Enough Possessive Specificity

This post is comprised of ideas I’ve been mulling over for some time now, though they’ve been given new life by recent discussions I’ve had with Dr. Annett. A large portion of this post also appeared as a reading response for Dr. Spring’s Classical Film Theory class from Fall 2014. So, grab your butts. This is going to be a little heavy.

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“…the photograph allows us…to admire in reproduction something that our eyes alone could not have taught us to love…” (Bazin “Ontology” 16)

I want you to forget everything you’ve been taught about Andre Bazin—that academic Cole Notes reading we’re all familiar with—and explore what is said and not said in his “Ontology of the Photographic Image”.

Though the photograph may have been tied to indexical reality Bazin never says that indexical reality is itself objective; it may be “objectively” recorded, it itself is not objective. The thing, the subject, had to be present before the camera for its imprint to be made on the film, and its likeness may be more accurate a representation than a literary description or a painting, but it does not follow that the object thus transcends subjectivity.

The opposite happens actually.

The photograph (not the camera, not the film) creates the subject, and thus subjectivity. Say, we all look at the same person: based on our own subjective experiences we will make each of us our own appraisal of them—and each appraisal is true in that we experience to be. The photograph merely creates one more subjectivity; one that is constructed to appeal to certain tastes (and also must eventually become subjected itself to us).

Bazin’s contention, that “photography actually contributes something to the order of natural creation instead of providing a substitute for it” (15), takes on Butlerian notions of intelligibility: you are only a subject as long as you are recognized as one.

What the photograph does is channel, and create, a subjectivity, a way of seeing and being, that was unseen and unknown before. But even then, it may have always been there, for some: for those that “had eyes to see”.

This notion of technology and subjectivity comes up again in Bazin’s “The Myth of Total Cinema” [note: the page numbers in this post do not correspond to this online copy].

The article itself is a romantic historical account of the development of cinema meant to dismantle the arguments of the silent era’s specificity theorists; but it can be extended further, ultimately undermining what is widely regarded as Bazin’s realist stance. He outlines the original visions held for the moving image and argues that this myth, which consists of a “total and complete representation of reality…a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief” (20), precedes any economic, technological, or industrial factors which have since shaped the medium historically.

However, in outlining this myth in service of his ontology of the medium Bazin is unaware of the opening he leaves which can unravel his own stance (but then, how could he be?). He brings up glass and paper as mediums used to channel the moving image before the invention of celluloid film (18). What emerges is the notion of film or cinema as the phenomenon of the moving image; a phenomenon distinct from film (a corporeal medium) or cinema (an exhibition venue), both of which were merely historical developments used to channel it.

By placing previous definitions of this phenomenon in historical context—the scientific work of Muybridge, the attractions of Edison and the Lumieres, the artworks of the silent era—Bazin must by extension place himself in that narrative as well: that is, a world before video and digital technologies would challenge film’s claim to the moving image.

If the moving image is more than glass plates or paper, more silent cinema’s expressionism, impressionism, or montage, then it follows that in today’s state of technology it can be more than film (celluloid) as well.

One useful way of thinking about this issue of phenomena and technology was handed to me when Dr. Annett brought up the analogy of a “membrane”—that is a semi-permeable barrier that allows certain things in, while keeping others out. [This notion was itself ignited by her reading of Karen Beckman’s introduction to Animating Film Theory, available as an online resource at Laurier.]

According to her initial musings, when we think of technology as a membrane it allows us to get away from the claims usually made when it is referred to as a platform: it is no longer a question of what a technology can or cannot do (and by extension, should or shouldn’t do), and becomes a question of what a technology allows us to do.

This also makes concept of remediation rather ineffective since a certain experience or phenomenon is no longer be the property of a historically specific technology. A technology may be able to channel a phenomenon, in its own peculiar way, but it does not “own” it. We go from remediation to simple mediation.

This may not be a revolutionary idea (speaking of a medium as an actual, literal, medium), but it is important to establish as a possible new starting point in light of the standard, accepted, ideologies surrounding media and their attitudes of possessive specificity. Digital technologies are not remediating film; they are mediating the same phenomenon in their own way.

Bazin’s forceful exhortation that “cinema has not been invented yet!” (“Myth” 21) takes on added significance in light of this view. Cinema has not been invented yet not only because it has not fulfilled the original visions set out for it (no colour, smell or 3D relief, at the time of Bazin’s writing), but also because every age seeks to define and redefine it, producing their own visions of what cinema should be. Technology shifts, and with it what is possible. What is allowed or restricted, both technologically and socially, redefines the makeup of this technological membrane and thus our idea of cinema.

Cinema has not been invented yet because we are forever in the process of inventing it.

But (and this is the big one): if an experience or phenomenon is not tied to its technological materiality—if it is merely channeled—then what is that experience or phenomenon?

We find ourselves in the same position as Bazin: “What is cinema?”

I may require an image to fall in love with someone, but you may have fallen in love with them without that photograph—with just your own naked eyes. So what is it we are seeing that is being channeled (or revealed, or created) through the photograph for me and through your eyes for you?

I am not quite sure at present.

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My next blog post will explore this idea of a technological membrane by looking, not at a film, but FromSoftware’s Dark Souls (Miyazaki, 2011). Video games are said to remediate every medium that’s ever existed… but do they really? Since this membrane is more permeable it would be interesting to see what experiences are being let through and how they change in this new configuration—perhaps enabling us to look at other media with new eyes as well.

Fitting, since Dark Souls is a game built around vision and knowledge revealed through movement. 

 

Works Cited

Bazin, Andre. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” What is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1967. 9-16.

Bazin, Andre. “The Myth of Total Cinema.” What is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1967. 17-22.

Beckman, Karen. “Animating Film Theory: An Introduction.” Animating Film Theory. Ed. Karen Beckman. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. 1-22.