BOOKS
Explorations in Film Theory (1991)
The following is an extract of the introduction to the book Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from Cine-Tracts published in 1991.
CINE-TRACTS began in 1976 with a burst of creative and collective activity. The idea of starting a Canadian based film journal was largely the work of four people and in some respects CINE-TRACTS could not have been created without the bonds of friendship, the emotional, philosophical and ideological ties which are the foundation upon which projects like CINE-TRACTS are built. More than just a magazine CINE-TRACTS was a project because we originally saw the journal as a tool for political debate, a context where a community of scholars, filmmakers and students could engage in a praxis somewhat alien to Canadian cultural life.
This idea, this ideal of a place where the artificial divisions between intellectual and practical work could be redrawn was only realised in a marginal way not because of a lack of desire but because the fundamental changes which we envisioned could not be created within the context of a journal. In the beginning CINE-TRACTS provoked more incredulity than faith among the members of the film community in Canada. After its first two issues it was ostracized by filmmakers, rejected by most of the people teaching in colleges and universities and looked upon with disdain by other publishers. At the same time the journal exploded in the rest of the world. Subscriptions, enquiries and manuscripts came pouring in from the United States, England, Italy, Germany, Australia, India, etc.. This rather strict division in support lasted for the life of the magazine and though we tried to ‘locate’ ourselves more fully within the community we most wanted to address it quickly became clear that the politics of Canadian culture operated in a very different way from what we had expected. In an ironic parallel to the way in which the cinema operates we were most fully present as an absence in Canada. As much as we attempted to resist it we were slotted (by funding agencies for example and by other media who rarely if ever examined what we published either critically or in a supportive manner - in fact when the journal stopped publishing it was a British magazine, FRAMEWORK, which wrote an emotional article about our demise) into that tiny and peripheral spot most fully expressed by the word “theoretical.” As ‘theorists’ we were supposedly divorced from practice, in fact we were accused of perpetuating the very divisions which the magazine had been created to dispel.
This question, which still today haunts the teaching and creation of the cinema and television (in Canada and elsewhere), is perhaps the most artificial and politically suspect of debates and yet it remains tenaciously enshrined in the very curricula which should be disputing its premises. Many schools, all production houses, certainly most universities remain locked into a division between practical and theoretical and historical approaches to the mediums of film and television. Ironically, media professionals regard universities with distrust, rarely engage in debate, rarely believe that debate per se need be a serious part of their work. When they do get involved it is in the promotion and financing of schools where the ‘craft’ of filmmaking for example is taught from within the ‘bowels’ of the technology as if in some mysterious way the technology has transcended both its own history and the discourses which have enabled its practicioners to understand and use it. Universities and colleges share the same problems. There are an untold numbers of ‘practical’ courses now available to students. Their identity is dependent on their perceived difference from ‘theoretical’ or ‘historical’ courses. What is demeaned by these divisions is the discourse available to students with which to examine their own interests in the media, but what is undermined at a deeper level is the very notion of practice itself. It is as if the act of using a camera can be divorced from the user, since this kind of pedagogy relies on the mystification, if not the elision of discursive practices which underly the complex relationship between subjectivity and creativity.
Once CINE-TRACTS was identified as a ‘theoretical’ journal it was quickly accused of using a language which no one could understand and thus divorcing itself from the community. Symbolically it came to represent that division between theory and practice which the community itself was installing. I was astonished by the vitriol which was often directed our way, mostly by members of the Canadian film community. I was often taken aback by the lack of institutional and subscriber support in Canada. I still believe that it was of great value to struggle with these problems but what I didn’t realise was that the journal was fragmenting from the inside because of them. As the pressure increased, many of the core members of the editorial staff began to look for a different intellectual and discursive model for the magazine. Ironically when our subscriptions zoomed over the one thousand mark they questioned the direction of the journal more and more. As the journal became increasingly well known throughout the world, as between ten and fifteen manuscripts began arriving every month, as suggestions for issues poured in from everywhere but Canada the group running the magazine disintegrated. I mention this here because CINE-TRACTS was conceived as a collective and political activity and once the former disappeared the latter weakened as well. If we are to understand the extraordinary success of CINE-TRACTS we must also understand how the pressures on the journal and on its editors finally succeeded. Those pressures were enframed by a profound anti-intellectualism, by the divisions mentioned above, and by preconceptions as to what role a journal should play in the community from which it springs.
The following collection of essays brings together all of the strengths and reveals few of the weaknesses of CINE-TRACTS. History is present in the selection, represented by the obvious desire to both explore and articulate the conjuncture of politics and theory, the growing awareness of gender as a central issue, the profound influence of feminist thinking. History is absent because the process through which the journal decided on the publication of these articles cannot be rendered in anything but a skeletal form. The following remarks are somewhat personal which I feel is important, crucial. Hopefully EXPLORATIONS IN FILM THEORY adequately represents the legacy of CINE-TRACTS and also the legacy of one of the most important periods in the very recent history of the discipline of film studies. EXPLORATIONS IN FILM THEORY.
How Images Think
Throughout this book reference is made either directly or indirectly to debates about perception, mind, consciousness, and the role of images and culture in forming and shaping how humans interact with the world around them. As more knowledge is gained about the human mind, embodied and holistic, the role of culture and images has changed. Images are no longer just representations or interpreters of human actions. They have become central to every activity that connects humans to each other and to technology—mediators, progenitors, interfaces—as much reference points for information and knowledge as visualizations of human creativity. However, the relationship between human beings and the cultural artifacts they use and create is by no means direct or transparent. Human consciousness is not passive or simply a product of the cultural, social, or political context within which humans live and struggle. Although the cognitive sciences have dreamed of developing a clearer picture of how the mind operates and although there have been tremendous advances in understanding human thought, the human mind remains not only difficult to understand but relatively opaque in the information that can be gathered from it (Searle 1998, 83). Notwithstanding numerous efforts to “picture” and “decode” the ways in which the mind operates, profound questions remain about the relationships among mind, body, and brain and how all of the elements of consciousness interact with a variety of cultural and social environments and artifacts. How Images Think explores the rich intersections of image creation, production,and communication within this context of debate about the mind and humaconsciousness.
In addition, the book examines cultural discourses about images and the impact of the digital revolution on the use of images in the communications process. The digital revolution is altering the fabric of research and practice in the sciences, arts, and engineering and challenging many conventional wisdoms about the seemingly transparent relationships between images and meaning, mind and thought, as well as culture and identity. At the same time, a complex cultural and biological topology is being drawn of consciousness in order to illuminate and illustrate mental processes. I labor under no illusions that this topology will solve centuries of debate and discussion about how and why humans think and act. I do, however, make the point that images are a central feature of the many conundrums researchers have encountered in their examination of mind and body. One example of the centrality of images to the debate about human consciousness has been the appearance of increasingly sophisticated imaging and scanning technologies that try to “picture” the brain’s operations. The results of research in this area have been impressive, and the impact on the cultural view of the brain has been enormous.
In general, this research has led to a more profound understanding of the rich complexity of the brain’s operations. Since I am not a specialist in these disciplines, I do not comment in detail on the medical or scientific claims that have been made about the usefulness of the research. My main concern is the role played by images as the output of scanning procedures and the many different ways in which those images are appropriated and used. The use of scanned images is one of many indicators of the significant role played by image-worlds in sustaining research across the sciences. For better or worse, depending on the perspectives one holds and the research bias one has, images are the raw material of scanning technologies like Magnetic Resonance Imagings (MRIs). In other words, the brain is visualized at a topological level, mapped according to various levels of excitation of a chemical and electrical nature, and researched and treated through the knowledge gained. MRI technology captures the molecular structure of human tissue, which produces enough of a magnetic charge to allow the signals to be reassembled into images. This is primarily a biological model and leaves many questions unanswered about mind, thought, and relationships between perception and thinking. In particular, the issues of how images are used to explain biological processes needs to be framed by cultural argument and cultural criticism.
These lacunae would not be an issue except that the use of images entails far more than the transparent relationship of scanning to results would suggest. The biological metaphors at work make it appear as if the interpretation of scanning results were similar to looking at a wound or a suture. The effort is to create as much transparency as possible between the scans and their interpretation. But, as with any of the issues that are normally raised about interpretive processes, it is important to ask questions about the use of images for these purposes from a variety of perspectives, including, and most important, a cultural one.
The use of scanning technologies does not happen in a vacuum. Scientists spend a great deal of time cross-referencing their work and checking the interpretations that they make. (Many issues about image quality arise in the scanning process. These include, contrast, resolution, noise, and distortion. Any one of these elements can change the relationship between images and diagnosis.) The central issue for me is how to transfer the vast knowledge that has been gained from the study of images in a variety of disciplines, from cultural studies to communications, into disciplines like medicine, computer sciences and engineering, which have been central to the invention and use of scanning technologies.
In the same vein, how can the insights of the neurosciences be brought to bear in a substantial fashion on the research being pursued by cultural analysts, philosophers, and psychologists (Beaulieu 2002)? If, as I often mention in How Images Think, interpretations about the impact of technologies on humans flow from reductive notions of mind and thought, it is largely because I believe that consciousness cannot solely be understood in an empirical fashion. Even though a great deal of work has been published by writers such as
John Searle, Jerry Fodor, and Noam Chomsky on the relationships of mind to thought, as well as on the infusion of biological metaphors into speculation about thinking and perception, many of their insights do not cross the boundaries into the sciences (Searle 1998, 1992; Fodor 2000; Chomsky 2000). This is a matter of disciplinary boundaries and the silos that exist between different research pursuits. It would not necessarily be a problem were it not for the manner in which some perspectives actually filter through and others don’t. I am an advocate of interdisciplinary studies and research. As someone who has studied the many ways in which images operate as information, objects for interpretation, sites for empathy and creativity, and windows onto the world, I feel that there is a need to infuse image analysis with as many perspectives as possible (Burnett 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1999). Interdisciplinarity is very much about crossing boundaries, but it is also about rigor within disciplines themselves. It is the application of that rigor across disciplines that interests me and is a constant subtheme of this book (Latour 1999).
Cultures of Vision
Often, to speak of photographic images, is to say, “there was my mother,” or “I looked beautiful as a child.” The plasticity and the physicality of the image collapses. Distinctions between memory and sight and photographic print temporarily melt into each other. This entanglement is cultural and is also representative of a history (histories) of desire, a history which links the invention of photography to the legitimation of the image as a tool of communication and which prioritizes directness, the explicit, the transparent, as formless expressions of truth. This is also one of the roots of the nostalgia which haunts relations between family imagery, photography and memory. As the plasticity of the photograph recedes into the background its transitory nature becomes more and more important. It takes an act of will to keep all of these connections from simply splaying off into many different directions. Because of this photographs are always in transition and at the same time they are held in tow — this process, this tension is partly the result of the manner in which photographs come from the past but must be converted into the present. There is an artifice to this activity which transforms the plasticity of the photographic image into a representation which need have little connection to the original experience from which the photograph has been drawn.
David Freedberg has commented upon the longstanding belief in the power of the image to both inspire and pervert (as if without form). Thus, well before the invention of photography the image played a paradoxical role, as information, as an icon of worship and as a vehicle for the imagination. This history was most poignantly played out in what Freedberg describes as the tavoletta . “What comfort could anyone conceivably offer to a man condemned to death, in the moments prior to his execution? Any word or action would seem futile, and it would be as nought beside the inner resources or human weakness of the condemned person. But in Italy between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, brotherhoods were set up to offer a kind of solace; and the instruments of consolation were small painted images. […] Each tavoletta was painted on both sides. On one side was a scene from the Passion of Christ; on the other side, a martyrdom that was more or less relevant to the punishment to be meted out to the prisoner. This martyrdom the brothers would ‘relate’ in some inspirational way to the actual plight of the prisoner as they comforted him in his cell or prison chapel during the night before his morning execution. On the next day, two members of the brotherhood would hold one of the pictures before the condemned man’s face all the way to the place of execution.”[1] It is thus crucial to think about the attribution of “a transparent effect” to photography through a general cultural history of images. Photography may have appeared as a new technology during a significant moment of the industrial revolution, but the insertion of photography into the history of images must be examined within the carefully defined parameters of its relationship to painting, for example. The shift in mediums did not necessarily change the assumptions governing the use and interpretation of images. The move into photography added the technology to the cultural spheres of influence which were already in place. The dynamics of the movement from painting to photography may have enhanced the attribution of power to the photograph (though this was not the case in the first instance) but this power could not have been proposed without the firm yet often contradictory beliefs and suspicions which had always surrounded images.
Although there is also the history of art photography, modernist and postmodernist, which tries to foreground itself as aesthetic practice (e.g., photomontage) and thus reveal its plasticity, these are creative engagements which see themselves framed through an oppositional struggle with culturally dominant conceptions of the image. The problem is that these dominant conceptions are grounded in discursive practices which link language and sight as if the two processes are not always and inevitably contesting each other, as if, although inextricably bound, they are not also the site of ambiguity and confusion. There may be no better time than now (with virtual technologies inching closer to realisation) to rethink what we mean by pictures when we talk about them and what we are capable of saying about the pictures we create. One of my aims then, is to discuss strategies for renaming and redescribing (thus reinterpreting), not only the pictures themselves, but circular processes of interaction, the relationships between images, thought and subjectivity.
Images function within the constraints of space and time and are bound to memory. Memory(s) doesn’t operate within the restrictions of digitalized time, just as consciousness displays no immediate temporal reflection of what we say when we talk about (it). What we describe as that place within the human psyche — the inner — is a mixture of sensations, feelings, thoughts, desires, abstractions, all of which can be isolated by language into discrete units, none of which can be described in isolation of the other. It is this symbiosis (and the organicity which underlies it) which links experience with learning but which makes the translation between experience and learning neither solely dependent on language nor somehow outside of the linguistic, neither of the image nor beyond it.
The “outside” of language has always been described as imagistic. In poetry for example, words combine to produce an image, though this is clearly an idea of image, which must be translated into prose in order to make sense. Obviously the idea has no firm location in space. It is made tangible through language, yet it feels as if it has come from somewhere else. This is often the feeling which I get when reading the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop or T.S. Eliot. I locate my feelings in what I say about what they have said, yet the process itself exceeds the parameters of language, their’s and mine. This excess repeats itself with images which are never fully present through the language of description and interpretation — the boundaries of the image dissolve in the face of what is said about them. There is a wonderful unpredictability here which overwhelms the specificity of what I say (the desire to point to a picture and transparently link meaning and language), which potentially transforms every encounter between images and myself into a novel situation. How then do we learn to deal with this endless reiteration of the new? Is this what encourages us to learn and unlearn the lessons brought to us by what we watch? Or must we find a dramatically different way of describing viewing and spectatorship?
A balance has to be struck here between the way in which we model the mind in language (usually through such words as reflection and representation) and a recognition of the complexity of consciousness. Any effort to somehow reduce this complexity because it will be easier to unpack the often contradictory relationships which we have with images (seduction and rejection), simplifies if not elides the interactive processes through which we categorize and organize our experience(s) of the visual. Of course the cognitive figures in here as one element in the perceptual, one of many stresses and strains between the operations of consciousness and our interpretation of the results. So varied and interactive are the interconnected strategies which we use to make sense of what we see, that it is no wonder the perceptual is drowned out in a chorus of words. But to see an object for example, does not mean that its “name” or its properties have simply been translated from vision to language. It is precisely this relationship which has to be made, brought into a coherent structure through which the sensuous, that which is “felt,” can be labeled, even if it is described as a “sight.” Linguistic categories are a necessary and integral component of this, but they are not the objects per se. Neither are they representations in the fixed sense of signifier-signified relations. The simple duality of object and sight falls apart here as do all the other binary formulae which transform vision into a function of the perceptual or the linguistic.
The dualism of viewer and image is one of the problems because it forces us to look in often oppositional and divisive terms at a staggered process. It locates the image outside of consciousness and understanding as a product of the relationship between image and thought. It suggests a movement in stages across a horizontal axis towards the visual, towards that which can be understood developmentally, as if consciousness is itself some sort of computational network within which there are connections soldered together by experience. The irony is that we know so little about how or even why our minds are capable of creatively engaging with so many different, sometimes recognizable and sometimes unrecognizable processes. We may need the dualism to make sense of sight and to confirm to ourselves that our minds are not the centre of the universe, but we cannot continue to experiment with cognition as if it can be packaged into neatly constructed modules within which learning, vision and language are essentially treated as homologous, parts organized into a puzzle, the whole already known well before the process has begun.
[1] David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp 5-6.