Page 39 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

Luchino Visconti 29

simply put forward as a thesis in a dialogue, since the enunciation of the
thought in the form of a thesis itself belongs to a discovery and develop-
ment overreaching such enunciation.
In this way the "cinematic circle" is formed of which, following
hermeneutics, Stanley Cavell speaks. It rests on the "reciprocity of ele-
ment and significance." 7 The "aesthetic possibilities" of the medium of
8
film are not "givens"; each film must conquer them through their real-
ization; the "medium" first needs to be created. The film is an actuality
that does not presuppose any possibility. Of course, Cavell occasionally
wavers between two arguments, between a historicist argument, which
observes in modernity a loss of existing schemata or "automatisms" bind-
ing medium and instance, and a structural argument, which never grasps
the instance as a mere actualization of the possibilities of an existing
medium. The "cinematic circle" attests not only to the formal or logical
possibility of that which is to be understood, given that the intuition of
the "element" presupposes comprehension of the "significance," which
in turn presupposes an intuition of the "element." The "cinematic circle"
attests likewise to the sensuously and intellectually experienceable tran-
sition of the "element" to "significance," to a certain kind of Utopia, if
Utopia can be understood as a removal of barriers. In a film that has
turned out well, in a film that is art and precisely on that account can-
not be included in the repellent genre of art films, no "element" is to be
met for its own sake, as a mere thing so to speak, and no "significance"
shoots beyond the "elements," as an abstract thought. Should one wish
to use the concept of experience as a concept for a certain kind of resis-
tance, one could also say that the "cinematic circle" demarcates the dis-
tance between thing, sign, and referent without the demarcation leaving
behind a trace, the trace of an experience. The criterion for the success of
a film is thus not the classical ideal of a complete mediation of form and
content—this ideal is the accompaniment of a primacy of spirit and the
end of art. The criterion is the shaping through and imaging of the work,
for which the disruption of mediation, the thingliness of the "element"
or "significance," is still not entirely arbitrary, as though a spiritless end
of art were to appear beside the spiritual. The disruption of mediation,
the experience, remains in a state of tension with respect to that shaping
through of the work that aims at mediation, at the closure of the "cin-
ematic circle." The failing voice, the voice as sound, is in the work of art
not a free-floating effect.