Le Chien Andalou

The analytical claim made by the creators of the film Le Chien Andalou is that the content bore absolutely no symbolism and that nothing that could be considered symbolic would be accepted as material. In the depiction of sequential imagery, no matter how void of meaning the images are individually, the encompassing audience reception leaves lots of room to create interpretation rooted in personal encounters with the content of each image is it can be found by anyone free of context in the world, and either intentionally or inadvertently, symbolism can be inferred and meaning can be constructed. I saw many messages outside the realm of psychoanalysis through content-specific implications. The first click! I felt in my brain was the idea of mind over matter that I inferred from the blade activity. I felt another click! when the Vermeer painting was revealed from the abrupt ceasing of the woman's reading targeting the film's inherent value of art. The next click! ensued in the form of seance, igniting the concept of reincarnation in my mind, which was followed by yet another click! as the hand of the man who had just been brought to the present erupts ants from a hole in the palm, alluding to a schizophrenic syndrome which I personally interpreted as a reminder of our inability to access supernatural powers for personal benefit, making the point that if they could be channeled, it would be all-inclusive and not only to our desires; there is a world of bad to be had there, and even if we seek only the god, the bad will come as well.

There seems to be a larger point here that connects to something our class has been making me think about. In regards to the development of prehistory, I asserted in a previous blog that the faith of civilizations older and smaller than ours are today remained so stable, as Curtis claims in The Cave Painters, largely because of a lack of exposure to other humans, amongst whom philosophy has room to develop in a different direction; therefore the more humans there were in the world, the more our development sped up. I base this off my belief that every mind is capable of original thought. By the same standard, I think that the film Le Chien Andalou was left predominantly ambiguous because its worldwide reception and analyses, such as all of ours in this class, would complete it as a work of art.

Questioning Stability

In his analysis of the longevity of prehistoric, paleolithic cultures, Gregory Curtis speculates what is was about the structure of such civilization that was so durable that their societies maintained such profoundly similar lifestyles for a span of 25,000 years, whereas modern or "classical" society underwent drastic changes throughout the last 4,000 years. Curtis hypothesizes that this is in large part due to the acceptance of answers dedicated to the same questions we today instinctively ask ourselves. I don't necessarily believe that the answers such cultures allocated to these questions were as sound as Curtis makes them out to be; I don't think that our modern answers are any more or less sound, and furthermore, I don't think that their mindsets were as tenacious as Curtis infers from their art because of the soundness of their logic. With so few people in the world, especially in comparison with recent numbers of population, and means of survival very accessible, cultures in separate areas had space to diverge in the directions of their development- not to say they took off in many different directions; that does not seem to be the case during that large period of time- but if it had been, they would not likely have come into contact with each other in a matter that would cause either war or cultural competition. Curtis deconstructs their art to signify strikingly similar widespread culture and philosophy. Even if philosophies had been highly varied between these societies, the chances of them sharing and/or comparing ideas was slim. If they had, I believe that an influx in development would have been the result, and by the same line of reasoning, I believe that population growth was the cause of our rapid expansion and all ensuing change. Once these numbers reached the point which ignited the mental and technological development that followed, our unavoidable encounters and subsequent contemplations of ideologies presented to us by foreign cultures as responses to the questions shared by all of humanity caused collective human civilization to take off with such momentum.

From all of this, I deduct that it took as much time as it did for population to grow and for culture to expand with it, and that the more people exist in the world, the larger a thought pool there is for understanding the world. Every brain has the capacity for more individual thought, and as our numbers continued to collect on this Earth, observations were built upon observations, therefore our conscience widened, our perceptions advanced, and the options became so numerous that the questions themselves grew more tenacious than the answers presented for them thus far. In summary, it wasn't the answers of these ancient societies that were so satisfactory, but the circumstances in which they could maintain their life were the source of their endurance.

Using the Force

Between Laming-Emperaire’s two schools, I would wholeheartedly belong to the second. The knowledge of specific dates and locations belonging to artifacts is of little importance to our understanding of history and humanity without being able to decipher from them the details of our evolution, and the roles they played in its development; where they fit its lineage is not enough. The discovery of facts without the research and critical contemplation that would allow us to achieve a deeper understanding of how we as a species have reached the state that we find ourselves in today and our relationship to the world is like a collection of blank puzzle pieces that doesn’t depict any kind of picture even after the pieces are fit together. I think it is extremely important as a human to understand humans, and I believe such understanding is impossible to attain without using artifacts to connect the dots of a complex timeline stringing along multiple civilizations and without using mental expertise to envision the collective effect that each stage of human progress had upon all subsequent stages. Strategically pinpointing the very crucial staples of human capability to our best abilities allows us to better perceive the world we live in now with mental illustration. For example, there is extensive evidence of various societies sharing technological advancements without any correspondence of information between them; to examine what each culture used these inventions for, how they invented them and when the need surfaced for an object of its function brings us infinitely closer to grasping our invisible nature as humans. It is the job of those in this second group to recognize how crucial each small development of any civilization was, and is, to the overall direction of their culture, and to the potential of a mind-blowing amount of cultivated resources that was made available to us with the initiation of trade, interaction and communication. The building blocks of our world need glue to be held fast together, and I want to be a part of the group that crafts that glue.