Session Information
13 SES 09 A, Text, Film, the Public
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper looks at the relationship between film, philosophy and education.The study of film often involves a focus on what might be loosely termed “cultural theory” and covers various “isms” – Marxism, feminism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and something that isn’t an “ism” – psychoanalysis. A number of such “isms” have their roots in what is (equally loosely) referred to as “continental” philosophy. Newcomers to the study of film can find such “isms” quite shocking. Conventional forms of textual analysis, which privilege a focus on authorial intention, plot, character and formal components such as poetic metre, are substituted for new possibilities of reading both text and world.
The shock of theory, and its power to disrupt our more conventional ways of seeing might be thought of as “educational” in the richest sense. Though I would not wish to reject this notion out of hand, I consider the possibility that “theory” (even when it is treated “creatively”) can represent a blockage that separates the subject from the educational power of cinema. There is, perhaps, something colonial about theory – the author is dead (see Barthes, 1968) and the critic takes her place (one human for another) This is quite ironic given that most of the theories I have mentioned critique the idea of a centred and enclosed self. Whilst the self will be generated and split through the play of language, performed in gendered ways and undone by irrational desires, the dominance of the critic, who knows all these things, becomes the centre of control. This arguably exemplifies what Deleuze calls “fascicular thought” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). The world is projected as multiple, yet all the threads can be tied up by the critic.
This paper considers whether what is done to film by critics may dilute the educational force of what film can “do”. If cinema can “do” things then can it educate us? The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze offers one way of thinking through this issue. Before discussing of Deleuze’s original approach to cinema, I will outline some Deleuzian “principles” (see Williams, 2003) that feature in Difference and Repetition (Deleuze, 2004). For Deleuze our ways of understanding the world arise from translating the “virtual” (or sensual) dimension of experience into various “actualisations”. This “virtual” dimension is then partially repressed as we become tied to our categorisations of experience. To live well we must allow ourselves to “connect” in new ways and forget our attachment to “actual” things. This presents a much richer understanding of “learning to learn” (Williams, 2003) than the conventional “onanistic” (Blake et al, 2000) treatment of that expression permits.
So how can cinema potentially educate us or help us “learn to learn”? Deleuze shows us in his discussion of cinematic images (Deleuze 1986 and 1989) To give a flavour of what this might involve, we can think of the camera as a kind of “virtual” self – not like a rational (human) individual (as this is an actualisation), but a site which moves and which receives things that move across it. It can take positions that humans cannot, and this removes the sense of an organising perspective such as that of the centred rational subject. From our “actualised” position we gain our sense of time from movement, breaking it up into orderly and consistent flows between events that progress in a linear fashion. By creating movement through cutting, changes of perspective etc., cinema can challenge our whole perception of time and movement. It can take us away from our “human” way of organising the world to expose us to life as mobility. These points are developed and added to during the paper.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
References Barthes, R. (1968) Writing Degree Zero. Hill and Wang: New York. Blake, N, Smeyers, P., Smith, R., and Standish, P. (2000). Education in an Age of Nihilism. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1989 Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and Repetition. Continuum: London. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus; capitalism and schizophrenia. London and New York: Continuum. Williams, J. (2003) Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh.
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