film "In the River of Consciousness

[pynchonoid]

Volume 51, Number 1 · January 15, 2004

Review

In the River of Consciousness

By Oliver Sacks

[...] A movie, with its taut stream of thematically
connected images, its visual narrative integrated by
the viewpoint and values of its director, is not at
all a bad metaphor for the stream of consciousness
itself. And the technical and conceptual devices of
cinema—zooming, fading, dissolving, omission,
allusion, association and juxtaposition of all
sorts—rather closely mimic (and perhaps are designed
to mimic) the streamings and veerings of
consciousness.

It is an analogy that Henri Bergson used twenty years
later, in his 1908 book Creative Evolution, where he
devoted an entire section to "The Cinematographic
Mechanism of Thought, and the Mechanistic Illusion":

We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality,
and...we have only to string these on a becoming,
...situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge,
in order to imitate what there is that is
characteristic in this becoming itself.... We hardly
do anything else than set going a kind of
cinematograph inside us.... The mechanism of our
ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.

Were James and Bergson intuiting a truth in comparing
visual perception —and indeed, the flow of
consciousness itself—to such a mechanism? Are the
brain mechanisms that give coherence to perception and
consciousness somehow analogous to motion picture
cameras and projectors? Does the eye/brain actually
"take" perceptual stills and somehow fuse them to give
a sense of continuity and motion? No clear answer was
forthcoming during their lifetimes. [...]" 

..read it all: 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16882>


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