Page 16 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

6 James Phillips

own kind of closure: in place of the closed world of ideology, it presents
the closed world of the past. That the means of playing audiovisual mate-
rial can be employed to show, rather than what was, that which is occur-
ring simultaneously—as in the case of live feeds on the Internet or the
now customary giant screens that magnify the proceedings at a concert or
political rally—is an argument not so much against defining cinema by a
relation to the past as for excluding such uses from the class of phenomena
to be discussed. Where recordings survive their immediate relay, their
subsequent appearance in television schedules and screening programs,
alongside what has come to be known as cinema, reconfigures their con-
tent as what is past.
Cinema is not incidentally but essentially a mass medium. It creates
a mass mentality as much as it caters to it. Claiming that the presence of
the actors in a theater stands in the way of the oneiric stupor in which
a film screening takes its course, André Bazin ascribes to theater an in-
sistence on an "active individual consciousness." 6 Even if this insistence
is intellectual in what it demands of the audience, it is grounded in the
lived experience of a body among bodies. Cinema may appeal to what are
called the lowest instincts, but the circumstances of its reception, when
contrasted with the shared physical space of a theatrical performance, are
further removed from the pheromone-filled air of prehistoric life on the
savannah. Cinema cheats itself and its audience of an engagement with
the present insofar as its technological means of recording what is can
only put forward reproductions of what is past. The price of the realism
of its reproduction is an unreality in the circumstances of its reception.
The realism that is the automatic achievement of the technology of cin-
ema reformulates rather than solves the problem in the visual arts of the
relation to what is: its deviations in the representation of what is have to
do not with fantasy and inaccuracy but with pastness. Technological pro-
ficiency in the replication of phenomena is the starting point of cinema,
whereas in the visual arts it is a goal. As this technological proficiency
does not allow itself to be appropriated by the individual filmmaker, the
exhaustiveness of its reality can however be called into question. The
supplementary reality that is not a technological given in the reception
of cinema (precisely because of the technological nature of this recep-
tion) is also not an achievement of the mimetic technique (or naturalist
commitments) of the individual filmmaker. It is the reality that certain
politicized filmmakers in the New Cinema will conceive as the outcome