Faithful Mechanisms

Abstract

A Bazinian commitment to cinematic realism, grounded as it is in the ontology of the photograph, sets up the aesthetic ambition of cinema as irreparably opposed to the structures and ambitions of high modernism – whether high modernism be taken to have its essence in formal experiment, medium specificity, or negation. Bazin himself licenses such an opposition, but the sense of a divide here is not his alone: there are structural and grammatical reasons why realism (photographic or otherwise) and modernism appear as incompatible. Yet however strong this opposition is – and however much he himself sometimes endorses it – Bazin equally offers us resources for closing the gap. In his distinction between aesthetic and psychological realism, his sense of the importance of automatism in cinema's significance, and finally in his insistence that true representation is achieved through poetry, Bazin uncovers a concept of realism as transformative, not transparent, fidelity. This idea of poetic, formalist realism allows for a tentative reconciliation between modernism and realism generally. However, it does so by giving up on a robust idea of photographic transparency as the basis of cinema's power, and thus threatens to efface its specificity as a medium. Stanley Cavell's redescription of medium as automatism helps uncover a Bazinian version of cinematic specificity, one which allows for cinema's appetite for realism without reducing that capacity to a mere inflexible fact of the medium.

Keywords:

• Clement Greenberg
• André Bazin
• aesthetics
• medium specificity
• Chris Marker
• La Jetée
• Stanley Cavell

Notes

Notes

1 My interest in automatism puts me in the company of others who have found it useful in thinking through medium after modernism, most notably Rosalind Krauss, in her A Voyage to the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames, 2000), and David Trotter, in his Cinema and Modernism (New York: Wiley, 2007).

2 Arthur Danto, for example, shares Greenberg's emphasis on purity and medium specificity as the defining characteristics of modernist practice but differs from him in assessing the significance of their status. In Danto, the emphasis on medium arises from art's confused attempts to work through its own philosophical content – so many paroxysms of its becoming self-aware of what its own idea is. Modernism appears here as art's seeking its own definition. Thus the question of differences between media can only be a pseudo-question for Danto. It is no more than a confusion to be worked through in coming to the conclusion that anything can be attempted anywhere and in any medium. Thus the question of whether cinema could be a modernist form would be more historical than philosophical, for Danto. If the period of modernism passed without anyone undertaking a modernist manifesto for cinema then that would be the end of the question. There is no possibility of a capacity for modernist production that went unrecognized or unused, because modernism is defined by explicit manifestos, by the demarcation of a boundary between what counts as art and what does not.

3 Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) 85.

4 Ibid. 86.

5 See ibid. 87–88.

6 In “American-Type Painting,” for example, he is remarkably subtle in tracing out the exclusions and uses of value contrast in painting, showing how at an given time a structure of painting could be both overcome in one artist and rehabilitated in another.

7 Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin,” Critical Inquiry 32 (spring 2006): 443–81 (445).

8 Bazin, What is Cinema?, vol. I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: U of California P, 1967) 14.

9 Ibid.

10 Morgan 453.

11 Ibid. 445.

12 Bazin, Jean Renoir 85; qtd in Morgan 443.

13 Morgan 470.

14 Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976) 246.

15 Ibid. 247.

16 Cavell, like Greenberg, is committed to holding on to the difference between saying that limitations are not given in advance and saying that there are no limitations – just as, on the other side, he is committed to holding on to the difference between saying that there are limits and saying that these limits are prescriptive and fully determinative.

17 Here we can already see a partial reconciliation between even a transparent realism and modernism: both turn us back towards the natural and the given limits of our world, though each approaches through its own paths.

18 Thus I am following Krauss in her attraction to the term automatism, but with a different idea about what it licenses. I want, I think, everything she wants: how the genre opens up spaces for new possibilities, how it seems to happen of itself, autonomous, how it emphasizes plurality and production over reduction and purity – making modernism the miner's art, always searching for new veins in order to produce new instances. But I want all this and more: I want Cavell's notion that mediums are invented as much as discovered, and that these inventions will have their own versions of rich plurality, local instantiations of what was once considered to be the working out of inherited matter and genre. I want the sense of its powers as neither made nor given but somehow both; I want to emphasize the possibility it opens up of automatisms that cross mediums, finding new sources and limitations – new nodes of autonomy – in this promiscuity. I also want the recognition that Cavell's sense of film's power of automatism loops through Bazin's engagement with photography and Surrealism before it gets to Cavell – as Cavell himself makes clear in The World Viewed, where his discussion of the term in the “Automatism” chapter relies on his inheritance of it from Bazin eighty pages before – however much he inherits it with a difference. Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1971).

19 Thus if the last paragraph locates my differences from Krauss, this one finds my distance from Trotter: while Trotter acknowledges the role of the writer or artist in making use of their medium's automatisms, he focuses on automatism as neutral, as happening, or seeming to happen, of itself. I share his sense of this moment's importance – the seeking of the world's return, after idealism and Romanticism's runaway subject – but want to keep from listing as far towards over-valuing the mechanism as we once leaned in overvaluing the intention.

20 This is why, though I am largely sympathetic to Morgan's account of Bazin, I find his two-step version of realism ultimately unsatisfying and argue that Bazin can offer us something still larger and more complex.

21 Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford UP, 1979) 185.

22 Idem, The World Viewed 40–41.

23 Ibid. 40.

24 Cavell, in discussing the automatic and automatism, is careful both to distinguish the two and not to let them come apart completely: see, for example, the “Automatism” chapter of The World Viewed, where he gives his reasons for using automatic/automatism to describe both the physical basis of film and the techniques that give this physical form its artistic significance. We have here not a situation that calls for better divisions among terms but one where the possible confusion is licensed and deepened by the relation among its objects: automatism works at both the level of the physical medium and the level of technique, genre, and form. The level of what can be relied upon rises and falls in the practice of an art; what can be relied upon today, firm as the earth beneath us, may be a mere convention tomorrow; what was a genre today may soon be a medium in itself, firm enough to stand upon. Our terms must capture both the firmness and its variation – and this is what automatism, so widely applied, tries to keep in mind. The extension and retractions of the term – its breathing – allows nature to remain beyond us, yet approach us.

25 I say constituted or discovered; what one wants, though, is a word that captures both, giving primacy to neither.

26 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in What is Cinema? I: 13.

27 Ibid. 16.

28 This despite Bazin's extreme care in distinguishing between the impression of neutral access to reality and the existence of such access: take, for example, these comments from “De Sica: Metteur en Scene”:

[De Sica's] mise-en-scène seems to take shape after the fashion of a natural form in living matter […] This neutrality is illusory but its apparent existence does not make the critic's task any easier […] It is a temptation therefore to see only craftsmanship where one is looking for style, the generous humility of a clever technician meeting the demands of the subject instead of the creative imprint of a true auteur. (In What is Cinema? II: 63; my emphasis)