Acta Universitatis Sapientiae - Film and Media Studies 1/2009 [antikvár]

i Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 1 (2009) 7-22 The Reality of Illusion A Transcendental Réévaluation of the Problem of Cinematic Reality Melinda Szalóky Department of Film and Media Studies, University of California (Santa Barbara, USA) email: [email protected] Abstract. The paper readdresses the parallel considerations of cinema as both access to an essential, true, objective reality and as a device of deception reproducing the fallacies of a biased and reductive human perception. The claim is that the critical consideration of cinematic mediation in these ambiguous terms stems from the traditional association of cinema with the working of mental mechanisms - whose logic, it is argued, follows neatly Kant's transcendental constructivist dualist model of reason and its reality. Kant's idea that our sensible but merely phenomenal experience is produced and projected by our supersensible, transcendental synthetic activity, which 'in itself is as unrecoverable as is the world that it moulds, describes perfectly the imaginary-symbolic regime of cinematic signification, whose dual nature has been considered both as a hindrance and as a guarantee of objectivity. Throughout the paper, repeated emphasis is given to the significance of Kant's insistence to preserve, and to make palpable through the aesthetic, a noumenal unknown, a pure and never fully assessable objectivity within an increasingly self-referential, self-serving and self-enclosed human reason. It has been this modicum of a humanly inaccessible, yet arguably intuitable 'excess,' the pursuit and the promise of modern art, which an aesthetically biased film theory and practice have sought to foreground. Joining forces with Deleuze, Lyotard, and Zizek, as well as with Cocteau, Tarkovsky, Wenders, and Kieslowski, the paper promotes the necessity of continued belief in a non-human metaphysical dimension, an outside within thought that forever eludes capture.