Film Beyond Ontology

The book entitled On the Philosophy of Film – Images of Events belongs to something that is expressed in English by the word beyond, and in that word there echoes at the same time the excess of transcendence and the deficiency of what almost all so-called ontologies of film usually emphasize in the foreground of their considerations. The excess refers to the sublime in the extra-metaphysical sense, and the deficiency to the expanded understanding of reality or actuality. Since I believe that for any future discourse on the philosophy of film, it seems necessary to start from Deleuze’s reflections on the image-movement and the image-time, then neither the so-called epistemological attempts to approach film, such as those enumerated and articulated by Felicity Colman in Introduction to What is Film Philosophy? I would not take it as the key point of my consideration of the philosophy of film. (Felicity Colman, ” What is Film Philosophy? ʺ in (ed.), Film, Theory and Philosophy – The Key Thinkers, MG Gill Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston, Ithaca, 2009, pp. 1-16)

Namely, Colman talks about technological and event epistemology, quite rightly, with Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer belonging to the first, who understood how the physical movement of the camera and the activity of editing lead to a cognitive-theoretical intervention in the concept of reality.

The object of the film means, therefore, according to Colman, a kind of transcendental form, and it must be purified from all kinds of sediments of the plastic arts and literature. She is right to consider Bergson the initiator of this approach, who introduced the cinematic movement into our everyday movement, thus enabling Deleuze to advance the proposition that two types of images are conditions of possibility for the emergence of film thinking and film as such. The second, or so-called event epistemology, refers to changes in aesthetic approaches to film. The event here should be understood as a terminus technicus, so it concerns changes in the field of the emergence of, for example, a new cinematographic recording system, such as that which emerged in the 1970s with the abolition of the Hollywood studio system. Basically, the event here serves to point to the metaphysical meaning of film, beyond special effects and the like.

 In this sense, there is a whole series of concepts that are historically and aesthetically synthesized in the philosophy of film, such as Benjamin’s aura, Debord’s spectacle, Deleuze’s rhizome, Foucault’s dispositif, Lyotard’s sublimity, and Žižek’s parallax. If, however, the philosophy of film should be determined as the so-called ontological research of what belongs to the theoretical-cognitive problems of perception, movement, and knowledge, then it becomes obvious that we must distinguish this “new ontology” from the “old”, traditional, metaphysical one.

          We know that the greatness of Deleuze lay in his ontology of becoming (fr. devenir), which he rejected as authoritative approaches and orientations for understanding not only film but also reality in general, including Husserl’s phenomenology and the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan. Many film theorists will agree that he wrote off Husserl and his way of thinking, which advocates the notion of intentional consciousness and the notion of phenomena purified from transcendental consciousness, as a continuation of the Cartesian-Kantian subject in a different form. The film cannot be overtly apparent or natural, although there is always an excess of symbolism in the mystery of the events depicted in its images. However, advocates of the so-called Eventual epistemologies following in the footsteps of Žižek and psychoanalysis seem to exult in always being able to say: here you have, dear Deleuzeans, Hitchcock and his Psycho, so please explain to us with your hermetic terminology what it is about when Norman Bates, in that spooky motel and even spookier house, guards his murdered mother in the basement dressed in virginal clothing and becomes a pathological serial killer? But my answer to that might be simple. It is about a schizophrenic as a character in the narrative structure of the movie, and all of that would be insufficiently visually striking and Unheimlich, so that there is nothing additional to the magic of the film image that does not arise from Lacan’s traumatic Real and Žižek’s parallax, but from the image as an event.

This means abandoning the traditional ontology that has always understood being as permanence and immutability, in the sense of the Being of beings or the universe of beings, and never from the purity of its openness. Being, therefore, as Heidegger showed in his thought, is always reduced to what is temporally transient and immortalized in the now, actuality, presence. In this respect, film marks the end of all possible ontologies, because it arises from the technological singularity of the image as an event. It is not, therefore, any epistemology that unites technology and aesthetics. Instead, it should be said that film denotes an event of visual autopoiesis or technosphere, which was announced before Deleuze, precisely in the era of early silent film, by Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein.

          The consequences of my position within the so-called philosophy of film extend far beyond any renewal of phenomenology and psychoanalysis as authoritative theoretical “grand stories” about film. First, the referential framework: this ontological-epistemological matrix means that contemporary film can no longer be a hybrid union of the unconscious and traumatic Real, plus neo-Marxism of the event à la Badiou or the aesthetic politics of equality à la Rancière. Žižek’s analyses of film are always “good” in the standard sense because they do not correspond to the essence of film art at all; the same applies to music, but rather speak of what determines the film’s ideological-political environment as an envelope around the core of the thing itself. (Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Antibarbarus, Zagreb, 2008.)

And so, his frontal attacks on posthumanism and transhumanism, on Deleuze and the cognitivists, on neurophilosophy, and on neoliberalism are always an Irish stew of ideology-politics that stands as the Unheimlich and sublime in the form of Capital behind every possible film narrative, which also applies to experimentation in contemporary film or the Heideggerization of film as in the works of Terrence Malick. The images of events are not only the logic of the technosphere’s events but also the logic of artificial intelligence’s action, which is “ontologically” possible only as a continuation of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This means that the image as an event is beyond all human-nonhuman sensibility and the space of action of machines of desire, as defined by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Film denotes, therefore, always a meta-film, or a movement-in-time that aims towards infinity and in this movement towards technological singularity remembers every moment of its duration (fr. durée), thanks to the possibility of storing information on a memory tape, DVD, stick, cloud, etc. (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989.)

Secondly, cinematic thinking presupposes, from the very beginning, what Stanley Cavell calls the union of automatism and autonomy, which is nothing other than the magical event of the observer’s bewitchment. (Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed – Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts-London, 1979.) In the traditional triad of the idea of a work of art, artist, and audience, film belongs to that which lies beyond all traditional arts, from drama and opera to dance and poetry, painting and sculpture. What else might be this than the mystery of events outside the mythic-religious referential framework, but with an attempt to secularize the divine and sacred so that the audience is primarily a mass catharsis of spectators in the cinema, and the artist of the film cannot be just the director, but a whole series of his assistants from the scriptwriter to the cameraman and the master of photography, etc., not to mention the actors.

 Finally, let us forget the autonomy of the work as the highest value in the modern understanding of art. Film becomes a technosphere, a visualization of events, and hence its mission appears to enchant the masses by creating what Deleuze calls virtual actualization. It is not any reality or Lacanian Real, but a techno-autopoietic construction of events that connect art and life through montage and the memorization of events as information, beyond any direct communication.

Response-communicationto occur, it should be probably clear that the film must knock us off our feet, like, for example, that masterful The Chaos of the Taviani Brothers, in which at the end the writer-Luigi Pirandello talks to the ghost of his deceased mother in the Epilogue, and the very name of the film refers to the local name of the Cavus forest near his birthplace in Sicily, on its southern coast. The aesthetic, therefore, cannot be a mere continuation of the technological, because that would be naive determinism. Let’s add the adjective “materialistic,” and here we are in a pseudo-dialectic, neither guilty. No, the film lies beyond all technology and aesthetics because it represents a sublime event of the image as an event on the screen, or in the matrix of the brain looking at the screen, provoked by fascinating images from life, not reality. Thought is always an event of thought, not an eternal source of some fixed transcendental inclination behind which stands God, the Matrix, the Real or Sublime nothingness.

Third, the film lies beyondevery possible and real ontology for the simple reason that it is the result of the union of thought as sensibility and thought as technosphere, with the tendency to become what Wim Wenders in the film Until the End of the World reveals as entering-into-the-brain and colonizing the dreams of the Other. When film is no longer a propaganda tool for forcing the ideological Kulturkampf left or right spectrum of colors, and that is already over the top today in the scourge of new realism as documentary at many world festivals, but the search for the lost world of magic of authentic artistic creation like the films of Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier, then the philosophy of film can no longer be caught in the trap of ontologizing a reality that actually no longer exists. Reality becomes what lies beyond any apology for realism and reality, that sublime nothingness that we see nowhere except in the bad infinity of the approach to film as politics-ideology and religious ecstasy, which was not relevant even for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s masterpiece of silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, in which Artaud plays a crazed and fanatical monk who wants to immediately and unconditionally take the saint to the stake.

The philosophy of film cannot be decided by the question of the essence of Being, beings, and of the essence of Human, but by the question of the essence of the image as an event. (Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, Verso, London-New York, 2007) This is beyond any one or other ontology of film. When the image occupies the space-time that, in the history of metaphysics, was assigned to language-speech-text, then ontology, with its tacit recognition of the rule of “nature” and “the divine,” has lost its credibility. All the so-called substitutes for language in film theory that come from semiotics and speak of meta-language or visual language are only an echo of something that no longer speaks authoritatively to anyone.

This does not mean that the film lacks “its” narrative structure, nor that the actors are no longer as rhetorically and poetically gifted as His Master’s Voice, Orson Welles, from Citizen Kane or Macbeth. The problem is not in the beautiful narration and the restrained gestures of the sublime body, but in the fact that the film image, in its technological progress, becomes an autopoietic device of the power of production, staging, and signifying events. Film represents the openness of images of events in movement and time, not the logocentric history of language-speech-text in its hidden or unhidden meaning.