What is Cinema?

What is Cinema?

Of all the readings so far, the chapter in The Philosophy of Motion Pictures, by Noel Carroll,  entitled “What is Cinema” most caught my attention, not so much for the content, but for the philosophical approach to the topic itself.  I’d frame my remarks on this chapter by quoting Martin Heidegger in his work Contributions to Philosophy (1989, p.307.) when he said “Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.”  This chapter struggles with being intelligible, or at least, in my opinion, exhibits grounds for suicide by Heidegger’s definition.

According to Carroll, “The philosophy of any practice attempts to clarify the concepts that are indispensable to carrying on that practice.”  In this chapter, Carroll attempts to clarify the concepts that are essential to cinema, to define cinema in a way that fully identifies all the requirements and elements required for a work to be considered cinematic.  One of the most useful pieces of information offered by Carroll, apart from his definition of cinema is the comment “You can usually tell if a philosopher is trying to offer you a real definition by his use of the phrase “if and only if.”  Keeping that in mind, he wanders through a very long, very detailed and comprehensive explanation of a “real” definition.

Carroll slogs through over twenty pages of text to carefully parse and over parse his definition of cinema, building layers of the definition until he finally arrives at a definition of a moving image only if the following conditions are true:

1.    It is a detached display or a series thereof;

2.    It belongs to a class of things from which the production of the impression of movement is technically possible;

3.    Performance tokens of it are generated by templates which are tokens;

4.    Performance tokens of it are not artworks in their own right; and,

5.    It is a two-dimensional display.

     Carroll concludes this masterpiece of over-analysis with the statement “Cinema is, at least, necessarily, the practice of making moving images.”  Could he have not just used that and that alone?

     Briefly, only briefly, Carroll offers a simpler definition of a moving image provided by Alan Goldman which states that it is 1) an image capable of movement 2) that is mechanically projected on a screen.

     Wow!  That makes sense!  But, according to Carroll, it is terribly flawed as it “invites paradox and should be discounted for that very reason.” The paradox? It seems that Carroll, and apparently others, get stuck on the concept of ‘projected’ and raise all sorts of concerns that the definition is unworkable as some moving images are not ‘projected” but are ‘beamed directly at the viewers.  Television, or movies viewed from a DVD, for example, are not projected necessarily on to a screen, and this alone removes the simpler definition from be acceptable.

     Confucius is quoted as having written “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”  Despite being regarded as a most famous teacher and philosopher, I suspect Carroll would argue with him as I suspect Confucius would accept the simple definition, not finding reason to complicate the matter or, as is said, split hairs. While there is a difference between a movie projected on to a screen and one that is viewed through the screen of a television (or laptop, or smart phone,) the projected image remains the same.  To complicate a definition beyond reason is puzzling to me. 

     If I take a tomato and slice it into very thin slices, and then slice those into even thinner slices, is it still a tomato?  At what point does it become tomato juice?  It would seem that Carroll, in his pursuit of perfection, slices the definition to the extent that it is no longer recognizable as reasonable. To quote Alan Judd (The Noonday Devil,) – “Too much philosophy makes men mad.”

     Carroll’s incessant hair-splitting needs a dose of Confucius and a big dollop of Judd.