Читать книгу The Matter of Vision - Peter Wyeth - Страница 29

i

Cinema is nature

Cinema is a matter of Vision

Vision is a matter of Emotion

Emotion is a matter of survival

Survival is a matter of nature

Nature becomes Culture in cinema

Cinema is nature

Nature becomes culture

Cinema is culture⁷⁸.

ii

Movement I.

Cinema is moving images

Movement is fundamental to existence

Movement of a predator.

Life is movement

Death is no movement.

Vision captures movement.

Evolution favoured Vision

The eye is the first sense.

We follow the hero

As we follow the predator

A matter of life and death.

iii

Movement II.

Cinema is Emotion

Classical Hollywood made Emotion visible

The movement of Emotion became visible⁷⁹.

We follow Emotional movement on the screen.

The fortunes of the hero/ine carry our attention

We watch their fate as it were our own.

iv

Movement III.

Movement attracts Emotion

Movement generates Emotion

Movement creates Emotion.

We are moved.

Movement of the hero across the frame

extended in time and space

by metaphorical movement

of emotions around him.

We care about the fate of the hero

Only because we care about our own.

The mechanism of Cinema

arouses the same processes

In the human brain

We follow the fate of the heroine

New information all the time

Adds to our knowledge about her.

Stars suspend a negative conclusion

Even when the hero is a baddie

(Hitchcock’s Uncle Charlie⁸⁰)

The trajectory of the fate of the hero attracts us

As our own fate at the hands of a predator.

The graph of his rise and fall

attracts our attention

as he stands in for us.

Like and dislike

Love and hate.

Life and death.

An unbroken continuum.

Cinema is Emotion in motion.

v.

Empathy I

The brain and the body are one⁸¹

Our brains inhabit the bodies of others

Our brains imitate the Emotions of others

Imitation is the mode of attachment to another.⁸²

We see more than we know

We cannot avoid knowing the mind of another None conscious, all Automatic

opposite to the wisdom of philosophers.

A hero in jeopardy puts us in jeopardy

Emotional identification/intuitive harmonisation⁸³

We become the hero

sharing what s/he feels.

Light from the dark

Illumination.

vi

Empathy II

The fate of the hero.

Ninety minutes

to watch a predator.

A short time

When life is at stake.

Cinema adds to our fascination with movement

fascination with the fate of the hero

Our own fate at the hands of the predator

is turned into a fascination

with the fate of the hero

Involving the same emotions

transferred from ourselves

To her or him

On the screen.

vii

Cinema dramatises Vision

The quality of Vision exceeds our view

Everything we know

we know from Vision

We see more than we know

(than we are aware)

Cinema taps into this power

and intensifies it.

Cinema dramatises Vision.

Emotion keeps our eyes on the hero/ine.

But of what we learn

we Know only a fraction

The iceberg effect

The realm of the Automatic.

To bring the Automatic to light

Is a matter for experiment⁸⁴.

viii

A film is not a text

A film is not a piece of literature

Non-sense⁸⁵ to refer to a film as a text.

Only under the hegemony of Logocentrism

does such reduction make sense.

Cinema is not structured like a language

Cinema is structured like the brain⁸⁶.

ix

Historicism:

Classical Hollywood

from Stagecoach (1939) to Marnie (1964).

Defining characteristic of ‘Classical’ Cinema

It made emotion visible.

In Mildred Pierce I know where I am. I feel that I know the emotional status of the heroine.

I am shown how she feels. Not ‘literally’ through the actor’s anguished facial expression. But dramatically: the narrative sets up dramatic situations which force to me to project onto her ambivalent expression her emotional status

Kuleshov – as understood by Hitchcock:

We see a character’s action

We see another character watching that action

And that character’s reaction to it.

The reaction expresses a particular reaction

Not the only one possible

But one to guide us in the labyrinth of possible meanings.

The crying baby

The sad man

The crying baby

The laughing man

The sad baby

The sinister man

The sad baby

The syllogism looking/looked at/reaction figure

ignites the narrative movement

Add to this sound and

a character never says what s/he means

Dialogue is a game of chess

Not a telling of the story.

Bogart tells Ingrid he hates her

But we know he loves her.

Cinema!

x

Film Theory

The eye evolved to track motion

We follow motion because of survival

Emotion arises from survival

The arc of a film

is the trace of Emotion

The brain follows Emotion

as the eye follows motion

(Neither are conscious)

We cannot avoid empathy

(Neither is that conscious)

The body/brain shadows the hero

we go through what s/he goes through

(Shared Circuits)

The brain connects diverse stimuli

to survive.

It is not a question of reality

but of representation.

The least unlikely explanation

for the co-presence of the various stimuli.

A story

is making the best of what we see.

Narrative is the native mode of the brain.

The Classic Hollywood Cinema

created a perfect engine of meaning

The Ideal Narrative

Each scene changes

the emotional status of the hero

Cinema is change

as life is change

The ideal script

has one change after another

scene after scene

Marnie.

From Culture to nature

reverse-engineering Cinema

Cultural evolution

(after Darwin)

from nature to culture

A science of culture

The Logic of Nature

The logic of culture

Cinema

51Karl Kraus, Werke, Vol III, p. 161.

52The emphasis is on modern societies

53It is an important distinction that it is not LCR themselves, but their ‘ideologies’ that are the issue.

54All the (externally oriented) functions of the brain are movements (of blood, electrical synaptic connections etc), that are the substance, as it were, of Emotion.

55in the sense of created through evolution.

56Emotion is an effect whose cause is the external world, external to the body, a response to the threat of a predator – or the opportunity to be that predator.

57A useful distinction between the Automatic and the non-conscious could be with the autonomic nervous system as the latter – perhaps internal regulation v external orientation as a boundary, with the Automatic more externally-oriented.

58The area outside consciousness is the major part of the brain. Consciousness is the minor part, an effect of the major part.

59The raw figures are from Information Science in the 1950s. For caveats, see Consciousness in Commentaries.

60Vision responds quickly to threats and opportunities - which create emotional responses.

61We have only representations in our brains, as against the idea of a real world that we can perceive as a whole.

62Joyce’s famous phrase, followed by the less-known follow-up, which might be interpreted as thought occurs in Vision.

63Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, Vintage, New York, 2000. p.188.

64Language, in common with everything human, evolved only for survival. Sound as survival alarm, as with Vision, suggests that concern over the sighting of a possible predator would use the help of sound over distance to warn others.

65Of the LCR trio, Consciousness is particularly about its image rather than its reality, see Commentaries discussion.

66Consciousness is suggested here as an epiphenomen of brain function, rather than strictly a causal agent in itself. Part of a chain of causation and therefore with a causal role, but a contingent rather than autonomous one.

67Although this is my view, I have had conversations with well-known neuroscientists who I was surprised to find took the same view.

68I tend to this view, although the interconnectedness of the pair makes it a difficult call.

69That is an effect of the operations of the brain.

70Again this is suggesting that the role of consciousness is less active than we assume, more on the receiving end.

71That is to say the brain creates Emotion as a sign of a survival-threat contained in information perceived.

72The notion here is that the brain utilises the resources of consciousness for the primary aim of avoiding threats to survival.

73Dietrich Trinker, Aufhahme, Speicherung und Verarbeitung von Information durch den Menschen, Veroffentlchungen der Schleswig-Holsteinischen Universitatsgesellschaft, Neu Foge, nr 44 (Kiel: Verlag Ferdinand Hort, 1966), p. 11. quoted in Norretranders op. cit. p. 126.

74David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739.

75see Damasio, The Feeling of What happens, Vintage, New York, 2000, pp. 188, 198.

76Emotion – blood flow, synaptic connection etc – is movement – a form of drive in that it ends by producing physical movement in our muscles and limbs, but also psychological, producing thought as part of processing Vision. But Emotion is also an effect whose cause is the external world, external to the body, a response to the threat of a predator – or the opportunity to be that predator.

77Said to be an average for conversation, with an effective maximum of 45 bps in silent reading. Norretranders op. cit.

78Cinema is a development of Culture. Everything in Culture evolves from Nature, therefore Cinema is Nature. Culture here means evolution exaptated from genetic to cultural evolution. It is salient to be reminded of the lineage.

79See Cinema section for more discussion. I would see that as a major achievement, largely unrecorded.

80In Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

81automatically aping them.

82see Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain, op. cit. Keysers discovered Shared Circuits, which move empathy from the physical, as in Mirror Neurons, to the emotional, a crucial discovery in terms of the themes here.

83A phrase from McGilchrist that echoes Christian Keysers’ themes (McGilchrist Ch 3, p. 122. op. cit.)

84The design of experiments to recover what enters the audience’s mind outside consciousness would be a key task for an ANB approach to Cinema.

85cf. Wittgenstein’s attitude to what does not make sense.

86see Cinema section for discussion of the eye, narrative and empathy in this context.