Back to Bazin
21
of plastic surgery in the United States, emphasizing the extent to which the cultural
cultivation of Tinseltown ideals gave impetus to medical innovation: “As they
paged through advertisements and papered their walls with pictures of movie stars,
Americans created and participated in a new, visual culture, where appearance
seemed to rank even higher in importance” (91). Perversely appropriate is it,
therefore, that with the digital manipulation of the film image, cinema itself has
become afflicted with the politics of artificiality that it helped to promote.
An awareness of the aesthetic and ethical ramifications of postphotographic
imagery is indispensable to the consumer of visual texts in the age of digitalization.
As our media cultures become saturated with images that have no material reference,
experience - alienated from representation - increasingly becomes subject to
falsification. Though I shall refrain from advocating an unqualified return to
Bazinian politics, I do believe that Bazin’s emphasis on film’s preservational
function may serve to remind us of that moral dimension which is lost in the
manufacturing of postphotographic images. The position that underlies my argument
may provide one starting point for a long delayed but much needed boost to the
ethical criticism of popular culture and the moving image.
University of Bergen
Asbjoem Groenstad
Notes
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Marcel L’Herbier labeled the cinematographic the ‘dialectical unity o f the real and the unreal’
(quoted in Virilio 65).
For a discussion of the partially converging ontologies of the photographic inherent in Bazin and
Tarkovsky, see Igor Kor?i?, Suspended Time. An Analysis of Bazin's Notion of Objectivity o f the
Film Image. Stockholm: U o f Stockholm, 1988. 70-77.
Roland Barthes zeroes in on this particular quality in his Camera Lucida when he maintains that
“the photograph is never anything but an antiphon o f ‘Look,’ ‘S ee,’ ‘Here it is”; it points a finger
at certain vis-a-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language” (5).
Evidently, cinema is not the only art in which such a situation arises, but unlike dance, drama and
pantomime, film involves also an act o f recording. I will return to the significance o f this later.
The conception of the photograph as a trace is a suggestion also made by among others Susan
Sontag, who contends that the substance o f the photograph is “something directly stenciled off
the real, like a footprint or a death mask” (154).
Siegfried Kracauer, like Bazin advocating a theory o f realism in the cinema, attempts in his
Theory of Film (1960) to provide a bridge between the essence and the function o f a given medium
(In Noel Carroll 116). Because the essence o f film is photography, Kracauer contends, its primary
use must be to record reality. This assertion seems to share a significant affinity with Bazin’s
notion o f film as preservation, though for the latter this objective is inherent in artistic endeavors
in general (and not in photography specifically), culminating in the mummification of change
facilitated by film.
As noted by among others Dudley Andrew, Bazin’s writings fell into serious disrepute after 1968,
when the notion of cinematic realism was attacked by the post-classical film theorists like Annette
Michelson and Peter Wollen (Andrew, in Lehman 74). Bazin was dethroned even in the journal
he helped cofound, the increasingly politicized Cahiers du Cinema. “Ideology,” Andrew notes,
“became the cornerstone subtending a new orthodoxy in film theory that reigned into the 1980s
during the nadir o f Bazin’s influence” (In Lehman 85).