Philosophical understandings of cinema - 1

Film is primarily a form of mass entertainment. If it fails as entertainment, all the other lofty ambitions claimed for cinema can fall by the wayside. However, a certain philosophical understanding is intertwined with this privileged notion of entertainment. This was driven home to me some years ago when Malti Sahai, the Director of the Indian Film Festival and I conducted a research on audience participation in cinema.

We selected one of the most popular Hindi films ever made called 'Sholay' (Flames) and interviewed over two hundred people in and around New Delhi regarding their attitude to the film. The results are contained in our book 'Sholay - A Cultural Reading', published by Wiley Publishers. We were indeed pleasantly surprised by the philosophical issues that some articulated, at times with a certain degree of acumen, in their own idiom of course.

Clearly, they were not articulating their views in a way that professional philosophers would, using an accepted philosophical lexicon. However, in their own way, and from their own distinct vantage points, they were raising certain issues that a philosopher would have been proud to be associated with. What has happened during the past three decades or so, is that bent towards philosophical explorations in cinema has become increasingly visible and productive.

In these next few columns, I wish to explore the topic of philosophical understandings of cinema. I plan to start out with the formulations of Stanley Cavell, Andre Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Metz, Gilles Deleuze and Noel Carroll. Their writings, in my judgment, are central to an understanding of this topic with any degree of usefulness. (This list of names is, of course, based on my personal predilections and other film scholars may have different preferences). After that I will illustrate their formulations, and comment on them, in relation to some Asian films including Sri Lankan films.

A number of eminent philosophers, both in the Anglo-Saxon world and in Europe, have chosen cinema as a way of explicating conceptual thought, a means of charting the flow of ideas. The number of books and research papers devoted to this topic has increased exponentially. There are even journals devoted specifically to this topic such as Film and Philosophy.

It is against this background of rising interest that I wish to examine the topic of film and cinema. Philosophers interested in cinema are keen to raise a number of questions that lie close to their professional interests: What is the nature of reality? How do appearance and reality interact?

What is distinctive about the being of cinema? What is the relationship between the spectator and the construction of cinematic meaning? What are the philosophical implications of cinematic narrative?

One of the earliest books devoted to the study of cinema from a philosophical perspective was Hugo Munsterberg's 'The Photoplay' published in 1916. A professor of philosophy at Harvard, he was keen to explicate the uniqueness of cinema as a medium of creative expression, and how it differed from theatre.

He focused on the cinematic strategies of representation such as close-ups and various forms of editing as a way of demonstrating their close relationship with human cognitive faculties. As he remarked, 'we recognized there that the photoplay......gave us a view of dramatic events which was completely shaped by the inner movements of the mind.' This is a line of inquiry that has been further developed in recent times by film theorists who have displayed an interest in the possibility of drawing on cognitive sciences.

Another Harvard philosopher, Stanley Cavell since the 1970s, has been contributing significantly to the exploration of the conjunction between cinema and philosophy. His book. 'The World Viewed,' published in 1971, made a great impact on philosophers as well as students of cinema.

The main title indicates its central trajectory of meaning, while its sub-title, 'Reflections on the Ontology of Films', emphasizes its special focus. Ontology, or the way of being, is an important area of philosophical inquiry. Cavell, drawing on the writings of philosophers like Wittgenstein, Kant, raises important issues about the nature of the medium and how camera captures reality and how spectators make sense of cinema.

'The World Viewed' is full if fascinating insights; however, one has to read his prose very carefully to de-code the meaning. A passage such as the following bears testimony to my contention. 'To say that we wish to view the world itself is to say that we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such.

That is our way of establishing our connection with the world. Through viewing it, or having views of it .we do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self.' There is not a single word here that is difficult or arcane; however, the way he has spliced them to form meaningful sentences invites repeated reading.

Stanley Cavell, in 1981 published, 'Pursuit of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage' that generated a large measure of interest among film scholars as well as philosophers.

Here he takes an aspect of popular Hollywood cinema, the screwball comedy, what he refers to as comedy of remarriage, and examines some important aspects of it in terms of certain philosophical concepts. For example, he takes the popular film, 'It Happened One Night' by Frank Capra, and investigates its central experience in terms of the idea of knowledge and its limitations which are of central importance to students of philosophy

In addition to 'It Happened One Night', Cavell discusses 'The Lady Eve, 'Bringing up Baby', the 'Philadelphia Story', 'His Girl Friday', 'Adam's Rib' and 'The Awful Truth'. Commenting on his calculated attempt to bring philosophical concepts to the understanding of popular cinema, Stanley Cavell remarks, 'in subjecting these films to the same burden of interpretation that I expect any text to carry that I value as highly, I am aware that there are those for whom such an enterprise must from the start appear misguided, those who are satisfied that they know what the film is, that it is, for example, a commodity like any other, or a visual medium of popular entertainment (as compared with what?) but anti-intellectualism is no more or less attractive here than elsewhere.'

He then goes on to make the following observation that if anti-intellectualism were the genuine antidote to over-intellectuality, there would not be any distinction between a sage and a punk. This is an important point to bear in mind when we seek to apply intellectual concepts in the elucidation of popular culture whether it is cinema or any other.

Cavell advised his readers, 'this book is primarily devoted to the reading of seven films. If my citing of philosophical texts along the way hinders more than they help you, skip them. If they are useful as I take them to be they will find a further chance with you.' I for one, found his philosophical ruminations most illuminating of the film texts under consideration.

The relationships between cinema and philosophy have been explored insightfully not only by professional philosophers. The names of two journalists, who were also eminent film critics, come to mind. They are the French film critic Andre Bazin and German critic Siegfried Kracauer. Bazin started writing film criticism after World War II, and continued up to the year of his death in 1958.His was a relatively short life of forty years. He had a distinct philosophical cast of mind and was influenced by Catholicism.

He saw the cinematic image as revelatory of the world and its spatial and temporal meanings. He focused on the gaze of the camera, the compositions, lighting, movement within frames rather than on editing. As opposed to Sergei Eisenstein, Bazin sought to underplay the strategy of editing because he saw it as partitioning the wholeness of the world, its spatialities and temporalities.

When discussing the conjunction of philosophy and cinema, the essays of Bazin assume a compelling significance. He was one of the most influential writers on cinema. He co-founded the prestigious film journal 'Cahiers du Cinema' that evolved into the most important periodicals in the history of films.

He attracted a number of gifted film critics to work with him like Truffaut, Godard and Rhomer who later became distinguished filmmakers.

Through his copious writings, Bazin paved the way for the New Wave in French cinema; he is also responsible for the circulation of the influential auteur theory ( that the film director is the ultimate author of films), although he was unhappy with some of the extreme forms that it assumed later.

Andre Bazin wrote numerous essays on film and film culture that have been gathered under the general title 'What is cinema?' Three such volumes have been published. Most of his essays are animated by philosophical concerns. Let me cite one example. Bazin was greatly influenced by the thinking of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. It was Bergson's belief that there were three ways of apprehending the world - through perception, rationality and intuition. He placed greatest emphasis on intuition which was able to rise above both brute perception and rational organization and bring a sense of unity to experience that had been fissured by intelligence. Bazin's predilection for a centripetal unity in a world of flux arises from this Bergsonian conviction.

I wish to illustrate this point with a scene from Lester James Peries' 'Gamperaliya.' This scene, with its perfect concision, invites us to de-code the various layers of meaning embedded in the physical visibilities that Bazin was so fond of. Manifold meanings are folded into the moment on display by the director with great sensitivity. Early on in the film we see Piyal (Henry Jayasena) teaching Nanda (Punya Heendeniya) English. Both Piyal and Nanda are seated at the table, and they are looking down at the table top somewhat uncertainly.the movements of their hands betraying their awkwardness. The physical atmosphere of the house symbolises the decay of the feudal order, while the presence of Piyal in a commanding role recognizes the rise of the new middle class. While Piyal and Nanda are looking down at the table and not into each others eyes, the mother of Nanda (Shantilekha) gazes at them from the far corner of the room concernedly but authoritatively; in a sense, she controls the gaze. As usual, Lester James Peries has constructed this scene with his customary restrained syntax in order to put into play a plurality of contending emotions related to the decay of the feudal family, rise of the middle class, the growing feelings for each other between Piyal and Nanda. This scene, with the kind of deeply incised realism that Bazin was arguing for, is suggestive on a number of registers.

This scene carries an enormous weight of intuitive understanding of the phenomenal world, and a capacity to release buried echoes - the kind of visualities Bazin longed for. For Bazin, realism is the grid through which understandings of reality are produced, affirmed and codified. This is what happens in Peries' films as exemplified in the scene mentioned above. Bazin thought that the pulse of cinema is realism; this is the central notion that is fore-grounded through the ground-beat of his formulations. When discussing the complex relationship between philosophical understanding and cinema, the writings of Bazin are important. They display a rare philosophical intelligence in search of deeper meanings. In the 1980s and 1990s, they glowed sporadically only from the margins; but today, with film scholars showing an increasing interest in the authority of history, and as history is being re-introduced to the discourse of film aesthetics, they have once again moved center stage .