The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      as he stands in for us.

      Like and dislike

      Love and hate.

      Life and death.

      An unbroken continuum.

      Cinema is Emotion in motion.

      v.

      Empathy I

The brain and the body are one⁸¹

      Our brains inhabit the bodies of others

      Our brains imitate the Emotions of others

Imitation is the mode of attachment to another.⁸²

      We see more than we know

      We cannot avoid knowing the mind of another None conscious, all Automatic

      opposite to the wisdom of philosophers.

      A hero in jeopardy puts us in jeopardy

Emotional identification/intuitive harmonisation⁸³

      We become the hero

      sharing what s/he feels.

      Light from the dark

      Illumination.

      vi

      Empathy II

      The fate of the hero.

      Ninety minutes

      to watch a predator.

      A short time

      When life is at stake.

      Cinema adds to our fascination with movement

      fascination with the fate of the hero

      Our own fate at the hands of the predator

      is turned into a fascination

      with the fate of the hero

      Involving the same emotions

      transferred from ourselves

      To her or him

      On the screen.

      vii

      Cinema dramatises Vision

      The quality of Vision exceeds our view

      Everything we know

      we know from Vision

      We see more than we know

      (than we are aware)

      Cinema taps into this power

      and intensifies it.

      Cinema dramatises Vision.

      Emotion keeps our eyes on the hero/ine.

      But of what we learn

      we Know only a fraction

      The iceberg effect

      The realm of the Automatic.

      To bring the Automatic to light

Is a matter for experiment⁸⁴.

      viii

      A film is not a text

      A film is not a piece of literature

Non-sense⁸⁵ to refer to a film as a text.

      Only under the hegemony of Logocentrism

      does such reduction make sense.

      Cinema is not structured like a language

Cinema is structured like the brain⁸⁶.

      ix

      Historicism:

      Classical Hollywood

      from Stagecoach (1939) to Marnie (1964).

      Defining characteristic of ‘Classical’ Cinema

      It made emotion visible.

      In Mildred Pierce I know where I am. I feel that I know the emotional status of the heroine.

      I am shown how she feels. Not ‘literally’ through the actor’s anguished facial expression. But dramatically: the narrative sets up dramatic situations which force to me to project onto her ambivalent expression her emotional status

      Kuleshov – as understood by Hitchcock:

      We see a character’s action

      We see another character watching that action

      And that character’s reaction to it.

      The reaction expresses a particular reaction

      Not the only one possible

      But one to guide us in the labyrinth of possible meanings.

      The crying baby

      The sad man

      The crying baby

      The laughing man

      The sad baby

      The sinister man

      The sad baby

      The syllogism looking/looked at/reaction figure

      ignites the narrative movement

      Add to this sound and

      a character never says what s/he means

      Dialogue is a game of chess

      Not a telling of the story.

      Bogart tells Ingrid he hates her

      But we know he loves her.

      Cinema!

      x

      Film Theory

      The eye evolved to track motion

      We follow motion because of survival

      Emotion arises from survival

      The arc of a film

      is СКАЧАТЬ