Teorie della rappresentazione - II modulo

Teorie della rappresentazione e dell'immagine

Prof. Giancarlo Grossi A.A. 2019/2020

Unità B – The Image-Self: Subjectivity in Media Dispositifs

In the first part of the course we met an issue, the issue of agency in the images of the art and art installations. This second part the principal problem will be a question: is it possible to think about the agency of the image without interrogating the subjectivity of the image itself? The field in which I will investigate the subjectivity of the image will be the field of film and media theory. In fact, from the very origin of film theory, the question of the subjectivity and the self of the image has been very important.

The first part of the bibliography is devoted to the issue of the relationship between an archaeological perspective on cinema and history of cinema and the sciences of the mind, and the second part is devoted to psychoanalysis in relation to cinema, to the issue of the construction of the subject made by the cinematic apparatus. If we own the book of Münsterberg The Photoplay, we can bring it to the exam, but nowadays a digital copy of this book is not available. We can bring, as a substitute, to the exam the essay by Mouré. The other texts will be available online.

Lesson 1 – The movement of the mind, the mind of the movie

What we call film is the product of two apparatuses, on one hand a cinematic, mechanical apparatus, and on the other hand a psychological, mental apparatus. There is an apparatus that produces pictures, material, moving images, and an apparatus that produces imagery and mental images. The problem is that the images of the movies do not move without the mental apparatus. It is important to consider the metaphorical relationship between the two. The idea that there is an analogy between the human mind and the cinema, between the mental processes and the cinematic processes pervades the history of film theory.

Before the birth of film theory this idea of a metaphorical relationship between the cinematic apparatus and the human mind was already spread. In particular, is the philosopher Henry Bergson, in a work written only one year after the invention of cinema by Lumière brothers, that considers the focusing of the movie camera as a metaphor for cognitive processes, cognitive act, and in particular the act of memory. He wrote: 1 But the first systematic theory of subjectivity in movies has been produced in 1916 by a German, American-naturalized psychologist, active in Harvard, called Hugo Münsterberg, in his masterpiece, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. The core of this work is the idea that film is a vehicle for representing subjectivity and interiority, a vehicle that makes subjectivity and interiority totally visible. This lesson will deal with the ideas expressed in this work.

In Bergson there was this metaphor, but the real problem was how we can consider the mind, how is the main character of the memory. In Münsterberg the problem is the mind in relation to the cinematic apparatus, in relation to the movie. For these reasons, this text is the basis of two important traditions in film, on one hand the spectator theory, based on the question “how does the spectator mind contribute to the production of a cinematic experience?”, and on the other hand the narrative film theory, based on the question “how does the movie represent or express a mental state?”

But why theorizing about cinema? Is it possible to theorize about it? The problem in 1916 was simple: is the film, what was Hugo Münsterberg called The Photoplay – something between the theatre and the photography – is this device only a mechanical device, only a spectacular machine or is it an art? If cinema is an art, it is possible to consider an aesthetical theory in order to investigate this art.

But what is an art for Münsterberg? He is German and he follows what Kant wrote, he is a big fan of the Critique of Judgement and Kant’s idea is that an art is something that is strictly linked with the concept of independence. The movie has to be independent in two senses, in particular, independent from the system of the pre-existent arts, as The Photoplay seems to be a sort of mixture of the pre-existent arts: there is the theatre, in the play of the actors, there is painting and sculpture in scenography and there is the photography, as the images of the photoplay are made with a photographic device. At the same time, this independence has to be thought in another way, as the independence of an artistic device from the utility in the real world, from the laws of the physical world. To demonstrate that the film is an art is to demonstrate that it is detached from utility and it doesn’t follow the laws of the physical world but the laws of the physical world. This means that what we call cinematic experience does not exist in itself, but only in relation to the psychology of the spectator. There are elements in the movie that are physically absent but mentally present. In particular Münsterberg, in the first part of his volume, titled The Psychology of the Photoplay, considers two aspects of the movie that are working in this sense: the impression of depth and the impression of movement. They are absent but they are introduced in the flat screen and in the fragmented images of the photoplay by the active mind of the spectator. The movie is thus a result of the cooperation of the human mind. It is like a bridge between a material idea of the picture and a mental one.

The first issue is related to the impression of depth. The space, also within the cinema, is a three-dimensional space, while the image within a screen is flat, but we don’t see this flatness. We quote from Münsterberg: For possible because only it him is Münsterberg never explains how this act effectively works. The same thing could be told for movement. We can’t perceive the still, fragmented photographic images that compose the body of the movie, we perceive a continuous moving image. How is this possible? For Münsterberg this issue is not related only to the psychophysiology of the vision, but to a superior mental activity.

The psychophysiological explanation of the moving image, that is not sufficient for Münsterberg is that related to a specific phenomenon, the phenomenon of afterimages. They are images that live between absence and presence, like film images, but for him it is not sufficient to explain the presence of movement in the movie. Afterimages will be at the centre of another book, that is very important, by Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. In this book afterimages are strictly linked to a new visual experience introduced by precinematic technology. In this experience the vision became a bodily act, a bodily phenomenon, while before the birth and the rising of precinematic technology the vision was seen a spiritual act, like the vision simplified by the perspective in the Renaissance. The function that relates precinematic technologies and afterimages, the fact that precinematic technology function only in relation to the psychophysiology of the human apparatus and the psychophysiology of the vision directly shows how the vision is a bodily phenomenon.

But this passive, physiological phenomenon for Münsterberg is not enough to explain the dynamics of the movies, the impression of movement inside the Photoplay. In fact, Munsterberg considers the role of an active experience, a high mental act that unifies the still, fragmented and separated frames in the perception of a continuous movement, an higher mental act that is very important to consider and that emerges in the relationship between the cinematic apparatus and the human mind. This idea is really important for the history of film theory, and is at the basis of the concept of impression of reality, that is a concept formulated by the French filmologists in the 40s but that becomes very important for the apparatus theory related to psychoanalytical approaches. The impression of reality is a psychological process, but also in the psychoanalytical and political perspective of apparatus theory an ideological process, that is based on the possibility to hide the fragmentation of the cinematic body through the impression of a continuous movement.

If we search this difference and this independence of the movie from the system of the other arts, it should be individuated in this dialectic between presence and absence, between material images and mental imagery. The theatre has depth and motion, without the any subjective help. The screen has them and yet lacks them. The independence of the movie from the outer reality is, at the same time, its dependence to the human mind and its laws.

The first part of the photoplay is devoted to the issue of the way the human mind contributes and cooperates to produce and shape cinematic experience by introducing the impression of depth and the impression of movement. In the second part the focus radically changes: the most important issue is the way the subjective acts and the mind, the mental acts, are represented within the film and affect the viewer. In fact, if we consider the movie, we can see that movies are not representations of the real world, but also representations of the processes through which we perceive and comprehend the outer world. In movies there is a process of objectification and materialization of subjective, mental processes.

For instance, a mental faculty that we can meet in the movie is the faculty of attention, that is very important in Münsterberg’s theory to represent the entire aesthetical goal on the movie. Why? Münsterberg distinguishes between voluntary attention and involuntary attention. The main device to express and drive the attention within the movies is the close up. We, in Italy, for the close up, use the term primo piano, by focusing only in the dimension of the face, but the close up is a shot that focuses the attention only to a part of the world viewed. As the objectification of the inner act of attention, the close up contributes to create a subjective world that is free from the physical form of space, time and causality. It’s the world of the attention of the author that drives the attention of the spectator.

• Ferdinand Zecca, Histoire d'un crime, 1901

The mind of the film is not only related to space, but also to time. The movies have their faculty related to time, their memory. This memory is expressed by the device of the flashback. With the flashback the mind can overcome the present and go to the past, to a dimension that is past. In this sense I find very interesting the first representation of a flashback in the history of cinema, that is in this French movie of 1901 by Ferdinand Zecca called Histoire d’un crime. Here we can see a murderer that visualises, the night before his death, his assassination, his entire life. The flashback is visualised in a very peculiar way, is visualised as a screen, a cinematic screen that appears at the shoulders of the murdered. In this sense we can see this analogy between a cinematic apparatus and the memory is referred not only to the theory but also to themselves. He sees his happy youth and his decline in alcohol and debits. This movie seems to answer to Münsterberg. If the cinema has a mind, the mind itself seems to act like a cinematic screen.

The problem with Münsterberg is that although he fights to recognise the importance, the aesthetical importance of the movie, the importance of the movie for the aesthetical theory, he never caught the names of the films he analyses. This is the description that Münsterberg gives to the flashback, but we don’t know to what film this description is referred. The possibility to overcome the present and go directly to the past is identified with the mental faculty of memory and with the technical cinematic device of the flashback.

What happens for the future? The possibility to go to the future with a higher mental act is identified with the faculty of imagination. The faculty of imagination has its expression in the forward, where a character imagines his own future. The description of Munsterberg is not surprising: It is not easy to find in early cinema expressions of flashforward, as well as is very easy to do it in modern cinema, but there is an example in A Christmas Carol (1910) made by James Searley Dowley, an Edison Manufacturing production, and naturally translated by Dickens. In particular a flashforward is the scene in which the old Scroodge, visited by the ghost of the future Christmas can imagine and in this sense directly visualise his destiny of death and solitude [minute 8.10 to minute 9.10]. By analysing this devices, the flashback and the flashforward, we can notice a radical shift in considering the role of the mind in the movies: it is no more the mind of the spectator, it is the mind of the film itself. It is a simulation of the mind that appears within the screen. It’s clear, movies are not only visualisations of the world, but also exteriorisations of the way we see the world, objectification of subjective way of life, of subjective visions and mental acts, but not only.

An instance is when we visualise the dream of a character represented within a screen, in particular with a peculiar device of editing, also in early cinema, called crossfade. We can see this instance in a film entitled Let me dream again (1900) by George Albert Smith. We know, dreams are desires. There is a French remake of this film by Ferdinand Zecca called Rêve et réalité (1901). Already for Münsterberg, in 1916, cinema has an agency and has a mind. There is a subjectivity in these images. In the next lesson we will analyse the way cinema represents itself, as an exteriorization of the human mind, with Sherlock Jr. by Buster Keaton and Le Mystère des roches de Kador.

Lesson 2 – The dream screen

In this lesson we are focusing on the ways cinema portrays itself as a technique of exteriorization of the subjective world, a psychic and psychoanalytical medium. A great focus will be devoted to dream states in early movies and to the psychoanalytical concept of dream screen. We talked about Hugo Münsterberg, focusing on the ways the film is not only the product of both pictures and subjective activity, but also imitates the subjective activity by exteriorising mental states. The film is seen as an objectification of the subjective, mental processes of the spectator: attention, memory, imagination, and dreams. From its early life, cinema has been studied as a psychological medium, whose aesthetic independence is based on its following psychological rules instead of the physical ones.

Münsterberg focuses on the possibility, displayed by the movie, to represent and make perceptible the dreams of the characters portrayed within the screen. It is also interesting considering the history of technological metaphors, used to indicate the dream state in the history of psychology. For instance, it is weird that Freud ignored cinema as a metaphor for the dreamwork, favouring other technologies, such as the microscope and the telescope.

Freud wrote: When, in 1925, the great Austrian filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst asked Freud for scientific consultancy for the first psychoanalytic movie, called the Secrets of a Soul, Freud firmly denied and the consultancy was given by two Freud’s most important collaborators, Karl Abraham and Anne Sachs. In the same year Freud wrote to Abraham:

In this movie we can really see a very complex portrait of the dream state. Secrets of a Soul is about an old professor who experiences nightmares that make him believe he is going insane, especially he fears that he is on the verge of murdering his wife. Then he hires a psychiatrist to help him work out this psychosis. In one of the first scenes we can see this visually very complex dream that reveals the basis of the psychosis, the jealousy of the professor for his cousin. Just like psychoanalysis, movies can theorize and visualize dreams. Cinema not only represents mental states, but also represents itself as a prosthesis of the inner world, a way to make collective, subjective mental states.

Here we can see the film of Leonce Perret, Le Mystère des roches de Kador, which represent one of the most meaningful scenes in the early history of cinema. In these sequences the female protagonist, Suzanne, moves away from a white screen and faints. The film’s story is about Suzanne, who was fallen into an amnesic and catatonic state due to the traumatic shooting incident in which Suzanne’s cousin has attempted to shoot her fiancé at the seashore, in order to achieve the whole heredity instead of her. There is also a psychiatrist, this professor Williams, who treats Suzanne with new cinematographic methods for psychotherapy; the method consists of restaging and recording the traumatic event, and then showing the theme to the patient. This particular sequence displays the screening of professor Williams’ film in front of Suzanne. The film is represented as a sort of mechanical dream, in a strict psychoanalytic sense, by letting the spectator to be in contact with the forgotten images of the unconscious and of the removed trauma. It makes her recovering memory, thought and speech.

In Sherlock Jr., by Buster Keaton, the cinematic screen explicitly becomes a dream screen. While asleep, Buster Keaton can cross the threshold that divides the real world from the cinematic one and interact with the characters and the environment portrayed within a screen. At the same time, we can consider here how human perception was not yet trained to the system of cinematic editing. The continuous change of scenes makes it difficult for Buster Keaton to dwell inside the body of the movie, he is continuously shocked and displaced. This idea of a perceptive shock, linked to the unconscious and introduced by new cinematic technologies and by editing technologies, overall could be considered in relation to the ideal of a training of human perception, of the perception of the masses in the way exp