Defamiliarization (I)

In the 1920s, the Russian Formalists argued that the purpose of art is to de-familiarize the world. Art is not meant merely to affirm our habituated perceptions of the world (our pre-formed beliefs or prejudices), but to make us discover the world anew. In our everyday encounter with the world we typically filter out those elements of the environment that are irrelevant to our immediate needs. For example, when we are walking down the street to the tube station on our way to work or school, we learn over time to filter out images and sounds that are irrelevant to this immediate activity. So the myriad of sensations of the world – the sensorial assault – that we could experience is gradually filtered out, eliminated. In our everyday life, there is thus a “deadening of experience”. As the world around us becomes more and more familiar, we see less and less of it. But art – precisely because it allows us to be contemplative, to be absorbed in what is in front of us – can allow us to “see” the world in a different way. As Victor Shklovsky states, “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged." Art allows us to perceive the world anew, by de-familiarizing our perceptions.

This is true of all arts but perhaps particularly so of film since it is not made up of images drawn purely from the filmmaker’s imagination (as it is in writing or painting) but of images drawn from the world, and captured by a camera. The filmmaker makes a film through an encounter with the world. As the Italian film scholar Francesco Casetti recently observed, ""[in the cinema] reality appears on the screen in all its richness and density, liberated from the habit and indifference that has obscured our normal view”; “to film means to capture and reactivate the world" (quotes from Casetti's excellent new book, Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity).

Cinema is a means of jolting us out of our apathy, our indifference, to the world and the things of the world. Unfortunately, most people seem to have the view that the purpose of cinema is to serve as an respite from the grind of existence; a place to flee from responsibility and the duty to engage with one another. Proponents of such an argument don't want to be re-introduced to the world in which they live, in all its complexity and beauty, but want somehow to escape the world. Cinema as a mode of defamiliarization would have a very different goal: to have us re-discover reasons to believe in this world.

S I-G