The Indians invented film. The ancient Indians. While Plato's Cave Allegory

has traditionally and widely been regarded as a precursor of the filmic principle of projecting moving shadows onto a wall in the face of immobile spectators, the notion of the Web¹ of Māyā, as in the Upanishads and in Vedānta religious thinking, has to my knowledge not yet been introduced into the European discourse on film.

Arthur
Schopenhauer,
1788 - 1860

In this text I will maintain that Māyā can serve as a fruitful metaphor or thought model for the filmic principle before the fact. It is related to the delicate motif of penetrating Māyā's Web. By piercing through her veil, the perpetrator can reach behind the surface of projections. Māyā is always understood as female and the embodiment of temptation. Her veil is an erotic metaphor, and so is the unveiling of Māyā, claimed by Schopenhauer to be leading to truth (e.g. the truth behind a film projection in our context). The claim of a violent, paradigmatically male destruction of Schein, of Māyā, her unveiling, should be regarded as a powerful fantasy of redemption, called by Schopenhauer the overcoming of the principium individuationis.

In Hindi, "maya" is a colloquial term. There are common expressions like maya nagar(i), maya puri, or maya bazaar.

Most often, "maya" is used in relation to the film world. In New Delhi a film magazine is published under the name of "CineMaya". On a superficial level "maya" can be compared to the American concept of Tinsel town make-believe, or to its German equivalent expression of Kintopp. However, there is a lot more, and deeper meaning to Māyā than that and the fact that it has not been used in the context of film in the Western world is quite astonishing – given the sheer amount of what and how much is continuously being written on film, on film history and on film theory. But it also comes as quite a surprise considering the history of ideas in more general terms: on the one hand the parallels between Plato's Theory of Forms (rather: of ideas, ιδέες) and the concept of Māyā were introduced into the Central European philosophical mainstream by Arthur Schopenhauer in his seminal book "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung²" in 1818, and have always remained there since.

Thus, Māyā has become a part of our own (European) history of ideas, albeit charged with a slightly different semantics from the one it originally had. On the other hand the obvious connection between Sigmund Freud's concept of Psychological Projection and the first projections of films, both simultaneously developed around 1895³, have become a commonplace among film and cultural theorists. How come the missing link in this open equation, importunate and demanding as it appears, has never been targeted? Where is the Vedic approach to the filmic principle? What, in short, is the relation between Māyā and film?

Phenomenology: Surfing, Not Boring

Edmund Husserl was born in the Moravian small town of Proßnitz/Prostějov in 1859; Sigmund Freud was born in the Moravian small town of Freiberg/Příbor in 1856. Both men came from German-speaking Jewish middle class families. One could well maintain that their respective life projects, phenomenology and psychology/psycho-analysis, had an impact on the history of ideas that was no less dramatic than that of Darwinism and Marxism merely two generations earlier. However, in spite of the extremely similar enculturation and socialization Freud and Husserl enjoyed, phenomenology in its attempt to bracket off, to factor out, previous knowledge and to restrict itself to perceivable phenomena only on the one hand and psycho-analysis with its interest in underlying truths that need to be dug out from below a surface on the other hand are contrary concepts effecting antipodal attitudes⁴.

It is obvious how Husserl's phenomenology relates to surfaces, planes and images. However, the surface of a phainomenon and the two-dimensional picture are not only opposed to the principle of the one-dimensional line. The phenomenological approach is also an antithesis of the method of piercing, of vertical analyses and the uncovering of deeper, hidden layers. The meaning to be dug up and disclosed from those layers is implicitly supposed to be more real or more meaningful than what can be found on the surface. This mode of thinking is most clearly represented by traditional natural sciences, by Sigmund Freud's depth psychology or by dialectical materialism.

When Arthur Schopenhauer introduced his personal understanding of Māyā into the Central European tradition, it was a concept he could easily embrace in the light of both his Platonic schooling and his admiration for Immanuel Kant: Māyā could easily be Europeanized and then serve as an epistemological metaphor for the unreal results of human perception: "this [...] conception is described by the Hindus as Māyā, i.e., illusion, deception, phantasm, mirage⁵".

Indeed, Mahamāyā is defined as "the power that throws people into the bondage of delusion and attachment [...]; the force that seizes those of knowledge and leads them to delusion⁶" . It cannot be denied – at least not at this rather superficial stage of comparison – that Plato's Theory of Forms, the Vedic concept of Māyā and Kantian and post-Kantian epistemology actually do share the basic opposition of "phenomenon vs. the real thing". And this is also the way Schopenhauer looked at it: by

"the doctrine of Maya [...] is understood nothing but what Kant calls the phenomenon as opposed to the thing-in-itself. For the work of Maya is stated to be precisely this visible world in which we are, a magic effect called into being, an unstable and inconstant illusion without substance, comparable to the optical illusion and the dream, a veil enveloping human consciousness, a something of which it is equally false and equally true to say that it is and that it is not.⁷"

Comparable With the Optical Illusion
And the Dream

In Schopenhauer's interpretation, Māyā is the sheer definition of film projections before their time. It is not so much the audio-visual quality of film, nor just the sequence of two-dimensional images on a time axis of one-dimensional narration that makes Māyā comparable with the moving image but rather the principle of projection that appears to be the perfect definition of filmmaking:

Māyā is the process of superimposition by which one projects one's own ignorance on the world and thus obscures ultimate truth. To wake up to the truth of things necessarily involves counteracting or overcoming māyā, which is grounded in ignorance and self-infatuation. Liberation in Hindu philosophy means to a great extent the transcendence of embodied, finite, phenomenal existence. And māyā is often equated precisely with finite, phenomenal existence. To be in the phenomenal world, to be an individual creature, is to live enveloped in māyā⁸.

"The problem of māyā is taken by Schopenhauer to be the age-old problem of metaphysics, the relationship between what appears and what is real." In filmic terms: the reel vs. the real⁹. »