?” 146. 16. Morrison and Schur, The Films of Terrence Malick, 47. 17. Woessner, “What is Heideggerian Cinema?” 147. 18. This factor figures very strongly into Robert Pippin’s analysis of Malick’s next film The Thin Red Line (see conclusions section). 19. Adrian Martin, “Things to Look into: The Cinema of Terrence Malick,” Rouge 10 (2006) (no page numbers). 20. David Davies, “Vision, Touch, and Embodiment in The Thin Red Line,” The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009), 60. 21. Cf. Hubert Dreyfus and Camilo Salazar Prince, “The Thin Red Line: Dying Without Demise, Demise Without Dying,” in The Thin Red Line, ed. David Davies (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 41–43. 22. Pippin, “Vernacular Metaphysics,” 267ff.

Chapter 6

Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown and The White Ribbon

This chapter examines two films by the contemporary German filmmaker Michael Haneke (b. 1942), in order to explore further avenues of application for the theoretical material discussed in chapters 1–4. As with my approach in chapter 5, I do not have a goal of providing an exhaustive analysis of every application of Heidegger’s thought to these films. Instead, my goal is to highlight items in these films for which Heideggerian concepts have exceptional relevance in illuminating the phenomenology of film. Accordingly, I focus on some features of the viewing Dasein’s existentiality that these films bring out. I also focus on the manner in which the selected films exhibit characteristics of Heidegger’s conception of artworks. CODE UNKNOWN Synopsis Code Unknown is distinct among the films I have chosen to discuss because it does not present a plot-oriented narrative. In fact, its original billing conveys the intention to eschew closure and fullness; the full title of its original French release is Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages. Although one may regard its narrative according to the label of “erotetic,” a narrative that proceeds by raising questions for the viewer, Code Unknown’s questions do not become answered as the film proceeds. Rather, the film’s sequences present variations on the central themes of communication, and more abstractly, trust, intimacy, and honesty, as these are manifested among an ensemble of citizens and immigrants living in the city of Paris. The lives of these characters briefly intersect at the film’s start, though from this point onward their 171

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connection becomes more elliptical and abstract. By the film’s end, several of these characters have separated from their families and associates, their intimate relations having broken down. Hence the title of this film comes across as particularly apt: the name Code Unknown functions as a blankly poetic expression of the connection of human characters who share an underlying discursive commonality, but where this commonality is either unarticulated or very difficult to articulate. The film begins with a scene depicting a deaf child playing at charades in a school room. The children watching the charading performer, all of whom also appear to be deaf, are attempting to guess which emotion is being mimed. They indicate their guesses in sign language. Each guess is unsuccessful and we are left in the dark as to the correct answer. The principal narrative of the film commences in the next scene, with a street scene in an average commercial corridor of Paris. A young man named Jean (Alexandre Hamidi) is shown bumping into the romantic partner, Anne (Juliette Binoche), of his elder brother Georges (Thierry Neuvic). We learn that Jean has just been at her apartment looking for her, but that she did not hear him ring. Jean explains that he has run away from the family farm, never to return, in what appears to be a typical act of teenage rebellion; his father wants him to train for taking over the family’s farming business, while Jean craves independence and the urban life. Anne agrees to allow Jean to stay at her apartment, but only until Georges returns from his reporting assignment in Eastern Europe. Georges is employed as a photojournalist, dispatched to the war-torn Balkan region. This initial encounter between Jean and Anne comes to a climax when Jean discards some wastepaper by throwing it in the lap of a poor beggar woman, Maria, who is sitting on the sidewalk next to a storefront. A twenty-something African immigrant, Amadou (Ona Lu Yenke), witnesses Jean’s rude act and accosts him, demanding that he go back and apologize to the woman he has insulted. Jean refuses, and after some prolonged arguing, he and Amadou get into a tousle. They are stopped by police who later arrest Amadou; the police and bystanders hastily gather that Amadou, the African foreigner, was the instigator and the guiltier of the two. The woman is also taken away, and shortly after we see her boarding a plane escorted by police; the tacit implication is that the authorities are deporting Maria to her home country. From here, the storyline of the film splits off into multiple directions of parallel narratives, into further minutae of the lives of Anne, Jean, Amadou, and Maria. We are introduced to Amadou’s household, which consists of a number of children (of which he is the eldest) as well as his parents. From their dialogue one gathers that their integration into French society has not gone smoothly, although they seem to be peaceful and flexible people. The home life of Maria is presented more obliquely; when she returns to her home country of Romania, her family and friends greet her warmly, but she does



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not explain much about her time in Paris and she makes no mention of her deportation or difficulty earning money. The family life of Georges and Jean is equally fractious, as depicted on the farm estate of their father. Neither son has a stable, open relationship with the father. The father for his part struggles to keep up his farm in the face of poor economic prospects for the future, seemingly at odds with himself over whether it is even worth the effort to try. The further the film proceeds, the more Georges comes across as a stranger in his own country. In a scene, he conveys that he feels more comfortable working on location in the war zone where he has been assigned. He suggests that this is where the real life is, such that people who only know world affairs via news and journalism are out of touch and uninformed. The irony of Georges’s world view is his occupation and general interest in photography. Photojournalism is a medium that, among other things, captures images of people and events so that others can see them without being present. As a means of news-reporting, photojournalism is predicated on an understanding between viewer and photographer, a trust that what appears in the photographs is truly as depicted, reflective of reality. Anne and Georges have a tendentious relationship; this comes out most strongly in a scene that occurs in a supermarket. They have an argument that escalates due to Georges’s aloofness, which seems to become especially bothersome for Anne in the context of Georges’s regular travel out of the country. Rather than try to assuage Anne’s frustration with him and reconcile the conflict, he becomes more distant. Things come to a head when she raises a rhetorical question out of the blue: “What if I were pregnant?” Georges is caught off guard by the question. Anne refuses to answer his pleas to know whether this is true. Georges comes around apologetically and they embrace passionately, though this reconciliation ends quickly as they become selfaware of their public display. One gains the sense during this brief reconciliation that nothing has really been repaired, that these two will be at odds with each other again in no time. Their relationship breaks up at the end of the film, creating something like a completion to the story, or at least a suggestion that the present chapter in these characters’ lives is coming to a close. Georges is shown returning from another assignment abroad, but when he arrives at Anne’s apartment the entry passcode for her building no longer works. He heads toward a call box to telephone her; however, before picking up the receiver to dial he appears to have second thoughts, and approaches the street to find a taxi instead. The viewer does not learn any further whether Anne intentionally changed her apartment passcode to lock Georges out, whether he himself has forgotten the passcode, or whether this incident only happened by accident. One can only gather that Georges has opted not to return to Anne and that he ultimately favors his life on the road. Figuratively speaking, he does not “know” the “code” to his and Anne’s life together, much less the

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code of civilized life in an urban center. This completion of their story finds a counterpoint in the return of the beggar woman Maria to Paris, to the same street she occupied previously. One does not know what her exact plans are, or how long she will stay, outside of the assumption that she has again told her family that she is travelling to Paris to earn money. Stylistically, Code Unknown will strike the thoughtful viewer as challenging a number of filmmaking conventions. The most striking technique the film employs in this regard is its assemblage of by and large disconnected scenes of human life, in the service of a very sparsely explained narrative containing characters who bear little relationship to one another. In other words, it differs from conventional narrative cinema in that a conventional fiction film will make its plot and premise much clearer from the start. Conventional narrative films typically reveal who their characters are and what motivations drive them. Code Unknown provides much less detail in these areas, seemingly just enough to make a minimum amount of narrative intelligibility possible. Code Unknown also poses this kind of challenge in the composition and editing of its scenes, many of which seem written in order to confound or at least in order to demand sharp comprehension on the viewer’s part. A number of scenes consist of virtually no action whatsoever, or a lack of activity that ostensibly demands of the viewer a keen discernment of what might be happening. Occasionally, these uneventful scenes are “narrativized”1 but it usually is elliptical. The film’s first scene, of the deaf children playing at charades, is one such example. No narrative ever ensues from this initial display; the discernable connection that emerges later remains more thematic and metaphorical. Another example is a scene depicting Anne alone in her apartment, watching television while she irons laundry; a faint sound of distress from another apartment interrupts her. We only later infer that this noise she heard over the television was in fact coming from a young child being abused in a neighboring apartment; a scene depicting Anne at the funeral of a child is the only clue provided for this inference. A third example, even more elliptical than these first two, shows the farmer at work on his farm; the scene is shot from a stationary camera as the farmer is depicted driving his tractor down a field, turning the earth over with a plowing attachment. Nothing else occurs in this scene other than the entrance and exit of the tractor into the shot and out again, going down the field-row; the farmer is occupied with ensuring the tractor’s path along the rows is true. A fourth example—actually two very similar scenes with different contexts—shows the classroom of deaf children playing drums in a steady, repetitive beat. Several of the players take up individual beats at the direction of the instructor, yet all the while the rhythm remains unified.



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A related challenge posed to the viewer amid these scenes is that the cuts between them often occur at random; scenes come to an end at inexplicable moments, fading to black rapidly, rather than concluding naturally. Some of this convention is clearly effected by the fact that the scenes themselves have little narrative intelligibility; one does not know where the action is happening, or what one is to look for. On the one hand, an immediate result of this unconventional cutting is a jarring displacement of the viewer’s ability to comprehend the action of the scene. On the other hand, a message that emerges from the film during these cuts is that the actual events are not as important as the very cuts between them, as the rapid transitions from scene to scene. The cuts in fact might be said to function as parts of the narrative, as if they too tell a cinematic story. In this aspect, the film proceeds as if its assemblage of cuts is meant to be seen as a collage. The narrative comes off as one of fragments.2 Moreover, what narrative comprehension this film does allow seems chosen in order to keep the viewer at a distance. Because the characters of Code Unknown remain relatively undeveloped, with their backgrounds and futures mostly unexplained, their stories come across as episodic portraits, vignettes whose completion is only possible through the inferential construction of the viewer. In other words, the fragmentary character of this film seems to highlight the existential fact of Dasein’s disclosedness in filmviewing, the fact that the being-there of viewership involves interpretive projection into this world. ANALYSIS: CODE UNKNOWN AND PHILOSOPHY As with the other films I have selected to discuss in this work, Code Unknown presents a rich entrée of noteworthy material for philosophical analysis, much more than I can cover without overwhelming the reader. Its characters are sketched out in fuzzy outlines only, and its storyline has a limited amount of coherence. In general it strikes one as a work that provokes reflection and questioning, eschewing a straightforward plot with beginning, middle, and end. The consensus in the scholarly reception of Michael Haneke’s filmmaking and of this film in particular is that it is self-consciously reflexive and critical, in the manner of seminal filmmakers such as Hitchcock. Haneke is often taken to be interested in the ambiguity of cinematic images and the incompleteness of an image’s representative power. As Peter Brunette observes, Haneke seems to wish to show that film images are always contextual.3 They give meaning in reference to one another, or alternately, in reference to the viewer’s factical understanding (if I may put it in Heideggerian terms). But the catch in Code Unknown is that context is also always incomplete, and thus, meaning is left indeterminate. The burden is placed on the viewer to

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complete the meaning as best she can, and also, to comprehend where the meaning stops.4 As I summarized in chapter 2 in regard to Heidegger’s concept of interpretation, the thrust for the phenomenology of film is that film images are likewise always interpretive, because Dasein’s being-in-the-world is itself interpretation. As I described above, the central theme of Code Unknown appears to resonate from its title. This film depicts various occurrences of “code” in the form of human discourse. The code is “unknown” in view of these characters’ communicative distance from one another despite their relationships and community. The code is fractured, and thus fragmented. The film’s smaller episodes each convey a breakdown of communication. This breakdown in turn is rendered metaphorically emblematic of other ways in which people create distance from one another. For instance, there emerges a theme of human insensitivity.5 This is an insensitivity that could be remedied if only the characters could find a way to uncover the connections they bear toward one another. This theme involves the viewer as well, posing to the viewer a series of moral questions about the degree to which we are morally responsible to intervene in reconstructing (or indeed, in constructing in the first place) the community between ourselves, loved ones, and community.6 The film poses to us questions about what we owe each other, what degree of hospitality we are each entitled to, and to what degree we are morally incumbent to provide this hospitality to others.7 The film thus involves the viewer in a line of philosophical questioning regarding human connection and obligation. This mode of Code Unknown’s viewership strikes me as in keeping with Stephen Mulhall’s take on film-as-philosophy. The film affords disclosures to the viewer, which only the viewer can make philosophically significant. Similarly, the question posed by this film involves the viewer in a reflective mode regarding care, not just of others but of oneself. One’s being-in-the-world and one’s being-with-others are issues relevant for the Heideggerian conception of care, insofar as they are existential features comprising Dasein’s essence. The questioning, reflective mode of this film’s musings on hospitality, community, and so forth involve the care of the viewing Dasein that projects itself into this film-world. A Heideggerian philosophical dimension emerges in this film’s emphasis on modes of human discourse. Discourse, or Rede is itself an existential category in Heidegger’s notion of Dasein; though one should say that as a theme, it is only pointed to, formally indicated, in Code Unknown rather than articulated explicitly. A pair of sequences early on in the film presents a more upbeat, positive assessment of human discourse. Both of these sequences involve the class of deaf children as they are portrayed in some unique school exercises. First, as I summarized already, the first such sequence portrays the class engaged in a game of charades. Noteworthy



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about this scene is the muted, yet nonetheless attuned, attentive state of the children’s communication with one another. Although they are deaf and can only communicate by signing, their interaction is fluid, graceful, and altogether peaceful. They appear to be enjoying themselves and the exercise; this is made all the more noteworthy given that their communication exercise is unsuccessful. None of the students is able to guess what emotion the leader is trying to demonstrate. However, this failure is not portrayed in a negative light; the children appear to be in a nurturing, gentle environment. The second sequence I would like to highlight appears shortly after this one. A classroom of children is shown in deep focus, as the young man Amadou leads the children in a drum exercise, along with some other adults, in what appears to be a music education or marching band course. This sequence consists of a long still shot of approximately thirty seconds, in which the sole subject of the camera is the children playing drums in unison, led by their instructor. As in the first sequence, notable here is the discourse that becomes audible through this figuratively silent exercise. No words are exchanged, yet the students nonetheless follow along with the teacher’s lead and stop on his command. The mood of the teachers is especially telling, as they can be seen leading the exercise with a warm and nurturing style. Their demeanor is reflective of the natural connectedness that fosters their community with the children, despite the lack of spoken words. In contrast with the much more fractious, even broken discourse exhibited among the film’s other characters, these scenes involving the deaf schoolchildren rhetorically suggest that authentic human communication is possible, but that it is most likely to occur at an unspoken level. A sense also emerges in which modern, globalized human life, with its economic and vocational commitments, simply creates too many distractions for us to be able to authentically connect with one another. Whereas sharing more common and modest goals might help us find more honest, genuine ways to be together. The seeming barrier is that we perhaps can never overcome the degree of otherness, the different codes at work within ourselves. We cannot be sure of communicating in the way that we want—that our message as understood by others will match what we think we are saying. Or, that we will even understand our own internal discourse with ourselves.8 These observations comprise the basic philosophical view of the film. And mind you, these are not items ever made explicit in spoken words. They are thematically generated from the assemblage of images, scenes, and sequences that comprise the film, and only articulable by the viewer. In the terms of the earlier chapters of this book: the viewer must be existentially projected into the film’s world, while the film yields a degree of truthful disclosure.

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CODE UNKNOWN AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DASEIN’S VIEWERSHIP Although Code Unknown is thematically intelligible, it still poses a number of puzzles for an analysis oriented in the philosophy of film. Foremost, this film’s altogether oblique and elliptical narrative raises the question of how the viewer is to find any precise, discernible meaning. For the film by and large refuses to the viewer a narrative-centric story in which it is made known what the characters are trying to do, and why. Yet the film also appears strung together clearly enough, for the purpose of highlighting the themes of code, communication, and the breakdown of these. How can we account for the hermeneutic intelligibility that Code Unknown offers? What are the mechanisms that foster our ability as viewers to make sense of this film? This puzzle reflects another problem I would like to address. How do we account for the viewer’s engagement with and comprehension of the film’s more granular, confounding features? In particular, I would like to explore the features I described above in the synopsis. One of these is a tendency for camera shots to cut unexpectedly, resulting in given scenes coming to an unnatural, jarring closure—or even a lack of a closure altogether. An alternate technique Haneke’s filmmaking employs frequently in Code Unknown is the use of prolonged still shots, taken from a stationary camera, in which not much action occurs in the scene. The viewer is often left ignorant of whether anything ought to be noticed from the shot composition or from the scene as a whole. In this section I would like to focus a bit on the transcendental aspect of the viewing phenomenology Code Unknown involves. In particular, I want to assess some of the conditions that make viewership of this film possible, where the film is able to be functionally intelligible as a source of meaning (i.e., able to attain a serviceable level of intelligibility). To be clear, I want to construe the existential, transcendental aspects as a distinct issue aside from Code Unknown’s status as an example of “reflexive” film. In other words, not at issue is the aesthetic concern of how to read the film’s stylistic or selfconscious conventions. Instead, the issue I am raising concerns the viewing Dasein’s capacity even to tune into these conventions, to comprehend them as such. Recall that Heidegger’s re-casting of epistemological issues in philosophy works by deconstructing and rebuilding the classical issue of transcendence in existential terms. The philosophical problem of knowledge, of Dasein’s transcendence to “things” is resolved through the phenomenological observation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Dasein is never a worldless mind that needs to escape the trap of subjectivity in order to engage with things or communicate with other Daseins. Rather, to be a Dasein entails belonging to



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a shared, open world in which things are already given for it. The existentials of understanding, attunement, and discourse refer to specific modes in which things are given for Dasein, or in other words, they refer to the ways Dasein has its disclosedness, specific ways it can be “in” the world. In these pages of Being and Time, discourse is defined as the articulation of intelligibility. It works in tandem with understanding and attunement, such that through its existential of discourse, Dasein is able to articulate the intelligible structure of the world to which it is understandingly attuned. This intelligible structure is what Heidegger calls “meaning.” It seems to me that Dasein’s existential of discourse (and derivatively, understanding/interpretation, and attunement) is particularly fruitful for helping to articulate the transcendental aspect of the comportment bound up with viewing Code Unknown. I say this because, on the face of it, this film seems quite literally to work on a transparent level of discourse in which the viewer is able to enter the film’s world, to be “there” with the film’s Daseins, and thus, to articulate the structure of this world. To put this simply, the film is basically accessible; one is able to follow along interpretively. More deeply, at the same time the film also operates at a level in which the viewing Dasein’s comportment is such that one must more consciously activate one’s interpretive discourse, as it were, in order for (the achievement of) meaning to be possible. But how does this occur? The film does not give much initial direction to the viewer regarding how it is to be interpreted; from the start, the viewer has the burden of developing her understanding. What does the viewer’s initial understanding consist of? If we proceed from the film’s first shots, the baseline level of viewer understanding proceeds from the oblique terms of the opening scene in which deaf children are depicted attempting to communicate with one another. This exchange effects a definite, if nonetheless understated mood for the viewer, insofar as it engenders a level of uncertainty regarding what emotion the charade leader is attempting to convey, and what the outcome would be if we (along with the children of the classroom) could learn the correct answer to the game. In sum, we might observe that in this particular example, the viewer’s interpretation is predicated on her being “there,” existentially and hermeneutically present with the scene, and thus, exercising a definite attuned understanding. This understanding works in tandem with the mood effected by the scene, insofar as the scene’s muted mood inevitably impacts what we look for in and between the scene’s shots. To be sure, the muted, understated mood of this scene and of many others that follow seem to command our attention, echoing the claim from Heidegger that mooded attunement is a condition of having understanding, of things being intelligible at all. Our mood attunes us to what is important at a given moment or what may be important in the future.

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Interpretation, which Heidegger defines as the development of understanding, arises out of this initial structure set up by the film. Indeed, in viewing Code Unknown for the first time, one does not know how to read the initial exchange of the classroom; this does not entail that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation only activates in such “interpretive” situations. Instead, I want to use this example as an illustration of interpretation’s role as an existential feature of discovering film meaning. In a word, the very process of viewing Code Unknown illustrates the more generalized phenomenon that film-viewing is fundamentally interpretive—it is the development of a state of understanding in which Dasein finds itself. Alternately, we can also say that this notion of interpretation captures Heidegger’s insight that Dasein is essentially disclosedness or a locus of disclosure. Dasein’s understanding is not solely an independent process it performs in its own right. It is a function of Dasein’s ecstatic projection into the world. The world, correspondingly, opens up to and with Dasein’s projective understanding. In this case of Code Unknown or similar films, we can say that the film, conceived as a world into which the viewing Dasein can enter, is a film-world the viewing Dasein is able to disclose or reveal by virtue of its interpretive understanding. It is in this way that Code Unknown or similar films can be said to possess a definite “meaning” (although they may refuse this meaning in the conventional sense). The point from this Heideggerian perspective is that the “meaning” of such a film is existentially predicated on the viewer’s understanding comportment, where this understanding comportment is derivative from the film’s world-ed character, the being-in-the-world one experiences in the film. This is to say: to find meaning in this film and to be able to articulate it in language is founded in the viewer’s engagement with this world’s structural intelligibility. In summary, despite the film’s refusal of easy explanation, its oblique cinematographic features do not prevent Dasein from constructing meaning of its own existential power. It is also worth highlighting that the film-world of Code Unknown is not a foreign world for the viewer, but instead a shared world of other Daseins— the film’s characters. The film depicts human discourse in a way that could not be unfamiliar to us (because we are existentially constituted to recognize discourse in distinction to white noise and goobledy-gook). Code Unknown’s Daseins have interests, needs, and problems just as we do. Despite these other Daseins not knowing us, we do know them, and existentially we can also say that we recognize ourselves through them. This echoes Heidegger’s observation in Being and Time that we exist, in the guise of Mitsein, precisely because there are others. We discover our existence as Daseins by virtue of this existence of others; we do not discern the existence of others by virtue of our own selves existing first. The shared world to which each of us belongs, with its preexisting customs, habits, and conventions was already a world of



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others. So in comprehending the meaning of this film—or what I am taking to be the same, articulating the discourse contained in it—it is not the case that the viewer approaches it as a complete blank canvas. We find meaning in this film-world because it is a world of other Daseins (and by extension) of ourselves. CODE UNKNOWN AS HEIDEGGERIAN ART In view of what I have discussed so far, the status of this film as an artwork in Heidegger’s sense should be relatively transparent. I believe its achievement in terms of the framework of Heideggerian art is also of a piece with its accomplishment as an instance of film-as-philosophy. While Code Unknown may not be a “great” artwork in the sense of defining and grounding a world for its people, I believe that in other terms it offers an excellent case of film rendered in the guise of Heideggerian art. The most obvious and visible instance of the art of Code Unknown is its “reflexive” nature, that is, its features that offer nonverbal commentary and reflection on the film medium. Plainly it is a film about films, insofar as its more offbeat features appear to be employed as interruptions to the viewer’s typical expectation. In this way Code Unknown’s play reveals the film’s material, crafted character as integral to what this film is and what films are. Because it calls these very features out, one is able to discern from Code Unknown the broader, generalizable fact that films fundamentally are edited compositions of selected photographic shots, shots that in turn are often prolonged and alternately cut short prior to one’s being finished with viewing them. Rather than disorienting the viewer, possibly offering a dissembling presentation rather than a clear one, the filmmaking techniques prominent in Code Unknown serve to make film’s material composition more apparent rather than less. That is, these techniques make more apparent to the viewer precisely what the film is doing, by calling attention to what it is. Particularly relevant on this note is Heidegger’s observation in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that genuine poetry does not exhaust words, but instead makes them visible as words for the first time. I suggest that in the case of Code Unknown, a parallel result occurs for the assemblage of cut, edited, sequenced images of which this film is made, and by extension, the subjects the film itself depicts. As a film Code Unknown does not simply use the medium as a means to other ends; it makes the medium itself visible. The filmmaking of Code Unknown exercises a level of restraint, letting the assemblage speak of its own power, and most importantly, without explicit verbal commentary. Shots become visible as shots; scenes become visible as scenes. And the same goes for editing, narrative, and dialogue. This muted presentation that does not take

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second seat to the verbal dynamics allows the viewer to reflect on the truthful, aletheic space the film opens up over and above the photographic objects it depicts. To be sure, the images of this film transcend the level of merely “representational” art, insofar as in their assemblage they foster a thematic, cultural meaning reflective of the globalized West. This Heideggerian truth that emerges in the film is not, strictly speaking, a truth that symbolizes or represents a corresponding fact of reality, so much as it is an insight the film opens up in a nondiscursive, poetic fashion. To be sure, this insight, this “truth” opened up by Code Unknown is not readily translatable into words. But this insight is in keeping with Heidegger’s notion of the struggle inherent to works of art. Code Unknown brings its insight to light by delicately framing the theme of broken human communication into cinematic form. To put it in Heidegger-speak, the hidden side of human discourse is shown precisely insofar as it hidden. THE WHITE RIBBON Synopsis The next film I will take up is somewhat more straightforward in style than Code Unknown, offering a much more linear erotetic narrative. The White Ribbon is a period drama set in early-twentieth-century Germany. The narrative is conveyed in the form of a retelling by one of the main characters, of events that took place in the fictional village of Eichwald some years prior. The film begins with this narrator’s voiceover. The voice heard in this voiceover is that of an older man; we soon learn that this older man’s counterpart in the narrative is the village schoolteacher. His introductory voiceover proceeds as follows: I don't know if the story that I want to tell you reflects the truth in every detail. Much of it I only know by hearsay, and a lot of it remains obscure to me even today, and I must leave it in darkness. Many of these questions remain without answer. But I believe I must tell of the strange events that occurred in our village, because they may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country…

The story told in the film that follows therefore comprises the narrator’s recollection of some events. His recollection is pieced together through his own testimony, along with what he has heard through the grapevine and some personal speculation. The “goings-on in this country” to which the narrator refers in the course of beginning his story appear to be the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany in the late 1930s onward, though, as we learn at the end of



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the film, the events depicted on screen are said to have occurred right before the events that started the World War I. We soon learn that the “strange events” in his story are a series of seemingly non-coincidental accidents and heinous crimes that occurred in the village in rapid succession, though no one ever identified the source. The setting and context of life in this village is portrayed with a prominent contrast of the new and old worlds. The old world is that of the rural farming community of Europe (not unlike the one imagined by Heidegger in his reading of Van Gogh). In the film, the peasant population of this community is by and large quite poor; the people work at agriculture and other crafts for their sustenance. The village itself is presided over by a baron (Ulrich Tukur) and baroness (Ursina Lardi), who presumably number among the last lines of the old-world nobility. The baron is owner of the farming estate where the majority of the peasants are employed in a seeming state of serfdom. The new world toward which the context of this film’s story moves is that of the global world made much smaller by the onset of two great wars. The world depicted in this film is about to come to an end, as the dawn of another epoch is about to begin. This contrast of old and new receives a voice through the narrator’s perspective, as he is a unique character by virtue of residing in the next village. Because he is an outsider he seems more able to perceive the truth of the strange events that occur. The first of the strange accidents plays out during the narrator’s introduction to the film. A man appears riding a horse across an estate, which, as it approaches the position of the camera, collapses to the earth, violently throwing the man onto the ground, after which he screams in terrible pain, unable to stand up. The narrator says that this accident was caused when the horse’s feet tripped on a thin wire that had been strung up, unseen, in the path this man uses for his daily ride. Those investigating the incident infer that the thin, nearly invisible wire was placed deliberately, precisely for the purpose of causing the accident. Although, no one saw when the wire was strung up, and mysteriously, the wire is also removed without explanation. We learn of the other main characters of the story not long after this. The man injured in the horse-riding accident (Rainer Bock), we are told, is the village doctor. Other characters with whom he is involved include his son Rudi (Miljan Chatelain), his daughter Anna (Roxane Duran), and his midwife and housekeeper (Susanne Lothar). We later learn that the midwife performs sexual favors for him, presumably in exchange for financial support, though some dialogue also indicates that they were on more romantic terms in the past. The midwife seems to harbor some affection for him despite his cruel nature, which is depicted in multiple scenes. At the film’s end it is conveyed that there is some hearsay in the village that the midwife’s disabled son, Karl

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(Kai-Peter Malina), is the illegitimate child of the doctor, and that Karl’s disability is the result of a botched attempt to abort the midwife’s pregnancy. Another principal group of characters is made up of the family of the village pastor (Burghart Klaussner); this family includes half a dozen children ranging in age from adolescent to kindergartner. Early on, the narrator makes suggestions that he suspects these children were somehow involved in the strange incidents taking place in the village, due to suspicious behavior he catches them in, and also based on his knowledge of these children’s whereabouts during several of the events. Upon confronting the pastor about the children’s suspicious behavior, the schoolteacher is rebuked and threatened by the pastor, and his suspicions go no further although at this point in the story he has become convinced that the children are responsible. The children for their part are often depicted in the film as driven toward mischief, and even toward evil, as a way of rebelling against their father’s harsh discipline. A number of scenes depicting the home life of these children show them in conflict with their parents and receiving very strong punishments relative to their transgressions. The other strange events depicted in the film include the death of a peasant woman, due to a fall through a rotten floor in the sawmill; a fire that destroys a barn on the baron’s estate, assumed caused by arson; the kidnapping and assault of Sigi (Fion Mutert), the son of the baron; and the killing of the pastor’s canary, Peepsie, which is found dismembered in its cage. These events come to a climax with the cruel assault on Karl, the disabled boy. The narrator conveys that just prior to this event the doctor fled the village unannounced, along with the midwife and their children. The wife of the baron has also fled, due to the hideous nature of the strange goings-on. The narrator also says that soon after the breakout of the war he was able to marry his sweetheart Eva (Leonie Benesch), after which they left the village to return to his hometown and take up his father’s tailoring business. So in general the episodes depicted in the film are identified as a series of unexplained events previewing in microcosm the even more rapid and calamitous happenings that were to take place on the world scene. Presumably the idyllic, sleepy existence of this little village was never to return to this state, with many of its people having either fled, or likely called up in the war. And of course, we know in the present that this was to be the fate of Germany in the decades that followed. In the factical terms of viewing Dasein, the narrative of this film is comprehensible due to Dasein’s own history. Cinematic Interplay of Phenomenology, Art, and Philosophy The power of The White Ribbon is effected as much through its cinematography as through its story. Its old-world look and feel is punctuated by the



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use of black and white film stock. For the film-viewer of the present, this filmmaking choice renders the film an historical discourse of a day gone by, in which life was, relatively speaking, much more primitive and lacking in conveniences. The black and white photography in this case also complements the altogether funeral mood of the film. The contrast of light and darkness is made especially prominent in the film’s cinematography by the use of candles and other natural light sources in mis-en-scene. Indeed, the bulk of the film’s stage lighting appears to employ wholly natural light, and to emphasize natural occurrences of shading and shadow, giving the film’s setting an authentic look. As a work of art, the look of this film makes its historical status particularly prominent. Another artistically significant cinematographic choice prominent in The White Ribbon is the juxtaposition of two directorial hallmarks Haneke is known for. First, this film frequently employs very long takes captured by one camera, in which the camera turns on an axis, while otherwise remaining stationary, following the actors as they move about the set. Sometimes during these long takes the camera will even remain idle while the actors go out of view, leaving the camera to record a blank still, where the viewer does not know what will happen next. In Deleuzian terms, this directorial technique seems chosen in order to cause the image to stare back at the viewer, over and above the viewer’s looking into the image. These sorts of images in Haneke’s work, and particularly in The White Ribbon, have an effect of confronting the viewer with an overt, visual muteness, while also commanding a thought-process.9 Secondly, these idle moments when the camera’s subject goes out of the shot are strongly encountered by the conspicuousness of the unseen. In other words, the camera’s shot brings attention to what is visibly un-shown in the shot, rather than focusing on a tacit subject. The latter technique, of course, is the conventional way a camera is employed in fiction film. The standard technique is for the camera to criterially focus on items that figure into the narrative, emotive, or artistic import of the shot and the scene.10 Effectively, what Haneke’s directorial choice does here is to reverse that logic, bringing emphasis to what is not being shown in the scene, but which is nonetheless visible and articulable. Looking at these two features of Haneke’s filmmaking in the context of The White Ribbon, their interpretive significance at once results in a stark realism, where the film eschews editing and scene cuts in favor of emphasizing the richness of what is in front of the camera; and on the other side, a denial to the viewer of a complete view into this world. The hermeneutic paradox this technique poses to the viewer is that, while the viewer is nonetheless present in this film-world and able to enter into its discourse, principal turns of action and scene are exhibited as fundamentally un-seeable, and thus, unknowable.

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I will highlight two scenes in which this twofold technique serves a prominent function. The first such scene occurs shortly after the death of a woman in the village sawmill. The camera placement of this scene is in the entranceway to a poor, ramshackle bedroom in what we can only assume is a peasant house. The camera’s initial subject is the naked lower half of the body of this dead woman; she is being washed by a worker, in preparation for funeral proceedings. We see the worker scrubbing the woman’s legs and feet with a rag, though, kept out of view is the upper half of the woman’s body. The lack of any dialogue or camera movement prevents the viewer from learning whether the unseen top half of the woman’s body is mangled or preserved. We do not know the extent of her injuries, but it is suggested during the investigation of her death that when she fell through the sawmill floor she got caught in the mill’s gearworks. In any event, the second half of this scene shows the dead woman’s husband enter the room from the foreground, passing by the camera position and walking to the background of the shot where he can see the body. The attendant tells him that he cannot enter yet, because she has not finished cleaning the body, but the husband tells her “You get out.” She covers the body with a blanket, so as to hide the corpse’s nakedness. As the husband sits down on the bed, we see nothing further, although the camera’s shot lingers for another minute. All that is heard is the husband’s slight weeping for his dead wife. The circumstances surrounding the wife’s death do not become any clearer as the film proceeds, although, it is suspected that someone knew she would be in the mill and perhaps staged the incident to make it look accidental. The eldest son of this woman’s family blames the house of the baron, as the sawmill is part of the baron’s estate. We do not learn any more of the husband’s state of mind, outside of his refusal to place blame because of his interest in keeping his job as the estate steward. The second such scene occurs not long after, in the home of the pastor. The context of this scene involves some trouble depicted in a scene from the previous day, in which the children of the family did not return home in time for the evening meal. When the children finally return, the pastor announces that for punishment they will all go to bed without food and that the next day each child will receive ten cane strokes in front of the siblings. The scene of note begins with the oldest boy, Martin (Leonard Proxauf), entering a room and then closing the door. Only silences ensues; he comes back out in a moment, and walks out of the shot briefly, before again returning and going back into the same room, this time with what appears to be the “cane.” As he enters this room, we briefly see the other children. After he closes the door, there is a brief moment of silence, followed by short cries that become progressively louder. One can only infer that the children are receiving their cane strokes. As with the scene I described above, the action taking place does not occur in front of the camera. The door of the room containing Martin and the children



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is closed, so the viewer can only speculate on what is happening behind this door. As John Rhodes has commented, one effect of the long take in this film is to emphasize film’s general potential for realism. The long take re-enacts the original experience for us, making it present again for the first time by forcing us to undergo the experience. We are subject to the film’s speed of disclosure, at the mercy of what the film will grant.11 Rhodes also makes the Heideggerian observation that the effect of such scenes is to render our being-in-the-world explicit, by forcing us to submit to the unfolding of the being that we live amid. The long take functions as a reminder that we are being-in-the-world.12 What else can we make of these two scenes on behalf of the phenomenology of viewing Dasein, and of Dasein’s engagement with the film as art? First, above and beyond the other observations I have made regarding the chosen films thus far, The White Ribbon’s emphasis on the unseen character of what it depicts seems especially apposite for a Heideggerian analysis in all of the guises taken up in this book. One way to observe this relevance is the hermeneutic quality of the unseen itself, to which the film makes both visible and more oblique references through its narration in the form of hazy memory. What does it mean for this film to call attention to the unseen, un-seeable character of what it depicts? One way to make sense of it is to understand the film scenes I have highlighted as parallel instances of the conspicuousness of things ready-to-hand in Being and Time. That is, sometimes the tool we need is either broken or missing altogether. The tool and the task we want to perform become more visible, in fact, uniquely visible, when the context of application breaks down. When this breakdown occurs, one’s existence in the world becomes uniquely visible; being-in-the-world appears precisely because one cognizes the network of significance that makes tools and work possible. In sum, I suggest that the conspicuous character of the unseen in The White Ribbon operates in a similar fashion. It clues us into the nature of film, and of our being-in the film-world, by virtue of breaking up the normal flow of things. The conspicuousness of the unseen in this film reveals other existential aspects of Dasein’s viewership, for instance, the unique character of Dasein’s disclosedness. The viewing Dasein is comported toward this film and its images in a state of intentional presence amid absence. Viewing Dasein reveals or discloses the truth of the unseen. It transcends what the image depicts, making what is un-depicted present in its hiddenness. As with my reading of Code Unknown, it seems to me that this observation can be leveraged over the film medium more broadly. Film-viewing Dasein fundamentally exists in a manner of Dasein disclosing the unseen via what is seen. This disclosing is an existential state of Dasein’s interpretive, projected being.

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Ostensibly, The White Ribbon provides an exemplary instance of Heidegger’s conception of the artwork. The historical meaning of The White Ribbon is quite clear. But one can also observe that the historical significance is of a piece with this film’s inherent character of hiddenness, secrecy, and mystery. What the film does reveal, in the voice of the narrator, and the images his memory conveys to us, is delicate, fragile, and not firmly grounded in established fact. Indeed, the unanswered aspects of the film’s narrative (told in the way that it is) reflect the oblivion of memory and memory’s inability to re-enact events with precision. Thus, not only does the art-character of The White Ribbon render an alethec depiction of the mystery embedded in an historic moment of a people; it also reveals the truth of the fragility of memory, and the fragility of memory as re-presented in images. For the film itself is in fact presented as a memory, a memory that calls out its own inability to discern what is real from what is not. The film for its part similarly conveys the fundamental unreality or unknowability of what its images purport to depict. For, as viewers, we walk away from this film with an explicit lack of understanding of the events conveyed to us, despite what the film actually “showed.” Film’s finite manner of showing is presented as a problem rather than as a solution.13 This serves as a reminder of the interpretive character Heidegger highlights in Dasein’s existential of understanding. Regarding film images as truth-bearing involves seeing them in an interpretive light, because all understanding is interpretive. All seeing is “seeing-as.” Finally, I would like to consider the philosophical outlook proffered by this film. Indeed, much of what I have already highlighted in The White Ribbon speaks to what I would deem to be this film’s philosophical achievement. In short, The White Ribbon presents a discourse regarding the fundamentally unseen, un-seeable character that often penetrates the minutest aspects of human interaction, in addition to the horrific disasters of the film’s narrative.14 This film’s emphasis on the secret, hidden interior lives of its characters similarly brings to light the abyssal source of human motivations, the notion that our hopes and fears are often fundamentally unknown for us, let alone unknowable to others. An emblematic scene that captures this outlook occurs when the teacher confronts the town pastor, after he has assembled what he believes to be sufficient evidence implicating the pastor’s children in the crimes that have taken place. The teacher presents his case clearly and cogently, and the pastor appears to listen carefully. Yet, without further notice or explanation, the pastor’s disposition shifts rapidly, as he responds to the teacher very sternly to not repeat the accusations any further, lest he fear unknown retribution. The scene ends without further commentary, and we are left in the dark as to whether the pastor believes the teacher, or how he will process the information given. In brief, the pastor’s character functions to exemplify the manner in which we often conceal truth from ourselves. We do



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not merely hide secrets from others; we also have the capacity to cover over truth, in a way that it can be obliterated from memory. NOTES 1. Peter Brunette, Michael Haneke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 78. 2. Ibid., 75. 3. Ibid., 84. 4. Oliver C. Speck, Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke (New York: Continuum, 2010), 33. 5. Brunette, Michael Haneke, 75. 6. Paula E. Geyh, “Cosmopolitan Exteriors and Cosmpolitan Interiors: The City and Hospitality in Haneke’s Code Unknown,” in The Cinema of Michael Haneke, eds. Ben McCann and David Sorfa (New York: Wallflower Press, 2011), 109. 7. Ibid., 106. 8. Ibid., 111. 9. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 203–6. 10. Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” in Theorizing the Movies Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78–93. 11. John David Rhodes, “The Spectacle of Skepticism: Haneke’s Long Takes,” in On Michael Haneke, eds. Brian Price and John David Rhodes (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 90. Also see Speck, Funny Frames, 183. 12. Rhodes, “The Spectacle of Skepticism,” 89. 13. Ibid., 100. Also see Speck, Funny Frames, 13. 14. John Orr, “The White Ribbon in Michael Haneke’s Cinema,” in The Cinema of Michael Haneke, eds. Ben McCann and David Sorfa (New York: Wallflower Press, 2011), 261.

Chapter 7

David Gordon Green’s Joe, and an Afterword

In this last chapter I want to make explicit some of the book’s central themes, in the context of a recent film by a filmmaker whose work exemplifies many of the traits I identified in the films of the previous chapters. My interest is not to recapitulate every argument, but to mark out some principal findings in a more condensed, digestible form and also to proffer some new directions for thought. The film I will take up is Joe, released in 2013. It was directed by the American filmmaker David Gordon Green (b. 1975) and stars Nicholas Cage and Tye Sheridan. My selection here may seem an oddity, given that the other filmmakers I have chosen to discuss at length are comparative heavyweights of the art-house, philosophical film scene. I have a few reasons for marking Green’s film and work as apposite for the present study. First, I believe it is important to press the boundaries a bit in terms of considering films and filmmakers whose work exhibits a discernible Heideggerian flavor. While Malick and Haneke certainly provide powerful examples, their status as philosophical filmmakers is firmly established. Secondly, Green’s work in general inclines toward the less oblique and elliptical in comparison to these two filmmakers, whose work often borders on abstract cinema (consider, for instance, Malick’s recent film Knight of Cups). Green’s films have flirted with mainstream popularity, or at least could have some chance to achieve mainstream success given a slightly different movie market. One of his films, 2008’s comedy Pineapple Express, was in fact a bona fide hit. Several of Green’s other films have helped launch the careers of actors and actresses who are now well known. For instance, Zooey Deschanel, Shea Whigham, and Danny McBride featured in Green’s second film All the Real Girls. Green’s third film Undertow included in its cast a very young Kristen Stewart, who in the early 2010s went on to become one of the highest-paid 191

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actresses in the business. Joe’s Tye Sheridan is another example of a talented young actor finding mainstream recognition after appearing in Green’s work. In this regard I wish to cite Green’s films (through the example of Joe) as offering a potential source for philosophical exploration without being outand-out “philosopher’s films” as it were. I am trying to make a stride in continuing the approach of Mulhall, and farther back, Cavell, in citing relatively unassuming, ordinary movies as nonetheless philosophically significant. The notion is that if our analysis of such works can yield defensible philosophical outcomes in keeping with our reading of more complex works (such as those analyzed in chapters 5 and 6), then we can more properly regard our philosophical findings as relevant for all films or at least a very good many films. Third and finally, despite Green’s potential popular appeal, his work is known for the visible and acknowledged influence of Terrence Malick. Green’s films feature many of Malick’s cinematic hallmarks such as voiceovers and episodic, lyrical narratives. Malick in fact served as an executive producer in Green’s third picture, Undertow. My goal in citing this aspect of Green’s corpus is not to justify his inclusion in the present study solely because he is a Malick disciple. But I am interested to present Green’s filmmaking as fertile ground for considering Heideggerian issues for the philosophy of film outside of the confines of Malick and the commitments a philosophical exploration of Malick’s work brings along with it. In short, Green’s films offer some fresh potential for thinking about Heideggerian issues without the distraction and clutter bound up with making sense of the filmmaker’s biography. Joe is a narrative, fiction film depicting the friendship of a young man, Gary, and an older man, Joe. The setting is an unnamed rural town that would appear to lie somewhere in the rural American South based on the geography of the surroundings and the demographic makeup of the characters. Gary belongs to a family of drifters, consisting of a mother, father, a daughter, and Gary, who is the elder child. A focal point of the family’s life is Gary’s alcoholic father (played by the nonprofessional actor Gary Poulter), whose addiction appears to walk a line between morbid alcoholism, psychosis, and high-function. Gary’s mother (Brenda Isaacs Booth) appears as somewhat more lucid and in control although she defers to her husband’s authority, excusing his addiction and instability on the grounds that he cannot help himself. Gary’s sister Dorothy (Anna Niemtschk) is a pre-teen, nonverbal child who exhibits a sweet and loving nature. She and Gary appear to possess a special bond that is fostered by Gary’s recognition that he needs to be the unsung caregiver in the family and Dorothy’s protector in particular. Early on we see that Gary is mature beyond his years. Gary meets Joe one day as he is wandering the new town he and his family have arrived at, after his father apparently was run out of their last town. Gary introduces himself on the spur of the moment and asks Joe whether he can get some work. Joe runs a ragtag



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crew whose work consists in a combination of forestry and wood-cutting. Their job is to poison unwanted trees so that they will die and justify being cut down later. The dialogue does not clarify with precision whose trees these are, or who employs Joe. One gathers that the crew is working in a state forest or nature preserve in which live trees are meant to be left in their virgin state until they become diseased or die. Joe explains to Gary that the trees can legally be cut down if they are dead. The crew’s job is to identify the unwanted trees to be poisoned and strike them with a “juice hatchet,” a small axe loaded with a poisonous liquid. The main contours of Joe’s plot follow Gary’s friendship with the title character, and the latter’s fatherly attempt to rescue Gary from an unstable home life that he does not deserve. Gary is an upbeat, energetic teenage boy who works hard. His even-keeled temperament clearly poses a paradox for Joe, as it is not conveyed how or why Gary is so pure and well-adjusted. It is plain from early on that Gary shines a light into Joe’s life, a positive source of energy that Joe wishes to reciprocate despite having reservations about becoming too involved in someone else’s affairs. As the film’s story unravels, Joe reveals in spoken dialogue and voiceover commentary that he fears losing control of his temper. And this would be putting it mildly. Joe conveys to his girlfriend Connie (Adriene Mishler) that in times past an all-consuming rage often overtook him and severely disrupted his life. He talks about his anger as if his grip on it is all-or-nothing: either he suppresses it entirely by staying out of provocative situations, or else he loses himself to it completely. Some of this inner conflict comes to a head in the middle parts of the film, where Joe tangles with police for altogether frivolous reasons and spends a night in jail. In general, Joe is portrayed sympathetically despite a number of prominent character flaws. On the one hand, he shows a markedly gentle, loving character through the deep care and affection he has for the men on his crew, and later, for Gary. He is also portrayed as a hard worker and a good manager in the scenes where he is shown on the job site. On the other hand, his character flaws include not only his deep-seated anger, but also some fairly serious alcoholism and a terrible smoking habit. A scene early in the film shows him consuming liquor and cola first thing in the morning before he heads out to work. Numerous other scenes also depict him in similar settings, with the general result that he appears to be someone whose addictions are a form of self-medication. A few other scenes second this observation, depicting him visiting an out-of-the-way flophouse, where he appears to be a frequent customer with significant appetites. In sum, Joe ostensibly is a deeply troubled, tragic man who, though relatively stable at the moment, has too many interior and exterior triggers working against him for a positive outcome to be likely. As Joe’s friendship with Gary solidifies, the film moves slowly toward a climax with Joe threatening Gary’s father. In the meanwhile, the father enters

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into a plot with a local ruffian (Ronnie Gene Blevins, named in the credits as “Willie-Russell”) to sell him his mute daughter Dorothy. Presumably she will be used by this man as a sex slave. The ruffian happens to be someone who has had separate run-ins with Joe as well as with Gary. Early in the film a scene depicts the ruffian shooting at Joe from medium range with a rifle; we later learn that this was an act of revenge after Joe cut the man’s face with a knife in a bar fight. This man later encounters Gary by chance on a railroad trestle; among the bits of their conversation is the question of whether Gary has a sister and whether she is pretty. Their exchange turns hostile when Gary takes offense to these questions. The film’s climax later occurs in its final scene, as Gary interrupts the attempted transaction where his sister is to be sold. As the conflict erupts, Gary comes close to being killed while trying to save his sister, but he is rescued by Joe. Joe as well as the two villains fall in the exchange, but Gary and his sister survive. In terms of mise-en-scene, this film exhibits a number of features that mirror the muted, tragic character of its narrative. One such stylistic convention lay in its setting: a run-down rural town without a robust economy or cultural life. Most of the homes and buildings that figure into the film’s scenes show a similarly depressed state: the ramshackle country store that functions as a meeting place for Joe and his crew; the dive bar and flophouse; the home of a friend in which a recently killed deer is strung up to be dressed in the middle of the kitchen; and the abandoned, half-collapsed house where Gary and his family are squatting. This similarity between mise-en-scene and narrative also plays out in Joe’s line of work: poisoning trees so that they can die and be cut down by someone else might strike one as a morbid cross between clever capitalism and environmental stewardship. The film’s characters appear written in order to follow a similar mold. In addition to the title character (who seems intent on slowly poisoning himself so that he can die) most of the supporting characters, especially Joe’s friends and work associates, exhibit a like character of beaten-down, hard-living salt of the earth. They are people who are portrayed as unkempt and raggedy, just-surviving on the edge of poverty in a decaying, forgotten landscape. Although, it is worth observing that few of these characters exhibit any discontent with their situation; instead, they appear satisfied in their surroundings, as if the filmmaker’s goal is to celebrate such personages by not embellishing them. Indeed, these characters and their sparsely told stories exhibit a quiet, though dignified beauty. These aspects of the film’s naturalism are in step with the humanistic, neorealist style of David Gordon Green’s other films, particularly George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow, Manglehorn, and Prince Avalanche.1 Like these other films, Joe’s film style emphasizes long takes, shots in deep focus, episodic narrative, and unprofessional actors. These features lead me to some of the more explicitly poetic aspects of this film.



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What would lead one to classify Joe as a poetic work? In plain-sense phenomenological terms (eschewing Heidegger-speak for the moment), this film weaves together image, character, place, and time in a fashion that ostensibly aims to let their combination speak for itself. Cinematic content is presented to us as viewers that does not immediately explain itself, but which instead gives itself over as something we can nonetheless thoughtfully articulate—indeed, we are led to interpret much of the film’s interior meaning quite naturally. For instance, we see the characters Joe and Gary portrayed in guises of a piece with the film’s setting, premise, and plot. Or, as I indicated above, the work Joe does for a living can be read as poetically reflective of a broader mood of decline and decay. But what makes any of this remarkable? I suggest that highlighting these features serves to illustrate that films exhibit a phenomenological dimension of poetry, and that this feature in turn can clue us into a deeper appreciation of film’s ontology. In other words, as Heidegger might concede if he were present, underneath the readily accessible immediacy of the rapid-fire pictures we know so well in popular, moving image media, there is also the potential for bringing things to language, by letting them be seen for the first time or in a fashion that occasions a unique thought or insight. Films such as Joe can preserve a poetic truth that is culturally and historically significant by virtue of their capacity to reveal being, to indicate the intelligibility of things. Now to be sure, film is not the only medium that fosters this accomplishment. Theatre and other performance arts such as dance have some overlap, as do painting and other plastic media. The decisive difference in the context of what I have marked out in this book is the power of the cinematic image to assert itself to the passive viewer, holding itself forth in degrees of overt clarity and obscurity, and contextualizing itself in relation to the other images. In other words, the poetic aspect of film’s ontology consists in the power of images to assert themselves, but in a way that calls attention to the subject of the image in its very intelligible presence. Films as temporal assemblages of images playing out over seconds, minutes, or hours have their poetic character in conveying articulable meaning through their very assemblage. Described in analogous Heideggerian terms, film images foster the occurrence of truth as aletheia—that is, revealing and unconcealing. They do this by creating a world; this is a world whose opening requires a degree of struggle. I will close by continuing this thought, drawing out some of the poetic insight this film’s characters afford to the human viewer, or Dasein. I have suggested in this book that the film-viewing experience is seated in Dasein’s existentiality, particularly, in its projective understanding, or being-in-theworld. Film worlds are Dasein’s being-in-the-world, because Dasein can be “there,” making things present. This occurs interpretively, which is to say, through the development or activation of understanding. How do the

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characters of Joe exemplify these (admittedly) highly abstract characterizations? The title character of this film appears in the guise of a man with deep, unspoken regrets. We understand him as another Dasein in his specific manner of care. As viewers, we disclose his inner conflict; that is, we have an intentionality, a comportment toward Joe such that we “disclose” his pain, we uncover it. His suffering shows itself without showing itself; its source is intrinsically hidden. Noteworthy about this observation on our part as viewers is that we reveal something that does not automatically self-show. We are present, we are projectively there, with this man’s inner conflict, though we know not from whence it comes. A similar dynamic is exhibited in the unnamed father of Gary’s family. While clearly an incurable alcoholic, this strange man displays an equally astonishing mixture of guile, helplessness, violence, and stupidity. Some scenes depict him as foremost a disgusting and mostly harmless drunk, someone so sick he can only hurt himself. But other scenes in contrast depict a man fully in control and capable of the worst kinds of premeditated evil. One scene in the film’s middle shows him stalking another, unnamed man who, as his mannerism comes into focus, appears to be just as sick, from alcoholism and mental illness. The father is led to stalk this man after seeing him on a town street carrying a bottle of some cheap-looking alcoholic beverage. Upon cornering him in a wood off the beaten track, the father chats up this man briefly, acting like something of a charmer, before smashing this man’s skull by surprise with a metal rod found on the ground. He does all of this seemingly for the purpose of taking the man’s bottle of drink and rifling through his pockets. As with the much more likeable character Joe, this man emerges onscreen as someone with an unimaginable amount of interior pain, a pain we can formally indicate and describe but not understand. In this case, however, his pain is countered by a darker and more fearsome evil, a malice that will cause him to take whatever action required to quell his demons and feed his addiction. He comes across as someone who, though on first glance bumbling and harmless, in fact contains a very great violence that knows no boundaries. This last comes to a climax as this man attempts to sell off his daughter, seemingly without remorse, for a small amount of money. What allows for this detailed reading of the characters? I have suggested that it is necessary to recognize the viewer’s existential presence, or projection, in and into the film world, which allows for people, objects, and situations to present themselves intelligibly. In a word, these things meaningfully appear because they belong to this film world, to which the viewer is factically and projectively present. More specifically, the viewer’s comportment toward Joe and toward Gary’s depraved father involves interpreting these characters in a world-oriented context. The viewer can articulate the intelligibility of these characters through the viewer’s own attuned understanding, in the



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background of which these characters appear.2 In other words, as viewers, we interpret these characters through the world in which they appear, but it is a world co-founded in the viewer, since viewing Dasein is constituted by being-in-the-world. The being-in-the-world fostered through the film Joe appears for us as one that is mooded in terms of slow dying, poisoning, and decay. As viewing Daseins, our way of being-with Joe the character is attuned in a fashion that allows us to interpret Joe himself in this way as well, as dying a slow death, a result of self-inflicted, though inevitable harm. To close, in light of these examples I would suggest that a general though unique feature of the film experience on the side of Dasein is this ability to disclose meaningfully some of the impenetrable aspects of what film images contain. I am suggesting that the viewer’s ability to reveal and comprehend Joe’s unseen pain and suffering is rooted in an ultimately existential feature of Dasein—an ability to make present what is not immediately present, and to articulate the discourse latent therein. For Heidegger’s concept of Dasein includes the existential capacity for presencing what is unseen on the basis of what is seen, where world is coextensive with the things and people in it. Films for their part, in the guise of Heideggerian works of art, make this occurrence possible through their phenomenological quality of poetically disclosing the truth of being in image form. NOTES 1. Justin Horton, “Mental Landscapes: Bazin, Deleuze, and Neorealism (Then and Now),” Cinema Journal 52(2) (Winter 2013): 24. 2. What I am describing here is nicely paralleled in Robert Sinnerbrink’s account of cinematic empathy. See Sinnerbrink, Cinematic Ethics, Ch.4.

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Index

Adorno, Theodor, 79 Aristotle, 77–78, 83, 143 attunement, 4, 16, 37, 55–61, 63, 70, 141, 158–61, 179. See also “mood” Bazin, Andre, 18, 21, 47, 49 being-in-the-world, 5–6, 9, 27, 31, 37–44, 46, 48–53, 57–58, 60–62, 64–67, 72, 102, 129, 141, 150, 158, 160, 176, 178, 180, 187, 195, 197 being (question of the meaning of), 3, 11, 14–15, 17, 19, 34, 127–28, 130 being-with (Mitsein), 50–54, 132, 176, 180, 197 Benjamin, Walter, 79

132–33, 139, 145, 150–51, 157–58, 163, 165, 167, 170, 175–81, 184, 187–88, 195–97 de-distancing, 17, 27, 44–48, 158–59 Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 24, 27, 69, 80, 126, 136, 144 Descartes, Rene, 3–4, 44, 76–77, 136–37. See also Cartesianism disclosedness (of Dasein), 5, 9–10, 37, 55, 65–67, 69–70, 108, 158, 175, 179, 180, 187 discourse (as an existential of Dasein), 5, 11, 13, 37, 55, 70–71, 76, 80, 84, 115, 129–30, 132–33, 145, 158, 160–61, 164, 167, 176–77, 179–82

Carroll, Noël, 21–26, 54, 62 Cartesianism, 3, 8, 12, 30–31, 38, 49–50, 56, 61, 63, 86 Cavell, Stanley, 21, 43, 47–49, 78, 116, 139–41, 149–50, 192 clearing, 66–68, 99–102, 132, 158 Currie, Gregory, 21, 47, 61–62

Eisenstein, Sergei, 18, 21 en-framing, 76, 78 existential(s) (of Dasein), 38, 43–45, 50–51, 55, 57, 59–60, 63–64, 69–71, 158–60, 167, 176, 179–80, 187–88

Dasein, vii, 4–6, 9–10, 14, 16, 19, 28– 29, 31, 37–72, 80–81, 92, 99–100, 102, 108, 113, 118, 123, 127–30,

Hegel, G.W.F., 133 Hume, David, 85 Husserl, Edmund, 3, 7–8

207

208 Index

Kant, Immanuel, 3–4, 6, 16, 38, 44, 63, 77, 84, 85, 143 Kurosawa, Akira, 79

58, 62, 76–77, 82–83, 88–89, 91–93, 97–98, 116, 125, 158, 182 Russell, Bruce, 114–15, 143

Livingston, Paisley, 139

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 46 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 25, 44, 115, 138–41, 164 space (Heidegger’s conception of), 16–17, 27, 44–45, 47

McCarthy, Cormac, 133 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3, 7, 18 mood (of Dasein), 4, 55–61, 129, 141, 159–60, 167, 179. See also “attunement” Mulhall, Stephen, 115, 120, 141–44, 149, 176, 192 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 77, 133 Percy, Walker, 30, 133 phenomenology, vii, 2–3, 6, 7, 9, 11–21, 26–28, 31, 44–46, 71–72, 75, 85, 88, 92, 99, 105, 108, 116–17, 118, 121, 125, 127, 133, 145, 151, 158, 161, 171, 176, 178, 184, 187 phenomenon/phenomena (of phenomenology), 14, 16, 18–19, 127 Pippin, Robert, 166–67 Plato, 6, 26, 42, 77–78, 132, 135–37 poetry (in art), 10, 93, 98, 103, 105, 124, 137, 160, 163, 166, 181, 195 realism, 47–49, 110, 185, 187 representation, photographic/pictorial, 8, 10, 12, 21–22, 24, 30, 42, 47–48,

technology (Heidegger’s conception of), vii, 2, 30, 75–79, 82–83, 88, 106, 137, 142 tools, 39–40, 45, 64–65, 72, 85, 90, 92, 117, 128–29, 158, 187 transparency, 47 truth (as Aletheia), 5–6, 16, 30–31, 70, 76–77, 83, 90–100, 103, 107–8, 129, 134–35, 137, 145, 162, 165, 167, 177, 182, 187–89, 195, 197 understanding (as an existential of Dasein), 37, 39–40, 43, 56, 59, 61, 63–72, 99, 127, 129, 139, 158–61, 165, 175, 179–80, 188, 195–96 Van Gogh, Vincent, 89–96, 106, 183 Walton, Kendall, 47–48 Wartenburg, Thomas, 115, 139 Wilson, George, 46–47

About the Author

Shawn Loht earned the Ph.D. in philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He has taught in the philosophy departments at The Catholic University of America, Pennsylvania State University, Mercer University, and Tulane University. He has published extensively in phenomenology, the philosophy of film, and ancient philosophy. He is also co-editor (with Noël Carroll and Laura T. Di Summa-Knoop) of The Palgrave Handbook for the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures (forthcoming, 2018). Shawn Loht is currently an institutional researcher at Baton Rouge Community College.

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