Читать книгу The Matter of Vision - Peter Wyeth - Страница 14

The overall approach to Cinema that is proposed reverses the common route of moving from Nature to Culture, that is from Biology to (evolved) human Culture. Instead, it is suggested to ‘reverse engineer’ from the concrete cultural artefact that is Cinema, its archive, its history, its every moment formal and informal, to the biological base. For example, if we ask the question why does the eye follow movement in Cinema, the answer lies in tracing that fact back to its roots in the evolutionary history of the eye, going back many millions of years. The explanatory power of an evolutionary explanation is contained in that example – the reason the eye follows movement is biological in the evolutionary sense, and with a history of almost unimaginable antiquity.

The epistemological challenge of the reverse direction is that it would be practically impossible to imagine Cinema from the starting point of Nature. The detailed route that evolution took that arrived at the birth of the medium, let alone the Classic Hollywood Cinema in all its moments, is inevitably so complex as to almost defy human imagination. However, the reverse route is more capable of being traced as we start from the existence of Cinema and can unpick its history in terms of the logic of evolution. There is something in that approach of Bayesian inference, reasoning backwards to infer the hidden causes behind observations.³³ Beginning with the concrete facts of Cinema and working backwards is practical, where the reverse – imagining Cinema from the evolution of the Eye, for example – would be a virtually impossible task.