“A Process Philosophy Framework

For Film Theory and Aesthetics”

DRAFT

Forthcoming: New Review of Film and

Television Studies 17, 2 (2019)

Edward Branigan

Abstract

Process Philosophy has a long history as a disciplined way

of thinking about the world. Process thinking flows in film
theories, too, though often unacknowledged as a framework. This
essay contrasts process and substantialist accounts of the world,
film, and aesthetics. Processual accounts promise new descriptions
of photography, film, color, narrative, narration, fiction, the
camera, semiotics, and the self. Performative aspects of aesthetic
texts may be measured by such dynamic events as temporal
gestalts, patterning, procedural schemata, judgment heuristics,
working memory (which includes the stream of consciousness,
adverbial sensing, and a flowing sense of selfhood), projections,
radial associations, reidentifications (frequency, vibration), and the
ever-present possibilia of paradigms and the nearly true. Processes
engender immediacy and directionality – a flow toward continual
becoming. The result is a new perspective on the nature of
textuality – its fluid properties, its collective behavior – without
necessarily displacing substantialist accounts that rely on
long-term memory and the immobile signposts of sign, cue, form,
and thingness.

Sections in this Essay

Process
Aesthetics
Film
Analysis
Color
Narrative
Narration
Semiotics
Consciousness
Conclusion