Page 38 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

28 Alexander Garcfa Düttmann

maintains a grip on an insight and expresses it. A thoughts understandabil-
ity, which an act alone is able to furnish, is not simply identical with that
intelligibility for which a meaningful linguistic utterance provides. Hence
it is not simply the same whether one understands something through the
expression of individual films, through the constellation that a series of
films composes, or through conceptual means whereby one attempts to
conceptualize an insight. There are many ways of understanding, and in all
of them the faculty of understanding itself, the possibility of understanding
something, has a part. Must, however, the insight—that which is under-
stood—be so affected by this difference that in the end only in the case
of the knowledge employing and indebted to conceptual means can one
speak of an insight? Such a restriction seems arbitrary.
Is the insight therefore something preexisting, which the illustration
as much as the concept can approach in order to give it expression? In the
first scene of Somnarnbula, which Visconti together with Bernstein and Cal-
ks so successfully brought to the stage at La Scala, the overwhelmed Amina
sings, "Ma la voce, o mio tesoro, / non risponde al mio pensier." 4 Can the
incapacity of the voice to articulate explanatory words be separated from a
pure thought whose service it quits? That one cannot differentiate between
the pure thought, on the one hand, and the voice and its failure, on the
other, means that nothing is able to express the thought more purely than
that very failure of explanation that arises from being overwhelmed. The
opera comes into existence. Aminas fiancé replies:

Tutto, ah! Tutto in questo istante
parla a me del foco ond'ardi:
io lo leggo ne' tuoi sguardi,
nel tuo vezzo lusinghier. 5
Hence, instead of regarding the insight as something given, one could
view it as something that first achieves an essential concreteness with the
image, having no existence independent of it. The image: an eye that sur-
veys the world and that is surveyed by the world. "In the eye the soul is
concentrated and the soul does not merely see through it but is also seen in
it," Hegel says in his lectures on aesthetics, immediately before describing
6
the work of art as a "thousand-eyed Argus." With each film Visconti con-
tributes to the expression of an insight, to its discovery and development,
to the illumination of an aspect. The significance of the insight measures
itself against its very inseparability from its expression. The insight is not