Page 181 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 181
Immediacy as an Attribute of Cinema as Art
Questions about what we see when we watch a film have been raised and
discussed many times over since the beginnings of cinema. These questions
immediately implied not only seeing in most basic sense of the word – as
what becomes an imprint on the retina of an eye – but also, perceiving, rec-
ognising, comprehending and understanding. Hence, the very act of visual
sensing triggers a process of broadly understood thinking. What thinking
is without language? And what function the preposition “without” oper-
ates in this question? Of course, “stepping out of language” into a so-called
non-verbal form of thinking is made conceivable only in and not outside a
relation to language. Therefore, it seems that any perception of objects or
perception of the so-called outside world is a kind of “reading”. Such intuit-
ing of the world highly probably owes its presence to film, which made ap-
parent a widely shared confidence in the epoch of the universal literacy that
sensory activities work as reading and through reading. After the incursion
of moving pictures into the field of reality, which, as ever, consists of a mix
of subjectivity and objectivity, obviously sensual activity and passivity in-
herently affect both “components” of reality. The very idea of reading, no
matter how metaphorically it functions, makes such a difference that there
is no way to imagine what kind of legibility had existed before the intru-
sion of first photography and then cinema. Hence, the term “reading” func-
tions here not only metaphorically, but also at the same time immediately.
179
Questions about what we see when we watch a film have been raised and
discussed many times over since the beginnings of cinema. These questions
immediately implied not only seeing in most basic sense of the word – as
what becomes an imprint on the retina of an eye – but also, perceiving, rec-
ognising, comprehending and understanding. Hence, the very act of visual
sensing triggers a process of broadly understood thinking. What thinking
is without language? And what function the preposition “without” oper-
ates in this question? Of course, “stepping out of language” into a so-called
non-verbal form of thinking is made conceivable only in and not outside a
relation to language. Therefore, it seems that any perception of objects or
perception of the so-called outside world is a kind of “reading”. Such intuit-
ing of the world highly probably owes its presence to film, which made ap-
parent a widely shared confidence in the epoch of the universal literacy that
sensory activities work as reading and through reading. After the incursion
of moving pictures into the field of reality, which, as ever, consists of a mix
of subjectivity and objectivity, obviously sensual activity and passivity in-
herently affect both “components” of reality. The very idea of reading, no
matter how metaphorically it functions, makes such a difference that there
is no way to imagine what kind of legibility had existed before the intru-
sion of first photography and then cinema. Hence, the term “reading” func-
tions here not only metaphorically, but also at the same time immediately.
179
