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

Köprüdekiler / Man on the Bridge

Although I don’t understand why should we categorize films as national or transnational, it is obvious that this type of analysis somehow needed and used to categorize films. It is a crucial point that in what terms we could call a film national or transnational. Is it the director or screenwriter or producer or the editing crew that make a film national or transnational? I think this kind of analysis should be made both in concept wise and economic wise, and decided on which made that film “that film”.

When I thought about the national films in terms of story and concept, the most (recently) applicable films that fits to the description of national films in my mind is Köprüdekiler / Men on the Bridge (Of course now, I don’t count Yılmaz Güney’s films). When I search about the production and when look into the details of the film crew, I came across with lot of names from other countries. And that raise the question whether or not “Köprüdekiler / Men on the Bridge” is national or transnational.

In terms of script and direction, it is obvious that Köprüdekiler is a national film. It is a story about lives of people who have a common that is the Bogaziçi Bridge. We see different lives, different stories of people, however they all have some kind of a relationship with the Bogaziçi Bridge. When you watch the film, you feel like you are very familiar with the people or with the stories of them. Because the theme is Turkey actually. I don’t think that there is another place like Bogaziçi Bridge in another place and therefore there are no children on that nonexistent bridge selling flowers. This is all “Turkish”. Whole film is therefore Turkish.

Additionally, in terms of the cast, it is totally national. Most of the characters are the real characters of the real stories. Children who are selling flowers on the bridge is actually selling flowers on the bridge in their lives. You can easily come across with them at the bridge. The couple that has problems about their marriage are also real. So that cast is totally national, too.

But what about the production and the producer? What about the people supporting the film financially? Fabian Massah (Berlin) is the co-producer of the film and the other producer is Aslı Özge, who is the “creator” of the film. I said creator because she is the one who writes and directs the film. Who is the one go and find those characters on the bridge talk to them and make them act in her film. She is the one who go and save the boys from police when they are arrested because since they don’t have and IDs. However, since Fabian Massah is the co producer, is this movie transnational? Since it is also supported from international sources, and since there are people from Berlin in the crew, is this film transnational?

And also, it is showed in Bruger Novo Cinema Festival, Premiers Plans d’Angers Film Festival International Rotterdam Festival, Rennes Clair-Obscur Film Festival International Belgrad Festival, is this film transnational?

Since it is the co-production of

ENDORPHINE PRODUCTION
YENI SINEMACILIK
KALIBER FILM
BAYERISCHER RUNDFUNK
ZDF/3SAT
RUSH HOUR FILMS

should it write Turkey-Germany-Netherlands Film on the web pages?

I am not a big fan of the origins, or I am not a person who tries to make borders between nationalities, and also I am not a nationalist at all but if we need to categorize films as national and transnational, those questions should be asked.

PS: It is also funny that the official website is www.menonthebridge.com not köprüdekiler.com. And when you go in to that web page, you come across with the “international” poster of the film. Another question here, huh?

Stereotype and Multiplicity

Think of organizing your DVD collection. What would be the most easy/quick categorization? Most likely, sorting them alphabetically! Taking their genre or their directors or their stars or their producers etc. into account, as a criterion, surely gets the decision-process longer and harder as one encounters with intersections and creates a need of sub-categories to answer the question ″where to put that one?″. And think of taking the criterion as ″nation″, then one should answer the question: Nation of what/whom? Nation of the director? Nation of the leading actor? Nation of the production company? Related nation of the setting? Related nation of the story?... Probably today, this kind of a categorization gets inextricable with the existent films... But, what about having a section of European Cinema?

In his writing, Thomas Elsaesser shows the difficulties of moving from national cinema to European Cinema which is also hard to define by asserting that today either considering European Cinema as a gathering of national cinemas or regarding directors standing for the nation lacks to explain what it actually is. He explains the reason behind this lack by pointing the change of the meaning ″national″, since in the 1990s West European countries become multi-cultural, their population become transnational and their politics post-national. (p.66) He suggests there is still apperance of ″national cinema″ in films’ signifiers of national, regional or local specificities in Europe as a cultural protection in the competition with Hollywood but this ″national cinema″ is neither essentialist nor constructivist, but it is something joined to the other categories of a movie which uncertainly floats over a film’s ″identity″ (p.70-71).

Reading Elsaesser reminded me Elif Şafak’s talk in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in which she tells that when her first novel written in English came out in USA, a literary critic told her that he liked the book but dissapointed in the issue that there were lot of international characters but only one Turkish character and who is a man. She explains that as the novel takes place in a university in Boston it is normal to have international characters in it more than Turkish ones, but she adds that the actual reason of this dissapointment was the expectation to see the manifestation of her identity as a Turkish woman in her novel. She goes on saying that ″We often talk about how stories change the world but we should also see how the world of identity politics affects the way stories are being circulated, read and reviewed. ...Writers are not seen as creative individuals on their own. But as the representatives of their respective cultures. ...When identity politics tries to put labels on us, it is our freedom of imagination that is in danger.″ Moreover, she offers that in creative writing courses today, the very first thing taught to students is writing what they know, she opposes this idea by offering that ″Imaginative literature is not necessarily about writing who we are or what we know or what our identity is about... We should get out of our cultural ghetto and go visit the next one and the next.″

Both literature (a book) and cinema (a film) are the consequences of the creative process of the writer’s or the director’s, the senarist’s who has roots in specific nations and cultures. And for sure it is expected to find echoes and reflections from their nations and cultures in their works. But it is not a ″must″ that films produced or novels written in specific countries obliged to reflect stereotypes of nations, identities and cultures. In artistic process people may find inspiration in their own culture or in other cultures, they may blend and represent both of them etc. Changing attitude, looking from different perspectives, discovering, not sticking to limitations, mixing supports the manifold of art which blossoms in multitude and multiplicity.

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Links:

http://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction.html