The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ required of a theory in science. Science would not regard such claims to the status of theory as legitimate.

The key to theories in science is their ability to be tested. Testing consists, in the classic method, of formulating ideas in such a way that experiments can be designed to assess the viability of the theory under laboratory conditions, a notion quite foreign to Continental Philosophy in all its guises. Theories have to be capable of being disproved. This is hardly news in science since Newton, but does not currently apply to any brand of ‘Theory’ in the Arts and Humanities, which all share Kant’s claim for the autonomy of Reason. The aim of this project is to propose the formulation of ideas in just that way – so they can be tested and are capable of support or disproof. The study of Emotion, Consciousness and Dream Science have shown that what was formerly thought to be subjective and not amenable to objective analysis can be approached scientifically. For example, there appear to be some parallels between the way the brain works in REM dreaming and while watching a film. The external referent part of the brain shuts down in both cases. Dream diaries have been used successfully to chart the forms that dreams take and to begin to challenge some of the myths around dreaming. Researchers have found, for example, that the bizarreness of dreams tends to be greatly exaggerated and that the great majority of dreams have a functional structure that is rather more coherent and rational than previously claimed.³¹ Dreams are seen as having a biological function like everything else, and as a result are brought down to earth, which is one of the great achievements of science – the ongoing process of replacing myth with experimentally-tested fact.

      Dream diaries could perhaps form one example of how viewers’ responses to films could provide the material with which to start a scientific approach to Cinema. The close study of individual films, as in my little experiment with The Searchers, begins to yield up their complex content. It would be possible to analyse the development of the script, its range of references, the ‘exformation’ that was discarded in its writing, all as part of a reclamation of the ‘unconscious’ of a film, an archive of the information it contains. The task is then to devise experiments that begin to untangle the conscious from the Automatic. That is no easy task but I have a sense that the way forward is through the same issues of Survival, Evolution and Emotion. I noticed in teaching that we only take in what has emotional significance for us. Without that, information doesn’t stick. In that sense knowledge seems always to be concrete. Abstract ideas tend to float away, but if there is something that attaches us to an idea, an identification of some sort, then we are much more likely to remember it. As with the study of Emotion, the combination of being able to track brain activity through imaging, like fMRI, and the constant relating of issues back to evolution, to Survival, perhaps offers a route to begin to define what information goes in Automatically and what Consciously. Such a process could also increase our understanding of how the brain works, shifting the ground of the study of Cinema to a collaboration with science. From the current introverted nature of academic study such a future seems far away, but it also seems to me to offer far greater rigour and a real contribution to society, with the considerable side-benefit of bridging the gap between the Two Cultures, bringing Art & Science back together, after a separation often seen as going back to the Eighteenth Century.

The approach in this project is a materialist one in which it is argued that everything has a solely physical explanation.³² It is a materialism of a scientific rather than Marxist character. Marxism borrowed materialism from science in a similar sleight of hand to the variants of Theory in the late twentieth-century, but Marx turned Hegel upside down, which is not quite the same as rejecting it completely. The inheritance of German Idealism is an antithetical tradition to the empiricism of Newton, Locke and Hume. I would suggest that the proper inclusion of Hume’s ‘passions’, Emotion, in the paradigm of scientific method, offers a revitalised and extended, a New Empiricism, an Expansive Materialism with explanatory powers exceeding any other framework.

      Science is often accused of reductionism. There is an irony in that it is reductionism as a method that has facilitated the achievements of science. Scientific method involves identifying key variables in order to make predictions about cause and effect. The accusation is that in doing a similar thing to analyse art, science applies a coarse mesh that fails to capture the subtleties of artistic expression. My contention here is that neurobiology with an affective emphasis marks an epistemological advance from the limitations of classical scientific method that is so marked that the potential for a science of art, a science of culture (using an evolutionary definition of culture) is transformed.

       Reverse-Engineering Cinema

      The overall approach to Cinema that is proposed reverses the common route of moving from Nature to Culture, that is from Biology to (evolved) human Culture. Instead, it is suggested to ‘reverse engineer’ from the concrete cultural artefact that is Cinema, its archive, its history, its every moment formal and informal, to the biological base. For example, if we ask the question why does the eye follow movement in Cinema, the answer lies in tracing that fact back to its roots in the evolutionary history of the eye, going back many millions of years. The explanatory power of an evolutionary explanation is contained in that example – the reason the eye follows movement is biological in the evolutionary sense, and with a history of almost unimaginable antiquity.

The epistemological challenge of the reverse direction is that it would be practically impossible to imagine Cinema from the starting point of Nature. The detailed route that evolution took that arrived at the birth of the medium, let alone the Classic Hollywood Cinema in all its moments, is inevitably so complex as to almost defy human imagination. However, the reverse route is more capable of being traced as we start from the existence of Cinema and can unpick its history in terms of the logic of evolution. There is something in that approach of Bayesian inference, reasoning backwards to infer the hidden causes behind observations.³³ Beginning with the concrete facts of Cinema and working backwards is practical, where the reverse – imagining Cinema from the evolution of the Eye, for example – would be a virtually impossible task.

       Kuleshov & Gazzaniga

An example of the Affective Neurobiology approach to Cinema can be seen in links between two moments, the Kuleshov³⁴ experiments of 1917, which featured a famous actor with a neutral expression intercut with emotive shots – a crying baby, an attractive woman, a hot bowl of soup, and a famous experiment by the neuroscientist Gazzaniga around fifty years later. What interests me about Kuleshov is not the discovery of editing per se, for which it is best-known, but the idea that the audience filled-in the neutral expression of the actor according to what was in the succeeding shot – for soup he was said to look hungry, for a crying baby sympathetic etc.

Gazzaniga³⁵ worked with a split-brain patient who was presented with three objects – a chicken foot, a spade and a shed. The patient had no problem – the spade was for shovelling the chicken-poo out of the chicken shed.³⁶ I would suggest a rather similar process is going on in both cases, which is that the brain constantly seeks to rationalise the slim resources of Consciousness by linking stimuli in a meaningful way. Another way of seeing that impulse is towards narrative, a narrativising process. There are several other examples in the way the brain functions that show a related activity. That suggests there is a biological basis to narrative and suggests one reason why narrative Cinema has been the dominant mode of the medium.

      The view of this project is that not only do we have very little idea of what we learn from Cinema, but little idea of how the brain responds to it. Neuroscience rooted in the historical sense of Evolution combined with an emphasis upon Emotion offers the possibility of overcoming those deficits and in the process adding to our stock of scientific knowledge of the brain. Compared to the analyses offered by Film Theory that would seem to be a rather more worthwhile project.

       Cinema and Language

The notion that СКАЧАТЬ