Chapter 1. Identifying the Meaning: In Search of the Concepts of Kubrick's Films [chapter]

2019 Film as Embodied Art  
The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. -Stanley Kubrick 1 If it is our goal to demonstrate how the situational meanings of Kubrick's films are communicated visually to the viewer, then, we first have to identify the concepts that constitute those meanings. Before pursuing this task, we will first provide the reader with some insight into the question as to
more » ... ow spectators construct the situational meanings of films. Since an understanding of this question falls together with the way people make sense of stories, the first part of this chapter will be devoted to a clarification of the concept of narrative. Knowing more or less how narrative comprehension is achieved, we will be able to move on to the second part of this chapter which is centred around the question as to where to find the concepts that constitute the situational meanings of Kubrick's films. This question will be explored through a consideration of four distinctive sources of conceptual description: the novel, the screenplay, the film, and the descriptions as formulated by the film viewer. Each level of description will be discussed with respect to Kubrick's unique method of adapting stories into films. Once we know where to find these concepts, we can actually present some conceptual descriptions. This will be done in the third part of this chapter in which we shall provide the reader with thirteen scene descriptions, one for each feature film that Kubrick directed. From these descriptions, we will then extract, in the fourth part, a literal conceptual scheme or skeletal blueprint that will be argued to underlie all of the thirteen narratives. In the fifth and last section, we introduce the challenge of the subsequent chapter by arguing how this conceptual structure poses us with a theoretical problem that necessitates us to consider the significant role of embodiment. Film as Embodied Art • CHAPTER 1 We now have a narrative that many of you will recognize as a very general outline of the plot summary of Dr. Strangelove. We are able to grasp it as such because, in contrast to our earlier description, we are able to connect the events. 4 Firstly, we are able to situate the events spatially: we infer that the general gave his orders from an air force base somewhere in the United States, that the bombers are heading toward the USSR, that both presidents are probably operating from inside their War Rooms. Secondly, we are able to link the events causally: the general has launched an attack because he has gone mad. The Americans are not able to recall all of the planes because the Soviets have destroyed the radio equipment of one of the bombers, which, in turn, necessitates the president's telephone call. Lastly, we can understand that the three events are temporally related to each other: the order of the attack occurs before the telephone call, which in turn occurs before the dropping of the bomb; all of the action probably taking place in a couple of hours. A narrative thus arises, as a final product, from an ongoing process of construction: from the events conveyed by the representation (whatever the medium), the perceiver actively construes "a chain of events in cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space. " 5 Narrative thus is, to cite Edward Branigan, a perceptual (and therefore mental) activity that organizes data (i.e., spatial and temporal data) into a special pattern (i.e., a cause-effect chain with a beginning, middle, and end) which represents and explains experience. 6 This conception has an important consequence: it implies that any description of a narrative should avoid a strictly formal and logical definition, but should take into account the mental or cognitive processes active in a perceiver during his or her comprehension of a narrative in an actual situation. 7
doi:10.1515/9781644691137-004 fatcat:e2juttkoozflfpbnhlah7wo5hq