Page 12 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

2 James Phillips

alleged passivity of the cinematic reproduction of phenomena. But it is to
suggest that there is something peculiar about cinema. It is more realistic
than the arts, but because it lacks their comparative self-subsistence, be-
cause its realism consists in pointing to what is no longer, in even being
what is no longer, it is also less real, less actual.
Another way a book of philosophical essays on film might begin is
with a statement of the irreconcilability of cinema and metaphysics. In the
brute positivity of its reproductions of what is, cinema remains immersed
in the singularity of phenomena and forgoes a claim to the universality in
which metaphysical knowledge has its element. Even when cinema falters
before the singular, it aligns itself with the cliché rather than the concept.
If Hitchcock is a great director, if his recognition as an artist of genius
was long resisted, it is arguably because his domain is the specifically cin-
ematic space of nonideal, animistic, and conspiratorial singular objects.
Cinema's gift for horror lies in its passivity and its attendant, paradoxically
technological, invention of the experience of the pretechnological expo-
sure to the tyranny of things. But the singularities with which cinema is
populated can also be the occasion for a declaration of faith in the world:
this is something that unites Cavell's and Deleuze's texts on film, just as
it is something that could only properly be borne out by a profusion of at
once exacting and eccentric observations (another shared feature of their
texts). Cinema, whose passivity before what is slips all too easily over into
a cynical complacency in the face of clichés, can by its receptiveness to the
unassimilable recall metaphysics to its foundation in wonder.
Each of the essays in this collection addresses a single director from
what, very broadly understood, may be called the New Cinema. Defined
in purely historical terms, the New Cinema names the resurgence of vari-
ous national film industries after the devastation wrought by World War
II and the commercial dominance of the American sound film. But the
Italian neorealism of the 1940s and 1950s, the French nouvelle vague (new
wave) of the 1960s, the Neuer Deutscher Film (new German cinema) of
the 1970s, along with other national and international styles and move-
ments, resemble one another in more than their historical conditions. As
the newness of the New Cinema is inextricable from a renewal of the very
question of cinema, from a search for ways to open up the medium, it is
one-sided to define the movement by its works rather than by its principle
of an interrogation and rejection of the habits of cinema. If a case can be
made for including Psycho and The Birds, it is because these films take