In his book Light of the mind, Light of the World: illuminating Science Through Faith, Spencer Klaven examines the history of the modern scientfic enterprise through the lens of the mind-matter divide. He notes that science, used in this modernist sense, can only hand us a representation of reality, not Reality itself, and shows how the historical narrative betrays a long and winding road through the trappings of materialism back to where it ultimately must land- the relationship of the material (science) to the mind (knoweldge). To know the world, as he puts it, is to properly attend for the mind that observes it, the question of truth, or the nature of Reality, boiling down to that which the mind observes. To do away with the mind as matter, which is one of the sole aims of the modernist enterprise, leaves us marooned in time and space.
Perhaps most interesting to me, particularly because of the ways it overlaps with the history of film, another subject I’ve been immersed in as a I work through James Monaco’s monumental work How To Read a Film, is the ways in which Klaven sees light as the means of knowing. Light is what allows us to observe the world. Light illuminates Reality. And as Monaco has spent pages exploring, the most fundamental role of the filmmaker is to work with light. The fundamental question of the filmmaker is how much light do I let in so as to clarify the images that I want to show.
For Klaven, apart from the minds ability to observe an illuminated world, Reality cannot be fundamentally true and alive, let alone known. The mind gives shape to what is behind the material world, and it is precisely, then, in the mind that we can know the full shape of this Reality, not as benign mechanistic systems but as something geniunely true. Klaven brings in the essential function of this interpretive process- language. To name something is to validate its truthfulness. It is to name that which we observe and thus recognize the life behind the system. Similarly, Monaco’s own thesis has been underscoring film as language. As language it bears both form and interpretation, function and observation.
There’s a fascinating element of this discussion that he touches on in chapter four, which breaks the history of film down into three central parts: film, cinema, and movies.
- The “filmic” is the aspect of art that concerns its relationship with the world around it
- The cinematic (cinema) deals with the esthetics and internal structure of the art
- The movie deals with its function as an economic commodity
Or more succinctly: Movies as economics, film as politics, and cinema as esthetics
Here it is telling that cinema, or esthetics gets, by a large margin, the greatest attention and most amount of pages. Why? Because ultimately film is asking similar questions when it comes to how we perceive the and concieve the truth about Reality. In the inital pages concerning esthetics, Monaco compares the Lumiere Brothers with Geoge Melies, both standing at the precipice of the birth of cinema. For the Lumiere’s, their accomplishement was the simple creation of a immitated reality- bringing space and time to life on screen through a singular image (the train pulling into the station). Melies on the other hand, sought after the ability of film to “change” reality by way of utilizing its illusion.
And yet Monaco makes the point that what Melies does reflects the natural progression that would have necessarily come about, no matter who was behind the camera. This is because it is rooted in technology. Just as science is rooted in reducing reality to its material property, the function of film is the natural outflow of its constructed codes.
This matters to a discussion about eshtetics because the question of films truthfulness, or its ability to say and reveal something about Reality beyond the mechanics of its form, its technology, reaches beyond the the functional properties. It reaches beyond the utility of the technological tools. One can call what we get an illusion (Melies was, quite literally, a magician by trade), but the illusion remains the product of its mechanisitc properites. It is not trully alive. Equally so, one can call our experience of Reality an illusion in the same sense of its mechanistic functions, and yet the question still remains- how do we attend for the observer. To what end is the observent mind experiencing and thus knowing a truth which lies behind the technology, the utility? To what end is the the observant mind seeing and knowing that truth which lies behind material reality?
This gets even more fascinating to me as I consider Monaco’s observations regarding the parallels between the rise of a global culture and the development of film. Modern society is mirrored, and in many ways driven, by the presence of film, practically and symbolically. Just as we find the age of science attempting to deconstruct reality, or as Kraven suggests turn God into small gods (atoms) which we can then control and thus circumvent and supersede on the basis of our own human inventions (for example, Love gets reframed from a Deity into a matter of function, the product of atoms and chemicals we can reduce and master), we also find the age of the movie attempting to be deconstructed into its economics.
And yet, our experience of Love stays stubbornly resistant to such attempts.
Film, as cinema, or as esthetic- as art, stays stubbornly resistant to such attempts to reduce it to its technological functions or the systems it produces. It is the art that continues to drive filmmakers, precisely because the primary role of film is to make sense of our experience of this world, not to keep us marooned on the level of its function and form. To mean something, we must observe it, and thus experience it.
In no small way then, to go back to that movie, film, cinema dichotomy, even in a world that Monaco describes as experiencing the death of cinema and film in favor of economics, even in an increasingly globalized world that is still wrestling with the reality of the dominating mechanics of the American industry that was so pervasive in the early oughts (the relationship between global industries and the Hollywood machine is a worthwhile discussion in its own right), the echos of film continue to reverberate with its cinematic presence. An artform that is tied to technology will have its inevitable and necessary advancements, but such innovations will remain empty apart from its relationship to light, to the observer. We got to the movies precisely because it is cinema.
As Klaven writes,
At this stage in our history, science and theology desperately need each other’
By this stage he means a modern landscape which has elevated the sceince of atoms to the level of a wholly explanatory system, leaving the world lifeless and void in its wake. The world, however, is not a machine. It is not the cruel and uncaring reality that the mind’s observation desires to contradict. Reality is that which we observe and experience. Similarly, the modern landscape has developed film into a mechanistic structure dependent on the machine that produces it. In Hollywood, even the greatest auteurs get subsumed by the system. And yet underneath this lies something more true. When film attends for the observer it becomes cinema- that which attends for the reality behind the structure.
The Stories of my Life 