Reading - Expanded Cinema

Chinese Firedrill

Will Hindle

1968

Expanded Cinema
Gene Youngblood




Part Two: Synaethetic cinema




Synaesthetic Cinema: The End of Drama


What is Synaesthetic Cinema?
It's the cinema form that evocate people's emotions and let them feel the thoughts within the combination of a various of means such as syncretism, montage, evocation, metamorphosis, etc.


P75
"The record subject, however, is not the objective external human condition but the filmmakers consciousness, his perception and its process." which indicated that the film was generated by the process of awareness, perception(interpret) and recreate.


P76
"Through synaesthetic cinema man attempts to express a total phenomenon - his own consciousness." Modern artists realized that 'the supreme order lie in nature' and acknowledged that 'chaos is another level of order'. In contemporary life, we are aware of the consciousness and the recognition of the process of perception.And that's what's significant in human experience.


P77
The remind that TV became a universal language correspond to 'Buckminster Fuller's observations on natural synergetics and consequently is negentropic' in the article attracted my interest to look up meaning in "negentropy". Within the help of dear friend William Green, here's a short definition of "negentropy":
Entropy is the scientific law that in a system disorder is always increasing. So negative entropy should be order increasing, which is physically unnatural.
TV, so called "the third eye", as a 70-year old media at that time, became the core of community federation and information synchronization, and that eventually lead into the nowadays meaning culture. And that's what synaesthetic cinema was trying to surpass.


Additionally, due to introducing TV with its sufficiency and accuracy in no time in modern life, people (especially western) always focus on the "past" and "future", and become non-capable for "present".




Global Closed Circuit: The Earth as Software


P79
"Cubism and other means of abstracting the realistic image were born with the photographic plate because painting no longer provided the most realistic images. The plastic arts abandoned exterior reality for interior reality. The same has happened to cinema as a result of television: movies no longer provide the most realistic images so they've turned inward." The idea was interesting because I once held a big "argument" with my friend about the true value of paintings and the tendency of contemporary art. My friend insisted the value in realistic paintings and couldn't approve the new-born art genre such as Australia-based artist Ian Burns. According to the opinion extracted from the paragraph, the continuous renewal of technology (movie-TV-Internet) brings that superficial imitations, mimic and documentation can no longer satisfy people's visual curious and gallery, a place brings imagination and thinking, has to move from capturing the happening moment into offering the happening moment, emphasising the present.




Synaesthetic Synthesis: Simultaneous Perception of Harmonic Opposites


P81
What is Synaesthetic Harmony?
"Synaesthetic and psychedelic mean approximately the same thing. Synaesthesis is the harmony of different or opposing impulses produced by a work of art.It means the simultaneous perception of harmonic opposites."


The notion of "either/or logic" and its equivalence of 'bistable logic" in physics; "both/and cybernetic logic" and its equivalence of "triadic logic" in physics were mentioned in the chapter talking about the new order differ from dualistic harmonic opposites.


"By reality we mean relations","and that is why it has come to the point of expressing nothing but relations." In terms of the example of phenomenon of light, the sensation and conceptualization of people's perception can be discerned in macroscopic and microscopic means, while both exist.




Syncretism and Metamorphosis: Montage as Collage


P84
"The specialized vision" is the method of guiding our eyes in picture plane used by conventional narative cinema. And it tends to decay our capacity to "comprehend the more complex and diffuse visual field of living reality." Despite the footages, image has the same 2D quality as a media. As a dominant presentation form, image is taken granted that people acknowledge the reality by only seeing one angle of the theme. And it decays our tention and ability to form a 3D modal mentally, which ironically move us further away from the living reality.


P85
The "Endotopic" and "Exotopic" 
”Endotopic” are forms treated from within. 
“Exotopic” are forms treated from without.
“Synaesthetic cinema, primarily through superimposition, fuses the endotopic and exotopic by reducing depth-of-field to a total field of non focused multiplicity." The cinema replaces montage with collage to create a plane complex in its graphic nature instead of a dramatic analysis of action.


P87
"Metamorphosis"
"In traditional cinema, superimposition usually gives the impression of two movies occurring at once in the same frame with their attendant  psychological and physiological connotations coexisting separately. In synaesthetic cinema they are one total image in metamorphosis." "In fact, the conflict-juxtaposition of intellectual effects is increase when they occur within the same image."


P88
"Superimposition is not used as an economical substitute for 'parallel montage' - indicating simultaneous but spatially separate events - for spatio-temperal dimensions do not exist in the consciousness." In compare with the idea of various time scale in same place, the overlapping of space in the same time imply the insignificancy of spatial and temporal sense in our conscious, so that the cinema presents a close impression.




Evocation and Exposition: Toward Oceanic Consciousness


What is Evocation and Exposition?
Exposition is to explain in narrative or story.
Evocation is to show within the syncretism of sensation.
"In expositional narrative, a story is being told, in evocative synaesthesia an experience is being created."
Take travel for example, when you go to a place, it's not only the story behind the historical buildings and memory of fine scenery, but also the atmosphere that you immerse in and grew habit on.


P92
"Oceanic Effect"
"Freud spole of oceanic consciousness as that in which we feel our individual existence lost in mystic union with the universe."
"The oceanic effect of synaesthetic cinema is similar to the mystical allure of the natural elements: we stare in mindless wonder at the ocean or a lake or river,......,not thinking anything in particular but somehow feeling secure and content."


P95
The theatrical and the cinematic
"The different is that Hindle used the images not for their symbolic or theatrical content but as ingredients of an almost iconographic nature, to be compounded and manipulated through the process of the medium."
"Every effort is made to distance the viewer, to keep us aware of our perceptions, to emphasise the purely cinematic as opposed to the theatrical."
The movie always rise emotional impact without a recognisable content. The unattainable and unreachable elements in the movie keep us aware of our perception while stirring with the inarticulate conscious. It's the metaphysical substance that evocates, but not the plot that tells.