Slabaugh on Bazin's Ontology

"Cinema Has Not Yet Been Invented!": Andre Bazin's Ontology of Film
By Andy Slabaugh

The title comes from an essay by legendary film critic and theorist Andre Bazin called "The Myth of Total Cinema," which was written over half a century after Louis Lumière had first used a film camera to record workers spilling out of a factory. Is Bazin, then, just being difficult? Actually, this statement fits perfectly with his theory that the true goal of the cinema is an all-encompassing experience, which he calls "total cinema."

Bazin was, as we noted in class, a "psychological realist," meaning that he believed cinema was essentially meant to reproduce life as we experience it. Never a strong supporter of montage or heavy editing, Bazin championed filmmaking developments such as sound and deep-focus photography because he felt that they were bringing cinema closer to its goal, as he saw it, of reproducing reality so perfectly that the viewer would not be able to distinguish it from everyday life.

Until Bazin started writing in the 1940's, most major film theorists had been formalists. Sergei Eisenstein and Bela Balazs, most notably, believed that style, more than content, should be the main determinant of how a film was made. Eisenstein advocated, during his time, several different types of montage (associational, dialectical, organic), which would affect the viewer emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically. Balazs argued for the primacy of the close-up, by which actors would convey what the film had to say with their faces, as well as the anthropomorphization of the mise-en-scene. Neither theorist, however, was particularly concerned that the cinema should represent reality.

Bazin bases his ontology of the cinema on its relation to the older plastic arts. In "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," he gives a subjective summary of the history of the plastic arts leading up to cinema. The plastic arts started with mummification, which would preserve the human form indefinitely after death. As time went on, cultures used statues and painted portraits as other ways of preserving the human form and appearance beyond death. At a fundamental level, though, forms of preservation other than mummification or the creation of death masks couldn't quite capture the exact contours of the human face and body, because they were recreations by an artist rather than a direct molding of the form.

Then came photography. Due to the physical properties of photochemical film, photography necessarily records reality exactly as the light rays bouncing from the subject to the camera show it. With the advent of cinema, or moving photography, the plastic arts achieved a greater potential for realistic preservation than ever before. Bazin argues that, ontologically, the cinema must be dedicated to the preservation of reality. Therein lies his objection to formalism and filmmaking techniques that don't attempt to portray reality as closely as possible.

Our class, however, questioned Bazin's predilection for realism, as did the cultural critics of the 1970's, because it is now taken for granted that all photography is subjective. Since photographers are able to manipulate their images during the development process, we can't put complete faith in the photo as an exact reflection of the image as it existed in front of the camera. James went further by asking whether or not total cinema would be totally objective. As we have seen with digital cinema, if the director has complete control over the experience, he is able to construct a reality that may seem believable even if it isn't authentically real. In a recent essay, Stephen Prince asks if digital versions of reality have subverted the traditional binary opposition of realism and formalism.

All this seems to suggest that Bazin is naïve, and that he fails to understand that the cinema is an illusion. However, he does not deny that it is possible to use cinema to manipulate the viewer's perception of reality. He recognizes German expressionism and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as well as Russian constructivism and the classical Hollywood cinema. In his essays, Bazin does not celebrate some essential law of cinema, i.e. he does not state that all films preserve reality as he would like to see it preserved. He celebrates the fact that the cinema is the most advanced form of preservation available to us humans, and wants it to be used for that purpose.

Andre Bazin, a nature lover, was concerned that the cinema faithfully render the beauty of the natural world on screen. He thought that the manipulation of nature for cinematic effect, as suggested by Balazs, was a perversion of the natural subject. If, at least psychologically, the filmed image is to the viewer the same thing as the object itself (and this is the basic illusion that sustains the cinema), then alteration of the filmed image, regardless of the artistic purpose for which it is altered, is a direct alteration of the physical object. This was objectionable to Bazin because of the reasons listed above.

Bazin died at the age of forty, and was a sickly man for much of the latter part of his life. Death was, for him, more immediately probable than for most of us. He understood the ephemeral nature of our existence, but he did not relish it. Appreciative of the life around him, he sought a way to capture it permanently, and thus subvert mortality's curse. He was sympathetic to the Egyptians with their pyramids and mummified pharoahs, because he too desired to preserve what he found beautiful (nature, humanity) after it had disappeared. Bazin was not so naïve as to believe that all filmmakers would tend toward this goal, nor that the medium itself mandated that such was the aim of all filmmaking, but he did see the possibilities inherent in cinema, given the unparalleled precision of the photographic image and ability of the cinema to capture not just the image of its subject but time as well, and was passionately devoted to seeing those possibilities developed to their fullest extent.

Comments

[Lauran Allinson]

In their reflective essays, Greg Poduska and Andy Slabaugh both discuss André Bazin’s ontological view of cinema and briefly touch on the ways Bazin has been misunderstood. I would like to say more about these misconceptions in order to alleviate any potential confusion that may arise when studying Bazin.

Bazin was interested in exploring the specific purpose of cinema as a medium. In his essays, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and “The Myth of Total Cinema,” Bazin concludes that cinema should be used to represent and preserve reality. The true goal of cinema is to become a “total cinema,” in which reality is so perfectly represented that the image and reality become indistinguishable.

However, it is easy to misinterpret Bazin’s theory. Most people believe that photos and films are subjective representations of reality, as they include aesthetic variables such as lighting, framing, and camera placement that directly affect the creation of an image. Bazin is sometimes dismissed as naïve in his understanding of the photochemical image as an “objective” display of reality. It is important to note that Bazin is looking at the “objectivity” of photography and cinema from the perspective of a “psychological realist.” This not only means, as Slabaugh explains, that Bazin was interested in using cinema to display reality as human beings experience it; he was also interested in examining how cinema relates to the human psyche. Bazin was concerned with the perceptions of the viewer with regard to the “objectivity” of the image. He did not think that an image was reality but rather that an image could make a person believe in the image as reality, tp subjectively invest the image with “objectivity.” In summary, Bazin believes that the cinematic image becomes “objective” because we are willing to invest belief in it as an objective representation of reality. That does not mean that the image should not be understood as an entirely subjective construct.

Today, as technology advances, Bazin’s theory remains pertinent. I recall an image that I saw following the 9/11 attacks. It was a picture of a man standing on top of one of the World Trade Center buildings as a huge plane was inches from hitting the building. I was totally frightened by the reality depicted. Later, I was informed that the picture was not authentic. Now, perhaps I am more naïve than some, but in line with Bazin, my psychological perspective told me that photo was reality and I was all too willing to invest it with the status of truth; this is how it happened. Modern day technology like Photoshop currently allows for digital editing – a creation of images that are not reality but invite us to invest them with objectivity. Bazin would agree that although such pictures, as well as digital cinema, do not display the truth, they invite us to “suspend our disbelief” in their illusory status. Perhaps with each successive technological breakthrough, we are moving closer and closer to a “total cinema” in which a medium perfectly mimics reality.