Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

In Tarr’s film »Werckmeister Harmonies« the musicologist Eszter is haunted by a question that can be seen as the theme of the film: is math real or simply imagined? It is possible to derive from this question further questions about the reality character of film. Can math be the arbiter of beauty or is there something more fundamental about beauty, which the human ear can hear but which logic and math cannot grasp? The Werckmeister Harmonies problem questions the categorical distinction between the given (nature) and the constructed (culture) and asks whether culture (in the film designated as “math”) is real.

Eszter discovers that there is a gap between math (or mathematically established music) and reality (or real music). The philosophical criticism addresses the »reality character« of geometry/math altogether. Mathematically, if one goes up seven octaves from a C (an octave defined as an interval that always doubles the frequency of the preceding note), one should end up on exactly the note that the human ear identifies as a higher C. The problem is that one doesn’t. After seven octaves, the note that we land on will be a quarter of a semitone off if measured mathematically. Is this an imperfection of the human ear, of mathematics, or of nature? Ratios that appear to exist in nature do not necessarily overlap with mathematical order. Natural laws hold the individual intervals together inside a harmonic system that might be irrational from a mathematical point of view but still needs to be accepted.

Eszter’s questions bear a strong metaphorical link with philosophical questions concerning the reality character of cinema. What is »reality« for cinema? Is it calculated beforehand (in terms of time and space) or is there an organic reality that evolves in cinema and from cinema?

Thorsten Botz-Bornstein was born in 1964 in West-Germany. He is associate professor of philosophy at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait. He earned his PhD in philosophy at the Oxford University with a thesis entitled »Play and style in hermeneutics, structuralism, and Wittgenstein« (1993). His habilitation followed in 2000 at the EHESS in Paris. He has also been researching in Japan, in particular on the Kyoto School, and worked for the Center of Cognition of Hangzhou University (China) as well as at Tuskegee University in Alabama. In 2015 he was a research fellow at the New York University.  In his philosophy he attempts to establish conceptual links between style, play, and dream which applies as well to film. Among his numerous publications are »Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Bergman, Kubrik, Wong Kar-wai« (2007) and »Virtual Reality: The Last Human Narrative?« (2015).