Ethics of Cinematic Experience

Screens of Alterity

Orna Raviv

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429765353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity deals with the relationship between cinema and ethics from a philosophical perspective, finding an intrinsic connection between film spectatorship and the possibility of being open to different modes of alterity. The book's main thesis is that openness to otherness is already found in the basic structures of cinematic experience.

Through a close examination of the ethical relevance of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze to cinema studies, Ethics of Cinematic Experience: Screens of Alterity pursues the question of how film can open the viewer to what is not her, and so bring her to encounter otherness in a way that is unique to cinematic experience. The book sees ethics as not just the subject, content or story of a film but part of its aesthetic structure. Accompanied by readings of films mainly from mainstream cinema, each chapter focuses on a different aspect of the encounter with alterity through cinema. The book gives particular attention to how theoretical discussion of the cinematic close-up can lead to ethical insights into the status of both the human and the non-human in film, and thus lead to an understanding of the relationships the viewer makes with them.

The book is a helpful resource for students and scholars interested in the relationship between philosophy, film and ethics, and is appropriate for students of philosophy and media and cultural studies.

1 Perspectivalism and Beyond

Conventional conceptions of cinematic experience have been in thrall to models of human perception that fail to do justice to the various modes of our visual and emotional engagements, as viewers, with film characters and the screened world. The predominant view in critical discourse was of cinema as a manipulative apparatus, controlling the unaware cinemagoer, leaving no room for alterity. In this construction, cinema is essentially fraudulent and inhospitable to ethical experience. Interestingly, much earlier, between 1946 and 1955, a very different approach towards cinema was established, involving thinking about it from what can only be called a phenomenological perspective (Andrew 1987, 46). And yet, for a number of reasons, the phenomenological tradition was suppressed, particularly where structuralist views were dominant, and the idea that cinema is nothing more than a modern version of Plato’s cave dominated film discourse.

The Cinematic Apparatus: In Plato’s Cave?

One of the most influential comparisons between cinema and Plato’s cave was introduced to film studies by Jean-Louis Baudry. Baudry, who was inspired by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, claimed that like the citizen unaware of the power of state institutions over her mind and body, a film viewer facing the screen is unaware of the film’s persuasive power. There is something in the cinematic experience that, according to Baudry, induces in the viewer the mind-states of early developmental stages or puts her in a dreamlike situation that prevents her from realizing that what she sees is not real or true (2009, 179). Baudry employs Plato’s allegory of the cave to develop this theme. As in Plato’s cave, the cinematic viewer is located in a dark room without access to what is being seen. The projector is located behind the viewer, concealing the source of illusion, and as in the cave, cinemagoers are effectively attached to their chairs. They do not remain fully cognizant that the source of what seems real is only projected light. They lose themselves in illusion, avoiding the thought that what they see is only a poor and two-dimensional representation of the outside world. For Baudry, cinema strengthens the conception of a passive subject bound to a single, external point of view, a subject that willingly gives up her own direct relation to the world, substituting it for mechanical representations.

From a political perspective, this account of the experience of cinema calls attention to “the whole question of its persuasive power and of the reason for which it revealed itself to be an instrument particularly well suited to exert ideological influence” (Baudry 2009, 184). This overcoming of the subject is also an ethical issue: cinema is responsible for the regression of the viewer to a primitive developmental phase resembling dreaming, and the viewer’s dreamy mental state is reinforced by psychological phenomena like the mirror stage (182). This might recall Jacques Lacan’s self-alienated child, who correlates the apparently integrated reflection in the mirror with the more disparate experience of being herself. All this provokes strong identification with the film without full awareness that what is seen is not real (187). These features of the cinematic apparatus enable it to conceal the “ideological surplus value” that accompanies it (Baudry 1974, 41). They allow the dominant ideology to transfer its values to a subject who is unaware that this could be going on (46).

While Baudry is one of the best known theorists to make explicit the link with Plato’s cave and to build a critique of the cinematic apparatus on that basis, the connection with Plato preceded him. Dana Polan refers to a 1926 article by Frank Cole Babbitt, “Plato and the Movies,” in which he anticipates elements of Baudry’s critique of the ideological role of cinema (Polan 2007, 121–122). In this semi-autobiographical article, Babbitt explains to his daughter Margaret why he avoids watching narrative films, pointing out the resemblance between the cinema and Plato’s cave. Margaret sees the deception inherent to cinematic experience but finds a crucial difference: “The people in the theatre aren’t fastened to their seats like those poor people you read about” (Babbitt 1926, 22). Her father agrees that the people are not actually chained to their seats, and yet they are “held pretty fast in the grip of something.” Margaret is convinced: “perhaps we are enslaved after all” (22).

Some later theorists would allow that although there is an affinity between the two experiences, there are significant and inherent differences between them. Most significantly, while the prisoners in the cave were born there and cannot know that there is an outside world, the viewer remains grounded in the world outside the film and can compare it with what she sees on-screen. Still, these theorists point to the viewer’s tendency not to leave the theater despite being aware of the possibility (Andersen 2014, 49). In other words, while philosophers acknowledge the differences between the cave and the cinema, there is an enduring trend among them to disenfranchise cinema, taking it to reproduce or echo the experience of the cave, an “image-world” whose “fascinating appearances … we must forgo if we are to acquire genuine knowledge and attain intellectual and moral virtue” (Sinnerbrink 2011, 34). Cinema cannot be considered a source of true knowledge about the world, including its moral dimension. So, the cave allegory has been an obstacle to acknowledging cinema as a channel for philosophical and moral inquiry. In the context of alterity, the subject matter of this book, the image of the cinema hall as a closed space where viewers are willingly or unwillingly chained to their chairs, and where the screened world is a false and shadowy reflection of the real, does not leave enough room for thinking in terms of the ethics of otherness.

Martin Jay offers another take in a similar mode on the cinematic experience, seeing cinema as constituting a viewer who involuntarily replaces the true complexity of reality with a false and homogenous view of the world. Jay claims that the development of cinematography, underwritten by preexisting photography, demonstrated for many thinkers, including Baudry himself, the connection between the cinema and the Cartesian perspectivalist scopic regime (Jay 1993, 473).

Cartesian Perspectivalism

Jay’s term “Cartesian perspectivalism” describes a subject who relates to the world from a fixed and limited point of view, a subject who is “an unhistorical, disinterested, disembodied subject entirely outside of the world it claims to know only from afar” (1988, 10). Cartesian perspectivalism is implicated in a Renaissance technical innovation, allowing three-dimensional space to be rendered on the two dimensions of the representational surface. It reduced ordinary dynamic binocular vision, moving among different focal points, to a single disembodied eye restricted to one point of view (Jay 1993, 54). This means that the gaze that supports this perspective is “the gaze that contemplates (and controls) the world” (Casetti 2008, 29).

The conception of cinema as a mode of perspectivalism influenced many theorists, who saw cinematic experience as similar to the viewing experience of early camera obscura. Cinema was thought, like the camera obscura in its time, to duplicate a certain stance of the viewing subject towards the viewed. On this account, cinematic space, like Renaissance perspectivalist space, represented for its viewers a homogeneity that barred entrance to multiplicity, diversity or anything alien to its abstracted form. It turned perceptual spaces into ideal relations that, says Ernst Cassirer, “can raise no question of a diversity in content” (1955, 84). The subject adopted one homogenous, external point of view, and as with Renaissance painting, it was a point of view that denied its viewers any way to spill over into what might transcend this fixed, static and highly determined perspective.

Early films like Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon [Le voyage dans la lune] (1902) well illustrate this claim about cinematic perspectivalism by showing their world from one external point of view—that of a spectator sitting in a fixed place, such as a theater. Cinema halls even used to have a curtain across the screen that was drawn back to begin the screening. Even when camera movements, such as pan or tilt, came into use, they were still made on the horizontal and at eye level. In this sense, the relationships between the film viewer and the filmed world, and the camera and the world, were analogous. The viewer seated in the cinema watched what the camera had recorded from a similar fixed point of view.¹ The camera, like the viewer, perceived the world from one single perspective and thus showed, as Jean Mitry puts it, “reality from a single point viewpoint and, in fact, represents only that” (1997, 30).

Figure 1.1 Still from A Trip to the Moon [Le voyage dans la lune] (1902), directed by Georges Méliès. Photofest.

It took cinema almost twenty years to recognize the possibility of changing the position of the camera so it could film from within the scene as well as from outside it, that is, from the perspectives of the film characters or from somewhere within their world. With the discovery that the camera could change position, it seemed that film spectators could be freed from the restraints of Cartesian perspectivalism. Different camera positions enabled the viewer to have a visual experience of the filmed world similar to that of someone moving around in that world, generating a new model of vision: “This might permit the supposition, especially since the camera moves, of a multiplicity of points of view which would neutralize the fixed position of the eye-subject and even nullify it” (Baudry 1974, 42). And yet although the camera now moved freely, constantly changing perspective, thinkers like Baudry were not persuaded that it had actually liberated itself from the restrictions of one controlling point of view. According to him, filmmakers had taken advantage of the development of new methods of editing in order to continue to present one homogenous space adjusted to their viewers’ point of view. In other words, although the raw material was photographed from different angles, it was edited in such a way as to conceal the differences between different perspectives. Moreover, there were technical innovations, such as those that improved the quality of projection, allowing cinema to hide differences between successive frames captured by the camera, removing the consequent jumpiness we associate with early film, rendering the frames into one coherent flow of images. With the invention of synchronized sound and the need to keep the speed constant, the norm was set at 24 frames per second (Usai 1997, 6). The abrupt discontinuities were thus removed. The frames were screened in one flow of movement that helped to restore the viewer’s sense of the screened world as an uninterrupted continuum.

The perception of cinema as constituting a viewer who is involuntarily led to replace the true complexity of reality with a false and homogenous view of the world continued to dominate the field of film studies with the development of suture and other psychoanalytic theories. The concept of suture is rooted in Lacan’s notion of subject formation and was introduced to psychoanalytic discourse by Jacques-Alain Miller. The concept designates for Miller a lack or absence that is inherent to the relation between the subject and the chain of its discourse (1977, 25–26). It was brought into film studies by Jean-Pierre Oudart, who was looking for equivalents to semiotic concepts and structures within filmic narrative construction. For Oudart and other suture theorists, links between shots were seen as equivalent to the syntactic links of language and could thus be viewed as constituting a subject position for the viewer. A sense of lack was inherent to cinema since “Every filmic field is echoed by an absent field, the place of a character who is put there by the viewer’s imaginary, and which we shall call the Absent One” (1977, 36). In other words, when the viewer looks at a cinematic image, she assumes that it represents someone’s point of view. This someone is missing or absent from the image (though parts of her body can appear, such as her shoulders). Now, traditional cinematic structure tends to “suture” this gap, this absence, by showing in a reverse shot the person whose look the viewer was supposedly following. Nevertheless, this “shot reverse shot” structure conceals from the viewer the existence of the camera as the source of the image and encourages her to identify with the cinematic character. Thus, the viewer who adopts the character’s point of view sees herself as the viewing character. Other theorists such as Stephen Heath have extended the concept of suture from specific techniques, such as shot reverse shot, to the whole process of cinematic signification and its relationship to the viewing subject (1977, 67–68).

This viewing subject is, writes Kaja Silverman, “one which is activated intermittently, within discourse. The cinematic text constitutes the viewer’s subjectivity for him or her” (1983, 48). Cinematic procedures manipulate the viewing subject into a false perception of the screened world, producing a viewer who unconsciously identifies with the screen character’s point of view while being unaware of the manipulative powers of the cinematic apparatus. As Vivian Sobchack explains, “the function of suture is to not merely repress the film’s material existence… but also to disguise the film’s perceptual presentation of a representation” (1992, 228). Thus, like Baudry’s notion of the cinematic viewer as someone denied access to the real world by the cinematic apparatus, theories of suture saw this denial as inherent to the very language of film.

While the history of art overlaps in many ways with the history of technology, it is also rooted in philosophical insights about the structure of the subject and her relation to the world. This implies, as Jonathan Crary observes, questions of domination, sovereign power and control over the way the world is perceived and interpreted by the human subject (1992, 8). Crary challenges Jay’s view of an unbroken continuity between Cartesian perspectivalism and the camera obscura, photography and the cinema. Nevertheless, for him, optical devices developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including pre-cinematic ones, “were techniques for the management of attention, for imposing homogeneity, anti-nomadic procedures that fixed and isolated the observer”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Perspectivalism and Beyond
• 2 Point of View
• 3 The Cinematic Type
• 4 The Face and the Close-Up
• 5 The Face and the Close-Up Take 2
• 6 Becoming-Machine
• 7 Cinema’s Responsibilities
• Index