Philosophy of Film Without Theory 3031136535, 9783031136535

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PALGRAVE FILM STUDIES AND PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy of Film Without Theory

Edited by Craig Fox · Britt Harrison

Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy Series Editors

Catherine Constable Milburn House University of Warwick Coventry, UK Andrew Klevan St Annes College University of Oxford Oxford, UK

This series offers a Film Studies centred approach to philosophy. In the light of the increasing numbers of volumes appearing in the fast-­developing field of film-philosophy, it is fruitful to distinguish between those that are designed to introduce students to philosophy through the use of popular film – the films acting as a bridge to the subject area of Philosophy – and those that critically consider the myriad ways in which films might be said to ‘do’ philosophy. Importantly, within both approaches, the term ‘film’ is ambiguous, standing for specific film texts and, less directly, for the subject area of Film Studies itself. Numerous philosophers writing in this new field conjoin philosophy with a discussion of specific films, following a template drawn from aesthetics in which philosophy is applied to a particular art form. As a result, the discipline of Film Studies is oddly absent from such works of film-philosophy. This series aims to redress the balance by offering a Film Studies centred approach to philosophy. This truly interdisciplinary series draws on the long history of philosophical debates within Film Studies, including aesthetic evaluation, style, genre, representation, and the image (its properties and processes), placing them centre stage. The series encourages philosophising about areas of aesthetic evaluation, style, genre, representation, and the image through engagement with the films and the use of evidence from them.

Craig Fox  •  Britt Harrison Editors

Philosophy of Film Without Theory

Editors Craig Fox Philosophy Pennsylvania Western University California, PA, USA

Britt Harrison Philosophy University of York York, UK

Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy ISBN 978-3-031-13653-5    ISBN 978-3-031-13654-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover credit line: Yaorusheng/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all those who have inspired, shared, and made possible the ‘without theory’ journey to date. This includes the contributors to this volume; our commissioning editors, Andrew Klevan and Catherine Constable; Lina Aboujieb and all at Palgrave Macmillan; the invited speakers at, participants in, and funders of the 2019 Philosophy of Film Without Theory conference at the University of York, and Rob van Gerwen, editor of the Aesthetic Investigations journal.

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Contents

1 Introduction:  Philosophy of Film, With and Without Theory  1 Craig Fox and Britt Harrison Part I Doing Without Theory Yet Still Doing Philosophy  15 2 The  Procrustean Bed of Theory: In Conversation with Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey 17 Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey, Craig Fox, and Britt Harrison 3 It  All Depends: Some Problems with Analytic Film Theorising from the Perspective of Ordinary Language Philosophy 37 Andrew Klevan 4 Lone Star: Ambiguity as a Philosophical Given and a Philosophical Virtue 53 Katheryn Doran 5 No  Theory at Marienbad 67 Constantine Sandis

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6 Film  and the Space-Time Continuum 83 Maximilian de Gaynesford Part II The Appeal of—and to—Wittgenstein  97 7 Ordinary Returns in Le notti di Cabiria 99 John Gibson 8 Wittgensteinian Film-as-Philosophy Exemplified: Exploring the Exploration of Point-of-view in Cuaron’s Space-­Exploration Film Gravity115 Rupert Read 9 On  Films that Think by Seeing Frictionally: Toward a Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Film129 Carla Carmona Part III Revisiting—and Reconsidering—Cavell 145 10 Knowing  or Not-Knowing in the Cinema? Rethinking Cavell’s Image of Skepticism147 David Macarthur 11 Cavell,  Experiences of Modernism, and Kamran Shirdel’s The Night it Rained165 Craig Fox 12 The  Same Again, Only a Little Different: Stanley Cavell’s Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story177 William Rothman

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Part IV Seeing Faces, Finding Others 189 13 Seeing  One Another Anew with Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors191 Eran Guter and Inbal Guter 14 A Punctum Scene in Shoah205 Rob van Gerwen 15 Mary Magdalene and Murdochian Film Phenomenology221 Lucy Bolton Part V Cinematic Investigations 235 16 Cinematic  Invisibility: The Shower Scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho237 James Conant 17 Entertaining Unhappiness253 Sebastian Sunday 18 I n Kieślowski’s Restaurant des Philosophes: Determinism and Free Will Under Surveillance271 Colin Heber-Percy 19 Loving  the Characters, Caring for the Work: Long-Term Engagement with TV Serials287 Iris Vidmar Jovanović Index303

Notes on Contributors

Richard Allen  is Chair Professor of Film and Media Art, City University, Hong Kong. He is author of Projecting Illusion (1997) and co-editor of Film Theory and Philosophy (1999) and Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts (2001). A well-known Hitchcock scholar, Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony (2007) is one of his many books on the director. He has also published widely on Indian Cinema, including Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (2009) and a new anthology, Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories (2022), both with Ira Bhaskar. He is wrapping up a book on the double in Bollywood cinema, and his current research is on religion and melodrama. Lucy  Bolton  is Reader in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (EUP 2019), and Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema, and Thinking Women (Palgrave 2009). She is on the editorial board of The Iris Murdoch Review and guest-edited issue number 8 on ‘Iris Murdoch and Visual Culture’. She is also on the editorial boards of Film-­ Philosophy and is co-editor of the book series Visionaries: Thinking Through Female Filmmakers. Lucy is currently writing a monograph on philosophy and film stardom and compiling an anthology on feminist film philosophy. Carla  Carmona  teaches Theory of Dialogue and Interculturality, East Asian Aesthetics, and Epistemology at the University of Seville, having previously been Assistant Professor at the University of Extremadura. She was educated at the Universities of Seville and Innsbruck. She specialises in social epistemology, as well as the philosophy of Wittgenstein, in particular xi

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in its application to arts and aesthetics, dance education, embodied understanding and knowing-how, the pictorial oeuvre and Weltanschauung of Egon Schiele, and the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of fin-desiècle Vienna. She currently develops her own artistic practice under the name of O|C. James Conant  was born in Kyoto, Japan, in 1958. In addition to being Humboldt Professor in Theoretical Philosophy at Leipzig, he is Chester D.  Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Full Professor in the College at the University of Chicago, USA. Conant works broadly in philosophy and has published articles on topics in philosophical logic, epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, German idealism, and the history of analytic philosophy, among other areas, as well as interpretative work on a wide range of philosophers, including Descartes, Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Josiah Royce, William James, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty, Stroud, and McDowell, among others. Maximilian de Gaynesford  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He specialises in philosophy in language, mind and action, and the relationships between philosophy, poetry, and film. His publications include a number of monographs, including The Rift in the Lute: Attuning Poetry and Philosophy and he teaches philosophy of film and discusses the philosophical implications and value of film on public platforms, ranging from the BBC to the BFI. Katheryn  Doran  studies and teaches courses on American philosophy, contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, environmental ethics, and philosophy and film at Hamilton College where she is Associate Professor and General Director of the Hamilton in New  York City Program. She co-edited the most recent edition of Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills and has published several papers on the problem of scepticism. She was appointed in 2013 to the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Teaching of Philosophy for a three-­year term and served as the guest editor of a special issue of the American Philosophical Association’s APA Newsletter that addresses teaching philosophy in nontraditional settings. Doran ran a philosophy book group at Marcy Correctional Facility from 2007 through the New York State Covid lockdown of March, 2020, and hopes someday to resume that work.

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Craig Fox  is Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania Western University. He teaches courses in logic, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. Recently, he has been working on pieces of an overall project focused on aesthetics as a path into understanding the significance and relevance of Wittgenstein’s later thought. John Gibson  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. His research focuses on topics in aesthetics, the philosophy of literature, and the philosophy of the self. He is the author of Fiction and the Weave of Life (2007), editor of The Philosophy of Poetry (2015), and co-editor of, among others, The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Literature (2015) and Wittgenstein & Literary Studies (Cambridge, forthcoming). He is currently writing a book titled Poetry, Metaphor & Nonsense: An Essay on Meaning. Eran Guter  has a PhD in Philosophy from Boston University. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College and also a researcher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel. He is the author of Aesthetics A-Z (Edinburgh, 2010), in addition to articles on Wittgenstein, philosophy of music, and new media aesthetics. He is a recipient of the 2014 Joint Excellence in Science and Humanities (JESH) award from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Inbal Guter  has the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in piano performance from Boston University. She is a musicologist and concert pianist specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. She teaches at the Department of Music, University of Haifa, and at the Buchman-­Mehta School of Music, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her current research concerns the organisation of pitch in varied environments (diatonic, octatonic, polytonal, bitonal, etc.), theories of tonality and a-tonality, and ordered and unordered pitch sets. Britt Harrison  is a film producer, screenwriter, and script consultant. In 2022 she gained a PhD from the University of York, under the supervision of Peter Lamarque, with her dissertation, Cinematic Humanism: Cinematic, Dramatic, and Humanistic Value in Fiction Films. In her first PhD, The Epistemology of Know-How (University of Hertfordshire in 2012), she drew on resources and insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock to challenge the ‘propositional presumption’ that all knowledge is, or can be, reduced to the propositional.

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Colin  Heber-Percy  is an award-winning screenwriter and an Anglican priest. He gained his doctorate in medieval philosophy from King’s College, University of London. His monograph Perfect in Weakness: Faith in Tarkovsky’s Stalker was published in 2019. His article on Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is available in the Philosophy of Film Without Theory Special Issue of the journal Aesthetic Investigations. He is a regular contributor to the Church of England’s Reflections for Daily Prayer. And his book Tales of a Country Parish was published to critical acclaim in February 2022. Iris  Vidmar  Jovanović is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Rijeka, and Chair of Aesthetics. She works primarily in aesthetics and philosophy of art, with particular interest in literature, poetry, film and television, and Kant’s aesthetics. She edited a collection Narrative Art, Knowledge and Ethics dedicated to aesthetic cognitivism and is the author of The Art of Genius: Kant and Contemporary Philosophy of Poetry (in Croatian). She is Secretary of the European Society for Aesthetics. Andrew  Klevan is Professor of Film Aesthetics at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (2000), Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (2005), Barbara Stanwyck (2013), and Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (2018). He is co-editor of The Language and Style of Film Criticism (2011) and is on the editorial board of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism. David Macarthur  (PhD Harvard) is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on liberal naturalism, pragmatism, metaphysical quietism, scepticism, common sense, perception, ordinary language, and philosophy of art especially regarding architecture, photography, and film. He has edited Hilary and Ruth-Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (Harvard, 2017), and with Mario De Caro co-edited the following volumes: Naturalism in Question (Harvard, 2004); Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia, 2010); Hilary Putnam: Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard, 2012); and Hilary Putnam: Philosophy as Dialogue (Harvard, 2022). Rupert  Read  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Before coming to Norwich, he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Balliol College, Oxford. There he was intro-

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duced to Wittgenstein by his teachers Tony Kenny, Peter Hacker, Gordon Baker, and Stephen Mulhall. He pursued and broadened his interest in Wittgenstein by working with James Guetti, Louis Sass, Saul Kripke, and Cora Diamond at Rutgers and Princeton. He landed a permanent job at UEA in 1997, where he has stayed for the last two and a half decades, working to grow the Wittgensteinian side of the Department in particular. He co-edited The New Wittgenstein. He has also developed the emergent field of ‘film as philosophy’ and published A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment in 2019 with Routledge. William  Rothman  is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Miami. He was Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies (1976–84); director of the International Honors Program on Film, Television and Social Change (1986–90); founding editor of the ‘Harvard Film Studies’ series and series editor of ‘Cambridge Studies in Film.’ His books include Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze; The “I” of the Camera; Documentary Film Classics; A Philosophical Perspective on Film; Cavell on Film; Three Documentary Filmmakers; Must We Kill the Thing We Love?; and The Holiday in His Eye: Stanley Cavell’s Vision of Film and Philosophy. Constantine  Sandis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, a founding director of Lex Academic, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The Things We Do and Why We Do Them (2012), Character and Causation (2019), From Action to Ethics (2022), and Wittgenstein on Other Minds (2022), and the editor of numerous volumes. Sandis is also secretary of the British Wittgenstein Society and series editor of Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein, Why Philosophy Matters, and Philosophers in Depth. His current projects include a book on Wittgenstein’s Lion for Bloomsbury. Sebastian  Sunday is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Peking University. His philosophical education began in Germany, at the University of Göttingen, and continued in England, first at the University of London, then Oxford. His research and teaching cover a large spectrum of issues ranging from aesthetics and epistemology to the history of analytic philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of mind. He is editor of Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language (with Jakub Mácha; Palgrave, 2016), Wittgenstein on Philosophy, Objectivity, and Meaning (with James Conant; Cambridge University Press, 2019), and Culture and Value After Wittgenstein (Oxford University Press, 2022).

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Malcolm  Turvey is Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University and was the founding director (2015–21) of Tufts’ Film & Media Studies Program. He is also an editor of the journal October. He is the author of Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008) and The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011), and the co-editor of Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (Routledge, 2001). His Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Rob van Gerwen  is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Utrecht University, co-founder of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics, and director of Consilium Philosophicum. His books include Modern Philosophers on Art (Dutch, 2016); Art and Experience (1996); Richard Wollheim on the Art of Painting, edited (2001); Experiencing Music co-edited (Dutch, 2014); Watching Art in Museums (Dutch, 2003); Shall We Stay in Touch. Removing the Mind from Our Worldview (Dutch, 2018). He currently works on Art as a Moral Practice and is editor-in-chief of Aesthetic Investigations (aestheticinvestigations.eu), an open access, peer-­reviewed journal in aesthetics.

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 13.1 Fig. 13.2 Fig. 14.1 Fig. 14.2 Fig. 15.1 Fig. 15.2 Fig. 15.3 Fig. 15.4 Fig. 18.1 Fig. 18.2

Cabiria contented 100 Cabiria & Wanda 102 Simply leaving the Earth 122 Who goes up, must come down 123 Leaving Earth, for a new planet, and then leaving that new ‘home’…124 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2b, Fatale Beauté (Deadly Beauty), 1997 141 Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2b, Fatale Beauté (Deadly Beauty), 1997 142 The proverbial doubles of who we are 195 The reciprocal gaze 203 Simon Srebnik and, behind him, a nervous Kantarowski 213 The angry woman and Kantarowski ‘washing’ his hands in innocence215 Mary reassures Leah 224 Mary shares the joy of those she has baptised 227 Mary stays with Jesus on the cross 228 Mary is joyful to see Jesus risen 229 David watches the news, from Wargames279 Kern and Valentine, God and Adam 283

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Philosophy of Film, With and Without Theory Craig Fox and Britt Harrison

Is philosophy of film without theory an oxymoron or a family of non-, anti-, and/or a-theoretical approaches with which to engage in film-involving philosophical scholarship and understanding? The goal of this collection is to argue for the latter and to do so by example. By demonstrating a mere handful of the many ways in which philosophy of film without theory might be pursued, in tandem with the insights born of these methods, this volume implicitly and explicitly challenges the contemporary academic assumption that engaging philosophically with film must be a theoretical activity.1 It also, we would argue, reminds us of the potential value of theory-free scholarship across the humanities as a way of practicing, pursuing, and celebrating humanistic understanding.

C. Fox Pennsylvania Western University, California, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Harrison (*) Independent, Southport, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_1

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I Were one new to film studies, particularly its more philosophically informed work, one might assume from the title of David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s 1996 collection of articles, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, that such a volume as this already exists. Not so. For Bordwell and Carroll’s title did not herald the stepping away from, or moving beyond, theoretically orientated philosophical engagement with film. Rather the editors’ stated aim was to justify piecemeal theorizing, an alternative philosophical method to the then dominant Film Theory. In their ‘Introduction’ to Post-Theory, Bordwell and Carroll announced, “What is coming after Theory is not another Theory but theories and the activity of theorizing” (1996, Preface xiv, original emphasis). In other words, ‘Post-­ Theory’ is not a matter of philosophizing without theory, rather it champions theoretical (lower case ‘t’) methods over those found in Theory (with a capital ‘T’), drawing on the commitments championed by W.V.O. Quine’s vision of philosophy as “continuous with science” (1969, p. 126). Carroll’s own ‘Prospects for Film Theory’ in his and Bordwell’s (1996) enjoined the more continentally orientated Film Theorists to a theoretical showdown in the name of progress (1996, pp.  37–68). Suggesting an interactive “methodologically robust pluralism”, he proposed a shared enterprise in which competing theories about film would be evaluated and revised along the lines of standard scientific practice: where possible such theories would be consolidated, where necessary eliminated (1996, p. 63). In promoting the idea of this joint effort, Carroll criticised those Theorists whose work owed much to the substance and preoccupations of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and others, condemning their suspicions of science as “feckless” and evaluating their interpretations of films as the products of a “standard-­ issue sausage machine churning out readings that look and smell the same” (1996, p. 59 & p. 43). Unsurprisingly, the theoretical battle went unjoined. More than twenty-five years later, the theory versus Theory wars are over—and nobody won. Bordwell and Carroll, together with many of their cognitivist-inclined theorizing colleagues still engage with, and in the spirit of, those naturalising philosophers of mind, empirical researchers, and cognitive scientists, whose cognitivism often assumes propositional and/or representational theories of the mind/brain. The various strands of Theory and preoccupations of those ‘doing’ Theory—be they

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Marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and so on—have continued their own intellectual evolution and these days typically eschew the capital ‘T’. One might consider the orientations and preoccupations of what is now characterised as film-philosophy as a re-booting and re-branding of ‘Theory’ in the wake of Bordwell and Carroll’s 1996 onslaught. Put simply, the majority of philosophical engagement with, and reflection on, film can be viewed as almost entirely constituted by three traditions—all unabashedly theoretical—whose adherents and legatees continue today: (1) classical film theory (driven by concerns to justify the artistic status of films and which began in the second decade of the twentieth century); (2) Theory or Grand Theory (the major driver and touchstone for academic consideration of film, media, and culture from the 1960s and 1970s on, of which theoretical film-philosophy is one of the major post-1996 iterations); this also includes philosophers who apply the writings of other theoretical philosophers (e.g. Heidegger) to film in a theoretical or quasi-theoretical manner; and (3) cognitive and/or piecemeal film theorizing (operating in partnership with analytic philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and underway by the mid-1990s). The very idea of doing philosophy of film without theory is orthogonal to all three of these theoretical trajectories and thus may take various forms. Inevitably, this picture of the theoretical engagement with film demands substantial finessing.2 Not all analytic anglophone philosophers of the post-War period are card-carrying Quineans. Not all those who champion cognitivist-orientated philosophy of film actually do it, or do it all the time.3 And indeed, there are a small number of philosophers and film scholars, including Stanley Cavell, Richard Allen, and Malcolm Turvey, who cannot be situated squarely within any of the three traditions; questioning as they do the methodological and meta-philosophical implications of (certain types of) theorizing. Before characterising the ambitions and approaches of philosophy without theory let us consider what philosophy with theory, or indeed philosophy as theory tends to be or to aspire to. Methods and methodologies found in theoretical philosophy include some, though not necessarily all, of the following: the search for and justification of law-like regularities, universal or unifying generalisations, and/or totalising claims; the postulation and exploitation of unobservable theoretical posits (both physical and metaphysical); concept creation (rather than clarification); the pursuit of a-historical, a-temporal, context-free, non-situated facts; the use of mathematical and algorithmic techniques and expression; the reduction of

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person-level characteristics, features, and abilities to a sub-personal level; the assumption that any resistance to physicalism entails a commitment to supernaturalism; prioritising the third-personal point of view often to the exclusion of all others, even presuming the possibility and authority of the view from nowhere, and so on. While many of these theoretical activities are standard components of today’s scientific practice, the suitability of such methods for philosophy remains a contentious meta-philosophical question. For those who embrace the third tradition above—regarding philosophy as continuous with science—this is not a problem. For those who wish to resist the conflation of science and philosophy (or indeed with the humanities tout court) embracing such theoretical methods and priorities is often criticised as scientistic, that is, it extends the application of scientific principles and practices beyond the realm of their legitimate use.4 In the case of philosophy, this imperils what might be achieved by our philosophical investigations into, and understanding of, ourselves, each other, and our world. By contrast, the methodological priorities and principles relevant to the pursuit of philosophy without theory (in general) include, but are by no means limited to: fine-grained description and discernment; disentangling confusions; reactive and/or reflective critical inquiry, the exploration of conceptual connections; conceptual clarification and synthesis; logical geography; the provision of perspicuous presentations and surveyable overviews; systematic and non-systematic engagement with individual or particular works, subjects, objects, ideas, events and/or situations; and an appreciation that the view is always from somewhere and at some time, and so on. Methods and priorities in philosophy of film without theory might include any of the above, without being limited to them. Theory-free philosophy is nothing new; it can, of course, be traced back two and half thousand years, to Socrates. Some of Plato’s dialogues, such as the Protagoras and Theatetus can be read as (straightforwardly or ironically) challenging the idea that wrangling our philosophical preoccupations into submission requires establishing metaphysical essences or discovering putative theoretical frameworks. More recently, the leading challenge to the importation of scientific-style theorizing is found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, philosophy is “not a body of doctrine, but an activity”; a philosophical work aims at “elucidations” (1961, 4.111–4.112). To conflate philosophical methods with those of the natural sciences is to confuse philosophy and science. Wittgenstein diagnoses the temptation to do this as sourced in our

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“craving for generality”; something that “leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is ‘purely descriptive’” (1969, p. 18). The risk is that in searching for metaphysical essences or hidden commonalities, à la science, one fails to see what lies open to view while delving ‘beyond’ or ‘beneath’ for something hidden, something that demands excavation or theoretical invention. Wittgenstein’s invitation is not to recognise that scientific theories are one thing, philosophical ones another, but to appreciate that it is not philosophy without theory that is an oxymoron, but the very idea of a (certain kind of) valuable philosophical theory. “What we do is the opposite of theorizing. Theory blinds” (1946/7 MSS 133, quoted in Monk, 2009, p. 135). A tendency we would like to avoid.

II In Ingmar Bergman’s 1974 Scenes from a Marriage, we meet Marianne and Johan: He is a psychologist, she a lawyer and they have two children. According to Bergman’s own description of the beginning of the film, the viewer sees “a pretty picture of an almost ideal marriage” (1976, p. v). This seems especially so after Johan and Marianne’s friends have a dramatic argument during a dinner party. The contrast between the couples is palpable, and watching Johan and Marianne clean up after the party is soothing and reassuring. Then, seemingly all of a sudden, Johan tells Marianne that he has met another woman and that he’s going away with her. Years pass and though they have not officially divorced each is now involved with other people. They continue to meet from time to time; almost as if they need to. Eventually they sign divorce papers, after which they make love—only to then segue into a violent fight. Both remarry and the film concludes with one more meeting between Johan and Marianne; a scene that the Criterion DVD calls ‘Different Kinds of Love’. In this final scene, Marianne has had a bad dream and she describes it to Johan. She abruptly then asks whether everyone is living in “utter confusion”. Her face is directed towards the camera through the scene, occupying most of the screen. She is distraught. She then mentions never having loved anyone, nor having been loved. Johan gently suggests that she is being dramatic. “I know what I feel”, he says, “I love you in my selfish way, and I think you love me in your fussy pestering way. We love each other in an earthly and imperfect way”. Marianne reacts immediately.

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The despair vanishes from her face. Now seemingly genuinely happy, she wants to stay huddled together for the rest of the night. It is Marianne’s reaction to Johan’s words that is so striking here. In telling her that love can be earthy and imperfect—and that they share such a love—he is providing her not with a reassurance but with a revelation. Rather than offering her proof of something she doubted, he provides a new way of seeing what was never hidden, yet was never seen like this. Johan’s words provide her with the wherewithal to describe, to understand, and now to appreciate something about her, him, and their situations and experiences; showing some of the commonalities, the connections, and the differences between them. Nothing has changed, factually, yet everything, as it were, is different. Compare Bergman’s use and treatment of Marianne’s dream with Wittgenstein’s discussion of the way Freud handles a patient’s dream. (The issue here is not the empirical accuracy of Wittgenstein’s account, but the use he makes of what he takes to be Freud’s words.) In the third of his four Lectures on Aesthetics, given in 1938, in Cambridge, Wittgenstein—as recorded by his students—says this: Freud does something which seems to me immensely wrong. He gives what he calls an interpretation of dreams. … A patient, after saying that she had a beautiful dream, described a dream … Freud shows what he calls the ‘meaning’ of the dream. The coarsest sexual stuff, bawdy of the worst kind … Is it bawdy? He shows relations between the dream images and certain objects of a sexual nature. Does this prove that the dream is what is called bawdy? Obviously not … But wasn’t the dream beautiful? I would say to the patient, ‘Do these associations make the dream not beautiful? It was beautiful. Why shouldn’t it be?’ I would say Freud has cheated the patient. (1966, III, 20)

Wittgenstein objects to what he takes to be Freud’s correction; he objects to Freud telling her the supposed ‘actual meaning’ of the dream, which is at odds with her own understanding. Each of these ‘scenes’—Marianne and Johan, and Freud and his patient—gives us an instance of someone who is trying to sort through a complex situation; trying to come to what they regard as a satisfactory understanding and appreciation of it. Marianne has brought something to that process—as we do—which amounts to a view, an assumption, about what ‘love’ must be like, in order to be love. Johan says things that enable her to put aside that assumption and, arguably, to see things more clearly.

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She embraces his re-description. Freud, like Marianne, also brings assumptions to the dream discussion—again as we do—about the meaning of symbols and ‘how to understand dreams’. Yet, according to Wittgenstein, the patient is not better off, but more confused. Unlike Johan’s facilitation of Marianne’s understanding of things, Freud seems to obscure the patient’s understanding. His assumptions are ‘getting in the way’. There is, we propose, an analogy between ‘theory’ and that ‘something or other that gets in the way’. This can amount to the witting or unwitting imposition of constraints on what counts as (ways of) understanding; blinkering where we might look and what we might therefore see. This is not to say that there will always be a theoretical mote in our philosophical eyes, but rather we need to be reminded that sometimes there might be; and we’d be wise to remember this and learn to look around it.

III What this means for our potential understanding and appreciation of films, of works of art, and indeed of other people, and so on, is that without theory approaches can serve a range of distinct philosophical, humanistic, and otherwise valuable purposes. As the various contributions to this volume demonstrate, without theory approaches can be reflective, systematic, discursive, illuminating, and intellectually provocative. When it comes to saying something about how one might understand a particular film, or what a film might help one to understand, the explorations tend to start from (and ultimately return to) that film.5 It will also be noted that while the names of particular philosophers surface periodically in these articles, there is nothing essential about their employment. Indeed, as demonstrated, one might make use of a theoretical philosopher’s ideas but in metaphorical or other non-theoretical ways. Equally, mentioning certain philosophers does not and would not necessarily ensure a without theory approach. Opening Part One, ‘Doing Without Theory Yet Still Doing Philosophy’ is a discussion with the philosophically orientated film scholars Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. Their Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts offers the ground-breaking collection (and set of arguments) not just for philosophy of film without theory, but for theory-free philosophy of art, in general.6 The conversation provides a revealing guided tour of the context and rationale behind some of the defining books in the recent history of theory-informed film studies and theoretically orientated philosophy of

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film. Furthermore, it lifts the lid on various questionable pedagogical practices in academic philosophy, encouraging us to reflect on how we do philosophy (of film) and are trained into doing philosophy. Allen and Turvey finish with personal reflections on a number of contemporary opportunities and challenges in these fields. Andrew Klevan’s contribution brings the preoccupations found in ordinary language philosophy to bear on an example of analytic philosophy of film by Berys Gaut, questioning the value of sacrificing the particular, the specific, and the singular, in the self-­imposed task of building another theoretical house on already theoretical foundations. Acknowledging the indefinite multiplicity of relations between emotion, music, and so-called identification, Klevan argues against a method that seeks to subsume a manifold of concepts and conceptualizations under single words, rather than expand, enrich, and reveal the distinct nuances they offer. Katheryn Doran explores a number of philosophical similarities and differences at play in Rob Reiner’s body-­ swap comedy All of Me and John Sayles’ Lonestar. Keeping the border between film and philosophy open, she discovers ways in which cinematic ambiguity can, contra Murray Smith and Thomas Wartenburg, be philosophically rewarding. Constantine Sandis recognises the temptations to impose theory on, or find it in, Last Year at Marienbad but argues for the possible pointlessness of either pursuit, as the film, in an important sense, has nothing to hide. There is no film-specific lock ready to surrender to the right theoretical key. Max de Gaynesford offers a set of systematic observations that recognise the opportunities and challenges available in the philosophical investigation of films that are constituted by actual, or seemingly, continuous shots. In exploring some of the ways in which films play around with the relations between space, time, and cinematic storytelling, de Gaynesford’s prolegomena also argues for the value of attuning our philosophical engagement to film criticism. Part Two, ‘The Appeal of—and to—Wittgenstein’, begins with one possible example of such attunement: John Gibson’s re-calibration of Wittgenstein’s notion of a perspicuous presentation achieved in tandem with his understanding of Fellini’s Le notti de Cabiria. Gibson argues that reflection on the everyday need not be limited to the quotidian, or the near documentary, but might embrace the poetic and the melodramatic in pursuing clarity-facilitating departures from the familiar. Rupert Read recognises an internal relation between the form of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity and the extent to which our human wandering  is itself internally connected to our coming home. Considering the two major tracking shots,

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early in the film, Read employs those wisdom-orientated Wittgensteinian tactics of offering invitations and reminders to help readers, and viewers, ‘see’ something in a way that might have been forgotten or gone unnoticed or unvalued. Developing this notion of ‘seeing as’ is part of Carla Carmona’s demonstration that Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, not least in its form as a philosophical album, is capable of illuminating the cinematic investigations of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma— and vice versa. By using a criss-crossing form that resonates with both of these works, Carmona’s paper also delves into their implications for the notion of the filmic reality and, by way of Arthur Danto and Noël Carroll, the relation between art and philosophy. In the opening chapter of Part Three, ‘Revisiting—and Reconsidering— Cavell’, David Macarthur scrutinises afresh the source and supposed type of scepticism that Stanley Cavell thinks is the very stuff of movies, finding standard characterisations either misplaced or misguided. Reconstruing the relationship between ourselves and others (in life and on screen) as a matter of acknowledgement does not merely raise questions about some supposed sceptical gap but provides the resources to diminish a specifically epistemic worry. Craig Fox brings Cavell’s paper ‘Music Discomposed’ and Iranian filmmaker Kamran Shirdel’s seeming documentary, The Night it Rained, into an orchestrated encounter that resuscitates and reorients a number of modernist preoccupations. He thereby shows that an augmented construal of modernism may enable us to better engage in sense-­ making. William Rothman uses Cavell’s repeated engagement with the characters of Dexter and Tracy in George Cukor’s film The Philadelphia Story as one possible way of characterising Cavell’s life-long philosophico-­ cinematic quest for Emersonian perfectionism. In so doing, Rothman not only illuminates some of the roles this and other films play, for Cavell, in the ‘register of the moral life’; he thereby provides reasons for us all to return to familiar films throughout our (philosophical) lives. In Part Four, ‘Seeing Faces, Finding Others’, Eran Guter and Inbal Guter do just that, and more. The Guters find in Godrey Reggio’s Visitors a way of re-connecting to ourselves as human beings, facilitated inter alia by the marriage of slow motion photography and Philip Glass’s music with its themes from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Out of their observations comes an appreciation of the extent to which our ‘Menschenkenntnis’ is crucially an aesthetic understanding. Rob van Gerwen draws our attention to two specific moments of self-betrayal in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah; moments that expose the extent to which our humanity is there in our

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very animal responsiveness. Van Gerwen finesses Roland Barthes notion of punctum—the way an aspect of a photograph can prick or puncture one— to investigate how this works, both on- and off-screen. Lucy Bolton argues that a phenomenological encounter with, and appreciation of, the Garth Davis-directed film Mary Magdalene, illuminates the value of Iris Murdoch’s limited but important writing on cinema. Considering the power of the close-up to confirm the face as a locus of human character, Bolton champions Murdoch’s complementary belief in the power of film to enlarge our imagination. James Conant opens Part Five, ‘Cinematic Investigations’ with a consideration of the invisibility of several of Hitchcock’s achievements in the shower scene in Psycho. He challenges theoretical approaches which recognise only the obvious, and the obviously theoretically serviceable elements of film, especially when they fail to situate parts, scenes, and/or sequences of a film in relation to the movie, as a whole. The importance of the part-­ whole interdependence is further demonstrated by Sebastian Sunday’s detailed account of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, a film, he argues, that allows viewers the rare, yet rewarding opportunity to happily, and reflectively, experience unhappiness. Colin Heber-Percy brings together medieval philosophy, Krzysztof Kieślowksi’s Three Colours: Red, John Badham’s War Games, and the articulations of a schizophrenic to explore the centuries old ways of accommodating the tension between free will and determinism. Key to this is his reminder that Three Colours: Red shares much in form and structure with romantic comedy. In the final contribution of this section, Iris Vidmar Jovanović argues that understanding our long-term commitments to long-form television series—such as the recent adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—requires going beyond Noël Carroll’s account of sympathy and Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s work on familiarity. She identifies the importance of the care we have for the work, and the dialogue between our internal and external perspectives on it. These contributions demonstrate the fact that doing philosophy of film without theory is a matter of engaging in an open-ended range of film-­ involving philosophical practices; practices that need not share a common method. Rather, each author tips their hat to some, but by no means all, of a range of criss-crossing themes, priorities, interests, and methodological principles. These include a reverberating philosophical curiosity about, and valorisation of, such things as the similarities and the differences between the everyday and the extraordinary; between understanding and

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knowledge; between description and criticism; between cinematic form and content; between the philosophical and the artistic, and so on. To provide a singular conclusion or ‘take-away’ as to the nature, purpose, and/or ambition of philosophy of film without theory would be to succumb to the reductionist abstraction that theory-free philosophers resist. Our goals with this volume are (1) to provide pointers to those whose work and arguments in these areas have gone either unrecognised or underappreciated, such as Allen and Turvey (2001); (2) to provide a window on some contemporary ways of putting film and philosophy into productive conversation; (3) to champion the idea that future philosophy of film need not conform to its past; and (4) to demonstrate, in a modest way, that laissez-faire theoretical pluralism is sometimes only possible if one curtails one’s meta-philosophical reflections. As such, this volume both acknowledges its position as an heir to the theory wars inaugurated by Bordwell and Carroll, while nonetheless aiming to show the value to be had by moving beyond theory, ‘Theory’, and theorizing of all stripes. The non-theoretical yet nonetheless philosophical approaches found here show, we trust, that resisting the theoretical does not entail post-­ modernism; that non-empirical understanding does not entail a commitment to anything ‘supernatural’; and that interdisciplinary intellectual engagement does not entail sacrificing the distinct achievements of humanist understanding.

Notes 1. See Fox and Harrison (2020) and the rest of our Special Issue of the journal Aesthetic Investigations dedicated to Philosophy of Film Without Theory in the wake of the inaugural international ‘Philosophy of Film Without Theory’ conference, held at the University of York in 2019. 2. For a variety of further systematisations and nuances of the various ‘schools’ and orientations see Richard Allen and Malcolm’s Turvey ‘Introduction’ to their (2001); Turvey (2019); Sinnerbrink (2019); Currie (2016); and Carroll et al. (2019). 3. One could make the case for Carroll (2011) as exemplifying philosophy of film without theory. 4. See Kenny (2009). 5. We take this point to be consistent with various ways others bring philosophy to bear on film. See also, for example, Stephen Mulhall’s discussion around his disappointment that commentary on his On Film focused on the

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“general philosophical claims” instead of his readings of particular films (Mulhall, 2008, p. 134ff.). 6. See particularly Allen & Turvey’s Introduction to the volume, ‘Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: a prophylaxis against theory’ (2001, pp. 1–36) and the included reprint of P.M.S.  Hacker’s ‘Wittgenstein and the autonomy of humanistic understanding’; a seminal work in the argument for theory-free philosophy tout court.

References Allen, R., & Turvey, M. (2001). Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. Routledge. Bergman, I. (1976). Scenes from a Marriage. Pantheon. Bordwell, D., & Carroll, N. (1996). Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. Carroll, N. (1996). In D. Bordwell & N. Carroll (Eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies Madison. University of Wisconsin Press. Carroll, N. (2011). Philosophical Insight, Emotion, and Popular Fiction: The Case of Sunset Boulevard. In N. Carroll & J. Gibson (Eds.), Narrative, Emotion, and Insight (pp. 45–68). Penn State University Press. Carroll, N., Summa, D., Laura, T., & Loht, S. (2019). The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. Palgrave Macmillan. Currie, G. (2016). Methods in the Philosophy of Literature and Film. In H. Cappelen, T. S. Gendler, & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology (pp. 641–656). Oxford University Press. Fox, C., & Harrison, B. (2020). Inaugurating Philosophy of Film Without Theory. Aesthetic Investigations, 3(2), 175–184. Hacker, P. M. S. (2001). Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding. In R. Allen and M. Turvey (Eds.), Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. (pp. 39–74). Routledge. Kenny, A. (2009). Cognitive Scientism. In H.-J.  Glock & J.  Hyman (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P.  M. S.  Hacker. Oxford University Press. Monk, R. (2009). Biography and Theory Reconsidered: Second Wittgensteinian Thoughts. New Formations, 67, 134–142. Mulhall, S. (2008). On Film (2nd ed.). Routledge. Quine, W.  V. O. (1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press. Sinnerbrink, R. (2019). Film and Ethics. In C. Rawls, D. Neiva, & S. S. Gouveia (Eds.), Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides (pp. 185–206). Routledge. Turvey, M. (2019). (Collapsed) Seeing-In and the (Im-)Possibility of Progress in Analytic Philosophy (of Film). In C. Rawls, D. Neiva, & S. S. Gouveia (Eds.), Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides (pp. 11–25). Routledge.

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Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus (D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, Trans.). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, L. (1966). Lectures on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. C. Barrett, (Ed.), Basil Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). The Blue and Brown Books (2nd ed.). Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell.

Filmography Bergman, I. (Director). (1974). Scenes from a Marriage. Cinematograph AB.

PART I

Doing Without Theory Yet Still Doing Philosophy

CHAPTER 2

The Procrustean Bed of Theory: In Conversation with Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey, Craig Fox, and Britt Harrison

In 2001, two philosophically orientated film scholars, Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, published their edited volume, Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. In their Introduction, ‘Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: a

R. Allen City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] M. Turvey Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] C. Fox Pennsylvania Western University, California, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Harrison (*) Independent, Southport, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_2

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prophylaxis against theory’, Allen and Turvey argue that the dominant theoretical approaches to film and art, in academia, are in principle misguided. Theorizing—be it ‘Theory’, ‘Grand Theory’, or the more scientific (even scientistic) ‘theorizing’ found in analytic philosophy departments and much cognitive film theory—is the wrong primary tool with which to develop our scholarly understanding of human artistic activities, creations, and achievements. Given Allen and Turvey’s arguments apply across the spectrum of artistic activity and scholarship in Humanities departments, the various philosophical contributions in their collection consider not just the arts in general, but also focus on poetry, literature, and the performing arts. In their own individual essays, Allen engages with recent developments in his paper entitled ‘Cognitive Film Theory’, whilst Turvey brings a fresh set of challenges to bear on the work of philosopher of film, Stanley Cavell, in his article, ‘Is scepticism a ‘natural possibility’ of language? Reasons to be skeptical of Cavell’s Wittgenstein.’ The editors of this current volume believe that the investigations, resources, and arguments of Allen and Turvey’s articles—both individual and joint—remain incredibly apposite. An important aim of this current volume is to raise awareness of the existence of their (2001) book, and gesture towards some of its contributions and insights, with the goal of inviting readers to engage with its richly detailed argumentation and challenges. What follows is a modestly edited transcript of an online conversation between Richard Allen, Malcolm Turvey, Craig Fox, and Britt Harrison on October 13, 2021. *** Britt Harrison: In 1996 David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies came out, questioning the enterprise of Grand Theory and all those so-called “arcane peregrinations” that were then passing as serious work in the corridors of Film Studies (1996, p.  36). Bordwell and Carroll argued for a range of approaches that emphasized piecemeal theorizing against the totalizing explanatory frameworks of Grand Theory. The following year, your volume, Richard, Film Theory and Philosophy co-­edited with Murray Smith, appeared, opening with the claim that “the field of film studies is in a state of flux, or even crisis or impasse” and proposing film theory informed by analytic philosophy as one solution to this crisis (1997, p. 1). Then suddenly it’s 2001 and now, Richard, you are co-editing Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts with

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Malcolm and challenging the very idea of theorizing. This was something of a tumultuous time. What was it like, in the 1990s, trying to do philosophy of film and/or film studies in a valuable way? Richard Allen: The intention behind Film Theory and Philosophy was to showcase the value of a broadly conceived analytic approach to film theory. Originally, I wanted to call the book Analytic Film Theory. But we were worried that people might confuse analytic film theory with psychoanalytic film theory, and so we called it Film Theory and Philosophy instead. But, of course, that title rather loosened the focus that we wanted to have. The point was we did want to include as broad a church as possible under the rubric analytic film theory. When we were working on it, Murray and I didn’t have the Bordwell and Carroll book at our disposal. The two books came out almost at the same time. We were also concerned with criticizing many kinds of Grand Theory, but from the framework of a broadly conceived analytic tradition. We valued this analytic tradition for being explicit in its premises, being clear about what it was arguing against and what it was arguing for, and for aspiring to coherence and clarity and reasoned argument. Craig Fox: Would you say that analytic theory—as a component of the broad conception of analytic philosophy—would not be theorizing in the ‘grand’ sense? RA: Sometime after Murray approached me to work on the volume, we discovered that we didn’t actually see eye to eye on the question of the role of science, and scientific theorizing, in Film Studies. So when you ask about whether there is ‘Grand Theory’ in it well there was, in a sense; for example, Gregory Currie’s cognitive manifesto in the volume. And the reason that was there, of course, was that it represented a certain wing—a highly theoretical wing—of analytic philosophy which exists and is an important feature of analytic philosophy. At that point, the differences myself and Murray had about the nature of philosophy, or the nature of analytic philosophy and its relationship to science, were suppressed. Initially, I had wanted to discuss, in the Introduction to this 1997 collection, Wittgenstein’s own repudiation of his Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus, and also how Wittgenstein repudiated science as a model of philosophy. However, these discussions would have made a certain interpretation of Wittgenstein too prominent and compromised our introduction of analytic philosophy as a broad church that encompasses both conceptual analysis and much more foundational, scientific forms of philosophizing as complementary enterprises, rather than, as in my understanding of

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Wittgenstein, incompatible enterprises. This line of argument was soft-­ pedalled in favor of the broad church position that the book espoused, which is why it seemed right to devote a separate volume to it, namely, Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. BH: Malcolm, what was it like for you at that time, jostling around, looking for where to lay your own hat? Malcolm Turvey: The 1990s, when I was a graduate student, was a very interesting time for Film Studies, because the discipline, which had really only existed since the late 1960s as an academic enterprise, had been almost completely dominated by two Grand Theories: psychoanalysis and semiotics. However, this was, thankfully, starting to change in the 1990s in part due to the intervention of analytic philosophers such as George Wilson and Noël Carroll. I still remember first reading Carroll’s Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory, and it was like a bolt of lightning. It was so different from the kind of continentally inspired Grand Theorizing that was being shoved down our throats as graduate students. I knew instantly—it was like a religious conversion almost—that I wanted to be with that guy and not with the psychoanalytical-semiotic film theorists. Analytic philosophy, broadly conceived—even in its theoretical manifestation in the work of people like Kendall Walton and Greg Currie— seemed to me, and still seems to me today, vastly superior to the kind of film theorizing that existed in our discipline and sadly still does (in the form of Deleuzean film theory, for example). But you know it’s important to remember—and this speaks to one of your [later] questions about the influence or lack thereof of our anthology—that it’s only a small group of people, a small group of film scholars, who are at all interested in analytic philosophy, however you define it, as well as in cognitivism. CF: Is that for practical reasons, though, because of maybe the training people receive and perpetuate? MT: Richard and I were talking about this yesterday. I think there are lots of reasons; one is pedagogical, though. I well remember, as a graduate student at NYU, taking a seminar on Foucault with Bob Sklar. We read one or more texts by the great master [Foucault] each week. Then in the last part of the semester we were set free to apply the theory to something. The idea that Foucault could be wrong about anything never entered the discussion at all. And that’s the way Theory is by and large taught. These days it’s not so much Foucault, it’s Deleuze. And the way Deleuze is taught, it’s not: ‘Okay, here’s an argument: is it empirically accurate?; is it

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conceptually coherent?’ and so on. It’s: ‘This is the greatest thinker on film ever, and you as a lowly graduate student need to absorb this and then apply it.’ And by the way, that’s what’s happened to Cavell. Cavell is in that position now in Film Studies. So, I think it’s partly pedagogical. By contrast a philosopher in the analytic tradition is taught to poke holes in extant theories and try to propose better ones. But people in Literary Studies, Film Studies, and Art History, etc., who are taught theories are not taught to do that; they’re not given the skills. The first time I really saw this analytic approach being applied to film in a systematic way was in Carroll’s Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory where he first clarifies the arguments of his opponents and then tests them conceptually, logically, and empirically—and he finds them wanting. I was sold immediately. RA: I’m in total agreement, but there’s a couple of further points to make about the way in which the logic of Theory operates. One is that that pedagogy in the Humanities, or the PhD production model of it at least, requires you to produce something as a graduate student; to carve out a territory or a terrain. From a practical standpoint, of course, it’s very enabling to build your intellectual house on the foundations of a body of thought that is introduced and simultaneously sweeps away some prior body of knowledge, as big theories tend to do. So you can sweep away a whole body of work without having a perspective on it, without having to really engage with it fully. You can build your new house on a different place. So I think there’s a kind of production of knowledge that is enabled by Theory. The second point I’d make is about the political or ethical dimensions of scholarship in the Humanities. These theories are not questioned, partly because scholars aren’t trained to question them, and as Malcolm says the pedagogy isn’t set up that way, but they’re also not questioned because they are used as a means to an end. The end being: if it’s Cavell, then there’s some kind of ethics of community supposedly to be gained. Or if it’s Deleuze, then it’s often in the name of anti-humanism or feminism. Just as psychoanalysis was invoked in the past, Deleuze provides another version of the criticism of the humanist subject: the patriarchal humanist subject, that straw man that informed so much of 1970s theorizing. So this dynamic is fundamentally a political one and this is another reason that the users of these theories are not concerned with testing a theory as Malcolm was discussing. Theories are enabling devices, they’re enabling

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intellectual structures to allow thinkers to make ethical or political interventions. BH: Which you said is sort of compromising… RA: It is epistemically compromising, as it compromises the legitimacy of the thought. But this also is where any critique of Theory ends up being seen as reactionary because of course the epistemic flaws need to be exposed and the theory needs to be criticized, but by doing so, you seem to be disempowering. And if you’re undermining any sort of a theory that enables the critique of humanism or of capitalism, then you’re on the wrong side. BH: So how did you two come together and come up with the idea of Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts? MT: Richard was my PhD advisor. I came to NYU to study partly with Richard and partly with Annette Michelson, who’s now deceased. I’d already read Bordwell and Carroll, and I knew that I wanted to do something theoretical that wasn’t within the psychoanalytical/semiotic tradition. I also wanted to study avant-garde film. Richard taught one of the best courses I’ve ever taken, on analytic film theory—it was intellectually rigorous and transformative—and in that seminar we read some Wittgenstein. I’d already read some but hadn’t fully grasped, I think, the implications of his work, nor fully understood it. Richard was about to publish his first book at that time, which was a book written more in the tradition of Grand Theory; a sort of analytically informed Grand Theory about perceptual illusion. But I think he was starting to realize that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy had implications for that style of theorizing too. Over the next few years, as we increasingly came to understand the methodological implications of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy for Film Studies, we started thinking about how we could introduce it to our field and we came up with the idea of the volume. It took a while for me to fully immerse myself in the tradition of analytic ordinary language philosophy and the wonderful richness of that tradition. Richard knew it much better than me because he’d studied with leading Wittgenstein exegete Peter Hacker. While absorbing this philosophical tradition, especially the work of Gilbert Ryle, I wrote my dissertation on classical film theory under Richard’s supervision, which became my first book (Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition), and it was deeply informed by Wittgenstein and ordinary language philosophy. Basically, in this book, I employ the techniques of ordinary language philosophy to show where

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classical film theorists such as Vertov, Kracauer, Balazs, and so on lapse into nonsense in their theories of cinema as a revelatory technology akin to a microscope or telescope. This ‘revelationist’ tradition of film theory, as I call it, is yet another example of the distorting influence of science and the model of Grand Theory on film studies, and my critique of it was anti-­ theoretical in the Wittgensteinean sense. RA: I would just add that that my first book Projecting Illusion was an illusion theory of representation in the cinema. It welded together quite a rigorous conception of psychoanalysis, influenced by Richard Wollheim, with a cognitive theory of illusion. However, it also contained a significant discussion of Wittgenstein and Wittgenstein’s salience for understanding theory. In brief, I proposed that Jean Louis Baudry’s theory of the cinematic apparatus as a machine of ideological subjection—then foundational in Film Studies—was grounded in Husserl’s transcendental subject and Derrida’s response to it. I then argued that this theory fell foul of Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of the conceptual confusion of thinking of our mental life as essentially ‘inner’, and therefore hidden, in the Philosophical Investigations. As Malcolm pointed out, I studied under Peter Hacker as an undergraduate. It was a formative experience, but I had a very narrow education in philosophy at Oxford doing papers on logic and philosophy of mind, Wittgenstein, and moral and political philosophy. At the same time, I had read psychoanalysis and Freud while I was still at school. I was fascinated by psychoanalysis and had been for a long time but I did not formally study it until graduate school. I had absorbed a sufficient amount of Wittgenstein’s thinking and ordinary language philosophy for it to remain of central importance to me, but I also felt under pressure, in my first book, to construct my own theory because that is so much the currency of knowledge in the field. I was sort of working through this as a young faculty member, and my first book is a product of that unresolved intellectual position. Partnering with Malcolm on Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts was critical, because Malcolm’s energetic embrace of Wittgenstein fired up my enthusiasm to really get to the bottom of the problem, as it were. BH: And when you got to the bottom of that problem both singularly and together, did you find that the idea of that broad church analytic philosophy was broad enough or not to allow for a Wittgensteinian position in there? And if so, did you have to reshuffle what you thought about analytic philosophy?

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RA: Well, that’s complicated and I’m sure Malcolm has things to say about this, but you know Wittgenstein occupies quite a complex position in analytic philosophy. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was an extremely influential book on the formation of the analytic tradition and some analytic philosophers of different stripes have also been influenced by his later Philosophical Investigations. At the same time, I believe that if one takes the Investigations seriously it offers, together with the ordinary language philosophical tradition it inspired, a repudiation of much of the mainstream of analytic philosophy. As Peter Hacker argues, mainstream analytic philosophy is dominated by the Quinean tradition (after American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine) wherein priority is given to science and to the role of science, along with the idea that philosophy and science are not fundamentally different disciplines. That tradition continues to play an absolutely fundamental role in contemporary philosophy. MT: You know I spend time with aestheticians, and it seems to me that Wittgenstein’s work is appealed to by them in a piecemeal fashion, if it’s appealed to [at all]. Its larger ramifications are rarely addressed or even understood. I get the sense that it’s not part of the training of contemporary Anglo-American philosophers to think about the larger methodological issues it raises. So, the position we try to articulate in the volume is very much an overlooked position; though there are a few people who are supporters. RA: To add: if the later Wittgenstein is discussed in analytical philosophy he is often treated critically as a behaviorist, that is, as someone who believes that statements about our mental life are reducible to statements about behaviour, which we, like Hacker, take to be a fundamental misunderstanding of his work. BH: Did you think about limiting Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts to film? MT: No. It wasn’t easy finding people [who were] actually working on art and aesthetics who fully grasped Wittgenstein’s views, as opposed to just taking one or two arguments piecemeal. So we’d never have been able to limit it to just film. BH: In your (2001) book you identify two basic features of what it is to ‘do Theory’ or to theorize in ways that are questionable when it comes to our understanding of the arts and works of art (and beyond). This is to engage in both a unifying and a reductive activity: one that aims to unify a range of diverse phenomena by reducing them to a singular principle— or entity, process, force, concept, or something else—that is somehow

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hidden from view and which it’s the theorist’s task to either discover or postulate.1 Did this characterisation come entirely from Wittgenstein, or were other influences informing this? MT: I think it was Wittgenstein principally, but also the tradition he informed, and especially the work of his student G. H. von Wright (such as Explanation and Understanding), which really influenced us. This is one way in which we’ve been misunderstood. Some people take us to be criticizing theory in general and that’s not what we were trying to do in this book; we were criticizing a particular kind of theorizing, what one might call reductive theorizing. Of course, there are other senses of the word ‘theory’; you could say that certain kinds of generalizations— descriptive generalizations—are theories and in that sense, we have no problem with theory. Even Wittgenstein could be called a theorist in that sense. But it wasn’t just reductive scientific theories of the arts that we were criticizing; we were criticizing theories that ape the scientific model, such as psychoanalysis, and I think you can say we took that from Wittgenstein. This is why in the last part of the Introduction to our volume, which Richard wrote, he doesn’t just address cognitivism, but he also addresses psychoanalysis and semiotics. Also, it’s important to point out that while our model of reductive theory overlaps with Bordwell and Carroll’s Grand Theory in some respects, it is also different. For them, Grand Theory is a doctrine such as psychoanalysis that is dogmatically applied to everything, and they recommend in its place ‘mid-level’ theorizing that is devoted to answering specific questions and solving particular problems. But for us, a theory doesn’t need to be a Grand Theory to be reductive. For example, in our introduction we criticize Barthes’s theory of narrative as an example of reductive theorizing because it tries to reduce all narrative to a deep structure of which narrative practitioners are unaware. But this theory of narrative is hardly a Grand Theory in Bordwell and Carroll’s sense. RA: In addition to Wittgenstein we were, of course, influenced by Peter Hacker but also, in particular in our writing of the Introduction, by a little volume by the French philosopher Jacques Bouveresse. He has a very good book on psychoanalysis and Wittgenstein’s comments on Freud (Wittgenstein Reads Freud), where he really brings out very nicely Wittgenstein’s perspective on the role of Theory. CF: I notice you both address the transition from early Wittgenstein to later Wittgenstein, in characterizing what’s bad about theory; the negative sense of it.

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RA: Right. That’s a key point. But this is a complex question. There are philosophers who see the relationship between the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the later Wittgenstein of the Investigations as being essentially one of continuity, but they miss the depth of Wittgenstein’s own transformation as a thinker… MT: I think we’re on the side that thinks this transformation is profound. But there is another view out there, which is that there’s a lot of continuity, so that’s a legitimate issue for debate. RA: And, of course, there is some continuity which we address in Introduction to the book—the crucial continuity being his rejection of science as a model of philosophical thinking. BH: The other target in your challenge to reductive theorizing is the notion that there’s something hidden (a conception that was found in Wittgenstein’s own early picture theory of language in the Tractatus which he later overthrows). In the Investigations he claims that there’s nothing hidden about our use of language; everything must be available to speakers and hearers who can understand and speak a language. The hidden—as something a theory must be searching for—evaporates. This notion of there being—or not needing to be—a hidden ties back to your earlier point about pedagogy and what people are being asked to do in a PhD; they are being asked to find new “hiddens” or being encouraged to find them, lay claim to them, name them, and then … and in so doing bring them into being. The idea that there are no such ‘hiddens’ threatens to do people out of a job. MT: That argument which you just articulated, Britt, is probably the most important argument in the Investigations: that the rules for our use of words must be public, at least in principle. Our ability to use words intelligibly, and do much else that goes along with being a language user, is built on that. That was a very important notion, for us; that’s why we built into our definition of reductive theory the idea that it postulates something hidden. And also that an explanation not only must point to something hidden, but that that [hidden] thing must be unified. That you’re talking about one or two simple laws, or primitives, or principles that explain everything else. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein uses Goethe’s term Urphänomen to describe the way someone can take a preconceived idea and apply it to everything whether or not it really fits, and this relates also to the question you asked earlier about why people are taught Theory in a certain way. Reductive theorizing is appealing because it’s very satisfying and intellectually easy if you can think about everything through the lens

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of one or two concepts: ‘modernity,’ say, or Deleuze’s ‘movement-’ and ‘time-images’. Such is the appeal of psychoanalysis, it seems to me, or part of the appeal. In fact, Wittgenstein suggested that Freud’s theory of dreams as fulfilling wishes was an example of an Urphänomen, as Bouveresse points out in Wittgenstein Reads Freud, the earlier-mentioned book that really influenced us. That’s also at issue in my essay in the (2001) volume on Stanley Cavell. That’s what you’re getting in Cavell: everything’s about skepticism. Skepticism is an Urphänomen. I find it extraordinary that Cavell is held up as a model of a Wittgensteinian philosopher. There seems to be nothing less Wittgensteinian than the idea that you explain the entirety of human art and culture through a single idea. CF: Do you not find that there are moments in Cavell that are not part of that? MT: Yes, of course. My favorite Cavell book is probably Pursuits of Happiness because there are moments in that book that are really enlightening about the films. But the idea that they [the so-called ‘remarriage comedies’ discussed in that book] constitute a genre is, I think, absurd, as is the idea that they address skepticism about other minds. In some ways, though, Cavell’s not so much a philosopher as he is an interpreter, and there are moments of very profound interpretation, but whether you buy the larger philosophical edifice—I certainly don’t. BH: Richard, with regard to what might be characterised roughly as continental-style Theory, one of the things you identify practitioners as doing is quoting authority figures at length. Yet, someone unfamiliar with the substance of our discussion might suggest we’re doing the same thing with Wittgenstein. So how do you respond to that? RA: We are, of course, invoking Wittgenstein’s views, but I would say that in the Introduction to our (2001) book and elsewhere we are also making clear the nature of his arguments, where they are derived from, and what we believe their implications to be. And we leave it perfectly open for somebody to contest those arguments on the grounds of their epistemic failures, or failures of reasoning, or whatever. So, I don’t think that we’re just appealing to authority in the way we’re using Wittgenstein. MT: I’ll say that this is something I’ve struggled with. In the first blush of my exposure to Wittgenstein in the 90s, I was a full-on believer. And now that I’ve read more… I mean this is part of the danger, I think, of non-philosophers turning to philosophy. What we tend to do is take one little bit of philosophy and believe in it wholeheartedly without

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understanding the larger debates. I’ve read much more now and I realize that there are legitimate criticisms of Wittgenstein’s position and I can see why the Quinean tradition, as we called it before, has flourished. There are things to disagree with about Wittgenstein. For example, I’m re-reading this great book by Frank Cioffi (Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer) where he makes a very compelling case that there are some confusions in Wittgenstein’s discussion of aesthetics; that he’s running together several different arguments, and so on. So, I do think it’s important to allow room for the possibility, in fact the certainty, that Wittgenstein is wrong about certain things. I would say that it’s important to take on the criticisms and to show why you think they’re wrong. When you’re appealing to an authority, rather than simply appealing to that authority and saying nothing else, you—at some point—need to show why you think that the criticisms levelled at that authority are incorrect. Now I don’t think Richard and I were in a position to do that in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts in part because we were trying to introduce a new body of thought. To tear it down straight away would not have been appropriate, but there are plenty of philosophers out there who do defend Wittgenstein’s approach. For instance, I have a colleague, Avner Baz, in the Philosophy Department here at Tufts, and he’s written two books essentially defending a version of Wittgenstein’s approach. There is a danger, I think, especially if you’re not a philosopher, and I am not a philosopher, in just latching on to a particular philosopher and saying, “Aha, this is the Gospel…” RA: I agree with Malcolm, and that’s actually part of the reason that I didn’t continue in the same vein as this book. We were using Wittgenstein, in this book, as a sort of tool to dismantle positions that we disagreed with in the field. And yes, in that sense, there is a certain truth to the charge we’re discussing. CF: It sounds like you’re both saying that you were appealing to Wittgenstein in a non-dogmatic way, avoiding appealing to him as if the text is somehow playing the role that you described for theorists in the ‘grand’ sense. Would you agree with that characterization? MT: We were trying to, I would say. I think this connects with another misinterpretation of our opinion: that it rules out science from the humanities. That was not our view and I don’t think it was Wittgenstein’s view, by the way. If I could go back and rewrite the Introduction [to our (2001)] I would try to be clearer about this; we do have a paragraph where we say

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that science has a legitimate role to play, and so on and so forth but it seems to have gotten lost in the way that the argument has been cited. RA: I don’t think we should beat ourselves up over the Introduction and that failure. We very clearly stated in the Introduction that science has a role to play, it just wasn’t the main argument that we were making in the book. But maybe the book you’re writing now, Malcolm, will be able to explain more clearly what that role is and what its limits are. BH: And that book is? MT: I’m working on a book on the limits of scientific explanations of the arts, mainly focused on film. What I’m trying to do in this book is articulate a nuanced position wherein one can defend humanistic forms of knowledge and explanation, and one can say that they can do things that the sciences cannot do—but at the same time allow that the sciences have a lot to contribute to the study of the arts. At least that’s what I’m thinking right now. BH: I am partial to V. F. Perkins who does not fall into any of these standard ‘theoretical’ camps. But are there people in Film Studies now who are not Wittgensteinians but who also eschew the pursuit of hidden things, who are not playing around with Theory, or the various heirs of Grand Theory. Is there anybody doing that? RA: Well, the humanities-trained film scholar who’s working on questions of historical interpretation and historical explanation, and discovering and exploring narrative form, film style and themes … he or she is interpreting texts and going about their business without any worries about these issues, you know. They’re not engaged in Theory and then they’re not engaged in science. They’re engaged in the activities that humanistic inquiry has been engaged in since the time of Biblical and Talmudic exegesis, which is interpretive and historical. MT: There is a rich tradition now of film history. It’s very sophisticated, and while you could say it’s theory-laden in the sense that all historical inquiry has certain sorts of conceptual and theoretical presuppositions, it’s not ‘doing Theory’. And even David Bordwell: if you look at most of his work, most of his work falls within the tradition that Richard has just articulated. Going back to the 1990s, part of what was going on was the move away from psychoanalysis and semiotics but part of what was also going on was the emergence of a film historical tradition. Of course, there had been film history before. But what was really emerging was that people were actually being trained to go into archives, to understand how to use them, how to write about them, etc. You know people like Charlie

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Musser, and so on, and that tradition is very central and very rich. And then there’s lots of people who still interpret films and TV shows. Some of it is theoretically inflected but not all of it. So there really is a lot of work that is separate from what we’re talking about. BH: I was trying to situate ‘film-philosophy’, some of whose contemporary adherents seem to speak in exactly the same way that was being criticized by Bordwell and Carroll back in 1996. MT: You know the great tragedy of our discipline, and I often think about this, is that in some ways the thing that is most important about films—which is film is an art—is the thing that’s least discussed. I can understand why you like Perkins, regardless of what one thinks about whether his anti-essentialism is really essentialist, as Carroll argues. The sort of tradition of which he was a part, which involves careful attention to stylistic features and understanding films as works of art, where you have to pay careful attention to subtle issues—that tradition is the least valorized in our field and what is valorized unfortunately is theorizing. I would say, first and foremost, that this partly comes from a very unhappy historical coincidence: our field was born in the late 1960s at the time of both the New Left and the turn to the continental thinkers such as Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, and so on. That’s cast a very long shadow over our field. I think most film scholars are taught that if they’re going to do close study of film or interpretation that, in itself, is not enough. You’ve got to link it to some sort of larger theory or paradigm. (I’m not talking here about historical research.) That’s part of the pedagogy in our field. RA: I think this goes back to the point, we started with. We started with talking about the way in which Theory informs thinking. There are degrees of this. You’ll find essays that pay some attention to a theory at the beginning, but then ultimately what they’re actually interested in is interpreting and understanding the film. So I think there’s various degrees by which interpretations get informed by the Procrustean bed of theory. But as Malcolm said it’s the sort of argument, it’s a way of thinking and a kind of discourse that is promoted and valorized at graduate schools. CF: Does this bear any relation to social media treatments of TV shows, of movies—and so there’s a need to distinguish the academic? RA: Definitely. When I went to graduate school there clearly was a need to separate academic criticism from journalistic criticism. And I think that was partly at work in the repudiation of Auteurism; because Andrew Sarris was a journalist—a very good journalist and a very good writer. And I think that there was a need for academic film criticism to show that it was

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authentic and legitimate, truly academic. So it had to have this weight of Theory to bestow it credibility and authority. CF: It strikes me that’s not for a reason internal to the discipline, as it were. It’s because of, say, the conditions surrounding the discipline. MT: Yeah, that’s interesting. You might be right about that. But I think it’s also the desire one sees in film-philosophy, namely the claim that a film can philosophize, or a work of art can philosophize—in the way that the Investigations is philosophizing. It seems to be a completely absurd claim, it’s a way of ennobling film because you’re trying to say, ‘Oh films aren’t just films; they’re works of philosophy.’ And that points to I think the way in which art, in and of itself, is often thought of as a very trivial thing. It’s not enough to be interested just in what art does; it has to be connected to some other pursuits such as philosophizing, or ethics, or politics. RA: Furthermore, when film in particular began as an academic subject, and you know these forces are very real, it had to fight against the accusation that it was trivial, that it was not a serious medium worthy of study. BH: Given that you expressed a lot of justified and cautionary concerns about inappropriate theorizing in your (2001)  book, how have people responded in the wake of your book, between now and then; has your work fallen on receptive ears or not? MT: No. There was no response to it. BH: There were at least four major reviews… MT: Well, yes, there were some nice reviews. But really you’re the first people who’ve ever seriously embraced its anti-theoretical orientation. This is not really surprising, to be honest, given the kinds of tendencies and habits of mind that exist in our field and the kind of critique that we were making; it was bound not to win many friends. I wouldn’t say it’s affected the field in any substantial sense. This is not say that other film scholars haven’t taken up aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought in the interim. D. N. Rodowick tries to affect a marriage between Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Cavell in a book called Philosophy’s Artful Conversation, which offers a decidedly “culturalist” reading of Wittgenstein in order to attack the embrace of certain scientific explanations of film and art by Bordwell, Carroll and other cognitivists. And then there is now the whole industry of interpretation that has grown up around Cavell, and a number of Cavellian film scholars (like Rodowick) draw on Wittgenstein. But none of these thinkers have taken up the anti-theoretical import of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. And it’s rare that they draw on the techniques of conceptual clarification exemplified by Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to address

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film theoretical problems. Rodowick’s example is instructive. He reiterates large portions of our introduction to Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, but he cannot swallow its anti-theoretical stance, perhaps because he’s a Grand Theorist who, after abandoning psychoanalysis, has taken up Deleuze and now Cavell. And he never engages in conceptual clarification. RA: Yes, the key point with respect to responses to our work is that no-­ one who has taken up Wittgenstein in the field actually embraces the idea of philosophy as an enterprise of conceptual clarification that is antithetical to theory building. On the contrary, Wittgenstein is invoked in support of theory! Another case in point is film scholar, Edward Branigan, who without engaging with the arguments of our book at all, propounds a “postmodern” conception of Wittgenstein (which a superficial reading of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy lends itself to, given Wittgenstein’s talk of “language-games,” etc.) and applies it to film in his book Projecting a Camera. BH: Do you think that going forward there are going to be philosophers of film, on the one hand, and film studies scholars, on the other, and any notion of a  mutual relationship between these two—learning from each other—is just a pipe dream? RA: Well, the thing is, philosophy is a highly professionalized discipline with years of training; it’s a highly specialized enterprise. So it partly depends what you mean by ‘philosopher.’ I certainly would never call myself a philosopher and I don’t think Malcolm would either. I’m a film scholar. I can be interested in philosophy and engage with philosophy but that doesn’t turn me into a philosopher. MT: I would say that in addition, a lot of analytic philosophy is very technical and difficult. If you look at the work of, say, Berys Gaut, or of George Wilson, for example, there are some really difficult issues being addressed in their work. And the vast majority of films scholars are not going to understand them, let alone be able to really critically parse them. I do think that Noël Carroll is in a way the exception that proves the rule, because partly he had a foot in Film Studies (he did his first PhD in film studies at NYU), then he went on to do a PhD in philosophy. And in his work, he tries to avoid getting into really technical issues which is of course one of the criticisms that’s made about his work by certain philosophers. But most other philosophers of film in the analytic tradition—like Gaut, like Greg Currie—can be very technical in places. Their books are not going to have an audience in Film Studies.

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CF: And Cavell, insofar as he counts as “analytic philosophy…”? RA: I don’t think a philosopher who proposes that philosophical skepticism can be turned into a general theory of intersubjectivity is an analytical philosopher and I don’t think that Cavell saw himself in that way. BH: Richard and Malcolm, your 2001 had a polemical quality to it, partly because you were championing the fact that one could and should do without theory and still deliver interesting goods. If Film Studies people aren’t going to go there because they’re not equipped to grapple with what analytic philosophers are talking about, and if philosophers of film are—leaving aside Carroll—wrapped up in their own pedagogical training and show little interest in looking at a film as a whole, or a work whose parts stand in a constitutive relation to its whole, then at whom is your project aimed? And might, to put it simply, the very idea of ‘philosophy of film without theory’ be doomed for the same reasons? MT: It depends. You might find an audience among philosophers who are less interested in coming up with Theoretically robust film-philosophy and are more interested in some kind of non-theoretical approach or aesthetic approach to film, absolutely. In Film Studies—you never know. Our book has yet to find an audience, but… RA: Partly this goes back to the earlier question. You said, had it been a book about film it may have found an audience more easily, but it couldn’t be a book about film specifically. So that meant that it didn’t have a natural audience. BH: Maybe that’s to our benefit. If what we’re trying to do is to stand on the shoulders of what you’ve done—in a very modest and humble way–it can, now, be about film. MT: I’ll say this. I do think there are a lot more philosophers interested in film now than there were 20 years ago. It seems to have exploded … And in that sense, you know you may find an audience in a way that that we didn’t. BH: And that audience may then, we hope, find your Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. As we draw to a close, we would like to invite you to speak about anything we haven’t touched upon. Or perhaps you’d like to say something about your own ambitions for your field and your intellectual concerns and goals for twenty-first century scholarship in these areas. RA: I would say that the problems we are addressing in our book and we’ve addressed in these conversations extend far beyond the domain of Film Studies. For instance, I’ve become involved in thinking about machine learning and its role in art. And in this field, there are certain very

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common positions taken about the relationship between the computer and the human brain and the potential capacities of machines to be intelligent, thinking things. Aspects of arguments we’ve discussed in our book, and here, show up as unreflective ways of thinking in these conversations. Some seem to me philosophically so primitive, yet also they are very pervasive now culturally. And the worry here is that a certain mistaken way of understanding computers as intelligent thinking things comes to inform and shape the priorities of a culture. MT: I also worry about neuroscience. We are increasingly seeing it in Film Studies. For example, there is a new book by Vittorio Gallese, one of the discoverers of mirror neurons (The Empathic Screen). Basically, he and his collaborator, Michele Guerra, argue that the reason we are engaged with movies is because of anthropomorphic camera movements, and the reason that camera movements engage us is because they stimulate our mirror neurons, at least if they are anthropomorphic in character. It just goes to show that the temptation of reductive theorizing takes new forms, all the time. Don’t get me wrong, neuroscience has contributions to make to the study of the arts, I think. But when Wittgenstein warns about a science of aesthetics that aims to explain why we like things, this is it in a new form. This is what the neuroscientists are trying to do, explain why we like art! There is now more and more of this research and it’s important for philosophers and philosophically minded film scholars to try to point out where this stuff goes astray… BH: Well, we have run out of time, gentlemen. CF: We thank you both very, very much. MT: And we in turn thank you for your interest in our volume. RA: Yes, and many thanks for this opportunity to clarify what we tried to do there.

Note 1. See Allen & Turvey (2001, p. 2) and Turvey (2008, p. 113).

References Allen, R. (1995). Projecting Illusion: Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge University Press. Allen, R., & Smith, M. (Eds.). (1997). Film Theory and Philosophy. Clarendon.

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Allen, R., & Turvey, M. (Eds.). (2001). Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. Routledge. Bordwell, D., & Carroll, N. (Eds.). (1996). Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. University of Wisconsin Press. Bouveresse, J. (1995). Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious (C. Cosman, Trans.). Princeton University Press. Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard University Press. Cioffi, F. (1998). Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer. Cambridge University Press. Gallese, V., & Guerra, M. (2019). The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience. Oxford University Press. Hacker, P. M. S. (2001). Wittgenstein and the Autonomy of Humanistic Understanding. In R. Allen and M. Turvey. (Eds.), Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts. (pp. 39–74). Routledge. Perkins, V.  F. (1993). Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. Da Capo Press. Turvey, M. (2008). Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition. Oxford University Press. Von Wright, G. H. (1971). Explanation and Understanding. Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

It All Depends: Some Problems with Analytic Film Theorising from the Perspective of Ordinary Language Philosophy Andrew Klevan

This chapter takes the opportunity of this volume to subject an example of theoretical film philosophy to sceptical scrutiny. It addresses some problems with analytic film theorising from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy. It uses a chapter by Berys Gaut, a leading analytic film philosopher, entitled ‘Emotion and Identification’ (from his book A Philosophy of Cinematic Art) as its case study (2010). It is a supplement to my essay ‘Ordinary Language Film Studies’ where I explain what an approach to film study derived from ordinary language philosophy might look like (Klevan 2020; from now on OLP).1 Rather than singling out Gaut’s chapter and picking it off, the aim is to draw attention to my concerns with a type of theoretical method and thereby provide something more generally instructive than an isolated censure. Indeed, the critique is not aimed at the author; as I was studying the chapter, I found myself

A. Klevan (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_3

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querying the method not the man. 2 I feel there is enough typicality to have wider relevance even though I recognise that the problems I identify will not necessarily be exhibited by all analytic theorising. This chapter focuses on the problems that arise from (1) the abstraction from context, (2) the questions being asked, (3) the working assumptions, (4) the overburdening of concepts, and (5) the reductive exemplification. Ultimately it argues that Gaut’s chapter struggles to work on its own terms and that its professed objectives might be better fulfilled without theory.

The Problem with Starting from Nowhere Berys Gaut’s chapter on emotion does not start from an actual emotion experienced, by the author or any individual viewer, nor is it generated by a film. It starts from a generalised declaration: There is no doubt of the emotional impact that films can have on their audiences. The nature of that impact varies immensely, ranging from the gut-­ churning fear produced by an effective horror film to the nuanced emotional landscape of the best films within the European art-cinema tradition. The emotional power of cinema is central to its appeal and value as an art form, and the question arises of how it is achieved. (Gaut, 2010, p. 244; all references to Gaut, 2010 unless otherwise stated)

The ‘no doubt’ of the opening sentence wishes to secure the essential truth that necessitates the importance of the study, but at the same time it is an all-embracing truism with no compelling specificity. The emotional descriptions provided—‘gut-churning’ and ‘nuanced emotional landscape’—are clichés, almost parodic. This sort of hackneyed description occurs when we feel the need to summarise pre-emptively; our language is not distinguished by matters genuinely arising. The descriptions are associated with a couple of capacious genres—one being ‘European art-­ cinema’ no less—further ensuring the orbit is vast and amorphous. Consequently, the chapter begins with abstracted claims and continues to operate in a remote, unrooted space. This disables it from generating adequately representative pictures or descriptions which it needs because it purports to be explaining real-world phenomena. The lack of a motivating particularity may explain the mistake made in the second sentence. Whereas ‘gut-churning fear’ can be said to be an ‘impact’, a ‘nuanced emotional landscape’ describes a reputed feature of

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the genre: I feel ‘gut-churning fear’, but it is yet to be specified what feeling will be elicited by a ‘nuanced emotional landscape’. An expressive quality of the film has been confused with an emotional feeling of the viewer. This might be unimportant were it exceptional and unrelated, but it heralds a vacillation that destabilises the study. Is the study concerned with the ‘emotional power’ of films or with the emotions of viewers? And which viewers? I am often left unaffected by films which other viewers claim to have, and presumably have (for them), ‘emotional power’. Equally often, I recognise the devices a film is using to generate ‘emotional power’, but this does not mean I feel the emotion the film is wishing to solicit (let alone feel the ‘impact’ of any ‘power’).

The Problem with the Question The question the author poses is ‘how cinema fosters emotional engagement’ and he focuses on four aspects of the cinematic medium which foster it (247).3 We should first recognise that the question is posed within a generalising mode: how does ‘cinema’, or ‘film’, foster engagement rather than how does a particular film foster it. I think there may be a presumption here that if one is to philosophise about art, say film, then one can only philosophise about overarching questions, for example ones concerning medium, and that one cannot philosophise about the matters arising from one’s experience, emotional or otherwise, of an individual film. Nevertheless, leaving that aside, I do not want to imply that questions about medium are illegitimate, but rather ask why they are privileged in the study of the topic, and initiate it. The generating of emotion differs from film to film, even in apparently similar types of film, even though they are all films, and from person to person, even though they are all people. One might want to ask therefore why, despite the medium being a constant, films vary so drastically in the type and amount of emotion they foster. Enumerating broader aspects of the medium in advance may conceivably not take you very far because the answers lie in the singular constructions of each film. Even if one does want to find out about how aspects of a medium might be tapped to foster emotion, claims about the medium do not have to be initiating. The worry, to my mind borne out in the chapter, is that coming in from this direction will mean that peremptory abstractions about the medium will limit its findings and produce a self-determining circularity. For an OLP approach, questions would arise from a particular engagement with a set of films, a specific film, or a

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moment in a film. I wonder how this film fostered these emotions I am feeling, and how might this film be revelatory of the medium’s possibilities or its handling.

The Problem with Assumptions The announcement of assumptions is always a bracing moment for me in this genre of philosophy. I suppose most arguments will need to make, explicitly or implicitly, some assumptions to proceed. In my experience, however, analytic aesthetic theorising is, at times, dependent on assumptions which either cordon off relevant concerns or establish a faulty foundation. The assumptions could be a stitch up or less conspiratorially speaking skew the future direction of travel. It is not always clear why some assumptions are prioritised over others, or why, more fundamentally, there is an assumption that assumptions need to be made. I think the presence of assumptions of this foundational type give us an insight into the stifling nature of the method. From an OLP point of view, if we were presenting an account of emotion out of an analysis of a film, we would not need to make a priori assumptions. We would investigate the film and our involvement with it and see what emerged. The author announces that he will make two assumptions, the first of which is ‘the truth of the cognitive-evaluative theory of the emotions’ (244).4 We are to assume not ‘the truth’ of emotions, or even ‘the truth’ about the ‘cognitive-evaluative’ aspect to emotions, but ‘the truth’ of a theory. Building a theory upon another theory risks instability. This is indicative of the way in which this brand of aesthetic philosophising, in addition to simply wishing to theorise, is theory oriented. Newly formulated theories are dependent upon, or directed by, or are in conversation with, prior theories to form a self-referential bubble. The bubble then floats free and, for quite some time, need not touch the ground. An attendant risk is a ‘game of telephone’ effect where assumption, conjecture, and generality get passed on from one theory to the next, subtly distorting each intervention. The author’s approach seems peculiarly theory-driven with theory building a preeminent and esteemed practice in itself. In response to Richard Allen challenging whether the empathy/sympathy distinction is supported by ordinary usage, the author writes, ‘my project is to refine our concepts for theoretical purposes, and though the precise labels chosen to mark the distinctions I have drawn do not greatly matter, it is

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important that they be drawn somehow if we are to build an adequate theory of emotional engagement’ (Gaut 2012, p. 207). When he writes ‘my project is to refine our concepts for theoretical purposes’ and ‘if we are to build an adequate theory’ it can appear as if building a theory is the purpose of the enterprise. Why are we refining concepts ‘for theoretical purposes’, and not refining our concepts so that emotion is illuminated? (An OLP approach would wish to clarify our concepts for just such a purpose.) It might be helpful if the theory enabled the refinement of concepts; it is not clear, however, what it means to turn this around and ‘refine our concepts for theoretical purposes’. Put in this way, ‘refine’ is looking like ‘adapt’ or ‘simplify’ for ‘theoretical purposes’ (‘refine’ as in free from impurities rather than make more subtle or polished). Not all assumptions are announced. They operate surreptitiously in different places throughout the essay sometimes under the guise of apparently stating the obvious. For example, here is a statement about what music does in films: The final aspect of the cinematic medium I will discuss is the sound and, particularly, the musical dimension of film. It is hard to overstate the importance of music in eliciting emotional reactions in films. This is not just a matter of musical highlighting at specific points in a film—to underscore the emotional importance of the moment that romance blossoms, or the monster strikes, or the pratfall happens. (251)

This statement betrays a particular view about film expression—that it is or should be affectively direct—and this tacitly underpins much of the essay. Here aspects of film form, for example music, are used to ‘underscore the emotional importance of the moment’. Music may ‘underscore the emotional importance of the moment’, but it all depends, and sometimes we may hope it does not because it could result in the moment being overstated, or point-making, or cloying, or in the soundtrack trying to compensate for inadequacies in the image. Concomitantly, in response, I may feel a range of emotions: put upon, coerced, patronised, nauseous, contemptuous, or merely disappointed. Assumptions about the relationship between devices and effects are asserted rather than derived from careful film analysis.5 Moreover, a slippage occurs as we move from ‘eliciting emotional reactions’ to ‘underscor[ing]…emotional importance’. They are different things because a musical motif might underscore the importance of a blossoming romance in the narrative while not eliciting an emotional

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reaction because it is acting as information rather than an emotional trigger. Such slippages would be less likely to occur, and presuppositions less likely to be made, if the claims materialised from closely monitoring the experience of a specific sequence; the mismatch with referents would be more readily noticeable.6 The chapter does not simply state that emotions are experienced and are to be explored, but that they have an ‘impact’ and ‘power’, and both are ‘emotional’ (‘emotional impact, ‘emotional power’). Before the study has begun, ‘emotion’ is being characterised and framed in a hyped-up manner. Will we be investigating ‘emotion’ generated by films, no strings attached, or the ‘emotional power’ of films?7 The word ‘power’ is oft used in the chapter. A little later in the discussion of music it is stated that ‘Music does not simply add tonal and emotional colour to a film, but also through its association with the particular events represented, gains greater expressive power and thereby imparts that power to the film as a whole’ (251; my italics). In the paragraph in which this appears, ‘power’ and powerful’ are mentioned five times. The gushing exaggerations of tabloid newspaper-style film reviewing appear incompatible with the analytic mode. Perhaps, the hyperbolic rhetoric about the films is meant to carry over to power the propositions. Perhaps, it issues from that nebulous approximation of film experience from which so much of the theorising seems to depend. Yet, there is no requirement to insist on the importance of music to film or on the insistency of music in a film to investigate the emotions generated by film music. When music is accompanied by words or ‘visual images’, the author writes, then it becomes ‘capable of expressing emotions’ (252). He continues: Music thereby gains expressive power and precision, and can in turn contribute this to the film as a whole (the same is true of opera, where words and actions lend emotional precision to music otherwise incapable of such precise articulation of emotions). Since expression is such a powerful elicitor of emotions, the film audience’s emotional engagement is thereby enhanced. So music is a major source of film’s emotional power. (252)

I dispute that music necessarily ‘gains expressive power and precision’ when in conjunction with words or images.8 A pre-existing piece of classical music, for example, can become less expressively precise when placed with images, because the images have a reductive or simplifying effect

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upon it. Consequently, this loss of expressive precision could result in the music being less emotionally powerful. It will depend on the piece of music and its conjunction with the image. Similarly, although expression may be ‘a powerful elicitor of emotions’, this does not entail that an ‘audience’s emotional engagement is thereby enhanced’. Films are made up of many moments that express emotions and/or aim to elicit them, but do not result in a greater ‘engagement’ (arguably often). For example, the more a film tries to have ‘power’ over me the more I might find it repellent if I feel it is shouting at me. I may even disengage because the forcefulness is tiresome and dulling. Moreover, being engaged with the emotion of a film is not the same as feeling that same emotion. I can engage with a film’s sadness without feeling sad myself even if I do think a film has achieved a sad quality. In fact, I quite often do not feel the same emotions as a film. I may, for example, while being engaged with a sad film about a man’s loss of a cat, find myself, or become, reflective (because I am stimulated to thought by the sad occurrences), or satisfied (because the film was sad about the loss of a cat rather than happy about it) or nostalgic (because the loss of the cat is a way of dramatising the loss of a certain way of life) or confounded (because the film seemed sadder about the loss of a cat than it did about the death of a beloved wife) or happy (because of the excellent aesthetic achievement of the sad quality). At the outset, the chapter claims it is interested in posing the question of ‘how cinema fosters emotional engagement’, and there is nothing wrong with pursuing this question, but fostering emotional ‘engagement’ is not equivalent to fostering emotion or emotions, and the emotion expressed by the film is not equivalent to the emotion felt by the viewer. There is an assumption in the piece, perhaps unintentional, that they are equivalent. This is an example of how assumptions can lurk in conflations, and then mislead the investigation.9 The author sees addressing identification as a way of addressing the question of emotion and he provides a lengthy treatment of what it is to identify with a character in a film. Although understanding identification may indeed help with understanding a certain type of emotional response, it will not with many other types. Again, the equivalence of the study is asserted, and identificatory response becomes something like a surrogate for emotional response. Emotions are ‘fostered’ by more than identification (e.g. settings, the pace of the story, dramatic dynamics, themes, evocations, and special effects). Moreover, addressing only character identification is a further narrowing because one might identify with, for

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example, the performer (‘I identify with James Stewart despite the character he plays in this film’) or the director (‘I identify with Howard Hawks’ authorial vision’), or the world of a film (‘I identify with the film’s portrayal of the milieu and behaviours of 1950s English suburbia’). Perhaps the reason for this concentration is because, traditionally in Film Studies, identification has been largely discussed in relation to character and the author now manoeuvres his boat into the currents of that debate. There is a tendency in analytic theorising to position thinking in relation to, or within, the prior moves of a debate rather than starting afresh with the experience of a film to see how the findings, unencumbered, might now speak to those debates. Consequently, and often unknowingly, the work can get locked into the language and assumptions that were established long ago (and far away).

The Problem of the Elastic Concept According to the author, the investment in the concept of identification is not because it has been a core term in a historic debate, but because ‘ordinary viewers’ commonly appeal to it. He gives three phrases ‘ordinary viewers’ might use, one of which is ‘I could really identify with that character’ (252). I can accept that this parlance is commonplace.10 It does not follow, however, that (1) merely because our standard responses use a term, that our thoughtful deliberations in explaining and unpacking are required to use the same term or that (2) there is an uncomplicated equivalence between some putative, standard response and an emotional response because the rich variety of the latter for any individual person cannot necessarily be reduced to the former. Moreover, why is this hypothetical, ordinary viewer’s response prioritised in the analysis over your emotional response, or mine, or the author’s? (There is the possibility that the author’s feelings have been unknowingly extrapolated to produce an ordinary viewer and are in fact being prioritised.) The chapter’s main aim is to hold on to the concept of identification (in relation to character) as relevant to viewer engagement, and to do so it wants to finesse the concept, in this case making it ‘aspectual’. This seems to be a characteristic of theorising whereby one remains wedded to a core concept and is devoted to sustaining its applicability. By providing an improved definition, the chapter commits itself to making the concept fit an ever-wider variety of cases, regardless of how troublesome the process

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of maintaining its primacy or centrality, or how convoluted the articulations. Hence: So far I have defended the concept of identification from the claim that it is mysterious or incoherent by distinguishing different kinds of identification: on the one hand, imaginative identification (imaginarily putting oneself in another’s position) which is in turn sub-divided into perceptual, affective, motivational, epistemic, practical and perhaps other forms of identification; and on the other hand, empathic identification, which requires one actually to share the character’s (fictional) emotions because of one’s imaginarily projecting oneself into the character’s situation. On the basis of these different kinds of identification, one may come to sympathise with the character (this sympathy, as we have noted, is sometimes itself thought of as a kind of identification, but we will treat it as one possible upshot of identification, since one can sympathise with someone without employing any sort of imaginative projection into his position). (263)

This squeezing-everything-into-one-concept with related sub-concepts, moderating, qualifying, or mediating each another, results in something necessarily compressed and tangled. For the theory to be robust, there is the anxious requirement to cover all the bases (‘on the one hand…and on the other’), anticipating future challenges. The determination of the theory means it must all be said now (just in case). Even if this summary does make internal sense, it does not satisfactorily offer an improved perception or an explanation that can be usefully applied. Film Studies has been fixated with the word ‘identification’. I cannot speak for other viewers, hypothetical or otherwise, but I always imagined and hoped, and dare I say assumed, that some, at least, will have, or be open to having, a range of complicated emotional engagements and attachments. From an OLP point of view, this emotional range will be helpfully characterised by using a range of beneficial descriptions as required (rather than trying to squeeze all the alternatives into the increasingly distorted figure of ‘identification’). I am not however querying the application of identification as an explanatory term, in the way that the author explains some other philosophers have done, because (1) it is guilty by association with other theories, for example, psychoanalytic theory (as it may in fact be more applicable in those contexts) or because (2) it does not fit my own theory of emotional engagement (as I am not proffering one). It may on relevant occasions be an apposite description. I am querying the profit in trying to understand our experiences of films by

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constructing a theory which in this case is a theory of, or based upon, a concept (namely identification), and which intends to be all-encompassing. I personally use the word ‘identify’ quite rarely when there is an aspect of a film with which I feel a particularly close personal affinity. Regarding characters, I have occasionally thought or declared ‘I really identify with this character’.11 Fortunately, my emotional engagement with characters does not rest on this special occurrence nor does my involvement with, or positive evaluation of, characters or films. If it did, few films would stimulate me. So, I continue, for example, to enjoy, to admire, and to desire characters, and be entertained, inspired, and aroused by them (sometimes all at once), and experience associated emotions. It is difficult to see, from the theory the author proposes, how understanding these emotions will be enhanced by necessarily filtering them through a more capacious or elastic conceptualisation of identification (where they risk losing their descriptive specificity and being homogenised). OLP suggests travelling in the other direction: instead of merging everything into one word, it likes to see how one word might decompose into many. The theory wants to incorporate empathy, sympathy, imagining, understanding, and I think even belief, into identification, but while these may be relevant terms to characterise engagement depending on the context they do not, and perhaps should not, need to exist as sub-species of identification. Were the theory not committed to the concept of identification or any other overweening concept, these terms could just be used, when and if they felt descriptively appropriate and helped our understanding. Why this devotion? It seems to be because a Theory of Identification is the matter of utmost priority and must be constructed and defended at all costs. Yet the local aim was to provide an understanding of character engagement and the wider, core aim was to provide an understanding of emotion. The philosophy should presumably be dedicated to those aims.

The Problem of Reduction The chapter asks us to: [c]onsider the shot in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) taken from the point of view of Buffalo Bill, who is wearing green-tinted night-glasses, looking at Starling (Jodie Foster), while she flails around in the dark, desperately trying to defend herself from him. Certainly, we have no tendency here to empathise

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or sympathise with Bill—our sympathies lie entirely with Starling—but the shot does tend to foster our imagining of Bill’s murderous feelings (partly because we can see their terrifying effect on Starling). (263)

As I have already mentioned, because of its enveloping zeal, the theorising tends to speak on behalf of others (‘we’, ‘our’) with conviction (‘Certainly’) and without variation (‘entirely’). Yet, I can easily imagine other responses. Someone might take a secret pleasure in Starling’s demise if she (or Jodie Foster’s performance) has annoyed them, or someone might enjoy violence towards women more generally (in films and beyond). Someone might feel angry with the film for ‘foster[ing] our imagining’ of ‘murderous feelings’ towards women (perhaps under the guise of, or complicatedly wrapped up in, our sympathy for Starling). Alternatively, neither imagining nor sympathy will be fostered if someone is too busy raising their eyebrows at the hackneyed use of the optical point of view shot. Or perhaps lowering their eyebrows and raising the corners of their mouth if they start to be amused by the pastiche handling of a familiar convention. And so on. For all the talk of ‘imagining’, there is a lack of imagination in the treatment of the film and in the entertaining of possible emotional responses. This is because the example is serving the thesis and is restricted by it. And if the instance from the film is indeed as limited as the quoted account makes it sound, then perhaps it should not be offered as exemplary. It provides no productive succour or challenge to the theory. There is an unsettling, unresolved tension in many types of film theory between the complicated and the simplistic. In the chapter, we see the incongruity between the involved theory of identification and the rudimentary film examples (or their rudimentary rendering) and banal accounts of viewer behaviour. The author writes: if one is sympathetic to a character, one will tend to align one’s emotions with his, feel what he feels, and so empathise with him. Second and more obviously, we tend to sympathise with characters who are represented as having various attractive traits or ones that merit sympathy. A wide range of traits can foster such responses: characters may be witty (as in Phil Connors [Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, 1993]), physically attractive, interestingly complex, and so forth’ (267).

When put like this, I feel like saying ‘of course’ because putting it like this makes it trivially true. (Unfortunately, the admission of ‘more obviously’

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does not seem to have resulted in these claims going without saying.) I am not quite sure what model of human being and their responses the claims are based on, but our sympathies do not necessarily match up in straightforward ways: witty = attractive = sympathy. I may feel, for example, that a film has forced a character’s likeability upon me, or I may feel that the film offers a cliché of the likeable male and has indulged it. The female characters in the film may be contrastingly witless, and I may feel irritated by the lack of balance. Alternatively, I might be impressed with the performer’s skill or chutzpah in carrying off his likeability or understand that it serves a wider purpose in the scheme of the film other than merely and easily pleasing me. His likeability may be subjected to scrutiny or put under strain. All these reactions will affect my sympathies. Nevertheless, the method appears to be requiring that the complexity of film expression and response be minimised. The instance, and the commentary upon it, need to be reduced to serve generalised claims. This jejune quality continues in a short discussion of Max Ophüls’ film Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948).12 The chapter uses the example of viewer identification with its central character, namely Lisa (Joan Fontaine), and bases its points about the film on an essay by George M. Wilson (1992). Derived from Wilson’s interpretation, the author writes, ‘the audience is encouraged to identify with Lisa in several respects, but is also provided with evidence that her actions are in certain respects foolish and self-deluded’ (271). It is not straightforward though how we get from there to here: If [the audience]… grasps this counter-evidence, then what it has learnt from the film is that certain of its romantic values are distorted, tending to encourage potentially disastrous self-delusions. And because the audience so much identifies with Lisa, it should take that lesson to heart… This, then, is the second way that identification with a character may teach an audience about correct emotional responses. On this model, the character does not grow emotionally, but the audience does because of the way it has discovered that its values are flawed’. (271–272)

The theory, apparently comprehensively ‘aspectual’, has concluded bathetically thus: Letter from an Unknown Woman teaches us a ‘lesson’. This is a dispiritingly instrumental and insipid assessment of arguably one of the most aesthetically sophisticated films ever made. Is all the perspectival layering, the compositional density, the storytelling delicacy, the graphic

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patterning, the camera dexterity, and the performative finesse really in the film to teach me ‘about correct emotional responses’? Leaving aside the constraining, not to say chastising, use of ‘correct’, the claim that a film taught a lesson would not be claiming very much: it might merely mean that it is didactic (or an instructional video). I probably do not need to be taught again that romantic values may be distorting or self-deluding. However, I may wish to experience self-delusion again by way of the film’s intricate and eloquent articulation.13 For more than twenty years I have shared the experience of Letter from an Unknown Woman with university students and marvelled at the invigorating variety of responses, emotional and otherwise, it continues to elicit.14 I feel it is reasonable to expect that any philosophy that wishes to understand the emotions of films and their viewers, accurately and meaningfully, should endeavour to account for this fecundity.

Notes 1. That essay provides the context for this chapter and is best read in conjunction with it. A longer version of Klevan (2020), which includes more extensive reference and commentary in notes, can be found at my academia.edu page. 2. I apologise in advance for any instances where I take my eye off the ball in this regard. 3. I am presuming that by ‘cinema’ what the chapter really means is ‘film’. This is worth clarifying because emotional response also depends on environmental factors around films, the wider ontological orbit of production and reception, captured by the term ‘cinema’, and not necessarily simply on the workings of film or a film (which the chapter focuses upon). 4. It appears from the author’s explanation that this theory involves differentiating emotions from feelings: emotions must have an intentional object (‘I am afraid of something’) to differentiate them from feelings. This is slightly disorientating because we do use the word feeling when we have a feeling about an intentional object (e.g., a film), and I commonly use it in relation to film (‘my feelings about this aspect of the film are….’). Presumably for the author these would be captured by the term emotion, and he is distinguishing them from more generalised states, for example, simply being tired. Therefore, ‘I am tired of this scene’ in a film is an emotion and I am tired because I have not had enough sleep this week is a feeling. I can accept this distinction so we can proceed, and it may not have significant ramifications in this case, but these sort of specialist definitional

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adjustments can send tremors through an argument. They can also rub up against the argument’s reliance on ordinary behaviours and linguistic usage elsewhere. 5. The chapter does say ‘not just’, and it provides another example of what music might do, but not for the purpose of challenging or nuancing this understanding. In fact, assumptions about ‘impact’ are similarly present. It goes on to say, ‘Several films, particularly in the epic genre, are ­through-­composed and their emotional impact depends centrally on the quality of the score—for instance, Howard Shore’s magnificent music for The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3) comprises nearly twelve hours of elaborately scored music, employing leitmotifs for many of the characters and cultures, and is absolutely central to the emotional effect of the films’ (251). We are not, however, given an account of how ‘the quality’ entails the ‘emotional impact’. Instead, some broad features of the score are mentioned—‘leitmotifs’, duration, and elaboration—magnificence is asserted, and our assent assumed. 6. We all slip of course, but the slips are frequent, and they are happening not because the author cannot walk, but because the terrain he has chosen to walk upon is slippery. 7. Arguably the author could simply be using ‘power’ and ‘impact’ in a neutral sense, but this is not my impression of their use in this context. At the very least, given how these terms are commonly deployed, confusion is invited. The word ‘effect’ might be a less emotive alternative. 8. It is not clear to what ‘the film as a whole’ refers. It might refer to the whole film from its beginning to its end or the whole film at any moment (not only the music, therefore, but the composition, the performers, the setting, etc.). 9. Sometimes the author refers to the ‘theorist’ being interested in ‘emotional reactions’ rather than emotional ‘engagement’ (e.g. 253). 10. Or was until ‘relatable’ became the favoured word to express a similar sentiment. 11. The author dismisses the etymological root of ‘making identical’ as a helpful guide by parodying it through literalism, but ‘making identical’ captures the mirroring or sharing or peculiar recognition that is at the heart of my usage. It need not entail that I feel that I am the character or I am merged with them. 12. I suspect the author is not a naïve person, and the naivety is generated by the author operating within this genre of theoretical philosophy. 13. It is not commonly accepted that the film is a moralistic critique of a character ‘who does not grow emotionally’. Lisa’s attachment to Stefan is socially and psychologically complicated. There are many pieces of detailed criticism, in addition to Wilson’s, which offer a variety of persuasive ways

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the film, and Lisa’s behaviour, can be understood and experienced (see, e.g. Wood (2006 [1976]), Modleski (1984), Perkins (1982, 2000), Studlar (1994), Cavell (1996), and Perez (1998)). Perez explicitly disputes Wilson’s account, complicating the accusation of self-delusion by arguing that the film builds in Lisa’s own consciousness of her delusion (through its retrospective, narrated mode). Perkins finds ‘the same commitment that lets [Lisa] feel her life’s integrity propels it to disintegration. In this she is not typical, but she might be exemplary’ (1982, p. 72). And Wilson himself writes, ‘I am not proposing a reading of the film that applies one or another “adverse” judgment to her’ and that the film carefully situates ‘Lisa’s pursuit of [Stefan] Brand’ so it can be understood to be ‘a strict rejection of the convenient, the comfortable, and the ceremonial in personal relations…a rejection of all the usual commerce of love’ (1992, p.  120). Given these interpretations, therefore, it will be difficult for a responsive viewer to know precisely what ‘lesson’ might be ‘learnt’ or what the ‘correct emotional responses’ should be. Indeed, Wilson’s essay does not present the film as a self-help guide to emotional growth. His main claims about the film are not moralistic but aesthetic: it is an extraordinary example of the possibilities of narrational and perspectival complexity. 14. Including some who do not identify, sympathise, or empathise with Lisa— in the way they consider the film wants them to—and can offer intelligent reasons.

Bibliography Cavell, S. (1996). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. The University of Chicago Press. Gaut, B. (2010). A Philosophy of Cinematic Art. Cambridge University Press. Gaut, B. (2012). Replies to Ponech, Curran, and Allen. British Journal of Aesthetics, 52(2), 201–208. Klevan, A. (2020). Ordinary Language Film Studies. Aesthetic Investigations. Special Issue: Philosophy of Film Without Theory, 3(2), 387–406. Modleski, T. (1984). Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film. Cinema Journal, 23(3), 19–30. Perez, G. (1998). The Material Ghost – Films and their Medium. John Hopkins University Press. Perkins, V. F. (1982). Letter from an Unknown Woman. Movie, 29/30, 61–72. Perkins, V. F. (2000). Same Tune Again!: Repetition and Framing in Letter from an Unknown Woman. CineAction, 52, 40–48. Studlar, G. (1994). Masochistic Performance and Female Subjectivity in Letter from an Unknown Woman. Cinema Journal, 33(3), 35–57.

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Wilson, G.  M. (1992). Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. John Hopkins University Press. Wood, Robin. (2006 [1976]). Personal Views: Explorations in Film. Wayne University Press.

Filmography Ophüls, M. (1948). Letter from an Unknown Woman. Universal Pictures.

CHAPTER 4

Lone Star: Ambiguity as a Philosophical Given and a Philosophical Virtue Katheryn Doran

Smith’s Case Murray Smith argues in ‘Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity’ that some of the goals of art are at odds with some of the goals of philosophy, and accordingly he rejects Stephen Mulhall’s position that there is something like an open border between philosophy and literature (Smith, 2006, p. 33). Smith grants that films can have a philosophical theme, or philosophical implications, or even that films can be used to introduce just the kind of philosophical conundrums treated in traditional philosophical texts. His question in the paper instead is: “Is [the] film’s project in some important sense a philosophical one” (2006, p. 38)? And his answer to it is negative. Smith, aligning with Cleanth Brooks and New Criticism, cites ambiguity (along with indirection, paradox, and irony) as the dividing line; ambiguity is rightly welcomed in art, and rightly seen as a failing in philosophy (2006, p. 40). My burden then is to show that a film’s project

K. Doran (*) Department of Philosophy, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_4

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can be in some important sense a philosophical one, and that ambiguity in the work does not disqualify it from being in some important sense a philosophical project. It is not obvious that a work’s having other aims, aesthetic or otherwise, means that it can’t satisfy the first condition. And showing that some works with multiple aims privilege aims other than the philosophical is not sufficient to show that the multiple aims must conflict. That traditional works of philosophy mostly have singular philosophical aims doesn’t settle the question of whether having a singular philosophical aim is essential to a work’s being a genuinely philosophical project. And even granting that works of art can be ambiguous in the ways Smith argues may not settle the matter about the work’s philosophical successes. Though it is not a focus of Smith’s paper, it is not too hard to see a dilemma about what Thomas Wartenberg calls the “Imposition” and “Explicitness” objections looming: either there is more than one way to interpret a theme or position (or a glance or shift of angle or change of music, etc.) in a movie, leaving too much of the philosophical work of the text to the viewer’s imagination, and revealing that the work itself falls short of doing the philosophy, or, to the extent that we can spell out, or restate or “paraphrase” the philosophical work in the text clearly and unequivocally, its artistic value must be wanting (Wartenberg, 2008, p. 9). [I]f we move up one level of abstraction, we begin to find properties with greater reach across the arts and across particular works of art—properties like complexity, ingenuity, inventiveness, density, ambiguity, and profundity. And while we can imagine finding these same properties in works of philosophy, it is not clear that we would value them in just the same way in a work of philosophy as in a work of art. (Smith, 2006, p. 40)

And while I won’t argue that we value ambiguity in just the same way in a work of philosophy as in a work of art—too high a standard to impose—I will argue that Lone Star, a 1996 mystery directed by John Sayles and starring Chris Cooper, shows us a way through the horns of the dilemma by embracing ambiguity at both the object level of the narrative and the meta-level of the audience response to it in ways that, far from detracting from its philosophical import, actually enrich it. My aim is not to defend Mulhall against Smith’s case against him, rather, to show that Smith’s indictment of ambiguity depends on a narrow conception of philosophy that presumes (1) that the standard by which we judge the philosophical merits of any putative work of philosophy is set by a subset of traditional

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works in the Western canon; (2) that abstractness and generality are hallmarks of philosophy; (3) that argument is the means to the end of philosophical enlightenment; and (4) that we can restate or ‘paraphrase’ the philosophical work in philosophical texts in clear and unequivocal terms. So while I won’t be defending Mulhall’s open border position I will argue that the nature of the film and philosophy border should be an open question, one that Smith has wrongly pre-empted by relying on all four of the problematic presumptions about the nature of philosophy listed above thereby appealing to cinematic evidence that is inevitably too thin. Smith builds his case against Mulhall’s view that films can have both significant aesthetic and philosophical goals around a detailed analysis of one movie, All of Me, a 1984 romantic comedy directed by Carl Reiner and starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin. To make sense of where and why in Smith’s view All of Me goes so seriously off track philosophically some plot summary is in order. All of Me is a funny, romantic philosophical romp through the mind-­ body problem. The three main characters, a sickly and miserable heiress, Edwina Cutwater (played by Lily Tomlin), a hapless lawyer trying to climb his way to the top of his soulless firm, Roger Cobb (played by Steve Martin), and the beautiful and scheming criminal daughter of the caretaker at the heiress’s estate, Terry Hoskins (played by Victoria Tennant), become entangled when Cobb is sent by his firm to oversee Cutwater’s legal bequeathal of her estate upon her death to Hoskins, into whose body Cutwater believes she has the means to have her mind (or mind-spirit) transferred. (The scenes showing the vaguely Eastern mystic Cutwater has brought in to do the procedure are cringeworthy.) Her mind-spirit actually gets around quite a bit over the course of the movie, landing by mistake most notably and for the longest time in Cobb’s body, rather than in that of her intended host, Hoskins. The filmmakers deploy a clever technique throughout to allow us to see and hear from Cutwater when she is in other bodies: Cutwater is shown to us (and to Cobb) via mirrors, and she often speaks in her recognizably Cutwater voice; she can also sometimes take control of Cobb’s body (e.g. once when Cobb falls asleep on his feet in court). This combination makes for some great physical comedy, some of it gendered (and dated), and some of it a send up of gendered expectations. One thing it does consistently is to represent Cutwater’s mind-spirit as her true self by showing Cutwater in the mirrored reflections. By the movie’s end Cobb is torn though. He has come

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to know and like Cutwater, though he has always had the hots for the rotten hottie, Hoskins. Smith writes: In the final scene, Cobb and Cutwater (now embodied by Tennant) dance. But there is one more twist. With its final gesture, the film reverts to the convention whereby Cutwater’ s mind becomes manifest through her original body whenever the new host is seen in a mirror. Following Cobb and Cutwater/Tennant onto the dance floor, the camera pans away from them after a few seconds in order to pick up their reflections in a mirror. As the film ends, then, instead of seeing Cobb dance with Cutwater/Tennant, we see him dance with Cutwater/Tomlin. This is a paradoxical conclusion. On the one hand, the film seems to insist on the centrality of a particular body (Tomlin’s) to Cutwater’s mind (it is hard to imagine Tennant dancing with just the kind of free-form playfulness that characterizes Tomlin’ s movements). On the other hand, the film has established, via the mirror convention, that Cutwater’s mind (or “soul,” we might very well say here) persists in its original form even as it inhabits another body, the original mind being manifest in the mirror views. The paradox thus resides in the fact that Cutwater’s persisting soul can only be represented by her body! The film seems committed, then, to both dualism and monistic physicalism. You might even say that it rests on the paradox of personal identity: personal identity both requires, and yet is independent of, the body. Or at least, All of Me gives expression to inconsistencies in our assumptions about personal identity that this paradox, as I have stated it, summarizes, and condenses. (Smith, 2006, pp. 37–38)

Smith goes on to argue that the decision to end the movie with a joyous Cobb and Cutwater/Tomlin dance (1:29:13–1:31:06) was made for aesthetic and Hollywood star-power reasons, and he is surely right: the first minute of Cobb and Cutwater/Tennant dancing was no fun. But Smith is wrong that the aesthetic decision to show Cobb dancing with Cutwater/ Tomlin in the final scene violates the internal logic of the movie’s dualism and is thus contrary to the movie’s philosophical goals. In fact, the scene is perfectly consistent with the mirrored reflections used throughout to show Cutwater’s true (mind-spirit) self and its commitment to dualism. The camera tracks Cobb swinging Cutwater-in-Hoskins in a wide arc until it lands on a large mirror, and it’s only in the reflection of the large mirror that we then see Cobb dancing with Cutwater. But it’s Cutwater’s mind-­ spirit that we’re seeing in the mirror, as has been the case throughout the movie: Cutwater is, after all, overjoyed to be in a healthy body at last, not

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to mention dancing with her soul mate, Cobb. Smith singles out what he calls the paradoxical conclusion as evidence that the movie’s philosophical aims are subsidiary to its artistic aims, a philosophical failure that nonetheless works because it is charming and funny. In contrast, the philosophical control case, if you will, Bernard Williams’s mind-body swap thought experiment in ‘Personal Identity and Individuation,’ would never swerve from its mission of showing that the body plays an important role in personal identity for the sake of entertainment or some other artistic goal (Williams, 1973, pp. 11–12). I am confident that Smith has read that last scene wrong, but suppose for the sake of argument that the movie had upended its internal logic in the final scene. Would that be sufficient to show that it is not the case that the film’s project is in some important sense a philosophical one? Only if we presume that the audience would not be in on the philosophically playful joke. Why presume that a logic switch, hiding in plain sight, must be an instance of the sacrifice of its metaphysical goals to the artistic, rather than a way to call attention to the very epistemic, and affective, complexities it has robustly engaged throughout? O ye of little faith… in the work and in the audience. And even if Smith were right that the best reading of All of Me’s project shows it to be not in some important sense a philosophical one it doesn’t follow that no movie’s project is in some important sense a philosophical one. Sure, All of Me is no Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, but give it a chance on its own philosophical terms, as I will with Lone Star.

Ambiguity Before I make the case that Lone Star’s project is philosophical, and that it succeeds in advancing our philosophical understanding of several compelling ethical questions, for example, when compromising is ethically tolerable, as opposed to good or craven, how past history should influence present decision making, and how one should live one’s life, more must be said about what Smith—and the New Critics—mean, and do not mean, by ‘ambiguity.’ Smith explicates ‘ambiguity’ surprisingly little given both that the concept is called upon to do so much work in the paper (other than in the title of the paper and in a section title it appears only thrice, and all on the penultimate page of the article), and that spelling things out as clearly as possible is, in his view, an admirable feature of good philosophical work. Smith turns instead to New Criticism and Brooks for an account:

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Something like ambiguity, in the New Critical sense of the term, lies at the heart of this vital but elusive contrast between philosophy and art. In part, this arises from the concreteness and particularity of art, as distinct from the abstract, conceptual character of philosophy.1 The epistemic content of a work of art does not enter into it, and is not conveyed to us, in such a philosophical manner. The meaning and experience that works of art typically create is one characterized by sufficient complexity and indirection that it resists restatement—or “paraphrase”—in clear and unequivocal terms. In other words, no matter how “philosophical” the theme of a narrative, to the extent that it is designed as an artwork it is apt to put a spanner in the philosophical works. As Cleanth Brooks, one of the architects of the New Criticism, put it: “When we consider the statement immersed in the poem, it presents itself to us, like the stick immersed in the pool of water, warped and bent. Indeed, whatever the statement, it will always show itself as deflected away from a positive, straightforward formulation.”2 Few criticisms are more apt to strike terror into the heart of the philosopher than the assertion that such-and-such a proposition is “ambiguous,” while in the world of art, that term is more apt to be used as a term of praise. (Smith, 2006, p. 40)

Note that what strikes terror in the heart of the philosopher is the charge that a proposition is ambiguous (Smith, 2006, p. 40). Yet on Brooks’s conception an ambiguity of any particular part of a poem seems to affect the poem as a whole, and as such sounds more like something like underdeterminism, and offers a brief for a holistic view of meaning. Try removing this Quinean stick: “Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries—not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer,” from the ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ waters to attempt a straightforward formulation of it (Quine, 1951, p. 41). At the very least, the notion of ambiguity Smith is using to draw the dividing line differs from the one feared by philosophers. Moreover, even Smith’s reading of the All of Me final scene test case might well put one in mind of the sometimes hard to track and disputed shifts between advocate and devil’s advocate seen in much of Wittgenstein’s work, work that also certainly prizes literary artistry. It’s hard not to argue for something like openness to interpretation in even more traditional Western philosophers’ work: how else to explain the amount of scholarly ink spilled over the last many centuries on, say, the Transcendental Deduction, B edition (etc.)? There’s no more reason to think that

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Brooksian ambiguity poses more of a problem for art than it does for philosophy. Of course some kinds of ambiguities in works of art undermine their philosophical success. Take, for example, the case of the preeminently philosophical filmmaker Errol Morris’s Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a documentary that interviews at length the strange, bumbling pseudo-scientist and Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter. Morris discusses the ambiguity here in a 1999 interview with Ron Rosenbaum: RR: But when you first showed the Leuchter film to an audience, I think you said, to a Harvard film class, they bought it, or half of them bought it, and the other half thought that you were a Holocaust-denier. So, you somehow felt the need to counter-balance that, to investigate and explode Fred’s obvious fraudulent science that’s still out there, right? EM: Well, it shocked me. I guess it’s little bit like the Stockholm syndrome. You’re trapped in a room with this one man—namely, Leuchter. He’s talking and talking and talking and talking. There is no one in the movie to grab you by the shoulders and say, “You know, this is, of course, nonsense.” It’s a scary thought. What if there is no one (or not enough people) in a society to say a man like Leuchter is crazy … Or wrong … Or evil … Isn’t there enough stuff inside ourselves … An insanity detector … Something. Well, in this Harvard class, there wasn’t … One of the professors got up and took me to task. “How could the same filmmaker who made The Thin Blue Line not investigate Fred’s claims and call him to account.” In the end, I decided he was right… I wanted to make a movie that had a strong factual element but at its heart told a story about an interior world. I’m very much interested—I guess it’s obvious—about how people see themselves. When we think about documentary, we think about documentary as being some species of journalism … We’re engaged in providing a picture of the reality. From my first film, Gates of Heaven, I believe I’ve been involved in a somewhat different enterprise—revealing an interior world, a mental landscape, how people see themselves as revealed through how they use language. If you listen to what people say, that gives you a route into how they see themselves. A different kind of enterprise. (Bloom, 2010, pp. 76–77)

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That Mr. Death could have been read in these two ways—Leuchter as a truth-telling scientist, a victim of cancel culture, and (the intended) Leuchter as an incompetent, dangerous denier of history—shocked Morris, and propelled him back to the cutting room for revision. This kind ambiguity would cripple the film’s philosophical project, but not necessarily in a way that helps Smith’s case: the philosophical failure also redounds to an artistic failure. This is so even though Morris’s enterprise is, as he says, an excavation of Leuchter’s mental landscape, allowing him more room for artistic license than if he were trying to provide “a picture of the reality” (Bloom, 2010, pp. 78–79). Finally, Murray notes that Mulhall is not pursuing “the idea that certain films might embody moral philosophy in the way that Martha Nussbaum and others have argued that certain novels do (such as, perhaps, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake (2004)” (Smith, 2006, p. 33), and thus one can infer that Smith is not going to be concerned with movies that attempt to embody moral philosophy. But surely only an overly stringent desire to patrol the border would cordon off moral philosophy from the rest of philosophy: in movies, not to mention reality, moral philosophy is rarely so cleanly cut off from metaphysical and epistemological matters, as, I’ll argue, is very much the case in Lone Star.

Lone Star Whatever else you might say about Lone Star it is not about just one thing. Nor does it fit neatly into the expectation-setting genre of a Western, neoor otherwise. From the cold open showing a rather conventional discovery of a long-dead sheriff’s body in the Texas desert, the director John Sayles interweaves many other mysteries, intertwined with ethical questions, most with intriguing, unconventional resolutions, the most central being a matter of moral epistemology: What kind of man was the protagonist’s father, the fabled sheriff Buddy Deeds? Unspooling with the answers to the original mystery the movie raises and points to answers to a whole host of other, related questions: Should a parent be forgiven for leaving his family? Who gets to decide what historical perspectives are taught in the town’s schools? Are we blank slates or formed in the crucible of family history? Do the human-made creations of borders have anything to do with reality? Is incest always wrong? And not least: How should I live? The movie masterfully moves the audience towards answers to each question, and then blocks the natural inclination to arrive at a simple, white hat/

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black hat view of the matter—whether narratively by a revelation of a new fact or detail, or, as often as not, by a glance or a tone or by what is not said, affording the audience intimate access to shifting points of view. The movie shows us not just a range of possible answers to these questions, but why and how characters arrive at them, what details matter to them, or not, and why. At least five major plot lines, covering three time periods, are launched in the first 20 minutes of the movie, and though they all end up being powerfully connected, the focus here will be on three of them, forming concentric circles with movement out from the center into the next. All are concerned with how history haunts the present, from the narrowest and most personal: the now middle-aged protagonists Sam Deeds’s and Pilar Cruz’s struggles to understand their own ill-fated teenaged love affair, torn apart by shared family condemnation; to the civic gap between the town’s reverence for Buddy, clearly out of sync with Sam’s judgment; to the broadest struggle of Americans in microcosm trying to figure out how to live together, and whose view of history will prevail. Buddy Deeds hovers over all. Sam’s inquiry is the audience’s inquiry. It’s the late 1990s, and Sam has returned post-divorce to his home town of Frontera to run for sheriff, a position he easily wins, but doesn’t much like. After a skull, Mason ring, and badge are discovered in the desert it falls to Sam to try to figure out who they’ve found and what the cause of death was. Sam’s now long-dead parents are presented to him by his fellow citizens repeatedly through mythic, but empty, exaltations: “The day that man died they broke the goddamn mold.” and “Your mother was a saint.” Frontera is about to rename the courthouse after Buddy, and Sam has only reluctantly agreed to speak at the ceremony. The reigning sheriff Buddy succeeded in the late 1950s, Charlie Wade, by contrast, was rightly hated and feared: he was corrupt (9:14), racist (31:35), and a cold-blooded murderer (1:18). No ambiguity there, and none needed. We next cut to a middle school classroom where a teacher, Pilar, is reassuring a concerned mother of a new Black student, Chet, that the school is a robust mix of Mexican, Anglo, Black, and Indian kids. The scene is short but it introduces Pilar as someone who seems to navigate many identities with ease: history teacher, Mexican American, fellow parent. Soon, in an important linked scene showing a Parent Teacher Association (PTA) meeting and confrontation over how local history should be taught, Pilar pushes, if diplomatically, the view that the town’s responsibility to all of the kids requires that they be better educated about Texas history (for which the fuller story about the Alamo is the stand-in).

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Angry parent: You call it history, I call it propaganda. Now I’m sure they got their own account of the Alamo on the other side, but we’re not on the other side. Pilar: I’ve only been trying to get across part of the complexity of our situation down here, cultures coming together in both negative and positive ways. Another teacher: We’re not changing anything. We’re just trying to present a more complete picture. Another angry parent: And that’s what’s got to stop! (16:15–18:09)

Forensics soon reveal that the dead man in the desert is Charlie Wade. And though the forensics expert tells Sam that the body is a “skinny”—too little on the bones to reveal much—and that the skull is intact and that there are no signs of trauma, the expert closes the conversation with a tantalizing question “You remember what old Buddy carried for a side arm?” (24:43). Sam answers, the expert supplies a detail about the kind of gun, and when Sam follows up with a “What?” the expert’s final word is “I’s just wondering,” planting the idea that the expert knows more than he’s saying about the cause of death, and indeed who might have caused it. And that closing exchange is certainly enough to lead Sam to suspect that his father has murdered Charlie Wade, not a theory the town has ever entertained, in part because of Buddy’s reputation, and in part because for the last nearly 40 years everyone had thought that Buddy had run Charlie out of town after they’d clashed over Buddy’s refusal to participate in a graft scheme, with Buddy threatening Charlie with death or jail, and with Charlie’s last words to Buddy being “You’re a dead man.” Charlie disappeared with $10,000 of city money the next day. The resolution of that central murder mystery is clever and surprising, but the passion to solve it takes a back seat as soon as Sam starts poking around to learn more about Buddy and his possible role in pretty much everything personal and professional, including Charlie Wade’s fate. Sam hears from many differently situated people not only encomia, though there are plenty of them, but lots of other bits of information that seem not to fit the party line. The form is almost a call and response: each blanket praise is followed by someone else revealing a more ethically damning fact. Is the twist going to be that Buddy was also a racist, corrupt, and a murderer?

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Otis, the Black owner of the bar where Black people hang out: I don’t recall a single prisoner ever died in your daddy’s custody. I don’t recall a man in this county, Black, white, Mexican, who’d hesitate for a minute before they’d call on Buddy Deeds to solve a problem. (40:24) Danny, PTA meeting activist: Mexicans and Chicanos are deported, evicted, moved forcibly out of their houses by our local hero Buddy Deeds … a whole community was destroyed. And who ends up with lakefront property bought for a fraction of the market value, Buddy Deeds and his deputy Hollis. (41:49) Pete (a convict who had worked for Buddy): Your father tried to do good for people. And your mother was a saint; she made me lunch when I was putting in the patio … I could have just eaten jail food. (1:10:10) Sam: You built our patio while you were on the county? (1:10:30)

In a signature Sayles technique, the camera often pans seamlessly between a present scene into the past (or the reverse) in the same place, in this instance showing Buddy, circa 1973, searching out and violently separating teenaged Sam and Pilar in the back seat of a car at the drive-in. We are given reason to believe that Buddy is once again in this instance keen to patrol ethnic borders. Pilar is soon sent away to a girls’ school, and they have no choice but to go their separate ways. Sam was drawn back to Frontera by an undying desire for Pilar; when they finally make love again it’s with a rush of intense, wonderful erotic relief.

The Denouements, and Ambiguity Revisited Sam heads over to Otis’s bar in search of Hollis and Otis, and Sam lays out what he thinks he’s figured out about what happened to Charlie Wade: that Buddy shot him and stole the $10,000 to make it look like Charlie had fled. After some hesitation Otis and Hollis set him straight. Charlie, with Hollis in tow, shows up at Otis’s bar one night earlier than usual, and finds Otis in the middle of a backroom poker game Otis had not cut Charlie in on. Charlie, enraged, beats Otis up and forces him to go behind the bar and get, not just the cash box, but Otis’s gun. Hollis had seen Charlie shoot and kill a man earlier under nearly identical circumstances. Once again Charlie pulls his gun, winks at Hollis, and the instant before he fires, Buddy appears at the door, shouts Charlie’s name, and

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Hollis—Hollis!—shoots Charlie in the back. The three then bury Charlie and take the money from the safe to make it look like Charlie had made off with it. Will Sam clear Buddy and implicate Hollis? Sam: …as for me, it’s just one of your unsolved mysteries. Hollis: Word gets out who the body was people gonna think Buddy done it. Sam: Buddy’s a goddamn legend; he can handle it.

In the last scene (present day) Sam and Pilar are sitting on the hood of a car at the dusty long-ago-closed drive-in. The ancient screen before them is blank—a thrilling visual contrast, not least because it is the scene where they’d been parted. Sam reveals to Pilar that her father had died not a few months, but a year and a half before she was born, and produces a photograph he’d dug up a few weeks earlier in his father’s papers of a young Buddy and Pilar’s mother Mercedes side by side on a boat and smiling, along with a card from Pilar’s mother to “Dearest Buddy” referring to “our beautiful daughter.” So Buddy had far more compelling reasons to separate them than ethnic animus, overdetermined though his actions may have been. Sayles is notorious for making the audience figure things out on their own (most notably, in Limbo). What kind of man was Buddy Deeds? Real viewers and imagined Frontera townspeople alike might disagree with any one of the variety of the categorical judgments about him that Sam hears. Is Buddy’s role in the destruction of the poor brown community to make way for his own acquisition of cheap lake-front property, or his collusion in the cover up of Charlie Wade’s death sufficient to land him in the camp of the irredeemably corrupt? How does that judgment square with Otis’s testimony that no one—Black, white, Mexican—in the county would hesitate to call on Buddy for help? Buddy may not be the white hat to Charlie Wade’s villain, but Buddy is no black hat villain either. Philosophy’s apparent attempt to rid itself of all Brooksian ambiguity fails on its own terms—how else to explain Maudemarie Clark’s Nietzsche and Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche? But even if such a purge were possible, even if the demands of abstraction lead to theoretical pellucidity, such clarity will vanish the moment one attempts to apply the theory to a real ethical problem of any complexity. Why do people turn to philosophy for insight into ethics anyway? One answer is

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that we want to know what we should do, what we must do, and what we can’t do, especially in hard cases. And we want to know why. So much of our reasoning about new problems depends on extrapolations from settled old cases, but to pull off the leap to the new we need to know what target principle, or property, or relationship unites the old and new cases; they are, after all, different. What are the relevant similarities? Philosophy helps us to think more clearly about difficult moral problems, in part by inviting us to detach from the particulars of the case in which we are enmired. Movies with central philosophical projects can help us to do the same thing, if by a different imaginative route: the detachment afforded by or even forced by depicting the problem case or person or relationships from multiple points of view allows different details to become salient, while shifting values highlight different domains, all with sometimes surprising, revealing emotional implications (Elgin, 1996, pp. 170–204). Pilar’s speech at the PTA meeting highlights the fact that in Texas there is no one single citizen body, rather it is constructed through multiple and often conflicting narratives, although the whitewashed Anglo narrative demands to be given pride of place. Just as Sam decides not to reveal the truth about Buddy, the movie does not promise that a clear solution to these battles over the many histories will prevail. And Sam and Pilar’s choice to stay together (Pilar: All that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo. 2:11:15) highlights the necessity to dwell in a parallel ambiguity, including the difficulty of figuring out when to remember and when to forget history, their half-sibling status and ethnic differences serving as allegory to the coexistence and admixture of cultures and history in Frontera and beyond. The glorious ambiguity Lone Star unfurls is of this third kind, neither the artistic and philosophical incoherence of Morris’s early version of Mr. Death, nor only the philosophically and artistically unproblematic ambiguity Smith and Brooks describe, rather, the movie’s central philosophical and aesthetic aim is to show how impossible it is to come to a simple, clear, singular judgment about the ethical questions it raises. Perhaps such ambiguity will point viewers in the direction of greater epistemic modesty. We may not be able to extract from Lone Star an abstract, explicit, general argument about these judgments and choices. But the movie is no less philosophically rich for it. Teachers of philosophy know that a particularly satisfying mark of student progress is the weakening of the inclination to the sophomoric

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response “In the end it all comes down to ____” or of the companion attachment to the reductionist dualism of matters of fact vs. matters of mere opinion. Philosophy, and a good movie, can show us that when we hold many a cherished belief up to careful scrutiny it turns out to shimmer with complication. You may think you have a clear, principled view on, say, whether incest is wrong. But, really, as Lone Star, as any good exercise in philosophy, shows you, you should think again.

Notes 1. An original endnote here, in Smith (2006), refers the reader to a discussion between Wellek (1937) and Leavis (1937). 2. An original endnote here, in Smith (2006), provides the reference here to Brooks’s original text (1968, p. 172).

References Bloom, L. (Ed.). (2010). Errol Morris: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi. Brooks, C. (1947). The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. Harcourt, Inc. Elgin, C. Z. (1996). Considered Judgment. Princeton University Press. Leavis, F. R. (1937). Literary Criticism and Philosophy: A Reply. Scrutiny, 6, 59–70. Mulhall, S. (2002). On Film. Routledge. Quine, W.  V. (1951). Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60(1), 20–43. Smith, M. (2006). Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64(1), 33–42. Wartenberg, T. E. (2008). Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. Routledge. Wellek, R. (1937). Literary Criticism and Philosophy. Scrutiny, 5, 375–383. Williams, B. (1973). Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956–1972. Cambridge University Press.

Filmography Morris, E. (1999). Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Morris, E. [Video/DVD] United States: Lions Gate Films. Reiner, C. (1998). All of Me. [Video/DVD] United States: Trimark Home Video. Sayles, J. (1999). Lone Star. [Video/DVD] Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video.

CHAPTER 5

No Theory at Marienbad Constantine Sandis

Look out for every detail and make your own story. You are given all the elements. Draw your own conclusions. Original theatrical trailer for Last Year at Marienbad Make of it what you will… whatever you decide is right. —Alain Resnais (1961)

Prologue There was once plenty of theory at Marienbad, the Czech spa town after which Goethe named his late-life Elegy of unrequited infatuation (Goethe, 1827; cf. Sebald, 1999).1 It is there that, in the spring of 1936, Jacques Lacan first outlined his account of the mirror stage, at the Fourteenth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He maintained that the ego was not the subject of experience but an object born in that jubilant moment of self-identification in which the human infant

C. Sandis (*) University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_5

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recognizes the reflection in the glass as an image of itself, yet also somewhat distinct and thus self-alienating.2 By the time that Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s divisive film L’Année dernière à Marienbad3 (from here onwards Marienbad, though the film’s relation to the town is nominal) was released a quarter of a century later, Lacan no longer thought of the ‘le stade du miroir’ as a developmental event involving either a toddler or a mirror. It instead now symbolized the libidinal phenomenon thought to permeate a dual structure of human subjectivity, one that is permanently conflicted between the Ego and the body, the imaginary and the real (see Lacan, 1938, 1949, 1953, 1956–57, 1960). Marienbad arguably gives self-conscious nods to Goethe, Lacan, Cocteau, Hitchcock (whose carboard cut-out makes a momentary appearance4), Nietzsche, Dali, and many others besides. Yet its dreamlike mirrors—like its labyrinth corridors and gardens—are pure semiotic formalities; red herrings shot in monochrome. Nothing may enter or leave Marienbad, for the film is causally closed and psychologically sealed. While a sequel to it in which all puzzles were solved and ‘the truth’ is revealed logically possible, it would be artistically null. Since any sequel could be made to accord with Marienbad, we must acknowledge any symbolism in the original as empty.5 To ask what happened the previous year in Marienbad is on a par with asking how many children Lady Macbeth had or where Hamlet was at the time of his father’s murder; to ask about the motives of the characters akin to the vain attempts to settle whether Falstaff is a coward, Heathcliff and Becky Sharp murderers. There is no doubt that Robbe-Grillet subscribes to the Leavisian school of fiction, according to which such questions are nonsensical.6 As a theoretician, he believes that the film is on a par with the novel in this respect. As a screenwriter, he goes much further, crafting Marienbad as the conscious cinematographic embodiment of the view from Leavis: [T]he work is not a testimony offered in evidence concerning an external reality, but is its own reality for itself. Hence it is impossible for the author to reassure a spectator concerned about the fate of the hero after the words “The End.” After the words “The End” nothing at all happens, by definition. The only future which the work can accept is a new, identical performance: by putting the reels back in the projection camera. (Robbe-Grillet, 1963a, pp. 153–154)

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A natural thought, at this juncture, is that if there is nothing beyond the film then all the truths of Marienbad must therefore lie within it. Indeed, there is a weak sense in which this must be true. What you get is what you see. But this does not entail that Marienbad contains answers to the questions we most want to ask about its characters. Rather, there are no answers to be had, either within or outside the film. One can theorize all one likes, but no amount of clever thinking will reveal anything. Robbe-Grillet continues: But, it will be asked, what do the scenes we have watched represent, under these conditions? What, in particular, is signified by these successions of daylight and nighttime shots or these excessive costume changes, incompatible with such a brief duration? It is at this point, of course, that matters become complicated. It can here be a question only of a subjective, mental, personal occurrence. These things must be happening in someone’s mind. But whose? The narrator-hero’s? Or the hypnotized heroine’s? Or else, by a constant exchange of images between them, in the minds of both, together? It would be better to admit a solution of another order: just as the only time which matters is that of the film itself, the only important “character” is the spectator; in his mind unfolds the whole story, which is precisely imagined by him. (1963a, p. 153, original emphasis)

Life isn’t elsewhere. It is in the film and nowhere else. There is no outside-­ film. And there are no truths outside the gates of Marienbad.

Nothing Is Hidden What is Marienbad about? It’s about 94 minutes long. First, there are the facts, in black and white, as stated by Alain Robbe-­ Grillet in his Introduction to the published script: Last year at Marienbad … is precisely the story of a communication between two beings, a man and a woman, one of whom proposes and the other resists, and who end up being reunited, as if it has always been. (1961, p. 18, my translation)

These facts are as few as the interpretations are many. The film’s original trailer adds a little more detail to both:

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A large international hotel…immense and baroque…with sumptuous but frigid décor…A stranger wonders from hall to hall…down endless corridors…in search of a woman. He tells her they met…“last year…”. “Try to remember”…that they had a passionate affair…that she herself set third rendezvous…and that he’s going to take her away. But she claims he doesn’t know him. Impossible, I tell you. I’ve never even been to Friedrichsbad”. He insists, but she protests even more. “What room? I’ve never been in any bedroom with you.” “You won’t remember…because you’re afraid. And you don’t recognise this photo either?” The young woman ceded ground. The stranger—serious, confident—gathers more and more proof. Who’s right? Who’s lying? Is he a mere seducer? A madman? Or has he just confused two faces? What really happened “last year”? You, the viewer, must answer these questions. Watch carefully. An object…a gesture…a décor…

The words are borrowed from Robbe-Grillet’s introductory essay to his screenplay. I quote the relevant passages in some length, so as to showcase the level of descriptive detail that the screenwriter succeeds in adding, without giving weight to any particular reading or interpretation: This is a reality that the hero creates by his own vision, by his own word. And if his stubbornness, his secret conviction, eventually wins out, it is in the midst of what a maze of false leads, variations, failures, repetitions! This all takes place in a large hotel, a sort of international palace, immense, baroque, with sumptuous but icy decor: a universe of marbles, columns, stucco branches, gilded panelling, statues, servants with frozen attitudes. An anonymous, polite, wealthy, no doubt, idle clientele observes with seriousness, but without passion, the strict rules of board games (cards, dominoes …), social dances, empty conversation, or shooting. Within this closed, suffocating world, men and things also seem to be victims of some enchantment, as in those dreams where one feels guided by a fatal ordinance, of which it would be as futile to pretend to modify the smallest detail as to try to escape. A stranger wanders from room to room—alternately full of a stilted crowd, or deserted—passes through doors, bumps into mirrors, along endless corridors. His ear registers fragments of sentences, at random, here and there. His eye changes from a face without a name to another face without a name. But it keeps coming back to that of a young woman, a beautiful prisoner perhaps still alive in this golden cage. And now she offers him the impossible, which seems to be the most impossible in this labyrinth where time is as it were abolished: she offers him a past, a future and freedom. He tells her that they met already, him and her, a year ago, that they loved each

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other, that he is now coming back to this date fixed by herself, and that he is going to take her with him. Is the stranger a common seducer? Is he a fool? Or is he just confusing two faces? The young woman, in any case, begins by taking the thing as a game, a game like any other, which you can only have fun with. But the man is not laughing. Stubborn, serious, sure of this past history that little by little he reveals, he insists, he brings proofs … And the young woman, little by little, as if with regret, gives way. Then she gets scared. She stiffens. She does not want to leave this false but reassuring world which is hers, which she is used to, and which finds herself represented for her by another man, tender and distant, disillusioned, who watches over her and who is perhaps her husband. But the story that the stranger tells is taking shape more and more, irresistibly, it becomes more and more coherent, more and more present, more and more true. The present, the past, moreover, have come to merge together, while the growing tension between the three protagonists creates in the heroine’s mind fantasies of tragedy: rape, murder, suicide … Then suddenly she will give in … She has already given in, in fact, for a long time. After one last attempt to slip away again, one last chance she gives her guardian to take her back, she seems to agree to be the one the stranger is waiting for, and to go with him towards something, something. of nameless, something else: love, poetry, freedom … or, perhaps, death …. (1961, pp. 12–15, my translation)

Beyond these details lies nothing. There is nothing outside the text, the film, the hotel. There is no truth about who is lying and who is telling the truth. About what happened the year before. If there even was a year before. This is no I Know What You Did Last Summer; no single discoverable truth behind the cinematic veil of perception. Since none of these three characters have a name, they are represented in the script by simple initials, which are used only for convenience. The one who is possibly the husband (Pitoëff) is designated by the letter M, the heroine (Seyrig, dressed in Coco Chanel) by an A, and the stranger (Albertazzi) by the letter X, of course. We know absolutely nothing about them, nothing about their life. They are nothing other than what we see them to be: clients of a large, restful hotel, isolated from the outside world, and resembling a prison. What do they do when they are elsewhere? One would be tempted to answer: nothing! Elsewhere, they don’t exist. As for the past that the hero forcibly introduces into this closed and empty world, one gets the impression that he is making it up, as he speaks, here and now.

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There is no last year and Marienbad is no longer to be found on any map. This past, too, has no reality beyond the moment. This past, too, has no reality apart from the moment it is brought up with enough force; and, when it finally triumphs, it simply becomes the present, as if it never ceased to be. (1961, pp. 14–15, my translation)

Nothing is hidden. Everything is in plain view. In Marienbad, neither structuralism not semiotics can help the frustrated spectator. It is no accident that Marienbad never features in any edition of Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, though it would have been interesting to read Wollen’s take on Robbe-Grillet’s proposal that “new works have no reason to exist unless they bring into the world in their turn new significations, still unknown to the authors themselves, significations which will exist only later, thanks to these works, and on which society will institute new values” (1963b, p. 144).

The Truth Isn’t Out There Before ‘Hotel California’ there was Marienbad. The guests at the hotel can check-out anytime they like, but they can never leave. Just as there is nothing beyond the text, so too there is nothing beyond the hotel grounds. From a semiotic point of view, Marienbad is a closed system. The film is pure effect. And yet, just as the hotel doors open themselves up to neat systematic mazes, so too the film is open to a myriad interpretations with their own harsh rules (semiotic, feminist, etc.) and cul-de-sacs. Over the years Marienbad has been viewed though the lenses of Cartesianism, conspiracy, feminism, gaslighting, hallucination, mirroring, psychoanalysis, repetition, solipsism, structuralism, surrealism, trauma, and victim-blaming, to name but a few.7 It has been further characterized, in turn, as the history of a persuasion, the refusal of all plot, a re-­imagination of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a limbo between life and death, an unreliable narration, a fable for the nuclear age and its anxieties, the confusion of theatre with reality, an assassin’s (or perhaps Death’s) search for his victim after a year’s stay of execution, a reality created in the hero’s own vision, possibly based on Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novel, The Invention of Morel. In Casares’ Pirandellesque experiment, the characters are stuck in a film which they are trying to derail by imposing their own narratives on it; a cold intellectual game that is itself reflected in the repetitive games played by the characters in the film.8 These readings are all united in the

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common thought that there exists—perhaps even must exist—such a thing as the correct interpretation of Marienbad. This is to be found by cracking a code hidden within the film itself, or perhaps via some external philosophical key. But can there really be such a thing? Spectators are free to make their own Marienbad as they watch it. A fun exercise is to pick an interpretative theory from the outset and proceed to project it onto the film as if there is no doubt that this is what is going on. If it is a film about the power of persuasion then who is trying to persuade whom of what? Is X trying to persuade A of something that never happened or is she trying to persuade him that something that had actually happened was all in his mind? Is it a game or deadly serious? Is M in on it? The invention of the past through the force of imagination or the force of the past being re-invented in the imagination? And what of the ghostly play within the film? Famously, the director and screenwriter orchestrated a ‘disagreement’ in which the former told the press that the characters had probably met the year before and the latter that they probably hadn’t. This choose-your-own-adventure element anticipates David Slade and Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, but the difference between the two films cannot be put down to technological advancement. They are completely different in nature and intent. In the case of Marienbad, if the viewer chooses anything it is not the way in which film will unfold but, rather, a way of understanding its inevitable unfolding. We might better characterize recurring viewings of Marienbad using Nietzsche’s description of his famous concept of eternal recurrence: “with nothing new in it … over again and again … and innumerable times again … all in the same succession and sequence” (Nietzsche, 1887, §341; cf. Deleuze, 1968, pp. 374ff.). While the closed hotel is replete with open possibilities, Marienbad adds up to so much more than the sum of all the possible parts it might play in the interpretative games of viewers. [W]e know that the scene will take on very different meanings in the viewer’s mind, sometimes even opposing ones, depending on whether the image shows the two characters from behind or in front, or their two faces alternately in rapid succession. It may also happen that the camera lets us see something else during their dialogue, even if it’s only the setting that surrounds them: the walls of the room where they are, the streets where they are walking, the waves that break before their eyes. It is easy to imagine a scene in which words and gestures would be particularly insignificant and would disappear completely from the viewer’s memory, to the benefit of the

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forms and movement of the image, which alone would be important, which alone would seem to have a meaning. (Robbe-Grillet, 1961)

What happens in Marienbad stays in Marienbad.

True Love Leaves No Traces It is hard not to view Marienbad as part of a thematic trilogy of memory and forgetting that begins with Hirsohima mon amour and ends with Muriel.9 The ground for this had already been prepared through a trifecta of short documentaries: 1953’s Les statues meurent aussi10 (which considers the loss of meaning when cultural objects are considered outside of the socio-historical context of their creation); 1955’s Nuit et brouillard (which anticipates Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah in its alternation between past and present realities); and 1956’s Toute la memoire du monde (which envisions the Bibliotheque Nationale as present mental space in which the future is forged from the past). There exist both external (impersonal) and internal (personal) truths about the past, but how do we come to know either? And what is the relation between deceiving others and self-deceit? Resnais’ films anticipate France’s intellectual obsession with “the trace” as the ethical thread of verification that connects the past to the present.11 Before Levinas, before Derrida, before Lanzmann, and before Ricoeur, Resnais’ documentary and fictional films saw their characters grappling with variations of the imagination within the corridors of history, memory, and forgetting, the halls of misleading leads and forgotten failures, and the mazes of repetition and false turns. Marienbad stands out from all these other films in not being about the remembrance or forgetting of some independent reality. In his essay, ‘Time and Description in Fiction Today’, Robbe-Grillet writes that the new novel, like modern cinema, is unconcerned with time: [C]inema knows only one grammatical mode: the present tense of the indicative. In any case, film and novel today meet in the construction of moments, of intervals, and of sequences which no longer have anything to do with those of clocks or calendars … It has very often been repeated in recent years that … Every modern cinematographic work is a reflection on human memory, its uncertainties, its persistence, its dramas, etc. … present i­ nvestigations

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seem on the contrary to be concerned, most often, with private mental structures of “time”. (1963b, pp. 151–152)

Gilles Deleuze famously attributes to Robbe-Grillet the view that the author and Resnais had strikingly different approaches to the question of time. According to Deleuze, Resnais’ direction highlights an “architecture of time” in which the past is eternal, whilst Robbe-Grillet’s text focuses on the structure of an “eternal present” that is “stripped out of time” (Deleuze, 1985, p. 101). The alleged difference is ‘in the nature of the time image, which is plastic in one case and architectural in the other’ (Ibid.). Deleuze elaborates: Resnais conceived Last Year…like his other films, in the form of sheets or regions of past, while Robbe-Grillet sees time in the form of points of present. If Last Year … could be divided, the man X might be said to be closer to Resnais, and the woman A closer to Robbe-Grillet. (Ibid.)

This seems to me to project specific aspects of Resnais’ pre-occupations within the films surrounding Marienbad onto a film that deflects them at every turn. It is true—of both the film and the screenplay—that ‘the past’ figures in X’s narration. But whether this past is real, fabricated, misremembered, hallucinated, and so on is not settled in either. Robbe-Grillet does indeed refer to Resnais’ earlier documentaries, but only does so to explain a common tendency to misperceive the film in light of them. Ironically, Deleuze engages in such an approach in his defence of the very passage in which Robbe-Grille warns against interpreting Marienbad as yet another one of Resnais’ “psychological variations on lost love, on forgetting, on memory” (Robbe-Grillet, 1963a, p. 152), for doing so inevitably leads to the asking of questions such as the following: Have this man and this woman really met before? Did they love each other last year at Marienbad? Does the young woman remember and is she only pretending not to recognize the handsome stranger? Or has she really forgotten everything that has happened between them? etc. (Ibid.)

The questions ‘have no meaning’ because Marienbad ‘is a world without a past, a world which is self-sufficient at every moment and which obliterates itself as it proceeds’. Robbe-Grillet elaborates further:

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This man, this woman begin existing only when they appear on the screen the first time; before that they are nothing; and, once the projection is over, they are again nothing. Their existence lasts only as long as the film lasts. There can be no reality outside the images we see, the words we hear…the duration of the modern work is in no way a summary, a condensed version, of a more extended and more “real” duration which would be that of the anecdote, of the narrated story. There is, on the contrary, an absolute identity between the two durations. The entire story of Marienbad happens neither in two years nor in three days, but exactly in one hour and a half. (Ibid., pp. 152–153, emphasis in the original)

The film shares a similar form with surrounding works by Resnais, but its content is rigidly bounded by its own duration. It looks neither back nor forward.

Epilogue A film about epistemology? The vulnerability of memory? Traces? Clues? A Leavisian mockery of semiotics? Effectively a Hitchcockian critique of all things French? Does it on every reading also become an essay on itself or is this too just one more way of watching it? One might agree with all this and yet refuse to participate in the celebration of the triumph of mere form over content. Marienbad moves beyond the Leavisian rejection of the outside-film. For there is nothing inside this particular film either. That is to say, again, that there is nothing hidden within in it. Everything is in plain view. This is not to defend a no-theory theory of Marienbad, but only to point out that it does not fix its own meaning. If the point of any given film is understood to be some kind of thesis or opinion which it conveys, or argues for, then Marienbad is a film without a point. But insofar as it lends itself to being viewed as gesturing towards the very impossibility of its offering any clues to its own interpretation, it is not a pointless film. What if Marienbad was frame-for-frame identical but its creators insisted that there was a single correct way of viewing it? While the views of its creators are relevant for the understanding of the making of any artwork, the resulting insights must not be imposed on, the artwork made (an object whose existence is ultimately independent from its makers’ intentions).12 The meaning of a film, novel, song, or painting does not

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magically change each time a creator has something new to say about it. Here lies the truth of the death of the author thesis. Like all people, artists ‘often learn things about their own works after completing them’, which is not to say that they discover things about their own intentions but rather, as illustrated by the case of T.S. Eliot, about the ‘content’ of their own work.13 The observer is in a better place than the agent to see patterns and recurring motifs across the latter’s behaviour and can, in this respect, understand them better. We find a parallel debate in relation to artistic intention and ‘what is there’ to be seen in the work of Stanley Cavell.14 Cavell’s radical conclusion is that “[t]he artist is responsible for everything that happens in his work—and not just in the sense that it is done, but in the sense that it is meant” (Cavell, 1969, p. 237). The other side of this coin is that “[i]n the land he has made, the artist is entitled to everything he wants, if it’s there” (Ibid., p.  233).15 It is no accident that Cavell doesn’t write about Marienbad.16 Does it follow from this that the film is all syntax and no semantics? Not quite. The characters speak in fairly straightforward French and, as Cavell would put it, they must mean what they say. There is still a story—and truths—and clues to those truths—within the closed system of the film. It is just that no truth lies beyond it for the characters and their stories to gesture at. This is not merely the death of the cinematographer but that of the spectator as well. The spectator and cinematographer die the same death (outside the film). Understanding art is not a matter of ‘correct interpretation’, for there is no fixed set of ideas to be found and understood in any artwork qua artwork. Therein lies the weakness in the very concept of conceptual art. Marienbad ultimately functions as “a constructed, ordered world that answers only to itself” (Tobe, 2016, p. 281) on every single level. Indeed, one may view it as having been carefully designed to prove this very point, though no revelation of authorial intention (on which, incidentally, the film’s makers at times appeared to disagree) can alter the fact that the film can be made sense of in a number of incompatible ways, including this one. But then, is that not its meaning? If so, the author is alive and well and living in Marienbad. Marienbad is anti-semiotic, yet full of signs. But the signs are empty, not unlike the parables in Bob Dylan’s album John Wesley Harding. Dylan’s liner notes, like the songs themselves, tease us with pseudo morals and revelations:

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There were three kings and a jolly three too. The first one had a broken nose, the second, a broken arm and the third was broke. “Faith is the key!” said the first king. “No, froth is the key!” said the second. “You’re both wrong,” said the third, “the key is Frank!”. (Dylan, 1967a)

Dylan couldn’t resist hiding the record’s anti-message within the plain view of the penultimate verse of ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’, in which the little neighbour boy mutters underneath his breath that “Nothing is revealed” (Dylan, 1967b). By contrast, in Marienbad we find no Easter eggs; no clues to hidden meanings or their negation; no anti-message message or anti-theory. There is no outside-film referenced within it. And there are no truths outside the gates of Marienbad.17

Notes 1. Goethe had met Ulrike von Levetzow at Marienbad in the summer of 1821, and then again (at either Marienbad and/or the nearby Carlsbad) in the summers of 1822 and 1823, culminating with a rejected marriage proposal on his birthday. 2. That this particular criticism of Anglo-American psychoanalytic theory took place at the very event in which the Europeans, under the Presidency of Ernest Jones (who famously truncated Lacan’s presentation), awarded substantial autonomy to the American Psychoanalytic Association is perhaps itself worthy of psychoanalytic investigation. 3. I approach the film as a unique collaborative work, but see Leutrat (2000, pp. 52–61) for a thorough comparison of the ‘two Marienbads’ which he individuates as Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay and Resnais’ film of it; cf. Deleuze (1985, p. 100ff.), discussed further below. 4. For Hitchcock’s own anti-theoretical cinematography see Sandis (2009). 5. Cf. Wittgenstein (2009, § 201): “…if every course of action can be brought into accord with the rule, then it can also be brought into conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.” 6. The locus classicus of this view point is Knights (1933). 7. See Legier (2009) and Leutrat (2000). 8. Michel Mourlet described the whole film as consisting of “pathetic little intellectual games which solemnly play at being cinema” (Mourlet, 1987, p. 87). 9. Muriel stands as an inverse of Marienbad in which Alphonse Noyard purportedly describes meeting an anonymous girl and Muriel replies “but that’s our story”: “A: I do so envy people who have a good memory. M: Are we going to spend all our days setting the record straight? A: We were

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in love, weren’t we? M: Forgive me I’ve lost my memory. I’ve forgotten everything. A: When you’re scared, you forget”. 10. With Chris Marker and Ghislain Croquet. 11. For a history of ‘the trace’ see Sandis (2022, p. 39ff). 12. See Sandis (2017b). 13. See Eliot (1923). 14. For example, Cavell (1969, p. 230ff.). 15. Cf. Sandis (2017a, p. 123ff., 2017b, §4). 16. In a poignant review penned shortly before his death, Morris Weitz writes: “In its style and substance, Cavell’s The Claim of Reason can be read as the philosophical script of Last Year at Marienbad. For, like that film (which I do not find mentioned in Cavell’s The World Viewed), this book, in spite of its initial (and, as it turns out, disingenuous) claim that philosophy is a set of texts, not a set of problems (3/4), keeps revolving around the problem of knowledge, both of oneself and of others. The author plays a cat-andmouse game with the reader, so that, even after some five hundred pages, the reader is still wondering what, if anything, has really happened. Nor, I think, is he supposed to know, since the author does not know either” (Weitz, 1981, p. 50). 17. A million thanks to Max de Gaynesford, Craig Fox, and Britt Harrison for their invaluable feedback on an earlier draft.

References Casares, A. B. (1940). La invención de Morel. Editorial Losada. Cavell, S. (1969). Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays (Updated 2nd ed., 2002). Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, G. (1968). Différence et repetition. Presses Universitaires de France. Deleuze, G. (1985). Cinema 2, L’Image-Temps. Les Éditions de Minuit. Translated by H.  Tomlinson & R.  Galeta as Cinema 2: The Time-Image (The Athlone Press, 1989), to which any page numbers refer. Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Les Éditions de Minuit. Dylan, B. (1967a). Liner Notes to John Wesley Harding; as printed in Dylan (2014: p. 272). Dylan, B. (1967b). The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest; as printed in Dylan (2014: p. 282). Dylan, B. (2014). The Lyrics (C. Ricks, L. Nemrow, & J. Nemrow, Eds.). Simon & Schuster UK. Eliot, T.  S. (1923). The Function of Criticism. Criterion, 2(5, Oct.), 31–42; reprinted in his Selected Essays (Faber & Faber, 1961, pp. 23–34), to which any page numbers refer.

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Goethe, J.  W. (1827). ‘Elegie von Marienbad’, in his Trilogie der Leidenschaft. Stuttgart und Tübingen: Cotta/Cottasche. Knights, L. C. (1933). How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?: An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism. The Minority Press. Lacan, J. (1938). Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu: Essai d’analyse d’une fonction en psychologie; as published in Lacan (2001, pp. 23–84). Lacan, J. (1949). Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je.L’agressivité en psychanalyse; as published in Lacan (1965, pp. 93–100). Lacan, J. (1953). Some Reflections on the Ego. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34(1), 11–17. Lacan, J. (1956–57). Le Séminaire. La Relation d’objet. Seuil, 1994. Lacan, J. (1960). Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien; as published in Lacan (1965, pp. 793–827). Lacan, J. (1965). Écrits. Seuil. Lacan, J. (2001). Autres Écrits. Seuil. Leutrat, J.  L. (2000). L’Année dernière à Marienbad (P.  Hammond, Trans.). Bloomsbury Publishing. Levinas, E. (1963). La trace de l’autre. Tidischrift voor filosofie, 25(3, Sep.), 605–623. Levinas, E. (1972). Humanism of the Other [Humanisme de l’autre homme] (N. Poller, Trans.). University of Illinois Press. Mourlet, M. (1987). La Mise en scene comme langage. Henri Veyríer. Nietzsche, F. (1887). The Gay Science (J.  Nauckhoff & A.  Del Caro, Trans., B. Williams, Ed.). Cambridge University Press, 2001. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1956). Dans le labyrínthe. Les Editions de Minuit. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1961). L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Les Editions de Minuit. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1963a). Pour un nouveau roman. Les Editions de Minuit. Translated by R.  Howard as For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (The Grove Press), to which all page numbers refer. Robbe-Grillet, A. (1963b). Time and Description in Fiction Today; published in Robbe-Grillet (1963, pp. 143–156). Sandis, C. (2009). Hitchcock’s Conscious Use of Freud’s Unconscious. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 5(3), 56–81. Sandis, C. (2017a). The Doing & the Deed: Action in Normative Ethics. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 80 (ed. A. O’Hear), 105–126. Sandis, C. (2017b). If an Artwork Could Speak: Aesthetic Understanding After Wittgenstein. In G. Hagberg (Ed.), Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Palgrave Macmillan. Sandis, C. (2022). Action Cubes and Traces. In C. Bagnoli (Ed.), Time in Action: The Temporal Structure of Rational Agency and Practical Thought (pp. 32–51). Routledge.

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Sebald, W. G. (1999). Marienbad Elegie; first published in Michael Hamburger’s English translation as ‘A Final Poem: Marienbad Elegy’, Irish Pages, 1(2), The Justice Issue (Autumn–Winter, 2002/2003), 125–132. Tobe, R. (2016). Pleasure in Understanding, Pleasure in Not Understanding. Architecture and Culture, 4(2), 281–291. Weitz, M. (1981). Review of The Claim of Reason by Stanley Cavell. The Journal of Philosophy, 78(1, Jan.), 50–56. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell. Wollen, P. (1969). Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (5th ed.). Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Filmography Lanzmann, C. (dir.). (1985). Shoah. France: Lanzmann. Legier, L. (dir.). (2009). Dans le labyrinth de Marienbad. France: Studio Canal. Resnais, A. (dir.). (1955). Nuit et Brouillard. France: Argos Films. Resnais, A. (dir.). (1956). Toute la mémoire du monde. France: Les Films de la Pléiade. Resnais, A. (dir.). (1959). Hiroshima mon Amour. France/Japan: Argos Films/ Como Films. Resnais, A. (dir.). (1961). L’Année dernière à Marienbad. France/Italy: Cocinor. Resnais, A. (dir.). (1963). Muriel. France/Italy: Argos Films. Resnais, A., Marker, C., & Cloquet, G. (dirs.). (1953). Les statues meurent aussi. France: Tadié Cinéma. Slade, D. (dir.). (2018). Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. London: House of Tomorrow.

CHAPTER 6

Film and the Space-Time Continuum Maximilian de Gaynesford

I Recent advances in technology and technique have made it possible to construct whole films so that they convincingly appear to be—whether or not they are—composed of a single continuous shot. Recent examples, like Birdman (Alejandro Iñárritu, 2014) and 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019), demonstrate that the appeal of such spatio-temporally simple films can be both broad and wide, whether we measure that attractiveness by commercial success (ticket sales) or aesthetic regard (awards). The commercial aspect and widespread appeal are particularly surprising and worth reflecting over. Until recently, the use of prolonged shots in films has been reserved, with few exceptions, to the ‘arthouse’ genre. Bela Tarr is a paradigm; his early television film of Macbeth (1982) consisted of two shots (5 m and 57 m), anticipating the extravagantly prolonged shots of his later films from Sátántangó (1994) to The Turin Horse (2011). The awed but limited reception of these films hardened a sense that the public would not tolerate too much of the prolonged shot, that entertainment

M. de Gaynesford (*) University of Reading, Reading, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_6

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requires a variety that precludes its use. And yet we now have commercially successful films which go beyond a rhythm of prolonged shots to consist, for all intents and purposes, of just one single continuous shot. No less striking is the fact that these films are appearing at a time when the complex, multiple-shot film is also undergoing extreme development. Keeping pace with the interpretative capacities and ambitions of audiences, advances in technology and technique have made it possible to construct spatio-temporally intricate films that blend multiple shots representing events taking place in different orders of time and space. Many of the most salient examples are by Christopher Nolan: Memento (2000), Inception (2010), Dunkirk (2017), and Tenet (2020). Again, where we might have assumed that the public would not stand for such exhausting mind-work, these films have attracted considerable commercial success and aesthetic regard. Some are intentionally disorientating and deliberately hard to resolve, others are not. Dunkirk demonstrates that the spatio-temporally complex, multiple-shot film can render a perfectly comprehensible narrative in a lucid way. The complexity is considerable: the film compounds three different temporal durations (roughly a week, a day, an hour) via association with three different spatial domains (land, sea, air). Yet the film nevertheless enables us to make sense of occasions where the three durations and domains blend, as when characters on the mole—that is on land but also over the sea—are attacked from the air. These are developments which will take time to digest, so the aim in what follows must be correspondingly modest: to identify some of the more pressing philosophical questions arising, to connect them with previous philosophizing about film, and to encourage a more fruitful collaboration with film criticism.

II The questions that dominate discussion at present are broadly technical: how it is possible to achieve such films, which use ever more inventive means and seek to overcome such testing and often self-imposed constraints. Another salient question is broadly psychological and sociological: why audiences are interested in and stimulated by such films, to what effect and to what degree. And a follow-up question is broadly cultural: why film-makers and audiences are tempted by films that move in such extreme and complicatedly opposed directions.

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No doubt specific material circumstances are relevant to these questions. Extremity of technique clearly appeals to the public at present. It is significant and perhaps indicative that the ultimate examples of the single continuous shot film (1917) and the spatio-temporally complex, blended multiple-shot film (Dunkirk) were both edited by the same person: Lee Smith. But to know more, we await filmmakers’ revelations and empirical research. Sixty years separate the use of prolonged shots in postwar Italian films and the exemplary exploration of the interdependency between material and aesthetic concerns which jointly explain them (Wagstaff, 2007). There are also issues which we can raise immediately that matter more directly to philosophy. A first pass identifies three broad categories. (i) Category and Appearance It is difficult to know how—and in particular, how narrowly—to characterize the kind of films in question. Does it matter, for example, whether a film is actually—as opposed to just apparently—composed of a single continuous shot? There is exactly this difference between films like Birdman and 1917 at one end and films like Russian Ark (Alexander Sokurov, 2003) and Victoria (Sebastian Schipper, 2015) at the other. On the one hand, we may be impressed by the fact that it would take an expert with unusual knowledge and discernment to be able to notice, let alone demonstrate the difference. On the other hand, we may be swayed by the observation, to which audiences of 1917 testify, that our experience of a film becomes subtly different once we know that its apparently single continuous shot has in fact been composed of several different shots. (ii) Editing and Art Editing seems to be eliminated in films composed of a single continuous shot. This goes against the doctrine, enunciated here by Robert Bresson, that ‘it is in the editing room that things attach to one another’ (2016, p. 282). On this issue, the difference between films that are apparently—as opposed to actually—so composed is obviously relevant. But its significance can be misunderstood. If it is necessary to combine shots so that they appear to be a single continuous shot, what else should we call that but editing? But there is a question about how deep this difference goes.

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After all, this is certainly not the kind of editing which Bresson had in mind (and occasionally used himself, e.g. in the final shots of The Trial of Joan of Arc 1962) which has played a significant role in philosophical arguments about film and to which ‘montage’ belongs as a sub-category, the kind which we might define as the activity of combining shots in such a way that their discontinuity is not just obvious but significant and itself a conveyor of meaning. It is this kind of editing which is traditionally cited as evidence for the claim that films can be art (e.g. Rudolph Arnheim, 1933, pp. 127–132; Kracauer, 1997, pp. 40f), as well as being essential to the practices by which some directors conceive themselves as producing art (Tarkovsky, 2005, pp. 113–124). And it is this kind of editing which is absent from films which appear to be—whether or not they are—composed of a single continuous shot. So one of the questions raised by such films is whether they could be art—more precisely, whether their defining features mean they must lack the very properties which would otherwise admit them to the category of art. (iii) Film and Dream The analogy with dream is a likeness which films that are—apparently or actually—composed of a single continuous shot put under pressure. The phenomenon has been memorably described in early film studies by Hugo Münsterberg (1916) and Arnheim (1933), and deployed philosophically by Suzanne Langer (1953). In our ordinary waking life, what we experience does not jump from one place or time to another; we have to pass through all the intermediate times and places. But in films, what we experience can jump in both dimensions, both together or separately: remaining in the same space but jumping forward or backward in time; remaining at the same time but jumping across different spaces. Dunkirk is a particularly notable example. It is constructed so that what we experience is a week’s worth of events on land, a day’s worth of events on the sea, and about an hour’s worth of events in the air. Moving constantly between land, sea, and air to reveal interconnections between these events means constant spatial and temporal jumping, often of this kind of order: from a land-event at T1, far forwards to an air-event at T5, and then backwards to a sea-event at T3. And yet, after an initial sense of slight

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disorientation, it really is possible to follow, to recognize the narrative, to re-combine the events oneself into a story one can tell. Some philosophers make much of the ease with which we negotiate these jumps. They draw our attention to the fact that the same facility manifests itself when we dream, prompting the claim that we have the same expectations of both because we correctly treat film as dream. This is in marked contrast with our expectations of ordinary experience. We would be completely thrown if, for some extended period, our waking life leaped from one space or time to another instead of passing through the spatial and temporal points in between. Colin McGinn presents the most patiently defended statement of the film/dream analogy (2005). What then are we to make of films which appear to be composed of a single continuous shot? On the one hand, it is undoubtedly a surprise when we experience such films. They excite comment, fail to meet our expectations, take some getting used to. On the other hand, we do not tend to be completely thrown by them. Though we are surprised because our initial expectations are not met, it is possible to get used to the experience. The public appreciation of both 1917 and Birdman appears to demonstrate this. And equally importantly, becoming more comfortable with the experience does not mean we are tempted to mistake it for ordinary waking life. Not that films with the appearance of a single continuous shot need undermine the analogy with dreams altogether. Dreams themselves come in different forms, after all. It is equally possible, if sometimes as surprising, for dreams themselves to contain no jumps and thus mimic the order and continuity of ordinary waking life. But the experience of continuous shot films does oblige us to renounce too simple a version of the analogy. Some films are like some dreams in some respects; other kinds of film are like other kinds of dream in other kinds of respect. The truth of the matter lies in noticing the relevant differences.

III The need to notice differences has implications, if we step back for a moment to reflect on the overall approach. It requires that we combine film criticism’s focus on the details of particular films with philosophy’s attention to clarifying analysis and argument. ‘Attuning’ philosophy and film criticism in this way brings certain benefits but more importantly, it avoids particular harms. It thwarts the tendencies to either disjointed

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observation-making or stratospheric claim-staking to which film criticism and philosophy gravitate when either is separated from the other. Without philosophy, the valuable insights of film criticism lack rigor and are blunted by conceptual imprecision and confusion. Without film criticism, the provocative claims of philosophy lack support, floating free of the evidence that a suitably sharp awareness of the details of particular films alone provides. It is only when we bring philosophy and film criticism to bear on each other that we can make headway on these issues. We can continue in the present case by drawing a rough contrast: (A) Where in experiencing films and dreams, unlike in waking life, we take jumps in space and time in our stride. (B) Where films set out to make it very difficult for us to grapple with their jumps in space and time, indeed at least as difficult as it would be to cope with such jumps in real life. (C) Where films try to mimic ordinary experience, avoiding jumps in space and time, maintaining the space-time continuum. Philosophers who advance the analogy between film and dream sometimes write as if (A) were the only category we need take account of. It is certainly true that very many films can be described in this way, not just the highly exceptional case of Dunkirk. But that in itself need not push us towards the dream analogy. It may well be true that this ease with negotiating jumps is akin to the way we experience some dreams. But we can also take these jumps in our stride in our thought more generally, as Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44 memorably affirms (2002, p. 469): If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, Injurious distance should not stop my way […] For nimble thought can jump both sea and land As soon as think the place where he would be.

So we may have at least equal reason to treat film as fundamentally thought-like, which would have interesting consequences for the way we approach both film and thought. It opens a connection with a theme on which Andrei Tarkovsky famously ruminates in his films and in his criticism: that ‘cinema operates with time that has been seized’ (Gianvito, 2006, p. 19). Is this something which distinguishes film from thought or which also brings them closer together?

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Of course, category (A) does not in fact exhaust the kinds of case worth thinking through. What is particularly interesting about category (B) and films that make the jumping difficult, are differences between time-focused examples and space-focused examples. One notable source of the latter are films by Tarkovsky in which characters are made distinctly mysterious by appearing to jump from space to space. There is a tracking shot in Nostalgia (1983), for example, in which a mother and her children seem to jump from one place to another: the camera passes over their immobile grouping once and, continuing in the same direction, encounters them again. The effect is charmingly easy to achieve and cheap—getting the actors to move behind the camera—but when done well, the experience offered the viewer is thoroughly disconcerting. So disconcerting that Sean Martin describes it with excusable hyperbole as ‘placing a character in two logically impossible places within the same shot’ (Martin, 2005, p. 45). What is in question is whether such effects violate Tarkovsky’s own prohibition on the multi-layering of cinema (1994, p. 92). An equally notable source of time-focused examples is Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), a film in 22 scenes which plays with the space-­ time continuum in a radically disorienting way. The intention is to replicate the experience of a subject who is himself radically disoriented by the systematic erosion of his memory. He continues to act but forgets what he is doing almost immediately, so that he is constantly surprised at where he finds himself in place and time. The film is so constructed that the viewer is also constantly surprised as the film plays itself out. Instead of following through each scene in its chronological order from 1 to 22, we are first given scene 22 and then 21, and so on. This is made more confusing still because the story is not simply told in reverse: the order of scenes is reversed, but what happens within each scene follows normal chronological order. Thus it is not until the end of any scene that we arrive at the temporal point where the previously shown scene started from. There is obviously philosophical interest in the corroboration given to the Lockean thought that memory is somehow constitutive of personal identity. But what Memento helps demonstrate is that what is intuitive about the epistemic version of this claim holds from the third person perspective, as well as from the first. It is not only the central character who is unable to gain epistemic grasp of the person that he is over time; by this mimicry of disorientation, his audience are also unable to get epistemic grasp of the person he is over time.

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Category (C) contains films which try to maintain the space-time continuum one way or another by using prolonged shots. These are particularly overlooked by those who stress the analogy between film and dream. This category is anything but uniform and it is worth distinguishing some varieties. As we have seen, some prolong their shot over the entirety of a film (e.g. Russian Ark; Victoria) or they give the appearance of doing so by hiding their cuts. In some cases, the hiding itself is hidden (e.g. 1917; Birdman); in other cases, the hiding is itself quite obvious, as in Hitchcock’s Rope (1948). But there are also films which contain prolonged shots—as opposed to consisting of them—and the next section will focus on some differences between them. Three aspects in particular are significant. One is a contrast in the placing of prolonged shots in films that contain rather than consist of them. The second is a contrast in the regularity of prolonged shots in such films. Placing and regularity matter principally because the appeal to the continuum of ordinary waking life registers differently depending on where and how often in a film this appeal is made. The third is a contrast in the phenomenology, between films that apparently consist of a single continuous shot and films that contain prolonged shots. We shall focus on each in what follows.

IV (i) Placing The majority of prolonged shots in films that contain them fall into either of two groups: an opening or establishing gesture, and an ending or culminating gesture. Placing can make a considerable difference to the way in which the film as a whole is experienced: whether one is made to notice the subsequent move into the rhythm of more familiar shorter shots, for example, or whether one is surprised by the transition from such shorter shots to the prolonged shot. ‘Transition’ is correct for this change, because it is usually only in the course of the shot that one realizes it is indeed being prolonged. So we would expect, and do indeed find, that the contrast between these films is quite noticeable. Films which use prolonged shots as an opening or establishing gesture include the bomb-planting scene at the start of Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958), the crane shot over the small-town brothel at the start of

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the second tale in Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952), the shooting of insurgents at the start of The Red and the White (Miklós Jancsó, 1967), the portrayal of the studio lot at the start of The Player (Robert Altman, 1992), the robbing of a Chinese restaurant in Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995), and the shooting at a boxing-match at the start of Snake Eyes (Brian De Palma, 1998). Most of these shots set up expectations that the film will be attempting to convey the continuum of ordinary life. Some immediately dash these expectations (Touch of Evil; The Player) but some honour them intermittently (Le Plaisir) or continuously (The Red and the White). The prolonged shot in Strange Days is an exception because it is a film within the film: it purports to be the recording of a device that takes memories and sensations directly from the cerebral cortex. But this emphasizes the underlying point: it is precisely because the experience of the life it records is continuous that the film incorporates this prolonged shot. In that respect, there is a connection with the prolonged shots used in Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), also a film about voyeurism, a connection that Adam Mars-Jones makes in order to help justify his high estimation of the film (Mars-Jones, 2019, pp. 44–45). Films which use prolonged shots as an ending or culminating gesture include the death in the hotel and arrival of the police in The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), the dance sequence at the end of the first tale in Le Plaisir, the revelation of the killer on the bandstand in Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent (1937) and the burning house in The Sacrifice (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986). What counts as a culminating gesture depends on the narrative preceding it, so the prolonged shot in Le Plaisir is as frenetic and charged as it is uncannily calm in The Passenger and icily forensic in Young and Innocent. In these cases, the prolonged shot is not used to convey the continuum of ordinary life but to reveal what is going on in a moment of intense activity (Le Plaisir) or concentration (Young and Innocent) or significance (The Passenger). The Passenger is curious because evidently it would have been possible to prolong the shot (6 m 31 s) further by extending the preceding shot (1 m 3 s) into it. But shunning the extra technical achievement seems right aesthetically. It is as if the film takes a new breath with the preceding shot, then lets it out infinitesimally slowly as the camera advances towards the window bars, like the use that a conductor can make of the pause in a romantic symphony when its last movement is an intense single flow.

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The culminating shot in The Sacrifice is an exception because it does follow a sequence of previous prolonged shots but nevertheless stands out from the rest as again a moment of unusually intense activity. The crisis of the house burning down after the comparative uneventfulness of what has gone before is the outward and visible sign of the inward drama in the central character, a moment of resolution and decision-making that succeeds a long period of quiet reflectiveness. (ii) Regularity The majority of prolonged shots in films that contain them fall into either of two further groups: films where the prolonged shot is rare or even one-­ off and films where it is common or even the basic compositional unit. Many of the examples we have reviewed so far belong to the one-off category: Touch of Evil, Le Plaisir, The Player, Strange Days, The Passenger, Young and Innocent. Here, the prolonged shot fulfils a very specific and temporally bound purpose and the film’s effectiveness as a whole depends on establishing a contrast between these dramatic sequences and the ordinary-­length shots with the spatio-temporal jumps that precede or follow them. If such films do aim at the mimicry of waking experience, it is so as to excite appreciation of what is extraordinary in the experience of the characters. Two further examples help make an additional point: the slow zoom onto the cellar key held in the hand in Notorious (Hitchcock, 1946) and the entry into the Copacabana club in Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990). One of the reasons that these sequences stand out is that, unusually for the one-off prolonged shot, they occur neither as an opening gesture in a film nor as its closing event. But we should not exaggerate the contrast with other examples. Though not itself an ending event, the prolonging of the shot in Notorious marks it as one of a series that will bring about the film’s culmination. And though not an opening shot, the Goodfellas sequence fulfils a significant establishing role in the film, after the context has been set out and launching the particular series of events with which it is centrally concerned. Again, this is a matter of exciting appreciation of what is extraordinary, however much the character in Goodfellas would like people to believe that the experience is ordinary for him. By contrast, two of the examples we have reviewed belong to films in which the prolonged shot is common: The Red and the White and The Sacrifice. Indeed, we might say of both films that they are essentially

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composed of prolonged shots. In Tarkovsky’s last three films, the protraction of shots like the burning house (The Sacrifice), the three men on the trolley car (Stalker, 1979) and the crossing of the pool with a lit candle (Nostalgia) are the rule rather than the exception. The Red and the White remains committed to the prolonged shot, whether surveying a wide panorama of particular fights or focusing on a single interpersonal conflict. Jancsó and Tarkovsky both appear close to Kenji Mizoguchi here, though their approach is looser than a ‘one scene, one shot’ formula. The sequence of prolonged shots in these films contrasts with the exceptional opening shot in The Red and the White and culminating shot in The Sacrifice. The exceptional shots excite an appreciation of what is extraordinary in the experience of the characters, whereas the sequence establishes a reflective distance from them, a detachment that is deeper and greater than could be achieved by ordinary-length shots and spatio-temporal jumps. Two further examples perhaps belong here also, though not entirely comfortably: the prolonged shots that form the marital argument in Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963) and the traffic jam sequence in Weekend (Godard, 1967). These shots are certainly not one-off in the films that contain them, but nor do they act as the fundamental unit of composition. These films are not essentially composed of sequences of such shots. They are too intensely various for that—as the wide-ranging 1965 interview with Cahiers du Cinéma brings out (Godard, 1972, pp. 215–234). It is better to say that these prolonged shots are one such basic unit, which Godard uses intermittently. And the doubtless intentional effect on the viewer of this intermittent use is what the preceding comments would enable us to predict: a set of thoroughly disorientating lurches between being given intimate appreciation of what is extraordinary in the experience of the central characters and being thrust out again to observe them at a reflective distance. (iii) Phenomenology What is it like to experience film that contains prolonged shots? There is considerable variety here, to which our set of examples draws attention. It is sometimes calming to realize we are not going to be jumping around in time and space, so a prolonged shot can take some pressure off. In The Passenger, that sense of calm is deliberately called on, only to unsettle us more gravely as the shot continues. We begin to realize events are taking place which we are not being shown, that we have only certain

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audible cues to go on—the noise of a distant crowd at a bullfight, a shot, vehicles arriving, voices. We want to know more and begin to press against the shot which now appears to be restricting us, holding us down, so that we begin to kick against its restraining force. This is an extreme case, but prolonged shots often seem to increase tension. We become aware of the fact that a shot is being prolonged, begin feeling slightly stressed—’how long can this last?’ A sign of this tension is in the feeling of relief when the shot ends, which often finds expression in admiration for the technical achievement. Sometimes when we become aware that a shot is being prolonged, we think ‘how long can I last?’ where this may reflect the effort of attending or the effort to attend, staving off boredom. We realize then jumping around in time or space brings its own reliefs. What it is like to experience a single continuous shot film seems quite different from experiencing a film that contains prolonged shots. One might assume that the single continuous shot must make the film seem like a single scene, but that is rarely if ever the case. Once the shot goes beyond a certain length or the narrative develops a certain thickness, we naturally find ourselves thinking in terms of different scenes. This is so even though the absence of visible cuts may mean we do not agree on precisely where to draw the divisions. Memory is an indicator here. When we recall Birdman or 1917 for example, it is segmentally, not simply as divided into a series of scenes but as the product of a series of shots. The trolley sequence in Stalker presents the opposite phenomenon, as Geoff Dyer notices: a sequence that we remember as a single continuous shot is quite clearly five (2012, p. 56). It is somehow impossible to retain single continuous shot films as a single continuous shot in the memory, to remember them as having the character of a single continuous shot. We remember that it is a single continuous shot, but our memory is not as of a single continuous shot. This is quite unlike films that contain prolonged shots. It is perfectly possible, if the shot is well-crafted, to retain it as a prolonged shot, as having that character, to retain a memory as of a prolonged shot. Films that—apparently or actually—consist of a single continuous shot are comparatively rare at present, but it is possible to begin distinguishing what is common and what is various in the phenomenology associated with them. One feature in particular is salient. Our experience of time in Birdman and 1917 is as of a sequence of points in a line and the apparently single continuous shots that compose these films seem to be responsible

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for this fact. Both films stimulate apprehension of what Deleuze memorably describes as a ‘dynamic surge’, a sense for the way that the past is retained into the present and the present continues into the future (Deleuze, 1986, 1989). But whereas that linear sequence seems more or less straight in the case of Birdman, ending at a point that is distant from its start, 1917 consciously curves around so that its end returns us almost to its start, with the central character resting under a tree. Another day at war, a single loop in what now looks set to be a continuing spiral.

Conclusion Recent developments towards the opposed extremes of single continuous and complex, multiple-shot films complicate well-known debates about whether film is art and whether it is dream. In future work, it would be particularly useful to pursue these themes in relation to directors like Robert Bresson, who strive against the kind of ostentatious editing on show in recent developments (Schrader, 1972/2018, pp. 91–93), aiming in films like Au Hasard Balthasar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) for what he called ‘the smoothness of cinematography’ (Bresson, 1997, p. 27). To continue appreciating crucial differences, it will be necessary to continue attuning philosophy and film criticism.

References Arnheim, R. (1933). Film as Art. University of California Press. Bresson, R. (1997). Notes on the Cinematographer. Green Integer. Bresson, R. (2016). Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943–1983. New  York Review of Books. Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Athlone Press. Dyer, G. (2012). Zona. Canongate. Gianvito, J. (Ed.). (2006). Andre Tarkovsky Interviews. University of Mississippi. Godard, J.-L. (1972). Godard on Godard. Martin Secker and Warburg. Kracauer, S. (1997). Theory of Film. Princeton University Press. Langer, S. (1953). Feeling and Form. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mars-Jones, A. (2019). Second Sight: Selected Film Writings. Reaktion Books. Martin, S. (2005). Andrei Tarkovsky. Pocket Essentials. McGinn, C. (2005). The Power of Movies. Pantheon Books. Münsterberg, H. (1916). The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. D. Appleton and Co.

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Schrader, P. (1972/2018). Transcendental Style in Film. Page references to its republication with a New Introduction. University of California Press. Shakespeare, W. (2002). The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems (C. Burrow, Ed.). Oxford University Press. Tarkovsky, A. (1994). Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970–1986. Faber & Faber. Tarkovsky, A. (2005). Sculpting in Time. University of Texas Press. Wagstaff, C. (2007). Italian Neorealist Cinema. University of Toronto Press.

Filmography Altman, R. (Director). (1992). The Player. Avenue Pictures. Antonioni, M. (Director). (1975). The Passenger. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bigelow, K. (Director). (1995). Strange Days. Lightstorm Entertainment. Bresson, R. (Director). (1962). The Trial of Joan of Arc. Agnes Delahaie Productions. Bresson, R. (Director). (1966). Au Hasard Balthasar. Argos Films. Bresson, R. (Director). (1967). Mouchette. Argos Films. Godard, J-L. (Director). (1963). Contempt. Rome Paris Films. Godard, J-L. (Director). (1967). Weekend. Comacico. Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1937). Young and Innocent. Gaumont Film Company. Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1946). Notorious. RKO Radio Pictures. Hitchcock, A. (Director). (1948). Rope. Transatlantic Pictures. Iñárritu, A. (Director). (2014). Birdman. Regency Enterprises. Jancsó, M. (Director). (1967). The Red and the White. Mafilm Mosfilm. Mendes, S. (Director). (2019). 1917. DreamWorks Pictures. Nolan, C. (Director). (2000). Memento. Summit Entertainment. Nolan, C. (Director). (2010). Inception. Legendary Pictures. Nolan, C. (Director). (2017). Dunkirk. Warner Bros Pictures. Nolan, C. (Director). (2020). Tenet. Warner Bros Pictures. Ophuls, M. (Director). (1952). Le Plaisir. Stera Films. Palma, B. de (Director). (1998). Snake Eyes. Paramount Pictures. Powell, M. (Director). (1960). Peeping Tom. Michael Powell (Theatre). Schipper, S. (Director). (2015). Victoria. Deutschfilm. Scorsese, M. (Director). (1990). Goodfellas. Warner Bros. Sokurov, A. (Director). (2003). Russian Ark. Seville Pictures. Tarkovsky, A. (Director). (1979). Stalker. Mosfilm. Tarkovsky, A. (Director). (1983). Nostalgia. Sovinfilm. Tarkovsky, A. (Director). (1986). The Sacrifice. Svenska Filminstitutet. Tarr, B. (Director). (1982). Macbeth. Magyar Televízió. Tarr, B. (Director). (1994). Sátántangó. Arbelos. Tarr, B. (Director). (2011). The Turin Horse. T. T. Filmműhely. Welles, O. (Director). (1958). Touch of Evil. Universal International.

PART II

The Appeal of—and to—Wittgenstein

CHAPTER 7

Ordinary Returns in Le notti di Cabiria John Gibson

Never love anyone who treats you like you are ordinary. —Oscar Wilde

I I begin by presenting not a thesis but a smile. In the final scene of Federico Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (1954b), Giulietta Masina’s Cabiria looks directly at the camera and hence at us, gratefully, just a moment before “Fine” appears on an otherwise black screen (Fig. 7.1): As far as smiles go, one would be hard pressed to find a better one in the history of cinema. Or a more curious one. That Fellini has Messina direct herself to the audience tells us that the film intends to make the smile bear upon our world as well as hers. Cabiria addresses us through it. Yet what does her expression convey? At the very least, it tells us that the end of the film is not the end of Cabiria: the catastrophe Cabiria just endured has not defeated her. Without this smile and the immense sweep of emotion it displays, the final moments of the film would have been, as

J. Gibson (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_7

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Fig. 7.1  Cabiria contented

it were, categorical, indicating the conclusion of both the story and its protagonist, the latter at least in respect to her quest for a life she finds worth having. It is true that surrounding Cabiria is a supremely improbable procession of joyous youths, dancing, singing, playing instruments, and enjoying their Vespas—the scene is “carnivalesque,” in the sense that that word is at home in Fellini criticism. But this characteristically Fellinesque coda uses the conventions of theatricality and resources of cinematic spectacle to conclude on a note not of absurdism but moral and emotional conversion.1 It is solely by virtue of Cabiria’s smile that the parade of ecstatic youths does not function to heighten the sense of her alienation from the world that it had established so powerfully just a moment before, when she found herself in a dark wood, abandoned, destitute, and begging for her life to end (“Non voglio più vivere! Ammazzami!”). As Cabiria ascends from the wood to find herself among the revelers, she is, as are we, at first nonplussed, then curious, and finally deeply moved as she receives a sincere “Buona sera” from a young woman. The image of Cabiria smiling immediately follows this greeting and functions to situate her now fully in this peculiar current of exuberant life. Hence the smile infuses the scene

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with a sense of forward motion and shows Cabiria to be newly attuned to the world around her. She can go on. Yet what will continue, exactly? Her change in outlook notwithstanding, one assumes that much of what will go on are the chronic disappointments, humiliations, and struggles of Cabiria’s ordinary life, to which the film’s conclusion suggests she will be returned. After all, the film just made it clear that Cabiria hasn’t escaped any of the unflattering features of her daily existence: the poverty, the lovelessness, the social invisibility, among much else. The entire film tells us that Cabiria wishes to escape this existence, preferably through marriage, and she nearly does, though, as we know, this turned out badly indeed. As Cabiria is “in the life,” the film trades on the common image of a sex worker as the object of a desire that refuses to grow into love. Since the narrative of the films begins and ends with an apparent lover prepared to murder Cabiria in an act of theft, what occasions her conversion surely cannot be the prospect of finding a new man. Her smile bespeaks newly acquired courage, even wisdom, and only a grossly unfair interpretation would make any such silly hope the proximate cause of her contented expression. So we must assume that Cabiria’s smile represents a form of acceptance of this world more or less as it is. But if Cabiria’s smile indicates an emotional realignment with her world, the question is why? She will be returned to her everyday life but now even worse off—she has just lost everything—and we need to ask what Fellini has given us to explain how this life could occasion a smile when he had hitherto represented it as a kind of prison, even if a comical prison (as the film is a picaresque, the rough business of life necessarily receives a light touch: hence the much-discussed role of mambo dancing in the film).2 If there is any doubt as to whether Fellini wishes us to see Cabiria’s conditions of everyday life in partially penal terms, this early image from the film should settle the matter (Fig. 7.2): Here we see Cabiria returning home after nearly drowning, trying to find a way into her shanty after having her keys stolen, with Wanda haranguing Cabiria to get her to acknowledge that Giorgio, the man she had presented as her beau, in fact pushed her into the Tiber so that he could abscond with her purse. This is the first insight we have into the structure of Cabiria’s everyday world, and everything from the stripes of Cabiria’s dress to the cell-like appearance of her home tells us something crucial about the character of Cabiria’s life. Even the banter with Wanda at moments feels as though it is between two inmates only one of whom has accepted her sentence. Fellini and Masina were great admirers of Charlie Chaplin, and one can detect faint references

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Fig. 7.2  Cabiria & Wanda

to Modern Times (1936) in this early scene—again, destitution is treated as comically as it is tragically in Le notti di Cabiria. Yet it becomes an unambiguously serious matter at the end of the film, certainly for the viewer, since we must see Cabiria’s smile bringing under its scope even Wanda and this context of daily life.3 It is part of Masina’s brilliance as an actor that in this smile seems to be implicated an answer to a great question, and part of Fellini’s restraint as a director is that the film refuses to answer it, since an answer would amount to an intrusion of didacticism. Fellini is a director of suggestion, and he is fundamentally poetic in his commitment to guiding thought through the use of images instead of the conventions of cinematic realism, dialogue, and dramatic declaration. I want to make a case for regarding this film as a reflection on the everyday and the final image of Cabiria as an achievement in understanding how art can explore it. These features of Cabiria’s expression tell us something about how the everyday can be accepted even

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when it is, in its core features, intolerable, and it hints at why the aestheticization of it in film matters. These achievements ultimately bring into relief a striking way of thinking about medium- to large-sized philosophical issues concerning not just the nature of the everyday and its significance but, crucially, how film can make of it an object of aesthetic and philosophical understanding.

II It is fairly easy to state what the artistic achievement consists in and highlighting it will help stage a more ambitious philosophical point. First things first, Le notti di Cabiria is the last in an early trilogy of films through which Fellini came into his own as a director, and in these films he is working through his complicated relationship to the neorealist tradition in which Italian cinema is at that moment steeped.4 The film’s famous ending relies on a form of cinematic abstraction—in this case, an employment of “visual excess” (Stubbs, 1993, p.  49) to effect a “spectacle-driven” (O’Healy, 2020, p. 465) embellishment of reality—and represents Fellini’s considered response to this tradition. As neorealists such as Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rosselini, and Luchino Visconti (and John Cassavetes, in an American context) were pursuing an “actorless” realism that was so committed to the representation of authentic lived experienced that they frequently took their performers as well their subject matter from everyday life, Fellini discovers, most perfectly in this final scene of Le notti di Cabiria, a new, if you will, mode of inheritance. The ending signals Fellini’s acceptance of neorealism’s commitment to the everyday but shows, remarkably for a filmmaker working in his milieu, that abstraction and not a form of representational hyperrealism—or any form of realism— is required for its exploration. This immediately raises a philosophical problem: how could such an artistic maneuver possibly present the everyday? Plainer still, how could a scene so extraordinary in nature deliver the ordinary? These questions of course track those great general philosophical puzzles about how artworks of any sort can represent life fairly or fully, that is, without importing to life, in the very act of artistic presentation, more than it naturally bears. The desire to offer an artistic solution to these problems commonly leads artists to find a way to get the form of their works to match the form of the bit of the world with which they are concerned: music delivered through staccato and atonal sounds so that it may capture the cacophony

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of modern life; poetry presented in free verse with an associative style that, one hopes, suffices to yield the actual flow of subjective thought; dance that embraces the inelegance and frenetic fits and spurts of our daily motions, and so on. Neorealism is just one instance of how artists try to get their works to match the rough edges of the world, and this is never a simple affair, since the aestheticization of life always risks bestowing too much beauty, form, and meaningfulness upon subjects that are often inherently messy, riddled, and imperfect. Even environmental aesthetics struggles with the issue of how the necessary acts of framing and selection that go into painting could ever permit us to experience nature as it naturally is in representations of wilderness and the like.5 The worry is much the same when it comes to artworks that try to capture the everyday. The risk of falsification is great, since the very aspects of an artwork that make it an aesthetic object can seem all wrong for a faithful presentation of the ordinary as ordinary. Fellini, like every other artist with worldly concerns, develops artistic strategies for negotiating these worries. The exact feature of the neorealist conceit Le notti di Cabiria tries to subvert is the idea that if art is to engage with ordinary life, it must go about its business, as Michael Fried puts it, “in the mode of near documentary.” (2007, p. 524) For Fried, as for many others, the everyday is best represented, “in antitheatrical (and implicitly absorptive) form.” (2007, p. 519) Hence the actors culled from the streets, filmed on location in their common haunts, speaking their ordinary dialects, and captured by a camera that tries desperately to efface its presence. The neorealist conceit is just one instance of the general belief that a retreat from distinctly artistic modes of presentation is demanded of art of the everyday, and it is just one example among thousands in the history of art of how artists think critically about whether their practices can at once be artistic and revelatory not just of “the world” but something rather harder to represent: the actual conditions of lived human experience.6 There are problems with this conceit.7 We can admit that neorealism and kindred movements have devised strategies for offering the impression of encountering the everyday in film. But if we think that art of the everyday must be antitheatrical and committed to nearly documentary modes of representation, a skeptical worry will lurk that even neorealism is doomed to just a lesser degree of failure in its attempt to make ordinary life present in art. These commitments can likely never be fully satisfied, since the framing of the world through film will inevitably open up some degree of a distorting gap. Or so skeptics will argue, and they will add that

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it is in the very nature of the everyday that this be so. Think of the respects in which your life unfolds in everyday contexts, by way of your engagement in ordinary affairs, and through your participation in common, typically very common, forms of sociality. Whatever you have precisely imagined, put it into words and what you’ve described is probably just uneventful. Your description might produce boredom, or curiosity, or sympathy; but it likely won’t reproduce, in addition to the recounted events, the everydayness of them. The concepts of the ordinary and the everyday mark a particular manner of experiencing the things and stuff of life, the spaces in which we encounter them, the weight of time as we pass between these spaces, and, especially, the feel of a life that is unfolding in and amongst all of this. How could one represent, in a plainly realist and documentary manner, our sense of the sheer presentness, unburdened understanding, and untroubled belonging that we have of the pieces of our everyday world and how they fit together into a pattern of familiar life? One can show these pieces; but that ordinary glue which binds them into a lived context of everydayness won’t thereby be made present. Their experiential quality is their defining feature, and fine-grained forms of phenomenological understanding simply aren’t the sort of thing that can be communicated in a literal description or realist depiction. The concept of the everyday, unlike the concept of a particular person or place, does not even appear to indicate a kind of thing or object that could be depicted or represented in any straightforwardly realist manner. Or so an artist or philosopher might reasonably think. There is much more that can be said about these claims, and of course they are all contestable. Here’s the point. The cinematic abstractions of the final scene of Le notti di Cabiria suggest that the skeptical worries just canvassed are misplaced because the artist of the everyday need not embrace such commitments and thus the failure to satisfy them tells us little about the limits of film. The skeptical worries only go through if we are committed to thinking about the matter representationally and, even then, as literalists about the “documentary mode” and the forms of verisimilitude it demands (“take your actors from the streets,” etc.). This is at root the problem with the neorealist conceit. For Fellini, this realization is a moment of artistic liberation, since it amounts to the discovery that he is free to harness the formal, fictionalizing, theatrical, and properly imaginative dimensions of film without thereby destroying the bridge that runs between art and ordinary life.8 Fellini discovers for film what certain philosophers in a very different context have discovered about their theories:

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the ordinary and everyday are brought to view not by tediously documenting our diurnal habits but by prompting in the reader forms of essentially imaginative experience that return understanding back to the rough ground of everyday life. This “return” puts the reader on the road to the desired destination; it doesn’t show this destination. Forms of abstraction, fictionalization (often as what philosophers call “thought experiments”) and a measure of participation on the part of the reader are required for this. We need images whose often fantastic departures from actual human conditions of speech and action in some manner permit us to return to the latter with a sense of clarity about what the everyday is and how thought, speech, and feeling find themselves at home in it. Let me explain.

III Though there is no indication that Fellini followed any of it, there was as explosion of philosophical work on the everyday in the three decades prior to Le notti di Cabiria. Marxists such as György Lukács and Henri Lefebvre were developing significant literary and political accounts of it, Martin Heidegger had already given it its most influential phenomenological treatment in Being and Time, and ordinary language philosophy was flourishing in those regions of philosophy we now call “analytic.” Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, surely the most influential text of “high” ordinary language philosophy, was first published in 1953, just four years before Le notti di Cabiria. It is this text that offers the view of the everyday most useful for the point I wish to make. The following will be an exercise in making a long story very short. For Wittgenstein, the project of ordinary language philosophy is to, “lead words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (2009, §116).9 For our purposes, the metaphysical may be thought of as where the philosophical imagination surrenders to its dissatisfaction with the everyday. If we wish to find a sturdy foundation for the meanings we produce, the values we embrace, the conceptual schemes with which we confront the world—and much else besides—their ordinary forms of support strike much traditional philosophy as too rough, ephemeral, and contingent, too shot through with ambiguity, vagueness, and mere practical interest to ground anything more than, crudely, an account of what people in Cleveland say and believe, and only some of them at that. On Wittgenstein’s diagnosis, philosophers turn to metaphysical explanations when they commit the error of believing that truth, logic, and normativity

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demand more than this untidy everyday can offer. Think of this as the philosophical analogue to that familiar thought, perfectly exemplified by Cabiria, that “life is elsewhere,” where by “life” we gesture generally in the direction of the objects of meaning and value that we deem essential to our being able to go on (in philosophy, in moral life, etc.) but which we come to feel are unavailable to us here, that is, in the context of life that happens to be our own. In a theological register, heaven represents one such beyond, as a domain that yields not merely an extraordinary but an otherworldly source of authority. In philosophy, various forms of Platonism seek to ground meaning and value in just a more intellectually sophisticated kind of an elsewhere: abstracta that behave like Plato’s eternal and immaterial forms. Less dramatically, even the attempt to devise a crystalline formal language, shorn of the roughness of our everyday habits of speech, represents one such beyond, as do “transcendental” theories that make of all this a matter of idealized categories of the human mind. The flight from the everyday we see in metaphysics is, on this picture, the philosophical inflection of this common human yearning for a perfected elsewhere. All such searches for a metaphysical beyond represent an ironic view of our epistemic condition. Much like Socrates, who thought that only in death could he acquire knowledge, we come to see the ordinary as a kind of prison house, at any rate as a barrier to the world rather than our point of entry into it.10 Friedrich Nietzsche once said that “mystical explanations are considered deep; the truth is, they are not even shallow,” (1999, §126) and for Wittgenstein this is true of metaphysical theories generally.11 The Philosophical Investigations is an attempt to show that flights from the ordinary conditions of speech and thought always risk putting language “on holiday”12 and, as such, at best produce the semblance of depth but never deliver actual insight. This is because it is only in the context of the ordinary that we find the forms of social attunement and cultural agreement that alone can create and sustain shared meanings. As Wittgenstein tells us, this is a matter of “agreement not in opinions, but rather in form of life.” (2009, §241) We disagree as a matter of daily course about this or that; for Wittgenstein, the ordinary provides a shared stage upon which we can intelligibly rehearse these disagreements. The ordinary comes in at this epistemically “soft” level, designating not truths we all must accept but, in effect, tools we must share if we are to succeed in reaching out to one another in thought and language. Absent the forms of sociality through which you and I can come together in language and render

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ourselves intelligible to one another, we are—as Cabiria discovers through her lovers’ promises of escape—alone, even if together. Consider this passage from the Philosophical Investigations, which tells us as much Wittgenstein ever will about what his “method” amounts to: A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words.—Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links. The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental importance for us. It earmarks the forms of the account we give, the way we look at things.13 (2009, §122)

Though this is routinely overlooked, this passage shows that Wittgenstein’s method is not at all one of offering drearily literal descriptions of everyday linguistic exchanges, as though his is merely a philosophical version of Fried’s “mode of near documentary.” This would be empirical enough; but, for reasons mentioned above, it would hardly suffice to enliven our sense of the significance of the everyday and so prompt us to return to it in order to achieve the clarity that we once thought only a metaphysical theory could provide. In Wittgenstein’s work, perspicuous representations are standardly fantastical, fictional, and, on occasion, quite poetic: an oddity called a beetle box, a drawing of an expressive steaming teapot, a shopkeeper who enlists color charts when asked for five red apples, builders whose language consists exclusively of masonry terms (2009, §293, §297, §1, §2–21, respectively), to give just the most famous examples. In other words, Wittgenstein’s own method for delivering philosophy back to the rough ground of the ordinary does so through a philosophical form of abstraction: artificial and highly stylized scenarios that guide imagination in a particular manner, the point of which is to create the conditions in the reader for returning to the actual now with the resources to see it aright. These “intermediate links” do much more positive work in the Philosophical Investigations than this. But, for our purposes, the point is that Wittgenstein’s philosophical abstractions have worldly goals: they function to reanimate our sense of the everyday as a site of philosophical potential and as invested with the possibilities of meaning and value that we once thought only an elsewhere could provide.

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IV This Wittgensteinian story now told, we can return to Fellini and in conclusion say with more clarity what Cabiria’s smile accomplishes in respect to the everyday. First things first, I trust that my Wittgensteinian excursion offers a way of thinking about the cinematic achievement of Fellini’s ending, as both a work of art and a response to the documentary conceit of neorealism. It would be silly to say that Fellini’s ending functions as a Wittgensteinian perspicuous representation, since the movement between philosophy and art is always a looser affair than this. Wittgenstein offers a way of thinking about what is utterly mistaken in the belief that representational realism is demanded of a work, artistic or philosophical, that wishes to make of the ordinary an object of attention and value. And his work simply provides a vocabulary for making explicit what Fellini demonstrates perfectly well in cinematic terms: forms of abstraction can be required of the artist of the everyday, since they create the critical distance from the ordinary that permits us to see “connections” between a work and the everyday world, and it is good that this is so, since, as we have seen, everydayness might well not be the sort of thing can be represented, at least in a manner that captures the desired sense of its significance. To make one more obvious but important point, we also have a richer sense of what it means to say that Fellini’s film, from the beginning until immediately before its final scene, dramatizes the allure of an elsewhere and the nature of disappointment in the everyday. Yet it does so in a way that film is arguably better suited for than philosophy, since film can give such a richer sense of—for lack of better terms—the existential, sentimental, and social reasons the ordinary can come to seem a kind of desert or prison. It therefore makes the prospect of staging a return to it all the more challenging, both artistically and philosophically, certainly on the assumption that poverty, alienation, and exploitation are rather harder to make alluring than Wittgenstein’s ordinary practices of language use. Fellini’s ending suggests that exactly two things are required for this reanimation of our sense of the everyday as a site of potential meaning and thus as worthy of a return. Before stating what they are, we need to say something further about what it means to say that the ending of the film is an example of cinematic abstraction. The point is simple. It is an abstraction in the further sense that it removes Cabiria entirely from her life and places her in a purely cinematic—that is, artistic and aesthetic—space.

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While it is certainly an event in the film, it is not an occurrence, as it were, in the story of Cabiria’s life. It takes her out of life for a moment to reconstitute her as character so that she can be given access to two things that her everyday life has thus fair denied her, in this way showing both her and us what is required for her to see it as now a site of possibility. Both of these two things are first presented within the film in Cabiria’s exchange with the contented youth who offers her a sincere “Buona sera” and then, more completely, when she then turns to the camera and smiles, thereby reaching out of the film and implicating us in their provision. So what are these two things? The sincere greeting is an act of recognition, an acknowledgement of Cabiria’s presentness as a person, that has a very specific consequence. It creates the conditions of sociality, much along the lines of what Wittgenstein calls “agreement,” that is, as indicating that very basic achievement of attunement without which the everyday is of course experienced as a disappointment. When Cabiria then turns to us, her smile shows that she understands that she has been an object of concern for us all along, visible to us, and she in turns acknowledges our gaze and enlists us in establishing the sense of mutuality that this bizarre final scene effects remarkably well. The suggestion, then, is that the everyday can only be imagined to be place of potential meaning if we call to mind those basic forms of sociality and recognition without which social experience is a form of alienation and other people essentially a problem. Thus it isn’t quite right to say that Le notti di Cabiria aestheticizes the everyday and reveals it to be tolerable, even alluring. It aestheticizes and in fact makes beautiful just the act of recognition and the creation of links of mutuality, and it suggests that this is required for a desire to return to the ordinary to be intelligible. The final scene abstracts from the everyday all but these two elements of it, and, with each in view, enjoins us to see the promise of community as present in both Cabiria’s and our own contexts of ordinary life.

Notes 1. Here I follow Peter Bondanella in seeing Le notti di Cabiria as a film “of grace or salvation” (Bondanella, 2002, p. 27), though I have no interest in the religious dimension of this. Hence my more neutral use of “conversion.” 2. See Schoonover for an excellent discussion of this. Schoonover seems to take Cabiria’s joyous bursts of physicality in the dance scenes to warrant

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the conclusion that Cabiria, “rarely appears deflated by her circumstances.” (Schoonover, 2014, p. 98). On my reading this is clearly false, though we can both acknowledge that there is nothing incompatible in asserting that Cabiria both finds her life unacceptable yet on occasion asserts herself, perhaps heroically, through creative acts such as dance. 3. In an earlier scene, Cabiria, Wanda, and their friends seek grace at the Santuario della Madonna del Divino Amore. During a picnic afterwards, Cabiria shouts to her friends, drunk and distressed, that they haven’t changed at all: “Siamo rimasti tutti come prima!” (“We’re all just as we were before!”). Surely part of what the final smile registers is Cabiria’s sense that she has, in fact, finally changed. And this gets us close to an answer; but we still want to understand how this inner change can make an oppressive everyday now bearable, and we should say something more sophisticated than that she now has moral strength. That isn’t false, but it also isn’t particularly illuminating. 4. The other two films are La strada (1954a) and Il bidone (1955). 5. See Carlson (1979) for the classic statement of this problem. 6. I explore this in Gibson (2007). An excellent recent treatment of the issue is Pippin (2021), which has much to say about film. 7. See Yeazell (2008) for what is in effect a study of the history of this conceit in painting and literature. 8. As Fellini himself says, “[m]y films give the audience a very exact responsibility. For instance, they must decide what Cabiria’s end is going to be. Her fate is in the hands of each one of us. If the film has moved us, and troubled us, we must immediately begin to have new relationships with our neighbors. This must start the first time we meet our friends or our wife, since anyone may be a Cabiria.” As quoted in Salachas (1969, p. 108). 9. I am here rendering führen “lead” instead of “bring” is more faithful to the original German and more clearly captures the future-directedness of the idea of “return” that is central to my argument. 10. For a prominent example of this sort of reading of Wittgenstein, see Cavell (1988). See also Mulhall (1994) and Hammer (2002) for excellent discussions of Cavell and Wittgenstein. 11. Wittgenstein believes this to be true not just of metaphysics but philosophical theories more generally. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to explain Wittgenstein’s distinctive sense of “theory” and his model of properly reformed philosophical explanations do that such that they count as an alternative to noxious theories. See Gibson (2017) for an account of this. Also see Cahill (2011) for an excellent philosophical discussion of this. See Moi (2017), Ong (2016), and Zumhagen-Yekplé (2020) for discussions of this specifically in respect to literature, all three of which I am indebted to here.

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12. “For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” (Wittgenstein, 2009, §38). 13. My translation, which at key points departs from Hacker and Schulte in favor of Anscombe’s rendering of parts of this passage.

References Bondanella, P. (2002). The Films of Federico Fellini. Cambridge University Press. Cahill, K. M. (2011). The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity. Columbia University Press. Carlson, A. (1979). Appreciation and the Natural Environment. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 37(3), 267–275. Cavell, S. (1988). In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. University of Chicago Press. Fried, M. (2007). Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday. Critical Inquiry, 33(3), 495–526. Gibson, J. (2007). Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford University Press. Gibson, J. (2017). What Makes a Poem Philosophical? In M.  LeMahieu & K.  Zumhagen-Yekplé (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Modernism (pp.  130–152). University of Chicago Press. Hammer, E. (2002). Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary. Polity. Moi, T. (2017). Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies After Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. The University of Chicago Press. Mulhall, S. (1994). Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Clarendon Press. Nietzsche, F. (1999). The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Cambridge University Press. O’Healy, Á. (2020). Le Notti Di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria)—Cabiria in the Classroom. In F. Burke, M. Waller, & M. Gubareva (Eds.), A Companion to Federico Fellini (pp. 465–470). Wiley. Ong, Y.-P. (2016). Lectures on Ethics: Kafka and Wittgenstein. In M. LeMahieu & K.  Zumhagen-Yekplé (Eds.), Wittgenstein and Modernism. University of Chicago Press. Pippin, R.  B. (2021). Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts. The University of Chicago Press. Salachas, G. (1969). Federico Fellini. Crown Publishers. Schoonover, K. (2014). Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation: Masina’s Cabina, Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism. Cinema Journal, 53, 93–116. Stubbs, J. C. (1993). The Fellini Manner: Open Form and Visual Excess. Cinema Journal, 32(4), 49–64.

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Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell. Yeazell, R. B. (2008). Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel. Princeton University Press. Zumhagen-Yekplé, K. (2020). A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature After Wittgenstein. The University of Chicago Press.

Filmography Chaplin, C. (Director). (1936). Modern Times. Charlie Chaplin Productions. Fellini, F. (Director). (1954a). La strada. Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica. Fellini, F. (Director). (1954b). Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria). Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica. Fellini, F. (Director). (1955). Il bidone (The Swindle). Titanus.

CHAPTER 8

Wittgensteinian Film-as-Philosophy Exemplified: Exploring the Exploration of Point-of-view in Cuaron’s Space-­Exploration Film Gravity Rupert Read

The way up and the way down are one and the same. —Heraclitus Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. —Simone Weil (Emphasis added)

R. Read (*) University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_8

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I There are significant forces in our culture militating against both a serious investigation of and a broadly ‘cognitive’ underscoring of the place of evaluation of films, and thus of taking seriously film aesthetics.1 Relativism/ subjectivism and consumerism/individualism go hand-in-hand; both suggest that whether a film is good or not is equivalent to being only a matter of the ‘customer’s preference’. Drawing on Wittgensteinian aesthetics, I will here suggest otherwise. Following a key moment in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, I will suggest how we ought to take seriously effects of rhythmic repetition/variation and even of what might helpfully be termed ‘echoings of logic’. But some of the films that emerge as being highly thus positively evaluated may well be very popular. (Indeed: it might even be that they are popular because they create such effects so effectively… It might be that some films are popular because they are good and not, as we intellectuals often tend snootily to suppose, in spite of being aesthetically good, or indeed because of allegedly being aesthetically bad.) In other words, an affirmative evaluation of (part or all of) a film’s style can be based upon the extent to which the film intelligently creates a rhythm of constrained variations or creates an effect as if of a logical argument (with which Wittgenstein repeatedly draws parallels, especially in the wonderful section 527 of Philosophical Investigations, to which we will come below, with regard to how music and other art works; I think something not dissimilar is true of film). And this goes, I am saying, precisely for some very popular films. But to justify these claims, I need at minimum to exemplify them. I take an apparently unlikely looking case, with which to do so. Because relativistic/consumeristic or cynical dismissals of the cognitive value of film and film style are particularly hard to rebut when the film in question is a mass-­ market ‘commercial’ film: so I take just such a film as my main example. If my claims work here, then a fortiori they will work with ‘arthouse’ films, and so on.

II My example is Cuaron’s film Gravity. It is several years now since this film appeared. Since its appearance, there have been no further similarly significant films made in 3-D. Alongside Avatar, Gravity makes then an unusual

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claim to be a 3-D film that demands to be taken seriously. Even: philosophically. Gravity’s being shot in 3-D was important because the film offers an immersive experience of the impossibility of living in space. (Whereas Avatar offered an immersive experience of a living world of extraordinary beauty where it is possible for us to live—but only if we are willing to profoundly change ourselves.2) But of course the 3-D-ness of these films also offered a grave obstacle to their being able to be seen. Taken seriously. Because the ‘meme’ that they spawned was, roughly: “Wow, have you experienced the special effects!” In other words: their being 3-D films inclined many critics and viewers to buy into a form of what I will call ‘entertainmentism’. Entertainmentism is the doctrine that something allegedly made to be entertaining (and so, money-spinning) can have no serious aesthetic merit, except at best by sheer accident. This doctrine is, I believe, widespread both among elite critics and the wider public. Some viewers (and critics) seemed to be blinded by the sheer visual power of the experience of watching these two films. The visual pyrotechnics seemed to some to mean that these films could only be watched as entertainment, not taken seriously as art, politics or philosophy. But, as I earlier implied, I think that nevertheless some viewers managed to see the films as a whole, and looking at the vast fan-sites that these films spawned suggests that I am right.3 Avatar and Gravity powerfully affected many viewers, and enthused them deeply to watch, rewatch and share the films, in ways going beyond their 3-D splendor.

III In what follows, I do not dwell very much more on Gravity as a 3-D work (nor on Avatar). Instead, I focus primarily upon the way in which the film, whether viewed in 2-D or 3-D, was constructed. And specifically on the lengthy, superb, necessary ‘tracking-shot’ that proceeds from the 12th into the 19th minute of that film. This shot is far more/other than mere ‘entertainment’; it is an audacious aesthetic move and a philosophically ‘educational’ one. It involves a gradual (impossible) entry into the ‘point-­ of-­view’ of the film’s main protagonist (the Sandra Bullock character, Ryan Stone), as she undergoes the crisis of an accident in space around which the film’s plot is based. (And it involves an invitation to reflect upon the meaning of that movement in and out of her point of view.) This process occurs primarily on the level of this remarkably executed

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tracking-­shot and its circling conception, but also and simultaneously on the level of the gradual movement back and forth between immersive and non-­immersive audio. (Furthermore, it is still one of the very few examples we have (arguably, another is to be found in Avatar) of the full efficaciousness of the employment of 3-D film to enable the virtual/visceral inhabitation of point-of-view, in film. In both cases, explicitly including immersion, identification and disidentification. It thus gives a different more literal meaning to the sense in which these films concern space-exploration…) Thoughtful ‘taking’ of such sequences is, I suggest, quite simply an allegorization of the way such sequences are naturally inhabited by an attentive viewer of such films. A crude ideology of ‘entertainmentism’ that would undermine the willingness to take a discourse of evaluation seriously gets in the way of such thoughtfulness. Detailed attention can re-­ engage the possibility of such taking; and I’ll sketch how thoughtful, targeted use of Wittgenstein can help shape the form of such attention, enabling us to take better the form of film at moments such as that that I follow in Gravity. Gravity, I claim, is a ‘Wittgensteinian’ film. Also, as we shall shortly, see, an Arendtian one. It fights the ‘progressive’, scientistic logic of ‘anti-­ gravity’ that is present in many other popular films—most strikingly, more recently, in Nolan’s Interstellar—a logic that Hannah Arendt famously challenged at the opening of her The Human Condition (1998).

IV Consider then the following lengthy quote, which is the opening of Arendt’s classic work, The Human Condition (Added emphases are my own): In 1957, an earth-born object made by man [the Sputnik rocket] was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies… To be sure, the man-made satellite was no moon or star, no heavenly body which could follow its circling path for a time span that to us mortals, bound by earthly time, lasts from eternity to eternity. Yet, for a time it managed to stay in the skies; it dwelt and moved in the proximity of the heavenly bodies as though it had been admitted tentatively to their sublime company. // …The immediate reaction [to the launch of Sputnik] was relief

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about the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.” And this strange statement … had [already] been carved on the funeral obelisk for one of Russia’s great scientists: “Mankind will not remain bound to the earth forever.” // Such feelings have been commonplace for some time. They show that men everywhere are by no means slow to catch up and adjust to scientific discoveries and technical developments, but that, on the contrary, they have outsped them by decades. Here, as in other respects, science has realized and affirmed what men anticipated in dreams that were neither wild nor idle. What is new is only that one of this country’s most respectable newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction (to which, unfortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires). The banality of the statement should not make us overlook how extraordinary in fact it was; for although Christians have spoken of the earth as a vale of tears and philosophers have looked upon their body as a prison of mind or soul, nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies or shown such eagerness to go literally from here to the moon. Should the emancipation and secularization of the modern age, which began with a turning-away, not necessarily from God, but from a god who was the Father of men in heaven, end with an even more fateful repudiation of an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky? // The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. (Arendt, 1998, p. 1)

To anyone who manages to see Gravity with open eyes, eyes not wide shut by means of the ideology of entertainmentism, this quote will appear either as a statement of the obvious or as something of a revelation: it will appear as the former if one is fortunate enough to have already realized the profound sense in which Gravity can be regarded as an ‘Arendtian’ film, and as the latter, if one is only realizing that now. The logic interrogated by Arendt in this passage (see especially the italicized portions of the second and third paragraphs thereof) is that of many sci-fi films. Strikingly, it is at the foundation of the logic of Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. It might be schematically represented thus: One of my claims here is that Gravity is the antidote to that logic, and in particular to Interstellar, a film which could have been entitled

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Anti-­Gravity, and so much the worse for it. (Nolan’s film centers upon an anti-­gravity device used to enable us to leave the dying Earth behind, and begin the colonization of another planet, without our seemingly having learnt anything from what we did to the Earth.) How does Gravity do this? How does it achieve this puncturing of the ‘traditional’ modern fantasy of escape from Earth? That dangerous despairing phallic dream of too much sci-fi. My answer will be this: Its form, the form we witness repeated over and over again in the film, literally manifests, reflects, the very rhythm, the very internal relation, between going away and coming back, between voyage and return—between odyssey and home4—that it seeks to convey, or, better, to remind us of.5 Moreover, this rhythm, this pulsation of the film between faraway and so close—between semi-safety and threat, semi-safety and threat and semi-­ safety again—gives us what we direly need at this time: just enough space for the reflection on and of direness. Of the mortal threat, from our reckless pollution of our planetary home, that Gravity both literalizes and allegorizes.

V Consider the following salient remark of Wittgenstein’s about aesthetics: Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer than one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme. Why is there just this the pattern of variation in loudness and tempo? One would like to say “Because I know what it’s all about.” But what is it all about? I should not be able to say. In order to ‘explain’ I could only compare it with something else which has the same rhythm (I mean the same pattern). (One says “Don’t you see, this is as if a conclusion were being drawn” or “This is as it were a parenthesis”, etc.). (PI 2009, Sec. 527)

When Wittgenstein says “Don’t you see” here, he is highlighting the offering of what he calls elsewhere in his text a ‘reminder’: an invitation to look at something in a certain way, to see it as something which it is waiting to be seen as. The particular character of the seeing-as that he invokes here is remarkable, striking because decidedly anti-relativistic: to understand art, Wittgenstein suggests here, you need sometimes to see a kinship

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with logic, an echoing of logic. To understand film, I’m, saying, ‘following’ him, you need to see sometimes a kinship, a family resemblance with philosophy. We might even call this (riffing on and extending the logic of Cavell) the claim as if of reason. Not a shared content. A shared form that we can and should find, see, feel and share…

VI The two celebrated long tracking shots with which Gravity begins (running from the very start of the film until 12.36, and from 12.37 to 18.11) are characterized by an inverted version of the fundamental form of voyage and return as it manifests itself for humans, for beings; and this device is repeated in different variants (i.e. on a ‘theme and variations’ model) during the rest of the film. These shots in that sense mirror in their form the content that they are seeking to make visible. To be precise: these ‘long takes’ work by having the structure of prolonged movements in from dead empty distant depths of space right into close identification with the Sandra Bullock character in the film (Ryan Stone), (in the case of the second long take, inhabiting at the apogee of the movement her very point of view) and then tracking all the way out again. And this movement is itself the ground that throws into relief the figure of the movement, the arc, that that character, like each of us, must take: voyage and return. The most basic structural feature of the hero’s journey in its timeless wisdom. Out, there and (necessarily) back again.6 The camera starts from far away from her, moves right in to closer than close, generating audacious aesthetic suspense as it passes, impossibly, through her very helmet, that divides her from emptiness and death. The aesthetic suspense is in this: can this move be carried off? Can we be convinced and not terminally alienated (in the Brechtian sense) by the passage of the camera through the very glass of her helmet? I think that it is clear that Cuaron/Gravity do successfully carry this off. And I am therefore making the audacious terminological move of calling these shots single ‘long takes’ even though in a purely technical sense they must be composed of more than one take. I believe that the concept of a ‘long take’, and certainly that of a ‘tracking shot’, ought to be understood primarily now (in these days of CGI) from the point of view of the viewer, not that of the cameraman. It is irrelevant whether or not the tracking shot is composed of more than one actual take by an actual cameraman, so long as the scene is felt by the viewer to be … one long take.7

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The camera then moves in to identity, into her (Stone’s) point of view. It aligns us briefly with that. And then it starts to pull away from that, and travels back far away again. It moves out of alignment with her point of view, and leaves her in her loneliness, spinning in space. This movement is the point of the scene. For consider in more detail this second long take of the film, as Stone spins out of control away into space.8 This take begins at 12.37. Especially in the pain and unnervingness (and probably also suppressed relief, on our part: ‘rather her than us’) of that second part of its movement,9 from her away, the camera’s movement draws attention to the logic, as it were, of the opposite pattern in human life. One might say that the camera’s movement reflects—as a mirror reflects—our own necessary trajectory. In other words: it shows it exactly, but the other way around. The trajectories of camera and character literally mirror one another. The camera, like in a photographic negative, succeeds in reminding us of the necessary character of our own existence; not an onward movement outward (as in Fig. 8.1), but a circular or elliptical movement of there and back again (as in Fig. 8.2): Audio too plays a crucial role in establishing point of view, here, in this long take. There’s no sound in space, of course, as the film bluntly informs us explicitly, in its opening frames. And yet we are almost constantly hearing what Ryan Stone hears. As we go in toward her, the audio gradually fades (In particular: the radio link with Clooney’s character, Kowalski, fades, as she becomes more distant from him). We perhaps don’t notice this as much as we might expect to, because of the extent to which we’re identifying with her, precociously (and aesthetically precariously) inhabiting her point of view, already. More precisely: we’re vicariously half-­ inhabiting her breathless, ‘deathful’ state of vertiginous anxiety, in which it is understandably hard to hear things properly. Intriguingly, inside her helmet the film’s musical score is suddenly muffled out, and we’re enclosed—almost entombed—with Stone in her remote loneliness. Cut off, with just her breathing for company (and even that stops after a short Fig. 8.1  Simply leaving the Earth

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Fig. 8.2  Who goes up, must come down

while, as she appears to be proleptically anticipating the death that she now seems fated to face). In the course of this tracking shot, the audio almost constantly establishes an inhabited point of view; which is kept in dialectical tension with the visuals which insist upon us taking on the trajectory of moving in from far away to identity to far away again. Consider now frames of reference, crucially altered, their norms literally suspended, in space, in zero-gravity, in the absence of ‘up’ and ‘down’. This is part of what Ryan Stone has to come to terms with as, by extension, do we. Is she spinning or is everything else spinning? This dilemma, we are shown, visually. She needs to move into the mindset of the latter conception (that there is a sense in which she can be considered as being at rest), in order to be able to give her possible auditors her location, by reference to a ‘clockface’ that she is virtually facing.10 The camera could of course then in this second long take of the film naturally be considered at least initially and finally as stationary, and only Stone as moving throughout. This would be a phenomenologically natural way to view the scene on which I am focusing our attention. But then we should say: they (she and the camera, which is our representative in space) travel together, for a little while in the middle of the scene, when we briefly identify directly with her point of view. Though there is no felt sense at all for this period of our sharing Stone’s point of view of our motion through space. It’s almost as if we were temporarily on a tiny planet, just spinning rather more than once a day … But yet we know of course that she is moving further and further away, out into space, into harm’s way, away from Earth. Outward. This is of course close to the linear ‘progressive’11 logic of the basic fantasy of interstellar exploration, of fleeing Earth, that Arendt highlighted and questioned (see Fig.  8.1, above). This is rightly the nightmare of Gravity, just as it is unfortunately the dream of Nolan’s Interstellar (as of much other sci-fi). We can extend the image (Fig.  8.1) as Interstellar

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Fig. 8.3  Leaving Earth, for a new planet, and then leaving that new ‘home’…

implicitly sees it: planets are merely staging-posts on our forever-outward voyage through space (thus giving us Fig. 8.3): We inhabit one planet for a while, probably trash it, and then presumably move on again. We are never really at home, just visiting. (It might be objected that this is exactly what Ryan Stone does in the film. She treats the spaceships she inhabits in succession in just this way. As temporary, disposable mini-planets. But this is no objection. In fact, it strengthens my argument. For it brings out what is exactly the point: that this, while an appropriate way to treat spaceships (especially once they are doomed to fall by virtue of the destructive space-pollution that has gone critical, in the plot of Gravity) is no way to treat our home.12) Interstellar focuses on us trying out and discarding planets, on both the ‘micro’ level—in terms of its plot, of visiting various ‘trial’ planets for us to inhabit—and, much more harmfully, on the ‘macro’/long-term level—in terms of seeming not to have a problem with the fundamental dynamic of leaving behind a trashed Earth, and starting again on another planet, without any sense of having learnt enough that we won’t just repeat the pattern again… It exhibits none of the kind of learning that Gravity teaches, the kind of ‘recollective’ learning that Ryan Stone, and hopefully the audience, achieve: about coming back to our sense of this planet as home, about interconnection and ecology and the nature of life. About our utter attraction to Earth, that is inevitable; gravitational.

VII I’ve been dwelling on the formal patterning of Gravity (and of Interstellar, as (very roughly) its ‘evil twin’). Suggesting why it is as it is, throughout in fact most of the film; for the pattern of camera-movement, zooming in and moving out again, as a mirror to the pattern of voyage and necessary-­ return, repeats in a theme-and-variations pattern in the next several takes

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and scenes. But what I’m saying can only be properly understood by one who already ‘knows’ it. As implied already above, I’m giving in Wittgenstein’s sense a reminder. Or evoking a recollection. You can’t prove to someone that life is worth living, that it’s worth trying to survive. You can’t prove to someone that Earth is non-negotiably our home. These things are too basic to be susceptible of proof.13 You can’t even prove to someone that it’s dangerous, hubristic, wrong, to desire to leave the Earth forever. All you can do is say to them: “Don’t you see? Look. Don’t you see this repeating rhythm … The form of this film—the evocation in it of an internal relation—the form of life itself, our life, as it must be, if it is to be. Life on Earth. The form of the film and the form of life: these are a reflection of each other”. All you can do is enable your auditors to reinhabit the pattern represented schematically in Fig. 8.2, above. Similarly: one can’t prove that the patternings in the film make it aesthetically good. One can only do the kind of thing that Wittgenstein does in PI 527. The film holds a mirror up to us, as Arendt does (especially in the final paragraph of the quotation given in section IV, above), as Wittgenstein does. What’s learnt in Gravity is not what Wittgenstein calls a thesis.14 Not, actually, a controversial opinion, unless sanity be controversial. It’s something literally so basic that it’s remarkable that we could ever have ‘forgotten’ it. That was only possible under the influence of a powerful ideology. The ideology of ‘progress’ and of ‘Prometheanism’ that we saw Arendt critiquing, and that is represented schematically above by Figs. 8.1 and 8.3.15 Away from the grip of such pernicious ideology, we can understand better the paradoxical wisdom binding together Homer and Heraclitus with Arendt and with the greatest works of science-fiction. That wisdom was expressed very powerfully by Lao Tse, in setting out the Tao: There was something formless yet complete, That existed before heaven and earth… One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven. Its true name we do not know; ‘Way’ is the by-name that we give it. Were I forced to say to what class of things it belongs I should call it Great (ta). Now ta also means passing on, And passing on means going Far Away, And going far away means returning.16 (Lao Tse (2005), Chapter 25)

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And the clincher is: this is not anything that I am bringing to the film. The film itself tells us that this is what it is doing, in the repeated mantra of the astronauts, “Launching is landing”. Taking off simply is landing, in reverse. In a mirror. Launching and landing are two sides of the same coin; or, better, two aspects of the same arc (cf. Fig.  8.2, above). Part of one integrated whole. Gravity is sometimes criticized for having a ‘thin narrative’. But don’t you see? The deepest interest of the film is not to be found in any unnecessary clever complexity, any more than in its pyrotechnics. It is to be found in the very form of its narrative (which is mirrored in the form of its filming, as I outlined in Section V, above). In its simple, mythic, deep pattern. That quite literally of a space odyssey. Launching-and-landing. To vary Newton: We may need reminding sometimes that who goes up, in order to remain a who at all, must come down.

VIII One might even say: it’s as if a conclusion were being drawn.

Notes 1. A place most powerfully argued for by Robin Wood in his Personal Views (2006). Beside the early chapters of that book, see especially p.  349 on how to transcend the crude ‘art vs entertainment’ dichotomy. Please note that by using the term ‘cognitive’ I do not mean to import some heavy theoretical commitment. I simply mean as opposed to merely emotive. I mean, that is, to be presupposing that a purely emotivist/subjectivist theory of what it is to evaluate art is crude and wrong. 2. See my discussion of Avatar in A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment (Read 2019). 3. It is impossible to do justice to these sites in an endnote. The fan-response to Avatar in particular has been overwhelming; there are several hundreds of thousands of posts on the official ‘avatar-­forums.com’ site alone. 4. I am thinking here, of course, of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a masterwork whose huge influence upon Gravity is patent. For detail on this, see Chap. 5 of my A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. 5. See Philosophical Investigations 127 (1958). This term, ‘reminder’, can also be translated as ‘recollection’.

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6. I am thinking here of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, classic exemplars of the quest/hero’s journey narrative structure. For discussion, see Chap. 6 of my A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment (Read 2019). 7. There is another great moment of (a different kind of) aesthetic suspense in the film, much later: the scene where, impossibly, the George Clooney character (Matt Kowalski) appears to return from what appeared absolutely certain death. In this scene, as one sees it for the first time, one is wondering how the film-makers can possibly pull this off. One is supposed to be skeptical, and disappointed at the absurd ‘Hollywood ending’ seemingly being forced upon one. The resolution of this moment of aesthetic suspense is when one realizes, with the Sandra Bullock character, that the miraculously returned Kowalski is only a figment of her imagination. She dreams him into existence, to remind herself of why and how it may yet be worth her trying to survive. 8. To be more precise: the pulse from far to close to far occurs twice within this one long take. I am discussing here only the first pulse, during which Stone is alone, not the second, in which Kowalski comes to re-tether her. 9. It is worth dwelling on the ‘down’ feeling one gets from this part of the scene. Especially, from the fateful moment when our point of view finally, categorically, separates from—detaches from—hers: by virtue of her starting (as we see it) spinning again. I think that the meaning of this feeling is: our oneness as beings. Our distress at her apparent hopeless case, as she drifts away from us. As we are forced, that is, to let her go… 10. As the shooting-script of the film has it (https://www.retourverslecinema. com/wp-­content/uploads/2013/11/scenario_du_film_gravity.pdf): RYAN: Kowalski? Kowalski, do you copy? Kowals– I have-have a vis– Kowalski, I have a visual. I have- have a visual of Explorer. With north at—twelve o’clock and the shuttle is at the center of the dial. I can see – I can see the Chinese station. No – No, it’s the International Space Station. ISS is at—ISS is at seven o’clock. 11. See my (2016) for a critique of that ideology of ‘progress’, that holds us captive. Ursula Le Guin’s novella Paradises Lost is a marvelous sci-fi critique of this fantasy of progressive linearity. See http://www.stephenandrewtaylor. net/paradiseslost.html for a brief explication. 12. The danger of the famous and supposedly eco-friendly metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ is that it can encourage us to think of Earth as if it is artifactual and disposable, rather than as the alpha and omega.

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13. Along the lines that Wittgenstein argues, in On Certainty (1975). 14. See Philosophical Investigations 126 (2009). Producing such controversial theses is not what Wittgensteinian philosophy does, nor what film-as-­ philosophy does. 15. As Christopher Peterson puts it in his paper ‘The Gravity of Melancholia’ (2015, p.  3): “the aptly-named Stone must eventually fall to Earth; or rather, she must come to learn that her continued survival depends on her ceasing to defy gravity”. The film’s tag-line is “Don’t let go”. And the film is full of physical tethers to others (to other people and physical structures), for good and/or for ill. We find in the film that one may need to let go of pretty much everything, in particular of depressive immersion in one’s grief at past losses (In Stone’s case: of her daughter, and of her fellow astronaut), in order to not let go of the one thing that matters most: our uncuttable invisible umbilical cord tethering us to Mother Earth: gravity. 16. See also the close of Chap. 22: “true wholeness can only be achieved by return”.

References Arendt, H. (1998). The Human Condition (2nd ed.). The University of Chicago Press. Heraclitus. (2001). Fragments. Viking Press. Lao Tse. (2005). Selected Writings: The Tao Te Ching (T. Griffith, Trans.). CRW. Peterson, C. (2015). The Gravity of Melancholia: A Critique of Speculative Realism. Theory and Event, 18(2). Read, R. (2016). Wittgenstein and the Illusion of Progress. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 78, 265–284. Read, R. (2019). A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. Routledge. Weil, S. ([1952] 2002). Gravity and Grace. Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1975). On Certainty. Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell. Wood, R. (2006). Personal Views. Wayne State University Press.

Filmography Cameron, J. (Director). (2009). Avatar. Twentieth Century Fox. Cuarón, A. (Director). (2013). Gravity. Warner Brothers. Nolan, C. (Director). (2014). Interstellar. Paramount Pictures.

CHAPTER 9

On Films that Think by Seeing Frictionally: Toward a Wittgensteinian Philosophy of Film Carla Carmona

On Forms that Think The phrase ‘a form that thinks’ appears in the titles and voiceover narration in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (HdC), in particular in episode 3A. Godard sheds light on it by contraposing the relationship between form and the activity of thinking entailed by the expression with the model of ‘a thought that forms’. By the second expression, Godard means the visualization of a preconceived thought; for instance, what takes place in what is generally understood as illustration. By contrast, Godard has in mind a form engaged in the activity of thinking by creating, not fiction, but friction. In this regard, the phrase ‘a form that thinks’ adds something new to other statements of his, such as the idea that “cinema is just as much a thought that takes on form as a form that enables thought” (quoted in Pantenburg, 2015, p. 147, fn. 46).

C. Carmona (*) University of Seville, Sevilla, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_9

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This expression has become a landmark in the history of writing on cinema, as it has been used to sum up the concept of the ‘essay film’ (Warner, 2018, p.  17). That said, it is often understood as a figure of speech. When taking Godard literally, I have often been confronted with the idea that it is either a hyperbole or a personification: ‘After all, films do not think; it is human beings, whether filmmakers, viewers, or both, who think by means of the film’. This conception is widespread both in the literature and among filmmakers. For instance, Volker Pantenburg (2015, p. 68) pictures Godard’s claim that “It’s the film that thinks” as a hyperbole before reporting on Marguerite Duras’ denial: “Don’t talk nonsense. The film doesn’t think on its own. Without you, there wouldn’t be a film”. The expression is also interpreted as a corollary to Godard’s conception of the author as receiver (Pantenburg, 2015, p. 50) or as a recognition of the role that the viewer plays in completing the film (Warner, 2018, esp. pp.  174–178). The underlying assumption seems to be that a film could only contain thoughts or trigger thought, not be thought or even, itself, think. At best, it is understood as a metaphorical expression of the modernist concept of ‘internal necessity’ according to which, in the case of cinema, it would be the film itself that demands this or that to be done to it at the editing table (Pantenburg, 2015, p. 156). Understanding film as a form that thinks is not incompatible with granting the activity of thinking to the viewer, whether the author (understood as the first viewer) or the spectator (understood as the second viewer). But Godard is also to be taken literally. I shall show how films can think by comparing HdC and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI). On my view, PI is also a form that thinks. In this regard, it is not a mere compilation of Wittgenstein’s philosophical insights. In his preface to PI (p.  3), Wittgenstein refers to his remarks as ‘thoughts’ (Gedanken). Wittgenstein’s description of the writing process makes his concern for organization tangible. We learn that his thoughts in PI are sometimes displayed in chains of remarks on the same subject, but that he also changes subjects without prior notice, jumping from one topic to another. Our attention is drawn to the tension that exists between them and the work as a whole: Wittgenstein gives up his original intention that any change of subject happens smoothly, as his thoughts resist being forced to move programmatically in a single direction. But Wittgenstein does not understand this limitation as a failure. On the contrary, it is

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“connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought” (PI, p. 3). Proceeding in such a flexible fashion is essential to the kind of investigation carried out in PI. For instance, shedding light on the workings of language entails travelling across a multiplicity of language games, sometimes revisiting one which has already been discussed with the purpose of pointing out a different aspect to it. Consider the first three paragraphs: we encounter an apple buyer and a shopkeeper (§1), we are introduced to a builder and his assistant (§2), who return in other paragraphs, and we engage with someone who thinks that all games are board games (§3). Such language games intertwine with philosophical remarks that sometimes take explicit form (for instance, PI §122) and in other cases have a metaphorical character (for instance, PI §309). By bringing them close to each other, by assembling them together, PI establishes similarities and differences between them. When I engage with PI, I always find myself travelling back and forth between paragraphs, looking for similarities and dissimilarities in every direction. My feeling is that no matter which final form Wittgenstein had given to the book I would go through the same ritual, as his philosophical investigation cannot be separated from one’s own activity of criss-crossing his remarks. The way in which the book is written, in the form of a compilation of paragraphs, is an invitation for this kind of journeying. It is the philosophical investigation that takes place in PI that I want to compare to the cinematic investigation that takes place in HdC: one whole to the other. Godard is known for reflecting on cinema with the help of other arts, such as painting or literature (Morgan, 2012, esp. Chap. 4; Pantenburg, 2015, esp. pp. 73–134). The same is true of Wittgenstein concerning philosophy. The preface of PI (pp.  3–4) contains one striking example in which Wittgenstein compares philosophy and drawing. Wittgenstein draws an analogy between his philosophical remarks and sketches of landscapes in which the same subject matter is addressed from different points of view. Only the remarks which were decent enough were polished and arranged to provide the desired overview, conscious that the result was an order, not the order. The fact that Wittgenstein, in the same paragraph, portrays PI as an album of thoughts/sketches could be understood as evidence against my claim that PI is a form that thinks. However, as an album, as a whole, given the specificity of its materiality, PI is also a form that thinks. It enacts connections that Wittgenstein had not thought of, as HdC enacts connections unimagined by Godard. ‘But you need a viewer,

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it is only a specific viewer who is able to make those connections’. The way the material is arranged, the form of both PI and HdC, displays such connections, which cannot be reduced to specific statements. One reader/ viewer will notice only a few. Even the author is aware of only a part of them. It is the kind of thinking characteristic of PI taken as a whole, that I also find in HdC. Now, let me introduce some friction by drawing your attention to Arthur C. Danto’s understanding of the relationship between art and philosophy in the context of his idea of the end of art.

The End of Art? Danto (1986)’s claim about the end of art had serious consequences for aesthetic epistemology. On his view, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box brought modernism to a dead end. As I understand it, his argument has four components. 1. Brillo Box demonstrates that something can be a work of art while its perceptually indiscernible, real-world counterparts are not. 2. This raises the question of why Brillo Box is art whereas identical-­ looking Brillo boxes in supermarkets are not. 3. Danto assumes that paradoxes pertaining to perceptual indiscernibility are the natural topics of philosophical research (cf. Danto, 1989, p. 11). Thus, Warhol’s Brillo Box poses the question of art’s definition in its proper philosophical form. 4. Art can raise the question of what it is to be art, but it cannot answer it. Consequently, Danto passes the baton to philosophers. Let me draw your attention to two presuppositions in Danto’s argument which are directly related to the assumption mentioned in (3). First, it presumes that artists can pose the question ‘What is art?’ only by means of the method of indiscernibles. This has been refuted by Noël Carroll (1998). Second, Danto takes for granted that what needs to be provided is a definition, and that art does not have its own means with which to tackle such questions. Danto’s identification of a second developmental narrative of art history as being the project of defining the nature of art rests on a specific perspective on the nature of philosophy. Certainly, self-­ reflection was a predominant game once upon a time in certain artistic

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traditions; however, is it justified to equate self-reflection and self-definition? To be fair, Danto (1981, p. 208) acknowledged that Brillo Box “does what works of art have always done—externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period”. By contrast, Danto (1981, p. 208) was speaking “as a philosopher, construing the gesture as a philosophical act”. Carroll questions Danto’s underlying assumption that “one cannot be an artist and a philosopher at the same time” (Carroll, 1998, p. 20). I do not think it is necessary to be an artist and a philosopher to address such questions. One can address questions by the means of art alone. Danto and Carroll share a traditional understanding of the methods of philosophy. Accordingly, Danto draws a clear distinction between philosophy and art, and Carroll sees the point in saying that one can be a philosopher and an artist at the same time. For Danto, art has to pass the baton to philosophers because “painting remains nonverbal activity, even if more and more verbality began to be incorporated into works of art” (Danto, 1987, p.  216). I second Carroll’s counterarguments regarding Danto’s assumptions that painting is non-verbal and that painting is the avant-­ garde art. That said, Carroll seems to agree with Danto that answering the question of self-definition requires a capacity for verbal articulateness. Carroll (1998, p. 24) admits finding “commonsensical” the idea that “if any art is to advance the project of self-definition, then it must be verbal”. Though Carroll argues that there is an exception to the rule, as artworks can be used as counterexamples, he holds that there are profound limitations on the type of contribution that avant-garde artworks can make to producing art theory and that many of the ways in which art critics describe such works as ‘theoretical’ are exorbitant. Insofar as avant-garde artworks are by definition disjunctive and elliptical, they are not, for example, functional vehicles for presenting detailed philosophical arguments. But this concession does not preclude the possibility that avant-­ garde works, even nonverbal ones, can make some contribution to art theory, including the definition of art. (Carroll, 1998, p. 25)

It is no coincidence that Carroll uses the word ‘theory’. Like Danto, the kind of philosophy that Carroll has in mind is theoretical, and its ideal form consists in “detailed philosophical arguments”, hence the reason for

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his statement that art “can only make some contribution” to it by providing counterexamples. I am not the first one to notice that Carroll makes a clear distinction between film and theory (Pantenburg, 2015, p.  54). However, unlike other commentators (Pantenburg, 2015; Warner, 2018), I don’t seek to reconcile the two domains. For instance, Pantenburg (2015, p. 255) refers to an implicit theory in filmic practice that, by means of montage, transforms the components of the image into “general statements about the medium”. He calls this way of “thinking images” “with images” ‘implicit’ because it “can’t be separated from its respective subject matter”. By contrast, this paper is an invitation to look at HdC as a form that thinks without theory, as a way of thinking images (yet not only images) with images that is implicit also in the sense that it does not make general statements.

Thinking as an Activity Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice provides us with a fresh perspective on how cinematic investigations can address questions without theory. Initially, following Danto, I was speaking in terms of answering the question. The change of verb and the plural are indicative of the nature of what is at stake in a cinematic investigation. Unlike Danto, Wittgenstein does not oppose philosophy and art. Unlike Carroll, Wittgenstein invites philosophers to learn from the methods of art criticism, architecture, literature, or music. On Wittgenstein’s view, philosophers would do well in adopting the means of art. He goes as far as to state that “one should write philosophy only as one writes a poem” (CV 28e, MS 146 25V: 1933–1934, 2008 [1994]), conceiving poetry, as well as art in general, as belonging to the domain of showing: “In art it is hard to say anything, that is as good as: saying nothing” (CV 26e, MS 156a 57r: ca. 1932–1934). As we saw, PI describes his philosophical method as that of a draftsman. Would Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice satisfy Danto’s expectations regarding the discursiveness he attributes to philosophy? Discursiveness is not a feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice. By contrast, his language games describe, picture, very specific situations, calling attention to particular details and showing how our language goes on holiday when we use it in certain ways. For example, he takes us to a construction context to show us one of the uses of the word ‘slab’ (PI §§19–20). The descriptions of such situations influence each other. Our

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understanding of a paragraph might be modified by adjacent paragraphs, by one coming much earlier, or by a collection of paragraphs taken together. As an album, PI’s form brings forth similarities and differences, performing an ongoing exploration of the workings of language and other activities, such as thinking or understanding. Wittgenstein compares philosophical investigations to aesthetic investigations, in which “reasons” are “of the nature of further descriptions” (Moore, 1955, p. 19). He gives the following example: making someone see what Brahms was seeking would entail exposing him to different pieces by Brahms or comparing Brahms with other composers. These kinds of reasons essentially consist in drawing attention to things and placing them side by side (Moore, 1955, p. 19). Both activities are inextricably intertwined. Introducing the concept of an ‘übersichtlichen Darstellung’, PI §122 makes it explicit: A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words.—Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy dissolves philosophical problems by providing such an overview, which consists in “assembling what we have long been familiar with” (PI §109). On his view, solving philosophical problems is not about providing definitions or detailed philosophical arguments that could constitute a theory. He is committed to remain “at the level of what we would or might or could say” (Baz, 2014, p.  134). Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice is no set of theories about reality. This interaction of his with Rush Rhees makes it explicit: “Do you think I have a theory? Do you think I’m saying what deterioration is? What I do is describe different things called deterioration” (LCA I, 33, 1966). In Wittgenstein’s method, description, guided by the problem at stake, substitutes explanation, and the only kind of definition that makes sense is ostensive definition (RFM VI 39, 1978). Wittgenstein combines description with a set of ways of drawing attention to similarities and differences, a method that reveals a very specific attitude towards what is generally understood as philosophy. Examples play an essential role in it:

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A method is now demonstrated by examples, and the series of examples can be broken off.—Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. / There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were. (PI §133)

Observe the emphasis on the plural in such a short paragraph: “methods”, “therapies”, “problems”, “examples”. Solving a philosophical problem does not take the form of answering a question. Wittgenstein poses many questions, but he is not interested in answering them. He does not seek to provide the required response, as if there were one. By contrast, drawing our attention to what we fail to notice owing to its familiarity, Wittgenstein solves problems by making them disappear, that is, by eliminating difficulties. Many of the language games he draws our attention to function as counterexamples aimed at freeing the reader from charming, false pictures. Their ultimate goal is not to express a thought. Rather, they draw our attention to aspects that pass unnoticed by highlighting similarities and distinctions. They have the aim of saying: ‘Look at this!’, ‘Why don’t you look at it this way now for a change?’, or ‘Compare it with your view!’. ‘Seeing as’ or ‘aspect perception’ is one of Wittgenstein’s fundamental concerns from the 1930s onwards. Wittgenstein (PPF XI, §111, 2009 [1953]) sheds light on the experience of “noticing an aspect” by contrasting it with what is “objectively” there to see, in the sense that any competent viewer with eyes in his head would see it under suitable conditions, whereas one could fail to see this or that aspect without thereby showing oneself incompetent. (Baz, 2014, p. 125)

Aspect perception is in a sense intransitive, as aspects cannot be detached from the objects in which they are noticed. While objects can be easily described, the description of aspects is tricky, given that when you notice an aspect you see the object differently, though the object has not changed. Accordingly, if one aims to produce an ordinary description when approaching an aspect, one might end up merely describing the object. Aspect description consists in drawing attention to what you now happen to see with the awareness that the other person might fail to be struck by it. It often takes the form of an exclamation concerning how one sees the object in a specific moment: “Ah, now I see this” (PPF XI, §130). This

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kind of description is constitutive of the experience of noticing an aspect and also of a form of thinking: “whoever has the visual experience expressed by the exclamation is also thinking of what he sees” (PPF XI, §139). Consequently, “the lighting up of an aspect seems half visual experience, half thought” (PPF XI, §140). The other person might also be asked to see something, as one sees it oneself, by using expressions such as “Try seeing it this way” or “Look here!”. This kind of description does not have the kind of empirical content that can be tested for correctness (BrB II 16, 1998 [1958], p. 162). Wittgenstein’s discussion of aspect seeing focuses on seeing aspects as such and not in seeing this or that particular aspect. One can also understand Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in general as a matter of seeing as. This is the feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to which I mainly want to draw attention because it is also at the core of Godard’s cinematic practice. Wittgenstein is aware that his method of methods is not neutral. Remember his statement that he is “in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another” (LCA III, 37). He admits that much of what he is doing is “persuading people to change their style of thinking” (LCA III, 40). Drawing attention to certain aspects of language and other activities is a way to orient readers towards specific directions. But this reorientation is not characterized by theory. PI’s main contribution to such a reorientation consists in enacting such a method of surveyability. Godard also makes propaganda for a way of doing cinema and ultimately for a way of thinking. Positioning Godard against Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin, Pantenburg (2015, p.  42) shows that for Godard any film is a political act. Cinema displays reality in certain ways. Godard equates cinema and montage. As we shall see in Section “Thinking with Images as a Frictional Seeing”, Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘seeing as’ can help us understand the style of thinking entailed by montage.

Thinking with Images as a Frictional Seeing Fighting the distinction between object language and metalanguage, Pantenburg (2015, pp. 25–27) identifies theory and filmic practice, understanding “the relationships and differences” which emerge from montage as a “non-predicative theory” that is able to make “general statements”. Unlike those who consider that Godard is interested in making specific statements, and thereby claim that the meaning of at least some of his

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connections is explicit enough not to be missed by a competent viewer (Morgan, 2012, esp. 5.3, 5.5 and 5.6), I would say that Godard’s chief aim is to provide us with a method of seeing what we generally don’t see because it is too familiar. As we shall see, Godard’s notion of ‘une image juste’1 resists the anaesthetization provoked by such a feeling of familiarity by introducing friction into what we see. Godard doesn’t want viewers to see this or that. Rather, his efforts are focused on making us see differently. The expression ‘cogito ergo video’ is one of the elements that constitute some of the images in HdC. These words equate seeing and thinking. I understand the speed by which images follow one another in HdC as evidence of the fact that Godard does not aim to make statements but rather to modify our way of seeing by making us notice how much we miss when we simply see. For this purpose, HdC enacts a way of seeing frictionally that is a way of thinking, of building connections: seeing as. Godard opposes cinema and television. One of the main differences that he establishes between the two is that cinema creates images in which there is always unresolved tension while with television the viewer is subjected to a closed message. Godard is strongly influenced by Pierre Reverdy’s conception of the poetic image as “a pure creation of the spirit” that is born “of the rapprochement of two more or less separate realities” (Reverdy, 1975, pp. 73–75). By means of montage, an image brings together at least two elements from the worlds of the word, sound, or the visual image that remain alterities. Montage is a frictional activity that is not oriented toward identity, equation, or reconciliation. Godard tells us that the more distant and just the elements remain in an image, the more powerful the image is. Justice in this context means revealing tension: the tension existing between two objects that are brought together yet remain alterities. By contrast, the image that tries to make friction go unnoticed is unfair. Deleuze offers insight into the Godardian practice of montage by portraying it as the method of ‘between’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 2) and of the conjunction ‘and’: “the and is neither the one nor the other, it is always between the two, it is the boundary” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 41). Elements are brought together for them to collide, creating friction. In the process, one does not necessarily create theory, in the sense of a set of principles or a system of ideas about reality (including filmmaking). On the contrary, Godard emphasizes the materiality of montage by drawing our attention to the role that the hand plays in it.

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For instance, the expression ‘Penser avec les mains’ is repeated or referred to in a number of occasions in HdC. Thinking and the activity of putting things side by side manually converge in these words. The editing table is a symbol of the intersection of doing and thinking for Godard. Wittgenstein’s desk was also an editing table. Remember Wittgenstein’s habit of using scissors to work on the organization of his paragraphs. The expression stresses the materiality and embodiment of thinking, as it suggests that thinking is enacted in that apparently simple activity of putting different elements side by side. These are not the only images in HdC in which hands engage in activities and embody experiences that are generally attributed to the domain of the inner. For instance, Godard superimposes Gelsomina in La Strada (Fellini, 1954) taking her hands to her face in distress and the suicide of Edmund in Allemagne Neuf Zero (Rossellini, 1948), in such a way that one notices that her experience cannot be detached from the movement of her hands. In fact, one could say that all elements in the film are related to each other to create an intricate image. As a whole, the film also embodies the action of the hands. It is no coincidence that HdC begins with the words ‘Don’t change anything, so that everything becomes different’. The collision in episode 1A of Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (Stevens, 1951) and images of the concentration camp at Ravensbrück makes us see something in each element that we had not seen before. Each separate element remains intact, and yet we see it differently. By the means of montage, we happen to notice an aspect that previously did not strike us. In this regard, HdC makes visible the invisible. By invisible, I mean “the aspects of things” by which “we fail to be struck” “because of their simplicity and familiarity” (PI §129). The cinematic investigation at the core of HdC thus does what Wittgenstein regards doing philosophy to be: “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything” (PI §126). Paraphrasing PI §124, HdC does not interfere with the actual use of cinematic tools. Rather, it describes them, leaving the workings of cinema as they are. In the process, it leaves the power of montage open to view. In this regard, HdC marshals “recollections for a particular purpose” (PI §127). The cinematic image is denaturalized: we realize that we have to occupy ourselves with it if we want to experience the dawning of aspects. “We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough” (PPF XI §251) would have been a good motto for HdC. Episode 1A quotes Shakespeare’s “Let every

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eye negotiate for itself”. The kind of seeing that Godard wants to foster is a kind of negotiation, in which the cinematographic dispositive is at the service of the human eye, so that we finally come to see how puzzling the whole business of seeing is. Godard’s method in HdC, like Wittgenstein’s in PI, is “demonstrated by examples”. HdC is an album of film games that shed light on specific aspects of the practice of cinema by means of relational seeing. In fact, HdC as a whole could be understood as a counterexample to what films are generally taken to be. This is not to say that one can equate HdC and PI. Of course, there are many differences. One of them is that Godard’s film games are not as straightforward as Wittgenstein’s language games. However, this might be related to the nature of Godard’s investigation, for his aim is making us notice that films are not as uncomplicated and honest as they appear to be. Not to mention that Godard and Wittgenstein belong to very different intellectual traditions. Godard (1962, p. 181) admits to “have always wanted, basically, to do research in the form of spectacle”. In other words, he aims at doing research by means of the resources of cinema. There is a powerful syntax in HdC that puts into practice a multiplicity of mechanisms of seeing as. Godard obtains his images by means of juxtaposition, subordination, coordination, superimposition, fragmentation, division, fusion, anachronism, exclusion, quotation, decontextualization, introduction, or repetition. For instance, he creates an image by introducing color (element one) in a film still (element two). His practice of using such devices is manifold. For example, in the case of his use of repetition, there are images that are repeated in a very short period of time and other images that are repeated at very different moments of the film. Some of the repeated images function as leitmotivs, while other repetitions seem to be mere anecdotes. Godard also plays with parallelisms, creating horizontal and vertical relationships, or generates hyperboles by repeating an element in an image. Likewise, his quotations are sometimes mindfully organized and occasionally appear to be half-accidental. He obtains some of his devices by playing with the temporality of the image. For instance, by interrupting it, slowing it down, or accelerating it. Exploring the application of this syntax in detail goes beyond the scope of this paper. (Excellent examples can be found in the Godard scholarship included in the reference list.) By contrast, this paper is an invitation to understand Godard’s cinematic resources as instances of a frictional seeing aimed at seeing aspects, not only of the history of cinema but also of the worldviews behind it.

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There is little to say about the aspects to which Godard draws our attention, as it is of the nature of aspects that they come and go and new aspects appear, and that they cannot be separated from the entities in which they manifest. No wonder one needs to see HdC time and again. There is a kind of ineffability regarding aspect seeing. For instance, take the framing of the gun and the male sex in Fig. 9.1. It is by bringing those two elements together that Godard make us notice an aspect of the practice of cinema. One way to bring them together is to teach us differences. For instance, calling attention to how women are generally framed at the height of their breasts. In Fig. 9.2, voiceover narration and a manipulated fragment of Rubens’ Portrait of Susanna Lunden create an image that in turn functions as an element that constitutes another image by colliding with the elements in Fig. 9.1. If we were to describe the aspect in question, we could do little more than describe what we see. There comes a point in which to persuade the other to see what we see one can only say: ‘Don’t you see it?’. The interpretations of Godard’s images are diverse. Another reason why film is not theory is that it is not possible to identify one interpretation as the exact reading of the collision of the elements that constitute an image.

Fig. 9.1  Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2b, Fatale Beauté (Deadly Beauty), 1997

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Fig. 9.2  Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2b, Fatale Beauté (Deadly Beauty), 1997

Concluding Remarks HdC and PI do not offer closed answers because they are not meant to do so. They are forms that think. The viewer/reader is needed to conclude this or that, to see this or that, but the form they encounter thinks, investigates, by putting things side by side. Film does not need theory to reflect on the problems that concern human beings. This is not to say that a film cannot have theoretical features. There are family resemblances between certain practices of theoretical philosophy and certain practices of film. However, film has its own untheoretical resources, and these are powerful enough to enable film to engage in thinking. Certainly, HdC is a paradigm of montage. However, montage is present in every film. Every film, as a form that displays material in certain ways, thinks. I don’t mean to reduce the mechanisms of seeing that are at work in HdC to seeing as. I simply call attention to this aspect of (the) film because it seems to have passed unnoticed.

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Note 1. The literal translation of ‘une image juste’ is ‘a just image’. By such an expression, Godard differentiates images that are morally right and fair from images that are just (simply) images. Although the translation might sound strained, the use of the word ‘just’ is essential to preserve Godard’s play on words.

References Baz, A. (2014). Aspect Perception. In K.  D. Jolley (Ed.), Wittgenstein: Key Concepts (pp. 124–136). Taylor and Francis. Carroll, N. (1998). The End of Art? History and Theory, 37(4), 17–29. Danto, A.  C. (1981). The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Harvard University Press. Danto, A. C. (1986). The End of Art. In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (pp. 81–115). Columbia University Press. Danto, A.  C. (1987). Approaching the End of Art. In The State of the Art (pp. 202–220). Simon & Schuster. Danto, A. C. (1989). Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. Harper & Row. Deleuze, G. (1989). Cinema 2: The Time Image. Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1992). Three Questions about Six Fois Deux. In R.  Ballour & M. L. Bandy (Eds.), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image 1974–1991 (pp. 35–41). The Museum of Modern Art. Godard, J. L. (1962). Interview with Jean-Luc Godard. In T. Milne (Ed.), Godard on Godard (pp. 171–196). Da Capo, 1972. Moore, G. E. (1955). Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33. Mind, 64(253), 1–27. Morgan, D. (2012). Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema. University of California Press. Pantenburg, V. (2015). Farocki/Godard: Film as Theory. Amsterdam University Press. Reverdy, P. (1975). “L’Image”. In Oeuvres complètes (pp. 73–75). Flammarion. Warner, R. (2018). Godard and the Essay Film. A Form that Thinks. Northwestern University Press.

Works

by

Ludwig Wittgenstein

BrB. (1998 [1958]). The Blue and Brown Books. Blackwell. CV. (2008 [1994]). Culture and Value. Blackwell. LCA. (1966). Lectures on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (C. Barrett, Ed.). Basil Blackwell.

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PI/PPF (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell. RFM. (1978). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Blackwell.

Filmography Fellini, F. (Director). (1954). La Strada. Ponti de Laurentiis. Godard, J.-L. (Director). (1998). Histoire(s) du cinéma. Gaumont; Canal +; La Sept; France 3 (FR3); JLG Films; CNC; Télévision Suisse-Romande (TSR); Vega Film. Rossellini, R. (Director). (1948). Allemagne Neuf Zero. France 2 (FR2); Production Brainstorm, Gaumont; Périphéria. Stevens, G. (Director). (1951). A Place in the Sun [Film]. Paramount Pictures.

PART III

Revisiting—and Reconsidering— Cavell

CHAPTER 10

Knowing or Not-Knowing in the Cinema? Rethinking Cavell’s Image of Skepticism David Macarthur

In More of the World Viewed (1979b), Cavell writes the startling lines: Film is a moving image of skepticism … it is a fact that here our normal senses are satisfied of reality while reality does not exist—even, alarmingly, because it does not exist, because viewing it is all it takes. (pp. 188–189)1

This linking of the fate of film and skepticism immediately raises questions of motivation and the form of skepticism at issue. As the reference to the senses suggests, the question is the Cartesian one of whether our senses provide us access to the external world as opposed to a mere play of seemings within the inner realm of the mind. As Descartes’s meditator puts it,

I’d like to thank the editors, Britt Harrison and Craig Fox, for comments on an earlier and longer draft of this chapter.

D. Macarthur (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_10

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we are apparently aware of a world but we cannot know, or know for sure, that it exists. The ‘world’ of our appearances is a world whose existence is in question. Film is a moving image of external world skepticism, Cavell claims, because in viewing a film we are aware of a “projected world [that] does not exist (now)” (p. 24). Since it results from a causal-mechanical photographic process that fixes images on a light-sensitive medium in time, Cavell argues that film is destined to project a world that does not exist contemporaneously with the viewer: “Photography [hence film] overcame subjectivity … by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction” (p. 23). The central thesis might, therefore, be more fully expressed as: film is a moving image of external world skepticism, the kind of skepticism that inaugurates modern philosophy and remains an abiding (although perhaps subterranean) theme of modern life. For the purposes of this chapter, I will take it for granted that skepticism is at the very least a powerful imaginative force in modern philosophy, so of modern life in general. Cavell’s talk of our finding ‘satisfaction’ in viewing a non-existent ‘reality’ precisely because it does not exist recalls an early moment of The World Viewed in which he stresses film’s capacity to make a modern skeptical distance from the world appear natural by way of a certain interpretation of the phenomenological condition of viewing film. In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection [in film] explains our forms of unknownness and our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance, it makes displacement appear as our natural condition. (pp. 40–41, emphasis added)

My aim in this chapter will be to engage in sympathetic criticism of the intriguing and enigmatic claim that film naturalizes metaphysical isolation and the skepticism it engenders. I shall argue that Cavell’s intuition of a deep connection between film and skepticism is a powerful and important insight, one I want to develop in a different way than Cavell does but, that is, nonetheless, consonant with key features of his thinking about film, and, particularly, of his deepest reflections on skepticism. I shall contest Cavell’s cinematic ‘realism’ and the related view that the skepticism at issue in reflecting on the medium of film is external world skepticism. I will

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argue, against that, that film projects a world whose ontological status is not-known, and that our condition as spectators of film enacts a distinctive form of other minds skepticism that Cavell explores in Part IV of the Claim of Reason and thereafter. He calls it the problem of the other to distinguish it from traditional other minds skepticism. Cavell’s claim that “we live our skepticism” of each other is a deep insight that helps explain the power of film but in order to show that I must criticize central aspects of Cavell’s philosophy of film (1979a, p. 440).

Automatism: Cinematic Realism and Its Skeptical Moral Cavell’s derivation of the relation of film and external world skepticism depends upon what he is prepared, somewhat ironically, to call his ‘ontology’ of film.2 Following an obscure insight in the writings of André Bazin and Erwin Panofsky, Cavell remarks: that the basis of the medium of movies is photographic, and that a photograph is of reality, or nature. (p. 16)

The camera mechanism establishes, for Cavell, “the physicality of the existence” of the things and persons seen on film (p. 17). Cavell’s argument for photographic (hence cinematic) realism—namely, that it is reality and not a representation of reality that photography (hence film) depicts—is largely based on the “automatism” of film as a photographic medium. The key point is that there is a “mechanical [i.e. non-human] production” of its images by way of the ‘camera’ which Cavell understands as “the entire physical apparatus which comes between what is before the camera and what results after it on the screen” (p. 184).3 Another consequence of automatism is the non-existence of the reality it depicts. As Cavell puts it: The depth of the automatism of photography is to be read not alone in its mechanical production of an image of reality, but in its mechanical defeat of our presence to that reality. (p. 25)

The fact that the camera mechanically fixes images at certain times temporally displaces what they capture from our witnessing of them. In a formulation Cavell returns to many times, the reality we view on film is present

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to us whilst we are not present to it (p. 23). And the audience of a film are “those to whom the actors are present while they are not present to the actors” (p. 25). That means, film presents a non-existent world. The connection with skepticism is then this: in film we view images of a non-existent world; in the grip of external world skepticism we view appearances of a possibly non-existent world since its existence is in doubt. The experience of viewing film is thus analogous to Cartesian skeptical scenarios of life-like dreams and hallucinations, which apparently deprive us of the world that seems manifest to us in visual and auditory experience. On Cavell’s view the great and almost instantaneous popularity of photography and film in the modern era demands to be explained on philosophical grounds, by invoking the modern obsession to connect with reality given a sense of our metaphysical isolation. He writes: So far as photography [hence film] satisfied a wish, it satisfied … the human wish, intensifying in the West since the Reformation, to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation—a wish for the power to reach this world … At some point the unhinging of our consciousness from the world interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became present to us, individuality became isolation. (p. 21)

Here Cavell rehearses the drama of the essentially lonely Cartesian ‘I’ confronting an inner realm of its own subjective appearances that it is, of metaphysical necessity, trapped behind. The mind confronts its own subjectivity and cannot penetrate the world beyond—except by way of the apparently impossible task of discerning which subjective  appearances reveal the world itself. Film satisfies our wish to escape subjectivity and metaphysical isolation, our wish to reach the world, by reproducing reality for us automatically. But in doing this film exacts a tragic compromise, namely, skepticism. The mechanical exclusion of subjectivity from playing any role in the production of the world presented to us establishes an immediate connection to the screened world only at the cost of our complete absence from that world. Film thus essentially reasserts our metaphysical isolation and skeptical detachment from the world by blinding us to our alienated condition. Film naturalizes a skeptical relation to the world by allowing us to indulge our wish to escape skepticism but without actually doing so. It accommodates us to an isolated internalized conception of ourselves by presenting the world to us in a way that makes skeptical detachment from

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that world appear natural. On this vision, filmgoers are ultimately selfdeceived voyeurs, akin to the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, whose inability to alter their fixed displacement from the world viewed is an analogue of their benighted skeptical condition. From the perspective of cinematic realism, Cavell interprets the phenomenological condition of watching a film—that is, of being fixed, silent, and hidden in darkness—as symbolizing Cartesian privacy, the idea of there being a metaphysical gap between an internalized mind and the external world. According to this metaphysical (or mythical) interpretation, we are to understand the condition of watching film as a matter of our invisibility, inaudibility, and incapacity to act in the world viewed— something philosophy interprets as a doubt about the existence of the world. Cavell writes, “Film takes our very distance and powerlessness over the world as the condition of the world’s natural appearance” (p. 119). This line of thought concludes in the memorable epigram, “Film is a moving image of skepticism” (p. 188). Stephen Mulhall is representative of the majority of commentators in arguing that “Cavell does not mean that anyone viewing any cinematic product is necessarily succumbing to the spell of skepticism” (1994, p. 229).. But he does mean this, or nearly!4 Cavell is quite explicit about film’s incapacity to offer us any respite from the skepticism it serves to normalize: [Film has] not solved the problem of reality but brought it to some ultimate head, since the connection [with reality] is established by putting us in the condition of ‘viewing unseen,’ which establishes the connection only at the price of establishing our absolute distance and isolation. And this is exactly the price of skepticism. (p. 195, emphasis added)

We are drawn to film precisely because we feel the pull of modern skeptical tendencies, our philosophical fantasy of being necessarily excluded (or withdrawn or distanced) from the world. And the coup de grâce is that film seems to solve the problem by providing a connection with reality—but one that does not solve the problem of skepticism but indulges further in it. Hence the popularity of film in the twentieth century is intimately tied to our most radical skeptical temptations and fears. Through viewing film, the fear of metaphysical isolation may be overcome but at the price of skepticism, our absolute isolation from the world—which is made to

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appear normal or natural to us.5 Skepticism is analogized and naturalized by the conditions of cinematic spectatorship.

Questioning Cavell’s Argument for Realism With this derivation of the skeptical significance of film before us, I would like to contest Cavell’s argument for the ‘realism’ of film on the primary ground of the camera’s ‘automatism.’ This will make available an alternative understanding of the skeptical significance of the phenomenological conditions of viewing film than the one Cavell envisages. But, as we shall see, the skeptical moral I find in film lies at the very heart of Cavell’s larger philosophical outlook according to which the lived problem of the other is seen as deeper and more existentially significant than external world skepticism (1979a, Part IV). Cavell writes: It may seem that this starting point—the projection of reality—begs the question of the medium of film, because movies also have from their beginnings recognized that films can depict the fantastic as readily as the natural. (p. 17)

His response is, in effect, to claim that film presents both the natural and the fantastic “by way of what is real” where what is meant is physical reality.6 But, in the context of what films are of or about, this is a non-sequitur. Of course, filmmakers use physical reality to present their projected worlds but the relevant question concerns the ontological status of the fictional ‘worlds’ that narrative films are experienced as being of or about. Cavell speaks of film as of or about reality—by which he must mean our reality given that film is understood to be a moving image of skepticism. Skepticism is only a crisis if it threatens the existence of our world. Cavell never takes seriously that narrative film, in our experience of it, presents something ontologically distinct from our world. His discussion is primarily concerned to reject the idea that film is akin to painting in providing only a mediated or representational relation to the real—say, in terms of likenesses, replicas, relics, shadows, or apparitions (p. 18). The problematic idea that the automatism of film establishes that film is of our (physical) reality has powerful links to many aspects of Cavell’s philosophy of film: (1) the claim, which we have already examined, that film is a moving image of Cartesian skepticism; (2) the idea that the actors

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on film are present to us, the characters they play having been absorbed into their sayings and doings (pp. 20–28); (3) the idea that the frame of a photograph is not the limit of the depicted world but cuts out a larger world surrounding it: “You can always ask, of an area photographed,” Cavell claims, “what lies adjacent to that area beyond the frame” (p. 23). But to ask such a question of a narrative film often gives the wrong results. If one is on a Hollywood film set depicting ancient Athens then what lies adjacent is the modern city of Los Angeles. Here it seems two notions of reality—the fictional reality on screen and the physical basis of its making—are being confused with each other. Perhaps the most telling objection to Cavell’s argument for the ‘realism’ of cinema on the basis of the physical-mechanical operation of the camera is that in looking at a photograph or film one cannot, simply on the basis of viewing, draw the distinction between what (elements of) images are automatically produced by the photographic transcription of “live persons and real things in actual spaces” and which are not because of artificial sets, fake objects, stunt doubles, computer-generated images, and so on (p. 165). In witnessing a narrative film, we are, first and foremost, concerned with the fictional world depicted there, not the causal facts that the filmmaker employs to create the images that present that fictional world to us on screen. To study the film’s basis in physical reality requires knowing something of the history or origins of its images, something that is typically inaccessible on a mere viewing of them. The ‘reality’ of narrative film is the fictional world projected on the screen; the mechanical basis of film is the ‘physical reality’ that is the ultimate causal basis for the projected images we see. An implication of drawing this distinction is that the automaticity of film does not, contra Cavell, immediately establish a conceptual connection with the fictional world of narrative film. Automaticity-as-mechanism depends upon a largely, or completely, unknown connection to whatever physical realities (plural) play an indispensable causal role in the production of the film images. It is a mistake to confuse this causal physico-chemical notion of the real—visible objects in actual spaces that reflect light, and so on—with the ‘perceptible’ fictional reality of the characters and events on film. The seeing and hearing involved in viewing a film is imaginative, a kind of seeing (or hearing) in or through the images of characters and events presented on screen. But if automatism does not establish the relevant conception of screened reality, then we must contest Cavell’s photographic and cinematic realism,

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that is, the claim that it is our—that is, the viewers’—reality that is depicted. As we have seen skepticism only gets a grip on us if we believe it is our world (as opposed to some fictional world) whose existence is called into question. To know what physical reality a photograph is of always requires more than simply looking. One has to know how the photograph was made, the design of the camera and type of light-sensitive medium used, the number of exposures, where they were taken, how they were combined or edited or manipulated, and so on; as well as the intentions of the photographer and the procedures involved in manufacturing the final photographic image. Digital photography and image-manipulation software such as Photoshop has in recent times made apparent a feature of the medium of photography as such: namely, that whether some feature of photographic content is to be counted as real or artifactual is not something that can be determined merely from the way it looks. In making any such determination we must consider the ways in which the photograph is a product of human intentionality.7 It is worth considering the photographic artist Jeff Wall’s large-scale light-box images that look exactly like photographic documents of specific events at specific times but that are, in fact, meticulously doctored creations made up of many carefully staged and manipulated photographic elements gathered over a considerable period of time. The image “A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)” (1993), for example, took over a year to make and involves the digital manipulation and integration of over 100 photographic images but it gives the overwhelming impression of a documentary image capturing a real moment in historical time. Espen Hammer sees essentially the same problem for Cavell’s cinematic realism but limits his criticism to those films which create “narrative illusion[s] … by a vast amount of technology” (2002, p. 107). However, the problem afflicts cinematic realism quite generally. Modern technology only makes it more apparent. The long history of using photographs as documentary evidence in newspapers and courts of law does not provide a challenge to this critique of photographic or cinematic realism. It simply reveals the possibility of using the medium of photography to provide reliable visual information under certain specific circumstances (e.g. satellite surveillance images, police ‘mug-shots,’ large-format cibachrome portraits)—which does not mean that these images capture the reality that we ordinarily ‘see.’ Photographs are selective and abstractive artifacts. The documentary employment of photography does not follow simply from the automatism

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of the camera; rather it depends upon knowing in detail how the relevant images were made, their origins and history of production. Cavell’s appeal to automaticity is supposed to establish both that the reality on screen is our reality and that it is reality past. He writes: that the projected world does not exist (now) is its only difference from reality. (p. 24)

Of course, the immediate problem with this conception of film ‘reality’ is that it is in obvious tension with the idea that the contents and characters of films are imaginative fictions. Taken literally the idea that film is of our past reality implies the absurd conclusion that what we view on film must have actually happened as historical fact. Cavell cannot mean it that way and, indeed, he later admits that he only meant the quotation mythologically, not literally (p. 211). But, then, what becomes of the argument for realism? Cavell writes, “Objects projected on a screen … [reflect] upon their physical origins. Their presence refers to their absence, their location in another place” (p. xvi). Is this also mythology? If it means what it says then it simply begs the question of realism as he feared it would (p. 13)8; and, in any case, it does not apply to digitally created objects nor to objects made by overlaying, splicing, or retouching film negatives (e.g. adding color to black and white images). When Cavell confronts the fact that narrative films are fictions which often use technology to create fakes or counterfeits of reality—for example, “special effects, back projections, miniatures, false fronts, etc.”—he responds that in such cases, “this elaboration of machinery shall serve for reality from the camera’s point of view” (p. 197). But that these devices serve for reality is distinguishable from the claim that what is shown from the camera’s point of view is reality. Cavell here seems to admit that such films depict an as-if reality, not our reality, the claim to which he is officially committed. His thesis of realism thus threatens to become empty. It is as if one responded to Cartesian skepticism by saying that it does not matter if everything is an extended dream or hallucination since dreams and hallucinations can serve for reality in the skeptical scenario. Here one is playing fast and loose with the notion of ‘reality.’ The world of narrative film is not experienced as our world, contra Cavell. It is neither spatially nor temporally continuous with the world of the viewer.

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Film’s Surreality The moral I take from these reflections is that we do not know how to place what we see on the screen in ontological terms—a problem that opens Cavell’s film book and that, despite his best efforts, remains at its conclusion. A photographic image is not, Cavell argues, a likeness or painting, not a relic, replica, shadow, or apparition. But nor is it, simply and without qualification, of physical reality. How reality relates to film depends upon how the image was made, not the nature of the image. It follows that the audience of a film is in a condition of not-knowing. The uncomfortable truth is that we do not know, on the basis of a viewing of it, what we are presented with in a film, we do not know the ontological status of the projected world or the creatures within it. My main conclusion so far is that we cannot suppose, as the argument from automatism suggests, that the causal facts of camera technology by themselves establish any thesis of realism. A photograph or film is not of or about our reality simply as a matter of physical or causal facts about the mechanical production of its images. Whatever it is of or about is a matter of what it is created for, of how and why it is made. (And much the same can be said about what images mean.) Let us then agree that from merely viewing film, without knowing the details of its origin or history, we can only say we are presented with an as-if reality or surreality.9 In that case Cavell’s derivation of film’s relation to external world skepticism does not go through. We cannot say, in general, that “it is … our world that is presented to us [in film]” (p. 194). How, then, are we to reinterpret the insight in Cavell’s intuition of a deep connection between film and modern skepticism?

Film and the Skeptical Problem of the Other I would now like to invoke one of the deepest and most pervasive themes in Cavell’s later writings, a radical reinterpretation of skepticism of other minds. This is not the traditional general metaphysical problem of inferring an intangible ‘inner’ mind on the highly problematic basis of mere ‘outer’ behavior—as if the body and its movements were utterly bereft of mindedness, akin to the meaningless movements of a tree’s branches. What Cavell calls “the problem of the other” is a skeptical reading of the human condition in terms of the failures or disappointments of I–thou relationships at the very core of our social being (1979a, p. 353). It is a

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form of skepticism that arises, recurrently, in our relations with certain individual others—not everyone, and not just anyone—with whom we cannot assure ourselves that we (fully) understand or know them or that they (fully) understand or know us. One asks, “Do you really know me?”; or “Do I really know you?” Even if we answer in the affirmative, on Cavell’s view, we have become disappointed in our answers: disappointed in what counts as knowledge of others, what it achieves or how far it falls short of what we like to imagine it could achieve (1979a, p. 440). This is more a skepticism of radical disappointment than radical doubt. We are disappointed not in this or that instance of knowing but in the concept of knowing others in general. Skepticism here does not denote a narrowly epistemological problem about having sufficient justification or evidence to avoid or mitigate a familiar uncertainty in our applications of psychological concepts.10 Rather it is a matter of a threat to our modes of intelligibility and responsiveness, whether, or to what extent, we can make sense of others or intelligibly express ourselves to them. This deeper understanding of the existential (hence ethical) threat posed by our relation to the other is thematized by Cavell in terms of an attack on the ordinary—the site, according to Wittgenstein’s vision (1958), of our mutual attunement in ordinary criteria for the application of concepts of ‘objects’ to the world, including psychological concepts for the mental states of others. Let me put the problem another way. We might say that we don’t know that we don’t know others and we don’t know that we do. The humanity of another is not a matter that is settleable in terms of epistemic notions like belief, justification, or knowledge but requires an imaginative act of what Cavell calls “empathic projection” (1979a, p. 421). But this is not an answer to skepticism about other minds as many might like to suppose; rather, it is an expression of the problem itself. For what is it to imaginatively identify with another person given other-mindedness is sometimes  opaque, and invariably  indeterminate and unfathomable? Our everyday ignorance or partial or imperfect understanding of others is coupled with an endless responsibility for acknowledging others in our everyday lives together. There is no end to knowing, or attempting to know, others and appropriately responding to them on the basis of such knowledge as we are capable of. A virtue of the present account is that the skeptical “problem of the other” (Cavell, 1979a, p. 429) which I have related to the medium of film as such is also at work in Cavell’s film criticism, in particular, his two books (1981, 1997) exploring the genres of remarriage

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comedy and the melodrama of the unknown woman, respectively, in Hollywood films from the 1930s and 1940s. Against the background of the guiding idea that skepticism is an attack on ‘the ordinary’ (i.e. an attack on the basis of human intelligibility in language) Cavell conceives of marriage as a domestic exemplification of the ordinary. A condition of marriage is improvising a way to avoid or mitigate skepticism. Recall Cavell’s connection between the invisibility of the audience of film and Cartesian privacy: In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and our inability to know. (pp. 40–41)

Looked at from the perspective of I–thou relationships in second-personal space we can reinterpret the invisibility, inaudibility, and inability to act in the projected world of film in terms of a total escape from the ordinary endless requirement to acknowledge others whom we encounter in everyday life. Cavell explains the powerful allure of film in terms of seeming to satisfy a wish to connect with the external world.11 On this alternative account, we return to the cinema again and again precisely in order to satisfy a wish to connect with others whilst in the uncanny position of escaping the ordinary conditions of sociality—the cinematic condition of viewing unseen. In allowing us to escape from the limitless burden of responsibility to others, film is comprehensible as an escapist art-form: not an escape from reality into fantasy; but from the ordinary conditions of encountering and viewing others, the requirement to respond appropriately, and the responsibility for the manner and quality of our response.

Acknowledgment in Film Cavell memorably claims that we bear no responsibility for our lack of acknowledgment for the characters (or the actors in character) of film and what they endure, in some sense, before our eyes (p.  26). Since film is “mechanically assured” we play no role in the displacement of the world projected on screen which, for Cavell, renders the issue of acknowledgment moot. No account of viewing others unseen is required. I want to argue, on the contrary, that it is precisely the fact that we seek out and find solace in this respite from acknowledgment of the human figures on screen that demands accounting for. The burden of responsibility for

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acknowledgment that we ordinarily endure and seek respite from is not to be equated with the ordinary endless responsibility of, say, being a parent. The powerful allure of film, I suggest, can only be explained by invoking some extremity or peculiarity in the difficulties or burdens of the ordinary or everyday condition of acknowledging others. By satisfying our deep desire to be in the surreal position of seeing others unseen, being in their presence without their being in ours, film calls upon us to reflect on the condition of everyday acknowledgment itself. In doing so we can be brought to recognize these unsettling facts about the conditions of acknowledgment: (1) that we have no settled standards against which to judge the achievements, or failures, of our everyday acknowledgments of one another; and, relatedly, (2) that we do not know, in any specific case, what ideal or complete acknowledgment of another, or oneself, would be. Our peculiar spectatorial position in watching film is such that, contra Cavell, we do need to account for the fact “that [we] do nothing in the face of tragedy, or that [we] laugh at the follies of others” (p. 26). Since we cannot engage with screen characters, acknowledgment here takes the form of self-revelation, a reflection on the condition of everyday acknowledgment from an uncanny position outside it. In the case of theatre, which shares with cinema the conditions of the invisibility, inaudibility and inactivity of its audience, Cavell himself suggests that acknowledgement takes the form of self-revelation (1969, p.  338). For further discussion see Macarthur (2016). What we can then recognize are the many small and large ways our everyday knowledge of each other miscarries or comes to grief—something Cavell suggests we think of as a form of skepticism that haunts human relationships uberhaupt. In Cavell’s vision we are: dealer[s] of those small deaths of everyday slights, stuttered hesitations of acknowledgment, studied reductions or misdirections of gratitude, that kill intimacy and maim social existence. (Goodman, 2005, p. 159)

These are manifestations of “living our skepticism” of one another, which Cavell explains more fully as follows: In saying that we live our skepticism, I mean to register this ignorance about our everyday position toward others—not that we positively know that we are never, or not ordinarily, in best cases for knowing of the existence of others, but that we are rather disappointed in our occasions for knowing, as though we have, or have lost, some picture of what knowing another, or

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being known by another, would really come to—a harmony, a concord, a union, a transparence, a governance, a power—against which our actual successes at knowing, and being known, are poor things. (1979a, p.  440, emphasis added)

Just why we are disappointed in our knowledge of others is a mystery. It may be because we fantasize an unreal connectedness with others or because we reveal so little of ourselves or because we suffer, as Hume, Emerson, and Nietzsche variously remark, from deadening habits of inattention through repetition, routine, custom, habit, and conformity. Or perhaps it is our uncertain grasp on the very idea of otherness. Something like this perception of everyday inattention or unresponsiveness to others animates the following remark of Wittgenstein’s: Let’s imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up & and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a chapter from a biography with our own eyes,—surely this would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful than anything that a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken on the stage. We should be seeing life itself.— But then we do see this every day & it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view. (1984, p. 6)

The magic theatre of Wittgenstein’s imagining is highly suggestive of film and its power to transfigure the commonplace. From an imaginary position beyond or outside of the everyday world, film can focus our attention on the details of life or let us feel the significance of unremarkable events as they  happen in time. Wittgenstein shares Cavell’s perception of our ordinary inattentiveness to what goes on around us in our daily life with others. The moral is this: it is precisely film that calls attention to the skeptical theme of our everyday failures or shortcomings of attentiveness regarding our acknowledgment of others, and it is film, too, that can reveal everyday expressions and actions and routines as something remarkable and worthy of our interest. Wittgenstein remarks, “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity” (2009, §129). Suppose we take this personally. Then his point is that the people in our lives that are most familiar are invisible to us precisely because of their familiarity! Film has the capacity to confront us with the fact that we live

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our skepticism of others. But film can also be described as providing new ways of seeing what is ordinarily unseen by defamiliarizing the familiar: one paradigm is the close-up; another, the  possibility “to let the world happen. To let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight” (p. 25). In providing us with new modes of attentiveness to uneventful events or ways to focus close sustained attention on often unnoticed details of embodied human expressivity—the infinite variety and nuance of facial expression, the poetic power of gesture, the suggestive readability of gait and posture, and so on—film has the resources to help us counter a skeptical denial of others by drawing us, time and again, to new discoveries of legibility and significance in the words and deeds and gestures of the figures we witness on screen.

Notes 1. All quotations are from Cavell (1979b) unless otherwise stated. 2. Cavell uses grammatical investigations rather than an appeal to a priori metaphysics to explore the ‘essences’ of things. 3. I appeal to this specific use of the term “automatism” throughout, that is, for the physical basis of film. Cavell also uses the term to refer to “an artistic medium,” that is, “artistic discoveries of form and genre and type and technique” (pp.  107, 105). I shall not discuss this secondary use of the term in this paper. 4. We might wonder whether it is necessary. 5. I, therefore, take issue with the critical consensus that reads Cavell’s philosophy of film as concerned to ultimately overcome the threat to external world skepticism that film allegedly engages with. See, for example, Bauer (2005, p. 50), Butler (2009, p. 148), Rothman and Keene (2000, p. xxv), and Sinnerbrink (2011, pp. 102; 2016, p. 30). 6. That it is physical existence Cavell has in mind is repeatedly insisted upon (e.g., pp. xiii, xvi, 17, 68, 105, 184). 7. The photographic artist Yanai Toister provides a striking example of the use of Photoshop software to create images that never existed anywhere on earth and whose indexical and artifactual elements are indiscernible. For further discussion see Macarthur (2012). 8. In response to the claim that photographs never project our reality Cavell claims dogmatically, “obviously they do” (p.  188). All or some? And if some, which? 9. Sinnerbrink comes close to this insight when he paradoxically remarks on “the inherent ambiguity of the cinematic image, as projecting a world (‘of reality or nature’) but also immersing us in a cinematic reality distinct from

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this world” (2020, pp. 131–132). Here he seems to say, impossibly, that the world of film is both our world and distinct from our world! My resolution of this dilemma is to say film has the power to present us a world that can serve imaginatively as our world but without being our world. 10. Here I mean to contest the reading of Cavell on other minds skepticism in McGinn (1998). 11. Only seeming because the ‘connection’ involves an acceptance or entrenchment of the Cartesian skeptical gap between self and world.

References Bauer, N. (2005). Cogito Ergo Film: Plato, Descartes and Fight Club. In R. Read & J. Goodenough (Eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell. Palgrave Macmillan. Butler, R. (2009). Stanley Cavell. In F. Colman (Ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy. McGill-Queens University Press. Cavell, S. (1969). The Avoidance of Love. In Must We Mean What We Say, (pp. 267–353) Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (1979a). The Claim of Reason. Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1979b; orig. 1971). The World Viewed, enlarged ed. Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1997). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago University Press. Espen, H. (2002). Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity and the Ordinary. Polity. Goodman, R. B. (2005). Contending with Cavell. Oxford University Press. Macarthur, D. (2012). Yanai Toister: Thinking (In) Visible Colour. In Name of the Work (pp. 144–152). Tal Hei Museum Press. Macarthur, D. (2016). Living Our Skepticism of Others Through Film: Remarks in Light of Cavell. SubStance, 45(3), 120–136. McGinn, M. (1998). The Real Problem of Others: Cavell, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on the Sceptical Problem of Others. European Journal of Philosophy, 6(1), 45–58. Mulhall, S. (1994). Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford University Press. Rothman, W., & Keene, M. (Eds.). (2000). Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Wayne State University Press. Sinnerbrink, R. (2011). New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images. Continuum. Sinnerbrink, R. (2016). Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience Through Film. Routledge.

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Sinnerbrink, R. (2020). Between Skepticism and Moral Perfectionism: On Cavell’s Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. In D.  LaRocca (Ed.), The Thought of Stanley Cavell and Cinema. Bloomsbury. Wittgenstein, L. (1984). Culture & Value. Revised 2nd ed. Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell.

CHAPTER 11

Cavell, Experiences of Modernism, and Kamran Shirdel’s The Night it Rained Craig Fox

In this chapter, I want to highlight things I find important and useful about an article of Stanley Cavell’s and also to offer something about the possible significance of a particular film, while weaving them together to draw out some of their plausible relationships. It is my belief that the film and the article can usefully shed some light on each other. The Night it Rained caught me by surprise a few years ago, when I accidentally ended up in a museum’s theater space watching some short films of the Iranian documentary filmmaker Kamran Shirdel. I knew nothing of his work before sitting down to watch. I found my attention palpably more focused after just a few minutes. I certainly had a general albeit vague sense that something was going on. The film tells us, using stills of newspaper articles and narration, about “[t]he epic of the Gorgan village boy … [and how] his bravery in saving 200 passengers [by stopping a train in order to avoid a fatal accident] calls to mind the heroes of antiquity.” We are also told that a “Ministry of

C. Fox (*) Pennsylvania Western University, California, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_11

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Culture and Arts film team has gone to Gorgan and is filming already, partially completed.” From the beginning, the film acknowledges both itself as a film and the story’s initially being disseminated by newspaper reports. A lengthy still shot of an official-looking letter bearing the lion and sun motif permits one to read (and hear, read aloud), “with reference to your instructions to make a film on the Epic of the Gorgan village boy, we beg to state that the team sent for this purpose first went to the village where the heroic boy lives. The [aforementioned] boy however, with his customary self-sacrifice, had taken his disabled father to the city of Gorgan for a medical examination and treatment. The team therefore took advantage of the situation to prepare a filmed report on the everyday life and customs of the villagers, with due regard for the ethnological and folkloric criteria…” (Shirdel, 1967). They film interviews with newspaper journalists, government officials, and railroad employees, where the viewer witnesses starkly differing accounts of all the alleged details of the epic: what kind of train it was, why the train stopped, what the weather was at the time, and even whether the boy exists. In the latter part of the film, the boy himself is interviewed, and we watch a summary of the conflicting testimony. The last scene consists of the Gorgan boy running down a railroad track away from the stationary camera into the distance. We first hear a looped echo of one of the interviewees saying, “Pure lies. Pure lies. It’s all a pack of pure lies.” The boy’s motion freezes once he’s barely visible on the horizon, and we hear a song that I would describe as a theater troupe alerting the audience to the conclusion of the performance. We are left wondering what it really was that we watched. I am going to propose what I hope are some plausible ways to understand the significance of the film beyond just the story it conveys (albeit with striking cinema vérité style) and a straightforward claim that “the film shows us different perspectives and how difficult it is to determine the truth.” In much of what follows here, I relay some of my efforts to get at what might be going on in the film.

I The article I want to place alongside The Night it Rained is Stanley Cavell’s ‘Music Discomposed,’ also from 1967. The title would indicate that the article is about music, but in fact, Cavell’s sights are set higher. “Though narrow in resource, however, my motives will seem extremely pretentious,

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because I am going to raise a number of large questions about art and philosophy and ways they bear on one another” (Cavell, 1967, p. 183).1 He uses music, but also many other art/art-ish examples, as prompts to confront these “pretentious” topics. The prompts are things that certain people make and present to others. Cavell spends much of the article saying things about “modernism” and “modernist art.” His interest in this art begins, primarily, with what it is like to experience these works (“these works” being “roughly the art of one’s own generation” (p. 183). Experience is his way into the topic. This contrasts with focusing on a work’s characteristics. (To state the obvious: experience focuses on the audience, as opposed to the work, or the artist.) Cavell does not present a theory of art, nor a theory of “modernist art.” He characterizes his work in ‘Music Discomposed’ as intended “merely as suggestions” (p. 183). Thus I describe my understanding of what Cavell is doing in this article as ‘non-theoretical,’ and this aspect represents at least a strand in Cavell’s work overall. I mean this as analogous to a ‘non-­ theoretical reading’ of, to take an entirely appropriate—but arguably more thoroughly non-theoretical—example, of Wittgenstein’s (2009) Philosophical Investigations. Cavell suggests things to the reader about modernist art, and we may either take up those suggestions or not. We’ll take them up, I would say, if they make sense to us and square with our understanding of things; if we find them to be useful. I want to suggest including Shirdel’s film as an artwork of the sort that Cavell focuses on here. If this is right, it should help us make sense of The Night it Rained. It should help us answer the question about how someone might have meant the film to be taken, or about how and why someone could have offered this film to us. But also, if discussing the film in this way is in fact useful, then this in (re-)turn lends support for what Cavell has said in the first place. There is no neutral ground. This is what a non-­ theoretical reading is like, for Cavell (as for Wittgenstein). There is no justification for his suggestions independent of what I will call “actual significance,” that is, they prove useful for me or for others.

II In ‘Music Decomposed,’ Cavell says that “if anything in this paper should count as a thesis,” it is that “the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential to the experience of art” (pp. 188–189). Further, he asserts that he does “not see how anyone who has experienced modern art can have

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avoided such experiences, and not just in the case of music” (p.  188). Notice here his appeal both to his and to our experiences, to justify the general claim. Also notice that a feature of his use of “modernism” is that it “makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art” (p. 189).2 What he describes makes sense and fits with a range of my experiences involving “modern art.” It is easy to imagine—I’ve seen it happen—someone getting annoyed by, say, a Carl Andre steel floor sculpture. Part of what they tend to be upset about is that they think that someone is essentially trying to trick them. They are on guard not to be “taken in” by the work, as Cavell also puts it (p.  212), and they are wary of treating the thing in front of them with “the respect due, we feel, to art” (p. 188). They withhold their trust. (Note this is a psychological matter, at least in part.) Let’s consider The Night it Rained the work itself, and also the experience of it, in light of the themes of fraudulence and trust. Note that doing so is legitimate if we find it to be helpful—but doing so is certainly not legitimate just because Cavell has some views about modern art. Now I can quite well imagine one reacting skeptically to viewing the movie. (I’ve seen students react skeptically to it.) “It’s a movie about a boy preventing a train accident! And maybe he lied. So why make the movie? It’s not like it’s about something important.” It takes things, after all, so seriously: thirty-eight minutes about a boy’s supposed involvement in an incident involving a train. Though even if this were “all there is to it,” it seems of significance that such a film was made in the late 1960s in Iran, especially given the film’s conscious inclusion of broad representations of cultural and governmental elements. It is entirely plausible to say that the film gives us representations of experiences of trust and of fraudulence. The question of the veracity of the boy’s accounts of the incident is at the center of the movie, and most of what we see on screen relates rather directly to establishing trust in it (or not). Is the boy a fraud? We see evidence on both sides of the question. Aspects of this evidence are formal as well: the film acknowledges itself as a film multiple times; it refers to itself as “ethnographic” and “sociological”; the formats of the interviews generally adhere to such social scientific-­ seeming documentary standards; it professes to having been sent to document an event and its aftermath. I propose then that we are justified in taking a cue from this coincidence of themes.3 Let us consider the controversial, confounding thing in The Night it Rained—the boy’s version of the story—as analogous to (or

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as a proxy for) the modern work of art in Cavell’s “Music Discomposed.” And if it makes sense to do this, then one may also say that just as the film is about the boy’s story, it’s also about both “modern art” and itself, as an instance of “modern art.” The question then is whether this helps us understand the film further. I’ll return to this momentarily.

III Of the many images that appear fleetingly in ‘Music Discomposed,’ there’s one that I quite like: a crumpled handkerchief. In considering the work of art as “something that absorbs us,” Cavell proposes that it is “a problem, an artistic problem—an experimental problem, one could say—to discover what will have the capacity to absorb us in the way that a work of art does. Could someone be interested and become absorbed in … a crumpled handkerchief?” (p. 197). He proposes there are two responses to experiencing someone experiencing a crumpled handkerchief in this way. (Notice that our experience of a work of art can of course be mediated, as it were, by another’s experience. This happens in fact all the time—probably with most artworks in fact.) The first response is dismissal: we say that the person is crazy; that they’re joking; and so on. The second response is to trust them and to see “what’s in it” (p. 197). One reasonable way to start to try to see what’s in it is to try to figure out what it is in the first place. This is to come to some explanation of the work of art “in relation to how [the work] is made and the reasons for which [it] is made, considering that some [works] are sincere and some are counterfeit” (p.  212). “Nothing could be commoner among critics of art,” says Cavell early in the article,” than to ask why the thing is as it is…” (p. 182). The second response to the uneasy experience of the modern work of art then is to engage in criticism (at least on some level). And in doing so we try to come up with reasons—an explanation in response to the “why?” question. But these reasons fall short of “proof,” Cavell suggests (p. 190). Even “the artist himself may not know” (p. 190). The question, if it is art, must be: How is this to be seen? What is the painter doing? The problem, one could say, is not one of escaping inspiration, but of determining how a man could be inspired to do this, why he feels this necessary or satisfactory, how he can mean this. (p. 203)

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This is one way to construe the task of criticism.4 Of course once one has done this much, one might then go on to say why the thing is done well, or not. “Why the thing is as it is” will ideally inform one’s evaluation of it. Cavell characterizes this as “getting inside” the work (p. 209). I want to say something briefly about an aspect of the above quote that I skipped over. Cavell says that it is an “artistic problem” or an “experimental problem” to see what will absorb us in the way that a work of art does. I take it that what Cavell means here is simply that it’s something that is borne out in experience. We cannot necessarily assume that the thing will be taken up as an art-thing, prior to actually experiencing it (either from the producer or the experiencer side)—or we can make such assumptions, but these can be shown to be unjustified. He does not, then, give any kind of characterization of what a work itself should be like, so as to be taken up in the intended way. I see this openness to what experience tells us as an aspect of his non-theoretical approach to these questions. Now if the heart of Wittgenstein’s work is his emphasis on the potential significance of the particularities of various uses,5 then one may say I’m examining a Wittgensteinian strand in Cavell. Given the task I set for myself here then, things I’m saying about both the film and the philosophical text might well be called a type of criticism: film criticism on the one hand, philosophy-as-criticism on the other.

IV Can any of this help us, then, understand The Night it Rained? If the story the boy tells is a proxy for the modern work of art, then what the film is both showing us and giving us is ‘an experience of a modern work of art.’ It shows it to us—represents it—alongside various responses and reactions to the story. (The reactions will be analogous to art-critical responses, note.) Those reactions run the continuum from trust to mistrust. They make sense too, given who the people are. The government official would seem to see value in the boy’s story and doesn’t want to dispute it, while also not wanting to accuse railway workers of negligence. The boy’s teacher is proud of the boy and the village students, and seems to have an investment in championing the boy’s account. The newspaper publisher stands behind his paper’s reporting, despite details he has uncovered that do not fit with the story as it has been told. The railway workers do not want to be reprimanded or worse; they deny that the boy exists. All of those interviewed, however, are certainly concerned to say something

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about the boy’s account. Even with such a simple matter as to whether the boy’s story is accurate, everyone brings their background values and beliefs to bear on their understanding of it. The film is also giving us an experience of a modern work of art too, because, first, as viewers, we are in the position of having to decide whether to place our trust in the representation of the story. We see and hear the conflicting accounts. It is natural then to want some resolution; I recall anticipating this as I was watching that first time. The film does some work to encourage this too. It does not sum things up tidily, however; in fact, there is a quick compilation of the main points up for dispute (including even whether it was raining that evening and how hard, note!) along with the various points of view on them. Second, there is another natural response in light of all this, which is “what is the point of this?” That is, should I put my trust in the film, or should I just dismiss it/not take it seriously? What I am doing is proposing some ways Shirdel could in fact mean this film, using Cavell’s suggestions as a prompt. What justifies what I’m saying is whether it makes (at least some) sense of the movie. Someone else could offer entirely different proposals; how could we rule this out a priori? At the same time, the film itself clearly constrains what’s plausible to say about it. Many things would just not make sense. The question of whether, biographically as it were, Shirdel did in fact mean it in this way, is not pertinent.6 What Cavell emphasizes is that this is how we experience and talk about a work of art: as made by someone. So “the category of intention is as inescapable in speaking of objects of art as in speaking of what human beings say and do: without it we would not understand what they are … Only the concept of intention does not function … as a term of excuse or justification” (p.  198). Importantly, this does not commit an intentional fallacy. Intention here rather serves as a heuristic concept that ideally prompts us to think about the art thing. Again, what’s important is whether the reasons offered make sense and so can be taken up by others. If using “intention” can aid in this process, then so be it. Cavell suspects it will. But it will not “ground” any aspect of what is said.

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V Let’s return to Cavell’s crumpled handkerchief. Immediately after this example he says that “objects of art not merely interest and absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them, and care about them … They mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do…” (pp. 197–198). This characterization proposes that modernist art has a significance for us that is, I would suggest, often under-emphasized in art-critical discussions of modernism. The significance need not lie primarily in a work’s formal properties, say. The modern work, recall, presses the question of “how someone can mean this” particular thing (emphasis mine). It also asks for trust to be placed in it, by me and by others. In describing our relationship to works of art, Cavell offers that: People devote their lives, sometimes sacrifice them, to producing such objects… and we do not think they are mad for doing so. We approach such objects not merely because they are interesting in themselves but because they are felt as made by someone—and so we use such categories as intention, personal style, feeling, dishonesty, authority, inventiveness, profundity, meretriciousness, etc., in speaking of them … We follow the progress of a piece the way we follow what someone is saying or doing. Not however to see how it will come out, nor to learn something specific, but to see what it says, to see what someone has been able to make out of these materials… (p. 198)

Exploring a work of art actually urges us to think of others: both the artist and others who are part of the audience. In trying to answer how the artist could mean this, and also why others might put their trust in it, we put ourselves in their positions, and we hope to offer reasons others will take up. Cavell says that “in art, the chances you take are your own. But of course you are inviting others to take them with you … [Y]our invitation incurs the most exacting of obligations: that every risk must be shown worthwhile … [by which he means] that risks that those who trust you can’t have known they would take, will be found to yield value they can’t have known existed” (p. 199, emphasis mine). When we do this successfully, we become aware of value, of how one can regard this thing with significance. Obviously, though, one can become aware—or believe one is aware—of a lack of value. In other words, one comes to the conclusion that this cannot be meant by someone. There has

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been a “loss of coherence” (p. 200), a failure to make sense. In the worst case, Cavell suggests, “that will mean that you conclude this is not art” (p. 203). The form of The Night it Rained makes sense in light of these kinds of suggestions. What we see in the course of the film is effectively a series of testimonials. Why might Shirdel have done this? We see person after person try to make sense of the boy’s story—or try to show it does not make sense. In addition to this, we see images that contextualize either those speaking or the boy’s story. It makes sense to give ‘person after person talking about the boy’s story’ because this is a way that we can come to decisions, ourselves, about whether it’s appropriate to put our trust in both what he described and the film. It is a matter for people to decide, and for us to decide—and it matters to us that others do, or do not, put their trust in the thing. Shirdel may then be reminding us, or making explicit for us, how we can navigate situations like this: and recall again the film withholds any kind of ‘proof’ or ‘disproof.’ It leaves us with the people represented in it. People, with backgrounds, interests, and values, are important. And continuing to think of the story as a proxy for the (modern) work of art, the suggestion is that people are important for navigating those—including this film—as well. Most generally, and perhaps pretentiously, both Cavell and Shirdel might be seen as reminding us about our dependence on others and others’ values, when it comes to sorting through understanding an artwork. So, they leave us with these reminders, but also with work to be done. There is no shortcut to—nor necessary ending to—figuring out what something means, to making sense of something.

VI I want to return to Cavell’s uses of “modern,” “modernist,” and “modernism.” In her introduction to the collection Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism, Anat Matar grounds the book’s discussions of modernism by appealing to Clement Greenberg (Matar, 2017, pp. 2–3). She quotes from his analysis of modernism as stemming ultimately from Kant. What he finds compelling in Kant is the notion of self-criticism within a particular discipline. Of course, Kant is also concerned with boundaries and limits. So, in contexts around the arts, this notion of self-­ criticism becomes more concretely about ‘the limits of a medium.’ This

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invariably leads to a focus on form. Good works of art then exploit the form of the medium in which the work resides. If the very distinction between form and content is not taken for granted however, then different notions of modernism are possible—in particular, ones that respond to common conceptions of modernism as formalist, detached, or essentialist. Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, in her A Different Order of Difficulty, describes modernism rather minimally as “characterized by the stress put on the interpenetration of form and content” (Zumhagen-Yekplé, 2020, p.  11). Further, she describes Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as “a humanist one.” I agree with this and with her interest in lobbying for a more nuanced variety of modernism. What I have been saying about Cavell and Shirdel in this chapter, then, could be characterized as an instance of just such a thing, a type of humanist modernism. The artist and the critic do not have any special “authority” when it comes to understanding a work. (Why would they?) ‘Music Discomposed’ and The Night it Rained explicitly highlight this. The end of the film replays snippets of the various testimony with an increasing pace, the inconsistencies highlighted by the rapid montage. Cavell questions the reader at one point, “[b]ut how do you know?” (p. 203). Space is created for making sense of what the viewer/reader has been given; one can respond to the challenge posed. Criticism can occupy that space—but of a sort where proving what one asserts about what something means is not the point. The literary critic James Wood understands his practice along these lines. “When I write about a novel or a writer,” he says, “I am essentially bearing witness. I’m describing an experience trying to stimulate in the reader an experience of that experience … Criticism is just such an adventure in sameness” (Wood, 2019, pp. 6–7). Often, paraphrasing or re-description will be a key part of the critic’s ‘stimulation.’ There are of course choices to be made for this paraphrase, and figuring out which words might work, as Cavell put it, “is an experimental problem” (p. 197). In other words, will the words of the critic get one not just to understand particular details of the work, but also give a perspective on how they hang together? This is analogous to the artist’s situation itself, as Cavell makes clear. From either perspective, there are no guarantees. Wood adds that this re-description is pedagogical in nature. The goal is to get the reader to see the thing under consideration in the same way. The critic leads the reader, analogously to ways a teacher may lead

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students.7 (Note one may approach teaching or understanding philosophy in this way too.) What is of value for the reader or the student is, ultimately, not a particular understanding of a particular work, but rather, what one gathers about “coming to understand a work,” which she is able to bring to her next art experience. The same may be true of The Night it Rained.

Notes 1. All quotations are from Cavell (1967) unless otherwise indicated. 2. Cavell employs the terms “modern,” “modernist,” and “modernism” similarly. I address this in Sect. VI. 3. I take what I am describing to be akin to Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé’s characterization of her “study of coincidence” in treating Wittgenstein and modernist literature (2020, pp. 22–25). 4. I sketched such a view of criticism in (Fox, 2017). This is also a way to approach understanding philosophy. 5. See, e.g., Juliet Floyd’s “envoi” in (Floyd, 2018, pp. 384–5). 6. I saw Shirdel speak in 2013 in Pittsburgh. When the topic of self-reference in The Night it Rained came up in discussion, he remarked, “I didn’t know what I was doing. I don’t think, I just do.” 7. See also (Klevan, 2018) for a similar emphasis on pedagogy, especially his “note on pedagogy” that in fact characterizes the entire book itself.

References Cavell, S. (1967). Music Discomposed. In Must We Mean What We Say? (pp. 180–212). Harvard University Press. Floyd, J. (2018). Aspects of Aspects. In H.  Sluga & D.  G. Stern (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (pp.  361–380). Cambridge University Press. Fox, C. (2017). Review of Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language. Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 5(4), 1–6. Klevan, A. (2018). Aesthetic Evaluation and Film. Manchester University Press. Matar, A. (2017). Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism. Bloomsbury. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G.  E. M.  Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th ed. by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte. Blackwell; Chicago University Press.

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Wood, J. (2019). Serious Noticing: Selected Essays 1997–2019. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Zumhagen-Yekplé, K. (2020). A Different Order of Difficulty. The University of Chicago Press.

Filmography Shirdel, K. (1967). The Night It Rained. Iran Ministry of Culture and Art.

CHAPTER 12

The Same Again, Only a Little Different: Stanley Cavell’s Two Takes on The Philadelphia Story William Rothman

In an August 2004 entry in his philosophical memoir Little Did I Know, Stanley Cavell cites a complaint, by someone who had valued his earlier work, that in his just-published book Cities of Words he was “just going over the same old films.” Cavell felt provoked to write, “I never take up a film again that I care about unless I feel that I have something new to convey in considering it, which is part of my claim that the films I have studied are inexhaustible” (Cavell, 2010, p. 494). So, I thought it would be an appropriate contribution to this wonderful colloquium for me to identify, and assess, what Cities of Words does convey about “the same old films” that goes beyond Pursuits of Happiness; I imagined that such a paper would almost write itself.1 If only! For Pursuits of Happiness and Cities of Words, too, are inexhaustible. As I soon discovered, so was the task I had set for myself.

W. Rothman (*) University of Miami School of Communication, Coral Gables, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_12

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In 1978, the year Cavell completed The Claim of Reason, he wrote “Thinking of Emerson.” It wasn’t until almost a decade later, though, with In Quest of the Ordinary, This New Yet Unapproachable America, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, and the Harvard core curriculum course he called Moral Perfectionism on which he later based Cities of Words, that Emerson’s full impact on Cavell became manifest. Pursuits of Happiness was published in 1981, but as Cavell writes in the introduction, “Thoughts of remarriage as generating a genre of film began presenting themselves to me during a course on film comedy I gave in 1974 at Harvard’s Carpenter Center” (Cavell, 1981, p. 275). In 1975 Cavell first presented his reading of Bringing Up Baby. In 1976, he gave a version of the film comedy course designed to “test out those ideas as rigorously as I knew how.” By 1978, he had also written the Lady Eve chapter and had worked out the structure and argument of the book that became Pursuits of Happiness. Surely, thinking about the distinctly American movie genre he named “the comedy of remarriage” was instrumental in moving him to return to Emerson, only a little differently this time, and in enabling him to read Emerson’s essays in a way he’d never been able, or willing, to do. In The Claim of Reason, Emerson’s name appears once, in passing, as it does in Must We Mean What We Say? In The World Viewed Emerson’s name appears never; in The Senses of Walden, rarely. In Pursuits of Happiness, Emerson is invoked more than a few times, notably in the caption for the book’s frontispiece, that glorious frame from The Awful Truth of Cary Grant, who manifestly does “carry the holiday in his eye” and is “fit to stand the gaze of millions.” But if Cavell had written “Thinking of Emerson” before beginning Pursuits of Happiness, Emerson would surely have played a more prominent role in the book, as was already the case in Cavell’s 1983 essay “Thinking of Movies,” in “The Thought of Movies,” and in “A Capra Moment.” Even in those essays, though, Cavell didn’t have a name for the way of thinking he was coming to recognize as his own, no less than Emerson’s. The Hollywood comedy of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness argues, is born full-blown in its first instance, It Happened One Night, and has no history, in the sense that there is no necessity to the order in which the members are created. “But if the genre emerges full-blown,” Cavell asks in his introduction, “how can later members of the genre add anything to it?” He goes on, “This question is prompted by a picture of a genre as a form characterized by features, as an object by its properties; accordingly,

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to emerge full-blown must mean to emerge possessing all its features. The answer to the question is that later members can ‘add’ something to the genre because there is no such thing as ‘all its features.’ It will be natural in what follows, even irresistible, to speak of individual characteristics of a genre as ‘features’ of it; but the picture of an object with its properties is a bad one” (Cavell, 1981, p.  238). Indeed, the chapters that follow do repeatedly refer to the genre’s “features.” But the introduction to Pursuits of Happiness exemplifies Cavell’s regular practice of prefacing each book with an introductory essay, written last, that addresses the book as a whole from a perspective that only completing the chapters that follow enabled him to achieve. Thus, the introduction offers an alternative picture of a genre’s “characteristics,” which is that: the members of a genre share the inheritance of certain conditions, procedures and subjects and goals of composition, and that each member of such a genre represents a study of these conditions, something I think of as bearing the responsibility of the inheritance. There is, on this picture, nothing one is tempted to call the features of a genre which all its members have in common. (Cavell, 1981, p. 28) What Cavell is proposing here is that we think of the “common inheritance” of the members of a genre as a story or myth. “The members of a genre will be interpretations of the myth,” he writes, “or to use Thoreau’s word, revisions of it, which will also make them interpretations of one another”. (Cavell, 1981, p. 31)

In Pursuits of Happiness, the chapter on The Philadelphia Story, like every chapter, takes the form of what Cavell calls a “reading” of a definitive member of the remarriage comedy genre—an account of the film that, viewed from the perspective articulated in the introduction, undertakes to discover that film’s particular way of exemplifying the genre, its particular way of interpreting, revising, the genre’s story or myth. Each such reading is an act of criticism that takes the film it “reads” as its subject. But given the conception of genre Cavell is working with, each reading is also philosophy. Taking the film as its subject is the reading’s way of taking the film’s genre as its subject. The comedy of remarriage—hence genre in film in general, hence film itself—is what every chapter of Pursuits of Happiness is about, what the book as a whole is about, the subject of the book’s philosophical investigation.

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The chapter on The Philadelphia Story in Cities of Words doesn’t in the same way perform a reading of the film. It continually refers to, and defers to, the reading of the film performed in Pursuits of Happiness, which it mines for evidence it puts in the service of the book’s philosophical investigation of its own subject, which is moral perfectionism, and in particular Emersonian perfectionism—the version of perfectionism that Cities of Words is defending, as the first sentence of the Philadelphia Story chapter declares—Cavell’s acknowledgment that Emerson’s way of thinking was also his own. In Cities of Words, Cavell observes in Little Did I Know, “the sets of comedies and melodramas I have devoted a book each to are cast systematically in a new light, namely, as embodying a specific register of the moral life, a register running, if largely unheralded, throughout Western philosophy and literature, from Plato and Aristotle through Dante and Montaigne and Jane Austen and Emerson and George Eliot and Nietzsche and Mill to Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Cavell, 2010, p. 259)—and, of course, Cavell. The “new light” Cities of Words casts on these films reflects back on, and illuminates, the “register of the moral life” that is both the subject the book illuminates and the way of thinking its writing exemplifies—the “light” the book casts on its subject. In this way, Cities of Words exemplifies the view Cavell articulated in a 1989 interview, during the period of his Moral Perfectionism course, that it is defining of philosophy that it is “at every moment answerable to itself,” indeed, that any place in which the human spirit allows itself to be under its own question is philosophy” (Fleming & Payne, 1989, p. 59). What does Cities of Words enable us to know about The Philadelphia Story, for example, that goes beyond Pursuits of Happiness? Next to nothing. Pursuits of Happiness already brought into plain view virtually everything within the film that Cities of Words “casts a new light” on. But this isn’t a flaw or weakness of the book. In Cities of Words, Cavell writes, “Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations, declares it to be ‘of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view, something that the human being cannot simply fail to know.” This formulation captures the familiar fact that “philosophers seem perpetually to be going back over something, something most sane people would feel had already been discussed to death. A more familiar formulation is to say that philosophy does not progress.” Cavell adds, flashing his underappreciated gift for delivering mordantly witty comebacks without ruffling his

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Georgia-born decorum, “This depends on who is doing the measuring” (Cavell, 2005, p. 14) It is Cavell himself doing the measuring when, in the preface for the 2002 edition of Must We Mean What We Say?, he cites “something specific about the way, or space within which, I work, which I can put negatively as occurring within the knowledge that I never get things right, or let’s rather say, see them through, the first time, causing my efforts perpetually to leave things so that they can be, and ask to be, returned to. Put positively, it is the knowledge that philosophical ideas reveal their good only in stages” (Cavell, 2002, p. xvii). For Cavell, Cities of Words was doubly a return in that he adapted it from lectures for a course he first offered almost twenty years earlier, and because in this book he returned to movies he’d already written about, continuing his earlier thinking from a changed perspective. In reflecting back on, and illuminating, the book’s subject, the “new light” Cities of Words casts on these films enables it to convey a new understanding of philosophy’s origins and history—philosophy’s public life, we might say— and on itself, on its own writing, the private dimension of Cavell’s philosophical life. Cities of Words accepts its own place within an intellectual and artistic tradition as old as philosophy itself. At the same time, its writing manifests, indeed validates, the late turn to autobiography that led to Little Did I Know, Cavell’s final book, in which he tells the story of his life up to the completion of The Claim of Reason, the work in which he declared his existence as the only kind of philosopher who could have written such a book or could have wanted to. In this story, his own story, as Little Did I Know tells it—and this, for Cavell, is its philosophical point—the public and the private, the philosophical and the personal, philosophy and life, are inextricably intertwined, as they are—this is the guiding intuition in Cities of Words—both in Emersonian perfectionism and in the lives of the characters in the genres it inspired. To be sure, Cavell’s late turn to autobiography, motivated by and motivating Cities of Words, was anticipated in his earlier writings. Little Did I Know is itself a return, a continuation from a changed perspective of thinking that can be traced back—he traces it back—to Must We Mean What We Say?, in which the guiding intuition is that philosophical appeals to ordinary language have a private, personal, dimension. But it is only from the changed perspective of his late writings, Cities of Words among them, that Cavell came to recognize as an inescapable subject for philosophy the

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intimacy of philosophy’s relation to autobiography, an intimacy rooted both in philosophy’s historical origins, its public history, and in its origins, in the private life of the human individual, within the realm of the ordinary, the everyday, what Emerson called the “near” and the “low.” I said earlier that Cities of Words enables us to know next to nothing about The Philadelphia Story, say, that Pursuits of Happiness hadn’t already placed in plain view. There’s one telling exception. In the introduction to Contesting Tears, written during the period he was teaching the Moral Perfectionism course, Cavell puts together a passage from Genesis with a moment in The Philadelphia Story that when he was writing Pursuits of Happiness he “had passed over as obvious filler, even boring” (Cavell, 1996, p. 27). Near the end of the film, Dexter invites Liz for a morning swim, but she declines, saying she’ll wait to take that pleasure with Mike. When Dexter asks her whether she isn’t running a risk in waiting so long for him, she replies that Mike still had something to learn. What had Mike to learn? In revisiting this passage from Contesting Tears in Cities of Words, Cavell writes, “I have elsewhere described the thought of Mike’s not being ready to put aside his intactness by recurring to the moment—the ‘detour’—in Genesis where, just before God creates woman as a helpmeet for the single man, he allows Adam to give names to the animals.” Adam’s—Mike’s— “detour” accomplishes two things, Cavell suggests. First, it creates time for the man, a sense of the reality of life as irreversible, consequential, time to come into his own words (Mike is said to be a writer), giving himself language, his names for things, making the shared world his. Second, it allows him to survey the world of living things and to learn that “none but the woman will make him feel other than alone in the world, will be a companion, reciprocal.” Mike’s “not being ready” thus means that, as Cavell puts it, “he is not ready to recognize Liz as his other, not Liz as opposed to all others, but as another to his separateness, to what Emerson calls ‘the recognition that he exists,’ the fact Emerson identifies as the Fall of Man in his wonderful essay ‘Experience.’” By the end of The Philadelphia Story, Cavell concludes, “Tracy has learned that Dexter is ready, that he is her company, that they exist” (Cavell, 2005, p. 47). When he was writing Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell wasn’t ready to recognize the significance of this moment. He too still had something to learn. Perhaps we can say that, like Mike, he wasn’t yet fully ready to “put aside his intactness,” or, as Emerson put it in “Self-Reliance,” to “accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your

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contemporaries, the connection of events.” What was it that Cavell did in the “detour” between Pursuits of Happiness and the Moral Perfectionism course that made Cities of Words possible? What enabled him to achieve the perspective articulated in his late work cannot be separated, I suggest, from his act of giving this perspective, his perspective, a name. What’s in a name? For Cavell, this, too, was an inescapable philosophical question. In pondering this question, I find myself drawn to the account, in Little Did I Know, of his decision as a young man, made entirely on his own, to change his last name from Goldstein to Cavell in the hope that giving himself a name would free him—in a sense, it did—to be reborn, to find a place for himself in a world that didn’t yet know him. Giving the name “Emersonian perfectionism” to his way of thinking enabled Cavell to put aside his intactness, in effect, and acknowledge that he existed, in and out of philosophy, within both a private and a public world. Within Little Did I Know as a whole, the significance of this incident is that the lengthy, arduous, process he had to endure to change his name legally, to make his private change take effect in the public world, was young Stanley’s traumatic introduction to the vexing tensions and conflicts that are inevitable consequences of the reality that we human beings inhabit two worlds—a theme central to all versions of moral perfectionism and to the comedies and melodramas that in Cities of Words the not-so-­ young Stanley understood Emersonian perfectionism to have inspired. When writing Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell, like Wittgenstein, found himself in a modernist situation in relation to the tradition of philosophy in which he had received his professional training, the essential fact of modernism being, as he put it, that the relation between the present practice of an enterprise and the history of that enterprise has become problematic. His recognition of his reciprocity with Emerson, as we might think of it, opened his eyes to the fact that, to invoke again a passage to which I keep returning, he had also inherited, without being aware of it, an alternative philosophical tradition founded in America by Emerson, embraced by Emerson’s great readers Thoreau and, in Europe, by his devoted reader Nietzsche (and, through Nietzsche, Heidegger), and kept alive in American culture and in himself by the films he watched in the years going to the movies was a normal part of his week. Cavell didn’t find himself in a modernist situation in relation to that tradition. And unlike Groucho Marx, he was happy to belong to a club that accepted him as a member.

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As I put it in “Cavell Reading Cavell,” in finding Emerson, Cavell found himself. And in the Moral Perfectionism course, hence in Cities of Words, he went beyond this by placing Emersonian perfectionism, foundational for “the American event in philosophy,” within a broad and deep tradition of moral perfectionism he traces back to Plato and Aristotle and forward, from there, to the major modern thinkers and artists he considers in this remarkably ambitious book. By placing his chapter on Emerson first, and pairing it with The Philadelphia Story, Cities of Words looks back over the history of philosophy from the perspective of that American rebeginning. From this perspective, Cavell’s perspective, that history looks very different from the way it appears to philosophers who, in his words, “begin their sense of philosophy’s re-beginning in the modern era with the response, in Bacon and in Descartes and in Locke, to the traumatic event of the New Science of Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, for which the basis of human knowledge of the world, rather than of human conduct in that world, is primary among philosophical preoccupations” (Cavell, 2005, p. 2). Cavell writes, “Each of the thinkers and artists we will encounter in the following pages may be said to respond to some insight of a split in the human self, of human nature as divided or double.” Each provides a position “from which the present state of human existence can be judged, and a future state achieved, or else the present judged to be better than the cost of changing it” (Cavell, 2005, p. 2). Cavell understands Emersonian perfectionism to propose that one’s quarrel with the world need not be settled, nor cynically set aside as unsettleable. It is a condition in which you can at once want the world and want it to change—even change it, as the apple changes the earth, though we say the apple falls.” In demonstrating our lack of given means of making ourselves intelligible (to ourselves, to others), Emerson’s writing at once “details the difficulties in the way of possessing those means and demonstrates that they are at hand” (Cavell, 2005, p. 18). Emerson expresses two dominating themes of perfectionism. “The first theme is that the human self—confined by itself, aspiring toward itself, dissatisfied with its present condition—is always becoming, as on a journey, always partially in a further state.” The second is that the other to whom I can use the words I discover in which to express myself is the Friend—a figure that may occur as the goal of the journey but also as its instigation and accompaniment” (Cavell, 2005, p. 2).

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The questions couples in remarriage comedies address in their witty conversations, Cities of Words argues, are moral questions, questions about how they should live their lives, what kind of persons they wish to be. But how are we to know what we truly desire? To know our true desires, we must know our true feelings. In comedies of remarriage, the moral questions are also philosophical questions. As Cavell writes, “Film, the latest of the great arts, shows philosophy to be the often-invisible accompaniment of the ordinary lives that film is so apt to capture” (2005, p. 6)—but only if we understand philosophy, as moral perfectionism does, to be a moral calling; only if we understand the ancient imperative “know thyself” to be defining for philosophy. In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell argues that Austin’s and Wittgenstein’s appeals to ordinary language are procedures for achieving self-knowledge, for rendering perspicuous to us our words, our concepts, the ways we really think. In Cities of Words, Cavell argues, in a similar spirit, that Emersonian perfectionism and the movies it inspired are equally concerned with the achievement of self-knowledge—not knowledge of our thinking but, rather, knowledge of our desires, our passions. One difference, of course, is that the procedures of ordinary language philosophy can be employed by a solitary individual, but to achieve the kind of self-­ knowledge Tracy achieves in The Philadelphia Story, it helps to be in a conversation of a certain kind with a true friend. Conversation is the form moral reasoning takes in Emersonian perfectionism and the genres it inspired. The conversations between the women and men in comedies of remarriage aren’t just pleasurable in themselves, to us as well as to them. And they don’t just lead to mutual forgiveness. Being in conversation with Dexter moves Tracy to open her eyes to the kind of person she desires to be, the kind of life she desires to live, and with whom, if anyone, she desires to share her life. Such claims are argued as clearly in Pursuits of Happiness as in Cities of Words. But Cities of Words, viewing these matters in the light of Emersonian perfectionism, makes the further claim that insofar as Tracy’s conversation with Dexter empowers her to achieve self-knowledge, their conversation has a philosophical dimension. To be sure, in Pursuits of Happiness Cavell anticipates this claim when he writes, “Dexter’s demand to determine for himself what is truly important and what is not is a claim to the status of a philosopher” (Cavell, 1981, p. 150). But Cavell wasn’t yet ready to add that Dexter is Emerson’s kind of philosopher—or that he is Emerson’s kind of philosopher, too.

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In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell doesn’t unambiguously defend Dexter, the way he defends Emerson in Cities of Words. When in Pursuits of Happiness Cavell goes on to ask whether the acceptance of individual desire, Dexter’s form of self-knowledge, is of “national importance,” he uses this question to help set up the chapter’s wonderful closing pages. But those pages do not answer the question. Instead of affirming that Dexter’s form of self-knowledge is of national importance, Cavell defers to Matthew Arnold’s distinction between “the two historical forces still impelling us on the quest for perfection or salvation” (Cavell, 1981, p. 158). (By the way, this is the first time in Cavell’s writings that he had ever invoked the idea of perfectionism.) In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell claims that these two “sources of authority—“Hellenism,” that is, “spontaneity of consciousness,” and “Hebraism,” “strictness of conscience”—are exemplified by Dexter and Tracy, respectively, and that “what the marriage in The Philadelphia Story comes to” is “a proposed marriage or balance between Western culture’s two forces of authority, so that American mankind can refind its object, its dedication to a more perfect union, toward the perfected human community, its right to the pursuit of happiness” (Cavell, 1981, p. 159). From the standpoint of Emersonian perfectionism, however, this formulation, as eloquent as it is, doesn’t quite “get things right.” But it does “leave things so that they can be, and ask to be, returned to”—as in Cities of Words Cavell would go on to do. For although it is accurate to say that Tracy Hebraizes to a fault—especially to other people’s faults—and has to learn to balance her Hebraizing with Hellenizing, Dexter, therapist and Emersonian sage, had already learned what he needed to know in order to become a philosopher of Emerson’s, and Cavell’s, stripe. But when he was writing Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell wasn’t yet ready to say this. Philosophical ideas reveal their good only in stages. Then again, Cities of Words, too, would “leave things so that they can be, and ask to be, returned to.” For Cavell, the next stage—the last stage—would be Little Did I Know. The Philadelphia Story is about Tracy’s creation, not Dexter’s—about the way the “conversation of marriage” enables her to open her eyes. Dexter opens his eyes off camera, in the “detour” between the film’s comical prologue and the time he walks into Sidney Kidd’s office and sets the narrative in motion. During that “detour,” he tells Mike, he did a lot of reading, including Mike’s own book, which didn’t help him get his eyes opened. Whether anything he read did help, Dexter doesn’t say, although I suspect that Cities of Words might well have done the trick. Dexter’s

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creation, how he becomes a philosopher, isn’t part of the story the film tells. It is by consigning to silence Cavell’s own creation as a philosopher, in other words, that Cities of Words “leaves things so that they can be, and asks to be, returned to.” This is what Cavell did by writing Little Did I Know, which tells the story of how Stanley Goldstein became Stanley Cavell, the philosopher whose work, and life, this essay is celebrating.

Note 1. This essay was given as the keynote address at the ‘Cavell and Film’ Conference held at the Sorbonne in 2019.

References Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1996). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. The University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (2002). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press. First Published 1969. Cavell, S. (2005). Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (2010). Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford University Press. Fleming, R., & Payne, M. (Eds). (1989). The Senses of Stanley Cavell. Bucknell University Press.

PART IV

Seeing Faces, Finding Others

CHAPTER 13

Seeing One Another Anew with Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors Eran Guter and Inbal Guter

Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors (2014) is a film that one has the immediate urge to flag up as being an example of a ‘philosophical’ film in lieu of a better term, superlative or derogatory. Our approach in this essay is tempered by Ben-Ami Scharfstein’s (2009) soft-spoken reminder that an example has an independent existence with a rich, maybe endless, set of characteristics of its own. It has a life apart from the abstraction it illustrates. “The more fully the example is described, the more directions it leads in, until, imagined from its innumerable possible angles, it leads everywhere imaginable” (2009, p. 434). Thus, we opt for a ‘thick description’ in presenting some of the thoughts and insights that Visitors occasions. Paradoxical as it may sound, if we let Visitors have its life apart from philosophy—that is, apart

E. Guter (*) Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Emek Yezreel, Israel e-mail: [email protected] I. Guter Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_13

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from the abstraction which it purportedly illustrates—it will usher philosophy in. Visitors is the fourth major collaboration between filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass, following their so-called ‘Qatsi Trilogy’: Koyaanisqatsi (1984), Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). Visitors continues to explore some familiar moral themes from the ‘Quatsi Trilogy’. In so doing it offers a lamentation for the havoc that humankind’s obsession with technological advancement has wreaked on our world and a concomitant urge to be more human and gentler. The film stands out both formally (it is shot almost exclusively in black and white) and in terms of its subject matter: Reggio’s focus is on portraits of individuals (including one lowland gorilla), nearly all of them photographed in close-up, probing their subtle nuances, fleeting expressions and various permutations thereof. Extended sequences in the film consist of successions of exceedingly slow-motion photography (‘live stills’), which delve into a range of possibilities of reciprocal gazing: as we look at these portraits, they look back at us, as it were. More than merely portraying the individuals who occupy the screen as passing visitors aboard ‘Starship Earth,’ the film explores the human face as the final frontier, bringing its viewers into uncanny, intimate encounters with these living portraits; as if it is we who are the visitors—onlookers at some sort of cinematic menagerie inhabited by humans. The concept of Visitors germinated gradually over more than a decade. Sediments of defunct interim projects can be identified in the film’s final form. Reggio initially developed a film, The Border, that drew on Butoh-­ style techniques to explore a range of emotive human expressions, which then morphed into the cinematic exploration of the live stills at the heart of Visitors. Images from Savage Eden include a fantastic vision of primates in a pew. These are reimagined in Visitors into a long panning shot in which we track along the faces of five human beings, all deeply engaged in computer games (Reggio calls them ‘cyborgs’), arriving at a gorilla, who becomes ‘the adult in the room,’ the only individual in the film not connected to technology in any sense. The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 deeply affected Reggio, who was born and raised in New Orleans. As his original plan for a cinematic reflection on the catastrophe in Louisiana, Evidence, stalled, he realized that “as these places moldered over several years, this evidence was becoming like a visage, like a huge set for the ruins of modernity, a modern Pompeii—in other words, more aesthetically articulate”

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(MacDonald, 2014, p. 349). In Visitors, the aestheticized outlook on the desolate landscapes of Louisiana not only endows the film with a sense of mourning, a requiem for the ‘New Order for the Ages’ (the phrase ‘Novum Ordo Seclorum’ is seen on the somber art deco building in the opening sequence), but also, and much more significantly for the film’s purpose throughout, it offsets the cinematic menagerie of humans by showing us a world without us. The working title for Visitors throughout most of the making of the film was Holy See (meant to be taken as a kind of exclamation like ‘holy smoke’ or ‘holy moly’ rather than a reference to the Vatican; see MacDonald, 2014, p. 349), and by then Reggio’s cinematic imagination seems to have approached Rilkean exquisiteness. “Holy See” meant for Reggio (MacDonald, 2014, p. 349) “to see that which the eye cannot see, to make the invisible visible, to see that which is hidden in plain sight.” For Rilke (1948, p. 374), the ephemerality of human existence is the locus for a special kind of transformative poetic activity, which he famously described in a letter to his friend, the poet and publisher, Witold Hulewicz, on 13.11.1925: Our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again “invisibly” in us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hives of the invisible.

The transformative task that Visitors sets out to perform is captured in Reggio’s idiosyncratic notion of “an autodidactic film” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 353): [I]n any art, and particularly in the case of—dare I say—poetic cinema, much more is suggested than is intended by those who make it. If it has a presence, a film takes on a life of its own; it outsmarts the art that was intended. […] The meaning, in this case, the subject of this film, is the person watching the film. I wanted to avoid a didactic piece, but I came to realize that what I was making was an autodidactic film. Visitors has no intrinsic meaning, all meaning is in the eye of the beholder. Each member of the audience must become the storyteller, must become the character and plot of the film.

The film is meant to ‘outsmart’ and transcend the boundaries of its purported medium. As it takes on a life of its own, it spills over and intervenes

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in the phraseologies of its viewers, “in social contexts of seeking and finding one another through words and images, shaped in a communal context in which harmonies of engagement, rather than consensus, are at stake” (Floyd, 2019, p. 716). That is to say, in our world, the world of ‘cyborgs’—wherein a ‘New Order of the Ages’ means growing more and more technologically interconnected and communality means being alone together (Turkle, 2017)—harmonies of engagement need to be recovered offline. “Technology for me is probably the most misunderstood subject on the planet,” said Reggio in an interview; “We keep thinking of it as another category, like the economy, like religion, like war, but it is [as] ubiquitous as the air we breathe and we’re strapped in and on the ride” (The Creators Project, 2014). And so, we tend to forget the social world and our own embedded, embodied plasticities, as we place significance in the wrong place, in the wrong way (Floyd, 2019). This is where Visitors intervenes: in the end-user’s conversation. In Visitors, the transformative ‘spill over’ into the end-user’s conversation begins with the reciprocal gaze. The film posits itself as a seeing aid, designed to situate the (cyborg) viewer, bewilderingly or even uneasily, as needing to reacquire the capacity to see human beings as human beings. Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us that our knowledge of people, of human beings (Menschenkenntnis) draws upon “imponderable evidence” (2009, p. 240), a mixture of immediate certainty and indeterminacy that characterizes our perception and understanding of other people’s emotions, expressions, feelings, reactions, intentions, and thoughts. A proficient knower of human beings is endowed with a sensibility to the physiognomy of the human; capacities to perceive and judge the nature, moods, dispositions, and states of mind of other human beings, which to a certain extent we can teach one another. “What is most difficult here is to express this indefiniteness correctly, and without distortion,” Wittgenstein (2009, p. 239) points out. That is why the phraseologies of the viewers matter— our social, evolving forms of lives with words. According to Wittgenstein, “imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance, of gesture, of tone” (2009, p. 240). We may recognize a genuine loving look, distinguish it from a pretended one, yet may be quite incapable of describing the difference, and this is not due to any deficiency of language. “The face is an uncanny semaphore,” Daniel McNeill writes. “We rely on these signals constantly and willy-nilly, for almost none of us can define them. We are reading a language we cannot articulate and may not consciously notice” (2000, p. 8). Reggio’s live stills introduce such

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imponderable evidence into the resources that Visitors offers, as a seeing aid. In one scene, he introduces a laughing person “at a point where you don’t know if he’s screaming or laughing. He was laughing, but it’s like that wonderful Baudelaire line about humor being the stigmata of Original Sin. Humor and tragedy, twins, same mother—an insight into consciousness” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 352). In other scenes, Reggio discovers “the virtue of an inhumanly slow move into the face so that the face you see at the beginning of the shot is not the face you see at the end. This face may be a mirror of the face within us all” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 351). The indefiniteness of the perceived difference between the genuine and the dissembled glance harbors an aspect-experience. Wittgenstein (2009) famously introduces this concept by considering how we observe a face and suddenly notice its likeness to another. In Visitors, the other face, the aspect that dawns upon us, is us as the human beings we are; “the face within us all.” Reggio explains: Essentially, the people in Visitors, be they humans looking “at you” or people playing games, are the proverbial doubles of who we are. In daily life we see ourselves as doubles through shadows, reflections, through spirits, but we can also see ourselves through other people. Their gaze brings us into a dialogue with ourselves, but the specific nature of the dialogue is up to the viewer. (pp. 355–356) (See Fig. 13.1)

While the particular substance of these prompted dialogues remains up to the viewer, such dialogues nonetheless share a point. It dawns upon us

Fig. 13.1  The proverbial doubles of who we are

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that what we used to ‘see’ as a matter of course, we were not really seeing, and that we are now able to really see ourselves—to see ourselves anew. So much so that we realize our observation and contemplation of human beings may have become routine to the point of blindness to the experience of seeing human beings as human beings. Our human capacities and sensibilities have been eroded by use, forgetfulness, or carelessness, as we regularly, by neat sleight of hand, offload our tasks as knowers of human beings to the calculative routines of some piece of technology. Yet, as William Day points out, “from the standpoint of our loss of interest in our experience, aspect blindness will seem to us not unimaginable as a human possibility at all, but quite familiar, a kind of fixed literal-­mindedness in taking in the world” (2010, pp. 218–219). The live stills of Visitors shatter this routine, shake up any fixed literal mindedness we bring to relating to one another, and render the familiar uncommon again by enabling us to recapture the uncanniness of what it is to be human. They evince what Reshef Agam-Segal calls “non-­preparatory aspect-seeing” that targets the poverty of one’s concept of the human by enabling the viewer to expand and explore this concept in ways, and with resources, that surpass what any norm-laden use of language could capture (2012, pp. 10–11). We take one of the cinematic achievements of Visitors to illuminate the extent to which we experience such aspect blindness—“soul blindness,” as Cavell calls it (1982)—endemically. We become withdrawn with respect to the extent to which our being in the world is internally related to our ability to see one another anew in it. As Avner Baz aptly puts it, “our relation to the world, as revealed by the dawning of aspects, is one in which we continually have to restore an intimacy with the world—an intimacy that is forever at stake, and that if taken for granted is bound to be lost” (2010, p. 238). To avail ourselves of Rilke’s ecstatic words, what may rise again invisibly in us is such intimacy with the world. Visitors also offers us a powerful reminder that there is a residual area of what is not offloaded to some auxiliary routine, that is beyond the norm-laden uses of language, in which our recognition and understanding of each other’s human physiognomy may be contested, redesigned, and reinterpreted. In engaging with the film, we are transformed, recognizing an achievement that does indeed “outsmart” whatever art that might have been intended; the possibility of a growing, deepening conversation betokens one’s hope for finding one another.

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Seeing one another anew in, and by means of, Visitors is enabled by various cinematic strategies of dépaysement, which are comparable in spirit to Cavell’s skeptical thought experiment concerning the possibility and import of soul blindness. “Could it be that human beings are in human guise?” he asks; “Suppose that there are in our world such things as human guises, ‘bodies’ that for all the world seem inhabited but happen not to be, i.e. seem to be human beings but happen not to be” (1982, p. 380). While Cavell’s musings predate our brave new world of avatars, bots, and fake profiles in social media, this nonetheless makes the comparison with Visitors even more poignant if one encounters the film as dwelling in, or a dwelling place for, human guises. The first layer of dépaysement pertains to Reggio’s employment of live stills as discussed above. Bringing the imponderable evidence concerning the physiognomy of the human too close for comfort, in abundant visual detail, in extreme slow motion, does not render it any less imponderable. The second layer is Reggio’s decision to shoot the film in black and white. According to Reggio, “color contemporizes the film image and would have been less emotive. In some cases this can be useful, but for this film I didn’t want to represent the contemporary; I wanted to put Visitors in an otherworldly zone” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 352). Next, the entire film is set up as two reflecting panels: (1) a world without us (the desolate landscapes); and (2) us without the world (the menagerie of humans). The first panel is bookended by computer-generated images of the barren surface of the moon and includes, among other things, shots of the monolithic ‘Novum Ordo Seclorum’ building, which represents for Reggio modernity itself, together with eerie images from a deserted amusement park and an autumnal forsaken swamp. “The building and the structures in the amusement park were all shot in infrared,” says Reggio (MacDonald, 2014, p. 353), “so the sky disappears and when clouds are present, they’re ghostlike. For me, seeing the building after the opening shot of the moon puts the building and us squarely on the moon.” The swamp was “the perfect companion for what I was trying to suggest with the moon. The contrariety of the swamp has a palpable primordial presence; it’s otherworldly” (2014, p. 355). The second panel (the menagerie of humans) includes a series of live stills, all shot separately, either directly (“humans” looking straight at us) or through a two-way mirror (“cyborgs” watching their screens as we observe them from the fictional point of view of the technology), and one group scene, shot at a sports bar. It also features (in the third movement

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of the film) an exquisite slow-motion ballet of disembodied fingers in three parts: a mouse-movement/picture-enlarging solo; a texting pas de deux; and a keyboard-playing pas de deux. Here dépaysement takes the form of dislocating human physiognomy from its worldly or otherwise technology-related affairs by eliminating all the details of the space around the faces or hands. Reggio calls this “the blackground,” which was part of his original motivation for this project: “I wanted a way to use split screening that would be hidden in plain sight, and using the blackground was important for this; it allowed me to put multiple faces next to each other in pans and dolly shots in the editing room, and without any visual distraction from the intensity of the faces” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 352). As the two reflecting panels are brought to reflect one another over the course of the film, we experience the urgency of their combined afterimage: the return of an intimacy that was lost when the world and our humanity were taken for granted. This occurs as the various materials are juxtaposed into “a pictorial composition, a syntax for the eye,” as Reggio puts it; “It’s not about text,” he avers, “it’s about texture” (MacDonald, 2014, p. 355). This is shown, most strikingly, in a textural anomaly at the beginning of the final movement of the film, entitled ‘The Reciprocal Gaze’: we see the barren surface of the moon, again in black and white, itself set in the “blackground” of space, and then we witness the rising of a familiarly blue earth, the only bit of color in the whole film. Our off-­ planet perception of our own world regains sensual intimacy for a moment. Another textural anomaly, which is crucially important in Visitors, is the liminal presence of the gorilla. Reggio chose Triska, a lowland female gorilla and resident of the Bronx Zoo, for the likeness of her face to the human face—an aspect-experience to be sure. Reggio often refers in interviews to Loren Eiseley’s dictum “one does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human” (1969, p. 12). With Triska, the otherworldly is rendered as intimately known, yet at the same time, the intimately known is reflected uncannily. There are three slow-­ motion medium close-ups of Triska fixing her gaze on the viewer. These were culled from several hours of slow-motion recording in which the footage was shot through the thick glass of an indoor viewing area of the “Congo gorilla forest” habitat. In postproduction, rotoscoping was used to cut the image of Triska, frame by frame, out of the trees and greenery of the zoo and place her, dressed up in majestic silver sheen, in the “blackground” (Murphy, 2014). Triska was digitally extracted and dislocated from her non-human world and placed in the cinematic menagerie of

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humans only to come across ironically as more human by comparison to the other individuals (all “cyborgs”) in the pew. A remnant from Reggio’s defunct project Savage Eden, Triska traverses both reflecting panels of Visitors. Like the moon shots, her otherworldly appearance bookends the film. Yet placing her in—and in the final tableau, on the limits of—the menagerie of humans thereby both engenders and overcomes dépaysement. Considering the texture of Visitors, one cannot overestimate the importance of Reggio’s collaboration with composer Philip Glass. Working intensely together on the Qatsi Trilogy, Reggio and Glass developed a unique hand-in-glove rapport. Glass was involved in the development of the concept of the film, went to locations, saw all the rushes, and throughout his work on the score was fully integrated into the whole process of the film (MacDonald, 1992). That did not change in Visitors. Reggio recalls that: [Glass] talked with us about creating a dance of music and image, so that one wouldn’t overwhelm the other, so that music and image would blend into one synergetic movement. […] Here, we were asking for a full orchestral score: in effect, a narrative for the film, an emotive armchair in which to view the images. […] Philip’s first writings were beautiful, but they were too symphonic and tended to overwhelm the images. Being someone who can function in a critical forum, Philip understood our feedback—and started over. At one point he had a Eureka moment and said, “What you’re asking is that I write for the attention of the audience; I get it.” He went back to his studio and we got two pieces of music in less than a week, and they were spot on. (MacDonald, 2014, pp. 350–351)

Two issues are relevant here: the distinct nature of Visitors as a hybrid art form (combining cinema and music) and what Glass refers to as his ‘Eureka moment’ when working on the development of the work. Both pertain to the sense of refraction which is conducive to the quest of seeing one another anew. Glass already had extensive experience with hybrid art forms before meeting Reggio. His first opera, Einstein on the Beach, composed in 1975 in collaboration with stage artist Robert Wilson, is a juxtapositional hybrid, wherein the contributing elements are distinct and separable from one another, forming a whole by the summation of elements (to a distinctly disintegrative effect) rather than by the merging or dissolution of boundaries between the constitutive art forms (Levinson, 1984). The first

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Reggio/Glass collaboration, Koyaanisqatsi, is also a juxtapositional hybrid which often capitalizes on the cognitive overload generated by juxtaposing Reggio’s signature time-lapse technique and Glass’s incessant repetitions, and featuring the progressive sound-world of the Philip Glass Ensemble. The case of Visitors is different. The music is not simply added to the images (to illustrate or negate them), but affords a narrative for the film, which is bound to be abstract due to Glass’s minimalist idiom, wherein content suggests form yet also vice versa. Visitors extends the possible ways in which images and music co-exist, enabling them to “blend into one synergetic movement”; Reggio stated uncompromisingly that his collaboration with Glass on Visitors was that of “a deaf person who works through Philip Glass’s ears” (The Creator Project, 2014). This renders Visitors a synthetic hybrid in which some essential or defining features of one or both arts are challenged, modified, or withdrawn (Levinson, 1984). Glass’s ‘Eureka moment’ occurred when he realized that he was not supposed to illustrate Reggio’s images musically, but rather to present the music for the attention of the viewer. His realization recaptured the original impetus for the emergence of the musical scene known as “New York Minimalism,” of which Glass was one of the leading lights. This impetus concerned the nature, purpose, and effect of gradual musical processes. It is captured in an oft-quoted text written in 1968 by composer Steve Reich, Glass’s comrade-in-arms at the time: While performing and listening to gradual musical processes, one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outward toward it. (2004, p. 36)

In Visitors, this means that the concrete synthesis of images and music is achieved by way of refraction, as the significance of the images bounces off the surface of an autonomous gradual musical process. This is most striking when an auratic afterimage emerges in the various juxtapositions of the aforementioned reflecting panels. Some beautiful examples include the transition from a close-up on the expressive face of an elderly woman to a shot of the monolithic building (in the second movement of the film, ‘The Day Room’) and the transition from the expressive outburst of the group at the sports bar to the slow-motion gesturing of an expressionless puppet (in the fourth movement, ‘Off-Planet, Part 2’). The terms for the co-existence of music and cinematic imagery in Visitors are clearly

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refashioned as Glass’s minimalist techniques for slowing down musical motion, reducing content, and simplifying texture decisively offset the unusual levels of semantic density and syntactic repleteness (Goodman, 1976) of the photography, engendered by Reggio’s decision to shoot the film, which consists of only 74 shots, on 3K and 5K high-definition video and release it in 4K. To echo Reich’s description of gradual musical processes, the musical narrative invites us to participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual, which soothes and primes us to dwell in, and take in such extremely fine-grained, slow-pacing visual abundance. Glass’s most original contribution to Visitors is, however, ideational. Rather than serving merely as “an emotive armchair in which to view the images,” his autonomous musical processes incorporate content, which, although being minimal, binds the film right from the outset, irrevocably and subversively, to Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a composition which has become synonymous in our common culture with a celebration of a harmonious society (Levy, 2003). At the beginning of the film, as Triska slowly emerges from the ‘blackground’ before our eyes for the first time, Glass introduces Beethoven’s signature ‘whispering’ fifth (the interval of A-E), the core sound unit which opens the Ninth Symphony in a sustained hushed tremolo. This surprising opening of Beethoven’s symphony, consisting solely of this fifth and its complementary fourth (marking the basic division of an octave) in changing dynamics, has become not only identified with this work (on a par with its concluding Ode to Joy), but also a celebrated model, for later composers, of how one might treat raw musical material frugally. Glass begins his overture to Visitors with the same interval, in the same pitches, using it both as a symbolic sign and as material for his gradual musical processes, which strive to lay bare minute changes for the viewer’s attention through the prolonged, controlled, and repetitive exposure of new elements. Glass not only borrows Beethoven’s signature sound unit as content, but also emulates Beethoven’s use of this musical content as a means for creating textural distinction and suspense. Like Beethoven, Glass isolates this interval in the acoustic space. But he does so by harnessing the devices of minimalism: tweaking the duration of the two pitches as they repeat, combining various elaborations of the interval (arpeggios, melodic intervals, and harmonic intervals), and so forth. Glass’s incessant minimalist treatment of Beethoven’s ‘whispering’ fifth deepens the sense of dépaysement as the reflecting panel of a world without us unfolds for the first time: Triska, the moon, the desolate monolithic

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building inscribed with ‘Novum Ordo Seclorum’. In the inner movements of the film, ‘Off Planet’, Parts 1 and 2, as Reggio intensifies his cinematic exploration of ‘cyborgs’ toward the climactic group scene, Glass further elaborates this core material by emulating some of Beethoven’s unusual techniques in the finale of his symphony. Beethoven increases the tonal tension by using certain pitch combinations which create dissonant sonorities. Some of Beethoven’s harsh critics at the time complained about what they described as unpleasant sound collisions. Similarly, Glass increases tonal tension in these inner movements by gradually incorporating the original core content with other components so as to generate moments of dissonance and tension. When one allows these subdued allusions to Beethoven’s Ninth, and by implication also to the images associated with Schiller’s An die Freude of the ecstatic undifferentiated communality of the band of brothers (Solomon, 1991), to impinge upon one, they lend Visitors an additional poignancy; indeed they deliver the very requiem envisioned by Reggio (MacDonald, 2014). As Visitors draws to an end, everything comes together in a strikingly self-reflexive final tableau. Following the textural anomaly of the rising of a blue earth, as seen from a black and white surface of the moon, we see Triska again—our liminal, panel-traversing ligature to the cinematic achievement that is Visitors. Glass’s orchestra undergirds the cyclical structure of the film by intoning again Beethoven’s ‘whispering’ fifth. Reggio’s camera slowly pulls back, revealing the configuration of the reciprocal gaze. As Triska looks directly at us (the viewers), we find her on the big screen in a theater crowded with mesmerized viewers, that is, at the very limits of the menagerie of humans. See Fig. 13.2. For a moment, the cinematic wherewithal—in all its diaphanous glory—is fully exposed for our intellectual perusal. Triska watches us and the other inhabitants of the menagerie, as we watch her watching us all, and watch all the others watching her. As the music intensifies, Triska’s image fades into blinding white, engulfing everything: the screen within the theater, the theater itself with its inhabitants, our screen and us. We lose sight inside the seeing aid. As the end titles appear, we are left with an eerie image of dispersal: ink droplets dissolving upside-down in slow-motion in a clear liquid. The relentless, softly searching pulsation of Beethoven’s ‘whispering’ fifth, now an idle wheel, is punctuated by occasional flashes of an A Major chord, gesturing aimlessly at the triumphant change of mode, from minor to major, with which Beethoven’s Ode to Joy culminates.

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Fig. 13.2  The reciprocal gaze

Now is the time for the end-user’s conversation to reengage and regain traction as we carry a sense of dépaysement back into our worldly affairs. Seeing ourselves and others anew, we don’t just refresh, but extend our Menschenkenntnis and thereby also the aesthetic puzzlements pertaining to human life. Outsmarting their medium, transformative works of film art have a unique role to play in this. Such works relate to philosophy’s most cherished, age-old instinct, voiced by Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus, that “wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”

References Agam-Segal, R. (2012). Reflecting on Language from “Sideways-on”: Preparatory and Non-Preparatory Aspects-Seeing. Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy, 1(6), 1–17. Baz, A. (2010). On Learning from Wittgenstein, or What Does it Take to See the Grammar of Seeing Aspects? In W. Day & J. Krebs (Eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (pp. 227–248). Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (1982). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford University Press. Day, W. (2010). Wanting to Say Something: Aspect-Blindness and Language. In W. Day & J. Krebs (Eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (pp. 204–224). Cambridge University Press. Eiseley, L. C. (1969). The Unexpected Universe. Harcourt, Brace & World. Floyd, J. (2019). Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 53(4), 715–733. Goodman, N. (1976). Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols.

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Levinson, J. (1984). Hybrid Art Forms. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 18(4), 5–13. Levy, D. B. (2003). Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony (Rev. ed.). Yale University Press. MacDonald, S. (1992). A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. University of California Press. MacDonald, S. (2014). Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-­ Garde Cinema. Oxford University Press. McNeill, D. (2000). The Face: A Natural History. Penguin. Murphy, M. (January 19, 2014). You Watch This Film as It Watches You. The New York Times, Arts and Leisure, 12. Reich, S. (2004). Music as a Gradual Process (1968). In S. Reich (Ed.), Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (pp. 34–36). Oxford University Press. Rilke, R. M. (1948). Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vol. II, 1910–1926. Norton. Scharfstein, B. (2009). Art Without Borders: A Philosophical Exploration of Art and Humanity. The University of Chicago Press. Solomon, M. (1991). Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: The Sense of an Ending. Critical Inquiry, 17(2), 289–305. Turkle, S. (2017). Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (3rd ed.). Basic Books. Wittgenstein, L. (2009). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Trans.). Revised 4th Edition by P. M. S. Hacker & J. Schulte (Eds.). Blackwell.

Filmography Reggio, G. (Director). (2014). Visitors. [Film]. Cinedigm. The Creators Project. (February 20, 2014). The Movie That Stares Back At You— Visitors by Godfrey Reggio. [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5CNARLwC_1s.

CHAPTER 14

A Punctum Scene in Shoah Rob van Gerwen

Introduction Sometimes, in a filmed scene, someone betrays what is really going on in them, and such moments of self-betrayal are without exception fascinating. They form, in my view, cinematographic analogues to what Roland Barthes calls punctum, that aspect or power of a photograph in virtue of which some connection with reality suggests itself irrespective of the photo’s subject-matter, pricking the viewer. I agree with Barthes that something in the viewer is required for the uptake of punctum, but think that he is unduly idiosyncratic about this, which may be due to the fact that he is speaking only of photographs. He thinks certain objects in the photos prick him by mobilizing an association from his own life. Considering scenes in films, rather than photos, gives priority to persons, rather than objects, as the locus of punctum. Here too, a viewer’s response is required for the uptake of the punctum aspect: one person’s self-betrayal depends on another person’s subjective understanding of

R. van Gerwen (*) Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_14

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gestures and facial expressions. The only thing required is a capacity widely shared, empathy, rather than a private association. The scenes I am interested in are based on documentary films. We are witnessing peculiar facts about some individual’s behavior—history, according to Aristotle—but these facts have the universal scope that Aristotle attributes to poetry. But here historical events provide insights as universal as poetry’s. I argue that punctum scenes in documentary films are halfway between art and history, on Aristotle’s understanding. Recognizing someone’s self-betrayal assumes that we have a good sense of them, which sense must be provided in the scene, or its cinematic context, available to all. Our interest is not historical or journalistic, but, rather psychological and—since we are talking about film—artistic. We are not simply collecting facts about the person, but understanding what type of person they are. My case of self-betrayal comes from Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s documentary masterwork, but first let us look at Aristotle’s distinction between art and history.

Aristotle’s Universal Poetic Knowledge In his Poetics, Aristotle lauds poetry for its power to deliver universal philosophical truths. History, in contrast, only tells us of things that incidentally happened. Interestingly, the universal truths of poetry concern what particular people think and do in particular circumstances. Aristotle’s formulation is well-chosen: By universal truths are to be understood the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation; and this is the aim of poetry, although it gives individual names to its characters. (Aristotle, 1986, 1451b6–1451b10, my emphasis)

There are at least two ways to interpret Aristotle’s claim. One is that some particular work, say, Sophie’s Choice, is about one mother but there are many more Sophies; the film presents one, portraying many. This interpretation treats the film as making a general claim about the inhumanity of the choice she is forced to make in a split second, comparable to a universalization in ethics. Ethical universalization requires that you leave out the peculiarities of a situation to find its ethical core, to compare it to similar situations and discern the relevant ethical principle. Such universalization

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involves one in abstracting from the particulars in the concrete case, which seems rather inappropriate in regard to works of art—or real-life behavior. The other interpretation derives a universal truth, in contrast, precisely from the particular details of the situation as they are presented in the work. In art, we do not step away from the particular, but follow it through. It is not just the fact that Sophie is forced to choose between her children. The merit of the film derives from all the details Sophie is confronted with and the psychological and phenomenological plausibility of her responses to them. This way of understanding the universal in fiction is as a truth about a particular person’s behavior in a particular situation. Viewers experience this particularity and understand the predicament of one particular person in these circumstances. The universal knowledge conveyed by a work of art concerns the full truth—one wants to say—about one character’s behavior. In real life, too, such truths about all the details of actions might be produced, as well, however hard they may be to retrieve. A tragedy concerns one action, ‘complete in itself’, Aristotle says (Aristotle, 1986, 1448a1–18). Yet Oedipus, for instance, is depicted as fleeing his alleged parents, killing a man (his real father), answering the riddle of the sphinx, entering Thebes, and then marrying Jocasta (his real mother), and then gouging out his eyes. How is that a single action? we might ask. Well, they all acquire a singular meaning as constituents of Oedipus’ response to the forecast of the Delphic oracle. Everything Oedipus does is connected psychologically in this peculiar history—of subjective acts and experiences—that defines him. (Rorty, 1992) The result is universal particular knowledge of ‘the kinds of thing a certain type of person will probably or necessarily say or do in a given situation’. The type of person is not a Platonic category (man, woman, child, farmer) but a person fixed so to speak by everything influencing his choices, and by how these choices make him the person he is. Individuals are defined by their specific responses to everything. You are what you do, but why do you do these things? Arguably, Aristotle’s view applies to all the narrative arts. But there is a sense in which it applies even more to film. Due to the technological nature of cinema films present the specific details of situations by way of real details in front of the camera. Moreover, a scene in a film might provide more details than a poem could, of the situations in which Oedipus, to stick with our example, makes his mistakes, and might show more of

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their psychological reality. The details that a fiction film presents us with establish that what happens to the protagonist is phenomenologically, psychologically, and rhetorically plausible in such a way that the protagonist’s subjective history in its various contexts adds up to the one action that the film is about. I want to concentrate on this role of particularity in art. Fiction film is, and offers, a form of understanding of a character’s behavior. The more phenomenological the knowledge a fiction film delivers, and the more it conveys its story through what happens before the camera—instead of imposing a narrative onto the events for the sake of a message—the more authentic it is. (See van Gerwen, 2018, pp. 175–200.) How to acquire this understanding other than by following through, in perception, the aspects of a situation or event as they are presented in the film? We track their development in the narrative, as this delivers the psychological coherence of the character. If you get all the details right you get the individual right, they become a person, in the sense of being psychologically and phenomenologically plausible, and authentic, instead of a mere token of a type (a flat character). In a documentary scene of self-betrayal, all of this seems present by accident. Someone does something and in doing it betrays something about himself he may have wanted to hide. We only find examples of personal self-betrayal in documentary footage where real events are somehow caught unawares. In fiction films, there are so many ways of playing, of actors’ behaving on and for the screen, that it is impossible to unearth examples of personal self-betrayal. Viewers lack the means to sort this out, because actors are always playing roles. They also know about the camera’s power to discern and reproduce any flaws in their acting. So if an actor inadvertently betrays some inner turmoil in front of the camera it may simply be a matter of their awareness of the presence of the camera.

Punctum Scenes Punctum is an element of depicted situations that somehow stands out from the narrative in the picture. ‘A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ (Barthes, 2000, §10, p. 27). In Camera Lucida, Barthes explains a photo’s punctum as consisting of some idiosyncratic association caused by something real in the photo, unintentionally there. One example he discusses is a photo by Andre Kertész: The Violinist’s Tune. Abony, Hungary, 1921. Barthes’

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‘thinking eye’ adds: ‘I recognize, with my whole body, the straggling villages I passed through on my long-ago travels in Hungary and Rumania’ (Barthes, 2000, §19, p. 45). The dirt road is the photo’s punctum that takes him back to his travels. The narrative, the subject or topic—which Roland Barthes calls the studium—seems to fit the photographer’s intentions with the photo, but the punctum somehow escapes that. Later, he clarifies this unintended accident of punctum: ‘(how could Kertész have “separated” the dirt road from the violinist walking on it?)’ (Barthes, 2000, §20, p. 47). Another example is Family Portrait by James van der Zee, 1926. (Barthes, 2000, p.  44). Barthes is pricked by a belt worn low by the woman with her arms crossed behind her back, but most of all by her ‘strapped pumps’. Barthes remarks that his interest has nothing moral to it—it is not related to the studium of the photo, which induces his sympathy for these people dressed in their Sunday best. Later he realizes he misidentified this photo’s punctum, the thing that makes the photograph so intriguing for him. It has all along been the pearl necklace the woman is wearing, which brings him to an aunt of his who wore a similar necklace. So something in the viewer’s psychology decides about the punctum thing in the photo. Barthes also reports that he is seeking a good photograph of his recently deceased mother from a large batch of family photos (Barthes, 2000, §45). It takes a while before he comes up with the one photo that in his view shows the air of his mother, her typical posture. In this photo she is standing in a winter garden. But she is only six years old. What is this thing that he recognizes in her posture? This something is the air (the expression, the look). The air of a face cannot be decomposed. … All the photographs of my mother which I was looking through were a little like so many masks; at the last, suddenly the mask vanished: there remained a soul, ageless but not timeless, since this air was the person I used to see, consubstantial with her face, each day of her long life. Perhaps the air is ultimately something moral, mysteriously contributing to the face the reflection of a life value? (Barthes, 2000 §45, 107, 109–110)

In sum, according to Barthes, punctum is an effect produced by a particular object or objective property that reminds one of something from one’s own past. The viewer must add something from another context, something they already know, and this is why punctum ‘pricks’ their

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imagination. It is a synecdoche (or pars-pro-toto) but one mediated by a personal memory. Although everyone might notice the detail in the photo it is not evident that everyone would also recognize its wider reference. Does it not depend on what the viewer must already have available, like Barthes’ ‘long-ago travels in Hungary and Rumania’, or his aunt’s necklace? Understanding it in this way turns punctum into a kind of correspondence whose truth cannot easily be established. Is this correspondence even there, in the picture? Barthes takes the recognition of punctum in some photo as an effect of studying photos, a criterion of success satisfied only contingently and subjectively. This may have had value for him for liberating him from the clutches of semiotic theory. In contrast, I think that for it to be of genuine philosophical interest, the punctum would need to be available in the picture for others too. It must involve something that can be perceived by others, for the punctum as such to be an aspect of the picture. Barthes is right to point out that even an idiosyncratic punctum is an interesting phenomenon. But I think there is more to it. Photographs as such are isolated still pictures, slices of events brought to a stop, which makes it hard to ward off Barthes’ idiosyncratic subjectivism. In films, however, such technically produced images come in sequences which reproduce meanings that may have been present in the event depicted. I focus on scenes where reciprocal interaction is shown as a process, which can rescue punctum from this idiosyncrasy. Hence the philosophical interest of punctum scenes. Punctum scenes in moving pictures concern gestures, actions, expressive bodily movements, and, what’s more, their authenticity or inauthenticity. What pricks me here somehow mobilizes my prior acquaintance with such authentic or inauthentic gestures and movements, and I assume that this goes for all of us in some measure, since we are all human. Everyone has this capacity of empathy, which allows us to get ‘pricked’ by a punctum scene and to supplement the subjective bit that punctum scenes seem to require. Why are the scenes that I have in mind, of which I will only discuss one, below, samples of punctum? This is, I think, because they exemplify something besides the narrative—Barthes’ studium—which punctures that narrative. For me, too, the trigger is subjective. But it is my body’s memory of expressive movements, that through mimicking, adds its own bodily understanding. Punctum scenes are about human behavior, not just objects. Indeed, they help us recognize our own human behavior.

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Movements So, like Barthes, I too start from some subjective event that apparently suggests something important in a picture. It is a physical memory of some gesture or look, that I cannot bring home, though I could mimic it. The memories are of gestures in some film. They colonize my thought until I succeed in identifying the films they are from. And the question is: do these scenes provide their profound insights through some correspondence with reality or is it some peculiar sensitivity of mine that opens up my perception to something inhering in the imagery that is not in the storyline? Is it not simply my idiosyncratic association that takes me there, but, rather, my veridical perception, which presumably can be shared? My test is whether I can make other viewers see it, too. Films can sometimes have a funny kind of influence, on me at least. It is the ways the actors move, the aspect of their existential reality which they cannot but bring to, and imbue their characters with, and which sometimes transfer to me too. I did not realize the extent to which life under lockdown made me stop matching my movements to those of people around me. For months on end, I moved identically through the rooms and corridors in my house undisturbed by others. Isolation removed every surprise factor of normal everyday life and as a consequence, nothing relativized and even ‘recalibrated’ my own movements—insignificant and plain though they are for me, not to mention, boring, one might add. Realizing this made me think of something Robert Bresson quotes from Montaigne: ‘Every movement reveals us’ (Bresson, 2016, p. 83). If movements reveal us, this is certainly a social fact—and it is connected with the movements of the others as well, with this synchronizing. Covid boredom made me realize that I missed the synchronization of my own movements and those of other people. The films I viewed while home alone, however, made me move differently—literally. I found myself copying the movements of the actors, even though within minutes I would notice the change this wrought in me, and stopped doing it: ‘I don’t move like that, that is not me’. Perhaps too, this is what triggers my subjective recognition of punctum scenes. Bresson remarks: Every movement reveals us (Montaigne). But it only reveals us if it is automatic (not commanded, not willed). (Bresson, 2016, 83)

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Though Bresson uses this argument to legitimate his acting strategy— actors should not play but be themselves, like a painter’s models—it helps me to better understand how our movements are a kind of social mechanism that do not merely require our authenticity, but reveal it. But what if I am merely projecting some idiosyncratic association? It is clear that my suggestions are not objective claims whose truth can be proven by some further objectivist description, nor are they meant as such. This concession forms part of the background of this essay. Subjective properties and aspects of the world and of events are indeed subjective— they cannot be provided by some supposed objectivist methods. But these subjective elements of the world are real nonetheless, and they are shared among subjects. (See Nagel, 1979) Therein lies their significance and normativity. Perception is normative and this is not merely due to the objectivity of its claims. In the case of subjective properties, that require a shared history of subjective events, this normativity requires that these subjective events are shared among perceivers. In the following example from Shoah we do not merely see the one protagonist that I concentrate on below, but a whole crowd responding, as one, to the things that are said, and this, we shall see, connects punctum scenes with Aristotle’s view on universal, particular philosophical knowledge, in its second interpretation. So far, I submitted that in documentaries people may sometimes betray themselves through gestures and facial expressions, which may be registered by viewers through their mimicking those movements. These movements reveal who one is (Bresson), providing a physical counterpart to the universal knowledge Aristotle expects from poetry. Only this time this occurs in filmed real events, not fictional ones. Through our bodily mimicking these moments of self-betrayal prick the viewer, like Barthes’ punctum.

Shoah: Srebnik and Kantarowski ‘Simon Srebnik surrounded by villagers from Chelmno outside the church’ is an episode from Shoah, with Simon Srebnik, who returned to Chelmno for the first time since his deportation in the early 1940s, for the sake of this meeting (Fig.  14.1). About Srebnik, Claude Lanzmann, the documentary filmmaker, says: During the night of January 18, 1945, two days before Soviet troops arrived, the Nazis killed all the remaining Jews in the “work details” with a bullet in

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Fig. 14.1  Simon Srebnik and, behind him, a nervous Kantarowski the head. Simon Srebnik was among those executed. But the bullet missed his vital brain centers. When he came to, he crawled into a pigsty. A Polish farmer found him there. The boy was treated and healed by a Soviet Army doctor. A few months later Simon left for Tel Aviv along with other survivors of the death camps. I found him in Israel and persuaded [him] to retum with me to Chelmno. He was then forty-seven years old. (Lanzmann, 1985a, pp. 3–4)

In the episode, Srebnik is shown standing in front of the local church amidst the inhabitants who are being interviewed about what happened when the Jews were deported and murdered by the SS. Lanzmann talks to the assembled people, through his translator, asking them detailed questions such as, ‘Why were the Jews assembled in the church,’ and ‘Where were they standing?’. In the morning they were taken into the woods in very big armored vans.

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The gas came through the bottom … They all knew these were death vans, to gas people? Yes, they couldn’t help knowing. (Lanzmann, 1985a, p. 97)

And so on. The people fill in the details: The Jews were rich, they hid money and diamonds in the ‘false bottoms of their pots’. Lanzmann keeps asking for more details: What did they hear exactly? and so on. They needed about fifty trucks to take all the Jews. In the film, the episode starts with a man—whom we are later introduced to as Mr. Kantarowski—singing and playing the organ in the church, throned high above the congregation but hidden from their sight. We see from his posture that he is aware of the camera, though we are not really paying much attention to the fact of his awareness. Kantarowski looks down on the congregation in the church whilst playing (for) them— through the sounds of the organ and his singing. He carries the service, rather than the priests, or so his posture suggests. Once the service is done, Kantarowski joins the people in front of the church who are already talking to Lanzmann. Almost instantly, Kantarowski is seen gesturing nervously, moving so much that it attracts our attention. Then he steps forward, and plants himself squarely in front of the camera, blocking our view of Simon Srebnik. Kantarowski obliterates Chelmno’s only surviving Jew by over-enthusiastically stepping in front of him, in full view of the camera. He solemnly reports that he had heard of a rabbi from Mindjewyce, near Warsaw, who had reminded the Jews assembled by the SS in the square before him, that it says in the Bible that the Jews had cried out that ‘His blood cometh over us’. Kantarowski adds that Pilate had said that they were killing an innocent man, and concludes: ‘It was God’s will’. And the crowd explicitly goes along with that conclusion. One woman steps forward from the crowd, too, seeming rather angry. (See Fig. 14.2) She explicitly repeats the Pilate scene from the Bible, and concludes, ‘The Jews cried out: “Let his blood fall on our heads!” That’s all; now you know!’ Kantarowski’s report may be true. The rabbi probably did say such things. But why does Kantarowski say this, and why did the rabbi speak as he did? The rabbi most probably thought that it would be better if the Jews did not protest against the unfolding events as they would risk being killed on the spot, leaving no hope at all of escaping harm. But Kantarowski seems to regard the event as proof that even the Jews themselves thought they deserved what was happening to them. Irrespective of what they expected, it was by now evident to everyone that they would not survive.

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Fig. 14.2  The angry woman and Kantarowski ‘washing’ his hands in innocence

Lanzmann assembled the villagers in front of the church to meet the returning Srebnik, and to inquire what they remembered of the past events. Against this background, Kantarowski’s report seems rather out of place. And he underscores the fact that it was the rabbi who said it, not he himself, and that he certainly did not think they deserved to be killed. Again, then, why recount the rabbi’s words? In one go, he attempts to clear both himself and the villagers of any responsibility for what happened to the Jews. When the woman repeats Kantarowski’s point, that the Jews were killing an innocent man, we see Kantarowski, next to the woman, wringing his hands as though he, too, is washing them in innocence, just as Pilate did literally.

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Pilate … took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. (The Bible, Matthew, xxvii. 24)

But then we notice that Kantarowski realizes what he is doing and corrects himself by making it look like his hands are cold and he is wringing them for warmth. And then we see him decide that there is no need for this charade, and resume wringing his hands. He has just exculpated his fellow villagers. To finish off, Lanzmann zooms in on the face of Srebnik expressing in his look an understanding of what has just happened. Lanzmann’s narrative interest requires him to explicitly turn the imagery into a message. But it is by a sheer cinematographic accident that Lanzmann records how, in the present, another Jew is betrayed. We can actually see in the punctum of the footage how this is happening. What we see is how people are. The scene shows what all people, in some measure at some time, do or would have done. We see the phenomenology of our psychology, just the kind of universal knowledge that interests Aristotle, illustrated in the behavior of one man. The scene as a whole, also, exemplifies beautifully how Lanzmann succeeds in recording the advent of so-called historical sensations through the testimonials of the witnesses. The notion of ‘historical sensation’ is proposed by Johan Huizinga, who advises historians to visit the geographical site involved in the history they are analyzing, so as to get a feel of the situation. Similarly, Lanzmann brings the witnesses he interviews into situations resembling those they are going to talk about. Srebnik and the villagers stand on the exact same spot, in front of the church, where the Jews were assembled; and he asks the villagers to recount details that will transport them to the past. In another period in the film, Lanzmann talks with Abraham Bomba, a barber who is recounting what happened when he had to cut the hair of women in the gas chamber in Treblinka, where they were about to be gassed, which he knew but they did not. Lanzmann interviews Bomba in a barbershop in Tel Aviv, and asks him at one point to show the moves he made when cutting the women’s hair, and so on. The witnesses physically feel the horrors they are recounting, in their movements, because in part they are in similar circumstances, and are aware of this. Historical sensations, I submit, are conveyed in documentaries in punctum scenes.

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In the present case, the people in front of the church are physically and psychologically transported back to those moments when the Jews were driven away in gas trucks. The older villagers have returned to their past and the younger ones pick up on this through the older ones’ expressions and body language. Srebnik, too, is feeling as lonely and betrayed as he must have done back then. And we are witnessing all this in actu. We are not being told this, but we see, in the images, how in the current situation moral betrayal arises, and that it consists in an inauthenticity that shows in gestures and facial expressions, for all to notice. In the episode, one person’s inauthenticity is shown helping others accept their own.

Back to Aristotle My fascination with punctum scenes is also connected to the fact that, initially, they are hard to identify. This, we know now, is due to the fact that punctum details lack their own narrative structure. As an unanalyzable expressive aspect of physical movement, they are harder to remember or to hold on to. I remember them through the inauthentic gestures that inadvertently I mimic in my imagination. These associative mnemonic episodes which, often, I cannot easily bring home, are not exceptions to my normal perceptual encounters. We see properties, events, people, and objects all day long and nearly always understand what they are, and what they afford or do not afford us to do with them—if not instantly then within seconds. But once we understand the details we simply move on and use the perceived as we anticipated. You enter a room, looking for a chair, and once you have found one, you sit on it, and forget about it. And then sometimes something comes to mind that we don’t know where from, nor what it means. Kantarowski’s gestures obsessed me initially not as clear and meaningful images but as movements with a certain coherence that my body was inclined to mimic intuitively. It is the search for the reality and the meaning of that coherence that guided me to their origin. Are there real-life analogues to punctum scenes in films? When I was pondering about non-actors playing a role who thus betray both themselves and their audiences, an episode from my own life came to my mind. I was with P. who had retrieved a copy of his latest book from his publisher and sold it to me. When I handed him the money I made a sniffing sound with my thumb under my nose as though suggesting he had just sold me some coke. Just a sick joke, I thought, assuming that P. would join me in

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laughing. Instead, he snorted ‘Don’t be impertinent’. I did not understand this anger, and did not know how to respond to it except by falling silent and switching to another subject. I had no clue what had gone wrong and hadn’t had the slightest intention to offend him. Later I realized that the joke I made was of a type an old friend of mine and myself would standardly have great fun with. Possibly, P. had a history of drug use and, in his view, I had confronted him with this in plain sight. And why was I shocked at his response? Because I realized that the joke was not mine to begin with but my youthful friend’s. I made it in bad faith. I could choose to argue that perhaps my sensitivity for punctum scenes stems from an acquaintance with inauthentic situations like this. They psychologically dispose me, so to say, to immediately recognize the slightest hint of betrayal: my own or others’. I guess that must be true, but I refuse to think it is something peculiarly mine. Being human equips us all with this capacity. This is unlike the necklace that pricked Barthes: though everyone may notice it in the photo they will not all have memories about it as Barthes did. Human gestures, and therefore events such as the one with P., are integral to life. Self-betrayal oozes out of all pores, said Freud. And so does authenticity or inauthenticity. This is the stuff that interpersonal relations are made of, and that a species such as ours depends on. If we can inadvertently betray our authenticity, we can also, at other times, communicate it—in both cases, gestures and facial expressions do the work, rather than the specific things we say. And the anecdote with P. shows something else: that such situations can be painful for all involved. One gets caught for being inauthentic. Isn’t this the existential core of shame? In this incident, everything fitted my mistake like a glove—not that I have established that here, but it is how I remember it (which is how memory works). That is why it sticks with me, possibly due to the fact that it exemplifies so much of the way I lead my life. The incident is not farfetched. It is one example of one part of that singular action, as yet unknown, that characterizes my life, symptomatic of the possibility of Aristotle’s universal particular knowledge. I definitely also felt inauthentic for some deeper reason—I felt that I had hurt my friend by being out of character and telling a joke for social reasons. This was not an example of punctum, obviously, since it is not reproduced here. But such scenes from reality could somehow have been captured in punctum scenes. So we must distinguish these real-life examples from fictional tragedies.

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In film, art and history sometimes come as one: the reality of historical anecdote and the universal insight provided by something made, a representation. Film shows that the cleft between poetry and history may not be as steep as it was for Aristotle; if only the historical representation gives us the phenomenological details, as it may accidentally do, in some documentary scene.

References Aristotle. (1986). Classical Literary Criticism (T. Dorsch, Ed.). Penguin Books. Barthes, R. (2000). Camera Lucida (R. Howard, Trans.). Vintage. Bresson, R. (2016). Notes on the Cinematograph. The New  York Review of Books, Inc. Lanzmann, C. (1985a). Shoah. An Oral History of the Holocaust. New  York Pantheon Books. Nagel, T. (1979). Subjective and Objective. In Mortal Questions (pp. 196–214). Cambridge University Press. Rorty, A.  O. (1992). The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy. In A.  O. Rorty (Ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics (pp. 1–22). Princeton University Press. van Gerwen, R. (2018). Shall We Stay in Touch. How We Remove the Mind from Our World View. (In Dutch: Zullen we contact houden. Hoe we de geest uit ons wereldbeeld verwijderen). Klement.

Filmography Lanzmann, C. (Director). (1985b). Shoah [Film]. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); Historia; Les Films Aleph; Ministère de la Culture de la Republique Française.

CHAPTER 15

Mary Magdalene and Murdochian Film Phenomenology Lucy Bolton

Phenomenology is not a theory, and film phenomenology does not apply a theoretical approach to film. Films are not spoken about as illustrating or demonstrating phenomenology. Rather the conceptual concerns of the phenomenological tradition with the lived experience of the individual, both their consciousness and their embodiment, enable an orientation towards film that focuses on the film experience and its affective nature.1 Film is, after all, an experience that takes time, which engages and immerses the viewer. Film conveys meaning through evocation of experience and feeling, which in turn evokes responses in the individual who watches, hears, and perceives the film. This aspect of film has captivated and entranced from the origins of cinema, and has been grappled with by thinkers from Epstein to Woolf, Balázs to Bazin, Munsterberg to Marks, and Sobchack to Cooper. Variously called the ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, or ‘magic’ of cinema, attempts to capture and explain this essence, or what Epstein

L. Bolton (*) Queen Mary University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_15

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called photogénie (Wall-Romana, 2013, pp.  25–31), reveal the way in which the ineffable is integral to the experience of film. In 1956, Iris Murdoch considered the ineffability of film in a short article on the cinema in British VOGUE. In it, Murdoch considers “now what can the movie camera do that nothing else can do, and what should it therefore busy itself in doing?” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 78). For Murdoch, the cinema can show “human character on display at the point where spirit and matter are most intensely fused” (ibid.)—that is, in the human face. Murdoch describes cinema as an “art of intensified consciousness” (ibid.), created from sound, image, movement, and emotion. The intensity of this “grotesque presentation” need not be alarming, she says, but it can be; it can also be funny, and it may be emotional, but Murdoch finds she does not see emotion minutely expressed as much as she would like. Murdoch was mistrustful of any theory, capital T, that claimed to take mastery over everything, whether it was Freudian psychoanalysis or Derridean structuralism. She was concerned, always, to pay attention to the reality of life, to historically situated beings, to real people, and daily activities. For her, this is where human beings are doing their moral work, and this is the realm of moral philosophy. In her discussion of consciousness, intention, and emotion, Murdoch grapples with what we might now call film phenomenology: the demands and experiences of the film, which show us the reality of emotion, “minutely expressed”, on the human face (ibid., p. 78). A phenomenological approach to film experience enables an appreciation of the elements Murdoch identifies, through careful, close attention and meticulous description. As Murdoch writes, “it can present to us human drama and feeling in the form of momentary awareness” (ibid.). Murdoch identifies sound, close-up, objects, emotion, lighting, time, and indoor and outdoor shots, as requiring our attention. This could not be further from the idea of ‘applying a theory’ to a film: rather, it calls for film to be attended to, viewed with care, and treated as generative. In this chapter, I will explore Mary Magdalene (Davis, 2018) in light of Murdoch’s thinking on the cinema, in order to convey the affective power of the film, and the way in which the fusion of ‘spirit and matter’ is evoked and conveyed. This is a highly Murdochian film for many reasons, not least because of the repeated concept of a transcendent light which is reminiscent of Murdoch’s thinking on a transcendent Good (Murdoch, 1997, p. 356). Primarily, however, the film is focused on the attention and unselfing of the protagonist, Mary (Rooney Mara), as well as demanding the same attitude from the film viewer. Subverting the stereotypes of the Magdalene

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character in popular culture (Bolton, 2020, pp. 2–3), and in the history of cinema, the film relies upon intensified consciousness in order to convey the mind and spirit of Mary (Bolton, 2019, p. 213). The film suggests that Mary Magdalene best understood Jesus’s message and was his closest follower, whom he identified as his witness: she is shown as the apostle to the apostles, as she is now acknowledged as being by the Catholic church (Bolton, 2020, pp. 3–4). The relationship between Jesus and Mary is portrayed as loving, based on spiritual connection and mutual understanding. I will demonstrate that the film Mary Magdalene is illuminated through Murdoch’s thinking about how film can enlarge our imaginations in relation to the notion of spirituality, and the specific abilities of cinema, which here create a spiritual phenomenological experience.

Mary of Magdala The film begins with Mary living her life amongst her family and community, mending and drying fishing nets, and taking part in communal meals and prayers. We are introduced to her abilities as a midwife when the women call for her to attend the childbirth of one of her relatives, Leah (Shira Haas), who is terrified and in intense pain. Mary lies down next to her and makes strong, intimate, and sustained eye contact with her, reassuring her and keeping her present and accompanied. Mary reassures Leah, “I am here with you”, and calms her. The birth goes well, and one of the women says the midwife described Mary as “a natural”. Our first encounter with Mary, then, is evidence of her strength and bravery, and also her ability to instil affinity and connection with another in their time of suffering. This marks her out as somebody with spiritual qualities, and the way in which she looks so closely at the woman in labour conjures up, at the outset, what might be considered a “sacred gaze” (Morgan, 2005, p. 3; see Fig. 15.1). David Morgan describes a sacred gaze as “the manner in which a way of seeing invests an image, a viewer, or an act of viewing with spiritual significance” (2005, p. 3). The word ‘gaze’ is clearly familiar in the field of film studies, not least as associated with Laura Mulvey’s work on identifying the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975). But Morgan uses “gaze” to convey the idea that “the entire visual field that constitutes seeing is the framework of analysis, not just the image itself” (ibid.). This approach takes gazing to be an act of looking but within context, and by an embodied subject. The notion of the sacred imbues the gaze with an awareness or openness to holiness or to God. This is the type of gaze that

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Fig. 15.1  Mary reassures Leah

Mary exhibits in the film, and also, I suggest, that the film calls on the viewer to be open to offer. The sacred gaze is useful to think about as the way in which Mary looks at Leah, Jesus, and others in the film. Although Mary is so frequently conceived of in art and cinema as a carnal, sexual, woman, the Garth Davis film presents her as a woman of spiritual yearning. Mary sees Jesus (Joaquin Phoenix), whom she calls the Rabbi, speaking and teaching, and is moved by him. She relates to his words about knowing God. Mary’s drive to know God is a metaphysical concern that consumes her, which means that her character in the film is one on a spiritual quest. Although physically she takes up with Jesus and the disciples and follows him, her desire and her drive are to know God. The challenge for the film, then, is to convey her spiritual quest on screen. It is here that Murdoch’s understanding of the capabilities of cinema for showing the fusing of spirit and matter can explain and enhance our understanding of how the film achieves this.

Mary’s Life in Magdala Mary is a young woman who prioritises caring for her father (Tchéky Karyo), prayer, and her love for God, and resists pressure from her brother Daniel (Denis Ménochet) to marry. Mary is desired as a wife by the widow, Ephraim (Tsahi Halevi), and her brother and father want this to happen, arranging a meal for them to meet. Mary returns from work and sees her embroidered dress put out for her to wear for the meal: she views it with a mixture of realisation and fear. Never has a simple embroidered linen dress been such an ominous sign of threat and menace, representing as it

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does the end of Mary’s freedom to love God and the forcing of her into a marriage, conjugal love, and childcare. Mary continues to resist the pressure to marry, saying that she is not made for that life. Mary’s brother and father do not understand her refusal to marry, and are at a loss as to what to do with her. They believe there might be an evil spirit in her, and, early one morning, they wake her and take her down to the lake to try to drive the demon out of her. In this distressing scene, her hefty, domineering brother, holds Mary under the water time and again, allowing her up above water for time to gulp air, then forcing her back under. Finally, her father intervenes, and Mary is carried away, unconscious. She is taken back to her home and laid on the floor. Her father approaches her with regret, but she rolls away from him. The women undress her and dry her, their hands caring and careful, and she lies on the floor, in a state that is almost catatonic.

Meeting the Rabbi An initially unseen visitor speaks to Mary as she lies on the floor, and he says he has been told by her family that she “dabbles with a demon”. She says that if there is a demon in her, “it has always been there”. The rabbi, Jesus, asks her what it is she longs for, and she says, “to know God”. Jesus instantly knows and sees what she means, saying all that is needed is her faith. He smiles and touches her on her forehead, and says “there is no demon here”, telling her to “rest in the light”. She is understood, not as a mad woman, or a possessed freak of nature, defying her societal obligations, but rather as a spiritual being, who is full of love and is driven to learn about God. Mary listens to the Rabbi speaking to the people of Magdala, challenging them to “wake up”. He and Mary smile at each other with mutual recognition of Jesus’s understanding of faith. This is a smile of understanding, of kinship, of love, and of excitement at the meaning of his teachings.

A Follower of Jesus Mary gets up early one morning and leaves Magdala to join Jesus and his followers. Her sister-in-law, brother, and father all try to stop her, but she is determined to leave. She walks into the water and Jesus follows and baptises her. The difference between this baptismal immersion in water and the violence of her brother’s assault is stark. She is not welcomed to

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the group by Peter (Chiwetal Ejiofor), who says she will divide them, but Judas (Tahar Rahim) speaks kindly to her and tells her what he understands by the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. For Judas, whose wife and daughter died because of Roman oppression, the coming of the Kingdom means that the dead will rise and he will see his wife and daughter again. For other disciples, it means there will be an armed uprising, and the Roman oppressors will be overthrown. Mary’s watchful expression reveals that she is troubled by this belief, and she challenges them with the prophecy of a Prince of Peace. When Jesus asks her about the followers, she tells him that they want to be soldiers, but that she does not. She asks Jesus what it feels like to be one with God. And Jesus replies that nobody has ever asked him that. This conversation between Jesus and Mary is intimate and personal, and on occasion childlike, as she covers her face with her shawl and then pulls it away, to show that Jesus remains, even when she can’t see him. She describes her out-of-body experiences when floating deep in the lake in Magdala, a time when she felt at peace. The moments of conflict with the disciples, and the burgeoning kinship with Jesus, establish the dynamic between Mary and Jesus as being based on spiritual understanding, which is strong and sincere, and certainly not sexual or romantic love. Jesus’s mother observes that Mary loves Jesus, and Mary does not demur. However, the feeling between them is portrayed as agape rather than eros. The film raises concepts that are rare in a mainstream film such as this, produced by Universal Pictures, amongst others, and employing star actors. Debate about Jesus’s status as the Messiah is central to the dynamic of the group, and the meaning of the Kingdom of God is what divides Mary from the rest of the apostles. Also, the idea of being ‘open to the light’ and ‘welcoming in the light’ is repeated as the words of baptism, by Jesus, and later by Mary when she baptises, evoking a transcendental, metaphysical meaning that those who are baptised should open their hearts and minds to see (see Fig. 15.2). When Mary and Peter come across a community who have been attacked and left to die by Roman soldiers, Peter expresses his opinion that it is too late to help them, but Mary stays, orders him to get water, and nurses them through death. Just as she held the woman who was giving birth, saying “I am here with you”, she eases the final moments of the emaciated, suffering people whom she holds and comforts with words of God’s love and care. Following this distressing and truly moving display,

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Fig. 15.2  Mary shares the joy of those she has baptised

Peter is compelled to proclaim that Mary has demonstrated mercy, another striking concept with spiritual and holy connotations.

“You Are My Witness” As Mary’s understanding of the Kingdom increases, that it is here, now, in the hearts of people, she comes to understand the ominous fate that awaits Jesus. The disciples are awaiting the uprising that they believe Jesus will instigate, but Mary knows that Jesus is heading towards his death. After Judas has realised that Jesus is not going to bring him the revolution that he has been hoping for, Mary washes Jesus’ feet, as an act of care, because they are dirty, not as is usually described, as an offering of expensive nard and then drying with her hair (Bolton, 2020, p. 3). Jesus says to Mary that “it has begun” and that she should not stop, nor “let them stop it”; she says that she will be with him, and that she will not leave. Jesus says that she is his witness. In the garden of Gethsemane, when Judas kisses Jesus and identifies him to the Romans, Mary is struck by a soldier as she tries to wrestle with him, and she is knocked out. In a sequence that departs from the usual filmic depictions of the last hours of Christ, which feature him being brought before Pontius Pilate, whipped, and forced to carry his cross to the site of his crucifixion, this film stays with Mary. We wake up with Mary as she comes round and Judas tells her what has happened. She runs to the city, trying to push her way through the crowds, until she sees Jesus struggling to bear the cross. Mary passes out and is left behind on the ground, unconscious. When she comes to again, she makes her way to the cross, to find Jesus in his final agonising state. She stands at the foot of

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Fig. 15.3  Mary stays with Jesus on the cross

the cross, fixing her eyes on his, and he returns her look. She weeps at his unbearable pain and this terrible sight, and yet she stays until he dies (see Fig. 15.3). Jesus’s broken body is given to his mother, who caresses him in her distress, and then he is bound and buried in a tomb. Mary stays outside the entrance to the tomb, which is blocked up with rocks and stones. She weeps, her sadness overwhelming, and stays pressed up against the stones, trying to stay close to him physically. At dawn, she is woken by Jesus saying her name, and she sees Jesus sitting a distance away.

Apostle to the Apostles We next see Mary going to see Peter and the other disciples, where she tells them that she has seen the Rabbi in person. She tells them he is not dead, he is not in pain, and that he has shown them that the Kingdom of God is here, on earth, amongst them: Jesus’s call is to lift the people with acts of love and care. Strengthened by her knowledge, and her realisation that they have the power to bring about change, she hopes that they have heard what she has said, but Peter will not believe her interpretation, and says she has weakened them, and that she weakened Jesus. In spite of this, Mary asserts that she will not stay and be silent, that she will be heard. The film returns to see Jesus and Mary sitting together, as Jesus explains to the joyful Mary that this is what the Kingdom is like (see Fig. 15.4). Mary is finally shown striding out, as women recognise her and follow her, and the film ends with the prospect of Mary’s mission. She has been the apostle to the apostles, telling them about the risen Jesus, and explaining his message to them. Without their acceptance, understanding, or

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Fig. 15.4  Mary is joyful to see Jesus risen

consent, she embarks on her own mission, and the film ends on a note of defiance and promise.

‘What a Commentary on the Dramas of Love!’ (Murdoch, 1956, p. 78) As Murdoch writes, cinema enlarges our imagination. It also enlarges our capacity for attention, which is the primary concern of Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. Murdoch describes the idea of attention or contemplation, “of looking carefully at something and holding it before the mind” (MGM, 1992, p. 3). This “holding” is an inevitable part of experiencing Mary Magdalene. One is compelled to focus and concentrate on Mary’s face as it is replete with meaning, and which aligns us with her observation and interpretation of Jesus and the disciples. Murdoch’s philosophy calls on us to “unself” (E&M, 1997, p. 376)—which means to turn away from our “fat relentless ego” (E&M, 1997, p. 342) and focus on another, with a “just and loving gaze” (E&M, 1997, p. 327). This gaze is not deluded, or consoling, but rather it pays attention: it aims to see justly. Murdoch draws heavily on art and images in her philosophy and sees that both the careful making of an artwork, like a painting, and the careful, patient regard of art, such as walking around a sculpture, or standing back from a painting, has value as a type of moral training: this type of attention to art takes us out of ourselves, helps us to transcend our ego and to cultivate “a loving regard” for the other person or thing. This attention is an objectual, directed attention. For Murdoch, “Art makes places and opens spaces for reflection, it is a defence against materialism and against

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pseudo-­scientific attitudes to life” (MGM, 1992, p. 8). A film like Mary Magdalene, which relies so heavily on emotion and information revealed through watchfulness and silence, certainly opens such a place and space for reflection. Although Murdoch does not write about cinema as such an art form, I suggest it is even more in line with Murdoch’s thinking than the other arts she mentions. Her article on the cinema also suggests that it would work for her, and for us, in this way. Murdoch writes, “the film is, for better or worse, the medium which can most exactly reproduce the moment-to-moment vagaries of the human consciousness” (1956, p. 78). Compared to the other arts, “a film is as near to us as our own self-­ awareness, and comes over us with the inevitability of time itself” (ibid.). Murdoch does also warn of the dangers of art, however, and in particular, claims that “Art is most pernicious when it poses as a spiritual achievement and inhibits serious reflection and self-criticism” (MGM, 1992, p. 13). It could be argued that a mainstream film about the story of Mary Magdalene, just might be a consoling piece of bad art. After all, as Murdoch describes, God is a kind of “super art-object” (MGM, 1992, p. 81), and Christianity, which “has provided us with a mythology, a story, images, pictures, a dominant and attractive central character, is itself like a vast work of art” (MGM, 1992, p.  82). Undoubtedly, as Murdoch observes, “The story of Christ is the story which we want to hear: that suffering can be redemptive, and that death is not the end” (MGM, 1992, p. 128). However, Murdoch also observes that “Understanding what art is, its charms, its powers, its limits, helps us to understand religion” (MGM, 1992, p. 83). This is a fascinating blend of the attention demanded by art in a more general sense, and that which is called for by art that professes to have spiritual content. My suggestion is that Mary Magdalene’s spiritual address is achieved through the invitation to a phenomenological orientation towards the film, which takes place through physical affect but also a sacred gaze, or Murdochian attention. So how does this all come together as a Murdochian-inspired film phenomenology? There are no rules, or prescribed patterns, or tropes. Murdoch is opposed to totalising theories that pronounce the way of the world, and which seek to override particularity and individuality. She is also opposed to theories of art which seek to explain meaning and dictate ‘reading’. I turn to Murdoch here not in order to apply her concepts to read or explain the film, but rather to adopt the orientation she suggests: a patient, loving regard. The film demands this, through its focus on

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Mary’s watchful face, and her responses to her witness of Jesus. Rooney Mara’s face has many different looks, from joy to desolation, seriousness to levity, intense focus to more general appraisal. Many of these appearances are unsupported by dialogue, and convey meaning by her facial expressions alone. She may simply be in repose, whilst looking on; and yet, we are able to discern what she is thinking. And, vitally, this is not narrative information, but rather it is spiritual understanding. One of the hardest things to communicate onscreen is thoughtfulness. There are of course the basic building blocks of film language, such as the point-of-view shot, the shot-reverse-shot, or reaction shot, to convey responses and character perception. But to clearly communicate cerebral processes without voiceover is challenging. I suggest that Mary Magdalene achieves this to a large extent by the focus on Mary’s sensitive, intelligent and watchful face in the context of this spiritually thoughtful film. As I set out at the beginning of this chapter, Murdoch writes how a film can show, on a face, spirit and matter intensely fused. Here, in Mary Magdalene, this is not only evident, but is an integral element of the film experience. It is through our close attention to Mary’s face that we see her sacred gaze at Leah, Judas, Jesus, and those she baptises. This gaze is focused, and searching, and sees the spirit of the other. We, in turn, see Jesus and the meaning of the Kingdom through the film’s focalisation on Mary’s spiritual life. In this way, the film is concerned with metaphysics and the transcendental: Mary’s knowledge and understanding of Jesus’s message is conveyed through her close attention to him. Mary Magdalene is a profoundly affective film experience. The soundscape of Mary tending to the fishing nets on the beach creates a harsh, isolating, and unforgiving environment. The positioning of the men and the women around the meal which is designed to introduce Mary to Ephraim is uncomfortable, and the moment when their hands meet in the olive bowl is a jolting shock. It feels as if it is a violation, as if Mary has been tricked, as Ephraim reaches for the bowl at the same time as her. What is intended by this man to be an invitation or a sign of romantic intent feels like a threat and an assault. As Mary is repeatedly held under water by her brother, the violence takes one’s breath away, and the trauma is exacerbated by this betrayal by her family. This only adds to the monumental feeling of relief and joy when Jesus touches Mary’s head and understands her, saying there is no demon in her. Mary is immediately healed by Jesus’s understanding, which releases her to follow her drive to know and understand God on earth. Some of the most physically affective

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moments are perhaps clichéd, such as the sight of Mary floating in the lake, or the pegging of the nets on the lines: both these tropes are overused in cinema as ways of conveying female embodiment. But other moments, such as the impact of the sight of the folded, embroidered dress, or the awareness of the strength of her choice when she is baptised by Jesus, are original and affecting in powerful ways. Approaching the film by describing its affectiveness, however, is only part of the work that Mary Magdalene requires. It is the case that the viewer is invited to share Mary’s physical experience of the world, be it on a windswept beach, floating deep beneath the surface of the water, or being knocked out and losing consciousness. But we are also invited to share her spiritual experiences: being misunderstood and betrayed by her family, being understood and accepted by Jesus, attending to the suffering of others from a position of strength and mercy, and remaining committed to spreading the word of her understanding of Jesus’s message. This leads not only to a figuration of the unselfing which Murdoch speaks of, but to a phenomenological experience of that spiritual strength. The intense joy in the exchange of looks between Mary and the women she baptises conveys the significance of this dynamic, and what the woman as baptiser might have meant to other women at the time. The exchange of looks between Jesus and Mary conveys their understanding and her commitment to him, and the exceptionality of their connection. One of the most radical elements of the film is the spirituality: this is a Christian film. It talks about the Kingdom of God, and calls for a way of being in the world that practices love and forgiveness. Murdoch, as a neo-­ Platonist, believed in a transcendent “Good” but did not believe in a deity. For Murdoch, Christ was an important moral example, but not in any way divine. Murdoch had no time for the view of God as a bearded patriarch, and did not believe in any divine being. Rather, she saw the Buddhist practice of meditation, and Christian prayer, as pursuits that were concerned with moral improvement, provided there was not an element of petition for favours or rewards (1997, p.  344). The idea of reward for good deeds is anathema to Murdoch, and she was firmly of the belief that goodness was to be lived and inhabited in the here and now; and that goodness is evident everywhere amongst us. This seems to be a viewpoint enacted by Mary Magdalene: Jesus preaches against the idea of rewards in heaven, and demands sacrifice here, now. Mary understands this, and the hardships it entails. Murdoch conceived of the Good as a transcendent attraction, like a giant magnet (1997, p.  361). For Murdoch, our

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attraction to the Good is evidence that we are “spiritual creatures”, and she speaks of it as “a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun” (1997, p. 384). These metaphysical images resound with the talk about seeing the light, or resting in the light, throughout Mary Magdalene. In many ways, the film creates spaces for us to reflect, respond, and to picture. For Murdoch, we picture concepts because “picturing is so natural”: In thinking about abstract matters, one instinctively produces images, such as duty being like a laser beam coming from above; an image which may itself elicit figurative rejoinders. (MGM, 1992, p. 36)

This inclination “to picture” is also one that Murdoch believes comes naturally to human beings. She writes that “We do not have to have a theoretical interest in morality”, but rather that “there is indeed a kind of (instinctive) orientation or certainty which is rejected if we emphasise free will and individual decision” (MGM, 1992, p. 55). Mary Magdalene is a film that accords with Murdoch’s opinion that, Religion is about reconciliation and forgiveness and renewal of life and salvation from sin and despair. It lives between cosy sentiment and magic at one end of the scale and at the other a kind of austerity which can scarcely be expected from human beings. (MGM, 1992, p. 129)

Mary Magdalene is not an easy or cosy film to experience, but rather a challenge as a piece of art with a powerful spiritual core. Murdoch considers that philosophers are artists, ‘and metaphysical ideas are aesthetic’ (MGM, 1992, p.  37). It is clear that cinema can show us Murdochian metaphysical ideas, and the duty is on us to explore them. A Murdochian neo-theology of cinema calls out to be written, concerned with how film can show us spirituality and resonate with the moral work of paying attention to art, as in this film we pay attention to Mary’s face. Murdoch describes scenes from The Magnificent Ambersons in the following way, as “a piece of intensified consciousness transformed into the material of art” (1956, p. 79). It is this intensity, and consciousness, and art, that we see in Mary Magdalene. And, as Murdoch wonders whether the figure of Christ can remain religiously significant, “without the old god-man mythology” (MGM, 1992, p. 136), I suggest that this film offers a phenomenology of spirituality which leads to feminist, theological, and ethical reflection on this very question.

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Note 1. A good introduction to the phenomenological tradition is Phenomenology (2021) by Stephan Käufer and Anthony Chemero, and in order to understand the development of the phenomenological turn within film studies, see Saige Walton’s book Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement (2016).

References Bolton, L. (2019). Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Edinburgh University Press. Bolton, L. (2020). Beautiful Penitent Whore: The Desecrated Celebrity of Mary Magdalene. Celebrity Studies, 11(1), 25–42. Käufer, S., & Chemero, A. (2021). Phenomenology, An Introduction. Polity. Morgan, D. (2005). The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice. University of California Press. Murdoch, I. (1956). What They See in the Cinema. VOGUE, 7, 8–79. Murdoch, I. [1992] (2003, pb). Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Vintage. Murdoch, I. (1997). Existentialists and Mystics (P. Conradi, Ed.). Penguin. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Wall-Romana, C. (2013). Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy. Manchester University Press. Walton, S. (2016). Cinema’s Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement. Amsterdam University Press.

Filmography Davis, G. (2018). Mary Magdalene. Film. UK, USA, Australia: See-Saw Films.

PART V

Cinematic Investigations

CHAPTER 16

Cinematic Invisibility: The Shower Scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho James Conant

One mark of a great work of art is how it can seem to unfold within itself an infinite degree of intention so that every aspect of the work appears to contribute in an essential way to its overall unity. If we are talking about a great poem, the resulting whole requires just these words spoken in just this order: each occurring precisely where and how it does, with just these possibilities of alluding to what remains unsaid, with just these assonances and dissonances, with just this rhythm and meter, with just this length of line, or duration of rhyme or lyricism or pathos, or degree of indulgence or restraint in relation to any or all of the above. If we are talking about certain great movies, every murmur or scream we are able or unable to hear, every violin stroke of the soundtrack, every camera angle and movement, everything shown or withheld from view, the brevity or length of the duration of every shot or pan, not only the number of cuts in a montage sequence, but every dimension of its rhythm and pacing—everything in the work—carries aesthetic significance and contributes essentially to

J. Conant (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_16

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the unity and power of the whole. Alteration of any one tiny aspect of the film would mangle the whole no less drastically than altering a single line of a Shakespeare sonnet. This classic conception of the unity of a great work of art is not one to which every Hollywood director aspires, but it is one to which Alfred Hitchcock aspires. If such perfection is achieved within the construction of a sonnet, then it will be comparatively evident to us that we cannot tinker with any part without ruining the whole. If such thoroughgoing unity in the relation of the parts to the whole is achieved within the construction of a Hollywood film, then the exquisite exactitude and beauty of such an achievement is apt to remain underappreciated. This holds true even if the moment in question is as famous as any in the history of Hollywood cinema: the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho. On our initial viewing of Psycho, seeing Marion Crane meet Norman Bates for the first time, we feel we are witness to a conversation between Marion and Norman that could hold the key to Marion’s salvation. This reinforces our sense that Marion is the heroine of this film—that she might be on the verge of regaining control of her fate, rather than just fleeing the consequences of her impulsive act of theft. On a second viewing, the bubble of our focus is irremediably burst; we are now in a position to begin to gauge the ramifying ways in which Marion’s (and our own) attention was misdirected. We begin to register what we blithely misconstrued, grossly minimized, or blankly overlooked, as that which was never hidden becomes visible. In this essay, I consider the challenges and achievements of one such case of cinematic ‘invisibility.’

Cinematic Orientations Until the film arrives at the shower scene, it has been about Marian Crane and the consequences of her impulsive act. The story appears to be her story not least because she has been on screen for almost all of the first forty minutes of the movie. If we know anything about how such movies work, we know this: this movie is about her. If we know anything about what a Hollywood movie is, we also take ourselves to know a great many other things—such as: we need to keep one eye firmly fixed on the $40,000, which she left back in her hotel room; for what happens to that money matters. Let this stand as the first entry in a long list of things

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which we mistakenly take ourselves to know about what is (and is not) supposed to matter. The last time we see Marion acting under her own power, she steps into the shower, ready to wash herself clean and purge herself of her crime. From this point on, we are increasingly deprived of the things we took ourselves on a first viewing to know about what we are watching. This is one evident respect in which the shower scene constitutes the pivotal seam in the structure of Psycho. It divides the movie into two halves, each beginning with its own crime, each of which leads to a further crime; each half featuring its own heroine (successively portrayed by Janet Leigh and Vera Miles) and an enigmatic counterposed persona or hybrid of personae (successively portrayed by Anthony Perkins and Anthony Perkins). Different forms of division of the movie into halves are beheld on a first and a second viewing of this cinematic diptych, each yielding a distinct experience of how the two halves form a whole. On a first viewing, the splintering into halves is precipitated by the shock of the loss of the initial organizing center of consciousness. The second time we watch the movie, armed with foreknowledge of that impending loss and where it leads, we see a different first part; this, in turn, yields a wholly different experience of how the half posterior to the shower scene completes the half that precedes it. For this scene to serve as the hinge of this diptych, it must be able to give rise to two distinct forms of experience on successive viewings. An interplay of structures of latent and patent intention are everywhere present in the form of the dialogue prior to the shower scene. After Norman admits to Marion that he likes to stuff things, she says: “A man should have a hobby.” Norman: “It’s more than a hobby.” He continues: “A hobby is supposed to pass the time—not fill it.” (On a second viewing, we come to appreciate that what Marion imagines to be his hobby—reanimating the dead—is quite literally more than just a hobby for him: it is his life.) To which she responds: “Is your time so empty?”. Not really, he says: there is the motel to take care of and the errands I do for my mother: “the ones she allows I might be capable of doing.” 1 I want to attend here, however, to how this latent/patent interplay finds its cinematic counterpart in the form of the visual mode of presentation of the shower scene itself. The task of accurately describing the entirety of the mosaic of images comprising the scene is formidable.2 My interest lies not in excavating the genesis of the work, but in attending to the structure of the product of that artistic process and elucidating its aesthetic form. With respect to the shower sequence, the aim is to discern the aesthetic

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intention latent in what we apprehend as viewers of the scene and to lay bare the means deployed to achieve those ends.3 In discussions with an aesthetic focus, the scene is adduced as an example of what is most distinctive about Hitchcock’s art—his predilection for “absolute camera” or his aspiration to achieve “pure cinema”4 or something else. Such concepts characterize what is most patently eye-opening about Hitchcock’s cinematic craft. I will concentrate instead on the scene’s latent virtuosity. To this end, we need to distinguish between what we see on a first viewing of the scene from what there is to be seen on a subsequent viewing without running together the following two sets of distinctions: (1) between what is immediately apprehensible on a first viewing and all that is eventually apprehensible in the scene on some eventual viewing of it, and (2) between what can become visible on some viewing of the scene and what we never directly visually apprehend on any viewing of it. Let us begin with this last point, noting that we are not subjected to the visceral experience of watching a blade repeatedly pierce skin; no nudity that violates the letter of the Hollywood censorship code is shown; no blood gushing out of wounds is open to view. Theorists of Hitchcock’s patent virtuosity focus on “How?” questions: How is it possible to shoot a sequence vividly depicting a naked woman, being murdered while taking a shower, without displaying anything that rises to the level of nudity? How do you depict a brutal murder, involving countless thrusts of the knife, and show no bleeding wounds? And so on. Our inquiry is after a different quarry, one whose guiding questions are of the “Why?” form. Such as: Why go to such extraordinary lengths to depict the murder in just this way? One answer (implicit in much secondary literature) is to display the director’s cinematic prowess. This presupposes that cinematic form and dramatic content (however gritty or concrete) in a well-made Hollywood movie comprise two self-standingly intelligible dimensions of the work, such that either could suffer alteration independently of the other. Another no less common answer is that the sequence had to be shot in this way to get the scene past the censors. This might be true. But to think that this answer suffices is the cinematic equivalent of answering the question “Why does Shakespeare end the first line of Sonnet 116 with that word?” by saying “So that it will rhyme with the last word of the third line!” It is true that he needs it to anticipate the rhyme to come. Any idiot can see that. In the book by Robert Bloch, upon which the movie is loosely based, the shower murder is the matter of an instant: the Norman character kills

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the Marion character with a single well-placed thrust of the knife. The cinematic equivalent of this manner of depicting the murder would last a single second. Yet in Hitchcock’s Psycho, to kill Marion, the knife must be raised and driven towards her flesh a seemingly uncountable number of times. Why is it that this character must die in such cinematically etiolated fashion? And why must the manner in which we, the viewers of the movie, experience her death be mediated through such an unprecedentedly elaborate forty-five-second-long, 78-shot montage sequence? George Toles comes close to asking what is needed to arrive at a proper conception of what this scene accomplishes: Before asking any questions about the formal lucidity of Hitchcock’s conception of the shower sequence, one would do well to consider the massive weight that this episode achieves within the total narrative structure … Does it seem either dramatically feasible or fitting that a female protagonist whose status in the narrative never rises above that of pitiable victim should be disposed of in so extravagant, prolonged and visually intoxicating a fashion? Is Marion’s shabby, useless death a proper occasion for a virtuoso set piece? (Toles, 1999, pp. 163-4)

The difference between Toles’s manner of phrasing these questions and my own is notable. For Toles’s first question—is it fitting that Marion should be disposed of in so extravagant, prolonged, and visually intoxicating a manner?—I substitute: in order for the movie to realize its ends, why must Marion be disposed of in such a cinematically dazzling, temporally dilated, and eidetically arresting a manner? For his second question—is Marion’s death a proper occasion for a virtuoso set piece—I ask: Why does the depiction of her death require precisely this form of montage? The entire sequence is, as Toles indicates, immediately recognizable as virtuoso cinema. Some of the shots are, on a first viewing, also likely to lodge themselves in the memory of the beholder—for example, the manner in which the camera lingers over and almost loses itself in Marion’s lifeless eye. Toles seeks to articulate his sense of what is so breathtaking about this moment: In a culminating extreme close-up, this eye contemplates us with the alert fixity of death, while a false tear, formed by a drop of shower water on Marion’s face, announces that emotion (of any kind) has no place here. The tear might as well be a fly: nothing is but what it is. (1999, p. 163)

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This is a fine piece of film criticism, astutely observed and beautifully expressed. However, its aim is to bring to reflective understanding one of those moments of patent virtuosity in the construction of the scene. My aim is to direct attention to its latent virtuosity: to how much that is cinematically extraordinary in this sequence escapes our notice, when our eye is trained only on the manifestly extraordinary. One consequence of the sorts of account of cinema I am opposing is the way in which they imply a certain conception of the aesthetic achievement in the movies. They imply that the moments of greatest cinematic achievement are those in which the spectator is overtly alerted to the means by which an aesthetically significant end is brought about. Such a theory pushes one in the direction of holding that there is an inverse correlation between the degree of a beholder’s absorption in the world of the movie at a particular moment and the degree of aesthetic significance or interest that may rightfully be claimed on behalf of an absorbing moment of cinematic art. Such orientation and focus can also push some so-called “theorists” of film into a particular variety of altogether poor criticism, born of bad theory. The theoretically top-heavy species of criticism I have in mind commits itself in advance to privileging (what we might call, borrowing a term from Michael Fried) cinematically theatricalized moments of filmmaking—moments that interrupt our absorption in the world of the movie precisely in order to call attention to themselves as performing a gesture, directed at a beholder located outside of the work.5 It is no accident that film theorists who love movies that contain such flourishes tend to love Hitchcock’s films. For there is no denying that this director has strewn throughout his oeuvre morsels of grist for their mills. But we need to look again at what those morsels are doing and how they function within the movie as a whole. Often, such self-professed admirers of Hitchcock tend to miss that, in catering to their species of sophisticatedly cinephile appetite (no less than when he panders to any other segment of his audience), Hitchcock thereby seeks to fasten their gaze as well. They, too, are no less prone to mistake the comparatively shallow in his layering of cinematic significance for its depths.

Latent, Patent, and Potent Cinematicity Let us approach this task of attending to (what I am calling) the latent virtuosity of the shower sequence in Psycho by first considering what this “episode” would have had to have been like if it had been filmed in a more

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continuous and spatially encompassing fashion from a single comparatively stable and sustained point of view. It would have been difficult to avoid a fairly graphic and stomach-turning depiction of violence and carnage. For the scene to fulfill the purposes Hitchcock here requires of it, however, the details of the horror and brutality of the scene unfolding before our eyes must take place largely in our imagination. For what we are directly given to see, though it conveys a forceful understanding of the event as horrible and brutal, almost entirely abstracts from the sensible matter that would allow us to immediately visually or aurally apprehend it as such. This is a hallmark of Hitchcock’s art: to terrify us all the more by placing us in a measured degree of indirection in relation to that which terrifies us, thereby allowing it to take hold of our imagination in a way in which no direct glimpse ever could. One might sum up the governing maxim of this dimension of Hitchcock’s craft as follows: never directly show the viewer anything that might detract from the power of what she will experience if she must complete what she sees with her own imagination. Hitchcock’s treatment avoids turning our stomachs by (as Victor Perkins puts it) aestheticizing the horror, abstracting from a representation of the totality of the scene and flitting instead from one detail of it to the next in a manner that allows us to receive a vivid impression of violence, brutality, and despair, while showing us hardly anything in the way of blood, guts, and gore (Perkins, 1972, pp. 10ff.). We do not see Marion’s injuries. We do not see blood pulsating from her wounds. The forceful impression of violence, brutality, and despair in the absence of any focal depiction of the physical trauma sustained allows maximum shock to be imparted via the intellectual and emotional registers of our understanding, while provoking minimal physical revulsion and visual recoil from that which we are actually permitted to see. This gap between what we see of and what we understand to be happening in the world of the movie is where the real action of this scene unfolds. But this scene obviously has three further tasks it obviously needs to accomplish: (i) to transition to a new default point of view, (ii) to conceal the identity of the murderer, and (iii) to enable the viewer’s appreciation not only of what has just happened in (the world of) the movie, but of its significance for the movie. Saying the scene “obviously” must accomplish these is itself an obvious observation only to someone who has already seen the entire movie at least once. Hence, on a first viewing of the movie, even these most obvious aspects of what the sequence must accomplish are

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in no way apparent to a viewer. These dimensions of filmic virtuosity emerge from their latency phase only over the course of subsequent viewings. Let us start with the first of those three required accomplishments. One reason it is not merely “fitting” but necessary that Marion not be disposed of in a cinematically banal, temporally punctate, and visually uncomplicated manner is the following: the shower scene must negotiate a transition in the meaning of the default point-of-view shot and hence in the primary anchor of narrative identification for the viewer. Such a shot in the movie until now has been associated with Marion’s point of view. Its meaning must now be caused to shift; the default understanding of what is revealed is now to be associated with the subjectivity of someone else— first of all, with that of Norman. The shock we undergo is not merely because a character in this world is dying in a horrific fashion but because the light of her subjectivity that has illuminated our vantage onto this world is, right before our eyes, being extinguished once and for all, threatening not merely the physical death of our heroine, but the ontological death of the world of the movie. Gradually, over the sequence, what we see is refracted less and less through Marion’s subjectivity and more and more through, first, that of the murderer, and then, increasingly, from no apparent point of view at all. While our viewpoint in terms of what we see may appear merely to jump violently about, the viewpoint through which we see is being subtly renegotiated; and we acquiesce to this. While being distracted by what is happening in the world of the movie, we alter the manner through which our access to this world is configured. A close description of the construction of the shower scene would register how the implicit point of view of the shots serve to facilitate this transfer to a new mediating center of consciousness through which we experience what is visually unfolding before our eyes.6 This transfer of point of view is completed when we identify with Norman’s exclamation (upon his apparently discovering Marion’s corpse on the floor of her bathroom): “Mother! Oh God! Mother! Blood! Blood!” Our understanding of what must have happened now dovetails with (what we, at least on a first viewing, take to be) his. It is his point of view we now share watching Norman divest Marion’s motel room of all traces of the crime and of her prior presence. In taking Norman to “discover” Marion’s corpse, we touch upon a further end that the construction of the scene must realize: concealing the identity of the murderer without cheating. In our thought-experiment of what we would see from a maximally perspicuous view of the scene, we

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would have no difficulty identifying the murderer. It is important that, on a first viewing, we are enabled to rest with our presupposition that the murderer is the mother. This assumption has been carefully prepared. We so effortlessly fall into it that this blinds us, on a first viewing, to what is otherwise discernible: namely, that the silhouette of the perpetrator accords poorly with that of a sick and elderly mother, while matching perfectly the frame of the tall and lanky Norman. The beauty about Hitchcock is that he doesn’t cheat.7 This hidden visual literality (as we might call it) is the cinematic counterpart of the structure of linguistic literality present in so much of Psycho’s dialogue. On a further viewing, we see that the murderer has the mien of a spry, lean, upright young man, significantly taller than Marion, able to thrust the knife from above down upon her, while garbed in unbefitting clothing. We are freed from the expectations that inhibit us from registering how anomalous the little old lady’s bearing is. Our schematizing of the visual impression of the murderer now organizes itself into the Gestalt of Norman, outfitted in his mother’s garb and a wig. A perfect degree of equipoise must be struck here; invisible enough to go at first unnoticed and yet fully visible enough to become at some later point suddenly apparently unmissable. Two aspects of its construction which facilitate the required equipoise are the adroit handling of the rapid montage and the perfectly gauged distribution of light and shade. The preceding points require the scene to have a double-edged temporality: what happens suddenly (in the world of the movie) is experienced gradually by the viewer. It enables us to linger over and fully absorb the extraordinary implications of what is happening before our eyes, while representing an event we understand to be sudden and violent. It must convey this suddenness and violence, while dilating the presentation of the murder to permit the viewer to process its initial significance for a first viewing, as well as (when the visually latent becomes patent) the different significance its construal confers on a second viewing. The scene needs to serve two apparently contradictory purposes at once. On the one hand, we need to see something sudden and shocking so as to experience it as genuinely shocking, while, on the other, experience it in such a way as to be afforded time to appreciate where this now leaves us qua viewers. Seemingly contradictory, these two forms of experience of the scene, in fact, presuppose the other. It has often been appreciated that directors must find devices for contracting time but it is no less critical to devise forms of visual narration that dilate time in ways that are not experienced as such.

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Finally, silent steps are taken to subvert the genre of the Noir from within and prepare for the revelation of a previously unsuspected adjacent genre. At the inception of the second half of the diptych, a gulf opens up as it dawns on us, on a first viewing, that we are no longer simply in a film noir. We are no longer able to determine the distance between the genre of movie we took ourselves to be watching, moments ago, and the one we are now watching; nor, as the gulf widens further, are we able to gauge the psychic distance separating Norman from his mother. This presages the even more profound and disorienting transition from a genre of film in which you are able to find your feet and feel at home to one whose dimensions defy encapsulation in a readily enumerable set of antecedently familiar conventions.

The Conjurer’s Trick [T]he effort of seeming effortlessness is the most demanding of all.8

These then are five purposes that need to be realized through the manner in which the shower sequence in Psycho is depicted: a) the transition from one organizing center of narrative subjectivity to another: from a perspective onto the world of the movie mediated through Marion’s consciousness to one that is, far less transparently, mediated through Norman’s; b) the dilation of the temporality of the scene: achieved through the mode of conveyance enabling the viewer to experience the shocking suddenness of the murder, while absorbing something that cannot be processed suddenly—its implications for the viewer’s mode of access to the world of the movie; c) the aestheticization of the horror: vividly imparting violence, brutality, and despair, while abstracting from blood, guts, and gore in a manner that frees the viewer up to experience and navigate the other four purposes that the scene must achieve, thereby preparing the ground for its climax; d) the concealment of identity: the displacement of one crime and set of assumptions through which to comprehend the action of the movie (pertaining to the consequences of Marion’s theft) with another (pertaining to the apparent disclosure of the murderer as Norman’s

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mother) in such a way as to allow the details of most significance to escape our view on a first viewing; e) the insinuation of a ‘false bottom’ 9 in the movie’s generic structure: like the placement of a pin into a hand-grenade, it is the ­assumptions the viewer is induced to make, as she takes in this scene, that pave the way for their removal and hence the subsequent explosion of the movie’s appearance of participation in a familiar Hollywood genre. On a third or fourth viewing of the movie, we may appreciate the artfulness of technique, the efficiency of means, and the breathtaking simultaneity with which these desiderata are realized. None of this could be accomplished unless this joint achievement were initially invisible to a viewer. What is most apt to strike us on a first viewing of this necessarily unforgettable scene is that we have just witnessed a cinematically remarkable episode.10 In priding ourselves on being thus struck by the scene, we fail to appreciate how that dazzling impression deflects our attention from the scene’s real virtuosity—namely, the extent to which the above five maneuvers in the director’s conjuring game are all performed simultaneously in a manner permitting none of them to strike us at all. Attention to the seeming effortlessness with which this fivefold task is discharged ought to put pressure on what sorts of answers satisfy us to two sorts of questions touched on above—one on the cinematic medium, the other relating to the aesthetic evaluation and criticism of such forms of art. Here are some examples of the first sort of question: What is montage? Or: What is montage for? Or: How does the technique of montage confer meaning on a sequence of shots? Reflection on the shower scene’s use of montage reveals that, when posed at this absolutely hopeless level of generality, such questions are ill-posed. One way to show this is by exhibiting some of the indefinite number of different cinematic purposes that can be realized when employing a given technique by looking at very different sorts of significance it provides across a range of contexts. Another is to show how a single scene can employ “the same technique” to realize a variety of purposes all at once—as with the shower scene. No established answer to the question “What is montage?” delivered by a film theorist wedded to his or her preferred theory of film ought to satisfy us if it serves to blind us to the forms of cinematic complexity and aesthetic unity embodied in this scene. A director whose exploration of cinematic craft faithfully answers to the antecedent expectations of the film theorist is the aesthetic equivalent of

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the poet whose exploration of language answers to the expectations of the grammarian. The history of poetry shows us how any requirement a grammarian lays down may be flouted in the interest of achieving a form of otherwise unattainable expressive power. So, too, nothing other than the development of the cinema can disclose the possibilities of cinematic art. That is part of what it means to claim that it deserves our recognition as a form of fine art—one whose aesthetically significant means and ends are determinable only through the unfolding of its practice. A second way in which appreciating the fivefold accomplishment of the shower scene can serve to illuminate the nature of cinematic art—especially the great Hollywood movie—is beautifully summed up in the Victor Perkins’s quotation that serves as the epigraph to this section.11 There is a mode of invisibility internal to the very form of artistic excellence that such cinema can achieve. Attention to the shower scene reveals how this mode is itself the source of our immediate unreflective experience of a certain form of fineness in cinematic texture. To reflectively account for the conditions of the possibility of such aesthetic experience, requires bringing to successive viewings a critical attentiveness comparable in its patience, care, and nuance to that invested in its construction.

The Conjurer’s Art There is a tendency to remember a sequence like the shower scene as remarkable, but to think that this must rest on some straightforwardly isolatable aspect of Hitchcock’s film-making method, one whose distinguishing marks or features can be designated by a single concept. This scene serves as an example of how unexamined categories of classification and overworn terms of criticism can engender the illusion that we already understand what it is that we experience when we watch such a scene, prior to our allowing it to teach us what it means to watch it. What I have attempted to show is how it can be exquisitely difficult to articulate why a scene’s immediately felt brilliance may be due precisely to its employing means and fulfilling ends none of which are themselves self-evident. If one treats the scene as a self-enclosed entity, intelligible apart from its role and significance within the whole of the movie, then one will be drawn to a certain sort of theory of its power. I have tried to do the opposite: to show how the structure of the movie (as a whole) and that of the scene (as a part therein) mutually depend upon and sustain each other. What can become unrecoverable when we are in the grip of a certain form

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of theory is that, on a first viewing, we may miss most of the artistry that goes into such a movie, and the very nature of such artistry. One way of misgauging the degree of cinematic perfection present in such a work is by chalking the effectiveness of a given scene or sequence of shots up to some fortuitous knack or facility with which the director has been blessed. Another, theoretically more stultifying way, is by displacing the aesthetic power of the work onto the physical nature of the photographic medium (as if the crucial effect in question is secured simply through something having to do with the very nature of projected motion picture images) or onto some single theoretically privileged tool in the filmmaker’s toolbox (such as “the” technique of splicing such images together). This leads to theories which mystify the medium without ever discerning what allows the medium of the Hollywood movie to achieve its distinctive varieties of aesthetic excellence. Such theories, in turn, encourage the idea that the measure of a great Hollywood movie qua work of art must lie in its willingness to obtrusively draw attention to (and perhaps even take up arms against) its own medium out of an eagerness to declare its seriousness of aesthetic purpose. There thus arises an inordinate fondness on the part of the theorist for cinematic gestures deemed to be cleverly self-reflexive or otherwise overtly preoccupied with thematizing the very techniques that are antecedently valorized by a certain form of theory. When this sort of gesture comes to be regarded as a mark of a movie’s aesthetic sophistication, then its capacity to retain the beholder’s attention by drawing her ever more deeply into its world is bound to end up seeming a mark of Hollywood naiveté. Such theories of cinema will not lack for strategies for carving out an exception for Hitchcock, absolving his Hollywood creations of this charge of naiveté by singling out for attention aspects of his work that the theory in question already valorizes—such as interpretively elusive and vertiginous dimensions of narrative structure, intricacy in employment of montage, delight in gestures of self-reflexivity, and density of moments of cinematic virtuosity. The idea that governs such theories is that what is great in such cinema is measured by what has antecedently been thought out in and prescribed by theory. Once such a requirement is in place, the only form of thought that can be discovered in a movie is one already available to the viewer prior to her aesthetic experience of the movie itself. The account of Psycho offered here is the opposite: it is only in and through what is genuinely novel in the forged cinematic form that what such a movie itself thinks is to be discovered.12

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This invites investigation into an even more entrenched theoretical presumption:13 the governing idea that serious art in our age must unmistakably lay claim to its intention to participate in the modernist condition. Our discussion of the shower scene provides an example of how even the outwardly most modernist moments in Hitchcock’s work still form part and parcel of the exploration of an aesthetic medium structurally designed to overcome the very forms of opposition that modernist works of art seek to effect: between insiders (able to appreciate work aspiring to seriousness of aesthetic purpose under conditions of modernity) and outsiders (able to make nothing of such work), and hence between serious art (that spurns mere popularity) and popular art (that measures its success at the box office). If the measure of an art-house film’s excellence is understood to be a function of its preoccupation with and capacity to draw attention to its methods of cinematic world-construction, then most Hollywood movies are relegated a priori to the category of the aesthetic poor cousin of all putatively ambitious art films. Even a Hitchcock creation deemed by such a theorist to qualify as exceptional cinema will be overpraised for its immediately discernible cinematic pirouettes and underestimated for all that it achieves seemingly effortlessly. Not unlike the spectator who takes up the invitation to presume that there might be something quite extraordinary about the “perfectly ordinary hat” which the conjurer invites him to examine carefully, the theorist who looks for the secret to Hitchcock’s genius in his most easily discernible cinematic gestures (thereby allowing her attention to be channeled by this conjurer) misses the extraordinariness of effort present in what she mistakes to be the ordinary portion of the performance. A well-made movie, perhaps more than any other art-form, activates our capacities for engaged reflection and intelligent response in ways in which the world itself does, by presenting us with and involving us in its world. Not only does it do this while eschewing the comparatively esoteric routes that other arts have generally felt obliged to travel since the advent of modernism, but it does this by achieving forms of aesthetic self-­ consciousness that it conceals. For it can do so only if it also initially conceals the means by which it exploits and explores its medium: only if buries its artistry so deeply that it can take decades before its professed theorists are able to work out what even the rudiments of the medium thereby disclosed are. Like many things American, a certain form of Hollywood movie—no matter how apparently sophisticated—is able to cloak its

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moments of artfulness in those of its stratagems most apt to be mistaken for relapses into naiveté. How many moments of cinematic perfection are there of the order of the shower scene in the history of Hollywood cinema? Only when we have a great many more film critics of the caliber of a Stanley Cavell, or a Victor Perkins, or a Robert Pippin—able to show how the whole of a movie is present in each of its parts and how seemingly negligible aspects of those parts are essential to the achievement of the whole—will we begin to know the answer.14 What such critics encourage us to do is set aside our antecedent commitment to some prior philosophical theory of how cinematic art must work and instead to look and see how it does work. Philosophers of film who share their aim of elucidating forms of aesthetic achievement within the medium of the movies would do well to follow their example.

Notes 1. See Section 4 of my (2018) for a detailed exploration of the dialogue. 2. See Rothman (2012, pp. 299-317) for one of the most influential attempts. 3. I take aesthetic intention to be something a critic discerns in a work of art, not something postulated through psychological speculation about what was “in” the mind(s) of its creator(s) at the time of its making. The real confusion on the contrary view is not one about art, but one about intention. See G. E. M. Anscombe’s (1957) account and Cavell’s “A Matter of Meaning It” in his (1976) for why “intention is no more an efficient cause of an object of art than it is of a human action; in both cases, it is a way of understanding the thing done, of describing what happens” (1976, p. 230). 4. See, for example, Isaacs (2020). 5. See Fried (1988) and my (2011). 6. This renegotiation of point of view arguably begins with that striking close-­up profile shot of Norman’s peering eye (after which we then share in Norman’s gaze of Marion in a state of undress, observed through his secret spyhole into her room) and ends with the shot (discussed above) of Marion’s lifeless eye (showing us what Norman is about to see). 7. “I’m a great believer in making sure that if people see the film a second time they don’t feel cheated. That is a must. You must be honest about it and not merely keep things away from an audience. I’d call that cheating. You should never do that” (Hitchcock, “Interview with Sarris”, op. cit. 246). 8. Perkins (1972, pp. 113–114)

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9. See my (2018) for the development of the idea that the work contains a further false bottom; the second contingent upon the first. 10. Godard thematizes this, in his characteristically mischievous manner, in his Histoire(s) du cinema. Episode 4a of that monumental work at first appears merely to celebrate Hitchcock’s directorial achievements, but actually turns out to juxtapose two distinct visions of wherein great cinema consists. 11. This is drawn from Perkins’s own discussion of the shower scene, op. cit. 12. Godard: “In cinema it’s the form that thinks. In bad cinema, it’s the thought that forms” quoted by Morgan (2013, p. 169). 13. See my (2018, Section 1) 14. My intellectual debts to Cavell, Perkins, and Pippin stem not only from my study of their works, but also from countless conversations. (Why is it that exploring a shared sense of why a movie is great allows for a particularly exhilarating form of intellectual intimacy and joy?) I am also indebted to Cora Diamond and Stephen Mulhall for comments on earlier drafts of my (2018) longer manuscript from which much of this material comes.

References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Basil Blackwell. Cavell, S. (1976). Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge University Press. Conant, J. (2011). World of a Movie “The World of a Movie”. In N. Forsberg & S. Jansson (Eds.), Making a Difference. Thales. Conant, James. (2018). ‘Cinematic Genre and Viewer Engagement in Hitchcock’s Psycho’ in Yearbook of Comparative Literature. Volume 64. Fried, M. (1988). Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot Chicago. University of Chicago Press. Isaacs, B. (2020). The Art of Pure Cinema: Hitchcock and His Imitators. Oxford University Press. Morgan, D. (2013). Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema. University of California Press. Perkins, V. F. (1972). Film as Film. Penguin Books. Rothman, W. (2012). Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (2nd ed.). State University of New York Press. Toles, G. (1999). ‘If Thine Eye Offend Thee’: Hitchcock and the Art of Infection. In R.  Allen & S.  Ishii Gonzales (Eds.), Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays. British Film Institute.

Filmography Hitchcock, Alfred. (1960). (Director). Psycho. Paramount.

CHAPTER 17

Entertaining Unhappiness Sebastian Sunday

I A bystander, upon realizing that the person who just sat down on the same park bench happens to be in a truly miserable state and is talking as if there were someone else with them, quietly leaves the scene. The scene, however, continues. Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine closes on just such a scene. Following the departure of the bystander, viewers of the film continue to enjoy watching the main character alone on the bench and listening to her delusional speech. How can someone’s deep unhappiness be so entertaining? The film itself is designed to ask this kind of question. It is framed by the aforementioned closing scene and a corresponding opening scene. The opening scene shows a different bystander, who is not so lucky as to get away in time. At first, it is not clear that this person is merely a bystander; this is only revealed at the end of the scene. Having listened to Jasmine throughout the first one and a half minutes of the film, the woman suddenly

S. Sunday (*) Chinese Institute of Foreign Philosophy, Beijing, China Peking University, Beijing, China e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_17

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hurries away, saying, ‘Oh, there’s my family.’ She politely adds, ‘It was really nice’—here she hesitates—‘talking to you.’ Presumably, she hesitates because she herself has hardly said a word. In fact, the only thing she said was ‘sure, sure’ once, when asked whether she knew the song ‘Blue Moon’. It is obvious that she did not enjoy this experience. Her family ask, ‘Who’s that woman you were talking to?’ She responds, ‘I was sitting next to her on the plane. She was talking to herself. I thought she said something to me. I said, “What?” But she couldn’t stop babbling about her life.’ It seems safe to say that no one would enjoy this kind of experience. Yet, the film seems to be asking, is this not what someone wants when they go to see a film such as Blue Jasmine? Being trapped in your seat, following the sad life story of a stranger? The film’s answer is an unqualified ‘yes’. The answer is provided in the form of the film itself, which is an example of how someone’s deep unhappiness can become a piece of joyous entertainment. The fact that unhappiness can in principle be somehow entertaining should not be very surprising. Seeing one’s enemy suffer is bliss. Moreover, the tradition of ancient Greek tragedy is evidence that all kinds of people find unhappiness entertaining. There are, however, important differences. For example, ancient Greek tragedy has no happy ending. In general, the entertainment provided by the representation of unhappiness in tragedy is more direct than it is in comedy; for the same reason, the unhappiness represented in tragedy tends to be more realistic. The comedic representation of unhappiness, by contrast, is ultimately designed to make the audience laugh—never to make the audience cry—and therefore tends to be less realistic. The tragic representation of unhappiness, again, is not ultimately designed to make the audience cry either. Tragedy is more complicated than that. Arguably, the best tragedians know how to both represent someone’s deep unhappiness in a realistic manner and make such a representation a piece of joyous entertainment. The attentive viewer, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘sees before him the tragic hero with all the clarity and beauty of the epic, and yet he takes delight in his destruction’ (1872, §22). Like the great ancient tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles—the Oresteia, Antigone, Oedipus Tyrannus, and so on—Blue Jasmine manages to achieve this paradoxical attitude in the viewer. In what follows, I will try to demonstrate this fact. And I will try to explain the philosophical and psychological importance of this kind of achievement. Let me first give a more detailed indication of where the discussion will lead. The heart of the matter is encapsulated in the

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ambiguity of the phrase that provides the title of this essay—‘entertaining unhappiness’—which can refer either to someone being entertained by unhappiness or someone entertaining unhappiness. The latter, someone entertaining unhappiness, is like someone entertaining a thought. Someone who is entertaining a thought need not believe it. Analogously, someone who is entertaining an emotion, a feeling, or a mood need not experience it. Thus, it will sometimes be merely an exercise of the imagination. However, there are also thoughts that are such that unless you assent to their truth you will not have fully entertained them (for example, that red is a color). Similarly, it is at least arguable that you have not fully entertained a given emotion, feeling, or mood unless you are actually affected by it. And it is certainly possible for at least some particular emotions, feelings, and moods that someone’s merely entertaining one of them will result in them actually experiencing it. For example, my imagining someone else’s anger may result in my experiencing this anger myself, or at least something very similar. This is especially obvious in cases where I happen to find myself in qualitatively the same situation as the other person. But where I find myself in a situation different from that of the other person, it is naturally less likely that my imagining their mental state will result in my actually experiencing it, or something very similar, myself. Now, the philosophical and psychological importance of the sort of achievement that is the representation of someone’s deep unhappiness in a realistic manner, such that it is simultaneously a piece of joyous entertainment, lies in the fact that the author thereby represents an aspect of the world (namely, unhappiness) that can rarely, if ever, be experienced so reflectively. Thus, returning to the two senses of ‘entertaining unhappiness’— someone being entertained by unhappiness and someone entertaining unhappiness—we can say that entertaining unhappiness in the first sense enables entertaining unhappiness in the second. In a word, the extraordinary thing that this kind of representation enables one to do is to happily entertain unhappiness.

II Blue Jasmine is so very pleasant to watch that it is easy to forget some of the deep unhappiness which the film depicts. Let me give a brief summary. Jasmine finds out that her husband has enjoyed sexual relations with other women, including mutual friends and acquaintances, and that many people, including her close friends, have known about this for years. When she

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confronts her husband, he makes no apologies. In fact, he tells her he has fallen in love with a younger woman, who works as an au pair for some of their friends, and that the two are making plans for the future together. Soon after, he gets arrested for some of his business practices. He is convicted and hangs himself in his cell. The government seizes all of his assets, and Jasmine loses nearly everything she owns. She used to live in Manhattan—5th Avenue with a view of Central Park—with a beach house in the Hamptons, she had servants and a driver, and she would spend her time hosting dinner parties, going to yoga classes, and buying expensive clothes. Now she is forced to get a job at a shoe shop, and cannot pay her rent in Brooklyn. She has lost all of her friends, and so she turns to her estranged sister in San Francisco for help. The film offers a detailed and multifaceted depiction of Jasmine’s resulting mental illness and general unhappiness, including reports by herself and others. When she first meets her sister again, Jasmine tells her almost immediately, ‘I can’t be alone, Ginger. I really get some bad thoughts when I’m alone.’ When tasked with babysitting Ginger’s two sons, she takes them to a restaurant, where one of them tells her, ‘Mom said you used to be okay, but you got crazy.’ The other one adds, ‘Yeah, and then you talked to yourself.’ Jasmine looks at them intensely for a moment— leaning over the table, appearing drunk and tired—then she begins muttering, her speech slightly slurred, ‘Well, there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.’ She takes a shallow, unsteady breath and continues, ‘That’s right, boys, they picked me up on the street talking to myself and gave me something called Edison’s Medicine.’ She gathers herself a little—‘Why Edison? Because they use electricity to get you thinking straight’—then she falls back into the pattern of confusion and desperation that characterizes much of her speech. She continues: See, everything unraveled so quickly. You know, I started experiencing anxiety and claustrophobia and this acute fear of death. [The children look slightly scared.] You know, I had nightmares and a nervous breakdown. I mean, you must have heard of Prozac and lithium. Well, all those drugs just made me worse. Of course, you know, I probably did suspect that not everything Hal did was always 100 percent above board. Christ, I mean, you’d have to be an idiot not to think his phenomenal success was too good to be true. Heh, heh, heh. But a cheat is a cheat. And when he had other women, I just flipped out. You know, and one thing led to another and … (Blue Jasmine 2013, parenthetical insertions, here and elsewhere, are mine)

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Here she breaks off. Considering she is talking with young children, whom she is babysitting, both the content and form of what she says are of course inappropriate. Similarly, on a day out with Ginger and her boyfriend Chili, she cannot stop going on about Hal’s suicide. Her initial explanation to Chili is perhaps reasonably calm: ‘No, it wasn’t strangulation. When you hang yourself, your neck breaks.’ But her sudden return to the topic, after the conversation has already moved on, is awkward and chilling. ‘A lot of people are under the misapprehension you strangle, but your neck snaps,’ she says, with an empty but serious look on her face. Her insensitivity in these situations may be partly due to medication or intoxication. She seems to have a high-dosage prescription of Xanax (alprazolam), and she often drinks alcohol (Stoli vodka martini). It also appears to be related to her frequent absentmindedness and occasional delusions. Her absentmindedness is especially pronounced when out drinking with other people, as her lifeless facial expression stands in stark contrast to the gaiety around her. She has delusional episodes throughout the film, including in the closing and opening scenes, which the other characters generally refer to as her talking to herself. More often than not, however, it is obvious that she is actually talking to her late husband. Notable low points of Jasmine’s unhappiness include her crying after the long-awaited call from Dwight, an attractive, wealthy, intelligent man she has recently met, when the natural reaction would have seemed to be elation. Similarly, she panics when Dwight proposes to her. Jasmine:  So you’re saying you love me. [throws a pill in her mouth] Dwight: Can’t you tell? I hope I didn’t cause you to become ill over the prospect of being my wife. Jasmine: You know, sometimes I get these headaches. [downs the pill with water] Dwight:  You always take Xanax for a headache? Jasmine:  I’ll admit, my heart’s beating a little fast. Dwight:  Yeah. Ooh, your hands are shaking. Jasmine:  [panting] I wanted you to want me and now you do.

Another low point of Jasmine’s unhappiness—immediately preceding the proposal scene—is her way of ending her confused monologue in front of the children, triumphantly  announcing: ‘But that’s all history, boys. I met someone. I’m a new person.’ Her words are unconvincing, however, because at the same time her appearance and behavior are very clearly still those of someone who is mentally unstable.

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Sure enough, the engagement is cancelled in dramatic fashion, even before they can buy an engagement ring. In fact, things begin to fall apart just outside the jewellery shop. Jasmine is left, once again, devastated— returned to the state of a debilitated, nervous wreck. And this is how the film ends.

III Now, how does Blue Jasmine turn the realistic representation of someone’s deep unhappiness into a piece of joyous entertainment? This is of course the collective achievement of everyone involved in the making of the film. But the following seven elements and techniques deserve special attention. First, Jasmine is portrayed as a character who is not only miserable but also irritating and sometimes despicable. This begins in the very second shot of the film when, once off the aeroplane, the incoherent and annoying nature of Jasmine’s continued blathering, to which she has subjected the woman she met on the flight, becomes apparent. Naturally, the more the viewer comes to dislike Jasmine, the more they will enjoy witnessing her misfortune. When Jasmine arrives outside Ginger’s apartment, in the second scene, the viewer gets a further taste of her arrogance when she treats the taxi driver like a servant. The third scene adds to this a touch of ruthlessness, when Jasmine and Hal are shown, in a flashback, viewing their future home on 5th Avenue. After expressing how much she likes the high ceilings, and just before exclaiming ‘The view!’, Jasmine makes the most inconsiderate throw-away remark, asking, ‘How can anyone breathe with a low ceiling?’ Next, Ginger picks up her sons from her ex-husband, Augie, who is upset to hear that she is helping out her sister, whom he accuses of being selfish and dishonest: When she had all that money, she wanted nothing to do with you. Now that she’s broke, all of a sudden she’s moving in … She stole our money. You understand? We could have been set. That was our whole chance in life.

The next scene, another flashback, provides evidence of Augie’s claim that Jasmine stole his and Ginger’s money by showing Jasmine’s habit of looking the other way, as the film calls it, in this case in relation to Hal’s questionable business practices. The scene that follows provides further evidence. During the sisters’ reunion in Ginger’s apartment, Jasmine

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mentions, ‘I wasn’t sure how angry you still were,’ with Ginger’s short reply ‘Oh, well’ seeming equally unsure. Then one of Ginger’s sons, neither of whom Jasmine has ever met before, confronts her with Augie’s, his father’s, first claim: ‘My dad said you were glad we lived far away.’ This introduces yet another flashback, which gives detailed and unambiguous proof of the truth of this allegation and, more generally, proof of Jasmine’s low opinion of and negative attitude towards her sister. In addition to being arrogant, selfish, and generally dishonest, Jasmine is also portrayed throughout the film as almost constantly lying. To sum up, there is hardly a scene that does not underscore some obviously objectionable aspect of her character. Second, one particular way in which it is suggested to the viewer that Jasmine somehow deserves her misfortune is the explicit blame she receives from various other characters for their own misfortunes. Both Ginger and Augie blame Jasmine for losing their lottery winnings, which she convinced them to invest with Hal. During the sisters’ final meeting, Ginger tells Jasmine that she is to blame: ‘Because you married the biggest loser of all and went your own sweet way while he pissed away my one big chance to make a better life.’ Chili explicitly blames Jasmine for driving Ginger away from him. ‘I blame this on Jasmine,’ he says. Dwight blames her for the breakup of their engagement (‘Of course we can’t get married. You lied to me up and down the line!’). Finally, her stepson Danny holds her responsible for his own misfortune following his father’s arrest (‘As disillusioned as I was with him, I hated you more.’). Third, the film is by no means all doom and gloom, but also contains plenty of humor. Notably, none of it ever seems to go beyond the bounds of realism. For example, Chili’s saying ‘But I appreciate it anyway’ in the middle of his tearful speech to Ginger at the grocery store when the manager offers him to sit in his office is funny, indeed absurd, but not unrealistic. Similarly, the character of Dr Flicker is largely ridiculous, but not therefore unrealistic (I will say more about Dr Flicker towards the end). Particularly noteworthy, in the context of the present analysis, are the small injections of humor that directly soften particular representations of Jasmine’s unhappiness, such as her being asked ‘You always stare into space like that?’ when doing just that, or showing the viewer the children’s stunned faces whilst they are listening to her confused and inappropriate monologue in the restaurant about her history of mental illness. Fourth, there is the dramatic structure. On the most basic level, the parallel story of Jasmine’s sister Ginger lightens the mood of the film. On

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the narrative level, the non-linear time structure further helps to balance the viewer’s emotions. For example, as the tragic plot surrounding Jasmine thickens and her story inevitably approaches its unhappy ending, the film subtly weaves in scenes and shots of the merry reunion between Chili and Ginger. Similarly, what is perhaps the happiest scene of all shows Jasmine returning to Ginger’s apartment with a bouquet of flowers she has just bought and being greeted by her sister, who lovingly exclaims ‘You seem up,’ and then sharing with excitement the news of her engagement to Dwight; this scene is immediately followed by a flashback showing how Jasmine found out about Hal’s numerous affairs and learned that people around her had known about them for years. Fifth, there are the excellent performances across the board, first and foremost by Cate Blanchett in the lead role of Jasmine, but also by Sally Hawkins as Ginger and by the rest of the cast. Often the beauty of the acting smooths over the pain that is being represented to such a degree that the viewer is able to actually take some direct pleasure from it, including in the final scenes in which Jasmine’s tragedy unfolds. Sixth, the beauty of the photography has a similar effect. Angles, colors, light, locations, costumes, makeup, etc. often compose stunning pictures that directly please the eye; this again includes scenes in which pain or violence are the main subject. Finally, there is the music. Most importantly, the film uses jazz and blues recordings from the early twentieth century which it employs to achieve various effects including, in the cases of ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ and ‘My Daddy Rocks Me (Part 1)’, driving the narrative forward. At other times, the music builds a lively contrast with the otherwise depressing action of a given scene, most notably the guitar at the beginning of ‘Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me’, which is played first during Jasmine’s arrival at Ginger’s apartment in the second scene and again during her exit at the end of the film, when it extends into the final scene on the park bench.

IV Supposing that what I have said so far is more or less correct—namely, that Blue Jasmine does indeed manage in the manner described to turn the realistic representation of someone’s deep unhappiness into a piece of joyous entertainment—what valuable reflections on happiness may this allow us to draw from the film? For the claim I made earlier (in section I) was

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that the representation of someone’s deep unhappiness in a realistic manner, such that it is simultaneously a piece of joyous entertainment, yields a representation of an aspect of the world that can otherwise rarely, if ever, be experienced so reflectively. I have also already hinted at the sort of principle on which this claim relies. To reiterate, what the film enables the viewer to do is to happily entertain unhappiness. Whilst it may seem fairly intuitive that this sort of activity will enable the viewer to have an exceptionally reflective experience, up to this point I have allowed myself to gloss over one crucial complication, which must now be briefly explained. For there is the question of whether the reflective experience that the film enables one to have is an experience of the relevant aspect of the world itself (in this case, unhappiness) or merely an experience of the representation of this aspect. It should also be noted, however, that the main argument of this essay will succeed regardless of which answer is deemed correct. Even if someone holds that the film cannot enable its viewers to have an actual experience of unhappiness itself, an exceptionally reflective experience of the representation of unhappiness may still be of philosophical and psychological importance (including in the ways proposed in section V below). The general principle, according to which happily entertaining unhappiness enables exceptionally reflective experience (of either unhappiness itself or the representation of unhappiness), can be derived in three steps as follows. The first step consists in formulating a necessary condition for unpleasant experiences based on the assumption that unpleasant experiences are at some level constituted by one or more mental states. Step 1: Unpleasant experience If a subject has an unpleasant experience (for example, the death of a loved one), then the mental states that constitute the experience (for example, shock, grief, fear, etc.) naturally tend to be, on aggregate, entertained not happily but rather unhappily.

The precise conception of experience and mental states does not matter much in this connection. For instance, another example of an unpleasant experience might be listening to an awful piece of music in a concert hall, which could be said to be constituted by mental states such as hearing, seeing, feeling, and thinking various things.

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The second step consists in adapting the platitude that one will usually be better at doing something if one enjoys doing it. Step 2: Degrees of reflectiveness For any given experience or kind of experience, the overall degree of reflectiveness that a subject may achieve with regard to it will be higher if the relevant mental states are, on aggregate, happily entertained (as opposed to their not being happily entertained).

Finally, step 3 consists in deriving the relevant principle from an instantiation of step 2 that employs the notion of an unpleasant experience from step 1. More specifically, substituting ‘unpleasant experience’ for ‘experience’ in step 2 permits us to infer an exceptionally high degree of reflectiveness for unpleasant experiences that are happily entertained. Step 3: Exceptionally high reflectiveness For any given unpleasant experience or kind of unpleasant experience, the premise of step 2 (degrees of reflectiveness) holds. Moreover, since the relevant mental states in the case of unpleasant experience naturally tend to be, on aggregate, entertained not happily but rather unhappily (step 1), the overall degree of reflectiveness that a subject may achieve with regard to it will not only be higher but, indeed, higher than it naturally tends to be, and thus exceptionally high.

Obviously, substituting either ‘experience of unhappiness’ or ‘experience of a realistic representation of unhappiness’ for ‘unpleasant experience’ in step 3 will be equally truth-preserving (QED). However, ideally the joyous entertainment that is the realistic representation of unhappiness in Blue Jasmine lets the viewer have not merely an exceptionally reflective experience of a realistic representation of unhappiness, in virtue of the viewer’s happily entertaining relevant mental states, but an exceptionally reflective experience of unhappiness itself. In fact, this is quite likely to happen. As noted earlier, just as someone who is entertaining a thought need not believe it, someone who is entertaining an emotion, a feeling, or a mood need not experience it. Thus, both types of activity will sometimes be merely an exercise of the imagination. Arguably, just as there are thoughts that are such that unless you assent to their truth you have not fully entertained them (for example, that red is a color), you have not fully entertained a given emotion, feeling, or

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mood unless you are actually affected by it. More to the point, it is certainly possible for at least some particular emotions, feelings, and moods that someone’s merely entertaining one of them will result in them actually experiencing it. For example, my imagining someone else’s anger may result in my experiencing this anger, or at least something very similar, myself. In the same way, my imagining Jasmine’s fears, anger, sadness, and so on may result in my experiencing some of the same, or at least something very similar. Thus, the exceptionally reflective experience of a realistic representation of unhappiness that the film enables the viewer to have—in the form of their happily entertaining relevant mental states (for example, some of Jasmine’s fears, anger, sadness, etc.)—could well result in an experience of unhappiness itself. And since such an experience of unhappiness would be the result of one’s entertaining relevant mental states happily, it could well be an exceptionally reflective experience of unhappiness.

V My aim in this final section will be achieved if I can make it plausible to the reader that there are in fact valuable reflections about happiness to be drawn in virtue of the sort of achievement by the film Blue Jasmine that I have described in the sections above. I shall therefore use the remainder of this essay to focus on just one broad kind of lesson about happiness that I personally take from this film, after having enjoyed watching it many times. Moreover, this broad kind of lesson ties in well with what has been my main theme throughout. As I understand Blue Jasmine, the film strives to provide joyous entertainment on the subject of unhappiness in order to help the viewer not only attain a certain perspective on its own specific content, but also adopt a similar attitude towards life in general. The first shot of the opening scene ends awkwardly. Jasmine has been speaking to the woman sitting next to her on the plane about her ex-­ husband, beginning, ‘There was no one like Hal. He met me at a party and swept me off my feet.’ Then she says: ‘And one more year and I would have graduated. But I quit BU to marry him. And what the hell was I learning at school anyway? I mean, can you picture me as an anthropologist?’ They both chuckle. But Jasmine’s chuckle almost immediately gives way to a shake of the head and a frozen smile, then she sighs whilst looking down and suddenly asks in a desperate-sounding voice, ‘Is that a joke?’ Here the shot ends, and the next shows Jasmine and the other woman

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already inside the airport terminal. Thus, the attentive viewer is left to wonder: was it a joke? Later, it becomes clear that Jasmine does not want it to be one. Although Chili scoffs and Ginger smirks at her suggestion of going back to school, Jasmine, remarkably composed, continues to explain: ‘The biggest mistake I made was leaving college in my last year and not completing my education.’ And when asked by Chili’s colleague Eddie ‘What would you be?’, she responds confidently, ‘An anthropologist.’ However, the impression of Jasmine’s sincerity is immediately broken for the viewer by Eddie’s incredulous response, ‘Really? Like digging up old fossils?’, from which the conversation quickly moves on to a different subject. Similarly, the film makes Jasmine’s subsequent decision to study interior design online seem both ridiculous and unreasonable. But, in fact, it is neither. Moreover, her resolve to make it work is strong. The next scene already shows her starting work as a receptionist in Dr Flicker’s practice, in order to pay for the computer class she is now taking in preparation for her planned online studies. At this point, even Chili applauds her effort: ‘I want you to know I think it’s great when a grown-up continues with their education. Not for nothing.’ By the end of the film, however, it may well seem as if it had been for nothing after all. Where did it all go wrong? The film itself asks this question, not least by having everyone blame Jasmine. But above all it asks this question when she ironically blames herself after Dwight accuses her of lying and cancels their engagement. After pleading with him for a while, Jasmine says: ‘I get it. You’re not marrying me. I brought everything on myself. I’ve only got myself to blame. I did it to myself again, as usual, as usual.’ Chronologically, the car scene marks the beginning of Jasmine’s final mental breakdown. So let us begin by going back from here, and ask who or what is really to blame. Dwight cannot be blamed for his reaction to finding out about the ways in which Jasmine has kept the truth from him. Augie, who appears outside the jewellery shop (‘surprise, surprise’) and reveals the truth about Jasmine’s ex-husband, cannot be blamed for doing so. But Jasmine cannot really be blamed either for keeping some of the truth from Dwight. Who is going to say, when asked about their ex-­ husband by someone they have only just met at a party, that he was imprisoned and hanged himself? So the worst part is perhaps her pretending to have worked as an interior designer for a while when she is only trying to become one. And for that she can probably be forgiven (and in any case, Dwight is not particularly worried about that detail).

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Thus far, then, it seems that Jasmine has done nothing seriously wrong, and that had she just been a little bit more fortunate, things might not have gone so badly at all. In addition, there is a positive sense of necessity, which calls for further exploration. Is not the story of her new fiancé Dwight in a way the same as that of her late husband Hal, which Jasmine keeps telling people about? Like Hal, Dwight met her at a party and swept her off her feet. As with Hal, Jasmine is ready to quit her education to marry Dwight (and live with him in Vienna). And Ginger’s diagnosis of Jasmine’s falling for Hal seems equally correct of Jasmine’s falling for Dwight: ‘He was a handsome guy with money. He was a smooth talker, and he pampered her. What’s she gonna say? “No”?’ Before continuing with this line of interpretation, we must consider the central accusation that Jasmine has been more or less complicit in the business practices for which Hal is indicted and imprisoned. If this is so, and if Dwight is right when he tells her ‘Your ethical behavior is equal to your ex-husband,’ then it will seem—as no doubt it does to many viewers—that Jasmine indeed only has herself to blame. Viewers who find it surprising that Jasmine may have been ignorant for such a long time of Hal’s affairs with other women—like Jasmine’s (now formerly) good friend who says ‘I’m surprised it took so long’—should be open to the possibility that Ginger’s observation ‘when Jasmine don’t wanna know something, she’s got a habit of looking the other way’ applies generally. Then the crucial question becomes the disjunctive one that Danny, Hal’s son and her stepson, asks her: ‘Did you not suspect anything or did you not care?’ Incidentally, the same question could be asked of Danny, who lived with them throughout his adolescence. Evidently, Danny was present when business was done, and he took pride in his father’s success. In the same scene, viewers are told that he accompanied his father on golf weekends, and an earlier scene shows Danny as a young child receiving a set of clubs for his birthday together with a word of advice from his father, ‘You gotta remember as you go through life to share some of what you earn with the less fortunate. Not everyone is as lucky as we are.’ Golf is of course well known as a leisure activity that is often combined with business meetings. Jasmine’s delusional shouting outside Dr Flicker’s practice—‘Be careful! Don’t get hit by a golf ball!’—in the scene that immediately follows can be interpreted as a warning to the younger Danny, out of sync with the present moment, not to get involved in shady business.

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Many viewers will perhaps be inclined, like Danny appears to be, to take the revelation, in one of the final scenes, that Jasmine called federal law enforcement on Hal after he told her he was planning his future together with another woman as proof that she knew enough to be complicit in her husband’s criminal activities. However, they would be ignoring an important scene in the middle of the film showing Jasmine and Hal relaxing outside their house in the Hamptons. In this scene, Jasmine tells Hal that she is scared because her friend told her the reason one of Hal’s ex-­business partners (presumably the friend’s husband) had left was in order to avoid prosecution. The scene shows Jasmine as caring but relatively unsuspecting, and quickly—too quickly?—giving in to her husband’s loving reassurance: ‘Hey, let me deal with it, okay? Is there anything you want that you don’t have? Is there? So stop worrying and let me spoil you.’ The phone call was bittersweet vengeance, whatever else it may have been. Jasmine later says she regretted the call, but she does not say why. The bitter part, of course, was the collateral damage that was her own downfall. But regardless of whether making that phone call was morally right or wrong, wise or unwise, and regardless of how much she really knew or merely suspected, Jasmine can hardly be blamed for this being her reaction to discovering the full extent of Hal’s betrayal of their marriage. We now need to try and understand what exactly happens before Jasmine’s story begins to repeat itself. How does Jasmine end up being at the party where she is going to meet Dwight? How does she suddenly end up asking her computer course acquaintance, ‘Sharon, do you know any men? … Men that would be good for me … someone substantial,’ when shortly before she had said that she was not ready to go out yet, that she was concentrating on school, and that what she wanted was to become ‘something substantial’? The event that brings about this radical change takes place in the previous scene, which shows Jasmine at the height of her recovery, coping with ease in her job as a receptionist, until Dr Flicker sexually assaults her. Jasmine wrestles herself free and says as she leaves, ‘Now look what you have done!’ Sharon is of course right to say afterwards, just before Jasmine suddenly asks her about men, ‘I don’t blame you for being shaken up.’ Thus, we have our answer: Dr Flicker—this ridiculous and slightly annoying, but apparently harmless clown who turns out to be a sexual predator—he is where it all goes wrong again for Jasmine. His sexual assault on her is what sets her on a path of destruction, ultimately leading

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her to the park bench, once again talking to herself and ready to be picked up on the street. Again, there is a clear sense of necessity present in this recurring structure of events, in addition to that residing in the fact that Jasmine does not seem to have done anything seriously wrong. At the same time, it seems that had Jasmine just been a little bit more fortunate—had Dr Flicker acted in a more civilized way, or had Augie perhaps not turned up outside the jewellery shop—things might just have gone a different way. Thus, the recurring structure of events such as it is—also including significant variation—contains a sense not only of necessity, but also of having another chance. The film offers two more structural analogies that are useful to consider in this connection. First, there is the story of Jasmine’s stepson, Danny. Both Danny and Jasmine have suffered immensely from the events surrounding Hal’s arrest, and they have both struggled to leave the past behind. It has not worked out for Jasmine so far, but it has for Danny—or at any rate, he is doing better—so there is hope for Jasmine. Finally, there is of course the parallel story of Ginger, which is of fundamental importance. Here are two sisters, adopted by the same parents though long estranged from each other, who have turned out very differently, but now are both looking to build a new life following the end of their failed first marriages. The film includes many verbal comparisons between the sisters, often explicitly formulated—like so much else in this film—in terms of chance, luck, and necessity. In particular, there is a lot of talk in this connection about desert, responsibility, good and bad genes, being more or less fortunate, and so on, including in the scene that directly precedes the one showing the sexual assault. The conversation in this scene, which takes place in Ginger’s living room, and specifically Jasmine’s sudden change and confusion, can be seen as foreshadowing the change that the assault brings by crushing Jasmine’s developing sense of autonomy. Jasmine:  Ginger and I are completely different people. Ginger:   Yeah, she got the good genes. Jasmine:  It’s not genetic. You can’t always blame everything on your genes. If you’re prepared to work hard and not settle— [suddenly stops] Ginger:   What, you mean Augie? Chili:    She means me.

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Jasmine:  Aw, who do I have to sleep with around here to get a Stoli martini with a twist of lemon!? [she looks confused, other people watch her] Oh. That’s what I… What—? What—? Oh, Christ, I can’t remember. [walks over to the Stoli]

Perhaps the others are slightly more shocked by Jasmine’s outburst than would normally seem appropriate because they think she is expressing a truth about herself. But the centrepiece of the sisters’ parallel stories is their meeting men at the same party, Dwight and Al, who sweep each of them off their feet. Al, like Dwight and Hal, is—following Ginger’s classification—a handsome guy with money (notice Ginger’s reaction to hearing he is from the affluent Marin, where Dwight has also bought his impressive house) and a smooth talker (Ginger tells him, ‘You know what clinched it for me? Because you were so smooth’), and he pampers her (for example, he gives her a sound system as a present). ‘He’s such a gentleman,’ Ginger tells Jasmine, and asks her, ‘You think Al is a step up from Chili?’ It soon becomes clear, however, that Al is mainly a version of Hal—like Hal, Al seems mostly interested in sex—even though Ginger, like Jasmine, is slow to recognize the problem. When Ginger eventually finds out that Al is actually married, she reunites with Chili. And she counts herself lucky for it: ‘You didn’t lose me,’ she says to him, ‘I almost lost you.’ The remaining scenes show the sisters returning to their respective starting positions. Ginger and Chili are again ready to move in together, happy to have each other even if they have little else. In their final appearance, they lovingly play around, lying on the sofa, teasing each other over the last slice of pizza, before chasing each other, presumably to the bedroom, where we can overhear them continuing to play. Meanwhile, Jasmine reverts to a state of acute insanity. Having suffered another trauma, she takes to the streets again, delusional, talking to herself and hearing music. Her final words are: ‘This was playing on the Vineyard. “Blue Moon.” I used to know the words. I knew the words. Now they’re all a jumble.’ Jasmine’s having forgotten the lyrics of the song she has kept telling everyone was playing when she and Hal first met can be interpreted as simply a sign of her ultimate disintegration. Alternatively, it can be interpreted as a sign of progress, not least since the lyrics—which are not part of the soundtrack, since it uses an instrumental version—represent a kind of happiness that is entirely dependent on romantic love (hence, precisely

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the kind of happiness that has not worked out for Jasmine). It would then be another one of those elements of variation by which the film ever so slightly breaks the sense of necessity and inevitability that lies in the repetition of Jasmine’s story and the fact that she has not really done anything wrong. One important such element, as I have just argued, is the happy ending of Ginger’s version. Things have not worked out for Jasmine so far, but they have for Ginger—or at any rate, things are going better for her— so there is hope for Jasmine. Yet this is only one way of looking at it, and moreover one it would be naïve to cling on to. The same holds for Jasmine’s facial expression before the film cuts to the final credits. Her smiling as if something or someone nice were approaching can be interpreted as a sign of hope. Alternatively, it can be interpreted as simply another sign of her mental breakdown. The closing scene, as well as the film as a whole, will have offered joyous entertainment either way. Furthermore, if the interpretation that I have presented in this final section is plausible, then the attentive viewer may equally take Jasmine’s closing smile as confirmation of the generalized lesson that can be drawn from the fact that the joyous entertainment that has come from a realistic representation of someone’s deep unhappiness has enabled that viewer not only to have an exceptionally reflective experience of unhappiness, or at least the realistic representation of unhappiness, but indeed to happily entertain some of the relevant mental states and, thus, to entertain unhappiness happily. The generalized lesson is simply to try, in life, to entertain unhappiness happily. That is, of course, not to desire unhappiness, but for any given episode of unhappiness that one experiences to entertain it happily rather than not happily. And perhaps, even more generally, not to desire pain but, for any given pain that one experiences, to learn to entertain it happily rather than not happily.

References Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1872). Die Geburt der Tragödie (third edition, 1878, E.  W. Fritzsch), Trans. The Birth of Tragedy, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Filmography Allen, Woody (director). (2013). Blue Jasmine. Gravier Productions; Perdido Productions.

CHAPTER 18

In Kieślowski’s Restaurant des Philosophes: Determinism and Free Will Under Surveillance Colin Heber-Percy

Opposite the apartment where Valentine Dussaut lives in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours: Red is the Restaurant des Philosophes. It is on screen only for a few seconds, in the background of several long shots. Given the themes of the film—determinism, chance, and free will—the restaurant is resonantly named. Whether the Philosophes is present in the film by chance or design is beyond discovery. I know of no interview in which Kieślowski has talked about the choice of location for Valentine’s Geneva flat. He has said, simply, that “the locations in Geneva weren’t badly chosen”, adding that the city itself is “exceptionally unphotogenic” (Kieślowski, 1993, p. 222-3). Since aesthetic reasons can be ruled out, perhaps the director chose Geneva for the city’s philosophical and theological associations, for its philosophes.

C. Heber-Percy (*) Independent, Marlborough, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_18

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Around the time Kieślowski was planning Three Colours: Red, he wrote an introduction to coincide with the English DVD release of his earlier work, Decalogue: The Ten Commandments. In that introduction, he wrote: I believe fate is an important part of life. Of all lives, my own included … Naturally, a person may select his or her path through life and so to a certain extent determines what happens along the way. But to understand where you are in the present, it is necessary to retrace the steps of your life and isolate the parts played by necessity, free will and pure chance (Kieślowski, 2007, p. 219).

There is something intuitively appealing about Kieślowski’s description of a life that in retrospect combines various ingredients—fate, necessity, free will, and chance—into a single recipe. Over the course of the following, I want to analyze this recipe as it is developed in Kieślowski’s last film, Three Colours: Red, and to defend it against a powerful alternative with a thoroughly Genevan pedigree. In effect, I shall argue that the philosophes are Kieślowski’s interlocutors throughout the film.

I In form and structure, Three Colours: Red is a romantic comedy. Tending to rely for part of their effect on our sense of fate playing a hand in the characters’ lives, the plots of romantic comedies appear to proceed through chance encounters, lucky conjunctions, and coincidences, but there must always also be a determined, fateful quality, a sense that this was ‘meant to be’. These lovers, we ought to feel, are star-crossed. A model and a dancer, Valentine (played by Irène Jacob) is currently apart from her boyfriend, Michel, who is working away from home in England. He sounds lukewarm and ambivalent in conversations on the phone. Meanwhile, Valentine’s neighbor, Auguste, is a callow law student in love with the unprincipled Karin, a weather forecaster. Although we may be expecting it, or even willing it, Valentine and Auguste’s paths never quite intersect. Prior to their meeting on the lifeboat at the very end of the film, the only time Auguste ‘sees’ Valentine is when he notices the vast billboard display of her face in a chewing gum commercial at a busy road junction in Geneva. Earlier in the film, as Valentine drives away from that same junction, she is distracted by ‘fortuitous’ interference on her car radio. Looking down, she taps the dial. And runs over a dog.

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It is through Rita, the injured German Shepherd dog, that Valentine first encounters Josef Kern, a retired judge (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who eavesdrops on his neighbors using surveillance equipment. An unlikely bond forms between Valentine and Kern. Throughout his last film, Kieślowski sifts and weighs the ingredients of his own recipe for a human life: fate, necessity, free choice, and chance. As we watch the unfolding narrative, we are repeatedly prompted to ask: what is accidental here? and what is fateful? Valentine certainly feels that fate or providence plays a role in her life. If she loses on the fruit machine in the bar below her apartment, all is well with the world. If she wins, trouble is in store. Through Kern’s listening apparatus, we are privy to a conversation in which Auguste and Karin try to decide what to do with their evening. They flip a coin which, of course, we cannot see. Still eavesdropping, Kern flips a coin too. Auguste’s comes up heads, we hear. So does Kern’s. Valentine with her fruit machine and Auguste with his coin: both of them are gamblers. And it goes without saying, gamblers cannot afford to believe in chance. To Auguste and Valentine, their lives are patterned, at least in part, by determining fate, or destiny. But chance and the accidental also play a hand, or appear to. On the catwalk at a fashion show, Valentine stumbles. And she does so again, when leaving the home of one of Kern’s victims. But are these accidents? In truth, how could they be? If the actor trips, why not reshoot the scene? By including the apparently accidental, Kieślowski repeatedly draws our attention to the artificial, plotted, diegetic and determined nature of the narrative medium itself. Kieślowski appears to be saying, ‘nothing here is as chance would have it’. Several scenes are disturbed by atmospheric noise: helicopters, light aircraft, and gusts of wind. Our first sight of Valentine in the film is a (genuine?) ‘mistake’. Her reflection is caught briefly in a mirror at the end of a complex crane shot as the camera pushes through an open window of her apartment. While the film playfully calls our attention to the apparently fortuitous or accidental, it is also formally cinematic, self-consciously borrowing patterns from the wider Romantic Comedy genre. And patterns seem to emerge from within the story too. The narrative itself suggests history repeating; events echo one another across time or come in waves, like the looping weather patterns on Karin’s computer. There are recurring motifs in the lives of the characters: separation, betrayal, misunderstanding, pursuit, and tragedy at sea. Stylistically, of course, there is the artful color

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palette of the film, alerting us continually to the director’s ‘eye’. Valentine’s stumbles, the sudden gusts of wind, and the sounds of helicopters and engines, all mischievously disrupt the formal filmic components, as though Kieślowski’s film is made up not of ‘takes’, but mistakes. And these mistakes form repeating patterns. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze asks us to “Consider what we call repetition within a life—more precisely within a spiritual life”(Deleuze, 2014, p.108). He goes on to discuss how apparent incoherences and oppositions between successive presents nonetheless belong to the ‘same life’. This is what we call destiny. Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions (Deleuze, 2014, pp. 108-9).

Deleuze’s ‘destiny’ is given diegetic expression in Three Colours: Red and appears in concrete form in Josef Kern’s study. Here are connections vividly embodied. Connections between neighbors as Kern listens in—or replays—their telephone conversations; here is action at a distance, echoes of lives, signs, snippets, signals, and repeating roles: lover, betrayer, drug dealer. Indeed, Three Colours: Red opens with an image of connectivity, disconnection, and distance. The wire from Michel’s phone leads across his desk, into the wall socket and then into the ducts and tubes of a modern telecommunications network. We follow the pipes under the sea, presumably the English Channel, and into continental Europe, all the way to his girlfriend’s apartment. But—after all that—she misses the call. At the same time, a crane shot lifts us from the street where we leave Auguste and his dog, up over the frontage of Chez Josef, before pushing through the open window of Valentine’s apartment, where an empty rocking chair is still rocking, just vacated we assume. She has missed Auguste too. But the film closes with a fulfilled image of connectivity. Apparently random survivors of a ferry disaster in the English Channel turn out to be the protagonists in the narratives of Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy. Caught by the cameras of a news crew, Julie, Karol, and Valentine and Auguste look shocked and cold. Unbeknownst to them, these seemingly disparate characters are connected, have been connected all along, at a

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distance, by the roles they play in the determination of Kieślowski’s overall narrative. Is it too far-fetched to ask if there is meaning in Kieślowski’s choice of ‘Auguste’ as the name of his male lead in a film partly about Auguste-inian ideas of determinism, providence, and the freedom of the will? Like Saint Augustine in Milan, Auguste in Geneva is a troubled law student. At the traffic lights, moments after Valentine has pulled away in her car, Auguste crosses the road, carrying his law books. But he drops his books, and his attention is caught by a particular passage that ‘happens’ to lie open on the pavement. It is hard not to see this as an echo of Augustine’s own epiphany, when he hears a child’s voice chanting “Tolle, lege”—Take it up and read (Augustine, 1992, 8.12.[29]). Augustine takes the words as a prompt to open the Bible and read the first passage he encounters. It marks the trajectory of the rest of his life. For Auguste, likewise, it is the passage at which his book falls open in the street that crops up later in his final exams. Together finally at the very end of the film, Kieślowski’s characters on the lifeboat are puzzle pieces sliding into the last remaining spaces on the board. The point being that the puzzle piece is cut—must be cut—to the shape of a pre-existing space. The pattern comes first; the pattern is primary. And fixed. ‘To understand where you are in the present, it is necessary to retrace the steps of your life’. From this direction, “where you are now” is entirely determined.

II Written and revised, at least partly in Geneva during the middle of the sixteenth century, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion argues that: What for us seems a contingency, faith recognizes to have been a secret impulse from God. Not always does a like reason appear, but we ought undoubtedly to hold that whatever changes are discerned in the world are produced by the secret stirring of God’s hand (Calvin, 1960, Vol.1, I. XVI. 9, p. 210).

For Calvin, the ‘Christian heart … has been thoroughly persuaded that all things happen by God’s plan, and that nothing takes place by chance’ (Calvin, 1960, Vol.1, I. XVII. 6, p. 218). And the ferry disaster at the end of Three Colours: Red calls to mind Calvin’s own example of God’s hand in all things:

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Suppose a man … is shipwrecked at sea by a sudden gale … [and] having been tossed by the waves, reaches harbor; miraculously escapes death by a fingers’ breadth. Carnal reason ascribes all such happenings, whether prosperous or adverse, to fortune (Calvin, 1960, Vol.1, I, XVI. 2, p. 198-9).

But this “carnal reason”, Calvin argues, is profoundly mistaken. All events are governed by God. There is no erratic power, or action, or motion in creatures, but that they are governed by God’s secret plan in such a way that nothing happens except what is knowingly and willingly decreed by him (Calvin, 1960, Vol.1, I, XVI. 3, p. 201).

As in a film, everything is ‘for some reason’, known and willed and decreed. Calvin saw this aspect of his reformed theology as deriving directly from Augustine. “If I wanted to weave a whole volume from Augustine, I could readily show my readers that I need no other language than his” (Calvin, 1960, Vol.2, III, XXII. 8, p .942). But in fact, Augustine never entirely abandoned his view that the human will is free. In a letter to Valentinus and the monks of Hadrumetum, Augustine asks: “If it is not by his grace, how does God save the world? And if our will is not free, how does God judge the world?” (Augustine 1845a, PL 33:969). In the De libero arbitrio, he asks, “What depends on the power of the will so much as the will itself?” (Augustine, 1861 PL 32:1235). Admittedly, in his later writings, hardened and disputatious, he is considerably less sanguine about the freedom of the will, seeing it as curbed by sin, and reliant on God’s grace in order for it to be able to prompt virtuous action. And yet he continues to see the will as fundamentally free; so even as late as the City of God he writes: We are in no way compelled either to preserve God’s prescience by abolishing our free will, or to safeguard our free will by denying (blasphemously) the divine foreknowledge. We embrace both truths, and acknowledge them in faith and sincerity, the one for a right belief, the other for a right life (Augustine, 2003, 5.10, p. 195).

Calvin’s determinism does not rest, ultimately, on an argument from God’s foreknowledge, but from God’s will; it is not that God knows x, but that God wills x. Augustine’s position depends—at least in the earlier

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phases of his thinking—more on God’s knowledge. God sees all things, judges all things. Writing in the ninth century, John Scotus Eriugena (to whom we shall return) argues that the Greek word for God derives from the word ‘to watch’ or ‘to see’: “when it is derived from the verb θεωρω, θεόϛ is interpreted to mean ‘He Who sees’” (Eriugena, 1999, p. 61). If we accept the etymology (which is highly contestable), it follows that ‘to do philosophy without theory’ would be to do philosophy without seeing, perhaps without God. Not something our philosophes would recommend. The issue of who watches whom is central in Three Colours: Red. Unseen, Auguste watches Karin making love with her new boyfriend through a bedroom window. He also spies on Karin and her boyfriend through the window of a restaurant (not the Philosophes). And Valentine’s job is to be watched, seen, viewed, either on a catwalk or a billboard, removed and separated from the audience. Of course, ultimately we are the watchers, the surveilleing ones. And so, we find ourselves represented in the story by Kern. Near the end of the film, he alone occupies the auditorium: he is audience. Horrified by Kern’s invasion of other people’s privacy, Valentine goes to tell a particular neighbor that their phone calls are being monitored, their hearts open, their desires known, and from [Kern] no secrets are hidden (see Book of Common Prayer 1662/2004). But she finds that the young daughter of the household is also listening in to her father’s intimate conversation. Layers of surveillance, signals, and systems of replay pattern the film.

III Released ten years before Three Colours: Red, John Badham’s 1983 thriller, Wargames tells the story of David (played by Matthew Broderick) a high school student who chooses to spend his time playing computer games rather than attending school. But that turns out not to be an issue for David. Using a dial-up connection in a pre-web world, he is able to gain access to the school’s mainframe and alter his grades. Harmless enough, you might think, but while trying to hack a games company’s latest release, he finds himself ‘playing’ global thermonuclear war with what he later discovers to be the US military’s supercomputer which we are told has “All available information on the state of the world”. It is omniscient, the ultimate watcher or viewer, the divine divining.

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Wargames and Three Colours: Red make an unlikely pair. While manifestly very different films, they have interesting and telling correspondences. Kern’s study and David’s teenage bedroom in Wargames are cluttered spaces given over to connection from a distance. And both films pitch unsuspecting young protagonists against older, disaffected, morbid, and quasi-divine older characters. In Kieślowski’s film, Kern, the retired judge is a cold, morally ambiguous puppet-master who seems unable to move on from a failed relationship as a young man. In Wargames, Dr Stephen Falken (played by John Wood) has retired from the world, disillusioned and broken-hearted after the death of his son. Both men are explicitly alone, a state which affords them an almost transcendent quality. Valentine challenges Kern about his lack of emotion after Rita, the dog is run over; she asks, “If I ran over your daughter would you be so indifferent?” Turning to look at her, he answers pointedly, “I have no daughter, mademoiselle”. My recent re-acquaintance with Wargames came through several conversations with a friend who suffers from schizophrenia. Noah talks about Wargames as a talisman, as offering an insight into the experience of psychosis. He says he first saw the film after “psychotic episodes had become a feature of my life. When I was already in the game, so to speak” (Noah M., pers. comm.). His use of the word ‘game’ is interesting. Clearly, it is a reference to the ‘gameplay’ in Badham’s film. But Kern, in Three Colours: Red plays games too. He challenges Valentine when she first discovers his spying. “Don’t you find it entertaining?” he asks. He seems not to recognize the morally relevant difference between game and reality. One of the first conversations we overhear through Kern’s listening equipment is between Karin and Auguste discussing whether or not to go bowling. In both films, games and play are revealed as the deadly serious expressed in a different register. In Wargames, when the computer presents David with statistics relating to the projected destruction of a nuclear exchange, David asks, “Is this real or is this a game?” The computer responds with “What’s the difference?” And as Noah says, “When you are playing a game, it is real” (Noah M., pers. comm.). Noah recognized immediately in the film a version of his own feelings of “being entirely surveilled”, of an “all pervasive surveillance system all around me” (Noah M., pers. comm.). For the characters in Wargames and Three Colours: Red, as for Noah, the events disclose themselves—at least partly—as plotted, or pre-plotted, and determined. If we are free, we are free as participants in a game with fixed rules and objectives. Noah

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describes his life as “a dolorous exercise of pre-fulfilled destinies along weird ley lines” (Noah M., pers. comm.). The apparently accidental and banal is somehow ‘accounted for’ and profoundly consequential. For Noah, happenstance is a hollow concept. And we are back with Calvin in a predetermined reality where “all events are governed by God’s secret plan”. Noah’s world is bifurcated; he is at once a pawn within the game, but at the same time, a powerful player who knows (as most do not) that it is a game. David must learn this in Wargames. The result, as Noah describes it, is a “tearing” or sundering from the world while at the same time feeling responsible for the world. Noah talks of a powerful connection with David in Wargames when he suddenly realizes he is answerable for the news item about escalating nuclear tension between the Soviet Union and the United States (Fig. 18.1). David’s girlfriend, played by Ally Sheedy, cheerfully reassures David, telling him over the phone, “listen, all you have to do is act normal. We’ll both act normal and everything’s going to be fine”. Her advice, Noah says, precisely articulates his sense of how we are all playing roles and being played. Our identification of these themes of pattern and providence, repetition, surveillance, and play all suggest Three Colours: Red and Wargames aim at depicting a world ‘wired up’ in ways we do not suspect in the

Fig. 18.1  David watches the news, from Wargames

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‘normal’ or neurotypical run of things. To claim that the world is ‘wired up’ at all is liable to earn you a diagnosis, like Noah’s. But to the medieval or early modern mind, it would have been simply descriptive of accepted reality. To the strict Augustinian, like Calvin, or later, the Jansenists, human beings are like characters in a film that has already been shot. The accidents—an injured dog, a reflection, a misstep in high heels, a ferry disaster—are not accidents at all. There is a dramaturg, like Kieślowski, or Kern, in the background, controlling all things. Towards the end of Three Colours: Red, Valentine invites Kern to a fashion show in which she is appearing. Afterwards, from the stage above an empty auditorium, she questions Kern about a dream. She says, “I’d like you tell me what happened in the dream you had”. He replies in the past tense, “You were fifty years old, and you were happy”. Kern’s dream of the future has the fixity of the past, the quality of a memory. And when asked, he insists that it will come true. Three Colours: Red thus dramatizes the essence of the problem of divine knowledge, determinism, and freedom, that is, time.

IV At the most general level, Augustine is engaged in trying to synthesize the Hebraic and the Hellenic. And thus, he passes to posterity an ultimately incoherent account of God’s providence. In scripture, Augustine encounters a God who acts successively in the world through history and towards a coming Kingdom. In the philosophical tradition, on the other hand, particularly in Cicero (where he encounters the Stoa-inflected Academy), and in Plotinus’ Neoplatonism, Augustine inherits a tendency to the monistic and deterministic, and the idea of a static or eternally recurring universe. He seeks to meld these traditions—the historical, successive, and linear with the timeless, transcending, and cyclical—in the doctrine of God’s eternal providence. That he is not altogether successful is one of his (many) great gifts to the Christian thought-world. In Book Twelve of the Confessions, he states that God does not will this at one point, and that at another, but he wills all things that he wills once and concurrently and always (semel et simul et semper), not again and again, nor now this, now that. Nor does he not will something he had previously willed, or will something he had previously not willed; such a will is changeable and anything that is changeable is not eternal: and our God is eternal. (Augustine, 1992, 12.15 [18]; my translation)

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After Augustine but before Calvin comes the intemperate controversialist of the ninth century, Gottschalk of Orbais. Like Calvin, Gottschalk believes he is correctly interpreting Augustine when he claims God’s creation is entirely determined. Just as Calvin does, Gottschalk argues for the position known as ‘double predestination’. Not only are some—the elect—predestined for the Kingdom of God, but everyone else is predestined for damnation. In a concerned letter to Hincmar of Rheims, written in 848, Hrabanus Maurus describes Gottschalk’s interpretation as supposing that “the predestination of God extends to evil as well as good, and that there are men in this world who cannot correct their erroneous ways nor turn from sin, because the predestination of God impels them to [everlasting] death” (Hrabanus Maurus quoted in Eriugena, 1998, p. xxii). Gottschalk’s interpretation allows no room for free will; no free decision on my part can alter the determination of an eternal, changeless God. Literally, I am damned if do, damned if I don’t. In a treatise commissioned by Hincmar to rebut Gottschalk’s arguments, John Scottus Eriugena, writing from the court of Charles the Bald, begins with a claim that he takes to be axiomatic: that “there is no true freedom of any will if some cause has imposed compulsion” (Eriugena, 1998, p. 35). And this is as true of God as it is of human beings. Despite Calvin’s conviction and argument to the contrary, Eriugena’s position is straightforwardly Augustinian. So, in Augustine’s late and incomplete disputation with Julian of Eclanum, we find this claim: “If the will is compelled, then it does not will” (Augustine, 1845b, PL 45:1117). Likewise, for Eriugena, not only does external compulsion preclude freedom of the will, it denies there is a will at all. So, he argues, Where there is inevitability there is no will. In God, however, there is will. In him, therefore, there is no necessity. God made all that he made of his own will and out of no necessity (Eriugena, 1998, p. 11).

It follows, Eriugena says, that “whatever we understand concerning the divine will, we must necessarily understand in the same way of his predestination also. But all necessity is excluded from the divine will. Therefore it is excluded from his predestination” (Eriugena, 1998, p. 12). That very art by which all things were made, that is, the highest and immutable wisdom of God, has by predestining so arranged the making of the rational creature as to impose upon it no necessity which would by an inevitable force compel it. (Eriugena, 1998, p. 29).

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Eriugena defends the notion of contingency in creation and the freedom of the will to direct our actions in the world. He does so, partly, by reference to the Boethian argument for the timelessness of God. Our temporally indexed talk of pre-destination or pro-vidence can only be metaphorical when predicated of God in whom “nothing is in the future, because he awaits nothing, nothing is past because for him nothing passes” (Eriugena, 1998, p. 62). In the development of his later work, however, Eriugena elaborates some of these ideas into one of the most speculative and challenging philosophical accounts of how human beings are both free and determined, living in a Kieślowskian world characterized by “necessity, free will and pure chance”. In his vast work, the Periphyseon, or De Divisone Naturae, Eriugena boldly argues that God and creation can be dialectically resolved into one. (It is an argument that will earn him—wrongly, in my view—a posthumous charge of pantheism (in 1225) and a place, in 1684 on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.) For Eriugena, God’s predestinations or divine volitions are the primordial causes of all things. The ordering, structure, or hierarchy of these causes, he states in Book Three of the Periphyseon, is “not discerned in the causes themselves, but in the contemplation (theoria), that is, in the beholding of the mind that seeks them” (Eriugena, 1853, PL 122:624A). The intellect, contemplating these primordial causes, is the hinge on which the whole of creation is hung, and by means of which it turns—or returns—to God. More, it is creation itself. “If the understanding (intellectus) of all things is all things, and it alone understands (intelligit) all things, then it alone is all things” (Eriugena, 1853, PL 122:632D). The human intellect, through an act of knowing, creates, by a wonderful operation of its science, whatsoever it most clearly and unambiguously receives from God (Eriugena, 1983, p. 121).

The temporal directionality and spatial complexity of creation, with its apparent Kieślowskian blend of the determined, the freely willed, and the fortuitous, is an act of knowing, of science, of theory. Eriugena can nonetheless still claim to be within the Augustinian tradition. After all, it is Augustine himself who speculates that time is no more than a distentio animi, an expansion of the mind (Augustine, 1992, 11.26.[33]). The complexity and successiveness of lived experience is a manifestation of a fallen point of view. The world is generated, even created, by the

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contemplating human understanding which can choose, freely, to turn towards the corporeal and complex, or towards the unchanging unity of truth itself which it receives from God. The characters in Three Colours: Red, it seems to me, are navigating Eriugena’s Geneva, not Calvin’s. The city, the structure, the story accommodates them, and emerges from them, with all its resonances and echoes, chances, and roles. When, after the fashion show, Valentine says to Kern, “I feel that something important is happening around me” she recognizes herself as having a role in a plot. She speaks to him from up on the stage, a character still securely in her story. Act normal. And Kern—ever the listener, the watcher, divine—is down in the auditorium. And yet they shake hands, reaching across to one another, like God and Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, across the screen, creation and creator resolved, diegetical collaborators (Fig. 18.2). Valentine’s life is a story which—according to Kern’s dream of the future—has already been written. “You were fifty years old, and you were happy”. As Kieślowski says, “Where you are in the present” emerges from the pattern of your past. What Kern offers Valentine is not a retracing but a pre-tracing. And, in whichever direction the story is told, it is happening “around her”, accommodating her, as a puzzle accommodates its pieces.

Fig. 18.2  Kern and Valentine, God and Adam

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Eriugena calls us to see ourselves as creative co-authors of ourselves and our world. In a complementary way, Deleuze speaks in a moral register, of our need “To become worthy of what happens to us, to become the offspring of one’s own events, and thereby to be reborn, … and to break with one’s carnal birth” (Deleuze, 2015, p.  154). There is a touch of John 3.1-8 here, and a dash of Baron Münchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own hair. But there is also an echo of Eriugena’s claim that we are both the teller and the told, created and creating, fixed and free. Perhaps we could claim, in conclusion, that theoria, qua contemplation, is both Deleuze’s break with our carnal birth and Eriugena’s act of knowing, a co-creative operation. As a strictly policed and arcane subdiscipline of the social and political sciences, theory may be inessential, even inimical to the doing of philosophy. As contemplation, however, theory is what makes us us, what makes what “happens around” us, and what makes us worthy of both. It is, in short, philosophy’s modus operandi and its subject matter.

References Augustine. (2003). The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. Penguin Augustine. (1992). Confessions. Edited by James J. O’Donnell. Oxford University Press. (My translation.) Augustine. (1845a). Epistola CCXIV. In PL 33. Augustine. (1845b). Contra secundam Juliani Repsonsionem imperfectum opus. In PL 45. Augustine. (1861). De libero arbitrio. In PL 32. Calvin, J. (1960/1). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Westminster. 2 Vols. Deleuze, G. (2014). Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G. (2015). Logic of Sense. Trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, Charles J. Stivale. Bloomsbury. Eriugena, John Scottus. (1853). De Divisione Naturae. In PL 122. Eriugena, John Scottus. (1983). Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae). Liber Secundus. Edited by I.P.  Sheldon-Williams. Scriptores Latini Hiberniae. Vol. IX. The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Eriugena, John Scottus. (1998). Treatise on Divine Predestination. Trans. Mary Brennan. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press. Eriugena, John Scottus. (1999). Periphyseon (De Divisione Naturae). Liber Primus. Edited by I.P. Sheldon-Williams. Scriptores Latini Hiberniae. Vol. VII. : The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.

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Kieślowski, K. (1993). Kies ́lowski on Kieslowski. ́ Trans. and ed. Danusia Stok. London: Faber. Kieślowski, K. (2007). Introduction to Decalogue: The Ten Commandments. In J. Mitchell & S. Brent Plate (Eds.), The Religion and Film Reader (pp. 219–224). New York: Routledge.

Abbreviation PL Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Latina. Edited by J.-P. Migne. 217 vols. Paris, 1844-1864

Filmography Badham, John. (Director). (1983). War Games. United Artists. Kieślowski, Krzysztof. (Director). (1994). Three Colours: Red. MK2 Productions.

CHAPTER 19

Loving the Characters, Caring for the Work: Long-Term Engagement with TV Serials Iris Vidmar Jovanović

“I feel a little bit dirty playing the actress who has to justify all the reasons why Serena does what she does because ultimately. I am on team audience who loads and hates her and wants her to be a better person.” (Actress Yvonne Strahovski on her character in The Handmaid’s Tale)1

Anyone familiar with the television serial The Handmaid’s Tale (THMT) will easily relate to Strahovski’s comment, as Serena may be one of the most despicable fictional characters currently on offer. Of course, with a work which presents such an array of brutal characters, the competition is strong. There is Aunt Lydia, poking women with the cattle prodder, plucking their eyes out, and burning their hands; even if only to help them ease into the new ways of Gilead, as actress Ann Dowd—who plays the part—repeatedly emphasizes in her interviews.2 There is the Commander, who may not have the brains of Serena or the composure of Aunt Lydia,

I. Vidmar Jovanović (*) University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2_19

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but makes up for what he lacks in smarts with viciousness and brutality— so much so that Joseph Fiennes, who plays this character, stated that he does not want his wife or his children to see his portrayal of Commander Waterford.3 All things considered, it is easy for the viewers to feel repelled by some of the main characters on this amazing show, and to repeatedly abhor the horrific things they do. With its gloomy atmosphere and challenging subject/theme nexus, THMT adds a new layer to Hume’s puzzle regarding the pleasure we find in works which are, for various reasons, hard to watch. The puzzle is given additional force, in connection with the TV show, given that audiences have been attending to it for five years to date. Presented in the form of serialized narration, with the story developing episodically over time, it is not a work that we experience in one go: time and time again, we return to it knowing full well it will be a trying experience. Why? Insightful pointers on how to answer this question have been provided by philosophers interested in film, who, armed with insights from the cognitive sciences, successfully discarded many of the facets of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and other Film-Theory-related views.4 Explaining the power of movies, Noël Carroll (2010, 2013) developed a theory according to which our interest in film is best explained in virtues of the emotional ties we develop for the characters, particularly for the morally praiseworthy ones who have suffered an injustice or harm, much like what is the case with THMT’s main protagonist, Offred/June (Elisabeth Moss). In the novel, film, and television serial,5 she is, within the first few scenes, presented as a woman who has had her child taken away, her husband shot, and her bodily integrity severely injured. From those first opening scenes, the viewers’ sympathies (some may even say empathy)6 are firmly on her side, and stay there, impervious to her subsequent (mis)demeanors. She may be morally flawed—and depending on whether you read the novel, watch the movie, or the serial, her transgressions include being a homewrecker, having an illegal romance, cheating on her husband, being a murderer, and kidnapping children— but she is, on the whole, a moral character tossed around in circumstances that, as Carroll explains, invite viewers to care for her and to be on her side. Her social ties are jeopardized, as her family and friends have been taken away from her, and her country is destroyed; she is devoid of her freedom, raped, and forced into pregnancy, only to have her baby taken away from her. Offred is thus someone who has suffered a considerable

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harm, unjustly; consequently, we want to see her get her revenge. On Carroll’s view (2010), caring for such things—moral values, social justice, family, and country—has evolutionary roots, which is why such concerns are often embedded in fictional scenarios: we care for Offred because we are aware of the value of family, of the importance of a just social order and of a positive moral code. In fiction and in reality, these are the things that matter, and matter deeply, cross-culturally. There is much to applaud in Carroll’s account, and my aim here is not to point to its shortcomings—in the context of film, it is hard to think of any. But I do want to suggest that this account needs some adjustments if it is to be applied to TV shows. For one thing, though I will not develop this here, it does not explain the longevity of formulaic TV series; those shows which portray the same set of characters who repeatedly (often for years and years in a row) do the same sorts of things, with little character development and no change in their moral values. Furthermore, the account does not explain the fact that we often have our preferences among characters who are saliently similar with respect to their moral character and the circumstances in which they find themselves. Both CSI—Crime Scene Investigation’s Grissom (William Petersen) and NYPD Blue’s John Kelly (David Caruso) satisfy Carroll’s criteria of a good guy fighting for the good cause, but you probably have strong preferences for one and are less inclined to enjoy the company of the other. Leaving formulaic series aside, here I will focus on examining the extent to which Carroll’s solution can be applied to TV serials, with THMT as my main example.7 Serials are similar in structure to films, in that they present their stories as a more or less loose chain of causally related events which unfold as an ongoing exchange of questions and answers, with at least one overall story uniting several, often highly complex, sub-stories or subplots. Often, they also portray good people fighting for a good cause. However, given their episodic structure, serials are extended in time, and it takes much longer to arrive at the finale, i.e. the resolution. My question here is, how does this temporal dimension influence viewers’ engagement with the characters, and relate to their continual interest in the serial? I start by exploring the interplay of the temporal dimension with the development of characters along with viewers’ emotional engagement, to point to some of the worries I have regarding Carroll’s sympathy account. I then turn to another influential account explaining the longterm interest in serials, centered around the notion of familiarity,

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suggesting that it too needs some modification. I conclude by tying my views on the serials’ temporal dimension and familiarity to a more general account of the emotional reactions to fiction, in order to explain the power they hold over viewers for extended periods of time.

Engagement Over Time: Curiosity, Suspense, and Fatigue “This season is about patience rewarded.” (Warren Littlefield, Executive Producer, commenting on the union of June and Luke in Season 4)8

Serials progress episodically, enabling the development of a prolonged story and bringing opportunities to introduce and exploit new information regarding the fictional world with each new episode. An episode is shorter than film and offers less time to develop a story, which is why episodes often progress at a very quick pace. However, in light of the episodic nature, serials are in principle never-ending stories; consequently, viewers are provided with significantly more opportunities to “construct” the characters and are given more time and space to “align” with them, i.e. to follow them and come to an understanding of who they are, and form ‘allegiances’ with them.9 Such expansion is welcome, as characters can be placed in various situations and contexts, thus providing viewers with new details about characters’ personal (hi)stories, motivations, and reactions. This open-endedness in the case of serials implies that unlike films, serials are not completed works: while the film is given to the viewer in ‘one sitting’, TV shows progress for years, developing constantly new stories, bringing in new characters, providing new takes on the regular ones, and placing them in new situations. While one may form allegiances with the characters in the opening few scenes, as suggested by the sympathy account, there is always the possibility that these allegiances will change. Quite often, serials deliberately exploit such changes to maintain viewers’ interest over the course of plot development.10 For many viewers, the most interesting aspects of THMT’s Season Three and Four relate to June’s transformation, from a victim into a vigilante; her later moral choices may be excusable only to viewers who have followed her story from the beginning, and even they can wonder if she is still a moral hero. This is not to say that characters do not undergo moral transformations in films, particularly in stories of moral redemption. But in case of TV, reversals are often extended (and even repeated) over many episodes, as

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the producers attempt to ensure their viewers remain committed to the show without being put off by the prolonged expectation of the resolution. When June decides, in Season Three, to bring as many children out of Gilead as possible, viewers need to adjust to her new goal: rather than finding Hannah, she is now on the quest to demolish Gilead. Consequently, the ‘end’, i.e. the fulfillment of a goal both June and the viewers were committed to since the pilot, is delayed, and new stories are incorporated which contribute to her newly formed plans. Since viewers seem to prefer moral heroes, attuning to her new goal is easily accommodated within their preferences. The viewers’ attendance to Season Four (and Five) is secured, even strengthened, once it becomes unclear whether June will reunite with Luke or pursue her romance with Nick. On the other hand, however, June’s refusal to run away when given a chance at the end of Season Two, and then again at the end of Season Three, can be a deal-­breaker for those viewers who have become restless by the serial’s continual refusal to reward their hopes for a family reunion. This is because suspense—the withholding of desired answers, particularly when the possibility of morally less preferable outcomes is high—can only take us so far.11 Too little suspense and we lose interest; too much, and we are frustrated. Films of 90 to 120 minutes are perhaps better positioned to maintain suspense, encourage the audience’s desire for answers whilst developing the plot, and coming to a desired resolution in a timely fashion. Maintaining such cognitive/emotional attention is harder in serials, particularly if the viewers feel the aesthetic/artistic appeal of the show is diminishing. Lack of closure may create exhaustion and irritation, in addition to being cognitively vexing. Not only do viewers need to be attentive and remember a vast amount of details and information to connect and interpret different bits of the unfolding story, but the emotional excitement that goes along with it can wear off. Emotional power fades when we get used to the object that gives rise to it, and this is true of things which we like as well as of those we dislike. Whether we take pleasure in June’s defiance or abhor the atrocities done to women in Gilead, at a certain point, we may become reluctant to engage with those same stimuli and we give up on the show, even if the moral values of our preferred hero are intact and she has yet to accomplish her goals. Sympathy for the hero, in Carroll’s sense, is a powerful incentive for viewers’ initial interest, but will not, in the long run, suffice to keep them committed to the serial. Thus, we need a different explanation for the long-term commitment to a serial; in the next part, I analyze the one offered by Robert Blanchet and Margrethe Bruun Vaage (2012).

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Familiarity, Friendship, and Investment “I love her probably more than any character I have ever played.” (Elisabeth Moss on her character)12

According to Blanchet and Vaage, a long-term interest in a TV show is best explained by the forward-looking desire for closure—we want to see whether the characters will be rewarded for their efforts—and by backward-­ looking concerns regarding our emotional investment in the project. Having dedicated a lot of time and energy, both cognitive and emotional, into the show, we are not ready to see that investment wasted and therefore we stay tuned. In addition, the long-term exposure creates a sense of togetherness, so much so that we start considering the characters as our friends, irrespective of the one-sided nature of such relation. Because our own life goes on while we are attending to the show, we feel as if we are sharing our lives with fictional people. And given our continuing attendance to the show, there is a sense of familiarity that comes from knowing the characters well and taking pleasure in predicting what they will do. In addition to being pleasant in itself, familiarity reduces the energy needed to follow the plot: it aids our cognitive capacities because we do not need to engage in deciphering who the characters are and how they are related. We know who everyone is when we engage with each new episode, unlike when we engage with a film, where everyone is new and thereby unknown. Not only does familiarity add to our appreciation of the characters’ relation and intensity of the storylines, but, in the context of our moral evaluations, it may blunt our sense of moral disapproval. As stated by Vaage (2016), we refrain from moral judgments because we know the circumstances under which the main character acted in morally blameworthy ways (information often unavailable to us with respect to other characters). It is for this reason that many viewers find themselves sympathizing, even if only briefly, with Aunt Lydia, having seen in flashback her life before Gilead. While many aspects of the familiarity account are evident in our daily experiences with TV shows, I am skeptical of its capacity to explain the ties we develop with the characters, or our long-term commitment to the shows we watch. Ignoring for the moment that familiarity can easily breed boredom, and even assuming (though I doubt it) a one-sided friendship is how viewers do feel when attending to a serial, it is not clear why viewers would remain committed to the show for the time needed for familiarity

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(or friendship) to develop, without the additional incentives to stay committed to the serial. Given the amount of serials on offer, I wonder why we would remain with any given show for several seasons, which is how long, on Blanchet and  Vaage’s suggestions, it takes for familiarity to develop. And while Carroll’s sympathy certainly explains our immediate interest in the serials, I doubt such sympathy is immediately followed by familiarity. Something more is needed to connect these two powerful incentives. In the next part, I explain what that is.

Beyond the Characters: Caring for the Work "The Handmaid's Tale" isn't the best TV show ever, although it's plenty good. But it's hard to think of a series that has been better calibrated to tap into the zeitgeist and unease of its cultural and political moment.13 (CNN entertainment)

I argued that neither the sympathy account nor the familiarity/friendship account explains viewers’ long-term dedication to a particular TV serial, nor the fact that we have our preferred characters and are more interested in some than in others. As I claimed, sympathy wears off if the desire for closure is frustrated, as it usually is. And while familiarity impacts the allegiances to characters we develop, it cannot shoulder the burden placed upon it by Blanchet and Vaage, since it develops only after substantial exposure to the serial, rather than giving rise to it. On the account I am proposing, there is more to a long-term commitment to serials than sympathy for the characters and an interest in what will happen to them. Serials often present psychologically complex characters who invite more considered responses than a mere pro or contra attitude, and the stories told and themes depicted invite more contemplation than attending to how the characters’ desires play out. In my suggestion, our repeated return to the work is secured when, in addition to caring for the characters in Carroll’s sense, we also care for the work, and, equally importantly, feel rewarded for such caring. Such reward incorporates a cognitive and/or hedonic payoff provided by the work’s subject/theme nexus, and by the aesthetic/artistic satisfaction obtained when we consider the work as an artistic achievement. Let me elaborate. To explain the cognitive/hedonic reward afforded by the work, I rely on Peter Lamarque’s (1981) solution to the paradox of fiction, i.e. to the

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question of why we react emotionally to things we know do not exist. On his view, we pity June/Offred because, through our engagement with the work, we develop various thoughts about what is happening to her, generated by the work and by the interpretative strategies we employ. Our pity develops as we recognize the wrong done to her; reacting in such a way is not irrational, since we react to distinctive thoughts we develop in response to a particular kind of description provided by the work’s creator.14 This account accommodates the work’s mimetic dimension—roughly, the fact that works speak about humanly important issues—and the fact that through characters’ actions, works generate thematic concerns that capture our interest and attention and invite reflection. Works of narrative art present themes we are concerned with because they constitute the framework within which we reflect on our experience—that is, after all, at the root of the humanistic intuition behind literature and cinema.15 These themes include the kinds of evolutionary concerns identified by Carroll, but go beyond them, given that works of art often trace cultural developments and focus on ethical, political, social, economic, and so on conundrums brought about by these developments. Arguably, one of the most compelling aspects of THMT, particularly in light of the Trump-enabled political climate, is its depiction of women’s rights and reproductive autonomy. In depicting these issues, the serial exploits those evolutionary and biological concerns of our shared human form of life, such as the importance of family ties, and positions them not just in a futuristic society, but one which resonates with the audience’s contemporary world. In addition, the work successfully demonstrates the power of the biological bond between mothers and their offspring, which, as polemicized from Plato onwards, has to be considered in the context of our political arrangements. Thus, our interest in THMT is not merely an interest in June’s recovery of her family, as the sympathy account suggests, or something aided by our considering June a friend. Rather, it is an interest in the themes developed throughout the serials’ progression: who we are as human beings, how we should live, which political arrangements are available, how we might deal with extreme violence, how do we cope with loneliness, betrayal, and so on. Relevant in this sense are also the ethical challenges the show provides: the morality of abortion, the utilitarian versus deontological moral code, the moral status of revenge, and so on. I am not claiming that our interest in films is not imbued with such elements, but I am suggesting that the open-endedness of the serial creates additional opportunities to address

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these issues. The extended program length made possible by serialization provides more space for different characters’ storylines, giving a deeper understanding of those concerns which dominate each character’s situation.16 Since different characters enable extended focus on different issues, our overall interest moves beyond our concern for the hero (and her particular concerns) and becomes more finely grained interest in the thematic concerns presented by the work and depicted in the doings of a greater range of characters. The harm done to Offred is significantly different from the one inflicted on Moira, whose story arc (a financially independent woman in a same-sex relation who ends up being an enslaved prostitute and then a refugee) enables the exploration of different moral issues and recognizes alternative ways of causing harm and violating a person’s autonomy, from those investigated in June’s storylines. Arguably, our preferences for different characters are partly shaped by the thematic concerns raised by their stories, i.e. by the manner in which characters create and handle such concerns. Another element that is relevant in explaining viewers’ interest and commitment to the series concerns the acknowledgment of how variations in paradigmatic scenarios—developed to engage viewers’ emotions— enable the work to have varying cognitive impact and ethical character. Both of these are fruitful for attracting and maintaining viewers’ interest in and care for the work. Consider for example the quest for justice, emphasized by Carroll as one of the incentives that immediately attracts sympathy and commitment. While in itself a cross-culturally relevant moral incentive, used as a thematic strategy that organizes the story and inspires viewers’ emotions, it works differently in different serials. Both Offred and Westworld’s Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) are on a quest for justice, but the wider thematic concerns raised by the two shows are significantly different: if (to put it simplistically) THMT invites us to consider the reproductive policies and female role within the society, Westworld invites us to explore the notions of humanity and consciousness. Viewers who are not intrigued by, say, issues related to humanity as depicted by Westworld may turn away from the show, regardless of the fact that, like Offred, Dolores too is cast in dire circumstances and is on a quest for justice, battling the harm done to her and her family. Caring for the work in this sense means caring for the topics it depicts and the manner in which it does so, because the viewer feels that some of her concerns—or concerns she recognizes or comes to recognize as relevant and feels invited to consider—are at the core of the serial.

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My proposal is that our emotional reactions to fiction and fictional characters are partly at least motivated by the recognition of the thematic concerns that a work depicts, and invites viewers to consider. When a serial does so, this has an additional impact on how viewers react to it: their imaginative involvement is increased, and strengthened, by all the details of the fictional world. Consequently, the overall “level of reflection or imaginative involvement” (to borrow from Lamarque) is heightened, as we respond to the richness of the work. This is an intrinsically rewarding aesthetic experience in itself, imbued with cognitive and hedonic elements, and it generates an overwhelming appreciation for the work itself, which is why viewers care for the work and keep returning to it, repeatedly and with enthusiasm.17 Sympathy for the main character is secondary to such over-arching care: although it serves the role of capturing our attention when we first encounter the serial, it is of lesser importance in the long run, provided the work keeps introducing and exploring themes that respond to our overall concerns, in ways which bring forward aesthetic reward. A relevant aspect of reflective and imaginative involvement with the serial relates to viewer’s interpretive predictions: her expectations about what will happen next. These predictions take place not only during an episode, but also between episodes and seasons, and are often accompanied by discussions about the show with others. Such activities strengthen and maintain viewers’ commitment, and their return to the serials’ next episode is motivated by a desire to see how the story will progress, and to see if their predictions and interpretations will be corroborated. Notice that this element is also temporally prolonged. While in films, all of our guesses are proven right or wrong within, roughly, the 120 minutes that the movie takes, our guessing game in serials can extend for years. During this time, there are numerous opportunities to engage in discussions about the serials with others, and such exchange of opinions and judgments about a work further strengthens the hold they have on us and intensifies our interest in the resolution of the plot, and of the ethical issues depicted. One final element operative in keeping viewers tuned to the serial relates to their artistic/aesthetic motivation in attending to the work: it is here, I suggest, that Blanchet and Vaage’s notion of investment is most efficient. There is a sense in which we owe it, so to speak, to the show’s makers, to acknowledge their creative efforts by attending to the work until it is completed, or for as long as it is available. We may be wrong in considering the work completed, given the possibility of generating new episodes, but to

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the extent to which there is an expectation of closure, our aesthetic curiosity extends beyond characters and into the work itself. This explains why we might remain committed to the serial after it loses its appeal, after our favorite character(s) are written off the show, and after the show jumps the shark. In my suggestion then, when the sympathy effect wears off, what makes us return to the show is a desire to see how the work itself is (to be) completed. Because serials are potentially open-ended, there is an interest in closure; not only regarding the characters’ stories, but in the way, this impacts and is impacted by the overall artistic design. Having invested our energy in following the episodes over a considerable amount of time, we are intrigued to see the final shape of what has been developing in front of our eyes for as long as it did. Since viewers are committed to their own predictions, a desire to see the resolution is also a desire to see how close they have come in guessing what will happen. This may be a particularly powerful incentive with serials which depict numerous characters, complex ethical issues, and a grand variety of potential resolutions—just think of how passionately viewers were expecting the grand finale of Game of Thrones! An interest in the final shape of the work is not restricted to the interest in characters’ situations, but it also incorporates an interest in the makers’ solutions to the problems they have opened up, with respect to thematic concerns and issues depicted within the serial. Having created an ethically complex fictional world, viewers want to see the solutions to these problems, and they want to compare them to their own preferences.18 We are interested in seeing how the makers, who managed to incite us with the issues they put in front of us for as long as they did, are to resolve them, and such an interest can take us a long way into the serial.19

In Conclusion I argued that a long-term commitment to TV serials is invited and rewarded by factors that go beyond sympathy or familiarity, primarily given their episodic structure, their progression over time, their open-­ endedness, and the time in between episodes/seasons during which viewers are kept in dark with respect to what will happen. Our sympathy for the hero is diluted by the serials’ refusal to provide resolution and is eventually accompanied by a more fine-grained interest in other characters. We take pleasure in the cognitive/hedonic rewards the show offers, and are often

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committed to seeing the show through in order to see the progression of the story, to see if our predictions are correct, and to see the final shape of the work. These are the factors that underlie our long-term engagements, and only if these are successful in attracting our attention, maintaining our curiosity, and providing satisfaction, will we remain with the show, enjoying additional nuances of pleasure brought about by the familiarity. The account I propose recognizes that in the engagements with works of narrative fiction, we shift between taking internal and external perspectives on the work. Internally, we are interested in the fictional world, its inhabitants, and their actions: we recognize the harm done to Offred, we despise Serena for committing that harm, and we cheer for Offred as she takes her revenge. We are also challenged to consider the ethical aspects of the events depicted and we feel invited to reflect on the thematic concerns that the fictional world depicts. Externally, we are interested in and care for the artistic product itself; its artistic and aesthetic features, and formal aspects. It is in this segment that most of our hedonic interest lies, as we feel rewarded by the makers’ skills in bringing forth our aesthetic pleasure. There are further factors that determine viewers’ commitment and the particular affections we develop for different characters, such as the personality of the viewer (an element I believe figures in our explanation of the allegiances), the choice of actors, their star status, and so on. Needless to say, these factors matter also in our engagements with films. While I could not engage with them here, I hope my views brings us a step closer towards developing a philosophically interesting account of the appeal of serialized narratives available on TV and explaining why we care so much for some, and so little for others.20

Notes 1. Yvonne Strahovski Interview with Meet Your Emmy (16 August 2018) available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_s-­itPIJ94o 2. Ann Dowd Interview with Peter Travers on Popcorn ABC News (4 July 2018) available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGOZn8f5yu4 3. Joseph Fiennes Interview on Good Moring America Digital, ABC (17 August 2018) available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= aJQlWCObGek 4. See in particular Bordwell and Carroll (1996); Plantinga & Smith eds. (1999); Plantinga (2009).

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5. The novel was written by Margaret Atwood and was turned into film in 1990, directed by Volker Schlöndorff, with the screenplay by Harold Pinter. In 2017, HULU initiated the first season of the show, and so far, five seasons have been created by Bruce Miller. 6. I will not engage with the difference between sympathy and empathy here. 7. Kozloff’s (1992) distinction between series and serials is commonly accepted, though the difference is much more blurry nowadays. See Mittell (2016); Andrzejewski and Salwa (2018); Bandirali and Terrone (2021). Here I am only concerned with serials; my view on series is presented in (my) Vidmar Jovanović (2021). 8. THMT cast interview with TV Line (May 20 2021) available here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIydNDn0OWk 9. I take the notions of character construction, alignment, and allegiance from Smith (1995), to indicate a process whereby a reader comes to individuate and understand who the character is by aligning with her via the clues provided by the work. Allegiance refers to the moral evaluation viewers make of the characters. 10. See Garcia (2016); Vaage (2016) for discussion on the change of allegiance with respect to morally blurry characters in contemporary TV series. 11. On suspense, see Carroll (1984) and Vaage (2016). 12. THMT cast interview with Film Independent (18 June 2020) available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDD_vaQ9RQk&t=616s 13. CNN Entertainment (3 June 2019) available here: https://edition.cnn. com/2019/06/03/entertainment/the-­h andmaids-­t ale-­c olumn/ index.html 14. It is important to stress this to counter Colin Radford's 1975 account, on which our emotional reactions to fiction are irrational. Research in the cognitive sciences shows that fictional descriptions provide as rational stimuli for emotions as factual ones. See Plantinga and Smith (1999), Nannicelli & Taberham (eds.) (2014); Gilmore (2020). 15. See Lamarque and Olsen (1994) for a humanistic account of literature; Harrison (2019) provides one in relation to film. 16. Consider how the flashback episode in Moira or Janine's story develops opportunities for exploring the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate, absent from the novel and the film, centered as they are on the character of Offred. Throughout the serial, various moral concerns and aspects of distinctly human positions (on abortion, surrogate motherhood, infertility, infidelity, friendship, loneliness, death, homosexuality, etc.) are depicted from the perspective of the liberal democratic regime, and that of the Gileaddictatorship theocracy, thus inviting the viewer to compare and contrast the political, social and psychological circumstances operative in both. The invitation is enhanced by the parallelism in depicting the relevant issues:

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the befriending of Offred and Emily in E1S1 is contrasted with June’s memories of friendship with Moira, the scenes of childbirth in E2S2 are contrasted with June’s memories of Hanna’s birth, etc. 17. Given my case study, a drama serial THMT, here I am focused on cognitive reward, but, depending on genre, the additional element I emphasize can be less reflective and more hedonic. One can care for the work and feel rewarded by it in light of the entertainment and humor that some shows, such as sitcoms, provide, which is a welcome relief from everyday hardships. I do not have the space to develop this here, but hedonic elements also include a pleasure derived from actors’ performances and other representative, expressive, and formal aspects of the work, which give rise to aesthetic satisfaction and contribute to viewers’ enthusiasm for the work. As an example, consider the aesthetic effect of visual sceneries depicting landscape in Northern Exposure, the use of music combined with biker’s imagery used throughout the Sons of Anarchy, the effects of wardrobe in Sex and the City, etc. 18. I would suggest that for many readers, an interest in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to the original book, can also be accounted for along these lines: readers want to see not just a possible resolution to the problems, but Atwood’s resolution. 19. Arguably, viewer’s disappointment at the particular ending of any given serial or storyline is the strongest when this kind of expectation is unanswered; consider the worldwide disappointment with the Game of Thrones serial. 20. This work has been supported by Croatian Science Foundation under the project number UIP-2020-02-1309. I am deeply thankful to Britt Harrison and Craig Fox for the incentive and encouragement they provided for my consideration of these issues.

References Andrzejewski, A., & Salwa, M. (2018). Law and TV Series. Brill Research Perspectives in Art and Law, 2(2), 1–74. Bandirali, L., & Terrone, E. (2021). Concept TV. An Aesthetics of Television Series. Lexington Books. Blanchet, R., & Vaage, M. B. (2012). Don, Peggy, and Other Fictional Friends? Engaging with Characters in Television Series. Projections, 6(2), 18–41. Bordwell, D., & Carroll, N. (1996). Post-Theory. Reconstructing Film Studies. Wisconsin Press. Carroll, N. (1984). Toward a Theory of Film Suspense. Persistence of Vision, 1, 65–89.

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Index1

A Aeschylus, 254 Allemagne Neuf Zero, 139 Allen, Richard, 3, 7, 8, 11, 17–34, 40 Allen, Woody, 10, 253 Althusser, Louis, 2, 30 Altman, Robert, 91 An die Freude, 202 Andre, Carl, 168 Antigone, 254 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 91 Arendt, Hannah, 118, 119, 123, 125 Aristotle, 180, 184, 206–208, 212, 216–219 Arnheim, Rudolph, 86 Arnold, Matthew, 186 Augustine, Saint, 275, 276, 280–282 Au Hasard Balthasar, 95 Austen, Jane, 180 Austin, J. L., 185

Avatar, 116–118, 126n3 The Awful Truth, 178 B Badham, John, 10, 277, 278 Balázs, Béla, 221 The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, 78 Barthes, Roland, 2, 10, 25, 205, 208–212, 218 Baudelaire, Charles, 195 Baudry, Jean Louis, 23 Baz, Avner, 28, 135, 136, 196 Bazin, André, 137, 149, 221 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 9, 201, 202 Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 6 Bigelow, Kathryn, 91 Birdman, 83, 85, 87, 90, 94, 95 Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, 73

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 C. Fox, B. Harrison (eds.), Philosophy of Film Without Theory, Palgrave Film Studies and Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13654-2

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304 

INDEX

Blanchet, Robert, 291–293, 296 Blanchett, Cate, 260 Bloch, Robert, 240 Blue Jasmine, 10, 253–256, 258, 260, 262, 263 The Border, 192 Bordwell, David, 2, 3, 11, 18, 19, 22, 25, 29–31 Bouveresse, Jacques, 25, 27 Brahms, Johannes, 135 Branigan, Edward, 32 Bresson, Robert, 85, 86, 95, 211, 212 Brillo Box, 132, 133 Bringing Up Baby, 178 Broderick, Matthew, 277 Brooker, Charlie, 73 Brooks, Cleanth, 53, 57, 58, 65 Bullock, Sandra, 117, 121, 127n7 C Calvin, John, 275, 276, 279–281, 283 Carroll, Noël, 2, 3, 9–11, 11n2, 11n3, 18–22, 25, 30–33, 132–134, 288, 289, 291, 293–295 Caruso, David, 289 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 72 Cassavetes, John, 103 Cavell, Stanley, 3, 9, 18, 21, 27, 31–33, 77, 79n16, 121, 147–161, 161n1, 161n2, 161n3, 161n5, 161n6, 161n8, 162n10, 165–175, 177–187, 196, 197, 251, 251n3, 252n14 Cioffi, Frank, 28 Clark, Maudemarie, 64 Clooney, George, 122, 127n7 Cocteau, Jean, 68 Contempt, 93 Cooper, Chris, 54 Cooper, Sarah, 221 Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), 289

Cuaron, Alfonso, 8, 116–126 Currie, Gregory, 11n2, 19, 20, 32 D Dali, Salvador, 68 Dante, Alighieri, 180 Danto, Arthur, 9, 132–134 Davis, Garth, 10, 224 De Palma, Brian, 91 Decalogue: The Ten Commandments, 272 Deleuze, Gilles, 2, 20, 21, 27, 31, 32, 64, 73, 75, 78n3, 95, 138, 274, 284 Derrida, Jacques, 23, 74 Descartes, René, 147, 184 Diamond, Cora, 252n14 Dowd, Ann, 287 Dunkirk, 84–86, 88 Dyer, Geoff, 94 Dylan, Bob, 77, 78 E Einstein on the Beach, 199 Eiseley, Loren, 198 Ejiofor, Chiwetal, 226 Eliot, George, 180 Eliot, T. S., 77 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 160, 178, 180, 182–186 Epstein, Jean, 221 Eriugena, John Scotus, 277, 281–284 Evidence, 192 F Family Portrait, 209 Fellini, Federico, 8, 99–106, 109, 111n8, 139 Fiennes, Joseph, 288

 INDEX 

Floyd, Juliet, 170n5, 194 Fontaine, Joan, 48 Foster, Jodie, 46, 47 Foucault, Michel, 2, 20, 30 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 7, 23, 25, 27, 218 Fried, Michael, 104, 108, 242 G Game of Thrones, 297, 300n19 Gaut, Berys, 8, 32, 37, 38 Glass, Philip, 9, 192, 199–202 Godard, Jean-Luc, 9, 93, 129–131, 137–141, 143n1, 252n10, 252n12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 26, 67, 68, 78n1 Goodfellas, 92 Gottschalk of Orbais, 281 Grant, Cary, 178 Gravity, 8, 116–126 Greenberg, Clement, 173 Groundhog Day, 47 H Haas, Shira, 223 Hacker, P. M. S., 12n6, 22–25, 112n13 Halevi, Tsahi, 224 Hammer, Espen, 154 Hawkins, Sally, 260 Hawks, Howard, 44 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 106, 180, 183 Heraclitus, 125 Hincmar of Rheims, 281 Hirsohima mon amour, 74 Histoire(s) du cinéma (HdC), 9, 129–132, 134, 138–142, 252n10 Hitchcock, Alfred, 10, 68, 78n4, 90–92, 237–251, 252n10 Homer, 58, 125

305

Hulewicz, Witold, 193 Hume, David, 160, 288 Husserl, Edmund, 23 I I Know What You Did Last Summer, 71 Iñárritu, Alejandro, 83 Inception, 84 The Invention of Morel, 72 It Happened One Night, 178 J Jacob, Irène, 272 Jancsó, Miklós, 91, 93 Joaquin Phoenix, 224 John Wesley Harding, 77 K Kant, Immanuel, 173 Kertész, Andre, 208, 209 Koyaanisqatsi, 192, 200 Kracauer, Siegfried, 23, 86, 137 L Lacan, Jacques, 2, 30, 67, 68, 78n2 The Lady Eve, 178 Lamarque, Peter, 293, 296 Langer, Suzanne, 86 L'Année dernière à Marienbad, 68 Lanzmann, Claude, 9, 74, 206, 212–216 Lao Tse, 125 La Strada, 111n4, 139 Leavis, F. R., 66n1, 68 Lefebvre, Henri, 106 Leigh, Janet, 239 Leigh, Mike, 60

306 

INDEX

Le notti di Cabiria, 99–110, 110n1 Le Plaisir, 91, 92 Les statues meurent aussi, 74 Letter from an Unknown Woman, 48, 49 Limbo, 64 Littlefield, Warren, 290 Locke, John, 184 Lone Star, 53–66 Lukács, György, 106 M Macbeth, 83 The Magnificent Ambersons, 233 Mara, Rooney, 222, 231 Marks, Laura U., 221 Mars-Jones, Adam, 91 Martin, Sean, 89 Martin, Steve, 55 Mary Magdalene, 10, 221–233 Masina, Giulietta, 99, 101, 102 Matar, Anat, 173 Maurus, Hrabanus, 281 McGinn, Colin, 87 McNeill, Daniel, 194 Memento, 84, 89 Mendes, Sam, 83 Ménochet, Denis, 224 Michelson, Annette, 22 Miles, Vera, 239 Mill, John Stuart, 180 Miller, Bruce, 299n5 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 93 Modern Times, 102 Montaigne, Michel de, 180, 211 Morris, Errol, 59, 60, 65, 79n16 Moss, Elisabeth, 288, 292 Mouchette, 95 Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., 59 Mulhall, Stephen, 11–12n5, 53–55, 60, 151, 252n14

Mulvey, Laura, 223 Murdoch, Iris, 10, 222–224, 229–233 Muriel, 74, 78n9 Murray, Bill, 47 Musser, Charles, 29–30 N Naqoyqatsi, 192 Nehamas, Alexander, 64 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 64, 68, 73, 107, 160, 180, 183, 254 The Night it Rained, 9, 165–175, 175n6 1917, 83, 85, 87, 90, 94, 95 Ninth Symphony, 201 Nolan, Christopher, 84, 89, 118–120, 123 Northern Exposure, 300n17 Nostalgia, 89, 93 Notorious, 92 Nuit et brouillard, 74 NYPD Blue, 289 O Ode to Joy, 201, 202 Oedipus Tyrannus, 254 Ophüls, Max, 48, 91 Ordinary language philosophy (OLP), 8, 22, 23, 37–49, 106, 185 Oresteia, 254 P Panofsky, Erwin, 149 Pantenburg, Volker, 129–131, 134, 137 The Passenger, 91–93 Peeping Tom, 91 Perkins, Anthony, 239 Perkins, V. F., 29, 30, 51n13, 243, 248, 251, 252n14

 INDEX 

Petersen, William, 289 The Philadelphia Story, 9, 177–187 Pinter, Harold, 299n5 Pippin, Robert, 111n6, 251, 252n14 A Place in the Sun, 139 Plato, 4, 107, 151, 180, 184, 203, 294 The Player, 91, 92 Portrait of Susanna Lunden, 141 Powaqqatsi, 192 Powell, Michael, 91 Q Quine, Willard Van Orman, 2, 24, 58 R Rahim, Tahar, 226 The Red and the White, 91–93 Reggio, Godfrey, 9, 191–203 Reich, Steve, 200, 201 Resnais, Alain, 68, 74–76, 78n3 Reverdy, Pierre, 138 Rhees, Rush, 135 Ricoeur, Paul, 74 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 193, 196 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 68–70, 72, 74, 75, 78n3 Rodowick, D. N., 31, 32 Rope, 90 Rosenbaum, Ron, 59 Rosselini, Roberto, 103 Rubens, Peter Paul, 141 Russian Ark, 85, 90 Ryle, Gilbert, 22 S The Sacrifice, 91–93 Sátántangó, 83 Savage Eden, 192, 199 Sayles, John, 8, 54, 60, 63, 64

307

Scenes from a Marriage, 5 Scharfstein, Ben-Ami, 191 Schipper, Sebastian, 85 Schlöndorff, Volker, 299n5 Scorsese, Martin, 92 Sex and the City, 300n17 Shakespeare, William, 88, 139, 238, 240 Sheedy, Ally, 279 Shirdel, Kamran, 9, 165–175 Shoah, 9, 74, 205–219 Sica, Vittorio De, 103 The Silence of the Lambs, 46 Sklar, Bob, 20 Slade, David, 73 Smith, Lee, 85 Smith, Murray, 8, 18, 53–58, 60, 65, 66n1, 66n2, 299n9 Snake Eyes, 91 Sobchack, Vivian, 221 Socrates, 4, 107, 203 Sokurov, Alexander, 85 Sons of Anarchy, 300n17 Sophie’s Choice, 206 Sophocles, 254 Stalker, 93, 94 Stewart, James, 44 Strahovski, Yvonne, 287 Strange Days, 91, 92 A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 154 T Tarkovsky, Andrey, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93 Tarr, Bela, 83 Taylor, Elizabeth, 139 Tchéky Karyo, 224 Tenet, 84 Tennant, Victoria, 55, 56 Three Colours: Red, 271–284 Toister, Yanai, 161n7 Toles, George, 241

308 

INDEX

Tomlin, Lily, 55, 56 Touch of Evil, 90–92 The Trial of Joan of Arc, 86 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 273 The Turin Horse, 83 Turvey, Malcolm, 3, 7, 8, 11, 11n2, 17–34 V Vaage, Margrethe Bruun, 10, 291–293, 296, 299n10 Vera Drake, 60 Vertov, Dziga, 23 Victoria, 85, 90 The Violinist’s Tune, 208 Visconti, Luchino, 103 Visitors, 9, 191–203 von Wright, G. H., 25 W Wall, Jeff, 154 Walton, Kendall, 20 War Games, 10 Warhol, Andy, 132 Wartenberg, Thomas, 54 Weekend, 93

Welles, Orson, 90 Williams, Bernard, 57 Wilson, George, 20, 32, 48, 50–51n13 Wilson, Robert, 199 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4–9, 12n6, 17–20, 22–28, 31, 32, 34, 58, 106–110, 111n10, 111n11, 112n12, 116, 118, 120, 125, 128n13, 130, 131, 134–137, 139, 140, 157, 160, 167, 170, 174, 175n3, 180, 183, 185, 194, 195 Wollen, Peter, 72 Wollheim, Richard, 23 Wood, James, 174 Wood, John, 278 Wood, Rachel Evan, 295 Woolf, Virginia, 221 Y Young and Innocent, 91, 92 Z Zee, James van der, 209 Zumhagen-Yekplé, Karen, 111n11, 174, 175n3