Film and ecology of mind
K. S. Sivakumaran
This is really a retelling of some of the main points I gathered from
a lecture by Prof. Christopher C. Benninger who as the Executive
Director, Centre for Development Studies and activities in Pune, India
nearly two decades ago.
In 1990 I was following a course in Film Appreciation at the
prestigious Film and Television Institute in Pune and it was where the
speech was made. The lecture was circulated in printed form. The full
title of his thesis was "Development, Film and the Ecology of the Mind".
The title was curious to me and the subjects too high a cerebral
manifesto with difficult to understand expressions then. Even now I am
not sure that I understand what the speaker was striving at.
Nevertheless I would like to inform our academics, intellectuals and
others of high thinking the basic discovery of the speaker. It may be an
interesting debate among maestros who are mindful of the Mind and
Ecology. Or maybe they would think these are nothing knew to our Sinhala
Buddhists, Thamil Hindus, Islamic Moors and others. But lesser mortals,
particularly most of us who are with closed minds might discover
something afresh by reading it.
I think our young people and others who know only one language,
either Sinhala or Thamil, should get this translated into their own
languages to understand how the local politics work and more importantly
to understand the world cinema.
To activate such action is the purpose of my writing here.
Excerpts:
"The human mind is but a clutter of stories, heard or experienced, of
images, and considered stimulations."
"Group fantasies provide social structure and cohesiveness. They
provide an explanation for the imposition of external choices over
internal ones. They ecologically balance the entity "mind", with its
external environment."
"Group fantasies provide us with social consciousness and from the
inner theatre of our minds e seek out such illusions which sustain our
inner image, and which guide all inner images toward consensus."
"Noam Chomsky, and the "Artificial Intelligence Group", at MIT have
explored a number of cybernetic mechanisms, in the brain, which maintain
balance. These are energized and driven by fantasies and dreams."
"We are in short bonded to society, culture, ethos and the "life
cycle'."
"Photography, radio and cinema all have challenged traditional group
fantasies, and revolutionized the inner theatre..."
"How did this happen? How dies Culture, which means patterns of
behaviour which persist over time, change? These patterns are encoded in
our minds, as if a computer chip with an inbuilt programme, were our
cultural heritage."
"Society is a system of rewards and punishments which sanction
thoughts and actions which are supportive of structured relations
between members of society."
"Ethos is the expression of a culturally defined system of feelings,
instincts and emotions. These are organized within our mind in a manner
which sustains our culture."
"Culture, society and ethos thus control our behaviour, our thoughts
and actions and how we feel about behaviour, thoughts and actions."
"Artefacts are the physical products of cultures and out of artefacts
art forms have emerged."
"What is called 'the development of personality' is the socialization
of each individual's mind into a balanced ecology of thinking where the
crises, options and solutions are all laid out by group fantasies and
the inner theatre of the individual need only choose from a pre-selected
pattern of possible choices, and be disciplined, through predetermined
rules, within the game of life."
The above are the contextual paradigm that the speaker provided and
his proposals on Cinema are what follow:
"How does cinema feed back into its 'sponsoring' society, culture and
ethos as a change agent? I propose four significant cinematic
interventions:
1. Cinema can be Tran cultural; it can lay out alternative patterns
of behaviour.
2. Cinema can be revolutionary; it can pose alternative societies.
3. Cinema can be stimulating; it can lead one to feel about behaviour,
thoughts and actions differently than one's ethos has defined
4. Cinema can even change our instincts; we n longer instinctively
protect ourselves.
"Cinema, more than any other art form, can unbalance the ecology of
the mind. It can create new feed back loops which will temper knowledge,
intellectual skills and sensitivity. And it can create new group
fantasies."
"Trancontextual illusions, which allow the mind to move out into the
group fantasy, and to look back on one's internal theatre and vis-a-versa,
for the group to reconsider variable individual life styles within
individuals, is the great power of film."
"The film is the only art form, which can unbalance the ecology of
the mind, can generate new autobiographies in each being's inner
theatre, and can alter group, fantasies and illusions. If there is a
modern man, and a modern society, then the film is the great modern
spaceship through which we can explore the universe of alternatives and
through which we can emerge as more just, more equitable and more
sustainable, if these are our desired new performance standards."
"Or, through cinema we may explore any number of other performance
standards by which we may wish to define and change ourselves and our
society. Such is the power of our new artefact."
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