Introduction

As a counterexample to Scruton’s claim that ‘there could not be a photograph of a martyrdom that was other than horrifying’, I used the Crucifixion sequence from The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). While the event depicted is no doubt horrifying, I postulated that this sequence does possess aesthetic qualities beyond the physical details experienced in the viewing of this film. For instance, there is an explicit acknowledgment of and reference to representations of Jesus and the Crucifixion in both art and cinematic history. Of particular import here is the acknowledgment and referencing of the tradition of ‘Jesus flicks’. The freedom to explore the central idea of The Last Temptation of Christ—the struggle between flesh and divinity—comes with freeing oneself of the cinematic images or conception of that story. The power of this sequence, thus, is dependent upon acknowledgment of the genre’s own past. At the very minimum, this acknowledgment of tradition and history is the least one could expect from art. The work in question also constitutes a transformation of the understanding of art, and how it can now find expression and realisation.

However, in taking issue with the matter of representation, the question of realism remains. That is, how does the realism of what I experience in the viewing of this film translate into talk of the reality of the subject of that experience? What have I experienced? What foothold—if any—does it have in the world outside of the movie theatre? Is its reality confined to the geography of the movie theatre, or to what is experienced in the viewing of a film? What can I know of this subject so revealed in my experience of the film?

To one end, the question could be put as one with respect to what extent the realism of this crucifixion sequence constitutes an awareness of the reality of a crucifixion. Am I dislodged from the grip of earlier cinematic depictions on the basis of this constituting a more realistic depiction of crucifixion? Do I know what it was like for Jesus to be crucified? Do I just know what crucifixion was like for anyone? Perhaps there are some things that I can (or do) know about crucifixion on the basis of this sequence, things of an empirical, scientific or archaeological nature. The question, I suppose, I am posing here is: what is the reality of what I am experiencing? Does that reality cross over from the movie screen to the world outside of the movie theatre? Does what transpires on the screen correspond with things in the actual world? Cinematic realism here accounts for how something looks and sounds. The question is: what is the status of the ‘something’—the subject of my experience—in question?

For instance, I do not experience Jesus being crucified—what I see is ‘Jesus’, in this case, Willem Dafoe. The crucifixion here does not take place at Golgotha; it occurs at ‘Golgotha’ (in this case, Morocco, which also acted as ‘Tibet’ in Kundun.) These are the things that are present as recorded (and projected) in space and time. Willem Dafoe and Morocco are the things that correspond in the real world to what transpires on the screen. They exist in space and time in the real world. But are they the things that exist in cinematic space and time? Something experienced in the actual world passes and goes, it is momentary, and is largely revisited through memory or recollection. What is experienced in the space and time of the experience of a film can be revisited over and over again: we can watch the film again, that thing is still frozen and intact in that spatial and temporal location.
 

The Question of Realism

Such questions take us to D. W. Griffith’s ‘The task I am trying to achieve is to make you see’. Visual realism opens up one sense of seeing; another sense pertains to consideration of reality, a cognitive claim. That is to say, Griffith also envisaged cinema as possessed of the cognitive power to engender a particular awareness of the world; to present aspects of a world we may be already familiar with in a light hitherto inaccessible or unrealised. However, if there is a gap between the world on film and the actual world—there is no direct correspondence between what is experienced in the viewing of a film and what exists in reality—how can one attribute to films such cognitive power (i.e. the capacity to enable us to know things about that world outside of the film)?

This is a matter of obvious philosophical interest, with respect to epistemology and metaphysics. It also provides the context for the theory of cinematic realism. According to Gregory Currie (Image and Mind pp.19-20), ‘realism’ here takes the form of three doctrines or claims:
 

(a) Transparency: cinema reproduces the real world, in that the camera captures real objects in the world. It is transparent in that we see through it to the real world, as one does through a window or lens. [André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer] If we take realism in the guise of transparency seriously, it gives rise to the metaphysical problem of requiring the existence of mind-observer independent reality or realm of entities. ('Realism' is access to a mind or observer independent reality.)
(b) Likeness: the experience of film is like the ‘normal’ perceptual experience of the world. [Bazin] 'Realism' in this instance pertains to issues of cinematic style.
(c) Illusionism: a film is realistic, to the extent that it has the capacity to engender in the viewer an illusion of the reality of fictional characters and events, through their presentness in an experience of a movie. [Rudolf Arnheim] 'Realism' here is a question of effect, pertaining to the objects of belief, and our emotional or psychological concern for and engagement with them. This is an issue that is largely pursued by some film theorists and film-makers, particularly in connection with scepticism with respect to the structure of reality. (Cinema can achieve some kind of 'reality' in realisation of the possibilities unique to it, but the 'reality' it achieves is still systematic illusion or delusion.)

Siegfried Kracauer, for instance, sees cinema as constituted by the task of ‘the redemption of physical reality’. Cinema is capable of holding up a mirror to reality, in that it actually reproduces the ‘raw material’ of the physical world. Due to the abstractions and categorisations of modern science and technology, we have lost sight of the ‘givenness’ of the concrete world, the material that exists outside of theory.
 
 

It almost looks as if [Mae Marsh’s] clasped hands with the convulsively moving fingers were inserted for the sole purpose of illustrating eloquently her anguish at the most crucial moment of the trial; as if, generally speaking, the function of any such detail exhausted itself in intensifying our participation in the total situation ...
 But is this really its function? ... No doubt it is to impress upon us her inner condition, but besides making us experience what we would in a measure have experienced anyway because of the familiarity with the characters involved, this close-up contributes something momentous and unique -- it reveals how her hands behave under the impact of utter despair. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Establishment of Physical Existence’ p.253.

Back to the Cave

Nevertheless, we can see that granting cognitive power to cinema locates us in the domain of epistemological concern, vis-a-vis the question of there being a gap between a subject’s experience of the world and the world itself. Is ‘the world’ commensurate with what is revealed by or encountered in experience? Is the true world something that lies behind experience? What are the conditions that enable or entitle us to see the world as it is, to think about it truly? Are we recreating or rehearsing this form of inquiry when we turn to the experience of films? Such thoughts invite us back to Plato’s Cave, and the kinds of considerations I foreshadowed in that earlier discussion. Perhaps we can assume that we are not tempted to equate the appearances or images on the movie screen with reality, in the sense of the actual world. (For instance, I do not actually believe that Willem Dafoe is Jesus; he is ‘Jesus’. Furthermore, I do not believe that I am witnessing the Crucifixion at Golgotha; I am viewing ‘the Crucifixion’ at ‘Golgotha’.) As such, we also believe that the experience of a movie is not an experience of the actual world. The world and space of the cinema screen is something that is physically inaccessible to me. There exists an irreconcilable physical gap between what is there on the screen (where I am not) and what is here with me. The recognition of such distance largely manifests itself, presumably, in the state of disengagement or detachment that the audience assumes with respect to what is projected onto the screen. They look upon a world whose physical details are similar to those of the world we are ordinarily familiar with, but also enjoy a kind of unreality that leaves them safe in the thought that the inhabitants of the world and space they peer in on cannot reciprocate that gaze. And it is an expectation that they will always bring to such viewing. One could almost characterise this as the viewing and experience of films as, and under the attitude of, a ‘view from nowhere’, a viewing of the world ‘not from any place within it’; an attitude specifically referring to what is countenanced on the cinema screen, and also applicable to one's own purported disengagement from the world outside of the screen in the viewing of films.

It would seem, then, that we are not entrapped like Plato’s cave dwellers, because we are cognisant of the appropriate distance between ‘the shadows’ and the world outside of the cave. It is interesting to note how the idea of the Cave has recently surfaced in Peter Weir's The Truman Show. This film, I believe, dramatises a 'meta-cave', a cave within a cave, in specifically referring to a 'film-within-a-film'. Where D. W. Griffith, say, had employed certain visual techniques to highlight a shot within a film, Weir uses similar techniques to specifically refer to a 'film-within-a-film', and, hence, a distinction between what are 'the shadows' and what is 'reality' (if not to blur the distinction in places). Of course, the point is that 'the shadows' and 'reality' are one for Truman Burbank, if not for all viewers of 'The Truman Show' the television series. The Truman Show's indictment is of television as the real Cave, as the real source of bewitchment and entrapment. It echoes the following observation from Desmond Lee:
 

As Cornford pointed out, the best way to understand the simile [of the Cave] is to replace 'the clumsier apparatus' of the cave by the cinema, though today television is an even better comparison. It is the moral and intellectual condition of the average man from which Plato starts; and though clearly the ordinary man knows the difference between substance and shadow in the physical world, the simile suggests that his moral and intellectual opinions often bear as little relation to the truth as the average film or television programme does to real life. Translator's Notes, The Republic, Second Edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974) p.316.

I can see where the makers of The Truman Show are coming from: the immediacy of television, in the sense of it is there, it is available 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year; it is an immediate presence in our lives, such that one literally becomes chained to the couch, bewitched and enslaved by the flickering tube. What about home theatre in this connection?

My problem with such claims, though, are that they take the metaphor of the cave too literally. First and foremost is the concern that, in taking Plato’s cave as transparently descriptive of the experience of watching a film, one is casting the issue as one of the difference between appearance (or illusion) and reality, in addressing the question of cinema within the context of knowledge and scepticism. This resonates more with the fireside scepticism of Rene Descartes’ ‘Method of Doubt’. This casts a particular sense of ‘being nowhere’ or being absent in the experience of a film; not so much nowhere in the film ‘world’ or absent from its affairs, but a detachment or absence from our own space and time.

The force of Descartes’ cogitations in this respect address the correspondence theory of truth. Its thrust is not intended to cast total doubt on the existence of a material world (reality), but upon the extent to which we could claim—within certainty—that the world is populated with, or constituted by, those particular experiences we have. Nevertheless, they do determine that sensory experience is of no consequence or irrelevant to determinations of truth and certainty. That can only be delivered by a particular method of thought, that employs reason as a rarefied, purified, sanitised abstraction of thought. The question of the difference between appearance and reality—and its resolution—only looms if one is prepared to consciously will one’s absence from all that belongs to experience and being located in the physical world.

That, I would argue, is not possible, nor should it be required. It certainly cannot be what is involved in talking of a ‘view from nowhere’, or an absence or forgetting of self, in the experience of viewing a film. (After all, what kind of view does one have from nowhere? what can you see from nowhere?) I also believe that such considerations do not come to bear with respect to Plato’s Cave. It cannot be the case that we leave our conceptual baggage outside of the cinema, before we occupy our ‘view from nowhere’ in the movie house. If anything, the experiential and cognitive dimensions of our viewings depend upon this baggage. We bring the actual world and ourselves to our viewings; and they similarly leave traces in our thoughts outside of the movie theatre. There is no outside, without one being grounded inside.

As Stanley Cavell writes on the relation between films and the cave:
 

The point of the relation is exactly that presenting yourself to these events cannot be a matter of walking out and literally going somewhere else. There is no time for me but the time I am in and there is no specific elsewhere to go. --Then why suggest that there is? --But I claim to be denying that there is. --Then why bother to so much as deny it since anyone with common sense cannot fail to deny it? --Because common sense is, and ought to be, threatened and questioned by the experience of film itself; and because the nature of our absence from the events on the screen is not the same as the nature of our absence from an historical event or from the events in a cartoon or in a novel or on the stage; and because the differing natures of our absence are internal to the differing natures of the audiences of the different arts; and because the nature of the audience of an art, its particular mode of participation and perception, is internal to the nature of that art (The World Viewed p.212).

To this end, our experience of films is placed fairly and squarely in this world -- both as a phenomenon and in terms of its requiring our presence in the world as a matter of our being present to what transpires on the screen. What this requires, above all else, is a deeply embedded acknowledgement -- both in the viewer and in the film -- as to the certainty of there being a world. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in On Certainty: ‘If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting presupposes certainty’. This, in a way, is probably what lies behind the sensibilities of realist theories of cinema, such as those put forward by Siegfried Kracauer.

Perhaps the idea of truth or knowledge we are getting at here is best revealed under the auspices of imagination.
 

Suggested Film References

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Dir: Martin Scorsese.
Torn Curtain (1966). Dir: Alfred Hitchcock.
Intolerance (1916). Dir: D. W. Griffith.
The Truman Show (1998). Dir: Peter Weir.
Total Recall (1990). Dir: Paul Verhoeven.
Dark City (1998). Dir: Alex Proyas.
The Matrix (1999). Dir: The Wachowski Brothers (Larry, Andy).
 
 

© 1999-2002  Brendan Long