Back to Bazin Part 1: The Ontology of the Photographic Image | Spectacular Attractions

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Back to Bazin Part 1: The Ontology of the

Photographic Image

Posted on 23 September, 2008

It’s been a long time since I’ve read Andre Bazin’s writings but, having included them on a syllabus

this semester, I’ve had to return to them. Bazin is rather unfashionable, his ideas on cinema’s “special

relationship” to realism dismissed as naive or simplistic, his Catholicised rhetoric seen as rather

quaint, and if he has been taught at all, he’s been set up as a straw man to give film students their

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first chance to take down a major figure in film criticism. It isn’t difficult to counter Bazin’s teleological

approach to film technology, but this is not to say his work is not useful or interesting. I want to write

down a few thoughts to summarise two or three (that’s not a figure of speech – it really will depend

on how much time I have to prepare this in the next couple of weeks!) of his short essays and invite

comment on their continued relevance or obsolescence. It’s worth noting that Bazin’s film criticism

was as important a part of his work as the theoretical writing, and it wouldn’t be accurate to posit

any over-arching interpretation of what he “stood for”. I would refer you to Brian Henderson’s

excellent overview of “The Structure of Bazin’s Thought” (see links section below), which suggests

that Bazin’s work cannot be thought of as a continual reiteration of the same concept of an objective,realistic cinema, but instead should be divided up into the historical and the ontological writings; there

is little crossover between them, and the theoretical positions on the ontology of the photographic

image are not simply applied to critiques of particular films.

This post should be a starting point, and there are links at the bottom if you’d like to explore more

about Bazin from those who see his work as still valid to the study and appreciation of cinema.

The Ontology of the Photographic Image

Bazin begins his essay with the now well-known mummification analogy:

If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn

out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of

painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex. The religion of ancient Egypt, aimed

against death, saw survival as depending on the continued existence of the corporeal body. Thus,

by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man,

for death is but the victory of time. To preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance is to snatch it

from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life. It was natural,therefore, to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death by preserving flesh and bone.

If I was a film-maker, I’d feel flattered by Bazin’s suggestion that I was the inheritor of a tradition that

could be traced back to the Pharaohs. This totalising idea of film as the achievement of a long-

cherished human desire to reproduce itself in images in defiance of time and mortality can never get

to the heart of how technologies develop, and nor can it explain how individual instances of filmic

practice come into being (I’m assuming there are not many directors who go onset because they

cannot resist the pre-programmed instinct to cheat death): it’s like evolutionary theories of sexual

selection that might tell us what kind of person we’re biologically predisposed to mate with, but can’t

stop us falling for someone with a dirty laugh or a shared passion for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

In Bazin’s extended analogy of mummification, representational art becomes the repository of these

death-defying instincts, since mummification could offer “no certain guarantee against ultimate

pillage”: making images of people, we are to presume, became a substitute for the preservation of

actual bodies. In turn, preservational representation gave way to “a larger concept, the creation of an

ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny.” Is this Bazin’s poetic articulation

of film’s unique capacity to embalm time, with photographic registration grasping a fragment of the

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world and preserving it indefinitely (consider this in contrast to painting’s attempts to reconstruct, with

all attendant subjective inflections, a picture of that world) as both a living (i.e. moving) and a

deadened (i.e. not actually present) thing? Or is he actually saying that a hard-wired human need to

counter-act bodily ephemerality drove and inspired the development of technologies of

representation? It is difficult to know, but the argument which is built upon it seems tendentious from

being founded on such ambiguous, historically vague groundwork.

One of the most enticing and least contentious claims Bazin makes for the importance of the

photographic image is that it uncoupled other art forms from a slavish debt to resemblance:

In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession

with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was

reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that

satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how

skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a

human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor in the

transition from the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process

(photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of colour); 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. The solution is not to be

found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it.

So, rather than supplanting painting and sculpture by doing their jobs more effectively, photography

took on those aspects which plastic arts could perform less efficiently. There is a teleological

argument here – it implies that painting was incomplete, that its own codes and conventions were

malformed precursors of something that required more advanced technologies for its realisation. Thisalways precipitates the most common criticisms of Bazin, that he posits film as an objective medium

of record, whose truth claims hinge upon a privileged link to reality. It forms this link by having a

direct, indexical relationship between image and referent. That is to say that, because the film camera

operates as a photochemical process independent of human intervention (except the interventions

needed to prepare and commence the running of the equipment), it can be seen as less subjective,

less prone to the manipulations of the human hand that always divert, even minutely the passage of

an object’s image into its painted or sculpted representation. When the shutter on a camera opens to

let light in, the light reflected from the object in front of the lens causes a chemical change in the light-

sensitive material of the film itself. Hey, I’m not a scientist: if you want to know a bit more about how

the process of photography actually works, you could do worse than follow this link . The point for

Bazin is that photography and film are distinct as art forms because of their very basis in mechanical

processes which take away the element of human activity. Whatever is done with those images

afterwards, their origins always confer a particularly authentic status that provides a heightened

sense of presence, along with a concomitant sense of absence – you know that what you’re looking

at in a photograph was really present in front of the camera, even as the image’s relocation to a 2-

dimensional space in front of your eyes marks it as simultaneously absent, only an image.

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On this issue, Bazin has been superseded by decades of critical theory and criticism that have

demolished notions of an objective reality that can be represented truthfully. The path from

phenomenological reality to spectator is always one which will branch, fork, twist and undulate

according to the specific capabilities, experiences, knowledge or desires of the apparatus, the artist

and the spectator. Regardless of the photochemical relationship between the image and the

represented object, the image is always selected . It does not give the viewer a window into an extant,

continuous reality, but instead offers a limited perspective, around which meanings and inferences will

be generated by viewers with varying frames of reference and intertextual knowledge bases. Bazin’s

ontological claims, it is argued, are irrelevant in light of the image’s subjection to ideological, technicaland heuristic influences. In short, the camera cannot operate objectively, because its images are

always constructs that are open to interpretation.

I may be defeating my own purpose here. If I wanted to concur with those critics who assert the

continued relevance of Bazin (you’ll find plenty in the links below), I probably shouldn’t have started

with his most obviously flawed article. I first became interested in Bazin when I began my PhD thesis

on special effects, and I was looking for some theories that would help me to examine the instability

or otherwise of the film image’s claims to authenticity. One of the ideas that was sparked by reading

Bazin’s ontology essays was that the spectator is often measuring the onscreen images against a

perceived notion of reality, even if that notion might be a subjective one. When watching a fantasy or

science fiction film that involves a lot of special or visual effects trickery, that same kind of measuring

takes place, with the spectator trying to discern the illusion by sorting the profilmic from the

fabricated. That residual belief in an inherent difference between, for instance, live action footage and

computer-generated characters might be a holdover from Bazinian ideas of the fundamentally

objective ontology of the photographic image. His faith in the ability of long takes and deep focus to

preserve that objectivity is mirrored in a set of devices of authentication which are still deployed in

cinema today, whether it is in the extended takes inside the taxi of Abbas Kiarostami’s 10, where adashboard mounted digital camera fixes on the faces of the passengers or the driver for many

minutes at a time, or in the virtualised camera that circles the moving car in Spielberg’s War of the

Worlds, for which a seemingly impossible long take through heavy traffic has been seamlessly

stitched together from multiple takes and augmented with digital objects.

In each case, a sense of engrossing access to a continuous space is generated by the impression

that the camera is present to capture, rather than construct, a moment in its entirety. But neither film

depends upon an indexical relationship between image and object. The long take can be made to

perform the effect of a filmic reality, either by using small, intimate digital cameras (where no chemical

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5 Votes

reaction between light and film takes place), or visual effects (where the continuity, and the

spatial fluidity, of the shot is an illusion).

I hope to find time to develop these thoughts in relation to some of Bazin’s other writing, but I

welcome comment on what I’ve written so far.

Links

Peter Matthews puts up a strong defence of Bazin here.

Girish Shambu’s blog has an entry on Bazin’s writings with a useful comments section.

Andy Slabaugh on Bazin’s ontology at Cinesthesia.

Donato Toraro, “Bazin Revisited.” PART ONE & PART TWO.

Bazin’s article, “ The Life and Death of Superimposition“, in which he looks at trick effects.

Eva Baaren, “ The Total Myth of Cinema: About the Continuing Need for Reality in Digital

Cinema.”

The following articles are available from JSTOR if you have access, and on old-fashioned paper

even if you don’t:

Ian Jarvie, “Bazin’s Ontology” Film Quarterly 14:1, 60-61.

Brian Henderson, “The Structure of Bazin’s Thought” Film Quarterly 25:4, 18-27.

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15 THOUGHTS ON “BACK TO BAZIN PART 1: THE ONTOLOGY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGE”

This entry was posted in Andre Bazin and tagged Andre Bazin, Bazin, criticism, France,

ontology , photography by Dan North. Bookmark the permalink

[https://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/back-to-bazin-part-1-the-ontology-of-the-

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Heather MacGibbon

on 10 October, 2008 at 6:35 pm said:

I have been pondering the same issues over the last year because my

original work during my MA and PHD studies was about Documentary film

and although flawed I still love Bazin. I think that the indexicality and

meaning of the image are still important as far as spectatorship is

concerned. We believe in what seem to be photographic images – even

when we know that images can be tampered with, altered, or completely

created without the idexical (chemical) process. I am interested in anyone

discussing these topics if there is a group out there doing so.

Thanks

Dr. Heather MacGibbon (NYU)

Dan North


Thanks, Heather. I don’t know about another group, but I wouldn’t mind if a discussion started here, especially once this site gathers some

momentum (hoping that it will). I’m planning a couple more Bazin posts

when I have time.

I’m quite old-fashioned in that I want to have some ‘trust’ in the image – I

feel fairly capable of distinguishing between a manipulated image and one

which is a direct recording of something. We don’t need to be suspicious

of everything we see just because it’s possible to deceive and fabricate.

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There’s still something special going on when you know for sure that a long

take is giving you a moment of continuous performance.

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Dan North


I should add a disclaimer that I didn’t mean to use the same image on this

post as the one on Girish’s blog entry about Bazin. We must’ve just both

copied the same image, which is the one where Bazin looks most like a hip

French intellectual…

Carl Looper

on 21 May, 2010 at 4:01 am said:

Bazin’s realism has it’s roots in Stoic philosophy, and differs from what

Platonists meant by the Real. In a platonic world it is Forms (formulas,

ideas, classifications, structures, blueprints) that are real whereas specific

objects are just instances (copies, reproductions, images, impressions) of

the real. But for the Stoics there is a functional relationship between an

image (impression) and reality, irregardless of whether we are aware of that

relationship or not. A process shot, for example, may appear to an

observer to be an impression of a giant ape astride a skyscraper but, in

reality, it is no such thing. It is an impression of what the artists thought that

such a thing would look like. There is no functional relationship between

Platos Forms and the Stoics Impressions.

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Carl Looper

on 26 February, 2012 at 3:09 am said:

Much of contemporary media theory has forgotten how realism (and

surrealism) was not about the real as some inaccessible other beyond the

grasp of the image/effect, to which all images must therefore be

inadequate, but that the real (for want of a better word) was something

that, on the contrary, could emerge in an image, that there wasn’t just a

nothing there in an otherwise mindless (mechanical) process. For the

surrealists this something (rather than nothing) was an example of what

they otherwise understood as the unconscious. The machine (automaton)

became important in such. Machines are not capable of consciousness, or

rather, the consciousness they are otherwise given (eg. a urinal behaving

as a urinal) can be disrupted, and rather than a void resulting, an

unconscious aspect can come to light (a urinal behaving as an art object),

the automatonomy of which (the machinic process of the urinal’s

becoming), was the beautiful thing (in addition to the disrupture). Realism

and surrealism are very closely related. The gun in the bushes of Blow Up,

represents the unconsciousness of an otherwise conscious fashion

photograph. Where surrealism might disrupt the fashion attributes of thephoto it would not disrupt the gun – on the contrary it would (if it saw it)

amplify such because the gun is there when it’s not supposed to be there.

Realism does the same thing (would keep the gun) but otherwise maintains

the fashion codes that are in operation.

Carl Looper

on 13 April, 2012 at 1:06 pm said:

While Bazin is probably not someone up on quantum physics, it is

nevertheless quantum physics which demonstrates an important

disjuncture between the comprehension of a real as prior to an image and

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the image itself as a reality. A comprehension takes place in relation to a

given image and one may (or may not) project that comprehension as the

cause of the image. Bazin certainly leverages that formula and it is a

common understanding (or misunderstanding), that the photographic

image is an image of that which is understood to have caused the image.

But of course that is impossible. A photograph can not be the result of

one’s own comprehension of it. What Bazin is tapping into is what an

incredibly weird thing photography is, or does. Trying to characterise this

weirdness is very difficult. Not even quantum physicists have worked outhow to explain the existence of a photographic image. They’ve been trying

for close to 100 years now. Literally. Sure they’ll pretend it’s explicable, but

they really don’t know. Nobody does. Not yet anyway. So what chance

does Bazin have of explaining it. But he knows there is something there.

He gets the difference between photographic images and other types of

images. He is that great advocate of the photographic image. The true

believer. And when I look at films through Bazin’s eyes I see an extremely

beautiful world.

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Carl Looper


The criticism of Bazinian realism, as totalising doesn’t hold. While he does

invoke some melodramatic flourishes of a destiny in the birth of

photography, the various works with which he identifies are not about the

construction of self enclosed totalities. On the contrary Bazin’s reality

extends as for so long as a shot survives, at which point a new reality takes

it’s place. The universe starting from scratch again. Where we might

comprehend continuity across the cut Bazin doesn’t see it that way. When

the mother in Mallick’s The Tree of life, demands God give her child back,

God recipricates, restarting the universe from scratch again. But what

occurs the second time around is not the Lord who taketh away but the

mother who giveth. She gives her child to God. In that act she becomes

the equal of God. Not that I’m religious but I get it.

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Dan North

on 14 April, 2012 at 7:48 am said:

That’s a very interesting take, Carl. I suppose what I was getting it,

in exploring the objections to Bazin, is that he was, in his ontology

essays, looking for a “general theory” of the photographic image,

one that might explain the effect of all photographic content. When

these theories are put into practice, as you suggest, they have toflex to take account of all the variations and modes to which film!

makers can apply the apparatus.

Carl Looper


Yes, he’s attempting to genralise something that is extraor!

dinarily difficult to generalise.

The ontology begins in terms of the image as an image of

“reality” which is where I disagree with Bazin. But where

Bazin is heading, as distinct from where he’s coming, is re !

ally quite open ended, remarkable and next to unthinakble

in conventional theory – the image as a reality in itself, more

so than an image as of some pre-existing reality.

Bazin, like the Stoic philosophers, does not see any dis!

connect between an impression (eg. death mask, finger!

print, photograph) and the objects to which such can be

said to correspond.

For Bazin there is a “relationship” between object and pho!

tographic image. But it’s not the one we might otherwise

assume. The relationship is one of equivalence. Literally,

not just figuratively – in the same way that there is a rela!

tionship of equivalence (an equation) between mass and

energy in Einstein’s famous equation.

Plato, on the other hand, differentiates between an object

and it’s image – that they are not the same thing. Plato

goes further. What is real is the Form (the formula). What is

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an image, on the other hand is the Imaginary. An instance.

In Platos version of the world it is the relationship between

things that is real whereas the things themselves are not.

For example, a square / square root function is real be!

cause it embodys the relationship between, for instance, 9

and 3, or (another instance), between 25 and 5. The in!

stances themselves are not real. It is the Form which is real

(because eternal, universal, infinite, etc)

Now Bazin is not interested in the relationship between

shots but in the shots themselves. The shot is real whereas

the relationships between them is what the Stoics would

have contemptuously called a Universal – which they de!

scribes as a “figment of the imagination”.

The difficulty we might have with Bazin is treating the

equivalence he sees between objects and images as a fig!

ure of speech, and the ontological frame of reference as

not so. But in Bazin it’s the other way around. Or at least

that is what I’d argue.

What is at stake in both camps is not necessarily which is

preferable: the Real or the Imaginary. Both prefer the Real.

It’s just that they disagree on what the word “Real” means.

Is it formulas or things?

Carl Looper


Here is my attempt to separate out the two dominate uses of the word

“reality” and why, if not separated, the word can have us going around in

circles.



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A general understanding of the word “reality” is that the word refers to what

is (or is at) the origin or source of something. Let us leave this as the same

idea in all uses of the word “reality”.

For example, we might say that in reality a mirage is not of water on the

horizon, but something that looks like water, due to the refraction of light in

very hot air. The phrase “looks like” is important. It refers to the image as of

something. So when we are talking about “reality” in relation to a mirage

we are wanting to distinguish between the signifieds: water or hot air, andwhich corresponds to “reality”. Now interestingly enough, what is signified

by a mirage, is actually water. We call it a “mirage” in order to treat the

signified: water, as misleading. If what we saw was not misleading we

would not call it a mirage.

So a mirage is simply a misleading image. Once we comprehend the

mirage as signifying ‘not water’, it is no longer a mirage, because the

image is no longer misleading.

Now a mirage/image, irregardless of whether it leads or misleads, is an

image. And in most debates the image, in itself, is not an issue. Rather, it is

in what the image signifies that is at issue: for example, water or hot air? Or

indeed, whether this should be an issue.

But how do we know a mirage is a mirage? It is, of course, knowledge and

context. We acquire knowledge that if we are in a desert (context) looking

for water and see something shimmering on the horizon, it is more thanlikely we’ll discover it was a misleading image of water, rather than a

leading image of water. Those who have discovered this out before us,

have investigated why it looks like (signifies) water, and come to the

conclusion that it’s due to the refraction of light in hot air. We learn this from

them, or we learn it ourselves, through investigation.

So “reality” in this sense, is something we come to comprehend or

understand rather than necessarily experience as such. The experience is

the image. Reality is not given in the image but through a conception. A

theoretical position. An idea. Now importantly, in this interpretation of the

word “reality” we can not then say an image is of reality, but rather that our

concept of reality is of the image, or rather, is a function of all sorts of

images that we have tested. From tests we create an idea of reality to

which the signified conforms or does not conform. The image itself is not

really at issue.

Now the other important use of the word “reality”, is in reference to the


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image. This is not in dominant usage but it has historical currency and it is

the sense in which Bazin uses the word. For example, if we see a

shimmering on the horizon then this shimmering is an image. This image,

whether it signifies water (a mirage) or hot air (a “reality”) can be regarded

as a reality. We do not need to know (yet) what it signifies. We can

recognise it as an image, but not yet what it signifies. It can be understood

as a reality in it’s own right. What follows on from this type of reality, is then

our comprehension of it, which eventually contributes to the other use of

the word “reality” – as an interpretation of the image in the context of allinterpretations and tests we’ve done over the years.

Carl

Carl

on 11 September, 2012 at 10:53 am said:

Bazin, I think, taps into something Deleuze identifies.

In the Logic of Sense, Deleuze elaborates a fourth aspect of the

proposition (which the Stoics first discovered), and that others haverediscovered at different times and epochs.

The first three components of the proposition, which are in relation to a

proposition, are:

1. Denotation. When one indicates something. There is a tree. There is a

dog peeing on the tree.

2. Manifestation. The speaker. The “I”. Descartes cogito. I see (and say)

that “there is a dog peeing on the tree”.

3. Signification. Universals. The Platonic ideal. God. The dog peeing on the

tree represents the idea of such. The mind of God.

Deleuze notes there is a circularity in the above. One can take any of these

as grounding any of the others. For example, Descartes formula is:

I think therefore I am



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I (manifest) think (denotation) therefore (signification) I (manifest) am

(denotation)

One could just as easily propose:

I am therefore I think

Or more perversely:

I think I am, therefore I am, I think

So Deleuze (following the Stoics) adds a fourth relation (or expression): to

break the circularity

4. Sense. The effect.

Sense is incorporeal (not existing). An effect. But in a reversal of Platonism,

Deleuze, following the Stoics, moves Ideas (relation 3) out of the domain of

causes (fundamentals), and into this domain of effects (relation 4). Ideas

become effects. And Sense (or nonsense) will be where ideas will now

*become* such, rather than exist as such. The idea no longer exists. It

becomes.

Sense becomes the domain of logic and dialectics, but now as an effect.

As superficial. But we are to take ownership of this word “superficial”. It

has no depth but it has breadth. It’s also impersonal. It’s not a cause. It is

not the world. It is not the I that speaks. It is not God. Its an effect. Not a

cause.

Now it is this effect (of impersonal Sense) that Bazin is aiming at when he

otherwise uses the words objective, real, etc.

I think :)

Carl

Carl


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on 11 September, 2012 at 11:44 am said:

I should add that Deleuze doesn’t read Bazin in quite the same way I am.

In Deleuze, Bazin is is definitely on the side of Deleuzean Sense, but he is

positioned as involved in more of an embryonic sense (the seeds of sense).

Deleuze uese the term “organic” in relation to Bazin’s sense.

Carl

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Daniel Chavez Moran


Appreciate this post. Let me try it out.
https://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/back-to-bazin-part-1-the-ontology-of-the-photographic-image/#comment-7257http://www.hostel-mexicocity.com/mexicocity1.jpghttps://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/back-to-bazin-part-1-the-ontology-of-the-photographic-image/#comment-6153

Back to Bazin Part 1: The Ontology of the Photographic Image | Spectacular Attractions

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