Music. Welcome to the Cinematologist Podcast. I'm Neil Fox, and joining me as ever, I'm delighted to say, is Dario Linares. Hello, Dario. Hello, Neil. And I must say, many happy returns. Happy birthday for a couple of days ago. Thank you. I've got something for you, but I don't know when we're going to see each other. I'd rather just give it to you in person rather than send it through the post.
And I don't know. I mean, I'm not one for, like, cards and, like, postcards with a note on and stuff like that.
I like to send that so i'll probably send you something along of that vein um but you know me i'm kind of i i don't i don't limit myself to the day of the birthday you know it'll come when it comes yes no i appreciate that uh we sort of exchange gifts when gifts come into our purview that we think that would be a nice thing so yeah which i like um yeah yeah no i appreciate that and i'll be up i'll be up in london at the end of january so maybe you can hold it then and we can breakfast
or something and that'd be nice sounds good and i didn't i i was traveling back with me anyway so i wasn't uh in a celebratory mood you know we had i had a really nice evening when i got home with yeah yeah yeah mostly just traveling yeah yeah that's true i enjoyed the little chat that that we had there with you in transit again i think these might become more staple parts of the of the patreon um so if you want to listen to neil talking about uh various films you'd see kneecap which you'd
really enjoyed and and i went to town on gladiator 2 which was enjoyable very much very much so so if you want to support the show please join the the patreon i know times are tight but it always helps with our costs you know helps us sort of bring the the quality of the show that we we want to and also our costs are going up you know we are doing more content so it is kind of more expensive to put on costs of all the software and everything just goes up and up and up
So if you're a long-time listener, then please consider joining up. And you'll get access to some of the commentary and the questions that we asked. We were talking about our end-of-season show and whether we're going to do lists this year, Neil. Yeah, we were sort of pondering what the shape of the final sort of 2024 episode will be. And it's always a kind of reflection on the year, but we've kind of veered away in recent years from a very...
Obvious kind of ranking of of a top 10 or a top five or whatever but we saw we wondered whether we might do that again because we haven't done it for a while and you know we are in a in a year of yeah just doing what we want really which is nice and so we put it out to the patreon, listeners if they wanted a particular thing or if they wanted us to do our own our each do our own top 10 in some kind of mammoth experiment then we would do that double episode or something yeah and and jerome one of
our one of our patreons instantly was like yep top 10s please we were like oh so but it's been really nice actually because since then it's been it's really helped focus my what will be my last month of watching films this you know and last couple of weeks kind of thing okay what do i want to see that might that might be in that that's available and i think we mentioned on the patreon i've already got a number of films i'm really excited to talk about in terms of the end of the year so
yeah i think it's been a really interesting year and a good year in many ways so yeah i'm excited about that so thanks jerome for the the nudge into long long long form for the final episode yeah we have to kind of carve out some space over maybe even before christmas and then release in between because that's what we've done in the past isn't it we've we've sort of taped before and then given it as a sort of you know in between that no man's land between christmas and new year when when you're
struggling for things to do it's nice when something drops in and you can have a listen to it yeah turkey you're hanging over podcasting is what is what we specialize in yeah that's it yeah.
I think it's good to think about the type of episode that we want to do at the end of the year and interesting this season because we've actually returned to a couple of the forms that we've sort of become renowned for over the the long history of the podcast you know which is again seeing as we're going into our sort of 10th year nice to kind of to go back to some of those original original ways of doing the podcast and we had the author the
jt laroi story which we did here in falmouth as a live screening which was kind of how the podcast started and then you know very early on in the podcast wanted it to be a space for long form academic conversation with sort of, you know, renowned academics that we really respected and liked. And that sort of became another feature of the podcast, particularly with some of the stuff that you were doing early on, Dario, with people like Richard Dyer.
And that kind of thing. So we've got another one of those, which is a kind of really nice throwback and a really kind of amazing conversation. So do you want to talk us through who today's guest is and yeah, sort of this conversation that you had?
Sure. So I spoke to Vivian Sobchak, who is Professor Emerita at UCLA, and she's someone who has had an incredibly influential career across the entirety of film studies and on me personally I think when I read her book The Address of the Eye it kind of fundamentally changed the way I thought about not just film but the way that film interacts with us as human beings what our relationship is to it as physical humans you know what I mean and it it made me sort of realize
that you can't look at film in isolation in the sense that here it is, and it's this objective reality that then just gets transported into the brain that you then interpret. There is this intermediary aspect, which is the body in space, the body in the auditorium, which is often why I talk a lot. And I'm interested in that idea of the spatial elements of kind of experience, whether it's film or whether it's media. And.
I mean, the other thing is to say straight off the bat, and we talk about this a lot in the interview, is that Vivian was, you know, around at the very start of film studies, let's say. I mean, obviously, you could talk about the idea that film is being theorized and written about conceptually almost from the very beginning. But if you think about film studies as a discipline, you know, she was around and part of the formation of the first courses that were taught
in America. I mean, again, I don't know how this correlates. There's always this battle, isn't there, between America and particularly France about who defined where film studies comes from and where film history should be located in many ways. But that's for another podcast entirely. But yeah, Vivian was incredibly generous with her time. So we've got, on the main show today, we've got a 50-minute excerpt of what is a two-hour interview, which is incredibly.
It was incredibly generous of her to give us so much time, but also just to react so well, I thought, and so in-depth to all of the areas that I was interested in.
And when somebody is at the stage of her career let's say that she is and has got so much knowledge I mean I say that I sort of talked jokingly off mic with her at the beginning it's like I didn't know where to start her she sent me her CV which is like 30 pages long and you're like okay where do I start here but just very quickly a quick bio she's the author of 10 books on many aspects of film theory and analysis possibly her
most famous ones I've just mentioned it are The Address of the Eye but also screening space which is just fantastic about science fiction and we talk quite a bit in this interview about science fiction too many book chapters and journal articles to to really list. But in 2005, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies awarded Vivian the Distinguished Service Award and in 2012, she got the Distinguished Career Achievement Award.
In 1995, she won the Pilgrim Career Award for Science Fiction Scholarship from the Science Fiction Research Association. And she served as a juror on the American Film Institute Awards Motion Picture Committee five times since 2000. And she's on advisory boards and editorial boards for so many publications over the years. Again, you know, be here listing them forever. So, yeah, it was just a pleasure and an honor. And we had a lot of back and forth about the shape of the interviews.
She was someone who's incredibly clear and precise about the standard. You know what I mean? It was just, it wasn't as if she was sort of saying to me, it needs to be this. It was like, you know, you could just tell here's somebody who was completely rigorous.
And her thinking is absolutely the recall of her understanding of these complex subjects is just fantastic and i was just hoping that i could kind of keep up in in many ways neil you've listened to have you listened to the full two hour one now what's your sort of initial take before obviously we'll we'll talk to you at the end yeah no i have listened to the full one so my response is going to be to that you know which hopefully will encourage people to listen to the whole thing because I
think it's such a rich conversation. And I think you more than keep up. I think it's very clear that her work has had a major imprint on you. And I think as well, it's interesting that you say.
That you know she was very generous with her time which obviously she was but what i thought was really lovely you know before we go into it was like the sense of of her gratitude for being provided the space to have that kind of conversation and to think through that stuff you know she was she's very open about how how grateful she was for that opportunity to actually think through this stuff and there was a little bit of the kind of the under underlying kind of
academic residue of like there isn't the space to do this enough and listening to listening to the conversation i just felt really proud of us in terms of what the podcast is you know like to actually i mean it was an amazing conversation and to carve that space where you can give over that amount of time to someone so influential and thought-provoking is it's so rare you know and it was like actually this is what this is what the podcast has increasingly become about over the years and
that was really nice to be like this conversation wouldn't exist in any other place in this form i don't think so that was really gratifying and it was such a rich experience.
And left me kind of yeah just buzzing from the the the intellectual thought that was on display from both you know like it's a real conversation it's a real dialogue you're not just being like please talk vivian you know it's like actually we're we're getting into the wean tier and that was amazing so yeah well well done and hopefully our audience will will respond similarly i think it's a really brilliant addition to our our archive lovely well thanks
for saying that neil i appreciate it so let's get straight into that now this is around 50 minutes as i say the longer version is around two hours which is on available on the on the patreon um so you can go over there and get that so this is me talking to professor vivian sobchak and we started off by talking about what drives her continued interest in cinema not just in the broad sense of that word but her continued commitment to scholarly thinking and writing.
Music. Everything I write starts from a curiosity about something. And it can be a number of things. It doesn't have to just be what would be initially seen as scholarly. But everything I do is trying to understand the meaning, not of my life, but of my thought. Of how, I mean, some simple things that, I mean, really do go back to childhood and... Could be attached to thinking phenomenologically or letting me somehow find phenomenology and recognize that that was a kind of methodology itself.
Yeah, no, definitely. And we'll come to that for sure. Obviously, that will be the sort of main talking point, I think, in the center of this conversation. But I just wondered as well, do you still watch a lot of films or I find myself kind of getting more and more selective? You know, when I was younger, I was very much, I want to watch everything. I need to see everything. And now I'm much more, well, I can give that a miss. That's fine.
Well, I watch a lot fewer films and there are reasons for that. On, you know, I don't know if all your listeners know that I am physically disabled and have mobility issues, let alone that I'm a lot older every day. And so going to a theater, if I can't find a parking space in LA, I can't walk, you know, to the theater.
So I have done, I mean, during the last number of years, and of course COVID was the kind of apotheosis of that, I would do some streaming and I played certain DVDs for older films and whatever. And here and there, so I've actually not seen many films over, from the time COVID started to where we were supposed to stay home to the present in a theater. But in terms of things that have to do with what I'm interested in and so forth, I can say that I loathe superhero films.
They are the most boring things ever, except the ones that subvert them, which are very few. But I'm fascinated at the same time by the fact that these franchises, which initially made more and more use of CGI as it got better and better, all fantasies, their historical fantasies like all the Game of Thrones things and spinoffs, I find them utterly boring after having seen a couple. So I would never plunk down money.
If I was writing something, because I do think there has been in the culture a move to magic as some both and history, a made up history that goes back to some time before King Arthur. Yeah, this is the subject of your 2014 paper, isn't it? They're called Sci-Why, if I remember correctly. Obviously, that's 10 years ago. Do you think that the science fiction has just continued on that trend?
Are there any films? I mean, in that paper, you talk about her, which I think, which I'm currently sort of revisiting in the, on the sort of back of AI explosion. I think the more introspective ones, although the most introspective, I actually didn't like all that much, which was Brad Pitt and Ad Astra. Yeah, yeah. But films like her, and I think Christopher Nolan's is, I mean, the only film that I was disappointed by, I think, was Inception.
Because getting finally to the core of the psyche, which was in some snowy area, was really a letdown in terms of turning into a chase scene. But his attempts to... to work with time and space, which is what, I mean, I do think that interstellar is a terrific film. Did you like Arrival? I was going to say that's exactly the next one I was going to say. No, I mean, I might even say in terms of its debt, I think, which is not necessarily tied to the physics.
That arrival somehow got at something in terms of a real change in having to change thought and space and time. And that's gone through all my work, thinking about space and time, which started, in a way, with film, in a serious way. You know, Erwin Panofsky in the 30s said that cinema was the temporalization of space and the spatialization of time. And those time-space and the chronotopes, which are the combination of the two, are fascinating to play out.
And central, whether you use the term chronotope or whether you, that space-time is... It can't be science fictional, which plays with all us abilities, but that's cinema. But even that element, which has been used in the kind of like hard or serious sci-fi as you, as you know, the ones we're talking about, that in a weird way has also been become part of the, the sort of postmodern aesthetics and relativity that you're criticizing in that piece.
If you think of a film like Everything Everywhere All at Once, it's like, actually, we're going to move through all of these time and space periods, but it's not just going to be another part of the fantasy escapist discourse that you're sort of talking about there. It's more important. Those films are in many ways are more important, I think, starting in the 2000s, which had to do. I mean, Everything Everywhere All at Once, that's sort of what happened.
I mean, I think the title of that film is the best thing about it, other than the googly-eyed rocks. But if you go through, you get all of these duo-over films. This is from the 2000s on in science fiction or related to that. You get duo-over films as if somehow you could save someone from dying in this timeline and not recognize.
No they're gonna die in their timeline timeline which is or how and everything everywhere all at once i'm sorry i'm forgetting the main character's name the michelle yo character or yeah yeah i can't remember a name off the top of my head he's jumping yes two different timelines which is a step above in a certain way, although, again.
In terms of what's happened during all of the possibilities that are played out from the 2000s on in terms of these either science fiction-y films that are taking themselves somewhat seriously, the more fantasy films. That are just placed in other times, the ones that change, I mean, aren't dealing with trying to, how do you get out of this world alive? How do you survive?
And all through the 2000s, and even to the present, for the most part, what used to be in the 50s with science fiction films that I watched when I was in my teens, that the breadth of what could be achieved by the human beings in the films and the plots to save the world, they don't save the world anymore. They've just saved their friends and family. I mean, if you take the 50s War of the worlds. It's God and his wisdom and his disease, causing disease for the Martians.
However, the army is called out and all sorts of large institutions. Now you take Tom Cruise's version, and it's all about trying to bring the family into some kind of unity because it's broken. But that's not the only one that does it. It's a whole range of... There's an underlying conservatism there, isn't there, I think? Yeah, but what it's conserving is so minimal. I mean, again, seeking a friend for the end of the world. What a wonderful happy ending, you know? Yeah.
Having finally joined these two people who have come to love each other. As the world goes. There are other films that do that. One, which is, I think it's called 411, like a time frame. William Dafoe was in it. And most of it takes place in his, he and his wife's apartment. And they're online talking to friends and so forth, because the ozone layer is supposed to disappear by this time, and that will be the end. But they're just acting normally. They send out for Chinese food.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And no one's rioting in the street. They're just, it's a sense of defeat that is being paraded as a happy ending in these films. In your case, you kind of say it's, these are the kinds of films that today's audiences find psychologically satisfying, I think you phrase it as, because of the, in their minds, the failure of science and rationality to deal with the crises. Particularly post-9-11, you say. And if anything, things have gotten progressively worse since 9-11.
Well, in that essay, Cy Why, I mean, I think I quote Hayden White. I quote him, the historian. But he wrote in his introduction to metahistory, he was looking at the different forms like romance or satire or tragedy and so forth as the kind of templates, and then doing further analyses of them in terms of their ideology, their sort of ideological take, and other things, rhetorical take.
But he points out that satire, satire is the genre of a world grown old, which was very much the postmodernism, right? And a sort of suspicion, or if not a suspicion. A recognition that somehow the things that were taken as things like science and reason and so forth are not viable. They're not helping anything. They're just another trope. Meta-narrative. Yes. And I think we're still, we're less postmodern. I mean, that had a certain flavor to it. We don't have now.
But Planislam Alonowski, an anthropologist who I read when I was writing my science fiction book and had discovered, has an essay. It's a long essay called Magic, Science, and Religion. And he says, every culture anywhere has all of those three things. They may be in different ratios, but where one will fail a moment, another will pop up. And they can sort of coexist at the same time. People can believe magic and they can believe science, and not even if it's
a contradiction. It's interesting, then, to think about the ratios of what. I mean, I think we're living in a period now in which, again, the world has definitely grown old, and in growing old, we're skeptical of science. Again, it's because everything, everywhere is all at once, and we can't grasp it. We can imagine it in some ways, but we can't really grasp it. And somehow, suddenly one starts watching on television when a drug ad comes on that's praising a drug, all of the little tiny things.
And disclaimers that end in death so what seems yeah if you which seems like this rational very way of getting rid of variables there's no way to get rid of variables there are variables in anything you could those ads though that you're talking about that they they almost could have been in an 80s science fiction movie you know and i think that's one of the interesting things for me i'm writing a piece at the moment
which is kind of borrowing from from that article which is why I've got it in my mind right now. And it's about how we've caught up with a lot of the science fiction narratives that we saw in the 70s and 80s. And what's happening is that the things like, say, for example, the idea of scary robots with scary voices, you know, where you're talking about the Terminator or Robocop or the Daleks or Hal, for example, from 2001. All of those things, they're not kind of othered in the same way.
They're becoming much more like us. It's not annihilation. It's replication. We're being copied and mirrored. These are the things that are now the things to be afraid of rather than the big scary machine that's going to destroy us. That's absolutely true. I mean, all of the discourse around AI, I mean, I've been one of the preliminary things that you asked me about when we were talking earlier as this was being set up, had to do with what I was sort of dealing with now.
And, I mean, again, in the background is the fact that I was a science fiction. I grew up in the 50s with all those great, you know, cheap films. I mean... I read science fiction a lot when I was younger. I somehow, from the beginning as a child, was aware there were other ways of looking or thinking. I mean, when I was really young, so science fiction was very appealing to me.
But that's why I love her, because her actually sort of gets at the problem with, particularly at the end, the problem about AI somehow. I mean, all the stuff about AI, very few people, although it does show up. How could an AI describe sadness?
It's a data collector and an organizer it's not i mean it uses algorithms it does things but what would sad mean it could go to all the dictionaries in the world and come back with those words that that describe it but it could not in any way same thing with i mean death It could conceptualize it, but it could not deal with grief, except to, again, conceptualize it. But it's Steven Spielberg's, and I love the film, AI.
I think that's one of his best films, is early on when a woman's sitting there at a meeting about, in a sense. The new technologies and so forth, and the head of the William Hurt character, asks the woman who has taken out a compact. What love is. And she starts talking about her temperature and fire temperature and things like that. And it turns out, of course, she's an AI and that's what using her as a demo. AI doesn't understand issues of context.
Why something that would be just rationally described the same way, if that's all you were doing could be totally different or a decision could be totally different. Just going back, because we talked a little bit there about your first book, which was your science fiction book from your MA thesis. But am I right in saying that you did your undergraduate degree was in English literature?
That's correct. Yeah. I went to Barnard as an English major and also got an incredible film education because of the geography of where I was. I was on the East Coast when, in the 50s, mid to late 50s on, all the foreign films were coming into New York. And I also was not far, given the location near Columbia University, I was not far from what was the equivalent of the Paris Cinematheque at film theater called The Thalia that would do retrospectives and bring in more obscure films and so forth.
There was also a society called Cinema 16 that was showing, I mean, it was a blossoming of film. And I didn't start out at all to be a film scholar. There weren't many. There were film history classes here and there, and some critical classes. They were, all of them, pretty much attached to the few universities that actually had production departments. Right, okay. It was supplementary to production.
And it wasn't until the 70s. I mean, nobody, or nobody, very few people wrote anything that could be considered critical studies of film during that period of time. You had, I remember going to my first study. Covrance, which was then the Society for Cinema Scientology. Yes, thank you. And I wasn't a member. I had been invited for other reasons. And by the time I got, they could blackball you out. There were only like 40 people initially.
And anytime anybody would try to write a book, I remember Brigetta Steen wrote a book on, who was Swedish, wrote a book on Ingmar Bergman. And it was like, oh, we have a book on Ingmar Bergman. Someone else did one in Hitchcock. Someone else wanted to do another Hitchcock. And the response was, we already have one. You shouldn't possibly need a second one. And so what one read, if you weren't interested in film, and I was watching everything at that time.
But I never thought about writing about it. I wanted to be a creative writer, which I had doing, actually, and doing well. It must have been quite exciting to be at the forefront of a subject area that was kind of burgeoning, maybe. Or was it not like that? It was, but it's also scary. And also sometimes you don't even think about it because there wasn't anything there. And you're just doing your thing. That was certainly the case with science fiction.
First of all, as far as my teaching, I didn't particularly want to teach. My mother was a great school teacher, and I thought I could get boring. And it wasn't until I actually left New York. My husband, my former husband, got a teaching job in Salt Lake City, and we moved to Salt Lake City from New York in 1966. And because I had published a few essays and things. There might have been a review of a book on film.
There might have been a publish some, you know, essay here and there. It was very limited. Because I was a faculty wife and you could count on me, I was asked if I would teach freshman composition. Right. Well, the classes, they didn't have enough grad students. I see. So that was my first teaching experience. I was a faculty wife teaching. All right. And I didn't have my MA then. and so forth.
There were large gaps between my BA and my MA, which happened when my husband got a sabbatical years later. So I had done a lot of teaching because what happened, and it happened all across the United States, really, in the universities, somewhere around the beginning of the 70s or late, you know, actually it might have been late 60s where a lot of things were changing, a lot of the young faculty across the country were interested in film.
And a lot of these more younger scholars who had come through those years and film coming in and interest in film decided they'd like to teach a film class, but English departments weren't interested in in that, what they did end up doing where they came into existence was usually during summer session, which was, you know, help pay the bills. And it turns out when my husband offered a class and I wasn't teaching at the time, they expected maybe 30 students, 110 showed up, which meant, Hey.
There's a cash cow for the English department, which is actually, in a sense, why it got finally put into that. It was finally it relatively quickly for academia got co-opted and put into the English department. You know, it's amazing the amount that things change, but really they stay the same. It's exactly the same now in the UK with film courses. It's like, you know, 130 turn up and it's the cash cow. Yeah, well, I mean, that's really...
First of all, if you think about the initial writings on film and so forth, other than reviews, which I read, I read a lot of reviews before, you know, when I was in New York and so forth of the films, there weren't really... Much available as that we would, you know, call criticism, film criticism or theory. But it's interesting how things got spread out.
We have communications departments, big ones in the United States, but communications never spoke to the humanities, shall we say, They were a separate school in journalism and speech and so forth. So there was no real connection initially and for a long time between communications and something that might be called film or film and media studies. On the other hand, once film studies was sort of at least, if not a department.
Installed in the English department, then comparative literature and another department wanted some too. And there were bouts of rivalry because the people who really studied film thought people who were in Cop Lit just didn't understand what they were doing. I mean, they didn't have any of the theory or thought that was then available. It went on like that.
And actually, if you go to Europe and think about philosophy and film, which always have been connected from the beginning that there were discussions, philosophy and film. I mean, the closest you could get was called theory. And even that was questionable to some extent in the United States. I mean, philosophy in the United States. So there you go. I really want to sort of move on to your PhD, then your dissertation, which obviously became the second book, I think, The Address of the Eye.
One of the things you sort of allude to in the first part of the book, of course, is the critique of direct experience.
And I always find that really interesting, that sense that, especially when you relate it to cinema, that we all go into the apparatus of the auditorium, we sit down, and then we're supposed to kind of have this experience and again you know this is the critique from the phenomenological side as i understand it that you you you sit down and you that everybody so their body just disappears and they become they absorb this image straight into their brain somehow and the body is
is kind of left behind or it doesn't exist anymore but this is what phenomenology is actually trying to contest or remind us that i mean you quote merlot ponty at the at the beginning where you say the radical semiosis of the lived body as a practical method for describing the existential structure of cinematic vision, which really gets to the heart of the idea that you can't leave your body behind.
It's fundamental to the experience of watching and the experience of being as a watcher kind of thing. The body is always necessary. Of course, of course. Choose to have one or not on a plane.
I mean, it's very interesting because looking at today, for example, for some time now, one of the things that irritates me greatly, in a way, Merleau-Ponty was really undoing body-mind split, which has been a huge philosophical issue and in variations and so forth, with the mind also being somehow hierarchically superior to the body. And that's how you get gender differences and just various hierarchies and whatever. Yeah, sure.
So, in reading Earl Alpantique, I mean, at the time, again, during the theory period. Obviously, feminism, second wave feminism had become important, very important theoretically, within film studies and so on. And some of the work was wonderful. A lot of it, we owed things to or were directly visible as psychoanalytic theory.
But it was in a way dealing with male-female and the binarism and you know a classic example was Laura Mulvey's great piece on visual pleasure yes visual pleasure yeah and it's however I just again found it limiting in in terms of although it made sense and it made sense in terms of narrative, the Ati women were passive in films, and men were action heroes, and so forth. It made a certain kind of sense. At the same time, it just wasn't rich, it wasn't full, and it wasn't...
So when it comes to the body, I mean, first of all, when I wrote about the body, I mean, Rollo-Ponty did not see a split between cognition and bodily knowledge, okay? But that wasn't the way it's used now. I mean, again, what's happened is embodiment, I use the term embodiment because it was a way to encompass cognition as well as the body. Yeah. body doing things, the two together, a being in the world, that slowly,
slowly, people started privileging the body and not mentioning a thing about cognition. All more. So you're back again to mind-body split. And I mean, it irritates me no end because it exists and it doesn't make any sense to, You can get really tired talking about the body, even if it's embodiment. You're using the term embodiment. It's almost as if embodiment as a term has become like the signifier or just a representative sign of identity, let's say.
And like you say, it kind of leaves behind the fact that these two things are not two things. They're one thing, they're being, they're ontology, as you say. First of all, embodiment was supposed to create a wholism and a non-abstraction, because it was always the body that was being talked about. I make a pun, it said, body held at arm's length. It was never your body.
And so, it was abstracted. But the haptic, and some of the people were my students, actually, but others not, just cognition sell out. And I find that really problematic in terms of what I was writing, which they were different modalities of being, but they were embodied together. And, again, to make it easy, cognition in its embodied state is not thought, it's doing. It's body memory, if you want to call it like that.
Or, again, you know, and I had mentioned this to you earlier when we were talking before this, I have a granddaughter who's very young, and watching her from, you know, year one to she's going to turn five, Kids grow up, they start with a big smile in front of the world, and then they start moving their hands and their legs, and they do things, and they watch, and they touch, but they also have a lot of room in their brains at that age.
And once you can feel something, you can feel something else. And it's not like they're saying, I'm feeling to myself somewhere. It's not thought done, and it's used.
And it's intelligent it learns yeah yeah so so it is a form of unthought thought yeah if that makes it easier it's very difficult though to say i mean this is one of the things that the most sort of tricky aspect of the of the analysis of the you know of the theory is that it's hard to sort of say to yourself it's easy to say i'm going to go watch a film but it's much more difficult to say, I'm going to watch myself watching a film, or I'm going to feel myself watching the film, you know?
No, I mean, that's great, because I used to tell my students in classes when I would have screenings. I mean, I was thought to be in some ways straight. I said, please do not take notes. Right. That's not watching the film. Somebody asked me, I mean, when you were starting this thread. When I go to the movies, I mean, this has to do also with questions about my preferences and certain things.
But when I go to the movies, I don't take notes, you know, when I'm watching something for the first time. And I go, and whatever it is, once I'm there, sitting there, and the film starts, I just do it to me. Yeah. Yeah. Do your worst. It's just go with it. And, you know, I can get bored, certainly, and abstract myself and start watching something about camper movement, because I'm not totally immersed in what I'm experiencing with the narrative or whatever.
And we all have moments like that anyway, through any given film of some sort of in, out, in, you know, of where we are in relation to it. But I'm always hoping for the one I'm in, I'm in it, you know, put all my money on the table. Right. And it doesn't fall into, oh, it's...
Particular types of films i never know when it's gonna happen you know i hope it's gonna happen absolutely yeah and this sort of this idea of the film having its own consciousness you know its own way of perceiving the world and then that what that means then the sort of next point of that is that there is this thing of the two-way address where the viewer and the film are making meaning or contributing to meaning. We're taking something from the film, but it's taking something from us.
And it's almost kind of like a reciprocal thing if I'm reading that right. In some ways, I'm sorry I used the term body or didn't, I mean, for the film's body. Yes. Except I didn't use it as a metaphor. Right. I was using it as an analogy to the way our bodies function as, you know, given that the title of the book was The Address of the Eye, address is both where you're, is first, if you think about address, I'm addressing you.
Meaning I'm reaching out to you, speaking to you, having some kind of communication with you. But address is also where I reside, where I am. I have an address. Everybody has an address, and it's where they are. Titles mean a lot to me. A pun or the difficulties of the double meaning of certain words actually say something. They're not just cute, to put them. I mean, it shows a structure of some kind that's transitive. But the problem was that a number of people didn't like my calling film,
I mean, thinking of film's body. But I was thinking, hey, what's our body? If we look at it materially, it's a bunch of flesh and bones and whatever that does certain things. And it has eyes and ears, so it has access to senses and so on. And looking at the film, I saw it as very closely. I mean, we are looking at looking. We are hearing, hearing. And in terms of where I am, I can't see, I mean, yes, I can see parts of my
own body, but I'm actually speaking from my body. I'm looking from my body. I'm hearing from my body because I'm looking outward outward.
To my world and and in a way every film does that and the other and the other to myself sure when i'm and the audience of the film or the viewer of the film in ways acting is responding or is being guided by the film in the same way that i am being guided by you now on the screen in front of me in terms of that sense of address right so they're doing that yeah exactly it's silent in a theater but it used to not be still not yeah of arguing with a film or
or making comments and and and so forth that i mean you can see the interactions in certain kinds of theaters that are less. It used to be more, at least, than it wouldn't be because it cost $15 to see a film people shut. I don't know. Well, I don't know about that now. I always get irritated when, you know, in London, it's not cheap to go to the cinema. And it seems, especially since COVID, the etiquette or, you know, people's behavior has gotten worse and worse.
I was wondering, actually, would you be on the forward in the argument that the cinematic experience as in going to the auditorium still has a uniqueness and has a power and maybe even a kind of sacredness that watching at home can never match up to? Or, you know, because there's a lot of people who write right now about how cinema is just one of a number of different types of embodied experiences you can have in relationship to audio-visual images.
Absolutely. I mean, going to a theatre, first of all, it's dark. Your focus is directed to a screen and you're sitting with other people. And in some cases, that's important, particularly with things like comedies and where, you know, there tend to be expressed feelings relative to what's going on. But it's, no, look, streaming, I've done this now because of my circumstances, which, you know, had to do with COVID, but also my mobility.
It's not the same thing. Although, if I'm sitting in front of a very large computer, I've got two screens like that on my tabletop right now. I start and I have, you know, do full screen.
I still get immersed in a certain way right i'm not looking at at other other things but there's just total distraction yeah what these other things or you could stop okay gee i have to go pee well yeah but you can you can you know i want to get a glass of wine i tend not to want to to get up once i'm watching a film that i actually care about but it's more distancing it's not the same and i don't think anybody can argue that it is i guess when you
when you actually go into the auditorium when you are in those conditions then it offers up the possibility for a sort of deeper sensuousness you know not not a you know a lacanian or a freudian kind of idea of. Libidinousness, if that's a word, that is used a lot to kind of describe the cinema-going experience by some theorists, of course. But that sense of the body being, open to being impacted, I suppose, in that way. Well, yes. I mean, listen, we're sitting in seats.
I mean, when, I mean, I talk about it with contempt in The Address of the Eye, Christian Metz's comment about spectator fish taking in everything with their eyes and nothing with bodies. That is one of the most insane non sequiturs forever. And it's not like I, I mean, I actually like some of Christian Metz's work. But again, there's not a split between the mind and the body in that sense. And it would be like having a conversation, except you can interrupt.
But you're interrupting in your head sometimes, you know, when you're watching a film. Let's maybe talk a little bit about, you know, when we talked earlier on in our preparations for this conversation, you know, this idea of your tastes and how they've maybe been formulated or changed over the years and, you know, how they feed into your scholarship and your thinking. Well, certainly what is clear, you know, is film studies is not film studies anymore in the way it was.
I mean, the names have changed so that there was a department of critical studies within film, like at UCLA film, there's a school of theater, film, and television, and then a department, it had been a department of film. And because it had both production and it had critical studies as sub areas, but then it became, you know, and it's even larger than that now, media studies, in some cases where film isn't even singled out, nor is the digital.
So there were certain tendencies of whatever was hot at a particular time in terms of areas or where, you know, how to get a job for the students. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The things that I'm interested in have gotten so big, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do it. I can talk it, but because, as you were pointing out, language has a shape and limitation. How do you write about everything, everywhere, all at once in linear prose without hierarchizing anything?
And I've described film recently, films are like canaries in the coal mine. Someone said, what? So I couldn't use it. It was quite clear to have to start explaining that there really were canaries in the coal mines. They were harbingers of gas coming, you know. The sense that film does not have to rationalize things. Films do not have to rationalize things, not just the fantasies and stuff. In a way, they're like us going about the world, doing the plot and whatever else.
But what gets picked to do, some have to do with money and the cultural, the high, and repetitions and franchises and sequences and prequels. But the way they're handled and how many of them say things about the culture. I'm always writing about the culture we're in. I really want to, I think, our sense of time and space have radically changed.
And we no longer live in a temporality that is sequential it's simultaneity and and part of this has done been huge part is what the internet has wrought yeah of course of course and it's it's not linear it's everything everywhere all at once everything bouncing off so where where is agency if, you know, you can't ascribe responsibility to an event in a film or whatever, to clarify. I started thinking about this some time ago when I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin
Button, which is by Rick Phelps. Wow, okay. And there's a sequence, well, two montages that follow each other in Benjamin Button. It was a lot in the film, but this really got to me. Okay, so in the middle of the film, one of the main characters, whose name is Daisy, whom Benjamin Button has, she's growing older while he's getting younger. She's a dancer, and she comes out of a theater after practicing and gets hit by a taxi. She twirls in the street, and a taxi comes along. and Moser down.
The montage starts with Benjamin going to the hospital and sitting in a waiting room. He speaks, he narrates the montage, although he could not, he was not there and he could not have been there at all. And what you see is he just is describing, he's describing, he says a woman who was going to get a taxi to go to X, she gets a phone call. And you hear, this is all happening. There's no psychology. For the most part, you don't know these characters. And there are a lot of them.
And it starts from there to the taxi that she would have had goes somewhere, gets another passenger, and it goes on for quite a long while for a montage with his voiceover saying, this person did this, this person did that, this is this, the car had. He's not using the words if at the time, he's just describing. And then the second montage comes on, and you're getting different visions of what's, you know, it's not the same images, but they're close.
And he says, if this didn't happen, if then, if then, all the way through, and again, it's long. And you're sitting there. And I mean, for me, it was this epiphany in a way, in terms of clarifying The fact that this is an endless if-thens, and who then was responsible for the accident. The sense that there is no beginning point for anything. Causality starts falling apart. It's local. You can only do it local. And we have been moving because of the internet and our community.
Expansion of space to it was local then it was global then it was global yeah and then it's planetary and it which is overwhelming so so there is this it's like the butterfly effect but the butterfly effect was always one butterfly yeah i mean that that film sort of started me thinking about that and that was long before everything everywhere all at once but by the time i had come to every everywhere all once as i said which i thought the title was the best thing about the film it
it was trying but it's also a part of the the like you you were saying earlier on the sort of mechanics of blockbuster cinema and superhero movies which i'm i don't care for either where you have to watch you have to watch seven films and three tv series just to know what's going on if you want to watch any of these films yeah and and some of it is boring i mean.
Or you don't care anymore yeah i mean so i mean the films again with the canary you know in coal mine you know things like nomadland and you know thinking i i mean the films that somehow speak to being disoriented in space and time, which, in fact, again, has been, in fact, the whole oeuvre from memento on with Chris Nolan. He's colder, except Interstellar wasn't. And it's the subjects of an awful lot of European art house movies as well. Yes, absolutely. And even narrative is an instant.
I mean, again, when you're having, if we're dealing with this apprehension of, of simultaneity rather than time changes. And I mean, the temporal mode is interruption. No, that's very true. So I'm going to write all this. I don't know. Well, I keep trying.
First of all, I can't even write because of all the crap I have to do that has nothing to do with anything interesting we we're talking about well it's an amazing kind of argument and and the way you contextualize in terms of the process of trying to get to grips with it and write about it is i certainly i certainly agree with you but it is very difficult i do want to say one thing i'm sure you are also, asked because what are your favorite films who are your favorite filmmakers
you know things like that, And I have, I mean, I have a list of films and things that range foreign, popular, whatever, that means something to me, did something to me. But usually I avoid that question by saying, if you are on a desert island, I refuse to say, I said, if, just to give them the 10, whatever, that way. I said, if you are on a desert island and you had 10 films and they were the only films you'd ever get. What would they be? I said, for me, there would have to be variety.
And what the variety was wouldn't even matter. You know, I would pick films that made me laugh. I've made films. I would have a very different criteria. It's like, how do you feel today? What kind of, you know, movie do you want to watch? for you go in and suddenly, I mean, if you can't get new stuff. And so I was looking at certain films I will see again and again and again. And I'm always scared when I first love a film that I won't like it the second time. So I tend to put off. Sure.
Watch it a second time. And then I put it on a syllabus, so I have to watch it.
Especially films that you haven't seen perhaps from a long time from a different phase in your life well listen thank you so much for for giving me your afternoon for a couple of hours it's been absolutely fascinating i've loved speaking to you yeah and i'm sure that our listeners will really really appreciate the the detail and everything that you've uh that you that we've talked about so thank you so much vivian oh you're welcome it was my pleasure to be able to talk about it i mean
i haven't talked about any of this stuff in quite a while and it's it's no it's soul crushing yes when you know everybody's changing your passwords and all of that crap let along my new computer and uh so forth ah it's it's just not a life um this was so that's great. Music. Okay, so thanks once again to Vivian for just being who she is really and allowing us to sort of talk about so many different things.
And I think what's interesting to me, I was sort of thinking about where phenomenology lies kind of in film studies.
And I think, again, it's sort of under-understood, if that's even a word, or under-theorized, even though there's a lot of work that has been done on phenomenology, particularly you know around around the key thinkers like merlot ponty and herself and you know people we sort of mentioned but then there was a book um i don't know neil if you know kelly fury no she's um she's one of the film philosophy group um so i i ran into her in in.
Portugal in the in the summer and she's just published a book called film phenomenologies which is a an edited collection so there's work being done out there but it's again i think it's a very niche a very niche aspect of what is a niche subject if you you know if you count sort of you know really high-end film studies so yeah tell us what you thought and let's have a chat about it between us so much so much stuff yeah it's really hard to it's really hard to know where to i'll just
i'll begin with like reflections on the conversation in terms of like things that were just really lovely to sure to hear you know so obviously as someone with an interest in the history of film education it was wonderful to hear her talk through her biography as someone who was present at those kind of milestone moments like where you say where film studies moves from being an appreciation or an apprenticeship in terms of film practice into a discipline and all
of the attendant tensions that that arise but just just hearing about the development of those programs that she was present at the the start of and sort of studied through and then obviously kind of led was really really interesting and aligned with that was how you get a sense of her kind of critical voice developing through her love of science fiction but through the space of genre you know in kind of early film studies and the kind of the dominance of the
western and the gangster movie and and. How she could sort of see that space for actually well. This is this is interesting stuff even it's that kind of period of 50s b movies but she was very aware of what. They were doing on a kind of cultural and political level and a formal level as well which i think is really it was just weird that was.
Sort of really interesting to hear that that history you know that kind of that history and then how she just was able to flow between her biography and kind of deep philosophy kind of seamlessly you know and a reminder that this you know it's not a. These things are not compartmentalized these are interlinked you know that there is a relationship between her experience and her her humanity and her body and the the way she thinks and what she thinks about you know it was just it was kind
of effortlessly impressive but obviously it's also the a lifetime of thought and then when that beautiful thing she said that writing is she writes to work out the meaning of one's thoughts not one's you know like and i just thought that's a really really nice thing which is about like you know again kind of why i thought it was such a rich conversation is because that's what that's what this is that's what this has always been about like we see something we engage we
have an experience and we want to work out how we think about it and what we think about it you know it's not whether it's good or bad it's not whether it's i was going to say that it's not ranking it it's about you know what what is this experience that i've had and how am i you know and i was reading about the substance again this morning which i know is a film that i think we differ on but i'm interested in how can i articulate what i don't like or what
kind of rubs me up the wrong way or what makes me feel a certain way you know rather than just always being well this is good and this is bad i don't think it's a bad film it's that's irrelevant really but it's kind of it conjures up thoughts writing and podcasts as a way of working through that with in dialogue i think is really was really really one yeah but also that The experience of being in the experience rather than just watching the experience.
You know, because that's the key differential I think that she's getting at is that you're not watching a film, you're being in the experience of a film. But we just don't talk in those terms, really. Yeah, I think, I mean, that's where I kind of landed in terms of the thing that was really...
Really fascinating and i think it's very timely for a number of reasons and it is that idea i just read this short book about meditation called being aware of being aware and like the ultimate state of consciousness is not kind of this zen nothingness it's actually it's where you realize that you are you have complete awareness all the time that's the state of being is like an awareness and that's what we're talking about isn't it's like actually that
yeah and it goes back to a lot of things that we've talked about recently, which is cinema as a thing. And I love this idea of it having its own consciousness and its own body. And it is this idea that cinema is most alive in this kind of way of having a dialogue with an audience when it's aware of its being and it's transmitting it's that awareness, you know, by saying, this is a film.
This is a very particular kind of experience, you know, rather than trying to hide it or pretend that it's something else, it's actually, it creates the space through that kind of consciousness of being cinema that allows for this experience and i love that idea and that's that's what's really kind of sort of uh i'm feeling really kind of engaged with that idea consistently because i think it is about what is cinema now and what is the experience of cinema now because you talked a lot about
the difference between the cinema space the auditorium space and the the home space you know but but but what is cinema now with with all of that having taken place we're not going back no one's putting their phones away cinemas are not suddenly going to become a nicer mainstream experience you know the multiplexes as an idea even if summer closing is there you know and then you've got these boutique cinemas like the everyman where you get your dinner served halfway through which
is a disruption on many ways not only just someone you're serving your food but then you're changing your body when you're actually too full for me and chicken wings while watching you know tarkovsky you know that all of this is a. Change it's a change to how we experience this thing and what is the phenomenology of that so where you know we talk about cinema not having the same place in the culture but it's still a really important art form in terms of these
kinds of experiences and how has that been changed by the physical experience i thought was just again like the opening up of that yeah and i wonder if that kelly fury book is about that kind of those kinds of film phenomenologies in terms of like well how do we grapple with this because another vivian clearly loves movies and clearly and it was so refreshing to not be like well films were great in the 60s like she's she's engaged and she's engaged
with the idea so what do we do you know what do we do with this art form that we love in these new contexts yeah yeah it really made me think what your thought as a kind of as a response I mean, just two things to that, I think. The first one is, I think that there is a, through her work, there is a crossover between the film as artefact and the effective...
Implications of watching a film so what do you feel in your body as a you know as a watching subject and how do you kind of reflect on on that watching of of watching you know all that consciousness of yourself watching and then you've got all of the social elements cultural elements of the you know the infrastructure of how film is delivered to us like whether you go to the auditorium you will ever watch at home and i think that her work is absolutely at the crux of understanding
the relationship between those three things, which I think in film studies are often kept quite separate. Yeah. Reading her work, it allows you to think about all those three things as, you know, intersecting concepts or ideas, which is quite difficult. You know what I mean? It's not easy to do, but all of those three things are important if you're thinking about the totality of what cinema is.
And the other, the other thing just to say, which picks up on something that you said you know in terms of her love but also the way she's you know the sort of curiosity like taking a film like everything everywhere all at once which she said you know just on a kind of like reviewer level she didn't like but was able to take that and say okay this is actually what it represents to me is is a kind of whole facet of thinking about space and time that we see in cinema
that's affecting cinema in so many different ways but also affecting our lives, you know, if you think about the internet, the idea of, you know, linear progression, which we've held onto as an anchoring point of understanding kind of human experience. And now it's kind of like the past and the future and the present are all mixed in into one, or, you know, they don't have a conceptual map to use that phrase.
You know what I mean? That goes out the window. That makes it much more difficult for us to understand our relationship to the world again, if that's not too grandiose, but do you know what I mean? Like just taking that film, which you could just throw away and say, oh, it's shit. But actually, even if I didn't like it as an experience just of watching, I didn't think it was a great movie, you could say, but it does represent something absolutely fundamental about the moment, you know?
Yeah, it's a great example of not dismissing anything that you watch in terms of its possibility.
And from that film, there was that really, yeah, eloquent, kind of discussion about kind of time and you know linear time and time so the time is no longer sequential but it's kind of it's in simultaneity you know i mean i like that film but you know but but also what i really think it captures which i think was is is is that kind of the anxiety of the contemporary moment in its form of like just this kind of overwhelming barrage of the now and.
That the conversation and thinking about christopher nolan and and his kind of time experiments and just and how which again kind of attaches me to my experience as a as an embodied person of cinema right now and how i am looking to think about how i live in time like i know you were saying like oh maybe that's too grandiose but i don't think you can come away from this conversation without thinking in those big grandiose philosophical terms i certainly thought like oh actually i am drawn
more and more to films i watch everything but the films that are really staying with me at the moment are the ones where there is a i feel a greater sense of how i want to live in time you know so the two films yeah yeah yeah yeah well i won't say what the films are this year but there's two films this year that have really stayed with me and both of them are kind of they they represent that narrative films anyway you know in terms of like actually i'm i'm very conscious.
About how i spend my days and cinema is a way for me of understanding my relationship to time and that's what i've been trying to articulate to my this this year really in teaching so it's like oh actually yeah this is a really beautiful way of thinking about it and using an example of a film that you don't like i think is a really good way of doing that and saying actually like this is it's doing something on a kind of philosophical experiential level that sits outside taste and
it sits outside yeah good or bad reviews like it's and what's interesting as well which i think is it it doesn't matter it's irrelevant whether the filmmakers know they're doing that and it's irrelevant whether that's the intention on the part of the filmmakers the film itself has that in it you know i don't think that's magic i think that's just you know the nature of of art and it's you know the nature of a lot of stuff that there is a you know you're talking
about those other positions there's also the separate position of the film detached from everything waiting to be engaged with which is outside criticism it's it's outside filmmaking it's this outside even the context of us it's just it's waiting to be engaged with yeah and i love the idea you know again it's i think we spend a lot of time on this podcast and we spend a lot of time talking about films and i always hate the idea that that this doesn't matter you know that it's not important,
it's frivolous. And it's like, no, actually, it's vital. This is one of the ways that we really understand where we sit in the world as embodied beings. And yeah, just that idea of, oh, actually, I'm able to...
Understand how i want to spend my time through film and through the experience of watching and what it leaves me with as a as an important person yeah it was amazing yeah it's interesting you say that because it made me sort of reintroduce a little bit of the i mean yeah i can say it's sort of love but the but the but that sense of the importance i think what you're talking about there that sense that i'm not just i you know i'm kind of lucky to get
to do this and you know i'm not going to go down a sort of personal track, but that sense of, I should be doing something kind of a little bit more useful. You know what I mean? I think maybe there are those people who work in certain areas that are just, they're doing that thing they love, which whatever it might be, you might be a sports commentator or whatever, or a film critic. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, I love this, but you look in the mirror
sometimes and think, am I just wasting my time on something frivolous? You know what I mean?
But I think that that sense of being in the world and and sort of wrapping your head around that and the fact i mean i'm doing a lot of work on on as you know i'm sort of looking at the advancements of technology and ai and these kinds of things try in a critical way and there's a couple of books i've read have talked about the idea of our relationship to technology is not about the technology it's about us it's a mirror.
You know it's it's just reflecting us back to ourselves in so many different ways and i think that that cinema is like that it it reflects back our imagination to us so we have to we have to contend with the fact that it's it's us but it's not us it's a it's an idealized it's a romanticized it's a fearful expression of all the things that we try to make sense of ourselves and then we then we watch it for kind of entertainment you know what i mean it's yeah and it
it kind of got me back in tune a little bit talking to vivian there is a there is a point to this stuff beyond just beyond just let's let's just escape for a couple of hours and i think that that's really in the ether right now you know i've talking to a film director yesterday and then reading a couple of articles recently which is which has almost been been saying look we need to go to the cinema to forget all the shit that's going on in the world and i think sometimes that i get it but also
So that's not going to help in the long term, you know? I rail against that because I think that, and it was interesting, like to go back to a film like The Substance, Rose Glasses, Love Lives Bleeding, you know, they feel like examples of where cinema as a kind of safe, transgressive space to reflect back ugliness is.
We go into this space to see ourselves as humans, the entire spectrum of humanity in a safe space where we can enjoy these images and these ideas in the safety of that space, but as a vital way of processing it. We're not avoiding it, we're confronting it. we're confronting.
The fact that this is you know these are the products of human beings and also they are you know the deep in the psyche of human beings sometimes but that's something that seems really lost and we talk about this the idea of ideology and aesthetics but you know certainly like that there has to be a kind of very clear moral position on the part of the film and the filmmakers so that we're all aware that there's nothing bad happening you know so if we're going to go in and be asked to think about
the world we're thinking about it in a very clear and coherent way that aligns with how we already feel when we go in and that's i just think that that's a huge part of art that's being absolutely ignored and the idea that cinema is only a distraction that we go only to escape the world outside i think is just i hate that idea you know and i'm not saying that doesn't mean there are times where you put on a will ferrell movie i love will ferrell you know but it's
it's this age and i've talked i talked about this at the conference a lot this kind of either or thing well it's cinema is this it's it is this now it's this kind of safe cozy warm clear uncomplex space for distraction and it's like no no no no that's not that's not what it should be at all there should be these things where we go in and it really brings out the murkiness and the complexity and the difficulty and the joy and the the the sadness and the confusion you know like and if you
can do that through a really entertaining and enjoyable.
Experience then that's amazing isn't it and that's kind of the highest of the art form i thought it's really interesting what she was saying early on in the conversation about arrival you know and how she was talking about how it kind of makes you rethink time it makes you rethink language yeah yeah you know all of these kinds of ideas around threats and like there's so much in it that you know is so political and so present and so current but it's also it's just a
really beautiful movie you know and it's like that you are being confronted with all this stuff but you're not having it you're not being reminded that it's doing it it's it's embedded in the film and in the the experience of watching it. And I'm like, that's a goal. That's a mainstream American movie of the last 10 years or whatever. This is not the distant past where this is possible. And there are examples recently, but that's the one that she pulled out, which I thought was that opposite.
And it was nice to hear her talk so much about science fiction and to think about that genre's move from.
Again, again the very very low grade 50s b movies which were vitally kind of engaged with with the present moment then and how it's become something else it was really lovely which must have pleased you as a as a as a sci-fi nad oh god yeah i mean it was funny because it's like there's more of the science fiction stuff in the longer version so i kind of had to cut some of that that down because it's quite a bit of it in the beginning because
i wanted to get into the the biography and then And, you know, obviously the phenomenology stuff. Yeah, so once again, thank you so much to Vivian. I hope she enjoys the episode when I send it to her. In the longer version, as we've said, all of those sections are expanded. But she almost gives a kind of mini paper on the fundamentals of understanding phenomenology and linking it to film.
And there's more on her current thinking what you were saying there about that sort of falling apart of our traditional anchoring points of time and space and the effect of that in terms of of us as human beings but kind of like reading that through film as well so yeah i just highly recommend going going to listen to the full version if you don't want to sign up you can actually just buy that individual piece of audio from the the patreon yeah and thanks to you neil for
that conversation that was really great that's invigorated me for the. The rest of the day and the week to think about about these things because one of the things i'm i'm again you know now i'm in my freelance mode i'm trying to think of a way that i can write about cinema that has something of a signature rather than just randomness and i think one way of doing that might be about this idea of the experience of watching as much as the film itself.
You know that i like talking about going to the cinema and the process of that and maybe there's a way of.
Writing around that that i can kind of focus on as the as the as the main the main line into me rather than just sort of doing random film reviews as it were yeah well that's exciting you know and i'm glad that you're invigorated by by our chat it's clearly you're invigorated by the chat with vivian and as am i you know like again it's listening to it and then our conversation this morning is that kind of vital the vital reminder of what matters in terms of like our lives which is
not the three online meetings i'm about to go into you know it's not that you know there's more there's more at stake and there's nothing at stake but there's you know in terms of the great nothingness of universal consciousness but there's also there's things that matter while we're here um and how we spend our time and you know i think and it was so so beautiful to hear that conversation and feel like yes you know this is this articulates so much that is felt um she was she is brilliant um and
she was brilliant in the conversation so yeah thank you to vivian and well done to you i mean it was it was it's brilliant it's a really great great piece great well i appreciate that i appreciate that very much uh okay so that's it thank you very much for listening to our patreon subscribers thanks very much for your continued support please head over to www.patreon.com forward slash cinematologists for all of our bonus content again including this this.
Longer version of this interview neil i'll see you very soon i hope the meetings are not too soul destroying they won't be now yeah thanks everyone see you soon buddy this has been the cinematologist podcast thanks for listening. Music.