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A Philosophy of Cinematic ArtThe Big Picture

Berys Gaut
A Philosophy of Cinematic Art is a systematic investigation of cinema as an art, examining cinematic expression, realism, authorship, interpretation, narration, emotional engagement and related topics. It argues that appeal to the medium plays an important role in any adequate theory of cinema as an art. Cinema is understood as the medium of the moving image. Like many other media (such as that of prints, which contains the media of etchings, engravings, woodcuts, etc.), the cinematic medium contains other medianot just photochemical (or traditional) film, which has been the almost exclusive focus of analytic philosophers, but also handmade cinema (such as that of mile Reynaud in the 1890s) and digital cinema (discussion of which comprises a quarter of the book); and digital cinema in turn has both non-interactive and interactive forms, including videogames. Since the cinematic medium contains other media, which nest within it, explanations and evaluations of cinematic works sometimes appeal to features of the cinematic medium itself and sometimes to those of its nesting media; so the book investigates what makes cinema in general an art as distinct from, for instance, literature; what makes traditional cinema artistically distinct from digital cinema; and what makes cinemas interactive forms artistically distinct from its non-interactive ones. Classical film theory, in the hands of theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim and Andr Bazin, also addressed the issue of cinema as an art and appealed to distinctive properties of the medium in returning its answers. But appeals to medium-specific evaluations and explanations have often been rejected in contemporary philosophy of film. Classical film theorists were attracted to medium-specific arguments partly because they had witnessed the birth of the new medium of film and this made salient to them what cinema could and could not do.Yet the 100-year hegemony of photochemical film made it easy to lose sight of the distinctive role of the medium in conditioning the artistic properties of cinema. With the emergence of digital cinema in the last fifteen years or so, we too have witnessed the birth of a new medium, and so are in a better position to see what is distinctive both to it and to traditional film.The newest technologies allow us better to appreciate the attractions of the oldest form of film theory. The book begins with a discussion of types of film theory and then turns to examine the technical aspects of cinema. Photochemical film is an analogue medium, composed in its visual aspect of a series of photographs made by exposing to light light-sensitive chemicals on a transparent and flexible base. Manipulating it is easy by cutting one frame from another (editing) but hard in respect of altering the individual image without degrading it. Digital cinema, in contrast, is composed of a finite amount of digital information, which is susceptible to potentially infinite computational manipulation without loss of image quality. Digital images can be made by mechanical capture (photographing or scanning), handmade
British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 52 | Number 2 | April 2012 | pp. 183186 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ays005 British Society of Aesthetics 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com

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methods (digital painting) or by computer synthesis (for instance, in rendering 3D models to a 2D image). So the digital image is not necessarily photographic; it is a mlange, or mixed, image: it can be generated by any of these three techniques, in any proportion, which can be seamlessly combined. So the philosophy of film should not focus exclusively on the nature of photography in thinking about cinema. Chapter 1 addresses the historical challenge to film as an art: since cinema is merely a mechanical recording of reality, there is no room for artistry. This is distinguished into a causal challenge, defended best by Roger Scruton, which holds that the ideal photograph stands in a non-intentional relation to reality and so cannot express thoughts about it; and the reproduction challenge, that film is a mere reproduction of reality. In reply, it is shown that photographs can stand in intentional as well as purely causal relations to reality; and a modified version of Arnheims theory is developed to show that film is an art form partly because of the plasticity of its recording capacitiesits ability to represent reality in different ways and so express thoughts about it by varying its mode of presentation. Digital cinema exhibits even greater plasticity and control over the details of the image than does traditional film and, since it need not be photographic, against some of its forms the historical challenge gains no purchase. Chapter 2 argues that pictures and their editing relations do not possess the necessary features of a language, so there is no language of film; and though digital images are specified by a language-like code, this is not a cinematic language, since viewers do not have to understand it to understand a film. Accordingly, the sort of realism that characterizes some films is the sort that can apply to pictures and their relations. Seven kinds of realism are distinguished, and I show that in respect of one of these, perceptual realism, cinema as standardly shot is a realistic medium, and that Renoirs deep-focus style of filmmaking is a realistic style, thus vindicating some of Bazins claims. One kind of realism, photorealism, is in practice achievable only in digital, rather than traditional, film. And I argue that another kind, transparency, holds neither of photographic nor handmade images, since uninterrupted light transmission between a viewer and an object is a necessary condition for seeing it, and this does not obtain between the viewer and the depicted object of either kind of image. Chapter 3 defends the claim that there are authors (artists) in cinema, but argues against the single authorship or auteur theory, holding instead that where more than one person occupies the key production roles, such as director, actor and screenwriter, in a film, the film must be multiply authored. This applies both to traditional and digital cinema, but the latter offers greater scope for artistic collaboration in allowing not just actors but others, such as animators and motion capture editors, to collaborate together in performing a role. An interactive work is defined as one that authorizes its audience partly to determine its instances and their features, and I argue that, though audiences are not co-authors of the interactive cinematic work, they are co-authors of its instances where these are themselves artworks, and that here audiences take on the role of performers. A theory of cinematic interpretation is developed in chapter 4. General reasons for rejecting intentionalism are advanced and I show that there are more-specific reasons to reject it for cinema, since the hazards of collaboration can defeat intentions and create

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happy accidents of unintended meanings. Bordwells general constructivist view of interpretation, which holds that audiences make the meaning of films, is also criticized. Instead, I defend a patchwork theory, which holds that cinematic interpretations are determined by multiple factors, not just intentions, and the role of these factors varies depending on the properties that are ascribed by the interpretation. The theory also allows for a limited role for viewer construction in interpretation. I then show how interactive cinema involves a more radical form of constructivism, feature constructivism, than does noninteractive cinema, since in the interactive case audiences generate instances of works and their features. Most films tell stories, and chapter 5 examines how they do so. I argue that there are several medium-specific differences between the ways in which films and literary works narrate. For instance, whereas implicit narrators exist in literature, they do not in film, since the audio-visual nature of the medium means that narrators would have to be imagined as located at the station point of the image, which would often require absurd or contradictory imaginings, whereas the lexical medium of literature imposes no such requirement. A similar argument shows that make-believe seeing is not the default mode of visual imagination in non-interactive cinema. I also defend the possibility and value of interactive narration, which has been denied by several videogame theorists, thus establishing another medium-specific difference, this time between interactive and non-interactive cinema. Chapter 6 examines how films engage our emotions, showing that they often do so in distinctive and sometimes unique ways, as when camera movement and close-ups of the human face in motion are employed to move us affectively. One important means of engagement, character identification, is defended against those who deny its coherence or usefulness, and I distinguish imaginative identification, which itself has various forms, from empathic identification, and distinguish both from sympathy. I show how cinematic devices, such as point-of-view and reaction shots, can be employed to foster some types of identification. I then show that interactive cinema supports distinctive emotional responses, both in the kinds of emotion possible and their objects: it makes sense, for instance, to feel ashamed or guilty about what one has fictionally done in the story world, and also about what one feels in making something fictional in it. Interactive cinema also supports direct participation in the world of the fiction, where one imagines that one is present and active in the fiction and this imagining is not mediated by thoughts of a characters actions. Direct participation grounds the sense of immersion in this kind of cinema. The final chapter draws together and extends the arguments of the book, insofar as they appeal to the cinematic medium. It locates them within a broader tradition of mediumspecific theorizing that goes back to Lessing, clarifies their key terms and distinguishes three medium-specific claims. A medium is defined as a set of practices for the use of physical or symbolic materials, and is distinguished from an art form, which is the artistic use of a medium. The notion of specificity is explained in terms of differential or distinctive properties, properties that differ between one group of media and another specified group, so that medium-specific properties need not, though may, be unique to an individual medium. (MSX), the claim that correct explanations of some artistic properties of works refer to distinctive properties of the medium, is shown to be supported by many

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arguments and examples in earlier chapters. (MSV), the claim that some correct artistic evaluations of artworks refer to distinctive properties of the medium, is supported by arguing that cinematic works are achievements and that to grasp an achievement one has to understand the difficulties, some of which are distinctive to the medium, that have to be overcome; and by appeal to medium-specific terms of evaluation such as cinematic and uncinematic. And (MSF), the claim that for a medium to constitute an art form it must instantiate artistic properties distinct from those instantiated by other media, is supported by completing the neo-Arnheimian argument advanced in chapter 1, by showing that there is a specific cinematic mode of presentation evinced by the distinctive and in some respects unique ways in which cinema represents its subject matter. So reference to and understanding of the cinematic medium is essential to any adequate theory and philosophy of cinematic art.
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Berys Gaut University of St Andrews bng@st-andrews.ac.uk

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