The Matter of Vision. Peter Wyeth

      The Matter of Vision

       Thank you, Kate

      The Matter of Vision

      Affective

      Neurobiology

      & Cinema

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      The Matter of Vision

      Affective Neurobiology & Cinema

       A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library

      ISBN: 9780 86196 712 4 (Paperback edition)

      Cover design: Simon Esterson

      The author has asserted his rights to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      Ebook edition ISBN: 9780-86196-911-1

      Ebook edition published by

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      Foreword:

      War of the Word

      There is a covert war raging in our culture, a secret hidden even from its most committed warriors, and for whom this conflict is so deep in their psyches that it is unconscious. If their allegiance is challenged they react with ferocity, utter conviction and total disparagement towards the enemy. These are ideal soldiers in any war, largely unaware of their dedication to the cause, virtually automatons unable to question it.

      Such a war exists and furthermore is at the heart of our culture. No one is unaffected by it, every single person strides its battlefields every day of their lives. No one dies in this war, it is after all a cultural war, but its effects go so deep and so far back in time as to dwarf human history. You are a victim of this war and you have been so all your life, but you will very probably be unaware of it. Most wars have their -isms, such as National-ism or Imperial-ism, and this war has its own-ism too, Logocentrism, the war of the Word against Vision.

      Logocentrism, in the sense it has here, places a greatly exaggerated value on the Word, creating a status for it far above its real capacities, glorifying it whilst at the same time viciously denigrating potential opponents, in particular its oldest adversary, Vision. Logocentrism places the Word at the centre of culture and attributes magical powers to it. It is almost unheard of for a voice to be raised in opposition to its universal rule, so pervasive is its influence. This project at last raises the standard for its most noble and ancient opponent, Vision. The day is near when Vision will be restored to its pre-eminence. I see therefore I am.

      This book started from a couple of ideas, hunches might be a better word. The first is that Vision is much more powerful than we realise. The second is that the vast majority of information we take in from a film is absorbed unconsciously.

      I came to both ideas in the course of making films. The notion of the power of Vision came partly from the sense of how much information there is in a film, and the feeling that most people are not aware of most of it. We rather take films rather for granted and that increasingly seemed to me an odd and striking injustice. The sentiment is usually accompanied by a casual disregard for the monumental achievements of Cinema in the face of a really rather intractable medium, all too often while simultaneously bowing down before what I would contend are the scant resources of the Word, in the assumption that it is by far the superior medium. I became convinced that was a myth, and that in fact Cinema wielded such power without apparent effort that it was both ironically invisible and hugely underrated, even among those one might think would know its riches. People I came across who made their living from Cinema, as well as critics and theorists, including most film-makers, seemed to share this largely unconscious assumption that Cinema might be fun, might on occasion achieve distinction, but compared to the masterly Word it was a mere trifle.

      I could see no one, anywhere, giving the credit to Vision and Cinema that was their due. That was a strange position to be in. After all, it was only a hunch, and against it was ranged not just the expected adversaries but also the considered views of most potential natural allies. Apart from the odd drunken conversation with directors of vaguely similar persuasions in dark corners of film festivals, snatches of suppressed thoughts rather than fully-expressed ideas, there was nothing. Not even the most fervent Cineastes seemed to take their partisanship further than the idea that a number of directors had achieved works of art despite the pressures of crass commercialism, particularly in Hollywood. Even the radical claim that the best of Hollywood was vastly superior to the best of European Art Cinema, pleasingly offensive though it was to many sensitive minds, stopped short of claiming superiority for Cinema to the traditional arts. Film Theorists, even where they shared a love of Cinema, by no means the majority, were so wrapped up in the Word as to be barely aware of Vision, except where it was almost certainly a bad thing, the guilty Look. This was not a healthy position to be in. It suggested either the whole world was wrong, or I was – like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca for the waters – misinformed. Naturally, I resented the implication, even from myself, and it seemed wise to keep the idea under wraps in a climate of wholehearted repression. However, going against the grain was too attractive an idea to surrender.

      I had one further instinct that seemed to be on my side of this great and cavernous divide. When we meet people for the first time we tend to make up our minds about them rather quickly, in a matter of seconds, perhaps even fractions of seconds. It occurred to me that there must be a huge amount of processing going on of various kinds to reach such a judgement in so short a time. The downside is that we sometimes get it wrong and are forced to revise our opinions as we learn more about a person, but in the main first impressions stick. Those impressions, it seemed to me, must have an awful lot of information being assessed to arrive at them – and in such a short time. That process is very largely, I reasoned, a visual one. We are used to the idea these days that ‘body-language‘ tells us a lot about a person, and that we interpret that material both quickly and decisively. It also seemed to me that this process was largely unconscious, as both the speed and volume of information involved could only possibly appear fragmentarily in consciousness. Such thinking would lead me towards Science to discover what evidence existed, and that is the story of this book.

      Another realisation that set off this study was that in a culture where the ideology of the Word dominates we have no experience of articulating visually, and that extends to those for whom we might assume it to be second-nature. Working with third-year students at a film-school in London developing their graduation film-projects, I asked one group to sketch out a scene portraying jealousy. They were initially stumped but then immediately fell back on devising dialogue. These were very good final-year students on a highly-competitive course attracting up to a thousand applicants for around forty places. Yet their first reaction to visualising a scene was to resort to dialogue. That experience was anything but unique, in fact to find the opposite was highly unusual. These were bright students, keen to make their graduation films as cinematic as possible, yet their whole cultural formation had not equipped them to articulate visually. We had students from around the world, Japan and Norway, Turkey and Columbia, Spain and Germany, so this was not merely