Li Yang
【Topic of this issue】Is there good and evil in the lens? ------------------
Special Planner: Jia Leilei Planner: Yan Peida Li Zhenwei
[Editor's note] We are in an era dominated by visual culture rather than print culture. In this era, the creation of art is being changed and swayed by the logic of vision and image. In this cultural context, which is different from the past, in addition to the spaces that can be bound and controlled by laws and decrees, there is also an ethical and moral field other than the effect of laws and administrative orders. In this field we see brilliant stars, but also see bottomless black holes... We know that its direction is always the human heart and the self. Self-discipline and self-examination are the most important spiritual laws in the ethical world, and this issue of the Times review introduces this mechanism of self-examination into the most dazzling field of visual and visual images of this era, inviting relevant experts and scholars to focus on "Is there good and evil in pictures and lenses?" "Ethical Logic in Visual and Visual Narrative Logic", "The Bottom Line of Ethical Laws in Artistic Creation", and "The Ultimate Orientation of Visual and Visual Ethical Requirements" were discussed.
Two dimensions of film ethics
□ Li Yang
Almost since the birth of cinema, the ethical debate around cinema has not ceased. From whether kissing should be shown in a film, to how violence is properly expressed, from the criteria for film grading to the way private life is presented, ethical issues accompany world cinema every historical period. The French philosopher Levinas once asserted that ethics is really an optical problem, and that limited visibility establishes an infinite ethical relationship between us and others.
Levinas
Since 2010, there has been a research trend in the international film community to reaffirm ethics, and the relevant results have been continuously published. In 2010, British scholars Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton edited Film and Ethics: The Blocked Encounter, raising the importance of ethical issues in the cultural study of cinema. In 2011, Oxford University Press in the United Kingdom published "Ethics in Cinema", which comprehensively expanded ethical criticism in combination with classic films. In 2012, Duke University scholar Max Haggiano published The Ethics of Digital Cinema, which combines ethical issues with the rise of digital media. Subsequently, Shohini Chaudhuri, a scholar at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, published Film on the Dark Side: Violence and the Ethics of Watching Film in 2014, extending the rise of digital cinema to the ethical issues associated with truth, body, and coding. In 2018, M. M Sara Rosenthal's Clinical Ethics in Cinema approaches the theme of medical ethics and provides an interdisciplinary ethical analysis of film cases.
The rehash of film ethics cannot be equated with dragging the study of film back into the conservative moral field, but it is precisely the new international political environment that urges us to return to basic ethical consensus from different political positions and beliefs, and to reflect on the ethical characteristics of human beings under technological accelerationism. In general, the ethical study of film can present two basic dimensions.
First, ethical issues emerge in the world of cinema. Ethical issues have always been the most concerned of directors and playwrights, and even the most provocative films in history reflect the importance attached to morality itself, and when films provoke morality, they in turn reinforce the sense of morality. The actions and choices of each classic character are wrapped in ethical motives. Ethics as a theme is both a technique for arranging dramatic conflicts and reinforcing the weight of the play itself. "Four Hundred Blows", "Prodigal Spring Tide", "Desire StreetCar" and "Marble Man", almost every important national film movement and representative works in the history of world cinema touch on major ethical issues. How movies express ethical issues and how to construct moral concepts through stories and characters are all concerns of film ethics. In the past, it seemed that ethical meaning became the embodiment of a certain conservative moral will, but today, the criticism that emphasizes the establishment of an ethical principle in the film as a finiteness is precisely the result of reason, and that ethics as a central principle does not mean a return to dogma, but to defend the responsibility of the film to society.
Four Hundred Blows
"Desire StreetCar"
In this regard, the bioethical issues related to euthanasia have recurred in the creation of Western films in the new century, such as "Savage Invasion" and "Deep Sea Long Sleep" and other films that explore in different ways whether people have the right to end their lives in different faiths and different social backgrounds, and the legal and ethical difficulties faced by the protagonists. "21 Grams" explores the emotional problems and ethical confusions brought about by the development of organ transplantation. Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or love places a couple about to say goodbye to the ethical balance of love and death.
"Deep Sea Long Sleep"
"21 g"
"Love"
Second, the ethical issue of cinematic language itself at the audiovisual level. Edward Hall uses the spatial relationship between people to depict different social relations, and he proposes four kinds of relationships (public space, communicative space, personal space and private space) in "spatial relations", and the corresponding visual relationships are precisely the four most commonly used in movies: panorama, medium scene, close-up, and close-up. Therefore, vision and scenery invisibly determine the relationship between the audience and the object, and this relationship becomes an important dimension in regulating ethical tension. What audiovisual language to use to express is an aesthetic issue as well as an ethical issue. In reflecting on the Nazi Holocaust, Sigismund Baumann introduced the dimension of ethics into visual relations, arguing that in modern society, our ethical concerns are inextricably linked to vision, because morality is embodied in the proximity of people to people, and ethical questions conform to the visual law of approaching or staying away. The closer we get to the object, the larger and more real the object becomes in our field of vision, and we develop strong emotional and moral attention. Therefore, lens techniques such as gaze and saccade are not only visual, but also ethical. In the film, the visual law of moral drive is exactly contradicted by the law of curious voyeurism, and the farther people are from the truth, the more curious they become, but when people approach and get closer to the facts, curiosity gradually dissipates, while moral drive gradually strengthens. As the gaze advances, the desire to peep is replaced by a sense of morality.
The ethics of a film is a very strange and important issue, and China is a country where ethics has always occupied an important place in culture, and trying to construct a film criticism with ethical principles as the priority principle is not only not anachronistic, but may find a film criticism method rich in Chinese style. ■
He is a long-term professor and doctoral supervisor of Peking University, the head of the Department of Art Theory, and a producer, mainly researching European film history, film theory and Western contemporary art theory. He graduated from charles de Gaulle University in France with a doctorate in film studies, a senior visiting scholar of the Erasmus Program of the European Commission of Universities, presided over and participated in 7 projects such as the National Social Science Foundation, published more than 40 papers in journals such as "Literary and Art Studies", "Literary and Art Theory Studies", "Film Art" and other journals, authored "Introduction to the Analysis of Film Dynamic Language", "The Ethics of The Eye", "History of Lost Film Culture", etc., edited the "New Fan Film Series", translated "Badio on Film", "Leonne's Past", "Feature: Abbas and His Film" and so on.