Practice of Theory: Part II

Continuing from yesterday's post, some of these questions we might ask about viewership are:

How much do a person’s preconceptions about an actor/director/genre/etc follow him into the theatre and color his reaction to the film? 

How does a film manage to provoke an emotional response from a viewer, causing him to sympathize or empathize with a character who is not actually real? 

Does the viewer use senses or perceptions other than sight and hearing while experiencing a film?  

In other words, what else do we do besides “watch” and “hear” a film? 

There is much more to viewership than just vision.

This brings me to the notion of film and thought – a ripe area for study.  Theorist Gilles Deleuze is most famous for making connections between cinema and philosophy.  He says that both film and philosophy are concerned with two major issues: movement and time. 

Movement of many sorts is implicit in the term ‘motion pictures’.  Films also can tricks our sense of our position in space.  A hand-held camera replicates the feel and perspective of walking, whereas a tracking shot suggests the feeling of floating or gliding. 

Time is needed to take in a film – it cannot be watched entirely all at one time, like a painting or a sculpture that can be seen instantly as a whole.  Unlike these other art forms, film occupies time as well as space.

It has been suggested that film, by its very nature, works in a way that is similar to the human mind.  This is a useful analogy when we examine how cinema is different from other arts and how it differs from real life.  Theorist Erwin Panofsky said that film, by its very nature is the "spatialization of time, and the dynamization of space."  This means that, in a way that is different from any other art form, film can manipulate time and space to achieve an effect or to present a semblance of reality.  I'll explain in a little more detail.

"Dynamization of Space"

A film can show one event taking place in one location at one time, and then instantaneously the film can cut to a completely different event in a different place and time.  For example, we can be at the police station where the detective is questioning a witness, and instantly in the next scene, it cuts to the gangster hide-out at the old train station, where Mugsy is counting his stolen cash. 

In the physical world, our bodies are bound by the space-time continuum - we cannot transport across spaces instantaneously - but in our mind’s eye we can "be" (and "see") any place as soon as we think of it.  It is the same in film.  This "dynamization of space" effect happens in smaller units too.  One minute we can be looking at a profile shot of two cowboys in a duel, and the next minute we are looking straight on at a close-up of one cowboy's eyes.   In the physical world, obviously our perspectives do not change in this instantaneous way.  Film grants us this special motive power that is otherwise restricted to our imaginations.

"Spatialization of Time"

Just as fim can jump between different locations, film can also jump between different times, and (except in the TV show 24) always does.  In the real world, time is a constant factor, moving forward at an unchanging rate.  A film, however, can jump from now to three hours from now, to ten years from now, to fifty years ago, or to 30 seconds from now.  Films frequently jump over things that can be explained by their (more dramatic) results.  When a scene between a guy and a girl begins with "Honey, I can explain!" and then jump cuts to the girl slapping the guy, we can kinda fill in the details.

Time is truly a dimension within which the content of the film is free to move.  As an element of narrative, film-time is "spatialized" because writers and directors can move and shape time to better tell the story. 

This unique quality of cinema, along with film's ability to manipulate space, are two of the things which distinguish it from real life and from other art forms.  For this reason, the Formalist school of thought insists that filmmakers should make the most of these qualities, rather than try to simulate reality as it is normally experienced in everyday life.  (This is an idea I'd like to explore more in another essay.)    

This connection between film and thought – film and philosophy – is something that interests me and that I would like to research further, but for now I’ll stick to some broader ideas about theory and practice.

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Continuing on, tomorrow I'll post Part III, where I'll talk about...you guessed it!  More theory!  

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The Practice of Theory: A Theory of Practice

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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