Back to Bazin
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they do not represent qualities unique to it. On the assumption that the possession
of qualitative specificity is crucial in determining the ontology of a given object or
phenomenon,^ one may therefore conclude that the Bazinian theory of the
photographic image - unfashionable as it may seem^ - can still contribute productive
insights into the nature of cinema, in the era of computerization perhaps more than
ever.^
If, as Bazin has argued, the photographic image works to embalm selected
fragments of a profilmic existence, then one could make the claim that the presence
of a certain lived reality imprints upon the image its own sohd substance in the
form of what Gilles Deleuze terms a mnemosign. The external referent acquires a
kind of secondary presence which enables it to transcend and outlive its own
impermanence. As Dudley Andrew has remarked, “We accept or even venerate
these [photographs] not because they look like the originals, but because their
origin stems from direct contact with the objects they call up” (In Lehman 78).
With the prevalence of digitized film imagery, this relation between origin and its
trace collapses, and results in images without re ferents.^ Hence, what needs to be
resolved is the substantial status of this new computerized image, with respect to
both ontology on the one hand, and aesthetic and ethical implications on the other.
What is at stake, then, in the passage from photography to computer animation
is the conservational value of film; the photograph as a record not of the ‘real’ but
of a certain presence located at the interstice between fiction and reality. For Bazin,
the principal purpose of the filmic is commemorative. He writes that “no one
beheves any longer in the ontological identity of model and image, but all are
agreed that the image helps us to remember the subject and to preserve him from
a second spiritual death” (10). In effect, such an emphasis on the nmemonic function
of photography suggests that, teleologically, film is fundamentally concerned with
what one could call an ethics of mourning. As Matthews has pointed out, Bazin
champions this view with an unflinching moral urgency. According to Bazin,
Matthews says, film has a special obligation “to document the world before
attempting to interpret or criticize it” (23). It appears that what Bazin intends with
his reflections on the ethical basis of filmic preservation is nothing less than to
divest memory of its subjective nesting. If not for the invention of photography,
his argument goes, this would of course have been impossible (many would
indubitably still maintain that this is so). In what is arguably one of the seminal
passages in the history of film theory, Bazin consolidates his deliberation:
The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power
to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex
fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there
the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all