Philosophy & Film: Session 2

After Session 1's intro/history, we got right into clips for Session 2. The main themes we explored were Time, Authenticity, and Freedom (of what film allows artists to do).

We started with La Jeteé (Chris Marker, 1962), which I had never seen before. I really loved this film because it is a great infinite-loop time travel piece, a theme which is almost always appealing to me. Points about this film include:

• Memory allows for recirculation of time/the past
• similar to what film itself does: can revisit something over and over/always come back to it
• Still shots enhance the sense of memory and confuse the duration of time
• no mechanical time
• past, present, and future all merge
• the narrative has a time, but the frames don't
• Memory is the striving toward authenticity
• passion for authenticity leads toward death
• continual striving for authenticity leads to continual death
• This film is very in-tune with literature and novelistic structure, but film allows for more than just narrative

Next we watched the last fifteen minutes or so of Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), which I had seen all of during a film course I had taken back at Uni. The end of Vertigo expresses philosophical ideas similar to those we saw in La Jeteé [spoilers ahead]:

•  Fulfillment of memory takes Scotty to a different time
• seeks authenticity through reenactment
• the authenticity of experiencing a memory
• loses something because he is searching for authenticity through memory
• Ability to overcome vertigo => another meaning of death
• Sense of fate: only authentic thing that occurs is that the girl actually dies
• inevitability and authenticity
• authenticity of death/search for truth
• authentically she was fated to die because she dies in his memory
•  Mechanical time is screwed up: Scotty has known this girl for much longer than he first though he did
• The concepts that authenticity is dead and time is torn apart are two overarching philosophies during the period of the birth of film

Finally, we watched several clips from Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941), which I had also seen in the afore mentioned film class. Themes throughout this film include:

• Inside vs. outside
• snowglobe
• tracking shot through fence and then window
• "No Trespassing" sign bookends film: nothing can get through the boundaries except for the camera/film
• Journalists in the dark/back-lit
• seeking truth, but unable to see/find it
• the film captured what the journalists cannot: only film can show the truth
• pure truth is weaker than a fictional version of the truth
• Authenticity
• snow in snowglobe vs. real snow outside
• acquiring objects in an attempt to find/recapture the past => authenticity is dying
• Kane collects a great number of items over his lifetime, searching for what he lost (an authentic time in his past when thing were simple, easy, and made sense); he struggles for realism throughout his life
• world moving toward a place where authenticity is no longer real
• life loses authenticity as it goes on, but death is always authentic
• Past and present merging
• situation tied to a strong memory
• mechanical time dies; all we have is the duration of the movie (which cover a whole lifetime)
• Citizen Kane brought realism back to film
• Welles showed that realism could be expressed through fiction