Philosophy of Cinema: A Talk between Yale’s Dudley Andrew and UT’s Nadia Maftouni
A Talk between Yale’s Dudley Andrew and UT’s Nadia Maftouni
On December 17, 2020, this dialogue was organized in the Faculty of Theology and Islamic Studies between Nadia Maftouni, Iranian preeminent philosopher, author and artist and Yale senior research scholar and Professor James Dudley Andrew, an American film theorist and R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. The host was Mahmoud Nuri, filmmaker and PhD in History of Arts, Art University of Tehran.
Nuri: It’s our immense honor and pleasure to welcome Professor Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose professor of comparative literature and professor of film studies at Yale, eminent scholar in area of film studies and unquestionable expert on André Bazin. As a student of cinema, for more than a decade, I’m familiar with Professor Andrew’s works and for those who might not be aware, his writings are one of the sources that are used in the system which works here to enroll people in the universities. A keyword cinema specialist who has worked on multiple national cinemas and his attention to global cinema and his quest to find the answer to the question, what cinema is, has always been fruitful to numerous scholars. It is truly a great privilege for me to welcome you here. Another point that I’d like to mention is that I believe one could compare Dudley Andrew’s role in film studies with that of Bertrand Russell in philosophy. What Russell did in his book History of Philosophy was not merely putting all these ideas near each other and explaining the landmarks and the important points that has happened in the history of philosophy, but he gave us an insight to the history of philosophy and the trade-offs between different ideas. That’s maybe similar to what Professor Andrew did in his now very old and classic book The Major Film Theories.
Andrew: Thank you very much, Mr. Nuri and thank you also to Professor Maftouni for inviting me to speak to Iranian film scholars and philosophers of art. It’s really a tremendous pleasure. The gracious introduction elevated my position too much, but I am proud of the point I have reached, not because of any special brilliance, but simply by being at the right place at the right time. And that’s what I’m going to talk about: how the development of my own ideas coincided with some of the developments in the field, allowing me to write with occasional effect.
Cinema in the Age of TikTok
Andrew: The cinema during the pandemic has been very different from before—people cannot go to movie theaters anymore. I just bought my first large screen television. I have always kept away from high quality home viewing, to encourage myself always to go out to see films. But now I own a new large screen TV to compensate for the closed theaters. Yet those theaters are essential to cinema. Meanwhile TV is making obsolete the two-hour time length that has been standard throughout the history of the art form. But in the home viewing situation, a two-hour feature film is just one option among several other timeslots. TV series can go on for 30 hours or more. There are also very short clips of computer animation, descendants of MTV and music television. Imagine if the cinema encompasses video games as well, and uploads of home movies and perhaps TikTok clips. Then what will be left of the cinematic body that we used to love and cherish and nourish with our attention and our devotion? I believe that just as not every piece of paper that has writing on it can be counted as literature, so not every audio-visual file or clip can be called cinema. This is a philosophical question of nominalism, important for cinema studies to consider. Maybe we need to change our field’s name to “media studies”, if our object has expanded to dissolve films within a much larger audio-visual complex. As my book What Cinema Is! makes clear, such an expansion could be a loss, because there is something specific and special about cinematic art as it evolved to be. Otherwise, our journals might be publishing articles, for instance, such as “best practices for using Zoom.” Of course someone definitely needs to study this and other for increasingly important Audio visual communication phenomena, but don’t such phenomena fit better in the field of sociology, which I know very little about, or in the history of technology, which I know something about. These fields edge up to cinema, but mainly as helpful allied disciplines. I think there is something unique about what we do that can only be done by close attention to the cinema itself, even if I describe cinema as always mixed and impure, amalgamating the arts. I’m suggesting that the disciplines need themselves to be disciplined. This is considered a conservative position to take. I don’t apologize for it. An anthology appeared in December 2020 just this past week, entitled Post-Cinema, from Amsterdam University Press. The article I contributed was put in the lead position, because I effectively accused the book of a self-fulfilling mission, as it was premised on the end of film studies and the start of a new era of post-cinema. This anthology goes on to exemplify, quite provocatively, the expansion of our field’s boundaries beyond cinema, which will indeed hasten its demise.
Cinema Will Die
Andrew: There’s a core at the center of cinema studies, which has to do with the development of film texts as works of art. This definitely includes documentaries, by the way. To grasp what cinema is, we should start with ontogeny. The word comes up in my book What Cinema Is! It is important to me, because it made me realize that André Bazin was an evolutionary thinker. He thought in terms of actual evolution, for he was a student of science as well as the arts. The concept of evolution is visible in every aspect of his thinking. So, when he asks the question “what is cinema?” he did not expect to give a definitive answer, because he believed that cinema grows into what it is going to be, and the growing is not finished yet. Bazin wrote from 1945 to 1958, a period that caused him to play with the idea that cinema’s ontogeny replicated that of any human being, that is, going from birth to death in about a hundred years.
It’s a brilliant insight. In 1953 when he brought up this idea, cinema was about 55 or 60 years old, and it had started to become wise. It was now ready to play a mature role in culture. Before that, cinema had a rambunctious childhood in the very earliest years, and a very strong adolescence when it reached the narrative feature form between 1912 and 1920. In the late silent period it reached the outset of adulthood and then with sound it took on a very important role in society just as adults do when they reach 40 years old, let’s say. This is cinema’s classical period, right around World War II. After that, cinema finally started to attain full maturity and perhaps attain some wisdom. It’s a clever idea, suggesting that cinema had risen to take its place alongside the novel as the most important signpost of culture in the 1950s, something that people would go to for direction, for food-for-thought to help the culture reflect on itself and develop. As a well-educated Frenchman, Bazin thought theater, poetry and painting were timeless and still powerful, but he didn’t believe them to be playing the crucial cultural role that the novel played in in the 20th century particularly. He didn’t think art forms were immutable. Theater had been particularly important in the 19th century in Europe, but in the mid-20th century, the novel was the form that people looked to when they really wanted to talk about where the culture was heading. According to Bazin, cinema after the war had matured to become the equal of the novel in this, even though it had not been so before. Cinema had been robust and popular up to 1940, but it hadn’t had the cultural purchase that it attained when it got to be mature.
By the same token, Bazin wrote a brilliant little essay with the title, ‘The cinema, is it Mortal?” where he suggested that cinema will most likely die. He even humorously suggested that perhaps in 20 years (around 1974) it would be so changed that it would unrecognizable and critics in that year would probably be laughing at the kind of claims about cinema his generation was making, because the medium would have altered so much. This didn’t trouble him, since cinema is a technological art and so subject to becoming outmoded. This is completely unlike the human arts. Take drama, which from the time of the caveman to our own day involves people imitating other people and actions for each other in satific skits or sacred rituals. Or take poetry, which comes from singing and from religious recitations related to the music the voice is capable of making. These timeless arts are attached to the human body. But cinema is a technological art and it will mutate and perhaps die as the technology is updated. In principle It is quite mortal.
Ontogeny of Cinema
Andrew: Cinema study has its own ontogeny, which seems likewise to be unrolling within the same length of time life as a human lifespan. And one such life-span with which it coincides happens to be mine. For I was born coincidentally with the advent of cinematic modernism as WWII ended. About twenty years later I became a graduate student just as cinema studies gained a foothold in American universities. In the US, The Society for Cinema Studies had just taken on its new name and mission when I joined it in 1970. I published my earliest reviews in brand new journals like Film Comment and Take One. Of course, before the 1960s there had been a tremendous film culture with many film clubs and journals, but it is in that decade that the universities became the site of cinema studies. In 1967 Cahiers du Cinema, which began in 1951 in Paris published an English edition I followed with the cine-club I ran in my university. While Sight and Sound had been an excellent British journal since 1948, by 1970 a more scholarly rival, Screen, made England a hotbed of theory which we discussed in our clubs and classrooms. We suddenly were overwhelmed with sophisticated ideas about cinema and began to coordinate these in classes devoted to film history, criticism, and theory.
The huge output of Jean Mitry, a prolific writer and friend of mine, was crucial for me in this transition from amateur film societies to university film studies. In 1965, he completed five volumes of the History of Cinema and two volumes called Esthétique et Psychologie du Cinéma in which he put together a virtual encyclopedia of film theory. That was a kind of groundwork, a foundation from which serious study could begin. Those books served as the starting point for Christian Metz and the French school of structuralism that grew up. Because they could criticize Mitry and the approaches he had laid out, advocating new forms of scholarship. I learned French by reading Mitry’s big volumes, while watching films and discussing them intensely at my university cine club in the late 60s. I wrote an undergraduate thesis on film aesthetics, and five years later a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Iowa on André Bazin. I felt capable of this in part because I had a strong background in philosophy, especially Catholic philosophy and some theology. I also had studied a lot of literary criticism in both the English and French tradition and this would be a background for my work on Bazin.
Andrew in Paris
Andrew: In 1973 and 74, I went to Paris for the first time. It was the first time I owned a passport, and in that exciting period I wrote The Major Film Theories, composing one chapter per month. Because I had been teaching film theory at Iowa for a couple years, I was able to write clearly about Bazin and the other theorists whom I discussed with my students. During that year in Paris I researched the biography of Bazin, helped by knowing François Truffaut, who was impressed and touched that someone would spend a dissertation on the man who was his foster father. Truffaut put me in touch with several famous filmmakers from that period: Alain Resnais and Éric Rohmer and Chris Marker, all of whom I got to meet to talk about Bazin. It was a fantastic learning experience. I was also sitting in the seminar of Christian Metz who was just developing his ideas about “Le Signifiant Imaginaire,” which was the second stage of his own film theory after semiotics. In this way I was involved in the development of French film theory in the early 70s.
When I came back to the U.S., I managed to publish The Major Film Theories and my biography of Bazin. This biography gave me many openings. I got to meet and talk to Orson Welles, who was supposed to write the preface for it because Truffaut asked him to do that. I got to meet Jean Renoir just before he died. It was very important to me to be associated with Bazin at that point, even while his own reputation in the field of film studies dropped dramatically. People were not reading Bazin and I no longer taught his works very much after 1980. This was a period of structuralism and post-structuralism. Bazin was associated with realism and the auteur, and both these notions were anathema at the time. Nevertheless, the years from 1975 to 1985 were definitely the most important time for my own work and a crucial period generally in film studies and literary studies. This coming semester at Yale, I’ll be teaching a seminar on Paul Ricoeur and Fredric Jameson whose publications blossomed at that time. Jameson worked on allegory. Ricoeur worked on metaphor. These were crucial to me and I studied as much as I could about how film studies could profit from these two literary and philosophical scholars.
Iranian Contribution to the Cinema
Andrew: I want to close my talk by suggesting something more important to me than postmodern spectacle films. It’s not easy to speak to you about this because it involves Persian aesthetics, which you know intimately, but let me hint at what I mean. Like many others, I have been trying to figure out how the cinema is reacting to the new art forms and the new media of our era, including video games. These are likely to produce new forms that the cinema may grow into. Or perhaps, as Bazin speculated, the cinema may just dissolve. But when I teach Iranian films in my class on world cinema, I find that they (and I) respond with wonder and deep feeling to another tendency altogether. I suggest to my students in the U.S. that they need to understand the crucial relationship of cinema to poetry in Iran, as the great tradition of Persian poetry continues thanks to the people who are making and watching such films. The novel may no longer be the key reference point for cinema in the West, but in Iran, poetry does serve as such a reference point. Iran is steeped in a poetic tradition that is far available in the culture in an “everyday” manner, something that is not at all the case in the West. We don't have a poetic tradition that operates that way. As I understand it, the novel in Iran has had much less impact, almost none until the 1920s or so. Even if the Iranian novel has grown and is a source for some films, the films traveling the festival circuit by the Iranian auteurs who have become crucial to world cinema appear to be poets of cinema more than storytellers
So, if I'm right about the fact that cinema evolves and grows thanks to its relationship to other art forms, then we can say that world cinema has grown thanks to Persian poetry, at least since the 1980s. Iranian masterworks do tell stories but they are indifferent to a novelistic tradition that, as I just described, is in crisis worldwide. But poetry is not in crisis; it is more resilient and perpetual, especially in Iran. We in the West, in the U.S. and France and Japan at least, recognize the fantastic possibilities of Iranian cinema.
Maftouni’s Philartist and Andrew's Notion
Nuri: Now, I will give a short introduction to Professor Nadia Maftouni. Nadia has a distinguished background in philosophy and Islamic theology. She specializes in philosophy of art. She's also an artist herself and she has held many exhibitions all over the world including two exhibitions in Paris in 2004 and 2010. And she's a professor at the University of Tehran and a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Her works on medieval philosophy, its effects and its rendering in modern times has been intriguing for many scholars and academicians. Yale’s Bruce Ackerman texted myself about Nadia “Please do send my regards to Professor Maftouni, whose scholarship I greatly admire.” And LSE’s Anthony Giddens texted her “many congrats on your stellar career!” So, Professor Nadia, please!
Maftouni: When I was reading the section of “cinema and perception” from Dudley’s book, Concepts in Film Theory, sprang to my mind to present Farabi’s theory on perception vis-à-vis art. He is an early Muslim philosopher of 9th and 10th century.
Farabi defines the imaginary perception as including three main jobs: keeping sensory forms, analyzing and synthesizing sensory forms, and using all those forms for metaphor and embodiment. Among the different powers of mind, only imagination is able to portray the sensible as well as intelligible beings. It can even depict the intelligible truths of utter perfection, such as the prime cause and abstract beings.
On the other hand, Farabi defines art, poetic speech, singing, and music. In his book on music, he defines art in general as a taste and a talent, combined with an intelligible element, reflecting concepts and imaginings.
When describing the features of a poem, he says, “Poetic speeches consist of words that create a mood in the audience, or demonstrate something higher than what it is or below the reality.” He stresses that when we listen to poetic words our imagination creates feelings so real that they resemble our feelings when we look at the objects. In this account, Farabi emphasizes two aspects of the poems: the ability to excite emotions, and the tendency to create strong responses in the imagination.
Also, he divides the arts of singing, music, and poetry into six types: three desirables and three undesirables. Describing desirable arts, or say literature and arts, Farabi focuses on those that produce virtues and happiness in the imagination, as well as those that moderate the emotions. The three kinds of undesirable arts are opposite, working to corrupt thoughts, and produce immoderate qualities and moods.
Dealing with singing and music, images, statues, and paintings, Farabi speaks about a few objectives: to create comfort and pleasure, and to forget fatigue and the passage of time; to create different emotions like satisfaction, anger, fear, to name a few; to create imaginary forms; and to enable individuals to understand the meaning of the words that accompany the notes of the song.
In short, Farabi focuses on imagination, understanding the intelligible, and emotions, when defining art. And feelings and emotions often originate in their imagination.
The final happiness is the state in which a human being successfully perceives the intelligible, and achieves the nearest possible status to the Active Intellect.
However, Farabi argues, the public usually don’t follow the intelligible. It is not feasible to speak of or bring into action the particular details of non-sensible beings such as ten intellects. You can only imagine them through analogy, parallelism, or allegory. Moreover, the majority of people are not used to reasoning about the intelligible. In most people, the soul is attracted to the imagination, and the imagination controls the mind. In effect, the proper method for educating the public is transferring images and resemblances of intelligible truths and intelligible happiness into their imagination.
Well, in Farabi's theory of the imagination, there is a relation between the imagination and intellectual faculty. The imaginary faculties are able to access, the intelligible through imaginary and sensory forms. But since intellectual perception of true happiness is not possible for the public, metaphors do this job.
Farabian artist, that I call philartist, that is, philosopher-artist, she produces intelligible happiness through creating sensory and imaginary forms. So, she shares philosophers in some aspects or some tasks. That was an effort to explain my terminology philartist.
Nuri: Thank you Professor Maftouni for Farabi’s notes on imagination. And the idea is that he talks about projections in mind and the relation to reality, sometimes makes us think that his views and the views of some medieval philosophers are quite related to cinema. Do you find it relevant, Professor Andrew, to connect those ancient ideas of people who couldn't imagine that there is going to be such a medium? Do you find it relevant connecting those ideas with the medium of cinema?
Andrew: Very relevant and excited to learn about Farabi. I knew just tiniest things about him and so I will now look much more deeply into him. What is especially impressive is he sounds like very sophisticated in a relationship of imagination to the intellectual faculties. And at the time I can see in a kind of Neoplatonic way, he might be interested in having the pure intellectual relationship to happiness be a final step. That is only achievable through climbing, I guess, a ladder of metaphors and analogies that artworks can help develop. I've always had some attraction to that.
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