Page 219 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 219
summary
lem. We can now better understand that the interaction between moving
pictures and the changes of the meaning of the concept of memory was an
immediate one. As such, it has been uttered in Bergson’s discourse. There-
fore, Bergson’s text still reminds us that a presumably scientific explanation
of perceptions of images lacks a grasp of complexity.
In the last twenty years or so of the 20th century cinema as art has be-
come increasingly an object of an expanding interest for philosophers – of
course, not only French ones. However, French philosophers are principal
references when a wide range of questions concerning film and thinking
are discussed. French film theory from its early days on, as it is visible in
the case of Epstein, amply borrowed ideas, notions and logics from philos-
ophy and aesthetics. Our contemporary colleague Jacques Rancière is un-
doubtedly a major thinker, who in his huge oeuvre pays an important trib-
ute to cinema and very noticeably intervenes into the field, which recently
has been globally identified as philosophy of film. In the chapter 11 (The Ma-
chine and Its Shadow) of his book Aisthesis he comes up with the notion
of immediacy linked to the notion of cinema: “Immediacy is what the art
of projected moving shadows demands. Since this art is deprived of living
flesh, of the stage’s depth and theatre’s words, its instant performance must
be identified with the tracing of a writing of forms” (2013). Rancière dis-
covers “immediacy” when he is trying to point out how cinema organises
within its capacities a “distribution of the sensible” and he takes Chaplin
not just as an example, but also as a decisive figure in the time, when film
was becoming art form and defining itself as such. Of course, as a philoso-
pher, who cannot but draw on texts – in this instance on Shklovsky, Meyer-
hold and, maybe more prominently, on Jean Epstein, Rancière did not miss
the question of language in cinema. Therefore, it looks like as if there is an
inherent link between thinking through cinema and his notion of imme-
diacy.
Although venerable traditional aesthetic considerations on beauty
seem mostly obsolete, the concept of beauty cannot be simply discarded
considering that it is inscribed in the foundation of the very idea of all aes-
thetics. The cinematic reality, always one way or the other related to a per-
ception of beauty (or, as it were, its contrast) of images, therefore, cannot
be conceived without aesthetics, which in case of cinema transgresses the
boundaries of “just” art. Elsaesser and Hagener ascertained and anticipat-
ed in their clarification that “/…/ the cinema seems poised to leave behind
its function as a ‘medium’ (for the representation of reality) in order to be-
217
lem. We can now better understand that the interaction between moving
pictures and the changes of the meaning of the concept of memory was an
immediate one. As such, it has been uttered in Bergson’s discourse. There-
fore, Bergson’s text still reminds us that a presumably scientific explanation
of perceptions of images lacks a grasp of complexity.
In the last twenty years or so of the 20th century cinema as art has be-
come increasingly an object of an expanding interest for philosophers – of
course, not only French ones. However, French philosophers are principal
references when a wide range of questions concerning film and thinking
are discussed. French film theory from its early days on, as it is visible in
the case of Epstein, amply borrowed ideas, notions and logics from philos-
ophy and aesthetics. Our contemporary colleague Jacques Rancière is un-
doubtedly a major thinker, who in his huge oeuvre pays an important trib-
ute to cinema and very noticeably intervenes into the field, which recently
has been globally identified as philosophy of film. In the chapter 11 (The Ma-
chine and Its Shadow) of his book Aisthesis he comes up with the notion
of immediacy linked to the notion of cinema: “Immediacy is what the art
of projected moving shadows demands. Since this art is deprived of living
flesh, of the stage’s depth and theatre’s words, its instant performance must
be identified with the tracing of a writing of forms” (2013). Rancière dis-
covers “immediacy” when he is trying to point out how cinema organises
within its capacities a “distribution of the sensible” and he takes Chaplin
not just as an example, but also as a decisive figure in the time, when film
was becoming art form and defining itself as such. Of course, as a philoso-
pher, who cannot but draw on texts – in this instance on Shklovsky, Meyer-
hold and, maybe more prominently, on Jean Epstein, Rancière did not miss
the question of language in cinema. Therefore, it looks like as if there is an
inherent link between thinking through cinema and his notion of imme-
diacy.
Although venerable traditional aesthetic considerations on beauty
seem mostly obsolete, the concept of beauty cannot be simply discarded
considering that it is inscribed in the foundation of the very idea of all aes-
thetics. The cinematic reality, always one way or the other related to a per-
ception of beauty (or, as it were, its contrast) of images, therefore, cannot
be conceived without aesthetics, which in case of cinema transgresses the
boundaries of “just” art. Elsaesser and Hagener ascertained and anticipat-
ed in their clarification that “/…/ the cinema seems poised to leave behind
its function as a ‘medium’ (for the representation of reality) in order to be-
217
