Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Spring 1995 Vol.16 No.2

Film Study: Enlarging Our Habits of Perception

Don Fredericksen

In Introduction to Film Analysis, the class had just completed its second screening of Stan Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night (1959), a personal, lyric expression of the young filmmaker's loss of hope and suicidal drive. The film is difficult to watch: its manic camerawork leaves neither the eye nor the brain time to gain control of the experience through comprehension; it violates most of the expectations we have about film-viewing-namely, that it be entertaining and immediately comprehensi ble-and, its dire and horrible subject strikes a deep chord in an audience which has not yet left the emotional roller coaster of adolescence.

As I expected, the first screening had been chaotic for many of the forty-five students in the class, so we spent our time afterwards carefully working toward a description of the film's structure and the expressive functions of the camera. We had noted, for example, that the imagery had clustered around motifs (trees, a door swinging on its hinges, children asleep), and we speculated about the logic of their progression. We had noted that the camera was embodied, and used a fairly small range of motion s (pans, plunges, swirls) to reach some rough equivalents for emotional reactions (curiosity, terror, the sense of coming unhinged). As that earlier analysis proceeded, there was a palpable sense of excitement about the fact that form was revealing itself to us, as a watermark does to a stamp collector when solvent is applied to a stamp's back. There, where many had first seen nothing, just there, the formative and expressive work of a most difficult filmmaker had begun to be made manifest by our collectiv e attention. Even if the class reached no deeper relationship to this film, it already had done something quite extraordinary. For by working in good faith with the film and each other, the class had managed to begin to make sense of the meaning and value of a film unlike any it had seen in many years of viewing commercial narrative films. The recognition that such films exist and that they yield their own rewards are fundamental steps out of stereotypical habits of perceptions. The enlarging of habits of perception is one way of saying what this course and the academic study of film are about.

At the second screening, two days later, we were ready to ask further questions-most particularly, the question of purpose. Why would anyone make such a film? Overnight the class had read an interview with Brakhage and his wife, in which he describes his sense of isolation from others, especially at the perceptual level. His sight encompasses the awe-ful; others seem not to have such sight. The realization that this is so drives him, he states, to construct equivalences by which he can perhaps make othe rs aware of qualitatively different kinds of sight. Crucially, he has no choice; he creates out of necessity, the alternatives being isolation, madness, perhaps suicide. Here is where the second discussion started-after I noted for the class Brakhage's statement that the making of the film saved him from actual suicide. Had he made an efficacious equivalent, and were there good reasons for honoring as "art" such blatantly therapeutic equivalences? Or did Brakhage remain in a solipsistic cage?

In addressing these questions to the class, I was remembering a passionate outburst several years ago from a philosophy major who was offended by the reality that filmmaking functions therapeutically for some filmmakers. I wondered if that thesis would reappear this semester. It was, after all, an honorable and contestable thesis, one with a rich history in general aesthetics, and one quite capable of leading us into a worthy conversation regarding the functions of art.

But this semester, things were to take another turn. In the back row the hand of a graduate student in literature went up. When she began to speak, her voice broke, and even from a distance her deep emotion was visible in her agitation: "For the last hour this film has been battling for my very soul." It was no sentimental outburst, no narcissistic refusal to follow the train of thought we had been pursuing. On the contrary, it moved the questions on the floor into the deepest possible waters. Collectiv ely, we were in one of those rare classroom moments when only a fool would break the silence. The meaning was in the silence, and could only be drawn by staying within it.

I must tell you that in that silence I experienced joy: joy that someone had been able to empathize so deeply with the film that its dark currents had become real; joy that some filmmakers still have the capacity to stir us at the level of wonder, which is also the genesis of philosophy; joy that this class understood and honored the education that occurs in silence; joy that I was standing there with these students and nowhere else.

While such a dramatic scene does not routinely occur, it does illustrate several of the salient aspects of film study as I understand it. In general, it reveals that we are always operating simultaneously at several levels, which we can characterize as critical, historical, and theoretical. In the case of Anticipation of the Night-and every other film screened in my courses-there is the need to come to some understanding of the film as a particular and autonomous entity. This is the act of crit icism. We do this, for example, by describing how the film has been segmented, by describing the logic of progression of parts, by interpreting its themes and theses, and by evaluating its aesthetic and rhetorical efficacy.

Beyond critical understanding there is the need to understand the film within the context of patterns exhibited by groups of film over time. This is film history. At the broadest level, Anticipation of the Night, for example, exists within a large but mostly unknown pattern of films which we call "personal," because they are characteristically made by one person (along the model of the more traditional arts), and because their concerns are personally grounded. More specifically, the film is cen tral to a lyric mode of personal filmmaking dominant in America during the 1950s and early 1960s. The lyric pattern can be studied as an entity in itself, insofar as it grows out of a 1940s pattern called the psychodramatic trance film and transforms into a mythopoeic pattern in the 1960s.

At the historical level, films are studied less for their particularity than for their participation in some larger pattern. There are many films whose particularity is not remarkable, and whose disappearance, as it were, into larger patterns of similarities we can experience without a sense of loss. But any film worth extended study will have some remarkable particularity. This implies that one's critical understanding of such films must not suffer from one's historical understanding of them. Were a class attending only to an historical understanding of Anticipation of the Night, that graduate student's heartfelt response would have been given no legitimacy.

Beyond criticism and history, there are questions about the nature and functions of film, about what film is and what it does. This is the realm of film theory, which is a form of philosophic discourse. By its very nature, film theory is always in danger of losing itself in abstraction(s). On the other hand, it can have a mutually enriching relationship with criticism and history. For example, the description of individual documentary films of the 1930s leads to the realization that the problem-solution structure is a predominate formal pattern. In the history of documentary film, this pattern is openly attacked and replaced in the late '50s and early '60s by filmmakers working under the banners of "direct-camera" and "cinema-verite". These filmmakers favor discovery structures that mimic the process of learning that initially uninformed audience members would go through in the same situation. Rather than tell us what to think, based on prior knowledge, they look and listen with us, to learn what can be learned in situ. These two historical patterns yield, and are based on, qualitatively different theories regarding the nature and functions of documentary. For example, the first sees the world as a locus of problems, which can be solved by reason and will. The second sees the world not as a locus of rationally and willfully solvable problems, but as an unending and inextricably ambiguous collection of situations which excite curiosity. Here the appeal is less to reason and will, more to the joy o f discovery via sights and ambient sounds. Meanings and values are not given by expert filmmakers, they are garnered idiosyncratically by individual viewers. The problem-solution approach is compatible with the use of documentary film in benign or virulent forms of social engineering. Thus it lives on where documentary is linked with political action. The discovery approach's linkage to politics is much less inevitable. In fact, because of its allegiance to idiosyncratically derived and ambiguous meaning, it shares dangers of solipsism with lyric personal films.

Aspects of criticism, history, and theory operate simultaneously in any discussion of film that tries to honor the complexity of our film experience. The urge to reduce our experience to the measure of our ideas must always be resisted. Here the teacher must point the way, by acknowledging when his experience outstrips his comprehension. No one loses by such acknowledgment, nor is what one does comprehend decreased by what one does not. The poignancy of our complex relationship to film receives, however , its proper due-including those moments when film struggles for our very soul.

Don Fredericksen (theatre arts) is the author of The Aesthetic of Isolation in Film Theory, and a series of essays on Jungian psychology and film-several of which have recently been translated into Polish. He is currently writing a book on Bergman's Persona, C.G. Jung, and Buddhism. In 1994 he was a recipient of the Robert A. and Donna Paul Award for excellence in advising.