Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema

The Musical Poetry of Motion Pictures Revisited

Daniel Barnett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501329838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Movement as Meaning in Experimental Cinema offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein's concepts of family resemblance and language games provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of movement as meaning to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery's concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning.

Part I

Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression

1.First ideas in a new medium: the cinematic suspension of disbelief

Here, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it’s easy to think that movies have been with us forever, but in fact they’ve just popped over the historical horizon. Not only that but movies have been followed so quickly by other still newer ways of moving ideas around—using some combination of words, moving pictures, and music—that the original cinematic paradigms have become the stuff of archaeology. With movies, the acquisition and dissemination of new kinds of knowledge and entertainment entered a very new kind of flow. And with the World Wide Web that flow has taken on the flux and interactivity of an atmosphere, influencing and influenced by everyone. As a result of these new media, language has crossed a threshold, and communication has taken off in a way that we’ve not experienced since the development of writing. These new media may ultimately be nearly as important to the overhaul of the way we parse life, as was the origin of speech itself.

A bit of speculative history, and of somewhat less speculative cine-archaeology might be useful in order to get a handle on the nature of that threshold, with the hope of taking a peek beyond; but also (and this is a very powerful undercurrent in my motivation) with the hope of gaining a deeper understanding into how the nature of language itself influences perception. That is, what is the relationship between language and epistemology—the theory of knowing; and language and ontology—the consideration of states of being? Another way of asking this most fundamental of all questions: How does the language we use influence the way we perceive reality and how much we can know?

We can bring this hazy and abstract question into focus on one level with a simple example that I am stealing from W. V. Quine’s essay Speaking of Objects (1969: 1) wherein he imagines a language in which every manifestation of a rabbit is followed by a vocalization: gavangai. He asks us how we are to translate the utterance, if we are in our very first encounters with the speakers. Does it mean rabbit, the way we think of rabbit: that is, the manifestation of an individual member of a species that English speakers call ‘rabbits’? Or does it perhaps mean rabbit the way we use the word ‘rain,’ as in the local manifestation of a general condition, for example, what we might translate as “it now rabbiteth” (3)?

This perhaps, oh-so-subtle distinction actually underlies something quite grand—how does the language we use influence how we divide the world into pieces: How do we parse reality?

Let us imagine a past so remote that there is almost no evidence to help us in our imaginings. Let us try to imagine what the origins of language itself might have been like, and how our grasp of reality might have changed around that new tool for organizing perceptions. Let us imagine that the development of specific vocalizations combined with ostention, or pointing at things, was the beginning of both description and reference. Words would, for the first time, allow us to relate to one another about things that are not present to be pointed at, and to relate about where they were when we saw them last and as we might see them again. With words, the ability to reference the not here and not now would begin our current conception of space and time.

As the making of marks evolved (possibly hand in hand with speech), including bent branches, cairns made of piles of rock, blazes cut into tree trunks; then, perhaps, diagrams, maps, pictures, and ultimately pictograms and alphabets, it seems obvious, but still interesting to note, that of the above systems, it’s the maps, diagrams, and drawings, the imitative markings rather than the learned writing systems or the stipulative markings, that have a greater universality and therefore can be read pretty equivalently by people of different languages and cultures. As the stipulated and learned marks ultimately became translatable from culture to culture, and language to language, and then became mechanically reproducible, the nature of culture and the spread of ideas took incremental but immense leaps.

When the first movie of a train approaching a station caused viewers to bolt from its path, a brand new level of reference came into being and the “cinematic suspension of disbelief” was born. This level so accurately caught the action dimension that it transcended the imitations of diagrams and the stipulations of language systems in immediacy and universality, giving cinema the unique referential boost of an illusion as well as the greatest instantaneous cross-cultural range of all media. This medium doesn’t just entrain the nervous system, it tricks it. But, like the evolution of the mark, there are other paths besides the telling of stories for the articulation of pictures to take—en route to referencing a world of which we have not yet dreamed.

Such a powerful new medium bursting on the scene opens lots of questions about both the past and the future of our media. Did music and speech evolve together? Was the beginning of time, that is, our ability to refer to the “not now,” also the beginning of rhythm as a way of carrying information? Or was it the other way round? Did the use of rhythm for marking time initiate the language process? Does the fact that we can now articulate pictures, inflecting them in time, giving them rhythm, mean that their referential power can synergize with the inflections of music, and speech—not just sum, but synergize? Can our new ability to reference the world by articulating pictures tell us anything about the way speech and music each refer to both our shared external and our otherwise private internal experiences? What can we learn about ourselves, about the nature of perception, and the nature of meaning, from the optical illusions that power the transcendence at the heart of cinema?

2.One description of how the mind may move toward understandings

You could say that with language, we parse experience, using the ‘parts of speech,’ into objects, actions, qualities, and relationships. But, given the complexities and subtleties of life, we know there is more to experience than that. With the quantifiable, we parse experience in ways that are more precisely analytic with mathematics, binary codes, or other logical schema. Beyond that, many of our experiences are not parsed at all, but absorbed, ridden with, meditated upon, stewed over. We allude to what we can’t parse in words with labels like the unconscious, the subliminal, the gut, the infinite, the sublime, the divine and collectively as the ineffable. The ineffable, we parse in ways that tend to be more private and personal: with music, pictures, gestures, other body language, and so on. But throughout history more and more previously unparsed experience has been solved, so to speak, as each of the great paradigm inventors (Zeno, Euclid, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Cage, etc.) have changed the ratio of the unparsed to the pars-able and served up new, discreet gobs of an up-till-then un-sharable aspect of the universe. How does parsing the world connect us to it? At this point I will revert to an almost unbearably simple description of what happens when we feel that we’ve made sense of something: Where the mind can move, there’s meaning. If we get it, we can move on; if not, we get stuck.

A grammar describes how words are assembled to make meaning, but describing how our minds move (metaphorically speaking, of course) under the influence of words, or for that matter music, pictures, and expressions of other kinds, could not only show us the how of meaning in general, it could also show us the many structural similarities, or homologies, in the ways that all language-like structures reference our shared experience of the world; ways that lie beyond the instruction manuals of grammar. This comparison among modalities is not meant as an equation or prescription, just as a way of looking at the problem of meaning—a scaffold or heuristic rather than the foundation of a theory.

I’m suggesting that our perception of the orderly (meaningful) flow of sound that is speech is analogous in a simple and discussable way to those symptoms of meaning that allow us to follow music: rhythm, melody, harmony, and form; it is also analogous, in the visual realm in the same rich but simple way, to the associations that power the path of the wandering eye and produce the sense of meaning we derive from the space we’re in, or the pictures we look at.

In each case, if we move with it, it makes sense. If it makes sense, we can move with it. We can not only ask: “Where are we going?” but also: “Why are we able to go with something?” Most of all we can examine the vectors, and characterize the qualities and implications of the movement.

3.New paradigms and new expressions

Whenever a new paradigm, for example, the invention of calendars and clocks, the heliocentric view of the heavens, Euclidian Geometry, Cartesian Coordinates; or a new medium, like alphabetic writing; or a serious evolution of an extant medium like the development of perspective in painting emerges, there’s the possibility for a new style of mental movement, new kinds of meanings and the parsing of revolutionary new knowledge. These are not just meanings that have been ported over from a previous paradigm or medium, those that are able to address old experiences with more accuracy, cleaner analysis, or more resonant exposition, but meanings of a whole new kind, able to open realms of new experience and knowledge; knowledge that is only sharable under the light of the new paradigm or in the voice of the new medium.

This doesn’t happen easily or directly. In order to bring new realms into shared meaning, a context needs to be created for the participants. With new paradigms there is often a struggle to integrate them into our extant worldview. With new media we usually port over the meaning-laden strategies from close relatives in old media first, a familiarity that helps the mind move into the new flow. So motion pictures first adopted and combined the idioms and methods of documentary photography on the one hand and stagecraft on the other.

4.Theories of meaning—media, messages, and how the mind moves

The attempt to analyze meaning in language has a rich and checkered history, and the threshing floor is littered with examples of partial and broken theories. Each might seem to satisfy a different picture and cover a particular case of reference, but all break down in the transition from the specialized worlds of scientific or philosophical inquiry into the general world of “ordinary language” and break down even further as we move toward the ineffable—meanings that cannot be put into words: meaning in art. The failure of some of the most powerful philosophers of the past century to reduce the meaningful vectors of ordinary language to logic and mathematics reflects a mistaken impression among some that ordinary language is a looser subset of a system of precise relationships, rather than the other way around—that logic and mathematics are in fact tighter subsets of what is actually and operationally a very loose and somewhat ad hoc system of relationships. Therefore I am approaching the problem of how human beings create referential relationships from the perspective of meaning as an ad hoc occurrence, within a highly structured, but utterly elastic context: everyday speech and action.

The extremely simple model of meaning as mental movement (referential movement) will be my way of getting closer to understanding a central process in cognition, in a way that allows broader and clearer equivalence across those realms where philosophy of language, semiotics, and art criticism jockey for understanding. I choose cinema as my paradigm because it combines meaning vectors from language, music, and pictures simultaneously, and also because it capitalizes on the inherent meaningfulness of pure movement.

My approach is embedded in the belief that an analysis must pinpoint and then penetrate the essence of any medium if we’re to understand what possible referential relationships that medium has to offer.

5.The relevance of the mechanism—lessons to carry forward from an already obsolete medium

When the very early filmmakers Lumière, Griffith, and Méliès picked up the new motion picture medium, they each analyzed certain aspects of its potential to accommodate their own particular ends and came up with distinctly different strategies for making meaning. Of the three, only Méliès, a magician by trade, looked to the essence of the mechanism for his inspira...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Where Does This Book Belong?
• Preface: Arriving at the Scene
• Introduction: Two Pictures of a Rose in the Dark
• Part I Modes of Perception and Modes of Expression
• Part II Dynamic and Syntactic Universals
• Part III Considering Description: Tropes, Tunes, and Moving Pictures
• Part IV The Moving Target
• Appendix
• Acknowledgments (With a Comment about the Bibliography and Filmography)
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Copyright Page