Re-reading Bazins

Ontological Argument
by Prakash Younger
words)

Volume 7, Issue 7 / July 2003

14 minutes (3251

Introduction
I would like to begin by outlining a problem that I hope will resonate with your own
experiences of reading Bazin. This problem emerges as soon as one abandons the
conventional distinction between Bazin the Theorist and Bazin the Critic, that is, the
tacit hierarchy that divides his work into a theoretical core based in the first three
essays of What is Cinema? and a little-explored periphery containing the great
bulk of his writings. Even if one confines ones exploration to the portion of this
periphery readily available in English translation, one soon discovers a figure
whose historically-sensitive contributions to the field cannot be reconciled with the
abstract theoretical doctrines that are generally-attributed to him.
There is the Bazin of The Evolution of the Western and On the politique des
auteurs, whose consideration of the genre film and the genius of the [classical
Hollywood studio] system stands at the origin of the examination of that system in

the work of Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger, Schatz, Maltby and others. There is
the Bazin of The Death of Humphrey Bogart and Entomology of the Pin-Up
Girl, whose analyses of star images, eroticism and other modes of myth and
Attraction preceded Roland Barthess Mythologies by more than a decade, and
Richard Dyers Stars by more than three decades. Finally there is the Bazin of
Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest and The Cinema and Popular Art, who
critiqued notions of the work and authorship and affirmed the political potentials of
the cinema, its Benjaminian implications, long before these topics became common
currency. There are of course many other aspects of Bazins work, but these three
have perhaps suffered most from the neglect imposed by the core-periphery
schema. Against the backdrop of contradiction internal to this schema, I aim to
offer a reading of The Ontology of the Photographic Image capable of
reconciling its argument with the totality of Bazins work.
The central task of my reading is to recover the crucial but generally-neglected
distinction outlined in the following quote:
The quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a
confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological; between true
realism, the need that is to give significant expression to the world both
concretely and in its essence and the pseudorealism of a deception aimed
at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind); a pseudorealism content in
other words with illusory appearances (WCI, 12).
Bazin here identifies two essentially different phenomena that any objective critic
must view separately in order to understand the evolution of the pictorial (WCI,
11). This distinction between the aesthetic and the psychological is crucial to
understanding Bazins use of the term reality which is here explicitly connected to
art and the aesthetic. Though the full sense of this connection has yet to be
unpacked, as stated it allows me to preview the basic point at which my account
will diverge from the standard views of the ontological argument. Despite their
differences, all of Bazins most prominent interpreters from his biographer Dudley
Andrew to his would-be nemesis Nol Carroll read his argument as claiming that
the photograph has, as such and without regard to its aesthetic qualities, a
privileged relation to pro-filmic reality that film-makers are prescribed to maintain.
As Andrew puts it:
For Bazin the situation was clear: either a filmmaker utilizes empirical reality
for his personal ends or else he explores empirical reality for its own sake.

In the former case the filmmaker is making of empirical reality a series of

signs which point to or create an aesthetic or rhetorical truth, perhaps lofty
and noble, perhaps prosaic and debased. In the latter case, however, the
filmmaker brings us closer to the events filmed by seeking the significance of
a scene somewhere within the unadorned tracings it left on the celluloid
(MFT, 145).
In a moment we will reconsider some of the textual evidence often produced in
support of this position. My immediate concern is simply to observe that nowhere
does Bazin argue for the exceptional status of photographic art vis--vis the
aesthetic/psychological distinction and that, in fact, he deliberately structures the
entire Ontology essay around this distinction. Though this feature is not reproduced
in Hugh Grays translation, Bazin organized the essay into six distinct sections
separated by asterixes. Consideration of this structure reveals that he establishes
the distinction in the first section of the essay, explores the psychological genealogy
of photography in the second, third and fourth sections, examines the aesthetic
potentials of photography in the fifth section, and concludes with the famous
reversal of the sixth and last section: On the other hand, the cinema is a
language (my translation) (Dautre part le cinma est un langage). In a loose
accord with this structure my own comments will deal first with psychology, next
with aesthetics, and will conclude with an examination of the reversal and its
implications.
I. Psychology
As you all know, the first section of the essay traces the psychological function of
art from ancient Egypt up to the present, and closes with the following conclusion:
If the history of the plastic arts is not only a matter of their aesthetic but in
the first place a matter of their psychology, it is essentially the story of
resemblance, or if you will, of realism (my translation) (QCI, 12).
For our purposes it is essential to note that Bazin reaches this conclusion after
acknowledging that the evolution, side by side, of art and civilization, has
relieved the plastic arts of their magic role (WCI, 10). Without denying the
processes of desacralization, rationalization and historical understanding that have
characterized the development of modern culture, he nonetheless affirms the
inescapable role of resemblance in any culture, bluntly asserting that the power of
suggestibility we associate with the primitive ideologies of the past remains at

work in the midst of contemporary illusions of radical human autonomy:

Civilization, cannot, however, entirely cast out the bogy of time. It can only
sublimate our concern with it to the level of rational thinking. No one
believes 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. Today the making of images no
longer shares an anthropocentric, utilitarian purpose. It is no longer a
question of survival after death, but of a larger concept, the creation of an
ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny. How
vain a thing is painting if underneath our absurd admiration for all its
works we do not discern mans primitive need to have the last word in the
argument with death by means of the form that endures (WCI, 10) (the
quoted portion of this last sentence is from one of Pascals penses).
In order to take a full measure of its rhetorical force and intent, I will restate what
Bazin is affirming here in a series of polemical propositions:
1. Whether they acknowledge it or not, human beings are attached to mortal
things by an erotic or ethical relation.
2. The development of human rationality notwithstanding, this attachment always
takes the form of an irrational attraction to the appearances of those things.
3. Its stated motives and historical justifications notwithstanding, all art derives its
motive force from this irrational attachment to appearances.
It is essential to emphasize the skeptical aspect of Bazins affirmations about
psychology, his manifest awareness of human vulnerability to illusion and
ideology. For Bazin, our receptivity to the world in which we live is inevitably
conditioned by the desire we carry with us and the ideologies that have shaped
that desire. This vulnerability is presented as an inescapable constant relevant to
the consideration of all art including photography and the cinema. Though Bazins
interpreters are correct in recognizing his affirmation of the photographs relation
with Appearance, they mistake his emphasis on the power of Appearance over
human credulousness for some form of naive faith. Instead, this emphasis should be
seen to reflect a skepticism far more radical than that of any of his critics, for to
Bazin the photograph is in the first instance a powerful and ambiguous illusion that

defies the critical power of the modern rationality that created it:
the essential factor in the transition from the baroque to photography is
not the perfecting of a physical process []; rather does it lie in a
psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion
by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part.
[] This production by automatic means has radically affected our
psychology of the image. The objective nature of photography confers on it
a quality of credibility absent from all other picture-making. In spite of any
objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the
existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us,
that is to say, in time and space. [] A very faithful drawing may actually
tell us more about the model, but despite the promptings of our critical
intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to
bear away our faith (my italics)(WCI, 12-14).
In these quotes and many others we might consider, Bazins point is to recapitulate
with regard to the photograph the general argument about the psychological basis
of art that he made in the essays first section, i.e. the discussion of the photograph
elaborates his general point that the irrational power of resemblance persists within
the domain of our enlightened and modern civilization. Far from disclosing a
pseudo-scientific or mystical axiom of objectivity, Bazins argument in the first
four sections of the essay works from the assumption that theory alone is as
powerless to discriminate between truth and illusion in the photograph as it is in
everyday life.
II. Aesthetics
Thus though it may satisfy our appetite for illusion the photograph does not, in itself,
satisfy our appetite for reality. In Bazins theory only art can do this, though, as we
have already noted, the reality of art paradoxically depends on the more primary
psychological fact of illusion. To understand this paradox we need to retrace its
articulation in the essays first section. The section closes with the adaptation of a
quote from Pascal, the original of which reads: How vain is painting, which
attracts admiration by the resemblance of things, the originals of which we do not
admire! (PP, 38). This polemical reference serves to return us to the point earlier in
the section where Bazin defines the paradoxical function of art as sauver ltre
par lapparence or to save Being by means of Appearances (QCI, 12). If the
task of art is to fundamentally satisfy our erotic or ethical attachment to the mortal

beings that inhabit our world, the quote from Pascal underlines the ambiguous
value of resemblance in allowing us to accomplish this task. For Pascal this
ambiguity is an inescapable fact of the human imagination and like Bazin he
recognizes the extent to which it defies rationality. As he puts it in another pense:
It is that deceitful part in man, that mistress of error and falsity, the more
deceptive that she is not always so; for she would be an infallible rule of
truth, if she were and infallible rule of falsehood. But being most generally
false, she gives no sign of her nature, impressing the same character on the
true and the false. I do not speak of fools, I speak of the wisest men; it is
among them that the imagination has the greatest gift of persuasion.
Reason protests in vain; it cannot set a true value on things (PP, 24).
Recasting this ambiguity in terms of the aesthetic/psychological distinction, we
might say that the psychological power of resemblance leads us equivocally to
imaginative relations with both truth and illusion, and that the aesthetic is that
faculty which allows us to discriminate between these relations. But when viewed in
the context of their common root in desire and the inability of reason to discriminate
between them, Bazins repeated distinction between the aesthetic and the
psychological forces us to track it into another dimension: we are led to posit a
qualitative difference in the heart of desire that distinguishes aesthetic achievement
from illusion.
This difference is only articulated later in the essay, in the quote with which we
began. Unpacking the full sense of this quote, we find that it distinguishes between
a basic psychological desire that is content with illusory appearances and a
higher or stronger form of desire that is only satisfied with true realism, defined here
as a union of the Concrete and the Essential. Seen as the process of
discriminating between true and illusionary relations, Bazins model of aesthetic
activity presupposes a simultaneous double-mimesis that puts the sensual power of
Appearances to work in the service of an invisible reality that only a higher quality
of desire allows access to. It is this process of double-mimesis that is expressed in
the phrase the form that endures (la prennit de la forme) which refers at the
same time to the persistence of resemblance itself, the formal qualities of art, and
the Platonic notion of forms. The form of the work of art thus fuses together two
realms, a realm of sensuous immediacy grounded in the power of resemblance,
and a realm of Necessity grounded in Being or Truth. With this general model in
mind, Bazins affirmations concerning the aesthetic potentials of photography lose
their hyperbolic character, for one is able to recognize in them the theoretically-

indistinguishable coincidence of the irrational power of conviction inherent to the

photographic medium with the process of ethical orientation and ideological
discrimination proper to any art. Thus:
Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it,
those piled-up pre-conceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my
eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my
attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the
natural image of a world that we neither know nor can see, nature at last
does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist (my italics) (WCI, 15).
At the root of Bazins ontological argument one can discern the assumption of an
inescapable ethical dimension to human life and culture, one which simultaneously
secures the illuminations of art and the skeptical awareness of ideology. This
assumption and process of discrimination can be discerned at work throughout
Bazins writings, as in the following passage from An Aesthetic of Reality which
serves to illustrate all the main points we have considered so far:
Reality is not to be taken quantitatively. The same event, the same object,
can be represented in various ways. Each representation discards or retains
various of the qualities that permit us to recognize the object on the screen.
Each introduces, for didactic or aesthetic reasons, abstractions that operate
more or less corrosively and thus do not permit the original to subsist in its
entirety. At the conclusion of this inevitable and necessary chemical
action, for the initial reality there has been substituted an illusion of reality
composed of a complex of abstraction (black and white, plane surface), of
conventions (the rules of montage, for example), and of authentic reality. It
is a necessary illusion but it quickly induces a loss of awareness of the
reality itself, which becomes identified in the mind of the spectator with its
cinematographic reproduction. As for the film maker, the moment he has
secured this unwitting complicity of the public, he is increasingly tempted to
ignore reality. From habit and laziness he reaches the point when he himself
is no longer able to tell where lies begin or end. There could never be any
question of calling him a liar because his art consists in lying. He is just no
longer in control of his art. He is its dupe, and hence he is held back from
any further conquest of reality.
III. Language

On the other hand, cinema is a language. This famous Janus-faced sentence

functions as a crucial mediator between the ontological argument and the
remainder of the essays in the four volumes of Quest-ce que le Cinema?. It serves
to remind the reader that the process of spiritual struggle I have just sketched out
takes place not in some ideal realm but in the historically-conditioned languages
and cultures from which the art of the cinema emerges. In a prospective sense it
indicates that in the essays that follow the aesthetic achievements of the cinema will
only be registered by attending to the historical changes they effect in cinematic
language. In a retrospective sense, its blunt qualification of what preceded it
reminds us of the dangerous potential for misunderstanding such poetic
affirmations, which are in fact nothing more than a set of inferences about
cinematic potential drawn from the realized facts of cinematic art. In this context the
debates between Bazins supporters and detractors about the nature of the reality
he is referring to misses the point, for the reality revealed by art is the source of all
definition or difference and cannot itself be defined; though they have undoubtedly
been the cause of much confusion, words such as realism and reality are in
effect only the vanishing points at which Bazins critical discourse loses the ability
to distinguish truth and illusion in any given instance of cinematic art.
Considered against this retrospective note of caution, my own elaboration of the
ethical vocation of art was itself reckless insofar as it reduced Bazins criticism to a
Platonic or Levinasian reading of it; it is important to emphasize that one could also
characterize the process of double-mimesis in terms of Benjamins dialectical
history, or in the language of Bordwells Historical Poetics, Barthesian semiotics or
Deleuzian philosophy. What is unique about Bazins approach is that the rigor of
his skepticism prevents him from subordinating the experience of art to any one of
these theoretical frameworks. If specific conjunctures of language, circumstance
and illusion form the only discursive crucible in which aesthetic achievement
dialectically distinguishes itself from a historical baseline of ideology, if art is the
only form of discourse that actually makes a historical difference, then the prime
responsibility of the critic is to use analysis and inference to reconstruct the contexts
of film history that makes these interventions possible, not to arrogate to itself the
theoretical ability to distinguish art from ideology. On its own terms, Bazins
rigorous subordination of theory to the nomadic itinerary of aesthetic experience
can claim to have made a stronger intervention in cultural history than the modes of
ideological critique that succeeded it; from his perspective, contemporary
approaches that deploy theoretical models of ideological operations are
themselves entangled in an unwitting complicity that neutralizes real difference
while manufacturing its ersatz. Thus among other things a re-appraisal of Bazins

ontological argument may provide us with motives to re-consider our disciplines

history and self-understanding.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Andrew, Dudley. The Major Film Theories (New York: Oxford UP, 1976)
Bazin, Andr. What is Cinema? Vol.II, 26
Bazin, Andr. What is Cinema? Vol. I, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: UC Press,
1967).
Bazin, Andr Bazin. What is Cinema? Vol.II, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: UC
Press, 1971)
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Though Prakash Youngers interests range widely across the

humanities (including English and world literature, political
philosophy, geopolitical history, and art history), his work
as a teacher and scholar is grounded by a long-standing
engagement with the cinephilic traditions that have shaped
Film Studies as a discipline. Though his work is rooted in close attention to
aesthetics and the details of cinematic form, Youngers ultimate goal as both
a teacher and scholar is to show how films give us an enhanced purchase on
the real world beyond them. By taking advantage of the access films provide
to the experience of other times, places, cultures and sensibilities we enhance
our ability to connect with the world we live in today; unlikely as it may seem,
a French film from the 1930s or a Bollywood film from the 1970s may turn
out to be the message in a bottle we have been waiting for, the magic lens
that brings certain facts and possibilities of the present into sharp focus.
Studying film is a detour that is justified by the fact that, in the end, it always
gets us to the right place, faster.
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 Volume 7, Issue 7 / July 2003 Essays

film style, film theory, new wave, people_bazin

1997 2016 Offscreen, ISSN 1712-9559

$ andre bazin, film history,