Visual Theory
Renaissance Perspective
-The bridge between the classical world and the modern world - Art begins to look more realistic and this changes the "believability" of art
Aristotle's Four Causes in Nature
1) First formal cause is like a blueprint, or immortal idea 2) The second cause is the material, or what a thing is made out of 3) Third cause is the process and the agent, in which the artist or creator makes the thing 4) The fourth cause is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as telos
camera obscura
a darkened box with a convex lens or aperture for projecting the image of an external object onto a screen inside. It is important historically in the development of photography.
Plutocrat
a person who derives power from their wealth
What is Visual Theory?
A field of study that often includes some combination of cultural studies, art history, critical theory, philosophy, and anthropology by focusing on psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, queer theory etc.
What is Critical Theory?
An examination and critique of the relationship between society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities
Apparatus Theory
An ideological critique of the cinema's subjective effects - in other words, how does the cinema affects the audience.
Historicist View
Apparatus is a biproduct of cultural norms, as well as sciences and technical practices
Eisenstein's Theory of dialectical montage vs. Hegel's Dialectical Model
Eisenstein: Thesis + Antithesis = Synthesis Hegel: Thesis => Dynamic Opposition (creative synthesis) <= Antithesis
persistence of vision
Eyes would capture single frames and our brain would flip images over and present them as fluid motion
Anthropocene
Human influences is affecting the world
Dialectical Materialism
Originates from two major aspects of Marx's philosophy: 1) His transformation of Hegel's idealistic understanding of dialectics into a material one, an act commonly said to have "put Hegel's dialectics back on its feet." 2) The thesis that history is the product of class struggles and follows the general Hegelian principle of philosophy of history.
Realist art movement
- 1850s France -> Against Romanticism, a genre dominating French literature and artwork - grew with the intro of photography
Unity of Opposites
- A conflict in which a protagonist and an antagonist have objectives that are diametrically opposed
Rudolph Arnheim
- A psychologist from the Gestalt school, originated in Berlin - Interested only in the aesthetics of film (as opposed to critique) - All media have multiple users, but only one is aesthetic, but it is this very artistic function that generally make use.. - Did not support "naturalism", which only offers a mechanical double of reality and the world; an artist would merely re-present the world
Dioptrics
- A technical treatise on optics, including an essay - Human vision is an extended critique of nature's workshop
Mu
- A zen aesthetics designate empty space, or mu, as an integral part of any art. - A Zen-like reverence for the everyday - emptiness is constructed - "Active" empty space
David Bordwell
- American film theorist - Mankind is the focal point of cinema → Classical narration → Psychological motivation - Neo-Formalism = supports Arnheim's moderate constructivism
Brownie Box
- Anyone can take a picture - Led to a crisis in art, because it's so easy to take a picture rather than a painting - Picasso kinda fixed this mentality: "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us." Subjective art!
The "Language-form" of cinema
- Balazs credits DW Griffith as being the first to create the new language-form of cinema by breaking scenes into fragments, shifting angles of camera, from fragment to fragment, and by assembling the film not by a linkage of scenes but as a montage of fragments
Determining Judgments
Subsume particular objects under already given universal concepts (reason) → the scientific method.
Noumenal
The noumenal world consists of things we seem compelled to believe in, but which we can never know (because we lack sense-evidence of it)
Objectivist View
The objectivist view sees the truth of science as facts discovered in the natural world and technical practices as things imposed upon practitioners by apparatuses
Phenomenal
The phenomenal world is the world we are aware of; this is the world we construct out of the sensations that are present to our consciousness.
Artistic judgement
The recognition, appreciation or criticism of a work of art or of art itself (objective, concept)
Aesthetic judgment
The sensory contemplation or appreciation of an object, which may or may not be a work of art (subjective, intuition)
What is Visual Culture?
Visual culture pertains to all forms of communication designed for purposes of perception or with the potential to augment our visual. Includes fine art, dance, photography, magazines, ads, comics, TV, Cinema, video games, and digital media
What did Marx and Engel say about Material Production?
Whoever controls material production controls mental production → whoever controls the narrative controls what we are thinking about.
Base and Superstructure
- Base → the economic base of material production determines how we develop other social formations, including politics, law, religion, philosophy, science, cultural and ideological activities → Superstructure - The ruling class controls the economic base and consequently the cultural and ideological productions, which in turn creates ideology that supports the ruling class and controls tehe ideas and belief systems of the working class - Therefore, it is not consciousness that determines our existence, but our social existence that determines consciousness - We become the society we are born into. Whoever controls that society, controls consciousness. Whoever control thats society, usually industry and corps, control the mind.
Cartesian Optics
- Beginning of the separation between subject and object - Through optics we can master nature; if we see more we can master - Separation in Subject and object
Karl Marx
- Capitalism Sucks - Entertainment and film make us passive and easy victims to the capitalist regime! -The inevitable decline of capitalism will lead to the rise of socialism → "the withering away of the state" - Revolution of the mind
The Soviet Formalists
- Eisenstein, Vertov, Kuleshov, Pudovkin believed filmmaking was a synthesis of practical work and theoretical work, complementing and conditioning each other to create a dialectical unity *Note: not to be confused with the political charge of 'formalism', which meant to put personal or aesthetic goals over political and social ideologies*
Liar's Paradox
- Film is both true and false. It isn't the truth because it's not reality
Gestalt approach
- Film is not simply retinal stimulation, but involves a 'field' of perceptions, associations and memory - A pattern of stimuli - Film art is produced not through realism, but is a product of the tension between representation and distortion - It is based not on the aesthetic use of something in the world but on the aesthetic use of something which gives us the world
Being ← → Becoming: A process of recollection (Plato)
- For Plato, the use of reason amount to a process of recollection, in which we gain knowledge by recalling information that is already present in our minds, acquired prior to birth, but which we have 'forgotten - We are born with innate knowledge. - Perpetual being is connected to essences. Even when we die, our being is dead, our soul is still present in the world - We deal in subjective truth, but Forms are objective truth
Andre Bazin
- French film critic who devised the term auteur for significant cutting-edge filmmakers - Mimesis - Myth of Total Cinema
A History of Genre
- Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature, as set out in Aristotle's Poetics - For Aristotle, poetry (odes, epics, etc.), prose, and performance each had specific design features that supported appropriate content of each genre - Theatre→ Three Genre → Tragedy, comedy, Satyr
The absolute idea
- Hegel thought that the end of history would arrive when humans achieved perfect self-knowledge and self-mastery → when life was rational and transparent - Hegel and the "absolute idea" → Plato's perfect "form"
Socrates
- How Should we live our lives? - The Socratic method; celtics (dialogue) - Anthesis + thesis = synthesis - Instead of two people butting heads and opinions, they talk about it and see where they agree/disagree - Democratic rule, logic, debate, rhetoric and poetics, dialectics, aporia (reach a deadlock) - The polis (the city) - The unexamined life is not worth living
Plato's Parable of the Cave
- Ignorance is not bliss, but a form of enslavement - Secondary reality (the cave) - Poetry is the art of divine madness, or inspiration; and as such the poet cannot convey the truth
Alienation
- In Marxists terms, the general populace is alienated from the material culture it has produced because the conditions of capitalism have created a situation that alienates labor. - Occurs in twofold: 1) The worker is alienated from the things that they produced (where surplus values become the capitalist profits) 2) The worker is alienated from themselves > Go around and sell yourself to others in hopes to be hired > Your resume, you are a commodity
realist film theory
- The essence of cinema is its ability to record and reproduce reality and its phenomena → the fact - Unadorned reality can reveal a 'strong view of truth'
The aesthetics and psychology of the cinema
- The synthesis of window and frame - The frame is necessary in film but unnecessary in life
Gesamtkunstwerk
- The total work of art , ideal of work of art, universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form - A synthesis of Realism and Romanticism, the Rational and Irrational
Cognitive Realism
- The view that there is such a thing as objective truth, that there is a way things are independently of how we represent these things to ourselves - The idea that knowledge, what can be said is true, varies relative to individual, social or cultural conditions
Marxist Theory
- Theory of communism > connected to anarchism - A critique of capitalism > How do you resist this?
Denotation and Connotation
- Through artfully building contexts, the author can invest prosaic objects, events, or characters with poetic meaning that transcends their everyday appearances - According to Plato, bazin, and balaza, the meaning already exists in reality and is revealed within the cinematic form, a kind of remembering.
Eisentstein's 5 methods of montage
- Tonal (emotional charge) - Metric (tempo) - Rhythmic (tempo within shots and the shots themselves) - Overtonal (synthesis of the above) - Intellectual r ideological (conceptual relationships)
The Theory of Universals
- Universal are type, properties, or relations that are common to their various instances - In Aristotle's view, universals exists only in things, never apart from things eg. A universal is identical in each of its instances; all red things are similar in that there is the same universal, redness in each thing => no perfect Platonic Form of Redness, standing apart from all red things; instead, each red thing has a copy of the same property, redness
The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction
- Walter Benjamin - The public is an examiner but an absent-minded one - Art's authentic cultural value is replaced with political value, exhibition value, reproduction value, and commodification - Art no longer promotes concentration, it's a distraction
Categorical Imperative (Kant)
- We should always act in such a way that our moral decisions could be used as a guide for everyone's moral behaviour
Canon
- a contrapuntal compositional technique or texture that employs a melody with one or more limitations of the melody played after a given duration
Gestalt Theory
- a theory based on the idea that the whole of personal experience is different from simply the sum of its constituent elements - To assemble a number of disconnected sense impressions into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts
chromatism
- an alteration of interpolation in or deviation from this basic diatonic organization → often realized through the contrast between consonance (harmonic sound) and dissonance (un-harmonic sound) - Consonance (harmonic sound) ← → Dissonance (unharmoic sound)
Romanticism
- artistic movement that appealed to emotion rather than reason - counter-movement to the scientific revolution - promoted anti-reductionism (the whole is was more valuable than the parts) - In part, a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment
What is Film Theory?
- explores the essence of the cinema and provides a conceptual framework for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers and society at large - Often allied with marxist critical theory and Freudian psychoanalysts
Hugo Munsterberg
- father of industrial psychology - Persistence of vision - Psychotechonology - Believe "without narrative cinema was merely gadgetry → to picture emotions must be the central aim of the photoplay"
Apophenia
- is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns of connections in random or meaningless data
Historical Poetics
- let films speak for themselves → traces the entire history of cinema through the composition of depth, ie, the context of deep space and depth of field
Andre Bazin Mimesis
- one of the truly unique aspects of the cinema was precisely the mechanical recording of reality without human intervention; putting the camera in the right position and letting it register what is before it, suspicious of "tricks" (historicist)
Praxis
- practical action that is taken on the basis of intellectual or theoretical understanding - the necessary human activity to initiate change
Marxist Film Theory
- rather than the traditional interpretation-dominated critique of cinema, a Marx analysis would seek meaning through criticism of capitalism and theory of social change, would consider cinema as a component in the forces that determine the consciousness of social beings
Johannes Gutenberg (1398 -1468)
- started the printing revolution ○ The spread of literacy and learning to the masses; knowledge-based economy ○ Decline of Latin ○ Lead to the Reformation
Gestalt Effect
- the mind's organizing capability in response to visual recognition of form - The form-generating capability of our sense, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and while forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves → the assemble a number of disconnected sense impressions into a whole that is larger than the sum of its parts - Pareidolia = to see faces in shapes
Formalist Film Theory
- the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the individual elements
Mass cultural forms
- the task of cultural forms, in particular mass culture forms, is to appeal to individual subjects objectified by ideological formations, allowing them to remain convinced that they are still subjects within that ideology Ex. You think you want to buy the diamond to show love to your fiance, but it's actually social values that have been placed on you to think like that
fetishism of commodity
- under capitalism, a system of generalized commodity production, people are in the grip of a false consciousness where they have the illusion of being confronted by things when in reality they are confronted with specific social relations of production. - "The religion of sensuous appetite"
reflective judgement
begin with particulars and seek universal concepts under which to subsume them (intuition) → governed by the indemonstrable but subjectively necessary assumption that natural objects have been created by an intelligent designer → This principle does not guarantee that there are purposes in nature, but it prompts us to look for such purposes.
diagesis/diegetic
narration, report or argument
Logos
reasoned discourse
Immanence
refers to philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence, in which the divine is seen to be manifested in or encompassing the material world.
Diorama
taking a static image and introducing the element of time. Ex. light shining through with light changing from morning to night
Doxa
the beliefs held by individuals
Béla Balázs
○ Analyzed the economic infrastructure of film, which he insisted was the basis of this new art ie. Film could not grow unless business conditions allowed it ○ Believed the reality and independence of the external world of sensation ○ As opposed to Bazin and the idea of film realism, Balazs believed the filmmaker should reshape reality through his or her use of the form language of cinema ○ Renewed interest in the "Close-Up"; feel like you know the subject through the close-up even though you don't ○ Supported new technology and techniques, but did not support extremes of metaphorical and intellectual montage ie. Eisenstein
Centripetal/Centrifugal
○ The conceptualization is different from the model where the cinema is framed by its edges. The reality of the film is within the visible screen, which has historically dominated western cinema ○ The concept of cinematic space existing within and without the visible frame, whereby the frame contains some of the action, or as with Ozu's 'empty scenes' no visible action
Positivism
○ the application of the scientific approach to the social world ○ Philosophies of science => the scientific method is the best approach to uncovering the processes by which both physical and human events occur
Rene Descartes
"I think, therefore I am"; ○ Defines the separation b/w Subject and Object ○ Dioptrics (1637) ○ Descartes said that through optics we can master nature ○ Even if I can't use my sense, smell, touch etc., I still know I am thinking. • I think therefore I am ○ Subject >= I think therefore I am • Philosophy equivalent to 1+1=2 • Descartes: Believing is seeing? ○ We need to acknowledge through reason b/c what we think we know on the basis of our exp can be questioned The one thing we cannot doubt is our own existence
Being← → Becoming
- Invisible world of Being → perfect order and design, containing all that is here - The material world of non-being → change, decay never remaining the same, becoming, of evil polluting good, of beauty forever fading
autonomous (Kant)
- Knowledge begins with experience, and experience is necessary for knowledge, and we play an active role in the production of knowledge - Human beings possess the unique capacity for rational self-determination - As rational beings, we can formulate our own ideas of truth and organize them into categories or "laws" which become a "moral duty" and thus we have a moral component
The Empiricists
- Knowledge through experience Ex. tower from far away looks cylinder, but up close it is a square. Had to walk to figure it out. → leaving the cave - Social contract; classical liberation → contrary to descartes, we are born without innate ideas so knowledge has to be determined by experience derived from sense perception - This could be a historical/societal approach - agrarian to machine-based economy, urban growth, change in demography, change in entertainment
The Rationalist
- Knowledge through reason - Plato - you can leave secondary reality - Rene Descartes
Emancipation of the camera lens
- Objective → subjective - Spectatorial identification with a ubiquitous camera - Kabiria Movement - Beginning of film language
Pillow Shots
- Ozu's form of cutaway shots which feature "still lives" of landscape as a means of transitioning between scenes - May not advance or refer to the subject, but gives the viewer to take a breather/moment
Theory of Knowledge
- Plato argues we have an innate ideas - those that are present in our minds at birth, linked to platonic forms - and those we discover through experience, linked to reason
The Social Contract
- Rational people get together, for mutual advantage, deciding to leave the state of nature and to govern themselves
The Age of Enlightenment
- Reason is advocated as the primary source and legitimacy of authority - Breaks through the "sacred circle" whose primary influence was the church - What is enlightenment? The freedom to use one's own intelligence
Sergei Eisenstein
- Russian film maker - pioneered the use of montage - Dialectical Montage
Immanuel Kant
- Sense experience by itself is meaningless; reason without experience is impossible - Therefore, we bring reason to experience by organizing principles - "categories" - which allows us to interpret the world - We can't know the world "in itself", but we can know the world as it appears to us in the framework of our organizing principles. - Reason => Experience => Knowledge - The Social Contract - Categorical Imparitive
Plato
- Socrates' student - The only way to have real knowledge is to use reason and so gain understanding - At the famous Academy in Athens, which plato founded and then taught, students trained in math and philosophy in order to look "below the surface of things" where they might seek "the Eternal reality and the Good behind it all"
Aristotle
- Student of Platos Logos = reasoned discourse Telos = The good, the intention of things, what does it mean
The "Cinematic Apparatus"
- The alignment of spectator, screen and projector. - Modeled on the human psyche, where the unconscious is structured like language - Like plato's cave - Difference between this and plato's cave: we are not chained anymore, we pay to watch.
Formalist/ Constructivist (Frame)
- The alteration and manipulation of filmic perception, distant from everyday perception - Montage, framing, manipulation of colour and language - Realism and Montage can both serve as a form of political resistance
Psychotechnology
- The application of psychological methods and results in the solution of practical problems especially in the industry - An application of technology for psychological purposes (As personal growth or behaviour change) □ The spectator has given himself over to an object of the imagination and is left in the world but wonderfully cut off from its cares and demands □ Giving meaning to film
Door/threshold
- The door is a border that divides something into two parts, designating marked space and unmarked space. - Threshold points in two directions because it simultaneously connects and separates
Realist/Humanist (Window)
- The essence of cinema is its ability to record and reproduce reality and its phenomena - The mechanical recording of reality without human intervention
Endoxa
The beliefs held by the population
Transcendance
The divine is seen to be outside the material world; transcends knowledge thus unknowable
Telos
The good, the intention of things, what does it mean
Mimesis/mimetic
The imitation of an action or set of actions through performance. This is showing as opposed to telling.
Louis Daguerre
inventor of the daguerreotype, an early type of photography