4
FROM THEORY TO PHILOSOPHY
fastener. In these cases, the names of the earliest, most popular entrants to a field get used — in an inaccurate way, strictly speaking — to refer to their successors and even their competitors. Because of this tendency, we under stand why sometimes digital cinematography will get called film, though it does not involve the use of film (i.e., the use of a filmstrip). There is little damage here in the daily course of events. Nevertheless, as we shall see, it can and does cause philosophical mischief. Chapter 4 follows the discussion of the nature of cinema with an analysis of the nature of the cinematic image, construed as a single shot. Obviously, these two topics are related, if only because throughout the history of motion pictures, the temptation has endured to treat movies as if they were equivalent to photographs, where photographs, in turn, are conceived of as modeling single shots.* That is, many have attempted to extrapolate the nature of cinema tout court from the nature of the photographic shot. Thus, it is imperative for the philosopher of the moving image to get straight about the nature of the shot. Of course, typical motion pictures, excluding experiments like Andy WarhoFs Empire, are usually more than one shot in length. Shots are characteristically strung together in cinematic sequences, usually by means of editing. Chapter 5 examines prevailing structures of cinematic sequencing from a functional point of view. In this regard, one might see the analysis here as returning to an exploration of the terrain that was of the greatest interest to the montage theorists of the Soviet period. Moreover, in composing the image series in a motion picture, one not only standardly combines shots to construct sequences but then also joins sequences to build whole movies. Consequently, in the second part of chapter 5 we turn to the most common way of connecting sequences to make popular, mass-market movies — a process that we call erotetic narra tion, that is, a method of generating stories by means of questions the narrator implicitly promises to answer. Just as chapter 5 revisits, with a difference, the concerns of the montagists, so chapter 6 also tackles a subject near and dear to the heart of Sergei Eisenstein — the way in which cinema addresses feeling. Unlike Eisenstein, however, in this chapter I will take advantage of recent refinements in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science in order to appreciate the wide gamut of ways in which movies can engage our affective reactions. I will try
For example, we call an afternoon photographing fashion models "a shoot" and a successful photo a "nice shot."
