The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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is nature
Nature becomes culture
Cinema is culture78.
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Movement I.
Cinema is moving images
Movement is fundamental to existence
Movement of a predator.
Life is movement
Death is no movement.
Vision captures movement.
Evolution favoured Vision
The eye is the first sense.
We follow the hero
As we follow the predator
A matter of life and death.
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Movement II.
Cinema is Emotion
Classical Hollywood made Emotion visible
The movement of Emotion became visible79.
We follow Emotional movement on the screen.
The fortunes of the hero/ine carry our attention
We watch their fate as it were our own.
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Movement III.
Movement attracts Emotion
Movement generates Emotion
Movement creates Emotion.
We are moved.
Movement of the hero across the frame
extended in time and space
by metaphorical movement
of emotions around him.
We care about the fate of the hero
Only because we care about our own.
The mechanism of Cinema
arouses the same processes
In the human brain
We follow the fate of the heroine
New information all the time
Adds to our knowledge about her.
Stars suspend a negative conclusion
Even when the hero is a baddie
(Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie80)
The trajectory of the fate of the hero attracts us
As our own fate at the hands of a predator.
The graph of his rise and fall
attracts our attention
as he stands in for us.
Like and dislike
Love and hate.
Life and death.
An unbroken continuum.
Cinema is Emotion in motion.
v.
Empathy I
The brain and the body are one81
Our brains inhabit the bodies of others
Our brains imitate the Emotions of others
Imitation is the mode of attachment to another.82
We see more than we know
We cannot avoid knowing the mind of another None conscious, all Automatic
opposite to the wisdom of philosophers.
A hero in jeopardy puts us in jeopardy
Emotional identification/intuitive harmonisation83
We become the hero
sharing what s/he feels.
Light from the dark
Illumination.
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Empathy II
The fate of the hero.
Ninety minutes
to watch a predator.
A short time
When life is at stake.
Cinema adds to our fascination with movement
fascination with the fate of the hero
Our own fate at the hands of the predator
is turned into a fascination
with the fate of the hero
Involving the same emotions
transferred from ourselves
To her or him
On the screen.
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Cinema dramatises Vision
The quality of Vision exceeds our view
Everything we know
we know from Vision
We see more than we know
(than we are aware)
Cinema taps into this power
and intensifies it.
Cinema dramatises Vision.
Emotion keeps our eyes on the hero/ine.
But of what we learn
we Know only a fraction
The iceberg effect
The realm of the Automatic.
To bring the Automatic to light
Is a matter for experiment84.
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A film is not a text
A film is not a piece of literature
Non-sense85 to refer to a film as a text.
Only under the hegemony of Logocentrism
does such reduction make sense.
Cinema is not structured like a language
Cinema is structured like the brain86.
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Historicism:
Classical Hollywood
from Stagecoach (1939) to Marnie (1964).
Defining characteristic of ‘Classical’ Cinema
It made emotion visible.
In Mildred Pierce I know where I am. I feel that I know the emotional status of the heroine.
I am shown how she feels. Not ‘literally’ through the actor’s anguished facial expression. But dramatically: the narrative sets up dramatic situations which force to me to project onto her ambivalent expression her emotional status
Kuleshov – as understood by Hitchcock:
We see a character’s action
We see another character watching that action
And that character’s reaction to it.
The reaction expresses a particular reaction
Not the only one possible
But one to guide us in the labyrinth of possible meanings.
The crying baby
The sad man
The crying