The Being of the Spirit is a Film Reel

By saying that the “being of the spirit is a film reel”, do we not come close to a particular operationalisation of Hegel, which Deleuze declines, while Žižek shows that he inherently accepts it, since there is no other option. We should either reject or forget Hegel or at long last humbly admit that his thought of movement marked the space in which film distinguished itself as something “spiritual”. Film does not owe its historical specificity only to technology and chemistry, but much more to the notions of social sciences and the humanities as well as the many already recognised forms of the representation of reality, shaped during the bourgeois epoch of art. Following Walter Benjamin, we ca say that film has actually rather brutally pointed out the origins of aesthetics in the social practice of the dominant capitalist reality as it interiorised the principle of reproduction (still exterior to other arts at this time) as its constitutive attribute. A bond between philosophy and film in general can be ascertained here because we are dealing with two forms of thought that, each in its sphere, operate analytically and synthetically and are, in relation to other forms of thought – philosophy to science and film to art – constantly in a special position. The bond between philosophy and film is created in view of the notions of reality and the real. We should say that André Bazin (a genius still not duly acknowledged, whose writings, far from any taxonomic discursive form, anticipate what happened much later with the notions of the virtual) pointed out a certain impossibility of a “philosophy of film”, for he is a thinker who came close to philosophy starting from the field of cinema and should, therefore, be considered a “film-philosopher”. It follows clearly from Deleuze’s work on film that cinema thought is an effect of a reality already constituted by film. Together with cinema, philosophy enters the movement of reality differently than it did before the invention of film, i.e. from the standpoint of a decentred subjectivity.

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