Two Issues in Serge Daney's Tracking Shot:2

This time Daney compares the “tracking shot” in Kapò (1959) to the death scene in Ugetsu monogatari (1953) in which we see barely a death scene. About the fact that the death of the character is not emphasized or dramatized like the way it was done in Kapò, Daney claims that Ugetsu’s director Mizoguchi “did the exact opposite of Kapo”. In a way, he suggests that showing the event in a point of view that is given indirectly rather than showing in detail and make exploitation. As he divides the effect of a cinematic image in history as before WWII, after WWII and nowadays, I agree that they are giving something different now. Reflecting the war and ethics about it, is something but I cannot find a morality issue in using a shot technique. It is never simply choosing a technique but the things argued about the intended meaning and the effect on audience is, I think relative on audience and only can be an assumption about the mind of the director. The tracking shot is seen as an emotional exploitation and trying to individualize the events that effected the masses, but going from one to a whole is a way too. I do not think it is a thing about being true to cinema or being honest to the medium. It is I think relative in the way people look at life in general.

I know that it is not same to compare a war situation deals with masses with this seemingly individual story of some people but I would like to give the ending close-up example from The Edge of Heaven (2007) of Fatih Akın. As is known, story deals with a couple of deaths which are looking like the unfortunate situations in life that can happen with the choices that made by characters. All the time the dramatic events occur and they are tried to be given in the way like Mizoguchi did. However, after the climax, in resolution, the protagonist or the main character is seen in a different way than the rest of the film. A close up is seen which tells a lot, from being a human with hope for a new beginning to see the beautiful details of emotions can be seen on a human face. Fatih Akın is not the inventor of this type of direction, but putting the close-up, saving it to last second and I thought that giving it in the end was the most sincere thing to do. That was the closest moment I felt to the character even if there are no parallels among our lives.

Anyway, while reading the text of Serge Daney, as it is autobiographical with stories from Daney’s life and it gives similar feelings like the book The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. His tone and writing style is really enjoyable for me as he passes from one subject to another combining personal experiences and film theory and he is writing like he is chatting. He gives his experiences of affection he got from the visuals in cinema as a young boy and gives the details of what made him decide to deal with cinema. He talks about being a cinephile, the experience of it and in a way makes his definition of it.

http://sergedaney.blogspot.com/

This blog has the writings, thoughts, interviews and videos about and of Daney, all translated into English.

And this is a video from the blog that can be an introduction to Daney’s ideas about the history of cinema, American cinema and cinema in general that we talked also in the class.

Journey of a "Cine-Son" (excerpt) from ibeescus on Vimeo.

Two Issues in Serge Daney's Tracking Shot:1

Daney tells his story about the “tracking shot” in the 1959 film Kapò, which is about a group of Jewish people led by a girl to escape from a concentration camp in WWII. He talks about representation of history through cinema and the deals with being a “moral issue” of a tracking shot which was argued back then. There is also an important comparison between the two films Kapò (1959) and Night and Fog (1955) or rather the attitudes towards the representation of the events that occurred in camps. I cannot differ the tracking shot and showing the things with their nakedness from each other in terms of being “just”. There is also an atmosphere intended to be created through the wonderful music by George Delerue, through a text, a narration and an editing in Night and Fog. I think it is relative to choose between this two today as the facts are known today, but back then it was a different argument as cinema was not used as an instrument of informing the world about what is happening over there; as there are very few footage about the crimes of humanity. Nevertheless, it was not only the cinema that was in silence; with all the instruments of civilization, the world kept its silence for a time in terms of reacting to the horrific situation. This is an issue still used as a criticism of civilizations, most of the time a criticism of German civilization, in cinema too. In recent examples The Reader(2008), we see that there is an argument occurs among the German law students of the first generations after the WWII in the academy of law about the inaction against the systematic tortures of Nazis against the Jewish race in Nazi Germany and the places it invaded.


Of course people did not approve the cruelty, however, they maybe could not, but for me, did not do anything about it. I know it is easier to say than it is done of course, there were different circumstances back then. This is dealt in the 9^th episode of “Band of Brothers” (2001) named “Why We Fight”. Of course these are two examples from American cinema that has an attitude of looking things from a bossy perspective like “we had to come over there to save your asses, therefore we can deal with it in the way we want” or “we fought as nobles to save the humanity, and when we fight we fight for noble reasons” maybe trying to justify their actions nowadays etc.


However, after all, this is an issue should not be forgotten about human in general and for me it should not bother people to see the Holocaust, remember it from time to time. Even if the perspectives change, even if the style of narration changes, even if it is not sincere and has different theoretical intended meanings under it; even if these are all thought to be constructs, it is secondarily for me how you deal with it, I think it is an issue about dealing with it and world is still trying to purify itself by constantly doing that as it did not at the time of war.

Representation of Illusion

The act of seeing actually starts with the act of seeing images, which involves such complex phases and makes us the inspectors of visual stimuli, even in the case of visual impairment; people are able to adapt their selves to sense images by defining them with a different type of transduction and in a different sphere of knowledge. Wherever we live, we live with images. We are surrounded by images and unlike words; images construct our ways of thinking and imagining. We introduce ourselves with sense of self-images, we are introduced with other kinds of images by means of images and we imagine images through mental images. So, within these intertwined concepts about “images”; realization of a separation between real, fantasy, image and representation get quite impossible. There is a double-edged argument on alienation of real through images and in the absence of images; we are exposed to representation of images and images of representations within the same context and that makes spectators both to be able to feel secure and alienated through what they see.

Photography, due to its use in the areas like medical science, archeology, history and architecture, is considered as a tool for ‘giving a permanent form to the enlarged images of the microscope’ (Hugh Diamond – editor of The Photographic Journal), which illustrates the effect of photography on the documentation/construction of the real. The photographic “document” is predictably perceived as neutral, styleless and objective record of visual information. Beneath this understanding about photography, as we all know, the existence of photographer is ignored and camera is evaluated as if it can work independent from an operator. While documents are seen as objective, mechanical copies characterized by detail and functionality, “art photography” stand for the status of invention and subjectivity. However, this kind of discrimination is considered as pseudo-separation due to the characteristics of photography in general, as an invented tradition or ideology that performs in modern society, specifically, in mass image forms like advertising, legal documents, pornography, anthropological images, topographic views, and so forth. In his essay “ The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin stated that photography and cinema, serve the basic human need for illusion and realism, which actually a confusing definition due to the problems in classifying these concepts. In Bazin’s perspective, photographs are objective and authentic copies of things and looking at a photograph force viewer to accept it as real the existence of the object reproduced. He stated that; the photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of space and time that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image might be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model which it is the reproduction; it is the model.

To conclude, within this endless range of images in modern narratives, images do more than just representing reality, they construct it. This construction of reality repeated itself with the help of culture and history as a myth of nature. Images are documents to help the myth of “real” or “nature” repeating over and over in various spectrums. So, having a sense of distinction between fiction and real / art photography and documentary / nature and culture is just for the sake of having the sense of distinction but nothing else. This sense of distinction about representation and image serves our understanding of understanding, because we use schemata in order to define everything, and without distinctions or boundaries schemata would not work as it has supposed to do. Besides “widen” our understanding about the self and the other, for me, having the distinction between illusion, reality, representation and image does not refer anything about illusive reality or reality itself.

References:

Edwards, S., (2006) Photography: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press

Photograph: Roger Fenton - Valley of the Shadow of Death (1855)

Some Problems of Bazin's Phenomenological Image - 3

Mitchell uses the concept of family resemblances in order to deconstruct the use of image in certain discourses. He draws a diagram in which certain uses of the word “image” is shown:

I added photography to show its place in Bazin’s hierarchy. Mitchell’s argument, as well as Wittgenstein’s, is that this hierarchy does not reflect reality. It only reflects language in use. The graphic image, or in Bazin’s case the photographic image is the most “literal” use of the word image. As we go towards right, the use of the word image becomes more and more figurative. In other words, the photographic image is the image that is most realistic because the other images are somewhat improper copies of the real objects. For example the impressions of objects in our minds are not as stable as photographs so we tend to argue that mental images cannot represent reality as successfully as photographs can.

So Mitchell tries to make a Wittgensteinian move by describing a situation where there are no minds. If there were no minds, than there would be no more images. Not because we could not make any more images, but because there would be no one to recognize an image as an image. This is a “paradoxical trick of consciousness”. When we see a photograph of an apple, we recognize the apple as “there” and “not there” at the same time. We do not say that there is an apple there, but we recognize that it is an apple. However when a duck responds to a decoy duck, it is not responding to an image of a duck, it is responding to a duck itself. This is because the duck does not recognize the image of the duck as an image. The same thing happens when people see TV for the first time in their lives, they cannot discern images from real people or things.

When we try to point to a mental image and say that there is a mental image we are unable to recognize it as an image because we do not know how to recognize it as an image. We do not have that knowledge because we cannot point to it. Can it be the only difference between a photograph and a mental image? That we cannot point to a mental image?

In order to understand how our consciousness works, we try to imagine it as things which reflect images. In certain points in philosophy, mind has been imagined as a mirror, a camera or a camera obscura. Bazin imagines mind as a camera which takes pictures of the world. Although it is a camera which works with language (I know this is a very crude metaphor), it is still another picture of how consciousness works. Wittgenstein argues that mind can have an image of itself in anyway it fancies or it may not have an image of itself at all. But when the mind is pictured as a camera, this is not a necessity or in other words, this is not an ontological claim. The mind can refuse to represent itself just as it can refuse to see a painting as a representation of something. There are no rules of representation in painting or in cinema; it is my opinion that otherwise we would not have those dialectic movements that Bazin talks about. If there is something necessary, maybe it is the necessity for different representations or schemes of formation of mental and material images.

Bazin privileges photographic image because mental image is a mystical thing. On the other hand, is it not more natural than a photograph to have a mental image? We can move from right to left in the above diagram just as easily we move from left to right:

“We  could just  as  easily replace  what  we  call  "the  physical  manipulation of  signs"  (painting, writing,  speaking)  with locutions such as "thinking on paper, out  loud, in  images,  etc."

I really like the idea that we can think painting as “thinking on paper” and argue that photograph itself is a false representation of how we perceive or think about the world. Although I get how photographic image is more similar to our ordinary perception, I think that is only one way to think about our perception. We are also capable of having extraordinary perceptions of reality. And why would we want to get rid of these different ways of imagining or perceiving the world just because they are not similar to our ordinary perception?

Impressions of Reality

Photographic image; as a mechanic tool for immortality, as a way to freeze and keep the impression of reality, as an art...

Andre Bazin’s ideas of realism in cinema try to place this incredible/magical mechanic agent in the most effective position to serve as a ″reality catcher″. For this reason, he offers some basic applications to realize this aim: deep-focus cinematography which keeps all actions in focus as given equal importance in the same shot and long-take used in parallel. And also offers an analytic editting procedure, unlike montage, just to serve altering emphasis and viewpoint, not for imposing expressionistic meaning or distorting unity of an event. As he offers that it is the most democratic way camera can work, still there is the problem of subjectivity. As one tries to represent the impression of reality, although one tries to abstract his/her self ideally, abstraction of subjectivity and human factor is almost impossible and the result is always –even if not intended- one’s impression of reality.

And the realism aimed by Bazin has 3 facets: ontological, dramatic and psychological. Bazin suggests that ontological status is realized due to the photographic image’s automatic and mechanical recording capacity, ″taking an impression, by the manipulation of light″ and transfering it to the image. However, fulfilled developments changed the recording capacity of the photographic image to a great extent, the procedure do not need only a ″click″ to start the chemical process anymore and digital environment became able to function without reality and also beyond reality. The first example of that beyond reality perception was Muybridge’s, as human eye may not perceive horse’s feet were actually all of the ground, photographic image was able to represent this. Digital capabilities offer people to see much more than they can perceive with their naked eyes. For example, in macro photography one become able to notice the tiny hairs of an insect; although bursting of a balloon full of water was perceived only in few steps burst and splash, high-speed photography represents the impression of reality, the water remaining in air before splashing, which is not possible to be perceived by the naked human eye. As photographic image became capable to represent without and beyond the reality today it is much more complicated to talk about an ontological realism that Bazin defines. On the other hand as Bazin offers, deep-focus and long-take cinematography is the most efficient technique to create dramatic and psychological realism, perception of reality changes in time. One camera movement once perceived unreal, may be perceived part of the impression of reality in time, like shaking the camera etc. and vice versa, one realistic camera movement in an old movie may be perceived unreal today.

As we try to examine the impression of reality in fiction film it is seen that spectator is open to perceive cut scenes as a whole and fill the blanks; for example, in one scene one gets in the train and the next scene one arrives. Getting inside to the train and steping outside creates the impression of reality that one traveled –even if travel process is not shown. Contemporary film theorists such as Heath defines this impression of reality not based on image’s relation to reality but rather, spectator’s positioning and relation with the image as Buckland states: ″According to this theory, realism is nothing more than an effect of the successful positioning of the spectator into an imaginary relation to the image, a position which creates a sense that the film’s space and diegesis is unified and harmonious. (p.202)″

After all, even the most objective object (camera) is not able to limit completely the presence of the subjective subject and although representing strong impressions of reality is possible, absolute reality is hard to catch.

*

Links:

http://www.photographymojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/high-speed-balloon.jpg

Some Problems of Bazin's Phenomenological Image - 2

First of all, phenomenology is itself an answer to the Kantian distinction between noumenon and phenomenon. This distinction in Kant leads to the strange conclusion that everything is phenomenological representation. In phenomenology, as we have seen, there is no such distinction. The only place to talk about objective knowledge is consciousness and moreover, there is no “outside” of consciousness, the objective world shows itself to consciousness and by doing phenomenology we gain objective knowledge about the world. In this sense, it would seem that whatever we find in consciousness should be equally legitimate for objective knowledge but this is not exactly the case. Rather it is the mechanisms of the cognition, of formations of thinking that is objective and not specifically the content but these mechanisms are the basis for objective knowledge.

Now if montage imposes a certain meaning on the viewer through ingrained symbolism on the image and therefore eliminates ambiguity, this would mean that, in turn, the image created by deep focus is itself more in line with how our cognition works because it is rich with possible meanings. Yet if our consciousness cognizes a world rich with ambiguous meaning, why would it stop cognizing the world like this when it is faced with an image imbued with symbolism? Since it would not shift into another mode of cognition when faced with a graphic image, every image, whatever the style of representation, should be imbued with ambiguousness by consciousness itself. Photographic image is not another mode of cognition; it is another means of representation. And every “object” in the world is cognized by the same mechanisms that phenomenology discusses.

Iconology: image, text, ideology by Mitchell begins with the chapter titled “What is an image?” and this chapter opens with a quote from Sartre (who is a phenomenologist by the way):

“It is one thing…to apprehend directly an image as image, and another thing to shape ideas regarding the nature of images in general.”

Mitchell uses Wittgenstein to question the privileged position of the graphic image in certain discourses. Wittgenstein’s philosophy is very unique in its approach to language. Although he is similar to structuralist / post-structuralist movement in the importance he gives to language, his approach is very distinct. Very roughly, he argues that the philosophical problems are in fact only problems that exist because of the uncritical use of language and if we can somehow show how these are not actual problems we can get rid of them. In this sense, he argues that there is no essence to language or mind (the word “essence” is also problematic), that words gain meaning through context (the meanings are “fuzzy”, no one-to-one correspondence between a word and its meaning) and what we think as essential features of things such as “games” are only related through family resemblances i.e. “overlapping similarities”. He gives the example of games to explain his concept of family resemblances. We call hide and seek, chess and Grand Theft Auto all as games. But these activities we call games do not have one essential feature. In some games you do not win or lose, some you play alone and so on.

I will be talking about Mitchell’s application of Wittgensteinian investigation of the uses of words in different contexts in order to show that photographic image may not actually have this privileged status, that maybe there is no distinction (aside from ontological differences which are not enough to warrant psychological realism) between any kind of image, imaginary or photographic.

Some Problems of Bazin's Phenomenological Image - 1

In “Ontology of The Photographic Image”, Bazin argues that the symbolic (spiritual expressiveness) and realist tendencies shaped the Western painting. However, Western painting mistook the pseudorealism of fooling the eye by introducing a perspectivist approach with true realism which would show the world both in its essence and in its concreteness.

The originality of photograph lies in its essential objectiveness: there is no intentional agent intervening in the process of the duplication of reality. In this sense, the absence of a narrator, of a “mind” makes photography what it is. Bazin talks about two art movements towards the end of the essay and of course finds both of them inferior to photography. One is impressionist realism (which adds movement as something essential to human experience and perception) and the other is surrealism. Now it is evident that Bazin favors realism. He even calls the paintings of surrealists as “monstrosities”. Ironically, it is surrealists who turn to the technology of photography as a tool in their works:

The surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose and the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image.*

I will be focusing on this passage and argue that this distinction between imaginary and real may be as nonexistent as surrealists think. But first, I will talk about Bazin’s realism a bit.

Now after giving his dialectical history of cinema by pointing out the privileged position of editing and deep focus, Bazin gives three kinds of realism that cinema provides us. One is the ontological realism. This one is fairly straightforward and the least problematic. Realism is itself an ontological claim and it is an intuitive and established philosophical position. The other two realisms, namely dramatic and psychological realism are a bit different since they introduce relations between the subject and the object and therefore these two are, to an extent, epistemological claims. In other words, by including the subjective experience of reality, Bazin argues that what we perceive in the photographic image is reality itself. As such, this is an epistemological claim and Bazin is a phenomenologist in this sense. For phenomenology, reality is not something independent of experience but it is also not subjective since by focusing on the conscious perception of reality, phenomenology is able to give an objective ground for the consciousness in which this world we experience resides in / emerges for us.

Bazin argues that the image must be something that is open to several meanings when he talks about montage as ruling out ambiguity. The use of depth of focus in Citizen Kane is important because the uncertainty of meaning is built into the image itself. And if we combine this with his argument that depth of focus provides us with psychological realism, his phenomenologist position becomes more apparent.  

Bazin’s use of phenomenology only serves as a tool for him to include the dimensions of history and experience into the study of cinema. However, he is privileging the deep focus cinematography as the image which better reflects the phenomenological reality. Therefore he also privileges photography as the most important event in the history of plastic art. While this is itself questionable, I will be focusing on his conception of image as the privileged representation of reality.


*This seems to me exactly what Bazin wants when he focuses on realism this much. Isn't photographic image's superiority a result of its ability to bridge this gap between the mechanical effects of the image on the mind (a real perception of reality) and the intentional effects of the artist on the image?

On "Filmic Experience" - 2

Casetti talks about “a double-sided situation” which arises from the experience of cinema. It meets us as the world meets us in our daily experience and it also presents a new model of the world, a new way to experience, or in other words, a particular experience of reality. Now this “particular” kind of experience, which is in a way religious, may be considered to be at the same level epistemologically with regards to a pragmatic viewpoint. Since it allows us to re-experience the world, cinema is useful and therefore, what it “shows” to us, the world that it represents, even though it is a simulation, may still be true. Yet it is not real since it is not authentic. Cassetti calls it “quasi-real”. Even though I agree that it is not “real” in a complete sense of the word, it may still be “true”.

There is no doubt that on the screen we re-view the world: both the actual one in which we live, and the possible one in which we could live. This “restitution” takes place on a multitude of levels: the filmic images can be seen as a “trace” or a “imprint” of that which has passed before the camera lens; they can be seen as a “copy” or a “facsimile” of the world in which we live; or they can be seen as a “reconstruction” or a “hypothesis” of reality. It is this multitude of levels that unfolds a double-sided situation.

The three levels of representation that Casetti here talks about roughly corresponds to different philosophical positions that discuss representational theories of mind and none of them are phenomenological accounts. The issue of representation is of crucial importance for philosophy, yet these three levels discussion is a bit outdated. An elegant solution to this may be found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations in which he deconstructs his own picture theory.

In short, Casetti’s discussion of experience is lacking in philosophical content and he ends it rather abruptly by hinting at the relation of power and truth ( Foucault’s “Truth and Power” is relevant here) and also at some places to Baudrillard’s hyper-reality discussion and arguments about possible worlds. Cinematic experience begins and ends within certain spatial configurations yet, as Casetti points out, lines and boundaries that delineate the filmic experience is blurring. The issue of reality in filmic experience leaves itself to the issue of power and control; and in turn to our tactics of resistance.

This mixed bag of issues are all relevant to the issue of experience, but when the issue is such a widely and deeply discussed philosophical concept, it is hard to really say anything aside from pointing out some relevant ways of application. For my part, I think that the issue of experience brings with itself a host of issues which we can locate on the side of the subject,even in phenomenological formulations. The reasons that Casetti gives for prioritizing filmic experience opens a gap between cinema's essential features and the subject experiencing cinema. While it is fruitful to focus on filmic experience, the issue warrants a more thorough philosophical discussion.

On Andre Bazin’s Photographic Image

Man wants indefiniteness and searched for it throughout the time. First way of reaching it was staying alive, however death was inevitable and man searched for an escape from it in order to feel better. It was a relief to know that a part of “you” will stay in life, in this world, even if you are gone. André Bazin shows this process of human by telling the origins of plastic arts. In time a change in medium happens from mummies to portraits, maybe because of the experience of mummies- which does not work actually as it does not preserve you well enough, whereas a portrait presents you young, powerful or beautiful as long as it is kept safe. Therefore the aim to make an image changed in time too. It is hard to disapprove the argument of Bazin about the Photography’s and Cinema’s setting free the painting from the chains of looking “real” or looking alike “real”. As photographic image, copies the world, images, human beings like the way they are seen to the human eye, the struggle to reach to the sameness in painting dissolved and it opened a very wide road to it, and also to art. And there comes the problematic issue about photographic image’s credibility as it captures the image of the objects, for instance in photography it captures a frame and in cinema it captures set of frames, which is seen as a portion of reality, life.

Even if Bazin criticizes photography for “not creating eternity, as art does, it embalms time rescuing it simply from its proper corruption” and hails cinema as the torch carrier of the tradition of reaching immortality through art; to give a consolation prize to it, Bazin claims that “Photography can even surpass art in creative power… photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it” and goes on saying that “it produces an image that is a reality of nature”. I cannot agree that there is a concept can be called as natural creation, as long as there is a human factor in it. There is a photographer behind that mechanical device; there is a construction of discourse trying to be made through the angle, with the lights, composition. Even if there is no photographer and there is no intention of creating something, even the camera falls from the sky and lands on somewhere randomly, it still captures the frame that it sees from the lens which creates its own composition itself with a meaning in it which directly comes from the human being that invented that device.

On "Filmic Experience" - 1

The question of experience is inexorably tied to the issues of perception. In the history of philosophy, questions on the nature of experience are generally discussed through visual experience and pain. Different modalities of experience (such as hearing discussed by Husserl) come at a later stage in philosophy. While it is true that all modalities of experience are more or less phenomenal in character, modalities different than perception are discussed only later by phenomenology. With phenomenology, the concept of experience extends itself to other areas of research, beginning with different modalities and becoming in the end the privileged object of knowledge of philosophy for a period of time (ending roughly about 1940).

Casetti enumerates some other uses of “experience” in footnotes but I will be specifically using it in the framework of the philosophical discussion beginning with classical empiricism and extending to phenomenology. I believe that to discuss filmic experience, aside from the three reasons that Casetti gives as his basis, we should first have an account of what experience itself is (that is, if such a coherent account is possible). I think that Casetti is using the term experience without explicating what he means by it. However, even to argue that there is such a thing as a filmic experience different from other experiences, we should be clear about what we mean by this concept.

In the classical empiricist sense, experience is the only ground for knowledge, which makes it the only legitimate object of epistemology. This focus on empirical grounds for knowledge is a reaction against the rationalist arguments that there are innate ideas in the mind (a priori, independent of experience). This period of empiricism, beginning with Locke and Berkeley and finalizing with Hume’s skepticism is replaced by phenomenology (considered as an extreme empiricism) which argues that physical world is reducible to experience. Consciousness is always consciousness of something: experience is capable of transcending the subject-object duality. In fact, empiricism itself can be seen as just another way to get rid of Cartesian dualism. In other words, phenomenology is different from classical empiricism in that in empiricism the issue is between the subject experiencing and the object experienced, still a kind of duality, still a gap.

Pragmatism of James is another kind of phenomenology and his theory of radical empiricism roughly argues that "everything" is experience. His radicalism comes from his argument that relations such as cause and effect are also part of our experience and therefore they are not beyond experience but precisely empirical phenomena. This move is an attempt to escape Hume’s skeptic arguments. Whatever James is successful or nor is not relevant here but his arguments about truth is what I am interested in.

James formulates a pragmatist theory of truth in which he argues that something is true as long as it successfully takes us from a part of experience to another part of our experience. In this sense, true is what is “expedient”, what is suitable for achieving a certain end. Therefore, pragmatist theory of truth is both a correspondence theory of truth (corresponding with a reality and determined by its relation to the world) and a coherence theory of truth (determined by its relations to other statements within a system). In this sense, if the idea of God “works”, in the sense that, if it leads us to meaningful, satisfactory experiences, than it is true.

The reason I am giving such a detailed account of theories of truth is to show that what we call “reality”, that world which we assume as given, is different from what is “true”. Now this may seem obvious, but in our experience of the world, what is real and what is true cannot so easily be distinguished. Even in philosophical analysis the issue is far from clear.

Reflection of reflection

As being a primary inventipn of cinema, photography and picture have really important role both in real life and for cinema. It was somekind a documentation of real life. It helped to document time itself. How it passes?, What changes does it bring?, How things shaped within the time? and so on. However being only a document was not enough for people and by adding some movement cinema has risen. Although it is believed that cinema or photography is the reflection of real life, it is just a hallucinations. As Bazin indicates cinema is a thing that it is hallucinations and at the same time it is the fact. This situation is not peculiar to cinema. Real life itself is something that we never can be sure about it’s reality. For example according to Platon, this life that we live is a reflection of the realm of ideas. We are living not in the reality but the reflection of it. Art is the reflection ofthe reflection according to him. If he could see the cinema he would be really happy as the cinema is the form that he was trying to explain with his cave allegory. Cinema would be a perfect example of the mechanism he was talking about.

Moreover, according to lots of continential philosopher and especially Kant thinks that objects noumena can never be known. All we can know its phenomenalogical apeearence. The reality of the objects is in their noumena and we can have clues about their reality by experiencing their phenomena.

The reality of the life we live in was debated by many philosophers and the answer that gave was that we can never be sure of its reality but assume it as real. Maybe we assume cinema as real as we assume our lives. As it is said repeatedly cinema is the reflection of life. In this point reflection of it remains as both hallucination and fact as the object that it reflects is both hallucination and fact.

From Bazin's Ontology of the Photographic Image to Baudrillard's Simulacra

Humans had been always trying to find solutions in order to cope with their life. In prehistoric ages, they were trying to communicate with each other so that they tried to communicate via wall drawings, they were trying to hunt so that they made tools for hunting. All of those products, now supposed as origins of art. Or in Egypt, people used plastic arts in order to cope with their concerns about after life as Bazin states. Difference is here that, in prehistoric ages art was a tool in order to cope with their daily life, but in Egypt as Bazin states, it a tool to represent reality, or substitute for reality. Looking from Bazin’s point of view towards art first seems very simplistic, however I think he points out the origins of the problems that is stated by Guy Debord and Baudrillard. Although Bazin use the reality frame just to show the change in visual representation, he actually was on the scent of an important discovery.

Bazin says that “A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.” Through his article, he always talks about realism that people tried to reach. From early ages to invention of photography, people always tried to imitate the nature. From that perspective, photography is the most objective one and the closest to reality.

Looking at art from Bazin’s perspective towards art, makes me think of Baudrillard “simulacra”. Although in Bazin’s article trying to reach reality was a basic and innocent need, in Baudrillard’s Simulacra it the biggest threat. In past representation was simply an imitation of the origin of the real. But when we come the world of simulacra, image is no longer a representation of the real. It takes the place of the real of the origin. There is liquidation of all referentials. It is no longer an imitation problem, it is not a re-duplication of the nature.

Simulacrum is fascinating. It erases the origins so that it becomes the major fear of the iconoclasts. It was so powerful that it could have taken the place of God. It could have erased the understanding of God that only can be understood with mind and replace that understanding with signs and icons. In the case of Simulacra, only simulacra exist, there in no more God.

Representation can be a tool to tell what is real, however simulation creates false representation. It breaks the structure of the representation and destroys what is represented.

We can state four steps from representation to simulacra;

1- It is reflection of basic reality

2- It masks and perverts basic reality

3- It masks the absence of basic reality

4- It bears no relation to any reality.

To sum up, I think Bazin’s perspective towards arts was not simple nor basic.

I think he points out the origins of simulacra.

Along the Subjectivity

(...After showing her the technical

computer simulation of the sinking process of Titanic)

″Thank you for that fine forensic analysis.

Of course, the experience of it was... somewhat different.″

- From Titanic, Old Rose DeWitt Bukater (Character)

People do not come into being who they are all of a sudden. They do not become a mother, a lawyer, an intellectual, good, bad, funny, serious, sensible etc. in a glimpse. The subjectivity of the individual standing in front of us is fed with past, reflects a process full of changes and alterations which is peculiar to the one. Besides, this subjectivity does not stay permanent, as time passes it goes on being exposed to change and alteration by the lived experiences which also differs from individual to individual. Subjectivity is the traces of different experiences and perceptions. As how one’s finger-print is unique to the one, subjectivity is as much as peculiar to the one. Subjectivity does not contrast with the thought that there may be similar ideas and experiences, alike attitudes and views between people, what it emphasizes is there might be similarities, resemblances but they do not/cannot be same one-to-one. As individual filters are always active, same facts cause different experiences and memories for different individuals through their peculiar filters which are also subjected to change and alteration in time.

In order to exemplify, people in movie theatres watch the same movie, same scenes at the same time. It is possible to talk about some kind of a common perception. However, some scenes may become more meaningful for some people (due to one’s lived experiences and subjectivity), a few years later one may remember some scenes which the other does not. On the other hand, experience of watching the movie in that theatre is also a subjective experience. It may be the first movie that one watches with his girlfriend, the other may have heard good news before watching the movie, one may have hard times in his life, one may come with her father, the other may come with friends from university...

Bill Nichols examines documentary and the effects of such a subjectivity on it. He says there are some specific approaches and styles in documentary such as reenactment, representing past in the present as an imaginary with the sources of the present like body, thoughts, mediums etc. by the aim to represent the thing, the fact that is not available here and now. Besides, there is the use of spoken testimony of social actors, people who witnessed and may tell what they know about historical events, when used parallel with historical footage which creates the coherent effect that the power of the image is strengthened with the spoken testimony as it determines its meaning.

Nichols offers that in that process the aforementioned subjectivity does not stop, it acts. Particular may only some extent serve for the general, one cannot be the voice of the collective due to the fact that as one tells, the ″I″ talks. In the testimonials of the witnesses who are filmed, in the way filmmakers conduct the process of collecting information and construction there is always subjectivity.

Therefore Nichols suggests to see documentary as handling the actual events in a creative manner:

″Traditionally, the word documentary has suggested fullnes and completion, knowledge and fact, explanations of the social world and its motivating mechanisms. More recently, though, documentary has come to suggest incompleteness and uncertainty, recollection and impression, images of personal worlds and their subjective construction.″

Ashes and Snow

Diversity in classifying films regarding some common characteristics gives birth to many different genres. This may result in both having more organized pattern to think on films and also adopting stereotyped way to interpret them. This confusion directs my attention to “contemporary-contemplative-cinema (CCC)” which I found a bit controversial type of grouping due to its similarity to “modern” narratives. Henry Tuttle highlights the differences btw modern and contemplative cinema). This term is first articulated by Henry Tuttle and defined as “the kind that rejects conventional narration to develop almost essentially through minimalistic visual language and atmosphere alone, without the help of music, dialogue, melodrama, action-montage, and the star system”. 1 Major characteristics of contemplative cinema or unspoken cinema (CC) are listed below but a film does not need one and all in order to be categorized within CC, different combinations are possible.

· Plotlessness: no obvious (forefront) drama, no beginning, no denouement, open-ending, no drive to go forward, no major narrative gimmicks (flashback, multilayered stories), simplicity, atmospherical depiction, distanciation of protagonist(s) with background action, no imminent threat, no external forces pressuring the protagonist(s).

· Wordlessness: laconical interactions (or silent protagonist), no plot-drive expository filling, no psychological arguments, no voiceover, direct-sound (no score), body language.

· Slowness: long takes, static shots/slow camerawork, patient pace, uneventfulness (down time), "unnecessary" mundanity, uncut movements, activities filmed in their entirety, extended wait/pauses, conscience of time.

· Alienation:disconnectedness,wandering/idleness/listlessness,solitude, fatalism, ennui / melancholy / depression, non-conformity, no intellectualized existentialism, distanciation of protagonist(s) with the world, with other characters, emptiness, empty frames, distanciation of the camera from the subject. 2

Works of Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar-Wai, Michelangelo Antonioni, Theo Angelopoulos Gus Van Sant, Andy Warhol, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Lavrente Diaz, Bela Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, Bruno Dumont, Weerasethakul, Sharunas Bartas, Kore-eda, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Sokurov, Lisandro Alonso, Carlos Reygadas, Pedro Costa and Roy Andersson are reflected as the auteurs of contemplative cinema. Considering the main features and examples of contemplative cinema, two main concepts attract my attention; space and time. Unspoken movies create a space for spectators to be rooted in an act of thinking and it plays with the limits of action and narration, which allows both spectator and filmmaker to play their own limits of seeing and contemplating. CC also plays with the state of mind and let different ideas to intersect within a scene, within a moment. Although cinematic time comprises elements like montage, sequences, cuts that make it synthetic, contemplative films present temporal illusion of immediacy and provide spectators to experience the sense of being here and now. 3 The pace of time makes the biggest difference between contemplating and mainstream movies, “slowness, an urge against the over-praised fast pace, the infatuation with feverish quickness, as it has become idolised in life as well as film”. 4 This type of understanding of slowness recalls the concept of boredom, which is actually, praised in contemplating movies. Filmmaker Raoul Ruiz define boredom with its productive aspect as; not spending the present moment preoccupied with past or present concerns, nor being distracted by restless ennui, but instead using the present moment to capture and anchor oneself to “an intense feeling of being here and now, in active rest.” The moment of boredom thus becomes a “privileged moment”: This privileged moment, which early theologians called “Saint Gregory’s paradox,” occurs when the soul is both at rest and yet turns on itself like a cyclone around its eye, while events in the past and the future vanish in the distance. If I propose this modest defense of ennui, it is perhaps because the films I’m interested in can sometimes provoke this sort of boredom. 5

In order to help capturing the sense of boredom in this respect, contemplating films uses silence as a tool for contemplation and Susan Sontag’s statement about silence corresponds to CC’s purposes on using silence.

“Silence is a metaphor for a cleansed, noninterfering vision, in which one might envisage the making of art-works that are unresponsive before being seen, unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny. The spectator would approach art as he does a landscape. A landscape doesn't demand from the spectator his "understanding," his imputations of significance, his anxieties and sympathies; it demands, rather, his absence, that he not add anything to it. Contemplation, strictly speaking, entails self-forgetfulness on the part of the spectator: an object worthy of contemplation is one which, in effect, annihilates the perceiving subject.” 6

In my perspective, contemplative cinema creates a personal space or a nothing space for spectators to experience the “stream-of-consciousness” and to be introduced with different layers of the thinking process. Through contemplating movies spectators are merged to perceptual thinking with timeless images. By means of their “freedom” across those images, they renew their beings by reshaping their understanding of what a film can do to mind and how it leads spectators to a state of mindfulness. Unspoken cinema assigns spectators an active role because these films refer parataxis in its narrative style and this gets spectators to be creative and to fill the gaps.7

Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow (2005) creates a magical sphere for spectators to be get involved with a deep thinking process. The thing that impresses me most about the film is the power of its form; more specifically, the structure of Ashes and Snow’s cinematographic items significantly alter visual and mental perception about the film. All scenes are captured in slow motion, which contributes to general understanding of time in contemplative cinema

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http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/

http://almayerinn.blogspot.com/2006/10/what-is-contemplative-cinema.html

Deleuze and CC: http://gravity7.com/blog/film/2007/01/what-is-contemplative-cinema.html#ixzz17j8gOgYlü

Chronology of CC: http://unspokencinema.blogspot.com/2006/10/chronology.html

Ashes and Snow : http://vimeo.com/13187776