The view from outside

I Scruton’s argument

Scruton focuses on films that are photographic recordings of dramatic representations and argues that their aesthetic interest lies in the dramatic representation, not in its photographic recording. Thus, as long as it is a form of art, film is parasitic on theater, from which it ‘borrows so many conventions’ (Scruton, 1981: 577).

According to Scruton, a representation is an artifact that portrays a subject by conveying the thoughts of the maker towards that subject. In his view, pictorial representations (such as paintings and drawings) portray a subject and convey thoughts about it primarily by highlighting its visual appearances. Likewise, dramatic representations (such as novels or plays) portray a subject and convey thoughts about it primarily by highlighting its actions. Instead, a recording is an artifact that presents a subject by putting us in perceptual contact with it through a merely causal link to it.

Scruton claims that a recording, unlike a representation, does not communicate thoughts, i.e. it does not convey the thoughts of the maker towards the presented subject. A sound recording of a concert, for example, just makes us hear that concert, without communicating the thoughts that the sound engineer may have in regard to the recorded concert. Scruton contends that a film functions in the same way: ‘A cinematic record of an occurrence is not a representation of it, any more than a recording of a concert is a representation of its sound’ (1981: 599).

In order to make this point, Scruton introduces the notion of an ideal photograph, which he characterizes as a photograph that is a mere recording. An ideal photograph presents the look of a subject by virtue of a purely causal (i.e. not intentional) link to it. The photographer can choose the framing at will, but she has no voluntary control over what is recorded once the framing has been fixed. ¹

Employing the notion of an ideal photograph, we will henceforth call ‘ideal film’ a film that is based on ideal photographs. An ideal film is not edited or, if it is edited, the editing is not intended to convey the maker’s thoughts towards the portrayed subject, but it is just a means to the end of effectively showing this very subject. In this respect it is helpful to go back to Scruton’s analogy between a film and a sound recording of a concert. In an ideal film there may be editing in the sense in which in a sound recording there may be editing in order to cut the pauses that the orchestra made between the movements of that concert. What the notion of an ideal film excludes, however, is the editing intended to be experienced as ‘the intentional juxtaposition of unconnected images … that we see and which determines our understanding of the sequence’ (Scruton, 1981: 601–2). ²

Using the notions of an ideal photograph and an ideal film, Scruton’s argument can be outlined as follows.

Given that,

the specific aesthetic interest in an artifact portraying a subject rests upon its capacity to be a representation, i.e. to communicate the maker’s thoughts towards that subject;

But since,

4. an ideal film is based on ideal photographs;

Gaut (2002, 2010) and Abell (2010) have challenged this argument by arguing that films, even when based on ideal photographs, can count as pictorial representations. More specifically, Gaut argues that an ideal film can communicate thoughts about the portrayed subject by virtue of a capacity to record reality in different ways that ideal photography itself possesses:

Film can convey thoughts because it has the capacity to record reality in different ways. It is because of the plasticity of its recording capacities that film can be representational – that is, scenes can be filmed in different ways: by selecting different optical points of view, different lenses, different camera movements, different film stocks, different techniques of editing, different aspect ratios, and so on. These variations in ways of recording can communicate something about the scenes recorded. Thus photography and film are representations (i.e., they can communicate thoughts), and can do so because objects and events can be recorded in different ways. (2010: 42; emphases added)

However, a sympathizer of Scruton’s argument could reply to Gaut and Abell by restricting the notion of an ideal film so that it could not be applied to the kinds of film that they propose as counter-examples. According to the restricted notion, an ideal film is one that not only presents the look of a subject by virtue of a purely causal link to it, namely a recording, but also avoids exploiting that recording as a way of communicating the maker’s thoughts about the portrayed subject. The ideal film yields an appearance, but the appearance is not interesting as the realization of an intention.

This restricted notion is compatible with the fact that there are a few parts of a film that work as pictorial representations by communicating the maker’s thoughts about the portrayed subject. Indeed, this notion is aimed to capture what normally constitutes the film as a recording and our interest in it. The expressive shots highlighted by Gaut and Abell are pictorial virtuosities that we can occasionally encounter during a film, but it is quite exceptional to encounter films that are completely, or even mostly, made of expressive shots of that kind. The shots highlighted by Gaut and Abell are just, so to say, expressive peaks on the non-expressive horizon that normally constitutes a film as a photographic recording of a dramatic representation.

It might seem that, by so restricting the notion of what counts as an ideal film, this reply could run the risk of making this notion aesthetically uninteresting. We believe that there is no such risk. There are many aesthetically interesting films, or at least parts thereof, that comply with this restricted notion of an ideal film. Consider, for example, the use of long static shots in works by directors such as Ozu Yasujiro, Pedro Costa, Tsai Ming Liang, or Hou Hsiao-hsien. With examples like these in mind, we will challenge Scruton’s argument in a different way. We will assume, with Scruton, that an ideal film is such that no maker’s thoughts on the portrayed subject are communicated by virtue of the photographic recording. However, we will criticize Scruton’s conclusion by disputing premise (1) of his argument. More specifically, we will argue that there are films, or at least parts thereof, that can elicit an aesthetic interest that goes beyond the interest in the dramatic representation. They can do so even if they fit the restricted notion of an ideal film, by virtue of which the photographic recording does not communicate the maker’s thought about the portrayed subject. ⁴

II The argument from detachment

There can be three kinds of interest towards pictures in general. The first is an interest in the subject that has been depicted; for example, in watching Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat there may be an interest in the train that was filmed. The second is an interest in the way in which the maker has intentionally configured the picture; in our example, there may be an interest in the way in which the Lumière Brothers exploited the diagonal lines in order to emphasize the movements and convey a sense of dynamism. The third is an interest in the way the subject appears in the picture, regardless of the way in which that picture has been made; in our example, there may be an interest in seeing a train in an unfamiliar way, which is slightly different from the way in which we can normally see trains in real life. ⁵ Scruton argues that, in the case of pictures based on ideal photography, there is no interest of the second kind (i.e. the interest in the configuration by the maker), while the third kind of interest (i.e. the interest in the presentation by the picture itself) boils down to the first one (i.e. the interest in the presented subject). He writes:

In some sense looking at a photograph is a substitute for looking at the thing itself; consider, for example, the most ‘realistic’ of all photographic media, the television … Television is like a mirror: it does not so much destroy as embellish that elaborate causal chain which is the natural process of visual perception. (Scruton, 1981: 588)

In this sense Noël Carroll characterizes the focus of the cinematic experience as a ‘detached display’ (1996: 70). Unlike what is normally shown by a mirror, what is shown by a film cannot be localized by the spectator in the spatio-temporal system that centres on the spectator’s body. The cinematic display does not provide us with ‘egocentric information’, i.e. information allowing our perceptual system to estimate the absolute directions of displayed things and the absolute distance between a displayed thing and our body (thereby possibly guiding motor actions, as we do, for example, when we use a mirror to shave, or when we drive a car). Instead, the cinematic display only allows us to estimate relative directions and distances between the displayed things themselves (cf. Vishwanath, 2014: 154).

The phenomenology of the cinematic experience is, therefore, sharply different from the phenomenology of the mirror experience; and that is why we can have a distinctive interest in seeing things through the medium of film. ⁷ Such an interest is neither a mere interest in the depicted subject nor an interest in the thoughts of the maker towards that subject. It is rather an interest in seeing things in the distinctive detached way that the medium of film provides us with.

It remains to be shown, however, that such an interest is an aesthetic interest. Scruton characterizes the aesthetic interest at play in films in terms of ‘contemplative attitudes’ and claims that representation is important to us ‘because it enables the presentation of scenes and characters toward which we have only contemplative attitudes: scenes and characters which, being unreal, allow our practical natures to remain unengaged’ (1981: 585). However, it is to be asked whether representation, understood as the communication of thoughts about the presented subject, is the only means to achieve the end of eliciting such contemplative attitudes towards that subject.

Here, Scruton appears to conflate two distinct possibilities, i.e. the possibility of eliciting contemplative attitudes towards a portrayed subject, on the one hand, and the possibility of communicating thoughts about that very subject, on the other. Yet, there are things, as, for example, landscapes, that can elicit contemplative attitudes from the beholder without requiring that she or he sees them as expressions of the thoughts of a maker. Likewise, an ideal film, by virtue of its distinctive detachment, can elicit contemplative attitudes towards the portrayed subject, even if it does not communicate the maker’s thoughts about that subject.

The real problem of Scruton’s view does not lie in the notion of an ideal film, but in his account of the aesthetic interest. He states that ‘the camera … is unable to make any precise or cogent analysis of what it shows’ (1981: 600) and then he infers that an ideal film cannot elicit any specific aesthetic interest from the spectator. In this way he conflates the aesthetic interest in a picture that depicts a subject with the interest in a picture conceived of as ‘an interpretation of the subject [by the maker], a way of seeing it’ (ibid.: 586), ‘a thought about its nature’ (ibid.: 587), a ‘comment [on it]’ (ibid.: 589). However, the communication of thoughts by the maker is not a necessary requirement for the possibility of eliciting an aesthetic interest from the spectator.

Several relevant accounts of the aesthetic interest, including those offered by Kant (2000[1790]: part I) and Schopenhauer (1883[1819]: book III), characterize it in terms of contemplative attitudes, just as Scruton does. Yet, such accounts, differently from Scruton’s, disentangle the aesthetic interest from the maker’s communication of thoughts. In the same line, but more radically, Wittgenstein conceives of the aesthetic contemplation independently from any expression of thoughts.

III Wittgenstein’s thought experiment

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and other writings from his early period, Wittgenstein connects aesthetics to ethics, inasmuch as they both concern a sphere of values that is beyond the reach of expression: ‘It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one)’ (Tractatus 6.421). ⁸ Wittgenstein characterizes ethics and aesthetics as belonging to the dimension of the inexpressible (the ‘mystical’, as he calls it), which is outside the reach of the kind of representation on which Wittgenstein’s ‘picture theory of language’ focuses.

As pointed out by Pasquale Frascolla (2007: 213), ‘what the picture theory austerely imposes is that the sphere of values, and the Mystical, ought not to be forced into the mould of a language which, because of its structural limitations, is not able to express it, thereby letting the ineffable make itself manifest in a purged language’. Such a ‘purged language’ does not involve expressions of thoughts, interpretations, or comments; indeed, it is not a real language, but rather the way in which the ineffable shows itself to a proper contemplation. Wittgenstein (Tractatus 6.45) characterizes it in the following terms: ‘The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole. The feeling of the world as a limited whole is the mystical.’

In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein specifies this kind of contemplation as a view ‘from outside’:

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. (1961: 7.10.16)

Therefore, Wittgenstein’s account of the contemplative experience suggests that an ideal film can elicit a distinctive aesthetic interest, which lies in the possibility of contemplating life from outside. This interest is enabled by the distinctive detachment of the cinematic experience. Only the medium of film can elicit an experience like that – the medium of theater cannot. That is because theater and film involve sharply different phenomenologies. While theater makes the spectator experience another environment by means of the actors who play in her environment, film makes the spectator experience another environment, wholly detached from his or her environment. ⁹ Therefore, whereas the spectator of a play necessarily perceives the portrayed events as ‘acted or spoken on the stage’, the spectator of a film can enjoy a view from outside on ‘life itself’. ¹⁰

IV From fictional incompetence to fictional neutrality

The phenomenological difference between theater and film entails an important difference in what they can present. A play can only make the spectator experience dramatic representations of events, whereas a film can make the spectator experience either dramatic representations of events or events themselves. For example, in watching a play portraying a battle, the experience of the play involves awareness of perceiving the dramatic representation of a battle, not the battle itself. By contrast, when a film portrays a battle, we need, in principle, non-cinematic information in order to ascertain whether we perceive the dramatic representation of a battle or the battle itself. For example, we immediately recognize that a filmed medieval battle is a dramatic representation instead of a real event, by virtue of the non-cinematic information that in the Middle Ages film had not been invented yet. Therefore, a play can be a dramatic representation of fictional events or, at most, a dramatic representation of real events, whereas a film has a third option, i.e. the direct presentation of real events in a detached way, namely as a documentary. ¹¹ In theater, unlike what happens in film, there cannot be documentaries but, at most, historical plays.

According to Scruton (1981: 588), only the third option – the direct presentation of real events – is available to ideal films, since they exhibit what he calls ‘fictional incompetence’. That is to say, they are unable to portray, at least directly, any fictional events. Ideal films can only indirectly portray fictional events by recording dramatic representations, but a dramatic representation is a real event, even in the case in which it portrays fictional events. ¹² However, an important distinction should be made here that Scruton neglects, that between the genealogy of fiction films (which concerns the point of view of the maker) and their phenomenology (which concerns the point of view of the spectator). Scruton’s claim that ideal films exhibit fictional incompetence is correct only if one considers their genealogy, not if one focuses on their phenomenology. Even if fiction films are obtained by means of photographic recordings of dramatic representations, not necessarily are they experienced as recordings of dramatic representations. Actually, most fiction films are made in order to elicit the impression that one directly perceives fictional events (even though from outside, in a detached way), not dramatic representations of fictional events. The emotional power of many films significantly depends upon the possibility of eliciting from the spectator the impression of directly perceiving events, in spite of the spectator’s knowledge that these events are fictional.

If one wants to make an ideal film that portrays fictional events, one has of course to record a dramatic representation of fictional events. Yet, when we watch an ideal film that portrays fictional events, we are not forced to focus on the dramatic representation of those events. Rather, we are often inclined to directly focus on fictional events. Robert Hopkins calls this phenomenon ‘collapse’, since the tier of the dramatic representation ‘collapses’ in the visual experience of the film when ‘we cease to be aware of theatrical representations, and simply see in the movie the story it tells’ (Hopkins, 2008: 149). In this way, the medium of film can function as ‘a way of narrating a story by showing the viewer moving pictures in which she sees (nothing but) the events that compose the tale’ (ibid.: 154). ¹³

The phenomenon of collapse makes room for a unitary phenomenological account that concerns both fiction and non-fiction ideal films. In fact, at a basic phenomenological level there is no difference between the experience of fiction films and the experience of documentaries. Our perceptual system responds to both kinds of film in the same way: the deepest feature of the cinematic experience, namely detachment from the spectator’s environment, is at work in both cases. Detachment is the common phenomenological root of both experiences. That is why we can somehow enjoy an ideal film even if we do not know whether it is fiction or non-fiction. In any case we experience the portrayed environment from outside, that is, as detached from our environment, independently of the fact that the film is fiction or non-fiction.

By highlighting the phenomenon of collapse, Hopkins suggests that film can make spectators experience fiction films as photographic recordings of fictional events. However, Dominic Lopes (2003: 443) suggests that photographic recordings make us perceive the portrayed events as isolated from their context, and that, by virtue of such isolation, those recordings can elicit a peculiar aesthetic interest. The combination of Hopkins’ and Lopes’ suggestions indicates that the spectator of a fiction film can experience fictional events in isolation from their context. Furthermore, the spectator experiences those events in isolation from her or his own context, that is, in a detached way. We contend that such a view from outside enables contemplation and therefore sustains a distinctive aesthetic interest.

Obviously, an ideal film needs a dramatic representation in order to become a fiction film. Yet, once it has been made, it can be indistinguishable from a recording of a real event. As a photographic recording of a dramatic representation, the fiction film gains a feature that the dramatic representation does not have, i.e. the possibility of being perceptually indistinguishable from the photographic recording of a real event. ¹⁴ The genealogical vice that Scruton calls fictional incompetence ultimately turns into a phenomenological virtue that we will call fictional neutrality. From a genealogical point of view, an ideal film exhibits fictional incompetence since in order to make it fictional one needs to record a real dramatic representation of fictional events. From a phenomenological point of view, instead, an ideal film exhibits fictional neutrality, since the distinctive sense of detachment it elicits from the spectator can characterize the experience of both fiction and non-fiction. ¹⁵

In section III of this article we have argued, by appealing to Wittgenstein’s account of the contemplation from outside, that the cinematic detachment elicits a distinctive aesthetic interest. Now we contend that, by virtue of fictional neutrality, this interest can concern both documentaries and fiction films. Both in the case of documentaries and of fiction films we are interested in perceiving, from outside, events that theater could make us perceive only through the experience of a dramatic representation. Thus, an ideal film can elicit a distinctive aesthetic interest even in the case of fiction – that is, an interest in perceiving fictional events in a detached way, as if those events were directly recorded instead of being dramatically reconstructed.

V Three kinds of cinematic interest

Scruton highlights a first kind of aesthetic interest that we can have in fiction films, i.e. the interest in the dramatic representation that the film makes us see. This is an interest generated by ‘a strong representational medium through which the dramatic action is filtered’ (Scruton, 1981: 600). Let us call it dramatic interest.

According to Scruton, this is the only aesthetic interest that we can have in films but, as seen above, this claim is exaggerated. Nevertheless, undeniably, the dramatic interest is among the aesthetic interests that films can elicit. The attention of film critics to the screenplay, to the production design and to the performances of the actors is a clear clue that the interest in the dramatic representation has a relevant role in the aesthetic appraisal of films. Furthermore, some film-makers emphasize the fact that their films actually are the recording of dramatic representations by deliberately revealing the artificial nature of acting, sets and mise-en-scène. Consider, for example, ‘Brechtian’ films (Hopkins, 2008: 155) such as Jean-Luc Godard’s La chinoise or ‘expressionistic’ films such as Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Scruton, 1981: 599). In these cases, the medium of film openly feeds the aesthetic interest highlighted by Scruton, since the dramatic representation embodies the makers’ thoughts about the portrayed events.

The claim that the interest in the dramatic representation is the only aesthetic interest elicititive by films can be challenged in two different ways. First, one can point out that also the photographic recording can function as a pictorial representation. That is, also the photographic recording, by working as a pictorial representation, can embody thoughts about the portrayed events so as to elicit an aesthetic interest. Let us call it pictorial interest.

Abell exemplifies this kind of interest by referring to a scene from Citizen Kane that ‘is aesthetically valuable because, by photographing Welles from a low angle, it expresses the thought that Kane is threatening’ (2010: 285; emphasis added). Likewise, Gaut focuses on Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men by observing:

As the tension increases in the jury room over the jury’s decision, the increasingly confrontational scenes are shot with progressively longer lenses. The strategy conveys the sense that the characters have less and less space to move in and are pressed one up against the other. (2002: 308; emphases added) ¹⁶

This is not an interest in the way in which thoughts about the portrayed events are communicated by means of acting, sets and mise-en-scène. Nor is this an interest in the way in which thoughts about the portrayed events are communicated by means of shots and editing, or even by means of the musical score. Rather, the contemplative interest concerns the way in which the cinematic medium makes us experience the portrayed events from outside, in a detached way, without the need of any comment.

The contemplative interest seems to play a quite relevant role in the history of film and film criticism. In his influential review of Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, André Bazin praises a kind of cinematic achievement that elicits such an interest. The spectator no longer experiences actors playing characters but characters as such:

The very concept of actor, performance, character has no longer any meaning. An actorless cinema? Undoubtedly. But the original meaning of the formula is now outdated, and we should talk today of a cinema without acting, of a cinema of which we no longer ask whether the character gives a good performance or not, since here man and the character he portrays are so completely one. (Bazin, 2004: 56)

VI Three kinds of cinematic achievement

Bazin’s review of Ladri di biciclette highlights a distinctive kind of aesthetic interest that complies with what we have called ‘contemplative interest’. Yet Bazin goes too far in suggesting that this is the only interest we can have in a film such as Ladri di biciclette. Indeed, one could also have a dramatic interest in, say, the structure of Ladri di biciclette’s screenplay or a pictorial interest in, say, the way in which De Sica exploits the close-up.

Bazin exaggerates in suggesting that the contemplative interest is the uppermost cinematic interest, just as Scruton exaggerates in stating that the dramatic interest is the only aesthetic interest in films. Conversely, other scholars exaggerate in arguing that the only aesthetically relevant interest in films is the pictorial interest: for example, Rudolf Arnheim (1956) states that sound films are less valuable than silent films insofar as sound diverts our attention from the pictorial representation.

A much more promising approach consists in treating the dramatic interest, the pictorial interest, and the contemplative interest as three complementary dimensions of the whole aesthetic interest in films. From this perspective, we can distinguish three ways in which a film can succeed in eliciting aesthetic interest. If a film reaches a dramatic achievement, it is because it especially succeeds in drawing the spectator’s attention to what the dramatic representation of the film communicates about the portrayed events. If a film reaches a pictorial achievement, it is because it especially succeeds in drawing the spectator’s attention to what its pictorial representation communicates about the portrayed events. If a film reaches a contemplative achievement, it is because it especially succeeds in drawing the spectator’s attention to the portrayed events as such, which are seen in a detached way. To establish which films exemplify which kinds of achievements is an empirical matter over which film critics and historians should have jurisdiction. Here we limit ourselves to suggest the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup as an example of dramatic achievement, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon as an example of pictorial achievement, and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari as an example of contemplative achievement.

The contemplative achievement deeply differs from both the dramatic and the pictorial achievements, inasmuch as it exploits the phenomenological transparency of the cinematic medium instead of its opacity. While both the dramatic achievement and the pictorial one emphasize the capacity of the cinematic medium to embody thoughts (in the former case in the form of a dramatic representation, in the latter in the form of a pictorial representation), the contemplative achievement elicits the impression of perceiving events from outside, in a detached way. The latter achievement is especially remarkable in the case of fiction films, since in that case the film-maker succeeds in making the spectators experience the photographic recording of a dramatic representation neither as a dramatic representation nor as a photographic recording, but as a view from outside on events that seem to unfold while the spectator perceives them. ¹⁸

Another trait of the contemplative achievement is worth noting. While the dramatic and the pictorial achievements bring into the phenomenology of the film some stages of its genealogy (respectively the theatrical stage and the pictorial stage), the contemplative achievement involves a phenomenology that plays down as much as possible the genealogy of the film. Therefore, whereas the dramatic achievement leads the spectator to focus on the eloquence of sets and actors, in the contemplative achievement sets and actors as such withdraw from the cinematic experience, letting the spectator focus on the portrayed events. Analogously, whereas the pictorial achievement leads the spectator to focus on the eloquence of shots and camera movements, in the contemplative achievement the cinematic frame functions only as a perceiving device that might be compared to a window or a telescope. Still, unlike real windows or telescopes, the cinematic frame completely detaches the presented events from the spectator’s environment, thereby providing him or her with a view from outside on those events.

Another way of accounting for the specificity of the contemplative achievement is in functional terms. In this kind of achievement, the dramatic representation and the photographic recording are just means to the end of eliciting the impression of perceiving the portrayed events from outside. The shots, for example, do not exhibit any expressive ambitions and merely fulfill the primary function of showing the portrayed events, just as the television shots of a football match normally do. As Bazin writes in his review of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà, ‘The camera, as if making an impartial report, confines itself to following a woman searching for a man, leaving to us the task of being alone with her, of understanding her, and of sharing her suffering’ (2004: 36–7; emphases added). In this case, the main aesthetic function that the camera carries out is not that of making comments on the portrayed events, but rather that of ‘making an impartial report’. In the contemplative achievement, the shot becomes a mere link in a chain that relates the portrayed events to the spectators’ experience and the camera plays its functional role at the beginning of the chain in the same way in which the projector does at the end of it. ¹⁹ Analogously, the performances of the actors do not aim at suggesting thoughts about the portrayed characters; rather, they are means to the end of conveying, as vividly as possible, the life of the characters to the experience of the spectators. ²⁰

To sum up, there are several features that spectators can aesthetically praise in a film. Scruton is right in pointing out that one can appreciate the way in which the dramatic representation of events communicates thoughts about the portrayed events; but this is not the whole story. Gaut and Abell are right in indicating that one can also appreciate the way in which the photographic recording, by working as a pictorial representation, communicates thoughts about the portrayed events; but this is not the whole story either. In fact, while watching a film one can also appreciate the way in which it raises the impression of perceiving events from outside, in a detached way, regardless of the communication of the maker’s thoughts about those events. This is the contemplative achievement, which constitutes the film’s aesthetic novelty. While the dramatic achievement can also be reached by theater and the pictorial achievement can also be reached by painting, the contemplative achievement is distinctive of the medium of film. Only films allow us to see life from outside.