Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Ontological Argument
by Prakash Younger
words)
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.
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-
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