Page 42 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

32 Alexander Garcfa Düttmann

it is its creation. Solely on condition that one can define art conceptually,
subordinate significance and element to a specific determination—and
thereby, for example, assess every drifting apart of significance and element
as a failure, as a deficient spiritualization of the sensuous or a deficient
sensualization of the spiritual—does this conflict admit of resolution: the
prize for settling the dispute is however the end of art, thus the reopening
of the circle whose closure is observed.
In a certain respect, then, the understanding of a film is never a
purely conceptual understanding. One can never reduce a film to its con-
cept. Art requires an indirect address. Perhaps that is true even of philo-
sophical discourse. If there is no significance of the significance, no idea
of the idea, no concept of art, no spiritual end of art, then the insight, for
example, that it is always the possible but never the "immediately real"
that blocks the way to Utopia, cannot be straightforwardly separated
from the form of thinking, in the end not even from its own formulation.
The thought has become "flesh and blood," something real, or rather it
has not fashioned itself in a distinct spiritual sphere in order finally to ex-
ternalize itself. The film or the philosophical text is an act, an expression
of thought in "flesh and blood" to which in turn only another act can an-
swer, another expression, another philosophical text or film that does not
remain in possibility but rather itself grounds the reality or actuality of
a circle of "element" and "significance." In this way the "force" to which
Cavell refers communicates itself. That also befits its inexplicability.
"Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality." In
Visconti attempts at change founder as a consequence of an orientation
by the difference between reality and possibility. Almost all of his films
revolve around this theme. Lo straniero forms an exception, L'innocente a
limited case. In L innocente, Visconti's last film, a man of the world takes it
for granted that the change has already taken place. What is at issue is the
experiment of a life beyond good and evil. Treating the possible as real,
this life shatters against reality because the possible is not real but rather
only an illusion, a deception. It is not real in the sense of the prevailing
society that maintains itself through double standards. Nor is it real in the
sense of a relationship that would be free of deceptions because it would
no longer equate freedom with permissiveness. The "stranger," the central
figure in the film of Camus' novel, passes over entirely into the anonym-
ity of the social immanence with which he involuntarily collides, in an
unexpected movement of exaggeration, of the exaggerated effect of the