I will return to the previous post about art disclosing a world from left field.
We have this link to this book is courtesy of Jean Genie who runs the very interesting Creativity Machine weblog.
The book is by Scott McQuire. It sure looks interesting in the way that it explores our visual culture that has been shaped by the camera. Some references are here. It comes out of this academic department. Scott's description of the book is that it explores:
"...the ways in which the development of media technologies such as photography, cinema and television have been implicated in the emergence of modern and postmodern social formations. The book explores themes including changing notions of realism, the ways in which the construction of history has been altered by the development of audio-visual archives, and the impact that the space-time compression characteristic of electronic media has on the nation-state and the formation of national identity."
There is little material on the web about this text. Too academic? It seems to have disappeared into a black hole. I have found a review of Scott's Visions of Modernity here and Scott's response is here
Scott's text opens up a space to thinking otherwise to the current modes of thinking and feeling about culture. How so? By highlighting the importance of the visual over the written word. Admitedly, that visual photographic culture was deeply positivist (mirroring the facts) whilst other strands of photography embraced modernism and the autonomy of the image.
However, we can dig further. Instead of this try this line of thought.
Camera technology, especially the cinema, has altered the possibilities for thinking and imagining. Opening ourselves up to that possibility, especially to those possibilities opened by the cinema, transforms philosophy; away from the old connection to the literary or art institution; away from that old kind of understanding that presupposes cinema is a filmic rewriting of nineteenth century novels. It takes us into a world of Senses of Cinema.
This takes us away from the boring The Movie Show, which views cinema primarily through the eyes of the theatre and actors. You know the line: cinematic meaning is all about character and narrative. It makes cinema throughly unremarkable since on their interpretation cinema represents the world we already have--they construct stereotypes. On their literary understanding of cinema, the camera reinforces everyday opinions.
This covers up the way that the machinic images produced by cameras using cuts and multiple viewpoints provides us with the capacity to view the world differently to our situated perspective. We see the world differently to our everyday interested and embodied perspective.
So cinema discloses a world. How So. Well it is not about representing a form of life we already have. It discloses, or opens up, new worlds. This can be done with Jonathan Demme's Silence of the Lambs, (1991) a film about the mutilatation of bodies----eating and skinning victims. You can see a Heidggerian exploration of this film here. (The text is heavygoing).
Cinema gives us a way to understand what Heidegger was getting at with art opening up a clearing in the everyday exchanges of existence.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 25, 2003 10:42 AM | TrackBack