Daniel Morgan Rethinking Bazin-Ontology and Realist Aesthetics PDF

Preview

Summary

file...

Description

Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics Author(s): Daniel Morgan Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Spring 2006), pp. 443-481 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/505375 Accessed: 01-10-2018 10:48 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and

extend access to Critical Inquiry

This content downloaded from 172.113.232.189 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:48:18 UTC

Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics Daniel Morgan The word “realism” as it is commonly used does not have an absolute and clear meaning, so much as it indicates a certain tendency toward the faithful rendering of reality on film. Given the fact that this movement toward the real can take a thousand different routes, the apologia for “realism” per se, strictly speaking, means nothing at all. The movement is valuable only insofar as it brings increased meaning (itself an abstraction) to what is created. —andre´ bazin, Jean Renoir (1973)1

The advance in digital technologies of image production and manipulation has seriously challenged traditional views about photography and film. In the main, classical theories of these media defined them by their ability to automatically, even necessarily, provide a truthful image of what was in front of the camera at the moment the shutter clicked. Cinema, JeanLuc Godard once remarked, is truth twenty-four times a second. Digital technologies, which allow for the almost total transformation and creation of images by means of binary coding, are thought to undermine the claim for the truthfulness of photographic media.2 The classical theories now seem inadequate and irrelevant. If we need to develop new theories to keep up with a rapidly changing media landscape, it is also important not to forget the ambitions of classical theories. Unlike much of contemporary media theory, classical theories are interested in the kind of physical objects images are. They start with the idea that the nature of the physical medium is a necessary part of our thinking about the images it supports. By contrast, it is often said that digital images as such have no physical existence, that they are merely contingently atFor critical suggestions and support at various stages of the writing process, I would like to thank Dudley Andrew, Kristin Boyce, Jim Chandler, Jim Conant, Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Barbara Herman, Jim Lastra, Josh Malitsky, Mickey Morgan, Richard Neer, Joel Snyder, and Candace Vogler. An earlier draft of this essay was presented at the Contemporary Philosophy Workshop at the University of Chicago. 1. Andre´ Bazin, Jean Renoir, trans. W. W. Halsey II and William H. Simon, ed. Franc¸ois Truffaut (New York, 1973), p. 85; hereafter abbreviated JR. 2. A representative example of this position is Fred Ritchin, “Photojournalism in the Age of Computers,” in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers (Seattle, 1990), pp. 28–37. Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006) ! 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3203-0005$10.00. All rights reserved.

443

This content downloaded from 172.113.232.189 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:48:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

444

Daniel Morgan / Rethinking Bazin

tached to various physical bases.3 They are not things in the way photographs are.4 This view, I think, involves a mistake. The materiality of the image cannot be avoided; it is crucial to how we think about the aesthetic possibilities, circulation, affective register, and so on of images of any sort. In this essay, I am not going to offer a theory for new media so much as argue for the continuing value of classical theories of photography and film. They provide a needed corrective to recent theories by emphasizing the productive tension between the form in which an artist expresses subject matter and the kind of thing an image is, between style and ontology. To make this case, I will take a careful look at the important work of Andre´ Bazin, whose intelligence and insight in grappling with the difficult problems of style and ontology has been misunderstood and therefore mostly rejected. Amore subtle interpretation of Bazin allows for elements in classical theory to emerge 5 that are important for thinking about images however they are produced. Since the publication of the two-volume English translation of Qu’estce que le cine´ma? (What Is Cinema?) in 1967 and 1971, Bazin has acquired a canonical, even foundational, position in cinema and media studies. Such is his importance that there is by now a generally accepted standard reading of his essays: a film is realist insofar as it comes closest to or bears fidelity to our perceptual experience of reality. Dudley Andrew speaks of Bazin’s aesthetic as oriented around a “deep feeling for the integral unity of a universe in flux”6 and elsewhere of realistic styles as “approximations of visible [or perceptual] reality.”7 Christopher Williams argues that, for Bazin, film has “the primary function of showing the spectator the real world,” which he, like Andrew, glosses as “the aesthetic equivalent of human perception.”8 Peter Wollen goes so far as to assert that this realism constitutes 3. The work of Timothy Binkley provides a clear exposition of this view. See Timothy Binkley, “Camera Fantasia: Computed Visions of Virtual Realities,” Millennium Film Journal 20–21 (Fall– Winter 1988–89): 7–43; “The Quickening of Galatea: Virtual Creation without Tools or Media,” Art Journal 49 (Fall 1990): 233–40; “Transparent Technology: The Swan Song of Electronics,” Leonardo 28, no. 5 (1995): 427–32; and “The Vitality of Digital Creation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (Spring 1997): 107–16. 4. Whether a film is a thing like a photograph raises a different set of issues. 5. Miriam Hansen has made a similar attempt to reinterpret another classical film theorist, Siegfried Kracauer. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, N.J., 1997), pp. vii–xlv. 6. Dudley Andrew, Andre´ Bazin (New York, 1978), p. 21; hereafter abbreviated AB. 7. Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York, 1976), p. 139; see also p. 157; hereafter abbreviated MFT. 8. Realism and the Cinema: A Reader, ed. Christopher Williams (London, 1980), pp. 35, 36.

D an i e l M o rg an is a graduate student in the Committee on Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a dissertation on Jean-Luc Godard’s films of the late 1980s and early 1990s. His email address is [email protected]

This content downloaded from 172.113.232.189 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:48:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2006

445

an anti-aesthetic, the very negation of cinematic style and artifice: “the 9 film could obtain radical purity only through its own annihilation.” The standard reading spells out Bazin’s conception of realism in film as a list of attributes—for example, deep space, the long take—and directors or movements—for example, Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and Italian neorealism— that fulfill this function in an exemplary way.10 Two propositions lie at the heart of this reading. First, Bazin argues for a necessary and determinate relation between the ontology of the photographic image and the realism of film. Second, Bazin gives an account of the ontology of the photographic image that is best understood in terms of a commitment, via the mechanical nature of the recording process of the camera, to the reproduction of an antecedent reality. I’m going to argue that both propositions should be rejected. The first has led critics to be satisfied with a thin and impoverished picture of his conception of realism.11 A closer examination of more of Bazin’s critical writings on individual films will expand and transform the parameters of our understanding of how his realism works. The second proposition misconstrues the ontological argument at the heart of Bazin’s account of film and photography. Proponents of this reading have assumed that his arguments can be described in semiotic terms. Dispensing with this assumption allows a different argument about the nature of the photographic image to emerge, which will have consequences for how realism is understood. I want f irst to explain why we should reject the standard reading of Bazin’s ontological argument and focus instead on his claim that objects in a photograph are ontologically identical to objects in the world. Part two of this essay discusses the standard reading of realism and its relation to this ontology, while parts three and four set out my own reading of Bazin on these topics. I will argue that, in contrast to Noe¨l Carroll’s caricature of a natural “entailment from representation to realism” (PP, p. 139; see also p. 136), Bazin sees a more complicated relation between style and reality. Though a film, to be realist, must take into account (or, as I will describe it, must acknowledge) the ontology of the photographic image, realism is not a particular style, lack of style, or set of stylistic attributes, but a process, a mechanism—an achievement. It turns out to cover a surprisingly large 9. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (London, 1998), p. 89. 10. See Noe¨ l Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton, N.J., 1988), pp. 108–9, 111 n. 25, hereafter abbreviated PP; and Brian Henderson, A Critique of Film Theory (New York, 1980), p. 37, hereafter abbreviated C. 11. I mean to evoke here the sense in which Wittgenstein speaks of being in the grip of a picture: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe [1953; Oxford, 1997], §115).

This content downloaded from 172.113.232.189 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:48:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

446

Daniel Morgan / Rethinking Bazin

range of styles, even those that bear little affinity to the perceptual experience of reality. Part five considers two objections to this argument. I hope to do more than simply provide a more accurate picture of Bazin’s work. As long ago as 1973, Williams declared Bazin to be of interest only for historical and ideological readings.12 This judgment was based on and supported by an inadequate understanding of both ontology and realism in Bazin’s work. I will try to show that, by attending to the complexities of the relation between ontology and style in realist films, Bazin’s position, properly understood, gives us a powerful and compelling account of the work realism can do as an analytic tool for film criticism.

1. The Ontology of the Photographic Image Bazin’s early essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” is generally regarded as providing the theoretical foundation for his account of film. The essay divides into three rough sections. First, Bazin sketches a psychology of art based on the historical origins of the impulse to make representations. He locates it in what he calls the “mummy complex,” where Egyptians sought to provide “a defense against the passing of time” by allowing the “corporeal body” to survive after death. Art emerges when this ambition moves away from preserving the actual body in favor of creating a representation of the dead person.13 Second, there is an argument about aesthetics, which investigates the realistic or mimetic telos inherent in the psychology of art. Bazin introduces photography here as the technological development that “freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness” (“O,” 1:12). Third, in the section that lies at the heart of discussions of the ontology of the photographic image, Bazin moves beyond the function of photography in the history of art to the question of what a photograph is. The standard reading interprets the argument of the third section asproviding an account of photography best understood in semiotic terms. Drawing heavily on the terminology of Charles S. Peirce, it generates the following picture. As a sign, a photograph mediates between the object (the referent) and the interpretant (the viewer); more simply: the image stands for the object in some relation to the viewer.14 Peirce presents three possible ways a sign can stand in this relation: symbolically, iconically, and indexically. Symbolic relations are determined by convention; language is the best example of this (the word car only arbitrarily refers to or means a car). 12. See Williams, “Bazin on Neo-Realism,” Screen 14 (Winter 1973–74): 61–68. 13. Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What Is Cinema? trans. and ed. Hugh Gray, 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1967, 1971), 1:9; hereafter abbreviated “O.” Gray’s translations often obscure important aspects of Bazin’s arguments; where necessary, I have modified them. 14. See Douglas Greenlee, Peirce’s Concept of Sign (The Hague, 1973), p. 33.

This content downloaded from 172.113.232.189 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:48:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Critical Inquiry / Spring 2006

447

Iconic signs concern resemblance, the capacity a sign may have to represent its object by virtue of likeness: a portrait, for example. Indexical signs have to do with a direct, causal, and existential bond between sign and object: a footprint, a weather vane, a bullet hole, pulse rates. On the standard reading, photographs are primarily regarded as indexical signs; light reflects of f an object and causes the photographic plate to react. A photograph’s iconic properties are a function of its indexical status. I will call this view of the ontology of the photographic image the index argument15 . If the relation between object and photograph is indexical, three things follow. First, a photograph refers to an antecedent reality that is, as it were, “behind” the image.16 Suppose I am shown a photograph of a car. Though I am tempted to say, “This is a car,” or perhaps, “This is my car; see the dent in the fender?” I also know that it’s not really my car, or even a car; it is an image or a sign of it. I cannot get into the car in the photograph and drive off; I cannot wash it. There is an ontological distinction between the object and the image: although the car is in some sense the cause of the photograph, they are not the same kind of thing. Our speech doesn’t alwaysmake this distinction, but we know it to be there. Second, the event or object to which a photograph refers is in the past. This is a general feature of indexical signs: a bullet hole refers to a past bullet, a sailor’s gait to years spent at sea. On this model, a photograph is a record of how something (an object, a scene) looked at the time the image was taken; it is a direct record of a past state of affairs. Third, for us to read a photograph correctly, we have to be aware of how it was produced, aware of its status as an indexical sign. We believe that a photograph is an accurate indication of the presence of objects in front of the camera at a past time not because of criteria of resemblance but because we know how the image was generated.17 Our knowledge enables what Bazin describes as “the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith” (“O,” 1:14). If we understand the process of production—the fact that there is a direct relation between image and object—we will be able to say 18 with certainty that what we see is faithful to what was there. 15. This interpretation of Bazin began with Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, pp. 79– 106, and is still influential. For a recent example, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass., 2002). For general challenges to indexicality as a descriptive category, see Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” Critical Inquiry 2 (Autumn 1975): 143–69, and Tom Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” Nordicom Review 25, 1–2 (2004): 39–49. 16. This kind of phrasing often leads to the thought that photographs are somehow “transparent.” 17. See Philip Rosen, “History of Image, Image of History: Subject and Ontology in Bazin,” Wide Angle 9, no. 4 (1987): 13, and MFT, p. 138. 18. I am not suggesting that what I am calling the index argument is Peirce’s own position but that he has been read in this way by a variety of film theorists. It may be the case that the thin

This content downloaded from 172.113.232.189 on Mon, 01 Oct 2018 10:48:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

448

Daniel Morgan / Rethinking Bazin

There is evidence in the “Ontology” essay to support the index argument. Discussing the psychology of art, Bazin states that “no one believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and portrait” [l’identite´ ontologique du mode`le et du portrait] (“O,” 1:10), a remark which suggests that he is thinking of visual images as signs. He then tries to categorize different kinds of images according to the means by which they are produced, the relation between the image and the object it purports to represent. In painting, “no matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image” (“O,” 1:12). For this reason, paintings do not have a direct relation to reality. What matters is not that there is mediation—a photograph has that as well—but that this mediation is human and intentional; the sign in the painting is not indexical. Photography is different. Bazin claims that “for the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man” (“O,” 1:13). The photographer has control over the selection of the object to be photographed (and other factors as well), but not over the formation of the image. This makes the photograph an indexical sign, pointing back in time towards its source in the objects behind the image. Bazin claims that “we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented” (“O,” 1:13–14).19 Despite such evidence, the index argument, and so the standard reading as well, does not capture the main argument of the “Ontology” essay; what Bazin argues is something far stronger, more powerful, and, in some deep ways, stranger. Immediately after the comments suggesting a semiotic model, Bazin begins to develop a new set of metaphors: “Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake” (“O,” 1:13); “something more than a mere approximation, a decal or approximate tracing” [un de´calque approximatif ] (“O,” 1:14). We are getting a different picture here. A snowflake and a flower do not stand for an absent object (though either can be interpreted in various ways, for example, to tell what season it is), nor do they refer to a past reality. Similarly, Bazin argues, obreading of Peirce in film studies is due to an association of his thought with a particular picture of Bazin’s arguments. 19. Doane summarizes this argument: “The fidelity of the image to its referent was no longer dependent upon the skill or honesty of a particular artist. The imprint of the real was automatically guaranteed by the known capability of the ...