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• W2912479175 abstract "Probably the best-known critical statement about film and ethics is Jean-LucGodard’s quip in 1959 that ‘le travelling est affaire de morale’ (‘trackingshots are a question of morality’). Asked during a round-table discussion ofHiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) whether the unease generated bythe film was moral or aesthetic, Godard provocatively reformulated a remarkmade by Luc Moullet in defence of the films of Samuel Fuller: ‘la morale estaffaire de travellings’ (‘morality is a question of tracking shots’).1 Both theseclaims posit a connection between ethics and aesthetics; more specifically,they suggest that moral significance is generated by the formal organizationof pro-filmic reality through mise-en-scene, rather than intrinsic to that reality.While Moullet’s comment carries the reactionary implication that morality isonly a question of tracking shots, Godard’s version implies that an ethicalhermeneutics might destabilize traditional distinctions between form andcontent. In Godard’s account, the tracking shot functions as a synecdoche forcinematic form and mise-en-scene. Such affirmations of the moral and, byimplication, political significance of mise-en-scene may be seen as strategic at atime when cinema’s status as a serious art form was still contested, andunderpinned the mise-en-scene criticism pioneered in the 1950s in the Frenchjournal Cahiers du cinema. Yet although Godard’s provocation retains little ofits original polemical force today – ironically, it has been reduced to acliche – much contemporary film criticism remains indebted to his insight.‘To write about cinema, today, is to inherit … [an] idee fixe: tracking shotsare a question of morality’, observed one French critic in 1998 of a formulation which has also found resonance in contexts outside France.2 ForGodard’s remark raises a question of continuing pertinence in film studies: towhat extent does aesthetic form, or style, determine ethical meaning?While this question has been addressed from a variety of perspectives infilm theory and criticism, it needs to be understood within the context of aWestern tradition of aesthetic inquiry which predates the invention ofcinema. Moullet and Godard were heirs to a legacy of philosophical conjecture about the relation between aesthetics and ethics, or the beautiful andthe good, which stretches back to the ancient Greeks. In dialogues such as thePhaedrus, the Philebus and the Symposium, Plato suggested that our appreciation of beauty can lead to knowledge of moral goodness, even though he hadmisgivings about mimesis and famously excluded poets and painters from hisideal republic. Aristotle responded in the Nicomachean Ethics by defendingimitation and art as conducive to moral formation. These connections werereconsidered by Enlightenment philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, whoseviews on the moral value of aesthetic experience retain an influence todayand occupy a prominent, if embattled, position in Continental thought.Implicitly, in asserting that tracking shots were constitutive of morality,Moullet and Godard were simultaneously reclaiming and contesting this legacy.On the one hand, they were staking out a place for cinema and cinephilia inthe history of Western aesthetics; on the other, they were proposing that werequire a new account of the alliance between beauty and goodness tounderstand the affective and cognitive experiences offered by film.This chapter begins with a brief look back at theories of aesthetics whichemerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It then turns to two attemptsto rethink the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the light of thespecific properties of cinematic technology, one in French cinephilic criticism andthe other in North American documentary theory. The rest of the chapteraims to elucidate a particular conjunction of aesthetic concerns and ethical visionthough analysis of a documentary at the centre of recent debates aboutfilmmakers’ responsibilities toward their subjects. It is important to emphasizeat the outset that this chapter deals with only two of many approaches to filmform that are explicitly ethical in their orientation and to acknowledge thelimitations of those considered. Despite its declared interest in questions ofmorality, the mise-en-scene criticism promoted by Moullet and Godard in themid-twentieth century has been condemned for its romantic, pre-structuralistview of art and politically reactionary formalism. Such approaches provide at bestsuggestive points of departure for ethical criticism, rather than fully developed interpretative frameworks. Moreover, the models of ethics discussed in thischapter either predate poststructuralism, or, in the case of one documentarytheorist, reject it as having minimal regard for ethical experience (an allegationwhich is refuted throughout this book).3 Poststructuralist critics have challengedsome of the fundamental beliefs of the Enlightenment philosophers alluded tohere: their faith in universal humanity, a transcendental, unified subject andemancipatory grand narratives of science and reason. Subsequent chapters of thisbook highlight the problems with a Kantian view of the moral agent as rational,autonomous and universal and examine alternative models of ethical subjectivity.In Critique of Judgement (1790) Kant argues that ‘the beautiful is a symbol ofthe morally good’.4 Kant does not mean that beautiful objects are of intrinsicmoral worth. On the contrary, he insists that aesthetics and ethics areentirely separate domains, but explains that there is an ‘analogy’ between theways in which we judge aesthetic and moral value.5 The four moments ofthe beautiful described in this text bear a structural resemblance to thetheory of moral action he had previously outlined in Groundwork of theMetaphysics of Morals (1785). Kant maintains that judgements of what isbeautiful, just like judgements of what is good, are disinterested, even ifthey coincide with personal inclination, and universally valid or normative instatus. Furthermore, both are autonomous, or freely made, rather than dictated by external laws. Just as a moral act is the result of a free individualchoice made in accordance with duty, so an experience of beauty is the consequence of the ‘free-play’ of the imagination and understanding whichorganize the sensuous components of an object into a ‘purposive’ form.6 InKant’s account, these structural similarities mean that aesthetic experiencecan act as a ‘propaedeutic’ for morality; beauty can prepare us for moralaction by revealing its structure symbolically through sensible form.7" @default.
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• W2912479175 date "2009-09-10" @default.
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• W2912479175 title "‘Tracking shots are a question of morality’: Ethics, aesthetics, documentary" @default.
• W2912479175 doi "https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203872017-7" @default.
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