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A Bazinian Half-Century

THOMAS ELSAESSER

Andre Bazin is taken by many to be the undisputed father of modern film studies, the classic

whom we make our students read but also the classic to whom we return ourselves. My title al­

ludes to the fifty years since the publication of the first collection of his essays, volume one of

Qu'est-ce que le cinema? But "The Bazinian Half-Century" alludes as well to Michel Foucault's

notorious prediction that "perhaps one day this [i.e., the twentieth) century will be known as

the Deleuzian century."1 By suggesting that a more realistic estimation might be half this length,

and, for our field, to give the honor to Bazin, I nonetheless want to acknowledge Deleuze's

parr-in addition to Serge Daney's tireless advocacy-in reigniting the discussion around the

master's unexpected topicality. In the special Autumn 2007 issue of Cinemas titled "La theorie

du cinema - enfin en crise," Bazin, flanked by Roger Leenhardt and the Cahiers du Cinema

generation, is situated at the center of a renewal of film theory in the spirit of discovery and

disclosure, terms Deleuze would endorse in opposition to aesthetic programs serving social

constructivism or cultural studies.

This "finally in crisis" of film theory may sound odd to non-French ears, for when has film

theory nor been in crisis? In fact- if we think of Arnheim, Balazs, Kracauer, Bazin, Merz, Heath,

Daney, Mulvey, and Ddeuze-is not film theory the product of the d ifferent crises that the ci­

nema has undergone, such as the coming of sound, the trauma of fascism, and the ubiquity of

television, not to mention the crisis in the humanities occasioned by structuralism and decon­

struction, as well as rhe crisis of patriarchy highlighted by feminism? Deleuze's theory of the

"rime-image" responds ro the crisis of rhe "movement-image," when European cinema realized the

impossibility alter Auschwitz of telling stories or inhabiting a world, of aligning body and mind

(perception, sensation, and action) in a coherent continuum. Perhaps film theory has always been

a reflection on one or another "death of cinema" (the death of early cinema brought about by

classical narrative in the '20s, the death of silent cinema by sound in the '30s, the death of the

studio system by television in the '50s, the decay of cinephilia by the closure of neighborhood

cinemas in the '70s, rhe death of projection by the video recorder in the '80s, the death of celluloid

by digitization in rhe '90s). Every film theory may be a funeral as much as a birth announcement.

The present moment stands under the crisis-sign of the digital divide. In a graduate sem­

inar at Yale University called "What W.'ls Cinema," we adopted a set of simple maxims: rather

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than reading this "what was cinema" as a question, we imagined a full stop, acknowledging the

so-called "death of cinema" debate but refusing to presume: knowledge about what cinema ac·

cuallywas, or to predicate what it no longer is. The: full stop allows for ucinema afier cinema," for

ucinema next to cinema," and indeed for cinema to redefine itself rc:rrospccrivdy and retroac·

rively, by turning out ro have been something slightly different from what we have thought it

was. This interrogation of a seemingly entrenched medium rakes inspiration from Bazin him·

self, who in reviewing the: first volume of Georges Sadoul's monumental His to ire generaie du cinema, concluded that "every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take

it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invc:mc:d!"2 A fortiori, this

must apply to cinema today: the effiorescence of early cinema scudies occurring in parallel to

developments in digital media are indeed bringing us closer to the medium's origins.

In the seminar, a second maxim followed directly from rhe first, namely that we reread

Bazin not to ask uwhat would Bazin have said about the simation of the cinema today?" but

"what did Bazin say about the situation of the cinema today," and using what vocabulary? So:

banned from discussion was the word udigital" and the term ofien used in relation to Bazin but

never used by him, "indexicality." Whether such a counterfactual approach is nothing more

than an exercise de styLe, its didactic and heuristic value encourages one: (a) to read Bazin more

carefully, (b) to think in categories that may have pertinence: beyond the present, and (c) to

confirm that classics-and Bazin is nothing if not a classic-have to be reread and reinterpreted

by every generation anew.

Extending the Range of "W~at Is Cinema,,

Bazin is useful today because he can bridge the ofien fatal divide: between photographic and

post-photographic cinema simply by the fact that he did not know it existed. His categories

were so well informed by classical philosophy and aesthetics that he makes us look beyond our

narrow and local view of changes we: take: to be radicaL At the same time, his key articles were:

written in a very specific historical context and against a background of ofi:en highly polemical

debates. The famous "Ontology" essay, for instance, was first published in a volume entitled

Probiemes de La peinture and therefore engages with painting: classic and modern, but also with

baroque: art (which Bazin didn't much like, calling it "convulsive catalepsy") and surrealism

(which he: did appreciate). He defines the: cinema as painting's extension as well as its rc:dc:mp·

cion, yet precisely not in terms of its heightened realism or mimesis but rather because of its

alternative genealogy: the cinema's family relation with masks and moldings, with the Turin

Shroud and the "taking ofimpressions." Much of recent an history in the spirit of A by War burg

(from Hans Belting ro Georges Didi-Huberman, from Michael Fried to Hal Foster) finds here

its confirmation for a way of thinking differently about images in the post-photographic age, by

reference: to pre-Renaissance art, trying to go beyond debates about "representationH and elab­

orate an idea of bodily mimesis not trapped by the mirror-metaphor.

Bazin's double position- universalist thinker and local critic, with specific prc:fc:rc:nces

and dislikes-has been used to attack him: one thinks of the polemics in Cahiers' rival journal

Positif, by Robert Benayoun or Gerard Gozlan, or subsequently by critics of the realism-effect,

such as Jean-Louis Comolli or Colin MacCabe. Yet he is also enlisted on the side of the argu·

ment that would see the post-photographic cinema as not being cinema at all. By endorsing the

A B AZ INIAN HAL F- CENTURY

·death of cinema" one nor only mourns its loss but opens the way for the cinema co finally have

a history, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, whereupon one can elaborate the proper

methodology for i cs study, work on its canon, and establish an agreed-upon corpus of its auteurs

and masterpieces.

Bazin's growing importance is due, however, to the very opposite of the need for closure.

Sensing char cinema would change forever our idea of rime, linearity, and temporal succession,

he extends what cinema is by making us reconsider what it was, revisiting its past so as to open

once more this past's own future, rather than foreclose it, while interpreting the present in a way

chat not only links it co the: past but also retroactively contributes to it. As T. S. Eliot argued in

· Tradition and the individual Talent" (1919), the introduction of a new work or a new way of

thinking not only changes the future but also the past, because the new work illuminates de­

ments and establishes connections neither noted nor recognized before. For instance, and de­

cisively, with a brilliant stroke Bazin put to rest the long debate about whether the cinema could

be an art, since it was based on mechanical reproduction. Arguing against the dominant view,

held by Eisenstein, Arnheim, and others ("the formalists"), that for the cinema to be art, there

had to be human intentionality and intervention, Bazin fan10usly insists on mechanical repro­

duction as the key aspect of photographically based film: "For the first time an image of the

world is formed automatically, without rhe creative intervention of man . . .. All the arts arc

based on the presence of man, only photography derives an advantage from his absencc."3 In the

context of a debate chat had raged for some twenty years, this was a truly counterintuitive claim,

its revolutionary impact usually mitigated by being attributed to his Catholicism. But from

coday's perspective-where the question "is cinema art?" no longer exercises us in quite the

same way-it is an insight that still points forward and reverberates backward. For instance, we

usually cite Marey in one breath with Eadweard Muybridge as the inventors of chronophotog­

raphy and rhus as precursors of the cinematic moving image. But Bazin sees Marcy and Muy­

bridge ar opposite sides. Marey-who knew Henri Bergson, as they both had positions at the

College de France- had lit d e co do with painting or still photography, which were Muybridge's

reference points. Instead, he concentrated on cracking, tracing, and recording movement that

emanates from both sentient and natural phenomena: he was as interested in the possibility of

recording the shapes of smoke as he was in the movement of humans, as interested in the vibra­

tions of bees' wings as he was in recording blood-pressure, heartbe.1t, pulse, breach.

Marey's use o f rhe cinematograph, the oscillograph, x-rays, and other evolving technol­

ogies of vision aimed at natural or man-made phenomena that previously could not be recorded,

scored, or imaged. One might say chat he continued the original promise of photography, chat

of being "the pencil of nature;' working without the intervention of the human will or agency.

Thanks co the moving image, apparently contingent phenomena could now be visualized, and

thereby reveal hitherto undiscovered patterns, their regularities and temporalities:

"Photography affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake." Making

Marey one of Bazin's predecessors suggests that among his successors are not only Daney and

Deleuze, but also Friedrich Kittler and Mary Ann Doane, the latter trying to understand the

relation between the inscription and storage of audiovisual data- their registration and legibil­

ity for the human eye and ear- in a nonreductive manner, and thereby conceiving of the index

and the materiality of the imprint in ways that do not confine them to the special case of

photography.

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Bazin, in short, can be fruitfully understood to srand at rhe intersection of several geneal­

ogies of the moving image; hdpful for the difference between "cinema" and "film," between

fiction and documentary, he also illuminates other aspects of contemporary visual culture. I

want to outline three intersecting lines char bring us effectively to three Bazins: Bazin the

media-archaeologist ("the delay of cinema" /"rhe cinema is yet to be invented"), Bazin the aes­

rhetician (not the "naive realist" but the "sophisticated illusionist"), and Bazin the philosopher

of cinema (not the misguided epistemologist, dependent on the "indc::xicality• of the photo­

graphic image).

Bazin as Media-Archaeologist

In "The Myth ofTotal Cinema," Bazin provides a surprisingly relevant revisionist program and

research agenda. There he demonstrates the impossibility of film history wirhour a history of

other entertainmem industries and other moving image practices, exactly as rhematized by

recent scholars of early cinema and of its conditions and spaces of reception. Paying due atten­

tion to the differem media technologies, without attributing to them determining influence, he

carefully balances the idealist vision of cinema as the "fulfillment of mankind's age old drean1"

against the contingencies surrounding the inventions of the technologies necessary to bring

about the dream. He mentions the still insufficiently tmderstood "delay" in the implementation

of cinema, the arbitrariness of its eventual definition, as well as the gap between the various

pioneers' goals and the consequences of their labors. Thus he implicitly shows how an archaeo­

logical approach might supplement (if not altogether supersede) what until now we have

understood by film history. In fact, he positions himself not far from those who today argue

that in rhe competition among media, the eventual victory of cinema or the survival of its ap­

paratus is not a foregone conclusion. Daney has pointed out that Bazin was perfectly capable of

thinking about the "disappearance" of cinema, in the sense of its apparatic contingency, seeing

this not as a death bur as an ongoing transformation or consummation of a way of seeing and­

even more so-ofbeing in the world.4

Daney's idea of the cinema as "the skin of history" also comments interestingly on Bazin's

remarkably dialectical understanding of the relation berween realism, imagination, and illu­

sionism. Consider the statement " ... cinematic reality could not do without ... docun1entary

reality, bur if it is to become a truth of the imagination, it must die and be born again of reality

irself."5 Depending on the meaning we give to each occurrence of the term "reality," the cinema

appears as a transformational agent that either intervenes in a process of change and renewal

through self-effacement, or constitutes an act of appropriation involving rhe destruction of

what you wish to preserve: a commonly observed fare of"documentary reality." Bazin may nor

draw chis ulrimate conclusion, bur the passage shows him anything but a na"ive realist, while

much points to the sophisticated advocate of illusionism, concerned with reality and illusion,

truth and belief as mutually interdependent rather than opposed categories. Rereading the

famous article on De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948), one notices once more how complex and

nuanced Bazin's views on realism actually are; not only does he repeatedly insist that "realism in

art can only be achieved in one way-through arrifice,"6 but he imagines a kind of self-abolition

of cinema in the dialectic between "spectacle" and "event." whose overcoming-rightly or

wrongly-he associates with De Sica's film: "No more actors, no more story, no more sets,

A 13A Z I N IAN HALF-CENTURY

which is to say rhar in rhe perfect aesthetic illusion of reality, there is no more cinema."7 This

self-abolition can be read against the neorealist credo it here supports, for it envisages the pos­

sibility of artifice taking on a life of its own. When, in "A Note on Umberto D.," Bazin suggests

enigmatically char "rhe outside world is reduced to being an accessory to ... pure action, which

is sufficient to itself in the same way that algae deprived of air produce the oxygen they need,"8

rhe medium is no longer measured against some a priori "reality" bur has the density, agency,

and resistance oflife itself. Bur this means, conversely, that the cinema may disappear precisely

because, complexly animated and ubiquitous, the cinematic way of seeing and being in the

world-irs way of picturing rhe self, irs logics of the visible and its narratives of conflict, resolu­

tion, and redemption-no longer need ac tors, plots, or sets, in order to be experienced as our

lived reality's signifier of authenticity and "truth." Or as Jean-Luc Nancy would say: "the lie of

the image is the truth of our world."9

This reading of Bazin differs from that of Daney, who in his early essay on his forebear

cites the san1e passage: "Sometimes [Bazin) declares the limit has been reached: 'no more ac­

tors, no more story, no more mise-en-scene, that is to say finally the perfect aesthetic illusion of

reality: no more cinema.' \XIhoever passes through the screen and meets reality on the other

side has gone beyond jouissance.Ifhe makes it back (but in what state? obsessional for sure) and

if he is still speaking, it will be to talk at length about what he has missed the most: the prohib­

ired."10 In other words, Daney, ever the cine-fils, insists on rhe cinema's alrerity and transgres­

siveness vis-a-vis contemporary visual culture, bur he is not entirely sure if he has Bazin's

support.

Bazin and "Indexicality"

Having redefined the realiry-srarus or "ontology" of the image at the outset of his career with

two distincc terms- "trace" and "imprint," rather than truth and likeness-Bazin could go on

ro provide a highly differentiated discussion of specific films and genres, including those of the

fantastic and the "marvelous." Take his essay on Crin bLmc (White Mane, 1952) and Le Bailon

rouge ( 7he Red BaLloon, 1956) by Albert Lamorisse. For Bazin, the fact that Lamorisse had to

use hundreds of red balloons and six different horses to "play" the single object/animal in no

way diminishes rhe rea lism of these films, for their magical effects succeed because staging and

editing give the flow of images a unique "spatial density" -Bazin's very modern term for rhe

cinema's w1ique form of realism. Shurding between "documentary" and "fiction," bur nonethe­

less making both a condition of their "truth," these films "owe everything to the cinema [the

respect for the unity of space), precisely because they owe nothing to the cinema .... If the film

is to fulfill itself aestherically, we are ro believe in the reality of what is happening while knowing

it to be tricked .... The screen reflects the ebb and flow of our imagination, which feeds on a

reality for which it plans to substitute. Correspondingly, whar is imaginary on the screen must

have the spatial density of something real."11 This passage shows Bazin perfectly capable of de­

fining an "ontology" without restricting it to first-level indexicaliry; that is, "this space and

place" and "this moment in time" can serve as a "substitute."

Although based on photography, Bazin's ontology of cinematic realism is above all a

theory about rhe inscription and storage of time, rather than being dependent on what we

usually understand by image, namely mimesis and representation. "Spatial density," while exem-

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plified in Bazin by the long take and depth of field, is not identical with these stylistic options,

nor inherently more "namrar or "ontologically grounded," because "spatial densityD is always a

result of artifice, selection, and design ( i.e., mise- en-scene), or alcemacively montage of one sort

or another. His famous example of the lioness and the child together in the same shot in Where

No Vultures Fly ( 1951) insists that realism resides in spatial homogeneity, which in chis instance

happens to be the opposite of montage. On the other hand, spatial homogeneity and montage

are not per se incompatible, as for instance proven in Harun Farocki's Images of the World and

Inscription of fftar ( 1988) or Schnittselle! Interfoce ( 1995 ). Likewise, grainy video footage can

have spatial density, and so does the high-definition digital image of the opening shot of

Michael Haneke's Cache (2005), even though it plunges us into an ontological void when we

realize that it is in fact a "recording" and noc given in "real- timeD (and that the footage of the

videotape must have been produced "digitally").

Bazin's concerns with time, the interval, and the series play into the debate, still ongoing,

between photography and the cinema, stillness and movement, as well as absence and presence.

First, he famously distinguished the cinema from photography by arguing that the latter cap­

tures "change mummified"; later, in his essay on "Theater and Cinema" he elaborated: "The ci­

nema does something [more] strangely paradoxical [chan the photograph]. It makes a molding

of the object as it exists in time, and furthermore, makes an imprint of the duration of an

object .... Hence it is no longer as certain as it was that there is no middle stage between pres­

ence and absence. It is likewise at the ontological level that the effectiveness of the cinema has

its source. It is false to say chat the screen is incapable of putting us 'in the presence' of the actor.

It does so in the same way as a mirror-but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of

which retains the image."12 Most argun1ents about indexicality (and its loss in digital processes)

are fixated on space, not considering the way a temporal index may apply to nonphocographic

technical media, as Bazin implies here. Think how important the time-coding of images has

become today, in the "real-time" surveillance of human beings ( in traffic, train stations, shop­

ping malls), and in the incessant monitoring of nonhuman movements (weather, stock prices,

data traffic).

Bazin and Philosophy Bazin can be considered the alpha and omega of modern film theory, because he stands at its

beginning, while he may well preside over its (temporary) end, perhaps even over its rebirth.

One could describe this history as the circular movement that has led film theory since 1945

from a focus on "aesthetics" to "anthropology," then from "anthropology" to "psychology" and

"ideology," before returning to "aesthetics" at the beginning of the 1990s. A more philosophical

vocabulary would suggest this to be a movement from "ontology" to "epistemology" and back

to a redefined "ontology."

Bazin stands at the beginning, because he subtly translated the perennial prewar ques­

tion: "if the cinema is art, what are its uniquely defining characteristics?" into an anthropolog­

ical inquiry, without foreclosing aesthetic and philosophical dimensions. His "Oncology" essay

shifted the terms of the debate as is evident in the work of key figures of the first generation of

postwar theorists. The most prominent of these, Edgar Morin, followed Bazin's line of thought

in Cinema or the Imaginary Man (u d nbna ou L'homme imaginaire, 1956), but in giving a

A BAZINIAN HALF-CENTURY

broadly conceived account of cinema in civilization, he also differed from him in the kind of

anthropology he appealed to. For Morin this medium is a product of roolmaking, and rhus a

prosthetic extension of the human senses, providing evolutionary advantages entailed by the

disembodied eye in voyages of discovery and conquest; while for Bazin the cinema offers pro­

tection against and preservation from death and material decay, aligning it with ancient burial

customs, embalming, plaster molds, death masks, and then with portraiture of the high and

mighty as well as the family albums of ordinary people. But Morin and Bazin complement each

other in indicating the role of cinema as mirror and double, fundamental co the formation and

the crises of consciousness and self-reAexivicy, while aiding mankind's ambiguous quest for

self-creation and self-perfection.

Because of its obsession with death, photographically based theories of the cinema in the

wake ofBazin (and Benjamin) have tended ro focus on memory, melancholia, and mourning,

where the cinema is always already an art ofloss and precarious recovery, and where cinephilia

compensates as that anxious love of the moment, of transient and evanescent pleasures, tinged

with nostalgia and regret, ready co case itself in a retrospective mode. Such a theory of the ci­

nema is usually called uontological" because of the tide of Bazin's famous essay, but Bazin was

neither melancholic nor dystopic with respect to the present state of the world. The most

scriking characteristic of his anthropological-ontological vision is that it is anti-mimetic,

whereas Morin's sociological, more evolutionary approach could be called mimetic, in the sense

of"training" survival skills.

Thus, when he discusses Egyptian mummies, the Shroud ofTurin, and the memorializing

function of early photographs, Bazin stands_right in the line of current art history which has

moved from connoisseurship and canon-formation ro what Hans Belting calls "image-anthro­

pology," conceived as coming to the "end of art-history," while incorporating photography, the

cinema, video, and installation art. Regardless of whether this is a friendly or hostile takeover of

the cinema by the museum and an enlarged art history, the paradoxes of such rescue operations

would have pleased Bazin, and it is clearly a debate he could join easily and effectively. In the

same vein, Bazin's anthropological perspective can lead to contemporary debates on modernity,

perception, and visuality, like those associated with Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer,

and with disciples of Foucault, such as Jonathan Crary. He also would have had much to con­

tribute to the new phenomenology. evident in rides and terms like "the skin of film; "tacriliry;'

the "haptic," and "embodied vision."

Because we have tended to prefer the term "indexicality" to "ontology," Bazin's ontol­

ogy-driven anthropology made his transit co our era a difficult passage. Indeed, just after h is

death, his film theory was denounced at Positifas "bad oncology," and as "Catholic." Then he

came massively under assault by the second generation of film theorists (Christian Mecz,Jean­

Louis Comolli, Jean-Louis Baudry in France; Peter Wollen, Steven Heath, Laura Mulvey in

Britain), whose apparatus theory and psychoanalysis amounted to an epistemology, not an

ontology of the cinema. Reality, knowledge, and even subjectivity were taken as "effects"

based on miscognicion. As a consequence, Bazin's realism was taken as naively pertaining co

truth-claims, announcing a correspondence between what was on the screen and what was in

the world, clearly a fallacious or "ideological" position. However, Bazin, as we have seen, had

always maintained a more nuanced, aesthetic view, arguing that realism is a function of arti­

fice, and that realism comes by way of belief. This is a classically aesthetic stance, which can be

....::

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linked to post-Kanrian aesthetics of"play" and "make-believe" on one side and to an aesthet­

ically grounded pragmatism on the other; in any case Bazin does not seem to have held ro

straight episremic realism. His thinking is unique, because in it the anthropological perspec­

tive of the social historian is not severed from the aesthetic value judgment of the critic; more­

over, his philosophical reflection on the ontology of the photographic image never denies the

cinema's epistemological dimension. Recall the final sentence of the "Ontology" essay: "On

rhe other hand, of course, the cinema is also a language." 13 ln "The Evolution of the Language

of Cinema," language is understood as a practice governed by rules and conventions, where a

stylistic "grammar" serves specific purposes: in other words, Bazin accommodates both an

argument in favor of "the content of the form" and one amenable to a constructivist view of

verisimilitude ("realism in the arts can only be achieved one way-through artifice").

Paradoxically, when in the 1970s the epistemological view of cinema prevailed, the de­

nunciation of Bazin's "realist" ideology as an un-deconstructed "subject-effect" actually

amounted less to a break with Bazin than to a manifestation of a disenchanted bazinism.

Wishing the cinema to provide "objective" knowledge, the new generation was disappointed

that it did not and could not. Psycho-semiotics, apparatus theory, and feminism all sub­

scribed to a Cartesian division of res cogitans and res extensa- of subject divided from

object-however much chis Carresianism may have been inverted to become skeptical and

agnostic, sometimes to rhe point of nihilism. Inverting Bazin's premises, epistemic film theory

depended on balancing two sets of assumptions: first, chat there is a real world we strive to

know through vision, and second, that there is the film-world that serves our demand for

knowledge. When brought together, these assumptions resulted in a third: that knowledge

can and does change the world, and thu5 that the cinema can, and indeed should, change the

world.

It is rhis package of implicit assumptions (or "fallacies") that American cognirivists have

attacked in "screen theory" or "apparatus theory," arguing that it rested on (false) epistemolog­

ical premises, notably about the equation of seeing and knowing, together with its mirror inver­

sion in seeing as miscognition. NoCI Carroll, David Bordwell, Richard Allen and Murray Smith

have variously delegitimized these concepts of illusionism and miscognition as creating false

epistemological problems around the nature of perception, and its relation to consciousness

and truth.

The philosophical core of their objection revolves around the kind of"seeing· char cine­

matic perception involves. Apparatus theory treats the spectator-screen relationship as if it were

based on a perceptual "illusion" (by suggesting that objects which move on the screen are really

there) which in turn assun1es that vision is always transitive, in other words, that it is a matter

of"seeing something," when it could just as well be aspect seeing, or "seeing-as" (in Wirtgen­

stein's terminology). At the same time, cognitivists and analytical philosophers question the

way apparatus theory unwittingly reinforces (bourgeois) ideology's disembodied, decontexru­

alized, dematerialized version of watching movies, while critiquing (with its call for "ami-illu­

sionism") mainstream cinema for producing such alienated, commodified forms of human

perception. Why, they ask, should perception, recognition, and apprehension of objects,

people, or places in the moving image involve deception or the suspension of disbelief?14

Indirect-and as it turned out, unwelcome-support for this cognitivist attack on Grand

Theory's epistemology came from a more influential source in the development of film theory,

A BAZJNJAN HALF-CENTURY

Gilles Deleuze. Sweeping aside altogether the epistemological questions surrounding the

image, the subject, language, and knowledge, Deleuze put ontology back on the agenda. Rather

than regarding cinema as a (deceptive) epistemological practice that opposes true/false, appear­

ance/being, body/ spirit, Deleuze imagined cinema to be something not in opposition to life

bur a part of life, open to the Bergson ian universe of energy and process, ofbecoming, ofinten­

,ities.

After Deleuze, cinema was no longer about meaning-making, about subjectification, or

about the "representatio n of . .. ~; it was now about movement as rhe manifestation of"life," and

about "rime" (or its suspension) as the medium in which humans experience life. The Bazinian

phrase, " [the cinema] makes a molding of the object as it exists in time," 15 now sounds remark­

ably Deleuzian, because in rhe latter's version rhe cinema had best be regarded as a unique

an1algan1 of mind and matter, beyond any subject-object division. For Deleuze and perhaps for

Bazin, this amalgam, like a Spinozist "substance," fills the world, reorganizing the abstract and

the concrete, the animate and the inanimate, the actual and the virtual, the general and the

particular, necessitating a new classification of what exists, that is to say, a new ontology.

Stanley Cavell would probably nod in agreement, since he has himself. in Tht World

t 'mvtd: Reflections on tht Ontology of Film ( 1971 ), identified the essence of the cinematic as a

form of unseeing or perceptive-attentive seeing, whereby films themselves teach us how to

look at them and how to think about them. Precisely because the cinema is a technical repro­

duction, people and things in the cinema are not represented, but present-as-de-presented,

and therefore touching us only insofar as we allow ourselves to be equally present in a mode of

being other than our usual meaning-makil)g, goal-pursuing selves. As William Rothman and

:\1arian Keene have summed up Cavell's film-ontology: "Coming to know what films are is

mseparable from acquiring self-knowledge." 16 Deleuze and Cavell, as well as Jean-Luc Nancy

and Giorgio Agamben, intimate chat the cinema's ontology is one of presence and appearance,

by which reality discloses itself to chose who have learned to "look," in the sense of remaining

open toward letting something enter before needing to "understand." As thinkers of an always

already mediated world, they hold our the prospect of a post-epistemological ontology of the

cinema. This seems a philosophically appropriate way of arguing that the cinema is amenable

to a critique in terms of belief and trust more than in terms of truth and falsehood or of reality

and its simulacrum/ manipulation. 1~ We have come full circle. IfBazin's Qu'est-ce qut le cinema? can no longer be construed as

a question of epistemology, it becomes once more a question of ontology, in the sense of"what

cinema is," or even: "cinema is." This in turn implies that we do not have co be "in the cinema"

m order co be (i.e., to feel, see, believe, and live) "in the (world of) cinema." Against the back­

ground of such an assumption, the question of knowing and of knowledge, of evidence and of

meaning (i.e., the question of an epistemology of the cinema), may be posed anew, this time

beyond radical skepticism and after constructivism. Here, too, Bazin can come to the rescue,

'ince his belief that the cinema has yet robe invented must mean today that the cinema-nei­

ther as reality's copy nor its illusory opposite, but its ever-present potential-always already

"knew" what it knew, as wel l as what it could not have "known." Put differently, and to repeat

in conclusion: it is nor a matter of asking what Ba.zin might have said about the new media but

what he did say about the new media. Enough reason, then, to read him again, and to conclude

that the Bazinian half-century is only just beginning.

11

12 LIN£AG£

Notes I . Michel Foucaulr,Dits ~~ Ecrits, 1954-1988, vol2 {Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 276.

2. Andre Bazin, "The Myth ofTotal C inema," in Wbat Is Cint:ma?vol. I. rrans. Hugh Gray (lkrkcley: Univer­

siryofCalifornia Press, 1967). 21.

3. Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image~ in Wbat Is Cin~ma?vol. I. 13.

4. "For Bazin, the horizon of cinema's history is cinema's disappearance. Until then, rhis h istory is indistinguish­

able from thar of a small difference char is the object of a consram negation: I know (rhar the image is nor

real) bur all the same ... [the formula for fetishism and disavowal]. W ith each technical change. the rranspar·

ency grows. the difference seems to ger smaller, the celluloid becomes rhe skin of Hisrory and the screen a

window open to the world." Serge Daney, "1l1e Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals)." in Rius ofRMlism:

Essays on Corporeal Cin~ma, ed. lvone Margulies, rrans. Mark A. Cohen (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2002), 34.

5. Bazin, "The Virrues and Limitations ofMomage." in What Is Cinmuz?vol. !. 47.

6. Bazin, "An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation." in Wbat Is

Cinmza? vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971 ), 26.

7. Bazin, "Bicycle Thief." in Wbatls Cinmza?vol. 2. 60.

8. Bazin, "De Sica: Metteuren Scene," in What Is Ciruma?vol. 2, 77.

9. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Alter Tragedy." a lecture in honor of Philippe Lacouc-Labanhe. at the New School Univer·

sity. April! 0, 2008.

10. Serge Daney, "The Screen ofFamasy (Bazin and Animals)," 34.

11. Bazin, "The Virtues and Limitations ofMomage." in Wbat Is Cinmza?vol. I, 46-48.

12. Bazin, "1l1earer and Cinema-Pan Two," in Wbat is Cinm1a?vol. I. 97

13. Bazin, "The Omology of the Photographic Image." 16.

14. Nod Carroll, Mystifjing Movia: Fads and Fallaci~s in Contmzporary Fzlm Th~ory (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1988). 891[

I S. Bazin, "Theater and Cinema-Parr Two." in Wbatls Cinmuz?vol. 1, 97.

16. William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell's Th~ World Vitwtd (Detroit, M I: Wayne Scare Un iver­

siry Press, 2000). 18.

17. If the epistemological question in the humanities during the 1970s and 1980s was above all prompted by the

negative assumption about rhe impossibility of secure knowledge and rhus was the expression of a radical

skepticism. where every ontology and every "order of things" was owed ro or based on a historically. ideolog­

ically, o r technologically determined "epimme," rhen one might have to reverse Foucault's archaeology of

knowledge and argue rhat every epistemology, every form ofknowledge today. already presupposes mediated

reality as "evidence" and as "given." Conversely. if cinema is our way of being on the way to a new ontology,

then of course this would be the besr proof char the cinema is also our episreme, in Foucault's sense, and that

the new oncology of the cinema would define our way of knowing and of nor knowing rhc world.