Forthcoming in Film International 6:2 (2008).

Filmosophy, Daniel Frampton (2006)
London: Wallflower Press, 254 pp., ISBN 1-904764-84-3 (pbk), $24.00, ISBN 1-904764-85-1 (hbk), $80.00

by David Sterritt

   Filmosophy, according to author Daniel Frampton, is `a manifesto for a radically new way of understanding cinema’. That has a militant and invigorating ring, suggesting that the foundations of film studies are about to shake before our eyes, riven by exacting ideas from the far older field of philosophy.
   As early as page 11, though, Frampton backpedals a bit—the book is `almost’ a manifesto, he clarifies—and indicates that his ambitions aren’t quite so grand. The system he calls filmosophy isn’t meant as `a solution to film studies’, he says, `but should be used and changed and adapted alongside other perspectives and interpretive schemas’. It is designed not to lay out far-reaching new parameters for film theory but to spark fresh questions, discussions, debates, and arguments. As for the link between film and philosophy implied by the system’s name, the former can `add a new kind of thought’ to the latter, which will benefit from a richer understanding of what it means to think in images. Philosophy `then becomes another kind of film’ (emphasis, and haziness, in original).
   Rejuvenating film theory via philosophy is a commendable endeavour. Cinema studies have been enlivened in recent years by contributions from such fields as cognitive psychology, visual culture, and historiography; from anti-“Grand Theory” scholars like Noël Carroll and David Bordwell; and from the film-philosophical thoughts of Gilles Deleuze, which play a major role in filmosophy. Yet despite all this, contemporary film theory shows only limited signs of moving past the tried-and-true ideas that have served it loyally for decades, derived from sources like psychoanalysis, cultural studies, and feminism. While these discourses have valuable insights to offer, the time is ripe for interventions of new and different kinds.
   Enter filmosophy. Its nub is the contention that films can be understood and interpreted most effectively when they are personified, i.e., engaged with as if they were autonomous beings, each with its own distinctive way of thinking the subject matter—themes, storylines, people, places, things--that it contains and defines. This is not a novel concept; theorists like Gaston Bachelard and W.J.T. Mitchell have done influential work along these lines. But filmosophy takes its fundamental cue from Deleuze, looking on every film as a microcosmic mental world that is ordered, immutable, decisive, and unwavering.
   Expanding on this, Frampton coins a few handy neologisms. The first to appear is film-being, which means the originator of a movie’s images and sounds. Frampton traces a genealogy of film-beings theorized by various writers—author beings, narrator beings, the ghostly beings of 1970s suture theory—and then concludes that imagining any kind of `enabler’ from outside the film is pointless, since as viewers we perceive a film as `issuing from itself’ and being `the creator of its own world’. The film-being behind the film is simply…the film. Filmosophy gives the name filmind to the kind of film-being it describes, and film-thinking to the filmind’s actions of designing and inflecting a diegetic world. When we encounter a film that `thinks’ philosophically, filmosophy urges us to respond with philosophical questions like: How does Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) think about landscape and humanity? How does Fight Club (1999) think about psychosis and the self? How does The Scent of Green Papaya (1993) think about love?
   Frampton then asks whether phenomenology, already useful in analysing the nature of the filmgoer’s consciousness and experience, can also illuminate the `consciousness’ and `experience’ of the film-being, which can become different characters, freeze and replay moments, alter colours and speeds, and—in digitally crafted cinema, which Frampton sees as the wave of the future—insert itself into characters and settings through techniques like morphing and computer-generated imagery. The phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that cinema provides a double experience: the spectator’s experience of the film, and the film’s own `experience’ of whatever its world contains. But in human experience, `to have an object is to “change” that object towards oneself’, while for the film-being, `to have an object is to be that object’ (40, emphasis in original). Looking to resolve this discrepancy, Frampton turns to the “film-body” that emerges in Vivian Sobchack’s film-phenomenological work—an embodied yet ungraspable presence that creates meaning through space and movement. Conceiving film as a body clarifies film’s capacity for synthesizing `the vagaries of time and space’ (43) in its `experience’. But a large problem remains: If film is a body, then it must be distinct from the film-world, and for filmosophy that isn’t the case. `We are separate yet mingled with our world’, Frampton writes, `but film “is” its world’ (43, emphasis in original). In addition, the film-body concept interposes anthropomorphic links between human perception (e.g., that of the artists who made the movie) and film `perception’, which is manifested in a film-world that is emphatically not `real’ by a film-being that is emphatically not human. Unlike us viewers, a film can turn green when someone feels sick or slip into soft focus when someone is in love. The phenomenologist’s film-subject experiences a world, subjectively; filmosophy’s filmind is a world, transsubjectively. Hence the need for a new conception of cinema, purged of all biological baggage.
   Frampton next deals with `film neominds’, identifying theorists who have blazed the trail for filmosophy by daring to think outside the anthropomorphic box. Here we have another genealogy of thinkers and ideas—Dulac and `cinematic thought’, Vertov and the `cine-eye’, Epstein and `lyrosophy’, Artaud and the ur-ness of images, and Eisenstein and organic-dialectical montage, which provokes in the filmgoer a two-way movement from perception to thought and back again. This lineage culminates with Deleuze, who builds on Artaud by hailing cinema’s power to reveal the powerlessness of our own thought, and on Eisenstein by proposing the identity of image and thought, such that `the image…is the real “thing” present to the filmgoer’ (61). What cinema produces is `the genesis of an “unknown body” which we have in the back of our heads, like the unthought in thought, the birth of the invisible which is still hidden from view’ (70), as Deleuze put it, citing Jean-Louis Schefer, in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (201) in 1985.
   If you suspect that the aforementioned ghostly beings have now slipped in through the back door to haunt us anew, I think you’re on to something. Perhaps alert to this, Frampton devotes his next chapter to clarifying and consolidating his view of the filmind as every film’s originating force. Thereafter he shows how the moviegoing experience is transformed by a proper understanding of filmind and film-thinking; contrasts filmind activity with conventional accounts of film narration; probes the relationships between linguistically based thinking and filmosophical (experiential, immediate) meaning; and wraps everything up by offering filmosophy as an important new methodology for philosophers, filmmakers, and everyone who likes to think about movies.
   Since filmosophy claims to be radically fresh and innovative, I’ve devoted a lot of words to laying out the basics. The big question remaining is how effectively Frampton’s system produces useful and exciting new ways of engaging with films and interpreting cinematic texts. Here the verdict is mixed. One reason is that some of Frampton’s observations are surprisingly insubstantial, as when he reveals the proper place to sit in a movie theater—hunkering down in the back can produce `a mistaken and cold interpretation’ while sitting close to the screen (but not too close) facilitates a `more aesthetic and truthful’ reading (150). His position against “technicist” (171) rhetoric--which means just about any mention of, say, a camera or a zoom or a tracking shot—seems like a picky kind of theoretical correctness. (He strays perilously close to this pitfall himself, as when he remarks that “mental imagery is the video recorder of our eye-cam” [184-5].) The book’s theoretical genealogies are detailed and well constructed, but they have a strong teleological slant, almost implying that analytical thought from Canudo and Münsterberg through Cavell and Deleuze has all been building toward—filmosophy!
   More important, Frampton’s interpretations of specific films can seem thin and anticlimactic after so much buildup of filmosophy’s merits. The movies he chooses are almost all by canonised auteurs and almost never by avant-gardists like, say, Stan Brakhage, whose intricate films brilliantly embody the possibility `that mind and reality are one’ (203). The filmosophical readings of Béla Tarr’s transfixing Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) and Michael Haneke’s electrifying films, such as Funny Games (1997) and Caché (2005), are standard critical stuff apart from references to `film-thinking’ (141) and the like. Ditto for the analyses of several works by the Dardenne brothers. At the beginning of their film The Son (2002), for instance, the camera—oops, the `moving sound-image’—comes out from behind the father character, indicating that the film’s events will be filtered through his psychological point of view without pretending an ability to share that point of view. `The film thinks this close affinity’, Frampton explains, `thinks (through framing and movement) this empathetic emotion’ (147). Well, sure. But do we need filmosophy’s special usage of `think’ to make this rather obvious point?
   Perhaps most important of all, Frampton’s enthusiasm for digitised cinema is too unquestioning for comfort. His embrace of such cinema is understandable, since its growing presence supports two of his rallying cries—for film theory and criticism that shake off analogies with the human and the real, and for drastic screen experiences that prompt moviegoers to shake off the conventional thoughts, habits, and responses that have colonized our brains through incessant media exposure. I furrow my brow, however, on reading that Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) exemplifies a brave new world of cinema. So what if `a whole year was needed just to perfect the 60,000 hairs’ on the heroine’s head? (And hey, what happened to that rule against technicist rhetoric?) Frampton notes that mixing filmed and digitised materials can allow filmmakers to devise artificial shots that `look indistinguishable from recorded events’, sometimes even `cheating the filmgoer into thinking there is a “camera”, and therefore a “recorded” world’ (205). The artistic possibilities here may be thrilling, but the possibilities for political and corporate propaganda are chilling. Filmosophy is insufficiently attentive to the dangers that may flow from `this new fluid cinema, this pure thought’ (206). It’s even odd that Frampton calls his system filmosophy in the first place, given the rising number of moving-image artists who are swearing off film and switching to high-definition video for good.
   On the positive side, scanning Frampton’s marvelously wrought genealogies is a fine refresher course in film-theoretical writing, and engaging with his ideas is a stimulating way to rethink one’s own notions of what cinema is, can be, and should be. I’m a tad skeptical toward his claims about the filmind, but I’m intrigued by his evocation of it as neither `the re-presentation of reality nor the re-presentation of thought [but] rather their mediation and conflagration….A thinking that enacts reasoning without the language of metaphysics’ (203, emphasis in original). If there is truth in Frampton’s claim that for filmosophy `film is the beginning and the future of our thought’ (213), then his commitment to innovative theory and forward-looking criticism is necessary, timely, and welcome.