Living Through Stories and Cinema

Part 1 - Believing in Story

One of my main intentions in writing about film concerns the development of a methodology and philosophy that improves the way in which we can individually experience cinema, and therefore life. It is not at all hard for our lives to begin to lack meaning and direction. Sustaining some sense of purpose and focus in our every day is not easy at all. It is a challenge to each of us every day as we wake up to find some drive in our existence. It is in moments in which we seek reprieve or uplifting that we often turn to cinema: to awaken the mind and relax the sensations, alone or with others. I have often felt myself drawn to movies as a way to secure some peace or stimulation. But all too easy is it to use cinema to waste time; this sentiment is true of many forms of the moving image: TV, online series and other forms of visual content.

Our eyes are connected to more than just our heads. They reach deep into our brains and very being. The moving image can be but a stimulation of the gaze; it can also be the basis of a conversation between one's soul and the universe itself. It takes intention, knowledge and practice to be able to engage the moving image so deeply. The reward of doing so rests in the 'change' that connection can manifest. In the same way we can wander through life forming meaningless and surface-level connections with ourselves, the objects of the world and other people, we can miss out on the development of a relationship with stories via moving images.

Stories are an essential aspect of human life. They are the beginnings of how we conceptualise of time, action and existence; of 'change' most fundamentally. Through stories, we communicate our very existence as well as the progression of the universe around us. Stories thus have the ability to let others know of what happened to you yesterday; how a country was built; when the dinosaurs died out; why the ocean is deep; and who constructed the universe. Stories contain the answers to everything, even if the truth in them is not known. If you understand stories, you will never be told a lie. This is possible through the study of what stories are really about.

Consider: a young boy tells you of how he is the fastest kid in town, and recently won a race against the wind. It's a lie, you could say - but he doesn't know it, and you should know far better than to call it that. The truth in this story rests in his evocation of youth; the sensation of his body and movement through the physical universe; in his story you can feel the beauty of aspiration, which is the true basis of the narrative. It is so important to not see the lie for you miss out on a connection between yourself and the child and between yourself and the very notion of being a child. What life would you rather live: in response to the child would you rather tell him to just stop telling stories and send him on his way with his smile gone, or smile, ruffle his hair and maybe challenge him to a race. The vibrancy of life rests in harmonising with the world, the individuals that compose it, and most essentially yourself. We have the chance to do this on a global scale in the modern world through the abundant moving images and the stories they tell that we have access to. In the greater world, there are stories far more complicated than the one exemplified. All pull us toward simpler truths, which become ever more difficult to approach and attain the more basic they become.

As important as it is to be able to tell stories, humanity must also be able to understand them. It is a case of global life and death. Stories bind whole cultures, they guide countries, they mediate relationships and help us dictate our individual path through life. It is story that we use to explain who we are, what we want, how things should be and every other intention and possibility in life. And it is the sharing of stories that sustains humanity. This is because stories are the patterns the collective human mind has recognised and formalised in some way across our history. We tell stories of war, love, family, Gods and death because humanity collectively recognises that these are consistent patterns in life. In telling stories about these things, knowledge and experience regarding these patterns that have effected us all, and will continue to do so, can be passed on. It cannot be denied that the transmission of knowledge and experience is everything in nature. In the same way that all biological life propagates with DNA, it is the structures of consciousness and unconsciousness that transmit through stories. We should not take them so lightly, much less dismiss them as lies. Within story is the truth in everything.

We should all therefore study story in some capacity. Some choose to study religion, politics, cultural narratives, science, every day gossip. Each of us who engage movies have the opportunity to learn and deepen our connection with the world through cinema. It simply takes a shift in perspective; choosing to believe that stories do not lie, that cinema holds truth in its nature and as a product of humanity. If you believe in this, then lend me your eyes and let us discover how to explore this truth and allow images to resonate deeper within us.

Part 2 - How To Study Story and Cinema

There are not many great places you can go to learn about film and story in my opinion - apart from the cinema and movies themselves. Film school, or a job in the industry, are perhaps the most valuable place, second to films themselves; it will teach you the mechanics of filmmaking. Understanding how movies are made via the coordination of lights, cameras, actors, writing, sound and more is of huge value and is a crucial step in developing visual literacy, as Martin Scorsese would say. Alas, the practical route of film study leads one to be able to understand how to make films and tell stories. This outcome is quite different from gaining insight into the knowledge and purpose of stories themselves. Most of us will not make movies; far more of us watch them. Film school can help you deconstruct stories and images to their technological parts, but the spirit of story is not a particular focus there. Why films are made and stories consumed can become quite irrelevant to a filmmaker, especially in the commercialised system that powers the cinema machine. The intent from many filmmakers is often tantamount to creating impact and being able to spread the stories that they can express, thus film school or simply working in the industry can teach one how to express through movies. Specific study and contemplation of film occurs outside of, but often in connection with, filmmaking.

Many people, like myself, are starting to go to university to learn of film and how to use it for themselves. University is not really a great place to go in the pursuit of discovery through film and story. The methods of teaching there - from my experience - are pre-occupied with ideology and continually produce visions of a symptomatic cinema. In such, university guides one to see film as the result of, and composed of, societal, ideological and philosophical issues. I oppose the narrowness in this; I do not believe cinema to be a symptom or simple product of something known. In university, you can learn of the forms and history of cinema, and there are opportunities to learn of its production also. This has value. But, the analysis of story, its function and purpose is particularly weak in the university system. Scholars focus on issues of feminism, semiotics, Marxism and colonial theory, Lacanian-Freudian psychoanalysis and linguistics. There are ways to see cinema through these lenses, but left isolated as such, the branches of film theory and study are pretty useless to the audiences of cinema at mass. There is even an argument that learning of these theories in an isolated context is damaging to audiences, who can be guided to only see the depths of cinema to be sexist, racist, capitalist, sexually deviant and propagandistic; or otherwise ideologically aligned. The issue here is that universities are structured and focused on solving problems. This is why problems have to be made of cinema - and ideology is most useful for just this.

What is sadly lacking from film studies as an academic practice are simple questions of how, what and why. I was always frustrated in being pushed away by the university system for wanting to ask 'what is cinema?' and 'how does it function?'. Don't get me wrong: I got good grades, have my master's degree and understood I was often trying to capture too many ideas while university was trying to teach me to say something concise and direct; to properly write, research and think. I did feel, however, that my questions were deemed too grandiose and unfocused because they also didn't identify and solve a problem within cinema. I wanted to know how to explain the sensation of experiencing it, and frame that honestly: as a mystery. I found no real and crucial problems with cinema - though perhaps with how people present it as I believed all stories were true while many present it as lying - and wanted to formalise an understanding of cinema's most obvious capability: to produce meaningful affect. I learned to see how film could sexually objectify, racially 'other' people and evoke propagandistic ideals, but always felt it did so because that is what people can do. But, that is not all people can do, it is not at the base of their intentions and nature, and nor is it at cinema's.

I remained captured by the larger film culture in general; film geeks who simply love movies. There is a form of film study here. What I never liked about that culture, however, was the common rejection of the idea that film could mean things and a rather rampant affirmation of taste. Though I think the culture of film and its intent to simply enjoy cinema is most pure and correct, its constant judgement of the value of a film - how does it rank in a list, how well did it do at the box office, is it a masterpiece, are there stupid plot-holes, was the acting substandard, is it so bad it is good - tired me to no end. I love to hear about the value people find in cinema and share what value I also hold, but I don't care for people to value it directly, focusing only on what is good and bad cinema. Cinema is a totality, all of it is true, and one should be far more focused on extracting the positives of film and understanding how individual works compose a greater whole, rather than working to define a niche of cinema that they like. I mean not to implicate the notion of film criticism generally here; one must be able to discriminate in some way when experiencing cinema. Alas, short-ended judgement and blabber about unexplored sensation are amateurish, and outside of the realm of film studies. Value judgement remains a part of film, however: we will inevitably be able to see the good and bad, and should freely discuss this as simple consumers. However, this should not be the final outcome of engaging film in my opinion. And, furthermore, far more energy should be put into communicating the value we feel in film; things should never stop at, I liked it, I felt it was fun and meaningful. That is where our hearts should be, but introspection should be far more encouraged in film culture, and we should grow to become increasingly more articulate about the stories that affect us. After all, this is the purpose of stories: transmission. Cinema is to be shared, its experience and knowledge continually expanded upon during this. There is no end to cinema and its meaning, but we should strive toward it in an effort to mature culturally through the study of story.

Part 3 - The Structure and Cycle of Cinema 

Picking up again from part 1, it is time to rationalise what has so far been said into a more tangible theory that I have been developing for many years now (but still have magnitudes more to put in). We have established stories to be a truthful form of communicating change. The approach to cinema I have developed is then fundamentally dramaturgic. It is drama that I posit is at the beginning, centre and end of cinema. This conclusion is derivative of our presuppositions on story. Stories communicate experiences of life; life and being are, at their fundament, change; at the social, chemical and metaphysical scale life is decided at the transfer or transformation of set states. Stories in all forms record and express the experiences of this change. Drama is this phenomenon manifest; it is the doing and being in stories that expresses and contains experience. Most basic studies of the term drama lead one to understand its original meaning being ‘to do’; I derived this through Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle teaches one that drama is poetry in action, and poetry a mimesis or imitation of being. Stepping beyond the rudamentaries of Poetics, we can further consider that drama is an unconscious and conscious imitation of change, or better put, a mimetic expression of unknown and known change; an experience of the way as nameless and named; passing into Tao as wuming and youming. Each progression of this understanding of drama as an imitation of change combined with the idea that stories are a truthful form of communication converge upon a greater understanding of cinema’s basic cyclical nature. As a mimetic expression of change, cinema records the oscillations of pairs and balances, yin and yang. This movement is not numerological, but existential; cinema is constructed upon the movement between negative and positive, photochemically with film strip, or binarily with digital cinema, yet also in its management of movement itself; negative space becomes positive on screen to specifically distinguish occurrences as happening or not (technically, a fabula and syuzhet); the greater montage of it all being a sculpture in time of specific weight and balance, the reception a transformation in its own right. The technical oscillation in cinematic sculptures in time is crystalised into a narrative that itself is at harmony with nature and the collective human unconscious, which can be understood as, existentially and metaphysically, an oscillation between yin and yang. To approach this idea in its total, it would be helpful to reaffirm that yin and yang in the narrative and artistic sense are a production of Tao as wuming and youming; named and nameless; most simply, a production of what we do and do not know yet live and speak about. This production causes a constant collision in cinema and on screen, and contains the primary elements of all drama in knowing and unknowing. After all, drama is an imitative expression of change. Change can only be expressed as knowable and unknowable; and thus drama and cinema produce logos and pneuma.

The breath and speech of a cinematic story, its logos and pneuma, are the primary concerns of our dramatology; our study of cinema as truthful stories expressing change through action. In short, logos and pneuma are produced by the cinema cycle, together manifesting the te (total basic character) of a given film or cinema. Logos comprises known mimetic material and pneuma unknown mimetic material; they are representations at each stage of the cinema cycle of the nameless and named world. With nuance, one comes to understand that logos and pneuma form a spectrum of possibility at each stage of the cinema cycle, but such details can be saved for a later point. Cinema cycles because it is self-regenerative and autopoietic; it is an basic technical imitation constantly imitated with additional factors to test the breadths of the infinite story. Cinema is one whole comprised of countless narratives and techniques. It is structured with the unconsciousness’ relationship with being, Tao, at the centre of the cycle with productions of their dance rising up into cinematic consciousness. What rises from the binary between human interiority and the flesh of the world are themes and archetypes of collective being. They are first processed by the cinematic trichotomy: the relationship between screen, audience and artist that sets the boundaries of the cinematic space. The cinematic space is brought alive by drama, causality and action; it is given a landscape and consciousness via mode; the live world of story is structured with logic; and style is mapped over the major elements of narrative as to give it individual shape and character. At each point logos and pneuma, the distinct and colliding developments of known and unknown mimetic material, undergo definition and transformation, the end result being the production of a cinematic narrative that passes on, becoming an aspect of cinema’s greater totality and therefore its refinement and propagation toward the end of the infinite story. Cinema is made of cinema, from style emerges a new consciousness of cinematic storytelling resumed in the culture of film production. Such is the cinema cycle.

Established here are the means through which cinema is structured as autopoietic. This structure produces logos and pneuma, though it is Jean Epstein that ultimately dictates to us the methods of this production with corner stone theories of photogenic and lyrosophy that allow us to process this production. Cinematic production is a moral enhancement; an assignment of meaning and soul. This is because cinema and stories are of truth - an expression of genuine reality - as established. Through the assignment of meaning and soul, drama is elevated to a communicative function, capable of expressing immanence and allowing its relationship with Tao to transform into palpable affect. Jean Epstein identified this capacity in cinema, and named it photogenie. This is the mimetic expression of soul and life through moral enhancement; an illusion of being and meaning conjured by compassionate reproduction that allows a product of Tao to pass on; it is the momentary immortalisation of an image. This is a fascinating and sprawling power. Alas, while cinema produces, it is also received and deconstructed lyrosophically. A complete cinema is perceived and therefore self-conscious by some means. As a result it is not simply a presentation of morally enhanced imagery, but a demonstration of knowledge. Like photogenie, lyrosophy is a sensation of sorts: the sensation of experiencing knowledge. But where photogenie guides one along the cinema cycle and its production of truth, meaning and soul, lyrosophy allows for a movement back towards the centre of its production: the syzygy formed between unconsciousness and Tao that gives birth to the totality of cinema.

We have found ourselves, then, the structure and subsequent methods of our dramatology. It sees that cinema is structured as a self-generative cycle, a product of collection unconsciousness and nature generally; a movement itself from collective consciousness, to a medium, to a trichotomous relationship between screen, audience and filmmaker, to drama, mode, logic, style and back to collective consciousness. The meeting of unconsciousness and nature within this self-generative cycle between consciousness and style allows for the transmission of story. Its element parts are themes and archetypes, tools of the unconsciousness, and it is brought alive by drama; where cinema truly begins and ends as such is the representation of story in imagery for cinema. The transmission of story is powered by the mimesis within drama: the reflections of nature and consciousness. Fundamentally, however, the fuel for this storytelling process can be understood as a composition of yin and yang; as all things associated with the cinema cycle and reality beyond it can be. The primary yin yang components of drama are known and unknown mimesis. They produce logos and pneuma, which, when solidified into a sculpture in time, generate the te of cinema: its character as a product of Tao. So through the cinema cycle is transmitted story; or that which could rather be called the te of cinema as a distinguished sculpture in time. The greater generation of the te of cinema is of interest to us. The method of recognising and engaging it is through the study of photogenie and lyrosophy. Herein is the method of our dramatology; a sensitivity to the production of truth through photogenie and the human relationship with change through lyrosophy in cinema.

Part 4: Living With Story

I have not decided to undertake a comprehensive exploration of my theories on what cinema is. I am rather attempting here to introduce the utility and direction of my perspective and developing way with cinema. My articulation of this is an open form of study, yet also an invitation into a field in which cinema is drama and change; one that intends above all else to enhance the quality of our lives - which is what we initially turn to cinema for. My philosophical influences are clearly in Taoism, Jung and Epstein, yet my basic evocation is that cinema has a truthful soul as a product of a world composed of change. I want to articulate my experiences of it as such and map out a structure that enhances this. For me, this is what it is to live with story and cinema. As with ones relationship with family, work, self and objects, one should seek to realise the soul, or rather the being, of things and structure themselves and their own being to maximise the impact of that relationship. Extracting the most from our highly intimate and existentially profound relationship with story (in my specific domain, cinema) as a species and individual is an infinite pursuit of great calling we all participate in and should seek to excel within. It is an act of passing on, the secrets of which unveil themselves through an association with Tao.