... one of the first pages; the name "film-north"...
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... one of the first pages; the name "film-north"...
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2007 read/write -- this is very old page ...
  Film Directing 101
vtheatre.net
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theatre theory and 
blog: anatoly-film
North became an idea.
World became a map....
NORTH IS AN IDEA
Hyperboreans -- according to the Greeks, live beyond the north wind in a region of perpetual sunshine....What is the "north wind"?Hyperion, titan-father of Hellos. Sun-God....
"Non-western" in the past, Anti-western in pomo. Social theories (most noticeably, marxism) and new technologies are "western" only in their origins, not in sensitivities. West and East became one place -- "South of North."
Visible and invisible light. Night is full of dark light. New physics answered it, when they equated matter and energy, everything is nothing but different forms of magnetic waves -- different types of "light" -- there is no darkness in this world?
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This page is not a continuation of Concepts and conceptualization, but in order to understand film-makers I selected, you need to understand that they all came from the same place -- the land of personal self-expression. Genre rules movies, style -- films.
If you didn't read Semiotics Page, please, go to Theory |
Kierkegaard is a "man alone." Without this kind of man film would be impossible. Man became a place of God. Now he can speak in light language, like angels. The sunset of modernity, see POMO page. Film is a postmodern phenomena.
[ The imperialism of light (film) -- see LIGHT in View Points. ]
He wrote at the time of Marx. Against Hegel, he didn't know about Marx, he felt that something terrible is coming. He turned his eyes in....
Kierkegaard and the INNER SENSITIVITY of cinema. Movies is the only method to spread the new gospel for those who don't know how read books in existentialist language.
Film, the semiotics of invisibility. Or even better -- of non-existence. Existential formula is a answer of God-creator to the Being of Nothing.
Socrates, irony and the birth of subjectivity. We have only a potentiality of Self. We have life to make it actual.
Film: Meditation is replaced by repetition. (From Kierkegaard to Deleuze). Stroboscopic effect + Gaze (vs. The Look)
[ see POMO reading - pomo.vtheatre.net ]
RHIZOME
The horizontal world of modernity (linear). According to Kierkegaard,
it became increasingly difficult to "become who you are" for two
reasons: (i) social identities were unusually fluid; and (ii)
there was a proliferation of normalizing institutions which
produced pseudo-individuals.
The answer was given 150 years ago: audience suffers from too much knowledge rather than too little.
Kierkegaard's "inverted Christian dialectic" and indirect communication with the reader. (See I-I, Inner Dialogue, and etc. in SELF)
Aesthetics and transformation of the boring into interesting -- the movies. Movies are boring, empty and senseless -- but interesting. The dream qualities.
K. and the pseudonymous authorship or the anonymous in film.
Film -- a poet of the religious. Lutheran pietism.
The Film dialectics serve both thought and feeling.
In Hegel's dialectics, when contradictory positions are reconciled in a higher unity (synthesis) they are both annulled and preserved (aufgehoben). Similarly with Kierkegaard's pseudo-dialectic: the aesthetic and the ethical are both annulled and preserved in their synthesis in the religious stage. As far as the aesthetic stage of existence is concerned what is preserved in the higher religious stage is the sense of infinite possibility made available through the imagination. But this no longer excludes what is actual. Nor is it employed for egotistic ends. Aesthetic irony is transformed into religious humor, and the aesthetic transfiguration of the actual world into the ideal is transformed into the religious transubstantiation of the finite world into an actual reconciliation with the infinite.
Could all three Kierkegaard's levels be seen in Bergman? This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity.
[ ... ]
Anxiety or dread (Angest) is the presentiment of this terrible responsibility when the individual stands at the threshold of momentous existential choice. Anxiety is a two-sided emotion: on one side is the dread burden of choosing for eternity; on the other side is the exhilaration of freedom in choosing oneself. Choice occurs in the instant (+jeblikket), which is the point at which time and eternity intersect - for the individual creates through temporal choice a self which will be judged for eternity.The self "is a relation which relates itself to itself" (The Sickness Unto Death).
THE REPETITION OF FAITH IS THE SELF.
We believe only by virtue of the absurd.
Whereas Socratic recollection is a recuperation of the past, Christian repetition is a "recollection forwards" - so that the eternal (future) truth is captured in time.
Tarkovsky? That is, we must realize that we are always in sin. The rebirth of existentialism in the mid twentieth century. (See notes on Bergman)
Could film be seen as a substitution for existentialist argue which mass man has to satisfied through the borrowing self of the movie? Trying to escape the cast the viewer falls deeper into the social production of stereotypes.
Hegel would have been the greatest thinker who ever lived, said Kierkegaard, if only he had regarded his system as a thought-experiment. Instead he took himself seriously to have reached the truth, and so rendered himself comical.
[ Also, pages from TECH: Theology of Technology, nonfiction ]
Soviet or Russian: The Dual Identity (historical question, the texts are not posted yet)
On Eisenstein
Bergman
Not lectures, just notes for myself. Come back, you will see them in more developed forms.
NEW PAGES: *Russian/Soviet Cinema *US Film Directors FilmNotes
Mirror, Tarkovsky
Vertov (art documentary)
In his work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), Heidegger starts his investigation from the point his master had reached. Husserl had traced the elements of the world in their historical and psychological reality to the final state of "ideal essences" which, in turn, should give us the explanation of that historical and psychological reality. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the existent reality should give us an understanding of the essence of reality. Thus...
...every metaphysical investigation must start from reality as it is in our experience, i.e., from existent reality, and seek to determine what it is in its finiteness, i.e., in its existence and in its temporal possibilities for developing the different forms of its own existence. Therefore, the initial problem of philosophy must be the following: Why am I here, rather than not existing at all? If I am able to determine the essence of the existent being, then I know what being is.
In his attempt to inquire into the nature of existence, Heidegger distinguishes two ways of living: the one, inferior, called the unauthentic; the other, superior, called the authentic. Unauthentic existence is an uncritical participation in the world as it is; authentic existence consists in an analysis of self. Although distinct, the unauthentic and the authentic life have some common characteristics:
actual participation in the world -- this means that the existent being has a relationship to surrounding objects which he uses as instruments of his existence; existence in a determined situation -- this means that every situation is essentially individuated, limited and presents only one of the infinite number of possible ways of realizing existence.
In this sense, the existent is in a state of inferiority, of privation, of radical poverty as regards plenitude of being. On the other hand, the unauthentic life is distinct from the authentic life in many ways.
The unauthentic life is characterized by its banality. The subject of such a life is not the individual, but an anonymous and featureless public ego ("das Mann"), the one-like-many, shirking personal responsibility and taking cues from the conventions of the masses. The result is a self-estrangement of human existence, which leads eventually to the blotting out of its possibilities and to its disintegration in the irrelevancy of everyday life.
Authentic existence is something decidedly different from everyday life. To live authentically means "to exist"; this in turn means to stand out -- from the Latin "ex-stare," i.e., to be outside the anonymous mass, to emerge from the world in which we ourselves, and to accept our own situation with all its limitations. To exist means both to stand apart (to withdraw) and to stand out (to be offered as a target for the fullness of being). Authentic existence, a conscious returning to oneself, is a means of discovering and disclosing that the surrounding banality of the world is vanity and disappears into "nothingness." This universal sense of nothingness produces anguish. Anguish must not be confused with fear. Fear has as its object some determined thing, a determined danger; anguish, on the contrary is a dread of that indefinite something which, because it is indefinite, is a dread of nothing in particular.
The struggle with anguish and the outcome of this struggle opens new horizons as regards the interpretation of being. Even though men and things are fashioned by "nothingness," I exist, I am not nothing; but I come from nothing. I accept my existence, with all the responsibilities involved in my present situation. I am aware that I am a finite being, and I can reach the fullness of my being only to the degree that my circumstances permit. The scope of my potentialities depends on time (the second section of Heidegger's work). Time is what I am not yet; it is my present situation in so far as it is moving toward my possibilities. Time is the horizon open to me. But time tells me that every being has its own end. Being is for death. Thus I am an "existent being destined for death." And since I accepted existence with all its ramifications, I accept my death without fear.
Heidegger's Existentialism is a valuable contribution to the understanding of individual life; but being guided by no spiritual principle, Heidegger ends with destruction and death.
Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)
For Heidegger, existence in its attempt to transcend its limits ends in nothingness. For Jaspers transcendence -- as a unique and absolute Being -- is always beyond and just outside the existent being. The more the "being in the world" clarifies his existence, the further the Absolute Being will remain from him. The transcendence of Being is intangible to human experience.
The philosophical search of Jaspers may be divided into three stages:
the discovery of the world;
the clarification of existence;
the attempt to transcend the world of objects.
The first stage considers "the being in the world" understood as a mere fact: I exist and things exist around me. In this first stage, man believes that he can reach being in its totality. This attempt is illusory and hence it is destined to fail. Indeed, all knowledge of the "being in the world" is a "limitation of horizon." Jaspers distinguishes three main types of limitation of horizon:
the horizon in which reality reveals itself in its individuality as a mere being in the world;
the horizon in which reality reveals itself through an abstract system of laws representing things in extra-temporal schemes in the Kantian sense;
the horizon in which reality develops itself from an Idea (which can be called Spirit in the Hegelian sense) according to a dialectic rhythm.
There are three types of truth corresponding to this threefold horizon:
the truth about empirical individuality -- such a truth coincides with utility, i.e., a thing is true "for me" if it is useful to me;
scientific truth, which consists in the common way of thinking of reality; spiritual truth, which consists in what I myself and others feel to be connected with the wholeness of being.
But not one of these types of knowledge is able to comprehend being in its entirety.
Every degree of human knowledge is a limitation of horizon beyond which there is something more. Knowledge is a subjective point of view belonging to the being in the world. It is also limited because of the existence of many subjective points of view.
Thus the intellect tells us of a multiplicity of possible presentations of reality, each of them based on the actual existence of a being. Jaspers calls this discovery of multiple existence a transcendent act, in so far as the intellect transcends the particularity of the various points of view and reaches what is absolute in these presentations; the fact that they are found in an existing being. Thus we pass to the second stage of philosophizing, whose object is the clarification of existence.
Thought, in so far as it is a faculty illuminating existence, is called "reason" by Jaspers. Because of the illumination of reason, the difficulty which was found in the first stage of philosophizing is now transferred to existence. Indeed, existence, on the one hand, illuminated by reason, becomes conscious of its own limitations; on the other hand, reason shows us other modes of existence, and beyond all, the transcendent, to which our existence should be related in order to be constituted on its true level.
The study of "transcendence" belongs to metaphysics, and hence we are in the third stage of philosophizing. But the difficulty already found in the first and second stages appears again. Our existence is a search for transcendence; but transcendence cannot be reached, because if transcendence were attainable, it would not be transcendence. Thus the transcendence of being is always something else, something more; and any attempt to attain it is destined to fail. There is in my existence an impassable barrier, a limit beyond which there is Transcendence (God), inaccessible to my being in the world. However, the transcendent Being can be perceived in the form of "ciphers" or symbolic characters expressed by the things of the world. Philosophy, in its search for being, reads these ciphers as possible traces of God, as signs and signals pointing toward the ultimate depth and plenitude of Being.
http://radicalacademy.com/adiphiexistentialism.htm
Europe: North vs. South (Reformation - Christian Christianity > God made in USA)
Fellini Pages @ film.vtheatre.net
FILM amazon
2005-2006 Theatre UAF Season: Four Farces + One Funeral & Godot'06
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