[Frameworks] "phi phenomenon"

Sat Aug 22 18:05:08 UTC 2020

Yes, a fair question. I will be repeating myself, but that's ok.

I disagree with Pip when he suggests that Deleuze is describing shots in
classic cinema, I think he sees himself as doing philosophy. And often it
is whole films that serve his purpose.

Now, all I had in mind, Michael, when I posted under the label "animation,"
was what I understand of early points made in Cinema !. And we can put it
like this:

For Deleuze, there is a context. It consists in a history of philosophy
that has conceived of movement in a certain way. And if I understand it,
the conception of movement belongs to a conception of time, namely that
time consists in a series. Bergson also discusses perception, which would
be central to any full account of what matters here.

But a phenomenologist rejects the idea that time is to be understood as
"clock time." That is the idea that there are these points in the past and
in the future, and we are to distinguish between the experience of time,
one one hand, and the correct time, on the other. That distinction has to
go.

So movement isn't this series of points or frames. The question has
concerned a relationship between what you collect in empirical study
(measured in minutes, say) and movement of different kinds. Now, the lab
tests demonstrate that movement isn't the various frames. They can lie
there without producing movement. You can see each one without seeing
movement (if, say, each is held for too long).

Deleuze seems to refer back to a much earlier time when poses would
constitute a movement. You know, it's like just taking those key frames of
Daffy in certain poses. There are frames between, but in this understanding
of movement, a move isn't something that has parts not currently in front
of you. It isn't something spatial at all. I imagine Deleuze elaborating by
suggesting that there are these movements in something like the way there
are the Forms in Plato.

But, for my purposes here, what we get is not a lot of flicker films, but a
reading of moments in cinema of significance, according to Deleuze.

Bernie

On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 12:28 PM Michael Betancourt <
hinterland.movies at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Bernard,
>
> What do you mean by Deleuze then?
>
> It's very easy to reject or deny what someone else says when you haven't
> explained your view yet. How about you explain it yourself?
>
> Michael
>
>
>
> Michael Betancourt, Ph.D
> https://michaelbetancourt.com
> cell 305.562.9192
> https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Betancourt/e/B01H3QILT0/
> Sent from my phone
>
> On Aug 22, 2020, at 1:19 PM, Bernard Roddy <roddybp0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 
> proofing my post:
>
> 'It's as if the lab *protects* the writer from philosophy.'
>
> '*Now*, all these tests [. . .]"
>
> Bernie
>
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2020 at 12:13 PM Bernard Roddy <roddybp0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Pip:
>>
>> The perceptual experiments you describe don't seem to me to be necessary.
>> We already have the moving image of cinema. What I have noticed, however,
>> is that there is an attraction to the various lab studies. And this will be
>> of particular interest for "experimental" animation.
>>
>> One of the things I am a little impatient with is this continual
>> observation that Delueze is somehow not saying anything about whatever we
>> want to identify as this "phi phenomenon." It's as if the lab protests the
>> writer from philosophy. All I have to do is open these first pages of
>> Deleuze to see that his thinking begins with broader questions than some
>> sort of film history.
>>
>> You write that "Deleuze rejects the notion that motion is an illusion
>> created from stills [. . .]." The very reliance on illusion, as far as I
>> can tell, has no relevance in what I understand of Deleuze. So, in a sense,
>> I can agree. But this point doesn't shed any light on what Deleuze thinks.
>> (I don't think A Thousand Plateaus is a reference.)
>>
>> No, all these details about tests with lights going on and off reminds me
>> of Bergson, who is also reading that kind of research, or what we would
>> today call cognitive science (only it's usually involving people who have
>> suffered injury of some kind and can thus provide a case study without any
>> ethical difficulty).
>>
>> Let's go to this Gary Beydler. I've never heard of him. But the
>> description lends itself to what goes for "experiment" in film. And that
>> would belong also to what we encounter in psychological research that
>> subscribes to the same philosophical orientation. That orientation, if I'm
>> not mistaken, is rejected by Deleuze. For one thing, it fails to recognize
>> the conception of movement and time that we find in Bergson. But we're all
>> pretty versed in these effects, and so (as I see it) we present these as
>> the philosophy of relevance.
>>
>> Deleuze isn't easy. But he's damn interesting, and this is in part
>> because he'll formulate all these notions of images to talk about changes
>> over the history of narrative cinema (he's selective, and says this history
>> doesn't include all the screen work we might be paying for).
>>
>> (And I signed on to open a thought about the avant-garde.)
>>
>> Bernie
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> - - - - -
>>
>>
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