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Philosophy & Film

The Philosophy of Motion Pictures

Foundat ions o f t h e P h i l o s o p h y o f t h e Arts Series Editor: Philip Alperson, Temple University

The Foundations of the Philosophy of the Arts series is designed to provide a comprehensive but flexible series of concise texts addressing both fundamental general questions about art as well as questions about the several arts (literature, film, music, painting, etc.) and the various kinds and dimensions of artistic practice.

A consistent approach across the series provides a crisp, contemporary introduction to the main topics in each area of the arts, written in a clear and accessible style that provides a responsible, comprehensive, and informative account of the relevant issues, reflecting classic and recent work in the field. Books in the series are writ ten by a truly distinguished roster of philosophers with international renown.

1. The Philosophy of Art, Stephen Davies 2. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, Noel Carroll

Forthcoming: The Philosophy of Literature, Peter Lamarque The Philosophy of Music, Philip Alperson Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, Paul Taylor

The Philosophy of Motion Pictures

Noel Carroll

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© 2008 by Noel Carroll

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To Loretta and Maureen for taking care of my brothers

Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: From Film Theory to the Philosophy

of the Moving Image 1

1 Film as Art 7

2 Medium Specificity 35

3 What Is Cinema? 53

4 The Moving Picture — the Shot 80

5 Moving Images — Cinematic Sequencing and Narration 116

6 Affect and the Moving Image 147

7 Evaluation 192

Select Bibliography 227 Index 233

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions offered in the preparation of parts of this book by Philip Alperson, Susan Feagin, Margaret Moore, Jonathan Frome, Vitor Moura, Jinhee Choi, Murray Smith, Gregory Currie, Aaron Smuts, Tom Wartenberg, Cynthia Freeland, Annette Michelson, Jeff Dean/ George Wilson, Elisa Galgut, Ward Jones, Amy Coplan, Patrick Keating, and Deborah Knight. They helped make this a better book. I'm the one who made it worse.

Introduction

From Film Theory to the Philosophy of the

Moving Image

Though the philosophy of the motion picture — or, as I prefer to say, the moving image — began early in the twentieth century, perhaps arguably with the publication in 1916 of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study by Hugo Munsterberg (a Harvard professor of philosophy and psychology in the department of William James), the philosophy of motion pictures did not become a thriving sub-field of philosophy until quite recently. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein enjoyed movies and attended them often — he especially liked westerns — he did not philosophize about them. But as of late, the discussion of movies by philosophers has become quite literally volurninous.

Why? At least two factors may account for this, one demographic and the

other intellectual. The demographic consideration is this: for the philosophy of motion

pictures to take root in any serious way, a substantial cadre of philosophers steeped in motion pictures was necessary in order for a deep and informed philosophical conversation to be sustained. Historically speaking, that condition did not begin to be satisfied sufficiently until the late 1960s and 1970s. By then there was at least one generation of philosophers who had grown up going to the movies in their neighborhood playhouses, and also a second generation who had access, through television, to a wide selection of the history of their own national and/or regional cinema

See for example the bibliography assembled by Jinhee Choi in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006).

2 FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY

traditions. Thus, toward the end of the twentieth century there were — suddenly — enough philosophers with enough knowledge about motion pictures for rich and wide-ranging philosophical debates to begin and for positions to be refined dialectically.

The demographic situation that I've just described, of course, not only explains the emergence of the field of the philosophy of motion pictures. It also accounts for the evolution of cinema studies (or moving image studies, or just media studies) as a rapidly expanding academic enterprise. However, though cinema scholars initially followed in the footsteps of the major film theorists (such as Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovin, Andre Bazin, and Siegfried Kracauer, among others), by the 1980s cinema studies, like other branches of the humanities, took what has come to be called "the cultural or social turn." That is, academics in cinema studies decided to reorient their field in the direction of what came to be known as "cultural studies." And in doing so, they left in mid-air many of the discussions of a lot of the issues that had perplexed earlier film theorists.

Intellectually, a vacuum appeared. And as Richard Allen, a former chairperson of the New York University Department of Cinema Studies, has pointed out, philosophers stepped into that gap. In effect, the professors of cinema studies have ceded what was once a central part of their field to philosophers of the moving image.

Perhaps needless to say, the philosophical appropriation of many of the topics of the earlier film theorists is by no means a matter of an alien colonization. For traditional film theory was always mixed through and through with philosophy. For example, to take a position on whether film is or is not art presupposes a philosophy of art. Film theorists also helped themselves to theses from many other branches of philosophy as well. Philosophy was never far from the thinking of classical film theorists. So, in this respect, the philosophy of the moving image is a legitimate heir to film theory, and not a usurper.

Many of the topics in this book — especially in terms of the questions asked — reflect the legacy of traditional film theory for the contemporary philosophy of the moving image. The first chapter addresses the question of whether or not film can be art. This is undoubtedly the question that got film theory and the philosophy of the motion pictures rolling in the early decades of the twentieth century. As we shall see, the issue has been revived of late due to some recent, highly sophisticated theories about the nature of photography. As in the past, showing that film can be an art forces us to look at and think closely about the nature of our object of study. In this way, meeting the charge that film is somehow precluded from

FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY 3

the order of art in fact becomes an opportunity to deepen our understanding of the moving image.

The second chapter concerns what can be called the "medium specificity thesis." This is the view that the artistic exploration of cinematic possibi­ lities must follow the implicit directives of the medium in which those possibilities are realized. The precise medium that figures in debates like this is typically film — that is, photographically or celluloid based motion pictures. The claim is that the nature of this medium has normative consequences with regard to that which moviemakers should pursue and avoid in their artistic endeavors. Quite simply, it is argued, they should strive to be cinematic and shun being un-cinematic (a condition that is often also equated with being theatrical). Because this was an article of faith for so long in the history of film and because the position appeals so seductively to common sense, it is worth a chapter to scrutinize the medium specificity hypothesis in depth.

Chapter 3 focuses on the question, "What is cinema?" The title, of course, comes from the legendary collection of essays by Andre Bazin, one of the most renowned theorists in the history of the moving image. It probably goes without saying that nearly every major film theorist has organized his or her thinking about cinema around this question.

In this chapter, I defend the notion that cinema is best understood in terms of the category of the moving image. "The moving image?" you might ask: "In contrast to what?" The short answer is: in contrast to film — that is, to be more explicit, in contrast to celluloidTmounted, photographi­ cally based film. I will argue that our object of study here is more fruitfully conceptualized under the broader category of the moving image than it is under the rubric of film, narrowly construed.

Film, properly so called, was undoubtedly the most important early implementation of the moving image (a.k.a. movies), but the impression of movement — including moving pictures and moving stories — can be realized in many other media including kinetoscopes, video, broadcast TV, GGI, and technologies not yet even imagined. Of course, ordinary folks don't haggle over whether a videocassette is a movie or not. And neither, I will argue, should philosophers.

This, of course, is a conceptual point. It is not my intention to initiate a crusade for linguistic reform. That would be quixotic. In everyday speech, many use the labelfilm to designate things that are really the product of other media. For example, they may refer to a high-definition video as a film.

This is rather like the use of the name "Coke" for any cola, or "Xerox" for any copying machine, or "Levi" for all jeans, or "zipper" for every slide

4 FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY

fastener. In these cases, the names of the earliest, most popular entrants to a field get used — in an inaccurate way, strictly speaking — to refer to their successors and even their competitors. Because of this tendency, we under­ stand why sometimes digital cinematography will get called film, though it does not involve the use of film (i.e., the use of a filmstrip). There is little damage here in the daily course of events. Nevertheless, as we shall see, it can and does cause philosophical mischief.

Chapter 4 follows the discussion of the nature of cinema with an analysis of the nature of the cinematic image, construed as a single shot. Obviously, these two topics are related, if only because throughout the history of motion pictures, the temptation has endured to treat movies as if they were equivalent to photographs, where photographs, in turn, are conceived of as modeling single shots.* That is, many have attempted to extrapolate the nature of cinema tout court from the nature of the photographic shot. Thus, it is imperative for the philosopher of the moving image to get straight about the nature of the shot.

Of course, typical motion pictures, excluding experiments like Andy WarhoFs Empire, are usually more than one shot in length. Shots are characteristically strung together in cinematic sequences, usually by means of editing. Chapter 5 examines prevailing structures of cinematic sequencing from a functional point of view. In this regard, one might see the analysis here as returning to an exploration of the terrain that was of the greatest interest to the montage theorists of the Soviet period.

Moreover, in composing the image series in a motion picture, one not only standardly combines shots to construct sequences but then also joins sequences to build whole movies. Consequently, in the second part of chapter 5 we turn to the most common way of connecting sequences to make popular, mass-market movies — a process that we call erotetic narra­ tion, that is, a method of generating stories by means of questions the narrator implicitly promises to answer.

Just as chapter 5 revisits, with a difference, the concerns of the monta- gists, so chapter 6 also tackles a subject near and dear to the heart of Sergei Eisenstein — the way in which cinema addresses feeling. Unlike Eisenstein, however, in this chapter I will take advantage of recent refinements in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science in order to appreciate the wide gamut of ways in which movies can engage our affective reactions. I will try

For example, we call an afternoon photographing fashion models "a shoot" and a successful photo a "nice shot."

FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY 5

to be precise where Eisenstein was often impressionistic. Nevertheless, at the end of the chapter, I will attempt to argue that at least one of Eisenstein's insights into the mechanics of influencing audience affect was spot-on. These audience responses are what we can call mirror reflexes; and Eisenstein was dead right about their significance.

The last chapter in the book focuses on the evaluation of motion pictures. Though many might be tempted to maintain that they are wholly a subjective affair, I will try to demonstrate that quite often movie evaluations can be shown to be rational and objective. Often, this relies upon determining the category in which the movie under discussion is to be correctly classified. Since more than one category comes into play when evaluating the range of available motion pictures, the position defended in our last chapter is called the pluralistic-category approach.

The pluralistic-category approach contrasts sharply with traditional approaches which attempt to identify a single category — often called the cinematic — into which all movies allegedly fall and in accordance with which all motion pictures can be evaluated. The pluralistic-category approach, instead, accepts that there are many categories of motion pictures — from comedies and splatter films to travelogues and onto instructional videos about install­ ing software or wearing condoms — and that, inasmuch as specimens of these different categories are designed to fulfill different functions, they call forth different criteria of evaluation.

In the past, the theory (or philosophy) of cinema was often pursued in a very top-down manner. One identified the essence of cinema — usually understood in terms of photographic film — and then attempted to deduce accounts of every other feature of film on the basis of that essence.

The conception of the moving image championed in this book is much looser. Although I attempt to define the moving image, I do so in a way that remains wide open not only to the media in which moving images may be realized, but also in terms of the purposes moving images may legitimately serve. Our characterizations of the elements of the moving image — the shot, the sequence, the erotetic narrative, and its modes of affective address — are not deduced from first principles. Rather, we proceed from topic to topic in a piecemeal fashion.

Thus, the end product is in nowise as unified as the philosophies of our very distinguished predecessors in film theory. Instead, our results are pluralistic. Nevertheless, that appears to be where the argument leads us.

Of course, whether or not that is really so is for you to decide. Therefore, read on.

b FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY

Suggested Reading

There are several anthologies that may be useful for readers interested in exploring the field of the philosophy of the motion pictures. A very serviceable introductory text is The Philosophy of Film: Introductory Text and Readings, edited by Thomas E. Wartenberg and Angela Curran (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). A slightly more advanced textbook is The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). Also valuable are any of the many editions of Oxford University Press's Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Marshall Cohen, Gerald Mast, and later Leo Braudy. For philosophical purposes, the earlier editions are to be preferred to the later ones.

Two anthologies that present a wide selection of topics in the discipline of the philosophy of motion pictures are Philosophy and Film, edited by Cynthia Freeland and Thomas E. Wartenberg (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Film Theory and Philosophy, edited by Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The journal Film and Philosophy, edited by Daniel Shaw, also publishes essays in this area of inquiry on a regular basis.

Although the present volume is concerned with the philosophy of motion pictures, many philosophers are also interested in the prospect of philosophy in motion pictures. This involves the interpretation of specific motion pictures as illustrations of — and sometimes even as original proposals of — philosophical themes. An example of this approach might be a reading of Groundhog Day as a version of Nietzsche's myth of the eternal return. Many of the articles in the journal Film and Philosophy are in this genre. An important recent collection devoted to the topic of philosophy in film is Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy, edited by Murray Smith and Thomas E. Wartenberg (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006). This book derives from the special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64:1 (Winter 2006).

Chapter One Film as Ar t

The philosophy of the motion picture was born over the issue of whether or not film can be art. The question here, of course, was not whether all films are art — surely raw surveillance footage is not. Rather the question was whether some films could be art. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the lurking suspicion in many quarters was that, since films are photographic, they are somehow precluded from the order of art. That is, photography as a medium — and film as an extension of photography — lacked the capacity to create art, properly so called. Thus, no films could possibly be artworks, since photo­ graphic media, whether still or moving, by their very nature, are incapable of producing art. This debate, moreover, was (and remains) a philosophical one, because it presupposes views about what is required of an object, if it is to be legitimately classified or categorized as an instance of the concept of art.

To contemporary ears, the contention that no films can be art undoubt­ edly sounds bizarre insofar as some films — such as Citizen Kane — number among our paradigms of twentieth-century art. We are sure that some films are art because we think we've seen a number of straightforward cases; in fact, we believe we've seen quite a few. We even, call some films — such as Robert Bresson's Mouchet, Federico Fellini's #^?, and Hou Hsiao Hsien's Millennium Mambo — art films. But things were far less obvious when film first arrived on the cultural scene. For in the first decade of the twentieth century there were not that many, if any, agreed-upon master­ pieces of cinema for the friend of cinema to cite.

However, the problem went deeper than merely the lack of available evidence. Skeptics concerning the possibility of film art thought that they had prior reasons that conclusively estabHshed that no film could be an artwork. Those reasons had to do with the supposition that film was essentially photographic in nature. Moreover, cinematography, on their view, was merely photography that moved. So, since these skeptics were convinced that photographs, given their essential nature, could not be art, they therefore surmised that moving photographs couldn't be either.

8 FILM AS ART

That is, the argument that films could not be art rested upon antecedent arguments — arguments that had been voiced throughout the nineteenth century — which maintained that photography could not be art. That the first moving pictures were films — the very name of which betrays their photographic (celluloid) basis — encouraged skeptics who contemplated the prospects for film art to extrapolate their reservations about the possibility of photographic art to the products of the new technological medium of motion pictures. The skeptics did so just because they believed that motion pictures were nothing more than moving photographs. Thus, in this chapter, in order to discuss the possibility of film art, we will have to spend a very great deal of time talking about photography.

Against Photography

So why, from the outset, did skeptics challenge the artistic credentials of photographs? Even in the nineteenth century were there not already photographs — by people like Julia Cameron Mitchell, for example — which were undeniably artworks? However, for often subtle reasons, many skeptics were not prepared to grant this.

Skeptics about the potential for an art of photography begin by taking note of the fact that photographs are mechanical productions. Photographs are the causal consequences of a series of physio-chemical processes — the exposure of silver haloids to light. A photograph was the sheer physical output of the operation of brute laws of nature. Thus, the skeptics concluded that photography precluded the creative* imaginative, subjective, expressive contribution of the photographer. Photographic images, according to the skeptic, were the automatic product of a machine, not of a mind. Press a button and you get a picture. But art is not made thusly. Art requires an artist who expresses herself through her work and who imposes form or style upon her materials. Yet that cannot be achieved by a machine slavishly grinding its way through a sequence of physical states.

According to the philosopher, Benedetto Croce, "if photography be not quite art, that is precisely because the element of nature in it remains more or less unconquered and ineradicable" in a way that blocks the transmission of artistic intuitions and points of view. The visual artist gives form to his subject, grouping its elements in a way predicated upon securing a specific effect. But the photograph allegedly does nothing more than mechanically reproduce the formless flow of reality as it passes before the lens of the camera.

FILM AS ART 9

This view of photography, moreover, was confirmed for many by the earliest film screenings, such as the newsreels of the Lumiere Brothers in France. Called actualites, these one-minute shorts captured street scenes from home and abroad, travelogue footage, domestic affairs, folkways, historic events, everyday details, and the like. These films appeared to be little more than documentary records of whatever flitted before the cameras of the itinerant Lumiere photographers. People wandered in and out of the frame. Audience fascination was with the reproduction of reality in all its shapeless bustle. Putatively, it was not as though some comment or feeling on the part of the photographers regarding their subjects emerged from the screen. What there was to see and wonder at was arguably nothing more than the simulacra of reality mechanically reproduced with neither the intervention of a subjective artistic interpretation nor formal invention.

On the one hand, the skeptic argued that inasmuch as photography was mechanical, it foreclosed the opportunity for creativity — both expressive and formal — on the part of the artist. An objective physical process, it left no space for the subjective influence of the artist. Photography was simply a mechanism. Moreover, the skeptic also drew attention to the kind of mechanism it is. It is a machine for automatically reproducing whatever finds its way in front of the camera lens. In this regard it is nothing but a recording device. When the camera is pointed at a street scene, it mechani­ cally records reality. And, the skeptic maintains, just as reality comes without expressivity or form, so does a mere mechanical recording of it.

But what of the case where what the motion picture camera is trained upon is not an everyday street scene, but a dramatic enactment of a fiction? Might not that be an artwork? After all, aren't the actors expressing their thoughts and feelings about the characters they are playing? However, the skeptic rejects this possibility, again by stressing that photography, moving or otherwise, is essentially a process of exact recording and, therefore, incapable of being art in its own right.

Consider the case of the museum-shop postcard of Munch's painting The Scream. It is not an artwork in its own right, though The Scream is. The postcard is at best the photographic reproduction of an artwork. It is not an artwork itself. Likewise, a CD of Bizet's Carmen is not an artwork itself; it is the recording of one. The postcard and the CD give us access to already pre-existing artworks, but they are not artworks themselves. They are recording media, not artistic media.

The photograph of The Scream does not make art; it only preserves art. Photographs and, by extension, films are recordings; they are rather like time capsules — temporal containers — that convey artistic achievements

10 FILM AS ART

that are far away in space and/or time from us. But just as the jar in which the caviar is sold is not the delicacy itself, neither is the photographic recording of the artwork — whether of a painting or a dramatic fiction — the work of art. No one would mistake the photographic plates in an art history book for the works of art they showcase. Furthermore, this argument can be applied to dramatic films. If a filmed drama is thought to be an artwork, then it is not the film that is the pertinent artwork. Rather it is the drama — enacted before the camera and preserved on film — that is the artwork proper. Fiction films are not artworks under their own steam; they are at best slavish, mechanical recordings of theatrical or dramatic artworks — that is, recordings of artworks staged in front of the camera.

For decades, many contended that the German expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was not really an example of cinematic art, but only the mechanical recording of a stage play. Yes, the sets are expressive — expressive of a kind of existential claustrophobia. But this, it was said, is the product of the work of the set designers; the filmmaker simply photographed the antecedently expressive sets that stood before the camera. Similarly, the acting is expressive. But that is the contribution of the performers. The filmmakers merely mechanically recorded that which the actors creatively invented.

Whatever artistry is attributable to Caligari, the skeptic protests, belongs to the enactment of the narrative and the design of the stage sets which were automatically imprinted on the film stock as the camera routinely cranked on. Surely, the skeptic charges, exposing film is not the work of an artist. If there is art in Caligari, then it is due to the work of the writers, the actors, and the set designers and not to the people running the cameras. If the director, Robert Wiene, added art to the proceedings, it is as a theatrical director of actors and not as a cinematic director of cameras that he makes his mark. The film as such simply preserves an already existing dramatic accomplishment for posterity. It does not make art itself; at best it makes available art from elsewhere in space and/or time. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is just like the postcard of Munch's Scream, except that it moves.

Because photography, still or moving, was regarded as the mere mechanical recording or copying of reality, its potential for creating art was denied. For it seems reasonable to presuppose that art requires the addition of artistic expression and/or formal articulation to its subject matter. And a mere copy adds nothing. Unlike a painting of a street scene, the Lumiere actualite reproduces mechanically the look of said reality sans artistic invention. On the other hand, where the subject of a film is a fiction, such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, then, allegedly, the art is in the

FILM AS ART 11

dramatic enactment of the story as it played in front of the camera. The art is not in the camerawork — not in the film as film. In contrast to theater, which creates artistic fictions, film at best records their performance.

To summarize: if a film is a nonfiction — say, a Lumiere newsreel — it cannot be art, since art, properly so called, affords the scope for artistic expression and/or formal invention. Machine reproductions do not afford the scope for artistic expression and/or formal invention, since they are, by definition, automatic mechanical transcriptions of how things look, So insofar as non- fiction films are machine reproductions, they cannot be artworks.

Nor, on the other hand, argues the skeptic, are fiction films art. Again, the problem is that film is essentially a recording medium. Where a fiction film is said to be art, the skeptic maintains that this confuses the recording of something artistic — namely, the performance of a drama — with an artwork in its own right. If Charlie Chaplin created art when in The Gold Rush he made us see his boot as a turkey dinner, it was his pantomime before the camera and not the filming of it that belonged to the Muses. But in that case, there is no art of the film as such; there is only theater art — in Chaplin's case mime — captured on film.

Of course, many remained unconvinced by these skeptical arguments against photography and then film. And in the process of resisting the skeptic's case, the philosophy of film took flight. For in addressing the skeptic's allegations that films could not be art on a priori grounds, the friends of film began to clarify the ways in which films could qualify as authentic candidates for the status of artworks.

Some theorists, like Rudolf Arnheim, pointed out that in spite of their mechanical dimensions, both photography and film were not perfect replicas of that which they represented and that, in virtue of the ways in which they diverged from being perfect mechanical recordings, photo­ graphs and films could be expressive. A low-angle shot, for example, can portray a typewriter as massive, thereby commenting upon it. In his The General Line, Sergei Eisenstein uses shots like this to underscore the oppressiveness of the bureaucracy that employs such typewriters. Similarly, a filmmaker can use a distorting lens to make a point; laughing faces can be made to appear hideous by means of a wide-angle lens, thereby unmasking the cruelty that can lurk underneath a smile.

Moreover, as silent film theorists frequently emphasized, film is not reducible to moving photography. Editing is at least as important to film as we know it. But since film editing can rearrange the spatio-temporal continuum, including the sequence of events in a play, a film need not be a mere slavish recording of anything — of either an actual everyday event

12 FILM AS ART

or the theatrical performance of a fictional one. Editing gives the film­ maker the capacity to rearrange reality creatively as well as to body forth imaginatively alternative fictional worlds — worlds of works of art.

Considerations like these have by now won the day — hardly anyone presently questions whether or not the motion picture is an artform. Indeed, some maintain that it was the artform of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the arguments of the skeptics should not be dismissed as nothing but cranky conservatism. The skeptics recognized certain pro­ found features of film whose possible implications enthusiasts sometimes failed to appreciate. Thus, one can learn about film from the skeptics, even in the process of trying to refute them. So, for the rest of this chapter, I will be taking a long look at the skeptic's case against the possibility of film art both in order to see how it goes wrong and what it gets right.

The Skeptical Argument

The skeptic's leading argument against the possibility of film art has three major movements. It goes like this:

1 Photography is not art. 2 A film is at best a photographic recording of a work of dramatic art. 3 Therefore, film itself is not art.

This skeptical argument, in turn, is supported by three further arguments, each of which is intended to bolster the first premise of the leading argument. For convenience sake, let us call these three supporting arguments respec­ tively: (1) the causation argument; (2) the control argument; and (3) the aesthetic interest argument. Typically the skeptic does not appear to have additional arguments to reinforce the second premise of the lead argument. This premise is sometimes treated as if it were absolutely unobjectionable. This, however, is not so, and we will return to this lacuna after reviewing the three arguments in behalf of the first premise of the skeptic's master argument.

The Sheer Physical Causation Argument

Crucial for the skeptic's case against film is the premise that photography is not an art. One way in which the skeptic supports this is by means of the sheer physical causation argument (henceforth, usually just called "the

FILM AS ART 13

causation argument"). The skeptic presupposes that anything worthy of being classified as art is necessarily an expression of thought — the expression of an idea, a feeling, an attitude, a point of view, or the articulation of a formal conception. If the snowflakes falling in my drive­ way assemble themselves in such a way that the results look exactly like one of Rodin's statues of Balzac, the skeptic would argue (and I think that most of us would agree) that that thing in my driveway is not a work of art. Unlike Rodin's statue of Balzac, there is no thinking, expression, or formal invention behind our putative snow "sculpture." Indeed, does it even make sense to call it a sculpture, since, given the case as we've described it, there was no sculpting involved. And, in any event, it is not the product of a sentient human agency. It is a natural event, the result of a mindless sequence of causes and effects, the outcome, albeit freakish, of the sheer operation of physical laws. That it resembles Rodin's Balzac, or, for that matter, Balzac, is an accident.

True, things that look like my snowdrift are usually the product of a mind — but not always. There are shadows cast by the mountains of the moon that from a certain angle are said to resemble a face. But such anomalies are not even representations, let alone artworks, the skeptics argue, since they are not the products of mental acts. They are not the result of human intentions, but of the sheer movement of matter. They do not express thought, since they do not express anything. If expression involves bringing something that is inside, such as a thought, outside, these stochastic flukes have nothing inside to manifest outside. They are com­ pletely the product of the random operation of physics, not psychology. They involve -no thinker; they express no thinking; they are neither portraits nor artworks properly so called.

But what does this have to do with photography, including moving photography? A photograph can occur sans human agency. Imagine a camera falling off the back of a truck in such a way that it starts to click off perfectly focused snapshots. These images would not meet the skeptic's criterion for art status, since they express no thoughts. How could they? No one is taking the picture.

Likewise airport surveillance cameras do not require operators; they may be fully automated. That is why, in the normal course of things, we do not count that footage as art. For, once again, it is not plausible to suppose that any thought is expressed by an automated surveillance camera. Perhaps an artist can take such footage and re-edit it in such a way that it counts as art. But that is another story. Raw surveillance footage is not art, if only because it is mindless. So again: that a photographic image of x,

14 FILM AS ART

moving or otherwise, enables us to recognize x in it does not entail that the image of x is an intentional product. Thus, we might also call this argument the absence of intentionality argument.

A photograph need not be the product of an intentional agent; it may be the consequence of a concatenation of sheer physical events. For example, we might imagine certain improbable but nevertheless logically possible instances of photographs that express no thoughts. Think of a cavern in the recesses of which there is a puddle of photographic salts; overhead there is a tiny crack in the ceiling of the cave that admits a ray of light. This light, in turn, functions like a pin-hole camera and fixes the outline of a neighboring volcano on the floor of the cave. A randomly occurring, "natural" photo­ graph like this would not require a human photographer nor a human intention. And for that reason, we would not count an image such as this as an artistic representation of a volcano, no matter how nicely it appeared to resemble one. For, since it lacks a photographer j it expresses no thought about the volcano.

What these examples are intended to show is that photography does not necessarily require a camera operator. There could be cases of things that we would be perfectly willing to call photographs — i.e., genuine products of the process of photography — that are the outcome of a sequence of physical causes without any human intervention. Stripped down to its essence then, a photograph does not require human input, and, consequently, need not involve the expression of human thought or the implementation of human intentions. The expression of thought, in other words, is not an essential feature of photography. Therefore, with respect to its essential nature, photography is not art.

In this regard, what might be called the essential photograph differs profoundly from the essential painting, which, for the purposes of argu­ ment, we may take to be paradigmatic of art status. All paintings putatively have the property of intentionality which means, according to the skeptic, that paintings are (1) about something because (2) the painter intends this. A painting is intentional both in the sense that it is directed at something and in the sense that it is a vehicle for the thought of its maker (such as a comment on or interpretation of whatever the painting is about). But essential photographs are not intentional in either of these senses. They can be the result of completely causal processes lacking any intentional/ mental mediation. Nor is the appearance of the volcano in our fanciful example of the aforesaid "natural" photograph about anything; it is just a happenstance collision of events with no more content than a hghtning bolt. Such an essential photograph could not express the thought that the

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volcano is awesome, as a painting of a volcano might, since an essential photograph of the sort imagined lacks an author to bear the thought, whereas a genuine painting, according to the skeptic, requires a sentient artificer by definition.

So the sheer physical causation argument ultimately boils down to this:

1 If something is art, then it must involve the expression of thought. 2 If something involves the expression of thought, it requires a mental

dimension, also known as intentionality. 3 Intentionality is not an essential feature of photography. 4 Therefore, photography (including moving photography) is not essentially

or necessarily art.

But if photography is not essentially art, then photography — whether still or moving — is not art qua photography, i.e., not in virtue of being photography,

Furthermore, whereas a painting can depict imaginary things, a photograph allegedly always delivers up the appearance of something that quite literally stood before the camera. Photographs present the specta­ tor with what philosophers call referentially transparent contexts — in other words, in the typical case, the photograph P is the effect of cause G (a volcano, for instance) in such a way that the existence of P allows us to infer the existence of G (a volcano or, at least, something that looks like a volcano).

Paintings, in contrast* are referentially opaque. From the painting of a satyr, you are not advised to infer the existence of a satyr. Paintings can be about whatever painters imagine; their subjects do not necessarily exist. This too is a feature of intentionality, sometimes called intentional inexistence. On the other hand, that which gives rise to a photographic image must have existed and the photograph gives one inferential grounds to affirm it. Thus, this is another way in which the photograph lacks intentionality.

But painting is a representational artform in large measure because it involves intentionality — which feature of painting is intimately related to its capacity authorially to express thoughts concerning its subjects. Instead, photography, seen in terms of its minimal or essential nature, produces its images by means of mechanical causation rather than by means of intentionality. Consequently, photography as such — photography qua photography — is not a representational artform and neither is film, since film is basically to be understood as merely moving photography.

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The Control Argument

In addition to the causation argument, the skeptic may also bring forward the control argument to elaborate the case against photographic art. According to the skeptic, an artist working in a medium requires control over the medium. Why? If art is the expression of thought, then in order to express one's thought clearly, you need to have control over every detail of the medium. If one lacks control, wayward effects may intrude into the results, undermining the thought or the feeling one intends to express. To articulate clearly one's thoughts, one must have a handle on the elements that go into presenting such thoughts. Ideally, it is said, every element in a genuine artwork either serves or should be capable of serving the expression of the artist's thoughts. To express a thought or a feeling is to clarify it; to clarify a thought or a feeling requires the capacity to hone every element that makes the thought or feeling more definite, and the capacity to expel or modify any element that might render it ambiguous. That is, art as the expression or articulation of thought or feeling requires consummate control over the relevant medium.

Painting evinces the requisite degree of control, since everything in a painting is ostensibly there because the painter intentionally put it there. Also, as we have seen, the painter — again in virtue of intentionality — can clarify her ideas or emotions by imagining whatever she needs to sharpen her thoughts, not restrained by what is. However, the photographer, including the cinematographer, supposedly has nothing approaching these resources. The photographer/cinematographer is at the mercy of what is in a way that it seems a painter never is.

The camera is akin to a mirror; the lens captures whatever looms before it, whether or not the camera operator is aware of the details she records and/or whether she intends to photograph them. For this reason, many historical spectacles are marred by the intrusion of unwanted anachronisms. A telephone pole, for example, may appear in the background of a medieval romance to the embarrassment of the camera crew just because it was a detail of the actual mise en scene* albeit not one the cinematographer noticed or desired to record. However, since photography is a causal process, if something stands before the camera, the physical procedure guarantees, all things being equal, that it will appear in the image, no matter what the cinematographer intended.

Tlie scenographic layout — what is next to what and in front of what else, etc.

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Were a telephone pole to appear in the background of a painting of what otherwise looked to be a medieval scene, we would suppose the painter intentionally drew it there and then go on to interpret what the painter meant by doing so. But when comparable anachronisms erupt in historical films, as they do with unnerving frequency, we infer that they arrived there because things got out of control. Since we know that the photographic process is automatic, abiding blindly by the laws of chemistry and optics, we understand that things appear, to the chagrin of filmmakers, in motion picture images that were never meant to be there.

There are so many things in front of the motion picture camera that may make an inadvertent debut in the final print of a film. Indeed, there are typically far too many details — large and small — for the cinematographer to keep track of. Many surprises appear uninvited in the finished film and the filmmaker just has to learn to live with them. On the other hand, everything in a painting is putatively there because that is what the painter intended. The painter is not surprised by what she finds in her painting, because she put it there. What would we make of a painter who, looking at her medieval scene, asked: "How did that telephone pole get there?" The painter has ultimate control over what inhabits her canvas.

Not so the photographer/cinematographer. Details appear in the photo­ graphic image, whether still or moving, just because they were in the camera's visual field even if no one on the film crew took heed of their presence. Furthermore, there are always an indefinitely large number of potential gaffs lying in wait for the unwary cinematographer. In this regard, the painter must be said to exert far more control than either the still or moving picture photographer.

Since paintings are intentionally produced, painters enjoy a degree of control such that there is nothing whose appearance in her pictures takes her aback. But photographers are often startled by what they find in their photos, because the causal process they initiate evolves in utter obliviousness of whatever the photographer believes, desires, or intends.

The photographer not only falls far short of the level of control the painter imposes over what can show up in her image; the photographer also lacks the painter's imaginative freedom to picture whatever she will — absolutely unrestrained by what is — inasmuch as the photographer can only present what can be placed before a camera. The painter can picture a werewolf for us; the filmmaker can only give us a photographic picture of a man got up in a werewolf outfit. The painter, in this regard, has greater freedom than the photographer, which, in turn, entails greater control over shaping her subject matter and the expression of her thiiiking about it.

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Because art involves the expression of thought, only media that afford a high level of control are suitable for the purposes of artmaking. The clarification of thought requires a degree of plasticity. To get across an idea or a feeling clearly you may have to depart from the way the world is — either by adding to it or by subtracting from it. Photographic media, however, are inhospitable in this regard. They are tied to what is and they incorporate details, like inadvertent telephone poles, that are beyond the photographer's ken. Unlike painting, photography is not an artform; it lacks the degree of control evinced by an unquestionable artform like painting. And for the same reasons, moving photography suffers the same liabilities as does still photography. So, once again, we must conclude that film is not an art.

The Aesthetic Interest Argument

A third skeptical argument to the conclusion that photography/cinemato­ graphy is not art can be labeled the aesthetic interest argument. An aesthetic interest is an interest that we take in something for its own sake, that is, because of the kind of thing it is. We take an aesthetic interest in the novel Remembrance of Things Past when we are preoccupied by the kind of thing it essentially is — an expression of thought — rather than as a set of books the color of the covers of which contrasts appealingly with the drapes in our living room.

According to the skeptic, photography cannot command aesthetic interest because a photograph is strictly analogous to a mirror. When we are interested in a mirror the object of our interest is whatever is reflected there and not the mirror itself. When one brushes off one's jacket in front of the looking glass, one is concerned with whether there is any telltale lint anywhere. We look into the glass in order to learn something about our jacket; our interest is in our jacket, not in the mirror reflection for its own sake. We are only interested in the mirror reflection because of what it tells us about something else, namely our jacket. Thus, the interest one typically has in a mirror is not an aesthetic interest.

Moreover, the skeptic argues that what is true of mirrors is also true of photographs. We are interested in them for what they show — historical events, atrocities, family weddings, dead relatives, and so on — and not for their own sake. It is the object in the photograph and not the photograph as an object that engages our attention.

With respect to the art of painting, it is the painting as object (indeed, as art object) that commands our attention and it does so because it is an

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expression of thought. Mirrors are not expressions of thought; they are optical appliances whose images are produced naturally, not intentionally. They relay appearances to us mechanically. There is no point in taking an interest in them in the way that we care about paintings. In fact, the only way to take an interest in the images in mirrors, if our interest is not scientific, is to be occupied by what they show us — like the police cruiser with the flashing blue light in our rear-view mirror.

Likewise, the skeptic argues that photos record appearances; they do not convey thoughts. We are interested in a photograph of x — say of Osama Bin Laden — because we are interested in seeing the way he looks. We are not interested in the photograph for itself, but only as a mechanism that transmits appearances. The interest is not aesthetic, since it is not an interest in the kind of thing the photograph is, but rather an interest in the person whose appearance it delivers.

Another way to make the skeptic's point here is to say that the skeptic is claiming that photographs, properly so called, are transparent. We have already seen that photographs are referentially transparent in contrast to the referential opacity characteristic of the productions of intention- ality. That is^ there is a causal connection between the photo and the object that gives rise to it such that the photo supplies grounds for inferring the existence of the object in the photo. My appearance in the surveillance footage supplies evidence that I was in the bank on the night of the robbery. All things being equal, the jury will legitimately infer it was so. But in addition to providing this inferential warrantj skeptics are also maintaining that photography as it is usually employed — what has been called "straight photography" — is also transparent in the sense that it provides us with indirect perceptual access to the object it represents. Just as seeing an object through a rear-view mirror is a special, indirect way of seeing the police cruiser behind me, so a photograph is a special way of seeing an object;

That is, we see objects through photographs just as I see objects through mirrors. In this way, photographs, like mirrors, are perceptually transpar­ ent. But, the skeptic adds, if photographs are perceptually transparent, then it is not the photograph in its own right that preoccupies us. It is the object to which the photograph gives us perceptual access that interests us, either for its own sake, or otherwise. In either case, our interest is not an aesthetic interest. We are not interested in the photograph as an object; we are not interested in the photograph as an artwork; we are interested in it because of what it shows and not how it shows it. Moreover, if a photograph cannot support aesthetic interest, then why suppose it is an