Lec 2 MIT 24.213 Philosophy of Film

sorry okay what now all right so before I begin I just want to say I want to keep this pretty informal you know so feel free to jump in if you have comments questions if you disagree with me you know which hopefully you will you know so okay so I'm the first presentation here and I kind of like being the first because we're just getting introduced to the class so I have a chance to kind of say my own opinions my own viewpoints on why we study film why we're studying philosophy of film um and so we've all done the reading you know so I kind of want to present my own views my own reactions to the reading you know I agree with a lot of it disagree with some of it I understand hopefully most of it and I'm sure I misunderstood some of it but I mean it definitely brought up a lot of questions in my mind and hopefully my my talk will bring up some more questions that we'll go over um through the rest of the term because I can't I can't possibly answer all the questions that came into my head let me interrupt briefly um if you have any ideas about the movie we watched last time Beauty and the Beast yeah I have some ideas on that and also feel free to bring that in okay um so one one of the major questions that I have that's kind of a recurring theme in my life is why study film because I've been studying film all through MIT you know and obviously all of us have chosen to study film too and I didn't really know why you know um it's not like my parents made me or I need to do it to graduate or something you know it's just something that I choose to do and it's a it's a very personal question for all of us and we probably each have our own answers and I'm going to talk about why I choose to study film because I thought about it a lot and to answer that you know I need to tell you a little bit about my personal life and I'll get to that but first uh some definitions like uh realism and formalism were mentioned in the text and at MIT I've taken I don't know like three or four film classes now and in each of those classes we generally use a combination of those two techniques and honestly I think they're pretty hard to Define they seem to be um the opposite ends of a spectrum in which you can analyze film and so there's two different ways you can look at each aspect of film so that that means U for example story editing um uh costumes everything you know there's two different ways you can look at it so it's hard to Define since they overlaps so much but still I try to Define them you know because I want to have a clear picture of what exactly they mean so in realism it seems like what that means is the film is capturing an aspect of real life and that's what makes it powerful basically the um I'm sure you've all heard that art imitates life um so something about film is reflecting the actual world and maybe maybe even more than reflecting it's representing the world or being the world now let's talk about formalism um to me that means that you're using the power of film you're using technology to extend real life um so for example with editing of course a realist would have something different to say about this but but for editing you're you're able to change um temporality you know you can you can rearrange time you can rearrange space and that's power part of the power of film in which you in which you can change reality and give people something more um okay so as I said we analyzed film in my previous classes using combination of the two things because you want see how it relates to the real world but you also want to see what directors can do to harness the power of the media of the medium um so which way is the best I really don't know but I think a combination of the two is useful because at least then you can see what you can try to get the advantages of both approaches okay so I want to I want to say a quote from a movie actually um there's a quote from the player which was I think it came out in the 80s directed by Alman and the quote I want to say is movies are art now more than ever and that's a quote by the main character and um so to me that's one of the central reasons why we study film because we think that it's art and that's great ex how do you define art because that's really hard to Define too and in fact it's an ongoing battle with modern art you know um a lot of people go to an art museum and see a piece of mod and say oh that's not art well why you know it's really hard to Define um so let me tell you a little bit about my own personal background I started playing piano and violin when I was four years old so and all the way up to MIT when I became too busy with problem sets to to really play much anymore but um so To Me music was my first my first art you know my first love of art came from music now if you look at music you can't really use realism and formalism to analyze music because well go ahead you want to say something well you can talk about leaving aside representational music which is obviously going to be patterned upon some reality right yeah um a tone poem by Richard Strauss wants you to hear or imagine sonically what um the Sheep are in donot or what the adventures are of Don Juan that's the nature of programmatic tone poems of that sort now that that would be a realistic effect uh but over and above that uh almost everybody recognizes that music is important for what it expresses shuminsky said somewhere music doesn't Express anything it expresses itself which is a way of denying that it expresses anything in the composer or in the world feelings or an a theory of the world an attitude toward the world it's not expressive at all um the OD what's amusing however is that Stravinsky's music it is often very very expressive and he went through Romantic Period and then uh Classical period and in The Classical period there's a great emphasis on technique but it still it nevertheless remains expressive the uh formalist view would emphasize music as a series of techniques as requiring a knowledge of the scales of of different ways of manipulating the notes of different forms musical forms and that's what's usually taught in music classes introductory ones because they're afraid the students are going to have Daydreams about um some romantic moment or or you know something in Schubert which is very sad or very you know something like that and never hear the music so that there too you get the same problem about the formalistic element and the realistic one and the difficulty for the theorist or the philosopher is to make sense out of what these different Alternatives might be so it's not entirely different from film okay but I don't mean I didn't mean to interrupt you that long oh no that's okay um so when I was growing up though of course I didn't approach music with such a with such a philosophy you know I was just trying to enjoy it and and try to see how it's an art form and one of the things that I noticed is just that art I mean music Sorry music is highly capable of of producing emotion in someone you know and that's something strange you know why should why should these noises produce an emotional response in a human being and that's probably never going to be explained but I mean that's that's one of the reasons to me that it makes it art it it is able to evolve this emotion and so um I think my personal um definition of art like what is art to me well I would say that it's something that can either provoke a cognitive or an effective response so what does that mean it either makes me think or it makes me have an emotional response to it of which music can do both and so to me art is all about the ception you know I don't I don't really um actually let me let me uh save that for a little bit later but um so what is it about perception you know why why would we enjoy something that makes us think something that makes us feel emotions well I think that's just one of the basic basic aspects of humanity that we want to learn we want to experience so art makes us learn and it makes us experience and that satisfies one of our basic desires let me interrupt you again one of the burdens the main burden of the book which you'll realize when you finish it is to say that our way of formulating the problem between the realistic and the formalistic is itself self deficient and that's the job of the philosopher to help us make our ideas clear and my suggestion is that the two alternatives are not really separate it's an artificial distinction the way most philosophical distinctions are and in reality the two interpenetrate and so one has to find a way of explaining and understanding and experiencing the interpenetration so that it's not just a question of Music doing both the formalistic and the non- formalistic one both uh making sounds and also expressing emotions but the two are interwoven and then how does one make sense out of the concept of the into W woing into weaving and what are different ways of doing that briefly in terms of your two instruments there are pianists and violinists who seem to have a very profound understanding of the music in terms of the feelings like yudi Manu would be a good example um on the other hand in Violin other hand on the other hand there are those whose technique is absolutely perfect and they don't seem to express very much they really know how to use the instrument but they don't use it with any profound Insight well for me as a listener as observing the situation it tells me something about them as people you know I want to say yudi minu in order to play like that has not only learned the how how to use the technique but he has developed in his personality and so if one says about his music it's very spiritual very Soulful very filled with a kind of natural acceptance of the world and of other people and that in that sense he's a very beautiful person I've never met him but just listening I've I've seen him on screen of course but listening to the music I feel like in touch with that aspect of his being well that's because of the way in which he integrates the formal and the technical the formal and the realistic and that others um do it in a different way and that tells me something about them in either event the art is a function of the humanity the total Humanity of the practitioner and the difficulty is that you can teach people scales and exercises you can't teach them how to be human they've got somehow to be lucky enough to grow up in a world in which it comes out of them maybe they had a suffer or maybe they had to have a a loving parent especially a loving woman you know uh that I don't mean a loving mother um I haven't done the sociology but um I'll bet one finds that a great many of the really outstanding musicians learn music from their mothers particularly if they were men I don't know what about the girls but the being a little boy sitting at your mother's lap while she's playing the piano and teaching you affects them as human beings and also uh accelerates their ability to become uh proficient technicians in their art form so there there are all sorts of causes about the expressiveness but the two are not going to be separable ultimately and that's what I tried to argue that was my inspiration when I try to argue uh the um thesis in reality transformed you noticed in the first chapter I set up the positions in terms of theorists who have maintained that they were realists or formalists and I attack both of them with the idea that what they're saying isn't wrong but having limited themselves they're ignoring something else and then in the last chap I suggest the integration and how difficult it is to understand the the second book you of mine you'll be reading tries to start from that except starting with exemplars of cinematic greatness three great filmmakers none of whom people would have called philosophers because they don't come in with thesis like some U European in particular filmmakers uh but there they're great men and approached properly one can see what the depths of their souls are and that's all I care about is when I talk about philosophical I don't care whether they've take taken courses called philosophy in some University or whether they've written the equivalent of consecrate of pure reason it's their having a deep awareness and sensitivity to human what it is to be a human being and then without they knowing necessarily what they're doing introducing that into the expressiveness and the meaningfulness of their of their work of art but doing it on the basis of absolute technical Mastery since the two cannot be separated okay so um I want to go back again to that question on why we study film you know and so I'll I'll tell you a little bit about my own personal view um I'm an engineer um I'm at MIT to do electrical engineering and what does that involve that involves solving a lot of problems and in general they're pretty easy you know like one of the hardest problems would probably take like you know like a couple days to solve before you figure it out and then you go on and build something as an engineer and the attraction of Art and philosophy is that the problem can never really be solved as far as we know you know you can keep on working on it forever you can keep on trying to figure out why film is so powerful and you'll you'll come up with a lot of reasons but you won't ever know for sure and as problem solvers you know that's that's I mean we we chose to challenge exactly you know we live on the challenge and that for me that's why I enjoy the challenge as opposed to say studying economics or something where the problems are generally solved and you just learn how to solve problems that have been solved or mathematics yeah where which is an art form based on the possibility of of a solution and then the achievement of it yes Am I Wrong is there are there any mathematicians here I you came in late you I I talked a little about life not being like a mathematical problem with you did I or was that my other class U why it is that I'm a humanist and pluralist U but in the context of that what I believed and what I must have said to the other class this term was that mathematics is a great art form it's a an abstract art form and therefore possibly the greatest of any pure art form it's pure art I'm not talking about useful mathematics I'm talking about um mathematics that is not useful uh it pure mathematics is pure art because it is purely abstract and that's because it can be solved and therefore it can be solved life is not like that and therefore um apart from the art of mathematics usual Arts like film and music and literature are are challenging and intriguing particularly to MIT students because you can recognize the problem and it's not clear that there is a solution to it which doesn't mean you shouldn't work at it um how much time do we have to I don't want to have to we have we can go on for an hour this way this is very profitable I think okay no do any of you feel differently than well I just meant because of the movie that we want what um because we have to watch the movie we have an hour before okay okay great um so I want to talk a little bit about the uni uniqueness and power of film as opposed to other media um so what is what is different about film you know first of all I can display any image it's not limited say an artist a paint artist is limited by the colors he can use or the brush I don't know much about painting but um the technique that he has he can't just put anything up there um of course there's sound in film which can be very powerful there's editing special effects and the experience of watching film is very different and that's that's unique to film and we there's definitely um advantage and disadvantages I'll mention a few and finally one of the great powers of film to me is that it's just socially pervasive and acceptable you know like it's a great tool as an artist a director as an artist and that he can release a film and instantly worldwide it's accessible to everyone and I mean that's that's really every artist's dream you know if if you're an artist right now and you want to get your work out film is probably the best media in which medium in which to do it but there's another dream and that is once you've achieved that kind of success you care about the audience you want to make sure that they know how to look at film exactly and that's that's what this kind of course addresses itself to okay so I want to also compare film to photography um because similar in some ways and very different in other ways so I think the chief difference between film and between movies and photography is the way they're experienced now in a photograph the image is self-sufficient and the way it's experienced is you look at it and your eye may be drawn around the film I'm sure you've heard I mean the photograph sorry and I'm sure you've heard about artwork which paintings which draw your gaze to a piece of the artwork that's commonly analyzed something similar is done with Photography in film it can still be done but not to the same extent because you're experiencing constant stream of pictures instead of one self-sufficient picture um and also the the experience in which you which you have at a movie theer is completely different than um looking at a photograph so how do we look at movies in general you go to a movie theater you sit down and you for 2 hours or however long and you watch the film on the screen what about photography you go to an art gallery or maybe it's in a magazine at home and so that experience is completely different and I want to bring up um an example of a horror movie now I was actually talking about this with my roommates yesterday which is why I bring this up but so why what what is it about a horror movie that is so appealing to people um because so so my roommates said that well it's because makes you feel scared and and to me that kind of makes sense but why would you want to feel scared you know that you could just go outside and walk alone at night you know then you feel scared but that's not enjoyable so what is it about a a scary movie that's enjoyable well I think it's because you know you're in the theater you know you're safe but you can still sympathize with the characters that you're seeing and so I I just bring up this example because it's one of the uh it's something that that the um director has to keep in mind for the mental state of his audience they know they're safe they know they're probably in a theater or at home watching it on TV and and this is part of the experience that they get as they're watching the film and that's part of the art form that's part of the medium okay we can discuss this further when you read my chapter on Hitchcock who who talks a great deal about this uh the principle that he develops is fear and fear not go ahead okay and um one thing that is really really important about film to me is that it's influenced by all other films that I've seen it's influenced by everything that I've seen you know because my experience watching a movie is going to be different than okay let's take an example of Beauty and the Beast our experience last week watching Beauty and the Beast I'm sure was vastly different than audiences watching it when it first came out and does that mean we got a less we saw less of an artwork I don't think so does it really matter to us um does it it's the point of our watching that film to try to recreate the experience of the original audiences at the time when it came out no I don't think so either I think to us it's a it's a whole different piece of art than to the people back then or even say me versus someone else in this room we have a completely different way of thinking about the movie it it drew out different emotions in us but I think that's okay and that's part of that's part of the power of art is that it can draw out different emotions different thinking from every single person from every single time with different experiences that watches the movie well let me inter up that uh that movie was made what 60 years ago almost and it in a world that you can't possibly appreciate because even your parents probably weren't born then um and that's the difference and people then for the people that who saw it they they were living in that world and you aren't anymore at the same time and also so that's a big difference another difference is the version you saw last week uh has been digitalized cleaned up restored looks better than it ever did including the first time it was shown it was probably much more grainy then and here you saw it as a beautiful perfect entity in itself true to its spirit but not identical to the first seeing so that in that sense too it's very different but I think what's most important is the fact that you're different that uh this is happens inevitably in the passage of time uh life um in a sense never repeats itself you know there is saying about history repeating itself but history doesn't repeat itself because every moment is a function of what happened before and that affects the novelty of that moment which then becomes the past for the next moment that life is dynamic it's developing and consequently uh in a sense we can't live the past anymore but we don't have to because as we change we're capable of aesthetic um aptitudes that didn't exist before so that it's a very complicated thing because of the presence of time uh in relation to particularly a temporal uh phenomenon like the movie uh the movies it's also true of uh non-temporal Arts like poetry but wanted to go on okay adding on to that I I strongly believe that recording doesn't reproduce reality and a large part of that is based on the experience that you have as you're as you're watching whatever has been recorded so for example um this class is being recorded and someone somewhere is probably going to watch this tap and their experience is going to be very different than the experience of everyone in this class and so they're it's not like by watching the tape they're suddenly sitting in an empty seat in this in this room as realistic as a tape may be and that's something to keep in mind also and that applies to photography as well that that definitely applies to film so finally I just want to talk a little bit about uh Beauty and the Beast and also citizen C so Beauty and the Beast um it's clear that not supposed to reflect reality since there's a beast you know it's fictional characters it's AIC Beast who talks yeah fictional fairy tale story you know there's the girl that can that can transport herself with the uh Power of the glove and so it's not a realistic story but it's still powerful at least I found it very powerful and why because it doesn't really reflect real life well to me it it does reflect real human them um most notably the love conquers all theme the the Beast and and Bell are in love and this is this you see in real life and you also see in the movie and in the movie love wins in the end and so in love of some sort that's something we can discuss go ahead and um so this kind of movie seems to trigger just H basic human humanistic concerns you know and I I'll just name a couple things um that the movie that the movie has in it um physical Beauty uh Forbidden Love These are these are common themes that people think about and can easily see reflected in real life no you're not forbidden to love a a monster it's just it's not ordinary it usually doesn't happen it's socially unacceptable in in the movie which which is a common theme in real life too um okay so citizen came no let's discuss this first does anybody want to say anything about Beauty and the Beast let me make a couple of remarks um to who directed it wrote it who was this great genius really um told the crew particularly the cinematographer alak Kon who does a wonderful job and Chan Kant barah um who was the set designer he said what I want to do is to make a documentary of another world of a magical world I don't want it to be uh have Frills and look look like magic I wanted to be another world which is different from ours because it is Magic now he he couldn't have had in mind beauty and beast that the Disney Studio made about 15 years ago which most of you may have seen that is that's not a documentary of anything that is uh touching your sense of fancy and the fantasy uh and that's not what I I read a lot about that in my chapter but I don't want to get into it right now but I want want to mention that as an alternative to what kto tried for and I think succeeded he gets us into the mood that of course this is what a beast would look like and would be talk like if he were if he were um able to talk you know you're involved in that other reality and um the whole fantasy of it the Magic The Magic Castle and and the the Articles like the glove and the mirror that have magical properties uh but they're real articles they're real things in the world and you get a feeling for the real world um why did clo do this that itself is a big story uh and briefly it's because he was talking about what he calls the Poetry of film his his life output is mainly as a poet he made movies starting with the blood of the poet uh which is um uh what's called a surrealist movie but it isn't really but I'll give you an idea and in 1930 when he was already over 40 I think and then he didn't make another movie for 15 years and that second movie was Beauty and the Beast in the meantime he was turning out volume after volume of poetry uh stage plays novels stories everything but always as a poet and uh his uh attraction to the film was that he saw that there's an aspect of film that is or can be poetic but he distinguishes between poetry itself and the poetic he says the poetic is what people uh uh try to emulate when they're being superficial they're trying to act poetically you know you get the that mood that is being expressed uh and that's not what that's not what real life poetry is like that's not what poetry is really like in real life poetry comes out of the things of everyday life out of common existence and it comes out in unpr predictable ways if you look for it you won't find it because it hides but if you are perceptive and aware of the the difference it'll suddenly appear in unexpected places and for him the attraction of film is that film lends itself to that bringing forth of poetry I'll come back to this more when we talk about Wells um and renoa both of whom speak of poetic effects but they don't analyze it and haven't thought it through as well as cck cck to did uh in in the film uh there everything is as if it were real The Farmhouse at the beginning the ordinary life that we accept oh yeah that's real a real Farmhouse and it was a real Farmhouse um and then the castle the castle the Enchanted Castle uh looks like a real thing except that unreal things happen in it but they happen in a way that make it as if in another reality there could be arms coming out of the walls that hold on hold the chandel uh you know candles or that uh pour the wine for you or that are uh faces embedded in the lle piece that keep moving around you remember all that uh all of that is real but in an unreal use and unreal context which is just what CTO wants um and as a way of enforcing that he avoided all special effects now we live in a world in which special effects have taken over the uh film industry and all visual uh experiences that we have uh in in his day when the movie was made 1945 they existed though they hadn't gone as far because they didn't have the computers at that time uh and he doesn't want it he didn't there's only one special effect in the movie does anybody spotted when she disappeared there's the moment that U Belle has come back to the farm and dressed gorgeously with her magnificent what is it Collard or bracelet you that's necklace that's right and U uh her sister obviously envies it and she takes it off to hand it to her sister the minute it leaves her hands it turns into a cluster of rope that falls to the ground that's a special effect it's the only one uh and we don't we're used to that so we don't even notice it um so the tuo's idea what's interesting in the movie is that it is like the doc a documentary of of another world and that poses questions about the meaningfulness which uh I mustn't start because um you know I've written n 9,000 words already and I'm only half finished go ahead okay so I just want to say to wrap up a few words on citizen K okay let's go to Citizen K unless somebody wants to say something about it did you all get something out of that movie I thought it would be get increasingly more meaningful to you especially after you've had a chance to read the discussion about formalism and realism because it uses both it use it has trick formal tricks like uh uh the Beast carrying Beauty into her room did you notice she's attired the way she was on the farm until she goes through the door and then she ends up gorgeously dressed now that's a formal technique it's it's very inventive Citizen Cane is considered the greatest movie ever made by many people because it has so many of those inventive techniques and yet they work on another level as well in Cen Kane and also in Beauty and and the Beast anything else any anything any of you want to say about that okay let's go on to citiz Kane okay I don't know I don't want to give away too much about the movie because how many have not seen it I think about half I think but um I've studied it in several other classes and one thing that's often brought up is just the history of the film Orson Wells who's the director was a radio star at the time but had I think no experience at all in movies and this was his first film that's true goad and it was a huge success and at the time at the time it was just groundbreaking for things that he did in editing in special effects especially and also the the camera work that's those are the main things that we studied um one thing that you hear time and time again is deep focus which is Poss I think this is the first film that really used it people say that and it's not true but it's not your fault it's a common mistake um when you see the movie by renoa called rules of the game which is also treated as one of the two or three greatest movies ever made and that you'll be seeing it in this course you will see examples of deep focus and the movie was was made in 1939 before Orson Wells but Orson Wells developed it further and he gets the credit but um not he wasn't the first one go ahead okay so I mean this historical background is nice but it doesn't really affect our viewing experience of the movie and it's still a very powerful movie otherwise why would people say it's the greatest movie of all time and so um as I was watching the movie you know I wasn't really impressed by the special effect of it all because I've seen them now I've seen them hundreds of times already give an example okay um so there's there's one scene where the camera will scroll up um okay so they'll be on a stage the camera will scroll up and then suddenly it'll be another another scene it'll show a person clapping and so at the time that was a tough special effect to do without computers without ways of editing now it's you know it's you see it all the time you know a camera will pan and suddenly you'll be in a different scene and that's really easy to do nowadays um uh what you're referring to perhaps is when Kane gives a political speech and so you see him on the stage with his this is one of the images that's often copied uh even on the cover of my that's right the dusk jacket of my book in the wreath where there are excerpts from films by Hitchcock and Renoir as well as Wells there's one um vignette that shows Wells with his arm stretched out pointing to his own photograph that happens in this scene it's part of his political speech it's done in a big audience a big theater and you occasionally get quick shots of people in the audience well there were no people in the audience that that was done with photographs that saved a lot of money and uh they there was no need for there to be real people so they did it that way um in a movie like Titanic um where they have hordes of people in all sorts of scenes a lot of them are not real but rather um uh special effects with with the computer you can do more of that uh I myself think that the computerized things uh for instance in the movie in Titanic but also the one called Pearl Harbor um where they do that a lot at the end for instance that it's so obvious that it for me it attracted from the value of the movie in the case of Wells I don't think I would ever have noticed this if I hadn't read about it uh I'm telling to you now so you can see for yourself that's an example of a special effect and Wells was very Artful in doing that right I agree with that I without a computer all all of the effects I really wouldn't have known if I hadn't listened to the director's commentary you know where he talks about how he had to saw a table in half so that he could open it as he moved the camera through things like that are just nowadays they probably would have some fancier way of doing it but it's not something that that is really impressive to the modern audience yet Citizen Kane is still a very powerful film and um I don't really know exactly why but to me it it there's some there's some questions and there's some mysteries in the movie that aren't really answered and to me that just keeps me thinking about it long after after I I leave the theater or leave the room where I've been watching it you know I just keep reflecting on the movie and to me that's that's the real power of Citizen Kane was the example about the sewing of the table out of Citizen Kane yeah when he's in the uh when Kane's in the in the window off playing in the snow in the distance as a boy and his his parents are talking and the camera is behind the table you'll notice it and then the camera moves forward I see and they had to chop the table in half to get Wells was a professional magician and that shows up in various ways you you know he saw ladies in half go ahead okay so I I think that's I think I hit all the main points that I want well that's Splendid I think that's a very good presentation and we have time for anybody else to say something um I just wanted to say something about um Beauty and the Beast like something that I thought was interesting was the communication that um he tried to have with the audience especially like even just the beginning before the movie started you know how he was like well um just take your preconceptions of Beauty and the Beast and just humor me in this film and watch it in a different way I thought that was very interesting that he he set up the movie like that and actually came out and said that and then um I don't know well he he says that in order to uh awaken your imagination the way he thinks it would be for children in other words be a child but it's not a movie for children I don't think children would get much out of it but that's that's the mode of expression notice that the credits are put on in a school room and he is like the teacher who writes it on the Blackboard but then the actors who are dressed not in their costumes but as real people they come up and they erase it so there is that play uh which is very clever I think yeah so it's also like the reality of like trying to show the reality of magic like trying to put yourself in that and that I thought that was something in a theme through the whole movie you know why don't we go because otherwise it'll run after um I made myself be in a little late who was it put the movie in last time person who put it in I say uh he's the person who put it in the last time he's not here today oh he's not here today yeah can any of you manage this or you really know because there's some trouble with the DVD there okay put it in and uh if I'm not back started anyhow but I'll try very hard to get back in time in the meantime could you make out um a card