Film Worlds by Daniel Yacavone

Author:Daniel Yacavone [Yacavone, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, PERFORMING ARTS / Film # Video / History # Criticism, ART057000, ART / Film # Video
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.5 Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies as a post–European art cinema film world.

There is, in short, no practical end to the number and specific types of film-world classifications that may be identified and argued for in film theory and criticism (beyond, that is, those that pertain exclusively to a number of films by the same maker). Today, of course, such criticism and interpretation extends to all of the many less formal, online outlets available to viewers and film lovers as platforms for discourse and debate about films and their artistic features, including their symbolic exemplifications and their merits (seldom, of course, under the specific theoretical label of “exemplification”). Such critical arguments concerning cinematic world-markers and types stand or fall on the same grounds, and are constrained by the same standards, as any general interpretation of a film work’s artistic (including all exemplified) features.

Perhaps the foremost potential interest of these sorts of “globally” relevant aesthetic classifications is that they clearly cut across more common stylistic classifications of films on the basis of, for example, period, movement, genre, and director.68 Centering, as they ultimately must, on both the forms and contents of the cinematic-artistic reference-making we have considered in this chapter, and as following from identification and interpretation of world-markers, they may thus reveal new, sometimes unexpected, artistic features of films as a direct result of such groupings and juxtapositions. This revelation may, in turn, lead to the creation of new film-world types (and markers) in an open-ended process of inquiry and discovery.

FROM FILM-WORLD CREATION TO EXPERIENCE

Through focusing mainly on their construction in filmmaking practice from a theoretical vantage point, we have now come some way in understanding why film worlds are “symbolic” and how their referential, communicative functions are directly related to their artistic and aesthetic being and value by way of creative transformations: regardless of whether these transformations are understood in terms of Pasolini’s “poetry” of im-signs, Mitry’s compound visual signifiers, or Goodman’s world-making strategies. These functions, however, which correspond to the more objective character and existence of film worlds, as it were, and which are more amenable to sufficient description in third-person terms using semiotic categories of analysis (broadly defined), are still only a skeletal part of a film’s work-world as an also concretely (“bodily”) experienced and profoundly temporal event in the viewer’s world. Cinematic transformation, and certainly the phenomenon of viewer “immersion” in the worlds of films, is also rooted in first-person, psychological realities that are generally outside the scope of Goodman’s particular symbol- and cognition-centered aesthetics, for instance. Yet our recognition of such an experiential and, in some senses, psychological dimension of film worlds—together with the more “personal” aspect of their creation—surely need not abandon a combined symbolic and expressivist framework, such as the one forwarded by Cassirer or, in a specifically cinematic context, as reflected in central aspects of Mitry’s, Pasolini’s, and Deleuze’s film theories. In each of these cases there is a far greater emphasis (than in Goodman’s account) not only on artistic intentions, the temporal

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