Irving Singer,
Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique.
Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press, 1998.
216pp
US$18.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by The MIT Press)
According to Singer, there are two kinds of film theorists – formalists and realists – and since the formative years of film theory their differences have been at the core of controversies in film criticism (2). He claims that the debate between the approaches has become frozen and that Grand Theories that have emerged in film scholarship in the latter half of the twentieth century ignored the “quarrel” and merely reinvented the wheel (3); he suggests that the situation needs to be rectified, and attempts to do so through focusing on the concept of transformation (4). (Basically, formalists adhere to the idea that film is an art and is not a reproduction or recording of reality while realists believe that film is meant to be a more or less direct reproduction of reality.)
In his Preface, Singer explains that cinematic art “is best understood as life-enhancement” (xii). He proposes that since the innovation of film there has been a developing exchange between film and human life, a mutual exchange that is full of impact and influence. He continues, “when we study [cinematic art] for its human import or philosophic scope, as well as for its use of specialized technology, we find that the meanings and techniques in each work are internally related to one another” (xii). Concerning philosophy Singer examines the impact of appearance vs. reality (recalling the Myth of the Cave of Plato’s Republic) on film theorists and shows that film taken as a mode of communication eliminates the audience’s alienation. Through transforming realities film can enable the audience’s suspension of disbelief. He stresses that “a filmmaker can present transformations that not only harmonize appearance and reality and the visual and the literary but also surmount the antithesis between communication and alienation” (xiii-xiv). Concerning film theory, Singer aspires to harmonize the approaches of formalists and realists in his own approach or film theory of transformation:
I mingle elements of both approaches in my idea that film is not inherently a re-presenting or recording of reality but rather a pictorial and usually narrative transformation of it. . . . I map out an approach that seeks to harmonize opposing points of view. I argue that film transforms our visual perception of reality through concepts that are basically literary and dramatic (xii-xiii).
In his Introduction, “Realism vs. Formalism,” Singer explains what is necessary for his theory and describes how transformations in film emerge:
To formulate a theory that can use elements of both realism and formalism, we must recognize that cinematic transformations arise from human and organic aptitudes that have a constitutive, not just causal, role in the making of movies (P. 5).
Singer claims formalists are wrong because “they misunderstood how transformation furthers communication among human beings” (6) and realists are wrong because they fail to consider that a film may look like something, but experiencing film is nothing like reality (10 and later in Chapter 1, “Appearance and Reality,”(33)). He “proposes the notion of transformation as a means of reconstructing formalist and realist theories” (8).
Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of Plato’s distinction of appearance and reality. Plato and his successors asserted that human perception of reality is based on sensory experience and is thus inferior to actual reality. Singer finds that this distinction has a direct influence on film theory as well as on other theories of visual and dramatic media (16). While philosophers such as Plato believe that art is an illusion and inferior to science because its basis is fiction and imagination instead of searching for truth, Singer aims to show that art is not necessarily illusory (17-20). According to Singer, formalism is also influenced by philosophical idealism of the nineteenth century (21). Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), a book that predates formalism, maintains that artistic presentations consist of unrealistic aspects (22). Singer disagrees with Münsterberg’s conclusion that audiences are aware that the images seen do not resemble the outside world. Münsterberg fails to understand that the audience may believe they are watching something very real (25-26). Singer also discusses philosopher George Santayana’s “The photograph and the mental image.” Among other ideas, Singer disagrees that there is “an unbridgeable chasm [that] separates [photography] from arts that revise and re-create what is given in reality” (35). Singer assumes that realists such as Bazin and Kracauer, who understand that film does more than merely record, would agree with Santayana (33).
Chapter 2 is an analysis of The Purple Rose of Cairo (USA, 1985). Singer mentions that at the core of The Purple Rose’s narrative is the question of appearance and reality (50). According to Singer, Woody Allen mentions that the core is the desire for fantasy while having to live in reality (54). The film is about Cecilia, whose life in the real world of the 1930s is so dislikable that she escapes it frequently by going to the movies. One day, from her favorite film, also titled “The Purple Rose of Cairo”- a film within a film – the main character, Tom, walks off the screen and into Cecilia’s life. Singer identifies Cecilia’s mythical experience as the thematic fantasy of the film. In her world, Tom is a monster; in his world, Cecilia disrupts what is supposed to take place (58-59). Singer remarks that the metaphors in the film are mythic and religious. For example, Cecilia cannot get through to Tom that God is not the screenwriter of “The Purple Rose” (73). Eventually, Cecilia must choose between Tom and Gil, the actor who portrays him. Because Gil is real, Cecilia chooses him. In Hollywood, Gil leaves her. By that time all copies of “The Purple Rose” have been burned and Tom is lost forever (60-62). Singer’s analysis includes Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. According to Singer, Pirandello and the philosopher Plotinus believed that the ultimate reality of Platonic forms could be reached through art and that both viewed appearance and reality as a shared dualism rather than an opposition (74-76).
Chapter 3, “The Visual and the Literary,” focuses on realists who believe that film “must adhere to the ‘outer aspect of things’, the surface manifestation of material reality” (82). Panofsky, Kracauer, Bazin, and other theorists have explored this viewpoint, which Singer opposes:
the meaning of these images belongs to more than just the surface appearances themselves. That is what the realist theory fails to recognize sufficiently. (83)
He mentions that realists do not consider how the meaning attached to film’s images got there in the first place (91).
Chapter 4 presents Singer’s analysis of Visconti’s film Death in Venice (Italy/France, 1971), an analysis revealing that imagination in literature differs from imagination in film; he asserts that Visconti fails by focusing too much on the beauty of film images (108). Much of this chapter deals with Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s novel and their narrative differences. Visconti’s film misses the meaning of Mann’s narrative several times because he adheres too much to surface images. For instance, Visconti could not show whether or not the events that take place at the end of the film are figments of the character Aschenbach’s imagination (110).
Chapter 5, “Communication and Alienation,” begins with Bazin and Santayana’s writings about the camera and technology and Singer’s assertion that there is a mutual exchange between film and real life. Film, as it alters communication, hides the alienation of audiences that cannot communicate with actors or change events (136-38). Singer explores how film changes our perception of reality and our interpersonal communication and how technological advances promote further detachment from the real world (139).
Chapter 6 presents Singer’s analysis of Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (France, 1939). According to Singer, Renoir succeeds “by getting us to think about human relations in a way that is neither purely visual nor purely literary but instead an indissoluble coalescence of the two” (156). Again, appearance and reality exist as a duality: Renoir portrays Octave as a liaison to the other characters (160). The film is based on dramas by Beaumarchais, Marivaux, and Musset (Singer points out that because it opposes the sensuous with the passionate and asks if men and women could ever be friends, the film is in the spirit of Beaumarchais and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and at times resembles Mozart’s Don Giovanni (161 and 165-72)).
In his “Conclusion: cinematic transformation,” Singer returns to the failures of formalism and relates the role of film in western culture to nineteenth-century opera. He claims, “The contemporary decline of opera is related to the almost synchronized growth of cinematic art in popular culture” and that film and opera possess coherence through coexpressivity of visual and aural aspects (195). He concludes the chapter by explaining what film theory should do:
film theory should be mapping out the diversities within structures of what can alternately be called conceptual perception or perceptual conception. As we move toward that goal, we recognize increasingly that the glory of cinematic art emanates not from recording, duplicating, or literally capturing anything, but rather from creating meanings that transform our reality through conceptualized percepts and perceptualized concepts arising out of the techniques that film possesses. Relying on words (and music) in conjunction with its photographic images, film attends to some aspect of the world that a filmmaker selects for his or her communication. . . . (198-99)
With bold proposals—to be able “to lay the groundwork of a general philosophy of film” (8), to harmonize the approaches of disciplines such as humanistic philosophy and literature (xii), and to harmonize the “opposing points of view” of formalists and realists through exploring narrative transformations (xii-xiii) – Reality Transformed creates mountains out of molehills; and with protective disclaimers – “this book should be read as an extended essay” (xi) and “to some people it may seem like philosophical quibbling for me to deny that the photographic image is basically, inherently a recording. . . .” (42). Actually, it clouds assertions and fails to fend off criticism.
Singer’s interpretation of formalism seems limited to the anthologies cited in his notes.
Of formalists, Singer remarks:
Despite their insights into the creativity that makes film an art form, they misunderstood how transformation furthers communication among human beings. In being a vehicle of communication, film changes reality through techniques that matter because of meanings they are able to generate (6).
Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art and Béla Balázs’s writings on film, however, show that formalists understood clearly transformation’s role in human communication. Arnheim’s second chapter, “The making of a film,” explores Chaplin’s use of camera angles for comical effect and shows how the filmmaker communicated with his audience. Balázs, who also wrote about Chaplin, was interested in associative montage, a kind of montage, which requires viewers to make their own psychological connections. Readers knowledgeable about formalism will wonder why Singer never addresses the formalist notion that, as Arnheim wrote, film art creates new realities. It is somewhat distracting that Singer appropriates film, music, and architecture as Balázs had years earlier, but for different reasons (150-52). Singer’s application of writings about photography to film may be problematic for observations of photography and film are not usually perceived as interchangeable.
While Reality Transformed avoids the complex technical language of film and brings together philosophy and film, I would not recommend it to readers without a previous knowledge of film theory. Singer intends to harmonize, but it turns out that he makes formalist and realist positions more opposed than they really are. Though some film theorists have indeed suggested that all audience members perceive and react to a film in the same way, and many do ignore the “quarrel,” a large body of film literature shows that holistic approaches have been around for quite some time.
Melissa Ursula Dawn Goldsmith
Louisiana State University.
Created on: Tuesday, 7 December 2004 | Last Updated: 7-Dec-04