Philosophical understandings of cinema - 2

Last week I discussed the work of Andre Bazin as representing one facet of the complex relationship between philosophy and cinema. In today's column, I wish to discuss the writings of two film theorists who were deeply interested in this relationship, but approached it from decidedly divergent vantage points. The two film theorists are Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) and Christian Metz (1931-1993).

The German film critic Kracauer shares many affinities of interest with the French critic Andre Bazin. Both were concerned with realism, and the centrality of photography for cinematic communication; they were also believers in the importance of content over dazzling techniques.

However, Kracauer, who wrote about fifteen years after Bazin, approached the concept of realism from his own unmistakable standpoint. While Bazin, with his religious proclivities, was interested in the metaphysical dimensions of realism, Kracauer was far more attached to the material and physical aspects of it. His important book, 'Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality' bears testimony to this fact.

Like Bazin, Kracuer was a journalist with a deep interest in philosophy. He was a distant relative of the Frankfurt School which sought to combine the thinking of Marx and Freud in innovative ways. He was primarily interested in the problems of representation in cinema and in history. Kracauer explored the question of reality and the ways in which technology served to facilitate this undertaking.

This led to his profound investment in cinema. As he once remarked, 'Films render visible what we did not, or perhaps even could not, see before its advent.' As one reads Kracauer's theory-laden writings on film, one realizes the complex intersections he noted among physical reality, technology, and ideological critique. In that sense he was more interested than others in folding in politics into cinema, but not the kind of fashionable dandified politics.

Siegfried Kracauer was passionately interested in the intertwining of philosophy and culture; as a matter of fact he liked to be known as a philosopher of culture rather than a film theorist. His strong devotion to, and understanding of, philosophy is attested to by that fact that Theodor Adorno, the leading luminary of the Frankfurt school and one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, made the following observation on Kracauer who was his senior by fourteen years.

At the age of fifteen Adorno was introduced to classical philosophy by Kracauer who happened to be a family friend. About this encounter, Adorno made the following remark later in life. 'For years, Kracauer read the 'Critique of Pure Reason' regularly on Saturday afternoons with me. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than to my academic teachers.'

Perceiving the imminent threat of Nazism, Siegfried Kracauer emigrated to the United States. His book, 'Theory of Film' that I referred to earlier, unfolds vividly his approach to cinema and his philosophical investments. In this book, it is his contention that photography is central to cinema, and that photography by focusing on and orchestrating images of life, permits audiences to observe more of the world than they would have with their naked eyes. He saw the film frame as a window opened on to society. By calling attention to what we do not normally perceive, according to him, cinema has a way of investing the ordinary with the extraordinary, and the everyday life with complex layers of meaning.

Kracauer's central argument is that it is the obligation and the privilege of filmmakers to record and reveal and through that process redeem reality. Kracauer said that,' Films come into their own when they record and reveal physical reality'. The realistic impulse focuses on recording what the formalist impulse focuses on revealing. For Kracauer the recording and revealing functions of cinema are vitally important and one without the other is meaningless. He focused on what he termed the 'constitutive surface' of films. The cognitive and moral obligations of the director find expression on this surface. Film critics and theorists are most interested in this constitutive surface as well, and a film commentator once observed, critics examine the visible world as a figure of thought.

Siegfried Kracuer was able to clear a rhetorical space which serves to return film criticism to the fundamentals of philosophical inquiry. He sought to direct our attention to these philosophical issues by exploring the physical world created by cinema.

He would have totally agreed with the statement of the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda that, 'the reality of the world should not be under-prized.' He pointed out that surfaces can reveal both the plenitude and loss of meaning. This was indeed an important aspect of his engagement with the physical world, given his interest in ideological critique.

Kracauer's approach to cinema, his focus on the visible world, the physical reality, created by film opens up interesting avenues of inquiry into philosophical issues. Clearly, he placed primary emphasis on the visual; however, in our effort to redeem physical reality, we need to pay close attention to the aural dimensions as well.

At times, Kracauer, I submit, did not recognize the full force of this desideratum. Let me illustrate this with a scene from a Sinhala film - Prasanna Vithanage's 'Pawuru Walalu' (Walls Within,). It explores the life of a middle aged woman named Violet, who is separated from her husband, and lives with her two grown up daughters.

In this film, Vithanage makes use of sights, but also sounds, to redeem the physical reality in a way that Kracauer did not adequately emphasize.

He uses music minimally, and instead relies on a stream of natural sounds to give depth and definition to the dominant mood. The house which is at the center of the narrative is by the sea. We hear constantly the sound of the rolling surf. We also hear frequently the sound of footsteps on the wooden floor and stairways.

These serve to counterpoint the sense of emptiness which is the ruling emotion of the film. The point I am making is that while visual registers are undoubtedly important in the redemption of physical reality in cinema, the auditory registers are of comparable significance.

In 'Pawuru Walalu', the apparent vacancy of visual density, in certain sequences, is compensated for by the fullness of the aural presence. The combinatory power of the visual and auditory has a greater chance of success of the redemption of physical reality that Siegfried Kracauer so ardently championed.

The next theorist that I wish to focus on is Christian Metz. His approach to, and understanding of, film is radically different from those of Kracauer and Bazin. He sought to bend back the traditional humanistic understandings of cinema and create a science of film.

This is indeed an ambition nurtured by other structurally-oriented semioticians as well. Christian Metz is a distinguished French film scholar who has authored such important books as 'Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema',' Language and Cinema', 'The Imaginary Signifier'. He sought to bring about a change of direction in the way in films were customarily understood by focusing on the structural elements of cinema, the codes and representational strategies.

He sought to codify images and create a science of film study. While film critics like Bazin were after the unity of the film experience, Metz thought that vision is di-vision; he was bent on categorizing, enumerating, analyzing individual ingredients of cinema and how they interacted, giving rise to a manifold entity.

Chritian Metz was deeply influenced by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who can be described as the god-father of post-structuralism. It was Metz's desire to locate film study within the specific confines of Saussurian semiotics.

He believed that cinema possessed a total structure, and he was keen to uncover that totality which he designated by the term 'grand syntagmatique.' With that in mind, he sought to clarify the rules, conventions, codes that shaped film language, and thereby formulate a frame of intelligibility of understanding cinema that was driven by semiotic inclinations and priorities. While this was, no doubt, an innovative approach, it failed to deliver the expected results as it calculatedly or inadvertently left out vital contextual energies that are crucial for the circulation of cinematic meaning.

Metz was interested in the establishment of the contours of a science of cinema and to investigate and evaluate each specific film in terms of that preferred science. Semoticians like Metz, both in film and literature, left out of consideration the wider discourses - economic, social, cultural, political, institutional - that inflected cinema in significant ways. They were primarily interested in the inner workings, the textual mechanics, of cinema. For film critics like Bazin and Kracauer reality furnished the raw material of films, while for Metz it was the complex of channels of information associated with filmic communication that were the raw materials.

He also selectively drew on the theories of psychoanalysts like Freud and Lacan with a view to fathoming the understanding of audiences regarding the diversity of employed cinematic devices and strategies; his desire was to explore the dynamics of film as language. Here we witness him venturing into the deeper waters of psychological exploration. He conceptualizes cinema in terms of the idea of the 'imaginary' that Jacques Lacan had propounded. Metz's views on cinema grow out of a distinct philosophical understanding - that taxonomy opens a useful gateway on to understanding.

While film critics like Bazin were entranced by the seductive wonders of the world that could be captured in cinema, Metz was entranced by the seductive wonder of the medium itself and its capacity for communication. While the former focused on the content of articulation, Metz was interested in the means of articulation. What fascinated him was the way a good film announces itself at the doorway to semiotic self-actualization; the realists, on the other hand, were examining the many-layered intersections of the lived world and the film world. The perplexed encounter with the transcendent that stirred Bazin's imagination was a virtual non-issue for Metz. For semioticians like Metz, the feat of cinematic codification enacts reason itself.

Christan Metz may have failed to achieve some of his cherished ambitions, and in later years, moved away significantly from his earlier staked out positions. However, the idea of codes as being central to the understanding of cinema is an assertion that has held up pretty well. Much of film criticism is devoted to the analysis of content and the magnitudes of social vision that radiate from it. Semioticians like Metz are interested in uncovering the rules that guide these messages. Metz focused attention on the codes as spanning the arc between filmmaker and viewer. His attention was primarily on the codes of cinema; however, there is a real need to stretch them to include cultural codes as well. As the distinguished anthropologist Clifford Geertz once remarked the algebraic semiotics should give way to cultural semiotics, and he demonstrated in his writings, how it could be done.

Let me illustrate this point with a scene from a film that many of us have watched with admiration - Satyajit Ray's film 'The Unvanquished' (Aparajitho). In the scene depicting Harihar's death, Ray cuts from his deathbed to an image of birds. Ray's camera focuses on Harihar's face as it suddenly collapses on the pillow. At the same instant, we hear a startling sound of a crack, and Ray cuts immediately to a close-up of a flock of birds, frightened and taking wing; about twenty eight frames later, the director cuts again to a long shot of the birds. The flight of birds, so beautiful, so ephemeral, is symbolic of life itself. In terms of cultural codes and cultural semiotics there is more to be read into the scene. In traditional texts such as the Upanishads, birds symbolize souls of humans. This brings in another level of cultural meaning to this death scene. The idea of code, therefore, can, and should, be fruitfully expanded to cover culture-specific experiences and visions as well.