Notes on a Filmosopher

From Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator (2000), comes Robin Hood. The trailer for that popular film type informs audiences that watching an epic story will be like watching the other. Thus, they will have some expectations about Robin Hood because they presumably have watched the former film. Trailers are not necessarily shown in movie theaters: they proliferate online and on TV. Thus, Daniel Frampton’s idea a film is “an organic intelligence…a ‘film being’ thinking about the characters and subjects in the film” suggests that audiences encounter films without any notion of what it is or where it came from (7). I agree with Frampton that film induces some kind of a waking dream state, where we forget about directors, Hollywood, and camera angles to experience the film as a new world. However, we are not innocent to filminds or film worlds, especially if we are anticipating moments in some film worlds, as if we have travelogues prepared/habituated thanks to the domination of narrative.

Frampton states that film offers philosophy, rather than validating philosophical concepts. I see no problem in philosophers using film for philosophical discourse. Films can reveal the intricacies of debates like cloning and the sanctity of identity, or the instability of judicial meaning in particular legal situations. Besides, some narratives express philosophical issues by their very construction: story and character. If academic writing takes the position of philosophy offering its services to film, then it is the filmind that does this in its form of thinking.

Frampton also implies a general definition for or identification of cinema. An aspect of the filmind is “the creation of the basic film-world of recognisable people and objects” (6). Thus, as long as representations of reality are perceived, then the filmind is a legitimate being. Otherwise, nonrepresentational images have no existence. Since this concept is intended for the moviegoer, then he or she will accept narrative films as cinema. Abstract films do not any “film-thinking,” for there is no designing and figuring of the film-world. If films are to be treated as autonomous beings, then experimental/abstract films should garner the equality that standardized films have, in their recognition as filminds.

By Raul Garcia

Work Cited

Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

In Defense of Narrative

Throughout the semester, but particularly in recent weeks during our discussions of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 (1983) and Cinema 2 (1985), Peter Frampton's Filmosophy (2006) and more generally the opposition between traditional film studies (in which technical analyses relate disparate elements back to narrative causality) and modern film studies (in which the medium's more affective visual and aural properties are considered), we've tended to speak very dismissively of narrative analysis. Our conversation last week turned to film textbooks such as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film As Art: An Introduction (first edition 1979), an introductory text that offers its close and exhaustive analysis of mainstream Hollywood cinema as a dominant paradigm against which to compare other works produced within and without that system like a cardinal point for film students to get their bearings from, rather than a rigid, proscriptive set of questions to be put to every movie. But to dismiss this type of analysis out of hand is to make the same error that practitioners of that school of film studies commit in assuming the causal relationship between some shot A and the following shot B while ignoring an affective, non-narrative analysis. Simply put: we should not forgo narrative analysis simply because its scholars tend to forgo affective analyses.

Indeed, much of the cinema that Deleuze espouses in Cinema 2, particularly Italian neo-realisn and the French New Wave, is by no means non-narrative. Rather, films of those periods marked fairly radical breaks with the dominant modes of filmic storytelling at the time. Films by De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, Truffaut and Godard are narrative, even in as much as they seek, more or less self-reflexively, to unsettle our habituated modes of watching and experiencing narrative cinema. Even such creative and formally audacious films rely in some manner or another on film's capacity to convey a story. The implication that seemed to be raised in class, that studies of film that construe technical and formal features as devices for narrative development are not worth our consideration, strikes me as dangerously close-minded.

Some of the most radical studies of film have undertaken such analyses to suggest the subversive possibilities for what might appear to be very conservative texts. I'm thinking, for instance, of Robin Wood's hyper-politicized writings on studio-era and immediately post-studio era American cinema, based on narrative and technical analysis, in books such as Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (1998) and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986). Or, Frederic Jameson's extremely rigorous Marxist interpretations of films like Jaws (1975), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Godfather (1972) in "Class Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture" (1977), with his particular focus on the process of adaptation from novel or true story into fiction film. These and many other astute film studies scholars demonstrate that viewers experience cinema as both an affective series of sounds and images and, the majority of the time, also as narrative. To champion analysis of the one at the expense of the other is to do the reader, viewer and the work under consideration all a great disservice, and leaves the resulting study critically incomplete.

-Benjamin Sutton