by Colin Mcginn
ADVICE
What, then, is my advice to filmmakers? What should they do with the theories propounded in this book? Well, there is no straight deduction from these theories to a recipe for a successful film. That depends on far too many other factors. But some general guidelines suggest themselves. First, they should remember that their ultimate subject is the human soul, no matter what visual gimmickry adorns the screen. Everything about the medium points to the soul, as I argued in chapter 3. Even the most crass action sequence is meaningless unless the audience feels that human souls are in peril (mere robots getting blown up is no big deal). The eye might like to be dazzled, but the viewer is quickly bored if all the pyrotechnics have no psychological significance. It is the human soul as visually presented, to be sure, but it is still the interior that ultimately attracts our interest. An actor's body is merely the means she uses to put her mind on display. The screen must be seen as a container into which mentality is poured; it is not simply a showcase for shiny objects. (Even in the case of pornography states of mind matter, more so than is generally acknowledged.)
Secondly, movies are primarily a medium for sensation and feeling, not for abstract thought. Novels are constituted by words and sentences that express thoughts; how the words look on the page is not the point. The “intellectual novel” may or may not be a good idea, but the “intellectual film” is liable to fall flat. Adapting novels to the screen, then, involves a radical transformation in the artistic means employed, and a very good novel may well not translate into film at all successfully. Film enters the brain through its sensory centers and radiates outwards to the emotional sub-regions; film reception is not primarily a matter of forming thoughts about things. Film lives in the senses, not the intellect—which is not to say it cannot have serious themes. It must make contact with the emotions through its visual power (as well as through its soundtrack, which is not primarily a matter of words spoken but of sounds heard). A good filmmaker can make his images mesh seamlessly with the feelings expressed, just as a dream does this as a matter of course. The Wizard of Oz, which I have mentioned more than once, is a close-to-perfect film because it understands this so well: visually glorious, it weaves feeling into every image, just as in a dream—which, of course, it is. The story is simple, the characters well defined: it wafts through the mind like a light and airy dream (though with its dark moments). I think, too, that Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast attains this dreamlike meshing of the visual and the emotional to an exceptional degree.
The right blend of realism and fantasy also maximizes the dreamlike character of a film, thus inducing that blissful state of dream immersion. A film must be rooted in reality, but it must also depart from reality and enter the realm of imagination. The best directors—Luis Bunuel, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and others— seem to me to recognize the essentially dreamlike character of the movie world, and they trade upon it in their films.
What is A Clockwork Orange but an audacious dream adventure insidiously combining nightmare and wish fulfillment?
THE FUTURE
Finally, let's indulge in a piece of science fiction. Suppose that movie technology progresses some time in the twenty-first century to the point that movies can be downloaded directly into the brain. You rent a cassette, plug it into your cortex, and enjoy the experience. There is no screen, no light projection—just mental images floating through your consciousness. Data is read off a disc and your neurons are appropriately stimulated. The movie has been rendered entirely mental. Your brain is directly caused to “screen” a purely inner movie. Then, supposing this, I want to make two observations. The first is that this strikes me as the manifest destiny of movies—the point toward which they are naturally moving. Who can doubt that if this technology became available it would be wildly popular? It would probably make obsolete the current formats for screening movies (just as the CD replaced vinyl records). Movies, as I noted in the previous section, are already partly mental products; so it seems only natural that they might eventually shed their material support and go completely mental.
The second observation—and my main point at the moment—is that it seems to me perfectly clear that such a movie format would precisely resemble the dream. The movie would consist of mental images arranged into a narrative sequence, and that is what a dream is. Images on the screen would be replaced with images in the mind, and with that the transition to dream would be complete. If movies took this form, it would hardly be necessary for me to write this book, because the thesis would seem so obviously true. But—to go back to my first point—this looks like the destiny of movies, their real underlying essence. They want to go radically inward. So the ideal movie is overtly dreamlike in its materials—a sequence of vivid mental images. Films aspire to the condition of dreams; this is what they dream of. These mind movies would directly mimic the dream state, despite the wakefulness of the “viewer,” thus fulfilling the destiny inherent in the film medium from the start.
However, such a technology is a distant dream (as it were), since no one yet has any idea how to stimulate brain cells so as to produce specific images strung together into stories. It seems to me, though, to constitute the underlying essence of film—what it would be if only it knew how. This technology would extend, and possibly usurp, our natural dream life, allowing us to dream of whatever we liked whenever we wanted to. Dreams themselves would pale in comparison, especially artistically. I can imagine a whole race of people wanting to be plugged into mind movies all the time, consciously dreaming their lives away. Whether this would be a good thing, I shall not say; but given the power of movies so far, in their present relatively primitive state, you can see why it might be an irresistible temptation. Meanwhile, we will no doubt carry on letting old-fashioned movies made of splashes of two-dimensional light have their way with us.
REFERENCES
One THE POWER OF FILM
1. Cavell, The World Viewed, 164.
2. See McGinn, The Mysterious Tlame, for a discussion of the mind-body problem.
3. For a critical discussion of this ideological approach to cinema see Carroll, Mystifying Movies, chapter 2.
4. See ibid., chapter 1, for a critical discussion.
5. Ibid., 29.
6. Ibid., chapter 5.
Two VISION AND THE SCREEN
1. Murch, In the Blink of an Eye, 122.
2. Ibid., 144.
3. See McGinn, Mindsight, chapter 3, for a discussion of this notion.
4. See Munsterberg, The Photoplay, and Arnheim, Film as Art.
5. See Kracauer, “The Establishment of Physical Existence,” and Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1.
6. Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol 1, 96.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. Balazs, “The Close-Up,” 256.
9. Ibid., 258.
10. Ibid., 260.
11. Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 806.
Three THE METAPHYSICS OF THE MOVIE IMAGE
1. For a nice discussion of shadows see Casati, The Shadow Club.
2. This is a book that made a splash on its initial appearance, then disappeared from view for decades, and now once again is receiving its due.
3. Munsterberg, The Photoplay, 153-4.
4. Ibid., 133.
5. Ibid., 181.
6. Kawin, Mindscreen, 192.
7. Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” 785.
8. Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies, 103.
9. Ibid., 93.
10. Ibid., 109.
11. Cavell, The World Viewed, 171-2.
12. Barthes, “The Face of Garbo,” 650-1.
13. Arnheim, Film as Art, 67-8.
14. Andrew, The Major Film Theories, note 16, 257.
15. Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies, 31.
16. Arnheim, Film as Art, 36.
17. See McGinn, The Mysterious Flame, for a discussion of why it is surprising that flesh is the foundation of consciousness.
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18. Barr, “CinemaScope: Before and After,” 152.
Four DREAMS ON FILM
1. See McGinn, Mindsight, chapter 1, for a discussion.
2. Langer, Feeling and Form, 412.
3. Tyler, Magic and Myth of the Movies, 28.
4. Ibid., 195.
5. Arnheim, Film as Art, 21.
6. Murch, In the Blink of an Eye, 57-8.
7. Langer, Feeling and Form, 415.
8. See Eisenstein, The Film Sense.
9. See Pinker, The Language Instinct.
10. Miller, Subsequent Performances, 213-47.
11. Hobson, Dreaming, 59.
12. Ibid., 64.
13. Ibid., 113.
14. Quoted ibid., 22.
15. For a discussion, see Munsterberg, The Photoplay, 138.
16. See McGinn, Mindsight, chapters 6 and 7.
17. For a discussion of dream belief see ibid., chapter 7.
18. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter 1.
19. Kracauer, “The Establishment of Physical Existence,” 237.
20. Kawin, “The Mummy's Pool,” 466-7.
Five REVIEWING THE DREAM THEORY
1. See also Hobson, Dreaming, chapter 7.
Six HOW TO MAKE A DREAM
1. See Pinker, How the Mind Works, chapter 4.
2. See Hobson, Dreaming, 28.
Seven CINEMA AND HUMAN NATURE
1. For a popular treatment see Pinker, The Language Instinct.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1976. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press,1957
Balazs, Bela. “The Close-Up.” In Mast and Cohen, eds., Film Theory.
Barr, Charles. “CinemaScope: Before and After.” In Mast and Cohen, eds., Film Theory.
Barthes, Roland. “The Face of Garbo.” In Mast and Cohen, eds., Film Theory.
Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema?, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Carroll, Noel. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Casati, Roberto. The Shadow Club. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Cavell, Stanley. The World Viewed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense. Translated by Jay Heyda. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1947.
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by J. Strachey New York: Avon, 1980.
Hobson, J. Allan. Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Hobson, J. Allan. Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.
Kawin, Bruce F. Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Establishment of Physical Existence.” In Mast and Cohen, eds., Film Theory.
Langer, Suzanne K. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
Mast, Gerald, and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
McGinn, Colin. Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
McGinn, Colin. The Mysterious Flame. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Metz, Christian. “The Imaginary Signifier.” In Mast and Cohen, eds., Film Theory.
Miller, Jonathan. Subsequent Performances. New York: Viking, 1986.
Mulvey Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Mast and Cohen, eds., Film Theory.
Munsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. London: Rout-ledge, 2002.
Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye. 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2001.
Pinker, Steven. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.
The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1994.
Tyler, Parker. Magic and Myth of the Movies. London: Seeker & Warburg, 1971.
Copyright © 2005 by Colin McGinn
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2005.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
McGinn, Colin, [date]
The power of movies : how screen and mind interact / Colin McGinn.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Motion pictures—Psychological aspects. I. Title
PN1995.M3785 2005
791.43’01’9—dc22 2005043049
eISBN: 978-0-307-48973-9
Author photograph © Sigrid Estrada Book design by M. Kristin Bearse
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