Page 15 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Introduction 5

abstract realm where individuals gather for the private consumption of the
interchangeable commodity of a film. The cinema presents its audience
with a fait accompli. What is shown is already past, and although it opens
itself up to the populations of the world through distribution and low
entry prices, the cinema excludes its public by means of the fatalism with
which a film plays itself out in being screened (even if audience members
stop the projection, they are too late to influence the film). In the epilogue
to his text Benjamin warns that fascism is turning politics into a theatrical
performance. 4 Yet were one to base ones judgment solely—and with no
doubt an inexcusable degree of historical irresponsibility, but here that is
not to the point—on their structural similarities, one might await a recon-
version of the theatrical into the political. From this perspective Cavells
diagnosis of the politics of cinema in The World Viewed seems much more
desperate. The past that film restores to us is not myth (the continuity of
culture and the vitality of traditions) but the raw fact of a here and now
from which we are excluded:

On film, the past which is present is pastness or presentness itself, time itself, visu-
ally preserved in endless repetition, an eternal return, but thereby removed from the
power to preserve us; in particular, powerless to bring us together. The myth of mov-
ies replaces the myth according to which obedience to law, being obedience to laws
I have consented to and thus established, is obedience to the best of myself, hence
constitutes my freedom—the myth of democracy. In replacing this myth, it suggests
that democracy itself, the sacred image of secular politics, is unliveable. 5

Film is illusionist not simply in certain of its themes; it is in itself an opiate
because it gives us a here and now in which we cannot do anything.
It is specifically as cinema that cinema intervenes against the myth
of the accommodating openness of democracy. A greater danger to demo-
cratic openness lies in this specificity than in what may have seemed to
favor early conceptions of cinema as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Each component
that is brought into play in the significant whole of a Wagnerian opera is
an art. In cinema, however, the passivity of the recording apparatus is a
mechanical intruder on the literary, musical, histrionic, and other artistic
components. Given the disparity between its artistic and mechanical con-
stituents, film may attain a degree of internal dissent incompatible with
the notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk. But this dissent, as much as it works
against the totalizing procedures of ideology that Kracauer deplores, does
not suffice to establish cinema's democratic credentials. Cinema effects its