2024 Issue No. 37 – Idealism and Contemporary Film Theory

This special issue of Transformations explores the relevance and utility of philosophical idealism as it pertains to film theory, film analysis and film in general. Less a defence of idealist philosophy than a sympathetic reconsideration of its tenacious influence upon theoretical and hermeneutical approaches to film, the special issue houses a range of contributions whose diverse philosophical interests testify to the difficulty of reducing idealism to any narrowly defined philosophical proposition, school of thought or movement. First conceived as a panel on “The Idealism of Contemporary Film Theory,” delivered at the 2022 Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand conference, this issue is motivated by a concern to rectify the lack of careful attention that has been paid to the question of idealism in film scholarship since the discipline was subject to a so-called “philosophical turn.” Persuaded that there is a need to reconsider the legacy of philosophical idealism in Film Studies, we propose this issue in the hope that, by publishing scholarly work that closely engages with the problem of idealism as it pertains to films and film theory, these articles will open up new avenues for film theoretical and film philosophical enquiry.

Although the concept of idealism has been employed with some degree of regularity as the “bad object” of Film Studies – misconstrued as a one-sided form of subjectivism incommensurate with “objectivist” approaches such as Marxist materialism or cognitivist film theory, and, more recently, as a brand of anti-naturalism at odds with the naturalism of the new materialisms of the post-humanist turn – idealism as a philosophical stance to the world poses a challenge to its most vocal detractors insofar as, without some notion of the ontology of ideas, such theoretical and philosophical discourses could not be articulated. Indeed, ideation subtends even the most strident anti-idealisms as these positions have no choice but to reckon with thought as a dynamic process irreducible to its material origins or outcomes. In rethinking the way philosophical idealism has shaped the way we perceive, conceptualise and experience films, the articles in this issue – each in their own way – testify to the imperative of arriving at a more nuanced appreciation of the way the idealist tradition has shaped the annals of film theory and continues to enrich our comprehension of films.

The contributions that populate this issue cover significant philosophical territory, from Leibniz’s monadology (Esmail), to Fichte’s transcendental realism (Mules), Deleuze’s “transcendental empiricism” (Kent) and Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology (Cribb). A recurrent philosophical motif  found among this selection of articles is the question of the “subject” – key to the Germanic idealist tradition – which might be viewed as a subject of reason (Dasgupta), of the unconscious  (Shervington) or of cinema itself (Jampol-Petzinger). There are also contributions built around close analyses of specific films that might be fruitfully (re)read in relation to questions of ideality including Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (Lash), Tom Ford’s A Single Man (Hillman), Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (Escobar) and Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s “never-to-be-repeated” The Mark of the Brief Night (Băcăran). Collectively, they demonstrate that there are not only numerous avenues through which we can reassess the question of idealism in Film Studies today, but equally that ours is a field overflowing with numerous (often incompatible) ideas about what, where and for whom cinema is. 

This paper turns towards a film that you could not have seen and will never see: The Mark of the Brief Night, part of the web-based and installation film project Seances (2016) by Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, and the National Film Board of Canada. Seances generates never-to-be-repeated short films by algorithmically combining scenes from a database of reimagined lost silent-era movies recreated by Maddin.

The uniqueness of The Mark of the Brief Night, emphasised by its imminent loss, highlights the indelible role of the spectatorial process in the actualisation of film as lived phenomenon, at the same time raising questions regarding the virtual (ideal) being of film before and beyond its concrete actualisation. I am arguing that any cultural trace, just like The Mark of the Brief Night, makes sense (where sense is understood both as a vector between the ideal plane and actuality and as a surface effect that denies the identity of the actual with itself) only inasmuch as it becomes part of embodied processes of individuation. Turning towards the role of the other in the dynamic of individuation, the paper proposes that spectatorship constitutes a stringent and much-neglected ethical responsibility in contemporary cultures.

In this paper, I propose that documentary can effectively navigate the slippage in idealism between solipsism and intersubjectivity. Following the pluralistic idealisms of Leibniz and Berkeley, as well as the dual-aspect monisms of Hegel and Schopenhauer, I develop a documentary monadology that establishes the ontological basis for documentary as a form of phenomenological description espoused by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. In this context, I employ Carolyn Forché’s poetry of witness to examine two documentaries – Burnat and Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras (2011) and Tatian Huezo’s Tempestad (2016). In analysing these works using documentary monadology and phenomenology, I arrive at contemporary feminisms of Haraway and Neimanis. These thinkers extend the previous discourses, and alongside a reframing of Grierson’s notion of the creative treatment of actuality, reveal documentary to be a form of situated knowledge in the idealist tradition and a site for posthumanist Husserlian intersubjectivity.

For the film theorists of the 1970s, phenomenology was pejoratively classified as a form of “idealism” which failed to recognise that “natural perception” is codified and structurally determined by ideological forces. This article proposes that, for this very reason, in returning phenomenology to film theoretical discourse, Vivian Sobchack presented Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology as commensurate with materialism. Exploring both Sobchack and Merleau-Ponty’s respective conceptualizations of cinematic meaning or sense, I point to a subtle discrepancy between Sobchack’s theory of embodied film spectatorship and Merleau-Ponty’s writings on film and the arts, the latter of which do not identity the body as the source of artistic meaning. Through a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “sensible ideas” and a sequence from Kira Muratova’s Long Farewells (1971), I argue that there is an ideal component to Merleau-Ponty’s writings on cinema and the arts that locates the genesis of meaning, not in the body, but in an incorporeal elsewhere. This reconceptualization of the relation between sense and the sensible allows for a renewed appreciation of the place of idealism in film theory.

 “Idealism,” unlike realism and materialism has not featured much in philosophical engagements with film. Representation, redemption, construction – these terms, among others, marked philosophical debates on the image’s relation to reality (Bazin, Hansen). A Deleuzian perspective, on the other hand, focused on the reality of the image, while the focus on “affect”, the “body” and “feelings” reframed the image in “materialist” terms (Deleuze, Sobchack, Marks, Massumi, Ngai). The philosophical complexity of idealism’s conceptualization of the subject, I argue, got lost in this bifurcation. Both the referential focus of the realism debates and the reduction of the spectator to the body in the “materialist” turn, to varying degrees, sidelined the reasoning subject’s dialectical relation to both its own reality and the place of the moving image in it. A dialectical understanding of the reasoning subject’s shifting relation to a moving object in historical reality, I argue, enriches a philosophy of the moving image by productively developing the contradictions implicit in the realism debates while avoiding the reductive materialism avowed by ahistorical theorizations of affect, the body and the senses. Analyzing Bianca Stigter’s Three Minutes: A Lengthening (2021), the essay produces an encounter between the dislocated subject reasoning with history through the moving image. Extending the post-Hegelian critique of Kant’s idealism developed by Theodor Adorno, Jacques Rancière, Judith Butler, Gillian Rose, Todd McGowan and others, my argument elaborates the tension between the embodied subject’s power of reasoning and the moving object’s negativity as the register through which reality is both thought and experienced. The point is not to avoid the image-reality relationship but to understand reality as intrinsically part of and transformed by an unstable subject’s encounter with the forms of the moving image.

This article examines some epistemological aspects of the notion of the contemporary in order to trace an image that is turned towards its past while also looking into the future. This is the Con•temporary in cinema; an image invested with temporality that brings together the old and the new by manifesting an ideal continuity along its path. Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma will be used as two examples to illustrate a philosophical notion of the contemporary that treats the past and the present as parts of a crystalline structure. Here, by employing an archaeological montage-technique that portrays an overall vision of the history of cinema (in Godard), or the history of art (in Warburg), both artist-historians develop a method of cinematic arrangement that remixes and recollects what has been lost in order to renovate it into something new. Their work – which is a product of their time, and yet it transcends their time – will be said to be contemporary inasmuch as the signatures of the archaic and the old are inscribed in the most recent and modern.

There are two philosophically inclined ways to understand films. The first comes from the belief that the world we inhabit is constructed from the thoughts we have about it. With this in mind, films are understood as a dialogue between what they present and the world as it is shaped by our own imagination. While the second position sees film as a purely realist phenomenon, focused not on our subjective power to imagine but on film’s formal presentation of what is. Of course, how we tend to approach films is usually from somewhere in between these two positions. In failing to fully convince us, being neither entirely idealistic nor realistic, films then serve to activate an unsettling thoughtfulness around our own subjectivity. Through a reading of the film A Single Man (2009), this paper examines how subjectivity is best understood dialectically, as an idealist project undergoing a never-ending transformation toward realism. It outlines what I tentatively call a subject of the cinematic: a subjectivity shaped by the questions we have about how we understand films.

In this article I elaborate upon a virtually-unobserved point of similarly between the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Walter Benjamin – namely, their common cause on the revolutionary political significance of cinema as capable of scrambling conventional modes of experience. I argue that both philosophers view cinema as capable of soliciting a uniquely embodied and collective form of engagement, thus making possible a revolutionary disruption of conventional behaviour. This point of similarity, I argue, ought to figure more centrally to a comparison of the two philosophers’ views than their more superficial differences of opinion about which forms of cinema are capable of soliciting such subjective deterritorialisations. I subsequently identify a more substantial point of disagreement between the two thinkers in their different views regarding the temporality of these subjective modes: for Deleuze, cinematic subjectivity will point towards an always-displaced future; whereas for Benjamin, cinema makes possible a revolutionary rectification of the past.

Theories surrounding the spiritual aspects of cinema often utilise a concept of the transcendental, exploring film’s ability to transcend its worldly material. However, this equation of the transcendental and the transcendent evades an important moment in the history of philosophical idealism that sought to distinguish such terms. Immanuel Kant interjected into the tradition of dogmatic idealism with his own “transcendental idealism”: a move away from a metaphysics of things-in-themselves towards the transcendental schema that makes thinking possible in the first place. It is then Gilles Deleuze that takes the transcendental to bare on a taxonomy of cinema, utilising a reorientation of Kant’s critical project in the form of transcendental empiricism, an immanent and material positing of the schema of real experience. This article will expound further upon what the immanent transcendental can mean for an understanding of film by comparing the cinematic mechanism with the machinery of the transcendental, first by modelling the two against each other, seeing Kant’s transcendental framework as proto-cinematic, and then by thinking materially across the two domains through their historicity and technicity.

The tendency of film-philosophy to dissolve the boundary between subject and object, materiality and ideality of the sensible and the intelligible, repeats the moment in German Idealism when these boundaries were collapsed in thinking of the Absolute as the real of thinking itself – an incomprehension posited within it – invoking “transcendental materialism, as, in large part, an account of the emergence of self-determining, auto-reflexive transcendental subjectivity out of asubjective substance” (Johnston 18). The real of this incomprehension was initially proposed by J. G. Fichte in his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre as an alien element lodged within the closed loop of self-identity (I = I), which, in his 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, becomes the generative principle of oneness mediated by pure light, the incomprehension of which is resolved in principle while remaining in fact as unresolved openness of an I-We realizing itself in communal life. By acknowledging the source of generative difference in the self-constitution of the I-We as Grundreflex – an originary reflex action – we open the apperceiving eye in its potential for creative freedom in engagement with films, which, when taking into account the memorizing of organic machines through which light must pass, becomes mechanical creativity. In practical terms, the genetic principle of pure light must be accounted for from within the cinematic system mediated by technical memory materializing the ideations of films in non-cinematic life as the moral imperative of a “should” (Soll). Employing Bernard Stiegler’s ciné-mnemotechnical thinking of organic machines, I apply Fichtean insights to one film: Antonioni’s L’Eclisse grasped in real thinking as a matrix of superpositional relations spreading through the cinematic system in which the film’s memory structure is enmeshed, generating entwinements of local and non-local interactions unfolding in the gap between ideation and materialization through quantum doubling. My aim in invoking the German Idealist moment is to demonstrate that philosophical problems underlying many of the issues facing scholarship in current film-philosophy find their roots within its complex structure. Through careful explication, Idealist concepts and analytical strategies can be applied in contemporary contexts to gain a stronger grasp of the idealist imperative underlying any attempt to undertake a materialist philosophy of film.

This article proposes that the contemporary philosophical disagreement between dialectics and Object Oriented Ontology should be understood as a repetition of a debate in Lacanian film theory which began in the 1980s. What is at stake in both exchanges is the critical relationship towards subjectivity, specifically, its reduction to an ideological illusion or the radical reappraisal of the concept. Following an initial survey of the key moments and theorists in both contentions, the affinity between the philosophical work of Quentin Meillassoux and the film theory of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry is considered. While distinct in their approach, these three thinkers are united by an emphasis on subjective de-exceptionalization, each pinpointing a moment of hubris in which the subject assumes to find themselves reflected in the world, or cinematic image. For Meillassoux, Metz and Baudry, this mirroring ultimately has pernicious effects, as the material pre-conditions of subjectivity are left unaccounted for, and illusion is accepted as real. In this respect, a critique of idealism is shared between these thinkers. In their respective critiques, the work of Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan insists upon the cinematic screen and ontology as conflictual sites, characterizing the cinema spectator (and by proxy, the philosophical subject) as a rupture within ideology, rather than running parallel to it. From this dialectical standpoint, the severe duality between idealism and materialism is sublated through the recognition that both positions intrinsically rely upon each other. In placing these debates side by side, the interconnected histories and theoretical concerns of cinema and philosophy are elucidated, with reference to the field of cinematic and philosophical idealism.