The reality of film: Theories of filmic reality

The reality of film

The reality of film

Theories of filmic reality

RICHARD RUSHTON

Copyright © Richard Rushton 2011

The right of Richard Rushton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 8268 9

First published 2011

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Contents

   List of illustrations

   Acknowledgements

   Introduction: On the reality of film

1 Beyond political modernism

2 Realism, reality and authenticity

3 The imaginary as filmic reality

4 A reality beyond imagining

5 Cinema produces reality

6 Filmic reality and ideological fantasy

7 Filmic reality and the aesthetic regime

   Afterword

   Notes

   References

   Index

List of illustrations

1 Listen to Britain(Humphrey Jennings, 1942) Crown film Unit / Kobal Collection

2 The key political modernist auteur: Jean-Luc Godard with Eddie Constantine and Anna Karina on the set of Alphaville (1965). Chaumaine Film Studio / The Kobal Collection / Georges Pierre

3 Searching for reality: Chronique d’un été (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, 1961) The Kobal Collection

4 Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805), The Broken Mirror (1762–63). Oil on canvas, 56 × 45.6 cm. By kind permission of the Trustees of the Wallace Collection, London

5 Over the rainbow: the imaginary of The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) MGM / The Kobal Collection

6 William Holden and Kim Novak promoting Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1955) Columbia / The Kobal Collections / Bob Coburn

7 Cinema produces reality: David Hemmings in Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) MGM / The Kobal Collection

8 Ideological reality: Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1995) 20th Century Fox / The Kobal Collections

9 Some things to do: The Far Country (Anthony Mann, 1954) Universal / The Kobal Collection

Acknowledgements

This project has benefited from input, suggestions and debate with a number of colleagues, especially Nick Gebhardt and Fred Botting. Others have given great support along the way, including Elizabeth Cowie, Annette Kuhn, John Mullarkey and D.N. Rodowick. Many thanks to the staff at The Picture Desk for making the gathering of images such a painless task. A Research Leave Award from The Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom enabled most of this book to be written. Special thanks to James Donald at the University of New South Wales and John Lechte at Macquarie University who set up research seminars for me to test-run some of the material from this book.

Introduction: On the reality of film

1 Listen to Britain(Humphrey Jennings, 1942)

What this book is about

Some years ago Cornelius Castoriadis asked why the imaginative products of human existence – dreams, works of art, cultural objects and so on – are never seriously considered to be of primary importance. He wondered why objects that are imbued with what we call ‘reality’ are invariably things that are physical, material or natural, as distinct from the creations of human imagination. Castoriadis stated his position in the following terms:

Remember that philosophers almost always start by saying: ‘I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is this table. What does this table show to me as characteristic of a real being?’ No philosopher ever started by saying: ‘I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is my memory of my dream of last night. What does this show to me as characteristic of a real being?’ No philosopher ever starts by saying: ‘Let Mozart’s Requiem be a paradigm of being, let us start from that’. Why would we not start by positing a dream, a poem, a symphony as paradigmatic of the fullness of being and by seeing in the physical world a deficient mode of being, instead of looking at things the other way round, instead of seeing in the imaginary – that is, human – mode of existence, a deficient or secondary mode of being? (Castoriadis 1997a: 5)

What Castoriadis argues here is that philosophers ought to consider that they have things back to front: they have sought to determine the reality of things only in so far as those things are divorced from human imagination and creativity. He therefore asks the philosophers to reverse their approach and begin with humanity’s creative acts – dreams, poems, music – as the basis of ontological enquiry. Let the imaginary aspects of human life be those that determine the reality of things. Why should the creative aspects of the world be deemed secondary, as ornaments, as products devoid of being, a being which is reserved solely for natural or physical objects? Why shouldn’t we take up Castoriadis’s challenge and instead begin from the creative imagination of the human as a primary mode of being and then regard the physical, material world as a secondary one, as one that can only be secondarily derived from the primary substances of human creativity?

In this book I take up Castoriadis’s challenge – though my examination of the ‘reality of things’ is here concentrated on films. I argue that films are part of reality. Against the idea that films are abstracted from reality and can thus only offer a deficient mode of reality, I instead try to see films as part of the reality we typically inhabit, as part of the world we live in, as parts of our lives. I argue that films help us to shape what we call ‘reality’. It is this attempt to acknowledge the reality of film that I call filmic reality.

My attempts to spell out exactly what I mean by filmic reality over the many months of this project have most often led to my being tied up in rhetorical knots. Why might this be so? I believe that my difficulty in providing a clear definition of just what filmic reality is derives to a large extent from the fact that it is a concept that lies well beyond the accepted paradigms of thinking about films (as indeed Castoriadis stresses a similar blind spot central to conceptions of philosophy). It seems to me that film scholars and students are invariably drawn towards trying to determine what a film represents, that is, to looking at films as at best a secondary mode of being, so that any claim for the reality of films is most often met with either the blank stare of bafflement or outright repudiation (one recent book, for example, can only bear to say that films are a cousin of reality, not reality itself; another that they are refractions of reality; see Frampton 2006: 2; Mullarkey 2009). In fact, I know of only one research project that has aimed to take the reality of film seriously. Martin Barker and Kate Brooks (1998), in their audience study of Judge Dredd (1995), repudiate the widespread belief that films can be accounted for on the basis of their adequacy to reality; that is, in terms of how ‘true to reality’ they are. They argue that an emphasis on truth and adequacy as determining criteria for films can only presume a rigid demarcation between what is real and what is non-real, between what is real and what is make-believe or illusion. If some films are merited for their adequacy to reality, then it stands that other films must fall short of the claim to reality. Barker and Brooks thus emphasize that the demarcation between the real and the non-real in films effectively blocks a more important question: ‘what do people do with their filmic experiences?’ (Barker and Brooks 1998: 165). Although I do not share in Barker’s and Brooks’s faith that audience research can effectively provide answers to the question of what people do with films, I am nevertheless asking a very similar question: what can films do and, as a consequence, what can we do with films? This question is central for an understanding of filmic reality precisely because it is one that breaks down the rigid dichotomy of real versus non-real in the cinema, or, as I put it more forcefully in the early chapters of this book, the distinction between reality and illusion in the cinema.

One of the central arguments of this book is that, by relying on the distinction between reality and illusion in the cinema, film studies has – perhaps unwittingly – relied on a logic of representation; it has shut films off as a deficient and secondary mode of reality. If the task for film scholars is to clarify what should be accepted as real in the cinema, and to warn against what is illusory or non-real, then such arguments can be made only on the basis of judgements about truth and adequacy. Such ‘truths’ about cinematic experiences in the final instance must be made on account of any particular film’s strategies of representation and can ultimately only be guided by the question of whether such and such a film is representing the ‘real world’ truthfully or adequately. It is such questions of the truth or adequacy of filmic representations that the present book tries to repudiate. I am well aware that cinema is often regarded as being one of what is known as the ‘representational arts’ or ‘representational media’, but what I want to take issue with here is the question of why anyone would feel the need to declare that cinema re-presents anything. Rather, what I want to argue by way of filmic reality is that films do not re-present anything. Instead, they create things; they create realities, they create possibilities, situations and events that have not had a previous existence; they give rise to objects and subjects whose reality is filmic.

Therefore, the question of what a film represents is antithetical to the aims of this book. Rather, what this book asks is: what do films do? How do films feature as part of the way we structure our lives? In what ways might films influence the ways we think about the world? In what ways do the impressions or thoughts we collect from films add to our experiences of reality? In what ways do films contribute to our understanding of reality? In short, in what ways do films become parts of our lives, parts of our world, parts of our reality?

An example

I think the best way to begin is with an example. In one section of her book on Family Secrets, Annette Kuhn investigates some very specific and personal responses she had to two films. The first of these, Humphrey Jennings’s ode to the British home front experiences of the Second World War, Listen to Britain (1942), is especially poignant for Kuhn, for it provides her with what she takes to be memories of the war even though the images which provide these memories are of events that occurred before she had been born. She thus defines the way Listen to Britain helps her to flesh out a reality, even if this reality is one that for her never took place in the so-called ‘real world’. What concerns Kuhn is not what these images represent. Rather she is concerned to discover what these images make possible. What certain images in this film have become for Kuhn are realities, realities she associates with the war effort and the experience or memory of the war. These are not experiences or memories of things that ‘really’ happened to her, but they are experiences or memories that have been imbued with a filmic reality. The reality of her filmic experiences of Listen to Britain are such that they give rise to real feelings, real meanings and even what seem to be real memories. Kuhn’s responses to the film go some way towards defining what I mean by filmic reality.

Kuhn’s ruminations in fact go far deeper. She reveals the intensity with which the film’s images worked their way into her experience and understanding of the world. She does so by ascribing to the film a ‘story’. This story unfolds in the following way. Walking around a particular area outside the British Museum in London, for reasons that are not entirely clear to her, evokes the ambience, mood, feeling, memory or, perhaps one might say, the presence of Listen to Britain. Kuhn explains that ‘Although no such scene occurs in the film, this experience is unequivocally associated for me with Listen to Britain’ (Kuhn 2002: 113). She further explains that ‘This feeling is so strong that I am convinced my reverie must depend on my knowing the film’ (ibid.). What Kuhn thus acknowledges is that this experience is one that does not depend on her knowledge of the events of the war – it does not depend on a prior reality which the film evokes or represents – and nor is it an experience reducible to the atmosphere of a particular area outside the British Museum. It is an experience that depends for her on knowing the film – it is a reality that is produced by Listen to Britain and by the impact this film has had on her understanding of the world. In this way, I think the experience Kuhn describes is one of filmic reality.

With Kuhn’s insights in mind, some more questions can be asked of the notion of filmic reality. Perhaps it is possible to say that one of the questions to be asked of filmic reality is: How do we use films in ways that help us to understand the world, ourselves, and our relations to others? Or more pointedly: What is it possible for films to make real? For Kuhn, Listen to Britain makes real an experience or memory of the Second World War at the same time as it gives body to her experience of walking in a particular area outside the British Museum. Her reverential experience near the British Museum is granted some degree of meaningfulness to the extent that it allows her to experience herself, to realize a specific memory, even though that memory is not a personal memory of anything that ‘really happened’ to her. What makes this kind of experience one that can be associated with the notion of filmic reality is that it is one that could have arisen only on the basis of Kuhn’s having seen Listen to Britain. The film contributes to her knowledge, understanding and negotiation of the world around her and, as such, this filmic reality enables her to experience reality in a way that it could not be experienced without the intervention of Listen to Britain.

Perhaps a simpler way of conceptualizing these issues is by more straightforwardly asking: What do films allow us to realize? How do films allow us to make sense of experiences, thoughts and feelings in such a way that we become able to incorporate them into the reality of our personalities, our memories, our ‘being’? It seems, more often than not, that films are understood to be mere fantasies, escapes from the real world, dream worlds that allow audiences to forget the reality of their lives for a few hours so as to be withdrawn into another world, a world that is distinctly separated from the realities of everyday lives. Or, correlatively, films are understood to be imbued with signs or symbols that reflect real historical instances or cultural predilections (in the former case, for example, that The Searchers(John Ford, 1956) is indicative of race relations in the United States in the 1950s; in the latter, to give another example, that HouseSitter (Frank Oz, 1992) expresses a return to old-fashioned conceptions of the romantic heterosexual couple; on these films, see Henderson 1985; Krutnik 2002). From such a perspective, a film can only ever ‘reflect’ or ‘represent’ issues that have their foundation in the ‘real’ social world. It is as though, by drawing these comparisons, film scholars and critics express a need to maintain a strict division between what happens in the ‘filmic’ realm and what happens in the ‘real’ world. On the basis of this division, the ‘real world’ is always the realm by virtue of which films themselves are judged; in one way or another, films are measured by their adherence or faithfulness (or lack of adherence or faithfulness) to the real world. Of course, adherence and faithfulness to the real world have nothing to do with a film’s realism – films need not be in any way realistic to represent the struggles or joys of the real world. Whether films are fantastic or realistic, the dominant way in which films are judged and measured is on the basis of their adherence or faithfulness to the real world – at least, that is the claim this book defends.¹ From such a perspective, films in themselves cannot be repositories of reality, they can only ever be reflections or expressions of or references to a ‘real world’ reality that exists outside films, and from which films themselves are irrevocably severed.

Against such an understanding, an understanding of films which, so far as I can see, emphasizes cinema’s lack of reality, the notion of filmic reality insists that films cannot ever be understood as mere fantasies or illusions unfolding in a realm that is definitively separated from the actions, objects and events of the ‘real world’. To hold on to an opposition between ‘filmic fantasy’ and ‘real world reality’ is to compromise both what fantasy and reality are capable of. Above all, in this context, such a division substantially constricts the possibilities available for films (discussions of the complexities and deficiencies of the perceived split between filmic ‘fantasy’ and the ‘real world’ occur at numerous points throughout this book).

Kuhn, when writing of her experience outside the British Museum, refers to the sensation as a ‘reverie’. If this sensation is one of reverie, does this therefore mean that it is a mere escape, that it cannot be described as a filmic reality? My contention is that what the notion of filmic reality makes explicit is the way in which something like a reverie contributes to, or indeed is at the very basis of, what human beings encounter as reality. Human beings have the capacity to dream and to imagine, to the degree that, to again invoke the views of a philosopher, Castoriadis has gone so far as to declare that ‘the human being is imagination’ (Castoriadis 1997b: 159; emphasis added). For Castoriadis, this is what specifies the capacities of the human subject and human societies: they have the ability to posit in imagination that which does not have objective existence. He calls this capacity one of ‘reflectiveness’: the ability for the human being to posit a state of the world other than what it objectively is. And this is precisely what occurs for Kuhn outside the British Museum: her reverie, invoked by Listen to Britain, enables her to posit in imagination something other than what objectively exists. It is her reverie that gives to her experience a sense of meaning and significance; it is her reverie that makes her experience into something.

In this way, I argue that films provide what might be called ‘reverential experiences’ that help us to flesh out our understanding of the world and our place in that world. Films make available concepts, feelings, and ways of seeing and relating to the world that contribute to what we understand as reality. What would our experience of reality be like without films? It would be entirely different, for films have changed the nature of reality itself. Films have given us new ways to dream, but those dreams have also made available new domains of reality. It is the reverie sparked by Listen to Britain that provides a something for Kuhn’s experience outside the British Museum. Without that something provided by the film, the experience would have been a totally different one. By making a contribution to our understanding and negotiation of reality, films can thus be described and analysed in terms of their filmic reality.

Film theory and filmic reality

Does film studies need a theory of filmic reality? Many scholars, I imagine, would think not. Film studies has, for the most part, been dedicated to denying the reality of film. In a recent book, for example, Laura Mulvey writes that ‘Finding the film behind the film is the main aim of textual analysis’ (Mulvey 2006: 145). There can surely be little question that finding the ‘film behind the film’ has been and remains one of the guiding aims of some of the most influential strands of films studies. What such positions make clear is that a great deal of film studies has failed to be interested in films at all. Instead, as David Bordwell recently noted, such approaches to film focus on how or what ideas or social issues are reflected by a film; in other words, such analyses fail to be guided by what film itself is or does, and instead are motivated by aims that are external to the film itself. ‘For many scholars’, Bordwell writes, ‘films exist as less a part of an artistic tradition than as cultural products whose extractable ideas about race, class, gender, ethnicity, modernity, postmodernity, and so forth can be applauded or deplored’ (Bordwell 2005: 266). What such social and political approaches to cinema make clear is that films themselves are not actually of great importance; such positions assume that films are secondary and that the truly important stuff of life happens outside films and without them. From this perspective, films are not important in themselves, for they can only reflect or represent the ‘important stuff of life’ that occurs outside them. The ‘important stuff of life’ is primary, while films in themselves are only secondary; a film itself is a degradation of a truer reality, and that truer reality is a reality that exists, as Mulvey puts it, ‘behind the film’. From this perspective, the truly important stuff of films is composed of a reality that transcends mere film. Films in themselves have no reality but can only refer to or reflect the realities of life that exist outside, beyond, or behind them.

With such arguments in mind, then, this book has one aim: to dispel the myth that there is anything behind films. Its central point is quite simply that films are enough – they do not need to be something else; there does not need to be anything behind a film that would be better or more significant than a film as it is. Filmic reality – the reality of film – is film as it is. The Reality of Film is guided by various attempts to delineate what films are capable of producing and by the understanding that what films produce is their reality. Films do not produce something that is behind or beyond them; rather, films are defined by what they produce. It is Gilles Deleuze who eloquently stated that ‘cinema produces reality’ (Deleuze 1995b: 58). By this he meant that there is no need to conceive of films as being composed of secondary materials that then need to be decoded in order for their truth to be revealed. On the contrary, films are made of a primary material – ‘signaletic material’, Deleuze calls it – that is as real as any other reality it is possible to come into contact with. The reality of films does not lie behind or beyond them. Rather, the reality of film is what films themselves are.

Making sense of this book

This book begins with a chapter that fleshes out the current state of film theory and film studies – or, at the very least, it fleshes out the predominant strand of film studies with which The Reality of Film takes issue. That strand is one I trace back to the notion of ‘political modernism’, a term denoting a particular period of film studies brilliantly examined by D.N. Rodowick (1994). My purpose in that chapter is not one of criticizing political modernism per se, for it is by way of political modernism that many of the most important founding debates of film studies were initiated in the late 1960s and 1970s. What I really bring into question vis-à-vis political modernism is that so much of what passes for film studies today has failed to go beyond the debates of political modernism. Instead, as I argue, the same debates that began with the political modernist intervention have been replayed over and over again during the last forty years. Even scholars who believe they are pursuing domains of study which are purportedly beyond political modernism are, I claim, in fact, merely restating the very same terms of discussion.

With this in mind, I argue that the logic of political modernism is based on a fundamental distinction between illusion and reality in the cinema. I further argue that many arguments in contemporary film studies are still mounted on the basis of this very same distinction, which is to say that, in the main, film studies has predominantly been guided by a desire to forge clear distinctions between what can be considered real in the cinema and what can be considered illusory or non-real. The characteristic way in which this argument has been pursued, certainly if one considers the framework of political modernism, is by distinguishing between transparency and reflexivity in the cinema. According to this logic, films which claim diegetic transparency are offering illusions to their audiences – the ‘illusion of reality’ – while films that foreground the apparatuses of cinematic production are deemed to provide ‘reality’. Such arguments have exerted a tremendous strength over the field of film studies,² so that what I ultimately claim is that, if studies of cinema are based upon distinguishing between illusion and reality, or between the real and the non-real, then such approaches to cinema rely on a logic of representation. For this strand of film studies, then, the origins of which rely on the logic of political modernism, films are, and can only ever be, representational. On this count, films can only ever aspire to representing reality; they can possess no reality in and of themselves. It is explicitly against the logic of representation in film studies – a logic predicated on making distinctions between illusion and reality – that this book argues.

The remaining six chapters of the book try to posit various ways of going beyond political modernism and its logic of illusion versus reality in the cinema. Each chapter focuses on the work of a specific film theorist, so that there are chapters on André Bazin, Christian Metz, Stanley Cavell, Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Rancière. What pans out, I think, is less a singular, pointed and specific theory