Cinema and the Art of Radical Thinking
A week of cultural encounters have provoked these interconnected reflections on cinematic art as a space/practice of radical thought.
Sometimes, it’s uncanny how often a particular idea or concept seems to serendipitously reappear across different spaces, conversations, and texts. In an effort to resist the ubiquity of algorithmic tyranny, I’m retraining myself to be present—to absorb and reflect on these recurring encounters.
Last week, in an editing and montage class I’m teaching to first-year undergraduates, I explored the concept of polyvalent montage. This form of editing, championed by American experimental filmmakers such as Nathaniel Dorsky, Warren Sonbert, and Stan Brakhage, operates differently from traditional narrative editing. Unlike the spatial and temporal continuity of the Hollywood Classical Style or the dialectical montage of Soviet greats like Eisenstein and Vertov, polyvalent montage relies on a network of subtle associations that build gradually throughout a film.
Rather than adhering to linear logic, this approach fosters an open-ended, multi-layered experience, engaging the viewer’s attention in a deeply intuitive way. As Noël Carroll describes, the polyvalent style recognises that a shot may either match or contrast with its surrounding shots through elements such as colour, shape, texture, movement, or even stasis.
*Carroll, Noël. Theorizing the Moving Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Stills from Dorsky’s Variations
Nathaniel Dorsky, in particular, develops this concept through an emphasis on visual resonance, forging connections and contrasts between images based on color, pattern, and iconography. By deliberately avoiding overly determined imagery, his films encourage audiences to actively construct meaning rather than passively receive it. This principle extends to his technique of intermittence—shooting at 18 frames per second—to create a subtle flickering effect that disrupts visual continuity, generating a sense of both disjuncture and fluidity.
If you’ve not heard of Dorsky before, have a look at his filmVariations from 1998. It’s one of the few that’s available.
Brakhage, working in a similarly non-narrative and abstract mode, was influenced by poetry, music, and the visual arts, he conceptualised his films as a kind of visual poetry, exploring themes of perception, memory, birth, death, and the subconscious. Films such as The Machine of Eden (1970) use a telephoto lens to flatten landscapes into rapid, abstract movements that transform space into a shifting, plastic reality.
The polyvalent formal ethos does not merely depict human experience; rather, it manifests a film’s existence as a living entity, inviting the viewer into a dialogue with the film as an active, thinking, and breathing presence.
This is not just an editing style but a radical mode of thought—one that dissolves fixed meanings and encourages the viewer to engage with cinema as an evolving, participatory process.
What has been particularly intriguing (and at times challenging) when watching and discussing such work with students is guiding them toward a mode of spectating that does not instinctively begin with the search for narrative or closed meaning. The challenge lies in helping them embrace the free associations that this style of editing presents and remain open to a phenomenological response—one that is intuitively felt rather than strictly viewed and interpreted.
As I was searching for texts that were no too over-wrought, enabling me to posit questions to help the students engage which these ideas, I came across an article by Hanneke Grootenboer: Visual Thinking: Art as a Form of Thought. It offers some historical context to the critique that visual arts “requires” philosophy as the interpretive process to “make sense” of abstract form.
It was a little too much of a tangent to discuss with the students, but it got me thinking (again!) about how today’s culture conditions us away from radical curiosity toward visual language, instead feeding us spectacle and enunciative simplicity.
Grootenboer argues that art is not merely a vehicle for representation or interpretation but a form of thought in its own right. Rather than serving as a passive object requiring philosophical explanation, artworks can actively generate ideas, triggering a different kind of engagement—one that is not about deciphering meaning but about initiating a process of thinking itself.
She distinguishes between images that depict thinking—such as Rembrandt’s portraits of philosophers—and those that embody thinking, such as still lifes or Bonnard’s evolving paintings, which materialize thought in visual form. “Pensive” images, as she calls them, do not provide clear messages but instead invite viewers into a state of contemplation, producing a dynamic interplay between perception and cognition.
This triggered an association with the feeling of meditative submersion that I attempted to adopt in the screening of Chantal Ackerman’s Jeanne Dielman I recently wrote about.
I found myself hypocritically trying to project an aloofness toward all things Oscar-related while simultaneously spouting the occasional line of invective—cinephile cakeism, one might call it.
I’ve felt completely out of touch with most of this year’s Oscar films, but what struck me more was how film discourse seemed to have congealed in the months following the New Year—through awards season and culminating in the Academy Awards themselves.
Listening to the Silver Screen Video podcast, I heard something that struck a nerve regarding the cine-dissonance I’ve been feeling. While discussing Roger Ebert’s review of Mike Figgis’ The Loss of Sexual Innocence, they highlighted this insight:
“The Loss of Sexual Innocence is an ‘art film,’ which means it tries to do something more advanced than most commercial films (which tell stories simple enough for children, in images shocking enough for adults).” (https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-loss-of-sexual-innocence-1999)
It’s this last sentence that really hit. This is EXACTLY how I feel about much of mainstream filmmaking, (and it could be the tag line for Anora!).
On Friday, I recorded the latest episode of The Cinematologists Podcast. Neil (my co-host) and I tend to alternate production duties, and this week he led with an episode featuring a live talk he had arranged at Falmouth University by Rod Stoneman.
Rod Stoneman is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Galway. He was the Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media from 2003 to 2015 and served as Chief Executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board from 1993 to 2003. Prior to that, he was Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television from 1983 to 1993.
He has directed several documentaries, including Ireland: The Silent Voices, Italy: The Image Business, and Between Object and Image. He is also the author of Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Seeing is Believing: The Politics of the Visual, and Educating Filmmakers (co-written with Duncan Petrie). Following Malcolm Le Grice's death Rod wrote this obituary for The Guardian.
Stoneman’s talk, entitled Artistic Forms of Thought, was so in tune with my thought processes over the past week.
He used many quotes to explore a the potential for cinema to elicit radical thinking. Here are just two that jumped out at me.
“While I collect and sort out the images, an attitude towards the material starts developing. It expands from parasitic nesting in already existing visual material and the uncovering of hidden messages to dismantling and denunciation. I tear the image from its original context, and this strategy, comparative to associative and mercurial thinking, triggers a process of transformation.” – Matthias Müller
“The truth of a text is not the truth of what it says; it is, paradoxically, the truth of its form.” – Roland Barthes
Müller’s description of his an approach to visual material that actively resists fixity, treating images as fluid, adaptable entities rather than closed symbols. His emphasis on parasitic nesting and transformation mirrors the principles of polyvalent montage, where associations emerge through juxtaposition rather than narrative cohesion.
Similarly, Barthes’ assertion that a text’s truth lies in its form rather than its declared content speaks to the broader question of how meaning is constructed—not as something inherent but as something produced through engagement. Both quotations challenge the idea of passive spectatorship, reinforcing the notion that cinema (or any art form) is not a vehicle for delivering fixed messages but a space for thought to unfold dynamically.
You can listen to the episode on below via Spotify:
Here is a full list of clips that Rod cites in the talk:
The Phoenix Tapes (1999) dir. Matthias Muller, Christoph Girardet.
Section 4, Why Don’t You Love Me? (25 mins, 50 secs)
It Felt Like A Kiss (2009) dir. Adam Curtis
Opening 5 minutes, and the section on Enos the Chimp (from 19 mins, 25 secs)
The Edge of Dreaming (2009) dir. Amy Hardie
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988) dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Berlin Horse (1970) dir. Malcolm Le Grice
Abstract Cinema (1993) dir. Keith Griffiths
Intro, with Stan Brakhage and then Malcolm Le Grice interview (34mins in)
Finiti (2010) dir. Malcolm Le Grice
Dark Trees (2019) dir. Malcolm Le Grice
On Saturday, the all knowing social media fairies sent me Namwall Serpell’s article in the The New Yorker entitled, The New Literalism Plaguing Today’s Movies. It’s deep mined excavation of a cinematic tendency where meaning/effect/theme is literalised to point of absolute zero. Serpell goes through all the films nominated for best picture, highlighting their literalist tendencies. He draw’s upon Anna Kornbluh’s book “Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism,” which defines the system of late capitalistic reiteration, and nostalgic defensiveness is a cultural exploitation of the prevailing of mood: “experiential intensity and crisis”.
At the risk of sounding boastful, Neil and Myself have been talking about this for years on our podcast. I describe the phenomena as “expositional cinema”, which through both form and content, where all possibilities of interpretation contained within matrix of recognition and emotional familiarity.
Films that step outside of this, however unintentionally, are chastised by a tyrannical fandom whose psychological investment manifests in the way of an infant not getting what it wants.
Finally, on Sunday night, I wandered down from my flat in Islington to Curzon Bloomsbury in some unseasonably idyllic sunshine. I don’t know how much you feel the rejuvenating anticipation of spring around the corner, that first time in the new year when you realise there’s no jacket required.
Bong Joon-Ho’s new film Mickey 17, was on the agenda for the evening, but, as it my cinema-going practice I left early to sit in the airy glass-walled cafe area for a Lucky Saint (because I’m so rock and roll), and to catch up with a couple of Substack pieces. One in article in particular, again, seemed to continue this prevailing discursive thread.
’s Film is Dead, Long Live Film (his first post on Substack) examines the impact of streaming on film production and exhibition, particularly the consequences of losing the theatrical window. A particularly salient—and unsettling—point he makes is that tech companies increasingly produce content with the expectation that it will function as background noise, catering to our distracted, dopamine-addled brains.In response, he poses a list of urgent questions:
Having a movie or a playlist playing in the background may sound nice at the right time or place, but intentionality does matter. Who or what made this content, and how thoughtfully was it made? Does this story even make sense? Is this music any good? How much was AI used in its creation? Do we know anything about who created it? Do we care?
Intentionality does indeed matter. We are back to art as radical thinking once again.
All of this has left me wondering about what it means to engage with art as radical thought. The tension at the heart of contemporary visual culture lies in how we interact with images: are they sites of critical engagement, transformation, and discovery, or are they merely passive, pre-packaged units of content designed to be consumed without friction?
Matthias Müller’s notion of tearing an image from its original context to trigger “mercurial thinking” presents an intriguing paradox. On one hand, this approach speaks to the radical potential of montage—the way an image, when severed from its expected meaning, can generate something entirely new, opening up unexpected layers of resonance and interpretation. Yet, on the other hand, this same process of decontextualisation can just as easily be instrumentalised for formulaic repetition.
If an image is stripped of its origins only to be repurposed within a predictable, emotionally safe framework—whether for algorithmically driven content, franchise filmmaking, or nostalgia-driven spectacle—then the potential for transformation collapses into empty reiteration.
O.K. I’m out of time. Going to have to carry these ambivalences into the Renoir screening room.
This post is already too long, but I do have things to say about Mickey 17 in the context of the above. An addendum to later.
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For paid subscribers, blow is a piece I wrote entitled The Paranoid Body, which is a reflection on the death of Gene Hackman, his career as an actor, and in his roles in The Conversation and Enemy of the State, he articulated in his physicality as much as any dialogue, the mood of paranoia in 70s and 90s cycles of conspiracy thrillers.
The Paranoid Body (originally posted as The Cinematologists Newsletter #81 March, 2025)
As you are no doubt aware, Gene Hackman passed away this month, along with his wife and dog—circumstances ripe for the rabidly speculative culture we live in. The headlines, obituaries, social media, and cinephile eulogies all echo the same sentiments: he lived a long life, he was one of the greatest screen actors of his generation, and he had rarely been seen in public since his retirement from acting in 2004.
Hackman was one of my favourite actors, and since the news broke, I’ve been reflecting on what exactly he brought to his roles and films.
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