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Abstract
The ongoing duel between realist and anti-realist tendencies in film theory usually positions the ideas of André Bazin unambiguously on the realist side. Whatever else we expect to find in his writing – and the current resurgence is finding more and more – we should find this: realism, cinematic realism. But what type of realism? Is it ontological, and, if so, is it based on a claim for the primacy of photography's “analogical” relation to the world, even to the point of a “direct contact” with the physical existence of nature? Is it aesthetic, celebrating depth of field? Unaffected mise-en-scène? The documentary impulse in preference to fantasy or artifice? In this article, however, I want to argue that we must expand the definition of Bazinian realism through its sensitivity to the non-human. The terrain of the cinematic “Real” is inhabited by a singular complex, one that includes physical space, animality, and material objects, as well as persons and events. To shift our attention to these elements and their effects – intimate as well as alienating, familiar as well as jarring and unexpected – offers another way to glimpse the Real. Which is not to say that the socially constituted world drops out. Of course, language, gender and culture are inescapable mediations. Yet they are, in a certain sense, all wrought by a transcendent human hand. Bazin's conception of realism provides access to a space that is less anthropocentric and testifies to an immanence of the Real, such that non-human, objective realism is not about capturing (representing) reality in toto but registering the fact that the human is only a part of (and immanent within) reality. There are realities beyond human subjectivity – in space, in objects, in animality – realities that we are put in contact with by cinema. Ideally, what cinema makes possible is an equality, a democratic freedom, not merely for the human spectator – to view and explore film worlds – but for the viewed “object” too: a democracy of the viewer-viewed that installs intersubjectivity in the Real.
Notes
Notes
1 Laruelle, Le Concept 36.
2 See Carroll; Shaw; Hills; and Wood.
3 See Powell; and Shaviro.
4 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 105, 106.
5 Though Merleau-Ponty's concept of flesh and invisibility emerges most fully in The Visible and the Invisible, which appeared in 1964 nearly six years after Bazin's death, these ideas were always present in Merleau-Ponty's work such that in Phenomenology of Perception we find him writing: “around what I am looking at at a given moment is spread a horizon of things which are not seen, or which are even invisible” (252). Most significantly, there is also a strong connection between invisibility and the perception of depth in Phenomenology of Perception (ibid. 297ff.).
6 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 36.
7 Andrew, What Cinema Is! 46.
8 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 88.
9 Ibid. 27.
10 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 37.
11 Ibid. 12.
12 Ibid. 47.
13 Ibid. 48.
14 Andrew, Major Film Theories 171.
15 See Cavell.
16 Andrew, Foreword xv.
17 Bazin What is Cinema? 1: 24, 26; translation amended.
18 Mitry 171.
19 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 100.
20 Thomas Nagel first posited an “objective phenomenology” in 1974 – see Nagel.
21 Bergson, Laughter 52–54.
22 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 15.
23 See Totaro.
24 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 46, 48.
25 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 97; translation altered.
26 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 52. One could, of course, also cite the part of the title of Bazin's essay on Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Mystère Picasso (1956) – “A Bergsonian Film.” See Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? 193–202.
27 Bergson, Matter and Memory 138.
28 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 102–03
29 Ibid. 13. Of course, in the original French, Bazin can play with the double meanings of objectif, which is also a name for the camera lens.
30 See Andrew, Foreword xx, xiv.
31 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 45.
32 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 57.
33 Ibid. 59.
34 Ibid. 92.
35 Mitry 169, 194.
36 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 166.
37 See Sartre, Imagination; and Psychology of Imagination.
38 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 64.
39 See Mitry 170.
40 See Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy 48–82 for more on Henry's strange phenomenology without intentionality.
41 See Laruelle, Le Concept; and Mullarkey, “1 + 1 = 1”.
42 The “non-” here is also not a negation but an expansion, an inclusive broadening of what counts as photography. Indeed, the “non-” in non-philosophy should be taken, in general, in terms similar to the meaning of the “non-” in “non-Euclidean” geometry, being part of a “mutation” that locates philosophy as one instance in a larger set of theoretical forms. Hence, Laruelle's use of the term non-philosophy is neither a dialectical negation nor even something contrary to philosophy. Non-Euclidean geometries do not negate Euclid, but affirm it within a broader or amplified paradigm that also explains alternative geometries that are only apparently opposed to it. Likewise, non-philosophy is an abstract conception of philosophies that allows us to see them as equivalent in value. See Laruelle, Philosophie 8, 99ff.; and Laruelle, En tant qu’Un 247.
43 Laruelle, Le Concept 51.
44 Ibid. 21; translation amended.
45 Ibid. 10.
46 Ibid. 57; my emphasis.
47 See Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 58 for Bazin's reference to “filmological preconceptions.”
48 Andrew, Major Film Theories 171; first emphasis mine.
49 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 35.
50 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 86; idem, What is Cinema? 2: 64.
51 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 13; my emphasis.
52 Ibid. 13–14; Deleuze, Cinema 2 156: “Automatic movement gives rise to a spiritual automaton in us, which reacts in turn on movement.” It is this compulsion that can be seen as equivalent to what Laruelle calls “force (of) vision.” The connection between inanimateness and Bazin's doubts concerning animation cannot be explored here (though see, for example, Andrew, Foreword xvi, xvii), but we suspect that, just as the objectivity of the film image need not depend on its analogical reproduction (but on its immanent randomness) so too animation, qua computer-generated digital imagery, need not colour all cinema with the human hand and so render it non-cinematic in Bazin's terms. Understood more broadly, all film is always already “animation” – giving life and random movement to things (see Cholodenko on this); in which case, the difference between optical imagery, hand-drawn cartoon cells, and computer-programmed pixel-drawing becomes only a matter of degree: movement is real, more or less.
53 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 50 n.
54 Quoted in Mitry 195. Mitry then goes on to attack this so-called freedom of attention as merely an uncertainty as to where to look (197).
55 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 56.
56 See Bazin on Ladri di Biciclette “The hand that slips into his is neither a symbol of forgiveness nor of a childish act of consolation. It is rather the most solemn gesture that could ever mark the relations between a father and his son: one that makes them equals” (Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 54; my emphasis).
57 See Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 50 (Bazin quoting): “when the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action, montage is ruled out.”
58 Sloterdijk, Ohanian, and Royoux 238.
59 Latour 142.
60 See Bergson, Laughter. For a synopsis of Bergson's theory of laughter and some critique see Lacey; and Moore.
61 Trahair 126.
62 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 151.
63 Ibid. 121; translation altered.
64 Carroll 34, 35, 37, 39.
65 See Mullarkey, Philosophy 178–79.
66 Bergson, Creative Mind 137; my emphasis.
67 See Bergson, Matter and Memory 15 for Bergson's citation of Janet in this regard.
68 Bergson, Creative Mind 303 n. 6 (hardback ed.).
69 Bergson, Matter and Memory 20–21.
70 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 27.
71 Mitry 171.
72 McRoy 181.
73 Giles 39–40.
74 Deleuze refers to “the Bergsonian reversal” in Matter and Memory (whereby the Real is light itself, not something lit by consciousness as phenomenologists claim); see Deleuze, Cinema 1, 227 n. 18.
75 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 45.
76 Ibid. 102–03; my emphasis.
77 Ibid. 105, 106, 11. This centrifugal movement towards human subjectivity replicates the movement inward from the “set of all images” to the one “privileged” image of my human body with which Bergson's Matter and Memory commences. It is the purpose of philosophy and art, according to Bergson, to reverse this movement (think in reverse) towards those other images so that they no longer are seen only in the background but are understood for the full role they play in the universe.
78 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 88–89; final emphasis mine.
79 Bazin wrote an essay “On the Difficulty of Being Coco” concerning the bureaucratic travails of obtaining French citizenship for a parrot, “Coco,” when Bazin brought him home from Brazil. See Bazin, “De la difficulté,” and Jeong for more on this.
80 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 78.
81 Bazin, “Death Every Afternoon” 30. On this, see Daney; and Pick 11.
82 Bazin, What is Cinema? 2: 91.
83 Daney 32.
84 Fay 42.
85 Bazin, “Les films d’animaux” 126; my translation. See Bellour 537ff. for more on this essay and Bazin's neo-realism, especially with respect to his reading of De Sica's Umberto D. (1952).
86 Jeong 177.
87 Jeong and Andrew 3.
88 See Jeong.
89 Ibid. 180.
90 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 43–44.
91 Ibid. 45.
92 See Mullarkey, Philosophy 201–04.
93 Heidegger 282; for an analysis of this, see Agamben 61.
94 Montaigne 505.
95 On the concept of mutual mutations in animals, film and non-philosophy, see Mullarkey, Reverse Mutations.
96 Sobchack 53.
97 Negri 211, 212. For more on this connection between love and spatio-temporal amalgams, see Rekab 33–45.
98 Bazin, What is Cinema? 1: 15.