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The Ontology of the Photographic Image

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The Ontology of the Photographic Image !"#$%&'()(*+$(,$'"#$-"('(*./0"12$34/*# 56'"(.789:$5&;.#$</=1&$/&;$>6*"$?./+ @(6.2#:$A1)4$B6/.'#.)+C$D()E$FGC$H(E$I$7@644#.C$FJKL9C$00E$IMJ -6N)18"#;$N+:$O&1P#.81'+$(,$Q/)1,(.&1/$-.#88 @'/N)#$ORS:$http://www.jstor.org/stable/1210183 522#88#;:$FTULVUWLLJ$FX:LI Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Film Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org 4 ANDRE BAZIN The Ontology of the Photographic Image TRANSLATED BY HUGH GRAY Before his untimely death in 1958 Andre Bazin began to review and select for publication his post-World War II writings on the cinema. Of the planned four volumes, one was published in 1958, and a second in 1959; the remainder await some competent selective hand. The first volume centers on the theme of the ontological basis of cinema or, as Bazin also puts it, "in less philosophical terms: the cinema as the art of reality." The second discusses the relations between the cinema and those arts with which it has things in common-the theater, the novel, and painting. A third volume was to have discussed the relations of cinema and society; the fourth would have dealt with neorealism. What follows is a translation of the first chapter of volume one. To those not yet familiar with the writings of a man who might be described with justice as the Sainte-Beuve of film criticism, it should serve to reveal the informed clarity and perceptiveness of his mind, shining through the inevitable awkwardnesses and compressions of writing under pressure as a jouranlist. It is difficult to estimate fully, as yet, the loss to the cinema of a man who was counsellor as well as critic. If the plastic arts were put under psycho- depending on the continued existence of the analysis, the practice of embalming the dead corporeal body. Thus, by providing a defense might turn out to be a fundamental factor in against the passage of time it satisfied a basic their creation. The process might reveal that psychological need in man, for death is but the at the origin of painting and sculpture there victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow Egypt, aimed against death, saw survival as of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in Other forms of insurance were therefore BAZIN ANDRE sought. So, near the sarcophagus, alongside the hold of life. It was natural, therefore, to keep the corn that was to feed the dead, the Egyp- up appearances in the face of the reality of tians placed terra cotta statuettes, as substitute death by preserving flesh and bone. The first mummies which might replace the bodies if Egyptian statue, then, was a mummy, tanned these were destroyed. It is this religous use, and petrified in sodium. But pyramids and then, that lays bare the primordial function of labyrinthine corridors offered no certain guar- statuary, namely, the preservation of life by a antee against ultimate pillage. representation of life. Another manifestation of 6 the same kind of thing is the arrow-pierced clay the form proper to it, towards an effort to com- bear to be found in prehistoric caves, a magic bine this spiritual expression with as complete identity-substitute for the living animal, that an imitation as possible of the outside world. will ensure a successful hunt. The evolution, The decisive moment undoubtedly came with side by side, of art and civilization has relieved the discovery of the first scientific and already, the plastic arts of their magic role. Louis XIV in a sense, mechanical system of reproduction, did not have himself embalmed. He was con- namely, perspective: the camera obscura of Da tent to survive in his portrait by Lebrun. Civili- Vinci foreshadowed the camera of Niepce. The zation cannot, however, entirely cast out the artist was now in a position to create the bogy of time. It can only sublimate our con- illusion of three-dimensional space within which cern with it to the level of rational thinking. things appeared to exist as our eyes in reality No one believes any longer in the ontological see them. identity of model and image, but all are agreed Thenceforth painting was torn between two that the image helps us to remember the sub- ambitions: one, primarily aesthetic, namely the ject and to preserve him from a second spiritual expression of spiritual reality wherein the death. Today the making of images no longer symbol transcended its model; the other, purely shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose. psychological, namely to duplicate the world It is no longer a question of survival after death, outside. The satisfaction of this appetite for but of a larger concept, the creation of an ideal illusion merely served to increase it till, bit by world in the likeness of the real, with its own bit, it consumed the plastic arts. However, temporal destiny. "How vain a thing is paint- since perspective had only solved the problem ing" if underneath our fond admiration for its of form and not of movement, realism was works we do not discern man's primitive need forced to continue the search for some way of to have the last word in the argument with giving dramatic expression to the moment, a death by means of the form that endures. If the kind of psychic fourth dimension that could history of the plastic arts is less a matter of their suggest life in the tortured immobility of ba- aesthetic than of their psychology then it will roque art.* be seen to be the of re- essentially story The great artists, of course, have always been semblance, or, if you will, of realism. able to combine the two tendencies. They have Seen in this sociological perspective photog- alloted to each its proper place in the hierarchy a raphy and cinema would provide natural ex- of things, holding reality at their command and planation for the great spiritual technical and molding it at will into the fabric of their crisis that overtook modern painting around the art. Nevertheless, the fact remains that we are middle of the last century. Andre Malraux has faced with two essentially different phenomena described the cinema as the furthermost evolu- and these any objective critic must view sepa- tion to date of plastic realism, the beginnings of rately if he is to understand the evolution of the which were first manifest at the Renaissance and pictorial. The need for illusion has not ceased which found a limited expression in baroque to trouble the heart of painting since the six- painting. teenth century. It is a purely mental need, of It is true that painting, the world over, has itself nonaesthetic, the origins of which must be struck a varied balance between the symbolic sought in the proclivity of the mind towards and realism. However, in the fifteenth century magic. However, it is a need the pull of which Western painting began to turn from its age- has been strong enough to have seriously upset old concern with spiritual realities expressed in the equilibrium of the plastic arts. * 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 photographicdocument developed only gradually. 7 The quarrel over realism in art stems from a which there is no trace before the invention of misunderstanding, from a confusion between the the sensitized plate. Clearly the fascinating ob- aesthetic and the psychological; between true jectivity of Chardin is in no sense that of the realism, the need that is to give significant ex- photographer. The nineteenth century saw the pression to the world both concretely and in its real beginnings of the crisis of realism of which essence, and the pseudorealism of a deception Picasso is now the mythical central figure and aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the which put to the test at one and the same time mind); a pseudorealism content in other words the conditions determining the formal existence with illusory appearances.* That is why me- of the plastic arts and their sociological roots. dieval art never passed through this crisis; si- Freed from the "resemblance complex," the multaneously vividly realistic and highly spirit- modern painter abandons it to the masses who, ual, it knew nothing of the drama that came to henceforth, identify resemblance on the one light as a consequence of technical develop- hand with photography and on the other with ments.
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