Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Response to BW
BW responded to my earlier post about analytic film theory, here. I responded as such:
this is going to have to be quicker than I'd like.
It's good that you bring up hermeutics. Because, analysis of cinema (qua artform) *isn't* hermeneutic. It's precisely what we find opposed to hermeneutics, that is, poetics. In that hermeneutics builds a cognitive structure, it fails: read Kant's Critique of Judgment: "That is beautiful in the mere act of judgment (not in the mere sensation of it of by means of a concept" (emphasis mine, sec.43)
Analytic philosophy presupposes intelligibility in whatever it's object is (or, rather, it takes intelligibilty as it's limit.)But, art as a field is unintellible conceptually, if you take Kant to be right, in the way that we take other concepts. Art appeals to the imagination. All the analytic work I've read on art has found this to be a terrible stumbling block. As a result, you read and read and read, and you find no reason given for why we look at art. Borges described aestheticians as "Astronomers who have never seen the stars."
Necessary and sufficient conditions are by definition generalizing. But, most of the really interesting bits of cinema are the ones that skirt those lines.
Poetics offers a possibility of understanding art through it's proximity to it, in that many of the important texts in aesthetics were written by artists themselves. The work of poetics grows out of the experience of the work, which is what I meant by "bowing down to cinema." The theory should come after the film, rather than vice versa; from that review, I got the feeling that you could have made any of those points without ever having seen a film in your life. What was so special about those Cahiers du Cinema guys is that they were voracious film watchers, their ideas came out of a long and profound encounter with the medium.
It's crucial to look at cinema in terms of poetics, because then you then have a way of connecting cinema to other artforms, which is absolutely crucial. Cinema isn't absolutely distinct from music, sculpture, painting, dance, etc. Part of what is so interesting about cinema is it's interaction with these other fields.
And sorry the statement: "A method that asks questions and tries to make sense of what is going on instead of talking in circles with obscure language. " is just disingenuous. Had I had no background in philosophy, I'd find Ayer, Quine, Russell, Davidson, etc. just as obscure. Much of the work in poetics is very lucid, look at Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy", Walter Benjamin, Aristotle, Horace even Bachelard. Hegel isn't really lucid, but to characterize his work as unstructured is simply wrong. It's just that the structures are kind of hard to keep track of sometimes. And you're right, you do define analytic too loosely. If that's you definition, than 95% of all things "theoretical" fall under analytic philosophy. I see the analytic movement as having a pretty clear trajectory.
this is going to have to be quicker than I'd like.
It's good that you bring up hermeutics. Because, analysis of cinema (qua artform) *isn't* hermeneutic. It's precisely what we find opposed to hermeneutics, that is, poetics. In that hermeneutics builds a cognitive structure, it fails: read Kant's Critique of Judgment: "That is beautiful in the mere act of judgment (not in the mere sensation of it of by means of a concept" (emphasis mine, sec.43)
Analytic philosophy presupposes intelligibility in whatever it's object is (or, rather, it takes intelligibilty as it's limit.)But, art as a field is unintellible conceptually, if you take Kant to be right, in the way that we take other concepts. Art appeals to the imagination. All the analytic work I've read on art has found this to be a terrible stumbling block. As a result, you read and read and read, and you find no reason given for why we look at art. Borges described aestheticians as "Astronomers who have never seen the stars."
Necessary and sufficient conditions are by definition generalizing. But, most of the really interesting bits of cinema are the ones that skirt those lines.
Poetics offers a possibility of understanding art through it's proximity to it, in that many of the important texts in aesthetics were written by artists themselves. The work of poetics grows out of the experience of the work, which is what I meant by "bowing down to cinema." The theory should come after the film, rather than vice versa; from that review, I got the feeling that you could have made any of those points without ever having seen a film in your life. What was so special about those Cahiers du Cinema guys is that they were voracious film watchers, their ideas came out of a long and profound encounter with the medium.
It's crucial to look at cinema in terms of poetics, because then you then have a way of connecting cinema to other artforms, which is absolutely crucial. Cinema isn't absolutely distinct from music, sculpture, painting, dance, etc. Part of what is so interesting about cinema is it's interaction with these other fields.
And sorry the statement: "A method that asks questions and tries to make sense of what is going on instead of talking in circles with obscure language. " is just disingenuous. Had I had no background in philosophy, I'd find Ayer, Quine, Russell, Davidson, etc. just as obscure. Much of the work in poetics is very lucid, look at Nietzsche's "Birth of Tragedy", Walter Benjamin, Aristotle, Horace even Bachelard. Hegel isn't really lucid, but to characterize his work as unstructured is simply wrong. It's just that the structures are kind of hard to keep track of sometimes. And you're right, you do define analytic too loosely. If that's you definition, than 95% of all things "theoretical" fall under analytic philosophy. I see the analytic movement as having a pretty clear trajectory.
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Film Theory
What is needed is not Film Theory, but only film criticism. Everything that one would need to know is in the film itself, and their interaction with other films, and other artworks. All that needs exist is commentary upon films, of their narrative structures, formal structures, content, thematics, etc. To treat cinema as if it were one of the arts, to simply presuppose art, and history, and to treat cinema as if it were part of this grand tradition. I've learned more about cinema from watching Sans Soleil over and over than from reading any book about film. Isn't this why Godard is great? He's doing film theory, but he's working in a way that there are no problems in translation. He's working in the language/field he's commenting upon.
This is the prime offender. The section on authorship is bizarre: have these people never read the auteurist canon? There's a long legacy of these people, and before the Cahiers became a bastion of post-structuralism, there was a hell of a lot of good work done on this subject. Why try to find necessary and sufficient conditions for what happens in Cinema? What do you hope to prove? With your analytic method, you're simply imposing a model on top of films, and hoping that they conform. Instead, it is better simply to bow to cinema, accept the burden the works themselves have placed upon the head of the critic, and get to work.
This is the prime offender. The section on authorship is bizarre: have these people never read the auteurist canon? There's a long legacy of these people, and before the Cahiers became a bastion of post-structuralism, there was a hell of a lot of good work done on this subject. Why try to find necessary and sufficient conditions for what happens in Cinema? What do you hope to prove? With your analytic method, you're simply imposing a model on top of films, and hoping that they conform. Instead, it is better simply to bow to cinema, accept the burden the works themselves have placed upon the head of the critic, and get to work.
How could I think of Guilt other than as a dog? Guilt is Charon-esque, thrice-headed. Upon the slightest provocation, it bites. Then while one ruminatess upon that bite, when whatever the stupid thing one has done recently the second head gets you, and you wonder why someone who has everything, and has no reason to feel guilty actually does. This is guilt x2, the second bite pushes one to a distance wherein the third bite hits, and by then it's mid afternoon, and you need to work but, *fuck* is it hard. The third bite is the third reflection upon one's conscience, when one recognizes that overall disgustingness of the situation, and then pushes you to the end, where you manage to crawl to a cup of coffee/narcotizer and Spinoza, and then you can ignore it for a while.
