The Being of Entities in the World

An important section of Heidegger’s Being and Time is his treatment of the “Being of the Entities Encountered in the Environment”, for the point of view taken here greatly affects the tenor of the entire work. Heidegger sees as fundamental to Dasein’s being-in-the-world what is called concern. In our everyday dealings in the world, that which is not characteristic is dealing which grasps and manipulates entities in the environment rather than merely perceives their existence. Thus the analysis is that of these entities so encountered, rather than any abstractly postulated entities of nature. This analysis is in keeping with the phenomenological approach, but it fundamentally affects our eventual attitudes. The central theme is the concern of Dasein – it is that which constitutes the encounter with entities. Thus Heidegger says:

“The achieving of phenomenological access to the entities which we encounter, consists rather in thrusting aside our interpretative tendencies, which keep thrusting themselves upon us and running along with us, and which conceal not only the phenomenon of such ‘concern’, but even more those entities themselves as encountered of their own in our concern with them. “ [1]

Entities that Dasein encounters in its concern are called equipment, but Dasein is not thematically aware of this “equipmentality”. Rather, the nature of the encounter is termed readiness-to-hand.

“The ready-to-hand is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself the sort of thing that circumspection takes proximally as a circumspective theme”. [2]

The important thing here is that the entities encountered are not simply brute-existent (present-at-hand) which are injected with the quality of readiness-to-hand by Dasein. This would imply that the entities are first encountered as present-at-hand and are later provided with the characteristics of readiness-to-hand. But Heidegger insists on maintaining the priority of readiness-to-hand. Heidegger introduces phenomenologically the concept of present-at-hand entities with the idea of unusability. When an entity presents itself as unusable (e.g. when it is damaged), its unreadiness-to-hand presents itself. Likewise when a utensil is missing for some project or when one obstructs the completion of a project, the unreadiness-to-hand is manifest. The unready-to-hand utensil, which is normally used to bring about the completion of a project, is suddenly unable to function in this way. When a hammer is broken, it immediately presents itself as incapable of hammering. Now, before the particular reason for the malfunction is observed, that is, at the moment when only its incapability for being used to further the project is noticed, then it is apparent that presence-at-hand lies behind the readiness-to-hand. This does not mean that presence-at-hand is more fundamental.

“This presence-at-hand of something that cannot be used is still not devoid of all readiness-to-hand whatsoever; equipment which is present-at-hand in this way is still just a thing which occurs somewhere.” [3]

It seems that readiness-to-hand maintains its priority. The damage to the equipment is still not a mere alteration of a thing – not a change of properties which just occurs in something present-at-hand” [4] Thus we are not observing pure presence-at-hand. The development seems to suggest that presence-at-hand is related phenomenally to thematic awareness of readiness-to-hand. Heidegger observes on this point that

“the presence-at-hand of entities is thrust to the fore by the possible breaks in that referential totality in which circumspection ‘operates’; how are we to get a closer understanding of this totality?” [5]

A footnote to this sentence in the text explains that in the earlier editions of the book, the word for readiness-to-hand was used instead of that for presence-at-hand. Thus Heidegger, himself, must have thought that the thematic awareness of readiness-to-hand brings about the concept of presence-at-hand.

Thus we are given two kinds of being of entities in the world, which are to a certain extent cofundamental (to Heidegger):

1. The Being of those entities within-the-world which we proximally encounter – readiness-to-hand;
2. The Being of those entities which we can comes across and whose nature we can determine if we discover them in their own right by going through the entities proximally encountered – presence-at-hand. [6]

If we again examine these concepts on the ontic level, we can more fully see the argument. All entities encountered in our concern are ready-to-hand instruments. Thus a pencil is seen as a writing implement – that which will serve to complete the project of writing. It can also be seen as a piece of wood that will burn, or a light object that can be thrown. No matter how it is encountered, it is seen as a utensil of some sort. One might argue that the idea that the pencil is the same thing in all of these situations is lost. But that is the point: the entity is a utensil, not a thing-in-itself. If an unreadiness-to-hand doesn’t appear (a broken pencil), then there is no awareness of the pencil as a thing other than its function in the given project. Of course we can reflect upon the single pencil as something to be used for many different projects, but it is still always in terms of some readiness-to-hand. When a pencil is perceived as broken, it is still perceived in a ready-to-hand way. It must be discarded, repaired, or ignored, but it always seen in terms of its readiness-to-hand.

The question now arises, where does presence-at-hand come in? When we look at a rock, we see it as ready-to-hand. As soon as we see it as a “rock”, it is assigned to the referential totality of ready-to-hand entities. Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel, La Nausée, depicts Antoine Roquentin as overpowered with a feeling of nausea when he reflectively observes a root in a park. Roquentin becomes aware that there is something beyond the root as it is perceived in all of its referential connotations.

“‘This is a root’ – it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was . . . below all explanation.” [7]

However, I do not think that Roquentin is nauseated because he perceives the presence-at-hand of the root. Rather he is nauseated precisely because he can’t. No matter how he looks at the root, he is overwhelmed with the mental abyss staring at him when he tries to penetrate to the presence-at-hand of the root – the existence of which can be postulated but never perceived. Everything that is perceived, every situation, is perceived in terms of antecedents and consequences. This suggests Heidegger’s concernful Being of Dasein and the category of cause-and-effect for Kant. This quality of antecedents and consequences is characteristic of all human knowledge, because it is rooted in human perception. If the ready-to-hand entity is perceived in terms of antecedents and consequence, then this is the being constitutive of it. The pencil is seen in terms of making a blank piece of paper full of writing. The future situation of a paper full of writing dominates here.

If ready-to-hand entities (all entities perceived) are in terms of antecedents and consequences, then the essential element of these entities is time. Time is the succession of events. When an environmental situation changes to another situation, time has elapsed. Thus an entity which is thought of in terms of antecedents and consequences has time as its constitutive element. Heidegger, himself, suggests this in his analysis of care and temporality:

“Coming back to itself futurally, resoluteness brings itself into the situation by making present. The character of ‘having been’ arises from the future, and in such a way that the future which ‘has been’ (or better, which ‘is in the process of having been’) releases from itself the present. This phenomenon has the unity of a future which makes present in the process of having been; we designate it as ‘temporality’. Only in so far as Dasein has the definite character of temporality, is the authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole of anticipatory resoluteness, as we have described it, made possible for Dasein itself. Temporality reveals itself as the meaning of authentic care.” [8]

Here, however, I believe that temporality arises from the idea of the ready-to-hand. The thesis of temporality being constitutive of readiness-to-hand is entirely consistent with Heidegger’s conception of time (above). That is, the present is the past projecting into the future.

As we noted earlier, presence-at-hand is not immediately encounterable for Dasein. Yet Heidegger suggests that pure science is handled in terms of presence-at-hand. He points out that the concern attendant upon any encounter with a ready-to-hand entity precludes the possibility of mathematical functionalizaton. Thus he says,

“By reason of their Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more, these latter entities can have their ‘properties’ defined mathematically in ‘functional concepts.’ Ontologically, such concepts are possible only in relation to entities whose Being has the character of pure substantiality. Functional concepts are never possible except as formalized substantial concepts.” [9]

This, however, is not consistent with our concepts of entities. Presence-at-hand is pure substantiality without the ascription of any properties, no matter now formal. All functional concepts are eventually relatable back to some sensory perception, whether it is the reading of a meter, hearing a buzzer, or seeing an image. This must be so in order to have experimental verification of scientific theories. As areas of knowledge become more sophisticated, they may seem to be more fundamental, but they all eventually go back to some empirical observation – this observation being exclusively of ready-to-hand entities. The physical theory is then a complex organizational framework of ready-to-hand things, and it, too, is ready-to-hand. As the quest for fundamental particles in physics becomes more and more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly evident that the theories are mere mathematical tools which seem to eliminate the need for the idea of a present-at-hand entity. That is, there are no longer discrete entities in modern theory, but just a vast space-time continuum with wave-like peaks and valleys which appear to be entities to our senses in the macroscopic world. This only indicates that present-at-hand entities are in no way necessary for physical speculation, even for "fundamental particles” of nature. Even physicists no longer believe that they are dealing with present-at-hand entities – that is what the “revolution in physics” is al about. Physical theories are seen only as mathematical interrelations of sets of data that are valid only in so far as their empirical predictability is successful. Thus physics and all other realms of knowledge are exclusively thought of in terms of the ready-to-hand.

What, then, is presence-at-hand? It is a kind of dimension characteristic of utensils. Since it can only be phenomenologically approached by the observance of an unreadiness-to-hand, this idea seems justified. If all the readiness-to-hand were to be removed from an entity, we would have its presence-hand. This can only be thought of logically, since when a certain readiness-to-hand is seen absent from an entity (an unreadiness-to-hand appears), then a new and different readiness-to-hand will show itself to Dasein’s consciousness. If we were to reflect on the utensil, we could approach presence-at-hand as a logical limit by contemplating the removal of all readiness-to-hand. In precisely the same way the concept of infinity is a logical limit, that is, it’s sum can never really be conceived, but by successive addition of units, we can approach infinity as a limit.

It seems quite possible that presence-at-hand is not unlike pure aesthetic speculation. This would suggest, if the foregoing is accepted, that pure aesthetic speculation, i.e. a purely aesthetic encounter of anything, is completely impossible, but that the idea may be approached as a limit.
Thus he who pursues the aesthetic way of life can never really achieve a fully aesthetic experience, and thus full aesthetic satisfaction is impossible – only nausea is the result.

The world seen as strictly utensils can lead to many ethical implications in view of the fact that the future dominates the outlook of the individual (“The Primary phenomenon of primordial and authentic temporality is the future.” [10]) The duty of man is then centered around projects that are continually set before him. Many of these implications are carried out in great detail by the Utilitarian philosophers, such as Dewey.

The important point is that central to Heidegger’s thesis is the idea that entities of the world are all encountered as utensils, and this fact can override other less fundamental tenets when implications of his philosophy are being considered.

Notes:

1. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (1962), Harper & Row, p. 96.
2. Ibid., p. 99.
3. Ibid., p. 103.
4. Ibid., p. 103.
5. Ibid., p. 107.
6. Ibid., p. 121.
7. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (1938), translated by Lloyd Alexander (1959), p. 174.
8. Heidegger, op. cit., p. 374.
9. Ibid., p. 122.
10. Ibid., p. 378.

Phenomenology and “Red Desert”

Film critic Stanley Kauffman relates the following conversation that took place over dinner with Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti during his visit to Rome in 1964, prior to the release of Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964):

“After an hour or so of chat as animated as my Italian will permit, I ask, ‘Well, what about Red Desert? Antonioni smiles broadly, makes a sweeping gesture, and announces with the self-satire of the confident, ‘Un film stupendo!’” [1]

This was another instance of Antonioni’s spare but remarkably revealing comments concerning his own work, for critical reaction in this country has generally been one of stupefaction. There can be no doubt that behind the film is a great degree of cinematic control and seriousness of purpose, but there appears to be confusion as to what Antonioni is actually getting at. His three previous films had been thin in terms of the narrative content but rich in terms of the depth of the interpersonal relationships. Red Desert on the other hand, lacks even the substance of human relationships. John Simon was thus moved to write that

“the color is so eloquent and thought-provoking that it emphasizes the vacuousness of what it envelops: plot, character, dialogue.” [2]

Similarly Dwight MacDonald observed that

“the thinness of the subject matter . . . contrasts with the brilliance with which it is expressed to the eye. . . And the farther he goes in that direction [towards abstraction] without giving up the conventional kind of plot, as in his last two films, the more obtrusive is the discrepancy between the feebleness of what he has to say and the cinematic power with which he says it.” [3]

When one embarks upon the expedition of exegesis, all sorts of objections are immediately raised – particularly in connection with a visual artist like Antonioni. One is warned that the work of art is just there – take it or leave it. The feeling is that the expository analysis is ultimately reductionist and that to intellectualize a work of art is to rob it of its aesthetic mode of communication. To this feeling I am sympathetic, inasmuch as I agree that Antonioni’s film is not overtly symbolic; it does not stand for something else. Yet for one to integrate one’s experience of viewing Red Desert with his other experiences, a certain amount of analysis and systematization is necessary. Therefore my comments concerning Red Desert are to be directed not so much in terms of an explanation (or, at least, in the commonly understood sense of that word) but more in terms of an aid to relating the experience of watching Red Desert to other modes of experience.

There have been typically two ways of interpreting Red Desert. The first, and one that was seized upon by those with a generally Marxist critical disposition, was to view the film as an attack on modern society and as a condemnation of the ravages wreaked upon man by modern technology. This critical approach was refuted by Antonioni just after the film's release when he was interviewed by Jean Luc Godard:

“It simplifies things too much (as many have done) to say that I accuse this inhuman, industrialized world in which the individual is crushed and led to neurosis. My intention, on the contrary, . . . was to translate the beauty of this world, in which even the factories can be beautiful.” [4]

The second manner in which this film has been considered is as a psychological case study of a neurotic girl. While this is ostensibly true, it is not particularly fruitful to think of the film in terms of psychology as it is conventionally practiced. Neither of these approaches is without some validity, but they fail to recognize the extent to which Red Desert probes the fundamental nature of experience. I suggest, instead, that Red Desert be looked upon as a cinematic exploration of the phenomenology of perception. In particular, certain ideas of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Martin Heidegger can be perceived within the cinematic structure of Antonioni’s film, and these ideas lie outside the realm of traditional film-critical categories.

The breakthrough associated with Kierkegaard was the understanding of the opposition between what is called “essence” and “existence”. That is, a thing’s essence is that which determines it and distinguishes it from others; existence is that which distinguishes the thing from nothing. Existence is that which brings the thing to realization; essences are interrelations, a thing’s essence relates it to other things. In this way a system of essences can be contemplated by the mind entirely separate from existence – an abstract, universal, timeless systems of inactive essences. Modern philosophy from Descartes onward has had a strong bias towards essentialism, and this was culminated in the Hegelian system. It was Kierkegaard who recognized that philosophy concentrated exclusively on essentialism was incapable of accounting for individuation, contingency, time, and will –

“What confuses the whole doctrine about being in logic is that people do not notice that they are always operating with the ‘concept’ existence. But the concept existence is an ideality and the difficulty is, of course, whether existence can be reduced to a concept. . .

But Existence corresponds to the individual things, the individual, which even Aristotle teaches lies outside or least cannot be reduced to a concept. . . an individual man has not, after all, a conceptual existence.” [5]

Thus it was that by considering the concrete nature of existence, which he felt Hegelianism overlooked, Kierkegaard introduced the related idea of nothingness. This attack on Hegelianism was and is of considerable consequence simply because most of the established thought patterns of the present age are founded upon Hegel’s thought. In particular all the social sciences are rooted in Hegelian essentialism, and this is especially significant for an existential critic of essentialism like Kierkegaard, who would charge that it is precisely in the social sphere that the scientific method of essentialism is inadequate. In other words the scientific method applied to objects in the world may have its uses, but it does not render an accurate accounting of our experiences of objects nor of our experience of each other – each of which can only be adequately dealt with by a philosophy that considers existence as well as essence. The breakdown of classical philosophy has, say the existential critics, brought about a mass neurosis, causing people to be regarded as dehumanized conceptual quantities and leaving the individual with a feeling of homelessness and boredom. It is this malaise that Antonioni has dealt with in Red Desert, and the psychotic condition of Giuliana is an externalization of that which is implicitly present in a great number of troubled souls.

It is now evident why the above-mentioned conventional critical approaches to Red Desert are inadequate. A Marxist attack on modern capitalistic technology is founded on Hegelian principles and thus is still essentialist. Similarly a psychological case study is a social scientific treatment that also remains within the confines of pure essentialism. Antonioni’s film, however, is existentialist, and thus of a different nature altogether. [6]

Now to express the idea of existence opposed to essence verbally is difficult, since it is the nature of language to deal with essences. For example the word “tree” does not do justice to this tree, and, in fact, no matter how detailed I become in my description of this tree I can never adequately convey the this-ness, as it were, of the tree. Nevertheless post-Kierkegaardians, like Sartre and Heidegger, have invested great effort to express their philosophies, which involve important ontological distinctions, in terms of written language [7]. Consider the following passages from Sartre’s novel, Nausea:

I lean my hand on the seat, but pull it back hurriedly: it exists. This thing I’m sitting on, leaning my hand on, is called a seat. They made it purposely for people to sit on, they took leather, springs, and cloth, and they went to work with the idea of making a seat, and when they finished, that was what they had made. The had carried it here, into this car, and the car is now rolling and jolting with its rattling windows, carrying this red thing in its bosom. I murmur: “It’s a seat,” a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing. It stays what it is, with its red plush, thousands of little red paws in the air, all still, little dead paws. This enormous belly turned upward, bleeding, inflated – bloated with all its dead paws, this belly floating in this car, in this grey sky, is not a seat. It could just as well be a dead donkey tossed about in the great grey river, a river of floods; and I could be sitting on the donkey’s belly, my feet dangling in the clear water. Things are divorced from their names. They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous to call them seats or say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things. Alone, without words, defenseless, they surround me, are beneath me, behind me, above me. . . . .

[later] I’m in the park. I drop into a bench between great black tree-trunks, between the black, knotty hands reaching towards the sky. A tree scrapes at the earth under my feet with a black nail. I would so like to let myself go, forget myself, sleep. But I can’t, I’m suffocating: existence penetrates me everywhere, through the eyes, the nose, the mouth . . .

And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.
. . .

So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, lone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision.

It left me breathless. Never, until these last few days, had I understood the meaning of “existence.” . . when I believed I was thinking about it, I must believe that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word, “to be”. Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belongs to the class of green objects, or that the green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things, I was miles from dreaming that they existed: they looked like scenery to me. . . . And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder – naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.

I kept myself from making the slightest movement, but I didn’t need to move in order to see, behind the trees, the blue columns and the lamp-posts of the bankstand and the Velleda in the midst of a mountain of laurel. All these objects . . . How can I explain? They inconvenience me: I would have liked them to exist less strongly, more dryly, in a more abstract way, with more reserve. The chestnut tree pressed itself against my eyes. Green rust covered it half-way up; the bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather . . .

. . .

In the way: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed. Of these relations (which I insisted on maintaining in order to delay the crumbling of the human world, measures, quantities, and directions) – I felt myself to be the arbitrator; they no longer had their teeth into things. . . .

. . .

In vain to repeat: “this is a root” – it didn’t work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was . . . below all explanation. . .

. . .

Suspicious: that’s what they were, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. When they ran quickly under your nose like startled hares and you didn’t pay too much attention, you might believe them to be simple and reassuring, you might believe that there was real blue in the world, real read, a real perfume of almonds or violets. But as soon as you held on to them for an instant, this feeling of comfort and security gave way to a deep uneasiness: colours, tastes, and smells were never real, never themselves and nothing but themselves. The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart. . . . But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city, and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float. . . .
. . .

I was no longer in Bouville, I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I new it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being. . . I shouted, “filth! what rotten filth!”, and shook myself to get ride of this sticky filth, but it held fast, and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness. [8]

Sartre is striving to describe a particular manner of perceiving entities, a particular awareness with which essentialism cannot cope. The character Roquentin’s feeling of nausea in Sartre’s novel is almost exactly mirrored by Giuliana’s anxiety in Red Desert. The threatening forces are not those of “technology”, but just things-in-themselves. The refuse in front of which Giuliana eats her sandwich in an early scene is not to be viewed as industrial waste, but as undefined, unexplained matter, analogous to the black root of Roquentin’s chestnut tree. And, in fact, Antonioni’s effort to bring us to Giuliana’s perceptual state by the use of cinematography is more directly successful than Sartre’s, since Sartre can only appeal to our recollections of possibly similar experiences when he expresses himself in words.

One of the techniques Antonioni used was to shoot much of the film in which Giuliana's perspective is in focus with very long (in focal length) lenses. This created a very short depth of field that results in several psychological effects. For one thing it is closer to our actual visual perception, since only a small part of what we take in in a glance is in focus. Moreover the objects that are seen out of focus tend to lose the specific functionality that we usually associate with them. When objects are seen out of focus, their outlines fuzzy and their colors blending in with color of neighboring objects, they begin to lose their conventional identities and become abstract entities. In the previously mentioned interview with Godard, Antonioni commented on the relation of Red Desert to his previous films,

“It is a less realistic film, from a figurative point of view. That is to say, it is realistic in a different way. For example, I used the telescopic lens a great deal in order not to have a deep focus, which is for good reason an indispensable element of realism. What interests me now is to place the character in contact with things, for it is things, objects, and materials that have weight today.” [9]

Thus it is not surprising that Red Desert lacks depth in its presentation of interpersonal relationships. What are significant are Giuliana’s relationship with and awareness of things – even the faces of actors like Richard Harris are deliberately muted and de-emphasized in relation to the surroundings.

Another technique Antonioni used to represent the altered consciousness was his manipulation of color. This is the most celebrated aspect of the film, but critics err when they assume that Antonioni was trying to create dynamic colorist painting. As he himself says:

“There is, in this film, no pictorial research at all; we are far from painting, it seems to me. . . . Moreover, I had never thought about color in itself. The film was born in colors, but I always thought, first of all, of the thing to be said – this is natural – and thus aided the expression by means of the color. I never thought: I’m going to put a blue next to a maroon.” [10]

The use of color was specifically intended to enhance the perceptual awareness of things. The bright, pure colors serve to detach things from their conventional environment and create new, abstract relationships with other unrelated colored objects.

Perhaps the most significant of Antonioni’s techniques was his treatment of screen kinetics. This effect necessitates on the part of the viewer a continuous struggle to orient himself with respect to the depicted environment. Elliptical action and oblique camera angles are employed not to emphasize dramatic moments but as a continuous condition of perceptual reality. An illustrative scene is the visit of Corrado and Giuliana to the radar installation [11]. A long row of skeletal radio telescope towers is the primary background material, and the viewer is continuously forced to orient the camera position and the characters with respect to his knowledge of the tower geometry. During the visit several important changes of position by the characters are omitted by Antonioni. Thus the struggle with orientation with respect to these huge, abstract edifices is forced upon the viewer, bringing him in greater sympathy with Giuliana’s struggling awareness of things. In addition Antonioni frequently uses slow disclosure by beginning a scene with a detail of an object. In almost every case the object is not seen for what it normally is, but as a quasi-abstract form. When asked by Godard about this practice, Antonioni explained that

“It’s a way of approaching the character in terms of things rather than by means of her life. Her life, basically interests me only relatively.” [12]

This is an extremely revealing statement, for it emphasizes the difference between Antonioni’s approach and the typically essentialist approach of a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst would be interested in nothing but her life – except that it would be considered in terms of conceptual events. The uniqueness of her perceptual awareness would be overlooked, and it is precisely this with which Antonioni is concerned.

I have so far only mentioned the visual stylistics with which Antonioni expressed himself, but of course the characters reveal themselves by what they say as well. Ugo, Giuliana’s husband, is a kindly person, but is also the ultimate technician. As such he can be thought of as purely essentialist. A characteristic moment for him is when he shows his son the spinning yellow toy. As an explanation of the toy’s behaviour, Ugo explains that it has a gyroscope in it, the same kind things used to steer ships. This is an utterly reductionist statement, reducing things to concepts. Though the statement is correct, one feels annoyed, given the context within the film, with the complacent disregard for existence implicit in the statement. Immediately afterwards, there is a cut to a large ship, and the visual impact of it seems to bring out the poverty of Ugo’s description. Giuliana, as already stated, is extremely sensitive to and feels threatened by the existence of the concrete other, just as Roquentin did in Nausea. She tells a Turkish sailor, “if you prick me, you don’t suffer,” thereby trying to convey her feeling of separateness and isolation. At another point she says to Corrado,

“The sea is never still. I can’t look at the sea for long and not lose interest in what happens on land.”

The sea is for her not a symbol or metaphor but an ever-changing, impossible to pin down “thing”. For her it is analogous to the chestnut tree root that brings on the “nausea”, since its uncategorizable nature thrusts its existence upon Giuliana’s consciousness.

Giuliana’s story that she tells her son is further elaboration of her psyche. The entire scene is shot in bright Hollywood style "technicolor”, the depth of field is increased to that of typical films, and the screen kinetics are completely straightforward. The viewer has to do none of the struggling with reality that is necessary in the other scenes; one feels very comfortable with the environment depicted. This scene acts to convey Giuliana’s romantic yearnings for her formerly naive, untroubled consciousness that was at home in the world. All the colors belong to nature, they seem to belong, as opposed to Giuliana’s real life where colors seem to force themselves on one’s awareness. Rocks are seen not as brute existences, but in terms of human forms. The world has an existence for her – it even sings to her. But this feeling of oneness with the world is only fable; it is not possible in her real existence.

The character of Corrado is somewhat problematical. He appears discontented with his existence and feels a sympathy for Giuliana’s problems. At one point he says to her,

“You wonder what to look at, and I wonder where to live. It’s the same thing.”

In fact it’s not the same thing at all. Giuliana’s sensitivity is more developed than his. Corrado is primarily an essentialist who feels that by sufficient manipulation of the external world of objects he can eventually find fulfillment. He wishes to have adventures, like his expedition to Patagonia, hoping that change of his external environment will bring about satisfaction. Giuliana contrasts her own feelings with his when she tells him, “If I were to leave, I’d take everything.” That is to say, the few things with which she has managed to feel somewhat comfortable (as opposed to the great mass of objects by which she feels threatened) are indispensable. She must cling to them as a means of protection. Corrado, the essentialist, living in a world devoid of content is constantly looking for the external stimulus. Giuliana, on the other hand lives in a world too full of existence. She would like somehow to demystify and humanize her surroundings.

In the final scene Giuliana tells her son that birds survive by learning not to go near the poison waste gas of the plant. In other words she is resolving to be like everybody else. While this may be the advisable course for someone who is on the brink of insanity, the larger questions concerning the inadequacy of our conventional thought patterns to deal with existence are left unanswered. Is the lesson we are to learn from Roquentin and Giuliana that to see beyond the veil leads to madness? Perhaps so, as long as madness is defined in terms of the conventional thought patterns. At any rate the extraordinary thing about Red Desert is that it deals with profound aspects of existence in an immediate fashion. It concerns the phenomenology of perception and expresses itself by means of perception. The gestalt psychologist Rudolph Arnheim has made studies to show that all thinking is structurally similar to visual perception, and “truly productive thinking in whatever area of cognition takes place in the realm of imagery” [13]. If this is true, then Red Desert may be a more direct and unadulterated presentation of existential ideas of Sartre than that philosopher’s own writing was.

Notes:

1. Kauffman, S., A World on Film, Dell (1966), p. 407.
2. Simon, J., Private Screenings, Berkeley (1967), p. 177.
3. Macdonald, D., On Movies, Berkeley (19600, PP. 375-376.
4. Sarris, A., (ed.), Interviews with Film Directors, Avon (1967), p. 23.
5. Kierkegaard, S., The Journals of Soren Kierkegaard, Oxford (1938), p. 147.
6. I have taken the pains to specify what I mean by “existentialist”, since casual usage has undermined its meaning.
7. In fact Heidegger came to despair of the possibility of conventional language to express the ultimate nature of existence and turned his attention to poetry as a possible avenue. Perhaps he might have profitably considered the film medium.
8. Sartre, J.-P., Nausea, New Directions (1964), pp. 168-181.
9. Sarris, A., op. cit., pp. 28-29.
10. Ibid., p. 30.
11. "The Visit to the Radar Station in Red Desert", The Film Sufi (2010), http://www.filmsufi.com/2010/09/visit-to-radar-installation-in-red.html.
12. Ibid., p. 28.
13. Arnheim, R., Visual Thinking, U. of California (1969), p. v.

Cinematic Expression in "L’Avventura"

The mark of an outstanding creative work is its accessibility to multiple critical points of view. Such is the case of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, which has been generally recognized as one of the most important films of the 60's, but has not generated a consensus of opinion as to its interpretation. This is not to say that the various critical interpretations contradict each other so much as that they seem to emphasize different ideas with regard to what is central and what is peripheral to the film’s meaning.

There is no question that the film seems to mean something, even if it is the meaninglessness of human existence. For though the film concerns primarily the relationship between Sandro and Claudia, the departure from conventional narrative style and the suggestiveness of the visual imagery convey a notion of larger significance. Generally critical opinion has fallen into several main categories concerning L’Avventura’s ultimate theme:

1. that it is an attack on the depravity and uselessness of the upper middle class in Italy,
2. that it is a condemnation of the obsolete moral values and ethical ideals of the bourgeoisie,
3. that it is an examination of the impossibility of human communication or love in the present age, and
4. that it is an investigation into the changing, and perhaps inverting, roles of men and women in modern society.

Obviously these categories are somewhat arbitrary and far from mutually independent, but they will serve for the present purpose. Thematic categories (1) and (2) focus on a social context and seem to draw on the knowledge that Antonioni had a Marxist background. (3) is concerned more with the individual, while (4) exists on the level of social psychology. My own feeling is that the third position comes closest to being the central issue, with the second and fourth being inferences to be drawn from it. However the first position is less closely connected with Antonioni’s expressed intent in view of the following passage quoted from Hollis Alpert:

"The film has been interpreted as a study of corruption among members of a certain group of upper-class Italians. I questioned Antonioni on this, and found that this was not his purpose. 'The people were members of the upper class,' he said, 'because I did not want to explain how they make their living, or why it is that have so much time to do the things they do.'” [1]

At any rate what is most in terest5ing about L’Avventura is the cinematic means with which Antonioni conveys his notions. He is able to convey in purely visual terms some rather abstract ideas about human relationship, and he does so with a succinctness and directness that goes beyond the powers of verbal expression. The principal psychological effect which Antonioni achieves cinematically and around which he is able to build his structure is alienation. I mean this not in the Marxist sense (a source of possible confusion) but in the existential sense. By the appropriate use of sound, pacing, and visual arrangements, Antonioni is able to get across to the viewer an idea which, though fundamental to human consciousness, was not conspicuously present in the film idiom – that a person’s consciousness is continually shifting back and forth between a state of direct involvement with one’s surroundings and a state of self-conscious reflection. The awareness of self and its concomitant reification of the external world has been felt by many to be one of the central problems of 20th century philosophy. For the objectification of external reality enables us to conceptualize and manipulate it, but at the same time the world is devitalized, and we are left alone, isolated, alienated. The state of alienation h as enabled Western man to build the modern world, but it has also left him with a feeling of not being at home in it – he has fallen from grace. Thus it is constant transitions between I-THOU and I-IT relationships, as it were, that figure fundamentally in Antonioni’s mode of expression.

Naturally, the state of alienation is inimical to that of love. Alienation brings along with it greater power of analysis and thus capacity for action. Opposed to this freedom wrought by alienation is the desire to free oneself of responsibility – the desire to merge one’s consciousness and being with that of another human being. This desire to lose one’s identity and merge with another person is not necessarily romantic love, which is a fairly complex and historical idea. For some people it may just be the erotic impulse. But whatever is the true nature of love, it is affected significantly and momentarily in an individual by his relative state of alienation.

Now the first and foremost question concerning a transition in or out of a psychological state of alienation is, what makes it happen? How does it happen who makes it happen? To answer that question necessitates revealing the extent to which one is a mechanical determinist, but there can scarcely be any question that the initial stimuli for such psychological states of mind occur as external events. Thus the surroundings in which one finds oneself can have, as we all have experienced, profound effects on one’s consciousness. Antonioni has take this idea as a starting point for the making of his films. He says that

“in general, I decide upon the outdoor locations before writing the script. . . . There are times too when an idea for a film comes to me from a particular place.” [2]

Thus the arrangement of the environment in an Antonioni films has a direct effect on the action and is not merely a metaphorical reflection of it. Throughout L’Avventura there are landscapes which seem to dominate the individual characters. First there is the barren volcanic island, Lisca Bianca, which sets the stage for Anna’s original disappearance, and by virtues of its harsh conditions, forces Claudia and Sandro to come closer together. Next Claudia and Sandro find themselves alone in a deserted village. The vicious environment of the island has given way to a state of environmental passivity and timelessness. At another point Sandro, wandering through the grand piazza of Noto, looks at the baroque architecture of the bell tower and is reminded of his betrayal of his youthful ideals about architecture. He deliberately knocks over a bottle of ink on a young man’s architectural drawing of the tower, causing a black swath to spread across the drawing. During the ensuing altercation, Sandro looks up to see black row of seminarians filing out of the bell tower. In the final scene, with Claudia’s illusion of love crushed by Sandro’s infidelity, the background to the two principles consists of a church ruins and Mount Aetna in the distance. While these environment can be viewed symbolically, it seems that the composition was intended to engender in the viewer an intuitive feeling for the psychological nuances taking placed within the characters.

Besides linear composition Antonioni effectively uses sound throughout L’Avventura to convey shifts in emotion. Two of the most striking examples are

• after a difficult night in a hut on th e island, Claudia and Sandro strike up a conversation the becomes progressively more oriented around themselves, when the harsh sound of a motorboat jolts them back to the realization that Anna’s fate remains unresolved, and
• after their initial encounter of love-making a train whistle is heard bringing them (us) out of their mutual absorption, back into a world of self-awareness.

The most common Antonioni effect is the most difficult to describe. This is the pacing of the length of various shots so that the camera continues to run, after the significant action of the shot has been completed. Our forced observations of the frame drains it of its emotional content and we “pull out” of the shot, so to speak. It should be mentioned that this self-awareness induced in the viewer at these moments introduces an element of boredom. This film would be ultimately boring if we were not subsequently reinvolved in the scenes. As it is, we are frequently forced during the film (as the director consciously intends), and yet the film itself it not boring. The most celebrated use of th is kind of technique occurs in the final sequence of L’Eclisse (Eclipse), wherein the lovers’ meeting place is shown from vari8ous angles and at a various times of the day for the last seven minutes of the film. L’Eclisse also contains perhaps Antonioni’s most explicit depiction of the psychological shift in and out of alienation with the stock market panic scenes.

All of the above effects are used with great subtlety by Antonioni and go into the making of a rich and fascinating motion picture. Especially effective is the continued presence, though progressively less forceful, of the consciousness of Anna long after she has disappeared from the screen. In the end on is left with the feeling that the inevitable transitory nature of love is bound up with the transitory nature of all our thoughts and feelings, that the feeling of loves comes and goes may times during that day, and that, however one may with otherwise, such is what we must accept.

Notes:

1. Hollis Alpert, The Dreams and the Dreamers, Macmillan, 1962, pp. 189-190.
2. Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura, Grove Press, 1969, p. 237.

"The Ister" - David Barison and Daniel Ross (2004)

The Ister is a philosophy documentary that was made on a shoestring by two Australian graduate students. The basic idea was a brilliant conception – so ingenious that I desperately wanted to see the film as soon as I heard about it. It traces the entire course of the Danube river under the inspiration of Friedrich Holderlin’s poem, The Ister (the Greek name for the Danube), and Martin Heidegger’s 1942 lecture on that poem (see “Existentialism in Film 1”). By following this course, the film takes on Heidegger’s later philosophy and a number of associated subjects related to European history, Continental philosophy, and time. Admittedly, such subject matter is esoteric, but the potential audience for this material is larger than you might think. Unfortunately, despite the brilliant premise of the film and the intellectual expertise of the creators (Ross wrote his PhD thesis on some of the material covered in this film), the film is a disappointment for me, and I will try to explain why. I will also explore what the film is about, since I don’t think other commentators have caught on to one of the main themes.

First, though, let me explain a little about the structure of The Ister. It consists of essentially four interviews of European intellectuals who have involved themselves with the work of Holderlin and Heidegger. These interviews were conducted in 2000 and are interspersed with mostly decorative footage of various sites along or nearby the river. The riverscape material is, for the most part, sequenced in the “up river” direction, starting out from the river mouth onto the Black Sea. By the end of the film, we have reached the (still disputed) source of the Danube, which is not far from Heidegger’s own forest retreat The four intellectuals are three French academic philosophers who have written about the connection between philosophy and film theory, Bernard Stiegler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, along with avant garde German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who is also an intellectual with a PhD. The interviews are basically off-the-cuff lectures, rather than interviews, since there is no dialogic interaction with the subjects (the filmmakers have no first-person presence in the film). The lectures are also mostly sequential: first Stiegler, then Nancy, then Lacoue-Labarth, Stiegler again, and finally Syberberg, which means that we are really sitting through four (or five, if you credit Stiegler with two) lectures on philosophy.

Interspersed among the lectures are some sites along the river. These include the Histria archaeological site from Roman times (Romania), the recently (1999) NATO-bombed town of Novi Sad (Serbia), Vukovar (Croatia), Dunaujvaros, which has had many names, including “Stalin City” during the Soviet era (Croatia), Vienna and the Mauthausen-Gusen Nazi concentration camp (Austria). There are also sites in Germany, including the Walhalla temple of mythic German heroes near Regensburg. But much of the non-interview visual material just consists of shots of the river, itself, or bridges crossing the river, and many of the same shots are repeatedly reused as visual cover for the voice-over material for the four lecturers.

In order to piece these various items together, one needs some familiarity with the cultural background of The Ister and in particular prior familiarity with Heidegger and his career. Heidegger was perhaps the most important philosopher of the 20th century, and his major work, Being and Time (1927), is a continuing influence on Western academic philosophy. However, he remains particularly controversial, because in the 1930s he also embraced Naziism and gave speeches imploring his students to follow the Führer (Hitler) with unquestioning loyalty:

Let not propositions and ideas be the rules of your being. The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.

Heidegger remained in Germany throughout World War II, and even after the war he was largely unrepentant about his Nazi loyalty during that period. Since 1989, more material has been published and discussed about the extent of Heidegger’s Nazi involvement and his lack of sympathy for Jews oppressed by Naziism, and so it is now no longer possible to dismiss his participation as someting unconnected with his thinking. The question still rages in academic circles today: does Heidegger’s philosophical position have intrinsic affinities with fascism in the political sphere? This is one of the principal themes of the film, The Ister.

In addition to Heidegger's politics, there are also controversies concerning the evollution of his thought. Shortly after Heidegger wrote Being and Time, he began to move away from the central aim of that work, which was to build up an understanding of being by means of existential phenomenology. There is much speculation as to why he made this move, but it seems largely associated with the idea that the very foundations of our language prevent us from arriving at a proper understanding of existence, and in particular, our own existence, or “Dasein”. This problem began, according to Heidegger, at the time of Plato and Socrates, who established a conceptual understanding of the world based on its essences. This mode of thinking leads us, for example, to see humans as essences, or things, and to miss out on the true existential richness of human experience. Everything then becomes material and available for manipulation (“standing reserve”, in Heidegger’s parlance). This Platonic movement towards essentialism, according to Heidegger, was a wrong turn, and for the last 2,400 years we have been moving in the wrong direction – a direction away from an authentic understanding of our existence.

By the 1940s, Heidegger had identified technology, itself, as a fundamental socio-cultural force that was relentlessly driving our society towards ever more materialistic (and thus inauthentic, non-existential) thinking. Most Anglophone readers are familiar with this Heideggerian theme from his The Question Concerning Technology (1954), but a significant earlier presentation of this viewpoint was in his 1942 lecture celebrating Holderlin’s hymn, The Ister.

Although it is not clear that Heidegger was a true fascist, it is definitely true that he despised both Communism and democracy, which he felt were dominated by inauthentic technological thinking. Thus the two growing world powers, Soviet Russia and the United States, were equally harmful to the future of mankind. For Heidegger, it was up to Germany to shun both of these powers and to recover its authentic purity as a people. Holderlin’s mystical and romantic poem summons forth some almost inscrutable images of soulful German nationality and offered inspiration to Heidegger’s leanings, which now took on something of a shift in focus from the authentic individual to the authentic society. Present-day admirers of Heidegger’s thinking feel that there is much in his thought worth preserving, but that some of his ideas (which are notoriously difficult to decrypt) need amending. Prominent among these people are French academics like Derrida, Foucault, Stiegler, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe. These thinkers have had a recurring dialogue with the thought of Heidegger in their attempts to dig out what is essential and worth preserving. The Ister movie is a something of an episode in this recurring dialogue.

So, returning to the film, let’s consider the lectures. Bernard Stiegler is a somewhat colourful character, since he is reformed back robber and ex-convict, who took up philosophy at the age of 31, after serving five years in prison. He argues, and this is presumably covered in his major work, Technic and Time, that technology (“technic”) is a fundamental core-aspect of man and that it is evolving and changing faster and faster. Man has an essential tension with technic, because man likes to conserve, remain static (because he sees things in terms of essences), while technic is fundamentally change. When man makes technical tools, these leave markings in the world. Stiegler calls these tools, “prostheses” (extensions of man, himself), but I would say they are usually external and provide a form of scaffolding that man uses. Accordingly, Stiegler feels that there have been three forms of “memory” in the world:

1. DNA, genetic memory from one generation to another
2. Human memory in the brain, the content of which is lost upon the death of the brain.
3. The scaffolding afforded by tools.

The tool-based scaffolding enables man to be historical, but since the scaffolding is changing all the time (and remember, Stiegler sees these prostheses as actually part of man), man, himself, is changing all the time. Thus man is always forced to ask himself, “who am I?”. Since different nations have answered this question in different ways, they see themselves as human and the “other” as non-human or less-than-human. This leads to the inevitability of wars. These thoughts expressed by Stiegler represent something of an extension, but also a departure from, Heidgger’s thought.

Jean-Luc Nancy, the next speaker, moves the focus more directly into the political domain. Prior to the appearance of democracies, he says, all sovereignties described themselves as eternal. They always were (they made up myths to make this false claim), and they would always be. But with the advent of democracies came the awareness of how they were born: a tyrant had to be overthrown. Thus, while the sovereigns are “eternal”, democracies are “temporal”, they are aware of their own violent origins.

Another theme covers the change in human thinking that took place roughly over the period from the 12th century BCE to the 8th century BCE. During this time there was

• an end to human sacrifice to the gods
• a rise in commerce
• the appearance of writing
• the establishment of laws (and hence the use of logical argument that trace the consequences of these laws).

Nancy suggests that the rise of the use of logical argument in public discourse led to the appreciation of step-by-step sequencing: one thing follows from the next. And this led to the rise of technology as a social force: mythos was replaced by logos. This progression of ideas lies at the heart of all Western philosophy. But because conflict and logical progression is intrinsic to Western philosophy, it cannot properly conceive of the time of poetry, before this process of logical progression started. In our present, logic-dominated world, this never-ending search for the “true” means that we are never permanently “at home” -- the current "truths" are only temporary. And so we suffer the feelings of alienation (see “Existentialism in Film 1").

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, another Heideggerian and a long-time collaborator with Nancy, discusses the puzzling nature of Heidegger’s political views. In particular, there is the controversial statement he made in Bremen in 1949, during the time of the Allied airlift of supplies to blockaded Berlin:

Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

How could Heidegger put all of these things on the same level? Lacoue-Labarthe eventually comes around to saying that there is something fundamentally missing from Heidegger’s analysis of technology, and that is the moral dimension. Because of this lack, it calls into question Heidegger’s entire deconstructive enterprise.

This brings us back to Stiegler again, who continues his discussion, now moving from the essence of technic to the related subject of the technic creation of time. Stiegler believes that Heidegger’s original work in 1927, Being and Time, was essentially an argument with his mentor and senior colleague, Edmund Husserl, about time. According to Stiegler, Heidegger felt that the past is not my own personal past. Instead, the past is factical (i.e. immersed in the practical affairs of the world that must necessarily be seen the way others see things). This was a departure from Husserl, who felt that the past could only refer to my own lived past. On the other hand, my own death in the future is purely my own personal death; it has no meaning for anyone else. Thus the future aspect of time would be more authentic (my own) than the past, according to Heidegger. Stiegler points out, though, that the scaffolding produced by technology enables man to record and hold onto the facticity of the past (other people’s past and my own inauthentic version, too.) Stiegler speculates that the idea of the inauthentic past and the authentic future led to a confusion, something of a contradiction, in Heidegger’s mind:

• On the one hand, technology provides man with the scaffolding to record events. This meant that it gives man access to temporality.
• On the other hand, Heidegger felt that technology can only engage in inauthentic calculations and will inevitably miss out on the originary (authentic) aspect of time that comes from the nature of human care.

This led Heidegger to dismiss technology as something inauthentic for man’s nature and was the principal reason, according to Stiegler, why Heidegger got stuck and couldn’t continue on the project to complete the second part of Being and Time, which was supposed to cover temporality. Stiegler, who sees technology as something essential to man’s nature, feels he can continue the Heideggerian enterprise in the right direction, with a proper appreciation for the fundamental importance of technology.

Finally, we come to the interview with Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, who is apparently a cerebral filmmaker and who has made significant works about Hitler (Hitler: A Film from Germany) and Germanness. The inclusion of the Syberberg interview is revelatory concerning the meaning of this film, because his artistic statements are more about Germany than they are about Heidegger. In particular, he is controversial for his virtually anti-Semitic pronouncements:

"The Jewish interpretation of the world followed upon the Christian, just as the Christian one followed Roman and Greek culture. So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx and Freud are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information. We live in the Jewish epoch of European cultural history. And we can only wait, at the pinnacle of our technological power, for our last judgment at the edge of the apocalypse…. So that's the way it looks, for all of us, suffocating in unprecedented technological prosperity, without spirit, without meaning... Those who want to have good careers go along with Jews and leftists [and] the race of superior men [Rasse der Herrenmenschen] has been seduced, the land of poets and thinkers has become the fat booty of corruption, of business, of lazy comfort."

Once we have the Syberberg piece of the puzzle, we get another perspective on what this film is about, and my interpretation goes like this. There has been in Germany a persistent intellectual current, which for this discussion we will call the "false Romantic view". This view is evident in the works of Nietzsche, Wagner, Heidegger, and others, and it sees the true and heroic German spirit and as one that followed a line directly up from the greatness of classical (pre-Socratic) Greece. Over centures, this Greek influence spread northward and followed the path up the Danube (the Ister), through the city of Histria and others and merged with the original Teutonic warrior culture of antiquity. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe strayed from the Greek influence and was polluted by Roman culture, which was, itself, ruined by Platonism and Judeo-Christianity. But finally, Germany, too, suffered from this pollution from Judeo-Roman culture. Heidegger was one of those Germans who apparently had these feelings, as perhaps evidenced by his visceral rejection of Roman Catholicism. For some, the root of this false cultural intrusion was Judaism. Thus the original Jewish influence was at the core of the diminution of Germanic greatness. Holderlin’s, Heidegger’s, and Syberberg’s romantic longings for a mythic German past variously place the blame of this loss on Roman Catholicism, on the Jews, on Communism, and on democracy, and, finally, on technology. (Heidegger's condemnation of technology was not shared by the Nazis, by the way, but his move to place the blame for decline on technology, itself, has found much more traction in academic circles and has been politically more acceptable in the past twenty years.)

Barison and Ross, of course, reject this false Romantic view. For them, the heroes are the French, who are in the process of rescuing Heidegger’s ideas from this German romantic poison and inserting the crucial elements of humanity that were missing in the Heideggerian version. Even Syberbeg at the end realises that Holderlin’s romantic vision of the Ister river is gone forever, and in fact was always a myth. The Ister river is a brute presence in the world and has often been a fundamental part of man’s engagements in its region -- and it will continue to be so. It's flowing nature will always offer various opportunities for cultural metaphor. For Holderlin, the German Romantics, and even the Nazis, the metaphor that they arrived at was false and led Germany in the wrong direction. We come back to Stiegler's assertion that technology's dynamism is constantly forcing us to face the question: who am I? In attempting to answer that question, the Romantic Germans, down to the Nazis, went so far as to claim that they were the descendants of the tragic-age Greeks and that they should free themselves from the weakening influences of Western culture that produced humanism. The French Heideggerians, not caught up with the Germanic obsession of their tragic destiny, were free to employ Heidegger's phenomenological methods with respect to technology in more fruitful ways.

OK, it’s an intriguing and provocative thesis, but the film, itself, fails to deliver, because it fails fundamentally as a narrative. It’s not really a road film (or a wasserstrasse film), since the feeling of a narrative journey is mostly missing, despite all the signposts and title pointers along the way. The repetitive use of the same images also fails, even though some reviewers have praised the “decontextualising” nature of these repetitions that offer a “fugal” structure to the film. No, I don’t think so. Such a careful structuring would have been nice, but the film, as it stands, doesn't have a narrative presence. The interviews are somewhat woolly, too, with long pauses and stray background noises getting in the way. Thematic characters like Antigone, who figured prominently in Holderlin’s poem, appear to be awkwardly inserted into the film and then dropped. Overall, the viewing experience was not as enlightening as it could have been., and the film's effectiveness, such as it is, is primarily as a written text presented on the screen for reading. This is not an existential film, and it does not exploit the potential that the cinematic medium offers for existential engagement on this subject. It was a bold and challenging effort, but it came up short.

All of this discussion finally brings me to “Carloss James Chamberlin”’s lengthy essay, “Draggin’ The River: The Ister”. Despite its overly ironic style, and even though I reject many of its dogmatic assertions about Heidegger, one has to admit that this piece is packed with erudition and insights. Although it’s more like a verbal guitar riff than a carefully structured thesis, Chamberlin’s piece is actually a more compelling narrative, more “cinematic”, if you will, than the The Ister film, itself. If you are interested in Heidegger and only have three hours, read the essay.
★★

Existentialism in Film 1

Film genres come in all shapes and sizes, but the usual ones, such as American Westerns, War Films, Spy Thrillers, and French Policiers, typically have standard schemata that encompass setting, character types, and plot structure. The subject or theme here, though, is Existentialist films, and those that belong to this category may vary across a wide range of the usual types. Nevertheless, I believe that Existentialist Film, despite some confusion as to what this means, is an important theme in film and one that lies close to the heart of the cinematic experience. This article is offered as an introduction to what is a broad and multi-faceted subject.

What ‘existentialism’ means exactly (and whether it is now a spent force that is no longer current) is a matter of some dispute, but I will begin with a somewhat simplified characterisation just to get things started. Existentialism in film concerns those movies for whom one or more of the principal characters is shown to experience alienation from his or her authentic self. I will elaborate on this further.

One of the issues with the theme of Existentialist Film is the name, “Existentialism”, itself. Steven Crowell, in his authoritative Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article says that Existentialism belongs to the past and now refers to a particular literary and philosophical phenomenon that peaked in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in connection with European disillusionment after the two World Wars. The principal figures of this movement included philosophers Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, along with writers Knut Hamsen, Franz Kafka, Andre Gide, Albert Camus, and Andre Malraux. As the popularity of these figures spread to wider circles, the cultural image of Existentialism became blurred and even a cliche. Perhaps because of the multiple interpretations, leading figures like Heidegger and Camus refused to be labelled “Existentialists”. And by the 1960s, Sartre, himself, had repudiated his own Existentialist work. By the 1970s, Existentialism was subjected to derisive self-parody of Woody Allen’s angst-ridden heroes. By this reckoning, then, “Existentialism” would seem to have lost whatever standing it once had as a meaningful framework with which to interpret the world.

However, I would argue that even though the name, “Existentialism”, is no longer favoured, many of the its issues are still fundamental to our modern consciousness. There are now other, preferred names that are concerned with many of the topics originally addressed by Existentialists: Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Interactionism, Continental Philosophy, Postmodernism. I could have chosen any of these other names for the theme under discussion, but somehow none of the other names are quite right here. “Interactionism” and “Continental Philosophy” are perhaps too general. “Hermeneutics” and “Phenomenology” refer to modes of interpretation. “Postmodernism” also has its blurred and now controversial semantics. So I will stick with “Existentialist Film” to designate this theme, and will focus attention just on the work of Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Although Heidegger was perhaps the first to articulate the fundamental themes of Existentialism, the basic issues began to appear in the 19th Century as a reaction to Positivism, which was an attempt to apply the principles of natural science to the entire world of human existence. Underlying Positivism is what we might call Objectivism, which claims that the world is knowable and can ultimately be reduced to a single, objective, and unified theory describing the interplay of fundamental particles operating according to the laws of physics. Objectivism holds that consciousness, itself, will ultimately be explainable in terms of physical laws. Despite the intellectual optimism underlying Objectivism, though, it has the unsettling consequence of undermining the integrity of all human values: life has no meaning. So despite the continuing and spectacular success of science and technology during the course of the 19th century, there were certain thinkers, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Doystevsky, and even Tolstoy, who became profoundly uncomfortable with this line of thinking and offered expressions of protest that ran counter to the general current. Heidegger was the first to put these various thoughts together and identify the fundamental Existentalist motifs:

• the rejection of science and objectivism;
• a tension between the conscious life of the individual and that of society (alienation);
• an emphasis on the situated context of human thought (being-in-the-world);
• an acknowledgement that the feelings of anxiety, dread, and nihilism were unavoidable;
• an awareness that authenticity is somehow an identifying aspect of self.

For the purposes of this introductory article, I will focus my discussion to two aspects: alienation and transcendence, because they both manifest themselves quite strikingly in Existentialist Film

Alienation
The feeling of alienation is something that is difficult to articulate for those who experience it, because the feeling is so profound. Although the world may be objectively meaningless, I, as a concerned operator in the world, have my own activities that may have a meaning to my own life. So it would be through my own projects that the world takes on a meaning for me. But despite this fact, the world in which I find myself was not brought into being by my projects. This world, then, has a stubborn existence that is independent of me and completely indifferent towards me. There is something about this indifferent world that is utterly beyond me; it is uncanny and alien. So the fact that I am immersed in this uncanny and alien world gives rise to my feelings of alienation. In addition, I am also aware of being observed by other people, and I can adopt a third-person perspective on myself, too, to imagine what they are seeing. But when I look at myself this way, the "self" that I see is utterly alien to me, too. I do not feel comfortable with this image of myself; it is a stranger to me. So I am not only alienated from the world, I am also alienated from that “objective” image of myself, too.

This is not just the feeling of a malcontent or of a social outcast. Even in an ideally operating world, I know that the world is not entirely under my own control. In order for me to operate successfully in this world, I must adopt a role that has generally been found to work well in situations like my present circumstances. But when I adopt that role, then I am just another, average person fulfilling that role, and that “average” person fulfilling that role (me) does not fully characterise the real me, in all my uniqueness. So my alienation remains.

Transcendence
Related to this feeling of alienation is the idea that I must transcend the “ordinary” descriptions of reality that are used by others. It was Sartre who stressed the idea that “existence precedes essence”. By that he meant that we cannot form categories of thinking about existence, because existence is more primordial (more primitive, i.e. comes “earlier”) than the category-forming activities of scientific model-building (which characterises things in terms of their essences). I might, for example, characterise objects in the world by the kind of things they are. So when I see a particular apple, I might say, “this is an apple”. But what makes a human is not the kind of thing it is (its essence), but the way it acts. By the way it acts the human becomes itself. Thus interactions are more primordial than the essences that are derived from Objectivist theory. In other words, Interactionism is more primordial than Objectivism.

On top of those interactions in which humans are engaged, humans are also characterised by care: they are concerned with some activities. While ordinary entities are what they are “in themselves”, human reality is “for itself”. Thus who I really am is not just describable as another essence (my facticity), but is determined by (a) my manner of coordinating the essence-based things that I encounter in the world and (b) the manner in which I interact with other being-for-itself entities (other persons). This is what characterises my transcendence, what it is that transcends ordinary essence-characterised entities. My transcendence goes beyond what simply is and is concerned with what can be. Thus I am always concerned with what is, what is not, and what is possible in the future.

These two aspects, alienation and transcendence, represent our dissatisfaction with everyday culture, which fails to account for key elements of our existence. This dissatisfaction has often been expressed in stories and novels of the past century and a half, and one’s first thought might be that these ideas are so abstract that they can only be expressed in words, not in film. The facility of written language gives us direct access to the expression of abstract ideas, whereas film depicts a physical, concrete world. This is, however, a misleading assertion.

Although many people think that films present the world as it factically is, this is far from the truth about the cinematic experience. Films are much closer to being an expression of our dreams, than they are about a representation of “objective” reality. Although we may watch a film and construct an “objective” representation of that world “on the fly”, we are actually performing extensive mental model building as we do this. What films present is a sequence of multimedia images, and they are closer to the primitive, real experiences of conscious beings than reflections of objective reality. These images can uncover and reveal our sense of the uncanny and alienating nature of life in a more direct way than a text can which merely “talks about it”.

Film can also express our awareness of and concern for the transcendent nature of our experience. Some people feel that the term 'transcendent' must be reserved for an awareness of spiritual and religious matters. But the ‘transcendent’, as used here, refers more generally to that aspect of our existence that extends beyond the factically-defined model of the world in which we live in our practical affairs. Certainly, we could say that this more general feeling for our transcendence beyond the everyday is associated with our spiritual yearnings and our belief in another, spiritual reality. But it need not be limited to religious concerns. So, for example, Paul Schrader, who later became an influential screenwriter and film director, wrote the book Transcendental Style in Film, which focussed on the work of directors Yasajiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer. Some people have criticised this book on the grounds that these three directors, in films made outside the scope covered by Schrader’s study, concerned themselves with matters that were not spiritual and “transcendental”. I disagree. If you consider ‘transcendental’ in the manner that I have defined it here, then I would say that Bresson’s work continued to have a feeling for the transcendental.

So, in summary, we can say that films offer a powerful and direct means for expressing and immersing ourselves in exactly the kinds of issues that the Existentialists were talking about with words. It is worth pointing out here that in this sense Existentialist films can be closely related to Expressionism and Expressionist films, which depict an external “world” that reflects the internal, emotional state of a consciousness. These reflections could perhaps lead one to the conclusion that all films are Existentialist. While there may be some truth in that statement, I am going to limit my designation to those films that have markedly raised our awareness and experience of Existentialist themes in a deep fashion. Here, for the purposes of illustration, is a list of outstanding films that I would classify as Existentialist Films:

• Sundays and Cybele (Bourguignon 1962)
• La Strada (Fellini 1954)
• L’Avventura (Antonioni 1960)
• The American Friend (Wenders 1977)
• La Rupture (Chabrol 1970)
• Blowup (Antonioni 1966)
• Once Upon a Time in America (Leone 1984)
• Badlands (Mallick 1973)
• The Go-Between (Losey 1971)
• Le Jour Se Leve (Carne 1939)
• The Passenger (Antonioni 1975)
• Baran (Majidi 2001)
• Il Posto (Olmi 1961)
• L’Eclisse (Antonioni 1962)
• Zorba the Greek (Cacoyannis 1964)
• Red Desert (Antonioni 1964)
• Fellini Satyricon (Fellini 1969)
• La Guerre est Finie (Resnais 1966)
• McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman 1971)
• A Condemned Man Escapes (Bresson 1950)
• The Trial (Welles 1962)
• Taxi Driver (Scorsese 1976)
• Medium Cool (Wexler 1969)
• La Dolce Vita (Fellini 1960)
• Isabel (Almond 1968)
• The English Patient (Minghella 1996)
• Accident (Losey 1967)
• The Conversation (Coppola 1974)
• Alice in the Cities (Wenders 1974)
• Quadrophenia (Roddam 1979)
• Diary of a Country Priest (Bresson 1951)
• The 400 Blows (Truffaut 1959)
• Roma (Cuarón (2018)

And, of course, there are many others that you might nominate for this category.