For The Illiterate

It’s ridiculous to try to call it reality, or define it within reality, or strain to cram it within a definition related solely to the idea of it’s connection with reality; the fact is, cinema, and all cinema like constructs (such as television, documentary, online videos, and even home movies) are not reality, and are not direct replications of reality. It’s a narrow-minded figure who tries only to look at such constructs within it’s relation to reality, yet somehow, unfortunately, the history of theory and discussion about film and it’s related artifices is bound to this connection and this connection alone.

There are two famous recordings of people’s reactions to the moving pictures when they first started becoming public. One is the obnoxiously repeated story of an audience during the Lumiere Brothers’ showing of “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat”, and the other is a quote from a newspaper article written by Maxim Gorky in 1896. Both of these responces are to Lumiere Brothers’ presentations, and both are quite contradictory when it comes to audience reaction and the feeling of reality.

These two reactions weave for me the rest of a long story in relation to cinema, and it’s the prevelance of these two catagories of reaction that proves that we need to look somewhere outside of these two restrictive views.

Both of these are told over and over again, especially this first one.

1. It is said that when the audience was sitting in the theatre watching “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat” there comes a point in the film where the train appears to be coming right towards the audience, and terrified that it was going to come right through the screen and kill them all, the audience rushed to the exits and dashed for cover. Having never seen an image projected both spatially and temporally, they were convinced that it was a real object, and it was going to crush them into tiny little bits of audience stew. This idea is proposterous, but it is told and retold more in recognition of films closeness to reality.

2. Maxim Gorky wrote the following in a local newspaper after seing a Lumiere Brothers’ projection in 1896:

“Last night i was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Everything there – the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, it is not motion but it is soundless spectre”(Frampton, 2006, p1).

Clearly, one of these stories relates to how cinema is so much like reality, and the other discusses how different it is. Cinema history is filled with how film is reality, and how film is non-reality. Personally, I feel that both are right in certain respects, yet below the point.

Either way, cinema definers have constantly struggled to either make cinema present reality, or demonstrate how much it doesn’t. Out of this, comes the attempt to define and replicate the real. Out of this, comes madness.

According to Andrew Trudor, in his book ‘Theories of Film’, Theorists Bazin and Kracauer were “…both crucially involved in the attempt to create a non-social aesthetic of the real” (Trudor, 1974, p77). despite they’re different approaches to the subject. They watched and critiqued films, and noted how the films related to reality. They sought for a way to show realism in film by avoiding the subjective viewpoints that society expects and creates. They seek objective realism in Cinema.

This struggle brings to the forefront the obstical of objectivity and subjectivity, and this is where the task of creating and defining anything within the terms of reality becomes ridiculous. It becomes ridiculous because “the reality” is a practically indefinable and unobtainable concept. What is reality? Thought’s float to those famous lines from ‘The Matrix’, “What is Real? How do you define real?”(Berman, 1999) Is reality a mental and/or subjective projection and interpretation of the world around you, or can reality be seen from some objective and outside standpoint? Can reality ever possibly be seen from one particular perspective?

The artistic world’s response to cinema, and cinematic realism show’s an interesting opinion towards the subject. Cubist artists started showing a different scope of objective reality that film could not. Within a single still image they tried to show an image from multiple perspectives both spacially and temporally, attempting thuroughly to demonstrate that a subject is more than can be shown from one viewpoint at one time.

Surrealist artists attempted as well to point out the fakery that representation is.

“There is a famouse painting by the surrealist painter Rene Megritte in which he draws a totally accurate pipe and writes underneath it “ceci n’est pas une pipe” – this is not a pipe. It is, of course, a picture of a pipe and not the real thing; he is drawing our attention to the fact that an image is not reality but someone’s representation of reality”(Film and Realism).
Cinema can’t be reality, and thusly must be some sort of non-reality, yes? Perhaps the cinema world is indeed a world of shadows: a separate world to be constructed as such.

This is true in a lot of respects. Cinema is a separate world, but to label that world purely as non-reality is still so restrictive into the definition of whether or not the image is real or not. Daniel Frampton gives us a good understanding of this concept in the introduction of his book ‘Filmosophy’ when he says that “Film might now be understood as creating its own world, free to bring us any scene or object it wishes. Film becomes less a reproduction of reality than a new reality, that merely sometimes looks like our reality”(Frampton, 2006, p5).

This is fairly solid. It even hearkens back to Gorky’s original reaction to the cinema in a truer light. Cinema is its own world. A world that is constructed on various levels, and has the ability to appear representative should it wish. This gives us more freedom to understand it separate of confinement, but is still excluding an important part of Cinema. Film, on a fundamental level, is an interaction between the film’s creator/s and the film’s audience.

And perhaps, since there seems to be such a great obsession with cinema and cinema-like constructs, it’s partially some fight for understanding of reality that the user and the creator are taking time for a moment to explore.

Marshal McLuhan believed that technology inadvertently became extensions of ourselves when we used it. In this regard, he believed that communications networks were an extension of our central nervous system (McLuhan, 1964). What does the central system do, but provide us with the information we use to understand and analyze our reality? If that’s the case, then what are all these media constructs but ways for us to extend outside of ourselves in order to understand and vindicate ourselves within a reality that is outside of our individual ability to grasp due to various obstacles. Obstacles such as the shear size of the world, and and amount of occurrences and interactions within it. The phrase “it’s a small world after all” applies only because as we extended our central nervous system through the technologies of communication and media we were able to accrue stimuli from further and further away, we were able to feel larger within it.

We utilize networks and sources of media to define ourselves within a massive world, and feel part of it. We use them to allow us to understand things beyond our original capabilities to understand them. For instance, In a book entitled ‘The GeoPolitical Aesthetic’, formative author on postmodernism and globalization, Fredric Jameson, discusses the contemporary figure’s stance within the globalized world. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice write of Jameson’s book that,

“…the analysis of the relationship between cinema and urban societies in this book in a comprehensive range of global contexts, and with an emphasis on cinema as a social and material practice, may be seen as an exercise in what Jameson, with reference to the peculiar spatial character of cinema, has termed “cognitive mapping” – that is, the attempt to ‘think’ a system (today, postmodern global capitalism) which evades thought and analysis”(Fitzmaurice, 2001 p6).

‘Cognitive Mapping’ is the key term here. The attempt to grasp through various contemporary societal resources (especially cinema) the concepts outside of ourselves that are beyond simple understanding. The example in this case is postmodern global capitalism, but perhaps the simply indefinable concept of reality is one of those systems.

This is, of course not the only thing that cinema can provide, or be, but it shows one reason why defining the cinematic experience within terms of reality is so ridiculous, because the cinematic experience is part of our social attempts at understanding reality.

References
1. Berman, B., Hughes, C., & Osbourne, B. (Producer). & Wachowski, A. & Wachowski, L. (Directore. (1999), The Matrix [Motion Picture]
USA: Warner Bros.

2. (n.d.). Film and Realism. Film Education, Retrieved Sept. 22, 2008, from:
<http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/concept/film-real/docs/frameset.html>’

3. Fitzmaurice, T. (2001). Cinema and the City. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell Publishers ltd.

4. Frampton, D. (2006). Filmosophy. London, England: Wallflower Press.

5. McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: Extensions of Man. Abingdon,
UK: Routledge Classics.

6. Trudor, Andrew (1974). Theories of Film. Viking Press.