What is Cinephilosophy? A Bazinian Paradigm, Part 1

Love needs reality. What is more terrible than the discovery that through a bodily appearance we have been loving an imaginary being. It is much more terrible than death, for death does not prevent the beloved from having lived.

Simone Weil [1]

“I say –whatever you’re looking at over there seems bloody interesting.”

Octave to Christine, as she looks through a pair of binoculars and discovers her husband Robert embracing his mistress Geneviève in La Règle du jeu.

What is cinephilosophy? However novel the term may seem, this essay does not aim to promote a new or specialized brand of philosophy. Instead, it proposes to recover an old and inclusive conception: if philosophy encompasses any exercise of the human capacity for fundamental reflection, then cinephilosophy is simply one set of such exercises, one portion of a vast and largely-anonymous archipelago of human activity. As the Oxford cinephilosopher Stephen Mulhall puts it: “…there is no essential break between the natural, inherent reflectiveness of human life-forms and the inveterate reflectiveness of philosophy; what distinguishes the philosopher is the persistence and single-mindedness with which he [sic] employs the capacity of self-questioning that informs every aspect of our ordinary existence.” [2] Though all human discourse involves some reflection, cinephilosophy is marked, like philosophy-in-general, by its extreme openness, the fact that it proceeds along all possible axes, disturbing and re-articulating an indeterminate whole. At the same time, it distinguishes itself from philosophy-in-general by consistently exerting the full pressure of its radical expectations on the cinema itself. Condensing these two features, one could say that cinephilosophy occurs whenever films are treated as the key to everything else. It always originates in a loss of balance, a vertigo or misstep, a disorienting moment of cinephilia. [3]

But what assumptions make a concept of fundamental reflection conceivable? And how can reflection on the cinema itself be a form of fundamental reflection? Since my model of cinephilosophy is based on the premise that the philosophic potentials of the cinema are inherently connected to the experience of cinephilia, presenting it is mainly a matter of clarifying what exactly I mean by philosophy and cinephilia. If the phenomena of cinephilia are a set of facts that need explaining, I believe the metadiscursive analysis that follows offers a coherent explanation for those facts which at the same time recognizes their philosophic powers. My ultimate goal is to present a universal or generic paradigm of treating film philosophically, one capable of illuminating what the various existing traditions and approachs have in common. I will argue that André Bazin’s often-misunderstood theses concerning photographic ontology provide a theoretical support for such a paradigm and that his critical writings exemplify how it works in practice.

I. Philosophy as Reflection on Historical Experience

To begin: what exactly do I mean by philosophy? [4] First and foremost, it is crucial to recall the radical independence of philosophy in relation to all existing bodies of knowledge, including those that go by the name of philosophy; as was once well-known, the etymology of the term clearly distinguishes it from the secure possession of facts, their relations and meanings, from existing narratives, theories and interpretations: philosophy is the love of wisdom or truth, a force which disturbs the settlements of knowledge and reveals their imperfection in the light of an emerging but unknown whole. [5] Philosophy is only true to itself by always being truly different; though the root cause of philosophy –human desire and ethical responsibility– is old and common, its effects always register as fresh, impertinent and beautiful, as a magnificent disorientation of knowledge and ideology. [6] To illustrate how this model of philosophy operates I offer a passage from Simone Weil as a thought-experiment; in it, she attempts to recover a concept of truth which she claims has been lost to the specialized practices that characterize modern disciplines:
bq. A little boy learns his geography lesson so as to have good marks, or in obedience to orders received, or to please his parents, or because he feels that far-off places and their names have a poetry about them. If none of these motives exist, he just doesn’t learn his lesson. Supposing at a given moment he doesn’t know the name of the capital of Brazil, and the next moment he learns what it is, he has acquired an additional item of knowledge. But he is no whit nearer to truth than he was before. There are certain cases in which the acquisition of knowledge causes one to approach truth, there are other cases in which it doesn’t. How to distinguish between the two sets of cases?

If a man surprises his wife whom he loves and in whom he has perfect confidence being flagrantly unfaithful to him, he is suddenly brought into brutal contact with a piece of truth. If he happens to hear that some woman whom he doesn’t know, whose name he hears mentioned for the first time, in a town he doesn’t know either, has deceived her husband, that fact doesn’t alter his relationship to truth in the slightest. The latter example furnishes the key. The acquisition of knowledge causes us to approach truth when it is a question of knowledge about something we love, and not in any other case. [7]

Though the results of this experiment will of course vary with the reader, I would tentatively unpack my own as follows. If the husband in Weil’s example is capable of philosophy, that is, if he still loves his wife and reflects honestly upon the brutal truth that chance has revealed to him, it should be manifest that his understanding of his wife, himself and the world will inevitably develop or grow; his understanding will be better because it will be truer to the whole which his consistent love for his wife helps make him open to. He prefers to contemplate the whole truth about her, however contradictory or bitter, because her existence is real to him and he senses, however dimly, that denying any part of that truth entails denying the truth about himself and the world in which they are situated. More than any specific view he may have of her, he loves and accepts the fact that she exists “in three dimensions,” i.e. that she enshrines a unique perspective on the universe, mortal and free, and that therefore “one side” of her actions and thoughts will always be hidden from view (even to herself). The encounter illuminates aspects of his life that he had, in retrospect, lived without understanding, and reflecting on it serves to improve his understanding. In the midst of the bitterness there is a stark beauty that he treats as an index of reality, as the very articulation of lived relations within a complex and living whole.

If, on the other hand, he stops loving his wife and/or is incapable of honestly reflecting on the encounter, an opportunity for philosophy will be lost. If he feels indifferent towards her, he will not even care to properly reflect on the possible explanations for the scene; if he hates his wife passionately, he will be inclined to accept the flat, simplistic re-interpretations of the past proffered by his hatred; and if his craven dependence on her is stronger than his love for her, he might well accept any explanation that will repair, however imperfectly, his pre-encounter state of blissful ignorance. In either of the last two cases, whatever new understanding he accepts might well be based on an impressive and cogent marshaling of facts, narratives, theories and interpretations, and may therefore be legitimately credited as a gain in knowledge. His new view of the matter may seem comprehensive and without contradiction. But when seen by the light of the truth opened up in the decisive encounter, his acquiescence in such knowledge can also be assessed to be a lie, a retreat into ideology, and a loss for philosophy.

If this experiment has been successful, and perhaps even if it hasn’t, the reader may appreciate why it is impossible to secure philosophy, so-defined, as knowledge. The independence and strength of philosophy, its radical and disturbing skepticism, originate in the vulnerability of desire, and its commonness derives from ethical commitments that are unique and inscrutable. [8] These paradoxical conditions determine both its moment of possibility and its extension into philosophic dialogue. Thus Weil’s example is designed to function for us in the same way the surprise encounter functions for the philosophic husband. Using a concrete and suggestive example, she prompts us to register the difference between “truth” and “knowledge” by drawing an inference as to the principle (“love”) that accounts for that difference; though we may never have faced such a situation, she gambles that it will nonetheless resemble and draw on our experiences (our own inscrutable networks of love and indifference) and produce a specific quality –a shimmer of beauty– capable of retroactively giving her terms freshness and definition. Since the production of this quality logically depends on our initial understanding of those terms, it seems as if we remember something about them, something which we nonetheless cannot recall having known before. Philosophical discourse thus provokes us to remember something new by creating a circuit of undecidability between the provocations of language and the facts of historical experience, an obscure but undeniable co-implication that infuses it with conviction. [9] Though we can never be objectively certain that we share an understanding of the distinction between “truth” and “knowledge” (any attempt to do so would only shift our uncertainty onto other terms), the provocations of this experiment hopefully “ring true” and ground her argument in our common experience of love, language, and reality. [10]

Everything thus hinges on “a shimmer of beauty” or “a ring of truth”. Even if these phrases stink and the entire experiment has been an abject failure, I would still point to that stink and failure as evidence of what I am trying to demonstrate, that we all take our bearings by the capillaries of erotic attraction, conviction and beauty that inform every aspect of human life. In this model, the aesthetic dimension of human existence lays out its defining possibilities; it is the source of all definition or difference and therefore cannot itself be defined: it is, inherently, avant la lettre. Driven by its loyalty to the singular accidents of aesthetic experience, philosophy always puts existing categories and terms into question (including the categories and terms used to construct this or any model of it) and forces them to undergo a radical metamorphosis. Viewed as a whole, it is simply the on-going collective attempt to secure the possibility of such metamorphoses through systematic reflection on the shared or shareable contexts which produce them.

But while the very fact of human discourse seems to presuppose the possibility of philosophy as a collective endeavour, it is nonetheless hard to assign it a definitive location. As its effective realization always depends on chance conjunctions of aesthetic form and living human desire, philosophy has a tendency to operate incognito, appearing and disappearing according to an unpredictable timetable throughout the domains of human experience. Those who create or study aesthetic forms are simply trying to make this timetable more predictable, to illuminate the world and thus better the odds for humanity, while more or less aware that they cannot overcome the fundamental limitations imposed by chance and desire. The assumptions presented by this model, which seem to me to be necessary to account for the radical disturbance of philosophy –both the fact of ideological illusions and the possibility of escaping them, progress in the most basic sense– also account for the enduring concern with philosophy’s mis-recognition. However rational an argument may be, its purchase on a given situation always depends on the uncertain effects of its particular aesthetic charms. Gambling that it can bridge distinct bodies of historical experience and thus mitigate human isolation and conflict, philosophy always risks being misunderstood: without anyone noticing, the bulb flickers out, good magic turns bad, truth turns to muddle, a shimmer of beauty congeals into a tired or dangerous cliché. Among other things, Octave’s remark in La Règle du jeu on the “terrible” fact that “everyone has their own reasons” indicates an anguished awareness that we can never fathom the quality of our own intentions or judge the extent to which they illuminate or darken our reasoning. [11] As in the case of the unphilosophic husband described above, we may imagine ourselves to be lucid and free while plunging ever deeper into personal or collective self-deception. In a 1966 interview, Octave’s creator Jean Renoir explicitly affirmed his own understanding of these principles:

Renoir: People are not convinced by arguments. They are convinced by the sound of a voice. For example, I’m sure the people who followed Hitler weren’t convinced by what he told them. I’m sure it was the little man’s strange personality.

Cahiers: The magical side?

Renoir: The magical side! I think that convincing people is magic. People think that one convinces with arguments, with logical reasons. It’s not true. Logic never convinced anyone. Absolute truth is absolutely invisible.

Cahiers: And Socrates’ dialogues?

Renoir: Ah! I’m sure it’s the same thing. There was a magical side. Because Socrates’ reasons are excellent, but the truth is that if one cares to, one can respond to them, one can oppose them. But I’m sure that the element that convinces us, in what we have of Socrates’s dialogues, is probably a kind of magic in the writing. It’s in every writer in fact. It’s by means of the magical side that one can reach the reasonable, or the reasoning side. Of course it’s a paradox, but paradoxes are true. In any case, they have as much chance of being true as logical truths do. [12]

Given this paradox and these equivocal conditions, on what basis does philosophy proceed? One cannot objectively prove why the good magic of Socrates is better than the bad magic of Hitler, or why it is worth spending time reflecting on La Règle du jeu. But for a true Renoir-lover the difference the film makes is more than a matter of taste, it is a truth that has given definition to historical experience, that is itself an irreducible fact of that experience. The world revealed by the film is more real than the indifferent or ideological worlds it displaces because its enigmatic beauty offers purchase for a collective exploration; in the long run, good magic sustains the scrutiny of dialogue and reflection in a way that bad magic can’t. [13] True love is not satisfied by anything less than the whole truth and it is this dissatisfaction that gives philosophy its radical motion and dialogical orientation. In betting against its misrecognition philosophy assumes that our desire for truth is always turning bad magic good, widening our horizons while honing in on a singular reality. As bitter as it might sometimes seem, philosophy is driven by the faith that human life is a happy accident or gift: however rarely or reluctantly we reflect on our encounters with truth, they never cease to testify that the world is “different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.” [14]

II. Cinephilia as Motive for Reflection on Historical Experience

There is the sense of a repetition, of a persistence within a discourse which we point to with the term cinephilia. Cinephilia doesn’t do anything other than designate something which resists, which escapes existing networks of critical discourse and theoretical frameworks. What is this thing that keeps cropping up in all these different forms and keeps being called cinephilia? What is the discourseof cinephilia hovering around? It has never been a coherent discourse.

Paul Willemen [15]

The attitude of looking and waiting is the attitude which corresponds with the beautiful. As long as one can go on conceiving, wishing, longing, the beautiful does not appear. That is why in all beauty we find contradiction, bitterness and absence which are irreducible.

The contradictions the mind comes up against –these are the only realities: they are the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

When something seems impossible to obtain despite every effort, it is an indication of a limit which cannot be passed on that plane and of the necessity for a change in level –a break in the ceiling. To wear ourselves out in efforts on the same level degrades us. It is better to accept the limit, to contemplate it and savour it in all its bitterness.

When the attention has revealed the contradiction in something on which it has been fixed, a kind of loosening takes place. By persevering in this course we attain detachment.

Simone Weil [16]

The preceding sketch of philosophy was designed to highlight principles that I believe are equally important for understanding the phenomena of cinephilia. [17] The stark geometry of Weil’s demonstration –i.e. the triangle linking the “truth” of the scene to both the husband’s historical experience and the realm of reflection– offers a clear way of illustrating structural similarities between the two phenomena, and of modeling a set of assumptions which in any real example would be irreducibly complex and difficult to present. I’m gambling that it offers an example of cinephilia that is better than any actual instance for having been imagined differently by each of us; however diffidently one performs this crude cogito, however underdeveloped the scene may be, whatever substitutions or reactions it may provoke, it remains the creation of each individual, an element, however minor, of historical experience. As such it will constitute the analogical rock (or sand) on which I build my account of cinephilia.

What exactly do I mean by cinephilia? As in the case of philosophy and for the same reasons, it is crucial to begin by making a distinction between the innumerable instances and possibilities of cinephilia (part of the unmappable archipelago of human experience) and existing accounts of cinephilia (e.g. the maps film scholars currently use to characterize the phenomena). The need to establish this distinction is even more pressing insofar as cinephilia is commonly taken to be a historical movement with specific parameters, an experience that has certain prerequisites, and/or a unique culture whose heyday has past. Though the limitations of these characterizations may already be evident, in light of their widespread currency it is worth taking a moment to briefly note some of their common features and define my own approach by way of a critique.

In examining discussions of the topic, Paul Willemen notes a pervasive equivocation between defining cinephilia as “a particular relationship to cinema” or as “a particular historical period of relating to the cinema”. [18] Though the discourse treats these as if they were the theoretical and historical dimensions of a single phenomenon, he argues that, like comparable definitions of a literary or art historical phenomenon (e.g. classicism, romanticism, modernism), they inevitably contradict one another:
bq. Such an ‘ism’ is either a bundle of characteristics which can always be detected in a wide variety of historical periods and places (that is to say it never coincides with the historical placement of the label), or it designates a cultural-historical moment at the cost of abusively simplifying and reducing the phenomena one is trying to describe. Procrustes comes to mind in that context. [19]

If one reflects seriously on the critical categories cinephiles typically use to identify their experience –the work of an auteur, a specific genre or cycle of films, fleeting details of audiovisual contingency that provide pleasure or epiphany– it becomes impossible to limit the phenomenon to specific historical parameters. Nonetheless, and for their own reasons, most contemporary discussions of the topic have chosen to represent it as a historical movement without clarifying how the primary experience of cinephilia distinguishes this movement from adjacent phenomena (aesthetic experience in general, other experiences of the cinema).

As far as I can tell, the discourse has only been able to represent cinephilia in this way by alluding to a vague measure of “intensity” and by treating secondary or derivative factors as if these were valid principles of inclusion/exclusion. Self-proclaimed cinephiles typically appeal to the idea of a “golden age” during which the love of the cinema is said to have reached its highest pitch of intensity and this apex is then used to give a broad historical coherence to experiences that are nonetheless described in theoretical terms as irreducibly private and incommensurable. In order to secure this imaginary coherence the discourse is forced to treat the coincident conditions and secondary effects of a particular group’s experience of cinephilia as if these were necessary and definitive characteristics of any and all cinephilia. Susan Sontag provides us with some egregious but nonetheless representative examples of how this rhetoric operates:
bq. Each art breeds its fanatics. The love the movies aroused was more imperial. Lovers of poetry or opera or dance don’t think there is only poetry or opera or dance. But lovers of cinema could think there was only cinema…

Cinephilia was mostly a Western European affair. The great directors of ‘the other Europe’ (Zanussi in Poland, Angelopoulos in Greece, Tarkovsky and Sokurov in Russia, Janscó and Tarr in Hungary) and the great Japanese directors (Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Naruse, Oshima, Imamura) have tended not to be cinephiles, perhaps because in Budapest or Moscow or Tokyo or Warsaw or Athens there wasn’t a chance to get a cinematheque education…

No amount of mourning will revive the vanished rituals –erotic, ruminative– of the darkened theatre. People still like going to the movies, and some people still care about and expect something special, necessary from a film. But one hardly finds anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephillic love of movies, which is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and re-seeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious past). [20]