Page 18 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

8 James Phillips

to reality and to pursue a policy of formidable pragmatism and opportun-
ism, securing and increasing its lion's share of the global market.
Cinema, which was seen to situate itself on the threshold between art
and reality, between the expressiveness of manipulated material and the
impassivity of bare fact, is prone to an alienation from the here and now, to
a hermetism from which traditional works of art are exempt. Cinema is life
itself and an unprecedented parody of life. To be sure, the life that the pro-
jector brings to the lifeless photographic stills of which a film is composed
requires the participation of its immediate audience, since the cinematic
golem of movement owes its appearance of animation to the memory traces
in the perceptual apparatus of those viewing it. The specificity of cinema is
nothing technological: cinema differentiates itself from photography by a
negation of the individual frames that are the sum of its actuality, coming
into its difference from photography between the frames, in the caesura
where its nonmaterial essence colludes with the synthetic prejudices of hu-
man perception. The romanticism of cinema is this setting to work of what
is not there. In this respect at least, cinema precludes totalization, since it
comes about less by putting images together than by preserving the inter-
vals that hold images apart. A film does not begin and end as cinema but
rather as photography: the film is reclaimed by the still in the same way
that poetry yields to prose after the final enjambment. But the aesthetic
engagement whereby cinema comes into its element in the immediacy of
an audiences sensory processes does not resolve the ambiguity in which
cinema is at once life and a parody of life because the mere immediacy of
life is a shadow of life. Ontologically, the essence of cinema belongs more
to the transcendental structures of experience than to the phenomenal
realm, yet this intimacy that characterizes our relation to cinema goes
hand in hand with the disengagement that marks our reception of the
interchangeable copies of a film.

Whatever negative appraisal might be made of cinema through
comparing it with the traditional arts is risible in the face of the con-
temporary pervasiveness of film: the judgment s pretensions to critical
negativity dissolve into nostalgia. It is not just that cinema now has a
one-hundred-year history; the history of the last one hundred years has
itself become cinematic for us—the nature of the technology of film in a
given period reaches into the period to define it for us and to date it so that