Abstract
Writ large across the textual surface of Western film theory is a hitherto unacknowledged conceptual history that is as rich as it is chequered. Walter S. Bloem’s Seele des Lichtspiels (The Soul of the Moving Picture) of 1922 and Henri Agel’s Le Cinéma a-t-il une âme? (Does Cinema Have a Soul?) of 1952 constitute the two most extended and explicit theorizations of the soul within film scholarship.1 Each book offers a response to the intriguing question of what it might mean for cinema to have a soul, and each is inflected by its particular author’s political and religious convictions in the differing contexts of the Weimar Republic and France respectively. Bloem’s conservative and nationalist vision and Agel’s Catholicism give rise to divergent connotations of the soul of cinema, which would seemingly render the term either politically untouchable or too spiritually imbued to conceptualize film hereafter, within a field that has come to define itself since the late 1960s as principally left-wing and secular, with materialism overriding idealism in large measure. Bloem and Agel do not have the last or the only word here, though, and it is the complexity of Western film theory’s recourse to ‘soul’, beyond such specific political and religious alignments, that forms the subject of this book.2
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Notes
See Walter S. Bloem, Seele des Lichtspiels: Ein Bekenntnis zum Film (Zürich: Grethlein & Co. Leipzig, 1922) and
Henri Agel’s Le Cinéma a-t-il une âme? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1952). As is the case with most of Agel’s writings, his book has not been translated into English. Bloem’s book has been translated by
Allen W. Porterfield: The Soul of the Moving Picture (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1924).
Warren S. Brown, Nancey C. Murphy and H. Newton Malony (eds), Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998).
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 4.
To note just a selection of the texts of contemporary film theory that have covered these issues and that will feature in Chapter 3 of my study, see the following: (i) cognitive theory: Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New The-ory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); (ii) theory on feeling, embodiment, the senses, and the film experience:
Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009);
Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009);
Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Touch: Sensory Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002);
Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993);
Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); (iii) theory on film, thinking, and affect:
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image [1983], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2007), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image [1985], trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1994) and
Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower, 2006). Sobchack is the theorist who has theorized ‘film’s body’ most extensively (see The Address of the Eye, pp. 164–259), and the ‘filmind’ is Frampton’s term (see Filmosophy, pp. 6–7).
Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991), p. 15.
Cholodenko, The Illusion of Life, p. 16. The follow-up volume features two articles that focus on the soul. William D. Routt’s article draws on Aristotle’s De Anima to discuss anime and manga, arguing that: ‘In the cinema, soul is movement, that is, it is animation.’ Routt, ‘De Anime’, in Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life 2: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007), pp. 172–90 (p. 187). Edward Colless reflects on various metamorphoses, ranging from The Little Mermaid to Pamela Anderson in Baywatch, in order to show that what these stories and images turn on is the nature of the soul. See Edward Colless, ‘Between the Legs of the Mermaid’, in Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life 2, pp. 229–42. In a paper presented at the Graduate Research Seminar series at King’s College London on 16 November 2011, titled ‘Cinema of Apprehension: Contesting the “anima” of Animation’, Suzanne Buchan presented a more critical view of the association between animation and soul, suggesting that the straightforwardness of this relationship is subject to question.
Rachel O. Moore, Savage Theory: Cinema as Modern Magic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
Jan N. Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 3–4.
Paul S. MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind: Speculations about Soul, Mind and Spirit from Homer to Hume (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 22. MacDonald notes that soul is to be understood as equivalent to Homeric ‘psyche’ only if the latter is understood to be a human life-force that ends at death.
R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 168–73. Onians’s vast etymological study also outlines the derivation of Eastern conceptions of soul. See Addendum 12, pp. 511–20 and Addendum 13, pp. 520–30 for ancient and modern Hindu and Chinese beliefs as they relate to European conceptions of soul and mind.
For a useful discussion of the relation between the more archaic senses of soul and the post-seventeenth century world, see Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). MacDonald also presents a good discussion of Spinoza’s and Leibniz’s monist responses to Descartes, along with a discussion of the empiricists who followed them. See MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, pp. 291–361.
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 145.
Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. David West (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 134.
For a detailed discussion of this symbolism, see Maurizio Bettini, ‘The Bee, the Moth, and the Bat: Natural Symbols and Representations of the Soul’, in Anthropology and Roman Culture: Kinship, Time, Images of the Soul [1988], trans. John Van Sickle (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 197–246 (pp. 198–200).
See David B. Claus, Toward the Soul: An Enquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 7. See also Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul; and
Bruno Snell, ‘Homer’s View of Man’, in The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), pp. 1–22.
See Rosalie Osmond, Imagining the Soul: A History (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003), p. 4.
Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallop (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 11–13.
Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 26.
Plato, Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 206–17.
Anthony Kenny makes connections between Plato’s tri-partite model of the soul and Freud’s threefold scheme of the mind. See Anthony Kenny, The Anatomy of the Soul: Historical Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), pp. 10–11. Plato broaches the question of the soul more frequently from an ethical point of view, and not from a psychological perspective. See Claus, Toward the Soul, pp. 181–3. Kenny argues, in contrast, that Plato was deliberately assimilating a moral concept to a medical one. See Kenny, The Anatomy of the Soul, p. 23.
See Plato, Republic, pp. 316–25. In the 1970s, apparatus theorist JeanLouis Baudry joined this allegory together with Freudian psychoanalysis to speak of the psychical state of spectators and their enthralment to images projected like shadows on the cave wall. See Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema’ [1975], in Philip Rosen (ed.), Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 299–318. There have been numerous critiques of the Platonic allegory and of its application to cinema. For a useful overview of the critical responses to Baudry’s theory, see Elsaesser and Hagener, Film Theory, pp. 68–81. For a contrasting defence of its continuing usefulness, see
Nicolas Tredell (ed.), Cinemas of the Mind: A Critical History of Film Theory (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2002), pp. 9–12. Tredell uses the allegory to emphasize his view that the key problem of film theory remains that of the relation of representation to reality.
Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: An Essay in Sociological Anthropology [1956], trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 222. Mortimer’s translation is based on the second edition of Morin’s text, published in 1978.
Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema [1963–1965], trans. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 270.
This is my translation of the French version, which reads as follows: ‘l’esprit, ou l’âme de l’homme (ce que je ne distingue point), est immortelle de sa nature’, in René Descartes, Méditations métaphysiques [1641] (édition bilingue) (Paris: Flammarion, 1992), pp. 49–53 (p. 51). John Cottingham’s English translation of the original text reads: ‘the mind is immortal by its very nature’, but Cottingham includes a note that the French version added the following clause after reference to the mind ‘… or the soul of man, for I make no distinction between them’.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. and ed., John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 10.
Descartes’s usage differs from the Thomist sense of the rational soul. St. Thomas Aquinas prefers to speak of the rational soul rather than the mind. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, the soul is defined as the form of the body, but unlike his predecessor (whom he terms the Philosopher throughout his text), Aquinas holds that the ultimate and complete form of the rational soul is not brought into existence by a bodily power; rather, it is brought into being by a higher cause. The rational soul is produced by God, but is not the substance of God. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas’s Shorter Summa: St Thomas Aquinas’s Own Concise Version of His Summa Theologica (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2002), pp. 95–7.
Augustine described God as ‘the Life of the life of my soul’, and his Being is reached through the soul. See Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), p. 213.
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 9.
Gerard Fort Buckle, The Mind and the Film: A Treatise on the Psychological Factors in the Film (London: Routledge, 1926); Frampton, Filmosophy, pp. 6–7.
Anna Wierzbicka, ‘Soul, Mind, and Heart’, in Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 31–63 (p. 41).
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul [1982] (London: Fontana, 1985), pp. 71–2. In an incisive review of Bettelheim’s book, Frank Kermode notes the harshness of many of Bettelheim’s charges against some of Strachey’s other translation choices, but finds the points he makes about the translation of ‘Seele’ more justifiable, even as he notes the inevitability of translation loss through the divergences that exist between different lan-guages and cultures. See Frank Kermode, ‘Freud is Better in German’, The New York Times (6 February 1983), http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/25/specials/kermode-bettelheim.html, date accessed 3 September 2012.
‘[C]e que désigne le mot “inconscient” n’est pas un repli de l’âme, c’est l’âme même, ou si l’on préfère, c’est l’homme.’ Jean-Luc Nancy, Appendice, ‘Freud — pour ainsi dire’, in L’Adoration (Déconstruction du christianisme, 2) (Paris: Galilée, 2010), pp. 141–7 (p. 143). Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind [1949] (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 17.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995 [1978]), pp. 29–30.
Descartes, Les Passions de l’âme [1649] (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), pp. 119–22.
Aristotle, De Anima, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 157.
For a discussion of the issues involved in the liturgical practice that locates Christ’s self in the image of the heart at the very point in history when science begins to posit the brain as the centre of the human, see Scott Manning Stevens, ‘Sacred Heart and Secular Brain’, in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (eds), The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (Routledge: New York, 1997), pp. 263–82.
See, for example, J. A. Armour, ‘Potential Clinical Relevance of the “Little Brain” on the Mammalian Heart’, Experimental Physiology, vol. 93, no. 2 (February 2008), pp. 165–76 (first published online November 2007, http://ep.physoc.org/content/93/2/165.full, date accessed 26 July 2012). Paul S. MacDonald notes that the Hebrew term ‘leb’ (heart) designates at times explicitly intellectual, cognitive, and reflective operations, rather than emotion alone. See MacDonald, History of the Concept of Mind, p. 9. It seems that the Old Testament holds the foreknowledge of latter-day scientific discovery. Aligning soul with a different bodily fluid and thereby de-centring concern with the heart, Jean-François Lyotard identifies it with lymph, not blood. See
Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’, in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time [1988], trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 182–90 (p. 186).
See Jolyon Mitchell and S. Brent Plate (eds), The Religion and Film Reader (New York: Routledge, 2007) for a selection of texts that represent a range of approaches to the conjunction of religion and film across the globe since cinema’s moment of inception.
S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (London: Wallflower, 2008), p. ix.
There are still those who wish to prove the existence of the soul, or explain what it has become today, and dualism has also been defended. See, for example, Fred Alan Wolf, The Spiritual Universe: How Quantum Physics Proves the Existence of the Soul (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). See also
Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) for a connection between the Aristotelian view of the soul and DNA in the understanding of growth in biology. For a contemporary defence of dualism from a Christian position, see
John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1989). For a further argument in favour of dualism from a philosopher of the history of the Christian religion, see
Richard Swinburne, The Evolution of the Soul [1986] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997 revised edition).
Susan Greenfield, ‘Soul, Brain and Mind’, in M. James C. Crabbe (ed.), From Soul to Self (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 108–25 (p. 108).
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).
Brown, Murphy and Malony (eds), Whatever Happened to the Soul?, pp. xiii–xiv. Murphy’s more recent work continues the argument referred to here, affirming that we are our bodies and that there is no additional metaphysical element such as mind, soul, or spirit. For Murphy, though, this physicalism need not deny that we are spiritual. See Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain [1994] (London: Vintage, 2006), p. 252.
Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence [1974], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2004), p. 106.
See Marc Furstenau (ed.), The Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 15 and
Annette Kuhn, ‘Screen and Screen Theorizing Today’, Screen, vol. 50, no. 1 (2009), pp. 1–12 (p. 5).
See D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information [1998] (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2004), p. 10.
See Bloem’s reference to the view held by theologians and ‘academic demi-gods’ that the moving picture is the offspring of the Devil in the introduction to the English translation The Soul of the Moving Picture, p. ix. See also Jean Epstein, Le Cinéma du Diable (Paris: Éditions Jacques Melot, 1947). The organizers of the first Domitor conference in 1990 on early cinema and religion take up the question of whether or not cinema is an invention of the Devil, as the title of the book based on the conference suggests: see
Roland Cosandey, André Gaudreault, and Tom Gunning (eds), Une Invention du diable? Cinéma des premiers temps et religion/An Invention of the Devil? Religion and Early Cinema (Lausanne: Éditions Payot and Québec: Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1992).
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Cooper, S. (2013). Introduction: The Soul of Film Theory. In: The Soul of Film Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137328588_1
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