2. the Art of Reality
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2. The Art of Reality Abstract This chapter is a contemporary examination of cinema as the art of reality: I explain the ways in which Bazin understands the complex, often paradoxical relation between reality and its image, which places him in direct dialogue with existing classical film theories as well as foundational scientific and philosophical concepts. Consequently, I extend his line of thought to include more recent examples involving digital image technologies that illustrate the relevance of integral realism today. I conclude the chapter with an exploration of existentialist influences in Bazin’s notion of integral realism. Keywords: realism, editing, scientific metaphors, existentialism Reality is not art, but a realist art is one which can create an integral aesthetic of reality. André Bazin, 1948d It’s the paradox of film that an abstract idea can only be expressed by means of the most concrete form of representation, namely reality. This is its strength, but also its risk. André Bazin, 1953e Regardless of Bazin’s fierce rejection of prescriptive aesthetics, several of his major essays could easily be – and often have been – qualified as an attempt at formulating fundamental laws or basic principles of cinema: a theory of film. In ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ (1946), for instance, he approaches film through the framework of ‘integral realism’,1 cinema’s undeniable association 1 In his 2009 translation, Timothy Barnard translates réalisme intégral as ‘complete realism’; this, however, does not do justice to the term originally chosen by Bazin, as it empties it of its mathematical reference, which I explain in the following chapter (see, 2.2 Integral Realism: Reality and Cinema ‘Ultimately Equal’). Joret, B., Studying Film with André Bazin, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi: 10.5117/9789462989528/ch02 48 STUDYING FILM WITH ANDRÉ BAZIN with reality, which he grounds in the ontology of film, explained in another seminal essay, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ (1945). Perhaps uncomfortable with the philosophical weight of the term, he reformulates ‘ontology’ in lay terminology for his introduction to What Is Cinema? (1958): ‘in less philosophical terms: cinema as the art of reality.’2 Realism, Bazin’s cornerstone concept, supposedly led to aesthetic prescriptions, such as his assumed prohibition of editing or his preference for long takes and depth of field. While these texts are now considered foundational for the discipline, it is nevertheless because of his focus on realism that Bazin’s work is often considered outdated, unable to account for the many technological changes cinema has encountered since the digital turn, which radically overthrew the ontology of film. And yet, Bazin’s film analyses build on philosophical questions and scientific references and metaphors that upon closer examina- tion reveal a useful interpretative framework – solid yet flexible enough to stand the test of time. This chapter is a contemporary examination of cinema as the art of reality: I explain the ways in which Bazin understands the complex, often paradoxical relation between reality and its image, which places him in direct dialogue with existing classical film theories as well as foundational scientific and philosophical concepts. Consequently, I extend his line of thought to include more recent examples involving digital image technolo- gies that illustrate the relevance of integral realism today. I conclude the chapter with an exploration of existentialist influences in Bazin’s notion of integral realism. 2.1. Paradox: The Existence of Film By way of introduction, I propose to take a closer look at one particularly outstanding critique relating to documentary authenticity, namely Bazin’s discussion of Thor Heyerdahl’s documentary film Kon-Tiki (1950). Heyer- dahl’s renowned exploratory expedition was set out as a counter-proof to established theories of migration: according to him, the people of Polynesia had travelled westwards on a raft from the coast of Peru around 500 BC. The hypothesis was rejected by Heyerdahl’s professors, and no serious publisher was interested in disseminating his research. As ultimate proof of this theory, Heyerdahl accompanied his thesis with a real-life expedition, documented by film. He built a raft, in original style and with the materials 2 Bazin, 1958a, EC p. 2554. T HE ART OF REALITY 49 the Peruvian Indians would have used, and embarked on the expedition with five fellow explorer-scientists. Their documentary film, in Bazin’s words, ‘does not exist’: Kon-Tiki is the most beautiful of all films, but it does not exist! [Kon-Tiki est le plus beau des films mais il n’existe pas!] Like those moss-covered stones that, surviving, allow us to reconstruct buildings and statues that no longer exist, the pictures that are here presented are the remains of an unfinished creation about which one hardly dares to dream.3 Because of the crew’s inexperience in filmmaking and the spatial restriction of the raft, the film lacked intriguing shots, and the material itself was of extremely poor quality. But rather than weakening the film, Kon-Tiki’s uninviting shooting conditions enhanced the documentary authenticity so dear to Bazin: These few images in the midst of a flood of film rolls with close to no objective interest, are like invaluable and very moving flotsam on the monotonous swell of the ocean. It’s that their poor state is not experienced as a lack; the huge gaps in these films are in reality a fullness, the fullness of human adventure to which [these images] so fully testify only through their emptiness.4 In fact, Bazin’s preference for an authentic image over aesthetic perfec- tion extends beyond the particular case of Kon-Tiki into his wide-ranging understanding of cinematic realism, more precisely, in what he termed ‘ontogenetic realism’: in short, for an image to be authentic, it usually means it doesn’t look perfect. Whereas he would name this procedure only in 1958, the idea of an ontogenetic realism5 is already clearly formulated in ‘The Ontology of the 3 Bazin, 1953-1954, EC p. 2562; Transl. Gray, 2005, p. 160. 4 Bazin, 1955a, EC p. 1703. 5 For more on Bazin’s usage of the term ‘ontogeny’, I refer to Hervé Joubert-Laurencin’s analysis in Le Sommeil paradoxal: ‘This term appears in an addition from 1958 […], which suggest, given its rarity, that it was included out of a desire for belated accuracy, able to qualify as scientistic; it indeed appears more serious, and is practically never used in any of its two meanings in French’ (2014, p. 20). Stepping away from the common explication of Bazin’s ontogeny thesis in biological and philosophical terms, in particular Dominique Chateau’s in Cinéma et philosophie (2003), Joubert-Laurencin writes: ‘the phrase in Bazin means that the functioning of cameras for both photography and cinema (the “genesis” extends from the mechanical operation of image creation) is known just well enough by the average viewer to credit in his eyes the resulting 50 STUDYING FILM WITH ANDRÉ BAZIN Photographic Image’: ‘The image may be out of focus, distorted, devoid of colour and without documentary value; nevertheless, it has been created out of the ontology of the model.’6 Similarly, in defence of Kon-Tiki’s poor cinematography, Bazin ultimately argues for decay and dissemblance as a sign and proof of authenticity: […] this film is not made up only of what we see – its faults are equally witness to its authenticity. The missing documents are the negative imprints of the expedition – its inscription chiselled deep.7 It is precisely because we do not see the image clearly that we can rely on its authenticity: if I were to film a murder in the streets with my cell phone, the shakiness and blurred quality of the footage would in fact be much more convincing than the same scene captured in a smooth 360 degree shot. This negative imprint of adventure, which implies authenticity without direct visibility, is put at work most clearly in Bazin’s description of a shark attack scene: ‘it is not so much the photograph of the shark that interests us as the photograph of danger.’8 Ever since, simply filming a shark attack, regardless of the aggravating circumstances of Heyerdahl and his crew, has proven to be anything but easy. Even Steven Spielberg, hoping to achieve a higher degree of realism, decided to shoot Jaws (1975) on location rather than in the usual massive bassins of Hollywood studios, it was his mechanical shark which disappointed him most, since it failed drastically in conveying the imminent danger of a real shark attack; in such cases, Spielberg nicknamed the shark ‘the great white turd’.9 Moreover, in the context of this discussion it is intriguing to note that the shooting conditions on location particularly aggravated and accentuated the shark’s artefactual qualities: it sank immediately when put to water at Martha’s Vineyard, and the salty ocean water repeatedly damaged the material of the mechanical shark. For these reasons, Spielberg ended up filming with subjective point of view shots assuming the position of the shark so that most scenes were recorded without explicitly showing it. This dramatic technique, then, brings us back full circle to Bazin’s argument concerning image as a faithful trace of recorded reality, regardless of its “objective” qualities of resemblance’ (Joubert-Laurencin, 2014, p. 21). 6 Bazin, 1945, EC p. 2557; Transl. Barnard, 2009, p. 8. 7 Bazin, 1953-1954, EC p. 2562; Transl. Gray, 2005, p. 162. 8 Ibid.; Transl. Gray, p. 161. [Slightly modified: Gray turns Bazin’s requin into a whale and adds an emphasis on ‘danger’ that is absent in the original text.] 9 ‘Jaws: Trivia.’ The Internet Movie Database. IMDB.com.