The Philosophy of Motion Pictures
The Philosophy of Motion Pictures
Foundat ions o f t h e P h i l o s o p h y o f t h e Arts Series Editor: Philip Alperson, Temple University
The Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts series is designed to provide a comprehensive but flexible series of concise texts addressing both fundamental general questions about art as well as questions about the several arts (literature, film, music, painting, etc.) and the various kinds and dimensions of artistic practice.
A consistent approach across the series provides a crisp, contemporary introduction to the main topics in each area of the arts, written in a clear and accessible style that provides a responsible, comprehensive, and informative account of the relevant issues, reflecting classic and recent work in the field. Books in the series are writ ten by a truly distinguished roster of philosophers with international renown.
1. The Philosophy of Art, Stephen Davies 2. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Noel Carroll
Forthcoming: The Philosophy of Literature, Peter Lamarque The Philosophy of Music, Philip Alperson Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul Taylor
The Philosophy of Motion Pictures
Noel Carroll
jfk Blackwell * C r Publishing
© 2008 by Noel Carroll
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First published 2008 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
1 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-?ublication Data
Carroll, Noel, 1947- The philosophy of motion pictures / Noel Carroll.
p. cm. — (Foundations of the philosophy of the arts) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-2024-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-2025-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Motion pictures—Philosophy. I. Title. PN1995.C3574 2008 791.4301—dc22
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To Loretta and Maureen for taking care of my brothers
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: From Film Theory to the Philosophy
of the Moving Image 1
1 Film as Art 7
2 Medium Specificity 35
3 What Is Cinema? 53
4 The Moving Picture — the Shot 80
5 Moving Images — Cinematic Sequencing and Narration 116
6 Affect and the Moving Image 147
7 Evaluation 192
Select Bibliography 227 Index 233
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions offered in the preparation of parts of this book by Philip Alperson, Susan Feagin, Margaret Moore, Jonathan Frome, Vitor Moura, Jinhee Choi, Murray Smith, Gregory Currie, Aaron Smuts, Tom Wartenberg, Cynthia Freeland, Annette Michelson, Jeff Dean/ George Wilson, Elisa Galgut, Ward Jones, Amy Coplan, Patrick Keating, and Deborah Knight. They helped make this a better book. I’m the one who made it worse.
Introduction
From Film Theory to the Philosophy of the
Moving Image
Though the philosophy of the motion picture — or, as I prefer to say, the moving image — began early in the twentieth century, perhaps arguably with the publication in 1916 of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study by Hugo Munsterberg (a Harvard professor of philosophy and psychology in the department of William James), the philosophy of motion pictures did not become a thriving sub-field of philosophy until quite recently. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein enjoyed movies and attended them often — he especially liked westerns — he did not philosophize about them. But as of late, the discussion of movies by philosophers has become quite literally volurninous.
Why? At least two factors may account for this, one demographic and the
other intellectual. The demographic consideration is this: for the philosophy of motion
pictures to take root in any serious way, a substantial cadre of philosophers steeped in motion pictures was necessary in order for a deep and informed philosophical conversation to be sustained. Historically speaking, that condition did not begin to be satisfied sufficiently until the late 1960s and 1970s. By then there was at least one generation of philosophers who had grown up going to the movies in their neighborhood playhouses, and also a second generation who had access, through television, to a wide selection of the history of their own national and/or regional cinema
See for example the bibliography assembled by Jinhee Choi in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
2 FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY
traditions. Thus, toward the end of the twentieth century there were — suddenly — enough philosophers with enough knowledge about motion pictures for rich and wide-ranging philosophical debates to begin and for positions to be refined dialectically.
The demographic situation that I’ve just described, of course, not only explains the emergence of the field of the philosophy of motion pictures. It also accounts for the evolution of cinema studies (or moving image studies, or just media studies) as a rapidly expanding academic enterprise. However, though cinema scholars initially followed in the footsteps of the major film theorists (such as Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovin, Andre Bazin, and Siegfried Kracauer, among others), by the 1980s cinema studies, like other branches of the humanities, took what has come to be called “the cultural or social turn.” That is, academics in cinema studies decided to reorient their field in the direction of what came to be known as “cultural studies.” And in doing so, they left in mid-air many of the discussions of a lot of the issues that had perplexed earlier film theorists.
Intellectually, a vacuum appeared. And as Richard Allen, a former chairperson of the New York University Department of Cinema Studies, has pointed out, philosophers stepped into that gap. In effect, the professors of cinema studies have ceded what was once a central part of their field to philosophers of the moving image.
Perhaps needless to say, the philosophical appropriation of many of the topics of the earlier film theorists is by no means a matter of an alien colonization. For traditional film theory was always mixed through and through with philosophy. For example, to take a position on whether film is or is not art presupposes a philosophy of art. Film theorists also helped themselves to theses from many other branches of philosophy as well. Philosophy was never far from the thinking of classical film theorists. So, in this respect, the philosophy of the moving image is a legitimate heir to film theory, and not a usurper.
Many of the topics in this book — especially in terms of the questions asked — reflect the legacy of traditional film theory for the contemporary philosophy of the moving image. The first chapter addresses the question of whether or not film can be art. This is undoubtedly the question that got film theory and the philosophy of the motion pictures rolling in the early decades of the twentieth century. As we shall see, the issue has been revived of late due to some recent, highly sophisticated theories about the nature of photography. As in the past, showing that film can be an art forces us to look at and think closely about the nature of our object of study. In this way, meeting the charge that film is somehow precluded from
FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY 3
the order of art in fact becomes an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the moving image.
The second chapter concerns what can be called the “medium specificity thesis.” This is the view that the artistic exploration of cinematic possibi lities must follow the implicit directives of the medium in which those possibilities are realized. The precise medium that figures in debates like this is typically film — that is, photographically or celluloid based motion pictures. The claim is that the nature of this medium has normative consequences with regard to that which moviemakers should pursue and avoid in their artistic endeavors. Quite simply, it is argued, they should strive to be cinematic and shun being un-cinematic (a condition that is often also equated with being theatrical). Because this was an article of faith for so long in the history of film and because the position appeals so seductively to common sense, it is worth a chapter to scrutinize the medium specificity hypothesis in depth.
Chapter 3 focuses on the question, “What is cinema?” The title, of course, comes from the legendary collection of essays by Andre Bazin, one of the most renowned theorists in the history of the moving image. It probably goes without saying that nearly every major film theorist has organized his or her thinking about cinema around this question.
In this chapter, I defend the notion that cinema is best understood in terms of the category of the moving image. “The moving image?” you might ask: “In contrast to what?” The short answer is: in contrast to film — that is, to be more explicit, in contrast to celluloidTmounted, photographi cally based film. I will argue that our object of study here is more fruitfully conceptualized under the broader category of the moving image than it is under the rubric of film, narrowly construed.
Film, properly so called, was undoubtedly the most important early implementation of the moving image (a.k.a. movies), but the impression of movement — including moving pictures and moving stories — can be realized in many other media including kinetoscopes, video, broadcast TV, GGI, and technologies not yet even imagined. Of course, ordinary folks don’t haggle over whether a videocassette is a movie or not. And neither, I will argue, should philosophers.
This, of course, is a conceptual point. It is not my intention to initiate a crusade for linguistic reform. That would be quixotic. In everyday speech, many use the labelfilm to designate things that are really the product of other media. For example, they may refer to a high-definition video as a film.
This is rather like the use of the name “Coke” for any cola, or “Xerox” for any copying machine, or “Levi” for all jeans, or “zipper” for every slide
4 FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY
fastener. In these cases, the names of the earliest, most popular entrants to a field get used — in an inaccurate way, strictly speaking — to refer to their successors and even their competitors. Because of this tendency, we under stand why sometimes digital cinematography will get called film, though it does not involve the use of film (i.e., the use of a filmstrip). There is little damage here in the daily course of events. Nevertheless, as we shall see, it can and does cause philosophical mischief.
Chapter 4 follows the discussion of the nature of cinema with an analysis of the nature of the cinematic image, construed as a single shot. Obviously, these two topics are related, if only because throughout the history of motion pictures, the temptation has endured to treat movies as if they were equivalent to photographs, where photographs, in turn, are conceived of as modeling single shots.* That is, many have attempted to extrapolate the nature of cinema tout court from the nature of the photographic shot. Thus, it is imperative for the philosopher of the moving image to get straight about the nature of the shot.
Of course, typical motion pictures, excluding experiments like Andy WarhoFs Empire, are usually more than one shot in length. Shots are characteristically strung together in cinematic sequences, usually by means of editing. Chapter 5 examines prevailing structures of cinematic sequencing from a functional point of view. In this regard, one might see the analysis here as returning to an exploration of the terrain that was of the greatest interest to the montage theorists of the Soviet period.
Moreover, in composing the image series in a motion picture, one not only standardly combines shots to construct sequences but then also joins sequences to build whole movies. Consequently, in the second part of chapter 5 we turn to the most common way of connecting sequences to make popular, mass-market movies — a process that we call erotetic narra tion, that is, a method of generating stories by means of questions the narrator implicitly promises to answer.
Just as chapter 5 revisits, with a difference, the concerns of the monta- gists, so chapter 6 also tackles a subject near and dear to the heart of Sergei Eisenstein — the way in which cinema addresses feeling. Unlike Eisenstein, however, in this chapter I will take advantage of recent refinements in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science in order to appreciate the wide gamut of ways in which movies can engage our affective reactions. I will try
For example, we call an afternoon photographing fashion models “a shoot” and a successful photo a “nice shot.”
FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY 5
to be precise where Eisenstein was often impressionistic. Nevertheless, at the end of the chapter, I will attempt to argue that at least one of Eisenstein’s insights into the mechanics of influencing audience affect was spot-on. These audience responses are what we can call mirror reflexes; and Eisenstein was dead right about their significance.
The last chapter in the book focuses on the evaluation of motion pictures. Though many might be tempted to maintain that they are wholly a subjective affair, I will try to demonstrate that quite often movie evaluations can be shown to be rational and objective. Often, this relies upon determining the category in which the movie under discussion is to be correctly classified. Since more than one category comes into play when evaluating the range of available motion pictures, the position defended in our last chapter is called the pluralistic-category approach.
The pluralistic-category approach contrasts sharply with traditional approaches which attempt to identify a single category — often called the cinematic — into which all movies allegedly fall and in accordance with which all motion pictures can be evaluated. The pluralistic-category approach, instead, accepts that there are many categories of motion pictures — from comedies and splatter films to travelogues and onto instructional videos about install ing software or wearing condoms — and that, inasmuch as specimens of these different categories are designed to fulfill different functions, they call forth different criteria of evaluation.
In the past, the theory (or philosophy) of cinema was often pursued in a very top-down manner. One identified the essence of cinema — usually understood in terms of photographic film — and then attempted to deduce accounts of every other feature of film on the basis of that essence.
The conception of the moving image championed in this book is much looser. Although I attempt to define the moving image, I do so in a way that remains wide open not only to the media in which moving images may be realized, but also in terms of the purposes moving images may legitimately serve. Our characterizations of the elements of the moving image — the shot, the sequence, the erotetic narrative, and its modes of affective address — are not deduced from first principles. Rather, we proceed from topic to topic in a piecemeal fashion.
Thus, the end product is in nowise as unified as the philosophies of our very distinguished predecessors in film theory. Instead, our results are pluralistic. Nevertheless, that appears to be where the argument leads us.
Of course, whether or not that is really so is for you to decide. Therefore, read on.
