REALITY’S A CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY OF CLASSICAL WRITTEN AND CONTEMPORARY FILM THEORY LANGUAGE

Edited with Commentary by Jon Wagner and Denise Spampinato

FIRST EDITION TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION JON WAGNER AND DENISE SPAMPINATO

What Happened with the Invention of Cinema? x

Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher CLASSICAL Michael Simpson, Vice President of Acquisitions Jamie Giganti, Senior Managing Editor FILM THEORY. Miguel Macias, Graphic Designer Marissa Applegate, Senior Field Acquisitions Editor Gem Rabanera, Project Editor I. Elizabeth Rowe, Licensing Coordinator Allie Kiekhofer and Claire Yee, Interior Designers INTRODUCTION 5

Copyright © 2017 by Jon Wagner and Denise Spampinato. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be ANDRÉ BAZIN reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval From What is Cinema? Vol. 1 system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Cognella, Inc. READING 1 The Ontology of the Photographic Image 11 Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for READING 2 The Myth of Total Cinema 17 identification and explanation without intent to infringe. READING 3 The Evolution of the Language of Cinema 21

Cover and interior image copyright© John Baldessari, Concerning Diachronic/Synchronic Time: Above, On, Under (with SIEGFRIED KRACAUER Mermaid). 1976, Black and White Photographs, 28.75 x 27.75 in. Copyright © by John Baldessari. Reprinted with permission. From Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality

Printed in the United States of America READING 1 Basic Concepts 35 READING 2 Film in our Time: Experience and its Material 46 ISBN: 978-1-62661-766-7 (pbk) / 978-1-62661-767-4 (br) JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY

From Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminisim and Film Theory Number One, Fall 1976.

www.cognella.com 800-200-3908 Translated by Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst

READING 1 The Apparatus 49

www.cognella.com | 800-200-3908 TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION JON WAGNER AND DENISE SPAMPINATO

What Happened with the Invention of Cinema? x CLASSICAL FILM THEORY.

I. REALISM

INTRODUCTION 5 ANDRÉ BAZIN

From What is Cinema? Vol. 1

Essays selected and translated by Hugh Gray

READING 1 The Ontology of the Photographic Image 11 READING 2 The Myth of Total Cinema 17 READING 3 The Evolution of the Language of Cinema 21 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER

From Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality

READING 1 Basic Concepts 35 READING 2 Film in our Time: Experience and its Material 46 JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY

From Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminisim and Film Theory Number One, Fall 1976.

Translated by Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst

READING 1 The Apparatus 49 BRIAN HENDERSON

From Film Comment, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 1971

READING 1 The Long Take 71

II. FORMALISM

INTRODUCTION 87 SERGEI EISENSTEIN

From Film Form: Essays In Film Theory

Edited and translated by Jay Leyda

READING 1 A Dialectical Approach to Film Form 93 VSEVOLOD PUDOVKIN

From Film Technique and Film Acting

Translated by Ivor Montagu

READING 1 The Plastic Material 115 RUDOLF ARNHEIM

From Film as

READING 1 Film and Reality 123 READING 2 The Complete Film 132 BÉLA BALÁZS

From Theory of Film: Character and Growth of a New Art

Translated by Edith Bone

READING 1 The Face of Man 137 SIEGRIED KRACAUER

From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film

READING 1 Caligari 153

III. CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD AND GENRE EVOLUTION INTRODUCTION 161 THOMAS SCHATZ

From The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era

READING 1 Introduction: ‘The Whole Equation of Pictures’ 169 JEAN-LOUIS BAUDRY

From Film Quarterly Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 1974–1975)

Translated by Alan Williams

READING 1 Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus 179 DANIEL DAYAN

From Film Quarterly Vol. 28, No. 1 (Fall 1974)

READING 1 The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema 193 LESTER FRIEDMAN

From An Introduction to Film Genres

By Lester Freedman, et al

READING 1 Introduction 207 LEO BRAUDY From The World in a Frame: What We See in Films CONTEMPORARY READING 1 Genre: The Conventions of Connections 231 FILM THEORY.

I. STRUCTURALISM IV. AUTEURISM AND THE ART FILM INTRODUCTION 307 INTRODUCTION 243 CHRISTIAN METZ FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT From Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema From Cahiers du Cinéma in English, Number 1, 1966 Translated by Michael Taylor READING 1 from A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema 251 READING 1 Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema 317 ANDREW SARRIS READING 2 Some Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film 329 From Film Culture, No. 27, Winter 1962/63 PIER PAOLO PASOLINI READING 1 What is the Auteur Theory? from Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962 265 From Heretical Empiricism

DAVID BORDWELL Edited by Louise K. Barnett

From Film Criticism, Vol. 4 #1, Fall 1979 Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett

READING 1 The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice 271 READING 1 The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ 335 GILLES DELEUZE II. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM From Cinema 2: The Time Image INTRODUCTION 363 Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta CHRISTIAN METZ READING 1 Beyond the Movement Image 283 From Screen, vol. 16, no. 2

Translated by Ben Brewster

READING 1 The Imaginary Signifier 375 CONTEMPORARY FILM THEORY.

I. STRUCTURALISM

INTRODUCTION 307 CHRISTIAN METZ

From Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema

Translated by Michael Taylor

READING 1 Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema 317 READING 2 Some Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film 329 PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

From Heretical Empiricism

Edited by Louise K. Barnett

Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett

READING 1 The ‘Cinema of Poetry’ 335

II. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND FEMINISM

INTRODUCTION 363 CHRISTIAN METZ

From Screen, vol. 16, no. 2

Translated by Ben Brewster

READING 1 The Imaginary Signifier 375 LAURA MULVEY

From Screen, Vol. 16. No. 3, 1975

READING 1 Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 391 CLAIRE JOHNSTON

From Notes on Women’s Cinema

Edited by Claire Johnston

READING 1 Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema 405

III. POST-STRUCTURALISM

INTRODUCTION 417 JEAN-LUC COMOLLI & JEAN NARBONI

From Screen, Vol. 12, No. 1, Spring 1971

Translated by Susan Bennett

READING 1 Cinema/Ideology/Criticism, Part 1 425 FERNANDO SOLANAS AND OCTAVIO GETINO

From Cinéaste, Vol. 4, No. 3, Latin American Militant Cinema (Winter

1970–71)

READING 1 Towards a Third Cinema 437 IV. POST-

INTRODUCTION 461 FREDRIC JAMESON

From The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture

Edited with an introduction by Hal Foster

READING 1 Postmodernism and Consumer Society 471 ROBERT STAM AND ELLA HABIBA SHOHAT

From Reinventing Film Studies

Edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams

READING 1 Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the ‘Posts’ 487

EPILOGUE JON WAGNER AND DENISE SPAMPINATO

Towards a Co-Temporary Film Theory 511 INTRODUCTION

What Happened with the Invention of Cinema? BY JON WAGNER AND DENISE SPAMPINATO

If one can say that reality—as a representation of itself, or as a language—is ‘cinema in nature,’ one can also say that cinema, by reproducing reality, that is, by becoming its ‘written’ language, shows what reality is; it underlines the phenomenology of reality.1 –Pier Paolo Pasolini

The quotation from Pasolini which inspires the title of this anthology plunges us immedi- ately into a question of theory by posing the way in which cinema mediates our experience of reality. How does cinema inhabit an incommensurable Nature as its “written language”? How does it function not merely as a reflection of reality, but as an agent of reality, of realization? These questions imply that reality may always have been cinematic in the broadest, and perhaps most poetic, sense. By representing reality through reality we establish the perspective by which the world becomes present to us at all. Reality is a cinematic phe- nomenology, an ontology and semiology of the image suffused with our efforts to occupy, express, and endure reality. For us, as cinematic animals, representation is immanent to presence; plastic negotiation of time and space is paradoxically essential to the way we inhabit and write our existential contingency. In this sense, cinema may be said to characterize our provisional depiction of re-lived experience from the beginning of time. The human experience of time, to which our grief and our ambition attest, is one of endurance. Ours is an attempt to construct a narrative of duration and survival wrapped

1 Pier Paolo Pasolini. “The End of the Avant-garde,” Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Poetics of Heresy (Edited by Beverly Allen. Saratoga, California: ANMA Libri & Company, 1982) 22.

Pg. x in the coil of our own mortality (what André Bazin calls “the mummy complex), and this ritual constitutes the existential lure of cinema as a reality machine. The desire to be eternally present to the world and to ourselves is always invaded by the traumas of the past, traumas that are precipitated by the very effort to resolve and represent them. The present is always a déjà vu composite of a reality already seen and of a future we reflect backwards and forwards into the time we call “now.” Now is never here nor there except to the degree that this constellated co-temporality becomes the historical sign of presence. Though “pure” presence may be what we desire so desperately as to animate and engineer apocalypse, it is our complicity in the ends and means of time and space that makes us so cinematic, so current to and capable of film theory! As Walter Benjamin observes in his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,”2 the cinematic image only gives us an absence concealed in the guise of a presence. Its “reality” is the effect of complex operations that produce a new form of reception, simultaneously tactile and distracted, conditioning us to experience copy and contact as two sides of the same mimetic sensing. Owing to its phenomenal mimetic/ kinetic powers—to its ability to recall and to articulate our sensorial experience of time and space—the cinematic apparatus became crucially significant of the transfigured structures of modern human experience. In the wake of historical developments (i.e., the mechaniza- tion of labor; the industrialization of production, of consumption, and of the military ap- paratus), and fueled by the social mutations these events produced (i.e., colonialism, the wholesale displacement of agrarian populations to densely accreted urban spaces, and the concomitant exploitation of the industrial proletariat), cinema introduced a technologi- cally mediated aesthetic of play. As Walter Benjamin argues, this antidote was capable of addressing the self-alienation of an historical subject seeking through technology a therapeutic and cognitive adaptation to technologies that had already failed to integrate experience. Correlating the erosion of the “aura”—the uniqueness, the authenticity, and the authority of the “here and now” in the work of art—with the rise of technologies of reproduction and economies of loss and gain, Benjamin notes that this erosion, this loss “is matched by a huge gain in the scope for play [Spiel-Raum]. This room for play is widest in film. In film the element of semblance has been entirely displaced by the element of play” (The Work of Art, 127). Benjamin links the historical role of film with a reflexive, therapeutic understanding of technology that makes room for an “inexhaustible reservoir of experimental procedures” (127). But herein lies a paradox: while experimental play may have “entirely displaced” the traditional aura/authority of the work of art, it is the brutally sublime shock of the city that provides the cause, the context, indeed the very need and means for the advent of cinema. It is that shock that characterizes the aura of cinema itself. Fueled by anguish and/or exhilaration, the cinema turns shock into its own formal

2 See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writing, Volume 3:1935–1938 (Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) 101–133.

Introduction / xi principle, and this in turn teaches us to re-appropriate our imperiled sense of physical reality into an experience—an act and play—of redemptive adaptation. Through a spectacular assault of past, static photographs flashed in our face at shocking speed, cinema exploits our desire to process and animate these frames into continuous motion and into present experience. Aided by the physiology of the persistence of vision, we psychologically confer on these photographic phantoms the urgency of pres- ence, encouraged by cinema to conflate desire with perception, to conflate representation with presentation. In a theater of disavowal, of the willing suspension of disbelief, we enter into identification with cinema’s seductions both technical and narrative, into identification with a cinematic reality all the more powerful by virtue of its own phantomness, by its transformation of absence into presence. By enlisting the transcendent aspirations of our gaze actively engaged in an “escape” from its own limited perspective, cinema enacts a meta-psychology of duration, of temporal order submitted to possible closure and resolu- tion. This feels so real because it is so real, the level of felt reality always immanent to the dream of what it would mean to be able to write experience in our own way:

In reality, we make cinema by living... . By living, therefore we represent ourselves, and we observe the representations of others. The reality of the human world is nothing more than this human representation in which we are both actors and spectators: a gigantic happening if you will.3

Pasolini will claim further that the cinema performs a poetics of reality that acknowl- edges the presence of an original matrix that can never be fully attained--of a real that can only be approached through the ambiguous, if lyrically ambitious, signs it projects onto the screen of the world. Coursing with the oneiric currents of memory, sexuality, the archetypes of the collective unconsciousness, and manifest in the gestures and actions that prefigure the metaphoric Image-Signs of cinema, reality refines its primal discourse through us. Cinema’s co-extensive “realism” is always thereby an ideological superstruc- ture, an ontological dream of reality built not so much on “false consciousness” (as Marx defines ideology), but on a misrecognition of the colossal labor we put forth inactualizing reality. And so it is into a truly dialogic ontology that theory hails us, calling out to us to re-cognize, to re-think, and to talk back to our assumptions about cinema and the splendid role we play as its agent. Despite its sometimes difficult and even painful rigors, despite the destruction of passive, escapist pleasure so often blamed on theory, theory can also reveal itself as a textual pleasure of the first order, as a joyously “eureka!” moment in the writing of reality. The first task of theory, then, is to examine “essentialist” claims to a reality inured against the texture and textuality of reality itself. Theory works to suspend those claims that naturalize or neutralize the work of ideological interpellation, of the psychological,

3 Pier Paolo Pasolini. “The Written Language of Reality,” Heretical Empiricism (Translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnet. Washington: New Academic Publishing, 2005) 204. Italics in the original.

xii / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory cultural, and historical means by which we come into identity and learn to identify. Nothing can silence critique so quickly nor as thoroughly as a supposed alliance with Nature, Fact, Truth, Normalcy. Nor could the threats to those who resist this imposed status quo be more ominous: deviance, criminality, contempt, madness, Otherness. Though the heroic quest for specificity, for an understanding of the fundamental assumptions of a medium like cinema defines a particularly “Classical” theoretical negotiation with essence, “Contemporary” theory will warn us not to forget just how essentially provisional essence turns out to be, a classical/contemporary interplay reflected in the rich array of theories in this anthology. Perhaps the etymology of the word “theory” can help us understand its motivations and methodologies: “Theory” comes from the Latin theoria, derived from the Greek theōria (contemplation) derived from theōrem, which means to consider, literally to look at. Theōros in Greek means spectator, the agent of a look or gaze that finds itself focused in a theater, and which makes “cinema theory” (kinēma is Greek for “movement”) an astonishingly apt appellation for what we do at the “movies” whether we like it or not. The spectator enclosed within a privileged arena of voyeurism moves to grant cinema its movement through a process so doubly active as to make a dismissal of cinema theory equivalent to enforced paralysis or blindness. We are only spectators insofar as we are theorists, and vice versa. Certainly, cinema as a medium has been subject to a number of historical and aesthetic dismissals, from the primitive notion that cinema is “the hand- maiden to the ,” a “bastard art,” merely mimetic and enslaved to its technological/ photographic base, or that it is merely a form of “mass entertainment,” vulgar from the start. Yet as focused interrogation, the function of theory in general has been to identify and question the underlying assumptions that inform a particular cultural practice, to question accepted notions of “common sense” and to set into motion static myths of the Real, the Truthful, the Natural, and the Transcendental. Theory will always reach for a sense of how a phenomenon and phenomenology like cinema gains is historical and cultural power, asking whom that power serves or excludes. Never content with the self- evident, theory serves also to subvert its own claims to mastery, challenging as a matter of its own logic singular, all-encompassing, or purely abstract explanations. Indeed, as a critique of mastery susceptible to proclamations of mastery and political correctness, theory deserves our suspicion, since that wariness is theoretical at its core. Nor as theorists should we fall victim to false dichotomies of theory vs practice, of production vs criticism. These reductive dualities refuse the thrilling symbiosis that is the complete cinematic act and impoverishes a heritage from Eisenstein to Rossellini, from Welles to Pasolini, from Truffaut and Godard to Altman and to Bergman that would never dream of cutting filmmaking off from its critical sources.

* * *

So what happened with the invention of cinema? As we have argued, it is not the “inven- tion” of cinema that should be our theoretical object—as if cinema sprang into being like

Introduction / xiii Venus on the half shell, or was conjured through the magic of sheer creative genius in the laboratories of scientific renegades. Rather, despite the oft-dated invention of cinema in 1896, it is the advent of cinema we need to contextualize. What were the conditions of its “birth”? That advent, that arrival, needs to be understood within a long period of gesta- tion fostered by the schisms, shocks, and revolutions we associate in Western civilization with the Modern and with Modernism. Cinema was conceived within an existential and experiential dilemma of time, space, presence, and identity that makes a date like 1896 merely an instance in cinema’s coming into appearance on the eve of an age cinema would come to occupy as perhaps its chief signifying device. Both the Modern and Modernism imply a paradoxical sense of overturning, of excited and often radical “liberation” from traditional constraints, from those values and beliefs that upheld an “old” reality. This liberation is paradoxical in so far as it is experienced not only as progressive, but also as a kind of loss, a crisis inflected as much by conflict, shock, even grief as by historical optimism and confidence. The Modern is an aporia—contradictory at its logical heart—both productive of transformative crisis and determined, sometimes disastrously, to solve that crisis. The Modern “crisis of the real” and the demise of outworn worldviews are given initial historical expression in the Renaissance, a rebirth now nearly 600 years old and, we are arguing, one of the historical cradles of the cinematic sense of life, of a reality increasingly ours to write and to project. The Renaissance represents a schism with the spiritual and social hierarchies of feudalism, a break with that medieval trance of Oneness that gave to God and his emissaries absolute province over one’s place and outcome in the world and after death. The very concept of individual subjectiv- ity and agency arises in the increasingly secular, rational, and humanist perspective of the Renaissance. People became “persons,” capable to some degree of their own voice and point of view and empowered to affirm those systems that would result in a fully realized humanity. This sense of humanist individuality, aided by the spread of literacy (through the mass technological reproductions of printing) and fostered by a skepticism about established ministries, saw the increasing monetization of experience along with the subjugation of Nature to empirical observation and imaginative intervention. This is not to say that the Renaissance was not a supremely violent time, shocked into its ontological skepticism by endless wars, crusades, and outbreaks like the Black Death, but reliance on the perfectibility of the human form in art, on the “real politick” of a Machiavellian Prince, and on the self-mediating sacraments of a reformed and protestant religion, attests to the agency of the artistic, the political, and the personal in writing a new reality. Though we celebrate this “rebirth” as an awakening to human potential, we need to remember it was forged in crisis and abuse, in an exploitation that carries a loss of inte- gration at the heart of its achievement. This Renaissance moment of the Modern in the 15th and 16th centuries gains momentum throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in an Enlightenment that further circumscribed metaphysical understanding in an expansion of worldly power that also saw the Age of Discovery circumnavigate the globe. Characterized by a concentration of State authority and colonial dominion alongside discourses of

xiv / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory increased religious tolerance, freedom from superstition, and philosophical and scientific confidence, this Age of Reason chilled with its intellectualism those passions of individual discovery it also excited. The Romantic Age inherits this Enlightenment critique of estab- lished beliefs and institutions and further pursues a progressive stance against injustice all the way to revolution, with the French Revolution of 1789 as its incomparable example. An ecstasy of “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” the French Revolution demonstrates once again the aporias of a radically Modern challenge to an ancien régime followed by totalitar- ian Terror and imperial conquest, a declaration of independence followed by reactionary reconsolidation. Though the Romantic Age elevated subjectivity above the cold certainties of rationalism and its policing of excess and un-reason, ’s lyrical intuition of a phenomenology mediated by conceptual, emotional, and spiritual categories also implies a loss of direct access to the noumenal, to the thing in itself. Ironically, reality becomes necessarily poetic, a beautiful if often melancholy allegory of itself. This juggernaut of the Modern is propelled toward that Modernism of the mid to late 19th century and into the 20th century as “progress” in art, politics, economics, technology, science, and philosophy becomes increasingly critical. A crisis in the logic of progress saw its innovations outstrip even newly traditional forms of processing and adapting to the shocks of the new. As an astounding confluence of challenge to conventional guarantees of belief, order, reason, and truth constellate in the thinking of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein, the very idea of what it means to be human—how we understand our origins, our moralities, our souls, our guiding ideologies, and indeed, space/time—comes undone. The enormous upheavals and mass dislocations accompanying the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions also ignite explosive alienations of labor in its relocation to the now teeming cities, creating the paradox of concentrated urban disaffection that becomes the possibility of commercialized mass culture and of a mass audience. This revolution in experience with its justification in infinite progress spawns another Modernist paradox: a mass nostalgia for re-integration and mastery born of a sense of loss that now voluptuously, if ominously, begins to dream, as James Joyce observed, of awakening from the nightmare of history, of regaining, as Proust wrote, “lost time.” Radical and yet incipient with apocalyptic yearn- ings, the cusp of the 20th century saw the spectacle of tomorrow through the dread lens of losing grasp on experience today. Time and space, the dimensions of reality and its representation, were up for reassignment and perhaps ripe for slaughter. The “great” and “total” wars and revolutions of the 20th century, its subsequent genocides, holocausts, and imperial collapses, testify to a terrifying willingness to solve the Modern/Modernist problem of reality in a “final solution,” in the catastrophic purity of a nuclear blast, a 1000 year Reich, a workers’ paradise revealed as a gulag of slavery. As the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “Look there! It’s the Century of hell!” In diametrical opposition with histories that describe the impetus of “progress” as an irrefutable, forward bound force, Benjamin’s notion of actuality “requires standing at once

Introduction / xv within and against one’s time.”4 “The time of the Now” (Jetztzeit) is Benjamin’s conceptual equivalent of a Molotov cocktail—it blasts the continuum of history, throwing into relief an experience of time and space that always exceeds the chronological order associated with teleological . Telescoping the mutations that historical events bring in their wake, he asks: Can we apprehend in our daily life the constellation our own era forms with earlier ones? Can we participate in a luminous if ominous moment of crisis when the causal connection among historical events no longer seems self-evident? Driven by the idea that progress is an irresistible force, teleological history envisions an evolution of events continuously mobilized by a linear concatenation of causes and effects. According to this model, Benjamin notes “the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of progression through a homogeneous empty time.”5 This empty time is the utopian “paradise” from which Benjamin’s Janus- headed Angelus Novus contemplates the “storm” of progress:

There is a by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.6

To challenge the paradisiacal clemency and homogeneous vacancy of time involves a critique of linear causality and, by extension, of the idea that time is only a vessel for progress having no dynamic of its own. It proposes a notion of historical materialism that seeks to redeem from the dream—or the nightmare—of the past a sense of a future that might bypass the catastrophic impasses of the present. This “messianic time” designates for Benjamin the anointed moment that, insofar as it awaits its transfigura- tion, brings the possibility of turning crisis into krisis (in the Greek sense, which means turning point). Benjamin’s sense of cinematic actuality (Actualitat) calls for the willing- ness to stand “with and against one’s time” in a stance that also coincides with that

4 Miriam Bratu Hansen. “Actualities, Antinomies,” Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) 75. 5 Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (Version 3) (Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 261. 6 Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, (Translated by Edmund Jephcott, et al. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) 392. Italics in the original.

xvi / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory peculiarly attentive mode of hyper-aware distraction by which the spectator confronts film—an experience of time that is at once contemporary, co-temporary and posthumous. By setting the time of the Now against the grain of teleological or chronological time, Benjamin underscores the potentiality of a time perceived through “a historical time- lapsed camera”—a holistic, multifold perspective akin to memory and anticipation that does not “measure time the way clocks do” (Concept of History, 395). And yet, a craving for totality, for mastery, for what is in effect an abstract or sublime solution to the problem of existence is Modernism’s great aporia, its internal contradiction. Following in the wake of a systematic and convulsive overturning of traditional founda- tions is an alienation driven to spectacular attempts at recovery and reintegration. Cinema arises and develops within this historical context as itself a spectacular training device in the onslaught, absorption/rejection, and processing of inconceivable amounts of stimuli. Gaged against the demands of urban existence, cinema rehearses, albeit in less morally dubious and less lethal ways than all-out fascism and totalitarianism, the ability to recall the shattered prowling of experience to its projected unity, to achieve this work of spectacle within a state of critical distraction. A spectacle whose aura glows with the lure and danger of spectacle, cinema can nevertheless train us in a mode of entertaining shock and crisis while teaching us with all of its perceptual wealth to play against the ethical poverty of final solutions. As Walter Benjamin aptly notes, among all mimetic machines (painting, printing, pho- tography), the cinema is not only the one most apt to induce corporeal knowledge of fragmentary psycho-sensorial experiences recaptured and reassembled, as it were, by an “optical unconscious,” but the one designed to fulfill this purpose in the most comprehen- sive way. The cinema extricates experiences entrapped in the hasty rhythms and routines of everyday city life and “bursts the prison-world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second”:

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroads, our stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hope- lessly. Then came the film and burst the prison world asunder by the dynamite of a tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible. It reveals an entirely new structural formation of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones… . Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowering and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements

Introduction / xvii and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psycho- analysis to unconscious impulses.7

As Christian Metz will observe later in this anthology, the signification of cinema —aided by the scopophilic positioning of the spectator and by her or his identification with the camera and with the entire apparatus of cinema—is Imaginary. This imaginary signification provides a chance to recapture the Ideal Ego of the Lacanian mirror stage, reflected now in a new kind of mirror where I don’t literally see myself, but, through an act of willing disavowal, myself as another, as a stand-in who empowers me to withstand myself. Intercessor in the transubstantiation of a scandalous reality, cinema ministers as a strangely messianic prosthesis in the truthful fictions and provisional ontologies by which we determine to endure and to prevail in our breed of existence. In this way, though we could say we passionately need to partner with cinema in this endeavor of writing reality, it is perhaps not we who love cinema as much as it is cinema who loves us. Despite its force, this love affair with the cinematic image is far from self-evident; rather the material seductions of the cinematic image involve a complex equilibrium between technology and the human sensorium. As Jean-Louis Comolli aptly observes in his essay “Machines of the Visible,” even the most analogical image of reality “is never its reduplica- tion.” The analogical representations through which cinema transcribes and translates reality is in effect “a false repetition, staggered, disphased, and different.”8 Yet falseness is precisely what lends materiality to the image; its productivity relies on the spectator’s active engagement with a sameness that is not self-same. As Benjamin contends, false analogies are figurations that speak to the innate human impulse to perceive indirect cor- respondences and to establish connections among even the most disparate and remote phenomena. Benjamin calls this aptitude mimetic and describes it as the precondition of language, its pre-linguistic moment, but also the moment of imaginary significations. Mimesis provides us the means to think through the senses, to participate in and to withstand the inherent ambiguity, structural open-endedness, and shifting signification of the cinematic image. Our complicity with the deferred reality of the image is productive insofar as it allows us to reflect on crisis from a stance of critical intimacy, implicitly unify- ing spectatorship with theory in the problems we attempt to oversee. But how can the cinema achieve this ethical and poetical potential? What kind of desire and engagement are needed to actualize it? On a profound level, we know the image is not a projection of the world, but an intensely mediated reflection of our desire to identify with “machines of the visible,” machines capable of rearranging the traumas, illusions and de- sires that haunt us while compelling us to seek alternative horizons. Paradoxically, we seek to recognize a version of our own identity though a mechanical eye that is not a human

7 Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (Version 3), Illuminations, 236–237. Italics added by authors. 8 Jean-Louis Comolli. “Machines of the Visible,” The Cinematic Apparatus (Edited by Teresa De Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1980) 138.

xviii / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory eye; an eye/I that is never self-same and that rearticulates realty according to a principle of non-identity. The cinema implicates us in a game in which subjectivity is provisionally freed from the willful intentionality of the self. Yet, as Comolli argues, it is primarily the spectator, not the technological apparatus, who powers this analogical alliance. The act of watching a film requires the spectator to assert a willing suspension of disbelief. There is no living authenticity in the image not already framed by the psychological and cultural drive of our look:

However refined, analogy in the cinema is a deception, a lie, a fiction that must be straddled—in disavowing, knowing but not wanting to know—by the will to believe of the spectator, the spectator who expects to be fooled and wants to be fooled, thus becoming the first agent of his or her own fooling… . We want one and the other, to be fooled and not fooled, to oscillate, to swing from knowledge to belief, from distance to adherence, from criticism to fascina- tion. Which is why realist representations are successful! (139)

The impression of reality, the paramount principle of cinematic imaging, is a language articulated in full empathy with the technological apparatus. We, cinematic spiritual au- tomatons, want to believe in the world. Never truly passive nor merely escapist, we main- tain our play of disavowal at the highest register of seriousness, because “the more one knows, the more difficult it is to believe, and the more it is worth it to manage” (Comolli, 139). By asserting our dual power to believe and not to believe, vicariously to know and to forget who we are, we come to stand not only in alliance or dissent with the dominant ideologies we inhabit, but alongside them in their precariousness. Through a process of identification, de-identification, and then re-identification, we become the agents of our own enchantment and of a “structuring disillusion” that amounts to a multiple exposure, to that flickering re-presentation by which blindness illuminates the conditions of visibility.

* * *

This anthology will engage main currents of Classical and Contemporary film theory in a deliberately subversive dialogue that constantly questions the secure establishment of critical paradigms. The effort of the different chapters will be to build on foundations that are then systematically exposed to possible intervention, discussion, and revision. It would, however, be naïve to assume that initial readings and theories associated with Classical approaches are somehow less relevant or more primitive than Contemporary theoretical formulations. The aim of Classical theory has been to investigate film’s extraor- dinary participation in the histories and revolutions of Modernism and to examine film’s possible and proper function within those contexts. Though Classical theory searches for a certain “essence” to the filmic medium in discourses of Realism, Formalism, Classical Hollywood, Auteurism, and the Art Film, this Specificity Thesis, as we might call it, is almost

Introduction / xix always haunted by the collapse of certainty that inspired such a critical quest in the first place. Another aspect of the Classical effort is the legitimization of film as art, an argument that seeks to recognize and understand the force of a medium that came to define so much of the imaginary life of the 20th century. And whereas Contemporary theory tends to deconstruct structures of Classical specificity as, precisely, structured rather than es- sential or revealed, Contemporary theory still gains much of its momentum and direction from its interrogation of Classical assumptions. If Classical theory tends toward specificity, Contemporary theory supports inclusive- ness. In an array of readings that acknowledges the long effort of Classical precision and legitimization, our chapters on Contemporary theory put film into dialogue with other cul- tural and aesthetic methodologies—Linguistics and Semiology, Literature and Mythology, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Politics and Ideology—with other practices and media technologies that may even presage “the end of cinema.” For Contemporary theory, cinema is not just a specific form, content, or singular expression, but the symbiotic encounter of multiple signifying systems with multiple kinds of spectators who read films with different economic, ethnic, racial, sexual, and ideological backgrounds. In tandem with each other, Classical and Contemporary theory comprise a tradition of inquiry born out of the rupture of tradition, and though this kind of critical “grandeur” may be encountering its own chal- lenges in the post-modern and “post-contemporary” era (a possibility we address in the Epilogue to this anthology), there is no doubt that even “post-theory” owes its lineage to Theory.

xx / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory

CLASSICAL FILM THEORY. I.Realism INTRODUCTION

Neither a theoretical artifact nor obsolete in our digital age, Realism is foundational to all cinema theory, classical or contemporary. The photographic, analogical relationship of the cinematic image to the thing itself provokes debate ranging from the insistence on an aesthetics of witness and respect for reality to a claim for cinematic art only when it interrogates or estranges that supposed intimacy. In what we might refer to as Orthodox Realism, its theoretical legitimacy finds its ground in an assumption ofimmanence , a worldview at the heart of metaphysical speculation from Aristotle and Aquinas through Spinoza to Deleuze. Immanence finds the significance of reality in reality, an implicit meaning neither transcendental nor synthetic, but specific to the physical presence and substance of being in itself. In a sense, immanence implies that reality is always already meaningful, its shining truth content manifest to a cinematic gaze that honors spatial and temporal integrity. Cinema’s century coincidental with “the century of hell” gives Realist theorists such as André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer their cultural urgency, a modern, indeed Modernist, response to the crisis of the real couched in humanist terms of recuper- ation, endurance, and redemption. Cinema finds its specific function within immanence by its ability to record, reveal, and to testify to the integrity of the mise-en-scène. This respect for the arrangement of elements in the scene and the camera’s relationship to them dignifies those techniques that maintain or restore that unity natural to time and space in the long take and depth of field. The technical specificity of classical or Orthodox Realism finds perhaps its greatest example in the Neo-realism of post-World War II Italian cinema championed by theoretical spokesmen such as Cesare Zavattini and most famously by André Bazin in his writings for

Pg. 5 the magazine he founded and edited, Cahiers du cinéma. These are, in effect, techniques of effacement rather than aesthetic intervention practiced by directors such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini who gain their mastery not as auteurs, but as metteurs en scène, abandoning contrived scripts and linear plots as well as exclusive reliance on professional actors and studio . In an attempt to redeem the sanctity of everyday life and people from the perversions of social and political life typical of Fascism, Realist films move directly into the streets and the homes of actual events, giving location and available lighting the chance to speak for the world in its own image, to give accep- tance to that incommensurable meaning natural or immanent to the physical body of the Earth. As Siegfried Kracauer writes, viewing reality from the point of view of redemption exposes the tragic and chaotic consequences of a totalitarian, if not heretical, formalist impulse to impose order on the face of things. In contrast, “the myth of total cinema,” to use Bazin’s designation, would aspire to an ever-greater correspondence with the flow of reality unburdened from formal preconception or imposition. Finally, this positions a spectator capable of retrieving his or her humanist relationship with the world as the language of cinema evolves in tandem with our own existential efforts at preservation and endurance. Rather than being forced into expressive agreement with the predetermined abstractions and categorizations of our modern technological and ideological eclipse, we return from exile to the enlightened embrace of a world awakened from its dormant state, sharing with us a rich “ambiguity” of opportunity for meaningful choice. Cinema achieves peak creativity and artistry, then, only in the paradox of a will to representation that substantiates and realizes what is already there. Yet this recognition that through cinema we grant realization to the world we inhabit gives to Realist theory an edge we might call Critical Realism. Jean-Louis Baudry reminds us that much of what we designate as “reality” is an impression—a kind of misrecogni- tion—of a state of being that conforms less to metaphysical verities than to the metapsy- chological manipulations of a medium that caters to our desire for continuity, for temporal and spatial coherence, and for the promise of resolution or closure. Cinema can encourage

Pg. 6 a reality effect out of disavowal, out of a suspension of disbelief that invites regression into a pre-egoistic narcissism, into the constructed illusion of experience as we would imagine it redeemed of alienation, fragmentation, and the mortal struggles and negotiations of identity. Critical Realism reminds us of how driven we are to see imitation as actuality, representation as presentation, and to ignore or habitually to forget that Realism is pre- cisely an ism, a stylistic and ideological legitimization of hegemonic worldviews and values. Critical Realism, while still admitting the crucial link between cinema and the scene of the real, exposes just how constructed, choreographed, and historically mediated our reality is, how it is “actually” comprised of stylistic, ideological, personal, and aesthetic regulations and circumstances that are often unconscious, artificial, irrational, or as brutally arbitrary as they are simply there waiting to welcome us home. For Critical Realism, we might say that ontology and ideology are two sides of the same coin. Brian Henderson’s investigation of the long take as it is actually practiced by directors and experienced by spectators maintains its distinction from the extreme formalist mon- tage aesthetics of a director like Sergei Eisenstein, but disputes the long take’s purely orthodox or impersonal witnessing of temporal continuity as it is espoused by André Bazin. For Henderson, though this supreme instance of Realist style stays anchored in respect for mise-en-scène, it is still stylistic; that is, it is still subject to a practice that makes judgements about how time and space are constructed, not merely revealed. The long take style always involves inter- and intra-sequence editing of shots as units of realization (not just length) in conversation with the dramatic and thematic potential and limits of the mise-en-scène. Long takes do, after all, end—that’s what makes of cinema a film—and they are not so necessarily “long” as they are punctuated in a qualifying syntax of commentary, reflection, and periodicity about the very logic of insight and completion. The impression of the reality of the long take paradoxically depends on the metapsychological direction it gives spectators through cutting, a guide to and verification of attention an extreme long take tends to alienate. Both Henderson and Baudry shift Orthodox Realism toward re-cognition, toward a rethinking of immanence as it is manifest in perception, impression, and desire. Critical Realism functions within a medium whose vast reality emerges in the yearning for metaphysical grounding even as it observes our Promethean efforts to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

7 / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory A PARTIAL LIST OF CLASSROOM-TESTED SCREENINGS:

ORTHODOX REALISM:

Vit torio De Sica Akira Kurosawa Shoeshine, 1946 Ikiru, 1952 , , 1948 1995 Umberto D, 1955 , Roberto Rossellini Robert Bresson 1999 Rome, Open City, 1945 A Man Escaped, 1956 , 1946 Au hasard Balthazar, Mohsen Makmalbaf Stromboli, 1949 1966 The Silence, 1998 Luchino Visconti Michelangelo Frammartino Ermanno Olmi La terra trema, 1947 La quattro volte, 2011 Il posto, 1961

Abbas Kiarostami Yasijiro Ozu , Tokyo Story, 1953 1999

CRITICAL REALISM:

Theo Angelopoulos Béla Tarr Ulysses’ Gaze, 1995 Close-Up, 1989 Damnation, 1988 Eternity and a Day, A , 1997 Werckmeister 1997 Harmonies, 2000 Terrence Malick Marcel Carné Days of Heaven, 1978 Tsai Ming-liang Daybreak, 1939 Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Kenji Mizoguchi 2004 Terence Davies Ugetsu, 1953 The Long Day Closes, 1992 Max Ophüls Lola Montes, 1955 Carl Dreyer Day of Wrath, 1943 Jafar Panahi The Mirror, 1997 Hou Hsiao-Hsien The Puppetmaster, Carol Reed 1993 The Third Man, 1949 Flowers of Shanghai, 1998 Karel Reisz Saturday Night and Miklós Jancsó Sunday Morning, 1960 The Round-Up, 1965 The Red and the White, Jean Renoir 1967 The Rules of the Game, Red Psalm, 1971 1939

Mikhail Kalatozov Andrei Tarkovsky I Am Cuba, 1964 Nostalghia, 1983, The Sacrifice, 1986

Introduction / 8 André

Bazin. What is Cinema? from VOL. 1 ESSAYS SELECTED AND TRANSLATED BY HUGH GRAY

READING 1 THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FILM QUARTERLY, VOL. 13, NO. 4

If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of em- balming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting­ and there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily ap- pearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone. The first Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy, tanned and

André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Cinematic Image,” Film Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 4, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray, pp. 4-9. Copyright in the Public Domain.

Pg. 11 petrified in sodium. But pyramids and labyrinthine corridors offered no certain guarantee against ulti­mate pillage. Other forms of insurance were therefore sought. So, near the sarcophagus, alongside the corn that was to feed the dead, the Egyptians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substi- tute mummies which might replace the bodies if these were destroyed. It is this religious use, then, that lays bare the primordial function of statuary,­ namely, the preservation of life by a representation of life. Another manifestation of the same kind of thing is the arrow-pierced clay bear to be found in prehistoric caves, a magic identity-substitute for the living animal, that will ensure a successful hunt. The evolution, side by side, of art and civilization has relieved the plastic arts of their magic role. Louis XIV did not have himself embalmed. He was content to survive in his portrait by Le Brun. Civilization cannot, however, entirely cast out the bogy of time. It can only sublimate our concern with it to the level of rational thinking. No one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from a second spiritual death. Today the making of images no longer shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a question of sur­vival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny. “How vain a thing is painting” if underneath our fond admiration for its works we do not discern man’s primitive need to have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures. If the history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their aesthetic than of their psychology then it will be seen to be essen­tially the story of resemblance, or, if you will, of realism. Seen in this sociological perspective photography and cinema would provide a natural explanation for the great spiritual and technical crisis that overtook modern painting around the middle of the last century. André Malraux has described the cinema as the furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of which were first manifest at the Renaissance and which found its completest expression in painting. It is true that painting, the world over, has struck a varied balance between the symbolic and realism. However, in the fif­teenth century began to turn from its age- old concern with spiritual realities expressed in the form proper to it, towards an effort to combine this spiritual expression with as complete­ an imitation as possible of the outside world. The decisive moment undoubtedly came with the discovery of the first scientific and already, in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The artist was now in a posi­tion

Pg. 12 to create the illusion of three-dimensional space within which things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality see them. Thenceforth painting was torn between two ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the expression of spiritual reality where­in the symbol transcended its model; the other, purely psychological,­ namely the duplication of the world outside. The satisfaction of this appetite for illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, since perspective had only solved the problem of form and not of movement, realism was forced to continue the search for some way of giving dramatic expression to the moment, a kind of psychic fourth dimension that could suggest life in the tortured immobility of baroque art.1 The great artists, of course, have always been able to combine the two tendencies. They have allotted to each its proper place in the hierarchy of things, holding reality at their command and mold­ing it at will into the fabric of their art. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are faced with two essentially different phenomena and these any objective critic must view separately if he is to un­derstand the evolution of the pictorial. The need for illusion has not ceased to trouble the heart of painting since the sixteenth century. It is a purely mental need, of itself nonaesthetic, the origins of which must be sought in the proclivity of the mind towards magic. However, it is a need the pull of which has been strong enough to have seriously upset the equilibrium of the plastic arts. The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion be- tween the aesthetic and the psychological; be­tween true realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both concretely and its essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudorealism content in other words with illusory appearances.2 That is why never passed through this crisis; simultaneously­ vividly realistic and highly spiritual, it knew nothing of the drama that came to light as a consequence of technical developments.­ Perspective was the original sin of Western painting. It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumière. In achieving­ the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable sub- jectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image.

1 It would be interesting from this point of view to study, in the illustrated magazines of 1890–1910, the rivalry between photographic reporting and the use of drawings. The latter, in particular, satisfied the baroque need for the dramatic. A feeling for the photographic document developed only gradually. 2 Perhaps the Communists, before they attach too much importance to expressionist­ realism, should stop talking about it in a way more suitable to the eighteenth century, before there were such things as photography or cinema.­ Maybe it does not really matter if Russian painting is second-rate pro­vided Russia gives us first-rate cinema. Eisenstein is her Tintoretto.

13 / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory Again, the essential factor in the transition from the baroque to photography is not the per­fecting of a physical process (photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of color); rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man pIays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it.3 This is why the conflict between style and likeness is a relatively modern phenomenon of which there is no trace before the invention­ of the sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinat- ing objectivity of Chardin is in no sense that of the photographer. The nineteenth century saw the real beginnings of the crisis of realism of which Picasso is now the mythical central figure and which put to the test at one and the same time the conditions determining the formal existence of the plastic arts and their sociological roots. Freed from the “resem- blance complex,” the modem painter abandons it to the masses who, henceforth, identify resemblance on the one hand with photography and on the other with the kind of painting which is related to photography. Originality in photography as distinct from originality in paint­ing lies in the essentially objective character of photography. [Bazin here makes a point of the fact that the lens, the basis of photogra­phy, is in French called the “object if,” a nuance that is lost in English.—Tr.] For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The per­sonality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind. Although the final result may reflect something­ of his personality, this does not play the same role as is played by that of the painter. All the arts are based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absence. Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake whose vegetable or earthly origins are an insep­arable part of their beauty. This production by automatic means has radically affected our psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography con­fers on it a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space. Photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transfer­ence of reality from the thing to its reproduction.4 A very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the prompt- ings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith.

3 There is room, nevertheless, for a study of the psychology of the lesser plastic arts, the molding of death masks for example, which likewise involves a certain automatic process. One might consider photography in this sense as a molding, the taking of an impression, by the manipulation of light. 4 Here one should really examine the psychology of relics and souvenirs which likewise enjoy the advantages of a transfer of reality stemming from the “mummy-complex.” Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud of Turin combines the features alike of relic and photograph.

The Ontology of the Photographic Image / 14 Besides, painting is, after all, an inferior way of making likenesses,­ an ersatz of the processes of reproduction. Only a photographic­ lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process: for photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. Viewed in this perspective, the cinema is objectivity in time. The film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were. Those categories of resemblance which determine the species photographic image likewise, then, determine the character of its aesthetic as distinct from that of painting.5 The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography,­ the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist. Photography can even surpass art in creative power. The aesthetic world of the painter is of a different kind from that of the world about him. Its boundaries enclose a substan- tially and essen­tially different microcosm. The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a fingerprint. Wherefore, photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it. The surrealists had an inkling of this when they looked to the photographic plate to provide them with their monstrosities and for this reason: the surrealist does not consider his aesthetic purpose and the mechanical effect of the image on our imaginations as

5 I use the term category here in the sense attached to it by M. Gouhier in his book on the theater in which he distinguishes between the dramatic and the aesthetic categories. Just as dramatic tension has no artistic value, the per­fection of a reproduction is not to be identified with beauty. It constitutes rather the prime matter, so to speak, on which the artistic fact is recorded.

15 / Reality’s Written Language: A Critical Anthology of Classical and Contemporary Film Theory things apart. For him, the logical distinction between what is im­aginary and what is real tends to disappear. Every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image. Hence photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact. The fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of visual deception with meticulous attention to detail substantiates this. So, photography is clearly the most important event in the history­ of plastic arts. Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfillment, it has freed Western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism and allowed it to recover its aesthetic autonomy. Impressionist realism, offering science as an alibi, is at the opposite extreme from eye-deceiving trickery. Only when form ceases to have any imitative value can it be swallowed up in color. So, when form, in the person of Cézanne, once more regains possession­ of the canvas there is no longer any question of the illusions of the geometry of perspective. The painting, being confronted in the mechanically produced image with a competitor able to reach out beyond baroque resemblance to the very identity of the model, was compelled into the category of object. Henceforth Pascal’s con­demnation of painting is itself rendered vain since the photograph allows us on the one hand to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love, and on the other, to admire the painting as a thing in itself whose relation to something in nature has ceased to be the justification for its existence. On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language.

The Ontology of the Photographic Image / 16