Filmosophy by Daniel Frampton

Author:Daniel Frampton
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Published: 2006-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

eight | filmgoer

Let’s go into a cinema where the perforated celluloid is purring in the darkness. On entering, our gaze is guided by the luminous ray to the screen where for two hours it will remain fixed. Life in the street outside no longer exists. Our problems evaporate, our neighbours disappear. Our body itself submits to a sort of temporary depersonalisation which takes away the feeling of its own existence. We are nothing but two eyes riveted to ten square metres of white sheet.

– Jean Goudal (1925)1

Watching a film is like having a daydream. It operates on portions of your mind that are only reached by dreams or dramas, and there you can explore things without any responsibility of conscious ego or conscience.

– Stanley Kubrick (1971)2

In this artificial solitude a part of us is porous to the effects of meaning without ever being able to be born into signification through language.

– Jean Louis Schefer (1981)3

In this chapter I will discuss how the concepts of the filmind and film-thinking might reconfigure our understanding of the encounter between film and filmgoer,4 and look at how the language and rhetoric of the concepts can shape the experience of the filmgoer. Because this chapter is devoted to a philosophical investigation of the encounter between film and filmgoer, its usefulness lies somewhat before more ’interpretive’ theories of the ’spectator’. For a start, many of those theories concentrate on our connection (emotional, imaginative) with characters within the film, and are less concerned with the power of the ’purer’, formal image. In a sense we need to understand the basic encounter before we can confidently talk about, say, voyeurism or identification or desire or pleasure (and other undeniable facets of filmgoing). Though at points in the chapter I will relate my finding to these ideas and concerns, the attentions here will mainly be of assistance to those interested in theorising such filmgoer positions. So what I shall not be attempting is an understanding of every possible (careless; attentive; sloppy; academic; open; blind; dumb; intelligent; trainspotter; passive; romantic; lustful) filmgoer. Thus I shall not be discussing any hypothetical ’weak’ filmgoers, nor when a filmgoer is removed from the film, for instance when they suddenly realise they are watching actors and sets. How can a person who experiences a film be any less than people we all know: complex, active, passionate, but also melancholic, romantic, swamped by sounds and images. After outlining the basic, personal and cognitivist experiences of filmgoing, I shall start to discuss how understanding film as thinking reveals an intimate relationship between film and filmgoer. My philosophy of the filmgoer leads us to a phenomenological ’mix’ of thinkings: the film and filmgoer join in thought, and the process of that encounter provides immediate meaning and knowledge.

Filmosophy is about proposing a new way of understanding and experiencing film, and in the next chapter I will attempt to argue that the concept of film-thinking provides a better language of description, and thus secures a much more suitable encounter between film and filmgoer.

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