DOI Heft:
Zwrot kinematograficzny w praktyce i teorii sztuki / The Cinematic Turn in Art Practice and Theory
DOI Artikel:Dalle Vacche, Angela: André Bazin's film theory: art, science, religion
Zitierlink:https://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/artium_quaestiones2020/0200
194
Angela Dalle Vacche
letarian communism. Instead of greed or dogmatic ideologies as the mea-
sure of all things, Mourner's society of the future would cherish basic human
rights, including art and ordinary creativity as self-expression outside any
market value, celebrity status, or elitism. According to personalism, human
rights must be broadly social and grounded in a universal acknowledgement
of everybody's human dignity regardless of any affiliations. Most likely Ba-
zin was aware that Mounier's personalism was a utopian, yet still productive
term of reference.
ART
In contrast to photography's technological modernity, the tradition-
al arts are inevitably egotistic. Based on the human hand working in synch
with the eye and the mind, especially the plastic arts such as sculpture and
painting are anthropocentric, because they stand up against the non-manu-
al, automatic, mechanical ontology of a photographic tracing. In the history
of image-making, photography stands out as the one and only incarnational
exception. Already in the early twenties, the American surrealist Man Ray's
"rayographs" called attention to their self-made status. Rayographs came into
being without a camera, thanks to thumbtacks and coils of wire on a sheet of
photosensitized paper exposed to light. A photograph is a natural image that
makes itself by itself, through light and time. This is so even in the normal
situation when someone is operating the camera.
Most importantly in the case of photography, Bazin's term ontology10
means "a way of being otherwise," due to the way this incarnational kind of
image is so irrationally believable that it blurs the difference between subject
and object. Whether or not a photographic negative is accidental and illegible,
it always bears witness to the "here and now" of a moment in time whose im-
printing is never again repeatable in the very same way. After all, the fuzziest
negative can make visible an infinitesimal trace of time passing that we could
not see otherwise.
Alternatively a photographic frozen moment never tells us a fully artic-
ulated story, the way any narrative does through development and change.
Thus Bazin specifies that, in comparison to photography's physio-chemical
record, cinema is a language-like medium. Being manual, the plastic arts de-
pend on some degree of self-projection. On the contrary, outside of any hu-
10 A. Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What is Cinema? vol. 1, 10.
As far as the intellectual development of Bazin's photographic ontology see: J-P Sartre, The
Imaginary: Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, London 2010.
Angela Dalle Vacche
letarian communism. Instead of greed or dogmatic ideologies as the mea-
sure of all things, Mourner's society of the future would cherish basic human
rights, including art and ordinary creativity as self-expression outside any
market value, celebrity status, or elitism. According to personalism, human
rights must be broadly social and grounded in a universal acknowledgement
of everybody's human dignity regardless of any affiliations. Most likely Ba-
zin was aware that Mounier's personalism was a utopian, yet still productive
term of reference.
ART
In contrast to photography's technological modernity, the tradition-
al arts are inevitably egotistic. Based on the human hand working in synch
with the eye and the mind, especially the plastic arts such as sculpture and
painting are anthropocentric, because they stand up against the non-manu-
al, automatic, mechanical ontology of a photographic tracing. In the history
of image-making, photography stands out as the one and only incarnational
exception. Already in the early twenties, the American surrealist Man Ray's
"rayographs" called attention to their self-made status. Rayographs came into
being without a camera, thanks to thumbtacks and coils of wire on a sheet of
photosensitized paper exposed to light. A photograph is a natural image that
makes itself by itself, through light and time. This is so even in the normal
situation when someone is operating the camera.
Most importantly in the case of photography, Bazin's term ontology10
means "a way of being otherwise," due to the way this incarnational kind of
image is so irrationally believable that it blurs the difference between subject
and object. Whether or not a photographic negative is accidental and illegible,
it always bears witness to the "here and now" of a moment in time whose im-
printing is never again repeatable in the very same way. After all, the fuzziest
negative can make visible an infinitesimal trace of time passing that we could
not see otherwise.
Alternatively a photographic frozen moment never tells us a fully artic-
ulated story, the way any narrative does through development and change.
Thus Bazin specifies that, in comparison to photography's physio-chemical
record, cinema is a language-like medium. Being manual, the plastic arts de-
pend on some degree of self-projection. On the contrary, outside of any hu-
10 A. Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," in What is Cinema? vol. 1, 10.
As far as the intellectual development of Bazin's photographic ontology see: J-P Sartre, The
Imaginary: Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, London 2010.