Surface, Material Bodies, and the Avant-Garde in Philosophy of Film

Abstract As surprising as it might seem, an important encounter between analytic philosophy and avant-garde cinema turns on conceptions of the human body and their origins in infancy. The basic ideas emerge from philosopher Richard Wollheim's writing on painting, though Wollheim himself was not prepared to apply his thought to cinema, and even most analytic philosophers of film who purport to draw on Wollheim have under-appreciated the consequences of his writing on “twofoldness”—let alone his writing on painting and the body—for explorations of the materiality of experimental film. Here that thought is pursued by comparing two poles in Wollheim with analogous ones in Annette Michelson's writing: I argue that it is not an accident that both Wollheim and Michelson understand their respective mediums as sites of “doubled” perception, and that both recur to Kleinian ideas of infancy and the body. Additionally significant to both writers are Hans Hofmann's ambitions for depth-perception as involving a kind of “push-and-pull,” which is here interrogated via a Wollheimian reading of Ken Jacobs's Tom, Tom the Piper's Son (1969). I argue that the terms of this reading are excluded by Wollheim-cognizant analytic philosophers of film like George M. Wilson, Enrico Terrone, and Gregory Currie. The holistic perception of a painting that Wollheim insisted was necessary for “corporeality” then finds its analog in a heterodox conception of structural cinema, including quasi-narrative adaptations of that genre such as Chantal Akerman's News from Home (1975). Taking up the limit case of the conception of the self in Wollheim's reading of De Kooning, I argue for the significance of child-parent collaborations like Mano de metate (2018) by Mexican filmmaker Bruno Varela and his then six-year-old daughter Eugenia, which are characterized by electronic analogues of what Wollheim called “those sensations which gave us our first access to the external world.”