Ken Wilber on the Comprehensive Nature of Cinema

The integration of an Integral or aperspectival vision, or the perceptual lenses of quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types in Ken Wilber's AQAL model, into a creative work is what Wilber refers  to as comprehensive art, and he differentiates this form of Integral Art from integrally-informed art, which is “any art produced by integral consciousness” (Wilber, 2003). Usually, comprehensive art refers to art that has been consciously created to reflect an integral perspective, but Wilber notes that the art of the cinema is more inherently comprehensive than other artistic mediums because it employs the multiple forms of expression of text, image, and sound (Wilber, 2003).

Google Glass and the Advancement of the Subjective Lens

The recent video (above) created by the partnership between Fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg and Google using Google's new Google Glass augmented reality glasses, suggests that this emerging convergence technology has the potential to transform how movies are made. This transformation appears to not just be about the extreme portability and non-intrusive nature of the technology, which are in themselves great advances, but this new wearable camera may very well bring us into the realm of experiencing a much more powerful subjective lens experience...bringing the subjective eye-line closer into alignment. Time will tell...but this tech looks to be full of potential in both the personal and professional movie-making and viewing space.

In addition to the potential shift in the movie making and viewing experience, there is the added dimension here of how having technology closer to our being, both physically and perceptually will effect our consciousness. The convergence of human and technology spaces has been and continues to be a topic of both inspiration and trepidation...are we evolving into a new form...the transhuman....and heading toward a new age marked by a profound techno-human shift that Ray Kurzweil calls the Singularity...or are we creating further distance and disassociation between our selves, each other and the world...for me, I see this movement as an advance like all other advances, filled with both potential blessings and challenges...for now...this looks like fun...

Integral Cinema Project Receives Donation of Write Brothers Software

The Integral Cinema Project has received the generous donation of Movie Magic Screenwriter, Dramatica Pro, and Outline 4D cinematic story creation software programs from Write Brothers, Inc.

Movie Magic Screenwriter is one of the film industry’s most highly regarded screenwriting software programs, Dramatica Pro is an award-winning story creation program, and Outline 4D is a story outlining and timeline building program.

The Integral Cinema Project is using these three software programs to help study the development process of the textual dimension of cinematic creation.

Our initial testing of these programs suggests that they can be used a valuable tools in the creation of integrally-informed cinematic works by offering the integrally-informed cinematic creator and creative team a wide range of story creation methodologies and dimension-perspectives.

Dramatica Pro offers a powerful story creation methodology based on a unique and integrally-informed story development theory and approach, which uses a four-quadrant approach to story structure. Like Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Dramatica’s quadratic approach is based on an expansion of the big three domains of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person dimension-perspectives. While Wilber’s model adds the 3rd person plural as the fourth quadrant, Dramatica uses the addition of the 1st person plural dimension-perspective.

Outline 4D extends this integrally-informed story creation process by adding the ability to view the created story from in-depth and overview vertical-outline and horizontal-timeline perspectives, offering the capacity to move through the individual and collective dimensions of a story with varying depth and span.

Movie Magic Screenwriter integrates these developed multi-dimensional story elements and assists in the further development of the created story into a screenplay (teleplay, etc.) format, while also offering tools to help take the elements of the screenplay into the next pre-production and production phases of script breakdown, storyboarding, scheduling and budgeting.

We are deeply grateful for the contribution of these software programs, and for the support and inspiration of the creators of Write Brothers software.

Integral Cinema Studio Dialogue with Ken Wilber (Part 1)

Announcing the Online Publication of Part One of 

INTEGRAL CINEMA STUDIO: 

A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO THE CINEMA EXPERIENCE 

An Audio Dialogue Between Ken Wilber and Mark Allan Kaplan 

Exploring the Application of Integral Theory to 

Cinematic Media Theory and Practice.

For over a year now, Integral Cinema Project Lead Researcher Mark Allan Kaplan has been producing a groundbreaking monthly article series at Integral Life: the much-acclaimed Integral Cinema Studio. In this remarkable exploration, Mark walks us through all of the main elements of Integral theory—using some of our favorite movies to illustrate the basics of the Integral approach, while noting how each of these elements has shaped the cinema experience since the invention of film itself. Not only does this series offer a wealth of perspective and insight to film, filmmakers, and audiences alike, but it also brings more color, more sound, and more awesome explosions to Integral thought and practice! Listen as Mark and Ken Wilber take an in-depth look at one of Integral Life's longest-running series, Integral Cinema Studio.

This dialogue serves as a wonderful introduction to the major elements of integral theory. For those already familiar with the Integral model, this is a nice opportunity to both revisit your understanding of integral theory and to see how it can be applied to just about any interest, activity, or pursuit that you may have.

Either way, Integral Cinema Studio is a terrific way to deepen and enrich your own experience of film, simply by recognizing some of the deeper patterns and perspectives running through your favorite movies that you may not have recognized before. All of the elements of the Integral model are present in our awareness right now; Integral theory simply points to all the various aspects and dimensions that shape our experience of this present moment. It's therefore no surprise that we can see all of these elements reflected in various characters, conflicts, and stories throughout the history of film. Of course, whether the film-makers themselves actually intended this, or just intuited it, is another question—and to some degree inconsequential to the beauty and profundity we experience when these ideas and perspectives come to life on the big screen.

What's more, this discussion and blog series promises to inspire a whole new generation of writers and filmmakers. It's not just how you express these perspectives, ideas, and insights—Integral Art does not require you to represent all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, etc. in your work (though all of these elements are implicitly present in every piece of art). Rather, it's about whether you are able to account for all of these in your own awareness, thereby allowing you to draw from a far richer, more colorful, and more comprehensive pallet of human experience.

So grab a snack from the concession stand, turn off your phone, and enjoy this groundbreaking discussion between Mark Allan Kaplan and Ken Wilber!

Introduction Written by Corey W. deVos

Available at: http://integrallife.com/ken-wilber-dialogues/integral-cinema-studio-comprehensive-guide-cinema-experience

Germaine Dulac on Integral Cinema

The term integral cinema was first used by French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac in the 1920s. Dulac employed this term to describe cinema that utilized the natural inherent language of the cinema to evoke the interior life normally hidden beneath the exterior life of the objective world (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996). This form of cinema was also called pur cinema or visual music, because of the contention by its adherents that the language of the cinema is a language all its own, more related to music or poetics, than to literature or drama. In order to liberate the cinematic image from literary or dramatic expression, “…Dulac sought to create for the spectator a ‘cinegraphic sensation’ that could be achieved through the contemplation of pure forms in movement—the melodic arrangement of luminous reflections, the rhythmic ordering of successive shots” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, pp. 69-70).

While Dulac’s theoretical writings and public discourses on integral cinema mostly focus on this definition, her films reveal two distinct types of cinematic approaches. Whereas some of her films did seek to explore pure visual music approaches of using cinematic imagery, movement, and rhythm to reveal the interior life, films like her 1928 classic, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), reveal the raw beginnings of a more comprehensive or “integral” approach that attempts to use the inherent language of the cinema to capture and express the interior and exterior lives of both the individual and the collective. Dulac hints at this approach when she writes, “It isn’t enough to simply capture reality in order to express it in its totality; something else is necessary in order to respect it entirely, to surround it in its atmosphere, and to make its moral meaning perceptible…” (Dulac, as cited in Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p. 49). This more comprehensive approach hauntingly captures some of the constructs of Jean Gebser’s integral worldview (1985) and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory (1995) while predating both by 21 and 67 years, respectively.

For more on this see my article Toward an Integral Cinema, available for download at: http://integrallife.com/integral-post/toward-integral-cinema

Integral Cinema Studio Has a New Home on Integral Life

The Integral Cinema Studio article series has a new home on Integral Life's new website at: http://integrallife.com/integral-post/integral-cinema-studio-holonic-lens

Many thanks to Corey DeVos and the entire Integral Life team for their support and for all their hard work in putting up the new site and their wonderful and creative publishing work on the series.

INTEGRAL CINEMA STUDIO

The Integral Cinema Studio series is a pioneering exploration of film and cinema through an integral lens, in which Mark Allan Kaplan shows how all the various elements of Integral theory have been expressed on the big screen through some of our greatest and most cherished pop-culture landmarks.

Integral Cinema Project Receives Donation of SHARM Software

The Integral Cinema Project has received the generous donation of SHARM Studio 4 Software from CyberTeam, Ltd.

SHARM Studio is a professional transformational audio tool that provides the capacity to create transformative audio entrainment soundtracks including the creation of original ambient scores along with the embedding of brainwave entrainment binaural, monaural, and/or isochronic tones.

SHARM Studio 4 Screenshot

The Integral Cinema Project is using this software to create transformative soundtracks for our cinematic experiments, and preliminary research suggests that the integration of this type of sound with integrally-designed visual and textual elements can significantly increase the immersive and transformational capacity of cinematic media.

We are deeply grateful for the support of CyberTeam.

Exploring an Integral Approach to Multimedia Mental Health Interventions

As part of the Integral Cinema Project’s outreach application process, I recently consulted on a multimedia mental health intervention project at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago Schools of Medicine helping them apply an Integral approach to deepen the power and effect of their intervention. The researchers already had intuitively fleshed out the need for an intervention that addressed the intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social dimensions of the issue at hand, namely helping teens at risk learn to become more resilient in the face of the often daunting challenges of growing up in today’s fast moving and complicated world.

To help the research team apply and integrate these four main intervention dimensions in a more coordinated and effective way I created an Integrally-Informed Sensory Synchronization Template for the project, mapping the four intervention dimensions of intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social across the multimedia expressive dimensions of Text, Image (still & moving), Sound, Time (accumulated meaning patterns), and Interactivity. This integration of the intervention and expression dimensions included the mapping of desired affect patterns and their relationship to expressive modalities including textual linguistic and mimetic patterns; visual shapes, colors, tones, framing and space; audio modalities (dialogic, musical, atmospheric, effectual, etc.); and meaning patterns accumulated over time.

The goal of this approach was to help them coordinate the intervention across multiple modes of expression and perception to induce what cinematic theorist Sergei Eisenstein called the synchronization of the senses, the process in which a message, synchronized across multiple expressive dimensions, achieves the power and force of actual lived multi-sensory experience. This shift from mere information sharing to a deeply felt lived-experience has the potential to induce deep change and transformation across all four dimensions of intention, behavior, relationship formation, and socialization patterns.

This research is still ongoing but initial results suggest a great potential for this approach, and its application for use in multimedia mental health interventions, and other multimedia transformational healing endeavors, including transformational learning, and individual and collective human development applications.

Integral CinemaProject Researcher Report

By Mark Allan Kaplan, Ph.D.

Integral Acting Q & A – Part Two

The following in an edited transcript of part 2 of a Q & A session I had with a young actor I am working with who was interested in my Integral Approach to acting:

Question: From past experiences with different actors on film, I get worried that I’m not getting the give and take that I deserve from them, that will help us be the best that we can be in that moment..? If I’m stuck with someone as a scene partner who isn’t giving their all, how can I get them to help me develop my character, as well as theirs in the manner they should?

Answer: From my perspective, worrying about what the other actor is or isn’t giving/doing/etc. is not your job as an actor. If you are bringing your best, deeply rooted in your character, your presence, energy, and beingness will lift every other actor to a higher level. I cannot count the number of times I have heard stories from actors how being in a scene with a great actor elevated their own performance beyond anything they could imagine. There is a term called “social contagion” which refers to the contagious nature of higher levels of presence and beingness in relation to human interaction. Your job is to be the character as deeply and fully as possible and interact with the other actors as other character-beings, no matter how flawed their beingness is.

Question: As an actor such as myself, what do you think develops first in becoming a character; The Physical or Mental or Emotional, etc?

Answer: This varies from acting school to acting school, and from actor to actor. The key to an Integral approach is to recognize that all four dimensions (physical/behavioral, experiential/intentional, relational/cultural, and environmental/sociological) co-arise. You can use any dimension as your entry point as long as you recognize and move into a place where all four dimensions co-exist simultaneously.

Integral Acting Q & A

The following in an edited transcript of a Q & A session I had with a young actor I am working with who was interested in my Integral Approach to acting:

Question: What’s the best way to know one’s self as an actor?

Answer: That is a big and tricky question; one that every acting theorist, coach, etc. would answer a little differently depending on their approach, etc. Since human beings have varied ways of perceiving, what is the “best” way for one actor, may not be the best way for another actor. That said, my own humble opinion is that knowing yourself as a person is key; that is, becoming conscious of the many dimensions of your own being, gives you a strong foundation from which to study the dimensions of your characters’ being. Knowing your self and knowing the self of the character gives you powerful reference points of where you are at and where you need to go to become the character. For example, if you know how you perceive the world, how you relate to others, how your environment has and is impacting you, etc., and if you know these same aspects of your character, you will be able to develop a felt-sense of the difference between these two realms of beingness.

Question: Now I've heard of dimension before, but exactly does that mean?

Answer: As with your previous question, the issue of what dimensions we are talking about varies depending on what acting theory we are using. In my experience and research I have found that no matter what these different approaches call these dimensions or how many divisions they make, in essence they are all talking about the same basic realms. The approach I use is based on Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, which is a metatheory that attempts to integrate all human knowledge, and according to this approach we can say that we as human beings have and exist within four main dimension-perspectives: 1. Intentional/Experiential: Our thoughts, feelings, awareness, consciousness, intentions, sense of self or “I”-ness – this includes our multiple lines of development (Cognitive, moral, emotional intelligence, creative abilities, etc.); 2. Behavioral/Physiological: Our bodies, actions, the objects and other bodies we interact with – this includes our physical limitations and gifts; 3. Relational/Cultural: Our cultural worldviews and identity, how we relate to others, or our way of being in relationships or our “WE”-ness; 4. Environmental/Sociological/Systemic: The ecological, political, economic, technological systems that we were born into, grown up in and now operate in and how they have and continue to shape us. Here is a chart from my journal article on Integral Cinema that summarizes these dimensions in relation to a character:

For more on these dimensions and the Integral approach, see my Integral Cinema Studio Series at IntegralLife.com: The Holonic Lens; The Quadratic Lens; and The Developmental Lens.

Question: In your Integral Cinema Studio article on the Holonic Lens you state: “Cinematic holons also have positive, neutral, or negative charges, much like atomic particles. At the level of text, an example of positive and negative charges can be illustrated by the energetic difference between moments of affinity and conflict between characters.” Can you please clarify negative, neutral, or positive; in what aspect; for a film maker or a character?

Answer: Holons are a useful perceptual lens for all aspects of cinema (and life), recognizing that every moment, every experience is a whole in and of itself, and at the same time all the past moments and experiences in your life (or the life of your character) are part of that whole moment/experience as well (i.e., everything that happened to you is part of the whole of who you are right now)…and this whole NOW moment/experience you are having will become a part of you as you move forward into other whole moments/experiences. When we are talking in terms of “charges” connected to these whole/part moments/experiences, as related to a character: Your character can be having a negative (i.e., fear, hate, anger), neutral (i.e., indifference, detachment), or positive (i.e., love, joy, wonder) emotional experience in any given moment. This moment is experienced as a whole unto itself, yet under the surface, deep within the characters unconscious, all the other moments in their lives that resonate with this moment help to color their experience in the present (i.e., in an onscreen moment your character may be feeling love for another character, while at the same time every other experience of love in their life is swirling inside them under the surface…so for example, if your character has had bad love experiences in the past, their present moment of love may bring up a tiny quiver of fear inside them. This fear may not be easily seen on the surface, but a great actor can feel this and energetically project this undercurrent to the audience). This performance moment then becomes a positively charged whole moment with a subtextual negative charge as a part of it…a holon…a whole/part.