Thorsten Botz-Bornstein ~ “Films and Dreams”: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai
~ Thorsten Botz-Bornstein ~ LEXINGTON BOOKS ~ 2008 ~ 176 pp
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A Philosophical Cosmopolitanism That Is Yet To Come
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s approach and accomplishment in Films and Dreams is of such a nature that a few words about his academic background and scholarly profile would be the best way to start this review. Botz-Bornstein studied Russian philology and Continental philosophy in Germany, France and England. After completing a PhD at Oxford (with a dissertation on play and style in hermeneutics, structuralism and Wittgenstein), he embarked on a number of international post-doctoral research projects dedicated to such varied topics and authors as: Russian structuralism (a project he pursued in Russia, Finland and Estonia), Vasily Sesemann (in Lithuania and Sweden), Kuki Shuzo, Nishida Kitaro and the Kyoto-School (in France and Japan), cognition and culture (in China), as well as virtual reality and various aspects of the relationship between dreams, space and time in Western and Eastern cultures. The outcome of this unusually diverse research program has been a number of books – Place and Dream: Japan and the Virtual (Rodopi, 2004), Vasily Sesemann: Experience, Formalism and the Question of Being, Space in Russia and Japan: A Comparative Philosophical Study (Lexington Books) – as well as a handful of edited collections and numerous journal articles. Currently Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Tuskegee University (in Alabama).
What this short presentation shows is, first of all, Botz-Bornstein’s rare ability to cross traditional boundaries and move freely between very different cultural spaces (Russia, Japan, Western Europe, etc.). More importantly, however, this cosmopolitanism is not just a matter of research agenda and academic affiliations, but it is what might be called a ‘philosophical cosmopolitanism’: a cultivated taste for foreign spaces, places, languages and flavors, a trained habit of engaging with and decode other cultures, as well as an ability to articulate complex narratives in relation to this engagement. On the other hand, Botz-Bornstein’s books display a superior capacity to engage – with rigor, application and insightfulness – in research projects dedicated to customarily neglected philosophical topics such as the aesthetics of dreams, the relationships between dreams, space and time, between films and dreams, between style and play, the philosophy of virtual reality, the cultural construction of space, and so on. Rather than in any way undermining his project, this constant preoccupation with ‘minor’ or ‘marginal’ topics – outside of the academic mainstream as defined by the Western canon – gives it its unique flavor and, in fact, confers upon it a paradoxical strength.
Films and Dreams fully exhibits these features. The book pivots around the notion of ‘dreams as aesthetic expressions’, and considers cinema as a medium through which this notion can be tested, elaborated, and given the scholarly attention it deserves. Doubtlessly, there is something philosophically fascinating about dreams and dreaming. As Robert Curry has put it, they display ‘a vividness, originality, and insightfulness that quite escapes us in our waking life.’ Compared to our dreams, the fantasies of our waking life, originating as they do in our ‘desires and fears’, prove to be pale, stereotypical and inferior. There has been a long tradition, in the West at least, according to which dreams and dreaming can be the source of a privileged form of knowledge, the occasion for numerous revelations, whether religious, philosophical, literary, artistic or political. Dreams can thus offer us access to a body of knowledge unattainable through the ordinary proceedings of our waking life. From a philosophical standpoint, if we only could place ourselves in a position from where to see reality as a dream, then we are on the right track: as Botz-Bornstein puts it, knowledge is ‘most likely to come to us when we manage to see reality as a dream, that is, when we know, during a flash of a moment, that it is a dream (and perhaps even stay aware of that fact), but still continue dreaming because no doctor can cure us from this disease’.
Studying dreams from an aesthetic standpoint pre-supposes, however, a move ‘from the original, clinical context within which dream theory was initially developed, to an environment established primarily by aesthetic concerns’. This is exactly what Botz-Bornstein does in his book: he focuses on dreams not as events of our psychological life, but as aesthetically interesting phenomena, as ‘“self-sufficient” phenomena that are interesting not because of their contents but because of a certain “dream-tense” through which they deploy their being’. To make his point even more clearly, he draws a parallel with the notion of ‘language’, which thus becomes a convenient metaphor for illustrating the structural autonomy of dreams: ‘the language of dream is an object of interest as just “another language”, in the same way as one can be fascinated by language from another culture without having a particularly linguistic interest in it’. In other words, dreams exhibit an internal coherence, cohesion and harmonious structures – a beauty of sorts – that make them worth studying from an aesthetic, purely formal point of view.
To put it differently, in Botz-Bornstein’s reading, dreams do not necessarily need (references to) the outside world in order to make sense. Their self-sufficiency is what renders them not only ‘beautiful’, but also perfectly ‘intelligible’. Henri Bergson once said that c’est la veille, bien plus que la rêve, qui réclame une explication (it is the wake, rather than the dream, that needs an explanation) and Botz-Bornstein in a way takes this Bergsonian insight as one of his working hypotheses: ‘Strictly speaking, dream is not even “strange”. […] Compared to the chaotic everyday life of the waking, dreams are not strange but rather clear and candid’. In a certain way, then, it is the ‘clarity’ – the formal purity – of our dreams that continually attracts us to them, however different their ‘language’ may be from the language(s) of our waking life.
For Botz-Bornstein what happens in our dreams is perfectly ‘logical’, even though we would have to redefine the term ‘logic’: ‘We accept the entire logical structure of the dream just because this structure appears as not having been “invented” through rational (aesthetic) calculation’. Last but not least, what makes dreams aesthetically interesting is the fact that they occur outside the field of our desires, and this is something that makes Botz-Bornstein’s approach differ significantly from a Freudian interpretation of the dreams: "dream scenes or dream films are fascinating because they take place in a sphere which seems to exist beyond any desire! We can derive a desire from a surrealist symbol; from a dream scene of Bergman or Tarkovsky we won’t".
More than – say – painting, literature or music, cinema is for Botz-Bornstein the art form that is most fitting when it comes to studying dreams aesthetically. The reason for this is, first, the insight that, in several important respects, the film viewer is not unlike the dreamer. Seeing a film and dreaming a dream are not very different psychological experiences, and one of the major points of Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s book is to show that they are not different aesthetic experiences either. But there are also more philosophical reasons, and here he cites Susanne Langer for whom film ‘is not any poetic art we have known before; it makes the primary illusion – virtual history – in its own mode. This is, essentially, the dream mode’.
To illustrate his argument, Botz-Bornstein explores how the aesthetics of dreams and dreaming have been treated in the oeuvre of several major film directors: Andrei Tarkovsky, to whom he dedicates several chapters, making this book very much a book about Tarkovsky (Chapter 1: ‘From Formalist Ostranenie to Tarkovsky’s “Logic of Dreams”; Chapter 2: ‘Space and Dream: Heidegger’s, Tarkovsky’s, and Caspar David Friedrich’s “Landscapes”; Chapter 8: “Aesthetics and Mysticism: Plotinus, Tarkovsky and the Question of "Grace"; Chapter 9: ‘Image and Allegory: Tarkovsky and Benjamin’), Alexandr Sokurov, to whom Botz-Bornstein dedicates one chapter (Chapter 3: ‘On the Blurring of Lines: Alexandr Sokurov’), Ingmar Bergman, with two chapters (Chapter 4: ‘Ingmar Bergman and Dream after Freud’; Chapter 5: ‘A Short Note on Nordic Culture and Dreams’), Stanley Kubrick, with one chapter (Chapter 6: ‘From “Ethno-Dream” to Hollywood: Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, and the Problem of “Deterritorialization”’) and Wong Kar-wai (Chapter 7: ‘Wong Kar-wai and the Culture of the Kawaii’). These chapters serve for the most part as ‘case studies’. The final chapter (‘Ten Keywords Concerning Film-Dream’) is a substantial theoretical chapter that maps out the ample thematic territory that a philosophical-aesthetic discussion of the relationship films – dreams delineates.
What Thorsten Botz-Bornstein does in this book might be best described as a philosophically-informed ‘cultural hermeneutics’. Films and Dreams is not the work of a philosopher in any narrow sense, nor that of a film theorist or aesthetician similarly narrowly defined, but it is more – and other – than that. It is the type of interpretative approach where imagination, personal insightfulness and intellectual risk-taking are as important as textual or visual analysis, traditionally defined. The work that the practitioner of such approach does is not unlike that of the novelist: it requires insight, improvisation, and poetic vision. It is thanks precisely to the employment of this type of cultural hermeneutics that Botz-Bornstein can bring forth, for example, a series of fascinating considerations about the mainstream and its discontents, about the relationship between center and margins and the marginal cultures as ‘dream cultures’. He thus comes to talk about a propensity among authors coming from marginal places to create works dominated by an aesthetics of dreaming. Kafka’s work would be such an example – and, for that matter, any ‘minor literature is dream literature by nature’ he says.
Botz-Bornstein also talks about ‘a particular spatial quality that lets Viennese appear as a dream culture’. The cinema that did most to transfer ‘dream and the fantastic onto the screen’ was the 'Nordic Cinema' (represented in the book mostly by Danish and Swedish directors). Carl Theodor Dreyer, for example, ‘produced an art of dream which is seen by many as one of the first expressions of dream in film’. Botz-Bornstein finds that Nordic Directors ‘developed a kind of “dream art” or a special cinema of dream’, which is something that ‘has been elaborated more in the North than elsewhere in Europe where it has always had a far more marginal position’.
This ‘cinema of dream’ belongs to what may be called a ‘stylistic of marginality’, a phenomenon to which – even though he does not use this term – Botz-Bornstein dedicates several insightful pages. At the margins one can always find the resources of non-conformism and defiance necessary for creating something new: ‘it is the distance which Swedish cinema maintained towards mainstream European culture which has made possible the elaboration of an original language that has never been completely dependent on certain modern European movements’. Being at the margins is not necessarily being ‘marginal’. On the contrary, sometimes it is precisely this experience of the margins that places you in an intellectually interesting position: ‘To be Swedish meant to live in the periphery and in isolationism which is most likely to become a drawback, but could also become an advantage. […] It is […] the tension which arises from a pressure-loaded contact between the province and the center which appears as fascinating’. To live at the centre, very often, makes you oblivious of the rest. To live at the margins instead can give you, apart from a host of troubles and misfortunes, a certain sense of perspective and a depth of understanding: it does not always make you smarter, but in general it helps you avoid making stupid mistakes.
The chapter on Wong Kar-wai is probably the most representative for the type of cultural hermeneutics that Botz-Bornstein practices as he blends in it his expertise in a number of humanistic fields with a sophisticated, philosophically-grounded cosmopolitanism. Noticing Wong’s singular ability to create ‘films that appear to be equally Chinese and Western’, he proceeds to locate Wong’s world on the complex cultural map of East Asia: ‘Wong’s world is neither the traditional Chinese one nor the “globalized” or international one, but that of lower middle class inhabitants of “modern” Asia who profit from the effects of globalization only in an indirect way’. Wong Kar-wai, as well as the world he has created, does not belong to any specific place in particular, but to an entire subtle constellation of places and spaces, languages and cultures. These (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea) are places that ‘have not simply been “Westernized” but have created a cultural style driven by a dynamics of its own that is able to exist, as an autonomous unit, next to “Western” and “Asian” cultures’. What unifies these places into one ‘culture’ is the phenomenon of Kawaii through which Botz-Bornstein reads Wong Kar-wai’s oeuvre. Kawaii (which in Japanese means ‘cute’) denotes a ‘common popular culture closely linked to aesthetic expressions of kitsch which developed remarkably distinct features in all modernized East Asian countries’. This culture has been borne out of a sense of ‘disillusionment with society’ and of ‘psychological helplessness’ and manifests itself through ‘unspirited consumption and the creation of a commodified dreamworld’. In a hermeneutic move that some may consider risky, Botz-Bornstein portrays this culture as overtly ‘dandyism’. For him, what Wong does in his films, is a depiction, ‘in his particularly nihilistic and detached “dandyist” manner’, of a set of ‘emotive lifestyles without substance determined by a non-productive existential emptiness’. The logic one comes across in Wong’s films is the ‘logic of dandyist Pan-Asianism’, which Botz-Bornstein defines as a culture marked by parody and even a certain sense of self-irony, a culture where capitalism is continually mocked, "good and bad guys appear as dreamy clones of themselves, and Asia is only evoked after having gone through mneme", that is, through the director’s personal memory of “Asia”.
To conclude, in an English-speaking academic world dominated by over-specialization and institutionalized narrow-mindedness, where the rule is disciplinary provincialism and monologism, Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s Films and Dreams brings a breath of fresh air. I heartily salute it as a genuine sample of a cosmopolitanism that is yet to come.
~ Authors: Manuel Ramos; Costica Bradatan; Fabienne Collignon.
