Philosophy & Film: Session 1

My philosophical journey at Brooklyn Brainery continues! This time with movies! Too perfect for me you say? Why, yes. Thank goodness it's an 8:30 class so I can actually take it; I was bummed to have to skip Game Theory, which had a 6:30 start time. (Ryan, please teach Game Theory in an 8:30 spot some time; I tried to teach it to myself in 2007 and that didn't go too well).

Just as Living Philosophy was structured to start with a general overview and some history, so we began Philosophy & Film.

The history of film from a technological perspective goes something like this, with three main conceptual coordinates:

1. Ability to fix images to a transparent surface
• 1826: Niepce finds a way to fix images to a surface
• 1837: Daguerre creates fully developed images/photos known as daguerreotypes
• 1839: Henry Fox Talbot creates the first images on paper using materials and chemicals similar to those used today
• 1885: George Eastman creates flexible film that can be rolled up
2. Ability to project a series of rapid images
• This technology had been around for a while, in the form of Magic Lantern shows and the like
3. Scientific understanding of optical perception of movement
• 24 frames per second is the rate at which images must move for the human eye/brain to actually perceive movement
• The Phenakitoscope is one of the first inventions of the era that allows for such projections, though it relied on looking through a slit to isolate the image and thus could only be used by one person at a time
• The Zoetrope is a modification on the Phenakitoscope, still uses slits
• The Praxinoscope used mirrors to create a greater illusion of movement than that allowed by the devices that came before it
• The Kinetoscope is a one person projector that employed real motion using real pictures, but was not widely liked

This technological explanation is seen by many as reducing the value of film. In fact, Euclid and Newton were among those who had ideas for apparatuses similar to those developed in the 1800s. Even in the 1800s, there was co-determinate work going on, with people in different places coming up with the same ideas and devices at the same time without knowing of each other or each other's work. Thus, many of the inventions of this period were variations on one basic form of technology.

Archeological technology enables us to look back now that we have film, and also see where the medium is progressing. Even though we are sitting here now saying that FILM is the end-point, that may not have been the original aim of the technology. In other words, a bunch of Victorian dudes weren't sitting around saying, "Hey, let's come up with film!" Those who take a more ideological view of the history of film don't want technology to turn into evolution/genetics - technology is more random than that.

Reproduction vs. Aura & Tradition

• Aura of a piece of art: the presence that a piece of art has when you are in it's presence; "more than just a picture on the wall" [insert your own Sistine Chapel debate here]
• Tradition of making art: doing something that many have done before you

1. Expression in the cult: cult/ritual experience of the artform
2. Authenticity replaces cult value
• secularization of the Renaissance
• more about the image that was created, rather than the creator
3. Authenticity dies
• the politics of creation overtake ritual

• Example #1
1. People who followed Christ valued cult/ritual aspects of the group
2. Object touched directly related to Christ came to have more value than the cult
3. Today, things like a Gideon Bible have no authenticity due to the politics that demand mass reproduction of the Bible

• Example #2
1. Picasso: cult value found by early followers
2. Seeing a Picasso painting in a museum: the object becomes more important than the ideas/concepts that went into it
3. Posters in college dorm rooms have little meaning die to mass production

• Reproducing things at a tremendous rate is killing aura and tradition. However, film doesn't have aura and tradition. 
• There is no such thing as "the original," especially in today's digital world
• People have created aura and tradition around film where none truly exists
• Cult value changes because of the amount that film can be reproduced

Time and duration

• Time is mechanical, exemplified in motion
• Film creates a scenario where duration becomes hypothetical, no longer encapsulates time
• 90 minutes can now capture a day, a week, a lifetime

Walter Benjamin

• A quantitative change in reproduction changes qualitatively that which is being reproduced
• Film is the ultimate fruition of this because film is reproducing time itself
• Film is infinitely reproducing time (side thought: do you change time when you reproduce it?)

• Makes all works of art generic
• Art continually getting easier to reproduce, and if all art is equally reproducible, then there is no more authenticity

• Reproduction changes the subjects/viewers and their desires
• makes us want everything to be reproducible; we want easily accessible copies
• Devaluing the work vs. devaluing ourselves 

Andre Bazin

• Mummy complex: the more things are reproduced, the more people desire to preserve the original essence; saving that original thing that you can reproduce
• Development of perspective in the artistic world is a fall from grace; photography and film are the redemption of art
• Art is not about capturing what you see exactly, but about capturing the essence of what you see

click image to enlarge

• The realist impulse of perspective in painting/drawing gets taken over by photography and then the aesthetic impulse is reborn in painting
• Film allows photography to become aesthetic
• Film has allowed us to recapture our sense of art/realism in art, but it is a bastard child with nothing to save it; it is stuck in realism
• Realist activity in film decreased with the introduction of sound because people took sound to a surreal level
• Citizen Kane showed that film can surpass all other art forms in capturing things; reinvigorated realism in film

And there ends session one, with the fitting note of the great Orson Welles. I can't wait to get into some clips and such next time. Thanks to Ryan Doto for another interesting and engaging class!