the cinematic angle

Whenever I stay away from Levi’s blog for 12 or 18 hours, I always miss something of interest. Yesterday’s example is a post from CineMadison:

“As I’ve mentioned here before, I think the recent work of Bryant and Graham Harman contains the seeds for a conceptual framework capable of engaging with the non-human aspects of cinema, something that I think film theory will have to address sooner rather than later.”

CineMadison continues:

“All of the elements of a shot’s mise en scène, all of the non-relational objects within the film frame, are figures of a sort. The figure is the likeness of a material object, whether that likeness is by-design or purely accidental. A shot is a cluster of cinematic figures, an entanglement. Actors and props are by no means the only kinds of cinematic figures—the space that they occupy and navigate is itself a figure. The cinematic figure isn’t just an image of the human body, a translation of the body’s form from spatio-temporal materiality to the ambiguous cinematic mode of being: the cinematic figure is, in Bryant’s terms, a local manifestation of an object situated among other local manifestations of other objects within the film frame.”

I’ll be eager to hear more about this, for reasons linked with a confession that I will now make, and which I hope doesn’t bother any of my readers. Namely, I have never been a great fan of cinema as an aesthetic medium. And the reason I’ve never been a great fan is that it has always seemed to me like an anti-object-oriented medium, in contrast with videogames (which I love as a medium, even though I rarely play them). Ian Bogost will love to hear this, I know.

Here’s why I’ve always thought so (and I’m perfectly willing to be proven wrong). It seems to me that what exists in cinema is not objects at all, but rather viewpoints. Maybe you think you see a horse or a tree or a mailbox in a film, but what you’re really seeing is the horse seen at a specific angle and distance in a specific shot, and it remains the same specific shot every time you watch the film.

Contrast that with a videogame (yes, I realize the medium is still not taken seriously in high art terms the way cinema is, but Bogost may be right that the 21st century will change that). In a videogame, the horse would obviously have the power to disengage from its current situation, gallop around, approach certain entities and distance itself from others, and so forth. This gives the videogame horse an autonomy that it seems to lack in cinema.

Nor do I think this is just a result of the fact that the player would control the horse in the videogame. The same holds true even of videogame characters that the player does not control, such as the dragons or the bat in the Atari Adventure cartridge.

In fact, and maybe this just shows some personal quirks on my part, I used to prefer not to control videogames during my adolescence. My youngest brother, who shares many quirky tastes with me, was much the same. What I liked to do was to set the initial conditions of a game, and then, when possible, set it for a computer player and just sit back and watch what happened.

The clearest example was the Apple II game Competition Karate. It sounds like a typical mid-1980’s male adolescent “let’s beat each other up” sort of thing, and I suppose that’s how most people used it. But for some reason I was more interested in simply generating the fighters and letting the computer control both, while I watched as a spectator sport. And then I would have certain rules such as: any karate character who gets knocked out or injured is punished with deletion from the disk, while any who wins a bout is rewarded with a trip to the studio (in the game, the studio is where a character built up his skill levels with a workout). My brother and I also came up with really bizarre, surrealistic names for these characters, so our playing of this game in our teens really had a sort of installation art feel to it. And of course no one could understand why we found this so interesting. Anyone who came over to the house for a visit immediately wanted to grab the joystick and do punching and kicking; it was a karate game, after all, and what’s the point of passively observing a karate game? But we managed to turn it into a beatnik sort of installation piece, and it became hypnotic enough that it was our major shared hobby for a couple of years (even more bizarrely, he’s 5 years younger than I am, so our shared enjoyment occurred despite vastly different life stages).

The point of this latter digression, I guess, is that I was never very convinced by the idea that “interactivity” is what is most important about videogames. For me, it was the object-orientation of the medium, and I seemed to highlight this with my instinctive dislike for having any control over the on-screen characters at all. It was like object-oriented cinema for me, I suppose.

Nonetheless, I remain open to a different understanding of bona fide cinema. I’m just confiding here about my instinctive prejudice against the medium (which far pre-existed my interest in philosophy at all, let alone the object-oriented kind).