INTRODUCTION
1. Deleuze Cinema 2, 68.
2. Bradley, quoted in Abrams, “From Addison to Kant,” 163.
3. Bordwell writes: “We don’t have to think of film as an art form. A historian can treat a movie as a document of its time and place . . . but most of the time we assume that cinema is an art of some sort” (Bordwell and Thompson, Minding Movies, 86).
4. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 562.
5. On the postmodern critique of aesthetics, more generally, see Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age.
6. See Margolis, Cultural Space of the Arts.
7. Dyer, “Introduction to Film Studies,” 4.
8. This is certainly not to pit the “cultural” against the “aesthetic,” which, as Dyer rightly notes, is a false opposition (ibid., 9–10).
9. Bordwell and Thompson, Minding Movies, 95.
10. See Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies”; and Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory.”
11. Along with Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film, other works include Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film; Verstraten, Film Narratology; Chatman, Coming to Terms; Wilson, Narration in Light; and Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Films.
12. See Thompson, “Concept of Cinematic Excess.”
13. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 53.
14. Bordwell and Thompson, Minding Movies, 86, 92–93.
15. In these respects this is a very different view of what an aesthetic approach to narrative cinema may consist in from that which Murray Smith appears to suggest in his essay “Film.”
16. For recent, similar perspectives in the contemporary analytical tradition see, e.g., Anderson, “Aesthetic Concepts of Art”; and Goldman, “The Aesthetic.”
17. Goldman, “The Aesthetic,” 265.
18. See Lewis’s foreword in Mitry, Aesthetics, vii; and Andrew, Major Film Theories, 185–205.
19. Mitry, Aesthetics, 80.
20. See Andrew, Major Film Theories; and Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory. In an article appearing a few years before my 2008 piece “Towards a Theory of Film Worlds,” and well after Andrew’s discussions, Christopher S. Yates also addresses “cinematic worlds” with reference to Dufrenne’s aesthetics, for example. His main focus, however, is on Heidegger’s concept of “world-disclosure” and aspects of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of film as juxtaposed with the works of Terrence Malick (see “Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic Worlds”).
21. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 70.
1. WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS
1. Andrew suggests this distinction in relation to films but does not explicate it in the present terms (see Concepts in Film Theory, 40–47).
2. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 25.
3. McKay and Nelson, “Propositional Attitude Reports” n.p. Propositions for these purposes may be generally understood as “public, language-independent, abstract entities with a structure that mirrors, to some degree, the syntactic structure of the natural language sentences that express them.”
4. Some theorists have evoked so-called modal logic, that is, the logic of “possible worlds,” in relation to fictional worlds of works, insofar as the latter are posited as at least logically possible realities but ones (as yet) empirically unrealized.
5. Bloom and Skolnick, “Intuitive Cosmology,” 77.
6. See Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, 89–139.
7. Herman, Story Logic, 4.
8. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 144–45; see also his “How Remote Are Fictional Worlds?”
9. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 57.
10. Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 201.
11. Goodman asserts that “there are no fictive worlds” (Of Mind and Other Matters, 125).
12. Margolis, Cultural Space of the Arts, 135.
13. Ibid., 137.
14. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, 140.
15. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 40.
16. Ibid.
17. Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, 198–99.
18. Abrams, “From Addison to Kant,” 164; see also Wilson, “Comments on Mimesis as Make-Believe” (393) for a discussion of Abrams’s work.
19. Abrams, “From Addison to Kant,” 170.
20. See Tolkien, Tolkien on Fairy-Stories, 112; see also Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds.
21. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 112.
22. Frampton, Filmosophy, 47.
23. Ibid., 6–7.
24. Frampton argues that although “filmmakers are film-creators,” they are also “simple conduits for film-thinking” (ibid., 75).
25. See Sobchack, The Address of the Eye, 24.
26. See Livingston, Art and Intention, 62–90.
27. Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 116.
28. See Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature, 197–202.
29. Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, 11, 29.
30. Perkins, “Where Is the World?” 22.
31. Metz, Film Language, 98; also quoted in Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy,” 228.
32. Burch, To the Distant Observer, 18–19. As Winters has pointed out, this differs from other influential theoretical conceptions of the diegetic (forwarded by Gérard Genette and Claudia Gorbman, among others) pertaining to cinematic narration exclusively or to a distinct level of it (see “The Non-diegetic Fallacy,” 225–27).
33. See Mitry, Aesthetics, 72.
34. See Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy”; and Stilwell, “Fantastical Gap.”
35. Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy,” 225.
36. See, e.g., Bordwell’s persuasive critique in Narration in the Fiction Film, 16–26.
37. See also Cecchi, “Diegetic versus Nondiegetic.”
38. See Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy,” 224; and Cecchi, “Diegetic versus Nondiegetic.”
39. See Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy,” 224, 228; and my “Spaces, Gaps and Levels.”
40. Stilwell, “Fantastical Gap,” 184; see also Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy,” 224.
41. Perkins, “Where Is the World?” 36.
42. Metz, Film Language, 108–9, 111, 212–15.
43. Ibid., 76–80, 97–98.
44. See ibid., 98. In addition to citing Dufrenne in Film Language, Metz also credits him with the suggestion of publishing the book (see xii).
45. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 176.
46. Ibid., 175.
47. Metz, Film Language, 10.
48. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 167.
49. See notably Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 153; and Harman, “Semiotics and the Cinema,” 90–93.
50. Burch, Life to Those Shadows; Bordwell, Staiger, and Thomson, Classical Hollywood Cinema, 24.
51. See Kawin, Mindscreen; and Orr, Contemporary Cinema.
2. THE FRAMEWORK OF WORLDS
1. Sh erlock Jr., Céline et Julie vont en bateau, Videodrome, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Inland Empire are among notable films that explore this fantasy.
2. O xford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), 2nd ed., s.v. “world.”
3. See Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 34, 42–44; and Gadamer, Truth and Method, 443.
4. OED, s.v. “world.” In a lecture (published in The Empirical Stance) Bas C. Van Fraassen also surveys the dictionary meanings of the word world, and their respective histories, for the purpose of showing that, despite grammatical appearances, the term does not refer to any single object or entity.
5. See, e.g., Schutz, “On Multiple Realities.”
6. See Margolis, “Deviant Ontology of Artworks.”
7. See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 4.
8. See Sebeok, Signs, 3.
9. See Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 141.
10. See also Buckland, Cognitive Semiotics of Film as another instance of a somewhat hybrid position in this respect.
11. See, e.g., Underhill, Creating Worldviews, 19–21, 63–64.
12. On this topic see Taylor, Philosophical Arguments.
13. Ibid., 101.
14. See Ellis, Language, Thought, and Logic, 1–44.
15. Friedman, Parting of the Ways, 88; see also Rockmore, In Kant’s Wake, 17.
16. See, e.g., Dupré, “Cassirer’s Symbolic Theory”; and Verne, “Cassirer’s Concept.”
17. Hamlin and Krois, Symbolic Forms, xv.
18. Cassirer, Language and Myth, 8.
19. See ibid., 98, for instance, as well as his An Essay on Man; and Verne, “Cassirer’s Concept,” 21.
20. See Verne, “Cassirer’s Concept,” 22–24.
21. See Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 141.
22. Langer, Feeling and Form, 410.
23. See Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 97–99.
24. Ibid., 93–94.
25. See Langer, Problems of Art, 124–27.
26. Langer’s suggested strong, overall identification between the film camera and the viewer (as witness to represented events) as a general property of all cinema, as opposed to a feature of specific works or film styles, is problematic, for instance, as are at least some of her analogies between cinema and dream experience.
27. Carroll, Philosophical Problems, 262; and Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 1–9.
28. See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 1–2.
29. See Ricœur, “Ways of Worldmaking (Nelson Goodman),” 107.
30. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 5; Languages of Art, xi.
31. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 3.
32. Ibid., 11.
33. See, e.g., Brown, “Greenaway’s Contract.”
34. Pascoe, Peter Greenaway, 21.
3. FILMMAKING AS SYMBOLIC TRANSFORMATION
1. Panofsky, “Style and Medium,” 365. See also Cavell, The World Viewed, 16.
2. Pudovkin, Film Technique, 24.
3. Rohmer, quoted in Bazin, Orson Welles, 120.
4. Wilson also suggests as much in Narration in Light, 140.
5. Burch, Theory of Film Practice, xix.
6. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, 180.
7. In the published screenplay of the film Truffaut discusses this attitude as displayed by the character of Ferrand (see Truffaut, Day for Night, 12).
8. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, 181.
9. Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 120.
10. Mast, “What Isn’t Cinema,” 386.
11. Langer, Feeling and Form, 412.
12. This is the title of Danto’s 1981 philosophical study of art, drawing examples from pop art practice.
13. See, e.g., Deleuze, Cinema 1, 56–57. In later writings Mitry endorsed Deleuze’s views as being close to his own much earlier published ones (see Mitry, Semiotics, 22–23).
14. See Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 92–126.
15. Mitry, Aesthetics, 54.
16. See Andrew, The Major Film Theories, 185–211; and Lewis, Jean Mitry, 6–7.
17. Mitry, Aesthetics, 88, 80.
18. See ibid., 343.
19. Lewis, Jean Mitry, 64. Lewis has also discussed similarities between both Mitry’s and Dufrenne’s “antistructuralist” views of the artistic symbol and Langer’s, Ricœur’s, and Merleau-Ponty’s, all seen to be part of a similar “family” tradition in this respect, one roughly analogous to that which I have traced further back in time (see ibid., 7, 55, 64).
20. Patar in Mitry, Aesthetics, xv.
21. Mitry, Aesthetics, 15 (subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text proper).
22. Dufrenne, Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 325.
23. Mitry’s stated views bear some resemblance to V. F. Perkins’s arguments in Film as Film, which also seeks to reconcile (while amending) central insights of classical realist and formalist film theory.
24. See Mitry, Aesthetics, 355.
25. Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 92.
26. Pasolini’s sometimes unorthodox and ambiguous application of linguistic terminology to cinema, in analogies drawn between film and language, attracted criticism from both semiotic and nonsemiotic theorists. This also appears to have colored Mitry’s reading of Pasolini in which the French theorist notably fails to recognize the affinity between Pasolini’s account and his own symbol-centered views (see Mitry, Semiotics, 138–39).
27. For more on Pasolini’s relevant views see Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini; and Viviani, A Certain Realism.
28. Eisenstein, Film Form, 130; see also Lewis, Jean Mitry, 23–27.
29. Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” 168.
30. See Greene, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 113.
31. Ibid., 98; Greene quotes Deleuze on 109.
32. Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” 171.
33. Ibid. (Pasolini’s emphasis).
34. It is not that Mitry denies this semiotic “prehistory” so much as he deemphasizes it.
35. See Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema.
36. Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” 169–71.
37. Metz, Film Language, 215n.
38. Ibid., 137–40, 215 (and note).
39. Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” 170.
40. Ibid., 173.
41. From Pasolini’s Marxist perspective, however, the aesthetic achievement in question is not always ideologically defensible: a case in point being the “poetic” cinema of Godard, Antonioni, and Bertolucci, which he sharply criticizes for its “bourgeois” artistic sensibility.
42. Metz, Film Language, 76.
43. See Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 45–49.
44. Pasolini, “The ‘Cinema of Poetry,’” 171.
45. Billard, “Interview with Michelangelo Antonioni,” 8.
46. Mitry, Semiotics, 171. Although for these reasons language is not an appropriate theoretical “model” for film, in Mitry’s view it remains an appropriate “basic” point of comparison.
47. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 12.
48. See Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, 26–41.
4. WAYS OF CINEMATIC WORLD-MAKING
1. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 4.
2. Ibid., 34.
3. According to Lamarque and Olsen, the concept of a world-version enables Goodman to deflect “the simple objection that worlds are just too vast or comprehensive to be the sorts of things [individual] humans can make. Making parts of worlds or making changes in worlds is more on the human scale” (Truth, Fiction, and Literature, 209).
4. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 7–17.
5. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 16.
6. Mitry, Aesthetics, 88.
7. Bonitzer, “Deframings,” 200.
8. Bazin, What Is Cinema? 1:165–66.
9. Mitry, Aesthetics, 45.
10. See Marks, The Skin of the Film, 172–77.
11. See my “Space, Theme and Movement.”
12. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 11.
13. Deleuze, Cinema 1, 108.
14. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 46.
15. See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 13–14.
16. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinematic Odyssey, 66.
17. Metz, Film Language, 115.
18. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 98–125.
19. See Kovács, Screening Modernism, 137–38.
20. Perkins, quoted in Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 282.
21. See Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 274–310.
22. On the subject of temporal and spatial divisions, intertitles, and reflexivity see Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 66–70.
23. See also Biro, Turbulence and Flow in Film, 203–29.
24. See Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 5–6.
25. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 81.
26. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 14.
27. Such viewer construction is one of the cornerstones of Bordwell’s theory of film narration (as fabula construction), drawing as it does on approaches to perception and comprehension rooted in cognitive psychology (see Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film).
28. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 14.
29. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, 93–94, 104, 96.
30. See Thompson’s analysis of what she calls the film’s “sparse parametric style” (Breaking the Glass Armor, 289–317).
31. See Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time.
32. Similarly, Deleuze refers to the “saturated” image-sets of some films and styles (marked by a “multiplication of independent data”) in contrast to relatively “rarefied” ones (such as close-ups of single objects, or the depictions of “empty” places and spaces) (Cinema 1, 12).
33. Godard, Godard on Godard, 239.
34. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 14.
35. See ibid., 16.
36. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, 68–82.
37. Along these lines, Goodman cites caricature in drawing as a prime example of distortion (see Ways of Worldmaking, 16).
38. Goodman regards “quotation” as a major aspect of world-making and devotes a chapter to its logical and epistemological nature in Ways of Worldmaking, 41–56.
39. From this perspective, and as Theodore Gracyk observes of Goodman’s aesthetics, “artistic creativity must be measured by an artist’s relationship to existing symbol systems” (Gracyk, The Philosophy of Art, 58).
40. See Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 17.
41. Ibid., 54.
42. Cavell, The World Viewed, 31.
43. Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 141.
5. REPRESENTATION, EXEMPLIFICATION, AND REFLEXIVITY
1. It was subsequently extended and modified in later writings, including those with coauthor Catherine Z. Elgin.
2. Goodman, Languages of Art, 5.
3. See Metz, Film Language, 108–14.
4. Those philosophers and theorists who appeal to putative scientific support for a general perceptualism and so-called pictorial recognition theory, which deemphasizes cultural mediation with respect to the perception of film images, include Noël Carroll, Gregory Currie, and Berys Gaut. See, e.g., Carroll, Philosophy of Motion Pictures; and Currie, “The Long Goodbye.”
5. Goodman, Languages of Art, 16.
6. On this issue see Files, “Goodman’s Rejection of Resemblance”; Lopes, Understanding Pictures, 55–76; and Lopes, “From Languages of Art.” In the latter Lopes attempts to “salvage” Goodman’s position on the conventional nature of pictorial representation by reinterpreting it.
7. See Robinson, “Goodman,” 187; Lopes, Understanding Pictures; and Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 38–41.
8. Mitry, Aesthetics, 51, 72–88.
9. On this point, and with reference to all representational art, see Margolis, “Deviant Ontology of Artworks,” 120–21; and Margolis, Cultural Space of the Arts.
10. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 253.
11. See, e.g., Arrell, “Exemplification Reconsidered”; Lopes, Understanding Pictures, 220–22; and Lopes, “From Languages of Art.”
12. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 9.
13. See Goodman, Languages of Art, 53.
14. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 9.
15. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 64–70.
16. Metz, Film Language, 77.
17. See Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 69.
18. Goodman, Languages of Art, 253.
19. Van Fraassen, Scientific Representation, 17.
20. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 65.
21. Ibid., 135–37.
22. For a balanced discussion of Goodman’s account of exemplification see Gracyk, Philosophy of Art, 47–51.
23. In Goodman’s own idiom, “Exemplification relates a symbol to a label that denotes it, and hence indirectly to the things (including the symbol itself) in the range of that label” (Languages of Art, 92).
24. See, e.g., Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 66–70; Margolis, “Art as Language”; and Beardsley, “Languages of Art and Art Criticism.”
25. The latter phrase is often associated with the Lumière brothers’ view of their invention and with Bazin’s film theory.
26. See Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 20.
27. See ibid., 40–41; and Goodman, Languages of Art, 85–95.
28. Goodman, Languages of Art, 248. For a criticism of this view see Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 95–104.
29. Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, 8.
30. Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor, 10.
31. See, e.g., Whittock, Metaphor and Film; and Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image, 212–23.
32. Goodman, Languages of Art, 80. Although far too vast a topic to be addressed here, unlike the theorists cited above, Goodman considers the movement in thought from concrete or possessed perceived properties of artworks to more abstract ones (via so-called “root” or “conceptual” metaphors) to be indispensable to the processes of interpretation and understanding.
33. See Whittock, Metaphor and Film for detailed discussion of metonym and synecdoche in cinema.
34. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 70.
35. Lopes, Understanding Pictures, 220.
36. See Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 42–44.
37. See Langer, Feeling and Form, 412.
38. Julia Kristeva (who introduced the term into widespread use), Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette regard intertextuality as an alternative to the discourse of “intersubjectivity,” individual intentionality, and influence in literary studies; see Kristeva, Desire in Language, 66.
39. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 42.
40. See MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema.”
41. These include Deleuze, Cinema 2; Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature; Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It; and Perkins, “Where Is the World?”
42. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 38.
43. Ibid., 36.
44. Sobchack, for instance, pursues an “anti-expressionistic” conception of reflexivity in film wherein it is explicitly identified with what she sees as the “perceptual” nature of the medium rather than its artistic uses (see Address of the Eye, 5, 20, 143).
45. Stam discusses cinema in relation to some of these traditions in Reflexivity in Film and Literature.
46. See Burgoyne, Flitterman-Lewis, and Stam, Vocabularies in Film Semiotics, 198–203.
47. I intend, in fact, to explore the nature of cinematic reflexivity as a form of symbolic exemplification and filmic world-making in a subsequent work.
48. See Greene et al., Princeton Encyclopedia, s.v. “objective correlative.”
49. In fact, the dark wig Camille/Bardot wears is, according to Godard biographer Richard Brody, the same that Karina/Nana wore in some sequences in Vivre sa vie (see Brody, Everything Is Cinema, 163).
50. In this sequence Godard’s own voice narrates portions of Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait” over highly composed shots of Karina’s character, Nana, and finishes with the line, “It’s our story, a painter portraying his love.”
51. For discussion of more examples of this dynamic in the film see Brody, Everything Is Cinema, 157–73.
52. Goodman, Languages of Art, 93–94.
53. On this and the dynamic oscillation between the “over-objective” and the “over-subjective” poles in Kubrick’s cinema see Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 82–89.
54. Ebert, “Review of El Topo,” n.p.
55. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 68; see also Elgin, “Reorienting Aesthetics.”
56. See Meskin, “Style,” who cites on this basic point Gombrich, Panofsky, Walton, and Robinson.
57. See Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 127–64.
58. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 34, 39.
59. Ricœur, “Ways of Worldmaking (Nelson Goodman),” 111.
60. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 40.
61. Goodman distinguishes between “trivial” and “contingent” features of works and “constitutive” ones (Ways of Worldmaking, 34–37).
62. See Bordwell, Making Meaning.
63. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 304.
64. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 39, 35–36.
65. See Bazin, What Is Cinema? 2:144; and Altman, “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.”
66. See Deleuze, Cinema 1; Deleuze, Cinema 2; and Jameson, Postmodernism. In another example of a relatively more general classification, James Walters has proposed a typology of represented worlds in films consisting of “imagined worlds,” “potential worlds,” and “other worlds” (more sharply divorced from “reality”). See Walters, Alte rnate Worlds, 157.
67. On the relation between Tarr’s films and those of Antonioni, Jansco, Tarkovsky, and Bresson, see Kovacs, Cinema of Béla Tarr, esp. 15, 50–51, 60, 174; on Green’s relation to Bresson see Brooke, “Robert Bresson.”
68. See Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 127–47.
69. See Robinson, “Goodman,” 192, 195–96.
6. FORMS OF FEELING
1. See Robinson, Deeper Than Reason, 231–32.
2. Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 145.
3. See Carroll, Philosophy of Art, 80.
4. See Croce, The Essence of Aesthetic; and Collingwood, Principles of Art.
5. See, e.g., Marks, Skin of the Film; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; and Shaviro, The Cinematic Body.
6. See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual.
7. Plantinga, “Notes on Spectator Emotion,” 378.
8. Tan, Emotion, 44.
9. Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 244.
10. See, e.g., Smith, Engaging Characters; Plantinga and Smith, Passionate Views; Carroll, Philosophy of Mass Art, 245–90; and Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 59–87.
11. See Turvey, “Seeing Theory”; see also Allen, “Looking at Motion Pictures (Revised)”; and Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 193–208.
12. See Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 68–74; see also Gaut, who defends a version of the widely held character identification doctrine (Philosophy of Cinematic Art, 252–62).
13. Tan, Emotion, 52–56.
14. Ibid., 64–65, 81–84.
15. Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 74.
16. See Smith, “Imagining from the Inside,” 412–30; and Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory.”
17. See Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 74.
18. See, e.g., Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 44–45.
19. Plantinga, Moving Viewers, 68–71.
20. As a whole this typology mirrors, approximately, a general analysis forwarded in recent years by Jon Elster, according to whom emotional experience in the arts may be analyzed in terms of features or elements of works that are immediate and visceral, cognitive, and intrinsic or qualitative (see Alchemies of the Mind, 246).
21. See Prinz, Gut Reactions.
22. See Elster, Alchemies of the Mind, 255.
23. Carroll has discussed this sort of feeling in films; see, e.g., his Engaging the Moving Image, 33.
24. Metz, Film Language, 76.
25. Mitry, Aesthetics, 343. Mitry also refers to this as “a priori emotional response” to a film’s representations.
26. In wider terms, of the three forms of affective expression in films identified, the sensory-affective would appear the most amenable to empirical, scientific study by a considerable distance.
27. A third, intermediary subcategory of sensory-affective expression may involve so-called haptic affectivity. This is seen to follow from the nature of what Marks and other writers term “haptic images” (here taking inspiration from Deleuze’s analysis of Francis Bacon’s paintings and other, older theoretical and art-historical sources). These lack any clear representation or denotation of objects (or objects-as-wholes) while still representing some parts or aspects of them. Lacking such clear representational purposes (or success), such images foreground the surfaces and textures of profilmic materials and are seen to activate less ocular and more “tactile” and synesthetic sensory capacities (see Marks, Skin of the Film).
28. Mitry discusses this subject with reference to Resnais’s Night and Fog (see Aesthetics, 342).
29. Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” 237.
30. See, e.g., Chatman, Coming to Terms.
31. Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 74.
32. Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 121–37.
33. Perhaps inevitably, some films that prioritize this sort of affect have had thrill rides based upon them constructed at major theme parks or, as in the case of Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, have been directly inspired by such rides.
34. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 141.
35. Mitry, Aesthetics, 337.
36. See Perkins’s relevant analysis of the sequence and its symbolic and affective levels and objects in Film as Film, 107–15.
37. Sarris, quoted in Hoberman, “Psycho Is 50,” n.p.
38. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 42–44.
39. Thompson points out that when a given cinematic “device” appears onscreen for a certain amount of time over and above that which is required to convey narrative information, this may cue the attention of some viewers to the it as an employed device with extranarrative “artistic” import. See Thompson, “Concept of Cinematic Excess,” 518.
40. See Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 32–33, 36, 53.
41. Barker, Tactile Eye, 3.
42. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 64.
43. See Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory,” 162–63.
44. In Elliott’s words immersion may involve “only a part of a picture or a momentary sense of the real presence of the object represented” (“Aesthetic Theory,” 163).
45. Elliott attributes this objectivist and strongly perception-centered, as distinct from imagination- and affect-centered, concept of aesthetic experience to the views of Monroe Beardsley, O. K. Bouwsma, George Dickie, and Joseph Margolis. See Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory,” 154n.
46. Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory,” 157.
7. CINEAESTHETIC WORLD-FEELING AND IMMERSION
1. Dufrenne’s first major work was not available in English translation until some twenty years later.
2. Beardsley, quoted in Casey, foreword to Dufrenne, Phenomenology, xxi.
3. Kaelin, An Existentialist Aesthetic, 367.
4. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 16. Casey points out in his introduction to the English translation that while sensuous is often synonymous with perceptual in Dufrenne’s arguments, it also has a more distinct philosophical meaning via Kant’s distinction between it and “understanding” (Casey, introduction, xlviii, note 3).
5. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 148.
6. Goldman, “The Aesthetic,” 266.
7. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 185.
8. Ibid., 195.
9. Ibid., 174–75.
10. On this point see Deleuze, Cinema 2, 267.
11. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 242–43, 185–90, 178.
12. Mitry, Aesthetics, 126.
13. Sinnerbrink also suggests that this mood is unique to every “cinematic world” (“Stimmung,” 148).
14. See Plantinga, “Art Moods.”
15. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 150.
16. Dufrenne describes the world-feeling of the aesthetic object as being like a “supervening or impersonal principle” (Phenomenology, 168). In the relevant philosophical sense, “A set of properties A supervenes upon another set B just in case no two things can differ with respect to A-properties without also differing with respect to their B-properties. In slogan form, ‘there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference’” (McLaughlin and Bennett, “Supervenience”).
17. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 168.
18. Beugnet, Claire Denis, 164–66.
19. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 328.
20. Beugnet discusses each of these aspects of the film (see Claire Denis, 164–84).
21. See Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 328–29.
22. Mitry, Aesthetics, 126.
23. Although sometimes attributed to earlier philosophers, this formulation belongs to the twelfth-century theologian Alan of Lille.
24. Ibid., 16. Mitry makes this point in critiquing Croce’s expression theory of art.
25. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 182–85.
26. What I term actual time is equivalent to what Bordwell and Thompson call “screen duration,” whereas represented time is compatible, in some respects, with their categories of “story duration” and “plot duration,” both of the latter being equally a matter of what a film denotes (Film Art, 97–99). However, Bordwell and Thompson’s schema has no equivalent for felt or expressed time as here described, nor is this part of Gaut’s similar classification of time in cinema in his Philosophy of Cinematic Art.
27. See Sherover, Human Experience of Time.
28. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 187.
29. Ibid., 184.
30. Mitry, Aesthetics, 125.
31. Ibid., 271 (see also 104).
32. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 256, 258.
33. Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 67.
34. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 73; Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, 57; and Mitry, Aesthetics, 90.
35. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 117.
36. Ibid., 121.
37. See Deleuze, Cinema 2, 42, 189–204.
38. See ibid., 42.
39. Eisenstein, “A Dialectical Approach,” 109.
40. Ibid., 106.
41. Eisenstein, “Montage of Film Attractions,” 54.
42. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 149.
43. Godard, quoted in Oumano, Film Forum, 78.
44. Ibid., 174.
45. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 114, 120–21.
46. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 282.
47. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 120.
48. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 247.
49. Panofsky, “Style and Medium,” 354.
50. See Morin, The Cinema, 63–64.
51. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 243.
52. Ibid., 273.
53. For more on the reasons for this see ibid., 242–48.
54. Both Sobchack and Barker cite Dufrenne’s concept of the work as “quasi subject” in support of the notion that films are “embodied” entities (see Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 142; and Barker, The Tactile Eye, 11–12, 18, 148–49, 160). However Sobchack, and to a lesser degree, Barker, problematically implies that Dufrenne’s view is simply of a piece with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of visual perception as applied to art. This is, however, to divorce Dufrenne’s arguments from their Kantian conceptual roots and to significantly underrepresent their crucial temporal as well as spatial (i.e., visual) dynamics (the former being the subject of comparatively less attention on Merleau-Ponty’s part).
55. Dufrenne, Phenomenology, 413. His suggestion here is made with reference to Kant’s insight that time-consciousness entails the self being “affected by the self.”
56. Ibid., 177, 413–14, 447–56.
57. See ibid., 450–56. Dufrenne argues that “the creator appears immanent in the work” owing to a “state of expression” that “can be related equally well to the work or to the creator” (222).
58. Ibid., 188–90.
59. Mitry, Aesthetics, 83.
60. Carroll, Engaging the Moving Image, 131.
61. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 562–63.
62. Ibid.
63. Bordwell, “Sarris and the Search for Style,” 172.
64. Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, 121.
65. Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” 563.
66. In his Signs and Meaning in the Cinema Wollen associates a “Ford” or “Hitchcock” world, for instance, with sets of systematic oppositions on the level of a film’s latent thematic content as these are uncovered by theorists (94).
67. Bordwell, “Sarris and the Search for Style,” 171.
68. Sircello, Mind and Art, 29.
69. Lamarque, Philosophy of Literature, 103.
70. See Livingston, “Cinematic Authorship”; see also Gaut, Philosophy of Cinematic Art, where Livingston’s views are discussed in detail (118–24).
71. Mitry, Aesthetics, 10.
72. Gadamer also makes this point (see Truth and Method, 292).
73. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense, 20.
74. Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs,” 257; see also Wollen, Signs and Meaning, 53.
75. Chion, Kubrick’s Cinematic Odyssey, 41.
76. Dufrenne writes that “to talk of the comic in Molière is thus to specify a singular world by giving it a name and contrasting it with other worlds which do not possess a precisely similar atmosphere” (Phenomenology, 450).
77. See ibid., 441–50.
78. Dufrenne acknowledges this copresence and interdependence of feeling and reflection (see ibid., 424).
79. Mitry, Aesthetics, 184, 28.
80. Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory,” 158.
8. TOWARD AN EXISTENTIAL HERMENEUTICS OF FILM WORLDS
1. Currie, Image and Mind, 20.
2. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 295.
3. This is certainly true in comparison with other major movements and traditions in twentieth-century continental philosophy—e.g., semiotics and structuralism, existential phenomenology, and Bergson’s life-philosophy.
4. For this reason (as well as its indebtedness to Heidegger’s brand of existential phenomenology) Gadamer’s hermeneutics and (that of subsequent philosophers building on it) may also be considered “existential” in orientation.
5. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 297.
6. Mitry, Aesthetics, 366 (my emphasis).
7. Hofstadter, Truth and Art, 23–36.
8. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 116 (subsequent references to this source are cited parenthetically in the text as TM).
9. See Cavell, The World Viewed, 28–29.
10. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 293. Thus the interpretation and understanding of a work is less a “subjective act” than a participation “in an event of tradition.”
11. Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art? 42.
12. See Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 101–11. This is a selfhood that, as Cassirer also maintains, is very largely symbolically constructed out of historical materials at hand.
13. Linge, introduction to Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics, xix.
14. Ibid., xii.
15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 291. As Gadamer reflects, the “circle” itself is ever-expanding, since “the concept of the whole is relative, and being integrated in ever larger contexts affects the understanding of the individual parts” (190).
16. See Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 102.
17. Collinson, “Aesthetic Experience,” 174–75.
18. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 182.
19. Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 30. In Bordwell’s film narratology the processes of narrative construction and comprehension belong to “viewing” in this sense.
20. See Bordwell, Making Meaning.
21. Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 182.
22. Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 12.
23. Truffaut, “What Do Critics Dream About?” 6.
24. Clearly neither metaphorical nor noncognitive, “truth” as here conceived is not a matter of certain sorts of propositions or a logical “operator” on empirical facts.
25. Sartre, quoted in Dunne, Tarkovsky, 38–39.
26. As in Bazin’s realism, such an automatically generated view or projection of the real world, as associated with cinema, is at the heart of Cavell’s realist ontology of film (see Cavell, The World Viewed).
27. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 39, 71.
28. See ibid., 51–63.
29. See also Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 224.
30. See Cassirer, An Essay on Man, 138–39.
31. See Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, 32–33, 39; and Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor.
32. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 15.
33. Goodman, Languages of Art, 260; on “projectibility” and “rightness” see Goodman and Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, 22.
34. As Goodman puts the matter in more general terms, “not only do we discover the world through our symbols but we understand and reappraise our symbols progressively in the light of our growing experience” (Languages of Art, 260).
35. Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 67.
36. See Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 9; see also Danto, “Moving Pictures.”
37. See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 186–89.
38. This idea is tied to Goodman’s view that “both the dynamics and the durability of aesthetic value are natural consequences of its cognitive character” (Languages of Art, 260).
39. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 21.
40. Mitry, Aesthetics, 338.
41. Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 166.
42. Ibid., 141–42.
43. Margolis, What, After All, Is a Work of Art? 136.
44. See Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, 307.
45. Le monde enchanté de Jacques Demy, 52.