Filming Perspective

Suddenly we’ve jumped from Kurosawa to Kant—from: Can the individual represent the event? to: Can the individual perceive the noumenon—the thing-in-itself—or only the phenomenon, the sense-datum?— Katie’s post: “We then have to understand that the human process of interacting with any object or idea is always a negotiation with distance from the ‘real’”; and Sonora’s post: “Our minds will filter reality.” From Kant, then, on to Nietzsche—performance theory—Theresa’s post: “It could be just a total fabrication. But then who are we if not just a sum of the stories we tell about ourselves, our lives, our ideas?”—which posts in turn address the two central questions underlying Rashomon: (1) Can the individual represent the real event? and (2) What/when is the real individual?—both of which assume some underlying presence which can be found once we peel away all the imbricated layers of falsities/binaries. Which two questions as well encourage us to step back—especially in light of our readings—and posit a third: Can film represent the real?

To think of art and technology as inherently deceptive or false is to posit these two frameworks in relation to some real (or Real or “real”)—out there that can’t be got to. Of course, we need first to agree on our terms (What do you mean by “real”?—Something outside of the individual’s comprehension: Kant, Lacan? Or something in which the individual is always already involved, that horizon which we can’t not comprehend, which grounds all of our perceptions: Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, et. al?). But we could just as well posit art and technology as fully participating in the making of the real. The automobile shapes the world as much as the cinema—we need not consider these two technology-arts as separate from the reality they shape.

Deren writes: “Inasmuch as the other art forms are not constituted of reality itself, they create metaphors for reality. But photography, being itself the reality or the equivalent thereof, can use its own reality as a metaphor for ideas and abstractions” (192). Helpful to me is Raymond Bellour’s phrase “amount of analogy”—so, in my own way of putting it, we have a scale: on one end we have impressionistic paintings (symbolic) and on the other end we have analog photographs (indexical) [note: the digital confuses/subsumes this scale]. When we are talking, then, about the real/Real/”real” as represented through either film or embodied storyteller, we are able to place that representation somewhere on our analogical scale. A filmic event, then, can be realized as anything between a stylized impression of to an indexical pointing toward the really real Real.

The real/Real/”real” story in Rashomon becomes a compromise of what the group relates. We, as judges, need not be baffled; we can just as well realize that the event is best recognized as that which the group together negotiates. These separate versions of the event, then, become a microcosm of culture itself: a group consensus on how to pragmatically negotiate the world which we inhabit.