Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital

Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital FRANCESCO CASETTI 1. A Digital Revolution? The advent of the digital image changes cinema’s relationship with physical reality. 1 No longer, the story goes, are we dealing with an image based (as with photography on film) exclusively on a direct record of objects placed in front of the camera, the essential link between the world and its representation thus established. The digital image has the ability to offer us a representation of things without ever having need of things themselves, thanks simply to the elaboration of an algorithm. The consequences of this situation are weighty. Faced with an image on a screen, we no longer know if the image testifies to the existence of that which it depicts or if it simply constructs a world that has no independent existence. Does this spell the end of the realistic nature of the cinema—the end of its ability to show us the world as it is, extending, in a certain sense, its life? Many scholars, including Lev Manovich and Sean Cubitt, maintain that the advent of the digital pushes cinema further from reality and closer to animation. 2 Without rehearsing the current debate in depth, the following pages suggest that questions about the relationships between cinema and reality should be situated within a wider history of “realism.” First: from its inception, film theory has focused its attention not only on the peculiarity of cinema as a direct record of the physical world, but also on its capacity to create an impression of reality. In this light, it is important to reconsid - er the recent attempts to go “beyond indexicality”; cinematic realism does not depend solely on a “trace” left by objects on the filmstrip. Second: an impression of reality is not simply a feeling experienced by the spectator: it is an effect triggered by a set of discursive practices that film has acquired along its history. Italian Neorealism is the climax of such a develop - * I want to thank David Joselit and Malcolm Turvey for the long and useful discussions we had during the writing of this text. This essay is dedicated to Dudley Andrew. 1. I use “physical reality” following Siegfried Kracauer; see his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 2. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), and Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). OCTOBER 138, Fall 2011, pp. 95–106. © 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00069 by guest on 27 September 2021 96 OCTOBER ment—and I will extract from it a series of elements that undoubtedly provide a “sense of reality.” Third: these practices are quite successful when the realistic cues are immersed in a discourse. These cues must act as links in the discursive chain, pro - viding an illusory mastery over the discourse while at the same time offering an illusory restitution of reality in its texture and in its density. Resurrecting an old and unfashionable word, I suggest that these cues must provide a “suture.” Not every “sutured” discourse is necessarily “realistic”—scientific discourses may be sutured too, even if in a different way. Nevertheless, my argument is that an impression of reality is generated in film through the establishment of a link that simultaneously provides an imaginary discursive coherence and an apparent re- establishment of reality. Fourth: in moving from analog to digital, we may assume (or better, pre - sume) that the end of the “photographic era” does not necessarily imply the end of a realistic attitude. The absence of an existential link with empirical reality— the absence of indexicality—may be compensated for by the presence of proper cues capable of functioning as sutures. Digital cinema is not condemned to the status of animation: its destiny is based not simply on the nature of its signifier but rather on the sum of its discursive practices. It is within these practices that cine - ma can satisfy its “claim to reality,” or fall short of it. 2. Beyond Indexicality In recent years, a number of scholars have argued that realism in cinema cannot be reduced to “indexicality.” Stephen Prince, in a text from 1996, claims that “ a perceptually realistic image is one that structurally corresponds to the view - er’s audiovisual experience of three-dimensional space.” 3 He sketches a “corre - spondence-based model of cinematic representation,” highlighting “the ways that photographic images and edited sequences are isomorphic with their correspond - ing real-world displays.” Daniel Morgan, in a contribution of 2006, reminds us that film’s orientation toward reality has to be described in different ways: we may say that a “ﬁlm ‘responds to,’ ‘takes into account,’ or ‘takes an attitude towards’ the reality of objects in the images.” 4 What matters is not the presence of an actual link with physical reality but the “acknowledgment” of what a film as a medium is expected to do and what a film as a work of art chooses to do. In 2007, Tom Gunning argued that “the index may not be the best way, and certainly should not be the only way, to approach the issue of cinematic realism.” 5 Rereading an essay 3. Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Spring 1996), p. 32. 4. Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006), p. 471. 5. Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” differences 18, no. 1 (Spring 2007), p. 31. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00069 by guest on 27 September 2021 Film, from Photographic to Digital 97 of Christian Metz, Gunning suggests that the representation of movement bears an “impression of reality” even stronger than a “trace” of objects laid in front of the camera. Gunning’s insistence on the “impression of reality” is useful. I would add that this concept surfaced in film theories well before Metz (and the Filmologie). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, many theorists shared the idea that film’s most relevant feature was its capacity to record reality, offering up a detailed and faithful image of it. In this view, cinema is a form of writing that is able “to arrest the fleeting aspects of life”; 6 it is a device that retraces reality “with - out hesitation or scruples, that is, devoid of venality, indulgence, or possible errors.” 7 And yet there were numerous theorists who insisted that cinema does not restore reality to us, but rather that it offers us an impression of reality. “Sitting before the white screen in a motion picture theater we have the impression that we are watching true events, as if we were watching through a mirror following the action hurtling through space. These are only images—small luminous two- dimensional images—but they give the impression of reality far better than the scenery and backdrop of any of the best live theaters.” 8 This impression of reality is also extended to the cinematic representation of dreams and fantasies, to the point that reality and representation become equated on the screen: “‘everything is true and real, everything is equally true and real’: the successions of the images of ‘cinema’ teach this.” 9 Attention to the impression of reality would reappear in the following years. In 1948, an influential member of the Filmologic movement, Albert Michotte, devoted an important essay to this topic, analyzing the mechanism of film percep - tion. 10 In the early ’60s, Christian Metz (in the essay quoted by Gunning) took up the question again from a phenomenological point of view. 11 And later, Jean-Luis Baudry would do the same from a psychoanalytical perspective. 12 I do not wish to retrace the debate here: rather, I want to claim that reality has always occupied a double position in film theory. It may be linked to the source of the image—that which allows the image to be an index—but it can also be an effect of the image— something that emerges from how the image organizes its representation and challenges the spectator. Therefore, in the cinema, reality is both a precondition 6. Ricciotto Canudo, “Reflections on Seventh Art” (1923), in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology 1907 –1939 , vol. 1, Richard Abel, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 296. 7. Jean Epstein, “The Senses I (b)” (1921), in French Film Theory and Criticism, vol. 1, p. 245. 8. Giovanni Papini, “Philosophical Observations on the Motion Picture,” La Stampa (Turin) (May 18, 1907), pp. 1 –2. 9. Georg Lukács, “Thoughts on an Aesthetics of Cinema” (1913), in German Essays on Film (London: Continuum, 2004), Richard W. McCormick, Alison Guenther-Pal, eds., p. 13. 10. Albert Michotte, “Le caractére de ‘réalité’ des projections cinematographiques,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie 3–4 (1948). 11. Christian Metz, “On the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 12. Jean-Luis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology , ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00069 by guest on 27 September 2021 98 OCTOBER and a construct. This double status leads us to consider not simply the genesis of the filmic image but, more generally, the “effects” that it triggers.

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