Читать книгу A Companion to Motion Pictures and Public Value - Группа авторов - Страница 47

As mentioned above, our two objections to mediated appreciation are not simply misconceived. They have, however, been exaggerated. With respect to the Poverty of Representation objection, for instance, it may be pointed out that the objection garners much of its force from the idea that nature must be understood as an environment. But while an environment may be the subject of a representation of nature, so too may natural objects; indeed natural objects form the primary subject matter in genres such as wildlife painting and wildlife photography.¹³ It is by no means clear that representations of objects are so inherently impoverished as to fail miserably in appreciative aptness. Wildlife painting and photography present us with the shape, size, and color of an organism, and can be suggestive of its movement and demeanor. Film representations greatly expand the properties of an animal that can be presented, encompassing sound and movement. The important point is that, when it comes to natural objects, the limitations of representational media vary greatly, so focusing only on particular media provides a distorted picture, one we can correct by considering a broader range of art forms and media, particularly film.

The importance of film becomes more apparent when we consider attempts to represent an environment, as opposed to an object. Here appreciative aptness is harder to achieve, given that environments have distinct properties related to the experience of moving through the environment, being enveloped by it, and so on. But one of the distinctive features of film is surely its capacity to convey precisely these sorts of spatial properties. To be sure, watching a film where the camera moves through, and is surrounded by, a certain environment is not the same as moving through and being surrounded by that environment. Also, how exactly we relate perceptually to the space depicted on screen is a large issue for philosophy of film and perception. Yet, it seems clear that cinematic representations can be appreciatively apt with respect to at least some of the immersive spatial features of the environments they depict.

That said, there are certain features of environments and objects that even film will be unable to capture: the smells an object offers, for instance, or the tactile sensations involved in being located within an environment. Perhaps only some kind of science fiction style virtual reality simulation could capture such features (as imagined, for example, by Danto 2004). But even in these cases, there is surely a role for imagination in filling out some of the features of environments that our representations are unable to capture. I can’t feel the pressure of the water against my skin as I watch underwater footage, but I can certainly imagine, based on my own experience, how that aspect of the environment would present itself.

Some philosophers have considered the role of imagination with regard to the aesthetics of nature, but have done so, as usual, in relation to our direct experience of the environment. Emily Brady, for example, offers a rich account of ways in which imagination can inform experience of our natural surroundings: by allowing us to visualize the temporally distant origins and history of natural things; by allowing us to experience an imaginative kind of “seeing in” (as when we see a gnarled tree as a wrinkled, old face); by allowing us to imaginatively take on the perspectives of natural things, and so on (Brady 2003). If these imaginative acts are a legitimate way for us to expand our direct experience of nature, they may also play a role in expanding experience mediated through film. Such a role for imagination, combined with the expanded representational possibilities of film, casts worries about the impoverishment of mediated representation of nature in quite a different light.¹⁴