Читать книгу The Matter of Vision - Peter Wyeth - Страница 23

Cinema is, in a word, Emotion. Since its inception, analysis of Cinema has been reduced to the word. The restoration of Vision is necessary for a proper understanding of Cinema. Cinema is a Matter of Vision.

Vision, the Automatic and Emotion complement our understanding of the world as they enhance our understanding of the brain, and can transcend the limitations that the ideologies of Language, Consciousness and Reason have imposed. The laboratory in which these conceptions can be tested is a complex cultural artefact whose paths to nature can be traced – Cinema.

In bringing science to bear upon art a route may be glimpsed that overcomes the gap between Art and Science. The two cultures become one. Art can only be fully understood through science.

Where the word inevitably reduces art, science has the potential to reveal its real complexity. For example, neuroscientists have found parallels between brain function and expressive techniques like metaphor and narrative.⁴⁹ Where science was once an unwieldy tool to unlock the subtleties of art, progress in neurobiology – and in particular the inclusion of Emotion within scientific method – has transformed its potential for a reach far deeper and fundamentally more intelligent⁵⁰ than the word.

An expansive materialism is in sight that can offer a deeper analysis of a work of art than anything that has gone before. Scientific method, revolutionised by the inclusion of Emotion in neuroscience, twinned with evolutionary biology, forms the basis of a potential Science of Culture. That notion of culture is itself biological, founded on the twin pillars of survival and reproduction, the basis of evolution, the Logic of Nature.