15 years after dropping out of film school i wasn't quite expecting - or maybe i definitely was - to be seduced by a call for abstracts for a conference on Film and Philosophy. An old friend from those days forwarded me a call for proposals. This July, here in Portugal, no less.
Not intending this as a humblebrag, i'll say that i came up with this abstract in a couple of hours - but i'm certain it only happened as such because ever since i started studying philosophy 3 years ago, i've been nagged by this feeling: Will i ever, and how and why, bridge my passion for philosophy with cinema? I knew something had to be done, that the joyous perplexity i get from conceptual art and structuralist film had to be formalised in some sort of inquiry. But i did not have the tiniest glimpse of any sort of interesting question in my soul. I only knew it would likely come from the aforementioned film explorations since the 60's, not so much by looking into narratively grounded film, which in comparison, is only superficially self-reflexive. A claim that already needs a lot of groundwork to make its stand. In fact, I think the abstract tells this same story i've just told you, albeit in a shape pointing to the required methodology for making it broadly cogent and beyond my "personal suspicion".
I cannot help but feel a minimal amount of glee. Back then, I remember being thoroughly irked by having to learn film synchronically: having to go through all its historical developments, in each semester's practical exercises. Please note i have nothing against "learning the rules in order to break them", but i do have a lot against disavowing a pedagogy where one may learn the rules after breaking them. Moreover, for all that historical justice, i don't think the majority - if any - of artists who broke cinema's rules in the structuralist film scene had any degree in *film* and all its historicized glory. My film school barely included experimental filmmakers in the curricula and no experimental filmmaking in itself at all - i suspect not out of snobbery, but mostly through a generalized compartmentalization of film from the rest of human activity, and well, lack of funds to also allow students to, say, spray film-developing chemicals on food and discuss what that meant. All this is furthered by the very material circumstance that the batches of the alumni i know (except editors and directors) are comprised by three subsets: those who have either killed themselves or those who are "committed" to working 16h a day for the rest of their lives, forbidden from any interdisciplinary inquiry. Either, or. Then the excluded middle: those who finish the degree but did not pursue a profession in cinema, and are socially embedded persons, curious, joyous, very much into experimentation and into parsing the grains of genuine universality.
So, the abstract:
FILM-AS-MEDIUM AND FILM-AS-CONCEPT: LOGICALLY ACTIVE AMBIGUITY EXPLICATED FROM TONY CONRAD'S FILMS
Tony Conrad's Yellow Movie paintings, Sukiyaki Film performances, and the Pickled Film multiples are all well established in the experimental structuralist filmmaking canon. Nonetheless, by virtue of their normative status as intermedia objects and conceptual artworks, they are seldom regimented for critical study as "film proper." This presentation will suggest that certain philosophical tools can be regimented in order to bypass this conundrum.
We will look at how Jean-Yves Girard's linear logic generates the conditions of possibility for logic to reflect upon itself – and if there is a logic to film-as-concept and film-as-medium, how the same can be done for it.
Rudolf Carnap's concept of explication will further help us in this regard, by enlightening the pragmatic requirements of such task.
Lastly, we will briefly present Evald Ilyenkov's notion of 'activity.' We believe that the contradictions which have historically been explored through film have kept themselves circumscribed to the syntactic realm of film-as-medium – itself a symptom of overlooking the semantic aspect of the medium, or its status as a concept. That being the case, it has limited its self-critical possibilities. With this provision, we will suggest film can still be synthetically understood as a dialectical endeavour. Ilyenkovian 'activity' will be held to enable the development of film's self-reflexivity as a concept, while preserving and explicating its status as a plural media.
We hope to show how new critical paths may be forged by realizing a transit between film-as-medium's abstract configurations and film-as-concept's concrete transformations. For this purpose, Tony Conrad's artworks thus appear as pivotal examples of how to implement this movement of thought both in film and the broader context of human theoretical-pratice. That such movement may be implemented between them is the broader aim of this contribution.
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Don't want to sound as a prideful contrarian, but i think this is something extremely out of the canon. A cynical segment of my self rolls their eyes at countless regimentations of Deleuze and Lacan for film studies, juggled indiscriminately almost always to end with a leap that amicably taps Heidegger on the shoulder and push some truism about Being. Or yet another story about cinema saying what Wittgenstein forbid us from. Not that any of the namedropped (except the racist, atavistic prick) are this silly by themselves - it's just that I've never really learned anything from that; i was only made to feel dumb for not understanding it. If the scenario is as methodologically bleak as i'm painting it, wish me luck in getting this approved. If it isn't, well, great! Will gladly stand corrected (already admitting I am generalizing in a possibly very unjust manner). Even if the proposal does not get into the conference, i'm super glad i finally came up with an idea for starting to bridge my future with my past while opening a door into a place i really want to map out.
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