Philosophical understandings of cinema - 5
In my last four columns I discussed a number of important
philosophical approaches to cinema, and many of the theorists I focused
on were Europeans, In this concluding column on the philosophical
understandings of cinema I wish to focus on a recent theoretical
movement - cognitive theory in cinema studies. It is largely an
American-driven phenomenon in the sense that many of its leading
practitioners such as David Bordwell, Noel Carroll, Joseph Anderson,
Murray Smith, Paisley Livingston, Edward Branigan, Carl Plantinga are
North American. Although I have had no personal dealings with the
European theorists that I alluded to in my earlier columns, I have
indeed interacted on various occasions with the theorists associated
with cognitivism in film studies; some like Paisley Livingston, I know
quite well and Mette Hjort was my colleague in the Department of
cultural studies and film studies.
Those theorists associated with cognitivism in film analysis are
united by one central aspiration: to demolish the mountainous authority
of the then (1980s) dominant paradigm of film studies. It is referred to
as General Theory by these writers. This paradigm was based on a
commingling of the thinking of Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis), Lois
Althusser ( structural Marxism_ and Christian Metz (semiotics). Journals
such as 'Screen' played a major role in gaining legitimacy for, and
disseminating the views attached to, this regnant paradigm of cinematic
analysis. Hundreds of doctoral dissertations have been written in North
America and elsewhere, based on this model. I myself have served as a
few Ph.D thesis advisor for numerous candidates who were deeply
influenced by the Lacanian / Althusserian brew.
The cognitive theory in film studies began to gather momentum, and
inflect film analysis in the 1990s. One can, for purposes of analytical
convenience, identify three intersecting stages in the evolution of
cognitivism in cinema studies. The first stage, which came to light in
the 1980s focused attention on what was termed 'historical poetics.' An
influential work like David Bordwell's 'Making Meaning: Inference and
Rhetoric in theInterpretation of Cinema', exemplifies this approach. In
this first stage one observes a movement towards cognitivism, and the
desire to introduce some aspects of Russian formalism.
The second stage begins somewhere in the mid 1990s. The book,
'Post-theory: Reconstructing film Studies', edited by Bordwell and
Carroll reflects the predominant features of this stage. Here we find an
attempt to fashion a new film studies based on cognitivist science,
historical poetics, and modes of reasoning drawn from logics of the
natural sciences. Clearly, one witnesses a determination on the part of
these film theorists to return theory to a paradigm of scientific
inquiry and explanation and ground it in a form of empirical
rationality. There was evident a longing to re-discover the viewer as a
rational agent endowed with cognitive capabilities.
In the third stage, we see the attempt to subject this approach to
film analysis to a keen conceptual investigation; we sense the desire to
construct theory on a scientific footing, and open it up to a deep
philosophical critique. Richard Allen's and Michael Turvey's work
represents the deepest pulse of this stage.
They were influenced by the thinking of the late Wittgenstein as
contained in 'Philosophical Investigations' and sought to explore filmic
discourses through the optic of the philosophy of humanities adumbrated
by Wittgenstein. In the three stages we see the emergence of the
discourses of history, science and philosophy as determinative factors.
During the 1980s, Bordwell, who is many ways the leader of this
group, wrote a number of works such as 'Narration and the Fiction Film'
that underlined the importance of historical poetics; this was indeed a
salutary move in that the regnant paradigm of cinema studies in the
1970s and 1980s tended to underplay the salience of history. It was his
declared interest to locate theory within the parameters of historical
and empirical study. Bordwell was also bent on fashioning a model of
'middle-level research' as a means escaping from the clutches of Grand
Theory espoused by the dominant paradigm.
Along with this desire, one can observe in Bordwell's work as well as
that of his fellow-cognitive theorists, a predilection to move away from
psychological theories of subject-formation towards understanding of the
cinematic experience shaped by empirical factors as well as mental and
perceptual processes of human beings. The concept of a rational agent
responding to the filmic experience is central to the effort of
cognitivists as opposed to the unconscious factors that were
foregrounded by the dominant theorists.
Noel Carroll, the other influential figure associated with this
movement is both a film scholar and philosopher; he has doctorates in
both fields. He is the author of such well-known books on cinema as
'Mystifying Movies', 'Philosophical Problems of Film Theory' and
'Engaging the Movie Image'. He brings the dynamism and probing instincts
of analytical philosophy to the study of cinema. One of his books is on
horror cinema; it is titled, 'Philosophy of Horror.' In this book, the
author raises the question, why are certain audiences are attracted to
horror film? This is the same kind of question that theorists of 'Rasa'
asked in classical India. But their answers are widely divergent.
The Rasa theorists believed that in works of art, raw worldly
emotions are transmuted into transcendental aesthetic emotions. The
mundane object of reference is sublated into tranquil beauty. Therefore
feelings such as 'krodha', 'jugupsa' and 'bhaya' become the aesthetic
emotions of 'raudra', 'bibhatsa' and 'bhayanaka'. The approach adopted
by Carroll is different. He seems to think it is the cognitive
challenge, and the ensuing pleasure that it spawns, that makes audiences
turn towards horror films. Here, he is approaching horror films from a
decidedly cognitivist frame of intelligibility.
The cognitive theorists associate with film studies were firmly
convinced the so-called Grand Theory of film studies had to be
demolished. According to them, this Grand Theory manifested two
intertwined strands of thinking.
The first strand was vitally connected to the thinking of Lacan,
Althusser, Metz and journals such as 'Screen' and 'Camera Obscura'
sought to propagate it. Here the focus was on the construction of the
textual subject through the film and the apparatus associated with it.
The film narrative as well as film technology produce subject-positions
for spectators.
However, after a while film scholars began to raise questions about
the nature and significance and importance of historical subjects who
view films and whether the propagated notion of the textual subject was
unacceptably restrictive.
It is at this point, that cultural studies-based film scholarship
emerged, and began to gain momentum. Cultural studies inspired film
scholars recognized the limitations of the earlier approach;
consequently, they were quick to focus on the historical subject. In
addition, they chose to encircle not only the intricacies of the text,
but also of the myriad ways in which spectators made use of film texts.
This approach, understandably, had a great appeal.
How audiences read texts against the grain, thereby generating new,
and at times, resistive meanings, became a popular topic of analysis
among these theorists.
Cognitive theorists find both strands of Grand Theory equally
unconvincing and unproductive. They also see important inter-connections
between the two strands. David Bordwell finds deep continuities between
the two approaches. He identifies four important themes. One, both
accept that human practices and institutions are in all significant
respects socially constructed. Two, understanding the ways in which
audiences interact with film texts require a theory of the subject.
Three, the audience response to cinema is determined by identification.
Four, verbal languages serve to furnish productive analogue for films.
On the basis of this like of thinking, Bordwell argues the both groups
share many features in common and they constitute the Grand Theory.
The cognitive theorists, it needs to be recognized, have succeeded in
renewing the discourse of film study. They have rescued film from Grand
Theory which served to overwhelm and bury the object if analysis. They
sought to remake film analysis by centering the film itself as the point
of departure and destination of film study. Their anguished questions
about film study underlined the importance of judging films on their own
terms. The concern of cognitive theorists for the future of film studies
deepened into alarm as reflected in the tone of urgency some of their
writings.
The emphasis on cognitive factors is crucial to understanding the
intent of these theorists. Certain films lend themselves better to this
form of analysis. Let us, as an example, consider Lester James Peries' 'Nidhanaya'
(Treasure). This film deals with tangled emotions of a tormented man who
was pulled by sinister forces he could not master, towards the brutal
murder of his wife. This kind of story has a great attraction for
cognitivists, because it allows them to explicate the cognitive pleasure
afforded by cinema in piecing together puzzles of challenging
conjecture. In addition, this film is notable for the way in which a
stern aesthetic modulates the flow of its images. The film's sensitive
eyes and ears externalize the inner conflict of the protagonist battling
his impulses. This cinematic style, too, is one that the cognitive
theorists would find attractive.
David Bordwell, Noel Carroll and other cognitive theorists of cinema
have performed a useful function in calling attention to the excesses,
and the counter-productive tendencies, of the paradigm of cinema studies
that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s. However, I fin there are numerous
problems associated with their approach; it is almost as if they are
moving to a more 'uncomplicated' age. As my friend, the eminent film
theorist Robert Stam cogently points out, 'while cognitivism claims to
be the latest thing, it can be viewed as a nostalgic move backwards to a
world prior to Saussurean differentiation.'
There are a number of glaring deficiencies in the cognitive
theoretical approach to cinema. The inadequate attention paid to the
politics of location of spectatorship and, how various investments,
ideologies, frames of intelligibility of audiences are shaped by social
and ideological forces get short shrift. A central question in film
study is why does spectator A find a given film interesting and
spectator B find it dull. One is left with the disquieting feeling that
the spectator posited by cognitive theory is raceless, classless,
genderless. As a consequence, culture, politics and history recede into
the background, or worse, disappear. Another, and related deficiency, is
that cognitive theorists seem to focus on similarities in cognitive
actions and reactions across diverse cultures. This has the unfortunate
effect of minimizing, or even ignoring, the antithetical imperatives,
the intense conflicts that almost always arise within specific cultures
and historical conjunctures and social formations. The cognitive
theorists have not faced up to the paradox of seeking to construct
universal norms to explain what are most certainly culturally-grounded
experience of cinema.
Cognitive theorists accused earlier film scholars who endorsed the
Grand Theory of being guided by a limited and limiting vocabulary;
however, the same charge can be leveled against cognitive theorists.
Their privileged vocabulary consists of words and phrases such as 'image
processing;, 'visual data, 'physiology of response', 'schemata', 'neuro-psychological
coordinates'. These terms have the consequence of underlining the notion
that the experience of cinema could be comprehended and explicated in
terms of cognitive structures and processes and psychological reactions.
Their circuits of reference point to scientific structures.
Unfortunately, the pathway opened up by cognitive film theory seems to
be leading us towards the land of reductionism. Despite their attempt to
uncover complex shapes of film reading, it seems to me, so far, their
efforts have given rise to more questions than answers.
What I have sought to do in these columns is to explore the topic of
philosophical understandings of cinema by charting the broad field, and
locating the peaks, that invariably should command our interest. It was
my intention to uncover the philosophical instincts at work in film
studies. Clearly, the names of theorists that I have focused on betray
my own predilections as well my investments in cinema. If another film
critic were to come up with a very different set of names, I would not
be surprised.
The diverse philosophical issues which emerge from and play
themselves out, in varieties of film analyses is indeed a topic that
continually tends to renew itself.
|