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Is there a film theory that starts from ma, rasa or the imaginal world rather than from Paris?

Rin Matsuda Fellow
· 6 replies
Film & mediaIndianJapanese & KoreanPersianBharataSuhrawardiZeami#film-aesthetics#imaginal-world#ma-interval#rasa
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Almost every film theory I've read starts from France, Russia or America: Eisenstein, Bazin, Cavell, Carroll. They're wonderful, but when I watch Ozu, I feel the most important things happen in what those theories treat as gaps.

In Japanese aesthetics there's ma, the interval, the meaningful pause between things. Ozu's famous ‘pillow shots’ (empty rooms, laundry lines, a vase) sit between scenes and seem to carry the feeling of the film. There's also Zeami, the great Noh theorist, who said something like: what is hidden is the flower. Restraint is where the power is.

I know there are other traditions too. In India, I'm told, people still discuss films in terms of rasa, the cultivated emotional flavour an artwork produces in a prepared spectator. And a friend here who is a film editor has mentioned Suhrawardī's ‘world of images’, a realm between the physical and the purely intellectual.

So my question: could you build a serious philosophy of film starting from one of these instead? What would it notice that the Paris-centred theories miss? Or would it just be the same theory with different words, a kind of decorative exoticism?

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6 answers

  1. Kavya Menon

    Fellow

    Rasa theory would ask different questions from the start. Not ‘what does the image record?’ or ‘how does montage mean?’, but ‘what emotional state is cultivated in the viewer, and through what combination of causes, signs and passing feelings?’ That puts the trained spectator, the sahṛdaya, the person ‘with heart’, at the centre. Indian audiences really do speak of a film's dominant rasa. It's a theory of reception, which most Western film theory came to quite late.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Parisa Moghaddam

    Fellow

    On Suhrawardī: the ‘world of image’, ʿālam al-mithāl, is a realm where forms exist without matter, where visions and dreams are real but not physical. For an editor it's a useful concept, because cinema images are exactly that: forms that are seen, that move us, that aren't the things they show. Bazin says the image shares the being of its object. Suhrawardī would say it has its own kind of being. That's a genuinely different ontology, not a translation of his.

    Helpful · 2
    1. Rin Matsuda

      Fellow

      Parisa, that's what I hoped: not a new vocabulary for the same theory, but a different answer to ‘what kind of thing is an image?’

      Helpful · 3
  3. Aiko Tanabe

    Fellow

    From Kyoto, a caution about ma. It's become a word foreigners use for anything empty and calm. In practice, in Noh or in a garden, ma is a precise thing: a timed interval that has tension in it, not a void. If someone builds film theory from it, they must be as exact as Eisenstein was about collision. Otherwise it's exactly the exoticism you're worried about.

  4. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    I collect false friends in comparative philosophy, and I'd frame the test this way: a non-Western film theory is real if it makes a prediction or a judgement that Western theory wouldn't. Aiko's precise ma would, for instance, say that a pillow shot fails if it's too long or too short, and why. Rasa theory would rank films by the coherence of their dominant feeling. Those are substantive claims. If the new words only redescribe the same verdicts, it's decoration.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    A Shirazi architect's note: Persian gardens use exactly this kind of interval, a threshold, a vestibule, a turn before the view opens. I watch Kiarostami's long roads the same way. The approach is part of the arrival. I'd love to read the film theory Rin is asking for.

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