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EDITORIAL
INTRODUCTION
lisabeth during
lisa trahair
BELIEF IN CINEMA
revisiting themes from
bazin
launched The Andre Bazin Special Issue, with
a collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Crouse. In
2011 Oxford University Press published Dudley
Andrew and Herve Joubert-Laurencins edited
collection Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory
and its Afterlife, which sourced many of the
papers presented at the Ouvrir Bazin/Opening
Bazin conference at the University of Paris VII
(Denis Diderot) in 2008. Bert Cardullo has also
been hard at work editing collections of Bazins
work. Since the publication of Bazin at Work:
Major Essays and Reviews from the Forties and
Fifties, trans. Alain Piette (New York:
Routledge, 1996), he has edited Andre Bazin
and Italian Neorealism (New York: Continuum,
2011) and French Cinema from the Liberation to
the New Wave 19451958 (New Orleans: U of
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New Orleans P, 2012). And a new translation by
Timothy Barnard (available only in Canada) has
refreshed Bazin studies, correcting some of the
errors and editorial omissions from the publication published by the University of California.
For this issue of Angelaki we asked our authors
to address themes that originated in Bazins work,
whether by acknowledging its theological inclinations or sharing in his belief in the promise of
cinema. The spectrum of cinemas promise to
filmmakers and film theorists has encompassed
such diverse utopias as the non-mechanistic
representation of time, the realisation of a
universal language, and the discovery and operation of an optical unconscious. Film has been
praised for its ability to present a kind of sensuous
thinking, its power to revitalise ethical judgement
through aesthetic form. In responding to this
proposal, our authors were invited to move
beyond a conventional film studies framework
and to focus on Bazins realism.
Everyone knows that Bazin is identified with
realism. But what is realism anyway? No matter
how often Bazins film criticism has been
described as an apology for realism, the
question remains ambiguous. Bazins critical
judgements, James Phillips writes, deploy a
mobile and open assemblage of realist criteria.
The success of realism as a practice depends on
the way the notion of reality is understood.
Modernity the age of cinema copes with a
plurality of worlds, competing and co-existing.
Reality is not just there for the taking. Phillips
understands Bazins distinction between technological realism and aesthetic realism as peculiarly
responsive to the emergent conditions of philosophical modernity. In fulfilling arts mimetic
quest for the self-identical, Phillips argues, the
technological realism of cinema disintegrates
reality by multiplying spatio-temporal horizons
ad infinitum and thus undermines the very basis
of the transcendental mode of apperception that
would for Kant constitute the ground of knowledge. The aesthetic realism that Bazin champions
(even as it eludes him) is a way of recovering
from the splintering of identity set in motion by
cinematic technology. Yet such a recovery
requires some ethical changes as well: we may
have to learn again what it means to be embodied.
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couple? What makes two people a couple? How
do you know if you are one? Cavells thesis about
marriage in American cinema seizes on the
improvisational, and the transformational,
nature of the creation of the couple, and puts
the criteria of authenticity (if there are any) into
suspension. But truthfulness matters. Imperative
for Bazin, for whom truth-fullness is one of the
sacred resources of realism, and much more
important than naturalism or plausibility, truthfulness worries Bernstein and inflects his objections to Deleuzes film theory and periodisation.
Bernsteins critique of Deleuzes philosophy of
cinema takes issue with the ontological priority of
the time-image over the movement-image.
Bernstein argues that the effect of this priority
is to force a reading of modern films, of which
Resnais and Duras are exemplary, that emphasises the virtual over the actual. If virtuality
trumps actuality, Bernstein continues, who is to
say that there is any difference between the
human and the zombie, the living and the
automaton? A world so depleted, so ontologically
eroded, will need a more than human recognition
if it is to be sustained at all; hence the turn, which
Bernstein deplores, to a quasi-religious faith in
Deleuze. For Deleuze, the structure of the timeimage provides a sufficient means of schematising
modern cinema. Against that claim, Bernstein
returns to Bazins vision (given an Arendtian
tone): it is not belief that underwrites a modern
relation to (in)authentic reality but love. This
love is nothing other than the relation to reality
that Bazin endeavoured to make cinemas vocation more than half a century ago.
Like Bernstein, Robert Sinnerbrink argues
that what Bazins work continues to offer
contemporary film theorists has nothing to do
with the way films technology claims ontological
or epistemological privileges when compared with
other forms of representation. Rather, it offers an
experiential or existential means of revelation.
What cinema reveals is not reality itself but
reality transformed. Sinnerbrink thus emphasises
the aesthetic dimension of Bazins thinking about
cinema and realism, pointing to the numerous
ethical and philosophical implications of the
Bazinian position. Film is the true democratic
art, not just because it refuses to exclude any
For Flaxman the question of the cinematic offscreen or out-of-field is central, and exposes
the failures of Camerons bloated science fiction
compared to an earlier (and very different)
science fiction, Stanley Kubricks 2001: A
Space Odyssey. What happens to the out-offield in digital reproduction? What does this
extension of virtual reality and other notions of
the virtual in Deleuze do to our understanding
of realitys inside and outside? Flaxmans
key concepts are the screen, the frame, and the
logico-mathematical notion of the set, all important to Deleuze and all ways in which Bazins
concern for the integrity of the mise-en-sce`ne is
established on different terms in a post-cinematic
medium. They are all also brilliantly exploited by
Kubrick, no technological determinist but fascinated by the metaphysical problems these categories introduce. The destiny of the cinema (a
very Bazinian theme) is re-imagined by Flaxman
in an ironic mode. The cinema can find its future
only in the past it has lost.
To say that the prototype for belief in cinema
is religious faith could mean many different
things. We left this open for our contributors to
respond to as they saw fit. It might, for example,
simply mean that cinema replaces the Church in
becoming the opiate of the masses; or it might
mean a transference of the belief in the meaningfulness of existence to the meaningfulness of
cinema. It might mean a belief in the need to
reflect through aesthetic form on the world of
mundane reality. Or that cinema beats all the
other arts to the post, assuming the guise of the
one true aesthetic technology to assure us of
the meaning of reality. It might be the beginning
of a new secular but inspired worldliness, not
requiring belief in the absolute as supersensible.
Rather, in an attempt to bring divinity back down
to earth, the cinema makes the secular and the
profane the sole theatre of grace.
For Bazin, cinemas power to make ordinary
things visible is miraculous. The spiritual in
cinema cuts between the rough ground of the
everyday and the giddying heights of transcendence and the supernatural. Films intrinsic
naturalism allows it to operate with images
that in another medium would defy belief. It is as
comfortable with monstrosity and fantasy as it is
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with the scrupulous mirroring of the mundane.
Our interest in the strange paths of the spiritual
in modern cinema is reflected in the papers by
Hill, During, Ahmadi and Ross, and Trahair. The
mystery of sainthood, of course, was one of the
traditional ways in which mainstream cinema
responded to the prospect of a religious audience,
and to that audiences taste for the spectacular
and colossal. But the saints of the ordinary,
like Bressons worried provincial cure and his
self-sacrificing donkey, belong to something
quieter, the imperceptible disclosure of grace,
not its revelation in glory. Anxious, almost
unseen, the spiritual heroes of modern cinema
test the presumption of the human will; they fling
themselves into the unknown without guarantee.
This, our authors suggest, resembles the cinephiles trust.
When cinema takes on religious iconography,
it is drawn to figures of the martyr, the sacrifice,
the holy fool, and the damned, as well as the
saint, the virgin and the devil. Leslie Hills essay
on Straub-Huillet, Godard and Holderlin looks at
the mythical figure of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles, who, like the artist, might be a
mediator between humans and the gods. Does
cinema suspend myths or prolong them? Does it
continuously execute its own gods desiring the
grace of their absence while wanting them to
return, immortal and astonishing? What counts in
poetry in modern times should not be the secret
persistence of the divine, nor the covert proximity of the gods, but their enduring absence.
Cinemas future and the end of cinema are linked
in Hill to a more challenging notion of the future
as what resists the present and refuses the
endless recurrences of myth. Can we affirm
finitude and transcendence at the same time? Just
as cinema, in exposing its own mechanism, used
realism to defer spectacle, so the three filmed
versions of The Death of Empedocles StraubHuillets three unfinished repetitions of
Holderlins unfinishable dramas defer the
false transcendence of sacrifice and apotheosis.
Hill follows the intricate paths of repetition,
fragmentation and the renunciation of sacrifice in
several key texts of Romanticism and modernism
(Godard, Holderlin, Straub and Huillet, Brecht).
As he argues, the stakes here are political (and
notes
1 Ginette Vincendeau, The Companion to French
Cinema (London: BFI, 2006) 28 ^29.
2 Daniel Morgan, Rethinking Bazin: Ontology
and Realist Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006):
443^ 81.
editorial introduction
Lisabeth During
School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Pratt Institute
200 Willoughby Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
E-mail: lduring@pratt.edu
Lisa Trahair
School of the Arts and Media
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW 2052
Australia
E-mail: L.trahair@unsw.edu.au