Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 8 Number 3, December 2007

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Towards A Neuroaesthetics of Film:

Eisenstein, Brakhage and Mantic Montage

By

Shannon Foskett

University of Western Ontario

…we need not be afraid of an analytic deciphering of the most basic laws of sensual thinking…

Sergei Eisenstein[1]

Matter has become intrinsically connected to subjective experiences.

                                                                                    Jeffrey M. Schwartz[2]

This paper seeks to build on recent efforts in the development of cognitive film theory by exploring the case for grounding its study at the level of neurophysiology.[3]  From the point of view of neuroscience and, some would argue, the scientific method itself, this is naturally an axiomatic analytical move.  To date, there is plenty of knowledge regarding the processes of visual and motor perception, but there is neither a neurologically-driven film theory of spectatorship nor of film aesthetics.  As I hope to suggest in part through a discussion of the Soviet formalist film theorist and director Sergei Eisenstein, there is a palpable undercurrent of neurophysiological thought – and thought in want of neurophysiological substance – present in various dimensions of film scholarship and practice.  Moreover, it has been suggested that formalism “is a major area ripe for reevaluation in light of the current revolution in brain studies.”[4]  We know of the strong interests that Eisenstein had in the interactions of cognitive, neurophysiological and imaginative processes.  These interests have been implicitly acknowledged in part by others as his “urge to explore an intellectual cinema.”[5]  Simultaneous with the formalist impulse in the theory of montage, however, I would argue there exists an equally rich and complex poietic or expressive process, such that the production of an image in general[6] consists both of an inner and an outer determination.  Whereas Eisenstein might have emphasized the latter at the expense of the former (he often said there wasn’t enough space to discuss the detailed workings of the imagination, for example[7]), the American avant-garde film experimentalist Stan Brakhage clearly approached image production via the inward determination of poietic process.  With Brakhage’s own admission that he sees “even the electrical patterns on the surface of his eyes,”[8] and that the Prelude of Dog Star Man is the result of his attempt to transcribe his “dream vision” and “closed-eye vision,”[9] we have further indications of where a neuro-aesthetic approach to film might begin.  I will argue that Eisenstein and Brakhage are two paradigmatic examples of a neuroaesthetic understanding of semiosis taken in a broad (i.e., non-Saussurean) sense, which is to say, as a bidirectional process of aesthesis and poiesis. 

From Hieroglyphs to Cells: Eisenstein as Prophet-Wizard

             In some ways a neuroaesthetic theory of film might seem to dissolve the autonomy of those portions of film theory dependent on the specificity of the medium.  The issues involved – visual perception, memory, imagination – can come to ground (or dissolve) some of the concerns and problems raised by many of the early writings on film.  This could certainly be the case with Eisenstein, who would make a point of insisting on the physiological perception of colour[10] or transcultural universals in spatial perception and expression,[11] and who was at least once an engaged observer of the linguistic consequences of certain surgical brain operations.[12] 

            In particular, Eisenstein’s theory of montage appears to afford us the most likely and illuminating entry-point for a consideration of the cinematic apparatus in relation to cognitive and perceptual neuroscience.  Taken in its narrow sense as a particular manner of editing and mise-en-scène composition, Eisenstein’s exposition of montage already explicates and depends upon the Humean associationism that would provide a basis for later work in artificial intelligence research and development.  Taken in its broader sense, however, as a practice of universal communicative and creative processes,[13] Eisenstein’s montage transcends the film medium and comes to serve as a site for developing a theory of mind. 

            But Eisenstein’s relevance for any neuroaesthetics of film goes beyond montage and into the realm of affect and poietic process.  His attraction to the problem of attraction, i.e., why we are attracted to fire[14] or the shapeshifting abilities of Mickey Mouse and Alice[15] is not only the sort of concern shared by the psychology of perception and group theory in mathematics (as, for example, in the case of the attraction to symmetry and Rorschach tests[16]) but also pertains analogically and theoretically to the newfound potentials for learning released in the discovery of neuroplasticity, as I will later discuss.  Moreover, the importance Eisenstein places on the sensuous and affective aligns himself with a (ro)mantic materialist relationship to the external world and its ritual objects and ornaments – whether the sublime experience of nature, curse tablets and papyrus books,[17] or the artifacts of wealth placed with the body on its journey into the afterlife.[18]  The physical juxtaposition of sensuous objects and elements – and it is instructive that Eisenstein referred to individual shots as “cells” – becomes a highly evolved artistic and scientific practice of ideation through imagination and evocation.

            Notably, American poet Vachel Lindsay, writing on the cinema in 1916, made a point of referring to film producers and directors as “prophet-wizards” (although he would call them author-producers too), placing them categorically in a line of artists and poets that included Dürer, Rembrandt, Blake, Coleridge, Poe and Yeats.[19]  Lindsay’s distinction between these prophet-wizards and those whom he saw as merely mechanical inventors or “realists” – the Wright brothers, Edison, Bell – invokes Heidegger’s explication of the historical shift in meaning of technε as a particular kind of mediated revealing.  Whereas we might align the technε involved in the “prophet-wizard’s” activities with the bringing-forth of poiεsis, the technε of the latter group of “realists” is more of a challenging.[20]  For Lindsay, the technopoiesis of presencing that occurs at the hands of the ideal film director is in part related to his belief in the director’s ability to make and use cinematic “hieroglyphs” in order to evoke his/her intended meanings for the audience.  These hieroglyphs – singular objects or images, such as a porcelain bowl, that can function as interpretive heuristics – form the basis of a new style of communication that Lindsay saw heralded by the arrival of cinema: an imminent transition from a linguistic culture to one that “suddenly begins to think in pictures.”[21]

            With Lindsay, I would argue, we thus have the basis for establishing a pragmatic equivalency between magic, photogénie and montage that carries over into a consideration of Eisenstein’s theoretical work. Eisenstein’s discussion of the “cinematographic traits” or ideograms found throughout Japanese culture[22] obviously recalls the hieroglyphs proposed by Lindsay.[23]  Eisenstein clearly values the production of ideograms from hieroglyphs for the process of montage he sees at work there, later referring jointly to the “ideographic (montage) process.”[24]  We could imagine Eisenstein putting into practice Lindsay’s ideas:

I do not insist that the prospective author-producer adopt the hieroglyphic method as a routine, if he but consents in his meditative hours to the point of view that it implies.  The more fastidious photoplay audience that uses the hieroglyphic hypothesis in analyzing the film before it, will acquire a new tolerance and understanding of the avalanche of photoplay conceptions […][25]

The suggestion in this passage of a new understanding of photoplay conceptions seems to hint toward the added level of conceptual signification Eisenstein maintained is produced by the montage of conflicts – a “montage-thinking.”  Instead of shuffling hieroglyphic “cards” made of paper around, though, Eisenstein works in the juxtaposition of celluloid cards.  Each shot literally a “hieroglyph.” Each hieroglyph holds the place of one of those immutable “granite” shots of film; both shot and hieroglyph have a complete iconic connection to their referents.  Indeed, Eisenstein could be read as answering Lindsay’s call for “transubstantiation [to] begin.  Our young magicians must derive strange new pulse-beats from the veins of the earth, from the sap of the sky […] they will build up a priesthood […] according to the intrinsic authority of the light revealed.”[26] 

            The poietic use of hieroglyphs and montage cells by the “prophet-wizard” recalls the distinction proposed by Barbara Stafford between what may be called the mantic and the hermeneutic paradigms.[27]  The mantic semiotic paradigm is constituted by a revealing or poietic bringing-forth and demands less an interpretative reading than, say, an affective or intuitive receiving.  This mantic spectatorial paradigm would be congruent with, although not equivalent to, Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” (a concept derived from Eisenstein’s “montage of attractions,” in fact) and suggests the possibility of a non-discursive, possibly Peircean, semiotics of cinema that would not be complicated by the problems of a film “language.”

            The connections between magic, photogénie and montage are further linked in both Lindsay and Eisenstein to the notion of the “primitive.”  As Lindsay puts it:

this invention, the kinetoscope, which affects or will affect as many people as the guns of Europe, is not yet understood in its powers, particularly those of bringing back the primitive in a big rich way.  The primitive is always a new and higher beginning to the man who understands it.[28]

Indeed, Lindsay sees the photoplay as harkening back to the union of expressionist and formalist styles that he saw present in and typical of East Asian and Egyptian penmanship and brushwork.[29]  Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the notion of the primitive is connected in an Hegelian manner to the idea of the evolution of art and humankind:

by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim that this lantern of wizard-drama is going to give us in time the visible things in the fullness of their primeval force, and some that have been for a long time invisible. To speak in a metaphor, we are going to have the primitive life of Genesis, then all that evolution after: Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers […] the history of man is to be retraced, the same round on a higher spiral of life.[30]

I suggest that we construe notions of “primitive” not in terms of progress or development but closer to the idea of “early” perception in neuroscience.  Early visual perception, for example, refers to post-stimulus visual processing in the range of 75-150 milliseconds.[31]  Similarly, Vygotsky’s notion of preverbal thought ontogenetically precedes the development of verbal thought as “internalized, abbreviated version of vocalized social speech”[32] and is found by David Bordwell to be parallel to Eisenstein’s notion of sensuous thought (which Eisenstein also referred to as inner speech).  Nevertheless, the notion of the primitive is relevant for the context of this discussion insofar that it has been used to refer to the practices and conventions of certain non-Western peoples.  The cartoons of Disney, as we shall see, were thought to provide material for Eisenstein to analyse the ‘survival’ of animism and totemism in modern consciousness and art.[33]  I would propose that these practices are intimately linked to a non-discursive or mantic thought which is merely an alternative and not inferior form of discursive or hermeneutic thought.  I would also suggest that for the purposes of understanding montage and associationism in relation to a mantic, neuroaesthetic paradigm, we are best served by an examination of the mythopoietic images of American avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, which seem to continue in the visual register the ideas Eisenstein presupposed in the theoretical register.

“Brain Movies”: Dog Star Man and Non-Discursive Thought

Parallels have been drawn between the perspective embodied by Brakhage’s work in general, and Dog Star Man in particular, and the existential thought of William Blake.[34]  P. Adams Sitney has argued that Brakhage, in the process of working through the “antagonism of language and vision […] has revived and revised the Romantic dialectics of sight and imagination.”[35]  Insofar that Blake and Wordsworth, in contrast to the empiricists’ faith in the senses, privileged the imagination over the “tyranny of sight,”[36] Brakhage follows this path with an equivalent fervor: “when he decided to become a film-maker he threw away his eyeglasses.”[37]  I would argue that not only does Brakhage’s work finely illustrate the distinction between discursive and non-discursive thought (apparently Brakhage had to “overcome” the influence of writing before making films, feeling that language constricts vision[38]), but that it also exemplifies and provokes specifically neuro-aesthetic and neurophysiological inquiry of the sort sought after by Eisenstein and later researchers such as mathematician Jack Cowan.[39] 

            Bressloff and Cowan’s team built on the findings of Klüver,[40] who discovered the four forms that structure all visual hallucinations, whether triggered by psychoactive ingredients such as LSD or caused by the rubbing of one’s eyes for a certain length of time.  These forms were categorized roughly into groups of: 1) honeycombs; 2) cobwebs; 3) tunnels and 4) spirals.  Bressloff and Cowan mathematically modeled the neural correlates to the experience of each of these hallucinations such that they could determine, by examining the neural patterns, what sort of hallucination would appear in the visual field.  Bressloff and Cowan found the mathematical reasons, so to speak, that visual hallucinations in the brain can only take on one or more of these four particular forms.  Most importantly, though, their work gives support to the idea that one can see inside one’s own brain – down to the neuronal level.[41]  No doubt Brakhage, for one, would have been interested in perception along these lines.

            Brakhage explains Dog Star Man as a day in the life of a man who climbs a mountain in order to chop down a tree.  Although contained within a day, it also “encompasses a year and the history of man in terms of image material.”[42]  The film consists of four parts and a prelude.  Of particular interest here is this prelude.  These twenty-five minutes cycle through mountain and forest landscapes, solar eclipses, fire, blood, wolf, cat, the nude female body and the moon.  These images alternate with and are superimposed upon flashes of colour and light and stretches where the celluloid has been painted or scratched.  The result is that Brakhage invokes a fleeting, ephemeral succession of styles, from Pollock to Miró, from the colour fields of Rothko to the nonrepresentational colour planes of Malevich, the skies of Turner and Rorschach inkblots.  More than this, Brakhage animates these forms with stretched celluloid and lenses for added plasticity.  Watching this parade of often non-representational imagery, one is reminded of the feeling of thinking itself, of the movements of non-discursive thoughts striving to grasp or express new ideas, attempting to cover new mental terrains.  Brief flashes of intense light recall the dynamic electromagnetic nature of the physical world and the storms of lightning within the human brain.  Above all, this parade occurs on the surface of things and evokes the intricate interconnectedness of neuronal circuitry.  At the same time, the sense of a deeper place that gives rise to these processes and movements seems to emerge.

            Sitney believes that “more than any other work of the American avant-garde film,” Dog Star Man “stations itself within the rhetoric of Romanticism, describing the birth of consciousness, the cycle of the seasons, man’s struggle with nature, and sexual balance in the visual evocation of a fallen titan bearing the cosmic name of Dog Star Man.”[43]  But the film also contains distinctly post-Romantic and Abstract Expressionist dimensions,[44] with the emphasis on tautology at the level of materials and the process-oriented manner of working that involved painting and scratching on the celluloid.  Sitney relates Brakhage’s language “of revelation and of process” to statements made by Jackson Pollock, who also tried to “let the image come through him.”

            The flow of creation is thought to proceed outward, rather than inward first, as it might in the sense of mimetic approaches to art.  Nevertheless, the outbound move of creation is not a self-expression.  For Brakhage, “extreme self-consciousness and the seduction of natural objects are equivalents […] since they both inhibit the working process.”[45]  Brakhage has written:

Of necessity I become instrument for the passage of inner vision, thru all my sensibilities, into its external form […] I am principally concerned with revelation […] I emphasize the fact that I am not artist except when involved in the creative process AND that I speak […] as viewer of The Work […] and I speak specifically to the point of What has been revealed to me AND, by way of describing the work-process, what I, as artist-viewer, understand of Revelation – that is: how to be revealed and how to be revealed TO.[46]

Here there are two points worth noting.  The first is the inherent connection made by Brakhage between an “inner” and “outer” vision through the notion of revealing.  This continuity of vision is made through a relationship between the French reveler [to reveal] and rêver [to dream], such that a dreaming is a revealing and its practice can continue from the unconscious, sleeping mind into the extended, actual world we are aware of during waking states.  Just as we forget much of what we dream, Brakhage “presumes that we have been taught to be unconscious of most of what we see.”[47]  Thus the attention to revelation is an attention both to the process of dreaming and seeing.  In other words, dreaming/ seeing are modes of the same revealing or what might also be called “imagination” in the broad sense of image-production.  As he puts it:

seeing includes what the open eyes view, including the essential movements and dilations involved in that primary mode of seeing, as well as the shifts of focus, what the mind’s eye sees in visual memory and in dreams (he calls them “brain movies”), and the perpetual play of shapes and colors on the closed eyelid and occasionally on the eye surface (“closed-eye vision”).  The imagination, as he seems to define it, includes the simultaneous functioning of all these modes.[48]

The second point I would like to make is that Brakhage’s sense of “inner vision” seems to resonate with and repeat Eisenstein’s notion of “inner speech,” or sensuous thought, as mentioned earlier.  David Bordwell has clarified the significance of Eisenstein’s use of this term in his post-1930 writings.  According to Bordwell, “inner speech” for Eisenstein refers to “a non-verbal psychic associationism underlying all behaviour, including language.”[49] It is a particularly private associationism, a process of “‘sensuous thought’ which may manifest itself in a variety of external behavior patterns.”[50]  Inner “speech” is thus independent of language, although it can manifest in language.  Through the many examples Eisenstein draws on from non-Western cultures, he “plainly intends us to see here some homology between thought and culture altogether unmediated by language.”[51] 

            It is in the context of the Empiricist associationism drawn on by Eisenstein[52] that we find another homology, one between thoughts and things.  Recall Hume’s statement on the association of ideas:

The first time a man saw the communication of motion by impulse, as by the shock of two billiard-balls, he could not pronounce that the one event was connected: but only that it was conjoined with the other.  After he has observed several instances of this nature, he then pronounces them to be connected […] When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connexion in our thought…[53]

The connection between thoughts and things is not only homological, but ontologically motivated.  Things cause thoughts and ideas by leaving their impressions on our brains:

all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible for us to think of any thing, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal sense […] complex ideas may, perhaps, be well known by definition, which is nothing but an enumeration of those parts or simple ideas, that compose them.[54]

Hume’s associationism thus supports Eisenstein’s theory of montage, which itself illustrates Hume’s point.  We can inverse the direction discussed here to include the process of technopoiesis.  The act of placing objects or frames side by side both gives rise to ideas but also acts as verification or a check on the expression of an idea.  A perfect example is Brakhage’s own process of determining how to begin editing Dog Star Man once he had shot all the footage he needed for it.  He pulled material willy-nilly from the unorganized rushes and edited thirty minutes by chance operations.  Looking at this random film, Brakhage had a new insight into the material.  He then consciously edited a parallel strip of film in relation to the original chance roll, as if commenting on it.  When at times that method failed to produce a coherent vision, he re-edited a section of the randomly composed roll.[55]

Ultimately, then, Eisenstein and Brakhage emblematize the two directions of the same aesthetic-techno poietic process, although strictly speaking, it is possible to argue in Brakhage’s case for the existence of an acheiropoiesis (pictures “not made by human hand”[56]).  Both filmmakers discover the creative process at the level of the association of images and both are attuned to the non-discursive dimensions of thought as the region where affective processes inhere.  Having established the immediate relations between these cognitively and neurologically sensitive artists, I would like to locate them within the larger scene that relates film to consciousness in general, and move from there to look at some specificities of visual attention processes.

The Uncanny Relationship Between Film and Consciousness

A work such as Dog Star Man seems to best express the inherent isomorphisms between the moving screen image and consciousness itself, understood as it has been through Plato’s cave allegory, the Cartesian Theatre, Husserl’s phenomenological epoché and the experience of Mindfulness in Buddhist thought.[57]  In fact, the notion of a theatrical or dramatic space specifically, complete with the notion of a spotlight, actors, director and audience, has been identified as the most pervasive metaphor for conscious experience in cognitive theories of mind.[58] To be sure, there are also a host of other visual structures specific to neither theater nor film that we depend upon to discuss and conceptualize the workings of conscious processes – such as foreground, background, frame and horizon.   For the purposes of this discussion, however, I am presupposing the arguments, weak or misguided as they may be, for cinema as the most “advanced”[59] form of art with respect to the description of what Bazin called an integral realism[60] and which I think can also be called an existential or spiritual realism.  Considering the various concepts shared by film and, to be as broad as possible, the psyche – attention; focus; pause[61] and memory – along with the shared metaphors for various conscious experiences, such as “fading to black” for fading “in and out of” consciousness, the existence of the moving film image as some objectified representation of or embodiment of conscious states merits deeper attention in light of neurological progress. In addition to these metaphoric properties of the medium, cinema retains many of the metaphors of theatre and painting mentioned above. 

            Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist contemporary of William James, wrote of these aspects of the cinema in his 1916 manuscript The Photoplay: A Psychological Study.[62] Münsterberg stresses a homology between the visual perception of an object, the perception of that object “onstage,” and the perception of that object onscreen.  This is all to allow him to bring his understanding of psychological processes to bear upon what must be happening psychologically when watching the cinema. Part of our fascination with cinema, at least as documented and experienced by early filmgoers, is this divide between the similarity of profilmic and filmic perception and our knowledge that nevertheless, “it is not real.”[63]

From Attention to Neuroplasticity

Münsterberg’s discussion of the extent to which elements within the visual picture plane help structure the processes of spectator attention[64] recalls the Tibetan Buddhist practice of “liberation through the senses.”  This practice involves “the belief that coming into contact with a sacred thing (a monument, a painting, a mandala, a stupa, a holy man, a tree, a mountain, a book, etc.) inspires hope or even guarantees liberation.”[65]  The name of a famous silk-embroidered cloth painting of Guru Rinpoche in fact means “liberation through seeing,”[66] thus directly addressing its aspirant viewer.  The expected liberation apparently only requires the mere sensual coming into contact with the said sacred object.  In this sense, I would argue, the practice is constituted by the same principles and methods as associationism and bricolage.  According to Tokarska-Bakir, these sensual practices are examples of “cognition-not-through-discursive-consciousness.”[67]  Letters do not function as mnemonic aids but as a magical medium when attention is paid not to their “content” but to their form and matter of inscription.[68]  Moreover, according to Tulku Thondup, the mandala is considered “the symbolic writing” – “the diagram which liberates by seeing.”[69]  I would suggest that we can also treat the moving image as a moving mandala, even if in Western visual practice the Tibetan sense of “liberation” is not involved in spectatorship practices.  Consider the visual object in its ability to direct our attention.  For Münsterberg, film, more than theatre or painting, seems to prompt a reflection on the nature of this process. 

We may say that whatever attracts our attention in the sphere of any sense, sight or sound, touch or smell, surely becomes more vivid and more clear in our consciousness […] It has taken a stronger hold of us, or, as we may say by a metaphor, it has come into the center of our consciousness […] While the attended impression becomes more vivid, all the other impressions become less vivid, less clear, less distinct, less detailed […] They have no hold on our mind, they disappear […] We may add a third factor.  We feel that our body adjusts itself to the perception.  Our head enters into the movement of listening for the sound, our eyes are fixating on the point in the outer world.  We hold all our muscles intension in order to receive the fullest possible impression with our sense organs.  The lens in our eye is accommodated exactly to the correct distance.  In short our bodily personality works toward the fullest possible impression.  But this is supplemented by a fourth factor.  Our ideas and feelings and impulses group themselves around the attended object.  It becomes the starting point for our actions, while all the other objects in the sphere of our senses lose their grip on our ideas and feelings.[70]

These comments constitute part of the collection of phenomenological insights put forth during this period by Husserl, Bergson and James.  Clearly initiated by Kant’s critical work, they also refer back to the British empiricists and Descartes’ original efforts to distinguish, through introspection, mind from matter.  As far as we are concerned from a cognitive neuroscientific perspective, attention returns us to the place of the “primitive” in the thought of the early film theorists.  Eisenstein, for one, felt that “the conceptual content of a work cannot be emotionally perceived by the viewer (reader, listener), if it does not simultaneously appeal to early (‘prelogical’) forms of thought,” which he associated with a “regressive tendency” in art[71] that he was nevertheless quite inspired by.

            Indeed, we might argue that the affinity between the prelogical/primitive/regressive and Eisenstein’s synthesis of montage with sensuous thought is clear insofar that the “sensualist tendency” is “typical of oral cultures in general” and “manifests itself in the specific use of sacred things or texts, and shows interest not so much in their theme (what a text is about or what an image represents), but in their rheme (the materiality of a text, the substance of an image what the text or the image is).”[72]  Transposing this to Eisenstein’s theory of montage, we see that for Eisenstein it is enough that the spectator see the very image presented – all else will follow.  Eisenstein places no emphasis or acknowledgment upon differences in spectatorial context or social status.  Can this not be related to the attempt at overcoming the self in the ontology of Tibetan painting and writing?[73]  Eisenstein did appear enthralled with the case, as noted by David Bordwell, of the Bororo Indians of Northern Brazil, who believe in their identity with a certain kind of red parakeet.  “They directly maintain that they are in reality these actual birds.”[74]  Similarly, there is an account of the Chinese painter Jo-ku, “who had forgotten about his body and turned into bamboo while painting bamboos.”[75]  Here we can recall the scene from “Crows,” the fifth dream in Kurosawa’s Dreams, wherein an eager painter examining a Van Gogh canvas on the wall so admires it that he literally falls into it and begins walking within the painting that has come to life around him.    

            Visual patterns and forms serve, among other things, to direct the attention, that is, the mind, of the spectator.  Insofar that a visual text, such as a mandala, painting or film, may be used, ironically, to facilitate through non-discursivity the disappearance of the object-oriented self, there would seem to be an a priori or transcultural link between pliability and attention – which, as neuroscientist Jeffrey M. Schwartz reminds us, is known as mindfulness in Buddhist thought.[76]  With the conjunction of pliability and attention I would like to turn to Eisenstein’s fascination with Disney cartoons, and in particular, to his interest in Disney characters’ peculiar “shape-shifting” ability.  I would like to suggest a tentative relationship between this morphogenic ability and the recent discovery of the extent of the reach of neuroplasticity in the adult human brain.  To the extent that it is true that, as Schwartz has indicated, “matter has become intrinsically connected to subjective experiences,”[77] – and I would add, from within and from without – then we might link the fascination with morphogenesis to the direction of the mind, through associationist principles, toward its own neuroplastic properties.  This is a justified speculation considering the extent to which sensory reception itself can drive neuroplasticity.[78]

             Consider this in relation to Eisenstein’s comments on what he calls the “elasticity of images” in Disney:

at the center of Disney […] stands man.  But man brought back, as it were, to those pre-stages that were traced out by […] Darwin.  In Merbabies, a striped fish in a cage is transformed into a tiger and roars with the voice of a lion or panther.  Octopuses turn into elephants.  A fish – into a donkey.  A departure from one’s self.  From once and forever prescribed norms of nomenclature, form and behaviour […] But one external trait especially sticks in the mind – a purely formal one, it would seem.  Mickey starts to sing, his hands folded together […] And then reaching for a high note, the arms shoot up far beyond the limits of their normal representation […] The necks of his surprised horses stretch the same way, or their legs become extended when running.[79]

Eisenstein identifies this “plasmaticness” also in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the German caricaturist Trier and 18^th century Japanese etchings.  “What’s strange is not that it exists.  What’s strange is that it attracts!”[80]  Eisenstein references the appeal of this property of images to the behaviour of “primal protoplasm, not yet possessing a ‘stable’ form, but capable of assuming any form, and which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence.”[81]  Eisenstein presses further with the biological metaphors, stating that It’s difficult to assume in the viewer a ‘memory’ of his own existence at a similar stage – the origin of the foetus or further back down the evolutionary scale (even if one measures the depth of the ‘base’ of memory not just as it resides in the brain but in all its predecessors, right down to the cellular tissue!) […] A lost changeability, fluidity, suddenness of formations – that’s the ‘subtext’ brought to the viewer […][82]

The work of Jeffrey M. Schwartz on patients with obsessive compulsive disorder – as well as researchers in other fields – since the late nineties has shown conclusively that in fact, this type of fluidity and changeability is not “lost” if we are speaking about the adult human brain.  Schwartz explains that

Cortical representations are not immutable; they are, to the contrary, dynamic, continuously modified by the lives we lead.  Our brains allocate space to body parts that are used in activities that we perform most often – the thumb of a video-game addict, the index finger of a Braille reader.  But although experience molds the brain, it molds only an attending brain […] Plastic changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention.[83]

Schwartz offers the compelling example of the “London cabbie” – after years of training and driving through the notoriously difficult-to-navigate London streets, the back of the hippocampus[84] of any London cab driver shows increased size compared with the back of the hippocampus of the average person.[85]  Moreover, the long the driver has had this experience, the larger the growth differential will be.  In another example, Schwartz links certain cases of synaesthesia to “weak” forms of neuroplasticity: cases wherein a region in the visual cortex becomes remapped to “feel.”[86]  Finally, I would argue that Schwartz indirectly links the neuroplastic process to mirror neurons, insofar that they are involved in the act of imitating or interiorizing the movements and/or expressions of another.[87]  Schwartz suggests that the practice of walking in a stiff, stooped and hesitant gait in older ages may be the direct result in part of watching older people walk this way: “we burn a trace of the old-folks’ walk into our brain, eventually losing the ability to walk as we once did.”[88]  Although Schwartz’ interest in neuroplasticity concerns what he might call the “strong” form of neuroplasticity – neurogenesis as a result of our own inwardly-directed processes of attention, without outside aid – it is the “weak” form of neuroplasticity that seems more immediately relevant for a neuro-aesthetics of film, and not any less interesting because of it.      

            What I think we have to proceed from, then, in order to move towards a neuroaesthetic interaction with cinema – and in so doing, also approach the “corporeal capacity for forming moving images,”[89] – is as follows.   First, a return to the locations within early writings on cinema (Münsterberg, Lindsay, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Bazin) that argue for or anticipate the knowledge of specific theories of mind in relation to issues, such as empathy, focus, and imagination, that question today’s cognitive and neurophysiological knowledge of their basis – such as mirror neurons, attention and synaesthesia/ associationist properties.  The early film theorists, along with certain avant-garde and experimental filmmakers, provide us with a detailed understanding of what is specific to cinema (editing, motion, “photogénie”) in contrast to the other arts and thus help to isolate a specifically neuroaesthetic theory that might pertain to the moving image, a move that has apparently not yet been made even within neuroscience itself.[90]  Despite this medium specificity, efforts must be made to explore inter-media, transmedia and transcultural visual forms in order to properly identify and contextualize the properties of the moving image.  One potentially rewarding line of research, as I have touched upon here, would be the examination of the bidirectional visual processes involved in dreaming/imagining/remembering/seeing.  Now that we know it is possible – at least, during visual hallucinations – to “see our neuronal circuitry at work,” this at least gives us a new richness with which to regard such works as those of Brakhage and other visual artists.  Likewise, a consideration of the cognitive and neural bases for attention and imagination could enrich and locate our understanding of Eisenstein, who so extensively presupposed a certain theory of mind, within an updated epistemological context.

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