Martin Heidegger wrote, in an essay called "The Origin of the Work of Art", that art's purpose is to reflect the understanding of being of a certain epoch, and thus to hold up for people what it means to be a human being in their particular time and culture. Hence, art has nothing to do with "representation" in the traditional sense, since a work can perform this task whether it actually represents something, like some paintings or sculptures do, or not, a temple or a human being, for example. In a later essay, "The Thing," Heidegger writes of a shrinking of time and space that modern, or technological society, has brought to the world, which rather than bringing things nearer to us actually eliminates our traditional concept of distance altogether. However, since Heidegger was a philosopher and not an art historian, he never attempted to bring these two concepts together and speculate on what a work of art in this age of non-determinate spatio-temporal relations would be like.

I suspected that art in the above sense was no longer possible, since it seems to presume a unified understanding of being in a certain culture, and post-modern society seems to be shrinking away from such unity. However, Maya Deren, in her essay,. "Cinema as an art form", presents a powerful case for the potential of film to provide the type of reflection that Heidegger speaks of in an art form. When she wrote that "the absolutistic differentiation between here and there loses meaning as here and there, being so mutually accessible, become, in effect, almost identical," my antennae were raised, so to speak, to the possibility of understanding film as the most appropriate work of art in the technological present. Moreover, I saw that Deren understood that a psycho-analytic approach to analyzing a work of art necessarily misses something of its importance, reducing its meaning, as it does, to the states of its maker, when instead, a work's significance, as Heidegger wrote, should be judged more in relation to the world, not the person who happened to make it.

When I read on and saw that she had concrete examples of what a film, fulfilling its potential, would look like, I was further intrigued, but when I actually saw the embodiment of her ideas in her work, especially in films like the well known "Meshes of the Afternoon", as well as "At land", "A study in choreography for a Camera" and "Ritual in transfigured time", I was absolutely convinced that she was on to something significant. So significant, in fact, that I found it amazing that there has not been further discussion and working out of this conceptualization of film in terms of its ability to create entirely new spatio-temporal relationships and realities. For these films do this with astounding success. In "At Land", for instance, Deren creates new spaces through an unusual use of traditional editing techniques. For example, in one sequence, Deren is seen walking through a door and into an open beach. Our usual reading of one shot continuing from the last leads us to an understanding of a space that could not be represented in any other medium, due in part to the sequence's essentially temporal quality.* Deren is careful to point out that "by manipulation of space and time I do not mean such established filmic techniques as flashbacks, [etc.]" for these are just a different type of representation of the types of spatio-temporal relationships we are used to. Instead, in both her writings and especially her films, she shows us how film language is perfectly well suited for actually "relat[ing] two unrelated geographies..." and "project[ing] as simultaneities, chronologically distant events."

Maya Deren's essay gives two insights that can help confirm Heidegger's suspicion. First, she addresses the issue of the Hollywood mechanism, which, through its workings, propagates the idea that film is beyond the means of the types of people who might use it to create a work of art, in Heidegger's sense of the term. She writes of the unconscious propaganda that people have been subjected to by "the cosmic production figures which Hollywood takes great care in making public." The effects of this are twofold. First, the public at large is kept from seeing works that are made by the types of individuals working outside the system. Second, would be artists are discouraged from considering film making as a possible means of creating meaningful work. As a result of this, Deren herself was limited to showing her work to small audiences, usually at universities. This type of specialized audience again illustrates the fact that her type of film making was and still is forced into a marginalized world and is therefore kept from working as art can and should.

Her second insight is possibly more profound. She writes of the receptivity (also Heidegger's term) necessary in the viewer in order to understand an "avant garde" work. She says that "the audience for art is limited not by ignorance nor by an inability to analyze, but by a lack of innocent receptivity." Of course, if a work is supposed to hold up to people what it means to be a human being, analysis is not a way to reach that understanding. (In other words, analysis is cerebral, abstract, whereas the beauty of a work of art "working" is that it is an embodiment of ideas. When an idea becomes concretized in a work, it has transcended the cerebral realm and become part of the world, and therefore has the possibility of being a sensory experience.) If, as both Heidegger and Deren point out, we live in a society that is unable to be receptive, a work that requires this type of sensitivity is bound to fail. In conclusion, one thing that I think Deren says that can seem to contradict Heidegger, and more importantly, appears inconsistent with her own ideas, is that we need to be receptive to "realities other than one's own." Of course, on a superficial level, this is true. One should be open to seeing new things in works of art. But on a more fundamental level, if we are receptive to a film that might seem like a different reality, than I'm convinced that, as Deren says at the beginning of the essay, what we would see is in fact a reflection of a reality that is very much our own. In other words, once we have opened up to seeing a vision of the world in a style we are not used to, the result, ideally, would be one of enrichment that goes beyond just seeing something "new".

© 1999, Tao Ruspoli

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