Toward an Integral Cinema

The following is excerpted from the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Click here to download the full 26-page pdf.
 

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ABSTRACT: Germaine Dulac's "integral cinema movement" of the 1920s and her integral cinematic work, La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928), are analyzed from a historical and theoretical perspective. Results suggest an early introduction of integral consciousness into cinematic media that corresponds to and predates the integral theories of both Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber. Defining characteristics of what may constitute an integral cinematic work are mapped out and developed into a set of evaluation criteria using the works of Dulac, Gebser, and Wilber. A test of these evaluation criteria with the viewing of several motion pictures is summarized; the results suggest that several past and recent films demonstrate qualities that could be said to constitute an integral cinematic work. A preliminary typology of forms of integral cinematic creation, and the potential benefits and challenges for the application of Integral Theory to cinematic theory and practice are presented and discussed.

There is a long tradition in the cinematic arts of applying advances in human understanding to cinematic theory and practice. These applications, including the adaptation of practical and theoretical approaches from psychology, philosophy, history, linguistics, anthropology, art, the physical and applied sciences, and cultural and social studies, have helped to advance our understanding and appreciation of the cinema, and have served to expand and deepen the technical and artistic capacity of the cinematic medium (Andrew, 1976; Brady & Cohen, 2004). This capacity for expansion has led to the ability to create more powerful and effective cinematic realities with an increasing potential to influence, in both negative and positive ways, human physiology, psychology, culture, and society. This impact can be seen from the extreme physical and emotional effects reportedly induced by films like Psycho (Hitchcock et al., 1960), The Exorcist (Friedkin & Blatty, 1973), and Jaws (Spielberg et al., 1975) to the cultural and social influences of films like The China Syndrome (Bridges et al., 1979) and An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) (Harrison, 1999; Kaplan, 2005; McLuhan & Fiore, 1967; Nielson Company, 2007; Petric, 1973).

While the advances in cinematic theory and practice have been valuable in many ways, "none of these approaches appeared without controversy or has maintained its relevance without polemic" (Brady & Cohen, 2004, p. xvi). Given the power and influence of the medium, as well as the eclectic mix of sometimes conflicting, complex, and controversial theories and practices, it is my belief that the application of a metatheory to integrate the truths of these many different approaches could advance our understanding and appreciation of the cinematic medium, and bring us to a new level of technical and artistic capacity. This article is a preliminary attempt to apply the metatheory of Integral Theory (Wilber, 1995) to cinematic media theory and practice, and an initial exploration into the development of an integral cinema.

Integral Cinema Historical and Theoretical Analysis

The term integral cinema was first used by French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac in the 1920s. Dulac employed this term to describe cinema that utilized the natural inherent language of the cinema to evoke the interior life normally hidden beneath the exterior life of the objective world (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996). This form of cinema was also called pur cinema or visual music, because of the contention by its adherents that the language of the cinema is a language all its own, more related to music or poetics, than to literature or drama. In order to liberate the cinematic image from literary or dramatic expression, "…Dulac sought to create for the spectator a 'cinegraphic sensation' that could be achieved through the contemplation of pure forms in movement—the melodic arrangement of luminous reflections, the rhythmic ordering of successive shots" (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, pp. 69-70).

While Dulac's theoretical writings and public discourses on integral cinema mostly focus on this definition, her films reveal two distinct types of cinematic approaches. Whereas some of her films did seek to explore pure visual music approaches of using cinematic imagery, movement, and rhythm to reveal the interior life, films like her 1928 classic, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), reveal the raw beginnings of a more comprehensive or "integral" approach that attempts to use the inherent language of the cinema to capture and express the interior and exterior lives of both the individual and the collective. Dulac hints at this approach when she writes, "It isn't enough to simply capture reality in order to express it in its totality; something else is necessary in order to respect it entirely, to surround it in its atmosphere, and to make its moral meaning perceptible…" (Dulac, as cited in Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p. 49). This more comprehensive approach hauntingly captures some of the constructs of Jean Gebser's integral worldview (1985) and Ken Wilber's Integral Theory (1995) while predating both by 21 and 67 years, respectively.

Aperspectival Cinematic Structures

In 1928, the year La Coquille et le Clergyman was released, Swiss cultural philosopher Jean Gebser was just beginning to discover the different structures of human consciousness reflected in various cultures that would eventually become the foundation for his 1949 work, The Ever-Present Origin (1985). During this formative period, Gebser observed an emerging structure of consciousness that he eventually termed "Integral." Gebser detected this new form of consciousness or worldview in many of the scientists, writers, and artists of the early 20th century. He discerned that this new worldview consisted of the transcendence of ego-centered perception and thought, and the realization that the three dimensions of space are relative to the fourth dimension of time, thus producing an aperspectival, or multi-perspectival, time-space transcendent form of consciousness (Feuerstein, 1987).

Many of the artists with integral consciousness that Gebser observed in the 1920s and 1930s were members of the same avant-garde and surrealist subculture circles as Germaine Dulac, and it is not inconceivable that Gebser and Dulac crossed paths. While there is no record of their meeting, Dulac's more comprehensive cinematic works do appear to reflect an integral worldview in their inclusion of aperspectival cinematic structures in which "time is no longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension" (Gebser, 1985, p. 24).

Throughout La Coquille, Dulac employs various cinematic techniques, including slow-motion, fastmotion, and image repetition, to create a plastic temporal reality in which time appears to move forward normally, to slow down and speed up, and to jump ahead and jump back. These cinematic temporal rifts also produce spatial rifts as the characters move through spaces that seem larger or smaller depending on the time it takes to navigate the areas. In addition, Dulac creates a specific sequence in which she attempts to visually concretize the passage of time and its effects on the characters and the space around them by having the three main characters stand motionless while the camera rotates around each of their bodies and the light around them moves from bright to dark, simulating the movement from day to night and from a world seen clearly in light to one steeped in shadow. For Gebser (1985), this type of variable and mutually dependent aperspectival field of visually concretized time and three-dimensional space is an essential quality for any work of art to be considered integral because "the concretion of everything that has unfolded in time and coalesced in a spatial array is the integral attempt to reconstitute the 'magnitude' of man from his constituent aspects, so that he can consciously integrate himself with the whole" (p. 99).

In addition to the concretion of time, Gebser (1985) also considers the concretion of interiority, or individual and collective interior dimensions, to be a precondition of the integral structure because "only the concrete can be integrated, never the merely abstract" (p. 99). In La Coquille, Dulac tries to visually concretize individual and collective interiority as well by attempting to "give concrete, objective form to human thought processes and fantasms" (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p. 62), putting them on equal footing with the individual and collective dimensions of time and physical space. To achieve this goal, Dulac creates a pure visual poetics "through a studied organization of images which evolve their own logic... unconstrained by the conventions of narrative coherence" that explores individual and collective repression, obsession, and transformation by following an obsessed clergyman, surrealistically battling his alter-ego, a General, as they vie for the affection of a beautiful woman (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p. 62).

Dulac's aperspectival integral cinema movement was short-lived due to several factors. In 1928, the year that Dulac made La Coquille et le Clergyman in France, Hollywood released the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (Crosland et al., 1927), and ushered in the sound film era. For many film theorists and historians, the introduction of sound marked the downfall of the artistic trailblazing of the silent film era as cinematic artists attempted to adjust and adapt to the new technological advancement, and audiences became enthralled by the heightened sense of reality of the talking picture (Andrew, 1976). The following year Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí made Un Chien Andalou (1929), which took the avant-garde cinema world by storm and established a precursor of postmodern relativism and meaning deconstruction as the center of gravity for the artistic worldview of experimental cinema, overshadowing Dulac's more integral vision (Ebert, 2000; Short, 2008). Finally, since Dulac operated from an unconscious expression of a worldview that had yet to be named or theoretically mapped, her integral vision ultimately fell dormant.

Integral Cinematic Quadrants

Several decades after Dulac expressed her integral cinematic vision and Gebser published his works, American philosopher Ken Wilber began to map the integral territory by expanding on Gebser's model of consciousness and integrating Gebser's work with the research of many other disciplines, formulating an Integral Theory of self, culture, and world. Wilber's approach "provides a comprehensive means of integrating the four dimension-perspectives of objectivity, interobjectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity (and their respective levels of complexity)" (Esbjörn-Hargens & Wilber, 2006, p. 524). These four dimensionperspectives are called quadrants in the Wilberian model, and each quadrant represents one of the four basic dimensions and perspectives of first-person/experience (I), second-person/culture (We), third-person singular/ behavior (It), and third-person plural/systems (Its); or put another way, individual-interior (I), individualexterior (It), collective-interior (We), and collective-exterior (Its) (Wilber, 1995) (Fig. 1).

Nearly 70 years before Wilber (1995) first described Integral Theory, Dulac created a quadratic splitscreen climax for La Coquille et le Clergyman that appears to evocatively depict Wilber's four quadrants of I, We, It, and Its in their precise configuration (see Fig. 2). In this powerful climactic moment, the main character, the Clergyman, seems to have a visual/poetic self-revelation as he finds himself surrounded by four different evolving moving images set within a quadratic split-screen field of vision: 1) a stalactite-covered cave appears in the Upper-Left (UL) subjective (I) quadrant; 2) below the cave, in the Lower-Left (LL) intersubjective (We) quadrant, the reflection of the cave ripples and multiplies across the surface of the moving waters below; 3) in the Upper-Right (UR) objective (It) quadrant, we see an island castle; and 4) in the Lower-Right (LR) interobjective (Its) quadrant, the image of the castle ripples and multiplies in the waters below it.

The image of the cave in the UL quadrant can be seen as a correlation to Dulac's use of cave and underground-room imagery as a visual signifier for the interior mind of the Clergyman⎯from the opening alchemical dungeon where the Clergyman splits his personality into the aggressive General and the cowering shadow of his own repressed Clergyman-self to the use of the stalactite-covered cave as a mind-to-dream segue for the opening of the pivotal inner-visioning/dream sequence, which ultimately leads to the quadratic split-screen climax and the consequent advance in the character's evolutionary arc. The cave image also appears to signify the individual-interior by its visual referent of a dark, empty interior space within a singular boundary. In juxtaposition, the objective visual referent of an island castle in the UR quadrant can be seen as a signifier for the individual-exterior structures of the film's objective (It) domain⎯from a spired church, to a royal hall, to an elite mansion.

The use of water imagery in the lower quadrants of this sequence is the culmination of Dulac's utilization of water as a major visual element in the film, starting with the title-referenced seashell and the echoing auditory memory of the ocean from which it came⎯a beautiful dual metaphor for the It domain of objects and the Its domain of systems. The film begins with the Clergyman pouring some kind of alchemical fluid into a large seashell. The imagery of the seashell liquid is then connected to smoke, and clouds, and then the ocean itself through a succession of visually metaphoric transitions during the film. In addition, the imagery of water, the ocean, ocean waves, and rippling water is used throughout the film at key subjective/objective transitions. These transitional moments appear to usher in the transition from individual to collective and from collective back to individual, from the lone Clergyman transitioning into a relational field with the General and the woman to the transition from collective cultural and social fields into moments of individual isolation.

Dulac brings the visual metaphor of water as individual-to-collective transformation to full fruition when she uses the imagery of rippling water in the lower quadrants during the film's quadratic climax. In this sequence, she breaks apart and multiplies the images of the cave in the UL quadrant and the castle in the UR quadrant, giving us a visual imprint of multiple caves or multiple subjective-interiors interacting in the LL quadrant, and multiple castles or multiple objective-exteriors interacting in the LR quadrant. As a result of this visual signification process, we are presented with a visual climax that can been seen as a depiction of the main character's integration of subjective (experiential/intentional), objective (physical/behavioral), intersubjective (cultural/relational), and interobjective (social/environmental) realities, seemingly representing Wilber's four quadrants in a visually powerful and primal way.

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Image: Land of Plenty by Bo Bartlett (click here for full gallery)