cardullo, robert. cinema as ‘social documentary - the film theory of andre bazin revisited (sfc...

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33 SFC 13 (1) pp. 33–46 Intellect Limited 2012 Studies in French Cinema Volume 13 Number 1 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.13.1.33_1 Keywords Bazin film theory documentary film fiction film Lacan Derrida robert J. Cardullo Izmir University of Economics Cinema as ‘social documentary’: the film theory of andré bazin, revisited abstraCt Traditionally, the discipline of film studies has associated the idea that cinema can bring the ‘truth’ to the screen with one theorist: André Bazin. But this notion is highly simplistic. Only 6 per cent of Bazin’s total writings (amounting to almost 2600 articles and reviews) saw the light of day later through republication in anthologies or edited collections; and any reading of the remaining 94 per cent of these writings (which basically are little known to date) makes it clear that Bazin was not so naïve. Fiction films do tell the truth, but mainly in the way that dreams do: that is, by revealing what people ‘really’ think or want or believe regardless of their conscious awareness. What is the nature of this ‘truth’ as told by any fiction film? How can one reconcile such a theoretical perspective on the truth with what is regarded as the Bazinian ontologically realist theory of the cinema? This article will attempt to answer these questions through the in-depth analysis of a specific article by Bazin, one of his early (dated 1947) and important ones: ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’/‘Every film is a social documentary’, as well as through a wide range of examples taken from other, mostly unfamiliar writings by Bazin.

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The film theory of Andre Bazin revisited

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Page 1: Cardullo, Robert. Cinema as ‘social documentary - The film theory of Andre Bazin revisited (SFC 13.1 (2012))

33

SFC 13 (1) pp. 33–46 Intellect Limited 2012

Studies in French Cinema Volume 13 Number 1

© 2012 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sfc.13.1.33_1

Keywords

Bazinfilm theorydocumentary filmfiction filmLacanDerrida

robert J. CardulloIzmir University of Economics

Cinema as ‘social

documentary’: the film

theory of andré bazin,

revisited

abstraCt

Traditionally, the discipline of film studies has associated the idea that cinema can bring the ‘truth’ to the screen with one theorist: André Bazin. But this notion is highly simplistic. Only 6 per cent of Bazin’s total writings (amounting to almost 2600 articles and reviews) saw the light of day later through republication in anthologies or edited collections; and any reading of the remaining 94 per cent of these writings (which basically are little known to date) makes it clear that Bazin was not so naïve. Fiction films do tell the truth, but mainly in the way that dreams do: that is, by revealing what people ‘really’ think or want or believe regardless of their conscious awareness. What is the nature of this ‘truth’ as told by any fiction film? How can one reconcile such a theoretical perspective on the truth with what is regarded as the Bazinian ontologically realist theory of the cinema? This article will attempt to answer these questions through the in-depth analysis of a specific article by Bazin, one of his early (dated 1947) and important ones: ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’/‘Every film is a social documentary’, as well as through a wide range of examples taken from other, mostly unfamiliar writings by Bazin.

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When the idea of ‘truth’ encounters that of ‘cinema’, the first name that naturally comes to mind is André Bazin. But over the past few decades, this French film critic and theorist has generally been viewed as a naïve realist, someone for whom the essence of cinema lay in its mechanical, photographic ability to bring the ‘truth’ to the screen without the all-too-partial and non-objective intervention of humans. As Noël Carroll once wrote, ‘Bazin held that the image from a film was an objective re-presentation of the past, a veri-table slice of reality’ (1996: 78). Carroll was by no means alone in identifying Bazin as someone who believed in the objectivity of the imprint that empirical reality automatically leaves on film. Jean Mitry, Christian Metz, 1970s Screen theorists, and most scholars adhering to semiological or cognitivist approaches have all dismissed Bazin’s ontological belief in film’s immediate access to, and correspondence with, empirical reality. Casting a retrospective glance at this almost unanimous rejection of Bazin, Philip Rosen has more recently argued that such a repudiation was a veritable collective obsession that allowed the then-new subject of film studies to be established as a consistent discipline in its own right. In other words, Bazin’s dismissal was a kind of founding act (Rosen 2001: 8–9).

Nowadays, it is perhaps easier to look back and discover what the writings by the co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma were really about. Yet these writings are still basically little known to date. Between 1943 and 1958, André Bazin wrote no fewer than 2600 articles and reviews (mostly published in daily news-papers, weekly magazines and film journals), only 6 per cent of which saw the light of day later on through anthologies or edited collections. Not long ago, Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin revived scholarly interest in this huge amount of neglected work. On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of Bazin’s birth in 2008, they organized two international congresses on the topic of ‘unknown Bazin’: one at Yale University (Opening Bazin) and the other at the Université Paris VII-Diderot (Ouvrir Bazin). Two-and-a-half years later, an edited collection was published that gathered most of the talks given at those venues (Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin 2011).

Reading the ‘remaining’ 94 per cent of the articles leaves no doubt: Bazin was not a naïve theorist. His was not a shallow and simplistic faith in some magical transubstantiation of reality directly on-screen. Indeed, much of his writing prefigures the very theoretical movements, from the 1970s and after, which – importing concepts from disciplines like psychoanalysis, gender stud-ies, anthropology, literary theory, semiotics, and linguistics to fashion struc-turalist, post-structuralist, Marxist and feminist film theories – opposed what they saw as Bazin’s exclusively realistic bias. In this article, however, I shall not try to give a complete account of Bazin’s thinking about the cinema: that kind of overview would require an entire book. I shall focus here on a specific aspect of his thought, in order to open up the possibility of further explora-tion: the photographic ‘umbilical’ link between the filmic image and empirical reality. Ostensibly the ultimate realist, the author of Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? has often been accused of being an idealist critic. This is not incorrect. In many ways, Bazin shares the philosophical perspective of idealism, according to which matter does not exist in its own right; it is a product of mind, and therefore all objects are mental creations and the whole world itself – the sum of all objects – is a mental construction.

But the view that Bazin is an idealist is not correct enough, either (Aprà 1973: xiv), since one should assume all due consequences from such a premise. The most obvious (but also the least negligible) of these is that, precisely as an

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idealist, Bazin’s notion of reality is by no means simple. It is not limited simply to what can be found ‘out there’, either in the ‘real’ world or the world as the mind projects it. Indeed, Bazin’s idealism quickly becomes a form of Catholic phenomenology, according to which any attempt at a faithful reflection of reality is really just a prerequisite – ultimately merely a pretext – for finding a transcendental or even theological truth that purportedly exists in reality and is ‘miraculously’ revealed by the camera.

Despite the common opinion, then, Bazin paid considerable attention to social, cultural, political and economic contexts in his consideration of indi-vidual films. If cinema is for him the quintessential realistic medium, this is because it can grasp social, cultural, political and economic realities. In other words, cinema’s ontological realism is not a matter of reproducing empiri-cal reality as such; ‘reality’ is much more than the sum of its empirical parts. As Bazin himself wrote, ‘the cinematic aesthetic will be social, or else will do without an aesthetic’ (1981: 37). Unsurprisingly, one of his early and most important articles is therefore called ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’ (Bazin 1947), or ‘Every film is a social documentary’, as its 2008 English trans-lation reads (Bazin 2008). This article will focus on that specific piece (along with marginal references to several less familiar Bazinian articles), in order to better understand the nature of truth as Bazin perceived it. In other words, a close reading of ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’ will become an occa-sion for posing some theoretical questions that arise from an in-depth enquiry into the 100s of lesser known, rarely republished articles by Bazin – questions that enlarge or magnify Bazin’s notion of cinematic ‘truth’.

As such, this article is not intended to be a programmatic dismissal of the standard opinion according to which Bazin advocated cinema’s photographic ability to reproduce reality. Nevertheless, the basic premise of my argument is that such a dismissal has already been validly formulated in various places by several scholars. One of the most interesting attempts to do so is Daniel Morgan’s ‘Rethinking Bazin’, a careful review of all the excerpts in Bazin’s written works that talk about cinema’s photographic, replicative dimension (Morgan 2006). Morgan noticed that, on this subject, Bazin says different things in different places. Whatever definition of cinema we can infer from Bazin’s writings, photographic objectivity thus has no essential place in it, as Morgan discusses in a related article on the ‘afterlife’ of superimposition (Morgan 2011: 130).

What is perhaps more important is that Bazin himself repeatedly stigma-tized the so-called ‘photographic objectivity’ of the cinema. His articles are replete with warnings like the following: ‘It is not enough to shoot in the streets to “make it real”. All in all, the script is more important than the fetish-ism of natural décor’ (Bazin 1949a1); ‘artifice and lie can walk down the streets as well as they can haunt the studios, because reality is not just in the appear-ance of things, but in man’s heart. Ultimately, it is also a matter of the screen-play’ (Bazin 1949b). One of the most surprising such examples can be found at the very beginning of ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’:

The realist destiny of cinema – innate in photographic objectivity – is fundamentally equivocal, because it allows the ‘realization’ of the marvelous. Precisely like a dream. The oneiric character of cinema, linked to the illusory nature of its image as much as to its lightly hypnotic mode of operation, is no less crucial than its realism.

(Bazin 2008: 40)

1. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

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In a word, cinema functions in such a way that we can believe (to some extent) that what we see on-screen is true. But this does not mean that cinema can reproduce truth; on the contrary, its innate realism cannot be separated from its potential to create believable illusions. Hence, cinematic realism is not a naïve acknowledgement of what reality actually is; rather, it is dialecti-cally linked to illusion – i.e., to its own fundamental condition. Indeed, in his one and only essay explicitly revolving around the subject of photography, Bazin defines it as intrinsically surrealist because it is ‘a hallucination that is also a fact’ (Bazin 1967a: 16). The content of a dream or hallucination may be false, of course, but the fact that it is dreamed or hallucinated is itself true.

As such, dreams and films point to some kind of ‘unconscious truth’ embedded in ourselves:

Being a dream, cinema hides its ultimate reality behind appearances that are nothing but symbols. As in a dream, nothing in cinema is completely accidental, and at the same time nothing is completely fake either. It isn’t true that French or American people enjoy lives free of work, living in sumptuous apartments […] But it’s true that some secret demon keeps the shameful hope for such a social paradise alive in each of our hearts. American secretaries don’t marry the sons of their billionaire bosses, but the Cinderella myth occupies a dominant position in American culture.

(Bazin 2008: 40)

In this way, every film is a social documentary because it documents the desires of the collective unconsciousness. Dreams are not real, but the desires behind them are. And in this sense, ‘cinema cannot lie’ (Bazin 2008: 40).

Bazin continues with the following statement: ‘Every producer who has made a film that pleases knows how to fill the type of imaginary void within which his film took shape. In commercial terms, good producers detect within the public any “dream holes” still unfilled and hasten to fill them in’ (Bazin 2008: 40). ‘Hole’ is the key word here. Bazin seems to emphasize that the hidden desire of the public is essentially a kind of void (his term). This desire that a producer needs to fathom is not something repressed, waiting to be expressed, but a sort of ‘hole’. It has no existence of its own, but comes into being in the very process of its being formed. This takes place (recall-ing the notorious notion, from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, of ‘conden-sation/displacement’, or the distortive operations performed by the mind on repressed wishes in the formation of dreams) through codification in symbols that have at the same time an illusory transparency (the fact that they look real and seem to belong to everyday reality) about them. Again, this is the paradox of realism as, and through, illusion – a paradox noted, as well, by Christain Metz in The Imaginary Signifier, where he himself deploys the Freudian terms ‘condensation/deployment’ in his discussion of filmic metaphor (Metz 1982).

This is one of those (not quite rare) points in Bazin’s work that seem to echo the ideas of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan was highly influ-ential during the fifteen years of Bazin’s critical output (1943–1958), and, to a large degree, the two shared the same intellectual influence, that is, the ‘French side’ of phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty in particular). Like Bazin, Lacan also thought of desire as some kind of ‘nothing’ in itself, an empty hole that gains shape only when it is ‘betrayed’ by some symbolic or linguistic imaginary formulation. Thus in dreams we do not find an

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instinctual or primal desire that was previously repressed in reality, only to pop up again in disguise: desire consists in the very way it is masked; it coincides with its own disguise. Such is the paradox of the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire:

In Lacanian theory, fantasy designates the subject’s ‘impossible’ relation to a, to the object-cause of its desire […] [W]hat the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satisfied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The funda-mental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.

(Žižek 1992: 6, original emphasis)

Accordingly, fantasies must be handled with care. Producers and film-makers therefore have a great responsibility. They hold the audience’s desires in their hands, as it were, since desire is not ‘inside people’, but exists only in the external form of its own patent formulation. Film-makers do not guess what dreams could better fit people’s desires: they invent people’s desires instead. Hence the attention Bazin paid to pedagogy. Himself an aspir-ing teacher who failed to pass the state licensing exam, after which he would have become one, Bazin felt that film criticism should help audience members to form their own critical conscience, rather than providing a ready-made one for them or merely judging films in the audience’s place. A film critic should educate moviegoers to deal consciously and responsibly with the dreams that are offered to them as their own. And this is possible only if viewers get to know how those dreams work, that is, how they are expressed through every formal, technical, social and aesthetic aspect of the cinema.

Unsurprisingly, the last paragraph of ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’ displays the similar aim of post-war film culture in general:

To defend the public against this form of abuse of consciousness, to wake the audience from its dream, to pull back all the veils, right down to the seventh veil that masks the viewer’s own unconscious desire, to help the audience in this way to prioritize its pleasure according to what it contains, to teach it at the same time to reject what consciousness could not admit were it to fully understand that; to render the public sensible to the needs or illusions that were created in it as a market, for the sole purpose of providing the opium sellers with an outlet for their drug.

(Bazin 2008: 41)

Bazin elaborated his thoughts on the subject of dreams as follows:

Psychoanalysts explain to us that our dreams are the very opposite of a free flow of images. While these express some fundamental desire, it is by necessity in order to cross the threshold of the super-ego, hiding behind the mark of a twofold symbolism, one general and the other individual. But this censorship is not something negative.

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Without it, without the resistance it offers to the imagination, dreams would not exist.

(Bazin 1971b: 71)

The crucial sentence here is ‘this censorship is not something negative’. We should take it literally: it is not a negative censorship because it does not really deny anything. There is no original desire that gets repressed and codified. As Bazin states explicitly, without this censorship there would not be any dream at all; the only thing denied is this ‘nothing’ that the ‘original’ desire in fact is. There is really nothing else, then, but the formal artistic work through which some kind of latency is manifested.

Perhaps, though, the most important part of the above excerpt is the word ‘resistance’. We have to remember that the shape fantasy assumes can never fully correspond to the subject’s intimate desire, for the simple reason that the latter does not exist. As a result, there is a fundamental discrepancy between the fantasy and the desire it should embody: indeed, fantasy struc-turally resists its own configuration, since the latter just cannot be reduced to zero. Fantasy bears a trace of that resistance in the guise of formal incon-sistencies or contradictions that affect the formulation of desire. On the one hand, these ‘blots’ derive from the impossibility of forcing desire into a proper symbolical shape; on the other hand, they are themselves a decisive form of faithfulness with regard to the ‘nothing’ that is the subject’s desire. In other words, these inconsistencies or contradictions signal the direct presence of the subject (as a void) inside the fantasy: the subject’s own involvement in it, as it were.

All of this ultimately means that ‘the truth of fantasy’, which fiction films document, is twofold: on the one hand, they illustrate certain socio-ideological tendencies actively influencing people’s lives; on the other, they can do so only by bearing traces – these breaches in the filmic communicative texture – of the spectators’ own involvement. Both levels are inseparable sides of the same coin (i.e. of fantasy). The breaches are plain confirmation of the substantial impenetrability of fantasies for the very individuals who have them: fantasies are ‘true’ in that they do not depend on the subject’s will, but engage instead in a veritable struggle with the subject. Formal inconsistencies (symptoms) mark at once that the subject is in conflict with his or her own fantasy, and that precisely because of this, both sides of this antagonism radically belong to each other. As a result, the subject cannot identify completely with his or her fantasies, but at the same time the subject cannot really consider them as something foreign. They are this person’s most intimate ‘self’, but they do not really belong to this person. In other words, the subject cannot assume and symbolize his or her own fantasies in full. And this is why a pedagogy of cinema is all the more necessary: audiences should learn to bridge the distance that divides them from their own ideological fantasies.

This also explains why, as Philip Watts has correctly pointed out, Bazin’s critical approach had nothing to do with demystification (2011: 221). It was not a matter of taking off the imaginary ideological mask and unveiling the truth. On the contrary, fantasy has a truth of its own that one has to deal with: the way in which it responds to the void of our intimate desires through its own inconsistencies. To say that fantasy is only an ‘illusion’ would mean to avoid the core of this paradox. Bazin himself was well aware of this: he was highly suspicious of those films attempting some kind of demystification, i.e., an unveiling of fantasies as illusions, thereby neglecting the secret link between

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fantasy and the void of the subject’s desire. In this regard, he was relentlessly hard even on such an estimable film as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). He accused this work of mocking an ideological system of which it was still a part: it dismissed Hollywood’s past glamour while fully participating in its glamour of the present. In other words, Sunset Boulevard fooled the spectator into thinking he or she was looking at Hollywood from a cynical and objec-tive distance, but this was just another illusion, since Sunset Boulevard itself is a total Hollywood product:

This kind of cinematic self-psychoanalysis must lead to the resist-ance of the subject, just like any other sort of psychoanalysis. Cinema still needs some illusions about itself in order to make a movie about itself. Similarly, her interpretation of the fallen star gained Mrs. Gloria Swanson […] the Oscar as Best Actress.

(Bazin 1951a)

But there is no real ‘résistance du sujet’ here because fantasy does not ‘resist’ its own formulation. Wilder’s depiction of early Hollywood glamour merely describes it, without coming to terms with its own contradictions and inconsistencies.

Psychoanalysis, for its part, is not supposed to explain to the subject how his or her unconscious works. It should instead make this person face those fantasies that structurally elude his or her grasp and are impossi-ble to fully assimilate and symbolize. Psychoanalysis (and hence film criti-cism) must deal with this impossibility. Sunset Boulevard itself cannot be the ‘cinema’s self-psychoanalysis’ that it aspires to be, because it keeps the viewer at too safe a distance from a certain ideological frame. The truth of a fantasy should not ‘run smoothly’ for a subject. Otherwise it is untrue, since it misses the irrational connection between the fantasy and the subject. Put another way, one cannot be completely awake, but is always on the verge of waking – or dreaming. That the truth of a fantasy should not ‘run smoothly’ is why Bazin so frequently declares himself against certain movies influenced by vulgar psychoanalysis. He despises the tendency to mistake psychoanalysis for a linear and determinist explanation of uncon-scious human behaviour, which is reduced to a mere cause-effect chain. By this standard, which Hollywood fully accepts, if there is such a thing as a gangster in America, this can only be because of the terrible environment in which he grew up, or maybe just because he got hit on the head when he was a child (Bazin 1955b).

Mutatis mutandis, Bazin means the same thing when he writes that ‘it is a sociological psychoanalysis rather than a critical analysis that can best reveal cinema’s secret reality’ (2008: 40). In other words, film criticism should not simply unveil how a cinematic text and the grand cinematic machine work. It should help the moviegoer to inhabit the boundaries of what he or she can consciously appropriate, including intersubjective (social) constructions of any kind. It should investigate how social myths are foreign and intimate to the viewer at the same time. Only thus can film be, as Bazin confirms a few lines later, ever a social documentary that recognizes ‘our collective dreams, illusions, and, I daresay, worst thoughts’ (Bazin 2008: 41, emphasis added).

Jacques Lacan’s name for this domain of what cannot be fully and consciously appropriated and symbolized is the Real (as opposed to the

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symbolic and the imaginary in his famous triadic classification). It is important to notice that the Real in Lacan’s thought also does not exist in and of itself. It has only a negative existence, i.e., it signals a basic impasse against which consciousness somehow bangs its head. The object-cause of desire, the aforementioned objet petit a in all its inconsistency, belongs to the Real as well. Thus fantasy is something that gets stuck in the throat of the subject, as it were. It is something that is radically impervious to the subject’s conscious intentions, and something that language itself cannot codify. My hypothesis is that the Bazinian notion of cinematic ‘reality’ (the reality that cinema can ontologically grasp as well as intimate) essentially corresponds to the Lacanian Real.

In ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’ (as in many other pieces by Bazin), social myths and ideological formulations, albeit illusory, are thus seen to be ‘real’ or ‘true’ because they concretely affect the life and feelings of people, who respond accordingly. But they are real or true, as well, in a differ-ent, perhaps more important sense: they are ‘there’ regardless of the subjects’ intentions and beyond their deliberate control. The existence of such fantasies is independent of what the viewers themselves consciously think and under-stand. As such, it can be ascribed to something that exceeds any attempt at rationalization and eludes the grasp of language.

In fact, ever since Bazin’s death and the Cahiers du Cinéma special issue that was dedicated to him shortly afterwards, his attachment to filmic ‘symp-toms’ has always been unanimously acknowledged (Leenhardt 1959: 16). As a rule, his ‘social psychoanalyses’ through film were generated by a relevant and enlightening but barely discernible detail detected in the film’s texture, which then stimulated a more general ‘diagnosis’ on Bazin’s part: ‘I can assure the reader that I always strive to discern, in each show that wastes my time, that little something thanks to which even a film deserving to be drowned can be pulled back, if only by one single hair’ (Bazin 1957: 2). He extracts the entire theological significance of Jean Delannoy’s Dieu a besoin des hommes (1950), for example, from an absolutely marginal scene in which a priest throws a few sacred hosts to the ground (Bazin 1951b: 243).

Bazin was fully aware of the theoretical implications of such a method, and of what it means to set in place a kind of dialectic of the margins. In speaking of certain films whose meaning had to be detected through the sidelong and ultimately unintentional traces on their surface, he gives us an extraordinary definition. These works are like cannons: ‘They are made of emptiness with bronze all around. But their substance is that very empti-ness. And the more or less interesting images surrounding these gaps are supposed to authenticate them and give them a soul, precisely as cannons are said to have’ (Bazin 1955a: 4). The French word for ‘cannon barrel’ is ‘âme’, which also means ‘soul’. This has everything to do with the inner core of a human being, which is nothing in itself; a person’s own most intimate core must paradoxically be located outside the body, in the marginal remains of his or her failed attempt to rationalize that core through language. In other words, in the symptoms. The ‘dream holes’ (Bazin’s term) are nowhere to be found, except in those little glitches on the surface that show the imag-ination’s irreducibility to its own explicit formulation (although it cannot really be anything else).

Here, Bazin may be linked to Hegel, specifically, to this aspect of the Hegelian perspective: that any essence fully manifests itself through appearance – more precisely, through the inherent gap that exists between appearance itself

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and what could be called the appearance of appearance. In other words, sometimes the superficial appearance of a phenomenon seems to reveal its own hidden essence, what Douglas Smith has called a ‘realism of absence’ as opposed to a ‘realism of plenitude’ (2004: 93, et passim). At the same time, this superficial appearance shows that there is no possible ‘beyond’: there is only appearance and the superficial gap opening within it. This gap, although it has been already rightly identified with Jacques Derrida’s différance (Schwartz 2011) and can further be connected to Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘supplement of the real’, could also be said to correspond to the Lacanian Real. Bazin’s ‘sociologi-cal psychoanalysis’ is an attempt to investigate the emergence of these gaps on the surface of films, as moments in which social myths and ideological fantasies are revealed.

The reason why he calls these revelations ‘truths’ is not only that they unveil some hidden and latent (but nonetheless authentic) tendency or postulation, but also (and foremost) that they manifest on the surface some-thing that resists the subject and his or her conscious adherence, and at the same time draws the subject in all the more irresistibly. Another way to describe this (Hegelian) perspective is the coincidence between the essence and the remnant. ‘The spirit is a bone’, as Hegel puts it ([1807] 1980: 190). The essential is embodied in the residual, in the ineffable little ‘something’ that eludes any effort on the part of language to illuminate it. This concept will prove crucial in the next and final step of my argument.

At this point, one could rightly accuse this article of ignoring evidence. The kind of psychological truth I have been discussing might in fact be pertinent, but what about empirical reality? What about the several indications in Bazin’s famous four-volume anthology Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (1958–1962) that, in cinema, reality ‘lays itself bare like a suspect confessing under the relentless examination of the commissioner of police’ (Bazin 1967b: 27)? My hypothesis is that there is no real contradiction here. If we look closely at Bazin’s numer-ous writings, we find that empirical reality does indeed play a key role in his thinking; nevertheless, the cinema is not designed to provide an exact copy of it. Empirical reality is not intended to be passively transferred to the screen: on the contrary, the screen is a potential site for revelations. The cinema does not merely document empirical reality; it can (if used properly) uncover those exceptional cases where empirical reality manifests some kind of spiritual essence (Bonitzer 1982: 128).

We should not be frightened by such metaphysical-sounding terms as ‘spiritual’ and ‘essence’: generically speaking, they just mean something beyond appearance. In other words, they are those occasions when some-thing more than the sheer appearance of empirical reality seems to manifest itself, even if, strictly speaking, nothing supernatural occurs. Of course it is not possible here to give a full account of how Bazin dealt with this subject in his oeuvre. Instead, I shall quote a number of significant examples:

Some landscapes bear a plastic, tragic, or lyric intensity so visibly, that recording them on film can almost be enough.

(Bazin 1983: 230)

Thus, Bresson rightly sticks to the thousand details of prison life that permit him to explain and justify his hero’s mission and success. Nevertheless, the viewer feels very soon that this accumulation of real deeds has nothing documentary-like about it. Through them,

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Bresson does not try to attain material verisimilitude, but a deeper truth – something like the spiritual secret of his hero’s inventiveness and of his uncommon stubbornness.

(Bazin 1956b)

The infallible objectifying lens of the camera has this paradoxical privilege of revealing to us the inexhaustible swarm of metaphors that makes up the life of the world.

(Bazin 1946)

When he [Boudu] comes up on the bank, an extraordinary slow 360-degree pan shows us the countryside he sees before him. [T]his effect […] is of unequaled poetry precisely because what moves us is not the fact that this countryside is once again Boudu’s domain, but that the banks of the Marne, in all the richness of their detail, are intrinsically beautiful […] Renoir’s films are [thus] made up of the surfaces of the objects photographed […] The most visual and most sensual of film-makers is […] faithfully, lovingly fond of [his characters’] appearance, and through their appearance, of their soul.

(Bazin 1973: 85–90, original emphasis)

Clearly enough, empirical reality is involved in the above examples, but only so that the reality of appearance can break through, i.e., so that the spiritual essence of phenomena may be viewed on the surface of things. Re-reading, for one, ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ from this perspective therefore makes perfect sense. Sentences like ‘photography enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to its repro-duction’ (Bazin 1967a: 14) acquire a new and richer meaning if we consider them from the point of view of the ‘reality of appearance’ instead of the naïve transfer of empirical reality to the screen.

Furthermore, many times in his writings Bazin suggests that this ‘reality of appearance’ stems from some kind of apparent surplus being produced within appearance itself. He frequently mentions a surcroît/increase (Bazin 1961: 67) or a supplément/supplement (Bazin 1997a: 114) of meaning and privileges it over the sheer appearance of empirical reality:

Given the fact that this movement toward the real can take a thousand different routes, the apology for ‘realism’ per se, strictly speaking, means nothing at all. The movement is valuable only insofar as it brings increased meaning (itself an abstraction) to what is created.

(Bazin 1973: 85)

We recognize great directors when in their films reality exceeds reality. (Bazin 1956a: 26)

We would define as ‘realist,’ then, all narrative means that tend to bring an added measure of reality to the screen.

(Bazin 1971a: 27)

By contrast, André Cayatte and Charles Spaak are criticized because their screenplays ‘need a very different reality, a reality “without rest” that is exactly divisible by its initial ideas’ (Bazin 1997b: 99).

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Moreover,

what distinguishes reality from abstraction, the event from the idea, the credible character from a mere psychological equation, is the portion of mystery and ambiguity therein that resists any attempt at analysis. The only true fiction hero is in a way more than what he is.

(Bazin 1997b: 99)

By now we have come to the very same conclusions that we had reached regarding the psychoanalytical realities of films as social documentaries: the coincidence between essence and appearance by means of some kind of remnant or ‘symptom’. Thus, the question ‘does Bazin’s notion of reality refer to empirical reality or psychological reality?’ can now be answered: it refers to both, without prejudice. The philosophical importance of cinema, for Bazin, is precisely that in it the metaphysical dyad of subject–object may be diffused and discarded, to be replaced by something more fundamental: the surface manifestation of essence thanks to a non-assimilable remnant, which can take place either at the level of empirical reality or in the spectator’s mind. ‘Truth’ for him is this kind of coincidence, regardless of its being before or behind the camera, on-screen or in audience members’ heads, as Thomas Elsaesser has argued (2011: 9–11).

Two films by Luis Buñuel in particular provide us with striking confirma-tion of this: Los Olvidados (1950) and Susana (1951). Buñuel is famous for his ‘objectivity pushed so far that it penetrates its object through and through. It affirms this unmercifully at first, to better transcend its appearances, but by the same appearances’ (Bazin 1982a: 73). Los Olvidados is almost a paradigmatic case of what I have described as ‘empirical revelations’. On the surface of ugly and abject places and people, Buñuel’s ultra-objectivity detects something like a surplus, some grace and dignity mysteriously shining through (Bazin 1982b: 56–58). Susana is ‘the opposite of Los Olvidados on all counts’ (Bazin 1982c: 65). Yet, this oppositeness is too extreme not to hint at a substantial, paradoxical sameness:

Susana had escaped from a house of correction and is presented as incurably depraved. When, at the end, the police catch her and return her to the cell, the scriptwriter flashes back to an idyllic scene on the hacienda, where this demonic female had tried to wreak havoc […] The story is so obviously pushed to the extreme of its conventions that one simply has to make fun of it. This apology for moral order […] is too systematic not to undermine its own purpose […] Immoral because of the excess of its apologue, Susana remains immoral without a grudge or any deep, profound convictions.

(Bazin 1982c: 65–66)

In other words, Susana is a ‘social documentary’ making us face our own ideological prejudices to the point where we cannot help but feel they are something foreign and do not really belong to us. We are made to identify with our own fantasies, but this itself provokes a sort of rejection: the subject cannot come to terms with his or her own fantasy and ‘resists’ it. So, either at the level of empirical reality or at the level of collective unconsciousness, these ‘twin movies’ manifest a reality that presents a contradictory appearance, revealing its essence only by means of ineffable remains, something that escapes and

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even defies rationalization. Either behind or before the camera, then, this is the heart of the Bazinian notion of ‘reality’, a reality that, in the end, is linked to Lacan, Metz and Derrida as much as to Kracauer, Lukács and Grierson.

referenCes

Andrew, D. and Joubert-Laurencin, H. (eds) (2011), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife, New York: Oxford University Press.

Aprà, A. (1973), ‘Presentazione’, in A. Bazin (ed.), Che cosa è il cinema? (trans. A. Aprà), Milano: Garzanti, pp. ix–xv.

Bazin, A. (1946), ‘Sables de mort: un admirable documentaire’, L’Ecran français, 56, 24 July, p. 14.

—— (1947), ‘Tout film est un documentaire social’, Les Lettres françaises, 166, 25 July, p. 12.

—— (1949a), ‘La cité sans voiles’, Le Parisien libéré, 18 May, p. 2.—— (1949b), ‘Un grand film de René Clément: Au-delà des grilles’, Le Parisien

libéré, 16 November, p. 2.—— (1951a), ‘Boulevard du crepuscule: le crépuscule des stars’, Le Parisien

libéré, 23 April, p. 2.—— (1951b), ‘Cinéma et théologie’, Esprit, 176, February, pp. 237–45. —— (1955a), ‘Avec Naufrage volontaire et Forêt sacrée le reportage filmé devient

une aventure spirituelle’, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, 275, April, pp. 4–5.—— (1955b), ‘Le Diable n’est pas américain’, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, 270,

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vol. 3, Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, pp. 65–67.—— (1967a), ‘The ontology of the photographic image’, in A. Bazin (ed.),

What Is Cinema? (trans. H. Gray), vol. 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 9–16.

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suggested Citation

Cardullo, R. J. (2012), ‘Cinema as ‘social documentary’: The film theory of André Bazin, revisited’, Studies in French Cinema 13: 1, pp. 33–46, doi: 10.1386/sfc.13.1.33_1

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Contributor details

Robert J. Cardullo is Professor of Media and Communication in Izmir University of Economics, where he teaches courses in film history, theory and criticism. His essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as the Yale Review, Cambridge Quarterly, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. He is the author, editor or translator of a number of books, among them André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, Soundings on Cinema: Speaking to Film and Film Artists and In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art.

Contact: Izmir University of Economics, Sakarya Caddesi No. 156, 35330 Balçova, Izmir, Turkey.E-mail: [email protected]

Robert J. Cardullo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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