Refractions of Reality Refractions of Reality Philosophy and the Moving Image
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Refractions of Reality Refractions of Reality Philosophy and the Moving Image John Mullarkey University of Dundee © John Mullarkey 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-00247-0 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28065-0 ISBN 978-0-230-58231-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230582316 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mullarkey, John. Refractions of reality : philosophy and the moving image / John Mullarkey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Motion pictures – Philosophy. I. Title. PN1995.M73 2009 791.4301—dc22 2008035183 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Contents Acknowledgements viii Preface: The Film-envy of Philosophy ix Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? ix Philosophical cinema or cinematic philosophy? xi Convergence on the film process: the élan cinématique xiv Philosophy’s perpetual identity crisis xvi Introduction: Nobody Knows Anything! 1 Oh, they both make such good arguments! 1 The circular logic of paradigms and examples 3 Between theory and post-theory 6 Continental or analytic? Once more unto the breach 8 Rapprochement or impasse? Film as relational process 10 Towards a non-philosophical cinema 11 Nobody knows everything: knowing, being and process 13 1 Illustrating Manuscripts 15 The meta-en-scène 15 The advent of high-concept cinema: ‘once upon a premise ...’ 18 Extreme pretexts 20 Philosophies through films 22 Gone to the movies 24 Conclusion 26 2 Bordwell and Other Cogitators 29 Introduction: going back to the future 29 Classical and art-house: hurray for Hollywood 33 Messages are for Western Union 35 Science, empiricism, culture 40 Closely observed frames 42 From reflection to refraction 46 Play time 48 Moving the continuum 52 The representationalist axiom of analytic film-philosophy 55 3 Žižek and the Cinema of Perversion 58 Good theorist, bad theorist: Bordwell contra Žižek 58 Freudianism for beginners 61 The return of the Real 64 v vi Contents The film gaze 67 Representationalism again: Žižek and the pre-cogs 68 Traversing the fantasy or transcending the Real? 70 The return of the Real to reality 71 Films, time and time again 74 Conclusion 75 4 Deleuze’s Kinematic Philosophy 78 Deleuze’s ambivalence: philosophia sive cinema? 78 Cinema’s concepts 80 A non-reductive materialism 84 From movement to time: images and signs 87 Time regained 92 Is cinema Bergsonian? 97 Movement-image and time-image: when is a cut irrational? 100 Films and their makers: from the automatic art to the autonomy of art 104 Amongst the Deleuzians: a thousand tiny examples 107 5 Cavell, Badiou and Other Ontologists 110 Cavell and the ontology of ordinary film 110 The philosophical ordinary 111 Reflections on the ontology of film 114 Automatism of the medium 117 Contra Deleuze? 118 Modernism 120 Reflexivity: film’s other minds 121 Other Cavellians 123 More ontologies: Frampton’s affective thinking 126 Badiou’s inessential cinema 129 6 Extended Cognitions and the Speeds of Cinema 133 Anderson’s elusive reality 133 Branigan’s radial camera 136 When is a film? The cinematic event 140 Nothing happening: events in the blink of an eye 145 Bringing us up and down to speed 150 7 Fabulation, Process and Event 156 Jacques Rancière’s Film Fables 156 Thoughts taken out of context 163 Making movies and art with time 169 Fabulating the film event 173 Paradoxical feelings: moved by movements 180 Contents vii 8 Refractions of Reality, or, What is Thinking Anyway? 188 Outline of an outline 188 Affective embodiment 191 New mediations 193 Differential spectatorship 197 Sound and false fidelity 198 Acting realism 199 Animal cinema 201 A non-philosophy of cinema 204 What is thinking (again)? 208 Conclusion: Code Unknown – A Bastard Theory for a Bastard Art 214 In praise of being unphilosophical 214 Filmology: from unknowing to pluriknowing 215 Beyond coprology 217 Notes 219 Bibliography 261 Index 273 Acknowledgements This book is the fruition of two lives that have coexisted over the last seven years, one actual and philosophical, the other virtual and cinematic. Its philosophical gestation owes a vote of thanks to many, but especially to my colleagues at the University of Dundee (Beth Lord in particular). Its cin- ematic life was born when I had the privilege to be taught by my colleagues in film theory at the University of Sunderland, either when taking their classes or teaching alongside them: they include Susan Smith, Trish Winter, Sue Thornham, Deborah Thomas and Steve Cannon. I also want to acknowl- edge the film philosophers and theorists who have helped this book see the light of day: Andrew Benjamin, Paul Douglass, Daniel Frampton, Mark Bould, Mark Richardson, Nicole Hewitt, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Stephen Zepke, Miriam Baldwin, Suzanne Guerlac, Will Large, Anna Powell, David Deamer, David Martin-Jones as well as everyone at film-philosophy.com. Without the advice of Elie During and Barbara Muriel Kennedy, this would have been far lesser work. It is especially Edward Branigan’s sage counsel that has had the largest impact, however, and as such I am truly grateful to him. In addition, I would like to thank those at Palgrave Macmillan who have helped this project along – Dan Bunyard and Priyanka Pathak, in par- ticular, deserve my appreciation. The copy-editing and proofreading skills of Keith Povey and Nick Fox have improved the book greatly. Finally, any sophistication this text has when discussing anything contemporary in the arts is due to long conversations with Laura Cull, to whom I am always indebted, both for her tolerance and scholarship. Earlier versions of some of the material from the Introduction, Chapter 4 and Chapter 7 appeared, respectively, in Mullarkey 2008a, 2008b, 2007a. I gratefully acknowledge permission to use this material. This project was supported by a research leave grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. viii Preface: The Film-envy of Philosophy World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.1 Who wants to be a philosopher anyway? In the introduction to his own work on film and philosophy, Reel Arguments, Andrew Light makes an interesting confession: there have been times in his career when he wished he was a film-maker rather than a philosopher.2 Let me also come out of this same closet with an even stronger declaration – I have always believed that it would be much more rewarding to make films than practise philosophy. Indeed, I have written philosophy books mostly in order to compensate for the fact that nobody would let me make films (I won’t bore you with the details). Yet, my retreat to philosophy was not on account of some vague likeness with cinematic storytelling, but because both film and philosophy share a relation with something far grander: reality itself. On the one hand, film, like philosophy, has its double in reality: both can (though don’t always) give us powerful depictions of reality, the one primarily through the use of words, the other principally through the vis- ual medium. On the other hand, writing philosophy, especially philosophy with leanings towards metaphysics, is a bit like being a film director. Before the blank screen of the word processor, one has the power to create a reality of one’s own, designating what goes where, which piece of information is relevant and which irrelevant, what will count as truth and what as mere appearance. Both practices involve god-like constructions, ones where a reality is constructed through artistic means; others where a world, though perhaps no less fictional, is constructed through thought. The obvious diffe- rence between these two activities, of course, is that, these days at least, few people are interested in the realities that philosophers create, whilst seem- ingly everyone is interested in those displayed through film. It is a commonplace to say that each century has had its distinguishing art form, that it was poetry in the eighteenth century, the novel in the nine- teenth and cinema in the twentieth.