Chapter Three A

Chapter Three: Filmic Space as a phenomenological method

“A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops – this is cinema”

Gilles Deleuze 1985

Introduction

In Chapter Two, the internal notion of embodiment was discussed in relation to neuroscience’s developments and discoveries, in this chapter, the second aspect of embodied architecture: the manifestation of a sense of space that allows expression and reflection on its nature will be discussed. Taking the viewpoint of Juhani Pallasmaa the Finnish architect and academic:

“The task of architecture is 'to make visible how the world touches us', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cezanne. In accordance with Merleau-Ponty, we live in the `flesh of the world', and architecture structures and articulates this existential flesh, giving it specific meanings. Architecture tames and domesticates the space and time of the flesh of the world for human habitation. Architecture frames human existence in specific ways and defines a basic horizon of understanding. We know and remember who we are and where we belong fundamentally through our cities and buildings.”

Why film?

While acknowledging that conventional, constructed architecture still plays a representational role in revealing the world and ourselves back to ourselves as it did so in the past, I argue that the massive upheaval in how we now understand space through neuroscience’s developments demands a new expression. Plasticity and mirror cells redefine all of our relationships, they describe new complex dynamic networks in flux. They describe plastic subjectivity. They pose deep questions about the symbiosis of states. They describe the existence of consciousness on a cellular level, they hint at what our very consciousness may be. They propose a blending of the chiasmus. They describe a new mobius like topology of space, one in which experience and perception feed back eternally.

To represent this as a static building (conventional, constructed architecture) or image (painting) or merely to describe it as a graph, an arrowed diagram or a complex equation (the sciences) or as words (philosophy) is to lose the essence of these new truths. The palimpsest of time and memory suggested by brain plasticity as well as the altered perspectives suggested by mirror cells, point to movement, dynamism and the effects of time.

The immersive embodied sense of perception which is now so clear is excellently transmitted and explored using the external embodied architecture offered by the medium of film.
The parameters and constraints imposed by conventional, built architecture cannot make the imaginative departure from concrete, physical reality in the manner that a film can, which by its nature is fluid and sensory, fuses sound, movement and image through time creating an immersive version of reality, that can be engaged with.

The complex space that we now understand and thus inhabit is one of dynamic relationships between the self and the world . Our active and subjective position within the world as sensory biological organisms is well described by the filmic medium. It transcends the normal constraints of physical architecture by its multi sensory and time based qualities, through these it gains a ‘body’ of its own and emulates the experience of space we sense from the complex world around us, thereby letting us both reflect upon the nature of this space as well as becoming active participants in the medium ourselves, feeding as we do from the world around us in a loop of perception. We are changed by and change the film by experiencing it.

Vivian Sobchack elaborates upon this reciprocal relationship in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience,

“More than any other medium of human communication, the moving picture makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience. A film is an act of seeing that makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard, an act of physical and reflective movement that makes itself reflexively felt and understood.”

In essence the filmic medium manages to both represent the embodiment of space while at the same time embodying space.

What is film? Defining Filmic Space:

For the purpose of this thesis I will be using the terms defined by Najmeh Khalili in her essay, Walter Benjamin Revisited: The Work of Cinema in the Age of Digital (Re)production. In this essay she defines two types of space which I feel make up contemporary current filmic space, hypercinema and cybercinema.

Hypercinema defines the ‘formal aspects of a cinema which is equipped by
1) virtual reality and digital simulation at the level of mise-en-scene (such as virtual actors, digital spaces and hyper-real motifs),
2) artificial intelligence as an apparatus for capturing or constructing the image, in other words replacing the human eye behind the camera with that of a machine”
She describes how, the medium through which filmic space is now expressed is altering its very makeup, in particular the rules that dictate narrative:

“Since the advent of sound, narrative film has dominated the scope of cinematic experience, to such extent that much of our film theories and cultural studies have been dedicated to using the language of film to convey a meaning or to decipher its text. The new digital and electronic technologies are well on their way to expanding the narrative dimension of hypercinema.”
The term cybercinema is defined to further the “narrative connotation of hypercinema”

“ 1) the poetics of the virtual imagery, or the non-narrative and oneiric possibilities provided by digital technology in creation of images which are not entirely divorced from meaning but are more dedicated to intensity and duration of an experience and to “haecceity” (referencing Deleuze)
2) the cult of digital image production and distribution.”

Using this contemporary definition of film I hope to analyse the developments in neuroscience with regard to embodiment and show that filmic space can decipher, illuminate and extend phenomenological and existential notions of embodiment through its liminality andits use of a set of non verbal and transcendental techniques.

Methods: Deleuze’s theories on the usefulness of cinema

By using Deleuze’s theories in particular that of the Crystal-Image to explore ways to invoke experimentation in film which therefore allow us to speculate more deeply about the self in contemporary space, thus fulfilling Merleau-Ponty’s desire for ‘revealing the world’. Cinema like the body can be seen as a mediator of experience and change and the space between the screen and viewer becomes the place of excitement and discovery.

“In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Deleuze showed that the ‘new cinema’ was an institution that took upon itself the task of creating images of the phenomena that would have otherwise been inaccessible to us. This is why its effects become reminiscent of the actual/virtual state of reality. Also known as liminality, this state allows us to capture the ‘transcendentals’ behind these symbols. By moving progressively from the appearing symbols to the basic structures of the human world Deleuze performs an analysis of a semiotic field (cinema) toward identifying its effects on our conception of the phenomenon of time.”

By using a hybrid approach to deciphering embodied space (through the mergence of philosophy, science and film) creative and new avenues of understanding can be forged.

“For Deleuze, the philosopher ‘works alongside’ the cinema, producing a classification of its images and signs but reordering them for new purposes…Cinema and philosophy are brought together in a continuing process of intercutting. This is philosophy as assemblage, a kind of provoked becoming of thought.”

The ability of cinema to go beyond conventional philosophical or scientific techniques lies in its immediacy and as Deleuze's describes 'preverbal, pre-linguistic content':

‘The cinema seems to us to be a composition of images and of signs, that
is, a preverbal intelligible content (pure semiotics)’

and

“It seems to us that cinema, precisely through its automatic and psycho-mechanical qualities, is the system of pre-linguistic images and signs”

The immediacy and ability to present time is also at the heart of the filmic experience:

get a quote for here//


The Crystal Image

The Crystal-Image is a notion that is comprised by a number of theories. It describes very adequately the dynamic, folded, symbiotic space between self and world and subject and object and the body that is the link for each of these chiasms, that neuroscience has heavily defined and influenced in the last forty years.

To summarise the key difference between Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (an analysis of pre WW2) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (post WW2):

“The former cinema, which finds its archetype in the Hollywood genre film, is dependent on movement and action. Characters in the movement-image are placed in narrative positions where they routinely perceive things, react, and take action in a direct fashion to the events around them. The movement-image is a form of spatialised cinema: time determined and measured by movement.”

In Cinema 2, Deleuze deals with the time-image which is the context to the crystal image: The time-image is one of fracture and non rational narrative:

“In the time-image, which finds its archetype in the European modernist or art film, characters find themselves in situations where they are unable to act and react in a direct, immediate way, leading to what Deleuze calls a breakdown in the sensor-motor system. The image cut off from sensory-motor links becomes "a pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"”

It is characterised by the difference in the techniques it uses in comparison to that of the movement-image:

“In the time-image, rational or measurable temporal links between shots, the staple of the movement-image, gives way to "incommensurable," non-rational links. Because of these non-rational links between shots, vacant and disconnected spaces begin to appear ("any-space-whatevers"). As a consequence, the journey becomes a privileged narrative form, with characters in a more passive role, and themes centered on inner mental imagery, flights of fancy, and emotional and psychic breakdown. The result of this pure optical and sound image is, according to Deleuze, a direct image of time (a time-image or crystal-image).”

The topology of the time-image is useful in describing the chiasmic nature of existence described by neurophenomenology:

“The time image which Deleuze releases from modern cinema gives him a new line of approach to a number of important problems of modern thought: the undecidability of truth and falsity, the relation of inside and out, the relation between the brain and the body.”

It's necessary to understand the Mneosign or Recollection image in order to understand the crystal image. It is defined as:

“a virtual image which enters into a relationship with the actual image and changes it.”

whereas the Crystal or Hyalosign image is the next step in this process defined as:

" the uniting of an actual image and a virtual image t the point where they can no longer be distinguished."

This can be read as a very pertinent method of understanding the notion of the brain’s plasticity. Although we experience reality directly through our bodies, the mediation of our mind in forming the experience is based on previous readings of other situations onto which the new experience is formed and is formed by. Thus the virtual image of a memory (a previous experience) is always part of the equation in perception of space and reality.

Its use as a method to decipher or create film, that in turn deciphers and reflects upon space is vital.

Deleuze describes the crystal-image chiasmic properties of memory:

“…the indivisible unity of an actual image and ‘its’ virtual image…the image has to be present and past, still present and past, still present and already past, at once and at the same time. If it was not already past at the same time as the present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and in its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror. ...Every moment of our life presents the two aspects, it is actual and virtual, perception on the one side and recollection on the other…Whoever becomes conscious of the continual duplicating of his present into perception and recollection…will compare himself to an actor playing his part automatically, listening to himself and beholding himself playing.”

The crystal image defines the process of image making in cinema, from actual image memory to the cinematographic image / virtual image to a mirror image. In this instance Deleuze is discussing it in relation to Tarkovsky’s films

“Mirror is a turning crystal, with two sides if we relate it to the invisible adult character…with four sides if we relate it to two visible couples… And the crystal turns over on itself, like a homing device that searches an opaque environment”

Through the medium of film we can look at ourselves as we do in a mirror, but whereas in a mirror one only sees a reflection (a replication of yourself), within film one sees a reflection and can reflect upon that reflection. The film has the ability through visual and sonic techniques to show the dynamic indiscernability of the actual and virtual. (add ref)


The crystal film is described by Alexander Kozin in his essay The appearing memory: Gilles Deleuze and Andrey Tarkovsky on `crystal-image'

"The ‘crystal-film’ is therefore the kind of film that exposes the relations between what is being reflected and the act of reflecting, or, to put it in phenomenological terms, the ‘given’ and ‘givenness’."



Relevance of the Crystal image to Hypercinema and Cybercinema:Techniques

The Time-Image and Crystal-Image as described by Deleuze offer both an explanation of techniques of cinema used as well as potential creative points of departure for new experimental film makers. Their presence acting as a powerful philosophical tools.

Virtual Reality and Digital Simulation:

The use of virtual actors, virtual landscapes and virtual special effects through Computer Generated Images brings the medium closer to the realm of the

“pure optical and aural image," and one that "comes into relation with a virtual image, a mental or mirror image"

The removal in some cases of an actual human being as a central character or a naturally recognisable landscape creates a stylisation of the form which allow for greater allegorical interpretation and reflection.

“Cinema does not just present images, it surrounds them with a world”

The ability of CGI to slow down / speed up time, remove gravity and alter the colour scape and form of the events taking place breaks down the natural sensor-motor system allowing for transformed reflection of reality and of modern space as it truly is. The contraints of naturally occurring laws of physics that dominate live footage are easily overcome, allowing the film to enter a new level of communication with the viewer, one which replicates the imaginary spaces of the mind and the invisible complex spaces of contemporary life. One which immerses the viewer with a new haptic sense; the fusion of carefully designed and constructed sound, image and motion.

Although Deleuze wrote Cinema 2 before the invention of CGI as we know it today, the ability of film to leave the inhibitions of the world and to express the world of the mind and the modern age was prescient:

“Antonioni does not criticise the modern world, in whose possibilities he profoundly ‘believes’: he criticises the coexistence in the world of a modern brain and a tired, worn-out, neurotic body. So that his work, in a fundamental sense passes through a dualism which corresponds to the two aspects of the time-image: a cinema of the body which pulls all the weight of the world and modern neurosis; but also the cinema of the brain, which reveals the creativity of the world; its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multiplied by artificial brains.”

Artificial Intelligence:

The Replacement of the human eye behind the camera with a machine has massive implications for the representation of the altered relationships between self and world through the body. As was earlier discussed in Chapter One, the use of perspective throughout the ages has always acted as a representation of the eras sense of itself and its place collectively within the world. From the God's eye view: a disembodied, single, omniscient, perfect perspective applicable it to all events, that was used in pre-Renaissance art, to the strict scientific rigour of a one point perspective, placing the subject at the centre of the world and yet immobile and static with one great unblinking eye, to the fractured multiple perspectives of cubism in art and deconstructivsm in architecture in the 20th century (and today).

But the artifical eye both within CGI and network controlled systems of cameras on a set, once again, like the God’s eye view removes the eyes of the individual and gains its own omnipresence. However, the distinction being that where God’s eye view proposed a divine, single point of all knowing perspective, the artificial eye allows an infinite mergence of perspectives. The subject to world relationship mirroring the complexities of modern thought in this medium, being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. The added dimension of time allowing for motion perspective, one which extends the possibilities of multi point perspective techniques of cubism and modern art.


The artificial eye combined with the other techniques of CGI such as the compositing of discrete elements into a single shot allows for the montage of experience, the linking of disparate time lines and narratives and the cut and splice of assemblage first described by Eisenstein and now more fully capable of fulfilling itself through the new techniques.

“For what is interesting in philosophy is that it proposes a cutting [decoupage] of things, a new cutting: it groups under a single concept things that one would have thought were very different, and it separates from it others which one would have thought very close. Now, the cinema by itself is also a cutting of visual and sound images. There are modes of cutting which can converge.”

Deleuze describes the components required for the creation of transcendental film which allows the greatest reflection of the sense of self both individually and collectively, the one which emphasises the intersubjectivity suggested by neurophenomenology earlier discussed.

“In short the, the three cerebral components are the point-cut, relinkage and the black and white screen. If the cut no longer forms part of either of the two series of images which it determines, there are only relinkages on either side. And if it grows larger and absorbs all the images, then it becomes the screen, as contact independent of distance, co-presence or application or black and white, of negative and positive, of place and obverse, of full and empty, of past and future, of brain and cosmos, of the inside and the outside. It is these three aspects, topological, of probabilistic and irrational which constitute the new image of thought. Each is easily inferred from the others, and forms with the others a cirulation: the noosphere.”