Some more thoughts on my journey through the book How To Read A Film by James Monaco.
Thoughts relating to how we see, how we know.
Monaco points out that a common artistic presence runs underneath all forms of art regardless of adaptations of technology and the subsequent development of new technique. One can study painting, for example, without needing knowledge of oil. The single exception is film. Why? It is indebted to and a product of technology. In a sense, it acts and functions as a technological lens through which to see the entire spectrum of the arts as a unified whole.
There are two levels of narrative cohesion at play here. One anchors film as a uniquely modernist expression or creation (the lens). It locates its revelatory power in the myth of progress, having relocated the artistic process in our ability to capture and tame the mysteries of the world through the employment of physics. We have captured the laws of time and space that govern this world and use this to remake the world in our own image. Art is no longer imitating life, life is being formed through the employment of this structural and practical artistic process- life itself has become the mirror image of our technological advancements, blurring the lines between what is artificial and what is real, or creator and creation.
And yet there is another level of narrative cohesion at play here, and it lies with this simple question: can this technological advancement ever outrun its necessary foundation.
Or to put it this way- can this technological advancement ever render that common artistic presence obsolete.
I don’t think it can. The persisting critique of modernism is simply this- the promise that it can unify the world and make sense of the world through its singular lens of science and progess has left the world without a necessary foundation. The only world it can know is the world of its own making, reducing knowledge to a singular way of knowing (science) and seeing as a singular conception (progress). The danger of film is that it leads us to think that artistic progression is the point rather than the art. That the form is able to transcend the aim of its knowledge.
In truth, the form, properly understood and detached from the reality of art’s necessary progression and innovation, reveals that necessary narrative foundation, it doesn’t render it obsolete. To neglect this foundation is to find ourselves in a crisis of meaning, measuring reality as purely a matter of form and function rather than a reality that has any inherent value, meaning and defintion. This is the same thing we see in modernism’s gradual march towards redefining naturalism in opposition to appeals to the transcendent. Naturalism, once simply a concern for knowing the nature of reality itself, became a way of domesticating the necessary mystery within the structural confines of form and function- scientific progress renders the common presence of knowledge and sight obsolete. We lose that necessary foundation for knowing and seeing truthfully.
The strength of film is that it can awaken us to the reality that knowledge and sight is rooted in the necessary foundation that form and function help to reveal and to understand.
To set this directly within the practicalities of function and form, consider the film lens. As Monaco describes, there are two kinds of lenses- wide angle or telephoto (wide and narrow). These lenses are distinguished by their points of perspective, their specific angles which define how and what we see.
Monaco makes an interesting observation in pointing out just how bound these lenses are to the laws of physics. The camera cannot achieve the concept of depth purely by appealing to a singular form of perspective. It needs them both to create the illusion of depth of perspective. Depth comes from playing with both the wide and narrow lens simultaneously. As one gradually narrows the other gradually expands, establishing this sense of uniformity. In this sense, the modernist appeal to form and function as a primary interpretive lens actually creates the absence of depth, not greater knowledge. The same would go for neglecting function and form in favor of the wide angle lens, a fact that should counter responses to modernism that neglect or ignore the sciences,
There is one more aspect of the lens that becomes important here- the reality of light. Without light any such visual representation would become incoherent. We need light to see regardless of which lens we are employing, and a filmmakers primary role is to determine how much light is let in (aperture) based on how dark the space is.
Light is the illuminating source that allows us to see. No matter how much technology progresses, this basic truth remains uniform. It’s a reminder of our dependency on both form and meaning. A filmmaker can use a lens in relationship to the light to focus us on a particular image, but that image will always be purposed for the sake of revelation. Not of itself, as though a film sequence exists solely to reveal the details of its form and function, but of the meaning and nature of this reality. The foundation of art itself.
The Stories of my Life 