Index of Consciousness

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The nature ofcinema is an elusive concept because so much of what defines cinema issubjective.  Leonardo Da Vinci inventedthe Camera Obscura long before 1588, when Giovanni Battista Della Portaimproved upon the idea with lenses and projection, recommending it as a drawingaid for artists.  This invention hadlimitations; it merely captured the shadow, and later reflection, of objectsoutside the Camera Obscura.  This isquite possibly the birth of moderncinema; however, it is not the moment of cinema’s inception.  Cinema is a complex method of communicationwith roots stretching back in time to the earliest moments of man.  Its technological progress has experiencedexponential growth since Edison and the Lumiere brothers in the 1890s.  Da Vinci’s invention marks an importantmoment in cinema’s history because it is the first time where reality is truly recreated.  Before we could only see images throughfiltered perceptions and the final execution at the hand of an artist.  The Camera Obscura is the first time we areallowed, as viewers, to gaze upon a pure index of reality and use our ownconstructs to perceive.  This inventionfreed the artist from realism as we no longer needed them as interpreters ofreality.  Artists were finally allowed toexperiment with various forms of abstraction and expression.  This paradigm shift, in my opinion, is theroot of the ‘what is cinema’question.  I think artists,photographers, businessmen, and film makers have been fleshing out thisargument ever since.At its core,cinema is about communication or, one might say, storytelling.  When words and gestures alone cannot conveywhat one wishes to articulate, due to nuances of physical and emotionalexperience, something more is necessary. Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams illustrates my point perfectly. In the film Herzog guides us through a newly discovered cave inFrance.  As we discover together it seemswe are unfolding a prehistoric theatre. Each cavern is filled with hand painted scenes, each communicating adifferent story important to primitive man. The layout of the drawings in the cave itself seems to tell astory.  The cave’s story begins byidentifying the authors as human.   Wesee human hand-prints throughout the cave but an entire wall of hand-prints greetus upon entering.  As we go deeper we seestories about the ways animals behave while gathering around a watering hole,probably a great place to catch dinner.There arevarious predators discussed on the cave walls and they seem to increase infrequency the deeper we delve.  That isuntil the final room, full of lions, and in the center above them all is somekind of mystical creature, half bison and half woman.  Perhaps she is the mother of modern man, thebison merging with her as to lift man up and give him advantage over allpredators.  Perhaps the walls teach ushow to use our most powerful tool, our brain, to survive in a volatile world sothat we may carry on our experiences to future generations.This cave was ata type of crossroads for prehistoric man, between Britain, France, andGermany.  Inside there is no evidence ofpeople staying long term, so it does not lead one to believe that people weredecorating their home.  However, there isevidence of humans continually returning to this location, sometimesgenerations apart.  This leads us tobelieve that it is some sort of holy place, maybe a prehistoric college, whichmight explain the continual pilgrimage as well as the maintenance or paintingover of the images by later humans. Herzog points out that the scenes dance in the light of a flame.  I believe Herzog is correct when he pushesus to accept these ideas as possible truths and I agree with the professor inthat this film seems to ask a similar question, why is cinema?  Herzog’s answer seems to be cinema exists sothat we may leave some sort of record, or better communicate and share ourlives with one another.   Also, byinsinuating that these cave paintings are a sort of proto-cinema, we are able toget closer to its definition by stripping away all the technical aspects thatseem to cloud our judgments today.In 1894 Fred P.Ott became the first movie star when Edison filmed him sneezing on cue forKinetoscope Films.  A year after Edisonstarted making his films in the United States, Lumiere Films started up inFrance.  Both studios referred to theirproduct as “actualities” though while the Lumiere brothers thought that theyshould just show things as they are, Edison thought that one should put moreeffort in producing a film that people want to see.  Edison made films about kissing, dancing,muscle men, funny boxing and cockfighting while the Lumiere brothers made filmsabout their workers leaving the factory or a train arriving at a station.  The Lumiere brothers would go as far ascriticizing Edison for misusing the medium and cry out against the moraldegradation it would lead to.  Someoneforgot to mention to the brothers that some of the first films made were smut.Whether theywere wrong or right, this moment lends understanding to the different aestheticchoices made by French and American schools of thought.  European cinema seems to be more concernedwith trying to show reality while American studios have never shied away fromcreating an alternate universe.  Closerexamination of Lumiere films show that the brothers must have made somedirectorial choices.  When watching theworkers leave the factory, I find it hard to believe that all them were dressedin their Sunday best and ignored the film crew on their way out.  These people were working in a factory andhad probably never seen a film crew before, it just isn’t natural.  The brothers must have given their workerssome instruction at least the day before.The only way fora film to be actual is for it tobreak the fourth wall and reveal to the audience that what they see is notreality, but a film.  Otherwise, onemerely uses bits of contrived media to persuade an audience to willfullysuspend their disbelief and live in the reproduction presented before theireyes.  Edison’s films do not announcethat they are films, however, we see actors on sets showing us bits of realitythat we love to look at.  The willfulsuspension of disbelief here is automatic and less demanding as we want to look at and accept those imagesas real.  They are those parts ofconsciousness we love to indulge and long to relive.  The medium was born of our guilty pleasuresbut as time and technology progress, so does the nature of cinema. Andre Bazin says that cinema is the art ofreality fine-tuned by the everlasting human endeavor to preserve life through arepresentation of it.  He references along tradition of preserving the corporeal body through man-maderepresentations.  The religion of ancientEgypt worked diligently to do just this, for those who could afford it.  Egyptians filled their tombs with statues andreliefs of the deceased living on forever in the afterlife.  He also references cave paintings, pointingout that early man would create statues of predator and prey alike and strikethem with spears.  A learning exercise orperhaps a ritual ensuring a successful hunt; either way representation ofreality created to communicate something transcendent of the objectitself.  His final example is Louis XIV,who waived the preservation techniques upon his death because he believed thathis portrait by Lebrun was enough of an afterlife.  While I agree that this human obsession leadsto the duplication of reality I think it was and still is merely the limitedmeans by which we are able to imprint our consciousness.  We have not yet seen total cinema.Bazin points outthat many see cinema as a mingling of economic and technical elements combinedwith the media produced through human endeavor. His genealogical investigation traces its roots to do-it-yourself men,monomaniacs, impulse, and genius industrialists.  Even deeper still we find idealists driven bysomething deeper; men who would light their own furniture ablaze just for aninteresting moving image.  Bazin says,“The myth of Icarus had to wait on the internal combustion engine beforedescending from the platonic heavens. But it dwelt in the soul of every man since he first thought aboutbirds.  To some extent, one could say thesame thing about the myth of cinema, but its forerunners prior to thenineteenth century have only a remote connection with the myth which we sharetoday and which has prompted the appearance of the mechanical arts thatcharacterize today’s world.”I agree withBazin that the what of cinema, 1588 to 2012, is an art formed from the continuedpursuit to replicate reality.  However, Ibelieve the why of cinema is to index our human consciousness and pass it on tofuture generations.  I believe that thiswhy has been a constant.  Therefore,cinema itself is merely an index of consciousness and the methods of imprintare secondary aesthetic choices based in the limitations of time and space. Eachperson is locked inside their heads. We are merely points in a vast sea ofconsciousness.  Men before me becameGods, creating an artificial consciousness that zeros in on parallel worlds andpeople with the intent to communicate something to me. Technologies have changedtime and again but the intent remains the same.Life is a lie.  Film is an imprint of life, therefore, alie.  If one attempts to make a fantasyof the film it is still a lie, however, if one makes a film saying, “based ontrue events,” it then becomes true because it is embracing the fact that lifeitself is a lie.  I think directors like Scorseseand James Cameron embrace the spirit of ever evolving cinema, as Bazin did withthe coming of sound, as they embrace 3D. What is cinema doesn’t really matter in my opinion as long as the why isintact.  Now the cutting edge may be HD3Dbut tomorrow it will be interactive uploads perceived without eyes or ears butfrom within while lying in bed.  Maybesomeday we will not have cinema because we are finally able to see the holy moment continuously demonstrated all around us and within.  That would take some magic technological leapunlike any seen before or some sort of human evolution.  Either way, I am looking forward.