Dreaming of Cinema

Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media

Adam Lowenstein

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231538480
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Video games, YouTube channels, Blu-ray discs, and other forms of "new" media have made theatrical cinema seem "old." A sense of "cinema lost" has accompanied the ascent of digital media, and many worry film's capacity to record the real is fundamentally changing. Yet the Surrealist movement never treated cinema as a realist medium and understood our perceptions of the real itself to be a mirage. Returning to their interpretation of film's aesthetics and function, this book reads the writing, films, and art of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, André Breton, André Bazin, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Joseph Cornell and recognizes their significance for the films of David Cronenberg, Nakata Hideo, and Atom Egoyan; the American remake of the Japanese Ring (1998); and a YouTube channel devoted to Rock Hudson. Offering a positive alternative to cinema's perceived crisis of realism, this innovative study enriches the meaning of cinematic spectatorship in the twenty-first century.

1

Enlarged Spectatorship

From Realism to Surrealism: Bazin, Barthes, and The (Digital) Sweet Hereafter

In “The Myth of Total Cinema” (1946) film theorist André Bazin writes, “Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short, cinema has not yet been invented!”¹ In “The Third Meaning” (1970) cultural semiotician Roland Barthes states, “Forced to develop in a civilization of the signified, it is not surprising that (despite the incalculable number of films in the world) the filmic should still be rare … so much so that it could be said that as yet the film does not exist.”² Although Bazin’s “cinema” and Barthes’s “filmic” are not equivalent terms, the similarities between these declarations suggest the neglected trajectory in film theory this chapter seeks to trace: pursuing surrealism’s influence on Bazin and Barthes in order to illuminate how their shared commitment to the realism of the photographic image, so often misunderstood as a naively literalist stance, is much more accurately described as an investment in surrealism. In the chapter’s second half this revised take on Bazin and Barthes will be tested against our current desire to understand cinema’s role in the digital age of new media. By examining The Sweet Hereafter as an intermediated text characterized by modes of spectatorship brought to the fore in the new media era—that is, as a text that exists for spectators between the media forms of Russell Banks’s 1991 source novel, Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film adaptation, and New Line Home Video’s 1998 DVD—I will attempt to demonstrate how today’s possibilities for intermediated spectatorship demand that we revisit yesterday’s surrealist visions of “enlarged” cinematic spectatorship.³

The notion of considering Bazin and Barthes together may seem a rather unpromising point of departure. After all, Bazin’s passionate devotion to cinema characterizes his work as clearly as Barthes’s ambivalent, self-described “resistance to film” (TM 66) marks his own. Although both men frequently ponder the nature of cinema by turning to related media forms for instructive comparisons, they tend to spin these comparisons (especially between photography and cinema) in very different directions. For example, in “Death Every Afternoon” (1949) Bazin asserts that “a photograph does not have the power of film; it can only represent someone dying or a corpse, not the elusive passage from one state to the other.”⁴ When Barthes begins his own meditation on the relays between photography, death, and mourning in Camera Lucida (1980), he admits, “I decided I liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which I nonetheless failed to separate it.”⁵ Although Barthes does refer briefly to Bazin later in Camera Lucida (a reference to which I will return), the passing mention seems more puzzling than enlightening. As Colin MacCabe observes while comparing Camera Lucida with Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), “Once one has noticed the parallels between Bazin’s and Barthes’s theses, it becomes absolutely extraordinary that Barthes makes no mention of Bazin in his bibliography.” MacCabe concludes that Barthes’s exclusion of Bazin indicates just how “immense” the differences that divide these two texts really are, however “striking” their similarities may appear to be.⁶ But perhaps these similarities run even deeper than we imagined.

BAZIN, SARTRE, AND PHOTOGRAPHIC SURREALISM

Dudley Andrew has discovered persuasive evidence in Bazin’s unpublished notes for how “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” was written in direct response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’imaginaire (1940), the very same book to which Barthes dedicates Camera Lucida.⁷ Sartre, whose philosophy in 1940 was powerfully influenced by Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology without having fully developed the existentialism that would structure his later work, devotes painstaking attention in L’imaginaire to distinguishing between perception and imagination. He describes perception as our sensual observation of an object in the world and imagination as our mental representation (or “quasi-observation”)⁸ of such an object. For Sartre perception and imagination must not be confused as interrelated points on a continuum of consciousness; instead, they are fundamentally different forms of consciousness. Sartre maintains that “we can never perceive a thought nor think a perception. They are radically distinct phenomena. … In a word, the object of perception constantly overflows consciousness; the object of an image [or imagination] is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it; it is defined by that consciousness: one can never learn from an image what one does not know already” (TI 8, 10). This stark division between perception and imagination leads Sartre to claim that the photograph has no privileged relation to reality or to perception, that it suffers from the same “essential poverty” (TI 9, 16) that afflicts all acts of imagination: the photograph can only reveal what the viewer has already brought to his or her encounter with it, so it cannot teach us anything we do not already know. As Sartre explains, “if that photo appears to me as the photo ‘of Pierre,’ if, in some way, I see Pierre behind it, it is necessary that the piece of card is animated with some help from me, giving it a meaning it did not yet have. If I see Pierre in the photo, it is because I put him there” (TI 19, Sartre’s emphasis).

If Sartre provides the initial inspiration for both Bazin and Barthes in their work on the image, neither one ultimately agrees with Sartre’s account of the photograph. For Bazin, what makes the photograph (and cinema, as a photographic medium) so important is its ability to conjoin those aspects of perception and imagination that Sartre divides. If Sartre’s photograph excludes objective perception (or “observation”) in favor of subjective imagination (or “quasi-observation”), then Bazin’s photograph unites imagination’s subjectivity with perception’s objectivity. To quote the famous passage from “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”:

The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there the gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love. By the power of photography, the natural image of a world that we neither know nor can know, nature at last does more than imitate art: she imitates the artist.⁹

Here Bazin ascribes to the photograph the very power that Sartre denies it: the power to reveal to the viewer something about the world that the viewer neither knows through imagination nor can know through perception. According to Bazin, the photograph captures, and allows us to glimpse, a reality that eludes both perception and imagination by uniting mechanical objectivity (which he describes as the “impassive” perception belonging to the camera, not to the viewer) with affective subjectivity (which he describes as the “love” of the viewer responding to this reality newly revealed through photography).¹⁰ For Sartre, when one detects true “life” or “expression” in a photograph, it is due solely to the viewer’s input (TI 17). For Bazin the photographic experience that reveals the world anew is forged between the camera’s contribution and the viewer’s contribution.

Bazin’s sense of the photographic experience as a union of perception and imagination, of mechanical objectivity and affective subjectivity, mirrors André Breton’s vision of a surrealist union between dream and reality in certain important respects. As I mentioned in my introduction, Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” includes the following formulation: “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.”¹¹ Although Breton’s surreality incorporates a number of explicitly political dimensions that Bazin’s photographic realism does not, both men aim to dissolve distinctions between objectivity and subjectivity, perception and imagination, nature and representation.¹² Indeed, in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” Bazin turns to the case of surrealist photography to crystallize what he describes as photography’s capacity to conjoin two different ambitions that have structured the history of Western painting: “pseudorealism” and “true realism.” For Bazin “pseudorealism” (OP 12) manifests itself as trompe l’oeil illusionism—a variety of visual deceptions that trick the eye into mistaking representation for reality. “Pseudorealism” is rooted in humanity’s psychological need to duplicate the natural world through representation or to “have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures” (OP 10), a psychological condition Bazin diagnoses as a “mummy complex” (OP 9) or a “resemblance complex” (OP 13). “True realism” (OP 12), in contrast, is rooted in the aesthetic rather than the psychological, in “the expression of spiritual reality wherein the symbol transcend[s] its model” (OP 11). In other words art that uncovers reality’s hidden essence counts as “true realism” by elevating an aesthetic commitment to revealing essential reality above the psychological need for illusionism’s duplication of superficial reality.

The surrealist, according to Bazin, marries psychological “pseudorealism” to aesthetic “true realism” by erasing “the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real” (OP 15). The evidence for this marriage can be seen in “the fact that surrealist painting combines tricks of visual deception [a hallmark of ‘pseudorealism’] with meticulous attention to detail [a hallmark of ‘true realism’]” (OP 16). Bazin’s very terms pseudorealism and true realism echo Sartre’s distinction between perception’s “observation” and imagination’s “quasi-observation,” but surrealism gives Bazin the means to interweave what Sartre separates—Bazin outlines those aspects of “pseudorealism” present in perception and “true realism” in imagination. The result is that Bazin’s most complete formulation of realism in “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” emerges as a version of surrealism, where the rational and irrational meet, while Sartre’s notion of reality is constituted by maintaining strict divisions between the levels of rational perception and “irrational” imagination.¹³

When Bazin claims that “a very faithful drawing may actually tell us more about the model but despite the promptings of our critical intelligence it will never have the irrational power of the photograph to bear away our faith” (OP 14), he revises Sartre’s account of the photograph in order to argue that photographic media possess a special ability to “bear away our faith,” to combine rational fact with irrational belief.¹⁴ We will recall Sartre’s insistence that “if I see Pierre in the photo, it is because I put him there.” But Bazin maintains, in effect, that “seeing” Pierre in the fullness of reality is not simply an act of viewer imagination (putting Pierre in the photo) but of complicated collaboration between the mechanical objectivity of the photographic medium and the affective subjectivity of the viewer’s response to, and belief in, the photographic image. For Bazin it is the surrealists who truly grasp the unique potential of photographic media to stage an encounter between camera and viewer where the image of an object emerges in both its rational concreteness and its irrational essence. This is the object understood through the lens of what Breton refers to as surreality, or the resolution of dream and reality, and what Bazin refers to as factual hallucination, or the resolution of psychological “pseudorealism” and aesthetic “true realism.” The surrealist, according to Bazin, insists on precisely that resolution of imagination and perception refused by Sartre—an insistence that “every image is to be seen as an object and every object as an image” (OP 15–16). Bazin continues, “Hence photography ranks high in the order of surrealist creativity because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, an hallucination that is also a fact” (OP 16).¹⁵

Here Bazin attributes to surrealism an understanding of photography’s most remarkable power—to present the world as a factual hallucination, as an irrational dream coextensive with rational reality. In other words Bazin sees photographic media as having privileged access to certain modes of surrealist revelation—modes that bridge the gap not only between Sartre’s perception and imagination but also between unknowable nature and knowable representation. When Rosalind Krauss summarizes the “aesthetic of surrealism” as “an experience of reality transformed into representation,”¹⁶ she helps shed light on what Bazin, himself a one-time “fanatic surrealist” and “energetic practitioner of automatic writing,”¹⁷ may be after when he turns to surrealism near the end of “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” The experience of reality made photographic, in its capacity to merge the knowable and the unknowable by encompassing both mechanical objectivity and viewer subjectivity, takes shape for Bazin, finally, as a surrealist phenomenon. Just prior to concluding that “photography is clearly the most important event in the history of plastic arts” (OP 16), Bazin chooses to describe the photographic experience of reality in very particular terms: through surrealism’s unmasking of reality as surreality.

This is not to say that every time Bazin speaks of “realism” in his work on the cinema, what he really means is “surrealism.” This would be impossible, for “realism,” as Bazin’s central theoretical concept and critical standard, undergoes a number of significant transformations within and between his most important writings. But it is striking, especially given the conventional interpretations of Bazin as primarily concerned with cinema’s faithful (even indexical) reproduction of preexisting reality, how often Bazin’s “realism” moves toward the territory of surrealism.¹⁸

Consider, for example, Bazin’s profound admiration for surrealism’s most important filmmaker, Luis Buñuel, whom he calls “one of the rare poets of the screen—perhaps its greatest.”¹⁹ Bazin insists that “Buñuel’s surrealism is no more than a desire to reach the bases of reality; what does it matter if we lose our breath there like a diver weighted down with lead, who panics when he cannot feel sand underfoot?”²⁰ Or consider Bazin’s enthusiasm for Federico Fe...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Cinema as Digital Dream Machine
• 1. Enlarged Spectatorship: From Realism to Surrealism: Bazin, Barthes, and The (Digital) Sweet Hereafter
• 2. Interactive Spectatorship: Gaming, Mimicry, and Art Cinema: Between Un chien andalou and eXistenZ
• 3. Globalized Spectatorship: Ring Around the Superflat Global Village: J-Horror Between Japan and America
• 4. Posthuman Spectatorship: The Animal in You(Tube): From Los olvidados to “Christian the Lion”
• 5. Collaborative Spectatorship: The Surrealism of the Stars: From Rose Hobart to Mrs. Rock Hudson
• Afterword: Marking Cinematic Time
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List