A previous post in this space mentioned I was reading a book called How To Read A Film by James Monaco. Some of what I read yesterday has been inspiring more thoughts
There’s a historical note that describes the formation of film as a specific artform that exists uniquely in relationship to the whole. Film begins in neutral space- pictorial forms relating to media. It then develops into an artform through the “process of replicaton.”
As noted in my previous post, Monaco describes art as imitation- it imitates reality. Here Monaco expands on this thought, noting what is called the “spectrum of abstraction”, a spectrum of modes or forms that “describes the relationship of art to raw reality.” The spectrum of abstraction has practical on one side and musical on the other. Inbetween is environmental (architecture, sculpture) pictorial, dramatic (stage, oral), narrative (written)
He breaks it down in the following equation: modes of discourse explain the transmission of the arts from artist to observer, structure defines the shape of art, the equation of artist plus observer provides new angles of critical approach.
What makes film unique is the way in which the once neutral mode becomes a lens that is layered over the whole spectrum. In doing so it formulates its own language, it’s own codes, now able to converse with the different parts of the whole by way of its tropes.
What’s interesting to me is how this mirrors the process of formulating a worldview. Worldviews are not only a lens through which we explain and interpret the whole, they allow us to establish a relationship with the different parts of the whole, to dialogue with the different parts of the whole. Further, worldviews aren’t static and unmoving. This dialogue, this relationship begins in neutral space- the world we observe- and it develops AS we apply it as a lens through which to make sense of the observed world.
There’s an even further corellation- the relationship between art, artist and consumer. If you look at the breakdown above (third paragraph), a critical approach requires this initial transmission between artist and observer, with art itself being the thing being transmitted. And what, again, is art? It’s relationship to “raw reality” is its imitation of it. It imitates what it sees to be true about reality, giving us the necessary symbols (language) to dialogue about it, and to relate to it.
In other words, it translates our “experience” of the world/film we observe. As Monaco states, “Experience of art comes first, abstract criticism is a secondary activity.”
Criticism=participation. As someone who adheres to participationist philosophy/theology, knowledge comes not through a list of data points or rules or facts that we observe, but by living, experiencing. We then overlay the criticisms as a way of connecting our experience of the world to the world we observe (or our experience of a film to the film we observe). All part of formulating that interpretive lens. It’s in this sense that we can be better or worse consumers of art. It’s also in this sense that the artist is engaging in an act of transmission, not of themskeves but of an experience that exists external to themselves.
One final tought: Monaco suggsests that conceptual structures, which all abstract systems are, exist in relationship to the art, artist and consumer. In this way they “are dialectical and in continual flux.” He makes an interesting corelation to the Protestant reformation. If art used to be the domain of the figurative priest (artist), art is now handed to the individual or collective consumers as an unfinished product meant to shape and formulate according to one’s experience. What once was an act of entering into a sacred space (engaging the transcendent), has now become a question of the sacred spaces we make for ourselves. Not unlike the shift from priest to people in the Protestant reformation.
Is there something lost in this shift? Likely. Gained? Probably. Part of the discuaion perhaps should be parsing out what that is. I suspect that part of what was lost relates to the loss of that sacred space, and with that the inability to recognize the role art plays in the formulation of our worldviews. Or perhaps the loss of our ability to know what a worldview even is. The more we relegate our experiences to a constructed self, the less connected we are to the reality of cultural formation. The less connected we are to the world/film itself.
The Stories of my Life 