THE CINEMA IS FORM OF THE MIND

THE CINEMA IS A FORM OF THE MIND

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte 

Review Les Cahiers Jaunes n ° 4 
(Cinema 33)

The cinema does not exist: it must be born or die. Now he is only a shadow in the limbo of the possible, tinsel in the shambles to the accessories of the cotillion of the human spirit. To attain existence, it must find its place, its moment, its necessity in becoming. It does not have its own role yet and cannot obtain it in the present form of our society: it came too early in a world too old.

I am not a "technician" of cinema but a "technician" of the essential I mean the human spirit essentially. From this point of view, the cinema constitutes an example of the strange imperfection of the powers of man. Applied science makes an immense discovery and then reveals itself incapable of discovering the applications of its discovery - its specific object. By ignorance she makes it serve for derisory purposes. Like a child who invented dynamite and then eats it.

Having not been able to find in the cinema his reason for being the man until now cannot measure all the importance of his invention.

To look for the obstacles which oppose the existence of the cinema is exactly the trial of contemporary society, of the modern spirit, of Western civilization.

The cinema is exemplary in front of the vanity of the intellectuals who think themselves still independent. The most recent of the forms of expression are more clearly than the others subject to the oppression of our social state.

The absolute dictatorship of capital: of expensive production but an immediate source of earnings, cinema is only an industry (competition and trusts) and as such subject to the sole criterion of the "benefits" it can provide.

It owes nationalism quota, protectionism. To the hypocrisy of liberalism censorship (approved by most filmmakers). To the imbecility of individualism, the cabotinage of the actors, the megalomania of the directors and the total lack of unity in the research. To the democratic spirit submission to the myth of the public, excuse of all the reactionary routines. Finally, to imperialism, it has the pretty roles of stunting the masses, patriotic skirmishers and provocative agents for the next war.

Slave of the economic regime the cinema like all the other modes of expression of the spirit are in the soft alternative: the freedom or death.

"Is cinema an art? It is too obvious that in this frequent and sinister question it would be necessary to answer without reservations by the affirmative so miraculously the cinema was suddenly released from all the material constraints which weigh on him. Once again doomed to death, it would be delivered without defenses to the individual fantasies of men who have never understood that even artistic expression is justified only to the extent that it meets a specific need of the moment that she alone can satisfy. Delivered to the capitalist conception of art: a so-called disinterested activity (to understand useless) of the order of the game, and destined to serve as a distraction (after dinner) to elevate the mind (and consequently, facilitate the digestion) by the sense of beauty (?) And cinema would share the sad fate of poetry, painting, and music.

More generally, the entire intellectual attitude implied by our culture, our civilization, our beliefs, and our traditions is absolutely opposed to the existence of cinema (example: the ravages of traditional psychology in most films). Decidedly the cinema has nothing to do in this galley.

From his invention to the present time, all cinematographic production can be regarded as null and void. The sole role of all this activity has been to perfect and develop an instrument for future use. Deprived of meaning and reason for being in the current state of our society, fatally the cinema will receive the life of the very future of the social state which will succeed it.

Any economic and social upheaval, any future revolution can only realize sooner or later the synthesis of the valid tendencies which our vanished era sees developing with regret. From this, the parallel revolution of human values ​​in all fields must be born a new culture, another civilization based on a different system of knowledge.

Having no room to demonstrate, I can only affirm here that to Marxist determinism of social evolution towards a communist state without class, without family, and without religion corresponds an evolution of the thought: as The dialectical spirit will overcome the mechanistic reason at the present, the scientific-religious phase will succeed a phase of monistic thought (not idealistic and non-materialistic). Anti-individualism and dialectical determinism will create a morality without responsibility, a new notion of man. The becoming of the mind must realize the synthesis of discursive reason and the spirit of primitive participation. It would be advisable first of all to carry out a dialectical reduction of the religious the fact to the magical sociology and the marvelous (said "supernatural") to the very nature of the human spirit.

But in this last research which is the one that occupies us the cinema is brought to play an immense role thanks to its possibilities.

Leaving aside the discoveries, possible in the near future, of colorful cinema and cinema-in-space (cinema-in-relief is a psychological error) that do not exist yet, we currently have at our disposal silent cinema on the one hand and sound cinema on the other: that is, mobile relationships of forms, surfaces of shadow and light, and sounds. In addition, if the camera eye does not see lines in nature we still have mobile line and sound reports through cartoons.

The cinegraphic vision is obtained by means of a succession of images which recreates the movement in the image of the life. For in the most general sense, life is a rhythm, a succession, an alternation, a continual palpitation of being and non-being, of presence and absence, pure breathing, which succeeds to the existence of inspiration. the emptiness of expiration.

That the vision of the cinema is a rhythm, that is to say a movement linked to the absence, this constitutes the first condition which allows us to consider the possible future of the dialectical cinema, the cinema form of the spirit.

The evolution of the forms of the mind, the natural movement to the mind, according to Hegel, is endowed with an indefinite perfectibility and can ultimately claim to an absolute solution because "the dialectic of nature is the same as that of our mind. The tree grows by syllogisms: the germination of the world is a plant that grows. The idea grows only by finding itself in its negation as the germ that Hegel defines as follows: by the idea of ​​mediating externality, the fabric of the eternal cosmic becoming, the idea denies itself to prove itself in the form of nature.

This is the only, but immense, raison d'être of cinema: mediating between the mind and nature, it can express in movement and insensitive forms the fate of the forms of the mind. If, one day, man sets this goal for him, cinema can become a means of expression whose "invention" would be almost as important as that of language and writing, exactly plastic language.

Thus cinema, a means of research and experience, would become a mode of knowledge, a form of the mind.

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It is not only speculations about the nature of cinema that can give rise to these conclusions but also the simple observation of films that are nowadays presented to the public.

The remark is obvious: why is the cinema delivered to the sole expression of the most insignificant and stupid activities of the human mind, such as the novel or the operetta? Why not, on the contrary, set for it the highest expressions of the mind, such as poetry and metaphysics in the "particular sense" in which I use these two terms?

The answer is obvious: any intelligent attempt is made impossible by the economic constraints of our society.

But the only theoretical possibility of such use of the cinema is frequently presented with this objection: the cow's eye of the camera sees and records the images in a course and mechanical way, without choosing between them and removing from them the qualities of which the perception of the spirit cloths them.

It should be noted first of all that this reproach is not addressed strictly to the cinema but to photography. Also does not apply to cartoons. Photography is arbitrarily contrasted with the "art of painting" with its harmonies and pitiful spirit of decoration. In fact, this objection is only directed against the use of the cinema for artistic and naturalistic purposes which are of no interest.

The truth is that the filmmaker must choose his images not in nature but in the studio among the most varied film essays because it is obvious that the result of a shooting, whatever it is, remains unpredictable.

In the cinema, photography of an object as such should only play a very limited role. In this role the vision of the camera to which the human eye has become accustomed for a long time would serve only to symbolize the social, impersonal, objective aspect of things to oppose the subjective vision of the filmmaker. According to an alternating rhythm the object would appear as it is recorded by the objective and then as perceived by the human consciousness through the haze of the states that metamorphose it, the veil of tears or the synthetic light of the inspiration of terror or charm.

Traditional psychology has been able to draw some effects from the cinema: the faculty of attention illustrated by the angle of view and the close-ups, - the associations of ideas by the fade, - the memory by the superimpositions.

But only the psychology of the states will serve all the possibilities of the cinema intended for the visual representation of the moving forms of the mind.

The eye of the camera can become the eye of the mind. For the movement of the cinema can reproduce that of the spirit in relation to the movement of life thanks to its variations of speed unknown until then to the senses and which allow consciousness to discover new rhythms.

Thanks to the accelerated: the germination of a plant; the growth of the beard.

Thanks to the slow motion: the movements of the dream; the flying man; the flight of angels; the gestures of the ghosts.

Thanks to the relativity of magnitudes on the screen: a die, a plug advantageously replace the pyramids; a piece of cotton wool becomes a cloud in the sky.

Thanks to deformations and games in space; the Hymalaya in the kitten of a ring; a train revolves around a man's head, the rides of the Far West and the swell of the season the pillow of a sleeper; a drama that is played in the dark of the nail.

Thanks to the relativity of time and space on the screen that allows the juxtaposition of all images.

Also, the eye of the camera can become the eye of the nightmare, the sorcerer's gaze, the key to metamorphoses and seize the lyrical fact in its instantaneous becoming the poetic metaphor in its essence: by means of a meticulous but simple technique ( it can reproduce the mysterious paranoiac transmutation that the mind undergoes in the objects of which it suddenly discovers the hallucinating secret horror: all the lucid visions of delirium; the curtain that becomes a ghost; the crocodile, which takes shape in the shape of a tree, becomes real, moving, then resorbs itself in the lines of the wood, it remains the tree; the eye of the cloud, the faces of the sky in the branches, the torn and screaming fauna of the wind.

Finally, when photography is powerless to fix certain images of the mind, in a very vast field, comes the role of cartoon (alone or mixed with cinematographic images). Perhaps even more than a humorous value, this mode of expression has a poetic value. He brings with him all the possibilities of moving and sounding lines.

The sound possibilities of the cinema will appear when one decides to look for the specific role of the sound subordinated to the unfolding of the images: a big luminous cry, the modulations of the pools of the water.

We cannot judge talking cinema until a cinema-diction is found.

Musical adaptations can only lead to horribly artistic results. But freed from music and language, cinema could combine rhythms of movement and sound (especially those of primitive percussion instruments) capable of provoking physiologically collective states of exaltation, trances, and so on.

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The true role of the filmmaker should be by means of these various techniques, to transpose on the screen all the life of the spirit. From this point of view, the forms of the mind are of two kinds: on the one hand, those that can be made directly sensible under a visual and sound appearance, on the other hand those that cannot.

In the first category belong par excellences the phosphine’s and dreams. In this case, the filmmaker should confront the images he draws deep within himself and the various images he projects on the screen until the experience gives him the intuition of an approximate coincidence closer.

In an essay on "experimental metaphysics," we have dealt with certain limiting concepts, certain ecstatic intuitions which are imposed in very particular states of consciousness and are therefore always indissolubly linked to the frenetic rhythm of the blood rumor. And to the synchronic dance of geometrical and colored phosphine’s. It would be of the greatest interest to know whether such states can be experimentally provoked by the external projection, on a screen, in a dark room, of this rhythm of visual images and sounds. A single spectacle, at the bottom of the same nature as the magic ceremonies of the primitives, would allow obtaining experimentally variations of states of consciousness.

The projection of images of dreams or delusions on the screen - in addition to the services it could render to Freudian psychoanalysis - would play a great role in the knowledge of the primordial myths of man. Thanks to such objectified images subjected to the criterion of the collective disorder they would provoke, it would be possible to go back to the deepest sources of the mind. It would be a means of research for the demonstration of the universality of the world of dreams, legends, and mythologies. It would be a probe thrown into the subterranean depths of man to reach the unknown chasm of genesis, to know the deep place where monsters and wonders were born, matrix of African or Polynesian masks, Chinese dragons, demonic apparitions that haunted the Middle Ages, werewolves and vampires. In this way, it would be possible to shed light on the caves of dazzling magic and the temples of sordid religions.

Some processes, some moving forms of the mind cannot be reduced directly to visual and sound images. In this case, however, the filmmaker could objectify them on the screen thanks to their Swedenborgian correspondences, or, according to the phenomenological language, thanks to other images belonging to the same affective category. We must then hear "affective category" in the sense of the principle of unity for the mind in different representations that affect it in the same way; - non-conceptual generality but felt; - coloring, a tone common to certain representations that the subject immediately grasps as belonging to all those of the same category. Such symbolism is characteristic of primitive thought, but also of all poetic thought: everything is related to everything according to a network of mysterious forces, of which man, without knowing it most of the time, a center of emission and reception. The knowledge of totemism (links of man to clan, animal, plant, mineral) depends on such experiences.

Are these too brief indications to predict what could become of the cinema applied to the knowledge of man's depths of the dialectical cinema, the cinema form of the spirit?