The Fates of Flesh

Abstract

This article is an attempt to rethink the terms on which we understand cinematic realism. Cinema's very success in recording reality problematises the notion of reality by which “realism” has otherwise been oriented. This is because the world of the age of cinema is a plurality of worlds, with the times and places captured on film competing for credibility. It is not a question, epistemologically, of discovering the real world so much as, ethically, relearning the art of being embodied. Bazin and Mizoguchi are two figures from the middle of the twentieth century who confronted the open-ended challenge of cinematic realism and whose works provide the impetus for reflecting anew on what it means to exist bodily in an advanced technological society.

Keywords:

• Bazin
• Mizoguchi
• body
• passivity
• cinematic realism

Notes

Notes

1 André Bazin, “On Realism” in idem, French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Critical Esthetic, ed. François Truffaut; trans. Stanley Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1981) 70–71.

2 This is not to deny that the reading has its own plausibility, even history. See, for example, Dudley Andrew and Paul Andrew, Kenji Mizoguchi: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: Hall, 1981) 24:

Mizoguchi embodied the core of Bazin's critical system: a director who carefully pruned all excess from his style; a man whom the traditional arts had fully infiltrated; a cinéaste who went to the end of mise en scène by his method of one scene/one shot, modulated by delicate camera movements, which continually reorient the spectator in relation to action that develops with the precision and sanctity of a ritual. In the fifties, when these stylistic traits came to serve an exotic but profound worldview, the Bazinian disciples at Cahiers du Cinéma had found their master. His cinematic style – an original style and not mere flair – was said to embody a stance toward the world unachievable in any other style or art form. Mizoguchi was ambitiously carrying out the mission of cinema; who could deny it?

3 Bazin, “On Realism” 71–72.

4 We trust the make of a camera to date its images for us to the period in which the make in question was available and most in use. Nature and the everyday are thereby won for the continuum of historical events by being photographed. Where an antiquated camera and/or film is employed, where a sepia tint is applied in Photoshop, we are inclined to feel imposed upon or played with in what amounts to a forgery with our technologically mediated understanding of time.

5 Bazin, “Will CinemaScope Save the Film Industry?” in idem, Bazin at Work: Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and Fifties, ed. Bert Cardullo; trans. Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo (Routledge: New York, 1997) 91. See also Bazin, Jean Renoir, ed. François Truffaut; trans. W.W. Halsey II and William H. Simon (London: Allen, 1974) 119:

Everything which really counts in the contemporary cinema; that is, with those works which contribute to the transparency of the medium […] The cinema will be fulfilled when, no longer claiming to be an art of reality, it becomes merely reality made art.

6 For a statement of Bazin's unwillingness to be trammelled in his judgements by his own realist criteria, see his discussion of Renoir's Diary of a Chambermaid (1946) in Bazin, Jean Renoir 94–96.

7 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in idem, What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967–71) 1: 14–15.

8 Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part Two” in idem, What is Cinema? 1: 108.

9 Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006) 457.

10 Bazin, “Bicycle Thief” in idem, What is Cinema? 2: 48.

11 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) 172.

12 Ibid. 171–72.

13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) H. 228–29.

14 Sontag suggests that photography has taken the place of “old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans” as the link with the past in the average modern American household. This new, photographic link, however, is less a link with the past than a memorialisation of the past as discontinuous, which, in the absence of artefactual competition from heirlooms, it is able to normalise as the experience of pastness. Cinema confirms this experience. See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, 1973) 68.

15 Barthes speaks of the photograph as a “temporal hallucination” that, as it is shared, cannot be subjectivised as an individual's psychological disorder. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984) 115.

16 Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford UP, 1978) 235.

17 For a lucid defence of the ontological claims of Bazin's theory of the photographic image against the criticisms put forward by Gregory Currie and Noël Carroll, see Jonathan Friday, “André Bazin's Ontology of Photographic and Film Imagery,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 339–50. “The process by which they are made, and not the resulting appearance of photographs, is the important factor in determining the medium's psychological effect” (345). Cf. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in idem, What is Cinema? 1: 14:

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. (Translator's emphasis)

18 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R.A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series, 2005) 3.4.104–06: “thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.”

19 Walter Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian” in idem, Selected Writings: 1935–1938, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings; trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002) 300 n. 71.

20 Bazin, “Marginal Notes on Eroticism in the Cinema” in idem, What is Cinema? 2: 173–74.

21 The two had previously played husband and wife in Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and were subsequently cast as the emperor and his concubine in Mizoguchi's Yang Kwei Fei (1955).

22 Psychology, however, is not the only business of the cinematic close-up. If it is a matter of disproving the thesis that the world of the film is the world of Genjuro's imagination, the abrupt assertion of the reality of the actor's face can achieve this. See Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock, ed. François Truffaut; trans. Sabine d’Estrée and Tiffany Fliss (New York: Seaver, 1982) 20: “Seen from very close up, the actor's mask cracks.”

23 Other things being equal, this level of directorial control of an image's meaning-making processes would, according to Ian Aitken, disqualify the film as realist in Bazin's sense. See Ian Aitken, “Physical Reality: The Role of the Empirical in the Film Theory of Siegfried Kracauer, John Grierson, André Bazin and Georg Lukács,” Studies in Documentary Film 1 (2007) 111:

For a film to be “realistic”, in Bazin's manifold sense of the term, therefore, it must reconstitute the apposite division between purposiveness and indeterminacy which ought to prevail within experience, and also counter the excessive and unbalanced fixation with the human sphere that characterizes modernity by bringing the physical world of nature back into the sphere of representation. In carrying through this process of reconstitution, resistance and resumption, the realistic film will necessarily replicate the actual structure of our experience of the Lebenswelt, and will be “realistic” in that sense.

But there is, necessarily, more than the one road to realism.

24 For an illustrated comparison of shots in Genroku Chushingura with Japanese screens and scrolls, see D. William Davis, “Genroku chūshingura and the Primacy of Perception” in Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan, eds. Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser (Austin: U of Texas P, 1994) 187–215. Noël Burch professes to discern in Mizoguchi's later films a falling away from the specifically Japanese cinematic style of Genroku Chushingura. See Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, ed. Annette Michelson (London: Scolar, 1979) 243: “Mizoguchi's first post-war films were already increasingly inflected by that fascination with the efficiency and ‘effectiveness’ of the Western codes.” Nonetheless, musically, Genroku Chushingura is more Western than the later films. For objections to Burch's claim of the stylistic decadence of the later Mizoguchi, see Stephen H. Barr, “Reframing Mizoguchi,” Film Criticism 8 (1983) 80.

25 Sato Tadao reports that Mizoguchi himself made an earlier version of the tale in the 1930s, now lost. See Tadao Sato, Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema, trans. Brij Tankha; eds. Aruna Vasudev and Latika Padgaonkar (Oxford: Berg, 2008) 46.

26 James Leach, “Mizoguchi and Ideology: Two Films from the Forties,” Film Criticism 8 (1983) 70: “the values of the samurai code are called into question by the almost total elimination of action from the film.” On the elision of the raid, see Sato, Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema 149:

In fact, it was planned, but even as the sets for the Kira mansion were being made, it seems [Mizoguchi] remarked, “I will not film a lie,” and stopped the work. After the war, directors such as Kurosawa Akira in Rashomon and Seven Samurai, or Yoshimura Kozaburo in Waltz at Noon, found ways to film realistic fight scenes. But when Mizoguchi filmed Chushingura, the fight scenes were always one-sided, unrealistic and artificial, and hence his decision not to shoot them.

Even the shot in which Asano is seen hurling himself, with sword drawn, at Kira cuts before the weapon makes contact, with the subsequent shot already concerning itself with the blow's aftermath.

27 Suffering is Mizoguchi's element (if this can be understood non-masochistically). Timothy Iles interprets Sansho Dayu (1954) as a denunciation of an unjust social system, which it no doubt is. But it is also an exploration of another image of humanity – the impotent appearance. See Timothy Iles, “The Functions of the Past: Political Allegory in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff,” Film International 16 (2005): 38–45.

28 Jacques Rivette, “Mizoguchi Viewed from Here,” trans. Liz Heron in Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985) 265.

29 Keiko McDonald, Mizoguchi (Boston: Twayne, 1984) 66.