This is Part I of a four-part series, where I will elaborate on some of the things I've learned during the past year studying Film Aesthetics. I spent all year trying to come up with a satisfying answer for when people would ask me "What exactly is Film Aesthetics?" I still don't think I've come up with an answer. But here are some things I think are valuable, for new filmmakers and new film critics alike, to understand. I'll make some generalizations, but I'll also try to explain some things. I know this topic is not of interest to everyone, but for those who do read it, think of it more as an essay (an "attempt") than as a blog post. I wrote this all back in June, on my last night of prepping for my final exam.
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Part I
In the tradition of the great cinéastes – the likes of Truffaut, Godard, and their cohorts – I want to put into words what I think is most important about filmmaking and film theory. These men were filmmakers in the French New Wave as well as film critics in the influential journal Cahiers du Cinema. After spending a year being barraged by theories, models, terms, and critics, while wanting all along just to prepare myself for making my own films one day, I’ve come to see the value in the wide array of film theory & criticism that has been published over the last century...or at least some of it.
One of the first things that helped me understand this beast I was studying is this: the difference between so-called Cognitive Theories and Psychoanalytic Theories. Both of these refer to what’s going on with the viewer while he or she watches the film. Is the viewer actively analyzing the stimuli in front of him, engaging with the story and the images, thinking about what they make him think and feel? This is what the Cognitive theorists would argue – that the viewer is in control of the impressions he gets from the film.
Psychoanalytic theorists, by contrast, would say that the viewer is being acted upon by the subconscious associations that are implicit in the film, and that he is not aware of how his psyche is being affected by the story and images. Rather than being able to think about concrete meanings in what he is seeing, the viewer is subconsciously swayed by how the film portrays people and situations.
An important concept for Psychoanalytic critics is the concept of the ‘gaze’. The gaze is the particular way that the film allows the viewer to view something or someone. Often this concept can take on a political slant, such as when a female character is pictured from a point of view associated with a male character.
For a filmmaker, having an opinion on the processes by which a person perceives a film, is of utmost importance. If the director wishes to make the audience think or feel something, he must have conception of how a viewer is made to think or feel something. To some degree, this depends on the individual viewer, as well as on the individual film. Summer blockbusters operate on the intention of making the audience feel sympathy for the character, suspense when the character doesn’t know something that we know, and to side with him against his adversaries. Often, mainstream Hollywood films do not leave much room for ambiguity within this model. By the same token, some audience members simply want to be entertained in exchange for their ticket money, and some movies deliver just that – entertainment. However, for a filmmaker who believes films have a deeper potential than this, bearing in mind how viewership actually works will most certainly affect the director's creative choices.
For myself, I think that viewership functions somewhere between the two models outlined above. We shall take as a given, of course, that not every viewer is the same. However, we can go deeper than that and ask questions about viewership that relate to human beings in general and our commonalities, when it comes to our perception and appreciation of art.
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Tomorrow, look for Part II on Film and the Mind.
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