As I was reorganizing my study—again– I came across some dusty research from a distant past. This was material on the impact of Dada and Surrealism on cinema. As it is well documented, all those European filmmakers of yesteryear who were heavily involved in Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism-let’s just say, Avant-Garde cinema-were profoundly influenced by Henri Bergson.
So…can film (i.e., cinema) think for itself? And can this thinking be intuitive to the extent of development of a relationship with an existing reality? My starting assumption is “Yes, it can.”
Something else, cinema is also a meditation on time. Bergson discusses two forms of time: pure time and mathematical time. Pure time is of course real duration (perhaps when we dream we are experiencing real time). Cinema is the vehicle that captures time and space and gives us a reflection of “real time.” For Bergson intuition is “a method of thinking in duration which reflects the continuous flow of reality.” Anchored in that thought, for me, cinema is one powerful medium that can build a bridge between intellect and intuition, as proposed by Bergson to be the perfect combination to produce what he calls “dynamic knowledge of reality.”
So Bergson considers the flow of time and concludes that real duration of time cannot be measured or experienced intellectually. In other words to experience “real time” we must be tuned in to our intuition. Bergson believed that intuitive knowledge is the ultimate knowledge. That is a provocative and ambitious statement. Bergson gets himself in trouble with finalist statements like that. In his Radiance of Being, Allan Combs states,
“Bergson’s emphasis on the role of the human as the highest expression of the evolutionary ascent led to the criticism that he was a ‘finalist.’” But Combs does point out that “his most important contribution for us was his creation of a major evolutionary perspective which placed the inner dimension of consciousness on an equal footing with external material organic processes” (p. 68)
Morin also explicates the dream process as follows,
“Dreams show us that there is no solution of continuity between subjectivity and magic, since they are subjective or magical depending on whether they occur by day or at night. Until we wake up, these projections of images seem real to us. Until we go to sleep, we laugh at their unreality. Dreams show us how the most intimate processes can become alienated to the point of reification and how these alienations can reintegrate subjectivity. The essence of the dream is subjectivity. Its being is magic. It is projection-identification in its pure state.
There are filmmakers that translate dreams into cinema effectively (e.g., David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Ingmar Bergman, Terrance Malick, and Andre Tarkovsky). But these dreams become a form of reality and form a life of their own. Think about it, projection of lights and shadows on a two dimensional flat screen in a dark room becomes a three dimensional reality that also contains in it many implicit dimensions. Each audience has his/her own unique relationship with this projected dream and interacts with it in a unique manner, as if the film is thinking for itself and adjusting its presentation according to the specific audience’s consciousness. The process of “projection-identification” gives life to this organism. Or does it?