Page 11 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Introduction

What Can Cinema Do?

JAMES PHILLIPS

ONE WAY A BOOK of philosophical essays on film might begin
is with an attempt to justify bringing philosophy and cinema together.
Something could be made of the fact that the two share a constitutive and
ambiguous relation to the past. The reality now projected on the screen,
before which the present of its technological projection effaces itself, is
no longer real. And by arriving after the event, as Hegel intimates in the
preface to the Philosophy of Right, thinking opens up the difference from
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actuality in which it can lay claim to being the truth of what is. Notwith-
standing the physical exertions, managerial vigilance, and, for want of a
nicer if not better term, power politics that are seemingly prerequisites of
the cinematic profession, the filmmaker is the contemplative among the
artists. The specificity of the cinematic art is the passivity of the techno-
logical apparatus of reproduction before a given scene: to put it a little too
pompously but not, for that matter, inaccurately, cinema is the contempla-
tive eye of the storm of the technological manipulation of beings. The myth
common to philosophy and cinema is that they acquiesce in front of the
spectacle of what is. This myth does not so much inform philosophy's title
to truth as ground the very understanding of truth. Cinema, which to be-
gin with could not be acknowledged as art by the terms of late nineteenth-
century aesthetics because a realistic art is an oxymoron, perhaps should
not have found a place so quickly among the traditional arts. This is not to
suggest that cinema should have been assimilated to philosophy; an anal-
ogy, and nothing further, exists between the disingenuousness with which
Hegel writes of philosophy's resignation with respect to actuality and the