Autumn Film School 2008, International Symposium of Film Theory

Cankarjev dom (E4 Hall): 20-22 November 2008

Film and Philosophy

“Maurice Nadeau [has claimed]…"If Descartes lived today, he would write novels." With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Méthode would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily.”

Alexandre Astruc

In 2006, the groundbreaking London-based publishing house Wallflower Press launched Filmosophy - the long awaited work by Daniel Frampton (the Introduction was published already back in 2001). The book by one of the founding editors of the notable web portal Film-Philosophy with the telling subtitle A Manifesto for a Radically New Way of Understanding Cinema, which at every step categorically declares its revolutionary difference, has certainly thrown down the gauntlet to current film thought. When, in the field of film study, one starts considering such things as an entirely “new way of thinking about film”, new “film thought”, new “understanding of film” and a new “poetical and philosophical approach” which is to replace the prosaic dullness of the existing debate on cinema, a series of dilemmas opens in examining all possible relations between film and philosophy, philosophy and film, philosophy of film, philosophy in film, film in philosophy, film philosophy, philosophical nature of film, filmosophy, etc.

First and foremost, the question arises whether (and if so - in what way) filmosophy, which the author believes represents the principle of studying film-as-thought, that is, a specific kind of thought, in fact radically differs from the past and current film thought. We have in mind here a film thought that is in some way bound to philosophy as its conceptual tool enabling film to enter into thought and vice versa. We, therefore, face a dilemma of whether Daniel Frampton actually confronts us with an entirely "new way of studying film" whose ambitious goal is in bringing about "change in the way of experiencing and interpreting film" by introducing the concept of film as "new thought"; that is, whether he truly embarked on the path of a radical break with existing film knowledge or are we, nevertheless and above all, witness to one of the more tendentious interpretations located at the key coordinates of the already explored territory of a mutual enrichment between film creativity and its reflection. At the same time, Frampton’s intervention offers an excellent starting point for a more in-depth analysis of certain aspects of contemporary film thought that, in its reference to philosophy, is not in the least merely a subjection of film art to various philosophical conceptualisations (as the favouring of one or the other discipline would have us believe) but expresses generic characteristics of their essential fusion.

The convergence of film and philosophy did not begin with Deleuze’s Image-Movement and Image-Time. On the contrary, we can say that from its earliest period, beginning with Hugo Münsterberg, film thought suggested rough analogies between the workings of a film camera and the cognitive processes of a human mind. Let us also add that this early research into the characteristics of the film medium, hovering, above all, within the orbit of the amateur – enthusiast and practitioner, cinephile and author, still primarily tries to affirm cinema as an art form, at best, pointing out its intellectual capacities.

With later interventions coming from “the other side” of film reception – the contributions of critical theory and the epistemology of the Frankfurt School, film art become the privileged reading material for a possible construction of the ontology of actuality. The early, “cinephile reflection“ thus gave way to a more rigorous deliberation on cinema as a cultural practice in which ideological relations of modernity are not only reflected but, in an increasingly more active way, also created. After that, the suspicion of critical thought towards cinema only grew stronger — the moving images often became texts that should, on the one hand, be read carefully so as not to overlook all the hidden structures revealing cinema’s entanglement in the reproduction of the conditions of domination but, on the other hand, also in an oppositional manner, in order to extract their supposedly emancipatory core.

Such, to a large extent binary positions accompanied film thought all until the interventions by two contemporary philosophers who endeavoured to transform film thought into philosophical action: American philosopher Stanley Cavell discerns in film a distinct subject of philosophical thought whereas Gilles Deleuze thinks cinema through as an ontology of movement through space and time, at the same time confirming its key philosophical capability of producing concepts. Henceforth, cinema can contemplate itself — not only as a mimetic reproduction of thought processes but also as a transformation of an image into a formal problem, into an image-question.

It is precisely at this point that we catch up to filmosophy as that conceptual thought procedure that film and philosophy can share to their common benefit – a procedure that is becoming all the more indispensable in the age of an increasingly more unclear fragmentation of image and meaning. This is precisely why it seems that it would be wrong to remove filmosophising from its entanglement in the concrete conditions and factors of actuality. If we understand the contemporary industry of the image in the utmost hyperrealistic terms — as a distributed factory of the production-gaze in which viewers, through their viewing (attention), create and valorise the specific and increasingly more abstract image-commodity —, then filmosophizing can quite easily be seen merely as its complementary cultural activity, as a secondary branch within the symbolic economy of the globally expanding post-Fordism.

But in the end, this old — although perhaps more justified than ever before — distrust of film in view of its ideological permeability must not stop us from addressing it with the key question the answer to which is at the same time a response to the understanding of a hundred-year history of the relations between the mind and the camera, between thought and the fleeting image on the screen: is cinema capable of creating philosophical truths or is it capable only of providing their constant illuminations? Does cinema merely state philosophical truths or does it bring them to the world, already completed and tested, where they touch upon the real? And the other way round: is cinema merely an endless opportunity for philosophy to illustrate its concepts or is it also an opportunity for cinema itself to create these concepts?

Schedule of lectures:

Thursday 20 November at 15:00
Darko Štrajn: The Being of the Spirit is a Film Reel

By saying that the “being of the spirit is a film reel”, do we not come close to a particular operationalisation of Hegel, which Deleuze declines, while Žižek shows that he inherently accepts it, since there is no other option. We should either reject or forget Hegel or at long last humbly admit that his thought of movement marked the space in which film distinguished itself as something “spiritual”. Film does not owe its historical specificity only to technology and chemistry, but much more to the notions of social sciences and the humanities as well as the many already recognised forms of the representation of reality, shaped during the bourgeois epoch of art. Following Walter Benjamin, we ca say that film has actually rather brutally pointed out the origins of aesthetics in the social practice of the dominant capitalist reality as it interiorised the principle of reproduction (still exterior to other arts at this time) as its constitutive attribute. A bond between philosophy and film in general can be ascertained here because we are dealing with two forms of thought that, each in its sphere, operate analytically and synthetically and are, in relation to other forms of thought – philosophy to science and film to art – constantly in a special position. The bond between philosophy and film is created in view of the notions of reality and the real. We should say that André Bazin (a genius still not duly acknowledged, whose writings, far from any taxonomic discursive form, anticipate what happened much later with the notions of the virtual) pointed out a certain impossibility of a “philosophy of film”, for he is a thinker who came close to philosophy starting from the field of cinema and should, therefore, be considered a “film-philosopher”. It follows clearly from Deleuze’s work on film that cinema thought is an effect of a reality already constituted by film. Together with cinema, philosophy enters the movement of reality differently than it did before the invention of film, i.e. from the standpoint of a decentred subjectivity.

Darko Štrajn obtained his PhD degree in philosophy in 1984. In the field of film studies, he published the book Melodrama (1989), a long list of articles in Ekran and journals in Slovenia, former Yugoslavia and abroad (Amsterdam, London). He is Research Councillor at the Educational Research Institute and lecturer in the media studies module at the Graduate School of the Humanities (ISH) in Ljubljana.  


Thursday 20 November at 16:30
Jurij Simoniti: Frampton's Affective-Descriptive Anti-Theory of Film

Daniel Frampton founds his theory of filmosophy and the filmind on a supposition that film is its own world with its own laws and creativities: film is not a part or a reproduction of the world, it is a world, it is its own world. In the article, we try to examine whether filmosophy meets the standards of a conceptual theory. Frampton’s principal suppositions are not new at all and seem to be as old as film-theory itself; for instance, the fact that film is ensured absolute autonomy or the fact that filmind means organicising the relationship of form and content, which was carried out in a much better and conceptually much more rigorous way by Lotman who argued a semantization of all formal elements of art. Frampton does not offer a single convincing specifically cinematic formal element around which film-meaning emerges. So we compare his attempt with other film-theories which do rest on some conceptual opposition: frame/cut, subject/object, auteur/many auteurs, etc. We maintain that every theory is a place of conceptual immanence (it therefore outlines a domain of its own and is not reducible to the laws of some other domain) and is established by a concept which, in the field of immanence, represents the point of difference. Frampton, on the other hand, levels every possible opposition, every point of difference in the field of immanence, back to some sort of uniformity. What his theory leaves us with is nothing but a description of affections with which the film affects the spectator.

Jurij Simoniti graduated from the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he successfully defended his doctoral thesis with the title: The Unfinished in Hegel. For his master's degree entitled Hegel’s Morality through Particularity and Universality, he received the Student's Prešeren Prize. In 2008, he published a monograph with the publishing house Analecta entitled: Truth as Creation. Hegel's Notion between Judgment and Spirit. He works predominantly in the field of German Idealism, above all in the field of Hegel's philosophy. He translates works of German philosophy (Frank, Honneth) and German classics (Schiller), philosophy of language (Frege, Peirce) and analytical philosophy (Parfit) into Slovene, and publishes articles on contemporary philosophical subjects and trends along with articles on film theory in peer-reviewed academic journals.


Thursday 20 November at 18.00
Andrej Šprah: The Image of the Moment of Cognition or The Moment of Cognition of the Image?

When, at the end of the 20th century, Jean-Luc Godard concluded his monumental audiovisual enterprise Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998), discussions about film history and the historicity of cinema were challenged as they had never been challenged before. The starting point of the present deliberation focuses on Godard’s well-known belief that one of the never-fulfilled but nevertheless key potentials of cinema is the fact that it has never managed (or wanted) to present us with the Holocaust. The inability to imagine the Nazi’s “final solution” – the inability which, within the search for a resolution of the traumatic facts of the past, is heightened by the opposition between the presumptions of the unrepresentability or over-representability of the final solution – will be examined through the conceptual prism of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image. The key aspects of Godard’s methodology (perceived as the “dramaturgy of double dialectics” by Jacques Rancière) will be explained as a realization of certain preconditions that Roland Barthes, while exploring the concept of the third sense, underlines as inevitable for the “birth of cinema into its maturity”.

Andrej Šprah started writing about cinema while studying philosophy and comparative literature. He intensified his cinema-related activities after 1997, the year when he collaborated with Stojan Pelko on a monograph about Wim Wenders and became a member of the editorial board of the Ekran film magazine. In 1998, he published his first book entitled Documentary Film and Power. He lectured at the Autumn Film School between 1997 and 2001, which is also the year he curated the School on the subject of “The Other Cinema of the ‘Third World’”. In 2001, he published a short novel Soraya and, in 2005, a collection of essays about contemporary Slovenian cinema entitled Liberating the Gaze. As a member of the editorial board, he actively participated in founding KINO!, a new magazine for the theory and history of cinema. His essays, focusing mostly on Slovenian cinema, documentary cinema and cinemas of the so-called Third World, are frequently published in the magazines Ekran, KINO! and Apokalipsa; occasionally, he also collaborates with magazines and newspapers such as Sodobnost, Literatura, Balcanis, MovEast and Romboid.


Friday 21 November at 15:00
Luka Arsenjuk: Eisenstein’s Idea of Intellectual Cinema

Sergei Eisenstein's attack on traditional idealist aesthetics with his constructivist practice and theory of montage is well known. What is less duly acknowledged is that his most important innovations – montage of attractions, intellectual montage, typage – can be traced to the domains of the comic and laughter. Eisenstein's constructivism is inseparable from his wide-ranging integration of the various (lower) and popular genres into his work: the genre of comedy proper, caricature, commedia dell'arte, satire, the grotesque, and the monstrous. Although these elements are usually acknowledged in the analyses of Eisenstein's work, he is typically seen as a filmmaker of a great and serious revolutionary pathos. What is left out is that Eisenstein himself conceived of this great and serious pathos as primarily comic. For Eisenstein, laughter was both an aesthetic and a historical problem, or, rather a specific form of the relationship between the two domains. Discussing Eisenstein's laughter in relation to a few other well-known theories of laughter (Baudelaire, Bergson), we can both describe his singularity as well as discuss the more general question about the relationship between laughter and (cinematic) ideas.

Luka Arsenjuk obtained his BA in Cultural Studies from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana in 2002. He is currently writing a dissertation on political cinema as a PhD candidate in the Program in Literature at Duke University in North Carolina (USA). At the moment, he is also editing the spring 2009 issue of Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics, dedicated to the figure of the student, different forms of study, and political implications of pedagogy within and outside contemporary universities.


Friday 21 November at 16:30
Ciril Oberstar: The Mutes of Post-Fordism

Our thesis is very modest and shall limit itself to a rough sketch of what could be described as a failed meeting of film theory and Post-Fordism. In reading one of the more popular philosophical variations on the theory of Post-Fordism, Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude, which asserts that “idle talk is the basis of Post-Fordistic virtuosity”, one cannot avoid a certain feeling of unfamiliarity. And indeed, if we look at the virtuosity of speakers-workers in the Post-Fordistic work process from another perspective, suddenly everything Virno is saying seems very familiar. The Fordistic slogan – “Silence! We are working!” – seems familiar. As if we had heard it somewhere before. Of course – “Silence! We are shooting! – is the shout of filmmakers. Not just any filmmakers, the filmmakers of the sound period. They kept repeating that shout, especially at a time when it really meant something, when the ear was not yet accustomed to it, at the time when sound cinema replaced silent cinema, when actors, crew and everyone on the set needed to be reminded of that. A similar situation can be found in Virno, who tries to follow the shift of the economic paradigm of Fordism into Post-Fordism: as if the previously mute working process suddenly came to life in the sphere of sound. As such, the theoretical background of Paolo Virno is equal to the theories of those, especially Michel Chion, who explored the shift from silent to sound cinema.

Ciril Oberstar is a postgraduate student in philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, sociology editor of the Dialogi magazine and member of the programme board of the Workers/Punks University. He spends his free time in the bookshop business.

 
Friday 21 November at 18:00
Pavle Levi: "The Crevice and the Stitch"

This talk will explore the role of montage in the production of cinematic meaning. Its focus will be on the films of Jean-Luc Godard, with particular emphasis on the 1970s work Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs, 1997) – a radical experiment in the politics of film form, initiated by The Dziga Vertov Group – and the more recent Notre Musique (2004). The theoretical framework of the talk will seek to relate the dynamics of "suture" – a classic trope of psychoanalytic film theory – to Gilles Deleuze's explication of the key functions of the cinematic "interstice".

Pavle Levi is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Stanford University. He is the author of Disintegration in Frames, a book about aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and post–Yugoslav cinema. He is also the editor of  Filosofska igracka, a selection of Annette Michelson's writings about film and modernist art. Pavle is currently writing a book tentatively called Cinema by Other Means.


Saturday 22 November at 15:00
Dora Baras: Chris Marker: Paradigmatic Example of Film and Philosophy Engaging in a Dialogue

Marker’s work, conjoining cinema and literature, document and experiment, activism and meditation, reaches the highest point of the authentically French philosophical (Montaigne) and film (Astruc) essayism. In a essayistic manner of attempting and exploring, it will be presented through the metaphor of hypertext – by transversal, non-linear, personal searching, focusing on the following knots/links: film as ars memorie/remembering as an act of fiction; cinéma – vérité or ciné – ma vérité?/representability of truth in documentary genre/metadocumentary; interpenetrative concepts of memory and history; history(s) and temporality(s);  release of time-images/simultaneousness of temporalities; essayism as form of activism/praxis – humanity – utopia.

Dora Baras (1982), MA in Comparative Literature and Art History. Currently doing PhD studies in literature, film and critical theory at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia. Coordinator and publicist for the project Film Mutations: Festival of the Invisible Cinema, Zagreb, 2007. Art director of Human Rights Film Festival and Subversive Film Festival (hommage 1968), both in Zagreb 2008. Work-in-progress: curating film and visual-arts programme for Subversive Film Festival 2009, translating Jonathan Beller’s book The Cinematic Mode of Production. On the editorial board of the magazine up&underground art dossier, since 2006.


Saturday 22 November at 16:30
Melita Zajc: Filmosophy and Nigerian Video Film Culture

What does Daniel Frampton’s filmosophy, the notion of film as thinking and thinking as film, mean for film theory? Is it possible to think cinema in the way proposed by Frampton and what does this mean for current film practice? This is the question I deal with in this lecture. My starting point is Frampton’s ambition to conceive a film theory which would respond to the new possibilities of cinema and could face all that is yet to come in film practice. I begin analysing the idea of film as thinking from the opposite side, with Frampton’s presentation of the conceptions of thinking as film in philosophy. This brings us to semiology and the texts by semiologist Francesco Casseti. Casseti, like Frampton, argues for an autonomous film theory and demonstrates the possibilities of such a theory through analysing film practices in the 20th century, when cinema was, as he says, “the eye of the century”. We compare his exploration of early film practices in the Western world with an exploration of currently the third strongest film production in the world, the Nigerian video film production. This comparison shows that the early years of Western cinema and the beginnings of Nigerian video share many common features, which can be effectively described precisely by Filmosophy.
 
Melita Zajc is a media explorer and creator. She collaborates with Ekran and KINO! magazines and is a columnist for Indirekt newspaper. She is also an assistant professor of anthropology of everyday life and a lecturer at the Institute for Media Communications at the University of Maribor. Her explorations range from film theory and criticism to theory of visual media and epistemology of technologies. She is especially interested in new media and technologies.


Saturday 22 November at 18:00
Michael Witt: Godard, Historian

Godard’s magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinéma is the central structuring project within his œuvre since the early 1970s. Part memoire, part autobiographical poem, and part exploratory videographic essay, the series is also a groundbreaking investigation into the theory and practice of audiovisual history. Following the release of the eight chapter video box-set in 1998, Godard commented as follows on the series’ reception: ‘I’m a bit upset that it’s only cinema people who talk to me about it and that the word “history” is forgotten. I feel like a mathematician who sets out a theorem and to whom people just say “your theorem’s lovely”, or “it’s lousy”… It’s as if people had said to Pythagorus (and I’m not comparing myself to Pythagorus), “your theorem’s great!”… Yes, but how is it useful?’ This lecture considers the nature of Godard’s ‘theorem’, and of the history offered to us by Histoire(s) du cinéma, by situating his extravagant, lyrical, digressive, lacunary, neo-musical historical methodology and style in relation to a wide range of traditions, and to the thought and work of an eclectic assortment of key figures within them, most of whom are cited in the series: film theory (Boleslaw Matuszewski, André Bazin); film-thinking (Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Epstein, Santiago Álvarez, Hollis Frampton, Artavazd Peleshian); modernist literature (Herrmann Broch, William Faulkner, Virginia Wolf); curation (Henri Langlois); history (Jules Michelet, Fernand Braudel, Georges Duby); cinema history (Maurice Bardèche, Robert Brasillach); art history (Elie Faure, André Malraux, Aby Warburg); the history of science (Georges Canguilhem, Alexandre Koyré); and the philosophy of history (Charles Péguy, Walter Benjamin).

Michael Witt is Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures at Roehampton University, London. He has published widely on cinema in journals such as Cinéma, New Left Review, Rouge, Sight and Sound, and Trafic, and is the co-editor of Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Centre Pompidou, 2006), The French Cinema Book (British Film Institute, 2004), and For Ever Godard (Black Dog Publishing, 2004). In spring 2008, he co-curated the “Paradise Now! Essential French Avant-Garde Cinema” season at Tate Modern, and he is currently completing a study of Godard as cinema historian for Indiana University Press.

Accompanying film programme in Kinodvor (Kolodvorska 13):

Histoire(s) du cinéma, Jean-Luc Godard, 1988-1998

Thursday 22 November at 22:00
1(a): All the (Hi)stories (Toutes les histoires), 51 minutes, 1988
1(b): A Single (Hi)story (Une Histoire seule), 42 minutes, 1989

Friday 22 November at 22:00
2(a): Only Cinema (Seule le cinema), 26 minutes, 1997
2(b): Deadly Beauty (Fatale beauté), 28 minutes, 1997
3(a): The Coin of the Absolute (La Monnaie de l’absolu), 27 minutes, 1998

Saturday 22 November at 22:0
3(b): A New Wave (Une Vague Nouvelle), 27 minutes, 1998
4(a): The Control of the Universe (Le Côntrole de l’univers), 27 minutes, 1998
4(b): The Signs Among Us (Les Signes parmi nous), 38 minutes, 1998


Admission to all lectures free. Autumn Film School 2008 is organized by Ekran and KINO! film magazines. Partners: Ljubljana International Film Festival, Adria Airways d.o.o.

http://www.ekran.si/
http://www.e-kino.si/
http://www.liffe.si