Bordwell vs Deleuze (Narration)

Narration historiography according to David Bordwell's book : Narration in the Fiction Film, 1985
[Chart adaptated to my Cinema Aesthetic Matrix]

* * *

Mapping of narrative structure according to Deleuze 2 tomes book : 

Cinéma 1. Image-mouvement (1983) / Cinéma 2 : Image-temps (1985)

Related : 

• Forgotten Obsolete English Word #8 : Tradition / Nuances in "Art Cinema" History
• Academic Film Styles Matrix / Cinema Aesthetic Matrix (Anglophone Edition) / Inaccessible Hollywood movie narrations... 
• Asian "Minimalism" (Bordwell)

Où est le cinéma? (Dercon, Karmakar)

Têtes modernes : Selon Chris Dercon, où est le cinéma ?
17 novembre 2012 (centrepompidou) 1h42'

La vieille question d’André Bazin, « Qu’est-que le cinéma ? », doit aujourd’hui être remplacée par celle-ci : « Où est le cinéma ? » La réponse est bien entendu : partout, et une question cruciale est celle de la nouvelle circulation des films. Ces vingt dernières années, le musée a été une plateforme importante pour des films qui avaient très peu de chances d’êtres vus ailleurs, mais cela ne suffit pas. Il faut maintenant donner sa place au cinéma en tant que mode de vie. Chacun à sa manière, Steve McQueen, Pedro Costa et Romuald Karmakar, qui pratiquent une nouvelle forme de cinéma « réaliste », se montrent fascinés, au sein même de leurs films, par un tel objectif.

Voir aussi :

• Où va la cinéma ? (Pompidou 2008) / Survey : Where is Film Criticism heading to?

Gilles Deleuze Notre Contemporain (France Culture)

Deleuze : notre contemporain
Hors Champ (Laure Adler; France Culture; Nov 2012)

Deleuze, c'est un style, une manière de penser le tout du monde, un démineur, une personne qui, quand on la lit, nous rend plus éveillés, plus aux aguets sans doute, parce qu'il ne donne jamais de réponses, mais continue à questionner.
Deleuze donc en 2012 notre contemporain.
Pourquoi, en le relisant, provoque-t-il encore de l'étonnement ? Comment les concepts qu'il invente - rhizome, machine désirante, ligne de fuite et bien d'autres - restent-ils opératoires aujourd'hui ?
Existe-t-il plusieurs Deleuze ? Peut-être celui qui, très jeune, nous a permis de relire Bergson, Hume, Spinoza autrement ne s'est jamais cantonné dans l'histoire de la philosophie et a pensé à la transformer en possibilité d'interrogation du monde - ce qui l'intéresse, ce n'est pas l'harmonie mais le symptôme, tout ce qui peut introduire du désordre.
Aujourd'hui plus connu par son Abécédaire que par Différence et répétition, Le Pli, Proust et les signes, son travail avec Félix Guattari avec L'Anti-Oedipe et Mille Plateaux nous ont permis de mieux comprendre les lignes de tension du capitalisme. Les relectures de Kafka, Beckett, Lewis Caroll demeurent toujours éclairantes ainsi que ses deux opus sur le cinéma
Deleuze aujourd'hui nous donne de l'énergie, du courage et de la jubilation.
Deleuze ou la philosophie exemplaire.
Deleuze ou la boîte à outils du XXIe siècle.

1. Gilles Deleuze et les enjeux philosophiques (19 Nov 2012) 45' [MP3]
avec Jean Clesmartin (Philosophe)

2. Gilles Deleuze relit l'histoire de la philosophie (20 Nov 2012) 45' [MP3]
avec René Schérer (Philosophe)

3. Gilles Deleuze et la vie (21 Nov 2012) 45' [MP3]
avec Gérard Fromanger (peintre) et Jean-Jacques Lebel (Plasticien)

4. Gilles Deleuze : Cinéma 1&2 (22 Nov 2012) 45' [MP3]
avec Raymond Bellour (écrivain, théoricien)

5. Gilles Deleuze (23 Nov 2012) 45' [MP3]
avec David Lapoujade (Philosophe)



Voir aussi :

• La bétise et le philosophe / Médiocrité courante 
• Deleuze on singular frames
• Crise de l'image-action (Thoret)
• Complaisance pour films mineurs (Deleuze, Guattari, Cahiers)

Matrice des montages

Lire aussi :

• Academic Film Styles Matrix
• Typologie des montages

Beauty, Art, Inutility and Subjectivity

The Avengers (2012) : beauty?

"If the contemplation of something beautiful arouses pleasurable feelings, this effect is distinct from the beautiful as such. I may, indeed, place a beautiful object before an observer with the avowed purpose of giving him pleasure, but this purpose in no way affects the beauty of the object. The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him."

Eduard Hanslick; music critic (1854)

Picasso (1937) : not beauty?

* * *

Why Beauty Matters (BBC2; Roger Scruton; 2009) video 59'

Philosopher Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives.In the 20th century, Scruton argues, art, architecture and music turned their backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leading us into a spiritual desert.
Using the thoughts of philosophers from Plato to Kant, and by talking to artists Michael Craig-Martin and Alexander Stoddart, Scruton analyses where art went wrong and presents his own impassioned case for restoring beauty to its traditional position at the centre of our civilisation.

Roger Scruton is well meaning, and, at the very least, provides a crash course in Aesthetics for dummies, which would have been perfect circa 1900. Unfortunately, it is a backward looking at Art, as it was conceived until the XXth century, a conservative and classicist approach to the wider spectrum of artistic possibilities. So for people who believe that everything is subjective and that only what they like can be art, that what doesn't fit their taste cannot be art, that there cannot be such a thing as an objective standard... this documentary answers to their uneducated self-deception. 

But this is the basic understanding of Art explained to beginners. Like I said, it was perfectly valid and complete until the XIXth century, because art had always been conceived and admired by and for these conservative ideas. And, these classic artists might have achieved the highest peaks of perfection in Art history. 

However, it's not because Modern Art, Contemporary Art or Conceptual Art may not (yet) be as perfect and transcendent as 2000 years of "classical" history (like DaVinci, Michelangelo, Raphaël, Botticelli, Rambrandt, Wermeer, Velazquez, Dürer, Rubens, Titian, David...), that we should dismiss them entirely.

Scruton makes two mistakes that conveniently rule out or disqualify anything that isn't "pretty", "sacred" or "ancient", one is theo-centrism (equating true art with sacred art because he's a religious believer) the other is  being retrograde (judging NEW art movements through the obsolete paradigms that could only validate CLASSICAL art). 

Speaking of "beauty" is already a self-limitation. Even if I agree with most of what he says, with the gist of his argument (if we understand a broad definition of "beauty" as including a more modern acception of beauty, less about cuteness or transcendental holyness, and more about a conceptual idea of aesthetic), Scruton still instills the whole discourse of outdated references that new art just cannot live up to, precisely because it was produced in reaction to these classical canons of beauty. The Classical Age being outdated, doesn't mean the old masterpieces aren't as great as they used to be. But that the definition of art that was pretty much consistent throughout millennia, has encountered many transformations, mutations, revolutions, in the last century alone. And to account for these changes (which brought us Picasso, Monet, Kandinski, Cézanne, van Gogh, Matisse, Mondrian, Warhol, Schiele, Miro, Chagall, Klee, Malevich, Dali, Ernst, Modigliani, Giacometti, Bacon...), we cannot continue to refer to a definition of Art that only validates the Classical Age.  

Beauty is no longer prettiness. Art is no longer figurative. Art is no longer material. Art is no longer a simple object, a product of the art market. What I mean is that Classical Art is still considered great art as always, the only difference today is that the expanded definition of art is more tolerant of non-classical experiments, thus the advent of Modern Art, Surrealism, Cubism, Constructivism, Abstract Art, Conceptual Art, Minimalism, Postmodern Art, Contemporary Art, Performance Art, Digital Art, Virtual Art...

I understand he's angry at Duchamp, Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Michael Craig... for discrediting the prettiness and meaningfulness of figurative/sacred art. But it's a very simplistic way of looking at the history of arts. It's not because you don't find it pretty, yourself personally, that it isn't, or that it cannot possibly be considered art.

The market of art which gives sometimes an overestimated attention to artists who seemingly don't seem to put much efforts in their work, has its excesses and perversions. But the mercantile market of art, hic et nunc, doesn't define what we should or should not accept as art, now and for posterity. In 2009 for Scruton, or today for us, we just CANNOT fall back on such antiquated definition of art, even if we don't understand the point, the substance, the purpose of everything going on in the realm of Contemporary Arts. 

Related :

• Eye of the Beholder (Philoctetes Center 2007) video 1h46'
• How beauty feels (Richard Seymour; May 2011; TED) video 17'
• Individual character and ideas of beauty (Alexander Nehamas; Princetown; 2011) video 51'26" 
• Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed in the Digital and Global World (Howard Gardner; Harvard; 2011) video 1h25'
• Emancipation du jugement de goût (Kant) / Object and Substance / Perception de la beauté cinématographique (Merleau-Ponty)

Perception du cinéma (Merleau-Ponty)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1/4: Une perception du cinéma

Les nouveaux chemins de la conniassance, France Culture, 4 juin 2012 [MP3] 59'

Aujourd'hui, Adèle Van Reeth reçoit Stefan Kristensen (attaché de recherche dans l'unité d'Histoire de l'Art à l'Université de Genève) pour évoquer le cinéma chez Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Extraits :

• Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle de Jean-Luc Godard, 1967 
• A bout de souffle, Jean-Luc Godard, 1960  
• Pierrot le fou de Jean-Luc Godard
• Causeries de Merleau-Ponty, 6 novembre 1948 [PDF] [MP3]
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, Collège de France, 1952-1960, Gallimard, 1968 
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et Non-Sens, "Le cinéma et la nouvelle psychologie", Gallimard, 1996

* * * 

Bibliographie complémentaire :

• Cinema 1 : Image-Mouvement / Cinema 2 : Image-Temps (Gilles Deleuze, 1983-85)

Lire aussi : 

• Perception de la beauté cinématographique (Merleau-Ponty)
• Reality and Representation (Bordwell) 
• Objets et Substance 
• When do images turn into cinema? / Deleuze on Singular Frames / Painting and Cinema
• Experiencing Self v. Remembering Self (D. Kanemann) / Temple Grandin : Thinking in Pictures
• Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Bellour)

Art of Argument

Dissent and Dissonance: The Science and Art of Argument 

Carol Tavris (Social psychologist and author) video 30'51"

TAM 14-17 July 2011 Las Vegas 

Hahaha. This is the history of the widdening, entrenched rift between anti-intellectuals and intellectuals ! LMAO

People who cannot fathom they ever be wrong speak confidently the most ridiculous bullshit, and when they're asked to revise their judgement and aspire to higher standard, they cling to conservative values and start rejecting anyone disagreeing with them, in complete denial of being in error. Rather than admitting to being wrong once, they unconsciously (in the best case) repress this process of redemption and reparation to indulge in their wrongdoings, self-justifying everything necessary to keep a straight face and carry on pretending they're right and everyone else is out to persecute them, while all it takes is to correct oneself, be grateful for learning something new and move on to a more enlightened life. 

This is especially true for people who hold important offices, like newspapers editors, leading journalists, famous critics, scholars... They prefer to surround themselves with yes-men who agree to anything they say and pat them on the back all day long (what's an "intellectual" without a good ego-massage?), rather than having to publish a correction that would put a dent on their shiny armor, and virtually question their legitimacy for being there in the first place. Futher down the line, they evolve to adopt trivial errors and defend them with aggressive energy, making a passing comment (which they didn't care enough for to think it through properly) become the unassailable core of their belief. From then on, it's impossible to discuss anything rational with them. They've become totally immune to reality, fact-checking, science, statistics, books, reasoning and philosophy. That's the price to pay for being overtly proud once (saving face for the occasion) and failing to seek truth instead.

Intellectuals we could look up to are ones who have the humility to accept corrections, suggestions, recommendations and don't feel insulted (or like their world is shattered by it). Casually striding along their merry intellectual ways by acknowledging mistakes is part of the learning curve and makes you stronger.

Justifying your mistakes wins you a verbal joust (in appearance, if at all) on the short term, but makes you weaker on the long run. 

I feel sorry that the ones in the wrong have no sense of humour or self-derision to deal with confrontational arguments more casually. As Carol Tavris says, you have to treat people who make mistakes with special attentions to the point where you have to apologize for pointing out to a mistake or concede that their bullshit may not be entirely deceptive... And this happens at the highest levels of society, in politics (political debates), in religious factions, in scientific arguments, as well as film criticism of course. Oh! the unwavering self-righteousness of those in the wrong. 

Handle stupidity with respect and devotion, or else... they throw a fit and threaten to refuse to welcome corrections. Very mature. Is that what we've come down to? Treating like precious divas the people who corrupt culture and constantly degrade the level of intellectual discourse, otherwise stupidity wins and we're not allowed to win an argument. Riiiiiight. Babies must have their ways. Always. That's very mature. Idiots have the easy life I see, and nobody cares for the damage they do to reason and culture. This is the evil of blissful "Positive Thinking", where everything must be positivized, where any position (even the ones proven wrong or the offensive ones or the self-contradictions) can be justified by any means necessary, and should be respected for that. Where "Freedom of expression" becomes "Legitimacy of non-sense". Sorry, but that's not the same thing. You're allowed to EXPRESS everything you like, but it doesn't mean that whatever you say IS RIGHT. Some positions are debatable amongst intellectually honest people, as a matter of taste disagreement or in the case of multiple compossibles. BUT. There is also such a thing as a universally recognized error that anyone intending to participate to an intelligent debate can agree on. And these are position that no-one may duck behind.

Related:

• Deficient Subjectivity
• Contra-contrarianism (IFFR)
• Critical Fallacy 1 : Deception 

Kant et la faculté de juger

1. Vitalisme, mécanisme... organisme ? (7 mai 2012) 50' [MP3]
Adèle Van Reeth reçoit Philippe Huneman (chargé de recherches à l'Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, CNRS / Université Paris I Sorbonne) à propos de la notion d'organisme dans la Critique de la faculté de juger de Kant

2. Qu'est-ce qu'un jugement de goût ? (8 mai 2012) 50' [MP3]
Adèle Van Reeth reçoit Luc Ferry pour interroger le concept de jugement de goût chez Kant.

3. Les Idées esthétiques (9 mai 2012) 50' [MP3]
Adèle Van Reeth reçoit Jacques Darriulat ( professeur de philosophie de l'art à la Sorbonne) pour évoquer les Idées esthétiques chez Kant.

4. De l'esthétique à la morale (10 mai 2012) 50' [MP3]
Adèle Van Reeth reçoit Michael Foessel (maître de conférences en philosophie à l'Université de Bourgogne à Dijon) pour décrypter le passage de l'esthétique à la morale dans la Critique de la faculté de juger


Bibliographie:

• Kant, Critique de la faculté de juger, traduction d'Alain Renaut, Partie II "Critique de la faculté de juger téléologique"
• Métaphysique et biologie : Kant et la constitution du concept d'organisme (Philippe Huneman; 2008)
• Hume, Essais esthétiques, "De la norme du goût", traduction de Philippe Folliot
• Art (pièce de Yasmina Reza, 1994) avec Fabrice Luchini, Pierre Vaneck et Pierre Arditi
• Homo aestheticus : l'invention du goût à l'âge démocratique (Luc Ferry; 2006)
• Le Sens du beau : Aux origines de la culture contemporaine (Luc Ferry; 2000)
• Humain trop humain, I, chap.4; Nietzsche
• La privation de l'intime : mises en scène politiques des sentiments (Michaël Foessel; 2008) 

Lire aussi :

• Emancipation du jugement de goût (Kant) 
• Deficient Subjectivity / Critical Fallacy 11 : Egocentrism 

Crise de l'image-action (Thoret)

Cours de cinéma par Jean-Baptiste Thoret : Gilles Deleuze, "crise de l'image action"
9 Oct 2009 (forumdesimages) 1h20'

présenté par Jean-Baptiste Thoret. Spécialiste du Nouvel Hollywood et du cinéma de genre, Jean-Baptiste Thoret est critique à Charlie Hebdo et chroniqueur à France Culture.
Gilles Deleuze clôt “L’Image-Mouvement” par un chapitre, “La crise de l’image-action”, dans lequel, à partir des films d’Hitchcock (Fenêtre sur cour), il identifie la fin de cette grande forme propre au cinéma hollywoodien, qui se manifeste d’abord par la perte du “lien sensorimoteur”. Quelles furent les conséquences esthétiques et formelles de cette crise ? Aujourd’hui, après la redécouverte du cinéma américain des années 70, ce concept est-il toujours valide ?

Related :

• La trilogie Jason Bourne (Burdeau)
• Complaisance pour films "mineurs" (Deleuze, Guattari, Cahiers)
• À quoi pense le cinéma américain lorsqu’il rêve de Jean Baudrillard ? (Thoret)
• Chaos Cinema (Matthias Stork) 1-2-3
• The Baroque, Spiraling: Michael Bay and the Dromospheric Cinema (Uncas Blythe; Mubi notebook; Oct 2011)
• Fast Cuts, Slow Views (Herskowitz)

Film Philosophy (MIT)

Philosophy of Film / MIT 24.213 (Prof. Irving Singer)
During the fall of 2004, four sessions of 24.213 were recorded especially for OpenCourseWare.

This course is a seminar on the philosophical analysis of film art, with an emphasis on the ways in which it creates meaning through techniques that define a formal structure. There is a particular focus on aesthetic problems about appearance and reality, literary and visual effects, communication and alienation through film technology.

Session 1 [1h10']
Syllabus and course requirements, philosophy and film, student introductions, the humanist philosopher, Jean Cocteau, film as cultural communication, readings for the course, meaning and technique are inseparable

• 00:00:00 Introduction to course
• 00:13:10 Singer explains his work in philosophy...
• 00:19:47 The first reading book Reality Transformed..
• 00:21:20 Singer continues with student introductions...
• 00:28:18 Singer describes himself as a humanist philosopher.
• 00:31:00 Singer discusses the work of Jean Cocteau.
• 00:41:30 Student raises issue of film as a primary form of cultural communication.
• 00:58:55 Singer's fundamental idea on meaning and technique is that the 2 cannot be separated

Session 2 [42'39"]
why study film?, realism and formalism, mathematics as an abstract art form, film and photography, Beauty and the Beast, Cocteau, Citizen Kane

• Student begins presentation, asking the question: Why study film?
• Singer discusses the interpenetration of realism and formalism in film.
• In response to a student's description of problem-solving in engineering, Singer argues that mathematics is an abstract art form.
• Discussion of the aesthetic differences between film and photography.
• Student talks about Cocteau's film, Beauty & the Beast.
• Further discussion of Cocteau; Singer explains that in Cocteau's work, film lends itself to poetry.
• Student continues presentation with analysis of Citizen Kane.

Session 3 [1h12'48"]
Beauty and the Beast, William James, Citizen Kane

• Singer announces that this session will continue the discussion of the last 2 weeks, which included an introduction to the philosophy of film; watching Beauty & the Beast (an archetype of what Cocteau calls "the poetry of film"); and discussion of the distinction between realist and formalist schools.
• Singer mentions the work of the American philosopher William James.
• Singer continues discussion of Beauty & the Beast.
• Singer reviews the Disney version of Beauty & the Beast, which draws on Cocteau's version to some degree.
• Emily begins presentation on Citizen Kane, discussing themes of alienation in the film.
• Discussion of Welles's choice of the word "Rosebud."
• Singer argues that Welles is not sympathetic to the character of Kane; students discuss whether or not they felt sympathy for the character.
• Singer discusses Welles's involvement with politics.
• Emily continues presentation with discussion of how techniques of cinematography are used to express elements of time, memory, reality, and illusion.

Session 4 [59'26"]
 Orson Welles, The Dead, The Magnificent Ambersons, expectations for student papers

• Student begins presentation on Welles, focusing on a philosophy of pessimism.
• Singer points out that Welles generally avoids nostalgia and sentimentality, in contrast to Huston's film, The Dead.
• Singer discusses the use of myths in works of art, and how myths function in our interpretations of the past and our search for truth.
• Discussion of the BBC documentary on Welles.
• Discussion of comic elements in Welles's work.
• Singer claims that critics have not given credit for the depth of feeling that Welles expresses, which is particularly evident in The Magnificent Ambersons.
• Singer reviews expectations for students' second paper.

Related:

• Citizen Kane (Ishaghour) 
• Penser le documentaire 
• Film school for dummies 
• Reality and representation (Bordwell) 

Désir Mimétique (René Girard)

René Girard, philosophe français, né en 1923

StudioPhilo, n° 19, par Ollivier Pourriol, 2009

Ciné Philo 2 : Vertiges du désir, comprendre le désir par le cinéma; Ollivier Pourriol; 21 mai 2011; 252pp

Fidèle à sa méthode consistant à faire dialoguer philosophie et cinéma, Ollivier Pourriol dévoile les grandes théories du désir à l'oeuvre dans des films aussi variés que Le Mépris, Kingdom of Heaven, Heat, Beau Travail, Casino, Eyes wide shut, Eros, THX 1138, Blow Up ou Toy Story.
Fruit des conférences Studiophilo - où la philosophie est expliquée par le cinéma, et le cinéma par la philosophie (voir extrait sur le désir mimétique)- ce livre nous fait comprendre ce qu'est le désir, tout en nous ouvrant les yeux sur certaines scènes célèbres du cinéma : Sartre nous éclaire sur les fesses de Brigitte Bardot dans Le Mépris, Hegel sur la lutte à mort entre Al Pacino et Robert de Niro dans Heat, Girard sur le désir mimétique dont sont victimes les jouets de Toy Story, Deleuze sur l'électricité sexuelle de Sharon Stone dans Casino, Platon sur les vertiges de l'amour dans Les ailes du désir.
Olivier Pourriol consacre un chapitre au désir mimétique à travers les films Casino (Le désir des autres), Blow Up (L'illusion du moi), Charlie et la chocolaterie (Le désir de distinction), Toy Story (Les jouets du désir), Le Grand Saut (Le désir à la chaîne) et Zoolander (Les modèles du désir).

* * *

René Girard et le Désir Mimétique
(Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance; France Culture; Nov 2011)

1. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (14 nov 2011) [MP3] 50'
2. Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde et Achever Clausewitz (15 nov 2011) [MP3] 50'
3. La violence et le sacré (16 nov 2011) [MP3] 50'
4. Shakespeare : les feux de l'envie (17 nov 2011) [MP3] 50'

Bibliographie selective de René Girard :

• Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque; René Girard; 1961
• Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire; René Girard; 2004
• Anorexie et désir mimétique; René Girard; 2008
• Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005; René Girard; 2008
• Géométries du désir; René Girard; 2011

Bibliographie complémentaire :

• Oedipe Roi; Sophocle; 415 B.C.
• l'Evangile selon Saint-Marc / Caïn et Abel
• Don Quichotte; Cervantès; 1615
• De la démocratie en Amérique; Alexis de Tocqueville; 1840
• Totem et Tabou; Sigmund Freud; 1913
• Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion; Henri Bergson; 1932
• Les structures élémentaires de la parenté; Claude Lévi-Strauss; 1948
• Un Mime nommé désir; Jean-Michel Oughourlian; 1982
• La marque du sacré; Jean-Pierre Dupuy; 2009
• La connaissance objective : une approche évolutionniste; Karl Raimund Popper; 2009

* * *

Entretiens en 5 parties avec Raphaël Enthoven (A Voix Nue; France Culture, 2005) [MP3] 25'

* * *

René Girard, le penseur du désir et de la violence
Philosophy Magazine, Hors-série Novembre 2011

Sommes nous libres de désirer ? Non, affirme le penseur René Girard, auquel nous avons consacré ce numéro exceptionnel. Nous désirons un objet parce que celui-ci nous est désigné par un tiers. Voilà une idée dont tout parent de deux enfants, ou plus, a pu tester la solidité.. Seulement voilà indique René Girard, la rivalité mimétique qui en découle peut entraîner une société entière dans une spirale de violence. D'où, pour enrayer ce mécanisme, la désignation d'un bouc émissaire dont le sacrifice permettra le transfert des tensions. Retour à l'harmonie et à la paix, sauf pour la victime… innocente. Voilà la trame d'un phénomène qui se répète à travers les âges, depuis Œdipe jusqu'à l'affaire d'Outreau.
Démonstration à travers quelques chefs d'oeuvre de la littérature et mise à l'épreuve, dans les champs politique, financier, militaire et publicitaire, d'une théorie qui fait de son auteur un grand nom de la pensée française. 

Articles dans ce numéro :

1. « Il y a une correspondance entre les thèses anthropologiques de Girard et mes observations d'éthologue » Boris Cyrulnick, neuropsychiatre, psychanalyste et psychologue
2. « Je pense que la guerre a sa vie propre, hors de contrôle du politique, mais cela ne veut pas dire que la politique est impuissante » Colonel Durieux, officier d'active et spécialiste de Clausewitz 
3. « Nous vivons dans un monde de sagesse au detail et de folie en gros » Peter Thiel, inventeur de Paypal et actionnaire de Facebook
4. « Le marketing peut parfaitement être interprété à l'aune de la théorie du désir mimétique » Marie Claude Sicart, experte en stratégie de marques
5. « Girard est un génie solitaire qui doit tout à toute l'histoire de la culture occidentale » Jean Pierre Dupuy, philosophe, ingénieur et épistémologue

* * *

Conférences et colloques proposés par l'Association Recherches Mimétiques 2011-12 [PDF] :

• 10 décembre 2011 : "Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque à travers le cinéma", par Ollivier Pourriol (Espace Bernanos)
• 16 mars 2012 : « Théorie mimétique et théologie »( avec James Alison, Benoît Chantre, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, François Euwe, Dominique Pécoud, Olivier Rey et Lucien Scubla) à la Bibliothèque nationale de France
• mai 2012 : « René Girard lecteur de Shakespeare » (avec Sandor Goodhart, Joël Hillion, Jean Duchesne…) 

* * *

Entretiens / Conférences de René Girard en vidéo :

• René Girard en vidéo (ARM)
• Projet René Girard 
• Insights with René Girard, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Hoover Institution (2009) 36'33" [English]
• Conception du désir, Parcours du monde (2010) partie 1&2 [Français] 14'45"

Voir aussi :

• René Girard (Wikipedia)
• Association Recherches Mimétiques
• Projet René Girard 
• Genesis of the mimetic theory; Imitatio Conférence 2008; René Girard [English] 18' partie 1-2
• Regards de philosophes, René Girard, Pierre Vidal-Naquet (KTO; mars 2007) [Français] 27' partie 1-2-3
• From animal to human; René Girard et Charles Darwin; a conversation with René Girard, Paul Gifford & Pierpaolo Antonello (Stanford, April 2009) part 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 [English] 

Intuition, Reflection (Kahneman)

Daniel Kahneman at Google Talks (Nov 2011) 1h02' 

Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many fields—including economics, medicine, and politics—but until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.
In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.

• System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; mostly below consciousness (innate reflex, natural instinct, learnt symbolism, acquired experience)
• System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical; activated automatically if a lack in System 1 occurs (abstract thinking, corroboration, swift investigation, logical processing)

Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities—and also the faults and biases—of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. The impact of loss aversion and overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the challenges of properly framing risks at work and at home, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning the next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.
Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Thinking, Fast and Slow will transform the way you think about thinking.

Related:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman; Oct 2011) [PDF]
• Experiencing Self, Remembering Self (Kahneman)
• Critical Fallacy 1: Deception 
• Deficient Subjectivity 
• The Root of Anti-intellectualism (Kael) 
• Emancipation du jugement de goût (Kant) 
• Gorilla attention deficit 1-2

Gorilla attention deficit 1 (Chabris/Simons)

Where is Waldo?

You found Waldo? (squint your eyes and it's the darkest spot on the beach) But did you spot the cactus? did you notice there was not a single shadow? did you notice there was no lifeguard? did you spot the guy with polka dots sunburn? Chances are you didn't, because given a limited amount of time, you probably tried to skim through this picture containing a flurry of details with only one thing in mind, the red-stripped shirt pattern : Waldo (the implicit mission of this picture).

The invisible gorilla experiment is very funny, but it's a "gotcha" trick and it only surprises you once (with 50% success! no bragging rights there). Like when you point away to turn someone's head for an instant, and take advantage of their distraction to slap them in the face... It's a joke requiring the willing trust of the person.

- Hey, look away! ... Ah-ha, gotcha!
- But you told me to look away...
- Exactly.

 That's basically what this "scientific" test comes down to. They test our attention, we kindly obey to the directives... only to learn the directives themselves were lies. This breaks the pupil-professor social contract. How cheap is it to catch someone off-guard through a deceptive premise? Anything goes in the realm of jokes, but as a scientific procedure it's pretty sloppy.

They don't ask you to spot a gorilla, they divert your attention to something else (count the passes of the team in white) and then blaming you for not noticing something else (which they implicitly ordered you not to pay attention to). That's what illusionists do : misdirection. Granted, the gorilla is a big detail to miss, but it was concealed carefully... Is it a coincidence if the gorilla is black (just like the team you are specifically asked to ignore), the same size as all the players, and moving across the screen at a comparable speed? Of course not. It's part of the strategy to avoid attracting your attention. The gorilla suit is only there to ridicule you, but it's merely the irruption of a random intruder within a scene we have no business keeping track of, except for the ball.

 

 The center of gaze (corresponding to an area of the retina called the fovea), sees only a cone of vision of 2 degrees wide. This is what we use to decipher letters and read for instance. The rest of the field of vision (peripheral vision) is more blurry, unfocused and less acute. What this "awareness test" does is monopolize the attention of the fovea exclusively onto the white team players (and more precisely on the white players holding the ball), leaving the black team players in the peripheral vision. This is why, in the peripheral vision (less competent for subtle details, more competent in tracking motion), the gorilla can easily pass as a shape and behaviour resembling a black-team player without raising enough attention to the brains to require a fovea double-check (which would identify the difference in a fraction of a second). To make this trick work, the fovea must stay away from the gorilla at all time. Which is why you are asked to concentrate on a moving ball.

 If a real gorilla was to pop in the scene, several details would have alerted our peripheral vision : abnormal posture and displacement of one of the "black-team player", animal sounds one would assume, different ground vibrations, and first of all, the panic of all players and the end of the passes. The delimited frame of the video also removes important aspects of our environment. The fact a gorilla moves in up-close, amongst a group of people without causing mayhem, keeps our senses quiet. Noticing and reacting to the panic in somebody's eyes, face or unusual gestures is part of our defense system. Even if these scientists like to make fun of our blind spots, we still have a pretty good instinct for survival, notably to spot danger in a familiar setting before it arrives, with all our senses, even if it is not under the direct scrutiny of the fovea. I guarantee you that if someone rushed in on screen, bouncing up and down, in a gorilla suit or not, even in the corner of the screen, 100% of spectators would be able to say they noticed something odd during the counting, even without looking at it.

In fact, Derren Brown makes use of this gorilla awareness test in one of his shows (Evening of Wonders, 2007). 

Daniel Simons created another version (The Monkey business Illusion) destined to catch off guard the people who already heard about the gorilla. While viewers will be content spotting the gorilla, other subtle changes have been added to trick them. The fake curtain (added on green screen) changes from a red hue to an orange hue (without altering the general luminosity of the scene, which would otherwise alert our peripheral vision), and they use the entrance of the gorilla to exit one of the black-team player by the same side of the screen at the exact same moment (which is also the moment the curtain colour changes, for maximizing confusion and stealth), which easily fools the peripheral vision in thinking the black shape moving offscreen is the same as the lookalike black shape coming back on screen from the same spot.

In fact the gorilla didn't go unnoticed. We just didn't register its presence at the top level of our waking consciousness. If we are not told about the gorilla at the end of the test, we could easily retrieve this information under hypnosis. Under a state of trance (or focused concentration) we could revisit our memories of the video, even the details that we are not capable to access/verbalize consciously. This demonstrates that the center of gaze is not the only area that sees and remembers. (see Derren Brown's Trick or Treat Season 2 Episode 1; May 2008) We see more than what we are able to recall/spell out, because most details are relegated to low-level priorities and removed from verbalizable memory.

Again this is a trick only possible because of the offscreen suspension of disbelief. They use the off-screen space to sneak in/out, thus creating a false environment. Theatre uses the curtains to facilitate a live performance on stage, but if they started to abuse this convention to sneak in gorillas, spectators would give up disbelief and suspect everything going on, which would kill the necessary immersion in the narrative universe. The camera frame is likewise a convention we accept as long as it is not turned against us, to expose the blindspots created by our suspension of disbelief. For the benefit of the narrative plausibility, filmmakers don't need spectators to become suspicious of the non-diegetic space, behind the camera, or in the off-screen wings.

 This is a valid experiment in the field of psychology, to test the compliance to a procedure, regardless for its irrelevance. I'm not sure it is as pertinent to the field of neurology, since the attention deficit is caused by the suppression of information in the fabric of the test itself. Seriously, it doesn't prove anything, and certainly not what it says it does. The two guys, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, interviewed on a radio show (CJAD radio) are more ambivalent/measured about the conclusions, when given a chance to expand on it.

On a short term prospect, the brains intentionally ignores certain elements (that are kept in check by the familiar permanence of the context) in order to become more efficient with a very specific task. But if there really was something fishy going on, the correlation of other signals (ear, feeling of vibrations, disorder of the environment...) would abort the silly task at hand (counting passes because we were asked to) and assess the general situation with all our senses, even for a second, until the suspicion is cleared up. At the cinema, we are dependent on what the filmmaker decides to reveal, visually on the screen, and aurally in the speakers.

That's why jump scenes are the easiest tricks in movies, and the cheapest (artistically speaking) effects. Like shouting "boo" in the back of an unsuspecting friend. Everyone falls for it. If we are in a safe environment, we never double check on everyone passing behind our back. We let ourselves betrayed by an excess of confidence with familiarity. In an unfamiliar place, we are on our guard, and would less likely let something fishy happen behind our back without double checking. The illusion of such tests is to pretend that the delimited diegetic world contained in a brief video sequence (to which we willingly grant the proverbial "suspension of disbelief") makes any claim on our real world perception. There are a lot of elements we take for granted in reality, that could fool us eventually, without checking them time and again, especially not more than once.

The Movie Perception Tests (Levin/Simons); Whodunnit? (WCRS&Co); Evolution of Games (MysteryGuitarMan)

Did you notice all the changes?

They play a brief clip from an unfamiliar scene where everything is new to us. We have to make sense of the context, while listening to a dialogue. And they ask us to pick up on gotcha changes that happen against the very logic of the scene and unbeknownst to us... In a real world environment we know what elements are unknown and which ones are known, because we've tested them before, we also assume that things stay the way they are. We also have a good sense of which elements are most likely to change in certain circumstances. A sudden change from the corner of our eyes or an atypical noise from the ambiance might make us reassess the permanence of things and check things again as if new. But when the edit ellipsis of a shot-countershot convention abuses our trust to slip in prop changes, it is not something we would naturally pay attention to, nor would such trivial details (fork switch, arm positions...) prove to be interesting at all. The Whodunnit clip abuses the offscreen space left by the close-up panoramic, to alter props that the main character (a detective of all characters) can see in plain sight. At the movies, we suspend disbelief for the editing shorthands and other camerawork tricks, provided the ellipsis maintains the coherence of the whole. We also rely heavily on the knowledge of the onscreen characters (even if some of them may lie purposefuly for the benefit of the story). But if ALL characters play pretend changes that occur in the diegetic world didn't happen (however we do expect them to ignore the technical staff from the non-diegetic world of course), then the narrative has no foundation to build on. And that's this loophole (the willingness of spectators to give credit to stage artifices) that these gotcha test exploit, which is a low blow to the suspension of disbelief. 

Applying this observation directly the movie narrative is rather abrupt and pointless. Comparing a chess master memory of checker conformations to reading the content of a movie is ludicrous. Of course, we let a lot of details pass by unchecked, especially when the talking and editing is accelerated. Just like in reality we could be fooled by something or someone we didn't go check out and assess firsthand, because details are too many around us, and because only a few of them will have any importance/influence in our life. When someone with an uniform on introduces herself as a nurse, we assume the hospital didn't let her enter and work there without qualifications. We don't verify her resume ourselves. Maybe we should. When someone walking in the park with a dog in leash says "this is my dog", we believe it without running a thorough administrative check up. Yet it could be another occasion to fool us. Another loophole of the "inattentional blindness" (an half-empty glass way of looking at the admirable evolution of one of our vital sense). Just like we assume that in a scientific video that unfolds very calmly, without scream or laughter  everyone on screen was put there on purpose by the scientists, and we have no reason to suspect anything tricky in this department, nor the directives ordered onto us.

Source: The Invisible Gorilla (Chabris/Simons)
 What You See Is What You Get (Manohla Dargis; NYT; 8 July 2011)

Good and good for you (David Bordwell; 10 July 2011) 

To be continued...

Related:

• Gorilla attention deficit 2 (Dargis) 
• Reality and Representation (Bordwell) / Mandarins and Philistines 2 

Penser le cinema documentaire

Penser le documentaire (en 7 leçons) TCP - Université de Provence / Canal U

Le cinéma documentaire est né de la rencontre entre le désir des cinéastes d'explorer le monde et la passion des inventeurs d'enregistrer le réel :
Entre Louis et Auguste Lumière, filmant le déjeuner en famille avec une caméra cinématographe noir et blanc muette et Dominique Cabréra se filmant elle-même avec une caméra DV numérique en couleurs et sonore, il y a cent ans d'écriture documentaire et d'inventions techniques.
Les cinéastes ont cherché à transmettre, avec leur point de vue, la vie quotidienne de leurs contemporains en s'approchant progressivement au plus près de leur intimité, jusqu'à parfois devenir les propres "acteurs" de leurs films.
Pour en arriver là, un dialogue permanent s'est établi entre eux, des inventeurs et des ingénieurs. il a fallu alléger les caméras, les installer sur des trépieds fluides, domestiquer la couleur de la pellicule, mener une véritable conquête pour entendre en direct les personnes que l'on filme, réunir sur un même support l'image et le son avec l'arrivée de la vidéo, inventer de nouvelles techniques de montage plus simples et plus rapides, miniaturiser tous ces équipements pour parvenir aux caméscopes que nous connaissons actuellement.

• 1.a : Le documentariste et ses outils à travers les âges (2003/Catherine Goupil) 52'06"
• 1.b : L'invention de la mise en scène documentaire (1994/Gilles Delavaud/Pierre Baudry) 40'15"
• 2. Tentatives de définitions du film documentaire (2010/Jean Luc Lioult) 24'23"
• 3. Théorie du film documentaire (2010/Jean Luc Lioult) 41'07"
• 4.a :  La mise en scène documentaire (2010/François Niney) 37'45"
• 4.b : Débat sur la mise en scène documentaire (2010/François Niney) 48'48"
• 5. Le Documentaire et les images d'archives (2010/Edouard Mills-Affif) 32'26"
• 6. Les différents modes du documentaire (2011/Jean Luc Lioult) 43'47"
• 7. Les stratégies de réalisation documentaire (2010/Denis Gheerbrant) 33'47"

Médiocrité courante (Deleuze)

« A quel point les grandes déclarations, d'Eisenstein, de Gance, sonnent étrange aujourd'hui : on les garde comme des déclarations de musée, tous les espoirs mis dans le cinéma, art des masses et nouvelle pensée. On peut toujours dire que le cinéma s’est noyé dans la nullité de ses productions. Que deviennent le suspense d'Hitchcock, le choc d'Eisenstein, le sublime de Gance, quand ils sont repris par des auteurs médiocres ? Quand la violence n’est plus celle de l’image et de ses vibrations, mais celle du représenté, on tombe dans un arbitraire sanguinolent, quand la grandeur n’est plus celle de composition mais un  pur et simple gonflement du représenté, il n’y a plus d’excitation cérébrale et de naissance de la pensée. C’est plutôt une déficience généralisée chez l’auteur et les spectateurs ; pourtant la médiocrité courante n’a jamais empêché la grande peinture ; mais il n’est pas de même dans les conditions d’un art industriel, où la propagation des œuvres exécrables met directement en cause  les buts et les capacités les plus essentielles. Le cinéma meurt donc de sa médiocrité quantitative »

Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2 : L'image-temps, 1985

* * *

« Le monde imbécile des images pris comme à la glu dans des myriades de rétines ne parfaira jamais l'image qu'on a pu se faire de lui. La poésie de ce qui peut se dégager de tout cela n'est qu'une poésie éventuelle, la poésie de ce qui pourrait être, et ce n'est pas du cinéma qu'il faut attendre... »

Antonin Artaud , La vieillesse précoce du cinéma, 1933

Lire aussi:

• La bétise et le philosophe

Reality and Representation (Bordwell)

When I say  "blue" everyone can represent that very color in their head... but do we really picture the same color for this particular wavelength of light? Maybe some people see the sky and everything called "blue" like what I see everything called "yellow" without knowing the internal discrepancy because we are consistent in calling the color-a-like objects by a consensual name. Like in the case of color blindness (which is a disorder we can detect).

Human perception is limited by the very nature of our brains, because that's what we use to comprehend. But this is high-end theory. Cinema doesn't make use of such refined aspects of the perceptive process. In Plato's Cave, cinema is that 2-dimensional  monochrome shadow on the wall, and real life human perception is what happens in the cave behind the fire, invisible to the prisoner-observer. Cognitive science strives to explain the universe of daylight outside the cave, which is of metaphysical interest, and do not really affect the understanding of cinema one way or another. The science of perception is infra-language : it comes ahead of any possible communication. A fully functioning eye-ear-brains apparatus enables the idea of language formation, perception and comprehension. Visual language comes afterward, developed by society with whatever the human brains could handle.

So says Bordwell :"But we don’t have to worry about whether it’s true; what matters is that filmmakers invoke it and film viewers follow their lead. Storytellers are practical psychologists, preying (usually in a good sense) on our habits of mind in order to produce experiences." after making numerous cases of such studies.

Cinema is made by flawed humans and watched by equally flawed humans. That's all film theory needs to know. If a camera could record images that we are unable to perceive or understand (eg. infra red or high-speed flickering), filmmakers wouldn't use them because of their inefficiency on the spectator experience.

Bordwell: "Film academics assume, along with most humanists, that once you set aside some uninteresting aspects of the human creature, usually summed up as “physiology,” culture goes all the way down. Beyond cell division and digestion, let’s say, everything is cultural, and to invoke any other explanations risks rejection."

Bordwell wrote an essay on "commonsense film theory" (there is at least a couple academics who could learn why "common sense" is not undesirable in film criticism!). 

I wonder why he uses the likeness of images rather than their editing to interrogate the perception of spectators. The audience reacts to screen images just about the same way they react to reality. Only editing is really specific to film language and could eventually require a different process than in the real world.

The real world we live in is full of situations where mankind has evolved to perceive, interpret and infer incomplete images, like in the movies. Humans are perfectly able to understand a reflection on a mirroring surface, a shadow on a wall, a silhouette in the fog, a sound without image, a view without sound, an animal through blocking leaves, a visage behind a glass window or a translucent curtain... In this regard, cinema didn't pose a major problem to our perception that we didn't have to solve before.

Even the absence of stereoscopy (perception of depth), merely equates to looking through a keyhole in real life. We are not disconcerted by this situation. It's harder to make sense instantly of a perspective, but we manage. So a video image of a person is not so different from looking at someone in real life, behind a window, through a keyhole, with a peculiar texture on the glass that alters the resolution of the image (like the typical video resolution does). 

You are sitting on a bench in a park, in real life, and you eavesdrop on a couple next to you having an argument. You don't know how it started, what succession of events led to this conflict, what is their past, their life, their background. But you can try to follow what is going on anyway, interpret the body language and the portions of sentences you catch, make your own speculations and infer what it is all about, little by little. They walk inside a building near enough to continue your observation, and you only see them and hear them each time they pass an open window. This is no different from what audience are subjected to on a cinema screen, and we are well equipped to fill in most of the blanks, and at least get a basic understanding of the action, even when the distillation of bits of informations and visual cues, the timing of their obstruction wasn't designed by a narrator.

I'm not saying that cinema narration is an innate language, but as far as cognitive process is concerned, it's not the imperfect nature of screen images or the timeline editing that could confuse spectators more than in real life. Not to mention the mental processes mankind used to develop and master for the transmission of oral traditions, such as memorization of a continuous timeline, at the scale of a day or a lifetime, or village history, and the manipulation of a discontinuous timeline to construct dramatised stories or lies. Cinema came after cave paintings, music, poetry, theatre and literature... and built a language largely based on previously acquired skills of perception, mental visualisation, communication and memory.

"Recognizing the contents of realistic images, I’ve suggested, depends heavily upon our everyday perceptual abilities. Similarly, filmic storytelling relies upon cognitive dispositions and habits we’ve developed in a real-world context." 

I wish the examples of "cinema narration" were a little bit more medium-specific than what he cites to question our understanding of cinema conventions : a man running away from someone (easily identifiable in real life without any more context than on a screen), a red-tinted sexy scene with saxophone (real life cliché), Daffy Duck (similar to identifying mural stick figures or a sock puppet)...
In these cases, cognitive science only indicates how humans generally perceive real world situations, it doesn't explain what is specific to film language, or what poses a problem to usual cognition in filmic representation...

I wish "cognitive science based film studies" would look into problematics that are less about plotpoint stereotypes (reading emotions, intentions, causality, continuity, space orientation...) and more about the subtle quintessence of film language (frame composition, harmony, sense of duration, pauses, images collision, rhythmic edit, organic crowds, permanent landscapes...) because filmmakers need to learn to use richer cues, more elaborate, more indirect, delayed in time, secondary cues that are not operative in the plot advancement, cues for transient impressions that only qualify a shot or a moment.

"Further, Narrative in the Fiction Film argued that the conventions that guide our inferential extrapolation don’t simply float free in space. There were recurring clusters of favored choices for presenting causality, time, and space. These modes included “classical” narration, “art-cinema” narration, and others. The historical layout still seems valid to me, and they seem to have proven useful to other researchers."

I'd like to come back to this nebulous label of "art cinema" later, because I don't think it represents anything identifiable by a standard form like "classical narration" or "Hollywood" (by period) or "Mainstream" could. As for "Avant Garde", the concept of "art cinema" doesn't correspond to a definite format, or to any films in particular, except to cast them outside of the well known classicism. Mentioning "classical narration" refers to a set of codes and conventions that will match almost every film we file under this umbrella term. However, what you call "art-films" are practically all different from each other (except for certain trends and "schools"), aside from being also different from the classical format. 

"Considering narrative comprehension as inferential led me to bring in the Russian Formalist distinction between fabula and syuzhet. These two terms have been used in several ways, but the most plausible way, it seemed to me then [Narrative in the Fiction Film, 1985] and seems still, is to see fabula as the chronological-causal string of events that may be presented by the syuzhet, the configuration of events in the narrative text as we have it."

Serge Daney was talking about "énoncé" (=fabula) and "énonciation" (=syuzhet) in 1974 (Cahiers du cinéma, n°248-249-250, janvier-mai 1974).

"But I now think that the inference-making takes place in a very narrow window of time, and it leaves few tangible traces. What is built up in our memory as we move through a film is something more approximate, more idiosyncratic, more distorted by strong moments, and more subject to error than the fabula that the analyst can draw up. [..] In assigning to the spectator the task of ongoing fabula construction, NiFF harmonized with one premise I consider central: a holistic sense of form. Even if we scan the entire narrative through a narrow slit, it’s important for the analyst and theorist to consider the overall design of the work, the more or less coherent principles that govern the unfolding tale. I’m thinking of such matters as smoothly cascading character goals, psychological motives and personality change, gradual development of knowledge, shifts in viewpoint, repeated and varied motifs, and finer-grained patterns of visual and sonic presentation."

That is an interesting aspect of human perception applied specifically to the cinema experience and how the limitations of this experience can be exploited, manipulated by the narrative design. 

Even if we do not recall every element of a film by the end of the screening, or even during the film, our subconscious does. Often the film needs to use self-quoting flashback (of images already previously projected in the distant beginning of the film), to make a pointed reference, as if the audience had already forgotten what they saw a few minutes ago. And the emotional climate within which each scene or image is registered (in state of fear, or under the tone of suspicion, or in awe, or accompanied by a music cue...) attribute to each memorial image a distinct accent, that influences the way we store and retrieve such memory, in the long term memory (belonging to our personal history), or in the short term memory (for single-using within the duration of the film).

Source: Common Sense + Film Theory = Common-Sense Film Theory? (David Bordwell, May 2011)

---

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops (TED talk, Nov 2009)

Lire aussi:

• Paul Virillo, La machine de la vision, 1988 [PDF]

* * *

Related:

• When do images turn into cinema? 
• Temple Grandin: thinking in picture
• Experiencing Self & Remembering Self (D. Khaneman) 
• Typologie des montages 
• Object and Substance 

Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Bellour)

Une œuvre parlée : Raymond Bellour
Le coprs du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités
23 février 2011 (centrepompidou) 1h23'

Dans le cadre de l'exposition au Centre G. Pompidou (16 février - 7 mars 2011): Aether de Christophe Keller, De la cosmologie à la conscience

Mandarins vs Philistines (Bordwell)

"In most arts, academic study isn’t considered the enemy of journalistic criticism. [..] When it comes to cinema, though, the relations are cool, even adversarial."
Academics vs. Critics. Never the twain shall meet: why can't cinephiles and academics just get along? David Bordwell (Film Comment, May 2011) 

He's talking about the climate in the USA of course, which is a particular combination of anti-intellectualism, fear of alienating oneself from the gut reactions of the crowd and the guilty conscience of enjoying cinephilia. American critics have the phobic anxiety to be perceived as "objective" or "intellectual". American scholars have the repressed guilt of infusing their love of cinema into their object of clinical studies. I guess the Grand Theory chiasm is typical to American ambivalence. There is so much useless drama around the repressed subjectivity of film students who want to be accepted in academe through self-important jargon. 

You don't see such extreme polarisation in French culture... There is a gap between common reviewers and actual researchers, each side acknowledges their territory of competency and their incompatibility but they use eachothers and communicate to exchange ideas (even when it fails). In fact French film scholars come from cinephilia (which is something American scholars tend to forget). Delluc, Epstein, Mitry, Desnos, Malraux, Artaud, Blanchot, Debord, Metz, Duras, Lyotard, Foucault, Debord, Deleuze, Bellour, Rancière, Badiou, Nancy are unapologetic cinephiles! French intellectuals are not afraid to admit their cinephilia, or their guilty pleasure, they don't shy away from hermeneutics and evaluation.  

• Bordwell on clichés in criticism [Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, 1989]
• Post Theory, reconstructing film studies (Carroll/Bordwell, 1996)
• Backpage: Against Insight (David Bordwell, cinemascope, #26, 2006)
• Ideas and excellence (David Bordwell, 16 march 2010) / Film criticism always declining, never quite falling (David Bordwell, 16 March 2010)

This topic seems to be a recurring concern for Bordwell, and I'm glad because it's worth repeating until the futility of such arguments stops clouding the general film discourse. This is an abstract categorization though. Evaluation and subjectivity might be the casus belli between actual film studies and actual film criticism, but what worries me more is the dissemination and misappropriation of such theoretical arguments into the lowest planes of film discourse. Pseudo-academics and wannabe reviewers appropriate and abuse this conflict, in order to somehow validate their participation to film culture, while they are neither scholars nor critics. It's not because somebody positions oneself in the objective/subjective war that it makes him/her a critic or a scholar. The impression of holding and defending a position replaces for some people the importance of discipline and ideas. What is destroying film culture is the infiltration of posers and other impostors at institutional levels, in the film press, in academic circles... And the main reason is that either nobody pays enough attention to notice the B.S. published everywhere, or, which is worse, that a pervading complacency lets such counterfeit arguments be for the sake of putting out content and mutual friendly encouragements. These types of irresponsible practices make the academic vs. journalist gap seem trivial.

A more pressing issue than the academic vs. cinephile debate to oppose Grand Theory, is to reflect on the nature of their incompatibility. The reason why Semiotics, Reception Studies, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies failed assimilation to Film Culture, is precisely because they deal less with cinema itself than with a broader theory or abstract concepts across general culture in its globality. Semiotics is to cinema what grammar is to Literature, or chromatology to Painting. Reception studies is hardly specific to cinema, and could indifferently apply to Theatre, Literature or Pavlov. Gender studies is a socio-cultural issue, again spanning across all arts and media indifferently. Knowing the building blocks of words (Literature) or colors (Painting) or chords (Music) is important to acquire a general understanding of the technique, but doesn't inform the production of aesthetic meaning resulting from the artist's use of such generic technique.

I see Cultural Studies as being a subset of Sociology, using movies as a statistical sample, on the other hand I see Aesthetics as the only academic studies dealing with what makes cinema an art, treating films as artistic statements. The controversy is whether you consider cinema as an ethnological evidence for the study of mankind or as the contribution to the history of the Arts for the study of Cinema itself. There is no wrong answer, but your slant will make your writing relevant to Cinema or to another domain of interest outside of and larger than cinema (Humanities, Sociology, Economy, Epistemology, Philology...) That's why there is no possible reconciliation. Academics from Cultural Studies are observing ideological phenomena AROUND the consumption of cinema as entertainment, OUTSIDE of the Arts.

You don't understand the place of La Joconde in the Arts by surveying visitors at Le Louvre, observing under the microscope its canvas, or contemplating whether Mona Lisa was a dude... Unfortunately that's how Cultural Studies are treating Cinema, as a commodity consumed by pigeon-holed shares of a demographic.

Bordwell is wondering why there is a gap between cinephiles and academics... I think it is a moot point. If it doesn't take away precious time from the serious study of Great Cinema (classics and contemporary), film scholars may study whatever they fancy! Be it Humanities or Economy or the Star System or Movie posters or trade newspaper or gossips... as long as any of this is NOT put in the same box as Cinema Art, just because it is remotely related to film production. Scholars don't need to seek the approval of auteurists or cinephiles...
That's the real problem today: anybody can write any bullshit about some movies and it will insidiously infiltrate Film Discourse, and sometimes pass as "serious criticism" just because it is a subversive way of looking at a B-movie that everyone else ignored. Turning lowbrow entertainment into highbrow film studies is a very very marginal share of cinema history, it doesn't happen every year! It's not because one blockbuster becomes socially relevant worldwide for a couple months that it has become an instant classic. I wish film discourse (contrary to humanities) had prospects with longer terms than that.

Bordwell: "[..] the auteur tradition never studied in detail how the Hollywood system worked. Suspending evaluation allows us to ask questions that aren't simply factual but have broader implications. The standard story about the early 'evolution of film language' has been shown over the last 30 years to be at best an oversimplification and at worst inadequate. But scholars had to look beyond the few classics of Griffith, Chaplin, and DeMille to what now realize to be a great diversity of creative choice."

The purpose of "Authorism" (or "Auteur Theory") is to look at films (possibly as part of a body of work or œuvre) from the perspective of the film director (most likely scenarist-director). It is self-limited in scope and in its object of study, by definition. It doesn't study ALL films, only those made with the implicit intention to create an œuvre (recurrent theme, trademark style, obsessions, original mise en scène). Not all films fit this criterion, especially not most early films. It is very selective by nature, not only in the titles studied but in the specific, narrow aspects of a larger production. So it seems OBVIOUS why the study of an industrial economical infrastructure like the "Hollywood system" is not part of the "auteur tradition", no? It's like blaming a biographer of Honoré de Balzac for not mentioning once the complete history of Gutenberg's movable type printing... Some academics study the infrastructure, other academics study the art. To each his own job. He said that as if the "auteur tradition" had the responsibility to write the TOTAL HISTORY of cinema (including non-auteurist productions), and failed. This said, I believe that in the 50ies, the so-called "auteur tradition" studied more seriously the "Hollywood system" than any American academics or critics, if only as a starting point for further investigations.
Second point : Isn't it a bit presumptuous for historians to base a comprehensive understanding of the average production of silent cinema on what amounts to 20% of leftovers from that period? About 80% of nitrate prints have been destroyed or lost! At this rate, it's more like archeology based on sparse fossils found in the soil by chance. Do you think we would KNOW about the cinema of the XXIst century if we only watched 20% of the current production? Oh wait, this is about as much of world production (including Hollywood production!) that is actually screened in commercial theatres in the USA...

"The prototypical cinephile piece in effect answers a question like this: “What distinctive qualities of this film can I detect, and how do they enhance our sense of its value?” The prototypical academic interpretation would be answering something like: “What aspects of the film are illuminated by my theoretical frame of reference?” I think, however, that we academics can make progress in understanding cinema if our questions are more specifically and self-consciously formulated." Academics vs. Critics. Never the twain shall meet: why can't cinephiles and academics just get along? David Bordwell (Film Comment, May 2011) 

"Film criticism lies at the centre of nearly all intellectual discourse about the cinema, and if we take criticism to be an effort to know particular movies more intimately, it probably deserves its prime place. But contemporary film criticism is failing. In academic venues, it mostly grinds Movie X through Theory Y, in the hope that somehow the exercise will yield political emancipation." Backpage: Against Insight David Bordwell (cinemascope, #26, 2006)

This sounds great. And then, when he reviews a minimalist, contemplative film he exemplifies himself the very shortcomings he criticizes Academia for : inadequately grinding random films through his classic theories of transitions with a film like What Time Is It There? (David Bordwell, The Hook: Scene Transitions in Classical Cinema, January 2008), or his classic theories of editing with a film like The Shaft (Three from Palm Springs, 16 Jan 2009), or his classic theories of staging for an undefined "slow cinema" (The Cross, David Bordwell, 1 June 2010) or his classic theories of suspense with a film like Le Quattro Volte (No suspense? David Bordwell, 11 April 2011; see my comment here), instead of adapting to what the specific stylistic of the film requires, and trying to understand what distinguishes classic narratives from minimalist narratives. What is the point of knowing so much about Cinema History if it's to treat recent films as if they had been made 70 years ago?

"Less obvious is the overlap between cinephile criticism and what I’d call middle-level research." David Bordwell (Film Comment, May 2011) 

More on "middle-level research" if you read his 1996 book :

"This 'middle-level' research asks questions that have both empirical and theoretical import. That is, and contrary to many expositors of Grand Theory, being empirical does not rule out being theoretical.
The most established realms of middle-level research have been empirical studies of filmmakers, genres, and national cinemas. [..]" Post Theory, reconstructing film studies (Carroll/Bordwell, 1996)

Hopeful parting thought:

"Academics have more elbow room to study how those qualities came into being, how they work together, and what roles they play historically and culturally. Academics can also contribute new ideas that critics on the front lines can try out. Readers who enjoy cinephile criticism should sample the academic work that stays close to the sensuous surface of a movie. Meanwhile, academics should recognize how cinephile criticism can alert us to the movie’s unique identity. Perceptive appreciation and analytical explanation can enhance one another."

Amen.

Related:

• Auteurist vs. cinephile (Dan Sallitt)
• Journalists vs Academics 
• Cinéma d'auteur blasé 
• Bordwell on cliché in criticism 
• Le quattro volte (English critics) 
• Slow films, easy life (Sight&Sound)
• Mandarins vs Philistines 2