IMAGE AND FILM AS A MEDIUM OF COMPREHENSION Sławomir Sikora 1. It is sometimes said that the cinema is a window onto the world. This metaphor is a summary of a years- long search for a privileged perspective of viewing within the range of European thought, and pertains both to art and science (Panofsky 1927|1991). Art proved capable of dealing with it more rapidly and un- ambiguously. Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, raw art, and successive currents of twentieth-century and earlier art decidedly favoured a departure from the idea of representation (cf. e.g. Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez and the interpretation proposed by Michel Foucault). Science proved to be more challenging. Initially, the ethnographic/anthropological film was every so often (or rather was supposed to be) thoroughly “painstak- ing” and “documentary”. Jay Ruby even declared that in order to be scientific, a film must meet the same criteria as those applied to a scientific dissertation (Ruby 1975, cf. also Heider 1976). Fortunately, those times are over and we are increasingly better aware of the fact that the image is not so much a poor relative of language (Biblia Pauperum) as a different manner of experiencing and communicating. John Berger, whose accomplishments regarding the creative approach to the image and visuality are considered significant, once described it as a half-way language. References to language are somewhat unavoidable, since it is our fundamental and universalising means of communica- tion at least in science and codified social life… But is this always the case also in daily life? Or in other cul- tures? “Early” Wittgenstein suggested disregarding all that cannot be grasped in language, but “late” Witt- genstein decidedly retracted. It is not my intention to undermine the importance and role of language, but rather to draw attention to the fact that image and imagination are endowed with increasing importance in the cognition and comprehension of the world, in which we live. In his important Modern Social Imaginar- ies, Charles Taylor used the term: imaginary/imaginaries, defined in a dictionary as: “having existence only in the imagination”, “unreal” (http://www.thefreedictionary. com/imaginaries). At the very beginning of his book, he wrote: “The social imaginary is not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (Taylor 2004, 2). Unambiguously, therefore, thanks to the endowment of meaning that, which is imagined makes possible social practices, i.e. is translated into social reality. That, which appeared to be unreal and imagined is rendered as that, which is as real as can be: social practices, which assume meaning thanks to the imagined. The real – imagined opposition becomes overcome due to practices, i.e. so- cial activities. In a conversation presented in this pub- lication, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett discussed the role of the imagined more extensively, this time in ref- erence to non-material heritage. Actually, that, which is imagined and non-palpable permeates that, which is material. The whole turn towards materiality and things that we have been observing in anthropology and, wider, in the humanities since the 1990s, is based on the reflection that it is difficult to uphold a radical division into the material and the spiritual/non-mate- rial. W.J.T. Mitchell captured this aptly in an ambiguous sentence: “The slogan for our time then is, not things fall apart, but things come alive” (Mitchell 2001). To- day, the agency of images is mentioned quite openly. Mitchell went even further and changed the focus of the question from agency, i.e. that what the images do, to that of a question asking what the images want. In doing so, he treated this query also as an intellectual experiment. Mitchell did not offer an unambiguously explanatory answer, but one of the significant albeit fragmentary solutions could assume the form of the following statement: images want to be treated se- riously and not to be reduced to a pale reflection of material objects, as we sometimes have a tendency to do (not only in science). They are an independent be- ing governed by laws of its own (Mitchell 2005). More, they demand that we resolutely abandon Cartesian dualism… The material and immaterial heritage… The cinema appears to unify this perspective. The “guru” of the anthropological cinema David MacDougall admit- ted that all his films are actually an attempt to touch the invisible (Barbash and Taylor 1996). Good anthro- pological films allow us to see, i.e. also to imagine that, which is sometimes difficult to imagine, and to find a different perspective. MacDougall even suggested that anthropological films could be innovative because they search for a new style of expression and presenta- tion by remaining at the junction of cultures. Susan Buck-Morss followed – with some interesting modifications – the traces of Walter Benjamin and pos- tulated philosophising with the assistance of images. Benjamin translated perceptions and images (i.a. those that originated in the course of his famous walks and excursions across cities) into language... “For Benja- min” – Buck-Morss noticed in a conversation with Au- rora Fernández Polanco – “images are keys to thought. He doesn’t collect images but, rather, data that pro- duced mental images” (Fernández Polanco 2014). Buck-Morss confessed that she also collects authentic images, which inspire and sometimes precede the pro- cess of thinking. They are the traces of reality. “What happens with philosophy when it becomes divorced from such traces of concrete reality, is that it loses… it loses everything! It becomes this purified thing that rolls on with no traces of the objective world, no trac- es of matter” (Fernández Polanco 2014). I believe that at this point Buck-Morss came closer to a definition of anthropology, claiming that it is a philosophy of the concrete, a process of philosophising whose point of departure is the concrete (e.g. Kirsten Hastrup). Can her approach be described as “thinking alongside the images”? Thus comprehended images do not replace Only images in the mind vitalize the will. Walter Benjamin IMAGE & FILM 14