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Three Philosophical Filmmakers: Hitchcock, Wells, Renoir

by Irving Singer
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004
312pp., illus. 4 b/w. Trade, $32.95
ISBN: 0-262-19501-1.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

Irving Singer analyses the writings and films of Hitchcock, Wells and Renoir in order to reveal what they have to say about the human condition. He does not argue that these film-makers were philosophers or that they consciously sought to "do" philosophy through the act of film-making. His thesis is that because they were great artists, they expressed a worldview that is worthy of sustained examination because of what it tells us about what it is to be human. Naturally, this approach requires a careful selection of directors as only those who can justifiably merit the description "auteur" will have been able to express their personal world view through such a complex and labour intensive creative process such as film. His chosen directors are also theorists who have left behind a considerable legacy of written works and interviews that Singer interrogates. Finally, Singer has chosen these three directors because, he maintains, in their work the distinction between meaning and technique is dissolved. It is Singer's belief that "various problems of aesthetics and ontology disintegrate once we recognise the extensive interdependence between meaning and technique".

When examining the work of each director, Singer starts with their writings and recorded comments on their films and their views about the process of making a film. His approach is one of sceptical enquiry, and Singer accomplishes far more than simply summarising the directors' views. He sometimes takes issue with them and shows how they were making glib remarks in order to deflect real analysis of their work. In some cases he also contrasts their films with remakes such as Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Hitchcock's Psycho. Singer shows how the formal methods of Hitchcock, which were integral to his vision, do not achieve anything like the same status in Van Sant's work.

Singer spends very little time on descriptions of the plots of the films he examines. He does, however, draw on the writings of many film theorists. His analysis of both the films and the directors' words is lucid and rigorous and expressed in precise language. His analysis of Bazin's woolly thinking in "The Myth of Total Cinema" and "The Ontology of the Photographic Image" is outstanding. Singer writes that Bazin "thought that the camera presents us with the very being of any object whose appearance it records" and shows how Bazin recognises "the role of epiphany in the creation and enjoyment of film". This, he explains, is a Joycean concept expressed in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where Joyce applied it to film and photography too, not only literature. Epiphany, writes Joyce, is when "its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance… The object achieves its epiphany". Singer goes on to trace back the genealogy of the concept beyond Joyce to Santayana and Aquinas.

Singer further develops this line of analysis in the chapter on Renoir where he examines Renoir's ideas about technology. Both Bazin and Renoir, Singer argues, believed that technology can advance man's quest for profound contact with nature and his desire to know the material world. Singer draws on Hegel and Bergson in showing how Renoir understood technology in two different ways. On the one hand, it could lead to an inhuman search for perfection, but, on the other hand, in the context of cinematic art its limitations can be a stimulus to creativity and innovation. In the latter context, technology can further develop and advance what is human when it remains subordinate to a human goal. Here Singer returns to his argument that dissolving the distinction between form and content simultaneously dissolves various aesthetic and ontological problems.

This book will interest anyone interested in Hitchcock, Wells and Renoir because Singer has new and interesting things to say about each of them. It will be of interest to anyone looking at realist and formalist theories of film, and it deserves a place on most Film Studies courses because of the wonderful clarity of language and precision of thought which Singer brings to the study of film.

 

 

 




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