Читать книгу The Matter of Vision - Peter Wyeth - Страница 5

There is a covert war raging in our culture, a secret hidden even from its most committed warriors, and for whom this conflict is so deep in their psyches that it is unconscious. If their allegiance is challenged they react with ferocity, utter conviction and total disparagement towards the enemy. These are ideal soldiers in any war, largely unaware of their dedication to the cause, virtually automatons unable to question it.

Such a war exists and furthermore is at the heart of our culture. No one is unaffected by it, every single person strides its battlefields every day of their lives. No one dies in this war, it is after all a cultural war, but its effects go so deep and so far back in time as to dwarf human history. You are a victim of this war and you have been so all your life, but you will very probably be unaware of it. Most wars have their -isms, such as National-ism or Imperial-ism, and this war has its own-ism too, Logocentrism, the war of the Word against Vision.

Logocentrism, in the sense it has here, places a greatly exaggerated value on the Word, creating a status for it far above its real capacities, glorifying it whilst at the same time viciously denigrating potential opponents, in particular its oldest adversary, Vision. Logocentrism places the Word at the centre of culture and attributes magical powers to it. It is almost unheard of for a voice to be raised in opposition to its universal rule, so pervasive is its influence. This project at last raises the standard for its most noble and ancient opponent, Vision. The day is near when Vision will be restored to its pre-eminence. I see therefore I am.

This book started from a couple of ideas, hunches might be a better word. The first is that Vision is much more powerful than we realise. The second is that the vast majority of information we take in from a film is absorbed unconsciously.

I came to both ideas in the course of making films. The notion of the power of Vision came partly from the sense of how much information there is in a film, and the feeling that most people are not aware of most of it. We rather take films rather for granted and that increasingly seemed to me an odd and striking injustice. The sentiment is usually accompanied by a casual disregard for the monumental achievements of Cinema in the face of a really rather intractable medium, all too often while simultaneously bowing down before what I would contend are the scant resources of the Word, in the assumption that it is by far the superior medium. I became convinced that was a myth, and that in fact Cinema wielded such power without apparent effort that it was both ironically invisible and hugely underrated, even among those one might think would know its riches. People I came across who made their living from Cinema, as well as critics and theorists, including most film-makers, seemed to share this largely unconscious assumption that Cinema might be fun, might on occasion achieve distinction, but compared to the masterly Word it was a mere trifle.

I could see no one, anywhere, giving the credit to Vision and Cinema that was their due. That was a strange position to be in. After all, it was only a hunch, and against it was ranged not just the expected adversaries but also the considered views of most potential natural allies. Apart from the odd drunken conversation with directors of vaguely similar persuasions in dark corners of film festivals, snatches of suppressed thoughts rather than fully-expressed ideas, there was nothing. Not even the most fervent Cineastes seemed to take their partisanship further than the idea that a number of directors had achieved works of art despite the pressures of crass commercialism, particularly in Hollywood. Even the radical claim that the best of Hollywood was vastly superior to the best of European Art Cinema, pleasingly offensive though it was to many sensitive minds, stopped short of claiming superiority for Cinema to the traditional arts. Film Theorists, even where they shared a love of Cinema, by no means the majority, were so wrapped up in the Word as to be barely aware of Vision, except where it was almost certainly a bad thing, the guilty Look. This was not a healthy position to be in. It suggested either the whole world was wrong, or I was – like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca for the waters – misinformed. Naturally, I resented the implication, even from myself, and it seemed wise to keep the idea under wraps in a climate of wholehearted repression. However, going against the grain was too attractive an idea to surrender.

I had one further instinct that seemed to be on my side of this great and cavernous divide. When we meet people for the first time we tend to make up our minds about them rather quickly, in a matter of seconds, perhaps even fractions of seconds. It occurred to me that there must be a huge amount of processing going on of various kinds to reach such a judgement in so short a time. The downside is that we sometimes get it wrong and are forced to revise our opinions as we learn more about a person, but in the main first impressions stick. Those impressions, it seemed to me, must have an awful lot of information being assessed to arrive at them – and in such a short time. That process is very largely, I reasoned, a visual one. We are used to the idea these days that ‘body-language‘ tells us a lot about a person, and that we interpret that material both quickly and decisively. It also seemed to me that this process was largely unconscious, as both the speed and volume of information involved could only possibly appear fragmentarily in consciousness. Such thinking would lead me towards Science to discover what evidence existed, and that is the story of this book.

Another realisation that set off this study was that in a culture where the ideology of the Word dominates we have no experience of articulating visually, and that extends to those for whom we might assume it to be second-nature. Working with third-year students at a film-school in London developing their graduation film-projects, I asked one group to sketch out a scene portraying jealousy. They were initially stumped but then immediately fell back on devising dialogue. These were very good final-year students on a highly-competitive course attracting up to a thousand applicants for around forty places. Yet their first reaction to visualising a scene was to resort to dialogue. That experience was anything but unique, in fact to find the opposite was highly unusual. These were bright students, keen to make their graduation films as cinematic as possible, yet their whole cultural formation had not equipped them to articulate visually. We had students from around the world, Japan and Norway, Turkey and Columbia, Spain and Germany, so this was not merely a local problem of the land of Shakespeare. When they were banned from dialogue, with a little prodding here and there, they would soon get into shifting their brains into the mode for thinking visually. It was not an insuperable problem, it didn’t require radically new skills, just the exercise of a mode that existed in their heads but had hardly been consciously exercised their whole lives, a whole continent, a galaxy awaiting exploration.

It was fascinating to watch their brains tick over, searching for the mode that was required in the absence of dialogue to visually express jealousy. Very soon they began to imagine how a man and a woman might stand, facing each other, perhaps facing slightly away from each other. The jealous person might hold themselves differently, their shoulders could be tense, hunched up. Perhaps the others would avoid eye contact if they felt guilty, or look challengingly if they felt the jealousy was unfounded. You could see a whole world of possibilities whirring around in their heads and coming out in suggestions between each other, negotiating the visual, the emotions, forming the drama visually, seeing it in the characters’ physical stances and behaviour.

It was like clicking a switch. With a simple shift of thinking, instead of resorting to Language it is quite possible to think visually in terms of emotion and its expression. Only a small shift, but showing how we are conditioned to turn to language, yet have the channels of thinking visually easily available, as it were next door. There is a price to Logocentrism, a whole world of thinking differently that it seems to exclude, and exclude forcibly.

Film-making has a lot to do with presenting information in such a way that the audience takes it in – in the right order and at the right time. If the film-maker misses out an important link in the chain, the audience will start to get lost straight away. The result tends to be that the film-maker sets out to cover all the bases, so that the audience has all the information it needs to follow the story. Experience soon tells you that a lot of that information is missed or not recalled, some by some people, some by others. However, I began to think that in fact audiences take in a lot more information than they realise. In other words, a lot of the information that goes in does so unconsciously, just as it does when we meet a new person for the first time.

As a sort of experiment to test those ideas I once took the rather risky strategy of teaching a single film to a class of fine-art and graphics students for a whole term as their introduction to Cinema. I was a little nervous at taking the chance, because if I was proved wrong the students would soon get bored and I would have done them – and Cinema – no favours. When I told the students we would be spending a whole term studying a John Wayne Western from the 1950s, the sense of anticipation was negligible. The film was The Searchers. The title-card, a painting of a brick wall, accompanied by what today sounds like a corny cowboy song did not augur well for my bold experiment. As we began to look closely at every element of the film and spot the details, the atmosphere changed. The students were surprised that, through a broadly Socratic method in which they were repeatedly questioned about what they were seeing, they were discovering that there was far more to this film than they had assumed and that they had seen far more than they realised. Each session began with a student presentation and a few weeks in the fine-art student who had been among the most sceptical and a leader of opinion among the group made his presentation, in which he declared that John Ford was a genius. I was delighted and relieved. The experiment had paid off. I learned a lot myself, in fact I was probably the greatest beneficiary as, despite making and analysing films full-time, I had not realised the depth that a film I thought I knew well contained.

Some years later I did something similar on Psycho, and again the same sense came across that there was so much information, and what has been called ‘exformation’¹, the material discarded in the process of creating something, in this case perhaps with regard to the finessing of the screenplay, elaborating back-story for the characters. The overall sense was what Freud called, in relation to the unconscious, the iceberg-effect. Ninety-percent or more of the ‘hidden-history’ around the characters and the story is either invisible or only hinted at, but in this case the fact that it existed in some way and at some time in the process gave a feeling of immense solidity to the film. It is fairly well-known that Hitchcock would spend a lot of time and money on preparation of the screenplay for his films, spending $225,000 on Marnie, for example, a substantial investment in 1963, and my modest work on Psycho began to reveal to me the depths of story that investment of time and money had facilitated.

That feeling of solidity was even more marked when I happened to see a presentation of Vertigo as part of a gallery installation. I chanced upon the scene where the recreated Judy emerges from the bathroom in the hotel room, surrounded by a green glow. The feeling I had watching it on a small screen in a warehouse-gallery setting was that the scene was carved from rock. Somehow there was nothing arbitrary about it, it felt as though no element in the scene could have been any other way. It somehow communicated a feeling that it was perfectly constructed, an immovable depth to it that defied the fragility of film-making as a craft.

In the course of making films I had learned that the most unlikely instincts, and without exception, turn out to be the most valuable. In this case it gave further support to the feeling that films contain more information than we are aware of, but also that when they are built with great skill they can realise the potential of the medium in such a way that they give a glimpse of the immanent depths of which it is capable.

That feeling was extended in relation to Classic Hollywood Cinema where, in certain films, I felt that you knew ‘where you were’ much more clearly, knew what was going on, what the film was about, what was at stake. A prime example was Mildred Pierce, a Hollywood film-noir of 1945. The odd thing was not so much the comfort of knowing what the story was about, but a feeling that you knew the emotions that Mildred, played by Joan Crawford, was going through. It struck me forcibly that the heart of the Classic Hollywood period was what Sam Fuller said in Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, that Cinema is, in a word, Emotion. What a film like Mildred Pierce succeeded in doing was somehow to make emotion visible. It was not a question of dialogue but of being able somehow to see what emotions were at stake and absorb that information in the course of the story.

Looking at Hollywood films from earlier in the sound period, they generally lacked that lightness of touch, that sureness in guiding the audience, but things seemed to change, not in a formal sense, but perhaps in the confidence and experience with which film-makers applied the formal paradigm that was already in place by around 1930. That ability to ‘know where you are’ is no mean achievement, as I had learned from numerous errors making films myself. We tend to take it for granted that a story will be reasonably clear in Cinema today, but the work by generations of film-makers, by which I mean to include screenwriters, directors of photography, editors and hands-on producers as well as directors, was a gradual improvement of firstly technique and then its use, to tame the recalcitrant medium of moving-pictures in the cause of narrative clarity. I had a sense that around 1939, often described as a landmark year for Hollywood releases, the skills had been honed to the degree that a film like Mildred Pierce feels distinctly modern, where films from the early 30s usually feel stagey and static, only partly due to the limitations of sound-recording technology in the early years of sound.

This is all informal and subjective, but experience gained in film-making has time and again suggested to me that informal knowledge, often unspoken and ‘tacit’, of the kind wordlessly or incoherently passed between an editor and a director in the cutting-room, is considerably more valuable than the more formal kinds of knowledge that we associate with the Academy. However splendid and irreplaceable instinct may be as a place to start, it was however only a starting-point. The story of this project is my setting out from there to see where I might find evidence one way or the other to test those instincts. Film Theory² had an almost lordly disregard for the visual, so unconsciously in league was it with the Word. I was quite lost as where to start with the ideas that I was then familiar with from those brave and exciting days of the mid 1970s, when the new approaches from France poured in to the staid English scene. They had nothing to say about Vision, as though it did not exist, and indeed for them effectively it did not. It seems to me now a perverse impasse that we gave over Cinema to what were in effect its natural enemies, but as a result I found myself in a dead end.

The only place I found the kind of evidence that made sense to me was far from the arts and humanities, in Biology and Neuroscience. That was both unexpected and a major challenge, not least as the matter of the interpretation of experimental results immediately crosses over into the territory of philosophy. I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher and therefore the only sensible approach to the ideas put forward below was to try to keep close to my background in film-making. My limited knowledge of both science and philosophy makes the propositions in this book necessarily tentative, although they have crossed over deep into those territories. My reading of the literature in those sallies forth suggested a range of connections between contemporary neurobiology and Cinema, and it is a sense of the significance of those connections that prompted a Theory of Film based upon them. The ambition of previous generations has often been to bring the discipline of science to bear upon Cinema, but it can be argued that it is perhaps only at this point in the development of neuroscience that one may arguably see beyond generalities to sense a number of profound connections between the way the brain works and the way we respond to Cinema. Those connections potentially form a foundation so much deeper than Language as to reduce any of the traditional parallels between that relatively recent evolutionary arrival and Cinema largely redundant.

This project proposes the notion of using Language to serve Vision rather than its current approach of disregarding and relegating it to a minor role. That would be a new role for Language, but both an eminently possible and valuable one. Language derives many words from Vision and, as with my students learning to think visually, it is as simple a shift as the use of words to attempt to adequately describe the multiple dimensions and richness of a visual scene instead of using words as a shorthand symbol – the comparison between a carefully-drawn portrait and a stick-man.

The antique nomenclature of the ‘Major’ and ‘Minor’ hemispheres of the brain, the first broadly associated with Language skills, the second with Visual skills, is an example of how Language has been used to relegate Vision to a position of inferiority. Neuroscience has almost dispensed with those terms as research has revealed the truth to be rather different, but the prejudice lingers. ‘Verbal’ and ‘Non-verbal’ skills in IQ tests is another example, as though Visual skills have no autonomy.

In one sense the real challenge of this project is to begin to uproot the very deeply-held feeling that Language is superior. I suggest that is a myth and on the contrary that it is Vision that is almost infinitely superior both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitively in that it processes much more information, and qualitatively in that not just the depth and breadth of information it handles, but the wisdom that information contains, is vastly in excess of anything of which the Word is even capable. It is perhaps above all the wisdom of Vision that is extraordinary. We see so much more than we are aware of and so much more than finds its way into Language. I see therefore I am.