The possibilities of ‘Film Consciousness’ : a formulation in search of a theory

This thesis attempts to follow through on two “calls for further research” from recognized film scholars. One line of research centers on early cinema and especially on early American film publications (from 1906 to 1913), which Jan Olsson has defined as a “discursive domain calling for analysis as a phenomenon in its own right,” as opposed to only being “source material” film historians use for writing about early cinema. Another line of research concerns the “relationship between consciousness and film” that Murray Smith argues is an “unchartered territory” in film studies.  In this thesis, this relationship between “consciousness and film” is defined from the perspective of ‘film consciousness’, which is a formulation with several functions. In some contexts, it refers to a “movement of consciousness” that appears in early film publications over the course of several years (between 1907 and 1912) manifested in a growing recognition of the constructed, aesthetic nature of film, changes in terminologies for naming and defining the object of cinema, in particular activities showing an appreciation of the contextual meaning of films, and in self-consciousness, such as in the study of audiences and meta-criticism.  These parallel lines of research have an important scientific and methodological implication, in that early film publications are sometimes implicitly seen as displaying a “naïve consciousness” that is transposable onto early spectators broadly. A “film consciousness” approach recognizes a more complex consciousness that is revealed in subtle changes in language-use and behaviour over a period of time. It also allows for the study of the subjectivity of the writers as well, which is often revealed indirectly to the film historian, as opposed to explicit descriptions of subjective film experience.  The formulation ‘film consciousness’ – which is occasionally used in film discourse, though usually without an institutional definition – is also regarded in this thesis as presenting its own ontological nature in the way it brings two semantic fields (“consciousness” and “film”) into relation. From this formulation, several “categories of film consciousness” are constructed. These include “film aesthetic awareness,” “film production awareness,” “film culture awareness,” “ways of existing towards film,” and several “entities of consciousness” (an imagined place in consciousness assumed to contain past film experiences, conscious phenomena derived from film experiences that are seen as bound to personal identity, a faculty that determines the way reality is engaged with, and a particular kind of conscious experience, defined as “subjective film consciousness.”)  These categories of film consciousness collectively constitute an imagined “field of film consciousness” that serves to conceptualize the “unchartered territory” Murray Smith defines. Each category represents an individual area of research with concomitant questions and criteria that nevertheless exist on a continuum that the key term ‘film consciousness’ brings into constant rhetorical relation. When this field is applied to a set of film-related data, such as early film discourse, a set of connections between different regions of film consciousness emerges, thus allowing for the description of film consciousness at various levels.

Keyphrases: presse corporative, film consciousness, consciousness, film experience, early film discourse, film trade publications, early cinema, film and philosophy