Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This chapter examines films that suspend the spectator between dimensional poles (flat and deep, left and right, up and down, still and moving, animate and inanimate). Denying the spectator ...
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This chapter examines films that suspend the spectator between dimensional poles (flat and deep, left and right, up and down, still and moving, animate and inanimate). Denying the spectator dimensional certainty, films by Marie Menken, Pat O’Neill, Ray and Charles Eames, Ernie Gehr, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge emphasize presentation and the contingencies of reception over the continuities and fidelities of representation. The chapter argues that these filmmakers privilege the contingencies of individual vision by creating and occupying a space in-between the perception and the apprehension of an image. Leaving the image’s dimensional status uncertain and unresolved interrupts the usually transparent means of cinematic representation and charts a preference for autonomy and diversity over universalizing or totalizing vision. Pat O’Neill, for example, uses the optical printer to suspend the spectator between two and three-dimensional images simultaneously, performing Wittgenstein’s aspect theory. The contingency of this mode of reception simultaneously borrows from Surrealism’s elevation of an individual’s subconsciousness over reason and Transcendentalism’s interest in the “intuition” of experience over the “tuition” of institutional learning.Less
This chapter examines films that suspend the spectator between dimensional poles (flat and deep, left and right, up and down, still and moving, animate and inanimate). Denying the spectator dimensional certainty, films by Marie Menken, Pat O’Neill, Ray and Charles Eames, Ernie Gehr, Maya Deren, and Sara Kathryn Arledge emphasize presentation and the contingencies of reception over the continuities and fidelities of representation. The chapter argues that these filmmakers privilege the contingencies of individual vision by creating and occupying a space in-between the perception and the apprehension of an image. Leaving the image’s dimensional status uncertain and unresolved interrupts the usually transparent means of cinematic representation and charts a preference for autonomy and diversity over universalizing or totalizing vision. Pat O’Neill, for example, uses the optical printer to suspend the spectator between two and three-dimensional images simultaneously, performing Wittgenstein’s aspect theory. The contingency of this mode of reception simultaneously borrows from Surrealism’s elevation of an individual’s subconsciousness over reason and Transcendentalism’s interest in the “intuition” of experience over the “tuition” of institutional learning.
Rebecca A. Sheehan
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- April 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190949709
- eISBN:
- 9780190949747
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190949709.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that ...
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Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”Less
Can films philosophize rather than simply represent philosophical ideas developed outside the cinematic medium? Taking up this question crucial to the field of film-philosophy, this book argues that the films of the American avant-garde indeed “do” philosophy, and it illuminates the ethical and political stakes of their aesthetic interventions. The author traces the avant-garde’s philosophy by developing a history and theory of its investment in dimensional, conceptual, and material in-betweens, clarifying how reflections on the creation and reception of images construct an ethics of perception itself. This entails the avant-garde’s locating of cinema’s—and thought’s—ends or meanings in their means, and their advancement of an image of truth that is made rather than found, that unites with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Rectifying film-philosophy’s neglect of the American avant-garde, the book demonstrates how, rather than showing their interest in the revelation of authoritative truths, the avant-garde’s interest in the re-encounter and review of the seen and known emerge from an American Transcendentalist tradition that opposes such notions. The author reads the avant-garde’s interest in the contingencies of spectatorial experience as an extension of Pragmatism’s commitment to replacing the authority of a priori knowledge with that of individual experience. She also shows how Emerson’s influence on Friedrich Nietzsche connects the American avant-garde’s philosophies to Deleuze’s time-image, premised largely upon Nietzsche’s “powers of the false.”
