فلسفه سینما؛ گفتگوی نادیا مفتونی و پروفسور دادلی اندرو

به گزارش خبرنگار ردنا (ادیان نیوز)، آنچه از نظر می گذرد مشروح گفتگوی نادیا مفتونی از پژوهشگران پیشکسوت دانشگاه بین المللی ییل و نویسنده کتاب «اقتصاد فرهنگ و رسانه فاضله» و پروفسور دادلی اندرو، نظریه پرداز فیلم پیرامون «فلسفه سینما» در بستر فضای مجازی است؛

خبرنگار: خانم دکتر مفتونی ضمن تشکر از شرکت در این مصاحبه لطفا بفرمایید در گفتگو با پروفسور دادلی اندرو چه موضوعاتی مورد بحث قرار گرفت؟

مفتونی: من هم از توجه شما تشکر می کنم و باید عرض کنم از آنجا که دادلی اندرو استاد ادبیات تطبیقی و نیز استاد مطالعات فیلم در دانشگاه ییل است، اشراف خوبی بر هر دو مقوله سینما و ادبیات و ارتباط این دو دارد. بعلاوه، آثارش تبدیل به منابع درسی رشته های سینمایی در ایران و خیلی از کشورهای دیگر شده و وی را به خوبی می شناسند. طبعا موضوعات مورد گفتگو پیرامون آورده های وی برای این رشته ها و نیز آورده های بنده برای فلسفه هنر به طور کلی و فلسفه سینما به طور خاص بود.

خبرنگار: در گفتگویی که با پروفسور راب ماس از دانشگاه هاروارد داشتید وی به سینمای ایران ابراز علاقه جدی کرده بود. نظر دادلی اندرو درباره سینمای ایران چیست؟

مفتونی: اندرو علاقه تخصصی به سینمای ایران دارد. یعنی سینمای ایران را در کلاسهایش تدریس و تحلیل می کند و علاوه بر سینما، ارتباط شعر و سینمای ایران هم برایش موضوعیت دارد. وی می گوید من فیلمهای ایرانی را در کلاسهای خود تدریس می کنم و به دانشجویانم می گویم باید ارتباط عمیق شعر و سینمای ایران را درک کنند. به لحاظ همین نگاه تحلیلی، دیدگاه های فارابی و نظریاتی که من از فارابی درآورده و تدوین کرده ام برایش مهم بود و موضوع گفتگوهای ادامه داری شد. ما اگر بتوانیم دستاوردهای پژوهشی خود را به اندرو و سایر استادان بزرگ فلسفه هنر جهان منتقل کنیم قطعا استفاده می کنند. مشکل اصلی، ناتوانی در برقراری ارتباط در این سطح عالی و گفتگو با امثال اندرو و انتقال دستاوردهاست. خوشبختانه در دانشکده الهیات دانشگاه تهران، این ارتباط محقق و عملی شده است.

خبرنگار: نظر اندرو راجع به ارتباط شعر وسینمای ایران چیست؟

مفتونی: اندرو به طور کلی درباره سینمای جهان تخصص دارد و کار می کند. در این بین سینمای ایران هم برای بسیار اهمیت دارد. وی عموما سینما را متاثر از رمان می داند اما معتقد است در ایران به جای آنکه رمان بر سینما تاثیر گذاشته باشد، خیلی بیشتر شعر بر سینما نفوذ داشته است. البته ما وارد جزییاتش و بررسی موردی فیلم های ایرانی نشدیم. وی در مصادیق و موارد، بیشتر به تجربیاتی که در زندگی خودش پیش آمده بود و مواجهه با بزرگان سینمای عملی و نظری پرداخت که تجربیات خیلی ویژه ای هم هست. مثلا او با آندره بازن، اورسون ولز و فرانسوا تروفو خاطره دارد و اساسا زندگی خودش به رشته مطالعات فیلم شکل داده است. به قول خودش، با بزرگ شدن او خود به خود مطالعات سینما هم بزرگ شد. وی گفت من کاری نکردم فقط در زمان درست در مکان درست قرار داشتم. البته فروتنی دادلی را نباید نادیده گرفت.

خبرنگار: با تشکر مجدد از خانم دکتر مفتونی، گزیده ای از گفتگوی انگلیسی در اینجا تقدیم می شود.

Andrew: Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to Iranian film scholars and philosophers of art. It’s really a tremendous pleasure. The gracious introduction elevated my position too much, but I am proud of the point I have reached, not because of any special brilliance, but simply by being at the right place at the right time. And that’s what I’m going to talk about: how the development of my own ideas coincided with some of the developments in the field, allowing me to write with occasional effect.

The cinema during the pandemic has been very different from before—people cannot go to movie theaters anymore. I just bought my first large screen television. I have always kept away from high quality home viewing, to encourage myself always to go out to see films. But now I own a new large screen TV to compensate for the closed theaters. Yet those theaters are essential to cinema. Meanwhile TV is making obsolete the two-hour time length that has been standard throughout the history of the art form. But in the home viewing situation, a two-hour feature film is just one option among several other timeslots. TV series can go on for 30 hours or more. There are also very short clips of computer animation, descendants of MTV and music television. Imagine if the cinema encompasses video games as well, and uploads of home movies and perhaps TikTok clips. Then what will be left of the cinematic body that we used to love and cherish and nourish with our attention and our devotion? I believe that just as not every piece of paper that has writing on it can be counted as literature, so not every audio-visual file or clip can be called cinema. This is a philosophical question of nominalism, important for cinema studies to consider. Maybe we need to change our field’s name to “media studies”, if our object has expanded to dissolve films within a much larger audio-visual complex. As my book What Cinema Is! makes clear, such an expansion could be a loss, because there is something specific and special about cinematic art as it evolved to be. Otherwise, our journals might be publishing articles, for instance, such as “best practices for using Zoom.” Of course someone definitely needs to study this and other for increasingly important Audio visual communication phenomena, but don’t such phenomena fit better in the field of sociology, which I know very little about, or in the history of technology, which I know something about. These fields edge up to cinema, but mainly as helpful allied disciplines. I think there is something unique about what we do that can only be done by close attention to the cinema itself, even if I describe cinema as always mixed and impure, amalgamating the arts. I’m suggesting that the disciplines need themselves to be disciplined. This is considered a conservative position to take. I don’t apologize for it. An anthology appeared in December 2020 just this past week, entitled Post-Cinema, from Amsterdam University Press. The article I contributed was put in the lead position, because I effectively accused the book of a self-fulfilling mission, as it was premised on the end of film studies and the start of a new era of post-cinema. This anthology goes on to exemplify, quite provocatively, the expansion of our field’s boundaries beyond cinema, which will indeed hasten its demise.

Andrew: There’s a core at the center of cinema studies, which has to do with the development of film texts as works of art. This definitely includes documentaries, by the way. To grasp what cinema is, we should start with ontogeny. The word comes up in my book What Cinema Is! It is important to me, because it made me realize that André Bazin was an evolutionary thinker. He thought in terms of actual evolution, for he was a student of science as well as the arts. The concept of evolution is visible in every aspect of his thinking. So, when he asks the question “what is cinema?” he did not expect to give a definitive answer, because he believed that cinema grows into what it is going to be, and the growing is not finished yet. Bazin wrote from 1945 to 1958, a period that caused him to play with the idea that cinema’s ontogeny replicated that of any human being, that is, going from birth to death in about a hundred years.

It’s a brilliant insight. In 1953 when he brought up this idea, cinema was about 55 or 60 years old, and it had started to become wise. It was now ready to play a mature role in culture. Before that, cinema had a rambunctious childhood in the very earliest years, and a very strong adolescence when it reached the narrative feature form between 1912 and 1920. In the late silent period it reached the outset of adulthood and then with sound it took on a very important role in society just as adults do when they reach 40 years old, let’s say. This is cinema’s classical period, right around World War II. After that, cinema finally started to attain full maturity and perhaps attain some wisdom. It’s a clever idea, suggesting that cinema had risen to take its place alongside the novel as the most important signpost of culture in the 1950s, something that people would go to for direction, for food-for-thought to help the culture reflect on itself and develop. As a well-educated Frenchman, Bazin thought theater, poetry and painting were timeless and still powerful, but he didn’t believe them to be playing the crucial cultural role that the novel played in in the 20th century particularly. He didn’t think art forms were immutable. Theater had been particularly important in the 19th century in Europe, but in the mid-20th century, the novel was the form that people looked to when they really wanted to talk about where the culture was heading. According to Bazin, cinema after the war had matured to become the equal of the novel in this, even though it had not been so before. Cinema had been robust and popular up to 1940, but it hadn’t had the cultural purchase that it attained when it got to be mature.

Andrew: I want to close my talk by suggesting something more important to me than postmodern spectacle films. It’s not easy to speak to you about this because it involves Persian aesthetics, which you know intimately, but let me hint at what I mean. Like many others, I have been trying to figure out how the cinema is reacting to the new art forms and the new media of our era, including video games. These are likely to produce new forms that the cinema may grow into. Or perhaps, as Bazin speculated, the cinema may just dissolve. But when I teach Iranian films in my class on world cinema, I find that they (and I) respond with wonder and deep feeling to another tendency altogether. I suggest to my students in the U.S. that they need to understand the crucial relationship of cinema to poetry in Iran, as the great tradition of Persian poetry continues thanks to the people who are making and watching such films. The novel may no longer be the key reference point for cinema in the West, but in Iran, poetry does serve as such a reference point. Iran is steeped in a poetic tradition that is far available in the culture in an “everyday” manner, something that is not at all the case in the West. We don’t have a poetic tradition that operates that way. As I understand it, the novel in Iran has had much less impact, almost none until the 1920s or so. Even if the Iranian novel has grown and is a source for some films, the films traveling the festival circuit by the Iranian auteurs who have become crucial to world cinema appear to be poets of cinema more than storytellers

 So, if I’m right about the fact that cinema evolves and grows thanks to its relationship to other art forms, then we can say that world cinema has grown thanks to Persian poetry, at least since the 1980s. Iranian masterworks do tell stories but they are indifferent to a novelistic tradition that, as I just described, is in crisis worldwide. But poetry is not in crisis; it is more resilient and perpetual, especially in Iran. We in the West, in the U.S. and France and Japan at least, recognize the fantastic possibilities of Iranian cinema.

Host: Now, I will give a short introduction to Professor Nadia Maftouni. Nadia has a distinguished background in philosophy and Islamic theology. She specializes in philosophy of art. She’s also an artist herself and she has held many exhibitions all over the world including two exhibitions in Paris in 2004 and 2010. And she’s a professor at the University of Tehran and a senior research scholar at Yale Law School. Her works on medieval philosophy, its effects and its rendering in modern times has been intriguing for many scholars and academicians. Yale’s Bruce Ackerman texted myself about Nadia “Please do send my regards to Professor Maftouni, whose scholarship I greatly admire.” And LSE’s Anthony Giddens texted her “many congrats on your stellar career!” So, Professor Nadia, please!

Maftouni: When I was reading the section of “cinema and perception” from Dudley’s book, Concepts in Film Theory, sprang to my mind to present Farabi’s theory on perception vis-à-vis art. Farabi defines the imaginary perception as including three main jobs: keeping sensory forms, analyzing and synthesizing sensory forms, and using all those forms for metaphor and embodiment. Among the different powers of mind, only imagination is able to portray the sensible as well as intelligible beings. It can even depict the intelligible truths of utter perfection, such as the prime cause and abstract beings. On the other hand, Farabi defines art, poetic speech, singing, and music. In his book on music, he defines art in general as a taste and a talent, combined with an intelligible element, reflecting concepts and imaginings. When describing the features of a poem, he says, “Poetic speeches consist of words that create a mood in the audience, or demonstrate something higher than what it is or below the reality.” He stresses that when we listen to poetic words our imagination creates feelings so real that they resemble our feelings when we look at the objects. In this account, Farabi emphasizes two aspects of the poems: the ability to excite emotions, and the tendency to create strong responses in the imagination.

Also, he divides the arts of singing, music, and poetry into six types: three desirables and three undesirables. Describing desirable arts, or say literature and arts, Farabi focuses on those that produce virtues and happiness in the imagination, as well as those that moderate the emotions. The three kinds of undesirable arts are opposite, working to corrupt thoughts, and produce immoderate qualities and moods. Dealing with singing and music, images, statues, and paintings, Farabi speaks about a few objectives: to create comfort and pleasure, and to forget fatigue and the passage of time; to create different emotions like satisfaction, anger, fear, to name a few; to create imaginary forms; and to enable individuals to understand the meaning of the words that accompany the notes of the song. In short, Farabi focuses on imagination, understanding the intelligible, and emotions, when defining art. And feelings and emotions often originate in their imagination.

The final happiness is the state in which a human being successfully perceives the intelligible, and achieves the nearest possible status to the Active Intellect.

  However, Farabi argues, the public usually don’t follow the intelligible. It is not feasible to speak of or bring into action the particular details of non-sensible beings such as ten intellects. You can only imagine them through analogy, parallelism, or allegory. Moreover, the majority of people are not used to reasoning about the intelligible. In most people, the soul is attracted to the imagination, and the imagination controls the mind. In effect, the proper method for educating the public is transferring images and resemblances of intelligible truths and intelligible happiness into their imagination.

In Farabi’s theory of the imagination, there is a relation between the imagination and intellectual faculty. The imaginary faculties are able to access, the intelligible through imaginary and sensory forms. But since intellectual perception of true happiness is not possible for the public, metaphors do this job.

Farabian artist, that I call philartist, that is, philosopher-artist, she produces intelligible happiness through creating sensory and imaginary forms. So, she shares philosophers in some aspects or some tasks.

Host: The idea is that he talks about projections in mind and the relation to reality, sometimes makes us think that his views and the views of some medieval philosophers are quite related to cinema. Do you find it relevant, Professor Andrew, to connect those ancient ideas of people who couldn’t imagine that there is going to be such a medium? Do you find it relevant connecting those ideas with the medium of cinema?

Andrew: Very relevant and excited to learn about Farabi. I knew just tiniest things about him and so I will now look much more deeply into him.