Cinema and "The Cinema"

Discerning Woolf's personal views of the cinema is a complex business if we take into account the turbid relationships literature has had with the up-start art form of film. Even in Woolf's day film was known for its parasitic relationship with the novel (beginning with Thomas Edison's Frankenstein) so it would not be surprising for us to finder her unsympathetic toward film, if not a bit hostile. The speed at which film's images communicate, as opposed to literature and painting is another area in which Woolf might be seen to deplore cinema and its hold on viewers, the savages that compose modern society. These English "savages" with their "unaesthetic eye" which "is a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain with toys and sweetmeats to keep it quiet, and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up" ("The Cinema") are confounded by the visual intensity of the moving image. We might think that, in this light, the cinema for Woolf could have been a plague upon the imagination. As Kafka once said, film puts the eye in uniform, so that all see the same, all feel the same, all think the same - savages bewildered by shadows on a cave wall.The imagination is shackled by images strangely real for the eye but too-real for the mind Additionally, the directors of film too receive some criticism from Woolf. Cinema is an art "born fully clothed" and lacks the maturity in its artists. The savages are unsure of their new instruments, and perhaps find it all too easy to rip-off literary works for inspiration.

Of course Woolf's view of cinema is more complex even if there are hints of disdain. She does see in it a profound power of emotion in the cinema. The terrifying tadpole in Dr. Calligari provides Woolf with an example of the lucid yet elusive evocation the cinema is able to create. Unlike literature, in which a tadpole could scarcely become frightening (the words "a frightening sight" would dull the edge, as would any words), by showing something as benign as a tadpole, looming on the screen (accidentally even!) can seem "fear itself." This power of cinema to not merely represent but to show a kind of reality superseding experience, intervening in the flow of our imaginations to erupt in a strange and powerful fear by the image of a tadpole is certainly a quality in cinema's favor. Human consciousness stands to gain from cinema in a way literature itself could not provide. The vapid nature of these images, when combined, accelerates emotions, thoughts, imaginations to what was then an unheard of speed. The intense visuality of cinema creates "The likeness of the thought [which] is for some reason more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available, than the thought itself." Woolf understands that cinema is not thoughtful (not in the way poetry is), even though it is more transparent to thought. This transparency could be a double edged sword. Because of its efficacy the film maker possess "enormous riches at his command" which the literary artist does not. There remains then, a possibility for cinema, even if not yet realized for Woolf. She writes, "If
into this reality he could breathe emotion, could animate the perfect form with thought, then
his booty could be hauled in hand over hand. Then, as smoke pours from Vesuvius, we should
be able to see thought in its wildness, in its beauty, in its oddity, pouring from men with their
elbows on a table." Which might make us wonder, if Woolf had some sort of vision for cinema (what it might become), was her sympathy for the art's potential because she wanted to see good films one day or perhaps something more universal.

I wonder if Woolf, given this opinion of cinema, was perhaps more interested not so much in making good films (somewhat hard to imagine), but was instead interested in what cinema allowed us to access in terms of our human consciousness. Cinema brought something new to the table and even if that new gift had not yet been fully opened, it still promised new riches for the human imagination. This was what Woolf saw as the treasure to be had in cinema and what made its possibility valuable to Woolf was what Deleuze refers to as the "insistent." Neither Woolf nor Deleuze were interested in what exists in cinema, what it represents accurately or well. The reason a tadpole could become terrifying is because through the tadpole, growing on the screen to monstrous proportions, something else, something that was terrifying, was insisting (not existing) through the moving image. According to Deleuze this relates to Bergson's Whole, of which all moving images subsist though we can not articulate their relationship with the Whole entirely. (This is perhaps why Woolf realized cinema possessed no "thought"). As Deleuze constantly refers this insistence as an opening onto a "spiritual reality" I think the connection with Woolf can be made stronger. I am reminded of the cotton wool in "A Sketch of the Past" through which certain intense moments of consciousness give us a glimpse. Is this not somewhat like the invisible yet effective thread which runs through the moving image, giving us an imperceptible sense of the Whole