Vision and Blindness in Film E-Book

Dago Schelin

• Herausgeber: Büchner-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 234

Beschreibung

In order to understand "vision", we have to look into concepts of blindness, both diegetically in typical film characters and in the representation of sight or lack thereof. A critical-historical investigation into theories of vision shows that the way we understand visuality today – scientifically and culturally – is very different from pre-modern notions and practices. In this book, Dago Schelin questions categories such as active and passive vision, tactile visuality, as well as blind vision, and discusses them alongside a variety of movies that deal with vision and blindness. Is there a connection between the filmmaker's gaze and an older pre-Keplerian ontology of vision? What is the role of sound in vision? Are our eyes mere camcorders or might they be projectors? These and other questions comprise the fascinating journey on which this study embarks.

Leseprobe

Dago Schelin

Vision and Blindness in Film

Dago Schelin

Vision and Blindness in Film

ISBN (Print) 978-3-96317-144-4

ISBN (ePDF) 978-3-96317-667-8

ISBN (ePub) 978-3-96317-677-7

Copyright © 2019 Büchner-Verlag eG, Marburg

The print edition of the publication was funded by the DAAD – Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Bildnachweise Umschlag: Pixabay / Frantisek_Krejci (Blende, bearbeitet), cocoparisienne (Auge, bearbeitet)

Film stills reprinted by permission of Copacabana Filmes.

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Dago Schelin is a Brazilian-German filmmaker/musician. After receiving his B.A. in Languages (Portuguese and English), as well as a B.A. in Popular Music in Brazil, Dago Schelin was awarded DAAD scholarships for his M.A. studies in Media Production and his PhD in Media Studies. Among other publications, Dago Schelin has edited and co-authored a book on the interdisciplinarity of cinema called »Cinema Invites Other Gazes«. Currently, Dago Schelin is a researcher at Philipps-University Marburg.

Contents

0 Acknowledgments0 Foreword – Aesthetic Dimensions of Blindness and Vision1 Theories of Vision1.1 Introduction1.2 The Gaze within a Brief History of Theories of Vision1.2.1. Introductory Remarks1.2.2. A Review of the Current State of Research1.2.3. A Historical Overview of Vision1.2.4. A Short History of the Gaze according to Ivan Illich1.2.5. Ancient Theories of Vision up until Kepler1.2.6. The Window of Renaissance1.2.7. Crary’s Prehistory of Contemporary Vision2 Categories of Vision2.1 Introduction2.1.1. A Dialogical Framework2.1.2. Vision and Visuality2.2 Active and Passive Vision2.2.1. From Camcorder to Erectile Pupilla2.2.2. Entering the Film’s Self2.3 Tactile Visuality2.3.1. To Touch or Not to Touch2.3.2. Between a Metaphorical and a Literal Touch2.3.3. Mimetic Visuality: Epistemological Implications2.4 Blind Vision2.4.1. Inner and Outer Vision2.4.2. Further Insights of Blind Vision2.5 A Summary of the Categories3 Film Analysis3.1 Outline3.2 Films, Blindness, and the Blind3.3 Introductory Analyses of Films in Relation to Vision and Blindness3.3.1. Le Scaphandre and the POV3.3.2. Sensation Enhancers3.3.3. Visual Prosthesis3.3.4. Documentary Film and the Reality of Seeing Reality3.4 Janela da Alma3.4.1. Introducing Janela da Alma3.4.2. A Brazilian Window3.4.3. The Opening Sequence3.4.4. Looking at the Reel3.4.5. Representing Views and Gazes3.4.6. Good Bokeh, Bad Bokeh3.4.7. Window, Sound, and Soul3.4.8. The Blind Photographer3.4.9. Seeing with Glasses4 Discussion and Conclusions4.1 Toward an Understanding of Filmmaking as a Bridge4.2 Filmmaking as a Remnant of the Pre-Keplerian Gaze4.3 A Substitute for the Invisible4.4 Trans-seeing Reality5 Final Words0 Works Cited0 Endnoten

Acknowledgments

I would like to give special thanks to:

João Jardim and Ana Carolina Esteves for kindly providing the stills of Janela da Alma (2001). Alex Stark for the patience to listen to my new paragraphs, for the feedback, and companionship. Chiara Marchini for the transcription to French of the Bavcar-sequences. Dietmar Kammerer for the first conversations, which helped me to find a better focus. Alena Strohmaier for simply being there as a fellow researcher and for the input in finding the right words for a title. Claudio Oliver for the initial ideas, conversations and insights, and final talks (all based on something much greater than just the writing of a dissertation). Tony Cristafi (September 30, 1968–May 21, 2017) whom I met here in Marburg while he was writing and teaching at the university for a year. It saddened me to hear that he passed away prematurely not long after he had returned to the US. Thank you, Tony, for the exchange of ideas in the initial phase of this project and, mostly, for the beginning of a friendship. Artur and Gabi Fuchs for opening their home so that I could lock myself up in the guestroom and turn on the writing-mode. Johannes Herrmann for the incredible job of reviewing this text. My family for the patience and total support, especially to you Cíntia, during the times I left all the hard work of managing two kids and a home to you in a (still) foreign country.

Dago Schelin

Foreword – Aesthetic Dimensions of Blindness and Vision

Dago Schelin’s reflections on blindness and vision aim at the central configurations of film, which appears as a medium which can return to pre-modern concepts of vision. Starting from a discussion of pre-Keplerian notions of visuality, Dago Schelin explores these forms in order to find an aesthetic model to research into contemporary film narratives and images. The reference to Ivan Illich, who – coincidentally? – has taught and researched in Marburg as well, provides a deeper understanding of pre-modern concepts of vision, since his idea of an active gaze bridges the historic gap between the modern, technological versions of vision and the older, bodily notions of the eye.

For Dago Schelin, film is the privileged medium to experiment with vision and in each case it is an artistic experiment which picks up science in order to explore the aesthetic dimensions of vision. In his understanding, vision comes very close to blindness, which is not conceptualized as the counterpart to vision, but as its pre-condition. Since there is blindness, we can understand vision. Against this background he investigates into the narratives and visual sketches of a variety of films. Pivotal are two films about blindness and vision, Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) and João Jardim’s and Walter Carvalho’s Janela da Alma (2001), both of which voice the conditions of seeing. Filmmaker and painter Derek Jarman’s Blue is a compassionate and sometimes ironic investigation of his becoming blind from the HIV infection, Jardim’s and Carvalho’s documentary fathoms the conditions of seeing on the basis of blindness. This film and the way it is approached here understands blindness as a primordial way of seeing.

Besides being an academic dissertation and thus the entrance ticket into academic life, Dago Schelin’s study is foremost a highly philosophical treatise on the conditions and different aspects of seeing in general. Film figures as the privileged medium to dive into the artistic complexity and expressions of seeing, since images can be delivered and individual perceptions can be documented. In its essayistic and philosophical approach this book transcends the close boundaries of academic research into a wide philosophical treatise of historic and artistic forms of seeing.

Prof. Dr. Angela Krewani

1 Theories of Vision

1.1 Introduction

The macro-question throughout this study encompasses many facets of what it means to see. Dialectics of vision will intersect with the role that film plays in representing sight (and blindness). To introduce the theme, I shall first take the route of visual studies by locating the sense of seeing within a history of regimes, the strongest of which appears to be that of vision (Jay, »Scopic Regimes of Modernity« 28). I shall then present the broader current state of research on visuality. From the various alternatives, I will specify which ones I aim to follow. The reader will soon notice that I take a transdisciplinary approach to my questions, from a historical perspective that ranges from the optics of ancient Greece all the way to current phenomenology-driven film theories. In-between this scope, I shall firstly undertake a historical analysis of the gaze, secondly, make film-specific analyses, then, reflectively return to a more critical approach, but incorporated with the films and filmic concepts of vision.

Throughout my thesis there runs an address to the concept that Ivan Illich labels »active gaze« (»Guarding the Eye« 47–61), a kind of seeing that contrasts to his understanding of present-day visualities. My intention is, starting from Illich, to develop concepts of vision that can be applied to film, more specifically to films that deal with sight and sightlessness. First, the films to be analyzed are taken diegetically, as if existing within themselves, providing meaning through both their character portrayal and their aesthetic representation of the sense of vision (or lack thereof). Then, by approaching film extra-diegetically, I will bring up and discuss the relationships and dynamics between film and spectator.

Within more modern theories of vision I will rely on Jonathan Crary’s groundwork, in which he argues for a historicity that takes into account the roll of the 19th century observer (understood by him as an embodied one) in contrast to prior analogies. From another angle, I approach this embodiment through Laura U. Marks’ theory of haptic visuality.

Thus, a critical-historical approach to vision combined with a categorization of phenomenological aspects of watching film, along with the analysis of key films, shall lead me to Jardim and Carvalho’s Janela da Alma (2001), a movie that epitomizes the epistemological implications of vision within and even beyond film.

In conclusion, I shall propose that there is a link between a pre-Keplerian ontology of vision and the activity of filmmaking, bringing us back to Illich’s active gaze. By including the filmmaker in the equation, I intend to show that this intersection makes it possible to explore an uncharted territory: the ontology of vision.

I have found little scholarly material that deals with the ontology of vision and even less that poses a new ontological approach. Current studies in media seem to give preeminence to the epistemological implications of new (digital) technology. Classic film theory remains very focused on the psychoanalytical and formalistic realm. Phenomenologists following Merleau-Ponty give precedence to the body in order to derive meaning. Hence, there still seems to be enough space for exploring the metaphysics of visuality.

My impending claim for vision’s ontological value was inspired by the question of what it means for something to be, a naïve ambition triggered by my first readings of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. In it, Heidegger expresses this aspiration right from the outset:

Do we in our time have an answer to the question of what we really mean by the word ›being‹? Not at all. So it is fitting that we should raise anew the question of the meaning of Being. But are we nowadays even perplexed at our inability to understand the expression ›Being‹? Not at all. So first of all we must reawaken an understanding for the meaning of this question. (Being and Time 19)

By engaging with Ivan Illich’s historical approach to the ethics of the gaze, it seemed a natural step to question the fundamental nature of vision, its connection to the world, and specifically to film. Even though I realize that the term ontology has the potential to behave like Pandora’s box, it seems to me the best (and less travelled) route to envision the dynamic relationship between creator, art, and subject. My proposition follows the Platonic school of thought, firstly by daring to reengage with the absurd question of whether rays travel from the eye to the object for vision to occur. I am interested in the relation of these so-called rays to other beings. Visual rays might not be an actual physical phenomenon but may be considered a historical (accidental) feature that manifests in a practice, the result of which »subsists« in a contingent form in the gaze (Morewedge and Avicenna 112).

My point, to be expounded in the first and in the last chapters, is that the relationship between film, filmmaker, and spectator bears traces of another way of being that dates back to pre-Keplerian notions of optics. My most risky claim will be that this tenuous relationship is an ontological remnant of an outdated, outmoded scientific theory, namely, the extramission theory, the dismissal of which might exclude the possibility of experience. In the end, one need not believe in emanations from the eyes, literally, but one should also not discard the entire premise in the name of foolproof science. In doing so, one would forsake its philosophical status. Therefore, I propose that a phenomenology of the gaze in conjunction with a critical approach to histories of visuality – culminating in cinema – will secure a better understanding of this ontology of vision.

1.2 The Gaze within a Brief History of Theories of Vision

1.2.1 Introductory Remarks

First published in 1904, H.G. Wells’ Country of the Blind tells a story about a people living in a forsaken valley, who long ago had become blind. After many generations of blindness there was no more memory of what it meant to see. The idea of sight was lost. One day, by chance, a traveler called Nuñez happens upon them. The encounter has a curious unfolding as soon as the traveler notices that, without exception, everyone in this village is blind, while he tries to explain to this people that he can actually see. The blind find him unfathomable. For the villagers it seems that he is the one with a handicap, not them. As the plot develops, Nuñez falls in love with a woman amongst the blind villagers. However, in order to marry her, he will have to be »healed« from his »ailment« (Wells 202). Old Yacob, one of the elders, eases the woman’s worries of her lover’s sanity:

›I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical operation – namely, to remove these irritant bodies.‹›And then he will be sane?‹›Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen.‹›Thank Heaven for science!‹ said old Yacob, and went forth at once to tell Nuñez of his happy hope. (Wells 202)

H.G. Wells’ story1 expresses a mystification of vision which seems to bewilder the imagination of many. Sight (and its extremely useful counterpart, blindness) offers an extremely rich and dynamic realm for discussions as much in science as in the arts. This fascination pervades both the level of storytelling (for example, the movies themselves), the conceptual aspects of visual studies, theories of vision, and the more traditional subareas of media theory.

The visual is present in every space and moment of life. Its importance is manifested in the fact that you are reading this dissertation, most probably at distance of about 40 cm (»Scientific American« 392). According to historian Dallas G. Denery II, »historians, philosophers, and psychologists have long noted the many ways that the emphasis on vision,« also known as ocularcentrism, »has shaped and determined conceptions of truth and knowledge« (9). In order to put the centrality of vision into perspective, in analyzing the history of the senses, Martin Jay has posed a question from the following standpoint: »Can one locate ›audiocentric‹ or ›tactocentric‹ cultures, let alone ›gastrocentric‹ or ›olfactocentric‹ ones?« (»In the Realm of the Senses« 310). It was also Martin Jay who reactivated the term »scopic regime«2 first introduced by Christian Metz. The concept of a scopic regime explains the different manners of seeing as phenomena of culture. Through this understanding, the way an individual sees is not innate but inherited from societal practices, which, in turn, are conformed by the regime in vogue. According to Jay, we now live in a scopic regime that was engendered by Cartesian perspectivalism (»Scopic Regimes of Modernity« 3–28). Fast-forwarding 350 years since René Descartes, one finds a world still very much accustomed to representing images on flat surfaces, though now quantitatively amplified.

Most human beings alive at this moment were born in a matrix of audiovisual stimuli unlike that of any previous generation, a matter thoroughly discussed by Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord3, forewarned by the Frankfurt School. Day after day, modern eyes see in default, skimming with eyes through videos and pictures, many times within virtual systems and interfaces. Images, however impressive, can be taken for granted while the next fad comes out with new 3D blockbusters being birthed and soon put to rest.

In the context of this »fast-food visuality«, there is an idea in visual culture studies, which I would like to review, namely, the gaze, specifically in its pre-Keplerian ontology4. This I would like to examine in contrast with what I believe to be a faulty new ontology based on the perfection of visual simulation through improved technology.

Having its Middle English origin in the fourteenth century, the word is primarily used as an intransitive verb and as a noun. To gaze is, according to dictionary definition, »to look steadily and intently at something, especially at that which excites admiration, curiosity, or interest« (Merriam-Webster). According to Jennifer Reinhardt from the Chicago School of Media Theory, in contrast to other words related to vision, gaze »has almost been singled out for use in discussions about art« (1). Psychoanalytic circles have also claimed the term from philosophy to feminist film theory (Mulvey; Lacan) embedded in their practice and politics. Based on the preference for the arts and film, the gaze can begin to be understood as this special and more engaged manner of looking, an enhanced seeing, which begets the notion of the filmmaker’s gaze in conjunction to that of the spectator.

In this monograph, I intend to review the history and concepts of the gaze in order to establish and develop several concepts of vision and visuality. These concepts are to be contrasted with films that deal with vision and blindness. I shall then point to a specific film, which I believe epitomizes my epistemological conceptions. The film in question is João Jardim and Walter Carvalho’s Janela da Alma (2001). Janela da Alma is a film that greatly contributes to the discussion and the understanding of the gaze. In preparation to the analysis of Janela da Alma, I will show how vision and blindness are dealt with in cinema, both within the films’ diegesis as well as beyond the mere representations of characters and stories.

I shall present the different notions of visuality underlying the text and how these notions stem from historic understandings of what it means to see. In doing so, I hope to show yet another side of a theme that might have been taken for granted.

1.2.2 A Review of the Current State of Research

Academic work on the topic of vision extends from philosophical explorations on the meaning of seeing to the physiology of the eye, to the physics of light or even to light as a metaphor for truth, or blindness as a metaphor for foolishness. In many instances these areas intersect, as is the case in media studies. In film, for instance, one often talks about the look. One could start in the areas of linguistics and semiotics to investigate the significations behind the term gaze in order to find out how its meaning is/was created, in which case one could evoke Ferdinand de Saussure and later Christian Metz. On another level of inquisitiveness, the gaze could be analyzed within the psychoanalytical developments of Laura Mulvey’s notion of the male gaze or rewind all the way to Freud and Lacan for the roots of such a hetero-normative gaze. Another option paralleled with a feminist approach, Ivan Illich provides a critical-historical perspective to understand the meaning of the gaze.

By investigating critical-historical and phenomenological approaches to vision I intend to develop categories with which to understand the notion of the gaze, firstly in general, then more focused on film. As mentioned above, I shall then present these categories within specific films and film sections that deal with vision/blindness. Current literature does not show one single manner of approach to vision even within the same scientific field. There are strong premises and many assumptions out of which theoretical structures have been built. Here I single out the scholars and theorists that have made a body of work capable of withstanding criticism whilst bringing fresh ideas for the ongoing debate. Jonathan Crary is one such theorist who has stood out in media and culture studies.

Crary’s rationale concerning vision rests on the assumption that semantic shifts occurred in recent historical observance practices. In his book Techniques of the Observer, using terms such as »observer« and »representation«, Crary examines the historical relations between the modern viewer and the new technologies of representation arisen between 1810 and 1830 (»Techniques of the Observer«). According to Crary, new viewing paradigms made possible by devices like the phenakistoscope took more weight, provoking changes in the observer’s practices, even before the popularization of photography. However, Crary claims that it was the new ideological context that brought forth the new technologies and their viewing practices, not the technologies themselves. In this line of thought, Crary takes an original, though not uncontroversial, approach to the history of vision as opposed to a more established standpoint. Supplemental to Crary’s historicizing, I would suggest, would be Susan Sontag and her inspiration, Roland Barthes, who focus more on the image rather than on the observer. In the upcoming subchapter I present a more in-depth analysis of Crary’s theory.

Along with Jonathan Crary there is the work of others in the realm of cultural and historical studies, as well as continental philosophy, who address vision in relation to modern concepts of knowledge, ethics and power. This group of researchers includes names such as Martin Jay, Hal Foster, W.J.T. Mitchell, Teresa Brennan, Hans Blumenberg, Dalia Judovitz, Rosalind Krauss, Stephen Houlgate, James Elkin, Gary Shapiro, Mieke Bal, and Georgia Warnke. Edited by David Michael Levin, a book that is still very up to date in the discussions on vision, gathering essays from these and other scholars is Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993). In their essays, the authors tackle this perceived hegemony through the various types of visual discourse by scientists/philosophers from Plato to Heidegger to Foucault in current themes such as television, the visual arts, and feminism. The common, even if partial, conclusion of the discussion is that there is not one simple manner to categorize vision but many modes of seeing within several manners of structuring visuality since the dawn of Modernity.

Hal Foster suggests a more distinctive differentiation between vision and visuality by equating the terms with human mechanism and social function, respectively. In Foster’s edited Vision and Visuality (1988), the essays also address the different ways of seeing. It is in this collection that Crary proposes his techniques of observation, which he would further develop and publish as a single book two years later.

In order to explain modes of seeing and being, James Elkins draws on psychology, literature, art history, neuroanatomy, and philosophy to investigate vision, making a case that »each object has a certain force, a certain way of resisting or accepting my look and returning that look to me« (70). In a similar line, W.J.T. Mitchell discusses the theoretical, historical and cross-cultural implications of the power of pictures and their relation to what he calls the »pictorial turn« (What Do Pictures Want? 77), a term that he borrows and adapts from Richard Rorty’s »linguistic turn.«5 Rorty approaches themes in linguistic philosophy with the viewpoint that »philosophical problems may be solved either by reforming present language, or by understanding it better« (3). Following this premise, Mitchell discusses imaginative language (pictures) as integral to human life and in need of further scrutinizing since, as he puts it,

images are not just passive entities that coexist with their human hosts, any more than the microorganisms that dwell in our intestines. They change the way we think and see and dream. (What Do Pictures Want? 92)

Martin Jay also supports the many modes of vision hypothesis and introduces the idea of a »polyscopic« visual experience in opposition to a total occularcentric dominance (Downcast Eyes 592). While he does not side with any particular antimodernist of recent French thought, Jay does call for a more postmodernist position of a plurality of scopic regimes.

By researching literature on vision, one will invariably come across the idea of blindness. Again, it is James Elkins who concludes that »blindness is the precondition and constant accompaniment of vision. It cannot be fully seen, but it must always be present wherever there is seeing« (210). For Elkins, gaze has more to do with an act of blindness than an act of looking, not in the sense that blindness is the opposite of seeing, but more like an a priori to seeing. As he puts it, »blindness is like a weed that grows at the center of vision, and its roots are everywhere. There are things we do not see and things we cannot see and things we refuse to see« (Elkins 205). This hypothesis seems to be attached to a paradoxical notion that we are usually blind to our blindness. Blindness, therefore, becomes an essential part of a dynamic dialectic of vision in discussions of power, aesthetics, and knowledge. Its importance in theoretical discussions within media studies becomes even more evident relative to visuality that relies on tactile epistemologies.

Indeed, another novel approach to studies of vision takes on the notion of haptics and its relation to media. Vision is understood within a wider connectedness to media, namely, »multisensory media« (Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media 14). Laura U. Marks tackles the issue of cinema’s addressing the body as a whole by contrasting haptic visuality with optical visuality, the former involving closeness (touch), the latter presupposing distance (vision). Marks claims that she intends to »restore the flow between the haptic and the optical that our culture is currently lacking« (xii) by attempting to rescue the relationship between film theory and practice, identifying predecessors such as Eisenstein, Vertov and Bazin. In The Skin of the Film Marks develops what she will call a tactile epistemology to serve as a new framework to theorize film. Partially in line with Jonathan Crary’s terms, Marks relies on the assumption of an embodied spectator, a term that she borrows from Vivian Sobchack’s Address of the Eye. According to Sobchack we enter film studies through the substructure of somatic experience, augmented mainly by touch. Sobchack and Marks build on the theories of Gilles Deleuze. Following Ivan Illich’s lead, in order to track down the concepts behind Marks and Sobchack’s emphasis on haptic/tactile visuality, I shall look into older epistemologies of vision6.

These epistemologies seem to have grown out of the traditions of ancient Greek philosophy and maintained their prevalence up to the age of pre-modern thought (Denery; Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler). The premise throughout such a significant time span maintained that vision could be explained through material properties that allowed for the sense organ (the eye) to generate physical elements. The generator of rays served, for a long time, as a model. Even if this model is now considered outdated, it was part and parcel of being in the world, an essential power to act within a world (Denery 10). In contrast to current predominant theories, the metaphor was mainly tactile. A historical analysis of the topic aligned with current phenomenological approaches to vision serves as ground on which to develop new concepts of visuality.

In an article about the internal hierarchy of media experience, Angela Krewani observes how the visual and the haptic have been hierarchically distributed in cultural practices such as in cinema (»Sympathie und Affekt im massenmedialen Umfeld« 209–218). Krewani explains how, from Aristotle to Walter Benjamin to Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory, cinema would become exclusively visual. She goes on to describe technological developments that have reduced the tactile gap between film and viewer. The Cinerama, for instance, even though still highly oriented toward the visual, offered a kind of tangibility (Greifbarkeit) to the viewing activity (215). Another example given is Morton J. Heilig’s Sensorama, a 1950s machine that offered an immersive, multisensory experience by combining stereoscopic imaging with stereo sound, as well as a tilting seat, wind and aromas. Along with other examples of non-mainstream media, Krewani concludes that traditional media, which derive little affectivity, have been labeled as Art or high culture, while the media forms that rely more heavily on tactility fall into an every-day pop culture category (219). However, even though the sense of vision is hierarchically placed above that of touch – a supremacy assumed in the history of Western thought – the tactile was understood as embedded in the viewing experience (Illich, »Guarding the Eye« 47–61).

Recent theorists such as Marks and Sobchack draw upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception