The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth
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Dream diaries could perhaps form one example of how viewers’ responses to films could provide the material with which to start a scientific approach to Cinema. The close study of individual films, as in my little experiment with The Searchers, begins to yield up their complex content. It would be possible to analyse the development of the script, its range of references, the ‘exformation’ that was discarded in its writing, all as part of a reclamation of the ‘unconscious’ of a film, an archive of the information it contains. The task is then to devise experiments that begin to untangle the conscious from the Automatic. That is no easy task but I have a sense that the way forward is through the same issues of Survival, Evolution and Emotion. I noticed in teaching that we only take in what has emotional significance for us. Without that, information doesn’t stick. In that sense knowledge seems always to be concrete. Abstract ideas tend to float away, but if there is something that attaches us to an idea, an identification of some sort, then we are much more likely to remember it. As with the study of Emotion, the combination of being able to track brain activity through imaging, like fMRI, and the constant relating of issues back to evolution, to Survival, perhaps offers a route to begin to define what information goes in Automatically and what Consciously. Such a process could also increase our understanding of how the brain works, shifting the ground of the study of Cinema to a collaboration with science. From the current introverted nature of academic study such a future seems far away, but it also seems to me to offer far greater rigour and a real contribution to society, with the considerable side-benefit of bridging the gap between the Two Cultures, bringing Art & Science back together, after a separation often seen as going back to the Eighteenth Century.
The approach in this project is a materialist one in which it is argued that everything has a solely physical explanation.32 It is a materialism of a scientific rather than Marxist character. Marxism borrowed materialism from science in a similar sleight of hand to the variants of Theory in the late twentieth-century, but Marx turned Hegel upside down, which is not quite the same as rejecting it completely. The inheritance of German Idealism is an antithetical tradition to the empiricism of Newton, Locke and Hume. I would suggest that the proper inclusion of Hume’s ‘passions’, Emotion, in the paradigm of scientific method, offers a revitalised and extended, a New Empiricism, an Expansive Materialism with explanatory powers exceeding any other framework.
Science is often accused of reductionism. There is an irony in that it is reductionism as a method that has facilitated the achievements of science. Scientific method involves identifying key variables in order to make predictions about cause and effect. The accusation is that in doing a similar thing to analyse art, science applies a coarse mesh that fails to capture the subtleties of artistic expression. My contention here is that neurobiology with an affective emphasis marks an epistemological advance from the limitations of classical scientific method that is so marked that the potential for a science of art, a science of culture (using an evolutionary definition of culture) is transformed.
Reverse-Engineering Cinema
The overall approach to Cinema that is proposed reverses the common route of moving from Nature to Culture, that is from Biology to (evolved) human Culture. Instead, it is suggested to ‘reverse engineer’ from the concrete cultural artefact that is Cinema, its archive, its history, its every moment formal and informal, to the biological base. For example, if we ask the question why does the eye follow movement in Cinema, the answer lies in tracing that fact back to its roots in the evolutionary history of the eye, going back many millions of years. The explanatory power of an evolutionary explanation is contained in that example – the reason the eye follows movement is biological in the evolutionary sense, and with a history of almost unimaginable antiquity.
The epistemological challenge of the reverse direction is that it would be practically impossible to imagine Cinema from the starting point of Nature. The detailed route that evolution took that arrived at the birth of the medium, let alone the Classic Hollywood Cinema in all its moments, is inevitably so complex as to almost defy human imagination. However, the reverse route is more capable of being traced as we start from the existence of Cinema and can unpick its history in terms of the logic of evolution. There is something in that approach of Bayesian inference, reasoning backwards to infer the hidden causes behind observations.33 Beginning with the concrete facts of Cinema and working backwards is practical, where the reverse – imagining Cinema from the evolution of the Eye, for example – would be a virtually impossible task.
Kuleshov & Gazzaniga
An example of the Affective Neurobiology approach to Cinema can be seen in links between two moments, the Kuleshov34 experiments of 1917, which featured a famous actor with a neutral expression intercut with emotive shots – a crying baby, an attractive woman, a hot bowl of soup, and a famous experiment by the neuroscientist Gazzaniga around fifty years later. What interests me about Kuleshov is not the discovery of editing per se, for which it is best-known, but the idea that the audience filled-in the neutral expression of the actor according to what was in the succeeding shot – for soup he was said to look hungry, for a crying baby sympathetic etc.
Gazzaniga35 worked with a split-brain patient who was presented with three objects – a chicken foot, a spade and a shed. The patient had no problem – the spade was for shovelling the chicken-poo out of the chicken shed.36 I would suggest a rather similar process is going on in both cases, which is that the brain constantly seeks to rationalise the slim resources of Consciousness by linking stimuli in a meaningful way. Another way of seeing that impulse is towards narrative, a narrativising process. There are several other examples in the way the brain functions that show a related activity. That suggests there is a biological basis to narrative and suggests one reason why narrative Cinema has been the dominant mode of the medium.
The view of this project is that not only do we have very little idea of what we learn from Cinema, but little idea of how the brain responds to it. Neuroscience rooted in the historical sense of Evolution combined with an emphasis upon Emotion offers the possibility of overcoming those deficits and in the process adding to our stock of scientific knowledge of the brain. Compared to the analyses offered by Film Theory that would seem to be a rather more worthwhile project.
Cinema and Language
The notion that Cinema can best be analysed by reducing it to the condition of Language has a history going back to the earliest days of the medium, culminating in Christian Metz’s declaration that Cinema ‘is structured like a language’.37 There was an echo in that statement of Lacan’s assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language.38 From the view taken here, both assertions are quite simply wrong, and reinforce the ideology of Logocentrism that denigrates and demotes Vision.
The Long Shadow of Immanuel Kant
Those two assertions are also symptoms of a philosophical approach that has proved ‘unreasonably ineffective’.39 In that regard there is an argument to be made that would be both unfashionable (at least in the humanities) and not uncontroversial. In the sciences, on the other hand, it would pass by largely without comment. There was a certain parting of the ways in philosophy that can be traced back to the eighteenth century, but with fundamental implications for contemporary debate both about philosophy and the vexed question of the relation between Art & Science, the Two Cultures debate so-named in the 1950s.
It all begins with Kant. Widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the modern era, there is however an argument that he was also responsible for much of our present troubles. The two philosophers to whom Kant principally responded were Hume and Leibniz. He was exercised against Hume’s idea that we apprehend the world solely through our senses. His desire was to assert that ideas form part of that perception of the world and in the Categorical Imperative it would appear that he claimed a certain autonomy to reason to that end, claiming a truth for philosophy that was independent of but